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      Defeating the Dictators review: prescriptions for democratic health

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      Charles Dunst’s “aspirational” book about how democracies can do a better job of competing with autocracies is bursting with statistics and lots of common sense.The statistics are there to convince us that many autocracies spend much more sensibly than the world’s richest democracies do. A few examples:
      China has increased spending on education as a percentage of its gross domestic product by 75% since 1975.
      In 2018, 15-year-old Chinese students had the highest average scores in the world on tests for math, science and reading, followed by Singapore, Macao and Hong Kong – “none of which is a democracy”.
      Citizens of Singapore have an average life expectancy of around 84 and an infant mortality rate of two per 1,000 – “better than almost every democracy”.
      Singapore achieves that good health by spending just 4% of its GDP on healthcare – versus 17% of GDP spent in the US, which gets much less impressive results.
      Dunst’s commonsense observations include ideas like these: weak safety nets damage citizens’ confidence in their governments (and therefore should be strengthened); bad healthcare systems cost more money in the long run than good ones; and investments in infrastructure repay themselves many times over.Dunst is deputy director of research and analytics at The Asia Group and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Looking at his own country, he is heartened that Joe Biden managed to push through a $1tn infrastructure bill, but then points out that’s only 1.25% of GDP, compared with the 8.5% of GDP China spent on infrastructure every year from 1992 to 2011.“China today spends more on infrastructure than the United States and Europe do combined,” Dunst writes.By spending more on things that actually matter, countries that oppress their citizens in other ways can engender remarkable levels of confidence in government.“In 2019,” Dunst writes, “nearly 90% of Chinese reported trust in their government … as did almost 70% of Singaporeans.”Practically the only good news for democracies in this story is the fact that almost every major economy faces similar declining birth rates. Most dramatically, China has gone from 2.25 children per woman in 1990 to just 1.3 today. No major economy is producing enough children to maintain its current population.At the same time, since 2017, China’s net migration rate – the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants – “has worsened every year”.China lost about 335,000 people in 2022 alone.Democracies like the US, Germany and the UK all posted positive net migration rates of at least 2.7%. These numbers support one of Dunst’s more optimistic notions. While “China and others may promise economic stability”, democracies remain attractive because they offer “more freedom, equality and opportunities to pursue happiness”.Dunst argues that one of the biggest challenges for democracies is to convince their populations of the benefits of immigration, instead of listening to politicians like Donald Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France, who have been so successful in reviving ancient xenophobia.Dunst also thinks education systems in places like the US and Britain need to become much more democratic. At Harvard, the acceptance rate for the children of alumni is 30%, versus 6% for the general population. In 2021, “nearly a third of legacy freshmen hailed from households making more than half a million dollars”.When non-connected parents “see the underperforming children of top financiers and politicians vaunted into top schools and jobs because of connections, these parents will rebel against the system that allowed this to happen … They will vote for the would-be dictator.”Dunst thinks we must offer more scholarships “for people studying science and technology … more funding for vocational schools” and “constant skill training” for the workforce.He wisely suggests that a “key reform would be to make non-regular [American] workers eligible for high-quality health insurance that travels with them from job to job”. But he is also bizarrely opposed to universal healthcare – the kind that is the norm all over Europe. Suddenly, he sounds like a flack for a greedy pharmaceutical company, writing that such a system “could undermine the competitive attitude that makes the United States one of the world’s leaders in medical innovation”.America’s continuing failure to provide decent health insurance to its most needy citizens is hardly a spur to innovation. And the fact we are the only major democracy with a healthcare system dominated by the profit motive isn’t mentioned here at all.Dunst is almost entirely silent about the explosion of fake facts on the internet, which makes it so much more difficult to sell the commonsense ideas he pushes for. Another problem is his failure to acknowledge that America now has only one major political party that is genuinely interested in solving any of these fundamental problems, while the other prefers to cater to its base with attacks on wokeness or any prosecutor who thinks it makes sense to prosecute a former president for any of his dozens of alleged crimes.This is the fundamental problem facing American democracy now. As long as the Republicans control the House of Representatives or any other part of the government, the chances of enacting any of the proposals Dunst thinks necessary to help defeat the dictators – serious educational reform, immigration reform and additional infrastructure projects – are exactly zero. More

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      TikTok CEO grilled for over five hours on China, drugs and teen mental health

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      The chief executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China, as well as the protections for its youngest users, at a testy congressional hearing on Thursday that came amid a bipartisan push to ban the app entirely in the US over national security concerns.The hearing got off to an intense start, with members of the committee hammering on Chew’s connection to executives at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, whom lawmakers say have ties to the Chinese Communist party. The committee members asked how frequently Chew was in contact with them, and questioned whether the company’s proposed solution, called Project Texas, would offer sufficient protection against Chinese laws that require companies to make user data accessible to the government.Lawmakers have long held concerns over China’s control over the app, concerns Chew repeatedly tried to resist throughout the hearing. “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” he said in prepared testimony.But Chew’s claims of independence were undermined by a Wall Street Journal story published just hours before the hearing that said China would strongly oppose any forced sale of the company. Responding for the first time to Joe Biden’s threat of a national ban unless ByteDance sells its shares, the Chinese commerce ministry said such a move would involve exporting technology from China and thus would have to be approved by the Chinese government.Lawmakers also questioned Chew over the platform’s impact on mental health, particularly of its young users. The Republican congressman Gus Bilirakis shared the story of Chase Nasca, a 16-year-old boy who died by suicide a year ago by stepping in front of a train. Nasca’s parents, who have sued ByteDance, claiming Chase was “targeted” with unsolicited suicide-related content, appeared at the hearing and grew emotional as Bilirakis told their son’s story.“I want to thank his parents for being here today, and allowing us to show this,” Bilirakis said. “Mr Chew, your company destroyed their lives.”Driving home concerns about young users, Congresswoman Nanette Barragán asked Chew about reports that he does not let his own children use the app.“At what age do you think it would be appropriate for a young person to get on TikTok?” she said.Chew confirmed his own children were not on TikTok but said that was because in Singapore, where they live, there is not a version of the platform for users under the age of 13. In the US there is a version of TikTok in which the content is curated for a users under 13.“Our approach is to give differentiated experiences for different age groups, and let the parents have conversations with their children to decide what’s best for their family,” he said.The appearance of Chew before the House energy and commerce committee, the first ever by a TikTok chief executive, represents a major test for the 40-year-old, who has remained largely out of the spotlight.Throughout the hearing, Chew stressed TikTok’s distance from the Chinese government, kicking off his testimony with an emphasis on his own Singaporean heritage. Chew talked about Project Texas – an effort to move all US data to domestic servers – and said the company was deleting all US user data that is backed up to servers outside the US by the end of the year.Some legislators expressed that Project Texas was too large an undertaking, and would not tackle concerns about US data privacy soon enough. “I am concerned that what you’re proposing with Project Texas just doesn’t have the technical capability of providing us the assurances that we need,” the California Republican Jay Obernolte, a software engineer, said.At one point, Tony Cárdenas, a Democrat from California, asked Chew outright if TikTok is a Chinese company. Chew responded that TikTok is global in nature, not available in mainland China, and headquartered in Singapore and Los Angeles.Neal Dunn, a Republican from Florida, asked with similar bluntness whether ByteDance has “spied on American citizens” – a question that came amid reports the company accessed journalists’ information in an attempt to identify which employees were leaking information. Chew responded that “spying is not the right way to describe it”.The hearing comes three years after TikTok was formally targeted by the Trump administration with an executive order prohibiting US companies from doing business with ByteDance. Biden revoked that order in June 2021, under the stipulation that the US committee on foreign investment conduct a review of the company. When that review stalled, Biden demanded TikTok sell its Chinese-owned shares or face a ban in the US.This bipartisan nature of the backlash was remarked upon several times during the hearing, with Cárdenas pointing out that Chew “has been one of the few people to unite this committee”.Chew’s testimony, some lawmakers said, was reminiscent of Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in an April 2018 hearing to answer for his own platform’s data-privacy issues – answers many lawmakers were unsatisfied with. Cárdenas said: “We are frustrated with TikTok … and yes, you keep mentioning that there are industry issues that not only TikTok faces but others. You remind me a lot of [Mark] Zuckerberg … when he came here, I said he reminds me of Fred Astaire: a good dancer with words. And you are doing the same today. A lot of your answers are a bit nebulous, they’re not yes or no.”Chew, a former Goldman Sachs banker who has helmed the company since March 2021, warned users in a video posted to TikTok earlier in the week that the company was at a “pivotal moment”.“Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok,” he said, adding that the app now has more than 150 million active monthly US users. “That’s almost half the US coming to TikTok.”TikTok has battled legislative headwinds since its meteoric rise began in 2018. Today, a majority of teens in the US say they use TikTok – with 67% of people ages 13 to 17 saying they have used the app and 16% of that age group saying they use it “almost constantly”, according to the Pew Research Center.This has raised a number of concerns about the app’s impact on young users’ safety, with self-harm and eating disorder-related content spreading on the platform. TikTok is also facing lawsuits over deadly “challenges” that have gone viral on the app.TikTok has introduced features in response to such criticisms, including automatic time limits for users under 18.Some tech critics have said that while TikTok’s data collection does raise concerns, its practices are not much different from those of other big tech firms.“Holding TikTok and China accountable are steps in the right direction, but doing so without holding other platforms accountable is simply not enough,” said the Tech Oversight Project, a technology policy advocacy organization, in a statement.“Lawmakers and regulators should use this week’s hearing as an opportunity to re-engage with civil society organizations, NGOs, academics and activists to squash all of big tech’s harmful practices.” More

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      How the Iraq war altered US politics and led to the emergence of Trump

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      Twenty years ago, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski was working as a desk officer in the Pentagon, when she became aware of a secretive new department called the Office of Special Plans.The OSP had been set up to produce the kind of intelligence that the Bush administration wanted to hear, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Kwiatkowski, then age 42, saw first-hand how the disastrous war was confected.“I had this huge faith in my superiors, that they must be there for a reason, they must be wise and strong and all of these fairytale type things, but I came to find out there are very incompetent people in very high positions,” she said.Kwiatkowski, who became a Pentagon whistleblower over the war, is now a farmer, part-time college professor, and occasional political candidate on the libertarian end of the Republican party in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. She says she was somewhat cynical about war and politics even before she was seconded to the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia department in 2002. But seeing America’s governance subverted up close dramatically deepened her disillusion.“There’s a crisis of faith in this country,” Kwiatkowski said. “As always, when you have these crises of faith you see populist leaders, and the emergence of Trump certainly was a response to a crisis in faith. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next, because Americans have a lot less to be proud of than we think.”On the whole, she believes the experience of the Iraq war has imbued Americans with a healthy scepticism about what they are being told by the establishment – but not nearly enough.“I could go into the Walmart right now and ask everybody about WMD in Iraq and probably three out ten people, maybe more, will swear that it’s all true,” she said. “Our public propaganda in this country is supremely good.”Polling figures over the past two decades suggest that overall attitudes towards foreign policy are fairly stable. When the Chicago Council on Global Affairs asked Americans whether “it will be best for the future of the country if we take an active part in world affairs or if we stay out of world affairs”, 71% supported activism in 2002 and 64% still supported it in 2021.More generally, the Iraq invasion coincided with a collapse in public trust in government which had very briefly recovered from its post-Vietnam slump after the 9/11 attacks. Data from surveys by the Pew Research Centre, show the post-Iraq malaise is deeper and more enduring.“It said first and foremost to young people that the government can’t be trusted,” John Zogby, another US pollster, said. “It also said that the American military may be the strongest in the world but it has serious limits, and it can’t impose its will, even on smaller countries.”He added: “Americans will go to war, but they want their wars to be short, and they want them to make a positive difference.”There are still US soldiers on counter-terrorist missions in Iraq and Syria. The Authorisation to Use Military Force that Congress first granted to the Bush administration in the run-up to the 2003 invasion has yet to be repealed by the Senate, and has been cited by the Obama and Trump administrations in justifying operations in the region.Coleen Rowley, an FBI whistleblower who exposed security lapses leading to the 9/11 attacks, wrote an open letter to the FBI director in March 2003, warning of a “flood of terrorism” resulting from the Iraq invasion. She says now that two decades on, nobody has been held accountable for the fatal mistakes.“I think the real danger is that their propaganda was very successful, and people like Bush and Cheney have now been rehabilitated,” Rowley said. “Even the liberals have embraced Bush and Cheney.”The terrible mistakes made leading to and during the Iraq war forced no resignations and neither George W Bush nor his vice-president, Dick Cheney – nor any other senior official who made the case the war and then oversaw a disastrous occupation – have ever been held to account by any form of commission or tribunal.However, the taint of Iraq arguably altered the course of US politics by hobbling those who supported it.“In some ways you can argue Iraq is what led to Obama being president as opposed to Hillary Clinton,” said Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher school of law and diplomacy at Tufts University. “I don’t think Obama wins the 2008 Democratic primary if Hillary hadn’t supported the war.”The war also opened a schism in the Republican party, strengthening an anti-intervention faction that eventually triumphed with the 2016 election of Donald Trump.George W Bush and his former vice-president have drawn some positive liberal press for their low-key opposition to some of the excesses of the Trump era, but Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East and military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, they paid a political price by becoming marginalised within their own party.“The system has punished those people. If you were a Bushie, if you were a neocon, you’re no longer welcome to the party,” Pollack said. “I would say there has been a lot of accountability, but it’s been accountability in a traditionally American way.”Those excluded included traditional conservatives with less extreme domestic social positions than Maga Republicans. The drive to war was fueled by partisanship – the Bush administration was contemptuous of Democrats and all opposition – but it also served as an accelerant to the extremism that led to Trump and the 6 January insurrection.“It’s very hard to say how much Iraq was responsible for that, but it does seem to me that it was an important element in making our partisanship worse,” Pollack said.Pollack is a former CIA analyst and a Democrat who backed the invasion, believing the evidence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD and supporting the humanitarian argument for ousting a dictator.Pollack jokes that he is the only person to have since apologised. It is not entirely true as a few other pundits, like the conservative commentator, Max Boot, have also been contrite, but there have been no public expressions of remorse from former senior officials who took the fateful decisions. It is one of the important ways in which the US has still not had a proper reckoning for the war.Pollack, who has stayed in touch with several of the Bush team for a forthcoming book on the US and Iraq, said that some express private regret for specific decisions and choices, but others remain unrepentant.“I’ve heard it said to my face that: ‘Nope, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d do everything all over again the exact same way’, which I find shocking,” he said. “I don’t see how you look at American behaviour during this period and not have regrets.” More

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      ‘I’m a little hard to pin down’: country star Brad Paisley becomes unlikely Ukraine advocate

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      Wearing white cowboy hat, black suit and black tie, country singer and guitar virtuoso Brad Paisley strode on stage in the East Room of the White House before a bipartisan audience.It was a Saturday night and, fittingly, he began the 40-minute set playing his hit song American Saturday Night – but with an amended lyric. “I had to change the second line because it mentioned Russia, and I don’t do that any more,” he explained.When Paisley delivered its substitute – “There’s a Ukrainian flag hanging up behind the bar” – no one applauded louder than Joe Biden in the front row.It was a moment that illustrated Paisley’s engagement with Ukraine’s fight for survival and, before a gathering of governors from blue and red states, his efforts to bridge political divides. The 50-year-old from West Virginia, a three-time Grammy winner, describes himself as hard to categorise but optimistic that America can move beyond what has been called a cold civil war.That night last month at the White House, Paisley compelled Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah and an amateur musician, to join him in a duet. He also performed a new song, Same Here, marking the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Speaking by phone Nashville, Tennessee, Paisley recalls: “You had most of the states represented and you had all sides. I could see it in the room: let’s not lose what this is saying because it works. Face to face, left to right, it works. That’s the thing about something like this: when you put it out there, it’s going to be uncomfortable, but that’s OK. Art can be uncomfortable. I welcome the discussion.”The commercial release of Same Here features a voiceover from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking proudly about his country and people. Paisley’s royalties for the track will be donated to the United24 crowdfunding effort to help build housing for thousands of displaced Ukrainians whose homes were destroyed in the war.He describes the song – the first from his new album, Son of the Mountains – as an expression of empathy. “It’s about anybody who longs for freedom. Around this time last year, when I was seeing all this begin to happen, I was moved by the images of people fleeing – mothers, daughters, grandmothers crossing the border, all huddled in the backseat of a car, fleeing for their lives as the husband stayed behind to fight.“It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s unlike anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes. It just felt so helpless to watch this and be a witness to this with nothing we could do. Maybe the most exciting thing for me in having this out is the idea that this is going to help rebuild homes for people, and it’s also raising some awareness.”Zelenskiy has worked tirelessly to promote his cause and build support around the world. The former actor, comedian and screenwriter delivered a rousing speech to the US Congress in Washington and has given video addresses at the Golden Globe and Grammy awards.Paisley reflects: “It’s an amazing thing. Who would have thought? You almost can’t write the script – they did, actually, that was his TV show – but he seems to be the right man at the right time in a way that just seems divine. It’s unbelievable.”The Ukrainian president was happy to collaborate with Paisley and even had some songwriting suggestions. “When he heard it, I got word that there were a few lines that he wondered about and so we worked on those and made sure that it came off the way it did.“It’s funny how much better it is now than when we began in the sense that it’s truly remarkable to hear this voice in the middle of this conflict with a melody. He had great suggestions. I don’t know if he’s got aspirations to write songs or not.”Paisley’s public shows of support for Ukraine has drawn attacks from bots – fake, automated accounts that became notorious after Russia employed them in an effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.It would be no surprise to find Paisley caught in political crossfire. The perils facing country music artists who venture into the political arena were spelled out when the Dixie Chicks faced fierce blowback for their condemnation of President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq.During the 2016 election, a survey by the trade publication Country Aircheck found that 46% of industry professionals favored Republican Donald Trump while 41% preferred Democrat Hillary Clinton. Many stars prefer to remain apolitical, which may be pragmatic considering the risk of alienating half their audience.Nashville, the home of country music, has a Democratic mayor, but is surrounded by Republican red in Tennessee. Paisley does not declare himself to be either Democrat or Republican. “The bottom line is I defy category. I definitely am one of the more confusing people that way. The minute you affiliate, ‘Here’s what I am,’ are you all those things? I’m certainly not all of those things on either side.”“I’m a little hard to pin down. There will be songs when this album comes out where a lot of liberals will go, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t say that!’ I have written an album that does not pull punches. If I believe in something or if I want to tell a story, it’s on here on this album. I have literally bled for it – I’ve cut my hand a couple of times playing the guitar. I’ve written it to the degree that I’ve really tried to scope every word all the way from the very first line to the last line of this album.“The far left may say, ‘What are you doing?’ Harlan Howard, one of our great songwriters in country music, they used to give him flak. So many of the songs were cheating songs, drinking songs. They’re like, ‘Why do you write about that so much?’ He said, ‘When people stop, so will I!” He laughs. “That’s the thing people do. If people don’t do that any more then we’ll have to write country songs about all the other things. But there are songs in here about things people do.”It would not be the first time that Paisley has faced criticism from the left. Next month marks the 10th anniversary of Accidental Racist, Paisley’s ill-fated collaboration with rapper LL Cool J.Paisley began the song with an anecdote about a Black man taking offence at his Confederate flag T-shirt, explaining: “The only thing I meant to say is I’m a Skynyrd fan” – a reference to the southern rock band that often used the flag. He went on to sing about white people are “caught between southern pride and southern blame” a century and a half after the civil war.Paisley insisted that he was trying to foster an open discussion of race relations, but critics said it was tone deaf. An analysis by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic was headlined: “Why ‘Accidental Racist’ Is Actually Just Racist.” Demetria Irwin of the Black culture website the Grio called it “the worst song in the history of music”. Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt tweeted: “I can’t wait for Brad Paisley & LL Cool J’s next single: “Whoopsy Daisy, Holocaust, My Bad.”Did he learn lessons from the experience?“You can’t think of everything, and at some point the art you make should exist as the way you want it to exist, but if it can be better, and somebody has an opinion, you should listen to them. If it’s a valid opinion, if it’s not a bot, if it’s not some sort of strange agenda. In that sense, it’s all been a part of my journey for sure, learning from these things.”The entire nation has been on a vertiginous learning curve in the 10 years since Accidental Racist, witnessing a racial reckoning that has a reframing of American history via the 1619 Project and the removal of many Confederate statues across the south.Paisley comments: “I drove by these statues my whole life since I was 20 here in Tennessee and never really thought about them at all. Obviously I’m the wrong one to ask on whether they come down. It’s not important what I think. To me it’s about the people that feel something so deeply and feel so much hurt. Let’s talk about that.”The musician has long used his platform to advocate for causes, opening a free grocery store in Nashville with his wife, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, and donating 1m meals during the coronavirus pandemic. He visited US troops in Afghanistan and has talked with Zelenskiy about performing in Ukraine. But he rejects that idea that Same Here is a case of mixing music with politics.“To me in no way, shape or form is it a political statement. I guess I have a world leader on and it’s interesting to say something is avoiding politics when you do that. But truthfully, for me, when you boil it down, here’s what we care about: crying at weddings, having a beer together in a remote place, families and soldiers and flags and freedom and all these things.“To me, if you want to call it political, call it whatever you want to call it. But let’s talk about this. These are key things in life that make us human.” More

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      John Bolton chose not to brief Trump on Russia Havana syndrome suspicion

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      John Bolton chose not to brief Trump on Russia Havana syndrome suspicionFormer national security adviser tells podcast ‘we didn’t feel we would get support’ from president during Russia investigationDonald Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton, did not brief the president on suspicions Russia might be behind mysterious “Havana syndrome” attacks on US diplomats because he did not think Trump would support him.‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by foreign adversary, US intelligence saysRead more“Since our concern was that one of the perpetrators – maybe the perpetrator – was Russia,” Bolton said, “we didn’t feel we would get support from President Trump if we said, ‘We think the Russians are coming after American personnel.’”Bolton makes the startling admission in an interview for an episode of a podcast, The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome, hosted by the former Guardian journalist Nicky Woolf and released on Monday.Bolton was national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, a period of intense scrutiny on Trump’s relations with Russia, primarily via special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Mueller issued his report in April 2019. He did not prove collusion between Trump and Moscow in his 2016 election victory over Hillary Clinton but the former FBI director did secure indictments of figures close to Trump and lay out extensive evidence of possible obstruction of justice.Trump angrily rejected allegations of wrongdoing and claimed to be the victim of a witch-hunt. But he also closely courted Vladimir Putin, even seeming, in Helsinki in July 2018, to side with the Russian president against his own intelligence agencies.“Havana syndrome” refers to the investigation of more than 1,000 “anomalous health incidents” involving diplomats, spies and other US government employees around the world. The first cases emerged in 2016.Symptoms have included brain injuries, hearing loss, vertigo and unusual auditory sensations. Speculation about directed energy weapons has persisted, though earlier this month an official report said “available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents”.Havana syndrome got its name because, as Bolton told The Sound, “the first reports came from Cuba [so] it would not be unreasonable to say the Cubans were doing it”.But, he said, “it becomes counterintuitive pretty quickly. If they wanted to keep the American embassy open, you wouldn’t attack it. That tended to show that it was some other government. And a government with more capabilities than we thought the Cubans had.”The Trump administration cracked down on Cuba anyway, returning it to the “state sponsor of terror” list, ending a diplomatic thaw begun by Barack Obama. Bolton, a famous rightwing foreign policy hawk, told The Sound he favoured taking that step anyway, regardless of the origin of the Havana syndrome attacks.He also said he and other national security staffers “felt that because it was possible – not certain, but possible – this emanated from a hostile foreign power and we had our ideas who that might be … we thought more needed to be done to consider that possibility and either find evidence to rule it in or rule it out”.If the attack theory was real, Bolton said, there was “no shortage of evidence that would point to Russia as … at least the top suspect”.Nonetheless, he said, he decided not to take that suspicion to Trump.“Who knows what he would’ve said,” Bolton said of his decision not to brief Trump on his suspicions about Russia and Havana syndrome.“He might’ve said, ‘Do nothing at all.’ I didn’t want to chance that, because I did feel it was serious.”Trump fired Bolton in September 2019. The following year, Bolton released a book, The Room Where It Happened, in which he was highly critical of his former boss. Trump sought to prevent publication. Bolton has said he could run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 if it is a way to stop Trump, who he has called “poison” to the Republican party.Speaking to The Sound, Bolton suggested the decision not to brief Trump about suspicions about Russia damaged attempts to investigate the Havana syndrome mystery.“When you don’t have the ability to bring the hammer down and say, ‘Find the answer out,’ … it’s much easier for the bureaucracy to resist.”TopicsDonald TrumpJohn BoltonTrump administrationTrump-Russia investigationUS politicsUS national securityUS foreign policynewsReuse this content More

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      Rightwing Republicans rail against US aid for Ukraine: ‘We’ve done enough’

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      Rightwing Republicans rail against US aid for Ukraine: ‘We’ve done enough’War emerges as a wedge issue in the forthcoming Republican primary election as far right at CPAC call for US to end supportMarjorie Taylor Greene, an influential far-right Republican in Congress, has called for the US to stop aid to Ukraine, giving added voice to a grassroots revolt in the party that threatens bipartisan support for the war against Russia’s Vladimir Putin.The Georgia congresswoman is a notorious provocateur who has made racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic statements and promoted bizarre conspiracy theories.Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps rising in Republican ranks despite ‘loony lies’Read moreYet she has emerged as a prominent voice in the House of Representatives after forging a bond with the speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who vowed that Republicans will not write a “blank cheque” for Ukraine.Greene told the Guardian that Joe Biden is “putting the entire world at risk of world war three”, a view widely held at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), America’s biggest annual gathering of conservatives.“I think the US should be pushing for peace in Ukraine instead of funding and continuing a war that seems to be escalating and putting the entire world at risk of world war three,” Greene said during CPAC at the National Harbor in Maryland on Friday.Greene called for US funding to cease immediately, insisting that, while she voted for a resolution to support the Ukrainian people and condemning Russia’s invasion, “we are actually accelerating a war there”.She added: “We should be promoting peace. Europe should have peace and the United States should do their part. Ukraine is not a Nato member nation and Joe Biden said in the beginning he would not defend Ukraine because they’re not a Nato member nation. It doesn’t make sense and the American people do not support it.”A year after Russia’s unprovoked invasion, the US has provided four rounds of aid to Ukraine, totaling about $113bn, with some of the money going toward replenishment of US military equipment that was sent to the frontlines.The two leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, former president Donald Trump and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, have both expressed scepticism about the Ukraine cause. Opinion polls also show an erosion of public support.The conflict was mostly absent from speeches on the main stage at CPAC, once the home of cold warrior Ronald Reagan but now a stronghold for the isolationist “America first” wing of the Republican party. Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the UN who is running for president, and Mike Pompeo, an ex-secretary of state weighing his own run, gave the subject a wide berth in their addresses.But outside the cavernous ballroom with its glitzy red, white and blue stage, neat rows of seats and banks of TV cameras, there was less circumspection and more crowd congestion. The rightwing podcaster and former White House strategist Steve Bannon repeatedly railed against the war in Ukraine before a noisy gathering of fans.On Friday he was joined by Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman who recently put forward a “Ukraine Fatigue” resolution in the House. Gaetz warned of the dangers of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the threat of a third world war and said: “Zelinskiy’s new zeal for anti-corruption efforts and oversight seems to directly align with Republicans taking over the House of Representatives.”Bannon rejoined: “Every Republican who supports this murderous war in Ukraine should be turfed out.”Interviews with more than a dozen CPAC attendees elicited similar views and, in some cases, sympathy for Putin. Theresa McManus, wearing a cowboy hat and jacket, and a riding skirt patterned with words from the US constitution, said forcefully: “I like Putin. I think he’s got balls and he’s taking care of his country.”What to expect from this year’s CPAC: Biden bashing, 2024 Republican primary chatter and lawsuit gossipRead moreRepeating a Kremlin talking point that people in the Donbas region want to be liberated from Ukraine, the 67-year-old horse trainer from rural Virginia continued: “No, we shouldn’t give them any more money. No, we should not be involved with them. They should not be part of Nato.”Paul Brintley, 50, ambassador for the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition, described Putin as “not so much a dictator” and said of Ukraine: “I don’t think we should be the police of the world. I don’t think we should bankroll them. We’ve done enough.”Some at CPAC hew to conspiracy theories about the war. Jason Jisa, 41, from Dallas, Texas, said: “Show me where you’re sending the money. Show me war footage. Go look at all the previous wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, we’re flooded. We’re shown video of it every single day. You don’t see hardly any video come from Ukraine. Why? Where are the camera crews?”Jisa, owner of the “USA Trump Store”, added: “Where’s the money going? Why are we on the hook for them? Why, while we have veterans in the street, we have homeless people all over the place, we have inflation going crazy, are we going to send billions and billions and billions of dollars?”Ukraine is emerging as a wedge issue in the looming Republican primary election. Trump, who launched his campaign last November, has repeatedly called for an end to hostilities and claimed that, if he were to return to the Oval Office, he could end the war “within 24 hours”.DeSantis, another potential contender, was viewed as a foreign policy hawk who embraced tough rhetoric against Putin while he served in Congress. But he has increasingly adopted a similar tone as he courts Trump’s populist base, though he did not attend CPAC.But former vice-president Mike Pence, widely expected to launch a bid for the White House in the coming months, has called for Washington to intensify support for Ukraine and insisted that “there can be no room in the leadership of the Republican Party for apologists for Putin”. This stance is shared by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and others in the party establishment.Neither Pence nor McConnell came to CPAC, which some critics argue is losing relevance as it fails to shake off Trump. Hylton Phillips-Page, 67, a retired investment manager from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, described Putin as a “thug” but admitted “mixed feelings” over continued aid for Ukraine.“I don’t think our support can forever be at the expense of our own country. I would be quite OK with our Congress saying: until you finish the wall and protect our own border, you shouldn’t be protecting somebody else’s border. I’m not opposed to supporting them but I would like us to do some stuff at home.”Antwon Williams, 40, from Columbia, South Carolina, who was selling Trump merchandise, said: “America needs to worry about the troops that we have, our veterans that need our help here in America, instead of writing an unlimited cheque to these people out here,” he said.“No offence to them [Ukrainians]. It’s horrible what they’re going through. No one wants to see anyone hurting and dying out there. But we have our own veterans that fought for America and our freedom that is hurting, that is homeless, that is needing help, who have mental issues and who are starving right here in America.”TopicsCPACUS politicsUkraineRepublicansUS foreign policyfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘Time is not on our side’: Congress panel says tackling China defines next century

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      ‘Time is not on our side’: Congress panel says tackling China defines next century‘We do not want a war within the PRC, a clash of civilizations,’ says ranking Democrat as new committee holds first hearingThe US Congress must act urgently to counter the economic and national security threats posed by the Chinese government, a bipartisan chorus of lawmakers on a newly created special House committee has warned during an inaugural, primetime hearing.The two superpowers were locked in an “existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century”, the committee’s Republican chairman, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, said as the rivalry between the US and China deepens.With democracy advocates and protesters in attendance, the panel – formally the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party – began its work at a precarious moment for US-China relations. It comes weeks after a suspected Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental US and amid intelligence that Beijing is considering providing lethal weapons to aid Russia in its war against Ukraine.Some politicians seem comfortable with the prospect of a new cold war. They shouldn’t be | Christopher S ChivvisRead moreMeanwhile, China’s militarization and aggression toward Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own, as well as its response to the coronavirus pandemic, have further escalated tensions.Underscoring the broad range of challenges the panel hopes to address, lawmakers peppered the witnesses with questions on human rights abuses, trade policies, the influence of TikTok, aggression in Taiwan, the origins of Covid-19 and international espionage.Gallagher hopes the committee will help shape China policy and legislation that can win support from both parties. But with the 2024 presidential campaign looming, and Republicans eager to paint Joe Biden as “weak on China”, the possibility of bipartisan action is likely to become increasingly narrow.“Time is not on our side,” he said, imploring a bitterly divided Congress to come together to confront China. “Our policy over the next 10 years will set the stage for the next hundred.”Illinois congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat on the panel, echoed Gallagher’s sense of urgency. He said Democrats and Republicans had for years “underestimated” the Chinese government, believing that economic integration would “inevitably lead to democracy”. But it did not and now the US needed to move quickly to pursue economic and trade policies that would “up our game” as Americans to compete with China.“We do not want a war within the PRC,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China, “not a cold war, not a hot war. We don’t want a clash of civilizations.”The hours-long proceeding ​offered a rare display of cross-party unity in a​n​ otherwise bitterly divided Congress​. It featured two former advisers to Donald Trump: former national security adviser HR McMaster and former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, a China expert who resigned after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.Offering a sweeping overview of China’s rise, Pottinger said the success of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) at presenting itself as “responsible” and “normal” was “one of the great magic tricks of the modern era”.“You could say the CCP is the Harry Houdini of Marxist-Leninist regimes; the David Copperfield of Communism; the Criss Angel of autocracy,” he said “But the magic is fading.”McMaster said the US and western leaders were guilty of decades of “wishful thinking and self-delusion” in its efforts to integrate China into the international system. But he expressed optimism that the panel’s work could help lay the groundwork in Washington to “rebuild America’s and the free world’s competitive advantage”.Pentagon releases selfie of US pilot flying above Chinese spy balloonRead moreThe panel met in the same chandeliered room where the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol held its hearings. In the audience were Hong Kong pro-democracy activists as well as anti-war protesters who interrupted the proceedings, with one yelling “this committee is about saber-rattling, it’s not about peace” as he was removed from the hearing room.Several members remarked on the interference, noting that the right to protest was a hallmark of American democracy and a freedom not afforded to those in China.Highlighting human rights concerns will be a major focus of the panel. On Tuesday, the panel heard compelling testimony from Tong Yi, a human rights activist who was the former secretary to one of China’s leading dissidents, Wei Jingsheng. Yi told how she was arrested and detained by the CCP in the 1990s. After spending nine months in a detention center she was charged with “disturbing social order” and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a labor camp.“In the US, we need to face the fact that we have helped feed the baby dragon of the CCP until it has grown into what it now is,” she said.The committee also heard from Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, who argued that the US dependency on China has had a crushing impact on American workers and wages. “While conflict with China isn’t inevitable, fierce economic competition is,” he said.On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan consensus has emerged around measures banning TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app, bills barring Chinese citizens and companies from purchasing land near sensitive military sites, and efforts to limit US exports and technology trade to China. But there are also sharp divisions.Republicans continue to assail Biden over his response to the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, which was downed by the US military after it sailed across North America.​Asked during the hearing what message China hoped to send with the balloon, McMaster said he believed it was likely a “metaphor for the massive effort at espionage” Beijing is carrying out around the world. China has denied the airship was used for spying, ​​claiming that it was a civilian aircraft blown off course​.Meanwhile, revelations that the US energy department concluded with “low confidence” that the Covid-19 pandemic was the result of a lab leak in China has inflamed anew a partisan debate over the virus’s origins. Officials in Washington have said that US agencies are not in agreement over the virus’s origins.Critics of the panel have raised concerns that heated rhetoric casting China as the US’s enemy would amplify anti-Asian sentiment amid a surge in hate incidents. Addressing those fears directly, Krishnamoorthi would avoid “anti-Chinese or Asian stereotyping at all costs”.“We must recognize that the CCP wants us to be fractious, partisan and prejudiced – in fact, the CCP hopes for it,” he said.Earlier on Tuesday, the House foreign affairs committee held a hearing focused on countering the rising national security threats posed by China. Testifying before the panel, Daniel Kritenbrink, US assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs, said China represented “our most consequential geopolitical challenge”.Joan E Greve contributed to this reportTopicsUS foreign policyChinaUS politicsAsia PacificCoronavirusnewsReuse this content More

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      Capitol Hill finds rare bipartisan cause in China – but it could pose problems

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      Capitol Hill finds rare bipartisan cause in China – but it could pose problemsExperts fear this moment of agreement in Washington could escalate tensions with Beijing and increase the risk of conflictIn the weeks since the US military shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have spoken passionately about the need to more effectively compete with Beijing. A resolution condemning China for the balloon incident passed the House in an unanimous vote of 419 to 0.Joe Biden has similarly expressed hope that efforts to strengthen America’s global competitiveness in response to a rising China can unite Democrats and Republicans in an era defined by bitter partisanship.“Today, we’re in the strongest position in decades to compete with China or anyone else in the world,” Biden said in his State of the Union address earlier this month. “Let’s be clear: winning the competition with China should unite all of us.”The new House select committee on China will hold its first primetime public hearing on Tuesday, and the panel’s supporters are optimistic its work will provide a rare opportunity for bipartisan cooperation in the divided Congress.But while there’s widespread agreement among policymakers and lawmakers in Washington over the need to better compete with China, there is no prevailing consensus on how to do so. Some experts also fear this kumbaya moment in Washington could escalate tensions with Beijing and increase the risk of conflict.“There is a bipartisan consensus on the fact that China poses a broad challenge to the United States across multiple domains,” said Patricia Kim, an expert on US-China relations at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “I don’t believe we have a clear consensus on the precise mix of policies that are necessary to address this challenge.”A committee walks the ‘fine line’Competitor or adversary? West struggles to define relationship with BeijingRead moreOne of Republican Kevin McCarthy’s first major victories after securing the House speakership (on the 15th ballot) was to create a new select committee examining competition between the US and China. The motion to form the committee was overwhelmingly approved in a 365 to 65 vote, with 146 Democrats joining all Republicans.“I’ve heard my colleagues on both sides say that the threat posed by Communist China is serious. I fully agree. This is an issue that transcends our political parties,” McCarthy said.The panel, officially named the House select committee on strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist party, is broadly charged with examining a host of economic, security and human rights issues involving China.The panel will be led by congressman Mike Gallagher, a Republican of Wisconsin and prominent “China hawk”, who emphasized that it would work in a bipartisan fashion to expose the threats the CCP poses to US national security and economic interests. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat of Illinois, will serve as the committee’s ranking member. The leaders have stressed that the target of their scrutiny is China’s ruling party, not its people, and hope their work yields policy and legislative recommendations that win support from lawmakers of both parties.Of course, partisan divisions will arise. Republicans increasingly depict China as an outright “adversary” intent on reshaping the international order while the the Biden administration and many Democrats ​have treaded more delicately, describing it as “our most consequential strategic competitor”.Republicans have repeatedly attacked Biden over his approach to Beijing, though members of both parties criticized the president’s handling of the balloon incident with some lawmakers accusing the White House of concealing information. And there have also been partisan disagreements about how the US should engage China over shared challenges such as the climate crisis.At the same time, some of the rhetoric from Gallagher and his Republican colleagues has alarmed Democratic members of the committee. Congressman Andy Kim, a Democrat of New Jersey, voiced concern after McCarthy and Gallagher co-signed a Fox News op-ed outlining a strategy to “win the new cold war” against China.“If Chair Gallagher keeps talking about this as a ‘new cold war’, that is not helpful,” Kim told NBC News. “There’s a fine line between deterrence and provocation, and you are crossing over that in a way that is only going to inflame and create greater escalatory challenges.”And there is fear that language casting China as America’s enemy will encourage anti-Asian sentiment amid a surge in hate incidents.“I have a lot of respect for Mike Gallagher in terms of how he’ll conduct the committee in a serious way, but it’s important to see how the conversations unfold,” committee member Ro Khanna, a Democrat of California, told the Guardian.“For those of us who are concerned about not devolving into a cold war or anti-Asian American sentiment, we have to be particularly vocal.”A transition is under wayOver the last decade, as the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, consolidated power at home, hope in Washington of improving US-China relations dimmed. Under Xi’s rule, the US has accused China of committing genocide against the Uyghurs and other Turkic and Islamic minority people in the country’s Xinjiang province.Xi has meanwhile overseen an expansive military buildup. This month, the Pentagon informed Congress that China now had more missile silos than the US, though the US has a much larger nuclear force than China.Amid rising fears of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a self-governed island that Beijing claims as its own, the US military has expanded its presence in Asia. Just this month, the US gained expanded access to four military bases in the Philippines.Meanwhile, US lawmakers, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, have enraged Beijing with visits to Taiwan in a show of support for the island’s democracy. Gallagher and Khanna made official trips to the capital city of Taipei this month for meetings with top political, national security and business leaders.The discovery of the suspected Chinese spy balloon sparked a diplomatic crisis that resulted in the cancellation of a long-planned trip to Beijing by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken. Just weeks prior, a top US military commander warned officers in a memo that his “gut” told him the US and China would be at war by 2025.Now US officials say China is considering supplying lethal weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine. China denies the claim, though that didn’t stop US national security adviser Jake Sullivan from telling CNN on Sunday that it would be “a bad mistake” for Chinese officials to do that. “China should want no part of it,” Sullivan said.In a sign of lawmakers’ hardening views on China, measures to confront Beijing on multiple fronts now routinely attract bipartisan support.Last year, Congress overwhelmingly approved sweeping legislation aimed at growing the nation’s domestic manufacturing and technology sectors to try to boost US competitiveness with China. Shortly thereafter, Biden introduced export restrictions on semiconductors in an effort to strangle China’s microchip sector.Congress also gave the Biden administration new authority to send Taiwan weapons​, though lawmakers say a spending dispute is slowing efforts to help the self-governing island fortify its defenses against China.Meanwhile, there is growing support for legislation that would ban the Chinese-owned video sharing platform TikTok that lawmakers say poses a security risk, as well as for efforts to hold China accountable over the country’s alleged abuses of Muslim minorities in its Xinjiang province.The US is turning from a strategy of integration with China to one of confrontation and competition, said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. ​The sharp erosion in relations between the world’s largest economies​​, underscored by calls for an economic “decoupling”, has left multinational ​companies ​scrambling to adapt to the new geopolitical reality.“It’s a very fraught environment for companies to operate in,” Kennedy said. “They’ve become careful to a fault.”Spy balloon, UFO or Dragon Ball? Japan baffled by iron ball washed up on beachRead moreYet despite the rising tensions, he noted that the countries’ economies remain highly interdependent. Last year, trade between the US and China reached a record high of nearly $700bn.Bipartisanship without consensusAs US policymakers intensify their efforts to reorient the relationship between China and the US, critical questions remain about what that strategy will look like in practice.There is broad agreement that the US must decrease its reliance on Chinese-made goods and technologies, said Kim, the Brookings expert, but “there certainly isn’t a consensus on how much de-risking and decoupling is necessary to strike the right balance between national security concerns and upholding American values and principles that have long held dear the free flow of information, people, trade and open markets”.The House panel begins its work at a time of rising ​public ​hostility toward China. ​According to a survey by the Pew Research Center​, ​82% of Americans ​hold an unfavorable view of the country, ​more than twice the figure in 2012, when Xi came to power. In general, Republicans, more so than Democrats, tend to harbor more negative views of China and are more likely to support the US taking a more hardline approach to the country, it found.The committee’s hearings, meanwhile, will play out against the backdrop of a presidential campaign cycle, ​with Republicans already aiming to cast Biden as “weak” on China.Amid this heated political environment, some experts have emphasized the importance of avoiding a drumbeat to war with China. Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, complimented Biden’s overall handling of the balloon incident, but he admonished the administration’s “overreaction” in canceling Blinken’s trip.“The American people are going to take cues from their leaders on these issues,” said Duss, who is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That makes it even more important for the administration and for others not to signal hysteria.”The US will soon mark 20 years since the invasion of Iraq, Duss noted; that vastly consequential and widely criticised decision was supported by members of both parties at the time.“Bipartisanship is good,” Duss said. “But bipartisanship behind bad policy is very bad.”TopicsUS CongressUS politicsEspionageChinaJoe BidenUS foreign policyfeaturesReuse this content More