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      The Sad Reality of US Dealmaking

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      The fallout from US President Joe Biden’s week in Europe has just begun. There was no dramatic moment that sums it up, though the media vaguely hoped the one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin might produce something akin to the jabs, uppercuts and right crosses of Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Drago in their opening round. But there was nothing to see. The fight wasn’t televised and Biden carefully avoided the risk of seeing both on stage in a joint press conference.

      Though no spectacular shift in US–Russia relations will likely appear in the months ahead as a result of the encounter, some aspects of Biden’s performance concerning the posture and attitude of the US on the world stage may prove pivotal. Biden’s actions and rhetoric in Europe have contributed in significant ways both to defining his presidential legacy and clarifying the shifting vocation of the US in a world that has become far more complex than the one previous presidents had to deal with.

      Biden’s Optimism vs. the Media’s Pessimism

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      Biden seems to realize it as he frequently refers to this moment of history as an “inflection point.” He’s right, though he seems to have seriously misjudged the nature of the tectonic shift the world is undergoing. Biden defines such inflection points as “moments in time when we’ve made hard decisions about who we are.” But the era in which presidential decisions in themselves constituted historical inflection points probably ended in March 2003, when the US, under George W. Bush, invaded Iraq. Forces were then unleashed that no longer await presidential decisions. Powerful undercurrents of history, the economy and of nature itself — all beyond any politician’s control — have been fueling the largely unmanageable force behind today’s inflection.

      Jonathan Lemire and Aamer Madhani are the authors of an AP article that focuses on Biden as America’s pitchman to the rest of the world. The title of the article is: “Biden Abroad: Pitching America to Welcoming If Wary Allies.” Reduced to its essence, Biden’s pitch consisted of reassuring his allies that he can be trusted simply because he is not Donald Trump, even though his policies have shown little indication of breaking with the former president’s innovations.

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      The world remembers Biden’s previous boss, Barack Obama, who before his election in 2008 claimed to represent a radical shift away from everything that Bush stood for. He even convinced the Nobel committee he was a prince of peace. Once in office, Obama prolonged most of Bush’s policies, including foreign wars, reinforcing the surveillance state and maintaining tax cuts for the wealthy, all of which imperiled the economy itself, leading to the 2008 financial crisis that he was tasked with solving.

      Lemire and Madhani note that whilst the allies in the G7 appeared relieved by the feeling that there was now “a steady hand at the wheel,” they were far from convinced that the US was permanently back on an even keel. They did end up agreeing to the general drift of Biden’s campaign to highlight the opposition between democracy (the West) and autocracy (China and Russia). 

      At the same time, the authors remarked that “Germany, Italy and the representatives for the European Union [were] reluctant to call out China, a valuable trading partner, too harshly.” More significantly, they noted that there was “a wariness in some European capitals that it was Biden, rather than Trump, who was the aberration to American foreign policy and that the United States could soon fall back into a transactional, largely inward-looking approach.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Transactional:

      An adjective that describes not only the willingness to make deals with others, but also the refusal to recognize the existence of anything other than calculation of individual interest in the conduct of one’s affairs and relationships even with permanent partners and allies.

      Contextual Note

      After his meeting with Putin, Biden declared: “This is not about trust. This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest.” He needed to reassure the American electorate that, unlike Trump, he had nothing but mistrust for Putin. But he may have been signaling what most Americans always want to hear: that nobody should be trusted, because all relationships begin — and most end — with the assertion of self-interest. America’s European allies have understood that, despite protestations of solid alliances, special relationships and undying friendship, Trump’s approach of reducing everything to a transactional deal was a true description of the reality of US policy under every recent president.

      The language used by the media demonstrates this reality with some clarity. The AP journalists already described Biden’s action as “pitching America.” In an article with the title, “Biden Struggles to Sell Democracy Abroad When It Faces Challenges at Home,” The Washington Post described Biden’s behavior in Europe to that of a street barker. “But then, like any good pitchman, Biden quickly regained his footing,” the Post reports. Diplomacy always involves self-interest and always contains an agenda, but when it consistently appears as a pitch, potential customers begin to doubt the sincerity. The authors of the AP article make it clear that, however persuasive the pitch, Biden has not yet closed any deal. They even seem to doubt one is likely.

      Historical Note

      Writing for Spectator World, historian Andrew Bacevich commented that Joe Biden’s premise concerning US leadership of democratically-inclined allies sounds like a desire to return to an imagined status quo that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, appeared to be heralding what George H.W. Bush called “a new world order.” But in this century, history has moved on in ways Biden and most American politicians appear either not to have noticed or persist in willingly ignoring. “The idea that a US-led bloc of Western nations will determine the future of the planet will become increasingly implausible,” Bacevich explains.

      The historian puts in perspective Biden’s insistence on managing an inflection point: “While repeatedly insisting that history had reached ‘an inflection point’, he simultaneously reiterated the claim made by every US president since Harry Truman (Trump excepted) that ‘the partnership between Europe and the United States’ will determine the fate of humankind.”

      The G7 is that partnership, which now includes Japan. But the fate of humankind will rely on the interplay of forces that no single nation or group of nations controls. If there were a way of getting humankind itself into the picture through, say, a global democratic revolution that respects the classic democratic dictum of one man, one vote, the combat to promote democracy over autocracy might make some sense. But that is on no one’s agenda. The degree of inequality between nations and within nations may now have reached a point of no return.

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      Trump’s presidency taught the Europeans about the dangers of getting on board with grand US-led projects. They are beyond risky. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), even more than the Paris climate accord, provides a perfect example. At a truly interesting historical moment marked by the election this weekend of a new president in Iran, the US actually has an opportunity to push toward a solution that would involve reconciling a number of competing interests stretching across a wide expanse of the globe.

      The New York Times believes that the election of Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s new president may be the perfect opportunity for Biden. Its reasoning makes sense. If Raisi makes the concessions necessary to remove US sanctions, Iranians will have the hope of returning to a prosperous economy. Still, the heritage of Donald Trump has seriously weakened US credibility. “The Iranians have demanded a written commitment that no future American government could scrap the deal as Mr. Trump did,” the Times reports. “They want something permanent — ‘a reasonable-sounding demand,’ in the words of one senior American official, ‘that no real democracy can make.’”

      What the official means is that a real democracy could make that “reasonable-sounding demand,” but not the US version of democracy. The Times explains: “Mr. Biden, like President Barack Obama before him, could never have gotten the consent of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. So it is termed an ‘executive agreement’ that any future president could reverse, just as Mr. Trump did.”

      Bacevich is right. The US, even with Europe, cannot “determine the future of the planet.” It can’t even define a line of policy that will hold for more than four years. The most powerful nation in the world is also the most powerless.

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

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

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      Democrats’ domestic agenda faces setbacks by Republican obstructionism

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      Joe Biden’s far-reaching domestic agenda in the US is facing serious setbacks on a range of issues as the political quagmire of a tightly contested Senate is seeing Democratic ambitions sharply curtailed in the face of Republican obstruction.On a number of key fronts such as pushing election reform and voting rights, efforts to curb gun control and to moving forwards on LGBTQ civil rights, there has been an effective push back by Republicans – and a handful of conservative Democrats – that is forcing Biden and the wider Democratic party on to the back foot.The Senate, whom critics deride as an increasingly unrepresentative body that gives undue influence to smaller, less diverse Republican-run states, is scheduled to vote Tuesday on For the People Act, the voting rights bill that’s certain to be defeated having won no support from Republicans.Republicans are expected to run down the clock – a controversial tactical rule known as a filibuster – on the package that requires lawmakers to reach a 60-vote threshold.On Sunday, Ohio Republican senator Rob Portman shot down amendments proposed by West Virginia’s conservative Democrat Joe Manchin, whose rejection of the initial bill all-but scuttled the Democrats’ project. Portman described the planned legislation as a “federal takeover of our election system”.“The bottom line is we should make it easy to vote in this country. We should also make it hard to cheat,” Portman said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Again, I appreciate [Manchin is] trying to find that middle ground, and, who knows, maybe something can be done.”By forcing Republicans to carry out their filibuster and making their opposition clear and public to a law seen as defending the voting rights of communities of color. Democrats hope to embarrass the party. But – without destroying the filibuster, which Manchin also opposes – there is little chance of the bill passing.Senate Democrats will also test calls for unity on LGBTQ civil rights, and another bill – The Equality Act – that is in search of Republican support. Schumer said last month the upper house is “considering” a vote on the bill but has yet to schedule it. Again, Manchin is the lone Democrat hold-out.The proposed legislation would include sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected classes of the 1964 Civil Rights Act alongside bans on discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin.Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin, one of two openly gay senators in the 100-member chamber, has said that she is lobbying Republican colleagues but has achieved only “incremental progress”.Baldwin has said she believes the Senate should “hold off” on a vote while “negotiations are productive” and progress is being made. The Senate is split 50-50 and only in Democratic control thanks to the tie-breaking vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris.“There may be a time where there’s an impasse. I’m still trying to find 10 Republicans [to help pass the bill],” said Baldwin.Republicans resistance to the legislation is focused on protecting the rights of religious institutions that condemn homosexuality and opposition transgender rights in sports. Yet it comes against a backdrop of broad public, business and judicial support on the issue.Manchin, an anti-abortion Democrat , has said he is “not convinced that the Equality Act as written provides sufficient guidance to the local officials who will be responsible for implementing it”. But he has also said he’ll seek to “build broad bipartisan support and find a viable path forward for these critical protections”.Nor are Democrats currently likely to find broader opportunities for political unity on infrastructure spending where large-scale Democratic proposals are running into Republican counter-offers of a fraction of the size.Former Republican presidential adviser Karl Rove told This Week with George Stephanopoulos President Biden faces two paths on infrastructure and both are riddled with obstacles. “[It will be] a bipartisan deal small enough to get Republican support, but not big enough to keep Democrats united, or a go-it-alone and go-for-broke plan that progressives want, with a price tag as high as $6tn that’s likely too big to pass,” Rove said.Similarly, pending gun control legislation may also be resistant to winning enough support to pass.As it stands, two House-passed bills to expand background checks on gun buyers have all but stalled out in the Senate. But rather than push legislation that Republicans will reject, Democrats may instead push for a vote on increasing the number of online and gun show sales covered by FBI background checks – a significant retreat on the original proposals.Senator Chris Murphy, the Democrats’ point person to win Republican support for gun control, said he’s still talking with Republican leaders about “some ideas that would involve the expansion of background checks without getting all the way to universal”.Asked if a bill on gun show checks would be favored by Republicans, two senators involved in discussions, Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, offered a cool take on that likelihood.“We’ll see if it goes anywhere,” Graham told Politico.Toomey, who is set to retire next year, said: “Honestly, it’s unclear at this point.” More

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      ‘Two Americas’ may emerge as Delta variant spreads and vaccination rates drop

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      With Covid vaccination penetration in the US likely to fall short of Joe Biden’s 70% by Fourth of July target, pandemic analysts are warning that vaccine incentives are losing traction and that “two Americas” may emerge as the aggressive Delta variant becomes the dominant US strain.Efforts to boost vaccination rates have come through a variety of incentives, from free hamburgers to free beer, college scholarships and even million-dollar lottery prizes. But of the efforts to entice people to get their shots have lost their initial impact, or failed to land effectively at all.“It’s just not working,” Irwin Redlener at the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, told Politico. “People aren’t buying it. The incentives don’t seem to be working – whether it’s a doughnut, a car or a million dollars.”In Ohio, a program offering five adults the chance to win $1m boosted vaccination rates 40% for over a week. A month later, the rate had dropped to below what it had been before the incentive was introduced, Politico found.Oregon followed Ohio’s cash-prize lead but saw a less dramatic uptick. Preliminary data from a similar lottery in North Carolina, launched last week, suggests the incentive is also not boosting vaccination rates there.Public officials are sounding alarms that the window between improving vaccination penetration and the threat from the more severe Delta variant, which accounts for around 10% of US cases, is beginning to close. The Delta variant appears to be much more contagious than the original strain of Covid-19 and has wreaked havoc in countries like India and the United Kingdom.“I certainly don’t see things getting any better if we don’t increase our vaccination rate,” Scott Allen of the county health unit in Webster, Missouri, told Politico. The state has seen daily infections and hospitalizations to nearly double over the last two weeks.Overall, new US Covid cases have plateaued to a daily average of around 15,000 for after falling off as the nation’s vaccination program ramped up. But the number of first dose vaccinations has dropped to 360,000 from 2m in mid-April. A quarter of those are newly eligible 12- to 15-year-olds.Separately, pandemic researchers are warning that a picture of “two Americas” is emerging – the vaccinated and unvaccinated – that in many ways might reflect red state and blue state political divides.Only 52% of Republicans said they were partially or fully vaccinated, and 29% said they have no intention of getting a vaccine, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. 77% of Democrats said they were already vaccinated, with just 5% responding that were resisting the vaccine.“I call it two Covid nations,” Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told BuzzFeed News.Bette Korber, a computational biologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said she expected variant Delta to become the most common variant in the US within weeks. “It’s really moving quickly,” Korber told Buzzfeed.On Friday, President Biden issued a plea to Americans who have not yet received a vaccine to do so as soon as possible.“Even while we’re making incredible progress, it remains a serious and deadly threat,” Biden said in remarks from the White House, saying that the Delta variant leaves unvaccinated people “even more vulnerable than they were a month ago”.“We’re heading into, God willing, the summer of joy, the summer of freedom,” Biden said. “On July 4, we are going to celebrate our independence from the virus as we celebrate our independence of our nation. We want everyone to be able to do that.” More

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      ‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisis

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      When the pandemic struck, George Packer moved his family out of the city and upstate into the countryside.The move forced one America’s most celebrated and decorated non-fiction writers, famous for his reporting, to sit still for once – and to contemplate what was happening to his country.The result is an extended essay, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, a meditation on the crippling division of the nation into irreconcilable political tribes, on to which Packer has added some reflections on the way out of the mire.“I felt immobilised as a reporter,” Packer said. “It seemed like an essay was the thing to do – just put down a bunch of thoughts that get stirred up when you’re sitting in one place for a long time, looking hard at yourself and your country. So it was a Covid book for sure, making the best of a bad situation.”In some ways it is a long epilogue to a previous work, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, for which Packer won the National Book Award in 2013. That was a deeply reported account of the shredding of the social fabric. Last Best Hope is a stock-taking two presidential terms later, after the rise and fall of Donald Trump, who the author sees as the inevitable symptom of the national unraveling.Instead of getting in his car and driving across the country, Packer ordered a small pile of essays which did what he was trying to achieve, a diagnosis of a nation in crisis. One was a pamphlet by Walt Whitman called Democratic Vistas, “a passionate, wonderful book”; another was Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, by the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1914.Packer also looked abroad, rereading George Orwell’s essay on wartime Britain, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, as well as Strange Defeat, a contemplation by French historian Marc Bloch of the chronic failings that gifted Hitler his easy conquest in 1940, published after its author was executed by the Nazis. Packer sees a parallel between France’s shock at being routed with the humbling of America in the face of Covid-19.Sitting alongside these shorter works in Packer’s rural retreat was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, an observation of the country and what made it different written by a French observer just over a half-century after its founding. Packer describes it as “a masterpiece of sociology and observation and political analysis”.He finished writing Last Best Hope at a point when the democracy de Tocqueville had described had barely survived a direct onslaught, the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol aimed at reversing the election result.“I think we dodged more than a bullet – a mortar round,” Packer said, noting that if Republican election officials in Georgia and Republican-appointed judges around the country had done the bidding of their president and party, and overturned the election, the battle would have spilled bloodily into the streets. And if Trump had not been so staggeringly inept in his handling of the pandemic, Packer believes he would have won easily.The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient“I’ve seen the foreshadowing of something I never expected to see, never imagined, which is the end of our democracy,” he said. “I lived through a lot of bad political periods, but that never seemed to be on the horizon.”On closer examination, American democracy might not have dodged the bullet, or the mortar round, after all. It may have been badly wounded.Packer says he sees the courts, and state election machinery, and all the institutions that just about held the line in 2020, as “a patient getting out of bed after a really long illness and having just the strength to walk across the room”. The analogy raises the question of whether the patient will have the will and the vitality to do the same in 2022 or 2024.“The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient at the moment,” Packer said. “They’re sneaking into the room and injecting toxins in the form of voter suppression laws and conspiracy theories and lies. So yeah, it’s a real question whether a democracy can survive if nearly half the country has embraced an anti-democratic worldview. That’s kind of the question we’re facing right now.”Real America, Just America … and moreOne of the side effects of Packer’s Covid-led move out of the city was that it brought him into proximity with people who saw the nation through a very different prism. He describes the night when he first sees Trump lawn signs in the yard of polite and friendly neighbours.“Five white letters stretched across a sign,” he writes. “The blaring shade of that red instantly told me what the five letters said.”His visceral reaction to Trumpists led to some introspection about the roots of those emotions and what they implied on a national scale.“My attitude had something to do with my good luck,” he writes. “My life savings were doing pretty well. I was comfortable and was afraid, and this fearful security shut down my imaginative sympathy. No wonder they resented me as much as I despised them.”One of the central propositions in Last Best Hope is that the American political firmament has shattered into four rival narratives, crossing across the old red-blue divide. There is the Free America of small-government conservatives, who put the liberty of the individual above all; the Smart America of a smug, comfortable intellectual elite; the Real America of white Christian nationalism, the driving force behind populism; and there is Just America, built increasingly around identity politics and critical theory.His disdain for the latter, which he sees as both elitist and a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, is the main point of contention over his book on the left.“Just America embraces an ideology of rigid identity groups that keeps the professional class in its superior place, divides workers, and has little to do with the reality of an increasingly multiracial, intermarrying society,” Packer writes.His description of Black Lives Matter protesters in New York in the summer of 2020 as “disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year” has raised hackles, to say the least.Critics accuse Packer of underestimating the fury of Black Americans at having to live in constant fear of lethal police brutality, and their agency in driving the BLM movement and the Biden campaign, helping it succeed where Hillary Clinton failed. Packer argues that presents a distorted view of the underpinnings of Biden’s victory.“I take issue with the notion that – let’s call it – the ‘identity left’ carried Biden over the line,” he said. “I think a coalition of groups carried Biden over the line, including suburbanites, including Never-Trump Republicans, including working class, black and Latino voters who voted for Biden in the primaries, who got him the nomination, when they could have gone for someone more closely identified with the left.”Biden really does have a feel for workers and for labourHe sees Biden as occupying space outside his Four Americas grid, a throwback to an age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and of powerful, respected labour unions. Packer approves.“He really does have a feel for workers and for labour. And I think he understands that you don’t advance the cause of equality by speaking to Americans as if they are members of monolithic identity groups that are somehow in perpetual conflict with each other.”To the extent that Packer has a remedy for America’s ills it lies in the reaffirmation of that trait De Tocqueville identified in the 1830s: a commitment to equality. And that, he argues, can only be achieved by the unification of the working class.It all sounds a bit un-American. For decades, the overwhelming majority of the population identified as middle class, the class to which almost every aspiring politician still appeals. But that aspirational self-image has been ground down over decades by the rapacity of the global economy and the elites who are its beneficiaries.“They don’t have the dignity that society once conferred on them,” Packer said. “They’re just struggling, drowning, paid abysmal wages, with no union to represent them. And now they’ve disappeared altogether because we have one-click shopping. So the working class is something we never have to think about because we don’t see them.”The pandemic, however, brought the working class back into the spotlight, albeit temporarily. The “knowledge workers” and the opinion-forming elites stranded at home were suddenly reliant on the essential workers who kept virtually the whole economy going with services and deliveries.Just maybe, Packer says, this moment of renewed appreciation can be leveraged under Biden into a real improvement in living standards of this virtually invisible majority, from all four Americas.‘Pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas’Some of the prescriptions in the tail end of the book, for restoring equality and the “art of self-government”, come across as somewhat fanciful, like calling on Americans to turn off Twitter and Facebook and do a year of national service, so followers of the four narratives have to spend some time in each other’s company.“The last pages are full of pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas,” Packer admitted, bluntly. “I’m not a political operative so I don’t think it’s my job to figure out how to get it passed through Congress. But I did feel the need to lay down a direction – here’s the way we need to go.”The key word in the book’s title is “hope” and it recalls a much earlier book on the American condition by the bard of the working classes, Stud Terkel. Terkel’s book was Hope Dies Last. For Packer, it is a necessity as much as a conviction.“For one thing I have kids, and it’s just almost psychologically impossible not to hold out hope,” he said.He believes Biden’s administration has a window in which it can address some national divisions indirectly, by demonstrating the power of government to change people’s lives for the better.“It won’t happen with a speech or with an open hand or with a plea, because the divisions are so deep and corrosive. It almost has to happen unconsciously,” Packer concluded. “I think we’re actually be getting to go in that direction, very slowly, with a lot of dangerous obstacles ahead.” More

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      'That's a private matter': Biden on rebuke from Catholic bishops – video

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      On Friday, Biden was asked for his response to the US Conference of Bishops taking steps toward rebuking Catholic politicians who receive communion and support abortion rights. ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen,’ the president said of the suggestion politicians may be blocked from receiving communion.
      ‘That’s a private matter,’ he said before leaving the briefing. The president took a couple questions from reporters after concluding his prepared remarks on his administration’s coronavirus vaccination efforts

      Covid ‘remains a serious and deadly threat’ for unvaccinated people, Biden says – live More

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      Biden’s Optimism vs. the Media’s Pessimism

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      Media commentators initially gave good ratings to US President Joe Biden after his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They expressed a sense of relief, in large part due to the contrast in tone with Donald Trump’s performance in similar situations, guaranteed to produce a sense of unexpected drama. Biden confirmed his image of a seasoned diplomat capable of engaging in civil dialogue, setting the stage for eventual problem-solving.

      But the event left US media with mixed emotions. Calm problem-solving may be good in the abstract, but isn’t Russia the evil empire? Isn’t a president’s mission the humiliation of the enemy? The New York Times, for example, has recently been praising Biden as a transformative president. But the Gray Lady has also been locked in a pattern of blaming Russia for every bit of unwelcome news affecting the US, from cybercrime and UFOs to directed energy attacks and more.

      Biden’s Binary Battle Against Putin

      READ MORE

      Prior to the summit, the Times and other outlets prepared their public to expect Biden to charge Putin with a litany of accusations he could not deny. Though no serious journalist expected the script of the meeting to result in a first-round knockout, followed by Putin’s emotional confession of all the crimes he has shamelessly committed against American democracy, they clearly were interested in counting the punches Biden might land to make the Russian leader wince.

      That clearly didn’t happen. Less obsessed by the Russian bugbear, Axios coolly analyzed what it called “Biden’s two-step negotiating process,“ highlighting the fact that his “approach with Putin followed his approach to Congress: try to take the most optimistic path, give it some time and be prepared to march ahead with consequences.”

      CNN and The New York Times showed the kind of impatience outlets obsessed with prosecuting Russia for its endless crimes feel obliged to display. Kaitlin Collins, a reporter at CNN, accused Biden to his face of being “confident” Putin would “change his behavior,” clearly unnerving the president. Michael D. Shea, the White House correspondent at the Times, made a point of expressing that impatience when he wrote: “Mr. Biden’s response to his Russian adversary underscored a persistent feature of his presidency: a stubborn optimism that critics say borders on worrisome naïveté and that allies insist is an essential ingredient to making progress.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Stubborn optimism:

      The only kind of optimism pessimists recognize

      Contextual Note

      Some attribute to P.T. Barnum the phrase, “Never give a sucker an even break.” Barnum did say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The idea that they never deserve an even break has become the equivalent of a wise saying for many Americans in the world of business.

      The US owes its position as the world’s dominant economy to its ruthlessly competitive business culture. But this harsh reality sits alongside a deep-seated belief in popular democracy and the rosy fantasy of the power of the people. This contrast has spawned an interesting divide within society itself. The capitalists — the makers and doers — in the business world tend to be pessimists. Believers in democracy are optimists. Successful capitalists with a true competitive spirit see most other people — competitors and customers alike — as suckers who deserve to be taken advantage of. This pessimistic disdain for other people is sometimes highlighted as the virtue of assertiveness.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In contrast, the conviction that democracy is the true model of social relations correlates with optimism and trust. For many, this sums up the distinction between the culture associated with Republicans and Democrats. Individualistic Republicans celebrate the assertive winners, whose winning takes place at the expense of the losers, the suckers. Democrats pity the losers, believing they should be encouraged to succeed. Success is most satisfying when it is shared.

      Biden will always play the role of optimist. But that doesn’t imply that he always thinks like an optimist. To be successful during a long career usually requires applying the lessons of pessimism. The “liberal media” in the US — which includes The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN and others — must pay lip service to optimism. But to achieve the success they have achieved, they must also be ready to criticize the optimists and even accuse them of naivety. And when it comes to Russia, everyone has been taught to be a pessimist.

      Explaining his diplomatic approach, Biden seems to be saying: I start as an optimist and then shift to pessimism when things start to become serious. It is a well-worn strategy in the American tradition. The problem for media like the Times or CNN is that they have designated Russia as the arch-villain in the story. True heroes must never be indulgent with the dragons they are on a mission to kill.

      Historical Note

      During Joe Biden’s jaunt to Europe, the media focused on deciphering his attitude not only toward the enemy, Vladimir Putin, but also to his allies at the G7 summit. None showed an interest in the clues Biden provided of his thinking about the rest of the world. At his June 13 press conference in Cornwall, Biden’s improvised remarks tell a subtle but sad story about his vision of the world. It is fundamentally that of the leader of an increasingly rudderless empire posing as an enlightened democracy.

      Biden began by defining the role of the US and the G7 in these most condescending terms: “Everyone at the table understood and understands both the seriousness and the challenges that we’re up against, and the responsibility of our proud democracies to step up and deliver for the rest of the world.” Perhaps Biden thinks of himself as the equivalent of Jeff Bezos, whose mission is to deliver goods to the rest of the world at a profit.

      The president follows that with this syntactically broken train of thought: “The fact is that we — the U.S. contribution is the foundation — the foundation to work out how we’re going to deal with the 100 nations that are poor and having trouble finding vaccines and having trouble dealing with reviving their economies if they were, in the first place, in good shape.” On one side, there is “the foundation,” the US. On the other, there are 100 helpless, nameless struggling nations. This is Biden’s polite version of Donald Trump’s standard motif: We are the winner and everyone else is a loser.

      He then embarrassingly explains the importance of what he repeatedly calls the “COVID project,” having apparently confused the disease with COVAX, the international program to distribute vaccines to low and middle-income countries. In its transcript, the White House discreetly added COVAX after each mention of “COVID.”

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      Perhaps the most rational and realistic — but at the same time troubling — thing Biden had to say in his speech was what sounds like his promise that “there will be future pandemics.” In other words, he looks forward to new occasions where the US will “step up and deliver for the rest of the world.” He even repeats the promise a few lines later: “And there will be others.”

      After applauding his own effort to impose a 15% tax on corporate profits — which may even lead to more inequality among nations — Biden lauds his Build Back Better World Partnership (B3W) designed to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. To anyone familiar with the history of US marketing, it sounds a lot like Pepsi seeking to dethrone Coca-Cola. At least Biden has his acronym and maybe will soon have a logo.

      In the most embarrassingly stupid moment, which should make professional marketers cringe, Biden describes the B3W strategy: “By harassing the full potential of those who are harassing, we’re going to have to try and change things.” Apart from the difficulty of harassing someone else’s “full potential,” we are left wondering how he could think he is doing a service to needy countries by proposing a policy of harassment. It may be better than a military invasion and decades of drone warfare, but if that’s the best the US has to offer the developing world, it might be better just to stay at home and focus on America’s own infrastructure needs.

      From that point on, his speech, Biden’s syntax and train of thought become even more incoherent, but there is too much to highlight in this short article. More to come next week.

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

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

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden’s foreign foray is all about shoring up democracy – in the US | Henry Farrell

      by

      During his first trip abroad as US president last week, Joe Biden kept telling Europe that “the US is back”. Before the G7 meeting, Biden signed a new Atlantic charter with Boris Johnson that agreed to protect democracy and open societies. After Cornwall, he went on to more meetings in Brussels with the European Union, as well as a Nato summit and a head to head with Vladimir Putin in Geneva. Past presidents have viewed the EU as an irrelevant bureaucracy or a sinister threat. Biden described it as an “incredibly strong and vibrant entity”. In his press conference with Emmanuel Macron, Biden seemed to promise that the US was returning to its normal role in international politics. After Donald Trump, some nostalgic politicians might even hope for a reinvigoration of the so-called rules-based liberal order which has purportedly prevailed since the second world war.Anyone with such hopes is bound to be disappointed. Despite his rhetoric, Biden isn’t really interested in a return to the status quo, or in reuniting the old band of transatlanticists to tour their greatest hits. The old transatlantic relationship reflected America’s needs after the 1939-45 war. The US didn’t create Nato or shovel money at shattered European economies out of disinterested generosity, but because it wanted to strengthen allies to better face shared threats.Now, the US’s needs have changed, and so will its actions. Biden genuinely and openly fears that American democracy is in danger. Threats come from outside, because China offers an attractive alternative model, with authoritarianism able to provide reasonable prosperity to its population. But more perniciously, American democracy is under threat from inside. Trump did not accept his election defeat in November and egged on his supporters to attack the US Capitol on 6 January to overturn the result. At the same time, Republicans are using their control of state legislatures to bring through a plethora of laws aimed at making it harder to vote and so cement their own rule.Biden is rather less keen to discuss the fact that he is relatively powerless to address those internal threats. Thin Democratic majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives, combined with united Republican opposition and the presence of the Senate filibuster, make it nearly impossible to get any legislation passed.On external matters though, one of the few major areas of bipartisan agreement is distrust of China. This is why the administration and its allies have been able to pass legislation aimed at boosting American research projects, which they can justify as helping the US to compete with China. This shared outlook allows Biden more elbow room for a robust approach to China – and besides, it is much easier for him to act abroad unilaterally than to work on domestic matters through Congress. US presidents have very wide leeway to make foreign policy so long as they don’t try to sign binding treaties.The result is an approach that combines competition with China, efforts to protect global democracy and measures ultimately intended to shore up some of the gaping vulnerabilities in US domestic politics. Other presidents wanted to spread democracy around the world, whether through free-trade liberalism or through force. The new administration wants to bring democracy back home.This focus will remake the transatlantic relationship. The guiding mantra of his international team is that they are making “foreign policy for the middle class”. This phrase isn’t nearly as bland as it seems. It implies that the traditional approach to American foreign policy of years past – pressing for free-trade agreements to spread international liberalism – actually hurt ordinary Americans and made them more likely to vote for Trump, with all the dangers for democracy that entailed.The Biden administration is likely to be far less interested in free-trade agreements than its pre-Trump predecessors, especially when they are costly for American industry. It’s notable that the new Atlantic charter with Britain doesn’t have any reference to the World Trade Organization, and that it talks about “open and fair trade” rather than simply “open trade”. Meanwhile, the president wants to use economic measures such as rebuilding supply chains to minimise dependence on autocracies and prevent China’s access to key technologies. But those efforts are likely to sit awkwardly with WTO rules.Despite Biden’s outward friendliness this poses a big challenge to the EU, which has in some ways been more committed to rules-based multilateral trade than the US. It may also present difficulties for Johnson’s post-Brexit Britain. A world of existing, stable multilateral rules is much more comfortable for a mid-sized power than a new free-for-all. Economies such as Germany, which have depended heavily on the Chinese market, are also going to face some difficult choices.Biden’s new enthusiasm for more strict global tax rules also provides some problems for international partners. Again, the reasons are largely domestic: the policy echoes Bernie Sanders’ argument, leading from the left of the Democratic party, that tax havens and easy, anonymous money-flows damage democracy by enabling corruption and kleptocracy. That then becomes awkward for the UK, which has long turned a blind eye to inflows of dirty money and whose overseas territories are among the world’s leading tax havens. It’s also a problem for EU tax havens such as the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands, and for islands like Cyprus and Malta with banking systems that cater for Russian and Eurasian oligarchs.While Biden proclaims that America is back on the world stage, truly he is looking homewards, preoccupied with a broken domestic political system and how to fix it. By tackling those vexed international issues of China, trade and tax, Biden hopes in turn to help US democracy to find its way again. If they really want to remake the transatlantic relationship, the UK and Europe are going to have to work together with an administration with a very different understanding of American interests than its predecessors. More