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    The Guardian view on the Tory right and Trump: a moral abyss and an electoral dead end | Editorial

    The Tory party is carrying out a postmortem on Rishi Sunak’s leadership before it has expired. It is a gruesome spectacle. Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister, has called on the prime minister to resign on the grounds that he is navigating the Conservatives towards electoral calamity and incapable of steering them to safety.MPs who might privately agree with Mr Clarke’s analysis have denounced the intervention as counterproductive. The majority of Conservatives recognise that defeat looms under their current leader and also that it would loom larger still if he were defenestrated. The succession would be chaotic; the government’s threadbare mandate would be void. Fourteen years in office would make any administration feel stale. The lack of tangible achievements, coupled with economic stagnation and decline in public services, gives Mr Sunak’s reign an unshakable aura of decay.But there are also ideological schisms and geographic faultlines running through the Conservative base that make recovery harder. The majority that Boris Johnson won in 2019 combined long-established Conservative supporters, concentrated in southern England, with former Labour voters in the north and the Midlands.It was a politically incoherent coalition, united only in support for Brexit (or at least impatience to end the bickering about it) and aversion to the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. Labour is now under new leadership and Brexit is enacted without material benefits. What some Tory strategists identified as an epic realignment of the electorate has unravelled in the absence of either a positive prospectus for the future or charismatic leadership. Mr Johnson’s potency in that department was overrated but not inconsequential. The incineration of his popularity in the Partygate scandal also contaminated an already diminished Conservative brand.The realignment theory is not entirely without foundation. Sir Keir Starmer might be poised to reclaim many seats in Labour’s former heartlands, but that doesn’t mean that the old allegiance, rooted in working-class identity and local culture, is renewed. Brexit was the catalyst for abandonment of a loyalty that had degraded over the preceding generation. Much of the so-called red wall will remain marginal territory after the next election.That leads some Tory MPs to imagine a swift recovery under a more radical prospectus – fiercer in opposing immigration; more aggressive in “anti-woke” campaigns; and fanatical in cutting taxes.The Conservative ultras draw inspiration from Donald Trump’s seemingly unstoppable march towards nomination as the Republicans’ presidential candidate, and the plausible prospect of his return to the White House in November. The apparent lesson is that blood-curdling nationalism, culture wars on a nuclear scale, contempt for democratic norms and disregard for truth are a winning formula.As a model this is repellent on ethical grounds. On the amoral test of practicality, Trumpism has limited application in Britain. Fixating on potential gains from a more radical rightwing platform spares party ideologues the less comfortable task of accounting for lost support among moderate, liberal and former remain-voting Conservatives. They are now swinging to the Lib Democrats, Labour, or whichever of the two is better placed to oust the local Tory.The more in thrall the Conservatives become to the extreme wing of the US Republican movement, the more brutal will be the electoral punishment that is stirring them to panic – and the more deserved. More

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    Joe Biden signals he has no interest in signing US-UK trade agreement

    Ministers have given up on signing a trade agreement with the US before the next election, after the Biden administration signalled it had no interest in agreeing one.British officials had been hoping to agree a “foundational trade partnership” before both countries head to the polls in the next 12 months, having already decided not to pursue a full-blown free trade agreement.However, sources briefed on the talks say they are no longer taking place, thanks to reluctance among senior Democrats to open US markets to more foreign-made goods. The story was first revealed by Politico.A British government spokesperson said: “The UK and US are rapidly expanding cooperation on a range of vital economic and trade issues building on the Atlantic declaration announced earlier this year.” Multiple sources, however, confirmed the foundational trade partnership was no longer on the table.Vote Leave campaigners said giving the UK the freedom to sign bilateral trade agreements with other countries would be one of the biggest benefits of Brexit, with a US trade deal often held up as the biggest prize of all.Talks over a free trade agreement stalled early on, however, thanks in part to resistance from Democratic members of Congress and concerns in the UK about opening up UK markets to chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-injected beef.Earlier this year, the Guardian saw documents outlining how Washington and London could instead coordinate over a partnership covering digital trade, labour protections and agriculture. The deal would not have included lower barriers for service companies, meaning it fell short of a fully fledged free trade deal, but could have paved the way for one in the future.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSources say the deal was always likely to prove difficult to finalise, in part because the US still wanted greater access for their agricultural products. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, said at a food security summit earlier this year that he would not allow either chlorine-washed chicken or hormone-injected beef into the UK.It also became clear in recent weeks that the Biden administration had no interest in signing any kind of a deal before the election, given how Donald Trump had weaponised international trade agreements during his first run for president.A spokesperson for Ron Wyden, the Democratic chair of the Senate finance committee, told Politico: “It is Senator Wyden’s view that the United States and United Kingdom should not make announcements until a deal that benefits Americans is achievable.” More

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    America’s undying empire: why the decline of US power has been greatly exaggerated

    In recent years, the idea that the United States is an empire in decline has gained considerable support, some of it from quarters that until very recently would have denied it was ever an empire at all. The New York Times, for instance, has run columns that describe a “remarkably benign” American empire that is “in retreat”, or even at risk of decline and fall.Yet the shadow American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable. The US has military superiority over all other countries, control of the world’s oceans via critical sea lanes, garrisons on every continent, a network of alliances that covers much of the industrial world, the ability to render individuals to secret prisons in countries from Cuba to Thailand, preponderant influence over the global financial system, about 30% of the world’s wealth and a continental economy not dependent on international trade.To call this an empire is, if anything, to understate its range. Within the American security establishment, what it amounted to was never in doubt. US power was to be exercised around the world using the “conduits of national power”: economic centrality, military scale, sole possession of a global navy, nuclear superiority and global surveillance architecture that makes use of the dominant American share of the Earth’s orbital infrastructure.If proponents of the end of the US global order do not assert a decrease in the potency of the instruments of American power, that is because there has been no such decrease. The share of global transactions conducted in dollars has been increasing, not declining. No other state can affect political outcomes in other countries the way the US still does. The reach of the contemporary US is so great that it tends to blend into the background of daily events. In January 2019, the US demanded that Germany ban the Iranian airline Mahan Air from landing on its territory. In September 2020, it sanctioned the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court for refusing to drop investigations into American citizens. In February 2022, at US request, Japan agreed to redirect liquefied fossil gas, which is critical to Japanese industry, to Europe in the event of a conflict with Russia over Ukraine. At the height of that conflict, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, found the time to visit Algiers to negotiate the reopening of a gas pipeline to Spain via Morocco. These were all quotidian events, unremarkable daily instances of humdrum imperial activity. The practical operation of the empire remains poorly understood, not despite its ubiquity, but because of it.From this perspective, the menial adherence of Britain to the US global project is at least intelligible. Historically, American planners divided their approach to the rest of the world by region. In western Europe and Japan, American interests were usually pursued by cautious political management. In Latin America and the Middle East, constant interventions, coups and invasions were needed. In east Asia and south-east Asia there was military exertion at scale. As long as it lasted, the Soviet Union was cordoned off and contained, against the wishes of the generals in the US Strategic Air Command, who would have preferred to destroy it in a nuclear holocaust. The major US allies were on the right side of this calculus and had less reason to begrudge it.When dealing with the US, elites in countries on the periphery of the global economy still often behave as though they are dealing with the imperial centre. The US permits a variety of political systems in its subordinates. US client states include medieval monarchies in the Arab Gulf, military juntas like Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s Egypt, personal presidential autocracies in the Philippines and Thailand, apartheid parliamentary systems like Israel and reasonably democratic systems with greater social equity and conditions than the US itself. What is required is not democracy, but reasonably close allegiance to American foreign policy goals.In Britain’s case, accordance with US foreign policy has been so consistent, over time and between political factions, that one must wonder whether Britain retains an independent foreign policy at all. The stance of Boris Johnson’s government – “stay close to the Americans” – continued uninterrupted through the collapse of the Truss government and the troubled ascent of Rishi Sunak. In Ukraine, the vision was straightforwardly that of Britain as airbase, provider of troops to the Baltic frontier, and advanced anti-tank weapons when needed. As prime minister, Sunak may have discovered the promises made by his two forebears to increase military spending to 2.5% or 3% of GDP were beyond the capacity of the Treasury, but the decision to back away from those pledges was based on finances, not a different political programme. British leaders may talk of a shifting world system, but the subordinate style in British foreign policy persists.To its credit, the contemporary US foreign policy establishment has shown some candour about its world-ordering ambitions. Much of the discussion takes place in public between a nexus of thinktank and academic institutions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Kennedy School at Harvard, the Wilson Center, the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Foundation. Respectable pillars of the establishment such as Michael Mandelbaum at Johns Hopkins University (formerly of the CFR) have talked of the US acting as “the world’s government”. By 2011, John Ikenberry – the central intellectual figure behind the idea that the US builds and upholds a “liberal international order” – was willing to entertain the idea of “imperial tendencies” in US actions deriving from its overwhelmingly powerful global position. Some discussion has begun about the kinds of imperial activity in which the US should engage. In 2014, Barry Posen, the director of the security studies programme at MIT, began to advocate for US “restraint” in the use of force in global affairs, if only for the ultimate goal of the empire’s reinvigoration. But whatever the merits of these contributions, hegemonists who seek American primacy and neo-cold warriors fixed on the likelihood of a confrontation with China have retained a plurality.For more than a decade, commentators on international affairs have obsessed over the supposed transition from a unipolar order, in which the US is the sole global superpower, to a multipolar or polycentric world in which the distribution of power is less lopsided. But this is easy to overstate. International affairs scholars have long predicted a return to a balance of power among the great states, as a correction to the enormous imbalance represented by the US since the late cold war, if not since the end of the second world war. One question is why it seems to have taken so long. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, two scholars at Dartmouth College, persuasively argued that the extent of American power had to be reckoned with in a different way: the US had attained power preponderance – a degree of global power so great that its very extent served to disincentivise other states from challenging it.To many observers, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was another omen of American decline. Most of the US national security establishment did not welcome Trump’s rise, and four years later would cheer his departure. In parts of the Holy Roman empire, a new prince was obliged not just to attend the funeral of his predecessor but to bury the body. After Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, many Trump opponents appeared to desire the finality of interment.It was clear why Biden’s victory was seen as a form of deliverance by many in the US. But a similar view was not uncommon among the elites in the core American allies. When the election results came through, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried the news under the headline “Demonstrativ Staatsmännisch” (Demonstratively Statesmanly), reflecting a belief that a Biden victory represents a return to dignity and rectitude. In the Washington Post, one columnist wrote that Biden held the promise of salvation from the Trump days: “A return to a bipartisan, internationalist foreign policy that moderate Republicans and Democrats have long championed.” For the New York Times, the moment would be accompanied by “sighs of relief overseas”. In Britain there was more ambiguity: Rishi Sunak’s future adviser James Forsyth wrote that the end of Trump was a “mixed blessing”: Biden would “take the drama out of Anglo-American relations” but might punish Britain over Brexit.The Trump administration’s foreign policy was more orthodox than is generally admitted. While derided as an isolationist by the US bureaucracy, for whom the term is a stock insult, Trump was committed to the US’s “unquestioned military dominance”. Many of his appointees were old regime hands: his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, was a Reagan-era official; the director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, ran a torture site under George W Bush; Trump’s fifth secretary of defence, Mark Esper, was formerly an adviser to Barack Obama’s defence secretary Chuck Hagel.Having pledged to “get out of foreign wars”, Trump did nothing of the sort. He pursued the global assassination programme established under Obama and prosecuted the US-backed war in Yemen. Trump did not get along with the diplomats at the state department, but his administration did very little that was out of the usual line of business.Trump was disdainful of international cooperation on terms other than those of the US, but this was nothing new, and disputes with the foreign policy intelligentsia were for the most part matters of style, not principle. In Latin America, Trump made clear through his adminstration’s “western hemisphere strategic framework” that the western hemisphere is “our neighbourhood”. In the Middle East, Trump overturned the minor accommodation the Obama administration had reached with Tehran and in doing so reverted to the traditional American strategy of strangling Iran while prevailing on the Gulf monarchies to recognise Israel. Trump criticised the costs of the US military’s presence in the Middle East, but US troop levels in the region increased during his time in office, as did military spending overall. His eccentricities were those of the modern Republican party, a reflection of the polity’s rightwing shift rather than of a barbarian anomaly. Dismantling American hegemony would have been a historic act, but Trump never considered it.The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, which necessitated the simultaneous withdrawal of the forces of any remaining western allies, was yet another death for American empire. The clamour of the final exit partly drowned out the tawdry record of every US president in Afghanistan from Bush to Biden. That 20 years of occupation and state-building crumbled in weeks confirmed only that the Afghan government had been an artificial and corrupt dependent. Under Trump and Biden, US planners had concluded that the US could no longer afford to keep up pretences with a fragile and exposed government in Kabul.Enough of the US global order survived the withdrawal from Afghanistan that it could die again in February 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Contrary to unserious predictions before its outbreak, this was no “hybrid war” or “cyberwar”, but a traditional ground operation that proved far more difficult than the Russian leadership imagined. In the event, expectations of a dash for Kyiv causing the quick capitulation of the Ukrainian government were frustrated. The US strategy of building up Ukrainian armed forces as a specific counter to Russian armoured invasion proved effective in staving off the initial assault. The US, Britain, Poland and other allies supplied key weapons and detailed intelligence, including satellite targeting, while seeking to inflict some economic damage on Russia with sanctions. That US intelligence appeared to have had a source in the Kremlin with access to the war plans – the US told Ukraine that Russia would invade before it did, and then made that assessment public, and CIA director Bill Burns has said clearly that the war planning was conducted by Putin and a small number of advisers – also ran counter to the narrative of the empire’s demise.That Ukraine, with heavy US support has, so far at least, held the line against Russia even at the extremity of eastern Ukraine reinforces the reality of current American power on global affairs. Russia’s general strategy has, since 2008, been to reassert influence in the former Soviet states around its borders. Yet between 1999 and 2009, Nato expanded into Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania and Croatia. Perceiving this as a defeat, Russia had sought to bring it to a stop through machinations on its immediate borders. Yet in Georgia, the Caucasus, Crimea, Belarus and Kazakhstan, recent Russian operations were comparatively small-scale. Why a completely different and far more hubristic strategy was adopted for Ukraine remains poorly understood. Part of the story must lie in the two strategic agreements signed between the US and Ukraine between September and November 2021. Yet the US, Britain and Nato itself had studiously kept to ambiguous ground about future Ukrainian accession. Putin’s decision to invade may have been taken after the failure of diplomatic talks between the US and Russia in January 2022. In any case, the invasion itself was a terrible crime and a grave gamble. It has been mirrored in the strategy of the US and its allies, which since April 2022 has shifted from a simple frustration of the initial invasion to the grander ambition of using the war to achieve strategic attrition of Russia.In the Middle East, Israel’s brutal retributive attack on Gaza, the mirror of the orgiastic violence carried out by Hamas fighters on 7 October, only reinforces this picture. Over the past two months, the influence of US global power has been plain to see. Thanks to US protection, Israel has been free to carry out what in all likelihood amount to large-scale war crimes while largely disregarding any threat from regional states that might otherwise have sought to limit its attacks on Gaza. The US has supplied Israel (probably with some help from Britain’s military base at Akrotiri in Cyprus) throughout the campaign and has moved aircraft carrier groups and nuclear armed submarines to the region to make the point abundantly clear. Britain has followed in lockstep with its more modest capabilities. The US and its allies have effectively rendered action at the UN impossible. American imperial power is all too evident in the ruins of Gaza city.In large part, talk of the end of American dominance was a reaction to the global financial crisis and China’s industrial rise. For prominent western strategic planners like Elbridge Colby, one of the authors of the 2018 US National Defense Strategy, conflicts in Afghanistan, the Middle East and even Ukraine had come to be seen as distractions from the China threat, which represents the only plausible challenge to American global dominance. In its 2022 National Security Strategy, the Biden administration declared that the 2020s were to be a decisive decade. Past military adventures in the Middle East were criticised as extravagances and distractions in the era of competition with China. “We do not seek conflict or a new cold war,” the NSS said, but “we must proactively shape the international order in line with our interests and values”. In order to prevail in competition with China, the US had to enhance its industrial capacity by “investing in our people”. The present moment was said to represent “a consequential new period of American foreign policy that will demand more of the US in the Indo-Pacific than has been asked of us since the second world war.”What should be made of the fact that it is Biden, not Trump, who has overseen a major escalation of tension with Russia and an escalation in the trade war with China? At the time, the one ostensibly distinct part of the Trump programme appeared to be the trade war. Trump was seen as standing for an insular protectionist turn, but the same basic policies have been continued under Biden through export controls on advanced microchips. Still, Biden has proved to be just as uninterested in limiting capital flows from surplus countries like Germany and China into US treasuries, which arguably have negative effects on industrial workers in the US, but certainly inflate the prices of assets owned by the rich and underpin US power over the international financial system.The US political system as a whole appears, at present, to be opting for China containment. President Biden said on the campaign trail that under him US strategy would be to “pressure, isolate and punish” China. Encouraged by the US, Japan, like Britain, is engaged in a major arms buildup. American politicians make showy visits to Taipei. The US has threatened China with nuclear weapons in the past on the basis that it does not have a comparable nuclear arsenal. There is some debate over whether China’s current nuclear-armed submarines are able to avoid tracking by the US. China is also working to make its intercontinental ballistic missiles more secure. It is possible that soon they will together constitute a completely reliable second-strike capability against the US. The most dangerous moment of the cold war was in the early 1960s, when an aggressive and overwhelmingly dominant nuclear power saw itself in competition with an adversary that didn’t yet have equivalent nuclear forces. The US and China may be approaching a similar point.Earlier this month, Biden and Xi Jinping met in San Francisco in an attempt to smooth over relations that had become dangerously unstable. In November 2022, when Biden met Xi at the G20 in Indonesia, both had appeared to strike a conciliatory tone. Biden said the two had “a responsibility to show that China and the US can manage our differences” and “prevent competition from becoming conflict”. But the 2022 decision to ban Chinese access to the semiconductor trade was a straightforward escalation. Trump and Biden responded to their respective moments according to a general strategy that is longer-lived than either of them. US foreign policy has been quite stable for 30 years: a mode best characterised as reactive management of the world empire, with the aim of pre-empting the emergence of any potential challengers to its primacy.For all the talk of multipolar worlds, other poles of world power have been hard to find. Russia has hardly proved itself a global power in its botched invasion of Ukraine. Fantasies of European strategic autonomy have shown themselves insubstantial. India’s economic growth has been notable but it projects very little influence away from the subcontinent. The resurgent nationalisms in Turkey and Iran hardly qualify them as poles of global power, and the former still serves as a staging ground for American nuclear weapons. As the former Tsinghua professor Sun Zhe observed, developing countries are not cooperatively “rising together” to “challenge the current order” – the likes of Brazil and South Africa have, if anything, been declining in terms of economic heft. So where is the multiplicity in world politics?Much of the predicted systemic change consists of the emergence of Sino-American competition. But “multipolarity” is a poor description for this development. The strategic balance so far remains hugely in favour of the US. China does not militarily threaten the US. Chinese naval power is routinely exaggerated; its navy is not predicted to rival the US Pacific fleet for another generation, and it still lacks “quiet” nuclear-powered submarines that resist sonar detection. It is not clear that China is capable of mounting an invasion even of Taiwan, and there are good reasons to think China’s leadership knows this. For its part, China has not even made a serious effort to escape the dominance of the dollar in its trade with the rest of the world. It is the US that asserts a policy of isolation and punishment of China, not vice versa. So long as the US is maintaining a “defense perimeter” in the East and South China Seas that extends to a few kilometres from mainland China, it is not dealing with a peer, it is threatening a recalcitrant.Assertions of the inevitability of American imperial decline over the long term are fair enough; in their most abstract form, and on a long enough timescale, they must eventually turn out to be true. And the US position does look shakier than it has for decades. But what is striking is how seldom this system that is said to be in decline is given even a cursory description, especially in the subordinate parts of the Anglosphere.Why the reticence to explain the nature of American power? And why ignore that so much of contemporary US grand strategy is oriented precisely to prevent its dissolution? As the 2022 National Security Strategy said, “prophecies of American decline have repeatedly been disproven in the past”. This time the effort may be in vain. The risks of a Sino-American confrontation and the Russo-American nuclear standoff implied in the war in Ukraine are considerable. Whatever is to come, the fact remains that global power at present remains unipolar. The task for those not committed to its continuation is to understand it and, wherever possible, to challenge its assumptions.Adapted from Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony by Tom Stevenson, published by Verso and available at guardianbookshop.com The best stories take time. The Guardian Long Read magazine compiles the finest longform journalism the Guardian has to offer: from politics to technology, food to cosmology, literature to sex, there is something for everyone. Beautifully bound, this 100-page special edition is available to order from the Guardian bookshop and is on sale at selected WH Smith Travel stores. More

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    Rish! talks up his hectic schedule in bilat with Biden | John Crace

    Rishi Sunak: Good morning, Mr President.Joe Biden: Er … good morning … er … I’m sorry, who are you?Sunak: It’s…Biden: No, don’t tell me … It’s on the tip of my tongue. I’m sure I recognise you. I never forget a face. You’re that guy who bought me that coffee in Belfast when I was over in Ireland.Sunak: That’s right, your excellency. We also met in San Diego and HiroshimaBiden: Are you stalking me?Sunak: No. I’m just a bit needy. We have a special relationship, remember?Biden: Do we? News to me … No. It’s no good. You’ll have to jog my memory.Sunak: I’m the prime minister of the United Kingdom …Biden: Of course you are. Good to see you again, Rashi Sanook.Sunak: It’s Rishi. Rishi Sunak.Biden: Whatever. So what brings you over to Washington?Sunak: I’m not sure really. A combination of things. Nothing’s going well at home. My polls are rubbish, I can’t do anything about inflation, hospital waiting lists are up, you know the kind of thing …Biden: Not really.Sunak: Anyway, I just fancied a break. Plus I had loads of free air miles after my brilliant ‘Take Your Helicopter to Work’ scheme. And I wanted to catch a ball game. Go, Nationals! High five!Biden: Glad, you’re having a nice time.Sunak: So, what have you been up to since I last saw you, your highness?Biden: Not a lot … Just a $1tn infrastructure act, fixing a two-year debt ceiling deal, fighting off the Republican crazies and a host of other minor stuff …Sunak: Gosh!Biden: So how about you? What have you been doing?Sunak: I’ve been rushed off my feet … I don’t really know where to start, but here goes. First and foremost, I have been working on my five priorities. To halve inflation, grow the economy-Biden: Sure. But what have you actually been doing?Sunak: As I said, I have been working on my five priorities for the British people which I have promised to deliver on. Let me tell you what my five priorities are. They are the five priorities on which I want the British people to judge me-Biden: So, you haven’t really been doing that much.Sunak: As I said, my five priorities-Biden: But what else?Sunak: Apart from my five priorities? Well, let me see … I’m taking the Covid inquiry my government set up to court because it keeps asking for information that I want to keep secret. And I’m just about to OK Boris Johnson’s honours list.Biden: So a disgraced prime minister still gets to do the honours?Sunak: Sure.Biden: You Brits crack me up. What else shall we talk about?Sunak: How about a US-UK trade deal? Back in 2016 I and the Vote Leave team promised that an improved trade deal would be a Brexit bonus.Biden: No.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSunak: What do you mean, ‘no’?Biden: I mean it’s not happening. There is no trade deal to be had any time soon. The UK is just not that big a deal for us since you left the EU.Sunak: Not even a little deal? We’ll take the chlorinated chicken …Biden: No. Not a chance. Maybe in five or 10 years. If then.Sunak: OK. I get the message. But can we at least say that we agreed not to talk about a trade deal? Or maybe we could just sign something vague and meaningless.Biden: If you like …Sunak: It would look good for my end-of-visit communique to the British media. Make it look like we had in fact talked about a trade deal a bit. Even though we haven’t. By the way, have I told you about my five priorities?Biden: I don’t have a lot of time, is there anything else you want to say?Sunak: There is. I want to talk about artificial intelligence.Biden: What about it?Sunak: That I’m very worried about it. Apart from AI that is obviously beneficial. Did I mention my five priorities?Biden: Sounds like you could do with an AI upgrade yourself. Unless you really are a halfwit. But what are you suggesting?Sunak: Well, seeing as I’m a world leader in AI …Biden: Since when? You had scarcely mentioned it until a few AI experts raised their concerns a few weeks ago.Sunak: But I am the expert! I had read something about it on my MBA at Stanford. Did you know I had an MBA from the States?Biden: You may have mentioned it before …Sunak: So here’s the thing. Because I know more about AI than anyone else and also have a lot of spare time on my hands, I am proposing the UK takes a leading role in regulating the industry.Biden: But you know that since you left the EU, the UK is no longer a member of the US-EU council that regulates AI-related policies …Sunak: Really? Never mind. What I mostly want is a PR exercise. We won’t actually regulate anything. We’ll just have a conference to talk about regulating AI. It will all be pointless as by the time anything happens, AI will have evolved to take over the world. So we’ll all just meet a few times, have a nice jolly and then forget about it. But we need the US to come. We’ll pay your air fares and hotels. It’s just that without you no one else will come. So please say you will.Biden: If we must …Sunak: Just a couple more things: Ukraine. Can we agree that we are both still committed?Biden: You didn’t need to come to Washington for that…Sunak: And, my green card … Is there any chance it can be renewed? I might need it again in a year or so.Biden: Is that the time? Must be getting on. More

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    The Guardian view on Sunak’s foreign policy: a Europe-shaped hole | Editorial

    The alliance between Britain and the US, resting on deep foundations of shared history and strategic interest, is not overly affected by the personal relationship between a prime minister and a president.Sometimes individual affinity is consequential, as when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were aligned over cold war doctrine, or when Tony Blair put Britain in lockstep with George W Bush for the march to war in Iraq. But there is no prospect of Rishi Sunak forming such a partnership – for good or ill – with Joe Biden at this week’s Washington summit.Viewed from the White House, the prime minister cuts an insubstantial figure – the caretaker leader of a country that has lost its way. That doesn’t jeopardise the underlying relationship. Britain is a highly valued US ally, most notably in the fields of defence, security and intelligence. On trade and economics, Mr Sunak’s position is less comfortable. The prime minister is a poor match with a president who thinks Brexit was an epic blunder and whose flagship policy is a rebuttal of the sacred doctrines of the Conservative party.Mr Biden is committed to shoring up American primacy by means of massive state support for green technology, tax breaks for foreign investment and reconfiguring supply chains with a focus on national security. Mr Sunak’s instincts are more laissez-faire, and his orthodox conservative budgets preclude interventionist statecraft.The two men disagree on a fundamental judgment about the future direction of the global economy, but only one of them has a hand on the steering wheel. Mr Sunak looks more like a passenger, or a pedestrian, since Britain bailed out of the EU – the vehicle that allows European countries to aggregate mid-range economic heft into continental power.London lost clout in the world by surrendering its seat in Brussels, but that fact is hard for Brexit ideologues to process. Their worldview is constructed around the proposition that EU membership depleted national sovereignty and that leaving the bloc would open more lucrative trade routes. Top of the wishlist was a deal with Washington, and Mr Biden has said that won’t happen. Even if it did, the terms would be disadvantageous to Britain as the supplicant junior partner.If Mr Sunak grasps that weakness, he dare not voice it. Instead, Downing Street emits vague noises about Britain’s leading role in AI regulation. But, in governing uses of new technology, Brussels matters more to Washington. London is not irrelevant, but British reach is reduced when ministers are excluded from the rooms where their French, German and other continental counterparts develop policy.Those are the relationships that Mr Sunak must cultivate with urgency. But his view of Europe is circumscribed by Brexit ideology and parochial campaign issues. His meetings with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, have been dominated by the domestic political obsession with small-boat migration across the Channel. The prime minister has no discernible relationship with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz. He has not visited Berlin.Negotiating the Windsor framework to stabilise Northern Ireland’s status in post-Brexit trade was a vital step in repairing damage done by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss to UK relations with the EU. But there is still a gaping European hole in Britain’s foreign policy. It is visible all the way across the Atlantic, even if the prime minister refuses to see it. More

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    Wednesday briefing: Inside Rishi Sunak’s whirlwind US visit

    Good morning. Archie loves early mornings so much he is having a baby, so I’ll be bringing you this email, with Nimo, for the next few weeks while he’s on paternity leave.As you read this, Rishi Sunak has just landed at Andrews air force base ahead of a whirlwind two-day visit to Washington DC, in which he will discuss trade with Joe Biden and seek investment from US business leaders – but sadly not humiliate himself on the baseball field (of which more below).It’s Sunak’s first trip to the White House as PM, and he is also expected to discuss the two countries’ cooperation on Ukraine, while pitching for a role for Britain in regulating AI – all part of a bid to prove Britain still has a place on the global stage following Brexit and its turbulent aftermath.The Guardian’s Peter Walker is travelling with the prime minister; he spoke to me about Sunak’s ambitions for the trip – and why he’ll be the first PM since David Cameron to stay in one of Washington’s most palatial residences (or as Sunak might call it, “slumming it”). That’s after the headlines.Five big stories
    Ukraine | Russia’s UN envoy was accused of floundering in a “mud of lies” after he claimed at an emergency session of the security council that Ukraine destroyed Kakhovka dam in a “war crime” against itself. Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador, said the Russians were resorting to “flooded earth tactics” because “the captured territory does not belong to them, and they are not able to hold these lands”.
    Media | The parent company of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph faces the threat of being put into administration by lenders. Lloyds Banking Group has threatened to put Press Acquisitions, the company controlled by the Barclay family that owns the newspapers’ parent company, Telegraph Media Group (TMG), into administration after a breakdown in talks over loans the business has racked up over the years.
    Health | Cases of syphilis were at their highest level in 75 years in England last year, rising to almost 8,700, while diagnoses of gonorrhoea rose by 50% in just 12 months – the most since records began in 1918, according to the UKHSA figures.
    UK news | The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said it has won a confidence vote put to its members after sexual misconduct allegations. A majority of its members backed its proposals to overhaul its culture and governance, with 93% of votes cast in favour of continuing to support the CBI.
    Environment | Research has found that it is now too late to save summer Arctic sea ice. Scientists say preparations need to be made for the increased extreme weather across the northern hemisphere. The study also shows that if emissions decline slowly or continue to rise, the first ice-free summer could be in the 2030s, a decade earlier than previous projections.
    In depth: ‘It’s the lesser cousin visiting the rich uncle – the power is very much on their side’There’s a remarkable video of a speech made by Joe Biden last October, on the day Rishi Sunak became prime minister. To guffaws of laughter from his audience, the president said news had come from Britain of Sunak’s elevation – or as he called him “Rashi Sanook”.“As my brother would say, ‘Go figure!’,” grinned the president. Biden didn’t refer explicitly to the chaos that had preceded the latest PM; with a smirk that wide, he didn’t have to.Seven and a half months later, Sunak (pictured above, with Biden) will be hoping Britain is no longer such a laughing stock in Washington – and that the president can at least pronounce his name. The PM has certainly put the miles in – this will be the pair’s fifth meeting in Sunak’s short premiership and their fourth since March.Sunak’s focus this week is on trade, but with a looming election at home, the symbolism of a statesmanlike “bilat” promoting Britain’s interests on the world stage may be just as important.What is No 10 hoping for?“This is a heavily business-focused trip,” says Peter Walker, the Guardian’s deputy political editor. Sunak will meet with senators and members of Congress today at Capitol Hill, and tomorrow he will address a major meeting of US business leaders, hosted by the CEO of General Motors. Their investments already account for thousands of British jobs, and Sunak will be hoping for more.“They’ve given up on the idea of a full post-Brexit, UK/US free-trade agreement,” says Peter – much vaunted by Brexiteers, but abandoned as a short-term goal by Downing Street – “but they’re trying to just get lots of kind of mini deals done.”That could mean concessions to help the British car industry, for example, and deals in the digital and technology sectors.Is Britain back?Given that it’s only weeks since Biden had to deny being “anti-British”, it’s fair to say the much-vaunted “special relationship” has had a bumpy time of late, particularly through the Boris Johnson years (and Liz Truss weeks).“As with any British prime minister visiting the US, it’s the lesser cousin visiting the rich uncle: the power is very much on their side,” says Peter. That said, Sunak’s achievement in securing the Windsor agreement in Northern Ireland – an area of British politics to which Biden pays close attention – impressed the White House.With cooperation over Ukraine and Nato critical, too, “having someone in Downing Street, at least for the next year, who they believe is reasonably stable, will say the right things on Ukraine and not do anything completely bonkers over Brexit, is actually quite important [for Washington]”, says Peter.And Sunak is getting the red carpet treatment. Unlike Theresa May, Johnson and Truss, he is being put up in Blair House, a palatial residence opposite the White House that has been described as “the world’s most exclusive hotel”.He will also give a joint press conference with Biden – relatively rare for the US president – and this evening will attend a baseball game between the Washington Nationals and the Arizona Diamondbacks, billed as a “friendship event” between the US and UK and featuring joint military bands and a flyover.Alas, however, reported discussions over Sunak throwing the ceremonial have come to naught – despite the PM fancying himself as a rather handy bowler in cricket.“At the very best, you get an OK photo opportunity,” says Peter. “But if it goes even slightly wrong, that will dominate the trip. That’s very much No 10’s mindset – to play it as safe as they possibly can.”What else will Sunak be hoping for?Amid tricky headlines at home over Covid and immigration and determinedly dreadful polling figures, a trip that cast the prime minister as a bold statesman, out there lobbying for Britain, would be hugely welcomed by his allies, says Peter.“Talking to Tory MPs and to ministers, some of them think their only election hope is to have Sunak travelling around the UK and the world seeming broadly competent and not openly mad while, in the meantime, they hope inflation goes down, growth goes up and the number of small boats goes down.“If everything goes right, they think there is a small chance they could be the biggest party after the election – but it all depends on him plugging on in quite a managerial way. So he doesn’t want to rock the boat. He’ll just want to go out there, be sensible and strike trade deals if he can.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat else we’ve been reading
    Melissa Jeltsen’s report into the growing tension between some independent abortion clinics (pictured above) and Planned Parenthood, the US’s largest single abortion provider, is enlightening. Jeltsen reveals how the deteriorating relationship between the abortion providers is impeding patient care. Nimo
    More than 10 years ago, Stuart Jeffries’s car was towed to the pound, and when he realised it would cost more to release it than it was worth, he decided to leave it there. In this lovely piece, he talks about a decade of happy car non-ownership – but recognises going car-free not as easy for everyone. Esther
    Jason Okundaye’s compelling analysis on the rise of Mizzy, an 18-year-old TikToker who found fame online by filming himself terrorising strangers or trespassing (sometimes both at the same time), is worth a read. In pursuing this “cloutrage”, Okundaye writes, Mizzy is gaming the “amoral, algorithmic universe that rewards anything that garners attention – he is engaging in a twisted form of online entrepreneurship”. Nimo
    I know, I know, you’ve read everything you could possibly ever want to about Phil and Holly. Make an exception for Marina Hyde. Her column is worth the price alone for her joke about This Morning editor Martin Frizell and a warder from HMP Full Sutton. Esther
    ICYMI: This week’s edition of the How we survive series is a must-read. Jonathan Freedland spoke with Ivor Perl about the year he spent, from the age of 12, as a prisoner in Auschwitz and the eight decades since. It is a remarkably moving story on survival, luck, hope and compassion. Nimo
    SportFootball | Chelsea midfielder N’Golo Kanté is reportedly being offered a salary that could reach €100m (£86.2m) a year to join a club in Saudi Arabia. Kanté’s Chelsea contract expires this month and emissaries from Saudi Arabia are in London to present their proposal. His salary would include image rights and commercial deals.Golf |PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Saudi backed LIV Golf have agreed to merge, ending a bitter split in the sport. The shock announcement will mean that the Saudi public investment fund will pour money in a new company that will effectively control top-level golf. Litigation between long-term rivals LIV and the PGA Tour has come to an abrupt end.Tennis | Aryna Sabalenka, the second seed, defeatedUkraine’s Elina Svitolina 6-4, 6-4. The win has moved her to the French Open semi-finals for the first time. Novak Djokovic will also be at the semi-finals after his 4-6, 7-6 (0), 6-2, 6-4 win against Karen Khachanov, the 11th seed, and confidently passing his biggest test of the tournament so far.The front pages“‘Environmental disaster:’ floods hit Ukraine as dam is destroyed”. That’s the Guardian lead today, as it is in some other papers. “Bombing of dam ‘a new low’ for Russia” says the Daily Telegraph and the i has “40,000 fleeing ‘war crime’ after dam blown up”. “Russia set off ‘environmental bomb’ by breaching dam, Zelenskiy claims” – that’s the Financial Times. It’s on the front of the Times as the picture but the lead is “Duke launches political attack”. For others it’s less about the constitutional implications – the Sun goes with “Harry’s day in court – Me, Hewitt … and that two-faced s**t Burrell”. The Daily Mail taunts: “He must have longed for the schmaltzy embrace of Oprah!”. The page one splash in the Daily Express is “‘Game-changer’ new drug to slim down nation”. The Metro leads with assaults on ambulance crews: “999 heroes under attack”. “Knight these heroes” – the Daily Mirror has a call to “Make it Sir Rob & Sir Kevin” about ex-rugby league player Kevin Sinfield’s motor neurone disease campaigning. His fellow star Rob Burrow has the condition.Today in FocusHow to develop artificial super-intelligence without destroying humanitySam Altman, the founder of the revolutionary application ChatGPT, is touring Europe with a message: AI is changing the world and there are big risks, but also big potential rewardsCartoon of the day | Ella BaronThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badIt has been 25 years since Sex and the City debuted and became an instant classic. While the show has clear, and at points painful to watch, flaws (namely its focus on white cis, mostly heterosexual women with lots of disposable income), it is still one of the best female-led series that centres sisterhood, friendship and romantic love. SaTC successfully reimagined the single woman, portraying her not as a desperate spinster or an ice queen but as a complicated, messy and (gasp) unlikable figure who is still deserving of whatever kind of love she desires. The protagonists spoke frankly and openly about sex and relationships in a way that still defines the genre. In commemoration of the anniversary, perhaps it’s time for a rewatch.Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
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    Incite, smear, divide: why are the Tories and Labour copying the tactics of America’s vilest strategist? | Nels Abbey

    Will 2024 be a repeat of 1992 or 1997, is the (binary) question people ask: a repeat of Neil Kinnock’s shock defeat to the Tories in 1992 or Tony Blair’s triumphant landslide victory in 1997.But while we are talking about the what will happen next time, we had better discuss the how. The means matter. The means help shape society. They impact how cohesive we are, how we treat each other. The means last longer than victory or defeat. And by many current indications, the means suggest we are looking at neither 1997 nor 1992, but at a mirror image of the 1988 US presidential election.The name might not mean much, but the brutal political genius of Lee Atwater looms large over today’s British politics – to such an extent that even he would not believe it. Atwater was a highly influential strategist who helped shape modern presidential campaigning for the Republicans. Perhaps the foremost part of his legacy was the ruthless, nihilistic mainstreaming of dog-whistle racism into political campaigning. He explained how that worked.“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.” Atwater’s crowning achievement, having advised President Ronald Reagan, was masterminding Vice-President George HW Bush’s 1988 presidential election victory against the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis. And to do so, he leveraged the most reliable of western tropes: the Black bogeyman. Atwater conceived and created the now notorious Willie Horton ad. The advert offered a simple juxtaposition: George Bush, a tough-on-crime Republican who believed in the death penalty for murderers, or Michael Dukakis, a wet liberal who allowed murderers to have weekend passes to get out of jail.And then came the money shot: a menacingly scary black-and-white mugshot of William Horton (his name was altered by Atwater from William Horton to Willie Horton; the intended effect is self-explanatory), a Black man who had been convicted of murder and rape in Dukakis’s Massachusetts, yet was granted a temporary release from prison pass (otherwise known as a furlough). While out on furlough he carried out even more horrific crimes. The advert did what it intended: to make Horton and Dukakis look like an inseparable couple, the Democrats and the black felon as running mates: a racist signal to rally the vote.Intentional or otherwise, I see a clear link between the Willie Horton advert and Labour’s “soft on paedophiles” attack advert on Rishi Sunak. Sadly, given the chance to pull back from his Willie Horton moment, the Labour leader stood “by every word”.But then, looking across the divide, Atwater would see much to admire in Tory politics as well. Last week the home secretary, Suella Braverman, pointed at Pakistani Muslim men with the message that she would not let “political correctness” get in the way of apprehending grooming gangs – despite the fact that her own department had found it was overwhelmingly and disproportionately white men who constituted grooming rings. But why stop there? Atwater wouldn’t. There goes Braverman apparently upholding a landlord’s decision to display golliwogs in his pub.There she goes, telling some of the world’s most desperate people that, should they dare to show up here, they’ll end up on prison barges. Just the place for the political scapegoat. Atwater would have loved those barges.In his pomp, he would have loved the intolerance, the viciousness, the very British race struggle in our politics right now: the tussle of one side to out-racist the other, to make complexity and decency look weak, often leveraging polite and innocent sounding substitutes and subtleties for race along the way – think: wokeness, political correctness, virtue signalling. Call it Atwater signalling perhaps, make a dead man happy. But ultimately we must decide if we are happy with politics conducted like this.Because the next election will have a victor and a vanquished, and the victor will feel the means justified the ends. But if both parties continue down this dark and dirty path, what will the following election be like, and the next? And what kind of country will emerge from them?Look at what devil-take-the-hindmost politics has done to America. We know it can work – that’s the tragedy. And we know where it ends.
    Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker. He is the author of the satirical book Think Like A White Man

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    Will UK follow US in demanding TikTok be sold by its Chinese owner?

    When asked this week whether the UK would ban TikTok on government phones, Rishi Sunak’s response signalled a change in stance: “We look at what our allies are doing.”Previously ministers had seemed sanguine, even saying that whether or not the app stayed on someone’s phone should be a matter of “personal choice”.Not any more. The UK’s allies are turning against TikTok and it was when Sunak said he was watching their actions closely that a government ban became inevitable. The US, Canada and the EU’s executive arm have already decided to strip the app from official devices. It is now a matter of geopolitical choice.TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance. The fear among its critics on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Chinese state can access data generated by its more than 1 billion users and manipulate its recommendation algorithm in order to push a China-friendly point of view to unsuspecting users.There is no hard evidence this is the case and TikTok says it would refuse any data request from the Chinese government, although the UK government cited concerns about “the way in which this [user] data may be used” for the ban on Thursday. But tensions over Taiwan, concerns that China will supply weaponry to Russia, the shooting down of a spy balloon that hovered over the US and warnings of state espionage have created a toxic backdrop to those denials. And on Monday a refreshed integrated review of UK defence and foreign policy described China as an “epoch-defining” challenge.TikTok’s reputation was severely damaged last year when ByteDance admitted employees had attempted to use the app to spy on reporters.TikTok will be concerned that Sunak will match each upward ratchet in pressure from his counterparts. On Wednesday the Biden administration demanded the platform’s Chinese owner sell the app or face a complete ban. Will the UK ultimately threaten the same?If geopolitics is the leading factor in these moves, as opposed to hard proof that TikTok poses a security threat, then it is likely every deterioration in relations between China and the west will push the app further along the road to a complete ban or forced divestment from its owners in the UK and elsewhere. Indeed, a forced sale in the US – if the Chinese government lets TikTok’s owners do so – could lead to TikTok being peeled off from ByteDance in its entirety.The shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon off the east coast of the US last month was followed by reports that negotiations between TikTok and the Biden administration over a deal to resolve security concerns had stalled, while this week the White House gave its support to a Senate bill giving the president the power to ban TikTok.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTikTok’s attempts to assuage those concerns – for instance announcing plans to store US and European user data on third-party data servers – seem to have failed with the current American president in the same way they did with his immediate predecessor, who also tried to force a divestment of TikTok’s US business. The backstop used by TikTok’s critics is the existence of Chinese laws that could force ByteDance to cooperate with Beijing authorities, including the national intelligence law of 2017, which states that all organisations and citizens shall “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. For many, this is enough evidence.Perhaps eliminating the concerns over Chinese interference by selling TikTok to non-Chinese investors is the only way to quell the critics. But there are plenty of other aspects of the Chinese tech industry – from Huawei mobile phones to other electronic devices – that are just as capable of eliciting similar fears. Without strong supporting evidence there is no way of knowing how proportionate the UK government is being – and the same could be true for moves against other Chinese tech interests. More