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      in World Politics

      How Tough Is Biden Prepared to Look?

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      A week after taking office, US President Joe Biden made a point of breaking with the position of his predecessor, Donald Trump, who famously blamed China for deliberately spreading the coronavirus. Trump insisted on calling it the Wuhan flu, Kung flu or any other xenophobic alternative. Coming to the defense of the entire Asian community in the United States, Biden issued a memorandum stating the following: “Inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric has put Asian-American and Pacific Islander persons, families, communities and businesses at risk.”

      The Iran Deal vs. the Logic of History

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      The World Health Organization (WHO) team conducting an investigation in Wuhan released its preliminary findings this week on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. It maintained, as Reuters reports, “that the virus likely came from bats and not a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan.” On February 10, an official of the US State Department announced what appeared to be a retreat to the Trump administration’s position: “The United States will not accept World Health Organization … findings coming out of its coronavirus investigation in Wuhan, China without independently verifying the findings using its own intelligence and conferring with allies.”

      One of the WHO inspectors, British zoologist and expert on disease ecology Peter Daszak, reacting to the State Department’s note, addressed this advice to Biden in a tweet: “Well now this👇. @JoeBiden has to look tough on China. Please don’t rely too much on US intel: increasingly disengaged under Trump & frankly wrong on many aspects. Happy to help.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Look tough:

      1. The principal action required to maintain the status of a bully, a person whose demeanor counts more than their substance
      2. The principal action required to maintain the image of the leader of a hegemon, called upon to make a show of being hyper-aggressive toward nations elected by politicians and the media as an existential threat  

      Contextual Note

      While the WHO team offered no definitive explanation of the origin, it focused on different possibilities of animal transmission requiring further investigation. When asked at a press conference on February 10 whether he had “any interest in punishing China for not being truthful about COVID last year,” President Biden cagily replied, “I’m interested in getting all the facts.” That answer leaves him free to look tough on China or, alternatively, to look tough at the intelligence that for the past four years has done what intelligence always does, responded obsequiously to the political solicitations of the administration in place.

      One American who, for the past four years, has made a point of looking tough and has been regularly featured in the media is Mike Pompeo, the final secretary of state under the Trump administration. In a desperate effort to keep the Trump mystique going to maintain its flagging ratings, Fox News brought Pompeo back to defend the Wuhan flu theme Trump consistently exploited for electoral advantage during last year’s presidential election campaign. In the interview, “Pompeo said ‘significant evidence’ remained that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory, casting doubt Tuesday on the World Health Organization‘s assessment that it likely spread from animals to humans.”

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      Pompeo, a former CIA director, admitted in 2019 that his job at the Central Intelligence Agency consisted of lying, cheating and stealing. He implied that he was now telling the truth, a fact ironically borne out by his honest admission of duplicity while at the CIA. And yet, there may be reason even today to believe that Pompeo has retained something of his talent for lying, which he will be willing to use for what he deems virtuous purposes. 

      The language people like Pompeo use often reveals how they manage to bend the truth when they aren’t simply betraying it. In the Fox interview, Pompeo explains, “I continue to know that there was significant evidence that this may well have come from that laboratory.” What can Pompeo possibly mean when he says, “I continue to know”? Is knowledge for Pompeo something that can appear and disappear? Knowledge is a state of awareness of truth, not an act of will, something one can decide according to the circumstances. 

      And because what someone knows must be a fact, what is the solid fact he says he continues to know? He tells us that it is the idea that the coronavirus “may have come from” the Wuhan laboratory. But something that “may” be true is at best a reasonable hypothesis and at worst a fabricated lie. Something that “may” be true cannot be called knowledge. Any honest speaker would use the verb “suspect.” But, in this age of conspiracy theories, people tend to suspect anything that is merely suspected. And Fox News has always preferred assertions to suspicions.

      In the same interview, Pompeo describes his recommendations for the US policy on China. He says the nation must “continue to make sure that the next century remains one dominated by rule of law, sovereignty and the things that the America first foreign policy put in place.” 

      Besides the fact that Pompeo offers another example of his favorite verb, “continue,” his odd assertion that “the next century” (the 22nd?) must be “dominated by rule of law” offers a curious yoking of two theoretically antinomic ideas: dominance and rule of law. The very idea of “rule of law” posits a relationship of equality between all concerned parties. It opposes the effect of domination. Rule of law is about level playing fields and fair play. Pompeo’s formulation reveals that he thinks of the rule of law as a specific tool of American domination. This is of course consistent with the facts, whatever the administration. The US still steadfastly refuses the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and Trump’s “America First” policy refused any law other than its own.

      For those wondering why Fox News has taken the trouble to interview the former secretary of state of a president now being tried for sedition, the journalists reveal the interest at the end of the interview. Fox sees Pompeo as a worthy contender for the 2024 presidential campaign. He’s a cleaner version of Trump, but one who will always talk and look tough.

      Historical Note

      After the most contentious presidential election in its history, the US has been preparing to experience the transition from one radical style of hyperreality to another — from Donald Trump’s outlandish display of petulant rhetoric committed to reshaping the world in his image to Joe Biden’s reserved and fundamentally uncommitted avuncular manner. Just as in 2008, when they voted in Barack Obama after eight years of George W. Bush’s chaotic wars and a Wall Street crash, Americans are expecting a change of style and focus from the never-ending drama of the Trump years. 

      But just as the self-proclaimed change candidate Obama, once in office, showed more respect for continuity than commitment to renewal, on the theme of foreign policy, President Biden appears to be following Trump’s lead while simply reducing the tone. This phenomenon reflects a more fundamental reality at the core of today’s pseudo-democratic oligarchy. It is regularly masked by the transition from Republican to Democrat and vice versa. The reigning political hyperreality, despite the contrasting personal styles of successive presidents, will always prevail. Continuity trumps change.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Biden’s future policy on both China and Iran provides two cases in point. The clock is ticking on the need to recalibrate both of these relationships, more particularly on Iran, which has an election coming in just a few months. As the world anxiously awaits the new orientations of the Biden administration, the kind of continuity Pompeo appreciates may prove more dominant than the reversal people have come to expect. After all, Trump set about reversing everything Obama did, so why shouldn’t Biden do the same? The answer may simply be that that’s not what Democrats do.

      The average American has never been seriously interested in foreign policy. That very fact has consistently led to the kind of Manichaean thinking that dominated during the Cold War. In his 2000 election campaign, the inimitable George W. Bush summed up how that Manichaean system works: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.” As John Keats once wrote, “That is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

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

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      in US Politics

      US sanctions have 'catastrophic impact' amid Covid, say progressive Democrats

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      Progressive Democrats in Congress are calling for an overhaul of US sanctions on other nations which they argue have “catastrophic humanitarian consequences” on the global effort to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
      In a letter to Joe Biden to be delivered on Thursday, 23 Democratic representatives and two senators, welcome a review of sanctions and their impact on the pandemic that the president launched soon after taking office.
      But the signatories also urge the new administration to take a broader look at sanctions as a foreign policy tool, which they say America had imposed as “a knee jerk reaction” for too long. The letter signals the issue is likely to be at the heart of the foreign policy debate within the party in the Biden era.
      The new administration has inherited a “maximum pressure” regime imposed by Donald Trump on Iran, as well as blanket sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba. It has already suspended a terrorist designation issued in the last days of Trump administration on the Houthis in Yemen, because of its impact on humanitarian aid deliveries.
      Thursday’s letter, authored by congresswoman Ilhan Omar, congressman Jesús García, and senator Elizabeth Warren, points to the unintended consequences of secondary sanctions imposed on third country governments and companies for dealing with targeted governments. Often, risk-averse financial institutions are deterred from facilitating any transactions, even in humanitarian goods formally allowed by the sanctions.
      “Existing protocols and licenses have proved woefully insufficient to meet the enormity of the challenges shared by people around the world in the face of the pandemic,” the Democrats say in the letter. “Even when licenses and humanitarian exemptions are available, moreover, there is a persistent problem of overcompliance, particularly from the financial sector. This has led to catastrophic humanitarian consequences in various parts of the world.”
      Under a national security directive issued by Biden on his first full day in office, the secretaries of state, commerce and the treasury, in consultation with the health and human services secretary and the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, are to review US and multilateral sanctions to assess whether they are obstructing global responses to the pandemic.
      Thursday’s letter represents a push for the review to encompass a radical rethink of sanctions, away from their use as a fix-all tool.
      “Far too often and for far too long, sanctions have been imposed as a knee-jerk reaction without a measured and considered assessment of their impacts. Sanctions are easy to put in place, but notoriously difficult to lift,” the signatories argue.
      “This is why we are asking for this release to be comprehensive, to see if these policies can be adjusted to make sure that they’re not specifically harming the people in these countries who are trying to survive…in a public health pandemic that is bringing about a financial crisis,” Omar told the Guardian.
      Chad Brown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the nature of the pandemic meant that international cooperation, even with rivals and adversaries, was all the more in the national interest.
      “If the pandemic is raging anywhere, the emergence of variants means that nowhere is truly safe,” Brown said. “That even includes the countries the United States may find challenging for geopolitical reasons.” More

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      in US Politics

      Four years after the ‘Muslim ban’ migrants view the US with hope – and caution

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      Their travel documents were meticulous, and security checks showed no red flags. “Your case looks great,” an apologetic American consular officer told Hedieh Elkhlasi’s parents at the US embassy in Armenia. “But because of the executive order, I just can’t print a visa for Iranians.”The rejection was one of tens of thousands issued by US embassies across the world over the four years since Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, the first of several attempts to enforce a policy that became notorious as the “Muslim ban”. Legal challenges chipped away at some of the restrictions, but travel bans on citizens from more than a dozen mostly-Muslim majority countries survived – until they were scrapped by President Joe Biden in one of his first acts in office.It was the end of a cruel regime of policies that did nothing to make Americans safer, according to national security experts. Instead, it cut US citizens off from their friends and families, upended educations and careers, and tarnished the reputation of a country that, despite its misadventures in the Islamic world, was still a magnet for ambitious and successful Muslim migrants.Many are now preparing to apply for visas again, hoping Biden’s election will turn the page on a dark era of American history. Some are still wary, wondering if the xenophobia that birthed the Muslim ban will linger long after the order has been scrapped.Of the estimated 42,000 people whose visa applications were turned down as a result of the ban, most were Iranians. Elkhlasi, 30, was born in Tehran but became an American citizen only months before Trump was elected. It felt as if the country to which she had sworn allegiance had turned on her, she says.“I became a US citizen to defend the US and to do whatever it took to count this is as my country,” she says. “But this country was not allowing my parents to even come and visit me, to see my new house. I was heartbroken.”Three weeks before the first ban came into place, Shawki Ahmed’s wife and three children had interviewed for their US citizenship applications at the American embassy in Cairo. The second-generation Yemeni American, a member of the NYPD, had been trying to get his family to the country since the eruption of Yemen’s civil war in 2014.The Trump order threw the process into chaos, he says. “It took two-and-a-half years to sort out: legal fees, I wrote the embassy, used lawyers – nothing.”It became clear the hurdle was not a matter of documents or security tests – it was simply who they were.“I’m a police officer, my father came to this country in 1959, we are law-abiding tax-paying citizens, we’re not dependent on welfare,” Ahmed, 40, says. “But apparently Trump decided those things don’t matter just because of our last name – because we are Muslim.”In Gaziantep, Syrian national Aya Shayah had more riding on the US presidential election than most. Her son, Hisham, requires surgery on his ear that a specialist in Los Angeles can complete six months faster than doctors in Turkey. She had visited her sister in the US a few times since 2013. Visiting Myrtle Beach in South Carolina was “like a movie”, the Syrian national recalls. “People running, and kites in the sky, and dog walking, it was so nice to see that.”She filled out an application to renew her visa in 2016, just before Trump won office. “It was a very long application, they literally wanted every detail of my life from about age five,” Shayah says. “And after all that, there was a six-month silence, and then they rejected me.”With Syrians now allowed to visit, and her sister pregnant again, she will try to return. “Now Trump is gone, I am applying for us again and I hope we will get it, I am feeling positive about it,” Shayah says.Elkhlasi followed the presidential race from London, where she moved after two years of lobbying to allow her parents to enter the US, efforts that she says left her questioning if she could ever really be American. “The ban felt very personal,” she says. “It got me mad, I was in a depression phase. I wondered, ‘Are Americans always going to think of me differently?’”It was the reaction of her colleagues and friends in California to the Muslim ban that gave her faith, she says. “They said they were sorry, that they didn’t know how to apologise – even though it wasn’t their fault. But it made me feel better. It changed my feelings about America, and that’s the only reason I want to give it another try.”Ahmed’s family was stranded abroad for almost three years. “It was very costly emotionally,” he says. “My kids were out of school for close to a year, it was very hard on them; they wanted to know what they had done wrong to be cut off from home and their dad. My mother was sick in Cairo and I couldn’t bring her to America for treatment.”In October 2019, he finally managed to get them to the US, but knows that tens of thousands of others in similar situations had no such luck. “People in the community are definitely joyful that Trump has gone and the ban has been lifted,” he says. “We feel like democracy has been restored. This is the America my father came to: immigrant America is the real America.” More

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      in World Politics

      The Iran Deal vs. the Logic of History

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      The Associated Press offers an update on the standoff between the US and Iran over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran deal, from which Donald Trump as president spectacularly withdrew the US in 2018.

      Trump committed an act of pure will, with no serious legal argument related to the terms of the agreement. In the culture of international diplomacy, that usually signifies a betrayal of trust or an act of bad faith. In the democratic and free market tradition, the idea of a contract depends on the recognition of theoretical equality of status between the contracting partners. In real geopolitics, however, the hegemonic position of the United States means that acts of bad faith will always be permitted. It is a privilege of hegemonic power. Such acts will also be resented. 

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      Just as Trump made a point of undoing anything associated with the Obama administration, many people have expected that US President Joe Biden would follow suit, seeking to overturn everything Trump so deliberately sabotaged. The AP article reminds us of Biden’s campaign promise to “seek to revive the deal,” while noting that the new administration insists “that Iran must first reverse its nuclear steps, creating a contest of wills between the nations.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Contest of wills:

      A competition between two parties of approximately equal strength based on their refusal to agree on anything until one subdues the other by imposing a solution designed to narrowly avoid a catastrophe with uncontrollable consequences

      Contextual Note

      Many cultures feature the proverb, “Where there’s a will there’s a way.” A logical corollary of the proverb would be: Where there are two wills there is no obvious way. But as Gary Grappo, in an article on Fair Observer, explained this week, this contest of wills is not limited to Iran and the US. There are a number of other wills involved. And where there are several wills, the way will be extremely obscure. Or, just as likely, there will be no way at all.

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      Grappo, a former US ambassador and the current chairman of Fair Observer, reminds us that there is the will of the other signatories of the original agreement, essentially the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the European Union. In normal circumstances, faced with the prospect evoked by the Iranians of returning to the agreement they signed in 2015, the signatories would simply reaffirm their good faith, which has never wavered. But even if they were to express that intention, for the multiple reasons Grappo lays out in his article, the Biden administration is itself caught in the trap Trump knowingly laid out for future administrations. Because of its status as hegemon — aka the international bully who imposes the rules of the road in the name of democracy and civilized values — the US cannot allow itself to meekly admit that Trump’s obviously failed “maximum pressure” policy on Iran was an irresponsible mistake and a violation of the very idea of the rule of law. It’s a question of pride, but also of pressure from both rational and irrational voices.

      The situation contains two major absurdities, which everyone is aware of but no one dares to speak about. Grappo correctly reports that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan “have promised that the US will consult with … regional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia before making decisions or taking any action.” This could make sense if “consult with” amounts to nothing more than informing those nations of the state of negotiations. If it implies involving them in the discussion or seeking to accommodate their positions, there are two reasons to see this as wishful thinking, if not dangerous folly.

      The first is that if the debate is truly about Iran’s military nuclear capacity, the insistence that the Israelis have a role in the debate is patently absurd. Israel has accomplished — totally illegally and with the benediction of the Western powers — exactly what the JCPOA is designed to prevent Iran from achieving. Israel is a nuclear power that, at the same time, denies its status as a nuclear power. In a rational world, a renegotiated treaty in which Israel has its say would require the dismantling of Israel’s nuclear capacity. No intelligent and informed diplomat on earth could imagine Israel accepting that condition.

      The second absurdity concerns Saudi Arabia. Grappo evokes the need to address the question of “terrorism, terrorism financing, human rights, religious persecution, etc.” If Saudi Arabia’s interests were taken into account, the logical consequence of this would be to examine and eliminate the kingdom’s obvious practice of all those evils. The Saudis remain the heavyweight champions of Middle East terrorism. It was Saudis, after all (possibly with the complicity of members of the royal family), who engineered and executed 9/11, the only direct attack on the US since Pearl Harbor. For decades, the Saudis have been spreading Wahhabi jihadism globally, contributing to the rise of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. And who — other than Trump — can forget that it is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who kills journalists working for The Washington Post and is not averse to imprisoning or killing anyone else who too publicly opposes his regime?

      And yet, on the subject of Israel and Saudi Arabia, Grappo tells us that “President Biden and his team will have to find a way to ensure that these governments’ concerns, fears and interests are taken into account.” If this has any meaning, that certainly means that there will be at least two wills too many in the contest

      Historical Note

      A former diplomat, Gary Grappo understands the thinking, positioning and maneuvering that must be going on within the Biden administration. He has presented a true and realistic account of the dilemma it is faced with. But the picture he paints is one of such a confusion of wills that imagining any solution with a reasonable chance of success requires believing in a world of diplomatic hyperreality — the equivalent of a stage play, where wills simply exist as the speeches characters express and never translate into concrete acts with consequences.

      The representation of geopolitics as a spectacle of hyperreality may please the media, who thrive by presenting it in living color. It keeps the pundits who depend on it for their livelihood talking and writing. It may even distract the public’s attention for short periods, as it once did for Roman emperors. But history has its own laws that will consistently undermine even the most solidly constructed examples of hyperreality.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Wills are not the only forces at play here. Underlying the quandary of how the US might return to the JCPOA is the evolution of global power and hegemony over the past three decades. It began with an earthquake: the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

      During the Cold War, the US could do pretty much anything it wanted in the so-called “free world,” knowing it was admired (for its dynamic economy), respected (for its power) and feared (for its might). Recent events have seriously reduced the level of admiration of the US across the globe. The actions of two presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, have seriously diminished respect for American power globally. Waging war on the basis of an obvious lie (Bush) and conducting foreign policy on the basis of whims and threats alone (Trump) have significantly reduced the credibility of any “reasoned position” the US takes to justify any action. Finally, the long series of military fiascos since the Vietnam War, along with two economic fiascos in the past 12 years, have transferred the fear people used to have of US might to a fear of the inadvertent catastrophes its policies provoke.

      Barack Obama’s strategy with the JCPOA made some sense. It consisted of betting on the idea that a loosening of constraints would naturally provoke an evolution within Iranian society toward a less paranoid vision of the West and of America in particular. It would encourage what optimists like to think of as “the better angels” of the Iranian people. It also meant leaving the Middle East quagmire behind, a feature of Obama’s Asia Pivot. The process worked in a unified Vietnam once the US abandoned its mission to save the country from communism. The problem with such a strategy today for some people, including members of Congress, is that it scores no hegemonic points. And that is intolerable.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

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

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      in US Politics

      What do Joe Biden's executive orders do?

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      Covid-19 response
      Establish response coordinators: This group isn’t just responsible for ensuring proper distribution of personal protective equipment, tests and vaccines. They are also charged with ensuring the federal government reduces racial disparities. Read more » More

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      in US Politics

      Biden will not lift sanctions to get Iran back to negotiating table

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      Joe Biden has said the United States will not lift its economic sanctions on Iran in order to get Tehran back to the negotiating table to discuss how to revive the Iran nuclear deal.Asked if the United States will lift sanctions first to get Iran back to the negotiating table, Biden replied: “no” in an interview with CBS News, which was recorded on Friday but released on Sunday ahead of the Super Bowl.Former president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US in 2018 from the atomic deal, which saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Biden has said he will seek to revive the deal, but insisted that Iran must first reverse its nuclear steps, creating a contest of wills between the nations.Asked if Iran had to stop enriching uranium first, Biden nodded. It was not clear exactly what he meant, as Iran is permitted to enrich uranium under the 2015 nuclear deal within certain limits.“Will the US lift sanctions first in order to get Iran back to the negotiating table?” CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell asked.“No,” Biden responded.“They have to stop enriching uranium first?” O’Donnell asked. Biden nodded.Earlier on Sunday Iran’s supreme leader urged the US to lift all sanctions if it wants the country to live up to commitments under its nuclear deal with world powers, according to state TV.In his first comments on the matter since Biden took office, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted as saying: “If (the US) wants Iran to return to its commitments, it must lift all sanctions in practice, then we will do verification then we will return to our commitments.”“This is the definitive and irreversible policy of the Islamic Republic, and all of the country’s officials are unanimous on this, and no one will deviate from it,” Khamenei added Sunday, reiterating Iranian leaders’ previous remarks that the US must ease its sanctions before Iran comes back into compliance.The supreme leader, 81, has the final say on all matters of state in Iran and approved the efforts at reaching the nuclear deal in 2015.In response to Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, the country began to gradually violate its atomic commitments, and threatened further provocations in a bid to increase its leverage and get Biden to prioritize a return to the deal as he moves to dismantle Trump’s legacy. Biden has signed a series of executive actions that reverse course on a wide range of issues, including climate change and immigration.Following the killing last December of an Iranian scientist credited with spearheading the country’s disbanded military nuclear program, Iran’s parliament approved a law to block international nuclear inspectors later this month – a serious violation of the accord.Iran also has begun enriching uranium closer to weapons-grade levels and said it would experiment with uranium metals, a key component of a nuclear warhead. The country has announced its moves and insisted that all breaches of the pact are easily reversible. Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki has embraced normalcy – is it working?

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      The blue door at the side of the White House podium slid open. “Hi everyone!” exclaimed Jen Psaki with a congeniality seldom heard in the briefing room in recent years.The press secretary introduced Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, and stepped away from the podium only to hastily reach back for a face mask she had momentarily forgotten there. Warning reporters that their time with Sullivan was limited, she quipped: “I will be the bad cop as per usual over here.”“Bad cop” is one of Psaki’s trademark phrases, along with “circle back” and “I don’t have anything more for you”. All are now becoming familiar to cable news viewers at the restored daily White House press briefing. After four madcap years of Donald Trump, the sessions are disorientingly civil, fact-based and unnewsy. In a word, “normal”.“To actually hear questions and substantive answers is refreshing,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster. “It does feel like something from a different era.”Psaki is the most prominent public face of a Joe Biden administration that has pledged to restore order and trust with a press castigated by Trump as “the enemy of the people”. Its communications strategy has involved a blitz of speeches, briefings and policy documents, including thrice-weekly virtual sessions with experts on the coronavirus pandemic. Whereas Trump’s White House was a theatre of anarchic improvisation, Biden’s is a set where everyone sticks to the script.At Thursday’s press briefing, Sullivan previewed Biden’s announcement cutting off support for Saudi military operations in Yemen. Psaki wielding a giant briefing book, reeled off facts and figures about why the president’s $1.9tn Covid relief plan is essential. Then she took questions, starting with the Associated Press, another quietly revived tradition.For the dozen or so reporters – masked and physically distanced due to coronavirus precautions – sitting in the blue seats of the compact briefing room, the back and forth is crisper than in the Trump era. There is a sense of kinetic energy that was lacking when the president himself could be rambling and soporific and when his press secretaries aimed sound bites mostly at cable news and YouTube.But there is also a fast chess game taking place, with reporters moving pieces forward in search of a weakness and Psaki marshaling her defenses to dodge questions or avoid a headline-generating gaffe. And when the pressure mounts, she has a queen’s gambit.She told National Public Radio’s (NPR) humorous Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! program last weekend: “I have a little secret thing I do – maybe not secret because I’m telling all of you. But when reporters are getting really loud, or they’re starting to ask crazy questions, I just slow down my pace, and I talk very quietly, and I treat them like I’m an orderly sometimes in an insane asylum.”But it is not all smooth-sailing.There was a minor clean-up required this week when Psaki was asked about Trump’s much-mocked space force. The press secretary replied with more than a hint of sarcasm: “Wow. Space force. It’s the plane of today!” – a reference to a past question about the color scheme of Air Force One.Republicans demanded an apology with the Alabama congressman Mike Rogers fulminating: “It’s concerning to see the Biden administration’s press secretary blatantly diminish an entire branch of our military as the punchline of a joke.” Psaki did not say sorry but did feel compelled to tweet recognition of the space force’s “important work”.If the 42-year-old from Connecticut is a polished performer, it is because she has deep experience. She was a traveling press secretary for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, a state department spokesperson and, from 2015 to 2017, White House communications director. She was then a political commentator for CNN and a fellow at Georgetown University in Washington.Mike McCurry, a former White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, is an acquaintance who has offered Psaki occasional advice such as “keep a good sense of humour” and “don’t let it consume every bit of your life”.He said: “Two weeks in, she’s doing very well. She’s gives good, complete answers, She’s taken on some tough subjects. She knows how to kind of parry and thrust, as you have to do from the podium, and I think that the press appreciates it. There’s a requisite amount of spin that goes with the job to try to put things in a favorable light for the president but she doesn’t overdo that.”That could not be said for Psaki’s predecessor, Kayleigh McEnany, who pushed false conspiracy theories about a stolen election and ended each briefing with a tirade against the “fake news” media. Compared to such cartoon villains, as they were perceived by critics, the new team of professional bureaucrats were bound to enjoy a honeymoon period.Jen Psaki has become must-see TV. I think many people are glued to these press conferencesWendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “Jen Psaki has become must-see TV. I think many people are glued to these press conferences. They’re longer than they used to be and she’s very good at what she does and, to the extent that she answers questions as truthfully as she can, it’s like being in a rainstorm after a drought.”Communications strategy is an early case study in the question of whether Trump did change the presidency forever or the White House and other institutions are more resilient than often supposed and able to revert to Bush and Obama-era norms.Those norms were hardly flawless. All presidents lie, argued Adam Serwer in the Atlantic magazine, providing a list of examples from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama and concluding that Biden will inevitably lie too when the public interest conflicts with the political interest of the White House. Trump’s narcissistic mendacity was hardly a solution to the problems of political doublespeak, but a snap back to the previous norm of evasiveness and spin may not be it either.Where the Biden White House will also break from the immediate Trumpian past, Schiller predicted, is by giving a more prominent role to other officials. “Biden has explicitly chosen very experienced politicians for most of his key positions, people who have been in front of cameras before, people who know how to communicate for the most part. He will rely heavily on a lot of those cabinet secretaries to get out his message on particular policies and give them some autonomy and freedom to do that,” Schiller said.Trump, by contrast, was often said to be his own communications director, press secretary and all-round salesman. He tormented his staff by upending their message of the day with heat-of-the-moment tweets that announced firings, threatened wars and dominated news cycles. But even some detractors admitted that it provided a real-time window on the president’s thinking unlike anything seen before.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There’s no doubt that Donald Trump was a pioneer in the use of social media. He was able to drive the agenda in a way that few presidents have ever been able to do using Twitter.”Meanwhile Biden generated the headline on the Mashable website: “Joe Biden’s first @POTUS tweet is refreshingly boring.” Indeed, Biden’s conventional tweets lack the personal authenticity not only of Trump but of social media savvy politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Given the president’s history of gaffes, this may be no bad thing, Jacobs added.“With Biden there’s really no choice because he’s a guy who shares Trump’s problems with agenda control. Biden is only effective as a communicator as long as he’s being handed talking points. When he’s gone off script, it’s been a wild ride. He doesn’t have the communication skills of Trump and he is prone to seat-of-the-pants comments that are damaging.”The Biden communications team was spared potentially troubling distraction last month when Trump was banned from Twitter, effectively cutting his mic. Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, does not miss him. “We didn’t learn anything from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed except that the man was an egomaniacal, hypersensitive petulant child,” he said.“As president there is a way to use it that doesn’t come off like you’re sitting in your underwear at two in the morning tweeting manically because you just saw something online that that pissed you off.” More