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Is the US Back Under Biden?
by Philippa Kaur 2 March 2021, 16:26
Caligula was by all accounts a nasty piece of work. During the nearly four years that he ruled over the Roman Empire in the first century CE, Caligula was notorious for sexual predation and extravagant spending. Never one to sell himself short, he proclaimed early on that he was a god. He held the Senate in such contempt that he forced its high-ranking members to run alongside his chariot for miles dressed in their togas. He dismissed Virgil as a hack writer and Livy as a dispenser of fake history, and he dreamed of making his favorite horse a consul.
He was also inordinately fond of killing people, sometimes only to seize their assets. Or because he was bored, like the time at a gladiatorial contest when there were no criminals to execute during the intermission. Thinking fast, the despot ordered his guards to throw an entire section of the audience into the arena to be devoured by wild animals.
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The world’s most powerful empire suffered four years of unbounded narcissism from a man with a reputation for sexual assaults and a fondness for cruelty who disparaged everyone in sight. Sound familiar?
The one member of his close circle whose life Caligula spared was his uncle Claudius, primarily to make fun of the older man, who was lame and stammered. But “Sleepy Claudius,” particularly as depicted in the two historical novels of Robert Graves and portrayed by Derek Jacobi in the hit BBC series, was a crafty fellow who knew how to survive the deadly game of Roman imperial politics. When the Praetorian Guard finally had enough of Caligula and assassinated him — with the support of the political elite — Claudius was found hiding behind the curtains in the palace and proclaimed the new emperor.
Claudius went on to rule for 13 years. Despite being absent-minded and scatter-brained, he proved to be far more capable than most Romans anticipated. The new emperor restored the rule of law throughout the empire. He stabilized the economy, embarked on an ambitious plan to improve the infrastructure of the realm, and even expanded its reach in the Balkans, North Africa and far-off Britain.
Joe Biden, similarly underestimated because of his stammer and meandering speeches, has channeled Claudius in his first month in office. With a flurry of executive orders, the new US president has quickly reversed some of the most damaging policies of his deranged predecessor. Facing both a pandemic and an economic crisis, he is restoring confidence in government with a rapid vaccination rollout and a large-scale stimulus package. He has plans for big policy initiatives around infrastructure, energy and immigration.
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But, of course, not everyone was thrilled with Emperor Claudius, particularly those on the Roman periphery. The British, for instance, chafed under imperial rule. Their escalating anger culminated in the bloody but ultimately unsuccessful revolt of Queen Boudica in 60 CE. Not surprisingly, Biden too has faced his share of criticism, particularly among those on the receiving end of American power or those who’ve bristled at the fickleness of American leadership.
America’s Caligula is still around, perhaps even harboring hopes of a return to power in 2024. In the meantime, what are we to make of America’s Claudius and his effort to bring stability to the American empire?
Biden Makes Nice with the World
The Biden administration has gone into overdrive in its efforts to rejoin the international community as a member in good standing. On February 19, the United States officially reentered the 2015 Paris climate agreement, while Special Envoy John Kerry has pledged to restore the $2 billion for the Green Climate Fund that the US promised under Barack Obama but never delivered. The administration has rejoined the World Health Organization, signed up for the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) program and promised to disburse the $4 billion that Congress appropriated for COVAX at the end of 2020. Biden reversed some of former President Donald Trump’s most noxious immigration policies, shutting down construction of the wall on the southern border, ending the “Muslim travel ban” and beginning to bring the country back into compliance with international norms around refugees and asylum-seekers.
The Biden administration has also pledged more cooperative relations with NATO allies, Pacific partners and democratic countries more generally. It rejoined the UN Human Rights Council as an observer and restored funding for the UN Population Fund. It began the process of reviving the Iran nuclear deal, restarted relations with Palestinian organizations, embarked tentatively on restoring better relations with Cuba, extended New START with Russia and stopped funding the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Not bad for one month’s work.
President Biden’s moves have encountered inevitable challenges, both domestic and foreign. The Senate, as I explained in my last column, has been perhaps the major check in American politics on an authentic internationalism. Not surprisingly, some Republicans in the Senate are already trying to undermine US involvement in the Paris climate agreement, and they’re sharpening their knives to attack renewed engagement with Iran and with Cuba.
Some allies, too, are not fully on board with Biden’s great reset. France would prefer to invest more in an independent European security system and rely less on NATO. Germany is not interested in a full-court press on Russia and hopes to strike a compromise with the Biden administration that would allow it to stay on schedule with its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline deal with the Kremlin. Japan and South Korea are squeamish about the trilateral coordination that the United States is (again) promoting, relations with Turkey are tense and Israel is unhappy with Biden’s restoring US ties with Palestine.
But the real problem with the president’s new approach to the world lies not in the resistance it has engendered at home or the ambivalence it has fostered abroad. It lies with the very nature of Biden’s foreign policy.
The Stick
The amount of damage that Trump did to the world was limited to a certain extent by his incompetence. He could have blundered into another war if his advisers had let the presidential id run wild. If he’d had a Stephen Miller to do to foreign policy what this savvy operator did to immigration, Trump might well have permanently damaged the global system.
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Biden, meanwhile, has assembled a thoroughly competent team of professionals — from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield to climate czar John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. That competence is a godsend when it comes to navigating the intricacies of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate negotiations.
But when it comes to the less pleasant aspects of US foreign policy, that competence might prove deadly. Claudius, it turned out, was not a feeble dotard. He knew exactly how to deploy Rome’s imperial might to finish the job Caligula had started in conquering Mauritania and to extend the empire’s dominion to the westernmost reaches of Europe. If the Biden administration decides to ramp up confrontation with China in the South China Sea, for instance, his team might very competently — and disastrously — marshal US allies in the region to implement the plan.
Pax Romana was largely an enforced peace rather than a negotiated one, and Pax Americana has always relied on the overwhelming predominance of US military power. Already, the Biden team has stated its desire to focus on great power rivalry with China and Russia rather than losing propositions like the war in Afghanistan. That preference will translate into a continuation of bloated military budgets, large arms deals with allies and sort-of allies on the periphery of China and Russia, and the deployment of various economic strategies like sanctions to influence the behavior of these perennial competitors.
In his early days in office, Biden has been quick to emphasize the role of diplomacy, promising that force will be the “tool of last resort.” A dramatic example of that approach has been the absence of any drone strikes during the first month of the administration. This is in marked contrast to the strikes that Obama and Trump ordered almost immediately upon taking office as well as the escalation in attacks that took place in Trump’s final months. Only one airstrike has been reported, in Iraq on February 9 against the Islamic State. (Editor’s note: This article was written prior to the US airstrike in eastern Syria on February 25.) In addition to initiating a review of drone strikes, the administration has launched a probe into Special Forces operations to ascertain whether they have adhered to the Pentagon’s “law of war” requirements. This is all very promising. But will it last?
Claudius was content to be successful within the Roman imperial framework. Guilty of his own excesses of violence, he never tried to turn the empire back into a republic or negotiate a new set of relations with Rome’s far-flung possessions. He knew only to expand. Biden, too, operates within the existing system of American dominance. It remains to be seen whether he will dramatically reduce the US military footprint and work with other major powers to redefine international relations at a time of multiple global crises.
If he doesn’t, America will risk the same fate that befell Rome after the death of Claudius. In 54 CE, a new emperor took power who made Caligula look like a cub scout. This latest Caesar made sure that the good that Claudius did during his 13-year reign was indeed interred with his bones. “Nero practiced every kind of obscenity,” writes the gossipy chronicler Suetonius, adding that the new emperor “annulled many of Claudius’ decrees and edicts, on the grounds that he’d been a doddering old idiot.”
The trick, then, is not just to reverse the evils of one’s predecessor but to make those reversals stick. That, in turn, will require not just quick fixes but turning the United States into a truly cooperative world power.
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Serious Politics Is Not About Recalibration
by Philippa Kaur 1 March 2021, 16:01
Donald Trump’s brand of hyperreality over the past four years relied heavily on melodramatic plotting to keep the audience invested in the performance. To reestablish the more sober style of hyperreality the Democratic Party as an ideological force has come to represent, US President Joe Biden has cultivated the Democrats’ artificial style of neo-realism in its approach to political conflict. The Biden administration’s rhetorical creativity offers some insight into how this hyperreality is intended to play out.
Trump, the former US president, typically chose an easy media strategy. He would disregard all existing standards, preferring to bully and shock. He relied on the public’s acceptance of the notion that — as he once said about himself — he could get away with murder in the middle of Fifth Avenue. (This paralleled his boast about women, whom he would grab in their private parts when he tired of shooting men in broad daylight.)
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Biden has inherited a different, more “presidential” role. Independently of the policies he adopts, he finds himself having to exaggerate the contrast with Trump by at least seeming to reflect on complex issues, weighing the pros and cons and engaging in thoughtful deliberation on the same topics that Trump typically bulldozed his way through. After all that deliberation, the result tends to differ more in style than in substance.
The Daily Devil’s Dictionary recently considered the case of Trump’s sanctions against Fatou Bensouda and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Biden has found himself in the awkward position of having to reaffirm the nation’s traditional refusal to be judged for war crimes while, at the same time, recognizing the legitimacy of the actions of the ICC so impudently denied by Trump. Now, Biden has a similar juggling act to carry out with Saudi Arabia after his director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, followed the prescribed democratic logic of obeying a command made by Congress that Trump had simply refused to acknowledge. It concerned the release of the CIA’s assessment of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist working for The Washington Post.
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Trump chose to shield the perpetrators from any form of judgment. After all, Saudi Arabia spends hundreds of millions on American weapons. After showing such virtue, what crime could they possibly be accused of? Biden had to find a way of countering Trump while reaffirming America’s commitment to the ideal of even-handed justice. It is all in the name of preserving “American interests” (which everyone by now should know means simply money and geopolitical influence).
The Washington Post explains how Biden has accomplished that mission: “The Biden administration will impose no direct punishment on Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, despite the conclusion of a long-awaited intelligence report released Friday that he ‘approved’ the operation, administration officials said.”
When the press corps confronted Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, questioning her over whether MBS could be “sanctioned personally,” she responded that something would be done, though without any indication of what that might be. She nevertheless offered this explanation, while insisting twice on the word “clear.” She said, “the president has been clear, and we’ve been clear by our actions that we’re going to recalibrate the relationship.” What could be clearer than the totally objective, scientific notion of recalibration?
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Recalibrate:
Redefine a policy or relationship in such a way as to make the undermining of any existing moral principles appear justified in the pursuit of selfish interests
Contextual Note
Most Americans consider cold-blooded murder a moral fault as well as a criminal act. The idea of dealing with it by recalibrating a relationship might sound to some like a sick joke. How many people on death row in the US wouldn’t welcome the idea of recalibrating their relationship with the justice system? Considering that most of them — a majority of blacks, some of them later proven innocent — have not have benefited from the kind of rigorous investigation the Turkish government and the CIA carried out concerning the Khashoggi murder, the leniency of recalibration would certainly interest them.
The Guardian notes a slight contradiction with the moral stance Biden took concerning the Khashoggi murder during the campaign: “The decision to release the report and expected move to issue further actions represents the first major foreign policy decision of Joe Biden’s presidency, months after he vowed on the presidential campaign trail to make a ‘pariah’ out of the kingdom.”
This recalibration of attitude illustrates an interesting phenomenon in politics: the freedom opposition politicians have to invoke what resembles the truth followed by their tendency to equivocate as soon as they have their hands on the reins of power. “Recalibrate” deserves to be voted the Orwellian Newspeak word of the year.
Historical Note
To put things in perspective, Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained: “The relationship with Saudi Arabia is bigger than any one individual.” A lot of Americans, from Henry Ford to Joseph Kennedy and some of the most prominent US companies — IBM, Coca-Cola, Chase Manhattan, General Electric, Kodak, Standard Oil and Random House among others — felt exactly the same way about Nazi Germany. Why compromise a productive relationship simply because one man spouts heterodox ideas and has a tendency to kill people in the name of those ideas?
The Washington Post quotes Blinken invoking Jen Psaki’s “recalibration” trope. In his press conference, he praised Joe Biden for moving “toward a promised ‘recalibration’ of the U.S.-Saudi relationship.” Oddly, the secretary of state seems to have forgotten that it wasn’t “one individual” who carried out the assassination, but a team of 15 who flew in and out of Istanbul for this specific effort.
The Guardian realistically described how Mohammed bin Salman’s team culture works: “Prince Mohammed had ‘probably’ fostered an environment in which aides were afraid that they might be fired or arrested if they failed to complete assigned tasks, suggesting they were ‘unlikely to question’ the prince’s orders or undertake sensitive tasks without his approval.” As Hamlet once said of Denmark, “something is rotten in the state.” Like Biden and Blinken, Hamlet was reacting to a high-profile murder. Part of his quandary was that it wasn’t just about “one individual,” even though the Danish prince was focused on the man — his uncle — who had killed his father.
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As a political metaphor, the idea of recalibration may appear reassuring to some people thanks to its scientific ring, expressing an engineer’s objectivity in seeking to work with the most accurate measurements. But does it make any sense when what is at stake is a moral question, in this case literally of life and death? Or should we conclude that, for those who practice it, there are no moral questions in politics, only pragmatic ones, only questions that can be decided according to the unique criterion of “national interest?”
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the limits of purely “national” reasoning. The awareness of those limits will inevitably be challenged again over the next decade by the impending drama of climate change, possibly other pandemics and another global economic crash. The question of supply chains that the US encountered at the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 and now concerning semiconductors demonstrates the absurdity of a world that has made sacrosanct the status of the nation-state.
Some kind of global system of cooperation — not just between nations and regions but between all manner of human groupings as well — must emerge if an economy now defined by the unique principle of technological exploitation of the earth’s resources is to persist. The ideal of growth that guides every national government is little more than a strategy of accelerated depletion of the world’s common patrimony. The very idea of national interest in a world of competitive nation-states has become a weapon of mass obliteration.
The more technologically developed the world becomes, the more it needs to adopt some form of moral compass capable of constraining the decision-making of nations. Growth and job creation have become the only public values today’s nations are capable of putting forward. Their political imagination withers and dies as soon as they attempt to reason beyond these goals. These “public” goals are nothing more than the veneer on the surface of a powerful system dedicated to private gain.
Such a system needs something more than simple recalibration if it is to survive.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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The Time for a Just and Equitable Society
by Philippa Kaur 26 February 2021, 13:19
While keeping a wary eye on the Republican Party bloodbath from a safe distance, it is probably time to get a grip on the Democratic Party, shake really hard, and hope that what comes pouring out is a commitment to the progressive policy agenda that so many in the party have worked so hard to define. This is not the time to cave in again to the nonsense about the perfect being the enemy of the good, a phrase that so quickly drips off the lips of those who promise a good game but are never willing to risk anything to realize that promise.
It should be easy to start with two simple propositions, each of which by now must be considered essential to any principled American social order after having been fully exposed like never before by the pandemic lens. It is way beyond time for universal access to meaningful health care to be the law of the land, not some dumbed-down public/private partnership, but the real thing. And it is way beyond time to double the minimum wage because no one can be expected to meet even the basic necessities of life at a pay rate of $7.25 per hour. That amounts to $15,080 per year, generally without benefits or paid leave, so don’t get sick, feed your kids from a real grocery store, live in a decent place or go anywhere.
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I don’t care about handwringing, I don’t care about the national debt (only raised as a problem when America tries to spend more on social programs), I don’t care about compromise, and I sure as hell don’t care about sanctimonious talk of incremental change where these two issues are concerned. The only people in favor of incremental change are those who already have access to meaningful health care and those making a whole lot more than $7.25 an hour. If you want to see what unanimity looks like, take a poll on these issues among those working for minimum wage pay with no benefits.
Moreover, even with respect to these two most fundamental components of any moral and just society’s collective response to those in the community writ large, there will be no Republican Party legislative support at all. So, Democrats, sit down and have a meeting, draft legislation to address these two priorities now, and then ram it down the legislative throats of anyone in the way. President Joe Biden will sign the bills, and then we can move on to other priorities, having finally demonstrated that Democrats can promise what is right and deliver on that promise.
There will be a lot more because there is a lot more that needs to be done and because progressives have long studied the problems, have responsible solutions, and they and their constituencies are really tired of waiting. With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging and causing continued disease, death and economic disruption, it goes without saying that a broad range of public health and economic relief measures will be an overarching priority in these early days of the Biden administration. However, these are mitigation and relief measures seeking to restore a way of life for many that is always secured at the expense of weaker others.
“Build Back Better”
That is another way of saying that it is impossible to restore a balance that never existed in the first place. As we watch the battle play out in America for something as fundamental today as vaccine distribution equity, try to project your view onto the daily lives of those who almost always are on the inequity side of the balance equation. Many of these people aren’t even on the vaccine playing field because they are too busy looking for food for their family, affordable housing, enough education to give their kids a chance in life and enough wages to meet basic needs. When they get that taken care of by the end of the day, they can go online to check out the latest vaccine opportunities and the multiple bus routes needed to get there.
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It isn’t just that inequities exist — it is that way too many among us seem to believe that to be an acceptable norm. I don’t know why this pisses me off so much, but it does. For how long and through how many pitiful iterations of America’s “greatness” have Americans of supposed goodwill noted the poverty and hopelessness in their midst and bemoaned racial and social divides that dehumanize, all while happily building monuments to consumption and unregulated capitalism that always attempt to give greed a good name? No more. Ya no más.
There is so much to change for the better and so little apparent political will to change much of anything that it is hard to imagine what Biden means when he says he wants the nation to “build back better.” To my ear, that sounds a lot like a slogan to inspire Americans to create little more than a glossier version of whatever the nation looked like “before,” maybe even something like making America “great” again.
To many people of color, the poor, the homeless, the hungry, the undereducated and the sick, what it looked like “before” will take more than a catchy slogan to fix. In the weeks ahead, watch the public discourse, the constant reference to an undefined return to “normal,” and most importantly, how quickly any broad consensus about the need to confront long-neglected fundamental reform gets lost in detail and division.
More Than Words
Beyond the pandemic’s public health and relief measures lie critical commitments to invest now in America’s failing infrastructure, to implement comprehensive and humane immigration reform, to develop a meaningful and likely inconvenient national and international response to climate change, to address the nation’s epidemic of gun violence, and to renew and reinvigorate regulatory frameworks for the financial, energy and communication sectors. Then, if any of this is to be truly transformative, it will have to be done with racial justice and economic equity at the core of meeting each of these critical commitments.
The challenges are great and the moment may be fleeting. Democratic Party leadership and its progressive allies have to actively drive each other to take advantage of this moment to give birth to another round of renewed hope in America. That having been said, it will take more than words to do so, after so many failed promises.
The place to start is with those two simple propositions mentioned earlier. Demonstrating that universal access to meaningful health care can be realized now and that the dignity of work and economic participation inherent in a living wage can be realized now could do much to convince those in need that the rest of the progressive policy agenda is possible to achieve.
In a political world filled with hyperbole, credibility is a good foundation on which to build the long-term political power necessary to deliver on the promise of a more just and equitable society.
*[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Will Biden Overturn Sanctions on the ICC?
by Philippa Kaur 26 February 2021, 12:19
From the get-go, US President Joe Biden’s administration has focused on reversing the worst of Donald Trump’s policy decisions. One of the very worst was the imposition of sanctions on individual officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Trump administration was so enamored of sanctions as a weapon of mass intimidation that it extended the policy beyond the traditional response to hostile governments to target individuals who failed to show the US sufficient respect.
This was a logical consequence of Trump’s vaunted “America First” policy. This translates as national interest first, international law last. In September 2020, Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, singled out ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda for sanctions. He “announced a freeze on assets held in the US or subject to US law by Bensouda and the court’s head of jurisdiction, Phakiso Mochochoko.” Even Rodrigo Duterte, the thuggish Filipino president who unilaterally withdrew the Philippines from membership in the Rome Treaty after the ICC received a complaint of crimes against humanity resulting from his brutal and chaotic war on drugs, never imagined imposing sanctions on the chief prosecutor.
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In other words, Trump’s initiative can only be considered extreme. Bensouda, whose job consists of carrying out investigations related to procedures of justice, complained of “unprecedented and wholly unacceptable threats, attacks and sanctions.” Appearing to sympathize, the Biden administration issued this statement: “Much as we disagree with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Israeli/Palestinian situations, the sanctions will be thoroughly reviewed as we determine our next steps.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Thoroughly review:
Examine an abusive practice with the hope of finding a devious way to justify its continuation
Contextual Note
The word “review” literally means “to look at again.” When politicians use the term, they imply that they will take a more critical look at the issue under consideration with a view to engaging remedial action. This is especially significant at moments in history where one party or political personality has been replaced by another with a highly contrasted worldview. Biden has already taken steps to return to the essential international treaties Trump so casually abandoned, as well as undo the former president’s complicity with the murderous Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The Biden administration needs to show that it is free not just to review but to thoroughly overturn dangerous and sometimes criminal policies.
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In reality, the promise to “thoroughly review” often serves a more devious purpose. It creates an expectation that whatever policy emerges — even if it is identical with that of the past — will be legitimized. Rather than remedy a mistake, it may stand as a ploy to seek a better argument in favor of perpetuating the effects of the mistake. Former President Barack Obama campaigned on the theme of ending the war in Iraq. After thoroughly reviewing it with the help of the Pentagon, he continued it.
The question of the ICC is no ordinary political issue. It contains within it the very idea of justice and fairness that Americans like to see as the core of their “exceptional” ideology, a system of values that never tires of proclaiming its allegiance to the idea of “liberty and justice for all.” On that basis, it should be easy for the Biden administration to cancel Trump’s sanctions and apologize for his arrogance. In terms of PR, it provides a perfect pretext for a new president to demonstrate a willingness to correct the injustices of the past.
But as with so many issues Biden has inherited from Trump, there is a hidden risk and potentially a serious embarrassment. By provoking the ICC, Trump shouted from the rooftops what previous presidents accomplished by whispering in private amongst themselves. The US has never demonstrated the intention of respecting the principles it so assiduously promoted when the victorious Allies launched the Nuremberg trials. The message those trials sent was that every nation on earth must answer the accusation of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The refusal to be judged by the legal criteria it uses to judge others may provide the best definition of the meaning of “American exceptionalism.”
Because the nation that invented democracy “believes” with all its soul in everything that is good and just, it can never be held to account for being bad and unjust. At best, American individuals are sometimes guilty of a lapse of judgment, but the American nation as a whole is, as the song says, “a soul whose intentions are good.” Since “no one alive can always be an angel,” the nation feels justified pleading to the heavens, “Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”
If Biden follows through and repeals Trump’s sanctions, the consequences could be serious. It would implicitly allow the ICC to pursue the complaints against both the US in Afghanistan and Israel with regard to Palestinians within its borders. Those were the two causes that prompted Pompeo to impose sanctions, citing the principle of national sovereignty.
That the US should defend Israel’s putative sovereignty — especially if it means shielding that nation from being prosecuted for war crimes — makes no serious legal sense. But it does reveal a basic truth about US foreign policy. If anything, the immunity the US claims for Israel can be compared with the principle in US law of someone who pleads the fifth amendment in a courtroom to avoid incriminating their spouse (“the spousal testimonial privilege”). Do both Trump and Biden consider the US and Israel a married couple?
How far is Biden willing to go to undo Trump’s devilry? How much can he backtrack without exposing the US to the principle of universal justice? This is a serious quandary for a president who repeats in nearly every one of his speeches that the US must “not lead by the example of its power, but by the power of its example.”
Historical Note
Another issue has just emerged in the news cycle that also requires a thorough review. It concerns the production of semiconductors. The Verge offers this headline: “Biden signs executive order calling for semiconductor supply chain review.” American industry is facing a penury of chips, the essential component of nearly everything Americans buy these days (apart from fast food). From PCs and smartphones to cars, watches and refrigerators, chips rule the consumer economy. Will this be as “thoroughly reviewed” as the reconsideration of the ICC sanctions? It should be because it concerns a problem that affects the entire economy.
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Not so long ago in recent history, the US was the world’s major manufacturer of semi-conductors. But because it became cheaper to outsource production to Asian nations, US manufacturers preferred to move their supply chain across the Pacific Ocean. Asia has since achieved a quasi-monopoly on semiconductor production.
The Associated Press recently reported on the “widening global shortage of semiconductors for auto parts” that has forced “major auto companies to halt or slow vehicle production just as they were recovering from pandemic-related factory shutdowns.” The penury of semi-conductors could send an economy already battered by the pandemic into a tailspin.
This would be especially true if the Asian countries that produce more than 80% of the world’s and America’s supply were unable or unwilling to deliver. The entire question has evolved into something even more dire. Business Insider summarizes the dilemma in a headline: “The global chip shortage is hurting businesses and could be a national security issue.”
It is not hard to imagine a war, even a limited war, breaking out between the US and China over navigation in the contested South China Sea or Chinese threats against Taiwan. In such an event, the US could potentially be starved of the supply of essential components required both for its military capacity and its consumer economy. The Biden administration must be aware of this and ready to review it. But once the review is completed, what can they do to remedy it? Not much, at least in the time frame that would be required to lead a military campaign.
Rather than challenge China and risk alienating nearly all of Asia, the Biden administration can only hope to solve the problem of penury through cooperation and the recognition of interdependence, in contrast with the attitude of confrontation nurtured by Donald Trump. The Biden administration may be forced to engage a particularly “thorough review” on this issue.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Biden Should Rejoin the Iran Deal Before It’s Too Late
by Philippa Kaur 25 February 2021, 21:35
As Congress still struggles to pass a COVID relief bill, the rest of the world is nervously reserving judgment on the new US president and his foreign policy after successive administrations have delivered unexpected and damaging shocks to the world and the international system.
Cautious optimism toward President Joe Biden is very much based on his commitment to Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement in 2015: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear agreement with Iran. Biden, along with his fellow Democrats, excoriated then-President Donald Trump for withdrawing from the JCPOA in 2018 and promised to promptly rejoin the deal if elected. But Biden now appears to be hedging his position in a way that risks turning what should be an easy win for the new administration into an avoidable and tragic diplomatic failure.
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While it was the United States under Trump that withdrew from the nuclear agreement, Biden is taking the position that the US will not rejoin the agreement or drop its unilateral sanctions until Iran first comes back into compliance with the terms of the JCPOA. After withdrawing from the agreement, the US is in no position to make such demands, and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has clearly and eloquently rejected them, reiterating Iran’s firm commitment that it will return to full compliance as soon as the US does so.
Biden should have announced US reentry as one of his first executive orders. It did not require renegotiation or debate. On the campaign trail, Senator Bernie Sanders, Biden’s main competitor for the Democratic nomination, simply promised, “I would re-enter the agreement on day one of my presidency.”
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It wasn’t just Sanders. Then-candidate Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said during the Democratic primary, “We need to rejoin our allies in returning to the agreement, provided Iran agrees to comply with the agreement and take steps to reverse its breaches.” Gillibrand said that Iran must “agree” to take those steps, not that it must take them first, presciently anticipating — and implicitly rejecting — Biden’s self-defeating position that Iran must fully return to compliance with the JCPOA before the US will rejoin.
If Biden just rejoins the JCPOA, all of the provisions of the agreement will be back in force and work exactly as they did before Trump opted out. Iran will be subject to the same International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections and reports as before. Whether Iran is in compliance or not will be determined by the IAEA, not unilaterally by the United States. That is how the agreement works, as all the signatories agreed: China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, the United Kingdom, the European Union — and the United States.
Neocons and Hawks
So, why is Biden not eagerly pocketing this easy first win for his stated commitment to diplomacy? A December 2020 letter supporting the JCPOA, signed by 150 House Democrats, should have reassured Biden that he has overwhelming support to stand up to hawks in both parties. But instead, he seems to be listening to opponents of the Iran deal telling him that Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement has given him “leverage” to negotiate new concessions from Iran before rejoining. Rather than giving Biden leverage over Iran, which has no reason to make further concessions, this has given opponents of the JCPOA leverage over Biden.
American neocons and hawks, including those inside his own administration, appear to be flexing their muscles to kill Biden’s commitment to diplomacy at birth, and his own hawkish foreign policy views make him dangerously susceptible to their arguments. This is also a test of his previously deferential relationship with Israel, whose government vehemently opposes the JCPOA and whose officials have even threatened to launch a military attack on Iran if the US rejoins it, a flagrantly illegal threat that Biden has yet to publicly condemn.
In a more rational world, the call for nuclear disarmament in the Middle East would focus on Israel, not Iran. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently wrote in The Guardian, Israel’s own possession of dozens — or maybe hundreds — of nuclear weapons is the worst kept secret in the world. Tutu’s article was an open letter to Biden, asking him to publicly acknowledge what the whole world already knows and to respond as required under US law to the actual proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
Instead of tackling the danger of Israel’s real nuclear weapons, successive US administrations have chosen to “cry wolf” over non-existent nuclear weapons in Iraq and Iran to justify besieging their governments, imposing deadly sanctions on their people, invading Iraq and threatening Iran. A skeptical world is watching to see whether President Biden has the integrity and political will to break this insidious pattern.
The CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), which stokes Americans’ fears of imaginary Iranian nuclear weapons and feeds endless allegations about them to the IAEA, is the same entity that produced the lies that drove America to war on Iraq in 2003. In December 2002, WINPAC’s director, Alan Foley, told his staff, “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so” — even as he privately admitted to his retired CIA colleague Melvin Goodman that US forces searching for WMDs in Iraq would find “not much, if anything.”
What makes Biden’s stalling to appease Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the neocons diplomatically suicidal at this moment in time is that in November 2020, the Iranian parliament passed a law that forces its government to halt nuclear inspections and boost uranium enrichment if US sanctions are not eased by February 21.
It’s Getting Complicated
To complicate matters further, Iran is holding its own presidential election on June 18, and election season — when this issue will be hotly debated — begins after the Iranian New Year on March 21. The winner is expected to be a hawkish hardliner. Trump’s failed policy, which Biden is now continuing by default, has discredited the diplomatic efforts of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif, confirming for many Iranians that negotiating with America is a fool’s errand.
If Biden does not rejoin the JCPOA soon, time will be too short to restore full compliance by both Iran and the US — including lifting relevant sanctions — before Iran’s election. Each day that goes by reduces the time available for Iranians to see benefits from the removal of sanctions, leaving little chance that they will vote for a new government that supports diplomacy with the United States. The timetable around the JCPOA was known and predictable, so this avoidable crisis seems to be the result of a deliberate decision by Biden to try to appease neocons and warmongers — domestic and foreign — by bullying Iran, a partner in an international agreement he claims to support, to make additional concessions that are not part of the agreement.
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During his election campaign, candidate Biden promised to “elevate diplomacy as the premier tool of our global engagement.” If President Biden fails this first test of his promised diplomacy, people around the world will conclude that, despite his trademark smile and affable personality, he represents no more of a genuine recommitment to American partnership in a cooperative “rules-based world” than Trump or Obama did.
That will confirm the steadily growing international perception that, behind the Republicans’ and Democrats’ good cop-bad cop routine, the overall direction of US foreign policy remains fundamentally aggressive, coercive and destructive. People and governments around the world will continue to downgrade relations with the United States, as they did under Trump, and even traditional US allies will chart an increasingly independent course in a multipolar world where the US is no longer a reliable partner and certainly not a leader.
So much is hanging in the balance, for the everyday people of Iran suffering and dying under the impact of US sanctions, for Americans yearning for more peaceful relations with our neighbors around the world, and for people everywhere who long for a more humane and equitable international order to confront the massive problems facing us all in this century. Can Biden’s America be part of the solution? After just weeks in office, surely it can’t be too late. But the ball is in his court, and the whole world is watching.
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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The Historical Significance of Malcolm X’s Assassination
by Philippa Kaur 24 February 2021, 13:51
Americans remember four spectacular and symbolic assassinations from the 1960s. That of President John F. Kennedy, shot in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, November 22, 1963, marks a moment of maximum trauma in modern US history. For three days, television channels ran with no advertising as the nation witnessed not just the sudden disappearance of a youthful president but the unfolding of a complex narrative of criminality that concluded with the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s presumed killer, two days later.
The second high-profile assassination, of the radical black political activist, Malcolm X, in 1965, played out as a mere sideshow. The national media treated it essentially as a black-on-black killing or a settling of scores among marginal political extremists.
The third assassination, the gunning down of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, shocked a nation already rattled by the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War. King was a black leader considered far more respectable than Malcolm X. The black community reacted with violence as riots broke out in several US cities.
The fourth assassination occurred two months later, when JFK’s brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was fatally wounded y a Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, following his victory in the California primary. Most people expected him to win that year’s November presidential election. His death induced a shocked sense of utter dismay across the nation.
The media have consistently demonstrated their patriotic discipline with regard to all of these assassinations. They shied away from looking seriously into the obvious anomalies in all of them. They have ever since blocked the preponderant evidence of foul play, particularly by the CIA and FBI, on the grounds that simple coherent alternative narratives of the events have ever been credibly established. Future historians will undoubtedly admire the dexterity of those who had good reason to prevent alternative accounts from coming. In deference to the authorities, the dominant media consistently either ignored or discredited any narrative other than the official version.
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As time goes by, the patterns have become clearer. But that hasn’t changed the dominant narrative in the media. Evidence that others were involved in the RFK assassination, for example, was available at the time of the investigation but wilfully ignored or obliterated. One victim of the shooting, Paul Schrade, insists today that the killer could not have been Sirhan Sirhan, who was duly tried and convicted. The King assassination contains a similar level of contradictory evidence, including the testimony of the man tried for the crime. The documented motives of J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI as his feudal domain, should have been obvious enough to make him the number one suspect instead of James Earl Ray.
In other words, anyone with a sense of the repetitive mechanics of political history should suspect that some form of concerted operation involving vested interests, including government officials, was at work in those three high-profile assassinations. That suspicion alone fails to justify any particular theory of who the actors were and how they may have executed their plan. It simply acknowledges a strong likelihood of collusion and recognizes the very real capacity those interests have for obfuscation. The case of Malcolm X until this week seemed to be the outlier, easily explainable through Malcolm’s rejection of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam movement. For the first time, we have highly credible evidence of the FBI’s role in the deed. It has been reported by Reuters, the BBC and others.
The evidence is the confession that New York City Police Department Officer Raymond Wood accepted to be revealed only after his death. He explains how the FBI and the NYPD set up Malcolm X’s assassination: “Raymond Wood’s letter stated that he had been pressured by his NYPD supervisors to lure two members of Malcolm X’s security detail into committing crimes that resulted in their arrest just days before the fatal shooting.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Pressured:
Induced in such a way that what amounts to an order that must be executed can be interpreted as a mere incitement.
Contextual Note
In the case of the JFK assassination, numerous people in a position to know and possibly reveal the truth were conveniently eliminated or silenced, allowing the official version of the events to take precedence over any alternative interpretation. Lee Harvey Oswald was of course the first to disappear, gunned down in the Dallas police station by Jack Ruby. Guy Bannister, Mary Meyer and Dorothy Kilgallen were others on a long list.
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None of these disappearances prove anything. They could be mere coincidences. But they point to a pattern not inconsistent with the documented policy of the CIA at the time that listed assassination as one of its tools in covert operations. Mary Meyer was the ex-wife of CIA operative Cord Meyer, who headed the Covert Action Staff of the Directorate of Plans from 1962. He had also been in charge of the notorious Operation Mockingbird that allowed the CIA to control the narrative of American media. Mary Meyer was also Kennedy’s paramour. She was the victim of an unsolved murder in 1964. Kilgallen had interviewed Jack Ruby in 1964. Shortly before her death (“apparent suicide”), she “told acquaintances she had a ‘great scoop’ that would ‘blow the JFK case sky high.’”
The standard reasoning to defend the official accounts of assassinations was expressed by Bruce Miroglio, a lawyer cited by the BBC: “The number of people that would be involved in the cover-up is so vast, it seems almost impossible they would keep anything earth-shattering under wraps.” Miroglio obviously knows little about either organizational psychology in general or government secrecy in particular. Why have liberal presidents such as Barack Obama gone to such extremes to send whistleblowers to prison? Concern for one’s survival and well-being can incite close to 100% of the population not only to keep a secret but to accept passive complicity.
As the BBC reports this week, the posthumous testimony of New York policeman Raymond Wood contains the allegation “that he was tasked with making sure that Malcolm X would have no door security in the building where he was due to speak in public.” Wood’s family affirms that “he did not want to make the letter public until after his death, fearing repercussions from the authorities.” As any mafioso knows, repercussions sometimes happen.
Historical Note
A month after the JFK assassination, President Harry Truman authored an op-ed in The Washington Post denouncing the fact that the “CIA has been diverted from its original assignment.” He singled out its newfound predilection for “peacetime cloak and dagger operations.” In 1953, the first year of the Eisenhower presidency, the CIA drafted a document that was only made public in 1997: “A Study of Assassination.” The director of the CIA was Allen Dulles, appointed by Truman. Dulles was the man John Kennedy fired after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles, Allen’s brother, as secretary of state.
Those two brothers literally ruled the world specializing in a wide range of skulduggery that typically included regime change. The overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala were two spectacular cases conducted in that same year, 1953.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had perhaps provided the example the Dulles’s post-Truman CIA decided to emulate. Hoover had effectively turned the FBI into the equivalent of a government terrorist outfit, using its legitimate activity that consisted of investigating federal crimes as cover for repressive acts with highly political ends. It is worth noting that the “I” in FBI stands for “investigation.” The “I” in CIA stands for “intelligence.” Investigation is the normal activity of any law enforcement organization. Hoover, of course, pushed it further.
Truman should never have called the CIA an “intelligence” organization. The French translation of intelligence is simply “renseignement,” which means gathering “factual information.” That was what Truman was expecting — the delivery of information to inform the executive’s decision-making about policy. The idea that it was “intelligence” may have gone to the head of CIA directors.
In the 1950s, Hoover and the Dulles brothers shaped a world in which political intellect was transferred from democraticly elected officials to organizations that encouraged the mentality of a police state. Since then, technology has simply added to their power.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Divide and Rule: What Drives Anti-Asian Resentment in America?
by Philippa Kaur 24 February 2021, 11:57
Donald Trump might have left the White House. His nefarious legacy, however, lingers on. A prominent case in point is the dramatic rise in the number of attacks on Asian Americans, ranging from verbal insults and harassment to physical assault to deadly acts of violence that has gone hand in hand with the pandemic.
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. It stands to reason, however, that Trump’s repeated characterization of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” significantly contributed to the mobilization of anti-Asian resentment, particularly among his most ardent supporters. Trump had started to blame China as early as mid-March last year, when the pandemic was starting to spread in the United States. The results of an Ipsos survey from April 2020 suggests that it had a considerable impact on public opinion. Among other things, the survey found that 60% of Republican respondents believed that “people or organizations” were responsible for the virus, most prominently the Chinese government and the Chinese people in general. In short, large numbers of Americans blamed China and the Chinese for spreading the virus — with sometimes fatal consequences.
Xenophobia and Denial: Coronavirus Outbreak in Historical Context
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In mid-March, a man attacked the members of an Asian American family with a knife at a retail store in Midland, Texas. Only the intervention of a courageous bystander prevented a bloodbath. Nevertheless, several persons suffered serious injuries, among them two children aged 2 and 6. When interrogated, the perpetrator stated that he had thought “the family was Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus.” They were actually Burmese.
A report published in early April recorded over 1,000 incidents of anti-Asian cases of various types of aggression and discrimination associated with COVID-19 in the last week of March alone. Among them were individuals reporting having been verbally assaulted, spat on and shunned in grocery stores, supermarkets and pharmacies. Most of the incidences occurred in California, New York and Texas.
Divide and Rule
In the meantime, a year has passed, information available about the virus has dramatically increased, yet Asian Americans continue to be scapegoated and victimized. The dramatic increase in conspiracy thinking over the past several months, promoted by right-wing media and politicians alike, has done its part to fuel the flames of anti-Asian prejudice and hatred. The most recent cases that have caught widespread attention have been deadly assaults on elderly Asian Americans in California. One victim, an 84-year-old man, was knocked to the ground in a San Francisco street by a young man. The victim died two days later of his injuries, with the perpetrator now facing murder and elder abuse charges. The other victim was a 91-year-old man, pushed to the ground by a young man wearing a mask and a hoodie in Oakland’s Chinatown. The victim survived the attack.
On the surface, the recent wave of anti-Asian hostility might easily be explained as being directly related to COVID-19. On second thought, however, things are significantly more complex and intricate. What might appear to be spontaneous outbursts of violence, verbal or physical — as, for instance against refugees in Germany and other Western European countries — are, in reality, the result of deep-seated diffuse resentments. What COVID-19 has done is to provide something like an excuse allowing these resentments to get out into the open.
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To a large extent, as has been frequently pointed out these days, anti-Asian resentment is intimately tied to the myth of Asian Americans as the “model minority.” In this narrative, what accounts for the success of Asian Americans is intact family structures and a high priority accorded to education and traditional values such as thriftiness and discipline. This explains why, on average, Asian American household incomes have been higher than those of white households. As has also been noted, this narrative has been primarily used not to celebrate the achievements of Asian Americans but to blunt charges of racism and privilege. As Bill O’Reilly, the disgraced former Fox News star, asked rhetorically during a debate on the “truth of white privilege,” “Do we have Asian privilege in America?”
For O’Reilly and other prominent figures on the American right, the success of Asian Americans was a convenient occasion to bolster a rhetoric that blames blacks, Hispanics as well as the poor (independent of color) for their plight. If only they followed the example of Asian Americans, worked hard, kept their families together, and lived within their means — or so the charge goes — they too would be able to achieve the American dream. In short, individual flaws, rather than racism and discrimination, are to blame if some Americans fail “to make it.”
In order to bolster their case even further, right-wing “thought leaders” such as Charles Murray, the author, together with Richard Hernstein, of the 1994 bestseller “The Bell Curve,” had no qualms to note that with regard to IQs, Asian Americans came out on top, ahead of whites. More recently, Murray wrote a short blog entry on the state of American education, charging that high schools were “going to hell” — unless “you’re Asian.” Analyzing SAT test scores over the past decade or so, Murry pointed out that the scores had declined for all major ethnic groups, except for Asians. Their scores had actually increased, and this not only in math, but also in verbal skills, where Asians had trailed whites in the past.
It should not entirely come as a surprise if comments like these and similar remarks provoke resentment, particularly on the part of minorities that are constantly subjected to this kind of comparison. One might suspect that this was exactly what was intended. By suggesting that Asian Americans might be “privileged” or pointing out, as Murray does, that Asian Americans constitute “the unprotected minority” they drove a wedge between minorities that share a common, if differentiated, history of oppression, discrimination and structural violence directed against them. In Roman times, they used to call this strategy of safeguarding one’s hegemonic position divide et impera — divide and rule.
A History of Migration
The history of Asian migration to the West Coast in the 19th and early 20th century is replete with episodes of anti-Asian mobilization. The arguably best-known case was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers — but only after they helped build the nation’s railway system. It came at the heel of intense anti-Chinese agitation, both “on the ground” in California and Oregon and in the US Congress. The rhetoric was highly charged, inflammatory — and meant to be so. In a speech on Chinese immigration, Senator Mitchell from Oregon, for instance, in 1876 characterized Chinese immigrants as a “festering sore which, like a plague-spot, has fastened itself upon the very vitals of our western civilization and which to day threatens to destroy it.”
Two years later, Representative Davis from California, in a speech in the House, warned that Chinese immigrants posed a fundamental threat to the institutions of the republic. The Chinese of California, Davis charged, clung to their nationality and separated themselves from other men; they were incapable “to change their ways and adapt themselves to their surroundings.” This alone rendered them “most undesirable immigrants.” Arrested in their development as a result of “ages of uniformity” that had “fixed the type,” they had “nothing in sympathy with the social and political thoughts of a free people.” Instead, their “political aspirations” were limited to a “paternal despotism, with no conceptions of a popular government.”
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This meant that the Chinese were unfit for life in the United States. Exclusion was the logical consequence, as were various measures adopted in the decades that followed targeting Asians. In the decades that followed, western states and territories passed various pieces of legislation that prevented aliens from acquiring land. Although general in nature, they were primarily directed against Chinese and particularly Japanese aliens.
One of the more ludicrous exclusionary measures was San Francisco’s Cubic Air Ordinance of 1870. Disguised as a sanitary measure, it was designed to expel Chinese workers from their crowded tenement quarters in the city’s Chinatown and thus “persuade” them to return to China. The ordinance led to the incarceration of thousands of Chinese from 1873 to 1886 “under a public health law driven by anti-Chinese sentiment.”
Even the populists, arguably the most progressive political force at the end of the 19th century, adopted nativist rhetoric directed against the Chinese. In the early 1890s, several state populist platforms included a passage calling for the exclusion of Chinese and/or Asian immigration. The passage appealed particularly to women who felt threatened by competition from Chinese men for domestic services and laundry jobs. Anti‐Chinese agitators seized the opportunity and charged Chinese workers with threatening the job opportunities of working women. Anti-Asian exclusion and discrimination were also reflected in anti-miscegenation and naturalization laws. The first anti-miscegenation law, which derived its justification from views on racial distinctions and barred marriages between whites and Asians, was passed in 1861 by Nevada. In the decades that followed, 14 more states passed similar laws. It was not until the middle of the 20th century to miscegenation laws were abolished.
This was also the case when it came to naturalization, the right to which was established in the Naturalization Act of 1875 that restricted American citizenship to whites and blacks. Whenever Asian immigrants in subsequent decades petitioned for naturalization, American courts ruled that Asians belonged to the “Mongolian race.” Ergo, they were not white and, therefore, not eligible for citizenship. In response to these court cases, Congress passed a law in 1917 banning immigration from most parts of Asia. Seven years later, Congress passed a further measure, excluding foreign-born Asians from citizenship “because they no longer were able to enter the country, and they could no longer enter the country because they were ineligible for citizenship.” It was not until 1952 that race-based naturalization was formally abolished.
A Privileged Minority?
Given this background, the suggestion that Asian Americans somehow constitute a privileged minority so dear to right-wing apologists of white privilege rings more than hollow — as does the myth of the model minority. The reality is quite different. The narrative of Asian American success obscures, for instance, the fact that over the past decade or so, inequality has risen most dramatically among Asian Americans. According to Pew Research, between 1970 to 2016, the gap between Asians near the top and the bottom of the income ladder “nearly doubled, and the distribution of income among Asians transformed from being one of the most equal to being the most unequal among America’s major racial and ethnic groups.”
Poverty rates among Asian Americans have been slightly higher than among whites, with some groups, such as Hmong and Burmese, far above the national average. This underscores the fact that Asian Americans constitute a community that is ethnically, socioeconomically and, in particular, culturally highly diverse.
The dominant narrative of the model minority, largely promulgated by the white right, largely ignores these subtleties. Instead, it creates the image of the privileged minority — singled out by the white majority compared over other minorities — and, in the process, sows discord among America’s subordinate communities. The resulting resentment goes a long way to explain the recent wave of anti-Asian hatred. It is hardly a coincidence that both recent hate crimes against Asian Americans in northern California were committed by blacks.
It is also hardly a coincidence that the two attacks put Asian American activists into a quandary. As one of them noted, “If addressing violence against Asian Americans entails furthering stereotypes about Black criminality and the policies associated with those stereotypes … we’ve misdiagnosed the problem.” The problem, of course, is the widespread disgruntlement toward Asian Americans, wrongfully seen as constituting an “honorable white” minority bent on defending its privileges.
A case in point is the lawsuit launched against Harvard University in 2014 charging it with discriminating against Asian American applicants in favor of less-qualified black and Hispanic students. Hardly surprising, the Trump administration, ever eager to stir the resentment pot, sided with the plaintiffs. The administration’s brief argued that the evidence showed that “Harvard’s process has repeatedly penalized one particular racial group: Asian Americans. Indeed, Harvard concedes that eliminating consideration of race would increase Asian-American admissions while decreasing those of Harvard’s favored racial groups.”
For those in the know, the language echoed Murray’s notion of “protected groups.” Once again, divide et impera was in action. Courts finally rejected the plaintiffs’ case. But ill feelings are likely to linger on, feeding into extant resentments that appear to have poisoned the Asian American community’s relations with other visible minorities in the United States. Under the circumstances, anti-Asian hostility, hatred and violence are unlikely to fade out in the near future.
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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The US Senate Is a Global Problem
by Philippa Kaur 22 February 2021, 11:53
Watching the Senate conduct the second impeachment trial of former US President Donald Trump brought back a flood of memories from high school. I distinctly remember an earlier incarnation of those Trump-friendly Republican senators taking up their positions at the back of class to snicker, yawn ostentatiously and otherwise disrupt the serious, well-researched presentations of their fellow students. Then, when it was their turn to present, the back-row rowdies were so embarrassingly unprepared that it was hard not to laugh in return.
The slavish devotion of the Senate miscreants to their imperiled leader and their casual dismissal of the January 6 violence, meanwhile, was like a modern-day replay of that grade-school classic “The Lord of the Flies.” In the Senate version, Trump played the part of the pig’s head, Josh Hawley was the pathological Jack, and Mitt Romney was the hopelessly conflicted Ralph who escaped the violence of the mob only thanks to the timely intervention of Officer Eugene Goodman, who stepped in at the last moment just like the British naval officer at the novel’s conclusion.
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Finally, the acquittal of the former president was like the slap on the hand administered to one of my school’s handsome star athletes for one of his many transgressions. Boys will be boys, Trump will be Trump and, alas, Mitch McConnell will be perpetually “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.”
The display of juvenile behavior during the Senate trial was nauseating, and the verdict was an embarrassment. But the Senate poses a much more serious problem than even this impeachment circus suggests.
When it comes to global issues, the Senate has been an enormous impediment to achieving peace, justice and environmental sustainability. More so even than the US president, the Senate has been the chief engine of American exceptionalism. It’s grimly fitting, then, that it has struck out twice in its duty to convict the supreme avatar of exceptionalism in modern American politics, a president who believed himself above democracy, above morality and above the law.
Senate Power
Senators love to call their chamber the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” It’s where the most seasoned politicians, partially protected from the insane election cycle that their House counterparts must face, can mull over the most important issues of the days.
It’s also a glaring example of the inequities of US democracy, with the two senators from Wyoming (population: 578,000) wielding the same power as the two senators from California (population: 39 million). Senate elections have tilted US politics in favor of rural, predominantly white and increasingly conservative voters by a factor of two or three over urban voters. Like the Electoral College, the Senate makes a mockery of the “one-person, one-vote” principle by effectively giving some voters much greater power than others.
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But the Senate is a far bigger problem because of its oversized role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. Presidents have considerable leeway in conducting foreign policy, as the rollout of executive orders over the last years has made plain. Presidents can pull the country in and out of international bodies and multilateral agreements. They can slap tariffs on countries and sanctions on foreign individuals. Despite the limitations of the War Powers Act, they can still wage war for a full two months without any congressional interference.
But the Constitution gives the Senate the sole power to approve, by a two-thirds majority, any treaties that the United States might be considering. As with the filibuster, however, this treaty power has as much influence in its threatened use as in its actual deployment.
Consider the example of the 2015 Paris climate accord. The reason why all the national commitments to reduce carbon emissions are voluntary rather than mandatory is the US Senate. Secretary of State John Kerry, the US negotiator in Paris at the time, insisted on voluntary commitments because he knew that any mandatory requirements would need Senate approval. And the climate deniers in the Senate were sure to nix any such agreement.
The Iran nuclear deal is, similarly, an agreement, not a treaty. This distinction allowed the Obama administration to secure congressional support short of the two-thirds majority required for a treaty. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — also known as the Iran deal — relies on various verification protocols to ensure compliance, not the signatures of the participating parties.
These workarounds are more the rule than the exception. According to one academic study, US presidents negotiated nearly 4,000 executive agreements between 1977 and 1996 but only 300 treaties. Whether you consider these maneuvers to be an unacceptable short-circuiting of checks and balances or a reasonable method of overcoming the American exceptionalism of the Senate has largely depended on which side of the aisle you sit.
The Graveyard of International Cooperation
The Senate is where international treaties go to die. Currently awaiting the “advice and consent” of the body are 37 treaties, beginning with an International Labor Organization convention protecting the right to organize trade unions, which has been hanging out in the Senate for more than 70 years.
Or consider the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), which has been ratified by 162 countries. The United States participated in the international conferences in the 1970s that produced this critical document that covers all aspects of maritime borders, navigation and commerce. US negotiators under three successive administrations — Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter — were instrumental in crafting the language of the working text. After Ronald Reagan’s administration balked at some of the provisions, negotiators even amended the final version to reflect some of the US concerns. But the Reagan administration still wouldn’t sign the agreement.
It would take the collapse of the Soviet Union, certain changes on the ground (actually, on the seabed) and a new administration (Bill Clinton) to bring UNCLOS to the Senate. The late and decidedly not great Jessie Helms said no for he held fast to his position that no foreign entity should impinge on US sovereignty. Lest you think this was a partisan issue, the George W. Bush administration subsequently pushed hard for the Senate to ratify the convention with the support of all living former legal advisers of the State Department. This time, despite the efforts of then-Senator Joe Biden, a different minority of hard-line Republicans, including Jeff Sessions, thwarted the bipartisan campaign.
The United States generally abides by this important convention, so what’s the big deal? As a non-signatory, however, the US cannot participate in key commissions, such as the one on the limits of the continental shelf, where it could otherwise advance its interests or push a conservation agenda. If that irritates you, don’t send your letters of complaint to the United Nations. Send them to the Senate.
The Senate has been a crowded graveyard for arms control initiatives. There you can find gravestones for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), various nuclear-weapon-free zones and the Arms Trade Treaty (which Trump dramatically unsigned in 2019). The CTBT has been signed by 185 countries, but it won’t go into effect until eight specific nations ratify it (including the United States). The Arms Trade Treaty has entered into force, so it is only dead to the US, which is problematic since America is the leading arms exporter in the world by a large margin. The resurrection of these treaties is, of course, possible, but only if the composition of the Senate were to change dramatically.
The Senate also stands in the way of the United States participating in the strengthening of international law and the prosecuting of war criminals — by blocking ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The Senate stands in the way of preserving what remains of the world’s precious biodiversity — by blocking ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Senate stands in the way of upholding the human rights of large swathes of the global population — by blocking treaties on disability rights, on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and on a variety of labor rights.
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The Senate is also not above exercising its power on seemingly trivial matters. It has refused, for instance, to support a treaty that protects albatrosses and petrels. Jeez, hasn’t anyone in the Senate read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”?
Of course, the Senate has displayed its remarkable intransigence in ways that go well beyond its advice-and-consent function on treaties. During the previous administration, among the 250 bills that the House passed and that McConnell blocked in the Senate were several immigration bills (the Dream Act, a measure to protect Venezuelans from deportation), several environmental bills (blocking drilling in the Arctic National Refuge, banning offshore drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico), and a measure to provide visas to Kurds who supported US forces in Syria.
Reform the Senate?
Those who hope to reform the Senate have focused on changes to the rules. With the exception of certain bills, the threat of filibuster has made the Senate even less reflective of popular will by turning a simple majority into a 60-vote wall into which the Democrats are likely to crash into repeatedly over the next two to four years.
“Dear centrist Democrats, you couldn’t even get 10 GOP votes to convict the guy who sent a mob to kill you all. You think you can get them to vote on issues like immigration/climate? Come on,” immigrant rights activist Erika Andiola has tweeted. “You have to end the filibuster and use every tool at your disposal to get things done.”
It’s a good point, but why not think big? What about eliminating the Senate altogether? Roughly half of the world’s sovereign nations have only one legislative body. Plenty of these unicameral systems are democratic, including Costa Rica, Denmark, Greece, South Korea, New Zealand and Norway.
Yes, I know, the smaller US states would put up even more resistance to the elimination of the Senate than they have to the proposed elimination of the Electoral College. Such an upending of the finely balanced compromises of the Founding Fathers would generate yowls of protest from constitutional literalists. Who could ever contemplate such a radical amendment?
Victor Berger, that’s who. In 1911, the Wisconsin congressman introduced a resolution in the House to abolish the Senate. Berger was also the first socialist elected to Congress, so he was accustomed to taking contrarian positions. His proposed amendment to the Constitution began thus:
“Whereas the Senate in particular has become an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth; a body, many of the Members of which are representatives neither of a State nor of its people, but solely of certain predatory combinations, and a body which, by reason of the corruption often attending the election of its Members, has furnished the gravest public scandals in the history of the nation…”
Those public scandals have continued all the way up to last weekend’s acquittal of a rogue president. Oh, Victor Berger, who will take up your mantle today?
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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