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    Does the Future Belong to the Taliban?

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    It’s as if a sudden natural disaster has just struck Afghanistan. The scenes from the capital Kabul reflect the kind of panic that comes when a Category 5 hurricane makes landfall, when the waters rise and the levees are breached, when a forest fire jumps over a fuel break to spread out of control.

    The Taliban victory this past weekend was not a complete surprise. The news had been full of warnings of their territorial advance, and pundits had worked hard to out-Cassandra one another with their pronouncements of impending doom. And yet no one expected the sky to fall quite so quickly.

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    The Biden administration had been expecting at best some kind of power-sharing agreement and at worst a few months to prepare for the fall of Kabul. In the end, the Taliban needed only a few days to go from seizing the last provincial capitals to marching into the Afghan capital and occupying the presidential palace this weekend. Also unexpected was their method. They accomplished this blitzkrieg as much with political persuasion as through military force — by negotiating surrender agreements with Afghan army and government officials in the areas where they were advancing.

    Reality of Chaos

    The Biden administration has tried to reassure the American people that it is presiding over an orderly response. The media, however, has depicted a street-level reality of chaos. The international airport in Kabul, where the United States is making its last stand, has been the last hope for many Afghans who fear that their collaboration with the Americans, their support for human rights or even just their style of dress will earn them a jail sentence or worse. They are desperate to get on the last flights out, even to the point of clinging to the fuselage of a departing US plane.

    Until we get full eyewitness reports, the best description of the catastrophe in Kabul comes from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer,” which has a harrowing section on the last-minute scramble of South Vietnamese to get on American transport planes as Saigon was falling in 1975.

    “The plane was a garbage truck with wings attached, and like a garbage truck deposits were made from the rear, where its big flat cargo ramp dropped down to receive us,” Nguyen writes of the C-130 Hercules and its open compartment. “Adults squatted on the floor or sat on bags, children perched on their knees. Lucky passengers had a bulkhead berth where they could cling to a cargo strap. The contours of skin and flesh separating one individual from another merged, everyone forced into the mandatory intimacy required of those less human than the ones leaving the country in reserved seating.”

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    From the Western perspective, this exodus is the result of an unnatural disaster, of armed bands of religious fundamentalists who have seized Afghanistan and are determined to drag it back to the Middle Ages. They have little professed interest in democracy, human rights or pluralism. The last time they were in charge in Kabul, they presided over a theater of cruelty: stoning, floggings, amputations, executions. This last week, in the territories they grabbed on their way to taking power, the Taliban enlisted child soldiers, rolled back the rights of women and restricted free expression, showing little sign that they’d updated their style of governance.

    The velocity with which the relatively modest number of Taliban (75,000) swept aside the Afghan national army (300,000) is reminiscent of the sudden expansion of the Islamic State throughout Syria and Iraq in 2014. Then, too, US allies in the region proved no match for a highly mobile and fiercely dedicated group of insurgents. The United States and its allies, deeming this so-called caliphate a risk to the region and the global order, conducted an all-out war that culminated in the Islamic State’s defeat.

    As the presumed linchpin in the war on terror, Afghanistan once commanded similar attention from Washington. But that was 20 years ago, and the United States is now leading the charge for the exit. In recent months, the Biden administration downplayed the risk of the Taliban taking over the country; on July 8, the president said that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

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    The Pentagon, meanwhile, was arguing back in June that the risk of the country again playing host to terrorist organizations was only “medium,” with Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin maintaining that “it would take possibly two years for them to develop that capability.” The Pentagon is now in the process of “reassessment.”

    The Taliban are now more firmly in control of the entire country than they were back in the late 1990s. It’s not just the Afghan national army that has given up. It seems like the country’s entire civil society is trying to get out as soon as possible. But that also demonstrates how different the country has become. When the Taliban were last in charge, there was barely any civil society. The images from Kabul might seem horrifying, but you reassure yourself by saying that all of this is very far away. Also, the Taliban don’t have global ambitions. What happens in Afghanistan, stays in Afghanistan. Don’t kid yourself.

    Capacity for Ruthlessness

    Stalin once complained that imposing the Soviet model on the Poles was like “saddling a cow.” The Catholic Church remained a powerful force in communist Poland, and Polish farmers put up so much resistance to collectivization that the land remained largely in private hands. It took more than 40 years, but the cow eventually threw off its saddle.

    Surely Western efforts to liberalize Afghan society can’t be compared to the attempted Stalinization of Poland: different times, different ideologies. But the Soviets, too, thought that they were bringing modern civilization to the benighted Poles. Similarly, the United States believed that it could drag Afghanistan kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It found willing partners: a government, an army, a lot of NGOs. The Taliban represented everyone else. Much of the country resented the intrusions of outsiders. Afghanistan had been combating such pushy foreigners for centuries. Much of the country remained effectively pre-modern, a constituency that the Taliban have actively courted.

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    Consider just one indicator of modernity: the rate of literacy. In Afghanistan, less than 20% of the population could read in 1979. By 2018, that rate had grown to 43%. On the one hand, that’s a big jump. On the other hand, Afghanistan continues to have one of the worst literacy rates in the world, well below Sudan and Yemen. Compare Afghanistan’s current literacy rate to that of Iraq (86%), Iran (86%) and Syria (81%), and you can understand the utter presumptuousness of US efforts to modernize the country.

    A thin layer of human rights activists did manage to do some extraordinary work in Afghanistan. But if you listen to this interview on the new podcast Strength & Solidarity with Shaharzad Akbar, the chairperson of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, you can hear the frustration in her voice as she talks about dealing with the entrenched interests and the outright corruption in her country. She has continued to do her work up to the last minute, reporting on the Taliban’s human rights abuses in the territories it was capturing. She tweets on the latest developments here.

    Anyone like Akbar who might form a domestic opposition to the Taliban has emigrated, is trying to leave or is lying very low. Protests have broken out, including one in Jalalabad that the Taliban shut down by firing into the crowd of demonstrators, killing three. Pushback will come in other forms as well. Relying primarily on support from the Pashtun community, the Taliban will face resistance from other ethnic groups. It may also have to deal with doctrinal disagreements with other Islamic forces in the country. But the Taliban can make up for any deficit in popularity with its capacity for total ruthlessness.

    25 Years On

    At the same time, this is not the same Taliban that ruled 25 years ago. A number of the current leaders have negotiated with US representatives in Doha, and they’ve met with numerous foreign leaders. In late July, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi welcomed a delegation of Taliban officials in Tianjin, which suggests that both sides are willing to compromise after some significant disagreements over what constitutes religious extremism.

    With the United States blocking the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars in Afghan reserves held in US banks, Kabul will increasingly rely on China for capital and technical expertise. Beijing will be happy to provide that capital without the pesky political strings that the West attaches, though it will likely demand other quid pro quos, like access to the riches that lie beneath the Afghan soil.

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    Some form of rapprochement with the West is not impossible. The Taliban, after all, have learned how to craft messages that resonate in Western capitals. “We are committed to working with other parties in a consultative manner of genuine respect to agree on a new, inclusive political system in which the voice of every Afghan is reflected and where no Afghan feels excluded,” wrote Sirajuddin Haqqani, a deputy leader of the Taliban, in The New York Times last year. “I am confident that, liberated from foreign domination and interference, we together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity.”

    Taliban spokesmen have echoed these same phrases in some of their recent statements as well. There is no consensus on political and economic issues within the Taliban leadership. Ousting the foreign powers will soon seem easy in comparison to running a country where the citizens, even if mostly illiterate, have different expectations of the state than they did 25 years ago.

    Those within the leadership who favor rapprochement with the West will only prosper politically if they can point to some reciprocal interest. The Biden administration should not, in Afghanistan, repeat its mistake of letting reformists twist in the wind, as it has done in Iran.

    Will the Taliban Take Over the World?

    The Taliban represent a powerful strand in Afghan society: fiercely anti-colonial and distrustful of the West. They are not alone. These sentiments can be found throughout the region. The mullahs in Iran and the crown princes in Saudi Arabia, despite their many mutual disagreements, have their own versions of this ideology. Given their historical experiences, who can blame them.

    We also make a fatal category error when we assume that fundamentalism is somehow a Middle Eastern or Islamic character flaw. Outside the region, you can find the Taliban wherever people gather in the name of rejecting modern politics in favor of tribal affiliations, decrying the permissiveness of liberal culture and elevating religious dogma to the single principle governing society.

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    When anti-vaxxers gather, the Taliban is there. When homophobes decry gay marriage and “family values” activists complain about gender fluidity, the Taliban is there. When Christian fundamentalists launch their own jihad against abortion, the Taliban is there. When right-wing extremists devise conspiracy theories about “globalists,” the Taliban is there.

    So, let’s stop all the hand-wringing about the barbarians massing at the gates of the West. Whether it’s Steve Bannon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Jim Dobson, the barbarians have been inside the gates all along. The US war in Afghanistan is over. Let’s now focus on the fight against these homegrown extremists.

    *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

    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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      The Delta Variant of Global Stupidity

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      You’d think that the whole world could unite against a deadly virus. COVID-19 has already sickened over 200 million people around the world and killed over 4 million. It has now mutated into more contagious forms that threaten to plunge the globe into another spin cycle of lockdown.

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      Avoiding global catastrophe from the more infectious Delta variant of COVID-19 doesn’t require a huge commitment from people and governments. Richer countries just have to ensure more widespread availability of vaccines, and individuals have to get vaccinated. COVID-19 is not an asteroid on a collision course with the planet. It’s not an imminent nuclear war. It’s an invisible enemy that humanity has demonstrated it can beat. It just requires a bit of cooperation. So, what’s the problem?

      Three Problems

      Actually, there are three problems. The first has to do with supply, since the richest nations have cornered the vaccine market and have been criminally slow to get doses to poorer countries. On the entire continent of Africa, for instance, less than 2% of the population has been fully vaccinated.

      The second problem, on the demand side, is the commonplace resistance to the newfangled, in this case a vaccine that was developed very quickly, hasn’t yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and has some side effects that are harmful for a very small number of people. Hesitation is understandable. But not when placed against the obvious lethality of COVID-19 and the clear benefits of herd immunity.

      The third problem is political. The far right has jumped on the anti-vaccination bandwagon, seized control of the wheel and is driving the vehicle, al-Qaeda-style, straight into oncoming traffic.

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      Both in the United States and globally, the far right has long been infected by various harmful delusions — the superiority of white people, the fiction of climate change, the evils of government. As the far right has spread, thanks to vectors like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, those delusions have mutated.

      Now, with its anti-vaccine opportunism, the far right is circulating a new Delta variant of global stupidity: virally through social media, in a shower of spit and invective on the street and through top-down lunacy from politicians and political parties. COVID-19 and all of its variants will eventually burn themselves out, though at who knows what cost. The latest versions of global stupidity promoted by the far right, however, are proving far more resistant to science, reason and just plain common sense.

      Hijacking the Anti-Vax Movement

      The Brothers of Italy is a neo-fascist formation that is now polling the highest of any political party in the country today. With 21% support, this pro-Mussolini throwback is just ahead of the far-right Lega party. Throw in Silvio Berlusconi’s Forward Italy party at 7% and the hard right looks as if it could form the next government in Italy whenever the next elections are held.

      How did the Brothers of Italy grow in several months from a few percent to the leading party in the polls? Led by Giorgia Meloni, a woman who predictably decries Islam and immigrants, the Brothers of Italy started out as a booster of vaccines, which seemed like a pretty safe position in a country that has suffered so much at the hands of COVID-19.

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      But Meloni abruptly shifted the party’s stance when the Italian government, currently led by technocrat Mario Draghi, introduced a “green pass” that allows the vaccinated to eat in restaurants, go to bars and enter various public places like museums. Meloni called the pass “the final step on the road to the creation of an Orwellian society,” which “limits the freedom of citizens, further devastates the economy and de facto introduces a vaccine mandate.”

      Limits the freedom of citizens? The freedom to infect other people with a deadly virus? Effectively, Meloni wants to grant all citizens the same right that James Bond famously possessed: the license to kill. Unfortunately, such nonsense has support outside Italy as well.

      Batting for a Pathogen

      In France, the government of Emmanuel Macron has instituted a similar health pass as well as mandating that all medical professionals get vaccinated. The response has been ferocious, with several demonstrations of over 100,000 people mobilizing around the country.

      It might seem at first glance that the French protestors are just ordinary folks who are sick and tired of government intrusions in their lives, similar to the yellow vests protestors from 2018. But the organizers of these anti-vax protests are the usual suspects from the far right like Florian Philippot, a former top aide of the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen. National Rally and the equally rabid Stand Up France have come out against Macron’s policies. Unfortunately, some leading members of the left-wing France Unbowed party have also endorsed the rallies. As in the United States, French anti-vaxxers are resorting to anti-system conspiracy theories up to and including QAnon.

      Despite the size of these rallies whipped up by the far right, a majority of French support the health pass and nearly 70% of the population has gotten at least one shot, compared to only 58% in the United States. But the far right sees the anti-vaccine movement as an opportunity to worm its way into the mainstream in France and elsewhere, such as the Querdenken movement in Germany, the anti-Semitic far right in Poland and evangelical Christian organizations in the Philippines.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Toward this end, the far right has eagerly employed the services of such “useful idiots” as Robert Kennedy, Jr., perhaps the most famous face of the anti-vaccine movement. The Polish far-right party Confederation invited Kennedy to speak on-ine to a Polish parliamentary group on vaccines. Kennedy also put his social media power behind a global day against vaccines that took place last October in 15 countries from Europe to Latin America, which a number of far-right parties helped to organize.

      Originally in the United States, vaccine skepticism circulated mainly on the left, where suspicions of chemicals and corporations created a resistance to having just any substance injected into one’s arm. But then along came Donald Trump, the dark conspiracy theories of the alt-right and ultimately QAnon, which focused latent anti-government sentiments against the medical establishment and its COVID-19 vaccines. Suddenly, videos like “Plandemic” were zipping around cyberspace, and prominent anti-vaxxers like “healthy lifestyle advocate” Larry D. Cook fell under the sway of QAnon.

      Today, in a tired repeat of 2020, US anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are again protesting in front of governors’ mansions, bringing their message to Disneyland and shutting down school board meetings. If COVID-19 were a wealthy corporation that underwrote such disruptions, these actions would make at least some economic sense. If COVID-19 were a wildly popular musical group or a subversively attractive religious cult that governments were trying to suppress, the frenzy of crowds would be somewhat understandable. But COVID-19 is a deadly virus. Why on earth would anyone go to bat for a pathogen?

      The Far Right Has Its Reasons

      Conservatives have traditionally supported the powerful pillars of society: the police, the army, the state. Today’s far right is not conservative. It detests the state. It prefers vigilante justice — everyone standing their ground with gun in hand — to the police and the army, since these latter are representatives of the state.

      Effectively, the far right embraces the old Hobbesian concept of a “war of all against all,” which was the status quo before the emergence of the state. To achieve this “golden age” of general mayhem, the far right pursues any means necessary. It supports homeschooling to destroy public education, privatization of state assets to weaken the government, and deregulation to tilt the playing field in favor of corporations.

      And now, in the age of COVID-19, the far right is even willing to support germ warfare. For that’s what the anti-mask and anti-vaccine ideology amounts to: siding with the novel coronavirus against the sensible policies of the state. One wonders: If the state issued a mandate that required people not to jump off cliffs, would the far right suddenly launch a Lemming Crusade simply to spite the state?

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      I can well imagine the segment on Newsmax.

      Reporter: I’m here with patriot James Q. Public. He and his family are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Tell me, James, why are you about to take a big step into the unknown?

      James Q. Public: The government can’t tell me what to do. I believe in choice. And this is my choice.

      Reporter: Do you think of yourself as a pioneer?

      James Q. Public: Absolutely. This socialist government with its Five Year Plans sickens me. I take it one day at a time. One minute at a time.

      Reporter: Your youngest child doesn’t look happy about your choice.

      James Q. Public: Oh, he’s just a crybaby. He’ll get used to it.

      Reporter: Get used to falling off a cliff?

      James Q. Public: What makes you think we’ll fall?

      Reporter: Well, uh, gravity —

      James Q. Public: Come on, man, you believe in all that nonsense those scientists are trying to force down our throats? Vaccines? Climate change? Gravity? Okay, everyone, let’s go. One small step for the Public family, one large step for arrgghhh….!

      It would all be grimly amusing, like some pandemic version of the Darwin Awards, if the far right’s Lemming Crusade wasn’t threatening to drag the rest of us off the cliff with it.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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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      So Far, Biden’s Foreign Policy Is Proving Too Conventional

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      On the domestic front, Joe Biden is flirting with transformational policies around energy, environment, and infrastructure. It’s not a revolution, but it’s considerably less timid than what Barack Obama offered in that pre-Trump, pre-pandemic era.

      When it comes to foreign policy, however, the Biden administration has been nowhere near as transformational. The phrase Joe Biden has used so often is “America is back.” That sentiment certainly captures some aspects of Biden’s relationship with the international community, such as repairing relations with the World Health Organization and rejoining the Paris climate accords. In these ways, the administration has brought America back to the status quo that existed before Trump was unleashed on the world stage.

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      But on some very important issues — China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea — President Biden hasn’t managed to restore even the previous status quo. His approach to military spending and the arms race is decidedly hawkish. His message on immigration, as expressed by Vice President Kamala Harris on a visit to Guatemala earlier this month, effectively erases the inscription on the Statue of Liberty by telling potential border crossers in the region to stay home. Okay, foreign policy is not a winning issue at the ballot box, and Biden certainly has a lot on his agenda. But even the notoriously cautious Obama took some courageous steps with Tehran and Havana.

      It’s possible that Biden is focusing on America first before turning to the world as a whole. It’s also possible that he’s simply not interested in altering US foreign policy in any significant way beyond removing US troops from Afghanistan. True, it was exhilarating to have a conventional president again after Trump. But conventional, when it comes to US foreign policy, is just not good enough.

      Confronting China

      If the Biden administration’s overriding domestic preoccupation is a sustainable economy, then its dominant foreign policy obsession is China. Biden and Xi have spoken only once, by telephone in February. Xi participated in Biden’s virtual climate confab in April. They are likely to meet face to face sometime this year, possibly around the G20 summit in Rome in October. There’s been talk of greater cooperation on addressing the climate crisis. And there haven’t been any overt military confrontations in the South China Sea or elsewhere.

      But otherwise, Biden and Xi have not really gotten off on the right foot. It was a no-brainer for the new Biden administration to lift the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese products and de-escalate the trade war that unsettled manufacturers and consumers on both sides of the Pacific. The Biden team is ostensibly doing a review of US-China trade policy with a focus on whether Beijing has met its commitments under the “phase one trade deal” signed back in January 2020 (so far, it’s been a mixed record of China meeting some targets for US imports and missing others).

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      The review is more than just bean-counting. In a marked departure from the usual neoliberal trade talk coming out of Washington, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai has said, “I want to disconnect this idea that the only way we do affirmative trade engagement, trade enhancement is through a free trade agreement.” Tai prefers to operate according to a “worker-centric trade policy” that evaluates China on issues of forced labor, workers’ rights and the environment. A more nuanced approach to trade is all to the good, of course, and Tai should be commended for breaking with the Washington consensus.

      But taken in conjunction with other Biden administration policies, the reluctance to lift tariffs on Chinese goods is part of a full-court economic press on the country. The Biden administration has effectively continued the Trump approach of not only lining up allies in the region to contain China (the Quad, the Blue Dot Network) but enlisting European countries as well to join the bandwagon. In his recent trip to Europe, Biden corralled the G7 to create the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative, a purported alternative to China’s Belt and Road infrastructure program, and twisted some arms to get NATO to prioritize China as part of its mission.

      NATO’s new emphasis on China reflects the Pentagon’s shift in focus. Trump might have loudly proclaimed his anti-China animus, but the Biden administration is determined to close what it calls the “say-do gap” by expanding capabilities beyond the Navy to challenge China in the air and above.

      China’s moves in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea are deeply troubling. Nor is Beijing doing nearly enough to green its Belt and Road Initiative. But the Biden administration needs to think creatively about how to leverage China’s own multilateral aspirations in order to address global problems. Trade tensions and disagreements about internal policies are to be expected. Yet the Biden administration has an urgent and historic opportunity to work with China (and everyone else) to remake the international community.

      Sparring With Iran

      Another no-brainer for the Biden administration was reviving the Iran nuclear agreement that Trump tried to destroy. Granted, it was tricky to unwind the sanctions against Tehran and address Iran’s demands for compensation. It wasn’t easy to reassure the Iranian leadership of the sincerity of US intentions given not only Trump’s past hostility but the current animosities of congressional Republicans. And there was also Israel, which was doing everything within its power to scuttle diplomacy up to and including sabotaging Iran’s nuclear facilities and assassinating Iranian scientists.

      These obstacles notwithstanding, the Biden team could have gotten the job done if it had started earlier and been more flexible. Not wanting to open itself up to criticism from hawks at home, however, the administration argued for a mutual, step-by-step return to the agreement. By contrast, Iran quite sensibly argued that the United States, since it attempted to blow up the agreement, should be the first to compromise by removing sanctions, a position that some US policymakers have also supported.

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      Meanwhile, the Biden administration is continuing a tit-for-tat confrontation with militias aligned with Iran. This week, the administration launched airstrikes against facilities on the Iraq-Syria border from which these militias have allegedly attacked US.bases in Iraq. US forces in Syria subsequently came under rocket fire.

      Why are there still US soldiers in Iraq and Syria? Didn’t the Biden administration commit to ending America’s endless wars? Although US forces are scheduled to depart Afghanistan in September and Washington has pledged to remove troops from Iraq as well, negotiations around the latter have yet to produce a timetable. Removing 2,500 US soldiers from Iraq would please the government in Baghdad, remove an irritant in US-Iranian relations and take US personnel out of harm’s way. What’s not to like, Joe?

      Getting Nowhere With Cuba and North Korea

      Late in his second term, Barack Obama orchestrated a bold rapprochement with Cuba. After lifting financial and travel restrictions, Obama visited the island in March 2016 to meet with Cuban leader Raul Castro. It wasn’t a full opening. Washington maintained a trade embargo and refused to close its anomalous base in Guantanamo. But it was a start. Donald Trump brought a quick end to that fresh start by reimposing the restrictions that Obama had lifted.

      Joe Biden promised to resurrect the Obama policy. Trump’s reversals, he said as a candidate, “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” And yet, as president, he has done nothing to reverse Trump’s reversals.

      As Karen de Young writes in The Washington Post, “Under Trump restrictions, non-Cuban Americans are still prohibited from sending money to the island. Cruise ships are banned from sailing from the United States to Cuba, and the dozens of scheduled U.S. commercial flights to Cuban cities have largely stopped. Tight limits remain in place on commercial transactions.”

      The reason for the new administration’s lack of action, beyond its concerns about human rights in Cuba and its fear of Republican opposition in Congress, boils down to domestic politics. Robert Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey who never liked the Obama-era détente with Cuba in the first place, represents a key obstacle in Congress. Public opinion in Florida among Cuban-Americans, which had swung in favor of rapprochement during the Obama period, has now also swung decisively in the other direction, thanks to a steady diet of Trumpian demagoguery.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Here, the Biden administration could try something new by closing Guantanamo. The administration is already launching a quiet effort to close the detention facility at the base by resolving the status of the several dozen inmates. He should go even further by rebooting Guantanamo as a center for US-Cuban environmental research, as scientists Joe Roman and James Kraska have proposed.

      North Korea, meanwhile, is the one place in the world where Trump sought to overturn decades of US hostility. His attempts at one-on-one diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un didn’t achieve much of anything, but it still might have served as a foundation for future negotiations. Biden has instead followed the script of all the administrations prior to Trump: review policy, promise something new, fall back on conventional thinking.

      The administration finished its review of the North Korea policy in April. Biden rejected his predecessor’s approaches as misguided and has relied on the usual big-stick-and-small-carrot policy that stretches back to the 1990s. On the one hand, Biden extended sanctions against the country and has maintained a military encirclement. On the other, his emissaries have reached out to Pyongyang, with Special Representative for North Korea Sung Kim saying this month that the United States would meet with Pyongyang “anywhere, anytime, without preconditions.” “Without preconditions” is fine. But what about “with incentives”?

      Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea is more shut off from the world than usual. It is preoccupied with the economic challenges associated with its increased isolation. In his annual address in January, Kim Jong-un made the unusual admission that the government’s economic program fell short of its goals. More recently, he has said that his country is “prepared for both dialogue and confrontation, especially … confrontation.”

      Biden should focus on the first half of Kim’s sentence. South Korea’s progressive president, Moon Jae-in, nearing the end of his own tenure, very much wants to advance reconciliation on the peninsula. Instead of beefing up its military containment of the isolated country, Washington could work with Seoul to break the current diplomatic impasse with a grand humanitarian gesture. Whether it’s vaccines, food or infrastructure development, North Korea needs help right now.

      Military Exceptionalism

      It’s still early in the Biden administration. Remember: Obama didn’t achieve his major foreign policy milestones in Iran and Cuba until later in his second term. Biden no doubt wants to accumulate some political capital first by repairing relations with allies and participating in multilateral fora on the global stage and achieving some economic success on the home front.

      The administration’s position on military spending, however, suggests that Biden is wedded to the most conventional of thinking. The United States is poised to end its intervention in Afghanistan and reduce its commitments in the Middle East. It is not involved in any major military conflicts. Everyone is wondering how the administration is going to pay for its ambitious infrastructure plans.

      So, why has Biden asked for a larger military budget? The administration’s 2022 request for the Pentagon is $715 billion, an increase of $10 billion, plus an additional $38 billion for military-related spending at the Energy Department and other agencies. True, the administration is hoping to boost non-military spending by a larger percentage. It is planning to remove the “overseas contingency operations” line item that funded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

      But if there ever was a time to reduce US military spending, it’s now. The pandemic proved the utter worthlessness of tanks and destroyers in defending the homeland from the most urgent threats. Greater cooperation with China, a renewed nuclear pact with Iran and a détente with both Cuba and North Korea would all provide powerful reasons for the United States to reduce military spending. To use Joe Biden’s signature phrase, “C’mon, man!”

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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 World Politics

      Benjamin Netanyahu’s Nine Political Lives

      by

      When Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister for the second time in March 2009, it was not long after Israel had conducted three weeks of sustained air attacks on the enclave of Gaza. More than 1,100 Palestinians died in that campaign. About a dozen Israelis also perished, four from friendly fire, the rest from rockets coming from Gaza.

      Operation Cast Lead, as it was called, was supposed to eliminate the offensive capabilities of Hamas, a Palestinian faction with political and military wings that had taken over Gaza the year before. The Israeli operation also featured a ground offensive with thousands of troops and tanks. There was nothing surgical about the strikes or the intervention. At least half of the Palestinian casualties were estimated to be civilians. The UN-sponsored Goldstone report identified “actions amounting to war crimes” committed by both sides.

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      From the start, the conflict pitted David against Goliath, with their Biblical roles reversed. Israel deployed overwhelming force on top of the economic blockade it had imposed on Gaza after Hamas took over. It was the Israeli Goliath that declared a unilateral ceasefire in January 2009 from what it considered a position of strength. Although the Palestinian David didn’t come close to knocking out the Israeli giant, Hamas did manage to survive the onslaught. It has remained in control of Gaza ever since.

      Acting With Impunity

      Operation Cast Lead took place during the lame-duck period before Barack Obama took over from George W. Bush. The Bush administration followed several decades of US foreign policy by supporting Israel during the conflict, as did Congress. The Obama administration did not substantially deviate from this consensus, but it did attempt modestly to level the playing field by criticizing Israel’s aggressive settlement policy and providing a bit more assistance to the Palestinian Authority.

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      Netanyahu, when he took over in 2009, understood that Israel could act largely with impunity in Gaza. Because of its militant and fundamentalist orientation, Hamas didn’t generate a lot of warm fuzzy feelings in the West, or even in some quarters of the Palestinian community for that matter. So, Israel felt confident enough to ignore the UN inquiry and shrug off the Obama’s administration’s mild criticisms. Meanwhile, it continued to outsource its policing of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority (portrayed in graphic detail in the Israeli TV show “Fauda”).

      In November 2012, Israel launched another attack against Hamas and Gaza, Operation Pillar of Defense, that ended with a ceasefire brokered largely by Egypt. This time, however, Netanyahu was attuned to the political advantages of attacking his nemesis. The prime minister had already called for early elections, which would take place in January 2013. The week-long bombardment of Hamas — on top of the exchange that freed Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 — made it relatively easy for Netanyahu to win the election and form a new government.

      The 2012 ceasefire didn’t last. Both sides continued sporadic attacks, and Israel maintained its economic blockade of Gaza. A reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah led to a unity government for the Palestinians in June 2014, which Netanyahu saw as a threat to his divide-and-conquer tactics.

      All of this served as a backdrop to a more sustained third round between Israel and Hamas that took place over the summer of 2014. It was another lopsided conflict that left more than 2,200 Gazans and 73 Israelis dead. Another UN report detailed potential war crimes on both sides. And Netanyahu’s Likud scored another political victory in national elections the following March, after the prime minister vowed that he would prevent a Palestinian state if he won.

      Political Survivor

      Bibi is a political survivor. He is now Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. He has weathered social protests, a raft of corruption charges and the persistent condemnation of international authorities for policies that trample the rights of Palestinians and military actions that have killed scores of civilians.

      One major reason for his political longevity is the collapse of the Israeli left. The Labor Party has seen a catastrophic drop in its vote totals, and it now has only one more seat in the Knesset than the other left-wing party, Meretz (together the two parties have 13 seats, less than half of what Likud alone controls). To stave off the centrist parties, Netanyahu has at one point or another counted on the political support of actors further to his right, like the Religious Zionist Party and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu.

      Netanyahu and Hamas Are Playing a Deadly Game

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      But it’s really been Hamas that has saved Bibi’s skin time and again. In 2009, Hamas served as a justification for steering the country into an even more hard-right direction. In 2012, the Israeli government killed Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari, which precipitated the rocket attacks from Gaza that in turn served as the pretext for Operation Pillar of Defense. This year, Netanyahu could count on Hamas again to launch rocket attacks in response to Israel’s eviction of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, itself part of a much wider effort to displace Palestinians in favor of Jewish settlers, as well as a police raid on al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan prayers.

      The Palestinian Authority protested both actions. So did the Arab world, the international community and demonstrators throughout the United States. But it was Hamas and its perennial quest to become the face of Palestinian resistance that once again has served as the anvil for Bibi’s hammer. In the 1980s, Israeli hard-liners helped create the organization to divide and weaken the Palestinian movement.

      Hamas has been a gift to hard-liners ever since. And, once again, Palestinians have suffered the most from this confrontation. In the current conflict, the death toll in Gaza has risen above 200, half of them women and children. Around a dozen Israelis have died in the rocket fire from Gaza. The only winner: Benjamin Netanyahu.

      What’s Next for Netanyahu?

      Netanyahu has managed to sell himself as indispensable to the Israeli right, which has been ascendant ever since he appeared on the political scene in the 1990s. His alliance with Trump produced nearly everything Israel’s right wing has wanted from the United States. The Trump administration gave the okay to Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem. It supported without reservation the Jewish settlement of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It removed funding and recognition from Palestinian entities.

      As he promised in 2015, Netanyahu has moved the goalposts in Israel’s struggle with Palestinians to such a degree that the two-state solution has practically disappeared from the political agenda. With Israel blockading Gaza and whittling away at Palestinian territory in the West Bank, Palestinians have less and less of a state to stand in. The Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas for as long as Netanyahu has been prime minister, has been incapable of stopping Bibi.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Abbas and his Fatah party have lost so much support among Palestinians that they had to postpone elections this year to avoid outright repudiation at the polls. Only Hamas, with a fanaticism equal to Netanyahu’s, has put up any significant resistance.

      Netanyahu is seven years younger than Joe Biden and three years younger than Donald Trump. He has no intention of retiring to an olive farm any time soon. He is staying in power not simply because he likes the perquisites of the office like Trump or because he has some vision of “building back better” like Biden. Bibi dreams of annexing as much of the West Bank as he can, defeating Hamas militarily and politically, and reducing the Palestinian community to nothing more than a source of cheap labor for Israeli farms and factories. Nearly everything he has done geopolitically has been toward that end, like negotiating diplomatic recognition deals with Arab states (UAE, Morocco) and humoring Jared Kushner’s “deal of the century” of buying Palestinian sovereign aspirations with the Gulf’s largesse.

      Of course, Netanyahu would also like to see regime change in Iran and the neutering of Hezbollah in Lebanon, but those longer-term goals depend a great deal on factors beyond his immediate control. Trump was an ideal partner for realizing these dreams. No doubt Bibi imagined that he could continue to change enough facts on the ground during Trump’s second term to reduce Palestine to the level of Abkhazia or, better yet, the former state of Biafra. But for the voters in a few key swing states, Netanyahu nearly got what he wanted.

      Meanwhile, in the last two years alone, Israel has had four national elections, and the only constant has been Bibi. The corruption charges against him alone should have doomed his career. He faces three cases of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. In Trumpian fashion, Bibi has tried to turn the tables by asserting that the charges are an “attempted coup.” In the most recent election, Netanyahu and his allies didn’t win enough votes to form a new coalition government. Opposition leader Yair Lapid was given a chance to form an anti-Netanyahu coalition spanning the political spectrum. He was in the middle of fashioning this unwieldy coalition when the current crisis conveniently (for Netanyahu) broke out.

      Biden vs. Bibi

      Joe Biden is cut from the same cloth as Obama when it comes to US policy toward Israel. Once elected, Biden quickly restored aid to Palestinian organizations and resumed diplomatic relations with the PLO, though both efforts now run up against provisions enacted by the Trump administration.

      But in other respects, Biden has made it clear that he does not want to put additional pressure on Israel. He’s not going to reverse Trump’s moves on the Golan Heights and Jerusalem. He lacks even the lukewarm determination of Obama to push back on Israeli settlements. In the current conflagration, the most he’s willing to do is support a ceasefire but so far, he’s leaving it up to the combatants to find their own way to a settlement.

      Netanyahu might have worried that he would be dealing with “Obama part two” with Biden. Instead, he faces an American president who has no real interest in investing any political capital to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian deal. The Middle East is knocking on America’s door, and Biden is pretending to be focussing on home repairs.

      The problem for Biden is that others want to change the foreign policy consensus on Israel. Criticism of Israeli policy is becoming more commonplace in Congress, with several US politicians now willing to call the socio-ethnic division in the country by its true name: apartheid. Opposition to an over $700 million arms package to Israel was gaining ground within the Democratic Party before the Biden administration managed to persuade the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to reverse his plea to postpone the deal.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Meanwhile, protests in solidarity with Palestinians are spreading around the United States, with an astonishing 4,000 people mobilizing in Patterson, New Jersey. Even within the American Jewish community, the disgust with Netanyahu and the direction he has taken Israel has become palpable. Peter Beinart, who has been forced by Israel’s occupation and settlement policies to reevaluate his liberal Zionism, recently wrote in The New York Times in support of a Palestinian right of return as a first step in rewinding the historic injustices that Netanyahu has only aggravated.

      But, of course, Beinart is not the Israeli prime minister. Nor is he the US president or even the head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. His views, however commendable, lack any traction among the powerful in Washington and Jerusalem — for now, at least.

      Cycle of Violence

      Just before the current violence broke out, Netanyahu was facing the prospect of a broad coalition forming a new government and ousting him from his position. That coalition fell apart shortly after the conflict commenced. So, either Netanyahu will manage to woo a couple more politicians to join his camp or there will soon be yet another election. Either way, as in 2013, Netanyahu will likely solidify his hold on power thanks to his hard-line approach to Hamas.

      It’s hard not to conclude that the Israeli prime minister deliberately stoked tensions and escalated the conflict for his own political benefit. Bibi has been wagging the dog practically since he took office. After each cycle of divisive politics within Israel and fratricidal violence between Israel and Palestine, Netanyahu has emerged victorious. To break the cycle of violence that has engulfed the region in 2009, 2012, 2014 and now today, the Israeli opposition has to break Netanyahu politically once and for all.

      Given how right wing the political climate has become in Israel, defeating Netanyahu won’t immediately end settlements, lift the blockade on Gaza or usher in the right of return for Palestinians. Indeed, many Israelis are willing to support political forces even more right-wing and militant than Netanyahu. But the dozen years of Netanyahu’s reign have been a terrible era for Palestine, a second nakba, a death by a thousand cuts. Sending Bibi into retirement would create at least a chance of something new — perhaps something better.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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 World Politics

      What Explains the COVID-19 East-West Divide?

      by

      COVID-19 has been ruthless in choosing winners and losers around the world. The obvious “losers” have been those countries led by right-wing nationalists: Brazil, India, Russia, the United Kingdom and (until recently) the United States. These five countries are responsible for more than half of the world’s coronavirus infections and nearly half the deaths.

      Just as obviously, the “winners” have been the countries of Asia. Although China and South Korea were both hit hard early on in the pandemic, they have managed to recover quite dramatically. The rest of the region, meanwhile, has suffered nowhere near the same magnitude of adverse consequences that Europe or the Americas have experienced. Taiwan has had fewer than 1,000 infections and only seven deaths. Vietnam had had about 1,500 infections and 35 deaths. Thailand has had over 13,000 infections but only 75 deaths. Mongolia has had under 1,700 infections and only two deaths.

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      Even the less fortunate countries in the region have managed to control the pandemic better than the West has. Burma has suffered over 130,000 infections, but just over 3,000 deaths. Malaysia has had 185,000 infections but only 700 deaths, while Japan has had over 360,000 infections but just under 5,200 deaths. Singapore has actually had the largest per-capita number of infections in the region but has registered only 29 deaths. The two relative outliers are the Philippines, with over 500,000 infections and 10,000 deaths, and Indonesia, with nearly a million infections and over 28,000 deaths.

      High Marks

      It’s not as if these countries have avoided the various surges that have taken place globally as a result of holiday travel, the loosening of restrictions or the new variants of the disease. But even among the outliers, the renewed outbreaks have been several magnitudes smaller than what Europe or the Americas have faced.

      To give you a sense of how relatively successful even these outliers have been, imagine if the Trump administration had handled the pandemic as poorly as the worst-performing Asian nation. Rodrigo Duterte is in many ways the Donald Trump of Asia. But if the United States had managed to follow the Filipino example, the United States would now be facing 1.5 million cases of infection and only 30,000 deaths. Instead, America not long ago passed the 25-million mark in cases and the 400,000-deaths mark.

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      Now imagine if the Trump administration had dealt with the pandemic as successfully as Vietnam. The United States would have been hit by under 5,000 infections and a little over 100 deaths. Not fair, you say, because Vietnam is a communist country that can impose draconian restrictions without fear of backlash? Okay, if we use Taiwan as the yardstick for comparison, the United States would have 15,000 infections and a little over 100 deaths. Not fair, you say, because Taiwan is an island? Okay, if we use South Korea as the baseline, the United States would have had 450,000 infections and about 8,000 deaths.

      Any way you look at it, the United States did worse than every single country in Asia. If America had just managed to handle the crisis as effectively as the worst-performing Asian country, close to 400,000 more Americans would be alive today.

      It’s easy to blame Trump for this woeful discrepancy between America and Asia. After all, according to the first Global Health Security Index released in 2019, the United States came out on top in terms of its readiness to deal with a pandemic. US hospitals routinely receive high marks in global lists. A failure of governance would seem to be the key distinguishing factor, particularly in light of all the mistakes the Trump administration made from day one, errors that the president compounded through ignorance, incompetence and sheer foolishness.

      But many of the governments in Asia made similar mistakes. Duterte has been widely criticized for delays and missteps. South Korean leader Moon Jae-in faced calls for impeachment early in the crisis because of the government’s failure to prevent the first outbreaks. So, perhaps at least some of the fault lies elsewhere: not in our political stars, but in ourselves.

      East vs. West

      After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West indulged in more than a little triumphalism. Pundits fell over each other in their eagerness to declare that the individual had prevailed over the collective, capitalism had vanquished communism, and the West was the best (so forget about the rest).

      Many people in Asia, however, begged to differ.  Maybe you remember the debate in the 1990s around “Eastern” vs. “Western” values. Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, along with their house intellectuals, claimed that Asian countries had superior value systems than those of the West.

      Rather than unstable democracies, disruptive human rights movements and the overwhelming cult of the individual, the East valued harmony, order and the common good. These values, it argued, made possible the continuous economic success of the Asian Tigers — Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan — not to mention the earlier accomplishments of Japan, the leapfrogging rise of mainland China and the copycat efforts of the Tiger Cubs — Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. The proof was in the productivity.

      The counterarguments came quickly from such august figures as Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, and Amartya Sen of India. They pointed out that there’s nothing inherently Western about human rights and democracy. Both South Korea and Taiwan, after all, democratized without putting a dent in their economic growth. Human rights movements had mass appeal in Burma, the Philippines and elsewhere in the region. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which devastated countries in the region, it became increasingly difficult to argue that the East was immune from the same economic problems that plagued capitalism in the West.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As a result, the “Eastern values” camp gradually faded from view. Good riddance to bad theory. The dividing line between East and West was spurious in so many ways, reminiscent of older stereotypes of the East as “unchanging” or “inscrutable.”

      And yet, today, COVID-19 has drawn a clear line between Asia and the rest of the world. What’s particularly striking about this latest divergence is the lack of significance in types of governance. The countries that have been successful in Asia have very different forms of government, from communist (Vietnam) to democratic (Taiwan) to military dictatorship (Thailand). Moreover, they have different histories, religious backgrounds, and relationships with the countries of the West. The only thing they share, it would seem, is what realtors are always going on about: location, location, location. So, should we be resurrecting “Eastern values” to explain such a startling difference in outcomes during this pandemic era?

      Three Reasons

      The most important reason that Asia reacted to COVID-19 with greater seriousness and better results has to do not with ancient history but with more recent experience. In 2003, the region was blindsided by the SARS epidemic. The first cases emerged in southern China in late 2002. By March, the new coronavirus was showing up in Hong Kong and Vietnam as well. Eventually, it would appear in 29 countries and result in over 700 deaths. By July, after unprecedented international cooperation, the World Health Organization declared the epidemic contained.

      Think of SARS as a virus that stimulated Asia’s immunological system. That system went into hyperdrive to fight off the infection. Once Asia successfully beat off the new disease, a certain immunity remained. That immunity was not biological, in the sense that the populations of the region had any resistance to novel coronaviruses. Rather, the immunity consisted of a heightened awareness of the problem, a new set of institutions and practices developed to fight future attacks, and a historical memory among a certain generation of political leadership. The rest of the world, which avoided the brunt of SARS, didn’t develop that kind of immunity.

      A second advantage that Asian countries have enjoyed is a coordinated central government response. After its initial denial of COVID-19, Beijing soon switched into high gear to contain the spread of the disease by locking down Wuhan and other hot spots and severely restricting internal travel. South Korea moved rapidly to institute a nationwide test-and-trace system. Taiwan quickly made masks available, imposed an immediate quarantine system and monitored citizens digitally. Countries in the region with less tightly federated structures — Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia — weren’t able to react as quickly or as consistently. But even they were models of central authority compared to the kind of policy clash between the center and the periphery that so complicated the pandemic response in countries like Brazil and the United States.

      The third advantage, and this comes the closest to a revival of the “Eastern values” argument, is the issue of compliance. The American anti-mask mentality, for instance, has no real counterpart in Asia. Sure, plenty of people in the region have issues with their governments and with state regulations. A number of the countries in the region, like South Korea, are notoriously low-trust. But throughout the region, citizens have greater respect for scientific authority and greater respect for community standards. And those who for whatever reason choose to flout this authority and these standards are quickly shamed into compliance.

      As Lawrence Wright points out in his thorough piece on COVID-19 in The New Yorker, consistent mask use stands out as a determinant of success in containing the spread of the virus. “Hong Kong was one of the world’s densest cities, but there was no community spread of the virus there, because nearly everyone wore masks,” he writes. “Taiwan, which was manufacturing ten million masks per day for a population of twenty-three million, was almost untouched. Both places neighbored China, the epicenter.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Anti-vaccine sentiment is also quite low in Asia. According to a 2018 survey, 85% of people in Asia believe vaccines are safe — the highest of any region in the world. Although anti-vaxxers have managed to spread their messages in Asia, it’s notably been in the two countries with the worst records on COVID-19: the Philippines and Indonesia. Elsewhere, vaccination levels have remained high.

      It’s not just deference to science or fear of public shaming. Compliance may also derive from a stronger sense of the common good. It’s not as if harmony prevails over Asia like a benevolent weather front. Look at the political polarization in Thailand that has led to multiple mass demonstrations and military coups. Or the rapid alternation in power of different political parties in Taiwan and South Korea. But underneath the great divisions in these societies is a persistent belief in pulling together during a crisis rather than pulling apart.

      It is impossible to imagine a scenario in any Asian country like what transpired in the United States during the January 6 insurrection. Lawmakers evacuated from the congressional floor found themselves packed into a small, windowless lockdown room. If ever there were a time for bipartisanship, it was during this attack on American democracy. Yet some Republican legislators, although they quite obviously couldn’t maintain social distance in this crowded space, refused to wear the masks offered to them. They couldn’t even pretend to care about the health and safety of others, and several lawmakers indeed tested positive for COVID-19 after this experience. This is the American response to the pandemic writ small: astonishing selfishness and ideological rigidity.

      In Asia, it’s very possible that the successful efforts by governments to contain COVID-19 will lead to a virtuous circle of trust, if not in the governments, then at least in social institutions like medical authorities, as this recent study from South Korea suggests. The West, meanwhile, is descending into a vicious circle of mistrust that vaccinations, herd immunity that the exile of Trump to Florida will not be enough to forestall. Forget about so-called Eastern values for a moment. The West needs to look more carefully at its own values since they are clearly not fit for purpose at a time of crisis.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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 World Politics

      Is US Democracy Still Exportable?

      by

      On Inauguration Day 2021, the nation’s capital looked like it has just experienced a coup, not successfully survived one. Streets were blocked off, barricades were up, and armed police and National Guard were everywhere. The inauguration itself took place in front of a deliberately minimal crowd as if the authorities are somehow pulling off an inside job. These precautions were eminently sensible, given the threat of right-wing violence. And the last thing the new administration wants on its first day in office is to hold a very visible super-spreader event in the nation’s capital.

      A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

      READ MORE

      But it’s not a good look for American democracy when the peaceful handover of power has the appearance of a banana republic installing a tinpot dictator — or resembles the America of 1861, for that matter, when a huge security presence at Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration presaged the outbreak of civil war. The brain turns the images it receives from the eyes upside down so that we can ultimately perceive the world right side up. Our brains must now perform the task when looking at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

      Cracked Vessel

      Washington, DC, might look like a city besieged, but this day is in fact the culmination of a vigorous and successful defense of democracy. Voters have removed an autocrat from office by way of an election. The courts and state officials have prevented his attempt to perpetrate electoral fraud. Those who broke into the Capitol on January 6 are belatedly being subjected to the rule of law. And the dictator wannabe is slinking out of town with the smallest and least triumphant farewell parties imaginable. Not only did a coup not happen on January 6 to keep Trump in power, but a coup wasn’t necessary to remove Trump from power. Two cheers for democracy!

      The Biden administration has promised to repair the political damage that Trump has caused. The proposals on the domestic side, such as undoing some of the Republican Party’s voter suppression efforts, are no-brainers from a progressive standpoint. But the foreign policy recommendations around democracy promotion are not so contention-free. A promise to bring together a global Summit of Democracies, for instance, has met with considerable skepticism.

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      There is no question that American democracy has been tarnished, not only by the events of January 6 but by the entire four years of the Trump administration. As I wrote right after the 2020 election, “The democracy that Donald Trump dropped on the floor suffered a great deal from the experience. It’s going to take more than an election to put it right.”

      The events of January 6 have prompted many observers, in the United States and abroad, to declare an end to US pretensions to democracy promotion. As Emma Ashford writes in Foreign Policy: “How can anyone expect — as Joe Biden’s campaign promised — to ‘restore responsible American leadership on the world stage’ if Americans cannot even govern themselves at home? How can the United States spread democracy or act as an example for others if it barely has a functioning democracy at home? Washington’s foreign-policy elites remain committed to the preservation of a three-decade foreign policy aimed at reshaping the world in America’s image. They are far too blasé about what that image has become in 2020.”

      Of course, US democracy has always been a cracked vessel, from the limitations on the franchise that accompanied the country’s birth and the near-constant eruptions of mob violence to the deformations of executive power by practically every president. So, when Roger Cohen writes in The New York Times that the “images of the overrun Capitol will be there, for those who want to use them, to make the point that America would be best advised to avoid giving lessons in the exercise of freedom,” the natural retort would be: There have always been such images.

      From its inception, the United States has continually needed to put its own house in order. When it comes to democracy, America has always been a work in progress. Actually, over the last four years, it was a work in regress, but the point still holds. Democracy in America is not perfect. But does that mean that America’s recent slide away from democracy has disqualified it from engaging in democracy promotion?

      Exports and Brands

      Countries are always promoting something. The French want you to buy their wines. Russia hawks its oil and natural gas. South Korea lobbies on behalf of its boy bands, Saudi Arabia its Wahhabist version of Islam, India its Bollywood movies, Israel its security forces, and so on.

      Democracy might seem like just another export. And, indeed, some American promoters treat their work as if it were an extension of the US brand. They are promoting not democracy in general but American-style democracy. Consultants in Europe, for instance, have evangelized about increasing the role of private fundraising in elections, an American innovation that hitherto has not been so prominent on the continent. In other cases, the promotion of democracy has been just a cover for the projection of US power and influence, as in Iraq after the 2003 invasion or Ukraine after the Maidan revolution of 2014.

      In other words, “democracy promotion” either boils down to the promotion of the US version of democracy or the promotion of US interests, actual democracy be damned. Either way, the phrase and the program have acquired a poor reputation, particularly in their linkage to the political agenda of neoconservatives throughout the Reagan years and again under George W. Bush in the 2000s.

      As with the support of other exports like soybeans and soda pop, there’s a lot of money in democracy promotion. USAID, for instance, has a budget of a couple of billion dollars for “democracy, human rights, and governance,” which includes Elections and Political Processes, the Human Rights Grants Program, the Global Labor Program, the Disability Rights and Inclusive Development Program, and so on. Various foundations and civil society organizations also put a lot of money into the global promotion of democracy and human rights. All of this has been put at acute risk by what Trump and his followers have unleashed upon the United States, much as a sour batch of wine can send an entire wine industry down the drain.

      “Repairing the substantial damage to U.S. image in the world and regaining credibility on democracy issues will be tough and take a long time, even under the best scenario,” Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based study group, told the Los Angeles Times. “The problem is not so much Trump himself, but rather his enablers and those who have remained silent and been complicit in his patently antidemocratic rhetoric and behavior.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Progressives have long pressed the United States to support labor rights overseas. If another country is throwing labor leaders into jail merely for organizing strikes, the United States should protest. If corporations are employing slave labor or child workers, the United States should sanction them. If a country is abusing its migrant laborers, Washington should say something.

      And the United States should do that even though its own record on labor rights is inconsistent at best. Sometimes US failings are connected to a lack of enforcement of rules on the books. Sometimes the rules on the books are lousy. And sometimes, as was the case in particular during the Trump years, administrations have gone out of their way to depress wages, ignore or actively worsen miserable working conditions and otherwise engage in a veritable war on labor.

      But none of that means that progressives should urge the incoming Biden administration to keep quiet about labor rights abuses overseas until it compiles a perfect record at home. Foreign and domestic policy ideally should go hand in hand. In this way, the United States can demonstrate how to repair an imperfect labor record even as it urges other countries to do the same. The same applies to other elements of the progressive agenda: access to reproductive health care, LGBTQ rights, environmental regulations. The United States has an imperfect record on every issue on the progressive agenda.

      Promoting Progressive Values Overseas

      The way out of the apparent contradiction between what the United States says for export and what it does domestically is relatively simple. Don’t do as we say; do as the world says. Focus, in other words, on international standards. All countries, including the United States, should adhere to these standards on labor, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, environmental regulations and the like.

      So, does democracy fall into the same category as these other planks in the progressive platform? To the extent that democracy consists of protections for human rights and political rights such as freedom of speech and a free media, progressives can comfortably insist that all countries, including the United States, adhere to international standards. Let’s call this embrace of the component parts of democracy the “let a thousand trees bloom” approach, with each tree a different human right.

      The challenge comes with the “let’s plant a forest” approach. Democracy as a category can be tricky because of widely varying definitions of what the forest is exactly. Viktor Orbán insists that Hungary is a democracy, albeit an illiberal one, and so far the European Union reluctantly agrees. Brussels might grumble about certain Hungarian actions, but it hasn’t expelled the country from the EU. Plenty of Hungarian activists, however, argue that Orbán has undermined the country’s democratic institutions by compromising the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the media, to name just two violations. So, does Hungary qualify to participate in Biden’s planned Summit of Democracies?

      Although there might be an international consensus around certain aspects of democracy as enshrined in various UN human rights conventions, there is no such agreement over democracy as a whole. Plenty of non-democratic countries have signed UN human rights agreements, for instance, but they would never presume to be invited to a Summit of Democracies. It’s not so much that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Many progressives have reservations about the forest and prefer to focus on the trees.

      One of those reservations concerns regime change. Neoconservatives, in particular, used “democracy promotion” as a cover for pursuing the collapse of governments they didn’t like. In the case of North Korea, for instance, they viewed US pressure on Pyongyang as necessary to eliminate not simply the country’s nuclear weapons but its entire political system. Ditto Iraq, Iran, Libya, Venezuela and Cuba. Such a version of democracy promotion should be off the table. It is up to the people of a country to determine their own political future. And they should be protected in their efforts to do so by international pressure to ensure that the country abides by global human rights standards.

      Over the next four years, let’s by all means work to protect all of those fragile trees at home and abroad. But let’s also take some time to define what we mean by the forest, and let’s make sure to include Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, the Occupy struggles and all the other powerful examples of grassroots democracy. The trees, after all, are part of a larger ecosystem, and they can’t prosper if the overall environment deteriorates.

      Once we have defined what we mean by democracy, American progressives should absolutely support its promotion, even as we work to improve our own political ecosystem. After all, at some point in the future, we may need to call upon the international community to help us save our democracy as well.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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 World Politics

      America: Motherhood, Apple Pie and the Mob

      by

      The United States began as a glint in the eyes of an English mob of oddballs, dissenters and criminals let loose on what they considered virgin territory. Once secure in their new digs, they administered rough justice to the original Americans and any colonist who fell afoul of community rules. Eventually, casting aside their imperial British overlords, the rabble achieved a measure of respectability by creating an independent state.

      Recruiting an Army for a Civil War

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      Even as the United States fashioned an army, a constabulary and an evolving rule of law, the mob continued to define what it meant to be an American. It policed the slave economy. It helped push the borders westward. It formed the shock troops that rolled back Reconstruction. A 20th-century version of this mob rampaged during the long Red Summer of violence that stretched from 1917 to 1923. It mobilized against the civil rights movement. And during the Trump era, it has reared its ugly head in Charlottesville, Portland and, last week, on Capitol Hill. America is motherhood, apple pie … and the mob.

      Un-American

      Last week, many a politician decried the mob violence at the US Capitol as “un-American.” Consider, for instance, the words of Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader: “This is so un-American. I condemn any of this violence. I could not be sadder or more disappointed with the way our country looks right now. People are getting hurt. Anyone involved in this, if you’re hearing me, hear me loud and clear: This is not the American way.”

      McCarthy was not on the same podium with Donald Trump earlier in the day urging on the mob. But he and the president were on the same page between November 3 and January 6. Two days after the election, the California Republican announced that Trump had won. Later, he supported the outlandish Texas lawsuit to overturn the election results, refused to acknowledge Biden’s win well into 2021, and stood up in the House last week even after the mob retreated to challenge the Electoral College results.

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      After January 6, McCarthy has tried to put some distance between himself and the rabble. He has been willing to consider an official censure of the president and has also indicated that he won’t try to enforce party unity against an impeachment vote. No doubt McCarthy has shifted his stance because he feared for his own life when the insurrectionists stormed the barricades and invaded his sanctum. Trump, enjoying the images on TV, refused McCarthy’s plea to issue a statement calling off his attack dogs. It’s enough to make even the most loyal lapdog bark a different tune.

      None of this detracts from the fact that McCarthy, since the election, was the elected representative not of his California district but of the mob. He was their cheerleader, their mouthpiece on the Hill, one of the many suits over the ages who have translated the “will of the people” into official-sounding acts and bills that attempt to preserve the privileges of white people at the expense of everyone else. For that is the beating heart of Trumpism: the Confederate flag, the noose, the closed polling booth, the knee on the neck of non-white America.

      The word “mob” makes it sounds as though the violence was perpetrated by a group of mindless rowdies. But there has always been a method to the madness of this particular crowd. Let’s take a closer look at what the latest incarnation of the American mob wants, how it connects to like-minded groups overseas, and what to expect over the next weeks, months and years.

      Against the Globalists

      At first glance, the people who descended upon Washington to disrupt Congress on January 6 are almost obsessively focused on domestic issues. They’re not so much America First as Trump First. They have turned against anyone in the Republican Party who has abandoned the soon-to-be-ex-president, and that includes the vice president. They are nationalist and parochial. They are also anti-globalist, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t global in their strategizing, their connections and their aspirations.

      One of the core components of the Stop the Steal coalition is QAnon, an amorphous global network that believes that another amorphous global network — of Satanic child molesters — somehow controls the levers of international power. What started out as a conspiracy theory centered on Donald Trump as a St. George figure battling a devilish dragon went global in 2020, attracting adherents in 71 countries by August. One German QAnon group counts 120,000 members in its Telegram account.

      Another key member of the coalition is a bloc of white nationalists and militia members that encompasses accelerationists like the Boogaloo Bois, who want to spur a race war to bring down the liberal status quo, and organizations like the Proud Boys that emphasize male supremacy. These groups have forged global links over the last decade in Canada, Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

      Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, these chauvinists united around a “great replacement” narrative according to which immigrants and people of color are determined to “replace” white people through migration, higher birthrates or sheer pushiness. When the border closures around the pandemic reduced the salience of the immigration issue, the great replacement became a less useful organizing tool.

      Embed from Getty Images

      It was into this vacuum that QAnon became the conspiracy theory de jour. Meanwhile, the far right shifted its discourse on “globalists” to challenge their approach to COVID-19, their deference to the Chinese and their proposed “reset” of the global economy — anything to deflect attention from the obvious failures of the nationalist populists who headed up the countries with the highest number of infections and deaths: the United States, Brazil, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.

      Although they often disagree about particulars, this array of groups is united by an animus against government. They supported Trump not as the head of government but as someone opposed to government. And they adored him because he didn’t just hate the US government and the elites that staff it, but global governance as well. The “deep state” was always a canard. The far right despised the liberal state, full stop. Trump attracted an even wider following by squaring off against the expert class: the uppity journalists and fact-bound scientists and Hollywood liberals and hand-wringing academics. Burn it all down, Trump’s followers demanded.

      Inside-Outside Game

      Trump in government, however, represented a certain check on the most ambitious impulses of the far right. True, during his reign, extremists have come out into the streets to protest economic shutdowns, masking ordinances and Black Lives Matter mobilizations. Some extremists planned more violent interventions, like kidnapping the governor of Michigan. But with the administration on its side, with the Senate in Republican hands and with Republicans controlling the vast majority of state legislatures, the far right focused its wrath selectively. It played the ultimate inside-outside game.

      After the November election, with Trump on his way out of power, the far right no longer has to place any caveats on its anti-government impulses. First came an attack on Congress, not coincidentally on the very day that the Republicans lost their Senate majority. Next, the far right is planning an armed march on Washington and all 50 state capitols on January 17. To cap it off, a Million Militia March is planned for Inauguration Day.

      What happened on January 6 was, despite some prior planning, a disorganized coup attempt. What comes next may well be more precisely planned, which may result in a focus on the weakest links rather than the most potent symbols, just as the Oregon extremists chose the easily occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016 rather than the heavily guarded state capitol building.

      The storming of the US Capitol, meanwhile, has proven to be a great winnower. The fainthearted, like Kevin McCarthy, have proven to be chaff, as has a number of previously ardent Trump supporters. According to polling conducted after the attack, “a quarter of Trump voters agree that actions should be taken to immediately remove him from office. Further, 41% of Trump voters believe he has ‘betrayed the values and interests of the Republican Party.’” This is an extraordinarily rapid fissure in what had hitherto been an impregnable base of support for Trump.

      What remains is a revolutionary core. They won’t muster enough force to make a difference over the next two weeks, not against the 15,000 National Guards likely to be deployed to Washington, DC, for Joe Biden’s inauguration. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, the far right couldn’t handle the avalanche of criticism and could barely muster a couple of dozen extremists for a rally one year later in DC. But it has since altered its messaging and its strategy. Expect even more adaptation over the next months and years.

      What Comes Next

      The idea that the Civil War was a “war of Northern aggression” has survived 150 years of civic, political and media education to the contrary. A large section of white Southerners, and even a few folks outside the region, cling to their “lost cause” much as Serbian nationalists mourn their defeat on the plain of Kosovo in 1389, Hungarians rail against the loss of territory after the Trianon Treaty of 1920, and the Japanese and German far right has bridled at the “outside interference” that robbed their nations of a measure of sovereignty after World War II.

      Prepare for the “stolen election” narrative to serve a similar function for the Forever Trumpers. This narrative of an unfair political system ties together many of the far right’s themes: liberal institutions are fundamentally broken and corrupted, the mainstream media is compliant in tilting the playing field, and the globalists will do anything to regain power from “the people.” Note, too, how these messages can appeal to a left also angry at the status quo, and you can understand why so many people who voted for Bernie Sanders switched to Trump and why the European far right have harvested votes from previous bastions of the communist parties.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Such appeals to fairness — a stolen election is above all unfair — conceal the racist, sexist and otherwise exclusionary content of the far right’s agenda. An explicitly fascist platform has considerably less broad-based appeal than a cry to right a wrong. Over the next four years, the far right will beat this drum of political illegitimacy. It will claim that nothing the Biden administration does will be legal or constitutional because of its original sin of ascension via a stolen election.

      The fallout from January 6 will continue to divide the Republican Party. But the opportunity to brand the Democrats as illegitimate will prove just too addictive to be ignored. Consider the attacks on Obamacare or the successful effort to block Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Even in the face of overwhelming counterevidence, the Republicans hammered on the illegitimacy of the Democratic initiatives. A “stolen election” caucus, composed of the congressional members who survive a corporate and fundraiser boycott, will attempt to pull the Republican Party further to the right, just as the Tea Party did during the Obama era.

      The international ramifications of this strategy are equally worrisome. The far right attacks governments not only because they are liberal in the sense of providing government “handouts,” but because they follow liberal principles of governance — checks and balances, free press, rights to gather and express dissent. Trump’s attacks on January 6 were not just seditious. They were designed to transform his position and that of the GOP into something resembling the United Russia party and Vladimir Putin’s leadership for life. Trump has always wanted to build a Moscow or a Budapest or an Ankara or a Managua on the Potomac: iron-fisted leadership, no serious political opposition, a cowering press, a cult of personality. He thought he saw his opportunity on January 6.

      This is also the ultimate goal of the mob. It doesn’t want anarchy, except as an interim strategy. It wants a strong hand on the tiller, as if Trump were the Great Helmsman guiding the country in a Great Leap Forward (or backward, given that a mob’s sense of direction is never very precise). Trump’s hands, however, are being wrenched from the tiller. Even better, he is being abandoned by leading members of his party, his social media enablers, his financial backers and his corporate sponsors. His ambition having overleapt itself, Trump has stumbled, irrevocably. The mob is taking note, even as it falls back to protect its wounded leader.

      For the next four years, prepare for the mob and its political representatives to rely on street power to identify, campaign for and put into office their next Great White Hope. What’s more quintessentially American than that?

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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 World Politics

      Will America Survive the Republican Zombie Apocalypse?

      by

      The 2017 film “Bushwick“ begins like a lot of zombie flicks. An unsuspecting couple is walking through a subway station in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn. The station is eerily empty. They hear gunfire outside. The boyfriend goes out to investigate, and you know from the conventions of a zombie film that this is a very bad idea. No need for a spoiler alert: He dies.

      The girlfriend ventures out to find the residents of Bushwick fighting an invading horde. But it’s not a horde of zombies, even though they are committed to the same relentless violence. The invasion force turns out to be a right-wing paramilitary bent on securing the secession of Texas and most of the South from the United States.

      Welcome to Joe Biden’s Socialist States of America

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      Why are they in Brooklyn? That’s not entirely clear. The grunts, all dressed in identical black riot gear, are just following orders. They didn’t expect resistance, but the diverse community has banded together — African Americans, Orthodox Jews, bearded craft beer connoisseurs. So, like zombies, the militia members are killing every resident they encounter.

      Worst-Case Scenario

      Militia violence. Rejection of the federal government. Right-wing crazies promoting a civil war. Bushwick was made at a time when Hillary Clinton looked like she’d be the next president and right-wing resistance inevitable. Instead, the Electoral College tilted toward Donald Trump. As the new head of the federal government, Trump preempted the worst-case scenario. His more extreme followers wouldn’t weaponize their grievances as long as one of their own was “running” the country.

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      At the same time, Trump implicitly promised to maintain this tenuous status quo as long as he won reelection. In the first presidential debate, Trump told the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group, to “stand back and stand by.” The extremists waited, locked and loaded. A landslide — against Trump and against his Republican Party enablers — might have put this worst-case scenario to rest. Instead, with Trump refusing to concede the election and the Republican Party celebrating its congressional and state house victories, the country is now inching ever closer to the “Bushwick” plotline.

      Accelerationists like the Boogaloo Bois, who want to bring down the existing system through a violent race war, are chomping at the bit. A raging pandemic has separated Americans into the cautiously masked and the defiantly maskless, further undermining what remains of the country’s cohesion.

      As for zombies, they have rampaged across American popular culture at least since “Night of the Living Dead” hit movie theaters in 1968. They have now lurched off the page and out of the multiplex into real life. For how else would you describe the millions of Americans who deny the effects of a disease that has killed nearly 250,000 people and the results of a free and fair election that repudiated Donald Trump? Jeez, something must have eaten their brains.

      The Disease Spreads

      In 2016, the virtual equivalent of zombies — bots operating through social media and the comment sections of websites — intervened in the US presidential election. In 2020, those bots were less influential. But who needs virtual zombies when Americans themselves have become so willing to spread disinformation? The Russian intention back in 2016 wasn’t so much to get Trump elected. No one, including Donald Trump himself, thought there was much chance of that. Rather, the disinformation campaign sowed doubt about the political system more generally.

      What started out as marginal hobbyhorses became widespread delusions. Don’t trust the candidates, the media, the NGOs. A conspiracy lurks behind the façade of normalcy. The Democrats are actually pedophiles (the Pizzagate conspiracy), the financiers are actually Nazis (the Soros conspiracy), and government officials are part of a deep-state resistance to Trump’s agenda (the Fauci conspiracy, among others).

      And then there’s the one conspiracy that rules them all. The QAnon notion that all the world’s a Satanic child-trafficking ring — Pizzagate raised to the nth degree — is so absurd on the face of it, that no reasonable person could possibly entertain it. But plenty of people have embraced equally wacky theories. L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics” has been a bestseller for decades, and all too many Americans were willing to believe that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

      Of course, it’s a lot easier to deny the existence of something if it remains far away in time or space. Those who live far from the ocean can blithely refute the evidence of the rising waters. That’s not so easy when those waters have reclaimed your land and your house tumbles into the sea.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Misinformation about COVID-19 — that masks are not necessary, that vaccines should be avoided or that herd immunity is a viable strategy — has been lethal. That denialism should have disappeared as COVID-19 infection rates began to spread to every corner of the United States before the election. The increasing proximity of the threat should have motivated Americans to come together as one to fight the virus. At the very least, fear should have kept people at home instead of venturing out to the potential superspreader events that President Trump was sponsoring as campaign rallies before the election. But no. Thousands still showed up to what Democrats should have called Trump’s “death rallies.” Even more unbelievably, Trump went on to defeat Joe Biden in those parts of the country hardest hit by the virus. According to the Associated Press, “in 376 counties with the highest number of new cases per capita, the overwhelming majority — 93 percent of those counties — went for Trump, a rate above other less severely hit areas.” Even in hard-hit areas that ultimately voted for Biden, Trump often improved his showing from 2016, NPR reports.

      Well, zombies don’t know that they’re zombies. One day they’re ordering BLTs, and the next they’re eating their next-door neighbor. They’re completely unaware of how the abnormal has become normal.

      The “Stolen” Election

      A coup requires at least some public support. The Thai military could count on the “yellow shirts.” The Egyptian military relied on those fearful of the religious leanings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Pinochet courted the rich and the middle class. Where public support is lacking, coups often wither. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991. This week in Peru, the would-be president who forced the resignation of anti-corruption campaigner Martín Vizcarra stepped down after only a week in office, as protests continued to roil the country and the police killed two demonstrators.

      Trump has the backing of millions of Americans who have bought into his allegations of a “stolen” election. As importantly, only a minority of Republican Party grandees has bowed to the inevitable by acknowledging Biden’s victory. That includes a mere four Republican senators —Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney and Susan Collins. A number of Republican candidates in this month’s election, including those who were beaten by large margins, are also refusing to concede. Errol Webber, who lost his bid to unseat Karen Bass in a California congressional seat by an astounding 72%, now claims election fraud and won’t back down. He’s not alone in his delusions.

      The question is, how far will Trump and the Republican leadership go? It’s not likely that the Pentagon would support a coup, even after the removal of Mark Esper. The militia movement is armed and dangerous, but it’s not even close to being as organized as in the “Bushwick” scenario. The “Million MAGA March” fell short of its goal by 980,000 people or so. Trump just doesn’t have the numbers — not the votes to reverse the election results in a recount, not the judges to overturn the decision through a legal strategy, not the support in state legislatures to replace the Electoral College delegates and not the people on the street for a popular uprising.

      That doesn’t mean he can’t still do damage. Just this week, he announced that the administration would sell new leases to oil and gas companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. He fired the Homeland Security official who declared the election secure, then narrowly failed to install wacko Judy Shelton on the Federal Reserve board. And he came close to starting a war with Iran just to destroy any last chance of salvaging the Obama-era nuclear deal. His advisers reportedly persuaded him that it would be unwise to bomb the country’s nuclear facilities.

      Meanwhile, as I explain in a new article at TomDispatch, not only is Trump throwing sand in the wheels of transition, the Republicans are gearing up to block just about everything the Biden administration will try to do from January on. The Republicans have transformed themselves into a zombie party that relies on a narrow base of zombie support. The party effectively died as a viable political force — absent gerrymandering and voter suppression — before Trump brought it back from the dead. In films, zombification is a one-way street. Once you start twitching and slavering, there’s no going back. Let’s hope that the analogy doesn’t hold in American politics.

      De-Trumpification

      In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” Today, the speech seems rather boring, full of jargon and acrobatic attempts to separate Stalin’s crimes from the Soviet system. But at the time, it shocked the Communist Party zombies who’d hitherto been unaware (or pretended not to know) of Stalin’s crimes.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Most of those who were well acquainted with Stalin’s crimes were already dead from famine, war or murderous purges. That’s the thing about plagues: By the time you’re finally convinced of their lethality, you’re on your deathbed. For some, even death is not enough. Compare the Stalinists who proclaimed love for their leader as they were being executed with the COVID-19 patients who continued to deny the disease with their dying breaths.

      The party speech was the first major step in the de-Stalinization campaign that Khrushchev waged into the 1960s. The campaign produced some liberalization of Soviet society, but the Thaw came to an end in a Brezhnev backlash that lasted effectively until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 (and finally published Khrushchev’s 1956 speech for all to read). Unfortunately, the de-Stalinization that Khrushchev started in 1956 didn’t completely discredit the Soviet dictator. Indeed, according to recent polls, an astounding 70% of Russians approve of Stalin’s role in Soviet history.

      Trump’s personality cult exerts a similar effect. His adherents are incapable of seeing that the man’s evil extends far beyond his intemperate tweets. No speech by Joe Biden is going to make any difference. Not even denunciations by former Trumpers — Michael Cohen, John Bolton, John Kelly — have done much of anything. Trump’s support only grew from 2016 to 2020. So, what will it take to avoid the Stalin scenario?

      In an article about three historical parallels —  Reconstruction, de-Nazification and de-Baathification — I conclude that a mere speech won’t do the trick: “Because Trumpism is a cancer on the body politic, the treatment will require radical interventions, including the transformation of the Republican Party, a purge of Trumpists from government, and the indictment of the president and his top cronies as a criminal enterprise. To avoid a second Civil War, however, a second American Revolution would need to address the root causes of Trumpism, especially political corruption, deep-seated racism, and extreme economic inequality.”

      In this way, the leader can be properly stigmatized while the followers can be progressively de-zombified. One thing is for certain: If the Biden administration doesn’t take firm and decisive action against the illegalities of the Trump team, and if Biden doesn’t address the root causes of the zombification of half the electorate, the new president will be eaten alive.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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 World Politics

      All the President’s Surplus White Men

      by

      The problem of America today is the problem of white men. Who lies at the intersection of guns, right-wing fanaticism, pandemic and climate change denialism? Who ensures that racism continues to course through the lifeblood of the country? Who stands in the way of gender equality? Who supports foreign wars and the military-industrial complex? Who is getting hit hard by the erosion of the manufacturing base in the heartland? White men.

      White men are twice as likely as non-white men and white women to own guns. Although white women espouse racist right-wing views as much or even more than white men, it is the latter who overwhelmingly show up to vote, to gather with guns on the street, and to intimidate non-whites in person and on social media.

      Conservative white men have been at the forefront of climate denialism, according to a fascinating sociological study from 2011, and it’s not just Donald Trump who hates wearing masks during a pandemic but men more generally. A significant gender gap exists on the use of force, with women considerably less likely to support military intervention.

      Take the example of Brad Pascale, Trump’s former campaign manager. He was detained in Florida this week after allegedly hurting his wife, waving guns and talking about suicide. After his demotion to a digital consultant position on the campaign in July, he no doubt was worried about losing work altogether after the November election. There it is in a nutshell: white male violence, right-wing politics and anxiety over economic security. And residual white privilege. If Pascale were African American, an encounter with the police like that might not have ended peacefully.

      America’s Reputation May Bounce Back After Trump, But Will the Country?

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      Of course, I’m not talking about all white men. Plenty of white women have jumped on the alt-right bandwagon. And American conservatives can always point to a few people like Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson and Diamond and Silk to allege that their ideology is colorblind.

      But white men who are all revved up and with no place to go pose the greatest challenge to American democracy. They are the core of Donald Trump’s support. They are showing up on the streets in militia formations and with Proud Boy banners. The “manosphere” of online anti-feminism is the gateway for many right-wing activists who worry about being “replaced” by minorities and immigrants. And white men have been struggling with a long period of enormous economic dislocation that has turned them into a surplus labor force.

      Go West

      If Donald Trump loses in November, these white men will remain a problem. After all, unlike liberals who threaten to decamp to New Zealand if Biden loses, disgruntled Trump bros are not going to just up and leave the United States. Yet that’s precisely how countries have long dealt with the problem of surplus white men.

      In the bad old days, countries handled surplus men by sending them off to populate far-off lands. The political and religious misfits of the incipient British Empire sailed off to settle the land that hugged the eastern seaboard of North America. Later, the British exported its unruliest men to the prison colony of Botany Bay in Australia. The imperial nations of France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal similarly redirected male energy into meeting, enslaving and killing the locals of distant places. Those white men who didn’t have imperial realms to colonize —  Germans, Italians, Scandinavians, Irish — ended up founding America’s early immigrant communities.

      Men with little prospect of improvement have always been a potential source of trouble. They turn to drink, to crime, to revolution — and sometimes all three — if left to their own devices. The law of primogeniture, whereby the oldest son inherited all and left the other male heirs penniless, only compounded the problem by producing a seemingly endless supply of dispossessed men.

      For its first 100 years of existence, the United States had a convenient safety valve for such male restlessness: the Western frontier. In the Midwest, the Southwest and the Far West, the industrious built family farms, the greedy sought gold, and the opportunistic robbed banks. Along the way, they did what white men often did in those days: kicked the locals off the land and killed them when they refused to leave.

      When the frontier closed at the end of the 19th century, white men enlisted to expand a new American empire in the Spanish-American War and through expeditionary interventions in Latin America. World War I and the flu epidemic of 1918 “solved” the problem of the surplus with a ruthless cull of more than 100,000 men. Later, World War II removed four times that many from the equation. Since that time, America has continued to go to war. But the US government also made an effort to deal with its white male population by creating well-paying jobs in an expanding manufacturing sector and offering returning soldiers a leg up through programs like the GI bill

      This golden age of American economic growth, however, was primarily a golden age for the white American male. White women, if they broke with tradition to enter the workforce, earned considerably less than their male counterparts. And black Americans, especially prior to the successes of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, were relegated to second-class citizenship. In 1960, a mere 2% of women and black men worked in high-wage jobs like engineering and law. Virtually all doctors in the United States were white men. Racism and sexism permeated the immediate postwar government programs.

      Angry White Men

      In the 1960s, as a result of powerful social movements, women and minorities began to rise professionally. They continued to make gains in the ensuing decades, but the US economy as a whole hit a brick wall in the early 1970s. Real wages peaked in 1973. Imports began to appear more frequently on supermarket shelves and in car showrooms. Unions began to shed members in the 1970s and 1980s. And by the 1990s, the manufacturing jobs began to shift overseas — first with a massive expansion of the maquiladora program in Mexico after the passage of NAFTA and then to low-wage locations in Asia. Between 2000 and 2014, the United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs.

      These economic transformations left behind many male blue-collar workers. They could still get jobs, but those jobs didn’t pay as well as the manufacturing positions of the golden age. In response, this proletariat didn’t organize against the ruling capital class. Increasingly, these workers listened to sexist, racist and xenophobic slogans that blamed women, minorities and immigrants for taking away their jobs. The financial crisis of 2008-09 swelled the ranks of the new right with many angry white men from the middle class as well.

      This is not a purely American problem. Angry white men have been a fixture in European right-wing politics, in Australia, in Israel. Machismo has long played a role in Latin American politics and, despite the rise of feminism across the continent, continues to influence electoral outcomes from Colombia to Brazil. Even China, where men can get jobs but not necessarily wives, has to deal with a problem of surplus men, given the population’s preference for male babies. India, too, faces an excess of 37 million men.

      But the United States must address a particularly toxic version of this problem because of the country’s endemic racism, polarized politics and Rust Belt economics. Angry white men contributed to the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, the Gingrich backlash of the 1990s and the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. But it wasn’t until 2016 that they found a leader just like them. Enter Trump, stage right.

      The Problem of Surplus

      Donald Trump would seem an unlikely spokesperson for white workers left behind by the deindustrialization of the United States. With his business empire, Trump has invested overseas in more than 30 countries, outsourced the production of his own brand-named items to foreign companies and hired undocumented workers for his US facilities. As his recently leaked tax returns reveal, he has also been spectacularly unsuccessful with his ventures even as he has cheated the government out of what he owes in income tax.

      Trump knows that playing to Wall Street is not a winning political strategy. Rather, as I point out in a piece on TomDispatch this week, the president has put himself at the front of a white male mob, channeling the violent vigilantism that has erupted periodically throughout American history. In this way, Trump lucked out by appealing to just enough white voters in economically distressed states to eke out an Electoral College victory in 2016. One month before the 2020 election, the polls suggest that Trump may not be so lucky this time.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The white mob still supports him for all his efforts at closing borders, suppressing minority votes and celebrating the racist history of the United States. And he still supports the white mob, this week refusing to denounce white supremacy in the first presidential debate. But the president hasn’t delivered on the economy, and the pandemic has claimed too many victims to be easily swept under the rug.

      Whoever wins in November, the problem of surplus white men won’t go away. The Democrats, entranced by “third ways” and “post-industrial” economics, have ignored white male workers at their electoral peril. Joe Biden has courted this vote by appealing to his working-class roots in Scranton. But he’ll have to pay more than lip service if he gains the White House.

      The past option of sending surplus white men off to other lands is no longer on the table. In taking the problem of surplus white men seriously, it’s not necessary to jettison identity politics or pander to sexism and racism. Rather, the answer is to create well-paying jobs for all through Green New Deal policies. The bulk of these jobs — retrofitting buildings, creating new energy infrastructure, building a fleet of new electric cars — need to be open to those without a college education. As automation advances, new educational opportunities have to be made available as well or else technology will just add to the problem of surplus labor.

      Racism and sexism won’t magically disappear with a Green New Deal. Nor are jobs alone the answer. They need to be jobs that promise a future and a sense of belonging to something greater. The Trump campaign has provided its followers with this sense of belonging. So, for that matter, have the Proud Boys. Together they have turned surplus white males into an urgent political problem for this country.

      A personnel change in the White House will not solve this problem. But putting into place a dramatic new economic program that relies on working-class Americans to save this country? That puts white men shoulder to shoulder with workers from all backgrounds on behalf of a common purpose? And that links up with Green New Deals in other countries? That might do the trick of turning a surplus into an asset.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

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