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      Democracy Is Down but Not Out

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      Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarussian dictator, snatches a dissident from midair. Military strongman Assimi Goita launches another coup in Mali. Benjamin Netanyahu escalates a military conflict to save his own political skin in Israel. In the United States, the Republican Party launches a full-court press to suppress the vote.

      Authoritarianism, like war, makes headlines. It’s hard for democracy to compete against political crackdowns, military coups and unhinged pronouncements. Sure, democracies engage in periodic elections and produce landmark pieces of legislation. But what makes democracy, like peace, successful is not the unexpected rupture, such as the election of Barack Obama, but the boring quotidian. Citizens express their opinions in public meetings. Lawmakers receive constituents in their offices. Potholes get fixed. That’s not exactly clickbait.

      Because the absence of war doesn’t make headlines, as Stephen Pinker has argued, the news media amplifies the impression that violence is omnipresent and constantly escalating when it splashes mass murder, genocide and war crimes on the front page. Peace may well be prevalent, but it isn’t newsworthy.

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      The same can be said about democracy, which has been suffering for some time from bad press. Democracies have been dragged down by corruption, hijacked by authoritarian politicians, associated with unpopular economic reforms and proven incapable (so far) of addressing major global problems like the climate crisis. After a brief surge in popularity in the immediate post-Cold War period, democracy according to the general consensus has been in retreat.

      Judging from recent quantitative assessments, the retreat has become a rout. The title of the latest Freedom House survey, for instance, is “Democracy Under Siege.” The report details how freedom around the world has eroded for the last 15 years, with 2020 featuring the greatest decline yet. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which produces a Democracy Index every year, promoted its 2020 report with the headline, “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year.” The authoritarian responses to the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the worst showing so far for the model, with the average global score plummeting from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Rule of Law Index for 2020 also registered a drop for the third year in a row.

      If we extrapolate from the current trend lines, democracy will be gone in a couple of decades, melted away like the polar ice. But it’s always dangerous to make such extrapolations given history’s tendency to move in cycles not straight lines. So, let’s look at some reasons why democracy might be in for a comeback.

      The Pandemic Recedes in America

      Much of the reason for democracy’s dismal record in 2020 was the expansion of executive power and state controls in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of those power grabs, such as Vladimir Putin’s constitutional changes in Russia, are still in place. Some countries, like India and Brazil, are still struggling with both COVID-19 and powerful authoritarian leaders.

      But even with the continued high rate of infection in a number of countries, the overall trajectory of the disease is downward. Since peaking in late April, the reported number of global cases has dropped nearly by half. So, two trend lines are now intersecting: the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the backlash against hapless authoritarians.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Americans, for instance, are coming to terms with both the retreat of COVID and the removal of Donald Trump from the White House, Facebook and Twitter. The Biden administration is undoing many of Trump’s undemocratic moves, including those imposed during the pandemic around immigration and refugees. The attempts by the Republican Party to tamp down voter turnout proved spectacularly unsuccessful in 2020, which despite the pandemic featured the largest-ever increase in votes from one election to the next. In terms of the voting-age population, you have to go back to 1960 to find an election with a higher percentage turnout than the 62% rate in 2020.

      This surge in voters helped put Joe Biden over the top. It has also motivated the Republican Party to redouble its efforts, this time at the state level, to suppress the vote. It is doing so under the false narrative that electoral fraud is widespread and that President Biden’s victory is somehow illegitimate. And it is setting the stage to orchestrate an authentic election theft in 2024.

      The backlash against these anti-democratic moves has been encouraging, however. When the state of Georgia passed its voting restrictions in April, pressure from voting rights advocates forced prominent Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta to reverse themselves and come out against the bill (though only after the bill had already passed). Major League Baseball pulled its all-star game from Atlanta, and Hollywood has also threatened a boycott.

      These moves motivated Texas-based companies to protest that state’s version of voting restrictions before the legislature scheduled a vote. None of that stopped Texas Republicans from pushing ahead with the bill. So, last weekend, Texas Democrats had to deploy the nuclear option of walking out of the chamber to stop the vote suppression bill from passing. These courageous Texans, up against a powerful and determined state Republican Party, are now looking to the federal government to safeguard voting rights.

      At the federal level, the Democrats have put forward for the second time a comprehensive voting reform bill, the For the People Act, to expand access, reduce corruption and limit the impact of money on politics. The House approved a version of this bill in 2019, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The House passed the reboot in March, but it again faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate because filibuster rules require at least 60 votes to pass and Democrats can muster only 50 (plus the vice-president’s).

      A failure to find “10 good Republicans” for this bill, the cadre that Senator Joe Manchin naively expected to step forward to pass legislation creating a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, may finally push the Democrats to scrap or at least significantly modify the filibuster rules, which were famously used to block further enfranchisement of African-Americans in the 20th century.

      High voter turnout and efforts to secure voting rights are not the only signs of a healthy US democracy. Last year, the largest civic protests in US history took place as tens of millions of Americans expressed their disgust with police violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Civic organizations stepped forward to fight the pandemic and ensure more equitable access to vaccines. Young people, in particular, are engaged in large numbers on the climate crisis, gun control and reproductive health. After a long winter of discontent under Trump, perhaps it’s time for an “American Spring.”

      Mixed Record Elsewhere for Democracy

      Europe, meanwhile, is coming out of the pandemic in slightly stronger shape politically. The budget compromise that took place at the end of 2020, which ended up providing considerable relief to the economically disadvantaged countries of the southern tier, effectively saved the European Union from disintegrating out of a lack of solidarity. Alas, the compromise also watered down the EU’s criticism of its easternmost members, particularly Poland and Hungary, for their violations of the bloc’s commitments to human rights and rule of law.

      But there’s hope on the horizon here as well. Eastern Europe appears to be on the verge of a political sea change. Voters brought down Bulgaria’s right-wing populist leader Boyko Borissov in elections in April, and the new caretaker government has begun to dismantle his political system of cronyism. In Slovenia, tens of thousands of protesters have massed in the capital of Ljubljana, the largest demonstration in years, to demand the resignation of the Trump-like prime minister Janez Jansa. The near-total ban on abortion orchestrated by the right-wing government in Poland has motivated mass protests by women throughout the country, and even “Polish grannies” have mobilized in support of a free press and the rule of law. A finally united opposition in Hungary, meanwhile, is catching up in the polls to Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of elections next year.

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      The far right, with their contempt for human rights, free media, rule of law and political checks and balances, are the greatest threat to democracy within democracies. Fortunately, they are not doing very well in Western Europe either. The anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland has witnessed a significant drop in support in Germany, while Lega in Italy has also declined in popularity. Golden Dawn has disappeared from the scene in Greece. Vox is still the third most popular party in Spain, but it hasn’t managed to rise much above 15% in the polls, which is the same story for the Sweden Democrats (stuck at around 19%). Only in France and Finland are the far-right parties continuing to prosper. Marine Le Pen currently leads the polls against French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of next year’s election, while the Finns Party leads by a couple of percentage points in the polls but with elections not likely before 2023.

      Elsewhere in the world, the pandemic may result in more political casualties for far-right populists, as they get caught in the ebbing of the Trump wave. Brazilians are protesting throughout the country under the banner of impeaching Jair Bolsonaro, a president who, like Trump, has compiled a spectacularly poor record in dealing with COVID-19. Bolsonaro’s approval rating has fallen to a new low under 25%. The still-popular former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently cleared by the courts to run again for office, appears to be assembling a broad political coalition to oust Bolsonaro in the elections set for next year.

      Hard-right leader Ivan Duque has achieved the distinction of being the least popular leader in Colombian history. Politically, it doesn’t matter so much, since he can’t run again for president in next year’s election. But the public’s disgust with the violence in Colombia and the economic inequality exacerbated by the pandemic will likely apply as well to any of his would-be hard-right successors.

      The extraordinary mishandling of the pandemic in India has had a similar effect on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, which has also recently fallen to a new low. However, after seven years in office, he remains quite popular, with a 63% approval rating.

      Modi’s Teflon reputation speaks to the fragility of democracy in many parts of the world. Many voters are attracted to right-wing nationalists like Modi — Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador — who promise to “get the job done” regardless of the political and economic costs. Such leaders can rapidly turn a democratic country into a putatively democratic one, which makes the step into authentic authoritarianism that much easier.

      The coups in Mali and Myanmar, China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, the enduring miseries in North Korea, Venezuela and Eritrea — these are all reminders that, however fragile democracy might be in formally democratic states, politics can always get a lot worse.

      Lukashenko: Strong or Weak?

      Take the example of Belarus, where Alexander Lukashenko has ruled supreme since 1994. Thanks to his own ruthlessness and the patronage of neighboring Russia, Lukashenko has weathered mass protests that would have ousted leaders of weaker disposition.

      His latest outrage was to order the grounding of a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania as it was flying over Belarus — just so that he could apprehend a young dissident, Roman Protasevich, and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Virtually everyone has decried this blatant violation of international laws and norms with the exception, of course, of Putin and others in the Russian president’s orbit. The editor of the Russian media conglomerate RT, Margarita Simonyan, tweeted, “Never did I think I would envy Belarus. But now I do. [Lukashenko] performed beautifully.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Lukashenko indeed came across as all-powerful in this episode. But this is an illusion. Putin has not hesitated to assassinate his critics, even when they are living outside Russia. Lukashenko doesn’t have that kind of reach or audacity, so he has to wait until dissidents are within his own airspace to strike. I’d like to believe that the opposition in Belarus takes heart from this desperate move — is Lukashenko really so scared of a single dissident? —  and doubles down on its efforts to oust the tyrant.

      Outside of Putin and his toadies, Lukashenko doesn’t have many defenders. This elaborate effort to capture a dissident only further isolates the Belarussian strongman. Even putatively democratic states, like Poland and Hungary, have unequivocally denounced Lukashenko.

      Anti-democratic actions like the Ryanair stunt capture headlines in ways that pro-democratic efforts rarely do. Honestly, had you even heard of Roman Protasevich before this affair? Along with all the other depressing news of the day, from Texas to Mali, this brazen move suggests that democracy is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

      But all the patient organizing against the strongmen that doesn’t make it into the news will ultimately prove the fragility of tyranny. When it comes to anti-democrats like Lukashenko, they will one day discover that the military, the police and the party have abandoned them. And it will be they who teeter at the abyss, their hands scrabbling for a secure hold, when along comes democracy to give them a firm pat on the back.

      *[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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      Biden to unveil Russia sanctions over SolarWinds hack and election meddling

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      The US is set to announce new sanctions against Russia as soon as Thursday in retaliation for Moscow’s elections interference, alleged bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, and cyber-espionage campaigns such as the SolarWinds hack, according to reports in US and international media.Ten Russian diplomatic officials are to be expelled from the US and up to 30 entities will be blacklisted, officials said, in the largest sanctions action against Russia of Joe Biden’s presidency.Additionally, the White House may issue an executive order barring US financial institutions from purchasing rouble bonds issued by Russia’s government, targeting the country’s sovereign debt and its broader economy. That could begin as soon as June, according to some reports.Q&AWhat was the SolarWinds hack?ShowIn early 2020, malicious code was sneaked into updates to a popular piece of software called Orion, made in the US by the company SolarWinds, which monitors the computer networks of businesses and governments for outages.That malware gave hackers remote access to an organisation’s networks so they could steal information. Among the most high-profile users of the software were US government departments including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state department, and the justice department.Described by the Microsoft president, Brad Smith, as “the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen”, US intelligence agencies have accused Russia of launching the attack.SolarWinds, of Austin, Texas, provides network monitoring and other technical services to hundreds of thousands of organisations around the world, including most Fortune 500 companies and government agencies in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.Its compromised product, Orion, is a centralised monitoring tool that looks for problems in an organisation’s computer network, which means that breaking in gave the attackers a “God view” of those networks.Neither SolarWinds nor US cybersecurity authorities have publicly identified which organisations were breached. Just because a company or agency uses SolarWinds as a vendor does not necessarily mean it was vulnerable to the hack.Kari Paul and Martin BelamUnnamed officials told the New York Times the new sanctions were meant to cut deeper than previous attempts to punish Moscow for its attacks on US institutions and allies. Some Russian officials have laughed off being added to the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions lists, comparing it to being elevated to an elite club. The threat of the ban on purchasing Russian debt has already depressed prices on the rouble and rouble-denominated OFZ treasury bonds.The sanctions will add tension to an already strained relationship between Russia and the US. Since last month, Moscow has been engaged in the largest troop buildup on its border with Ukraine since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, provoking fears of an invasion. Biden called Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to urge him to de-escalate tensions with Ukraine and proposed a summit in a third country. The Kremlin gave a frosty account of the telephone call, and did not say whether Putin had agreed to the meeting.Earlier this year, Biden had agreed with a reporter when asked if Putin was “a killer”. Those remarks were replayed widely on Russian television. Putin responded by wryly wishing Biden “good health”, which was seen as a nod to Biden’s age.The US president’s tough approach differs considerably from that of the Trump administration, which largely sought to avoid confronting Russia over a CIA assessment that Moscow had offered and paid bounties for foreign fighters to kill US troops in Afghanistan. Trump said he doubted the evidence behind the reports.He similarly sided with Putin over an FBI assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 elections during a summit in Helsinki two years later.The planned sanctions were said to be retaliation for Russian interference in the 2020 elections, during which US intelligence agencies concluded that the Kremlin had backed Trump over Biden.Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterThe sanctions would also be a response to a massive and sophisticated cybersecurity breach against SolarWinds Corp that affected software used by US government agencies. The US has blamed Russia for the attack.Peskov this week said that “the hostility and unpredictability of America’s actions force us in general to be prepared for the worst scenarios”. More

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      in World Politics

      Fair Observer Scoop: Putin Engineered the Blockage of the Suez Canal

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      MSNBC’s star journalist Rachel Maddow was ready to break the news but hesitated when certain insiders worried that, if the accusation was not borne out by verifiable facts, the reaction might further damage the reputation of a news organization whose ratings have been plummeting for the past two months. This lapse has enabled Fair Observer to provide the scoop that Maddow was on the verge of making before being pulled back by MSNBC’s marketing department. Maddow did mention a rumor that Russia could have been involved, warning that if this could be confirmed it would be seen as “a new variation in Putin’s playbook.” But with no substantial evidence to present or names to cite, she went on to focus on the lurid details of Representative Matt Gaetz’s sex scandal.

      Credible witnesses with access to the Kremlin have revealed to The Daily Devil’s Dictionary that the sandstorm credited with disturbing the navigation of the Ever Given — the Japanese container ship that ended up blocking the Suez Canal — was the result of a covert operation by Russia’s weather modification team. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aim was to damage the credibility of traditional trade routes, sowing doubt about the West’s ability to manage global commerce as the US prepares to disengage militarily from the Middle East. The message is clear. Russia is ready to mount similar operations in Syria, Iraq and even Egypt and Libya to further weaken the waning US influence in the region.

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      But there is another dimension of this geopolitical struggle whose implications will stretch out over decades. Thanks to global warming, which the Russians officially blame the US for encouraging, Putin has been nourishing his plan to turn the increasingly navigable Arctic Ocean that stretches across Russia’s northern coastline into the obvious choice for most East-West trade. Thanks to the melting ice, Russia will soon be in a position to monitor and control as much as 60% of intercontinental trade in the decade to come.

      Fair Observer’s scoop resulted from a cryptic remark spoken by a Russian official and overheard by CNN’s correspondent at a lunch table at the Kremlin. One of Putin’s closest aides, Nikolai Stavrogin, sat down with the intention of explaining to New York Times reporter Shawn McDermott a major shift in geopolitical history that would soon become apparent. The past, he claimed, was being undone in front of our very eyes. When asked for a detailed explanation, Stavrogin leaned back in his chair and slowly articulated this enigmatic thought: “Ice melts and ships float. It is ever a given that when water evaporates stillness reigns.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Evaporate:

      A verb used alternatively to describe the transformation of water under the effect of heat and the fate of many news stories left in the hands of journalists who refuse to think below the surface

      Contextual Note

      CNN reporter Elizabeth Prynne, who was just near enough to overhear Stavrogin utter his enigmatic statement, noted the words “ever” and “given” in his arcane message and suspected the remark might have a deeper meaning. Convinced that it needed to be followed up, she asked her colleague at The NY Times for some background. The Times reporter told her that Stavrogin’s observation concerned climate change, a purely scientific matter. He had other matters to deal with and would refer this one to his scientific colleagues, always eager to speculate about the effects of global warming.

      Prynne began asking around what Stavrogin’s remark might mean. She mentioned it to a friend who happens to be a Fair Observer contributor, who then informed The Daily Devil’s Dictionary. We immediately understood that this did indeed refer to the phenomenon of global warming. But, as Prynne suspected, it concerned the geopolitical impact of climate change. Thanks to the ever more apparent annual Arctic thaw that has opened up previously inaccessible trade routes, Russia is certain to obtain a growing strategic advantage. 

      Thanks to another of our relations, we were then able to reach Stavrogin himself who, without offering any new details, confirmed that his remarks concerned an impending revolution in maritime commerce. He also dropped the telling hint that the Kremlin’s weather experts had the knowledge and expertise to cause the stranding of an oversized ship in the Suez Canal. He refused to confirm that the operation was actually carried out by the Russians, but his boast that they were capable of such an operation left no doubt in our minds.

      Historical Note

      Fair Observer is not in the business of seeking or publishing scoops. But when one lands in our lap, we will not hesitate to disseminate it, especially at this crucial moment of history on April 1, 2021. The Daily Devil’s Dictionary published one of the first warnings concerning the suspicious disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in early October 2018. We pointed to the nature and the probable author of the crime well before the mainstream news began reporting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s possible involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance.

      Embed from Getty Images

      We have now established the fact that Vladimir Putin effectively intervened in beaching the Ever Given, an incident that for a full week dramatically disturbed global trade by blocking the Suez Canal. This is a major story that neither MSNBC nor CNN have shown the temerity to reveal. Proud of our scoop, we find ourselves in the embarrassing position of having to backtrack on our own recent and repeated claims that The New York Times has been pathologically obsessed with blaming Russia for every crime and misdemeanor on the international stage, or even in domestic politics in the US. We hope the Gray Lady will accept our belated apologies.

      This incident that came to light through such indirect means tells us that, contrary to our own claims, The Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, was in the end justified in pursuing beyond reason the paper’s campaign against Russia. After what has now become clear about Putin’s intervention in the Suez Canal, what rational person could possibly doubt what The Times has been claiming for the past five years — that Putin colluded with Donald Trump and personally played the decisive role by tampering in the 2016 US presidential election to ensure the defeat of Hillary Clinton?

      It was barely a week ago that the sandstorm occurred leading to the blockage of the Suez Canal. Some will say that so soon after the event, with the facts still difficult to pin down, that this first day of April is not the appropriate time to claim the truth of such allegations. But we proudly proclaim that April 1 is a far more appropriate moment than the other 364 days of the years when MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and others have consistently pushed a similar story, and that for more than five years.

      *[Humorists have always been attracted to the temptation of reporting patently fake news on April Fools’ Day. In our turn, we have succumbed. Our apologies to MSNBC, CNN and The New York Times for doing what they would never dare to do: print news that isn’t true. As Jonathan Swift might describe it, they are the Houyhnhnms, who “cannot say a thing which is not” and we are the Yahoos, whom he describes as “restive and indocible, mischievous and malicious.” (Disclaimer: we have no legal connection to Yahoo!) 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’s America Is the New “Middle Kingdom”

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      For decades, The New York Times has tried to manage the image it once created for itself as a “progressive” newspaper. On various occasions, its ineptness at this game has been so patent that its reputation as the “paper of record” appeared irreparably tarnished. Its support of George W. Bush’s campaign to invade Iraq in 2003 is just one prominent example. Nevertheless, since no other US newspaper can compete with its brand, The Times not only holds pole position in reporting the news but is also assured of winning the race on most headline political stories in the US news cycle.

      Thanks to its stable of high-profile editorialists, its specially cultivated relationship with government insiders and the intelligence community, and its occasionally thought-provoking in-depth features, The Times commands the respect of an elite, “politically-aware” class of readers. Even when the paper’s editorial stance appears totally skewed on a major issue, its position will be deemed worthy of attention. Despite multiple failures, this particularly applies to US foreign policy.

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      The key to The Times maintaining its image as a voice of progressive values lies less in its willingness to air progressive ideas than in the persistent belief Americans have that the Democratic Party is more progressive than the Republican Party. In other words, because Democrats read The Times, it has no need to sound progressive. Like the Democratic Party itself, The Times’ editorial policy over at least the past three decades has increasingly distanced itself from most traditional progressive themes, particularly on foreign policy.

      Still, the newspaper feels the need to at least seem progressive. It finds itself faced the difficult task of navigating very real pressures within the Democratic Party. With the arrival of a new Democratic administration and the continued suspense concerning what its policies will actually look like, The New York Times is now making an effort to assess the trends.

      In an article on March 11, Michael D. Shear, Carl Hulse and Jonathan Martin provide an example of tracking the trends. “Even as Mr. Biden’s stimulus victory lap will be embraced by the left,” they write, “he remains in the cautious middle so far on foreign policy, easing off on punishing the crown prince of Saudi Arabia for ordering the killing of a Washington Post journalist and imposing only modest sanctions on Russia for the poisoning and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader there.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Cautious middle:

      The position that defines how Democratic politicians may hold onto power and mainstream journalists hold onto their jobs. Only Republicans politicians and journalists may be allowed to deviate from it.

      Contextual Note

      Citing the notion of cautious middle would seem to imply that, in contrast, there may also be an incautious middle. But the concept is difficult to imagine. The expression sounds like a pleonasm. The whole point of placing oneself in the middle is to avoid being conspicuous. This raises the question of what The Times means by “cautious.” Does caution mean using one’s rational faculties to steer clear of danger, or does it signify abandoning one’s own principles and beliefs for the sake of survival?

      The two cases cited leave the reader wondering. President Joe Biden has promised no punishment for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), whom the CIA blames as the man directly responsible for the murder of US resident Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who worked for The Washington Post. In contrast, Biden has imposed “modest sanctions” on President Vladimir Putin’s government and directly maligned Putin himself for the poisoning of a Russian citizen with no connections to the US. Does Biden think MBS has a soul? How afraid is Biden of Saudi Arabia? Should this really be called caution?

      Then there is the question of defining what The Times means by “the middle”? When polls show that a significant majority of Americans wish to see single-payer health care, the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East, a $15 minimum wage and increased taxes on the wealthy, does it have any meaning to call Biden’s position — who appears to oppose all of these issues — “the cautious middle”? Perhaps The Times imagines Biden’s foreign policy position should be called “the cautious middle” because it sits somewhere between MBS and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, or between India’s Narendra Modi and the UK’s Boris Johnson.

      Historical Note

      The independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who has never sought the middle but always taken seriously the notion that the media’s first responsibility in a democracy is to stand up to power and challenge its orientations, has noticed how, with the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House, most of the press — and in particular The New York Times and the Washington Post — have abandoned any pretense of critical appraisal of the sometimes incomprehensible caution of the new administration. He compares their reporting to “embarrassing, Soviet-style contortions,” bordering on hagiography.

      He notes how Biden and his Democratic colleagues are not alone in seeking shelter within the “cautious middle.” So are most journalists, even Republican stalwarts working for the media. He cites the case of New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks who, as a philosophically-focused Republican, “spent his career penning paeans to ‘personal responsibility’ and the ‘culture of thrift,’ but is now writing stories about how ‘Joe Biden is a transformational president’ for casting aside fiscal restraints in the massive Covid-19 bill.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Taibbi speculates that Brooks may be undergoing the same “evolution” as Biden, leading him to some kind of safe haven where those who have some power over his future — his employer, The New York Times — want to be sure he will not deviate from the party line. Taibbi compares Brooks to a lot of people in the corporate press “who are searching out the safest places on the op-ed page, the middle of the newsroom middle, in desperate efforts to stay on the masthead.”

      Being in the cautious middle is now perceived by many to be the key to survival in the new political-media complex, even if being in the middle rhymes with irrelevance, inefficacy and refusal to implement or even take into account the will of people. The political middle is no longer the position in the center of people’s real interests or even of the spectrum of popular opinion. The middle appears to exist as a theoretical point of absolute stasis in which changing as little as possible while finding ways to reassure the discontents by acts of verbal bravado defines a decent strategy of governance.

      In 2008, Barack Obama ran as the anti-George W. Bush candidate. Once in office, Obama maintained most of Bush’s heritage, from disastrous tax cuts for the rich to maintaining and prolonging the Bush wars that he had railed against. Biden has come into office as the anti-Donald Trump, ready to bring things back to a middling “normal” presumably defined by the status quo of the Obama period. Just like Obama, President Biden appears to have accepted the new “middle” defined by his predecessor rather than realizing his own stated ambition during the 2020 campaign to become a “new FDR,” the Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in the 1930s decisively overturned the policies of his Republican predecessors.

      For the moment, Biden is showing no signs of listening to the needs of the populace beyond offering a quick fix of injected cash ($1,400). And, apart from the symbolic move of rejoining the 2015 Paris climate accord, Biden has maintained nearly all of Trump’s foreign policy legacy, including refusing to cancel Trump’s sanctions on Iran that followed the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with the Iranians. A mere reduction of those sanctions might have modestly pointed toward a return to the status quo ante-Trump. In his various actions concerning China, Iran and Saudi Arabia and even Venezuela, Biden appears to be paying homage to Trump’s leadership rather than blazing a new path in international diplomacy.

      In a famous moment during a vice-presidential debate in 1988, Democrat Lloyd Bentsen cut his young opponent, Dan Quayle, down to size with a remark that followed Quayle’s attempt to compare himself to President John F. Kennedy. Bentsen reminded Quayle that he had served under the assassinated president before concluding, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Bentsen was a child of 12 when Roosevelt began the first of his four terms as president. If he were alive today, Bentsen might have the gall to say to Biden: You’re no FDR.

      *[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

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in World Politics

      Will the US and Russia Start Over?

      by

      It’s winter in Russia, which is not a season for the faint-hearted. The pandemic is still hitting the country hard, with the number of new COVID cases hovering around 20,000 a day, which has cumulatively put the country in the global top five in terms of infections.

      Under these inauspicious conditions, if you are brave enough to face down the cold and COVID to protest openly against the government of President Vladimir Putin, your reward may well be a trip to jail. If you’re very good at your job of protesting, you might win the grand prize of an attempt on your life.

      Yet, for the last two weeks, Russians have poured into the streets in the tens of thousands. Even in the Russian Far East, protesters turned out in Yakutsk (45 below zero) and Krasnoyarsk (22 below). Putin has predictably responded with force, throwing more than 5,000 people into jail.

      The US Will Need Turkey to Counter Russia

      READ MORE

      Media coverage of the Russian protests focus, not surprisingly, on Alexei Navalny. After recovering in Germany from an assassination attempt, the Russian opposition leader returned to Moscow on January 17. He was promptly arrested at the airport where his plane was rerouted. His close associates, who’d shown up at the original destination of his flight to welcome him home, were also detained. These arrests, and the government’s desire to lock Navalny away in prison for as long as possible, triggered the latest round of demonstrations throughout the country.

      Putin has ruled over Russia for more than two decades. Because of the constitutional changes he rammed through last year, he has effectively made himself leader for life. Will these latest protests make a dent in his carapace of power?

      Meanwhile, the US and Russian governments this week exhibited a modest form of engagement by extending the New START treaty on nuclear weapons for another five years. Despite this hopeful sign, no one expects anything close to a full reset of US–Russian relations during a Biden administration.

      But as Putin faces protests in the street and US President Joe Biden deals with recalcitrant Republicans in Congress, the US and Russia might at least avoid direct conflict with one another. More optimistically — and can you blame a boy for dreaming? — the two countries could perhaps find common cause against the global scourges of nuclear weapons, climate change and pandemics.

      Putin vs. Navalny

      Although they face each other across the Russian chessboard, Putin and Navalny share some basic attributes. They are both adept politicians who know the power of visuals, symbols and stories. They rely on the media to sustain their popularity, Putin using state-controlled media and Navalny exploiting social media.

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      And they have both been willing to adjust their messages to grow their appeal among everyday Russians by turning to nationalism. Putin started out as a rather conventional Soviet bureaucrat, with a commitment to all of the ethnic groups within the Soviet Union. Even when he became the leader of Russia in 1999, he thought of himself as the head of a multiethnic country. Particularly after 2014 and the conflict with Ukraine, however, Putin began to make appeals to russky (ethnic) Russians rather than rossisky (civic) Russians. He has made the defense of ethnic Russians in surrounding regions — Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics — a priority for his administration.

      Navalny, meanwhile, started out as a rather conventional Russian liberal who joined the reformist party Yabloko. Liberalism, however, has never really appealed to a majority of Russians, and parties like Yabloko attracted few voters. Navalny began to promote some rather ugly xenophobic and chauvinistic messages. As Alexey Sakhnin writes in Jacobin:

      “He participated in the far-right Russian Marches, waged war on “illegal immigration,” and even launched campaign “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” directed against government subsidies to poor, ethnic minority-populated autonomous regions in the south of the country. It was a time when right-wing sentiments were widespread, and urban youth sympathized with ultra-right groups almost en masse. It seemed to Navalny that this wind would fill his sails — and partly, it worked.”

      Navalny used nationalism to wipe away any memories of his unpopular liberalism, but it was difficult to compete with Putin on that score. So, increasingly, the oppositionist focused on the corruption of the Putin regime, publishing exposes of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s wealth and most recently a video tour of a huge palace on the Black Sea said to be the Russian president’s (which Putin denies).

      With these critiques of the ruling elite’s corruption, Navalny can bring tens of thousands of angry protesters, particularly young people, onto the streets. Unlike present-day Belarus or Ukraine 2014, the Russian protesters don’t represent the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens. Putin remains a relatively popular figure in Russia. Although his approval ratings have dropped from the 80% range that was common five years ago, they still hover around 70%. US presidents would be thrilled with those numbers. Approval of the Russian government is considerably less — around 50% — which suggests that Putin has successfully portrayed himself as somehow above everyday politics.

      Putin Is Worried

      Still, the Russian leader is worried. In his latest speech at the World Economic Forum, Putin spoke in apocalyptic terms of a deteriorating international situation. “The pandemic has exacerbated the problems and disbalances that have been accumulating,” he said. “International institutions are weakening, regional conflicts are multiplying, and the global security is degrading.”

      His comments on the global situation reflect more parochial concerns. Because of COVID-19, the Russian economy contracted by 4% in 2020. Although the government implemented various measures to cushion the impact, many Russians are suffering as a result of rising unemployment and falling production. The Russian economy depends a great deal on sales of oil and natural gas. Any further reduction in global trade — either because of the pandemic or tariff wars — would complicate Russia’s economic recovery and consequently undermine Putin’s political position.

      The immediate challenge comes from the parliamentary elections later this year. Putin’s United Russia party currently holds a comfortable majority in the Duma. The other two top parties are led by nationalists who are equally if not more fanatical — Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party. But a political force coalescing around a figure like Navalny could disrupt Putin’s balance of power.

      That’s why Navalny returned to Moscow. And that’s why the Russian court decided this week to lock Navalny away for more than two years — for violations of parole that required him to report to the authorities that tried to kill him. Navalny has taken an enormous risk, while Putin is taking no chances. The Russian leader has long deployed a preemptive strategy against any potential rival. Those who dare to oppose him have been killed (Boris Nemtsov), poisoned (Vladimir Kara-Murza), jailed (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) or forced into exile (Garry Kasparov).

      Embed from Getty Images

      Civil society is also under siege in Russia, with activists vulnerable to charges of being, basically, spies and saboteurs under a “foreign agent law.” Yet the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT community and others continue to protest against the country’s authoritarian system. And these protests are not just taking place in relatively liberal enclaves in the western part of the country like Moscow and St. Petersburg. Large-scale demonstrations took place at the end of 2020 in Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, over the arrest of the region’s independent-minded governor. While Navalny gets the press, civil society activists have quietly built up networks around the country that can turn people out onto the streets when necessary.

      Like all authoritarians, Putin uses “law and order” arguments to his advantage. Russians have a horror of anarchy and civil strife. They have long favored an “iron fist” approach to domestic politics, which helps explain the persistent, posthumous fondness for Joseph Stalin, who had a 70% approval rating in 2019. According to polling conducted last year, three in four Russians believe that the Soviet era was the best period of time for Russia, and it certainly wasn’t the dissident movement of that period that made them nostalgic.

      The protesters thus have to tread carefully to avoid losing popular support among a population fond of an iron fist but also deeply disgusted by the corruption, economic mismanagement and social inequality of the Putin era. The Russian opposition also has to grapple with the distinct possibility that getting rid of Putin will usher in someone even worse.

      US-Russia Relations: A New START?

      The extension of New START, the last nuclear arms control treaty in effect between Russia and the United States, is a spot of good news in an otherwise dismal outlook for relations between the two countries. Joe Biden has prided himself on his knowledge of and commitment to arms control. So, if the two countries can agree on terms of selective engagement, the next four years could be profitably taken up by a series of negotiations on military weaponry.

      New START merely establishes ceilings on nuclear warheads for both sides and addresses only strategic, not tactical, nukes. So, as Stephen Pifer argues, a follow-on treaty could establish a ceiling on all nuclear warheads, for instance at 2,500, which would cover battlefield nuclear weapons and result in at least a 50% cut in the arsenals of the two sides. Another option for bilateral negotiations would be to focus on limitations to missile defense or, at the very least, cooperation to protect against third-party missile attacks. A third option would be to focus on conventional weaponry and constraints on weapons sales.

      The Biden administration could even move more quickly with an announcement of a no-first-use policy of nuclear weapons — something Biden has supported in the past — and agreeing with Moscow to de-alert intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) much as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev de-alerted another leg of the nuclear triad, strategic bombers, back in 1991.

      This arms control agenda is only part of a larger potential program of selective engagement. The US and Russia could return to their coordination around the Iran nuclear deal. They could explore ways to cooperate on global challenges like climate change and pandemics. They could even start addressing together the harmful effects of economic globalization, a topic Putin brought up in his recent Davos speech.

      Embed from Getty Images

      To do so, however, the two countries will have to manage the numerous points of friction in their relationship. For one thing, they’ve gone head-to-head in various proxy battles — in Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. Russia is legitimately furious that NATO expanded to its very doorstep, and the United States is legitimately concerned about Russian interventions in its “near abroad,” most recently in Ukraine. The US has lots of evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — not to mention Russian involvement in a coup attempt in Montenegro that same year and its meddling in the presidential election in Madagascar two years later — and Russia is pissed off at US “democracy promotion” in the Color Revolutions and within Russia itself. Russia is eager to finish the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would bring natural gas to Germany, while the US is eager to sell its own gas to its European ally. Then there’s Russia’s penchant for assassinating Russians in other countries and repressing protestors at home.

      Any of these issues could scuttle cooperation between Moscow and Washington. One way of negotiating around this minefield is to delink the agendas of cooperation and conflict. Arms control advocates have a long history of doing just that by resisting calls to link other issues to arms control negotiations. Thus, the Iran nuclear deal focuses exclusively on the country’s nuclear program, not its missiles, not its relations with other countries in the region, not its human rights situation. The same lack of linkage has historically applied to all the arms control agreements between Washington and Moscow.

      This strategy of delinking doesn’t mean that these other issues are completely off the table. They are simply addressed at different tables.

      Those who desperately want a new cold war with Russia will not be happy with such a practical solution. They don’t want to talk with Putin about anything. As repugnant as I find the Russian leader, I have to acknowledge that he heads up an important global player and he has the support (for the time being at least) of much of his population. So, even as we challenge the Russian leadership’s conduct at home and abroad, we must also work with Moscow in the interests of global peace, prosperity and sustainability.

      Of course, there’s another word for all this: diplomacy.

      *[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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden presses Putin on election interference and Navalny arrest in first call

      by

      The US and Russia have agreed to extend an arms control treaty limiting their deployed nuclear warheads after Joe Biden’s first phone call as president with Vladimir Putin.At the same time, Biden took a firm position on Russian actions that Donald Trump largely ignored, raising concerns about the poisoning and arrest of the opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, warning Putin that the US supported Ukraine against Russian “aggression”, complaining about Russian interference in last year’s US presidential election, and the “Solar Winds” cyber-attack on US government agencies last year.Biden challenged Putin on US intelligence reports that Russia had offered bounties to the Taliban and other extremist groups in Afghanistan for the killing of US soldiers.The White House account of the call said: “President Biden made clear that the United States will act firmly in defense of its national interests in response to actions by Russia that harm us or our allies.”The White House spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said that Biden had also expressed opposition to the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, as being a “bad deal” for Europe, one example of continuity with the Trump and Obama administrations.The Biden team is seeking to take a tougher line on Russia’s violations of human rights and international law while seeking to make progress on arms control with Moscow, which crumbled under the Trump administration.The two leaders formally exchanged notes extending the 2010 New Start agreement by five years, assuring the survival of the last remaining arms control treaty between the US and Russia in the wake of the Trump era.The extension was agreed just 10 days before New Start was due to expire. It keeps in place a limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on either side, imposes limits on delivery systems, and enforces verification and transparency measures, helping ensure the two biggest nuclear weapons powers do not take each other by surprise.According to the White House the two leaders also talked about re-establishing a regular “strategic stability dialogue” between senior officials, at which frictions in the relationship, and possible new arms control agreements, could be discussed.The Kremlin’s readout of the conversation said that “the presidents expressed their satisfaction with the exchange of notes of extension of the New Start, which happened today”.“In the coming days the parties will complete all the necessary procedures to ensure that this important international legal mechanism for the mutual limitation of nuclear missile arsenals functions in the future,” the Kremlin account said.The Kremlin’s account described the conversation as “frank and businesslike” – a turn of phrase often used to describe tense discussions.It added that the two leaders had also discussed the Open Skies treaty, another arms control agreement allowing transparency through mutual aerial surveillance, which Trump also withdrew from, and from which Moscow has said it was also preparing to leave.Biden and Putin discussed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump left but Biden has said he is willing to rejoin, and the conflict in Ukraine between the government there and Russian-backed separatists. Putin, now dealing with his fifth US president, restated his proposal for a summit of the five permanent members of the UN security council.Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Centre, tweeted that: “[The] Putin-Biden phone conversation today promises no reset, but suggests a degree of predictability to the badly strained relationship. Confrontation needs to be managed safely.”The change in course in US foreign policy is likely to accelerate after the Senate confirmed the appointment of Antony Blinken as secretary of state on Tuesday, one of his first actions was to co-sign a statement with other G7 foreign ministers condemning the poisoning and arrest of Navalny and the mass detention of protesters and journalists.The statement said the G7 ministers “call upon Russia to adhere to its national and international obligations and release those detained arbitrarily for exercising their right of peaceful assembly”.At the UN, the acting US ambassador announced another sharp break with Trump-era policy, the restoration of diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority and renewing aid to Palestinian refugees as part of its support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Trump, a close ally of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had broken US ties with the Palestinians.The Biden team has said its first foreign policy goal would be to repair relations with allies and global institutions ruptured by Trump. The state department said on Tuesday it would “thoroughly review” sanctions the Trump administration imposed on the prosecutors office of the international criminal court (ICC), over investigations it launched into war crimes committed by all parties in Afghanistan, and by Israeli and Palestinian forces in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.“The United States shares the goals of the ICC in promoting accountability for the worst crimes known to humanity. At the same time, the United States has always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it, or that are referred by the UN security council,” a state department spokesperson said.“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.” More