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      Neera Tanden confirmation seems unlikely after moderate Republicans oppose her

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      Neera Tanden, president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, seemed unlikely to be confirmed as budget director in the Biden administration after Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, two moderate Republican senators, said they would not vote in her favour.In a statement on Monday, Collins said Tanden was unfit to run the Office of Management and Budget, which plays a powerful role in overseeing federal finances and regulation.“Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency,” the Maine senator said.The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, backed Tanden, who she said was “an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent budget director”.“We look forward to the committee votes this week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties,” Psaki said.But then a spokesperson for Romney said the Utah senator would not back Tanden. Romney had been “critical of extreme rhetoric from prior nominees”, the spokesperson said, “and this is consistent with that position. He believes it’s hard to return to comity and respect with a nominee who has issued a thousand mean tweets.”Such a position might seem paradoxical for a party that just endured four years of Donald Trump’s offensive and intemperate tweets. But much of the Republican attack on Tanden, who has strong links to Hillary Clinton, has focused on her social media record.Collins noted Tanden’s decision quietly to delete more than 1,000 tweets in the days after the election. Several of the tweets attacked Republican members of Congress, including Collins, whom Tanden described as “the worst”. Collins said the deletion of the tweets “raises concerns about her commitment to transparency”.Collins and Romney’s opposition delivered a blow to Joe Biden as he struggles to fill his cabinet. Several other key nominations are lining up for confirmation in the Senate but Collins made her move just three days after the Democratic senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, said he would vote against Tanden.With the Senate split 50-50, Manchin’s defection meant the administration already needed to persuade at least one moderate Republican to come on board. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a possible vote for Tanden, has not yet indicated her intention.The White House is on tenterhooks with its efforts to fill cabinet posts. On Monday one of the most critical positions – that of attorney general, the country’s top prosecutor – went before the Senate judiciary committee.It was an especially poignant moment for the nominee, Merrick Garland, who five years ago was denied a confirmation hearing for a seat on the supreme court by the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.Beyond Garland, Deb Haaland is up for confirmation hearings as interior secretary and Xavier Becerra as health and human services secretary. More

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      Texas Republican hypocrisy over federal aid is nothing new – ask Flyin' Ted Cruz | Lloyd Green

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      Texas has been hit by a disaster of its own making and its Republican office holders expect the rest of the US to pay to clean up the mess. To quote Dana Bash of CNN questioning Michael McCaul, a veteran GOP congressman, on Sunday: “That’s kind of rich, don’t you think?”
      For all of their bravado and anti-government rhetoric, in the aftermath of calamities like last week’s deep freeze Lone Star Republicans make a habit of passing the plate. Their suffering is ours too.
      But when the shoe is on the other foot, they begrudge kindness to others. Said differently, Ted Cruz is merely a grotesque illustration, not an exception.
      Take a walk down memory lane. In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hammered New York and New Jersey. As the north-east reeled, Texas Republicans stood back, treating the region as if it were another country. As if the civil war had not ended.
      After the turn of the year, Cruz, his fellow senator John Cornyn and 23 of two-dozen Texas Republicans in the House gave a thumbs down to Sandy aid. Less reflexively hostile heads prevailed. The relief bill cleared Congress. But the GOP’s Texans had left their mark.
      Peter King, then a Republican representative from Long Island, understood malice and stupidity when he saw it. He called for a halt to donations to Republicans who opposed rescuing sister states.
      “These Republicans have no problem finding New York when they’re out raising millions of dollars,” King said. “What they did last night was put a knife in the back of New Yorkers and New Jerseyans. It was an absolute disgrace.”
      But Cruz in particular is nothing if not performative, ever Janus-faced. After Hurricane Harvey slammed Houston in 2017, he offered this explanation for his vote four years earlier: Sandy relief had become “a $50bn bill that was filled with unrelated pork”.
      Cruz also intoned: “What I said then and still believe now is that it’s not right for politicians to exploit a disaster when people are hurting to pay for their own political wish list.”
      Other than possibly Cruz’s long-suffering wife, it is unclear whether anyone believed Flyin’ Ted even then.
      Cruz may have flown home alone, leaving his family in Cancun, but he is not alone among Texas Republicans in hating Blue America. He is just the most notorious. Unlike congressman Louie Gohmert, Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. He should and likely does know better.
      In 2019, as part of Donald Trump’s overhaul of the tax laws, Kevin Brady, a Texan then chair of the House ways and means committee, virtually eliminated the deductibility of state and local taxes from federal tax returns, in order to pay for an upper-bracket and corporate giveaway. New York and New Jersey are still feeling the bite.
      Under Trump, the economy failed to pass 3% growth annually and a much-touted manufacturing renaissance failed to appear. Covid made a bad situation worse.
      And now, lo and behold, Texas is forced, cap in hand, to pucker up to a Democratic House, Senate and White House. Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader and a native of Brooklyn, must be suppressing a smile.
      To be sure, the federal government and Congress must help Texas. No ifs, ands or buts. Joe Biden is treating the state a whole better than Trump did Puerto Rico. That’s a good thing.
      Innocent lives have been lost and upended in the name of retrograde ideology masked as policy. Real people, families and business have been destroyed. Climate change denial comes with a high human cost. Standing apart from the national electric grid isn’t independence. It is a death wish by another name.
      Confederacy 2.0.
      Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the breakaway states, summed up this attitude in 1861: “If Charleston harbor needs improvement, let the commerce of Charleston bear the burden. If the mouth of the Savannah River has to be cleared out, let the sea-going navigation which is benefited by it, bear the burden.”
      Sounds familiar?
      Other than when it came to repelling Abraham Lincoln, the Confederacy was not a mutual assistance pact. Before this latest man-made debacle, Republicans were dreaming of drowning government in a bathtub. Hopefully, in Texas that may change. More

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      Fauci laments 'historic' Covid toll as US nears 500,000 deaths

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      As the US approached half a million Covid-19 deaths, the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, struggled for words to convey the grim magnitude of the death toll from the pandemic.“It’s terrible,” he told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “It’s really horrible. It is something that is historic. It’s nothing like we’ve ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic.”Fauci added that “decades from now” people would be “talking about this a terribly historic milestone in the history of this country. To have these many people to have died from a respiratory born infection, it really is a terrible situation that we’ve been through and that we’re still going through.”The US death toll stood at 497,957, according to Johns Hopkins University. The US has long had the highest Covid-19 death toll of any country. According to the World Health Organization it has one of the worst per capita death rates, at 148.61 per 100,000. Countries including the UK, Italy and Portugal have higher per capita rates.Although infection rates have been steadily declining since record highs in early January, the US still recorded 13,347 deaths and more than 500,000 new cases in the past week, according to Johns Hopkins.Last week an average of 1.32m vaccines were administered each day, according to a tracker by Bloomberg News. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said more than 61m doses had been administered in the US, with about 5.47% of the population now fully vaccinated.Fauci, who is President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, acknowledged in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that cold weather across the US south had set back vaccine rollout, but projected the deficit would be made up by the middle of next week.“It’s a temporary setback,” he said. “And when you just, you know, put your foot to the accelerator and really push, we’ll get it up to where we need to be by the middle of the week.”The Biden administration has pledged to administer 150m vaccinations by 29 April.On CNN, Fauci acknowledged that despite the rollout of vaccines, Americans could still be asked to wear masks into 2022.“I think it is possible that that’s the case,” Fauci said. “It depends on what you mean by normality … if normality means exactly the way things were before we had this happen to us … I can’t predict that. Obviously I think we’ll have a significant degree of normality beyond the terrible burden that all of us have been through over the last year.”Fauci added that only when transmission rates fell significantly and vaccines had been rolled out to the point of “minimal, minimal threat” of transmission would mask requirements begin to be dropped.“When it [transmission] goes way down and the overwhelming majority of the people in the population are vaccinated, then I would feel comfortable in saying, you know, ‘We need to pull back on the masks’,” he said.Elsewhere on Sunday, former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger told CBS the Trump administration “misjudged” the need to advocate for mask-wearing a year ago, in the early stages of the pandemic.“We misjudged the nature of this thing to think that it was like flu,” he told Face the Nation. “One of the mistakes that followed on from that was the misjudgment by public health officials in this country to not advocate for the widespread generalised use of face coverings, cloth masks, surgical masks and what have you.”Pottinger continued: “The mask misstep cost us dearly. It was the one tool that was widely available, at least homemade, you know, cotton masks were widely available. It was the one effective, widely available tool that we had in the arsenal to deal with this. But public health officials were stuck in this sort of flu mentality. It was a grave misstep.” More

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      Merrick Garland vows to target white supremacists as attorney general

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      At his Senate hearing on Monday, attorney general nominee Merrick Garland will pledge to prosecute “white supremacists and others” who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January, in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat.The pledge was contained in Garland’s opening testimony for the session before the Senate judiciary committee, released on Saturday night.“If confirmed,” Garland said, ‘I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January – a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”Five people including a police officer died as a direct result of the attack on the Capitol, before which Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” against the result of the presidential election. Trump lost to Joe Biden by 306-232 in the electoral college and by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. More than 250 participants in the Capitol riot have been charged. As NPR reported, “the defendants are predominantly white and male, though there were exceptions. “Federal prosecutors say a former member of the Latin Kings gang joined the mob, as did two Virginia police officers. A man in a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt took part, as did a Messianic Rabbi. Far-right militia members decked out in tactical gear rioted next to a county commissioner, a New York City sanitation worker, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist.”In his testimony, Garland made reference to his role from 1995 to 1997 in supervising the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City Bombing, a white supremacist atrocity in which 168 people including 19 children were killed.Trump was impeached for a second time on a charge of inciting an insurrection but was acquitted after only seven Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate in voting to convict, 10 short of the majority needed.“It is a fitting time,” Garland said, “to reaffirm that the role of the attorney general is to serve the rule of law and to ensure equal justice under the law.”The 68-year-old federal appeals judge was famously denied even a hearing in 2016 when Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell blocked him as Barack Obama’s third pick for the supreme court.Biden’s selection of Garland for attorney general is seen as a conciliatory move in a capital controlled by Democrats but only by slim margins, the Senate split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote.In his testimony, Garland said he would be independent from Biden, being sure to “strictly regulate communication with the White House” and working as “the lawyer … for the people of the United States”.Trump pressured his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to do his bidding, then saw his second, William Barr, largely do so, running interference on the investigation of Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow. If confirmed, Garland will face sensitive decisions over matters including Trump, now exposed to criminal and civil investigation, and Hunter Biden, the new president’s son whose tax affairs are in question as he remains a target for much of the right.Some on the left have expressed concern that Garland might be too politically moderate. Black Lives Matter founder LaTosha Brown, for example, told the Guardian: “My concern is that he does not have a strong civil rights history … even when Obama nominated him, one of the critiques was that he was making a compromise with what he thought was a ‘clean’ candidate to get through.”In his testimony, Garland said justice department civil rights work must be improved.“Communities of colour and other minorities still face discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system,” he said, “and bear the brunt of the harm caused by pandemic, pollution, and climate change.”Garland is expected to be confirmed. More

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      The Ten Year War review: Obamacare, Trump and Biden's battles yet to come

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      Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was unpopular, viewed by many as welfare redux. Barack Obama’s promise that “If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan”, didn’t exactly work out. By the middle of the 2010s, so-called Obamacare had cost the Democrats both houses of Congress.
      Yet one great recession and one raging pandemic later, the ACA is liked, if not necessarily loved, by a majority of Americans.
      The political process “doesn’t stop just because a bill becomes a law”, according to Jonathan Cohn.
      As if to prove Cohn’s point, the US awaits a ruling by the supreme court on another challenge to Obamacare, this one brought by the Trump administration and Republican state attorneys general. If they prevail, more than 20 million Americans may lose health coverage. Nearly a half-million have died from Covid. Markets don’t always deliver what is needed.
      The Ten Year War is a look back at the “crusade” for universal healthcare coverage, and a sequel to Cohen’s earlier book, Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Healthcare Crisis. Cohn is a senior correspondent at the Huffington Post. His take remains informed and nuanced, not breathless. The Ten Year War also captures acrid and tectonic shifts in US politics.
      Cohn persuasively argues that the combatants in the healthcare fight operated with less than perfect knowledge, and that preconceived convictions too often clouded their judgment. Cohn aims at both policy wonks and political junkies. Laced with interviews and quotes from both sides of the aisle, his book is definitely newsworthy.
      Obama and Tom Price, Donald Trump’s short-tenured health secretary, speak on the record. David Axelrod, Obama’s counselor, and Michael Carvin, a veteran conservative litigator who unsuccessfully argued against Obamacare’s constitutionality, also talk to the author. Years earlier, in the 2000 election, Carvin was on brief in George W Bush’s winning supreme court gambit.
      Obama admits his surprise over Republicans not moving on after the ACA passed, unlike Medicare in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. “We got no take-up on any of that stuff,” he says. Left unsaid is that blue and red are more than just colors – they are tribes.
      By the same measure, Obama acknowledges “that there were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy”. That is an understatement.
      One of those “outsiders” was Chuck Schumer, now the Senate majority leader. Even then, Cohn writes, the New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all-in on healthcare amid a meltdown in the jobs and housing markets.
      Indeed, after the Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, New York’s senior senator unloaded on Obama before the National Press Club: “After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs.” Said differently, the ACA highlighted the inherent instability of the Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition.
      Instead, in Schumer’s telling, “we took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – healthcare reform.” Apparently, there are few things more gratifying in politics than telling a sitting president: “I told you so.”
      Of course, political myopia is not the sole province of any one party. Price admits that Republicans too operated in their own universe.
      “I think there was a lack of appreciation on the part of all of us in the administration about how difficult” repealing Obamacare would be, he says. Price is a physician as well as a former Georgia congressman.
      Price criticizes Trump for fashioning policy to comport with the last voice to whisper into his ear, and for a fundamental lack of understanding of healthcare and insurance.
      “We would make concrete decisions about what we were going to do,” he says, “get presidential sign-off, and then within 24 hours the decision would change.”
      For Price’s boss, pulling the rug out from under others was standard operating procedure. More

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      US makes official return to Paris climate pact

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      The US is back in the Paris climate accord, just 107 days after it left.While Friday’s return is heavily symbolic, world leaders say they expect the US to prove its seriousness after four years of being mostly absent. They are especially keen to hear an announcement from Washington in the coming months on the US’s goal for cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2030.The US return to the Paris agreement became official on Friday, almost a month after Joe Biden told the UN that the US intended to rejoin.“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear now.”The president signed an executive order on his first day in office that reversed the withdrawal ordered by his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump.The Trump administration had announced its departure from the Paris accord in 2019 but it did not become effective until 4 November 2020, the day after the election, because of provisions in the agreement.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Thursday the official US re-entry “is itself very important”, as was Biden’s announcement that the US would return to providing climate aid to poorer countries, as promised in 2009.“It’s the political message that is being sent,” said Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief. She was one of the leading forces in hammering out the 2015 mostly voluntary agreement where countries set their own goals to reduce greenhouse gases.One fear was that other countries would follow the US in abandoning the climate fight, but none did, Figueres said. She said the real issue was four years of climate inaction by the Trump administration. US cities, states and businesses still worked to reduce heat-trapping carbon dioxide, but without the federal government.“From a political symbolism perspective, whether it’s 100 days or four years, it is basically the same thing,” Figueres said. “It’s not about how many days. It’s the political symbolism that the largest economy refuses to see the opportunity of addressing climate change. We’ve lost too much time,” Figueres said.The UN Environment Programme director, Inger Andersen, said the US had to prove its leadership to the rest of the world, but she said she had no doubt it would when it submits its required emissions-cutting targets. The Biden administration promises to announce them before a summit in April.“We hope they will translate into a very meaningful reduction of emissions and they will be an example for other countries to follow,” Guterres said.More than 120 countries, including the world’s biggest emitter, China, have promised to have net zero carbon emissions around mid-century.The University of Maryland environment professor Nathan Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s Paris goal, said he expected a 2030 target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions between 40% and 50% from the 2005 baseline levels. A longtime international target, included in the Paris accord with an even more stringent goal, is to keep warming below 2C above pre-industrial levels. The world has already warmed about 1.2C since that time. More

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      Biden tackles white supremacy in town hall: Politics Weekly Extra

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      As Joe Biden visited Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week, our guest presenter Kenya Evelyn spoke to the state representative David Bowen about the administration’s early obligations to the Black voters who swung the election in the Democrats’ favour, racial equity in pandemic and vaccine plans, and how the president should combat white supremacy

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Joe Biden took the stage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week for his first town hall since entering the White House. For some, it was a necessary first step toward combatting racial inequities in the economy and healthcare made worse by the coronavirus. People in the audience asked the president how he was going to make sure everyone got a vaccine, and how he planned to combat white supremacy in the country. Watching intently was David Bowen, a state lawmaker and one of the young progressive Democrats leading the party forward. He told Kenya about his thoughts on the new Biden administration. Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Fault Lines in Biden’s Approach to China

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      So far, the White House has undertaken a flurry of activity designated to back up President Joe Biden’s pledge to be tough-minded on China. He has warned that Beijing will face “extreme competition” from the United States. Taiwan’s top representative was invited to the presidential inauguration on January 20 and the Biden team has promised to continue US arms sales to Taipei.

      Is China the New Champion of Globalization?

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      Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said he agrees, conceptually at least, that former President Donald Trump “was right in taking a tougher approach to China” and that he supports the prior administration’s finding that Beijing’s treatment of Uighur minorities in Xinjiang constitutes “genocide.” In early February, the new administration conducted naval maneuvers to contest Chinese dominance in the South China Sea and reaffirmed the US security commitment to defending the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which are controlled by Tokyo but claimed by Beijing.

      Veterans of the Obama Administration

      Yet all of this cannot conceal the two major fault lines threatening to undermine President Biden’s promise. The first centers on the heavy presence of Obama-era veterans on his national security team, particularly those associated with that administration’s “strategic pivot” toward the region. Two of President Biden’s top staffers were key architects of the much-touted initiative: Kurt M. Campbell, who was in charge of East Asian affairs in the State Department under President Barack Obama and is now the White House’s Asia policy czar, and Jake Sullivan, who was deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and is now Biden’s national security adviser.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The rhetoric of Obama’s pivot to Asia simultaneously antagonized Beijing while its actual track record largely failed to impress other Asian governments. According to one assessment, the pivot’s hype caused a marked increase in Chinese military spending at the same time that sharp cuts in the Pentagon budget were hampering US military operations in Asia. During a visit to Japan in 2013, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted that “We are going to have to think about how to remain a global power with fewer resources. I think we are going to have to find ways to accomplish almost the same things but with smaller force structures.” In early 2014, the Pentagon’s acquisitions chief publicly stated that budget constraints were forcing a reconsideration of the initiative.

      As Obama’s coordinator for North Korea policy has acknowledged, the effort “was ill conceived and bungled in its implementation.” In late 2013, the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers, noted an “increasingly widely shared view in Japan and the region that the Obama administration may not have enough political capital or the financial assets to implement” the pivot. It added that some have even come to see it as no more than a “bumper sticker.” Similarly, a leading Australian analyst observed, “There is a growing perception in Asia that the Obama administration’s much-ballyhooed ‘pivot to Asia’ has run out of puff.” By late 2014, a foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times argued that most of Asia had concluded the pivot was nothing more than hot air.

      Memories of this track record persist. A commentator focused on Asian affairs observed last year that “Officials in Tokyo, Taipei, New Delhi, Singapore and other capitals have grown relatively comfortable with Trump and his tough approach on China. The prospect of a Biden presidency, by contrast, brings back uncomfortable memories of an Obama era that many Asian movers and shakers recall as unfocused and soft toward Beijing.”

      Just before the 2020 election, The Washington Post noted that current and former officials of the Taiwanese government and ruling party had “privately expressed concern that a return of Obama-era foreign policy advisers in a potential Biden administration could mean a U.S. approach that is more conciliatory toward China compared with the Trump administration’s — and less supportive of Taiwan.” The Financial Times also reported along similar lines.

      The personnel problem extends to Biden himself, as he is a late convert to the tough-on-China crowd. Prior to his becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, he had regularly dismissed the notion that China mounted much of a geopolitical challenge. His campaign staffers were reportedly troubled by his naivete, and one adviser later admitted that for the rest of the campaign, Biden had to be “deprogrammed” on China. While this was going on, Robert M. Gates, Obama’s first defense secretary, reaffirmed to CBS News his earlier judgment that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” 

      Standing Strong vs. Climate Change

      The second fault line running through Biden’s approach to China is the irreconcilability between maintaining a hard line and his administration’s insistence on the pressing urgency of securing Beijing’s cooperation on climate change. Biden officials claim they can somehow manage this tension and will not have to make significant concessions in other policy areas in order to fulfill its global climate ambitions.

      John Kerry, President Obama’s secretary of state when the 2015 Paris climate agreement was signed, is now Biden’s special climate envoy with a spot on the National Security Council. He insists, for example, that climate is a critical stand-alone issue that can be compartmentalized on the US–China bilateral agenda. Administration officials believe that collaboration is so self-evidently in Beijing’s interest that it will naturally sign on to Washington’s new push for significant climate action.

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      The Chinese government so far is not much impressed with this logic, with its foreign ministry stating that climate could not be separated from other issues “unlike flowers that can bloom in a greenhouse despite winter chill.” A Chinese government Twitter account also declared that “China is willing to work with the US on climate change. But such cooperation cannot stand unaffected by the overall China–US relations. It is impossible to ask for China’s support in global affairs while interfering in its domestic affairs and undermining its interests.” 

      Given the White House’s fervor on the issue, one suspects the Biden administration will be making the concessions in the end. During the presidential campaign, Biden asserted that climate change is an “existential threat” and the “number one issue facing humanity.” Now that he is in the Oval Office, Biden believes “we can’t wait any longer.” He signed a directive making the issue the “center of our national security and foreign policy” and ordered government agencies to factor “climate considerations” into their assessment of international priorities. Kerry uses similar language, declaring that “the stakes on climate change just simply couldn’t be any higher than they are right now. It is existential.” He added that Biden “is deeply committed — totally seized by this issue.”

      In shutting down construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, as well as freezing new oil and natural gas leases on federal lands and waters, the administration has also shown it is willing to subordinate important domestic goals, such as energy security and employment stability in the middle of a job-killing pandemic, to climate priorities. It has written off large job losses as inevitable and is accepting of a backlash from important labor unions that aided its electoral victory just a few months ago.

      Susan Rice Returns

      It is also telling that Susan Rice, the national security adviser during Obama’s second term, has returned to the White House as President Biden’s top domestic affairs coordinator. Bilahari Kausikan, the former senior Singaporean diplomat widely regarded in East Asia, recently exclaimed that Rice “was among those who thought that the US should deemphasise competition to get China’s cooperation on climate change, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of international relations.” Another observer has made the same point, noting that “Obama and Rice wanted to work with China on issues such as climate change, but they did so at the cost of treating Beijing with kid gloves.” 

      Influential members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment have advocated the same thing. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of an influential think tank in Washington and a former director of policy planning in the Obama-era State Department, recently argued that “Biden should prioritize global issues over geopolitical competition” and that the president’s focus on climate “should guide his foreign policy as well.”

      Rank-and-file party members also share this view. In a recent public opinion survey, Democrats by a wide margin believe climate change to be a more critical threat than the rise of China as a peer competitor to the US. Indeed, according to Democratic respondents, China did not even rank among the top seven challenges facing the country.

      Something will have to give in the new administration’s approach toward China. There is already an early indication of how things will play out. Notwithstanding the protestations about Beijing’s egregious human rights abuses, the Biden team continues to support holding the 2022 Winter Olympics in that city.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More