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    Vietnam and India Are Now Acting to Contain Aggressive China

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    Mitt Romney’s Excessive Evening

    The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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    The US Leaves Ukraine to Fight New Cold War With Russia

    The defenders of Ukraine are bravely resisting Russian aggression, shaming the rest of the world and the UN Security Council for its failure to protect them. It is an encouraging sign that the Russians and Ukrainians are holding talks in Belarus that may lead to a ceasefire. All efforts must be made to bring an end to this conflict before the Russian war machine kills thousands more of Ukraine’s defenders and civilians, and forces hundreds of thousands more to flee. 

    But there is a more insidious reality at work beneath the surface of this classic morality play, and that is the role of the United States and NATO in setting the stage for this crisis.

    The Unthinkable: War Returns to Europe

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    US President Joe Biden has called the Russian invasion “unprovoked,” but that is far from the truth. In the four days leading up to the invasion on February 24, ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) documented a dangerous increase in ceasefire violations in the east of Ukraine. Most were inside the de facto borders of the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) regions of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, consistent with incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. With nearly 700 OSCE ceasefire monitors on the ground, it is not credible that these were all “false flag” incidents staged by separatist forces, as American and British officials claimed.

    Whether the shell-fire was just another escalation in the long-running civil war in eastern Ukraine or the opening salvos of a new government offensive, it was certainly a provocation. But the Russian invasion has far exceeded any proportionate action to defend the DPR and LPR from those attacks, making it disproportionate and illegal. 

    The New Cold War

    In the larger context, though, Ukraine has become an unwitting victim and proxy in the resurgent Cold War against Russia and China, in which the United States has surrounded both countries with military forces and offensive weapons, withdrawn from a whole series of arms control treaties, and refused to negotiate resolutions to rational security concerns raised by Russia.

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    In December 2021, after a summit between Biden and his counterpart in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, Russia submitted a draft proposal for a new mutual security treaty between Russia and NATO, with nine articles to be negotiated. They represented a reasonable basis for a serious exchange. The most pertinent to the crisis was simply to agree that NATO would not accept Ukraine as a new member, which is not on the table in the foreseeable future in any case. But the Biden administration brushed off Russia’s entire proposal as a nonstarter, not even a basis for negotiations.

    So, why was negotiating a mutual security treaty so unacceptable that Biden was ready to risk thousands of Ukrainian lives — although not a single American life — rather than attempt to find common ground? What does that say about the relative value that Biden and his colleagues place on American vs. Ukrainian lives? And what is this strange position that the United States occupies in today’s world that permits a US president to risk so many Ukrainian lives without asking Americans to share their pain and sacrifice? 

    The breakdown in US relations with Russia and the failure of Biden’s inflexible brinkmanship precipitated this war, and yet his policy externalizes all the pain and suffering so that Americans can, as another wartime president once said, “go about their business” and keep shopping. America’s European allies, who must now house hundreds of thousands of refugees and face spiraling energy prices, should be wary of falling in line behind this kind of “leadership” before they, too, end up on the front line.

    NATO

    At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s Eastern European counterpart, was dissolved. NATO should have been too since it had achieved the purpose it was built to serve. Instead, NATO has lived on as a dangerous, out-of-control military alliance dedicated mainly to expanding its sphere of operations and justifying its own existence. It has expanded from 16 countries in 1991 to a total of 30 countries today, incorporating most of Eastern Europe, at the same time as it has committed aggression, bombings of civilians and other war crimes. 

    In 1999, NATO launched an illegal war to militarily carve out an independent Kosovo from the remnants of Yugoslavia. NATO airstrikes during the Kosovo War killed hundreds of civilians, and its leading ally in the war, Kosovan President Hashim Thaci, is now on trial at The Hague charged with committing appalling war crimes under the cover of NATO bombing, including murder, torture and enforced disappearances. 

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    Far from the North Atlantic, NATO joined the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan and then attacked and destroyed Libya in 2011, leaving behind a failed state, a continuing refugee crisis and violence and chaos across the region.

    In 1991, as part of a Soviet agreement to accept the reunification of East and West Germany, Western leaders assured their Soviet counterparts that they would not expand NATO any closer to Russia than the border of a united Germany. At the time, US Secretary of State James Baker promised that NATO would not advance “one inch” beyond the German border. The West’s broken promises are spelled out for all to see in 30 declassified documents published on the National Security Archive website.

    The INF Treaty

    After expanding across Eastern Europe and waging wars in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO has predictably come full circle to once again view Russia as its principal enemy. US nuclear weapons are now based in five NATO countries in Europe: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey, while France and the United Kingdom already have their own nuclear arsenals. US “missile defense” systems, which could be converted to fire offensive nuclear missiles, are based in Poland and Romania, including at a base in Poland only 100 miles from the Russian border. 

    Another Russian request in its December proposal was for the US to join a moratorium on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe. In 2019, both the United States and Russia withdrew from a 1987 treaty, under which both sides agreed not to deploy short- or intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Donald Trump, the US president at the time, pulled out of the INF treaty on the advice of his national security adviser, John Bolton.

    None of this can justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but the world should take Russia seriously when it says that its conditions for ending the war and returning to diplomacy are Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament. While no country can be expected to completely disarm in today’s armed-to-the-teeth world, neutrality could be a serious long-term option for Ukraine. 

    Neutrality

    There are many successful precedents, like Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Finland and Costa Rica. Or take the case of Vietnam. It has a common border and serious maritime disputes with China, but Vietnam has resisted US efforts to embroil it in its Cold War with Beijing. Vietnam remains committed to its long-standing “four-nos” policy: no military alliances, no affiliation with one country against another, no foreign military bases and no threats or uses of force. 

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    The world must do whatever it takes to obtain a ceasefire in Ukraine and make it stick. Maybe UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres or a special representative could act as a mediator, possibly with a peacekeeping role for the United Nations. This will not be easy. One of the still unlearned lessons of other conflicts is that it is easier to prevent war through serious diplomacy and a genuine commitment to peace than to end war once it has started.

    If or when there is a ceasefire, all parties must be prepared to start afresh to negotiate lasting diplomatic solutions that will allow all the people of Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other NATO members to live in peace. Security is not a zero-sum game, and no country or group of countries can achieve lasting security by undermining the security of others. 

    The United States and Russia must also finally assume the responsibility that comes with stockpiling over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons and agree on a plan to start dismantling them, in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

    Lastly, as Americans condemn Russia’s aggression, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy to forget or ignore the many recent wars in which the United States and its allies have been the aggressors: in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. 

    We sincerely hope that Russia will end its illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine long before it commits a fraction of the massive killing and destruction that the United States has committed in its own illegal wars.

    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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    An Expert Explains Why We Need a New Cold War With China

    Michael Beckley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.” He has no time for the commonly held thesis that America’s hegemonic power is in decline. He even claims that “it is now wealthier, more innovative, and more militarily powerful compared to China than it was in 1991.” If the regular expansion of the US defense budget is any indication, he may be right. President Joe Biden has just promised to increase it yet again, this time to $770 billion.

    In a new article for Foreign Affairs bearing the title, “Enemies of My Enemy: How Fear of China Is Forging a New World Order,” Beckley makes the case that having and sharing an easily identified enemy is the key to effective world government. The Cold War taught him that “the liberal order” has nothing to do with good intentions and being a force for good. Instead, it thrives on a strong dose of irrational fear that can be spread among friends.

    Ukraine’s Tug of War and the Implications for Europe (Language and the News)

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    As the Republican presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush produced these immortal words: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.” Probably unwittingly, Beckley echoes Bush’s wisdom. “Today, the liberal order is fraying for many reasons,” Beckley writes, “but the underlying cause is that the threat it was originally designed to defeat—Soviet communism—disappeared three decades ago.”  Unlike the clueless Bush, Beckley now knows who the “they” is. It’s China.

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    History has moved on. China can now replace the Soviet Union as the star performer. Bush proposed Islamist terrorism as his coveted “them,” but that ultimately failed. The terrorists are still lurking in numerous shadows, but when President Biden withdrew the last American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, he definitively delegitimized it as a threat worthy of spawning a new Cold War. And now, even while Russia is being touted as the best supporting actor, the stage is finally clear to push China into the limelight.

    Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Shared enemy:

    A powerful nation whose negative image can be modeled by another powerful nation in such a way that its name alone inspires fear, to the point that it may be generously offered to governments of weaker nations on the pretext of forming a profitable alliance

    Contextual Note

    For Beckley, US hegemony needs China’s help. Now that the Middle Kingdom has now achieved the status of a high-profile enemy to be generously shared with obedient allies, the liberal order may thrive again, as it did during the Cold War. For Beckley, it is China, not Donald Trump, that will “make America great again.”

    Some may find Beckley’s historical logic slightly skewed. He explains that the modern liberal order was “designed to defeat … Soviet communism.” If it was “designed,” what does he have to say about the designer? Who indeed could that have been, and what were their real motives? Could it have been the Dulles brothers, whose combined clout in the Dwight Eisenhower years allowed them to dictate US foreign policy? More alarmingly, Beckley seems to be suggesting that without a pretext for paranoia, the liberal order would not or could not exist.  

    Beckley is probably right but for reasons he might not appreciate. The idea of needing an identifiable enemy stands as a purely negative justification of the liberal order. But Beckley has already dismissed the idea that it is all about bettering the world. He seems to underestimate the need ordinary Americans have to think of their country as a shining city on a hill, endowed with the most powerful military in the history of the world whose mission is not to maraud, destroy, displace populations and kill, but to intervene as a “force for good.”

    It’s not as if social harmony was the norm in the United States. The one thing that prevents the country from descending into a chaos of consumer individualism, or from becoming a nation populated by angry Hobbesian egos intolerant of the behavior of other egos, is the ideology that Beckley denigrates but which politicians continue to celebrate: the “enlightened call to make the world a better place.” Americans would fall into a state of despair if they no longer believed that their exceptional and indispensable nation exists as an ideal for humanity.

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    But recent events have begun to shake their faith in what now appears to be a manifestly not very egalitarian democracy. Increasingly oligarchic, if not plutocratic, American society remains “liberal” (i.e., free) for those who control the growing mountains of cash that visibly circulate among the elite but rarely trickle down to meet any real human needs.

    As the defender of an idealized liberal order, Beckley is right to assume that, with so many factors undermining the American consensus, the cultivation of a shared enemy may be the necessary key to maintaining that order. Fear has always had the unique virtue of diverting attention from serious and worsening problems. Between income inequality, climate change and an enduring pandemic punctuated by contestable government mandates, people’s attention definitely needs to be diverted.

    Historical Note

    Michael Beckley is certainly very knowledgeable about China. He admires Chinese civilization and many of its accomplishments. He also believes a war between the United States and China is far from inevitable. Moreover, he is a realist. He admits that, as many people across the globe affirm, the US represents the biggest threat to world peace. At the same time, he believes “that the United States has the most potential to be the biggest contributor to peace.” He lucidly notes that “when the United States puts its weight behind something the world gets remade, for better or for worse.” But, having said this, he eludes the implicit moral question. If both the better and worse are possible, the rest of the world should be the ones to decide every time its reality is “remade” whether that remaking was for the better or the worse.

    As Pew studies show, most people outside the US appear to believe that American initiatives across the globe over at least the past half-century have been predominantly for the worse. Beckley himself cites Iraq and Vietnam as egregious examples. But, ever the optimist, he sees in what he calls the ability of the “system of US alliances” to create “zones of peace” the proof that the worse isn’t as bad as some might think.

    Beckley recognizes that alliances are not created out of generosity and goodwill alone. In his influential book, “Super-Imperialism,” the economist Michael Hudson describes the workings of what is known as the “Washington Consensus,” a system of economic and military control that, in the decades after World War II, managed, somewhat perversely, to miraculously transfer the immense burden of its own debt, generated by its military adventurism, to the rest of the world. The “Treasury-bill Standard,” an innovation President Richard Nixon called into being to replace the gold standard in 1971, played a major role. With the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, Hudson notes that “foreign governments were obliged to invest their surplus dollars in U.S. Treasury securities.” It was part of a complex financial, diplomatic and military system that forced US allies to finance American debt.

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    Beckley’s  “zones of peace” are zones of dependence. Every country that participated in the system found itself forced to hold US Treasury bonds, including China. They thus had an interest in maintaining the stability of a system that dictated the flow of money across the globe. To a large extent, that is still the case. It explains why attempts to dethrone the dollar are systemically countered, sometimes violently through military action (as in Libya, to scotch Muammar Gaddafi’s plans for a pan-African currency).

    None of that worries the eternal optimist Beckley, clearly a disciple of Voltaire’s Pangloss. He believes that — even while admitting the US has “wrecked the world in various ways” — its “potential” for peace trumps the reality of persistent war and that its “capability to make the world much more peaceful and prosperous” absolves it from the wreckage it has already produced. 

    From a cultural point of view, Beckley is right. Americans always believe that what is “potential” trumps what is real and that “capability” effaces past examples of incapable behavior. That describes a central feature of American hyperreality.

    *[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 Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

    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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    From Kremlin leak to sperm counts: our readers’ favourite stories of 2021

    From Kremlin leak to sperm counts: our readers’ favourite stories of 2021 Here are 20 articles that may have helped convince people to support the Guardian’s journalismThe Guardian benefited from hundreds of thousands of acts of support from digital readers in 2021 – almost one for every minute of the year. Here we look at the articles from 2021 that had a big hand in convincing readers to support our open, independent journalism.Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House – Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Dan SabbaghExclusive leak reveals Moscow’s deliberations on how it might help Donald Trump win 2016 US presidential race‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’ – Arundhati RoyThe author and activist plumbs the depths of India’s Covid catastrophe and finds much to reproach the prime minister, Narendra Modi, for‘I’m facing a prison sentence’: US Capitol rioters plead with Trump for pardons – Oliver MilmanThe past very quickly catches up with those who ransacked the seat of US democracyClimate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse – Damian CarringtonA shutdown of the Atlantic current circulation system would have catastrophic consequences around the worldAn Afghan woman in Kabul: ‘Now I have to burn everything I achieved’ – A Kabul residentAs the Taliban take the Afghan capital, one woman describes being “a victim of a war that men started”.Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity – Erin BrockovichA warning from the environmental advocate and author about the damage being wrought by toxic chemicalsPandora papers: biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich and powerful – Guardian investigations teamMillions of documents reveal deals and assets of more than 100 billionaires, 30 world leaders and 300 public officialsThe Hill We Climb: the poem that stole the inauguration show – Amanda GormanShe spoke, and millions listened, at Joe Biden’s inaugurationRates of Parkinson’s disease are exploding. A common chemical may be to blame – Adrienne MateiIs an epidemic on the horizon? And is an unpronounceable chemical compound to blame?Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction – George MonbiotThe Guardian columnist at his most incandescent‘Take it easy, nothing matters in the end’: William Shatner at 90, on love, loss and Leonard Nimoy – Hadley FreemanThe actor discusses longevity, tragedy, friendship, success and his Star Trek co-star‘Our biggest challenge? Lack of imagination’: the scientists turning the desert green – Steve RoseIn China, scientists have turned vast swathes of arid land into a lush oasis. Now a team of maverick engineers want to do the same to the SinaiOff-road, off-grid: the modern nomads wandering America’s back country – Stevie TrujilloAcross US public lands thousands of people are taking to van lifeThe greatest danger for the US isn’t China. It’s much closer to home – Robert ReichThe columnist and former secretary of labour warns of enemies withinThe rice of the sea: how a tiny grain could change the way humanity eats – Ashifa KassamCelebrated chef discovered something in the seagrass that could transform our understanding of the sea itself – as a vast gardenRevealed: leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon – Guardian staffThe Guardian teams up with 16 media organisations around the world to investigate hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO GroupBeware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth – James LovelockLegendary environmentalist argues that Covid-19 may well have been one attempt by the planet to protect itself, and that next time it may try harder with something even nastierThe Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth? – Hadley FreemanEthel and Julius Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for being Soviet spies, but their sons have spent decades trying to clear their mother’s name. Are they close to a breakthrough?Out of thin air: the mystery of the man who fell from the sky – Sirin KaleWho was the stowaway who fell from the wheel well of a Boeing plane into a south London garden in the summer of 2019?The life and tragic death of John Eyers – a fitness fanatic who refused the vaccine – Sirin KaleThe 42-year-old did triathlons, bodybuilding and mountain climbing and became sceptical of the Covid jab. Then he contracted the virusIf these pieces move you to support our independent journalism into 2022, you can do so here:
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    TopicsRussiaInside the GuardianDonald TrumpVladimir PutinCoronavirusIndiaUS Capitol attackClimate crisisfeaturesReuse this content More

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    The secret history of Sesame Street: ‘It was utopian – it’s part of who we all are’

    In 1970, David Attie was sent to photograph the birth of the kids’ landmark TV show as part of a cold war propaganda drive by the US government. But these newly found images are just one part of the programme’s radical historyby Steve Rose“I’m still pinching myself that my dad, my own flesh and blood, had Ernie on one hand and Bert on the other,” Eli Attie says. “It is like he got to sit at Abbey Road studios and watch the Beatles record I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Attie’s father was the photographer David Attie who, in 1970, visited the set of Sesame Street in New York City during its first season. His images lay forgotten in a wardrobe for the next 50 years, until Eli recently discovered them. They are a glimpse behind the curtain of a cultural phenomenon waiting to happen. Here are not only Bert and Ernie but Kermit, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch with his original orange fur (he was green by season two). And here are the people who brought these characters to life, chiefly Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the Lennon and McCartney of Muppetdom. What also stands out in Attie’s images are the children visiting the set. As in the show itself, they are clearly so beguiled by the puppets, they completely ignore the humans controlling them.Eli himself was one of those visitors, although he has no memory of it. “I was in diapers, and as the story goes, I was loud and not to be quieted down, and was yanked off the set,” he says. His parents and older brother Oliver at least made it into the photos. Oliver was even in an episode of the show, in the background in Hooper’s Store, Eli explains, with just a hint of jealousy.Fifty-two years and more than 4,500 episodes later, Sesame Street remains the premier address in children’s entertainment. It is still watched by hundreds of millions around the world, and broadcast in more than 140 countries. One attempt to statistically measure the show’s impact on American society failed because nobody could find a large enough sample group who hadn’t watched it. Sesame Street’s place in US culture was bizarrely underlined last month when Big Bird announced on Twitter: “I got the Covid-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.” He was promoting the rollout of vaccinations to five- to 11-year-olds, but Big Bird’s tweet, combined with Sesame Street’s recent introduction of a new Korean American muppet, has prompted a conservative backlash. Texas senator Ted Cruz responded: “Government propaganda … for your 5 year old!” Cruz later doubled down, tweeting a cartoon of the Sesame Street characters sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, with a dead, cooked Big Bird in place of a turkey.Others piled in. The influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) expressly banned Big Bird and other Sesame Street characters from its next conference, and CPAC organiser Matt Schlapp called for PBS, which broadcasts the show (although new episodes now air on HBO Max), to be defunded. “They just won’t stop in their push for woke politics,” he complained. Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers went even further, declaring: “Big Bird is a communist.”Beyond the optics of beating up on universally beloved children’s characters, in the context of David Attie’s images, these takes could hardly be more wrong. Attie had been commissioned to photograph Sesame Street by Amerika, a Russian-language magazine funded by the US state department and distributed in the Soviet Union. Essentially, it was a cold war propaganda project. Soviet officials would regularly return copies of Amerika to the US embassy unsold, saying their citizens were not interested. In truth, the magazine was so sought after, it became a black-market commodity, explains Eli Attie. “One embassy official said to me they had traded two copies of Amerika for these impossible-to-find ballet tickets in Moscow at the time,” he says. So Sesame Street was used as government propaganda, just not in the way Cruz and Rogers might imagine.You could say that Sesame Street had a political mission from the outset, as the new documentary, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (to which Attie’s book is a companion piece), lays out. One of the show’s co-founders, the broadcaster Joan Ganz Cooney, was involved “intellectually and spiritually” with the civil rights movement. The other, psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, was concerned about a widening education gap in the 1960s US, which was leaving behind socioeconomically deprived children, particularly African Americans. These children were often spending long hours at home watching television while their parents were busy working. Instead of jingles for beer commercials, Cooney and Morrisett reasoned, why not use television to teach them literacy and numeracy?With an $8m federal grant, the newly formed Children’s Television Workshop spent two years researching how to make content that would not only be educational but entertaining. That’s where The Muppet Workshop came in (even if the hippy-ish Henson was initially distrusted by his more academic colleagues). Not to mention the songs, the anarchic comedy sketches, the surreal animations, and the improvised child-with-muppet segments. The whole thing was an experiment. Nothing like it had been done before and there was no guarantee it would be a success, but everyone seemed to be on the same page.As Cooney puts it in the documentary: “We weren’t so worried about reaching middle-class children but we really, really wanted to reach inner-city kids badly. It was hardly worth doing if it didn’t reach them.” This explains why the show was set on an ordinary New York street – a radical move for children’s TV, a familiar place for the target audience. Equally radically, the show was multicultural and inclusive from the start, with white, Black and Latino actors alongside non-human characters of all colours. Even the title sequence and the guests reflected the US’s diversity (the first season featured James Earl Jones, BB King, Mahalia Jackson and Jackie Robinson). As the long-running writer and director Jon Stone said of the show’s inclusive approach: “We’ve never beaten that horse to death by talking about it; we simply show it.”Sesame Street has taught kids about all manner of life topics. Not only racism (most recently with the introduction of two new African American characters, post-Black Lives Matter) but also poverty, addiction, autism, HIV and Aids, public health (Covid was not Big Bird’s first jab, he also got a measles vaccination in 1972), and gentrification (in 1994, the street was under threat of demolition from a loud-mouthed property tycoon named “Ronald Grump”, played by Joe Pesci). Sesame Street has even tackled the concept of death: when Will Lee, who played storekeeper Mr Hooper, died in 1982, the show featured a wrenching segment in which neighbours, clearly tearfully, explain to Big Bird that Mr Hooper is dead and is never coming back.It wasn’t just “inner-city kids” Sesame Street was popular with. While his father was working, Eli Attie’s artist mother would also put him and his brother in front of the TV to watch it so she could paint. “There was a block of hours that it was on public broadcasting stations in the New York region. So she just thought: ‘Hallelujah. I can place them here, they’re entertained,’” he says. “We were learning to count, we were learning to spell and we were learning a kind of comedy: we both became fans of Monty Python and standup comedy and I’m sure this was the gateway.” Attie went on to become a TV writer and producer, working on shows such as The West Wing, House and Billions.Sesame Street’s inclusive, humane, progressive agenda has always had its enemies. Mississippi broadcasters refused to air the first season back in 1969 on account of the show’s desegregated setting (they backed down after a few weeks). In the past decade, the conservative chorus of disapproval has been getting louder. Before Cruz and co, the show and PBS have been targeted by the likes of Mitt Romney, Fox News, and, inevitably, Donald Trump.“Sesame has never been a political show; it has been a very socially relevant show,” says Trevor Crafts, producer of the Street Gang documentary. Although the political climate today has echoes of the 1960s, when Sesame Street was created, he feels. “It was a very similar time. There was a lot of social unrest, and here we are again. It just shows that you need something like Sesame Street to sort of increase the volume of good in the world. And also to know that through creativity, you can make change. Positive change can occur if you’re willing to see a problem and try to fix it and do it creatively.”Where some might see a political agenda, many more would simply see a model for the kind of society the US would like to be. “I think it showed everybody: ‘This is who we should be in our hearts,’” Eli Attie says. “It was utopian. It was optimistic, it was challenging and smart. And it didn’t talk down to children.” As well as a family album, his father’s photos capture that spirit of playful idealism. “I see now that’s part of who I am,” he says. “And it’s part of who we all are.” TopicsChildren’s TVUS televisionTelevisionPhotographyThe MuppetsArt and design booksfeaturesReuse this content More

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    The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?

    “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…… ” So goes the opening sentence of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, referring to the Jewish American couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sent to the electric chair exactly 68 years ago today. Their execution casts a morbid shadow over Plath’s book, just as it did over the United States, and it is seen by many as the nadir of America’s engagement with the cold war. The Rosenbergs are still the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for espionage, and Ethel is the only American woman killed by the US government for a crime other than murder.During their trial, Ethel in particular was vilified for prioritising communism over her children, and the prosecution insisted she had been the dominant half of the couple, purely because she was three years older. “She was the mastermind of this whole conspiracy,” assistant prosecutor Roy Cohn told the judge. But questions about whether she was guilty at all have been growing louder in recent years, and a new biography presents her in a different light. “Ethel was killed for being a wife. She was guilty of supporting her husband,” Anne Sebba, author of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, tells me. And for that, the 37-year-old mother of two young children had five massive jolts of electricity pumped through her body. Her death was so brutal that eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose out of her head.The killing of the Rosenbergs was so shocking at the time and is so resonant of a specific period in American history that it has become part of popular culture. In Tony Kushner’s play Angels In America, Ethel haunts Cohn. In Woody Allen’s Crimes And Misdemeanours, Clifford (played by Allen) says sarcastically that he loves another character “like a brother – David Greenglass”, referencing Ethel’s brother, who testified against her and Julius to save himself and his wife. The most moving cultural response to the Rosenbergs’ deaths was EL Doctorow’s 1971 novel, The Book Of Daniel, which imagines the painful life afterwards of the Rosenbergs’ oldest child, whom he renames Daniel. In reality, the older Rosenberg child is called Michael, and his younger brother is Robert. It is a bitter, rainy spring day when I interview the Rosenbergs’ sons. Only three and seven when their parents were arrested, six and 10 when they were killed, they are now grandfathers with grey beards and known as Michael and Robert Meeropol, having long ago taken the surname of the couple who adopted them after the US government orphaned them. When their parents were arrested, Michael, always a challenging child (“That’s putting it kindly,” he says), acted out even more, whereas Robert withdrew into himself. This dynamic still holds true: “Robert is more reserved and I tend to fly off the handle,” says Michael, 78, a retired economics professor, whose eyes spark with fire when he recalls old battles. Patient, methodical Robert, 74, a former lawyer, considers every word carefully. We are all talking by video chat, and when I ask where Robert is, he replies that he’s at home in Massachusetts, in a town “90 miles west of Boston and 150 miles north-east of New York City. To be more specific… ” Michael is in his home in New York state, in a town he describes as “just south of Pete Seeger’s home”, referring to the folksinger and leftwing hero.The differences between the brothers are obvious, but so is their closeness: Michael calls Robert “Chando”, a childhood nickname, and since Michael’s wife, Ann, died two years ago, his younger brother has called him every day.“Rob and I are unusual siblings in so many ways. We have dealt with so many struggles, so we are very enmeshed,” says Michael. I ask how it would have been if he had gone through it all on his own. He recoils, poleaxed by the thought. “I think it would have been very, very hard,” he says eventually. Perhaps just as importantly, they have been there for one another as adults, as more evidence about their parents’ case has trickled out, and they’ve had to keep reframing their own past. “Throughout the 70s and 80s, we believed our parents were just communists who were framed. Do you want to add anything, Chando?” says Michael. “Yes, I would add: you can frame guilty people,” says Robert.The brothers’ struggles began on 17 July 1950 when their father, Julius, was arrested in the family’s home on New York’s Lower East Side on suspicion of espionage. Michael had been listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio, an episode in which the Lone Ranger was framed, and now the show seemed to be happening in front of him. The previous month, Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, had been arrested for the same crime. Equally significantly, the Korean war had just begun, which was seen by the US as a fight to stop communism destroying the American way of life. Senator Joseph McCarthy was warning Americans about “homegrown commies”. By the time Julius was arrested, America was in a red panic. A month later, Ethel was seized by the FBI and charged. She called Michael at home and told him that she, like his father, had been arrested.“So you can’t come home?” he asked.“No,” she replied.The seven-year-old screamed.Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, like David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, were communists. Like a lot of Jews, they became interested in the movement in the 1930s when it seemed like a means to fight against fascism. Unlike many others, they stuck with it after the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, ostensibly, if not officially, allying the countries. “It’s easy today to criticise them, but these were people who grew up in poverty during the Depression and saw the rise of fascism. They thought they were making the world a better place,” says Sebba. As a historian, Sebba has built up a reputation for writing in particular about women, such as Wallis Simpson. “I do like writing about a woman who has been misunderstood,” she says, and few, according to her, have been more misunderstood than Ethel Rosenberg.The Rosenbergs are almost invariably discussed as a duo, but as her sons have slowly realised, and as Sebba shows in her book, their stories were very different. While Julius had a close relationship with his mother, Sophie, Ethel and her mother, Tessie, had a difficult one. Tessie favoured David, the baby of the family, and for Ethel, communism was a means of educating herself and separating herself from her mother.David briefly worked as a machinist at an atomic power laboratory called Los Alamos Laboratory. He was arrested when he was identified as part of a chain that passed on secrets about the technology to the Soviets. David quickly admitted his guilt, and his lawyer advised him that the best thing he could do for himself, and to give his wife immunity, would be to turn in someone else. Then the Rosenbergs were arrested. The FBI believed that Julius was a kingpin who recruited Americans to spy against their own country, and that he had used David to pass on secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians. The initial allegations against Ethel were that she “had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg and others in November 1944”, and “had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass and others in January 1945” – in other words, that she talked to her husband and brother. It was feeble stuff, as the FBI knew, yet Myles Lane, the chief assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, told the press: “If the crime with which she, Ethel, is charged had not occurred perhaps we would not have the present situation in Korea.”Michael played hangman with his father on prison visits, although he didn’t realise the irony until he was an adultInitially, David testified that his sister had not been involved in any espionage. However, his wife, Ruth, said that Ethel had typed up the information David had given Julius to pass on to the Soviets. David quickly changed his story the week before the trial to corroborate his wife’s version, probably under pressure from Roy Cohn, the ambitious chief assistant prosecutor. This was the key evidence against Ethel, and the chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol, conjured up an image for the jury of Ethel at the typewriter, pounding the keys, striking “blow by blow, against her own country in the interest of the Soviets”. But even with that, Myles Lane, who had publicly laid the blame for the Korean war at Ethel’s feet, admitted privately in a closed-door meeting of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: “The case is not strong against Mrs Rosenberg. But for the purpose of acting as a deterrent, I think it is very important that she be convicted, too, and given a stiff sentence.” FBI director J Edgar Hoover agreed, writing “proceeding against the wife will serve as a lever” to make her husband talk.At the trial, under Cohn’s questioning, David testified that in September 1945 he gave Julius a sketch and description of the atomic bomb, and that Ethel was deeply involved in the discussions between them. Because he had given names, David was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and ended up serving nine. Ruth was free to stay home and look after their children. The Rosenbergs, who insisted they were innocent, were found guilty. Judge Irving Kaufman carefully considered their sentence. Hoover, aware of the tenuousness of the case against Ethel, and how it would look if America executed a young mother, urged against the death sentence for her, but Cohn argued for it and won.Michael and Robert never saw the Greenglasses again after the trial, and all Michael remembers of them is: “David looked like a nondescript schlub and Ruth was a cold fish. But is that true, or just a nephew who wants to expose the people who lied about my parents?” he asks. They constantly question their own memories of the past. Robert says that when he thinks of his family before his parents were arrested he has, “this feeling of a golden age, of a wonderful loving family before it was ripped apart. But is that just fantasy?”Ethel has long been portrayed as a cold woman, one who, as Kaufman said in his sentencing, loved communism more than her children. In reality, as Sebba reveals in her book, she was a particularly devoted mother, with a progressive interest in child psychology. Before her arrest, she regularly saw a child therapist, Elizabeth Phillips, for help with Michael and to learn how to be a better mother. During her three years in prison, she faithfully kept up her subscription to Parents magazine. But when she was arrested, all the aspirations she had harboured for giving her boys the kind of happy childhood that had been denied to her imploded spectacularly. At first the boys lived with her mother, Tessie, who made no secret of her resentment of the situation. Things got even worse when they were put in a children’s home. Eventually, Julius’s mother, Sophie, took them in, but two little boys were too much for their frail grandmother to handle. None of their many aunts or uncles would take them, either because they sided with David and Ruth, or they were scared. So they were shipped around to various families. All Ethel could do was write letters to her lawyer, Manny Bloch, desperately laying out her parenting theories in the hope they would somehow be followed (“One cannot behave inconsistently with children… ”) For the sake of the boys, she always maintained a happy front when they visited.“We always had a good time on the prison visits: singing, talking, enjoying ourselves,” says Michael. He even used to play hangman with his father, although he didn’t realise the irony until he was an adult.The US government said that if Julius gave them names of other spies, and he and Ethel admitted their guilt, their lives would be spared. The Rosenbergs issued a public statement: “By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence, the government admits its own doubts concerning our guilt… we will not be coerced, even under pain of death, to bear false witness.” On 16 June 1953, the children were brought to Sing Sing prison in New York State to say goodbye to their parents. Ethel kept up her usual brave appearance, but on this occasion Michael – who was 10 and understood what was happening – was upset by her outward calm. Afterwards, Ethel wrote a letter to her children: “Maybe you thought that I didn’t feel like crying when we were hugging and kissing goodbye huh… Darlings, that would have been so easy, far too easy on myself… because I love you more than I love myself and because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying.” On 19 June, Ethel and Julius wrote their last letter to their children: “We wish we might have had the tremendous joy and gratification of living our lives out with you… Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy and Mommy.” Just after 8pm that day, the Rosenbergs were executed. They were buried on Long Island, in one of the few Jewish cemeteries that would accept their bodies.With their extended family still unwilling to look after them (“People later said to me, ‘A Jewish family and no family members took in the kids?!’” says Michael wryly), the boys were eventually adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, an older leftwing couple. They could finally grow up in anonymity among loving people who told them their parents had been brave and admirable. Abel Meeropol was a songwriter whose biggest hit was Strange Fruit, so the boys were raised on the royalties from the most famous song of the civil rights era. “I never thought about our aunts and uncles not taking us in, because living with Abel and Anne, it felt like we won the lottery,” says Michael. But memories of their parents were always there. Robert developed a strong physical resemblance to Ethel. “It made me want to hug and kiss him all the time,” says Michael.The boys enjoyed a happy, academic, leftwing upbringing as Meeropols. They told almost no one their real surname, and Robert, who was a toddler when his parents were imprisoned, never considered reverting to it. It was more complicated for Michael, who could remember playing ball games with his father in their apartment (“If it went in Robby’s playpen, it was a home run.”) Eventually, he decided as an adult that reverting to Rosenberg would be “artificial”. It soon didn’t matter, because in 1973 the local media unmasked them, ignoring their pleas to retain their anonymity. They decided to put the exposure to good use by campaigning for their parents. They wrote a memoir, We Are Your Sons, and sued the FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, obtaining more than 300,000 once secret documents which they believed proved their parents’ innocence. But the story had only started to unfold.In 1995, the Venona papers were declassified. These were messages sent between Soviet intelligence agencies that had been intercepted and decrypted by US counterintelligence from 1943 to 1980. The Rosenbergs were named in them. Julius, it was now clear, had definitely been spying for the Soviets, so much so that he was given the codename “Antenna” and later “Liberal”. David and Ruth Greenglass were also sufficiently productive as spies to be given codenames – “Calibre” and “Wasp”. But there was little about Ethel. She didn’t have a codename. She was, one cable noted, “a devoted person” – ie a communist – but, the cables also stressed, “[she] does not work”, ie she was not a spy. But when describing the recruitment of Ruth, the cable said, “Liberal and his wife recommend her as an intelligent and clever girl.”“At first, I hated that transcript, because it made Julius look guilty of something,” says Robert. “But then I realised this was as close to a smoking gun we would ever get, because it said that Julius and Ethel didn’t do the thing they were killed for. Ethel didn’t work and Julius wasn’t an atomic spy, he was a military-industrial spy,” he says, meaning that although Julius passed on details of weapons, he wasn’t passing on details about the atomic bomb.When our father got involved with the Soviets, our mother stayed out of it so that if he got arrested, she could take care of usMichael was more sceptical of the Venona papers and wondered if they were “CIA disinformation”. But in 2008 he finally accepted them when Morton Sobell – who had been convicted for espionage along with the Rosenbergs and served 18 years in Alcatraz – gave an interview to the New York Times. He said that he and Julius had been spies together, and confirmed that Julius had not helped the Russians build the bomb. “What he gave them was junk,” Sobell said of Julius, probably because he didn’t know anything about the bomb. Of Ethel, Sobell said, “She knew what he was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.” This corroborated what Aleksandr Feklisov, a retired KGB agent, said in 1997 when he admitted that he had been Julius’s handler. Feklisov agreed that Julius had passed on military secrets but, “he didn’t understand anything about the atomic bomb, and he couldn’t help us”. Ethel, he said, “had nothing to do with this, she was completely innocent. I think she knew [what her husband was doing], but for that you don’t kill people.”Michael has made peace with the revelation that his father was a spy. “As Robby’s daughter Jenny said to me, there is a positive to not thinking of our family as hapless victims. We want to be people who take charge of our lives,” he says. But he and Robert repeatedly emphasise that their uncle David’s claim that he gave Julius atomic information in September 1945 is extremely dubious. Recent research corroborates their argument: Soviet sources state that Julius stopped working for them in February 1945. “[The government] took a small-fry spy and framed him to be an atomic spy,” is Michael’s take on his father. Ethel, however, was a very different story.In 1996, David Greenglass gave an interview in which he finally admitted he lied about his sister: “I told them the story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife. I mean, I don’t sleep with my sister, you know.” He added, “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.” It is possible that Ethel helped to recruit Ruth and David, but they needed little encouragement. Many Jews of their milieu were communists and the Greenglasses’ letters show they were even more enthusiastic about communism than the Rosenbergs. Ruth died in 2008, David in 2014.Robert launched the campaign for Ethel’s exoneration in 2015 – not for a pardon, because that would suggest she had done something wrong, but a full exoneration. He is, he says, “more focused” on his mother than his father. “Perhaps my willingness to separate Ethel from Julius is a sign I don’t feel the same way about my parents,” he says.I ask what he means.“I wonder if there’s a little voice in the back of my head that’s saying, ‘You know, Julius, you really shouldn’t have done it, because you had kids,’” he says with some effort. I ask how he feels when he looks back at his father’s letters from prison, in which he insisted he was innocent. “I think he was spinning: he wasn’t an atomic spy, like they said, but he was a spy, so it wasn’t the whole truth. And I think he thought if he confessed to anything they would kill him, so denying everything was the best option. But yes, I have some ambivalences.”Michael, who has clearer memories of his parents, sees his father’s behaviour differently: “Should a man not have children if he goes off to war? In those days, that wasn’t the thought process. For a Jew and a communist, this was about survival.”Ethel’s innocence raises more questions than it settles. First, given that she was a true believer in communism, why didn’t she join her husband, brother and sister-in-law in spying?“Robby and I think that when our father got involved in helping the Soviets, our mother stayed out of it so that if he got arrested, she could take care of us,” says Michael.This sounds to me like a son hoping that their parents at least tried to protect their sons. But Julius and Ethel seemed to have little understanding of the danger they were putting the family in. After all, Greenglass was arrested a month before Julius, so they had plenty of time to flee the country, but didn’t. Sebba’s theory strikes me as more likely: “I think she just had other concerns: she was looking after her children and trying to be present for them. She gave up activism when her children were born. Her main identity was as a wife and a mother, and that’s what mattered to her,” she says.So why didn’t Julius save Ethel? The FBI was right: he had recruited spies, so he could easily have given names and probably saved her life, and very possibly his own, too.“Dad’s unwillingness to rat out his fellows wasn’t about him wanting to be a soldier of Stalin,” says Michael. “It was more personal. These were his friends! My father was not going to cooperate with the government, and that’s why they arrested my mother. So now he’s going to turn around and say, ‘OK, I’m going to save my wife by ratting out my friends?’ No! He had a naive belief that the American justice system was going to work because half the case against him was a pack of lies, so he thought he could deny everything and save them both.” Almost until the end, Julius believed that they wouldn’t go to the chair. The government and FBI hoped that, too. They never wanted to kill this young mother and father – they wanted names. After Ethel was killed, the then deputy attorney general William Rogers said, “She called our bluff.”Then there’s the question that baffled officials at the time, and has become the defining mystery about her: why did Ethel choose to stay silent and die with Julius, over staying with her children? We know she was deeply in love with her husband, and her letters to him during their imprisonment are filled with her longing to “lift my willing lips to yours”. But they are also full of her anxiety about the boys. Yet she said nothing.“Ethel absolutely did not want to be separated from Julius, and her letters show that she thought she was the one who had done him wrong by introducing him to her ghastly family,” says Sebba. “I believe that Ethel thought her life without Julius would have been valueless because her sons would never have respected her, because she would have had to make some kind of confession and name names.”If Ethel did think this, she might have been right.“As a child, it might have been easier if Julius had cooperated” says Robert. “He’d have been in prison and Ethel would have been released to take care of us – that’s the deal the government made with the Greenglasses. But as an adult I would much rather be the child of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg than the child of David and Ruth Greenglass.”Michael and Robert’s campaign for their mother’s exoneration was struck a major blow with the election of Donald Trump, whose original mentor was none other than Roy Cohn. Like many on the left, the Meeropols were shocked by Trump’s victory. “We just didn’t believe people could be so conned [into voting for Trump], but of course they can: the Salem witch trials, the antisemitic blood libel, communists under the bed, all the crap people have believed through the ages,” says Michael. It felt, Robert says, as if Cohn had won again, and they knew there was no point in asking Trump, of all presidents, to exonerate their mother. But the Meeropols got their revenge: in 2019, Michael’s daughter, Ivy, made a documentary about Cohn, in which Michael features, called Bully Coward Victim, in which she made the connection between her grandparents’ execution and Trump. “I’m a very revenge-oriented person, but it’s never about beating people to a pulp. I like exposure,” grins Michael.The campaign to exonerate Ethel is starting again, and the Meeropols are “optimistic” that President Biden will look at it favourably. They know their argument defies the confines of bite-size headlines, and so is a difficult one to sell to the public: Julius was guilty, although the extent of his guilt was exaggerated in an attempt to scare him into naming names; Ethel was possibly complicit, but not culpable. “There’s a very binary idea of the political world, in which people are guilty or innocent, right or wrong. But understanding nuance is essential to understanding how politics work and how society works,” says Robert.I ask why it matters so much to them what people understand. Their parents’ lives were destroyed by this case; instead of spending so much of their lives reliving it, why not leave it in the past? “It’s personal as well as political,” says Robert, emphasising both words. “That the US government invented evidence to obtain a conviction and an execution is a threat to every person in this country, and to not expose that is to become complicit in it. The personal stuff is obvious, but the political stuff is equally powerful.”The biggest question about Ethel for me relates to her sons. After our initial interview, I end up speaking to them, together and separately, several times over the course of a month, mainly because I have so many questions, but also because they are so delightful to talk to: wildly intelligent, always interesting, completely admirable. How on earth did they triumph over such a traumatic childhood? Sebba tells me that she asked the same thing of Elizabeth Phillips, the child therapist Ethel used to consult, whom she interviewed before her death.“She told me it was down to three things,” Sebba says. “She said, ‘One, they have an extraordinarily high level of intelligence. Second, they had amazing adoptive parents. But we now know how important those early years of life are, and Ethel must have given those two boys so much in those years that it lasted all their lives. Ethel must have been an extremely good mother.’” More

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    What Planet Will Our Children and Grandchildren Inherit?

    Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed through the Straits of Taiwan and into the South China Sea, skirting the Paracel Islands that China has claimed as its own. It represented yet another Biden-era challenge to the planet’s rising power from its falling one. My friend was thousands of miles away on the West Coast of the United States, well vaccinated and going nowhere in COVID-stricken but improving America.

    As it happens, she’s slightly younger than me, but still getting up there, and we were chatting on the phone about our world, about the all-too-early first wildfire near Los Angeles, the intensifying mega-drought across the West and Southwest, the increasing nightmare of hurricane season in the Atlantic and so on. We were talking about the way in which we humans — and we Americans, in particular (though you could toss in the Chinese without a blink) — have been wreaking fossil-fuelized havoc on this planet and what was to come.

    Could This Have Been a Zoom Call?

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    And, oh yes, we were talking about our own deaths, also to come at some unknown future moment but one not as far away as either of us might wish. My friend then said to me abashedly, “I sometimes think it’s lucky I won’t be here to see what’s going to happen to the world.” And even as she began stumbling all over herself apologizing for saying such a thing, I understood exactly what she meant. I had had the very same thought and sense of shame and horror at even thinking it — at even thinking I would, in some strange sense, get off easy and leave a world from hell to my children and grandchildren. Nothing, in fact, could make me sadder.

    And you know what’s the worst thing? Whether I’m thinking about that “destroyer” in the Strait of Taiwan or the destruction of planet Earth, one thing is clear enough: It wouldn’t have to be this way.

    China on the Brain

    Now, let’s focus on the Curtis Wilbur for a moment. And in case you hadn’t noticed, US President Joe Biden and his foreign-policy team have China on the brain. No surprise there, though, only history. Don’t you remember how, when Biden was still vice-president, President Barack Obama announced that, in foreign and especially military policy, the US was planning a “pivot to Asia”? His administration was, in other words, planning on leaving this country’s war-on-terror disasters in the greater Middle East behind (not that he would actually prove capable of doing so) and refocusing on this planet’s true rising power. Donald Trump would prove similarly eager to dump America’s greater Middle Eastern wars (though he, too, failed to do so) and refocus on Beijing — tariffs first, but warships not far behind.

    Now, as the US withdraws its last troops from Afghanistan, the Biden team finds itself deep in its own version of a pivot-to-Asia strategy, with its collective foreign-policy brain remarkably focused on challenging China (at least until Israel briefly got in the way).

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    Think of it as a kind of pandemic of anxiety, a fear that, without a major refocus, the US might indeed be heading for the imperial scrapheap of history. In a sense, this may prove to be the true Achilles’ heel of the Biden era. Or put another way, the president’s foreign-policy crew seems, at some visceral level, to fear deeply for the America they’ve known and valued so, the one that was expected to loom invincibly over the rest of the planet once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; the imperial power our politicians (until Trump) had long hailed as the greatest, most “exceptional” nation on the planet; the one with “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (Obama), aka “the greatest force for freedom in the history of the world” (George W. Bush).

    We’re talking, of course, about the same great power that, after almost 20 years of disastrous wars, drone strikes, and counterterror operations across vast stretches of the planet, looks like it is sinking fast, a country whose political parties can no longer agree on anything that matters. In such a context, let’s consider for a moment that flu-like China obsession, the one that leaves Washington’s politicians and military leaders with strikingly high temperatures and an irrational urge to send American warships into distant waters near the coast of China, while regularly upping the ante, militarily and politically.

    In that context, here’s an obsessional fact of our moment: These days, it seems as if President Biden can hardly appear anywhere or talk to anyone without mentioning China or that sinking country he now heads and that sinking feeling he has about it. He did it the other week in an interview with David Brooks when, with an obvious on-the-page shudder, he told The New York Times columnist, “We’re kind of at a place where the rest of the world is beginning to look to China.” Brrr… it’s cold in here (or maybe too hot to handle?) in an increasingly chaotic, still partly Trumpian, deeply divided Washington and in a country where, from suppressing the vote to suppressing the teaching of history to encouraging the carrying of unlicensed weapons, democracy is looking ill indeed.

    Oh, and that very same week when the president talked to Brooks, he went to the Coast Guard Academy to address its graduating class and promptly began discussing — yes! — that crucial, central subject for Washingtonians these days: freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. (“When nations try to game the system or tip the rules in their favor, it throws everything off balance,” Biden said. “That’s why we are so adamant that these areas of the world that are the arteries of trade and shipping remain peaceful — whether that’s the South China Sea, the Arabian Gulf, and, increasingly, the Arctic.”) You didn’t know, did you, that a guided-missile destroyer, not to speak of aircraft carrier battle groups, and other naval vessels had been anointed with the job of keeping “freedom of navigation” alive halfway across the planet or that the US Coast Guard simply guards our coastlines.

    These days, it should really be called the Coasts Guard. After all, you can find its members “guarding” coasts ranging from Iran’s in the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea. Evidently, even the coast of the island of Taiwan, which, since 1949, China has always claimed as its own and where a subtle dance between Beijing and Washington has long played out, has become just another coast for guarding in nothing less than a new “partnership.” (“Our new agreement for the Coast Guard to partner with Taiwan,” said the president, “will help ensure that we’re positioned to better respond to shared threats in the region and to conduct coordinated humanitarian and environmental missions.”) Consider that a clear challenge to the globe’s rising power in what’s become ever more of a showdown at the naval equivalent of the OK Corral, part of an emerging new cold war between the US and China.

    And none of this is out of the ordinary. In his late April address to Congress, for instance, President Biden anxiously told the assembled senators and congressional representatives that “we’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century. … China and other countries are closing in fast.” In his own strange way, Trump exhibited similar worries.

    What Aren’t We Guarding?

    Now, here’s the one thing that doesn’t seem to strike anyone in Congress, at the Coast Guard Academy or at The New York Times as particularly strange: that American ships should be protecting “maritime freedom” on the other side of the globe, or that the Coast Guard should be partnering for the same. Imagine, just for a second, that Chinese naval vessels and their Coast Guard equivalent were patrolling our coasts, or parts of the Caribbean, while edging ever closer to Florida. You know just what an uproar of shock and outrage, what cries of horror would result. But it’s assumed that the equivalent on the other side of the globe is a role too obvious even to bother to explain and that our leaders should indeed be crying out in horror at China’s challenges to it.

    It’s increasingly clear that, from Japan to the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, Washington is pushing China hard, challenging its positions big time and often in a military fashion. And no, China itself, whether in the South China Sea or elsewhere, is no angel. Still, the US military, while trying to leave its failed terror wars in the dust, is visibly facing off against that economically rising power in an ever more threatening manner, one that already seems too close to a possible military conflict of some sort. And you don’t even want to know what sort of warfare this country’s military leaders are now imagining there as, in fact, they did so long ago. (Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame only recently revealed that, according to a still-classified document, in response to the Chinese shelling of Taiwan in 1958, US military leaders seriously considered launching nuclear strikes against mainland China.)

    Indeed, as US Navy ships are eternally sent to challenge China, challenging words in Washington only escalate as well. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks put it in March, while plugging for an ever-larger Pentagon budget, “Beijing is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system… Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin and I believe that the [People’s Republic of China] is the pacing challenge for the United States military.”

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    And in that context, the US Navy, the Air Force and the Coast Guard are all “pacing” away. The latest proposed version of an always-rising Pentagon budget, for instance, now includes $5.1 billion for what’s called the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, “a fund created by Congress to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region.” In fact, the US Indo-Pacific Command is also requesting $27 billion in extra spending between 2022 and 2027 for “new missiles and air defenses, radar systems, staging areas, intelligence-sharing centers, supply depots and testing ranges throughout the region.” And so it goes in the pandemic world of 2021.

    Though seldom asked, the real question, the saddest one I think, the one that brings us back to my conversation with my friend about the world we may leave behind us, is: What aren’t we guarding on this planet of ours?

    A New Cold War on a Melting Planet?

    Let’s start with this. The old pattern of rising and falling empires should be seen as a thing of the past. It’s true that, in a traditional sense, China is now rising and the US seemingly falling, at least economically speaking. But something else is rising and something else is falling, too. I’m thinking, of course, about rising global temperatures that, sometime in the next five years, have a reasonable chance of exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius limit (above the pre-industrial era) set by the 2015 Paris climate accords and what that future heat may do to the very idea of a habitable planet.

    Meanwhile, when it comes to the US, the Atlantic hurricane season is only expected to worsen, the mega-drought in the Southwest to intensify — as fires burn ever higher in previously wetter mountainous elevations in that region — and so on. Within this century, major coastal cities in the US and China like New Orleans, Miami, Shanghai and Hong Kong could find themselves flooded out by rising sea levels, thanks in part to the melting of Antarctica and Greenland. As for a rising China, that supposedly ultimate power of the future, even its leadership must know that parts of the north China plain, now home to 400 million people, could become quite literally uninhabitable by century’s end due to heat waves capable of killing the healthy within hours.

    In such a context, on such a planet, ask yourself: Is there really a future for us in which the essential relationship between the US and China — the two largest greenhouse gas emitters of this moment — is a warlike one? Whether a literal war results or not, one thing should be clear enough: If the two greatest carbon emitters can’t figure out how to cooperate instead of picking endless fights with each other, the human future is likely to prove grim and dim indeed. “Containing” China is the foreign-policy focus of the moment, a throwback to another age in Washington. And yet this is the very time when what truly needs to be contained is the overheating of this planet. And in truth, given human ingenuity, climate change should indeed be containable.

    And yet the foreign-policy wing of the Biden administration and Congress — where Democrats are successfully infusing money into the economy under the rubric of a struggle with China, a rare subject the Republicans can go all in on — seems focused on creating a future of eternal Sino-American hostility and endless armed competition. In the already overheated world we inhabit, who could honestly claim that this is a formula for “national security”?

    Returning to the conversation with my friend, I wonder why this approach to our planet doesn’t seem to more people like an obvious formula for disaster. Why aren’t more of us screaming at the top of our lungs about the dangers of Washington’s urge to return to a world in which a “cold war” is a formula for success? It leaves me ever more fearful for the planet that, one of these days, I will indeed be leaving to others who deserved so much better.

    *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

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