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      'A similar challenge': how Joe Biden echoes Kennedys on US foreign policy

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      It was a popular Washington sport: find the past president who best explained Donald Trump. There was a touch of Andrew Jackson’s populism, a dash of Richard Nixon’s skulduggery, a sprinkling of Ronald Reagan’s myth-making. But now all that is over, who are the closest matches to Joe Biden?

      A huge portrait of Franklin Roosevelt hanging in the Oval Office makes the obvious connection between two men who inherited epochal crises and prescribed epochal remedies. But the room’s other contents suggest an affinity between the oldest man ever elected president and the youngest: John F Kennedy.
      Biden keeps a photo of himself meeting Pope Francis behind his desk, leaving no one in any doubt he is the second Catholic president. Kennedy was the first. Biden displays a bust of Robert F Kennedy, the 35th president’s brother and attorney general, beside the fireplace. The Oval Office also contains a 332g moon rock brought back by the Apollo missions, the posthumous realisation of Kennedy’s dream.
      So it was that in his first prime time TV address, last week, Biden pivoted from the coronavirus pandemic to exult in America landing a rover on Mars. He did not add that China, which last month put a spacecraft in orbit around the red planet, intends to put a rover on the surface too. A space race is under way between two global superpowers. Sound familiar?
      “It is very hard to exaggerate how much all of JFK’s beliefs and policies were shaped by the cold war,” argues Lawrence Haas, author of a new book, The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire. “In the case of space, he was far less interested in the magic of space than he was in losing the space race to the Soviets.

      “He greatly feared the impact of Soviet advances on America’s competition with the Soviets for influence throughout the developing world. This was a time when countries and peoples across several continents were choosing sides: whether to be loyal to freedom and democracy and through that to the United States or communism and through that to the Soviet Union.
      “JFK obsessed over America’s image in the world. He took office when the United States was behind the Soviets in space and he agonised over it, certainly through 1961 and didn’t begin to relax about it until at least 1962 and then into 1963 when we were really making advances in the aftermath of his announcing the goal of landing a man on the moon and bringing him safely to earth by the end of the decade.”
      In a 1962 memo to his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, who chaired the National Space Council, Kennedy asked if America had a chance of beating the Soviets. Haas adds: “Whether it was space or civil rights or a whole variety of other domestic issues, JFK crafted them through the prism of foreign policy in general and the cold war in particular.”
      ‘An alternative model of governance’
      Kennedy, a former senator, became president aged 43 at an inauguration featuring Robert Frost. Sixty years later to the day, Biden, a former senator, became president aged 78 at an inauguration featuring Amanda Gorman. Both poets sought to project optimism about the future but inherited a sense of American hegemony under existential threat. More

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      Win the Amazon union fight and we can usher in a new Progressive Era | Robert Reich

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      The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money and the abandonment of the working class.All this is coming to a head in several ways.Over the next eight days, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first US-based union in its nearly 27-year history.Conditions in Amazon warehouses would please Kim Jong-un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings “and they track our every move”, Jennifer Bates, a worker at Bessemer, told the Senate budget committee on Wednesday.To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.Why is Amazon abusing its workers?The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a commitment to antitrustThe company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39% of Americans put together.Amazon is abusing workers because it can.Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying about $15 an hour and treating workers like cattle.The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union, summoning the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% together.Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a renewed commitment to antitrust.The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same. More

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      'Climate facts are back': EPA brings science back to website after Trump purge

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      Canceled four years ago by a president who considered global warming a hoax, climate crisis information has returned to the website of the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of Joe Biden’s promise to “bring science back”.
      The revival of a page dedicated to the climate emergency reverses Donald Trump’s order in 2017 to drop all references to it from government websites, and prioritises the Biden administration’s pledge to “organize and deploy the full capacity of its agencies to combat the climate crisis”.
      In a statement, Michael Regan, confirmed by the US Senate last week as the federal agency’s new head, said: “Climate facts are back on the EPA’s website where they should be. Considering the urgency of this crisis, it’s critical that Americans have access to information and resources so that we can all play a role in protecting our environment, our health and vulnerable communities.”
      Trump’s decision to drop the EPA’s climate informational page was just one of many controversial moves that angered environmentalists during his single term of office. He pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement, rolled back countless environmental regulations and protections and appointed a scandal-ridden climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to lead the EPA.

      Analysts, however, considered the Orwellian removal from the world wide web of scientifically accepted climate data and information to be especially heinous.
      In a Guardian article last October, Michael Mann, one of the world’s most eminent climate experts, likened the following month’s presidential election to “a Tolkienesque battle between good and evil” and said Trump’s re-election would have made it “essentially impossible” to avert a global climate catastrophe. More

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      'Blindsided': Biden faces tough test in reversing Trump's cruel border legacy

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      Lauded for his human touch, Joe Biden is facing an early political and moral test over how his government treats thousands of migrant children who make the dangerous journey to America alone.

      Officials say the number of people caught attempting to cross the US-Mexico border is on pace to hit its highest number for 20 years. Single adults and families are being expelled under coronavirus safety rules inherited from Donald Trump.
      But a growing number of children, some as young as six years old, from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are arriving at the southern border without parents or guardians. These minors are brought to border patrol facilities – where many languish in cramped, prison-like conditions for days on end.
      The fast-developing humanitarian emergency shows how Biden’s determination to break from Trump’s harsh, nativist crackdown in favour of a more compassionate approach has collided with the reality of finite resources and a broken system.
      “I do think that they were blindsided by this surge,” said María Teresa Kumar, founding president of the grassroots political organisation Voto Latino. “As someone that monitored this a lot, I didn’t see that coming and I don’t think the community saw that coming. It took everybody by surprise.
      “It is heart-wrenching knowing that there are children that are cold and don’t have family. It’s one of these cases where there seems to be no right answers. Knowing the people inside the administration are very much on the side of immigrants speaks to me that there are real moral dilemmas happening right now and I would not want to be in that position.”

      Democrats have called the situation a “challenge” and “problem” and blamed Trump’s legacy. Republicans have rushed to brand it the first “crisis” and “disaster” of Biden’s presidency. The battle is proof that border access remains one of the most complex, emotive and radioactive issues in American politics.
      Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by promising to build a wall, routinely vilified migrants and, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, spoke often of an “invasion”. Biden stopped construction of the wall and promised to unwind Trump’s zero-tolerance policies.
      The number of “encounters” between migrants and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has increased every month since April 2020. But when 100,441 migrants were reported attempting to cross the border last month, it was the highest level since March 2019 and included a particular rise in unaccompanied children.
      Many such children head to the US to reunite with family members or escape poverty, crime and violence. Central America has been hit by hurricanes and the economic fallout of Covid-19. In an ABC interview this week, Biden denied that more migrants were coming because he is “a nice guy”, insisting: “They come because their circumstance is so bad.”
      Under Trump, unaccompanied children were sent straight back to Mexico. Biden decided they should go to a border patrol facility and, within 72 hours, be transferred to the health department with a view to being placed with a family member or sponsor.
      However, it has quickly become clear the system is not fit for purpose, leaving about 4,500 children stuck in facilities designed for adult men. Lawyers who visited one facility in Texas described seeing children sleeping on the floor or on metal benches and being allowed outside for a few minutes every few days.
      The administration is scrambling to find more capacity, opening emergency shelters and using a convention centre in Dallas to house up to 3,000 teenage boys. It also deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which typically responds to floods, storms and other disasters, to help shelter and transport children at least until early June.
      Republicans seized on that move as evidence a disaster is unfolding. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, led a delegation of a dozen Republicans to El Paso, Texas, and spoke of “the Biden border crisis”, adding: “It’s more than a crisis. This is human heartbreak.”
      The message has resounded through a conservative media that finds Biden an elusive target. Trump made wildly exaggerated claims in a Fox News interview: “They’re destroying our country. People are coming in by the hundreds of thousands, And, frankly, our country can’t handle it. It is a crisis like we have rarely had and, certainly, we have never had on the border.”
      For Republicans, reeling from election defeat, internal divisions and failure to block Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the border offers a political lifeline.
      Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If the numbers go down next month this isn’t a crisis, but I think what they are expecting is that they’re not going to go down and that this is going to be something that will be an enduring and endemic problem.
      “It’s something that energises and unites the Trump voting coalition and could easily be seen as a failure on behalf of the administration by just enough of the people who voted for him but aren’t hardcore Democrats. So I think it’s a very smart move by Republicans to play this out and Biden needs to figure out how you can be compassionate while not being naively welcoming. He has not yet figured out how to do that.”

      Others, however, regard the Republican response as predictable ploy by a party obsessed with demonising migrants. Kumar said: “They’re phonies and it is coldly calculated because they know they have problems with suburban white women voters, and they are trying to make a case for it for the midterms.
      “It’s cynical and gross because when children were literally dying at the border, when they had a president that was teargassing refugees, not one of them stood up. It’s callous and cold political expediency and it’s shameful.”
      The White House has pointed out that the Trump administration forcibly separated nearly 3,000 children from parents, with no system in place to reunite them. Alejandro Mayorkas, the first migrant and first Latino in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress: “A crisis is when a nation is willing to rip a nine-year-old child out of the hands of his or her parent and separate that family to deter future migration. That, to me, is a humanitarian crisis.”
      Mayorkas argues that Trump’s decision to cut staffing, bed capacity and other resources was reckless given the likelihood that the number of migrants would rise again as the pandemic waned.
      “The system was gutted,” he said, “facilities were closed and they cruelly expelled young children into the hands of traffickers. We have had to rebuild the entire system, including the policies and procedures required to administer the asylum laws that Congress passed long ago.” More

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      in US Politics

      US reaches 100m Covid vaccine milestone six weeks early as Fauci urges vigilance – live

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      Key events

      Show

      2.15pm EDT
      14:15

      Afternoon summary

      1.41pm EDT
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      Biden “100% fine” after stumbling while boarding Air Force One

      12.39pm EDT
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      Biden administration reaches 100 millionth coronavirus vaccinations goal six weeks early

      11.02am EDT
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      CDC relaxes physical distancing requirements in schools from 6ft to 3ft

      8.01am EDT
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      Blinken to visit Europe next week for talks with Nato and the EU

      6.56am EDT
      06:56

      US and China publicly rebuke each other in first major talks of Biden era

      6.37am EDT
      06:37

      Biden and Harris trip to Atlanta to focus on meeting Asian American community leaders

      Live feed

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      5.53pm EDT
      17:53

      Today, a staffer in Andrew Cuomo’s office became the first current employee to come forward with sexual harassment claims against the governor. The Guardian’s Victoria Biekiempis has an overview of the latest bombshell that was published by the New York Times:
      Alyssa McGrath, 33 told the newspaper that Cuomo made suggestive statements to her and another staffer. McGrath said that this co-worker is the woman who accused Cuomo of groping.
      “He has a way of making you feel very comfortable around him, almost like you’re his friend,” McGrath reportedly said. “But then you walk away from the encounter or conversation, in your head going, ‘I can’t believe I just had that interaction with the governor of New York.’”
      While McGrath does not work directly for Cuomo, she claimed that she and her co-worker were frequently selected from the group of executive chamber assistants to work at the governor’s mansion on weekends.
      The governor has denied wrongdoing, and said that his relationships with staffers he considered to be friends might have been misinterpreted.

      5.37pm EDT
      17:37

      Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, and a bipartisan cohort of Senate members just finished a trip to the El Paso border to visit facilities that have seen a surge in accompanied minors.
      Earlier this week Trisha Garcia reported on the mad dash to make room for migrant children who are coming into the city for the Guardian.

      Latest data revealed that more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children were now in US custody, but only 500 beds were available, the Associated Press said, further reporting that hundreds were packed into tents, some sleeping on the floor and waiting five days for a shower.

      Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut accompanied Mayorkas and shared his reflections in a series of tweets:

      Chris Murphy
      (@ChrisMurphyCT)
      Just left the border processing facility. 100s of kids packed into big open rooms. In a corner, I fought back tears as a 13 yr old girl sobbbed uncontrollably explaining thru a translator how terrified she was, having been separated from her grandmother and without her parents.

      March 19, 2021

      Updated
      at 5.50pm EDT

      5.23pm EDT
      17:23

      Hello, this is Abené Clayton from the west coast bureau. I’m going to be taking over the live blog for the next few hours.

      Updated
      at 5.48pm EDT

      4.55pm EDT
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      Late afternoon summary

      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are in Atlanta meeting with Asian American leaders. Follow our coverage of their meeting here.

      “Science is back” Biden declared during a visit to the CDC in Atlanta on Friday.
      Four men linked to the far right the Proud Boys have been charged with plotting to attack the US Capitol.
      Republican congressman Tom Reed has been accused of sexual misconduct by a former lobbyist. Reed, who is considering a run for governor of New York, has denied her account.
      DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is traveling Friday to El Paso with a bipartisan group of senators amid spiraling political fallout from a spike of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border.

      Updated
      at 4.55pm EDT

      4.39pm EDT
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      Earlier today, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan resolution condemning the military coup in Myanmar on 1 February and calling for the release of those detained.
      But fourteen Republicans voted against the measure. The list includes several arch-conservatives who objected to the electoral certification of Biden’s presidential victory following the insurrection at the US Capitol by supporters loyal to Trump.

      Manu Raju
      (@mkraju)
      14 House Republicans voted against a resolution condemning the military coup in Myanmar, per @kristin__wilson:Lauren BoebertAndy BiggsMatt GaetzTom MassieKen BuckMary MillerChip RoyJodey HiceAlex MooneyScott PerryAndy HarrisTed BuddBarry MooreMarjorie Taylor Greene

      March 19, 2021

      A spokesman for Pennsylvania congressman Scott Perry, who voted against certifying his state’s electors, told Forbes that the measure was an “overt attempt to trap Republicans into condemning the claims of evidence of election fraud in Burma” while “perpetuating similar claims (in the Democrat’s views) of evidence in US elections.”
      Arizona congressman Andy Biggs, who objected to the certification of his state’s electoral votes, denounced the violence in a video posted to Twitter, but said he believed that the resolution was a way for the US to “put our foot in the door in Burma.”
      Myanmar is also known as Burma.

      Updated
      at 4.44pm EDT

      4.09pm EDT
      16:09

      We have a separate live blog following the latest developments on the spa shootings that left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent. Tune in here for our full coverage of Biden’s visit with Asian American leaders in Atlanta.

      3.57pm EDT
      15:57

      Twitter said is temporarily suspended the account of congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in error.
      “We use a combination of technology and human review to enforce the Twitter Rules across the service,” a spokeswoman for the social media giant said. “In this case, our automated systems took enforcement action on the account referenced in error. This action has been reversed, and access to the account has been reinstated.”
      Responding on Twitter after her account was restored, Greene cast doubt on the explanation and demanded the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, disclose the name of the employee who removed her account in error.
      She wrote: “I was just told @Twitter suspended me for 12 hrs in “error,” on the same day Dems introduced a resolution to expel me from Congress. What a coincidence
      Twitter’s little error wasn’t resolved until after 12 hrs. @jack which employee made the ‘error?’ Reply to my email, Jack.”
      Greene, a conspiracy-peddling conservative acolyte of Donald Trump, had her account locked once before in January for what Twitter said was “multiple violations of our civic integrity policy,” including false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
      Greene’s last tweets before her account was temporarily suspended on Thursday night angrily denounced the Democratic effort to expel her from Congress.

      Updated
      at 4.12pm EDT

      3.38pm EDT
      15:38 More

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      in World Politics

      China and the Perils of Bipartisanship

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      Not a single congressional Republican voted for the recent $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Not even the so-called moderate Republicans, the handful who backed the second impeachment of former US President Donald Trump, deigned to support an economic package that helps Americans hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire Republican caucus didn’t just snub the Democrats. They ignored the Republican mayors, as well as 41% of Republican voters, who approved of the legislation.

      Naturally, the unified Republican caucus complained that President Joe Biden was not displaying his promised bipartisanship. It didn’t seem to occur to them that bipartisanship is a two-way street. How soon they’ve forgotten that nearly every Democrat in both houses voted for the Trump administration’s initial bailout package in March 2020.

      A Deeper Look into Hong Kong’s Evolution

      READ MORE

      Nevertheless, the Biden administration remains eager to find common ground with Republican legislators. The president has high hopes that he can attract Republican support for an infrastructure bill this summer, given that rebuilding American bridges, highways and the like was a priority for the previous administration.

      But here’s a truly troubling scenario. Casting around for another unifying topic, the Biden team has seized upon China. Democrats and Republicans alike are concerned about what China is doing these days. There is bipartisan disgust over what’s happening in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Hawks in both parties have long warned about Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea. Despite wildly different economic ideologies, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands in their opposition to Chinese trade and currency policies, cavalier approach to intellectual property rights and efforts to dominate markets in the Global South.

      On the face of it, however, the bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is starting to pull together is just another infrastructure initiative. It is meant “to shore up U.S. supply chains, expand American production of semiconductors, create 5G networks nationwide and pour billions into investments into U.S. manufacturing companies and hubs, among other proposals,” according to The Washington Post.

      Embed from Getty Images

      But it’s not just infrastructure. The measure is specifically designed to bolster the full-spectrum US fight against China. “Hating China is a big bipartisan thing, and Schumer has the opportunity to take ownership of being against China,” points out Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-wing American Action Forum.

      According to the most benign reading of this bipartisanship, the Biden administration will be manufacturing an anti-Chinese version of the Sputnik moment when, in 1957, the Soviet launch of the first artificial satellite prompted a frenzy of US government spending on science and technology to catch up to the Russians. “The danger China poses could fundamentally reorder U.S. attitudes toward government’s role in domestic economic growth, research and development in ways that leave the United States stronger,” writes liberal columnist E.J. Dionne.

      A robust industrial policy is indeed preferable to, say, the tariffs that the Trump administration levied against Chinese products. If fear of China overcomes the conservative distaste for government interventions in the economy, should progressives really be looking this particular gift horse in the mouth?

      Full Court Press

      The Quad is the latest multilateral mechanism through which the United States is putting pressure on China. The four countries — the United States, India, Japan and Australia — all have their separate beefs with Beijing. But last week was the first time that the heads of these four states met as part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which was set up in 2007.

      The statement the four leaders recently published in The Washington Post makes no mention of China. It’s all about cooperating on climate, the pandemic and strengthening democracy. But that’s just being diplomatic. As Alex Ward writes in Vox, China has “gotten into a deadly fight over a disputed border with India, started a trade war with Australia, hacked the US government, and for years used its might to push Japan around on economic and military matters.” Trump tried to rally the four countries behind his own anti-China agenda. But his efforts were compromised by a suspicion in many quarters that he’d just as soon negotiate a deal with China behind the Quad’s back as coordinate a united front.

      The current president, by contrast, has moved steadily away from a preference to engage China. “Biden had to be reprogrammed on China” during the presidential campaign, one of his advisers said. This reprogramming explains Biden’s harsher tone during the election, such as calling Chinese leader Xi Jinping “a thug.”

      As president, Biden has been careful to sound notes of both amicability and threat. Cooperation to deal with the climate crisis is certainly a possibility. But promoting deals with China is not going to win the new president support in Congress or, for that matter, with the American public. China’s unfavorability rating rose to 79% in a recent Gallup poll, its worst showing in more than four decades. A shift has taken place in just the last couple of years. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 67% of Americans now have “cold” feelings toward China, compared to only 46% in 2018.

      The appointment of Kurt Campbell as the Indo-Pacific coordinator at the National Security Council (NSC) indicates the direction of the administration’s new take on Asia. Campbell was a key architect of the “Pacific pivot” under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration. He’s not going to play quite the anti-China role that Matt Pottinger did on Trump’s NSC, but he’s a firm believer in strengthening bilateral alliances and multilateral coordination to contain China.

      In a January 2021 piece in Foreign Affairs, Campbell channeled Henry Kissinger in asserting the need for the US to restore a “balance of power” in the region. What that really means is that the US, with the help of its friends, must push back against China to reassert its own Pacific authority, both militarily and economically. Practically, Campbell explains, this means that:

      “Although Washington should maintain its forward presence, it also needs to work with other states to disperse U.S. forces across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. This would reduce American reliance on a small number of vulnerable facilities in East Asia. Finally, the United States should encourage new military and intelligence partnerships between regional states, while still deepening those relationships in which the United States plays a major role—placing a ‘tire’ on the familiar regional alliance system with a U.S. hub and allied spokes.”

      Over the years, China has steadily eroded US power not only in Asia but internationally. It used the anti-globalism of the Trump years to expand its influence in international institutions such as the United Nations and its associated bodies like the World Health Organization. Where It has encountered difficulties in expanding its influence, such as with international financial institutions, it has simply created its own. Shortly after Biden’s election, China joined the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes the countries of Southeast Asia, plus Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan). This move, plus Beijing’s recent investment agreement with the European Union and President Xi’s announcement that China would also consider joining a modified Trans-Pacific Partnership, suggests an economic counteroffensive to the US ramping up of multilateral security arrangements.

      These moves have not gone unnoticed. On the eve of their first visit to Asia this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin III wrote in The Washington Post, “If we don’t act decisively and lead, Beijing will.”

      The Biden administration’s decision to focus on beefing up US economic competitiveness, particularly in the tech sector, is in some ways an admission of defeat. China has outmaneuvered the United States in the global economy. The only way Washington can compete at the moment is by throwing its weight around militarily and trying to play catch-up on the home front.

      Is China a Useful Threat?

      It’s hard to argue with the importance of investing in critical US industries. Republicans and laissez-faire economists generally oppose such a policy of picking winners and losers in the marketplace, except when it comes to the military-industrial complex. Only a large external threat can move such ideologues to accept the obvious: governments can and should shape markets.

      But here are some problems with hitching this industrial policy to the “China threat.” The global economy needs an overhaul to address the climate crisis, rampant economic inequality, automation and other developments. This is no time for the US to turn its economic relationship with China into a Cold War competition. Sure, let the two countries compete over who makes the best laptop computer, but cooperation is essential for developing new rules for the global economy. A robust industrial policy doesn’t preclude cooperation, unless it feeds into a rancor and a parochialism that makes cooperation near to impossible.

      The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of global supply chains, with the collapse of international trade and countries initially competing for scarce medical equipment. This is not a new problem, however. Shelley Rigger writes in her 2013 book on Taiwan about a moment “in 1999 when a power transmission tower on a remote mountain in central Taiwan toppled, blacking out the island’s high-tech industry for a day. The interruption nearly doubled the world price of memory chips and the supply of TFT-LCD flat screens took six months to return to normal.” Natural (and unnatural) disasters can wreak havoc on the supply of essential components.

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      Ensuring an indigenous supply of computer chips may well protect the US in the short term, but it does little to address the underlying problem of supply chains. A return to a time when every country produced all of its essentials or went without is not really an option, considering the importance of global trade routes going back to the Silk Road and even before. Reshoring and relocalization are both essential in this age of climate crisis. But a reordering of the global economy that accommodates such changes should be a matter for coordination, not Cold War competition.

      In addition, an industrial policy that prioritizes gaining a competitive edge over China could overshadow the other major focus of the Biden administration, namely reducing the national and global carbon footprints. High-tech products often rely on key outputs of the extraction industry, like cobalt and lithium. An industrial policy built on minimizing carbon emissions and the use of rare minerals, rather than besting China, would pick very different economic winners and losers.

      When it comes to foreign policy, bipartisanship is not necessarily a virtue. The two major US parties came together around waging the Vietnam War, confronting the Soviet Union during the Cold War and fighting “terrorism” in the wake of September 11. The first failed, the second was outrageously expensive and nearly ended in nuclear apocalypse, and the third led the country into the infamous “forever wars.”

      Selectively challenging China over its human rights record, its overreach in the South China Sea or the conduct of its businesses around the world (like this fish meal operation in Gambia) is appropriate. Going all out in a military, economic and cultural competition with the Asian superpower — and forging a wafer-thin bipartisan consensus to do so — is the height of folly.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      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 House passes bill that would give Dreamers a path to citizenship

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterThe US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would give undocumented immigrants, including “Dreamers”, a pathway to citizenship. The House on Thursday voted 228 to 197, largely along party lines, to set up a legal pathway to citizenship for Dreamers – people who came to the US as undocumented minors and who received temporary protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.The bill, called the American Dream and Promise Act of 2021, would also grant green cards for many immigrants who have fled war or natural disasters and are residing in the US with a temporary protected status. In all, it could make 4.4 million people eligible for permanent residence in the US, according to the Migration Policy Institute.Nine Republicans joined Democrats in support of the measure.Representatives also voted 247-174 Thursday on a second bill, which would grant legal status for undocumented farmworkers. Both measures passed in 2019, as well, with some Republican support – but the measures are likely to join a growing list of legislation that will hit a wall in the evenly divided Senate, where Republicans have vowed to block proposals with the filibuster.The measures are among several attempts by Democrats to reverse Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies. They also coincide with Joe Biden’s efforts to address the number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border, many of whom are fleeing dangerous conditions in Central America.The Dreamer bill would grant conditional legal status for 10 years to many undocumented immigrants who were brought into the US as children. During Thursday’s debate, the Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal noted she had come from India to the US alone at the age of 16, saying: “Let’s stop the hypocrisy of criminalizing immigrants.”Immigrant rights groups celebrated the news of its passage. “This is a result of years of organizing and pressure from the immigrant rights movement, but we’ll continue to hold our celebration until the very end,” tweeted the advocacy group Raices.As president, Trump rescinded the Obama-era Daca program, which offered temporary protection from deportation to Dreamers. However, the supreme court ruled in 2020 that Trump’s move had been unlawful.The Biden White House backed both bills. But it also urged lawmakers to adopt broader reforms in Biden’s sweeping immigration bill introduced last month, saying this would secure the border and “address the root causes of instability and unsafe conditions causing migration from Central America”.“We can’t keep waiting,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “I urge Congress to come together to find long term solutions to our entire immigration system so we can create a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system, tackle the root causes of migration and legalize the undocumented population in the United States.”Biden’s wide-ranging plan would provide a path to US citizenship to the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. But the Senate’s No 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, said this week that goal does not have enough support in the House or Senate.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, panned the House efforts on Thursday, saying they would exacerbate problems at the border, further dimming prospects in that chamber, where a supermajority of at least 60 of 100 members are needed for most legislation to advance.And even if the Dreamers bill were to pass the Senate, it would still have limitations, including provisions around criminal history that could bar some young immigrants from legal status if they have committed a misdemeanor. It also gives the Department of Homeland Security discretion over which youths can be excluded from the path to citizenship, based on alleged gang affiliation or dispositions in juvenile court.Human Rights Watch and other groups have written to Democratic legislators asking them to strike provisions that would bar young immigrants who have been criminalized from becoming citizens.“If we learned anything in 2020, it’s that the policing and mass incarceration systems in this country are fundamentally rigged against Black and Latinx people,” said Jacinta González, the senior campaign organizer for the advocacy group Mijente, who criticised the bill for being “designed to strip access to Biden’s promise of immigration reform from people who have experienced police contact. Criminalization born of a racist system cannot be the measure by which we determine who belongs and who goes.” More

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      in World Politics

      Why the US Return to the WHO Matters

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      In compliance with major statements made repeatedly during his electoral campaign, US President Joe Biden, on his first day in office on January 20, signed two important executive orders — among 15 others, a record number — signaling the United States’ return to the international arena, to global cooperation and multilateralism. One of these orders was for the United States to rejoin the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and the other was to reestablish the country’s full membership and support to the World Health Organization (WHO).

      Germany’s Handling of the Pandemic: A Model of Incompetence?

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      Both acts were hugely symbolic, especially since they occurred within hours of Biden’s inauguration, as they set a fundamentally new tone in US foreign policy and sent a strong signal to the world, paraphrased as: We are back, count on us. But other than being symbolic, these acts constitute a material and substantial backing of global efforts to address two of the 21st century’s most severe world crises — the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change — under the aegis of the United Nations.

      When the Trump administration announced in July 2020, in the middle of the most devastating pandemic in at least a century, that the US would withdraw from the WHO — having already frozen payments of mandatory membership dues and thereby violating international law months earlier — that move was widely regarded as not only hugely counterproductive but as outright insane.

      The World Needs the US as Well

      Clearly, the country hit hardest by the pandemic — both in terms of total infections and deaths — is better off as a member of the very global community that ensures the fast sharing of research, data and best practices, coordinates responses, and comes together to devise evidence-based solutions to the world’s most pressing public health issues, be it malaria, tuberculosis, HIV or COVID-19. But the international community needs the US as well.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In fact, the US has been the single most important independent variable in international relations and global affairs since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of the Declaration of the United Nations on January 1, 1942. Hence, a WHO without the active participation and support of the US government is unthinkable. This engagement extends well beyond funding. Since its inception in 1948, the US has been the single largest contributor to the WHO — which budgeted $4.84 billion for the biennium 2020-21, not including COVID-19-related expenses — with a steady share of 22% of the organization’s assessed core budget and significant additional voluntary contributions made every single year.

      Yet the active support of medical research data, analysis, know-how, logistics, supplies and people power to the WHO’s multifold programs and emergency operations by the US, such as during the West African Ebola crisis of 2013-15, is priceless and virtually irreplaceable. Indeed, a great sense of relief was voiced in unison by scientists, senior government officials and UN leaders alike when the Biden administration applied common sense and restored the United States’ bond with the WHO on the day of its inception. This step will have an immediately relevant and measurable impact on the global response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

      With the unfreezing of previously withheld payments and the allocation of additional, fresh sums of money targeted at global health emergency relief efforts, research and development, and the provision of supplies and teams, the global fight against COVID-19 will experience an important boost. This will be particularly important in the context of WHO’s COVAX initiative, which is a historic, unprecedented fundraising effort to make effective and safe vaccines available to all countries, especially developing ones. Moreover, COVAX entails a proprietary vaccine development program, including the building of manufacturing capabilities, and provides technical and logistical support to countries in need.

      COVAX Initiative

      The new US administration has quickly become COVAX’s largest funder and pledged to donate surplus vaccine stocks in addition to its financial contributions. Also, efforts to assist developing countries by deploying on-the-ground technical assistance where needed are underway.

      However, COVAX still has a long way to go to meet its goal of buying supply so that 2 billion doses can be fairly and equitably distributed by the end of 2021. To date, financial support by OECD countries to the facility has been lukewarm at best, although the US and Germany stand out. The apparent lack of solidarity and tangible support by wealthy nations is disappointing and recently prompted UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to call global vaccine distribution “wildly uneven and unfair,” describing the goal of providing vaccines to all as “the biggest moral test before the global community.”

      In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic with its rapidly-emerging mutations and variants, quick, unequivocal and substantial support — both financial and technical — to developing countries and those behind in getting access to effective vaccines is not only a moral obligation for developed countries, but also a mere matter of rationality and self-interest.

      As long as over 100 countries globally have not even received a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, even the most ambitious and aggressive vaccine rollout campaigns in wealthy countries may be in vain as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 can emerge and cause new viral strains at any time. The Biden administration, along with other governments, is well advised to massively support multilateral solutions and collective action. It is the only reasonable, promising approach to tackling the world’s biggest crises in the 21st century.

      *[This article was submitted on behalf of the author by the Hamad bin Khalifa University Communications Directorate. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the university’s official stance.]

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