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      America, the Stumbling Giant

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      The United States has been the most powerful country in the world for 130 years and has actively led the international community for 75. With only 4.25% of the world’s population, the US still accounts for a little more than 24% of the world’s GNP. Its military is by far the world’s most powerful, with a budget larger than the next 12 biggest militaries combined. The US has the highest per capita income of any major country and the most diverse and creative economy the world has ever seen. It leads in virtually every technology critical for economic and military predominance, from artificial intelligence to materials science. Its democracy has set a standard the world has looked up to for 240 years.  

      But the American giant is stumbling. Today, Americans fear that the US is in decline. Its economy is progressively skewed to the ultra-rich. Its national government is almost paralyzed. China is challenging Washington’s international power and leadership. American society is more divided than at any time since the Civil War, with up to 40% of Americans believing that a “strong man” leader — a fascist — is preferable to democracy.

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      Almost all Americans worry that for the first time in history, their children will be poorer than they are. Many of America’s political moderates and progressives fear that America’s democracy will be replaced by fascistic autocracy and consider former president Donald Trump and the current Republican Party fascist. Yet on the other side of America’s political divide, an NPR/Ipsos poll in December 2020 found that 39% of Americans believe that the country is controlled by a sinister “deep state,” and this enrages them.

      Social Stresses

      My family and I are literally what made America. Since my ancestors arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower off the shore of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, America was created by “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” popularly known as WASPs. The culture that shaped the United States for 350 years was overwhelmingly English, then Western European, with a dominant Puritanical, Protestant ethos.

      For 15 generations, America was also culturally and legally a society for whites. Even for my generation growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans still changed their surnames to sound more “Anglo” — dropping the last vowel, say, from the Italian (and Catholic) “Lombardi” to “Lombard,” to appear more WASP-like and less “ethnic” or un-American. Fully 10% of the population was black, but they were excluded from power and lived on the cultural periphery. Half the nation still lived in an apartheid “whites only” regime, the legacy of centuries of white domination and black slavery. In the media, one saw only white faces like mine, except in subordinate or, rarely, in “exotic” roles. And, of course, America, like the rest of the world since time immemorial, was only a man’s world.  

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      But with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, America began a stupendous social change, with blacks and women gaining unprecedented rights. Furthermore, non-WASP immigrants have arrived in the US by the tens of millions. When I was born, America was over 88% white. By the year 2045, under 50% will be white. The trend has already been clear for decades. In the past dozen years, the US has elected a black president twice, a black-Indian female vice president, and its second Catholic president.

      Today, the US has a vibrant black middle class. Its Asian population is growing rapidly. Asian and Indian Americans hold many prominent positions in the country’s economic and scientific establishments. Women now hold countless key positions in all sectors of the US economy, including boardrooms. This demographic and social revolution has diversified America but also engendered a nativist, racist reaction and the rise of a fascist: Donald Trump.

      Socially conservative whites — especially the least educated — have literally taken to the streets to “save” their country from these changes. Donald Trump voices their anger and their demands. Having lost the presidential election of 2020 yet having refused to accept verified results, the Republican Party has taken dozens of measures to restrict voting access for non-whites. There has been talk of civil war, and there has been an insurrection.

      Economic Stresses 

      Real incomes have largely stagnated for about 40 years. Globalization has destroyed entire sectors of America’s middle-class economy. Much of US manufacturing has moved abroad to lower-wage economies. In the 1960s, the single male income earner could provide a middle-class life for most families. Today, 60% of families require two full-time incomes to maintain a middle-class life. According to a Brookings paper, women account for “91% of the total income gain for their families.”

      In 2019, a Federal Reserve study found that almost 40% of Americans “wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit-card charge that they could quickly pay off.” With $41.52 trillion in assets, the top 1% of households control more than 32% of the country’s wealth. With just $2.62 trillion in assets, the bottom 50% own a mere 2%. This concentration of wealth is creating social and political strains.

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      The Republican Party has based its appeal on these grievances for decades, and Trump, the classic demagogue, exploited them all the way to the presidency. Blaming stagnation and increasing economic insecurity of ordinary Americans — and their loss of white social status — on globalization has been a ploy of Republicans since the mid-1960s. The party has progressively based its appeal on such tropes and fears since.

      Today, Republicans systematically oppose any action by the federal government as a threat to “freedom.” They seek to reduce taxes, gut economic regulations, lower investments in infrastructure and slash expenditure on education, which they deem to be a means of dangerous social engineering. 

      Political Stresses

      As McKay Coppins has pointed out in The Atlantic, after emerging as the leader of the Republican Party in 1994, “Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise.” As speaker of the House of Representatives, Gingrich sought to demonize and destroy the Democratic Party. He refused to cooperate, let alone compromise with the Democrats at any level either in the White House or Congress.

      When Barack Obama was elected president, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acted ruthlessly to oppose everything the Obama administration proposed. Before the 2010 midterm elections, McConnell declared: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Today, McConnell has stated that “100% of his focus is on blocking” President Biden’s agenda.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Since the mid-1990s, American politics has turned increasingly polarized, its federal government almost paralyzed. There are two principal reasons the US suffers from political rigor mortis. First, the Republican Party has become increasingly intransigent and partisan. The Democratic Party remains more moderate and open to compromise but has gotten little in return from the Republicans. Second, America’s electoral structures accord a disproportionate weight to rural districts, which is where the anxious, angry and reactionary WASPs and other whites live. The more ethnically diverse, urban and educated citizens tend to live in the major cities, heavily concentrated on the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. 

      On July 1, 2019, Wyoming’s population was 578,759 while California’s numbered 39,512,223. In the presidential elections, Wyoming receives three electoral college votes; California receives 55. This means a vote for president in Wyoming is worth more than 3.72 times a vote in California. However, it is in voting for the US Senate where Wyoming really has an edge. Every state in the US elects two senators, regardless of its population. This makes a vote in Wyoming 68.27 times more valuable than a vote in California. 

      This structural bias toward less populous rural states gives Republicans a tremendous political advantage. It has enabled them to triumph in two of the last six presidential elections despite winning a minority of the popular vote and to frequently hold a majority in Congress and Senate, despite receiving lower overall votes. America is so evenly divided politically that one party often controls the White House while the other dominates Congress, or at least one of its two chambers. Given the partisan gridlock in the US, this virtually brings legislation to a halt.

      The consequences of this electoral and institutional schizophrenia are everywhere to see and experience: American roads, bridges, water mains, harbor facilities and education now lag far behind most developed countries and even many emerging economies. Some foreign visitors to the US have commented that American infrastructure reminds them of the 1950s — which is precisely when much of it was built. The Shinkansen, Japan’s bullet train network, awes Americans, including myself, and it is 50 years old. America has always been a “third-world country” for the ethnically excluded. Now, the strains and failures of America’s social, economic and political paralysis extend more broadly through society. Even the WASPs are not spared.

      Global Stresses 

      Two global issues in particular shape American public life and self-doubts. First, the US is no longer the only great power. China’s rise has been breathtaking. Beijing challenges American preeminence in trade, technology, diplomacy and military strength, posing the greatest challenge to the US since World War II. Many Americans fear that China’s rise is a sign of American decline.  

      Second, global warming threatens the American way of life and shapes much of the political debate about the environment, the economy and the role of government. Signs of a literal cataclysm are already upon us. The West Coast has experienced the worst forest fires in recorded history and is living through the worst drought in 500 years. In 2012, the US Geological Survey estimated that sea levels would rise on the East Coast by nearly 50 centimeters by 2050. In 2021, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association projects the same level of sea rise in Boston and Massachusetts. By 2050, the spot where my Mayflower ancestors began the American experiment 400 years ago will be swallowed by the sea.

      Yet even global warming divides America. Most of the Republican Party believes that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the “deep state” so that scientists can have jobs. Some even assert that the California wildfires are linked to “Jewish space lasers.” These Republican beliefs are an amalgam of lunacy and old fascist tropes. That one of the country’s two major political parties believes such dangerous lies and delusions bodes ill for America’s future. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      During his campaign and since becoming president, Joe Biden has declared that the next four years will be a “battle for the soul of the nation.” He and his party have to end the paralysis of America’s public institutions and democracy, heal social divisions, and reduce growing economic inequality. They must rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure and rise to the challenge of China as a fast-emerging peer competitor in international and economic affairs.

      The Republican Party and nearly 40% of the American population will oppose every step Biden attempts. The rural bias in the country’s political structures consistently grants this 40% control of about half the House of Representatives and Senate. Biden must win majorities to implement his transformative economic, social, political and diplomatic policies with only the slimmest majority possible in the legislature.

      Furthermore, this majority is fragile. Of the 100 seats in the Senate, Republicans have 50, Democrats 48 and independents two, both of whom caucus with the Democrats. The vice president presides over the Senate and supports the president but may only vote in the event of a 50-50 split. Historically, most presidents have struggled to enact their agenda even with strong electoral majorities.

      No president since Abraham Lincoln in 1861 has had to deal with such an array of grave social, political and economic crises. Throughout history, many states have proven unable to address structural, systemic problems with legislation and policies that do not profoundly alter these structures or systems. In most instances, however, this requires major social and political upheaval, sometimes even revolution. This has happened before in America — in 1776, when there was revolution, in 1861, when there was civil war, and in 1929, when there was economic collapse. 

      Within the current framework of American democracy, Biden can probably only succeed in radically addressing America’s daunting democratic, diplomatic, social, political and economic challenges if his party wins a more solid majority in both chambers of Congress. Thus, all eyes, hopes and fears turn to America’s congressional elections of 2022, now only 16 months away. This historic vote may well decide who wins the “battle for the soul of the nation.”

      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 Libyan Government Faces Numerous Challenges

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      On February 5, the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF), a 75-member body, supervised by the United Nations, approved Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh’s list of officials to temporarily run national affairs. Their mandate will last until presidential and parliamentary elections take place on December 24. The list includes Mohammed al-Manfi as chairman and Musa al-Koni and Abdullah Hussein al-Lafi as members of the Presidential Council. Dbeibeh became the prime minister of Libya.

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      On March 10, Dbeibeh presented his cabinet to members of parliament and won the confidence of 132 deputies out of the 133 who attended the session in Sirte. The internationally recognized national unity government based in Tobruk was subsequently sworn in, but it faces many challenges. These include political, military, economic, and social and human rights issues.

      Political Challenges

      Dbeibeh is a businessman-turned-politician from Misrata, a port city that is around 200 kilometers to the east of Tripoli, the Libyan capital. During his time in business, he was involved in political circles as a trusted person of the ruling Arab Socialist Union. In 2007, Muammar Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya at the time, charged Dbeibeh with the task of running the state-owned Libyan Investment and Development Company (LIDCO). The firm was responsible for some of the country’s biggest public works projects. After the Libyan revolution of 2011, which led to the overthrow and subsequent death of Gaddafi, the Libya al-Mustakbal (Libya Future) movement was founded by Dbeibeh.

      The prime minister has succeeded in forming a broad-based coalition government that has brought together representatives of most stakeholders from the political, regional and tribal scenes in Libya. Dbeibeh crystallized a state of relative consensus between the different parties that have lived during a state of dissonance and a raging power struggle. This culminated in Major General Khalifa Haftar’s declaration of war on Tripoli in April 2019. Haftar’s heavy losses, his failed coup against civilian rule, the suffering of Libyans from war and their forced displacement pushed the bickering parties to negotiate and reach a political agreement. This deal was endorsed by the United Nations mission, under the pressure of countries such as the United States, Germany, Britain and Italy. The formation of the new Libyan government is based on a fragile consensus dictated by necessity. The sustainability of this is a challenge in itself, requiring a high degree of governmental harmony and solidarity.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Dbeibeh’s team now faces the challenge of bridging the gap between the various actors on Libya’s political scene and bringing them together under a single banner. This national project entails the extension of state sovereignty over the whole of Libyan territory and the consolidation of civil peace, taking into account public interest. The new government is also required to implement the roadmap drawn up by the LPDF. Most importantly, this includes the unification of sovereign institutions to elect new leaders to manage the transitional phase. It also involves creating conditions for organizing legislative and presidential elections at the end of the year.

      The formation of the national unity government represented a historic moment that was the result of talks between the most prominent political actors in Libya. It served as a political solution to the Libyan crisis and a transition from a situation of war to one of peace.

      Despite the peaceful transition of power from Fayez al-Sarraj, the prime minister under the Government of National Accord (GNA), to Dbeibeh, some political figures have not fully grasped the scope of change taking place in Libya. Instead, they have resisted the shifts in government to preserve their influence and personal and factional interests.

      An example of this is the case of Aguila Saleh Issa, the speaker of parliament and president of the House of Representatives (HOR). Issa was expected to vacate his role, as decided by the forum, to allow a new figure from the south to be head of the legislative body. The aim is to create a balance between the different regions of Libya. Yet the speaker has clung on to his position.

      Issa has a long history of obstructing the path for a peaceful settlement to the Libyan crisis. In 2016, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) adopted sanctions against him. He was accused of being “complicit in, actions or policies that obstruct, undermine, delay, or impede, or pose a significant risk of obstructing, undermining, delaying, or impeding, the adoption of or political transition to the GNA.” In addition to this, parliament remained divided and suspended during his term and only met on rare occasions.

      Military Challenges

      On the military front, the UN Security Council has called on all parties to abide by the ceasefire agreed in Geneva under the UN in October 2020. Yet in March this year, a UN report stated that the arms embargo in Libya is “totally ineffective.” The Geneva agreement issued a 90-day deadline for foreign mercenaries to leave the country. The stated period has since passed, but Libya is still teeming with local and international armed groups.

      This complex situation poses a major challenge to the national unity government. Officials are primarily concerned with forcing all parties to respect the ceasefire and stop the imports of weapons by land, sea and air. In addition to this, millions of weapons — smuggled or stolen — are handled illegally in Libya.

      The state needs to regain its authority and have a monopoly on the use of weapons. This requires forcing the armed brigades in the east and west to hand over their equipment to the Ministries of Defense and Interior. This approach calls for dissolving Libyan militias, draining their sources of funding, rehabilitating their members and reintegrating them into official security and defense structures. This includes institutions such as the police, army, civil protection or border control, which have specific laws and codes of conduct and a clear hierarchy subject to civilian leadership.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The government will likely face resistance from armed groups. The brigades loyal to General Haftar, who considers himself above the state and does not accept the command of civilian leadership, will present a particular challenge.

      Mercenaries also pose a risk. There are an estimated 20,000 foreign fighters in Libya, according to former UN Envoy Stephanie Williams. Most of them are stationed in the east of Libya and in the oil crescent, a coastal area that hosts most of the country’s oil export terminals. The fighters include Sudanese, Chadian, Syrian and Russian nationals earning high salaries.

      Their deportation presents a further challenge because the groups are part of a network of power relations involving other countries. Russia, Turkey, Egypt and France have used fighters and technical experts as bargaining chips to ensure their share of reconstruction projects and natural resources in Libya. The Libyan government needs to create a situation where locals reject the presence of mercenaries and put pressure on them to leave.

      The support of the European Union, the United States and Britain is also important. Such global powers must intensify diplomatic and field efforts on these armed groups to surrender their positions and weapons to the Libyan government. If this can be achieved in a manner that guarantees the sustainability of peace and stability, foreign investors might view Libya as a safe country for commercial and economic activity.

      Economic, Social and Human Rights Challenges

      The Dbeibeh government has inherited an economy that has been weakened by war and financial and administrative corruption. The economy has been severely affected by the deliberate halting of oil production and export by tribes and militias loyal to Haftar. It has also been impacted by depleted parallel institutions and informal trade as well as the smuggling of fuel and other basic materials. “Due to the closure of oil wells and restrictions put by pro-Haftar armed groups, the Libyan economy suffered a loss of $5 billion in January 2020,” Mucahit Aydemir reports. “From 2016-2019, the country has already lost more than $100 billion, as Ibrahim Cadran, an Haftar ally interrupted the oil excavation in the east of the country.”

      It is assumed that the national unity government will set an audited public budget and liberate oil fields from foreign, tribal or militia domination. The interim leaders should also seek to restore the export of oil, the country’s primary source of income. Undertaking these urgent, necessary reforms will allow the provision of cash liquidity, secure salaries and help the Libyan dinar (LD) recover, if only relatively. According to the World Bank, the dinar “continues to suffer in the parallel market because of political uncertainties and macroeconomic instability. In the first two quarters of 2020, the LD in the parallel market lost 54 percent of its value.”

      On the social and human rights front, it is imperative for the new government to provide citizens with essential services, such as clean water, electricity, gas, medicine and basic foodstuffs, and to fight the wastage of public money and increasing prices. In March, UN Special Envoy Jan Kubis said the “country is facing an acute electricity crisis this summer and there are risks to its water security as well.” He added that “UN agencies estimate that over 4 million people, including 1.5 million children, may face being denied access to clean water and sanitation if immediate solutions are not found and implemented.”

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      In addition, the coronavirus was confirmed to have spread to Libya on March 24, 2020, when the first case was reported in Tripoli. Libya is vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic due to the impact of the last civil war, which led to a dire humanitarian situation and the destruction of the country’s health infrastructure. In April, Libya launched its vaccination program against COVID-19, but, as with most countries in Africa, the supplies of doses remain low. At the time of publishing, the country had recorded more than 195,000 infections and over 3,200 deaths.

      In light of risks to the country’s health care, an effective strategy must be implemented to combat COVID-19. This must take into account sufficient steps to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, import the necessary number of vaccine doses and guarantee access to health services for those suffering from the COVID-19 disease.

      It is also important for authorities to release political prisoners, deal with cases of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and end impunity for those committing crimes. Those forcibly displaced during the civil war must also be allowed to return to their homes and resume their professional lives in a safe environment. The building blocks for a project of transitional justice as a prelude to a practical, inclusive and fair system of reconciliation must also be pursued.

      The time available to the Dbeibeh government is limited and the challenges it faces are plenty. But this should not prevent the interim administration from being able to introduce changes and pave the way for political, economic and human rights reform. However, this will be possible only if officials are united and cooperate to serve the public and if international support continues for the national unity government. Most importantly, to succeed, the government will need the support of Libyans themselves.

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

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      in World Politics

      So Far, Biden’s Foreign Policy Is Proving Too Conventional

      by

      On the domestic front, Joe Biden is flirting with transformational policies around energy, environment, and infrastructure. It’s not a revolution, but it’s considerably less timid than what Barack Obama offered in that pre-Trump, pre-pandemic era.

      When it comes to foreign policy, however, the Biden administration has been nowhere near as transformational. The phrase Joe Biden has used so often is “America is back.” That sentiment certainly captures some aspects of Biden’s relationship with the international community, such as repairing relations with the World Health Organization and rejoining the Paris climate accords. In these ways, the administration has brought America back to the status quo that existed before Trump was unleashed on the world stage.

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      But on some very important issues — China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea — President Biden hasn’t managed to restore even the previous status quo. His approach to military spending and the arms race is decidedly hawkish. His message on immigration, as expressed by Vice President Kamala Harris on a visit to Guatemala earlier this month, effectively erases the inscription on the Statue of Liberty by telling potential border crossers in the region to stay home. Okay, foreign policy is not a winning issue at the ballot box, and Biden certainly has a lot on his agenda. But even the notoriously cautious Obama took some courageous steps with Tehran and Havana.

      It’s possible that Biden is focusing on America first before turning to the world as a whole. It’s also possible that he’s simply not interested in altering US foreign policy in any significant way beyond removing US troops from Afghanistan. True, it was exhilarating to have a conventional president again after Trump. But conventional, when it comes to US foreign policy, is just not good enough.

      Confronting China

      If the Biden administration’s overriding domestic preoccupation is a sustainable economy, then its dominant foreign policy obsession is China. Biden and Xi have spoken only once, by telephone in February. Xi participated in Biden’s virtual climate confab in April. They are likely to meet face to face sometime this year, possibly around the G20 summit in Rome in October. There’s been talk of greater cooperation on addressing the climate crisis. And there haven’t been any overt military confrontations in the South China Sea or elsewhere.

      But otherwise, Biden and Xi have not really gotten off on the right foot. It was a no-brainer for the new Biden administration to lift the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese products and de-escalate the trade war that unsettled manufacturers and consumers on both sides of the Pacific. The Biden team is ostensibly doing a review of US-China trade policy with a focus on whether Beijing has met its commitments under the “phase one trade deal” signed back in January 2020 (so far, it’s been a mixed record of China meeting some targets for US imports and missing others).

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      The review is more than just bean-counting. In a marked departure from the usual neoliberal trade talk coming out of Washington, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai has said, “I want to disconnect this idea that the only way we do affirmative trade engagement, trade enhancement is through a free trade agreement.” Tai prefers to operate according to a “worker-centric trade policy” that evaluates China on issues of forced labor, workers’ rights and the environment. A more nuanced approach to trade is all to the good, of course, and Tai should be commended for breaking with the Washington consensus.

      But taken in conjunction with other Biden administration policies, the reluctance to lift tariffs on Chinese goods is part of a full-court economic press on the country. The Biden administration has effectively continued the Trump approach of not only lining up allies in the region to contain China (the Quad, the Blue Dot Network) but enlisting European countries as well to join the bandwagon. In his recent trip to Europe, Biden corralled the G7 to create the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative, a purported alternative to China’s Belt and Road infrastructure program, and twisted some arms to get NATO to prioritize China as part of its mission.

      NATO’s new emphasis on China reflects the Pentagon’s shift in focus. Trump might have loudly proclaimed his anti-China animus, but the Biden administration is determined to close what it calls the “say-do gap” by expanding capabilities beyond the Navy to challenge China in the air and above.

      China’s moves in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea are deeply troubling. Nor is Beijing doing nearly enough to green its Belt and Road Initiative. But the Biden administration needs to think creatively about how to leverage China’s own multilateral aspirations in order to address global problems. Trade tensions and disagreements about internal policies are to be expected. Yet the Biden administration has an urgent and historic opportunity to work with China (and everyone else) to remake the international community.

      Sparring With Iran

      Another no-brainer for the Biden administration was reviving the Iran nuclear agreement that Trump tried to destroy. Granted, it was tricky to unwind the sanctions against Tehran and address Iran’s demands for compensation. It wasn’t easy to reassure the Iranian leadership of the sincerity of US intentions given not only Trump’s past hostility but the current animosities of congressional Republicans. And there was also Israel, which was doing everything within its power to scuttle diplomacy up to and including sabotaging Iran’s nuclear facilities and assassinating Iranian scientists.

      These obstacles notwithstanding, the Biden team could have gotten the job done if it had started earlier and been more flexible. Not wanting to open itself up to criticism from hawks at home, however, the administration argued for a mutual, step-by-step return to the agreement. By contrast, Iran quite sensibly argued that the United States, since it attempted to blow up the agreement, should be the first to compromise by removing sanctions, a position that some US policymakers have also supported.

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      Meanwhile, the Biden administration is continuing a tit-for-tat confrontation with militias aligned with Iran. This week, the administration launched airstrikes against facilities on the Iraq-Syria border from which these militias have allegedly attacked US.bases in Iraq. US forces in Syria subsequently came under rocket fire.

      Why are there still US soldiers in Iraq and Syria? Didn’t the Biden administration commit to ending America’s endless wars? Although US forces are scheduled to depart Afghanistan in September and Washington has pledged to remove troops from Iraq as well, negotiations around the latter have yet to produce a timetable. Removing 2,500 US soldiers from Iraq would please the government in Baghdad, remove an irritant in US-Iranian relations and take US personnel out of harm’s way. What’s not to like, Joe?

      Getting Nowhere With Cuba and North Korea

      Late in his second term, Barack Obama orchestrated a bold rapprochement with Cuba. After lifting financial and travel restrictions, Obama visited the island in March 2016 to meet with Cuban leader Raul Castro. It wasn’t a full opening. Washington maintained a trade embargo and refused to close its anomalous base in Guantanamo. But it was a start. Donald Trump brought a quick end to that fresh start by reimposing the restrictions that Obama had lifted.

      Joe Biden promised to resurrect the Obama policy. Trump’s reversals, he said as a candidate, “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” And yet, as president, he has done nothing to reverse Trump’s reversals.

      As Karen de Young writes in The Washington Post, “Under Trump restrictions, non-Cuban Americans are still prohibited from sending money to the island. Cruise ships are banned from sailing from the United States to Cuba, and the dozens of scheduled U.S. commercial flights to Cuban cities have largely stopped. Tight limits remain in place on commercial transactions.”

      The reason for the new administration’s lack of action, beyond its concerns about human rights in Cuba and its fear of Republican opposition in Congress, boils down to domestic politics. Robert Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey who never liked the Obama-era détente with Cuba in the first place, represents a key obstacle in Congress. Public opinion in Florida among Cuban-Americans, which had swung in favor of rapprochement during the Obama period, has now also swung decisively in the other direction, thanks to a steady diet of Trumpian demagoguery.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Here, the Biden administration could try something new by closing Guantanamo. The administration is already launching a quiet effort to close the detention facility at the base by resolving the status of the several dozen inmates. He should go even further by rebooting Guantanamo as a center for US-Cuban environmental research, as scientists Joe Roman and James Kraska have proposed.

      North Korea, meanwhile, is the one place in the world where Trump sought to overturn decades of US hostility. His attempts at one-on-one diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un didn’t achieve much of anything, but it still might have served as a foundation for future negotiations. Biden has instead followed the script of all the administrations prior to Trump: review policy, promise something new, fall back on conventional thinking.

      The administration finished its review of the North Korea policy in April. Biden rejected his predecessor’s approaches as misguided and has relied on the usual big-stick-and-small-carrot policy that stretches back to the 1990s. On the one hand, Biden extended sanctions against the country and has maintained a military encirclement. On the other, his emissaries have reached out to Pyongyang, with Special Representative for North Korea Sung Kim saying this month that the United States would meet with Pyongyang “anywhere, anytime, without preconditions.” “Without preconditions” is fine. But what about “with incentives”?

      Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea is more shut off from the world than usual. It is preoccupied with the economic challenges associated with its increased isolation. In his annual address in January, Kim Jong-un made the unusual admission that the government’s economic program fell short of its goals. More recently, he has said that his country is “prepared for both dialogue and confrontation, especially … confrontation.”

      Biden should focus on the first half of Kim’s sentence. South Korea’s progressive president, Moon Jae-in, nearing the end of his own tenure, very much wants to advance reconciliation on the peninsula. Instead of beefing up its military containment of the isolated country, Washington could work with Seoul to break the current diplomatic impasse with a grand humanitarian gesture. Whether it’s vaccines, food or infrastructure development, North Korea needs help right now.

      Military Exceptionalism

      It’s still early in the Biden administration. Remember: Obama didn’t achieve his major foreign policy milestones in Iran and Cuba until later in his second term. Biden no doubt wants to accumulate some political capital first by repairing relations with allies and participating in multilateral fora on the global stage and achieving some economic success on the home front.

      The administration’s position on military spending, however, suggests that Biden is wedded to the most conventional of thinking. The United States is poised to end its intervention in Afghanistan and reduce its commitments in the Middle East. It is not involved in any major military conflicts. Everyone is wondering how the administration is going to pay for its ambitious infrastructure plans.

      So, why has Biden asked for a larger military budget? The administration’s 2022 request for the Pentagon is $715 billion, an increase of $10 billion, plus an additional $38 billion for military-related spending at the Energy Department and other agencies. True, the administration is hoping to boost non-military spending by a larger percentage. It is planning to remove the “overseas contingency operations” line item that funded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

      But if there ever was a time to reduce US military spending, it’s now. The pandemic proved the utter worthlessness of tanks and destroyers in defending the homeland from the most urgent threats. Greater cooperation with China, a renewed nuclear pact with Iran and a détente with both Cuba and North Korea would all provide powerful reasons for the United States to reduce military spending. To use Joe Biden’s signature phrase, “C’mon, man!”

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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 Myth of Bipartisanship Takes a Hit

      by

      In January, Joe Biden assumed the leadership of a nation in disarray. On Donald Trump’s watch, the US had struggled for nearly a year to come to terms with a pandemic that disrupted not just the economy, but people’s lives and relationships. Last summer, an unprecedented protest movement against the brutal treatment of black Americans rivaled the COVID-19 pandemic for headlines. These parallel events underlined deep contradictions that have long existed in the social fabric. As a parting gesture, Trump chose to put on display the apparently irreparable division of the body politic by encouraging a mob to assault Congress as it prepared to validate his election loss.

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      Those particular events were dramatic enough. But in the background lay other pressing issues. First among them was the rapid decline of the health of the planet due to anthropogenic climate change. At the same time, the effects of wealth and income disparity became ever more visible inside the US and across the globe. In the background was the persistence of wars, terrorism and global instability accompanied by a very real nuclear threat, aggravated by powerful nations’ obsession with producing increasingly sophisticated weaponry. Arms sales had become essential for the economies of Western nations, exacerbating instability in entire regions of the world. Not only the American people but also the global population were becoming increasingly aware of the stakes implied by these converging issues. In this context, expectations grew for Biden’s FDR-style change in American politics. Not that he would challenge the existing order, but that he would for once address the real issues.

      President Biden thus entered the White House with an implicit mission to restore a semblance of order, whatever that meant. Observers quickly discovered that today’s version of US democracy entertains two possible approaches to restoring order. The first, which to many people appears logical, requires assessing the nature of the crises and promoting policies designed specifically to address the perceived causes. The second is clearly less logical but represents a long-standing tradition a seasoned politician such as Joe Biden fully understood. It consists of weighing the opinions and interests of the two parties that share power and devising solutions that do not threaten their specific interests. It also implies relegating the needs and desires of the nation’s population to a secondary position.

      Biden quickly put his well-honed skills to work. The New York Times describes the dramatic scene in which he “strode to the cameras on the White House driveway on [June 24], flanked by an equal number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, to proudly announce an overall infrastructure agreement totaling $1.2 trillion over eight years that could cement his legacy as a bipartisan deal maker.” 

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Bipartisan:

      A descriptive term for any agreement between the two dominant parties designed to buttress the status quo, bipartisanship becoming a necessary ingredient when the status quo itself has become exceptionally dysfunctional, built on policies that are unpopular with the majority of the electorate but considered vital to the preservation of donor support by the political class

      Contextual Note

      Progressive Democrats wasted no time expressing their displeasure with a bill that fails to address even the most tepid of Biden’s campaign promises concerning the real problems the nation was facing. Emboldened by his belief in his own bipartisan superpowers and wishing to appease progressives, Biden explained, in response to a question from the press, his commitment to pushing through another bill that would deal with those issues. He even promised to reject the bipartisan version he had just negotiated if it was not accompanied by the partisan version. The Times commented: “It may not seem like much, but it was enough to upend Mr. Biden’s proud bipartisan moment.” Pride certainly appears to be a more powerful motivator for the president than problem-solving.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Revealing the strategy that would have had a chance of working only if left unmentioned, Biden announced, “if this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it.” This set off a firestorm among his bipartisan partners, who judged they had been taken for a ride. Over the next 24 hours, Biden had to find a way of walking back his imprudent remarks. He dutifully promised to back the original bill with no conditions, and peace was restored. Republicans now have a clear path to devise ways of canceling the threat of action being taken on the issues that matter.

      There is still a small chance Biden could succeed by mobilizing every member of the Democratic Party to pass the “real” infrastructure bill through reconciliation. But the odds seem rather long. This leaves some observers wondering whether the gaffe was inadvertent. Perhaps Biden’s real bipartisan aim was to provide his opponents with a pretext for ensuring that the second bill never gets passed.

      “The drama does not appear to have sunk the deal,” The Times writes reassuringly, “but Mr. Biden admitted that his comments on Thursday left ‘the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to.’” That was ‘certainly not my intent,’ he added.” This glib explanation of the confusion may sum up the public’s perception of the first months of the Biden presidency. There is a thick fog around his intent.

      Politico reports that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell criticized accused Biden of “‘completely caving’ to the party’s left wing and has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to derailing Biden‘s progressive agenda.” What this means is that the nation must prepare for a direct confrontation between the ideologies of the two parties, the very opposite of bipartisan government. The logic has come full circle, as often happens these days in Washington.

      Historical Note

      The myth of bipartisanship in US politics is relatively new. It is linked to the emergence a century ago of a binary political system in which only two dominant parties could legitimately claim the right to govern. It took new meaning in recent decades once the parties had settled into their stable ideological identities. For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the Democratic Party drew its capacity to govern from its force as a coalition of Northern liberals and Southern segregationist Dixiecrats. The Republicans had their own two factions: Northeastern liberals and heartland conservatives. In such circumstances, bipartisanship was both an inevitable ingredient of almost all legislation and a meaningless concept. Once the Democrats became “the liberals” and the Republicans “the conservatives,” bipartisanship would become a real challenge.

      Joe Biden entered Congress at a time when the old bipartisanship was fading but not yet deceased. At one point, progressives excoriated Biden for expressing his nostalgia for the days when he collaborated respectfully with white supremacists. The progressives were right in their reproach, but not for the moral reasons they cited. Rather for what it indicates about Biden’s inability to dissociate himself from an irrelevant past. He still hasn’t adapted to today’s very different reality.

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      The idea of bipartisanship may be the central myth of the Biden presidency. Conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have fallen in love with it and revere Biden for his commitment to it. Senator Mark Warner, a conservative Democrat, lauded Biden’s successful negotiation in these terms: “The message it sends to the American people, and also to our friends and adversaries around the world, is so important. In a post-Jan. 6 world, it shows that people who come from different political views can still come together on national priorities.” The fiasco that followed Biden’s threat to veto his own bill demonstrates the absurdity of this maudlin sentiment.

      Despite persistent public quarrels about budgets and taxation required to maintain the conservative or liberal label of the two parties, bipartisanship has actually been the norm in recent decades. And it is a destructive norm. Critiquing Biden’s brazenly illegal bombing this weekend of Iraq and Syria, Glenn Greenwald makes this historical point: “This has continued for close to two full decades now because the establishment wings of both parties support it. Neither of them believes in the Constitution or the rule of law, nor do they care in the slightest about the interests of anyone other than the large corporate sectors that fund the establishment wings of both parties.”

      *[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.]

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      The Issue of Abortion Is a Litmus Test for the American Catholic Church

      by

      Ignoring warnings from Pope Francis and the Vatican, US Catholic bishops earlier this month overwhelmingly approved drafting guidance that would deny the rite of communion to public officials who do not support the church’s opposition to abortion. The decision was seen as the church’s most public rebuke yet of US President Joe Biden, only the second Catholic to occupy the White House. A drafting committee will convene to write the guidance and present a draft to the bishops for a formal vote in November.

      The sacrament of communion, or Holy Eucharist, lies at the core of the Catholic faith. The communion host, bread, is viewed as the actual body of Jesus upon consecration by the priest during Mass. Receiving it is considered a sign of a believer’s state of grace. Receipt of communion is de rigueur and almost automatic for any Catholic attending Mass. Typically, only non-Catholics and excommunicated Catholics would be formally denied communion, though those who consider themselves not in a state of grace, i.e., guilty of a serious sin, are not supposed to receive it. Abortion, among others, is considered a grievous sin.

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      Joe Biden is an observant Roman Catholic, having grown up and been educated in the church. He regularly attends Sunday Mass and even periodic daily services, and receives communion, which has never been denied him previously. He often quotes from the Bible and church hymns in his political remarks and is known to frequently recite the rosary, which he carries with him in his pocket.

      Biden has been clear on his position on abortion. While accepting the teachings of the church, he has said that he will not impose his personal view on others and, therefore, supports a woman’s right to choose. It is precisely that position that has riled American bishops, all of whom have begun to view the issue as a litmus test for Catholicism.

      Losing Their Hold

      In America, the Catholic Church has seen a steady erosion of adherents to its teachings on a host of moral issues, most involving the treatment and role of sex and gender in everyday life, and abortion. American Catholics, like their non-Catholic counterparts, are all over the moral map. While practicing or observant Catholics are more likely to follow church teachings on these matters, even they have shown an independent streak by making decisions in their lives at odds with traditional Catholic dogma.

      For example, the church officially opposes the use of artificial contraception, yet 99% of US Catholic women use some form of artificial birth control, according to a recent Guttmacher Institute poll. This compares with 99.6% of women with no religious affiliation, 99.4% of mainline Protestant women, 99.3% of evangelical Protestants and 95.7% with other religious connections. While this is universally known among Catholics, the church leadership nowadays usually — and wisely — avoids the subject. Moreover, there is no movement to deny communion to either these women or those who support their right to choose contraception.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The church sees its authority eroding elsewhere as well. Surveys suggest that Catholics favor allowing to divorce and remarry, and divorced Catholics who remarry to receive communion. Since 2011, a majority of Catholics have supported gay marriage, up to 69% today. Sixty percent support the ordination of women, and 62% think that priests should be able to marry.

      On the controversial subject of abortion, a clear majority (56%) of Catholics support its legalization. The figure may be deceptive, however. Among Catholics who attend Mass regularly, opposition to abortion is significantly higher. Nevertheless, two-thirds of Catholics oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

      On the specific issue before the American bishops, 67% of Catholics oppose denying communion to Biden for his views on abortion. Worth noting, however, is that among Catholics who identify as Democrat or Democrat-leaning, 87% oppose such a ruling, while only 44% who identify as Republican or Republican-leaning do so.

      Immutable Catholicism

      All of this lends weight to the call among a growing majority of American Catholics for changes in their church’s policies and teachings. Yet the Catholic Church is anything but a democracy. So, Catholics are voting not only with their feet but also their dollars, either leaving the church or simply refusing to support it with their contributions. Those who strongly identify as Catholic have declined from 46% in 1974 to just 27% in 2017. Regular Sunday Mass attendance among Catholics has also fallen, from nearly 50% in 1974 to about 25% in 2012.

      These numbers tell some but not all of the story behind the church’s decline in the US. From 1970 to 2020, the number of priests in the US fell by 40%, not surprising given that vocations draw heavily from the church’s school system, which has also suffered declining numbers. Catholic schools are closing across the country, with almost 50% fewer elementary schools and 40% fewer secondary schools in 2020 than in 1970. Catholic parishes, which typically support Catholic schools, have fallen by 15% since 1990.

      With declining membership and Mass attendance have come decreasing church collections. Also, Catholics see withholding contributions as the only way to voice their opposition to church policies. The child sex abuse scandal that has wracked the church for the last 20 years has also provoked considerable outrage among Catholics of all political persuasions, especially as diocese after diocese pays tens of millions in legal settlements of child abuse cases nationwide, dating back to the 1950s. Many believe the church has yet to provide a full accounting of the priests’ behavior and of the senior clerics who tolerated it.

      It is this independent thought and attendant behavior that has conservative Catholic bishops worried. They fear the steady decline of Catholicism in America into the same fate as Protestantism, a cafeteria-style buffet of moral and theological offerings and teachings from which members may pick and choose. For an organization accustomed to obedience and acceptance, it is tantamount to a revolution. They have chosen to confront that revolution on the abortion battlefront.

      Train Wreck or Track Change?

      Though he may not have sought the position, Joe Biden represents the growing numbers of American Catholics — and most definitely Americans in general — who wish to define a defensible middle ground on abortion, a chronically neuralgically contentious issue in the US. The conservative Catholic bishops will have none of it, rather drawing a clear line brooking no viable middle ground.

      In doing so, they’ve formally submitted the church to America’s culture wars that infect so many segments of polity and society. Even more importantly for the church, these bishops threaten to divide the US institution. On one track, there is the conservative movement, a compliant core that is faithful to all the church’s teachings and dogma, intolerant of any deviation, whether on abortion, married priests, contraception, gay marriage, etc. On another track, there is a more liberal version of the church, focusing on its historic mission of social justice, immigration, climate change and poverty elimination but also more tolerant of diverse views on sex and morality.

      Pope Francis unquestionably knows this and is trying to avoid what may be inevitable, especially as his American bishops appear so eager for the confrontation and consequent division. Following the bishops’ vote, he issued no comment. The Vatican asserted that he had already spoken on his opposition to the action. Clearly, however, their decision flouted his position and amounts to no less than a direct challenge to the pope and his authority, a rarity in recent church history.

      Francis and the Vatican appear to be relying on the ultimate failure of the bishops’ initiative. It would require unanimous approval by the Conference of Bishops or at least two-thirds approval followed by the pope’s consent. The likelihood of either is microscopically slim.

      The bishops’ action is more than one of merely trying to force dogmatic adherence to church teachings. It is a barely veiled challenge to this pope whom they’ve viewed as out of step with tradition and steering the church down a dangerous path of diluting the faith. Even if their measure fails, they will have established themselves as an alternative voice of the Catholic faith, thereby condemning Catholics across the country to a church divided between two versions of Jesus’ “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.”

      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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      Iran’s Hardliners Are Back

      by

      To some critics, US elections are managed affairs. According to this cynical view, the “powers that be” narrow the field of candidates, the two parties don’t represent the real range of public opinion in the country, and periodic elections are just shadow plays staged by powerbrokers behind the scenes. In this way, US democracy is a sham.

      Although certainly distorted by the powerful, US democracy is not entirely scripted. If nothing else, the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 should have dispelled this particular misconception since the array of forces within the Republican Party, the intelligentsia and Wall Street were initially unified against him. By the same token. the come-from-behind victory of Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush in her House race in Missouri in 2020 also demonstrates, on a smaller scale, that US elections cannot be predicted in advance.

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      Iranian elections, on the other hand, are generally considered semi-democratic at best. Here, a true deep state of clerics and security organs really does stage-manage the elections in often quite transparent ways. This year, for instance, the Guardian Council of clerics and lawyers qualified only seven presidential candidates out of the 592 that registered. Forty women threw their hats into the ring, but the council rejected all of them. It also made sure that no viable reformist candidates would compete in the race.

      As a result, hardliner Ebrahim Raisi handily won the election last week. Just as US President Joe Biden was declaring in his first European trip that “America is back” — by which he meant that an internationally engaged America is back — the recent Iranian election has been an opportunity for the Iranian conservatives known as principlists to declare their return to power. Raisi will take over from the reformist President Hassan Rouhani, who had staked his political career on a nuclear deal with the United States and a reduction of US economic sanctions, which was initially a winning bet. Thanks to Trump’s rejection of that nuclear deal and his ratcheting up of sanctions, however, the reformist agenda lost credibility, if not among the population then at least among Iran’s ruling elite.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Many Iranian voters were so disgusted by what was on offer in the recent election that they refused to vote. The turnout, under 50%, was the lowest since the revolution of 1979. Perhaps most telling was the candidate who came in second place. Actually, it wasn’t a person at all: it was “void.” More than 4 million votes were declared invalid.

      Combined with the number of voters who stayed home, those who voided their ballots sent a signal that they, at least, know a sham when they see one. If one wants to be optimistic, the low-turnout election reveals just how strong the pro-democratic constituency is in the country. And ironically, this poor showing demonstrates that elections do matter in Iran since the Guardian Council had to go to great lengths to guarantee its preferred outcome.

      When Trump won in 2016, he set about transforming US foreign and domestic policy. The swing in Iranian governance from reformist to conservative might be expected to produce a similar sea change in how Iran deals with the economy, its nuclear program and the outside world. But Raisi may end up selling the reformist agenda better than the reformists themselves.

      The Nuclear Deal

      The United States and Iran have just concluded a sixth round of negotiations on reviving the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). It’s just possible that the two sides, in negotiations facilitated by the European Union, will come to an agreement before Raisi assumes the presidency in August. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, for instance, is upbeat about a quick and positive conclusion to the talks.

      But even if such an early agreement is not forthcoming, there’s no reason to expect that Iran will suddenly pull out of the negotiations. True, the JCPOA was integral to the reformist program, and the reformists were just voted out of office. But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei backed the agreement in 2015 and continues to do so. Raisi himself has expressed support for the deal, with the caveats that it was America’s fault for jeopardizing the agreement and that he’s no fan of negotiations for the sake of negotiating.

      Raisi is looking to tread a fine line. His election campaign was based largely on improving the Iranian economy, and that will require the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear-related sanctions. At the same time, he has made clear that he’s not interested in following the reformist agenda of using the nuclear deal as a cornerstone of rapprochement with the West. He stated this week that Iran’s missile program is not up for discussion — something that might have figured in post-JCPOA negotiations — and he is not looking to meet with President Biden.

      “The Americans trampled on the JCPOA and the Europeans failed to live up to their commitment,” Raisi pointed out. “I reiterate to the US that you were committed to lifting the sanctions — come back and live up to your commitments.”

      That’s a fair assessment of what happened under Trump (the trampling part) and what has so far failed to happen under Biden (the lifting of sanctions part). Still, if both sides return to the JCPOA even without future agreements, it would be an improvement over the dangerous impasse of the last few years.

      So, the message is acceptable. The messenger, however, is problematic. Accused of gross human rights violations from his time as a prosecutor in the 1980s and a judge after that, Raisi was included in a 2019 Treasury Department sanctions list. So, Iran’s new president is going to face some difficulties traveling to the West and will not likely give a speech at the UN General Assembly meetings in New York as his predecessors routinely did. Given his reception in the West, it’s not surprising that Raisi is unenthusiastic about a detente with his detractors.

      Yet because Raisi will now be presiding over a state that hews closer to the conservative views of the clerical establishment, there will be less political infighting at the top and Raisi may very well be able to sell an agreement at home more effectively than the reformists.

      The Economy

      The Iranian economy is a mess. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the country experienced significant contractions in GDP of 6% in 2018 and nearly 7% in 2019. With Trump applying maximum pressure on Iran, Europe was supposed to pick up the slack. In fact, trade with Europe dropped by an astonishing 85% after 2017 as European countries buckled under the threat of secondary sanctions from the Trump administration.

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      The rise in prices for consumer goods, particularly gas, prompted widespread protests throughout Iran at the end of 2019, to which the government responded with force. US-imposed sanctions, the disruptions of COVID-19 and chronic budget deficits have all contributed to the inflation that generates a good deal of public discontent in the country.

      In the late 1990s and the 2000s, Iran experienced a huge expansion of its middle class from below 30% of the population to nearly 60%. This middle class generally supported the modern, outward-looking agenda of reformists like Rouhani, who served two presidential terms beginning in 2013.

      Instead of cultivating that constituency, however, the Trump administration undercut the reformists by withdrawing from the JCPOA in 2018 and applying punitive measures that hurt the middle class. This was not a case of unintended consequences. As Ryan Costello explains at Responsible Statecraft, elements of the US far right quite consciously supported hardliners in Iran as the political figures most likely to unwittingly precipitate an uprising and, ultimately, the collapse of the regime. The maximum pressure campaign of the Trump years was designed with the same ends in mind.

      Instead of mobilizing another Green Movement, which protested the last hardliner to preside over Iran’s political system, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the return of the conservatives to power will more likely provoke apathy or even eventually support for anti-Western policies. “A decade of economic stagnation caused by sanctions and broken international promises has brought Iran’s middle class to a point that it may reconsider its future as a force for political moderation and globalization,” economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani concludes.

      Raisi, meanwhile, has promised to fight corruption and economic mismanagement in the Iranian economy. He has his work cut out for him. The country ranks 149 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Bribery and favoritism are widespread, while a number of officials have been prosecuted for embezzlement and influence-peddling. It’s going to be difficult to root out corruption since the system basically runs on clientelism. The new patrons who take over the government apparatus expect to siphon off a portion of the state’s wealth for distribution through their patronage system.

      As a result, Raisi might find it easier to improve Iran’s economy by negotiating a reduction of external sanctions than a reduction of internal corruption.

      Regional Relations

      One of the side benefits of the Biden administration’s rethink of relations with Saudi Arabia is that it has forced Riyadh to hedge its bets in the region. Trump lavished praise on the Saudis, even as they were killing Yemenis, assassinating a Washington Post columnist and jailing human rights activists. Under Trump, the United States and Saudi Arabia bonded on their anti-Iran agenda.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Now, with the Biden administration pulling back from its support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and criticizing the Saudi record on human rights, Riyadh has begun secret negotiations with Iran to mend their relationship. Those discussions, which began last month in Baghdad, cover a number of flashpoints, but particularly the places where the two countries are competing for influence such as Yemen and Iraq.

      Shortly after his electoral victory, Raisi announced that he wanted to improve relations with the Gulf Arab states. He singled out Saudi Arabia, which severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 2016. “There are no obstacles from Iran’s side to re-opening embassies,” Raisi said. “There are no obstacles to ties with Saudi Arabia.”

      A rapprochement between these two regional hegemons, however superficial, could significantly improve the prospects for reducing tensions in the region. And that, in turn, could be good news for a Biden administration that so desperately wants to shift its attention away from Middle East conflicts.

      In contrast to hawks like Elliott Abrams, I certainly do not root for the hardliners to win in Iranian elections. I believe that the Iranian system, led by the reformists, can evolve in a more democratic, more peaceful and more equitable direction.

      But in the short term, the victory of Ebrahim Raisi might just be good news. After all, he supports the nuclear deal, needs the reduction of US sanctions to fulfill his economic promises and is open to better relations with his neighbors. Imagine if Ahmadinejad, Iran’s version of Trump, had returned to power. Fortunately, the Guardian Council disqualified him as well. That’s not a bad lesson for Congress, as it confronts the possibility of Trump’s return to public office.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      Joe Biden Meets Afghanistan’s Leaders as the Country Faces Collapse

      by

      The security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating dramatically. The Taliban have captured the country’s border crossing to Tajikistan. Prospects of civil war have risen.

      Even as the US withdrawal gains momentum, Afghan leaders are visiting Washington to meet President Joe Biden on June 25. This includes President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, the chairperson of the High Peace Council for Reconciliation.

      The Hazara Minority’s Precarious Existence in Afghanistan

      READ MORE

      The Taliban are filling the vacuum that Americans are leaving behind. Violence has surged across Afghanistan and the government is losing territory by the day. As September 11, the deadline for the departure of American troops, draws nigh, the Taliban are becoming increasingly emboldened.

      The government in Kabul has a reputation for corruption and is proving to be ineffective. People are dying every day in cities, towns and villages from terror, crime and hunger. The US is leaving behind a royal mess. If its presence in Afghanistan was problematic, its withdrawal promises to be doubly so.

      Ghani Is Running Out of Time

      Stakes are high in Biden’s first meeting with the Afghan leaders even if expectations are low. Ghani is not an ideal interlocutor. He has presided over a notoriously corrupt administration of a failing state. Kabul’s writ does not even run in the city. Even if Biden and Ghani do a dream deal, the latter is highly unlikely to be able to uphold his part of the bargain.

      Biden wants to bring back American troops and minimize the instability that will inevitably follow in Afghanistan. He needs a good partner to work with. Once, Ghani was the blue-eyed boy of Washington. His academic credentials and bureaucratic experience gave him a halo that few Afghans possessed. Ghani has squandered all the resources that the US provided him. He has few, if any, opportunities left. Ghani’s government is on the verge of total collapse.

      Embed from Getty Images

      According to a new assessment of the US intelligence community, Ghani’s government could collapse within six months of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan. The government has lost credibility because it has failed to provide basic public services to the people. Consequently, the people have lost hope. Yet again, Afghans are voting with their feet and leaving the country in droves.

      Like many African strongmen, Ghani has surrounded himself with sycophantic cronies. He sees himself as the savior and messiah of Afghanistan. The president has no idea that he has lost all credibility in his second term. His lofty rhetoric fails to reflect Afghanistan’s grim realities.

      Ghani is not entirely delusional, though. He realized fully well that he occupies his fancy palace in Kabul thanks to the barrels of American guns. Once the Americans leave, he is toast. Therefore, he has opposed Biden’s peace plan that calls for a political settlement between warring parties, including the Taliban. Unsurprisingly, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has lauded Biden’s plan. 

      What Joe Biden Must Do

      Afghans fear that the US might be leaving their country to the mercy of the Pakistani generals. After the last Soviet troops departed from Afghanistan in 1989, the Pakistan-trained Taliban took over. This provided Pakistan with strategic depth, jihadis to send to India and a bargaining chip vis-à-vis Washington. History might be about to repeat itself and Afghans are terrified of another tragedy.

      Biden is meeting Ghani to reassure Afghans that he is not leaving them to the Taliban wolves. The official American line is that the US will continue to support the legitimately elected government in Kabul. Yet the Americans are infamous for short attention spans and Afghans fear they will be forgotten again. After all, Charlie Wilson could raise a ton of money to fight the Soviets but very little for schools or hospitals afterward. As the iconic American movie on the late congressman records, no one cared.

      There is another historical parallel. When US troops left Saigon in 1975, the Viet Cong overran Vietnam. As the last American planes fly back from Bagram, the Taliban could do the same in Afghanistan. Washington must act differently this time around. The US has to back Afghan security forces, put its weight behind a people-centered peace process and uphold Biden’s much-touted democracy agenda.

      If the US fails, the Taliban will be in charge. Pakistan will make Afghanistan a puppet state. Bagram, the closest American airbase to China’s western borders, might well fall to Beijing. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) might expand into Afghanistan too. The risks for Afghanistan, the region and the US are only too real.

      In an article for The Washington Post, David Ignatius argues that “a summer of pain awaits” Afghanistan. Over the years, American leaders have found themselves in a Catch-22 regarding Afghanistan. They cannot tell the public that Afghanistan deserves American blood and treasure forever. Nearly 20 years have passed since the tragic 9/11 attacks in the United States. American troops have patrolled Afghanistan’s dusty roads, fighter jets have flown endless sorties and drones have liquidated fearsome foes. Yet peace is nowhere in sight. At the same time, packing up and leaving only fuels the raging violence further, leaves behind a geopolitical vacuum and allows rival powers leverage against American interests.

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      Donald Trump promised American troops would come home when he was president. Biden has set a date for the final withdrawal. By doing so, he has tied his hands. The Taliban now know that American troops are preparing to leave and will soon be gone. In their worldview, the Taliban have made history. After humbling the Soviets, they have defeated the evil Uncle Sam. They see themselves as superiors of super powers in their own backyard. With morale sky high, they have launched bold military operations to take over Afghanistan. It seems the US can do little to prevent the Taliban from taking over.

      Yet things are never as dire or as rosy as they seem. Many Afghans have fought the Taliban and are willing to fight them again. The Ghani government may be incorrigibly corrupt, but its officials want to avoid the fate of the Soviet-backed leader Mohammad Najibullah whose corpse was strung for public display. Crises tend to focus minds and this might be the best time to deal with Afghanistan’s manifestly flawed leaders.

      Even as American troops are leaving, Biden must support Afghan leaders against the Taliban. He must make that support conditional on Ghani and his cronies leaving office by a certain date. They must put in place a more credible Afghan leadership to take on the Taliban. After all, the British replaced Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill during World War II. For Afghanistan, this is a time of national crisis.

      The Taliban could take over much of the country but will struggle to hold it together. A civil war might break out. The disintegration of Afghanistan might move from the realm of possibility to reality. Ambitious powers in the near neighborhood will take advantage of the ensuing chaos. Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan will not become a nation of high literacy, low infant mortality and better nutrition. It will yet again become an impoverished land where fanatics and terrorists will find refuge and a base for their global jihadist operations.

      President Biden has long declared that “America is back.” Afghanistan could smash that assertion to smithereens and demonstrate that America is just going back home. If he is serious about American leadership and holding aloft the torch for democracy, Biden cannot throw Afghanistan to the dogs of war. He has to build an international coalition that pushes through a peace process, backs credible leaders in Afghanistan and provides aerial, if not ground assistance to those putting their lives on the line against the Taliban.

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

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      in World Politics

      The Death of Meaningful Live Coverage in US Media

      by

      In an important article in Foreign Affairs cited yesterday in this column, Charles King mentions a particular initiative of media manipulation that an increasingly panicked President Lyndon Johnson undertook to defuse criticism of the war he had engaged in Vietnam. King describes a game of political chess that took place between William Fulbright, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1974, intent on exposing the bad faith of the government, and Johnson, who was desperately seeking to manufacture consent for his war.

      Fulbright, Vietnam and the Problem of Purity in US Politics

      READ MORE

      The chessboard was the media and specifically, television. “If there was a moment when the White House began to lose middle America,” King writes, “the Fulbright hearings marked it. From the outset, Johnson was so worried about their impact that he pressed one television network to air I Love Lucy reruns instead of live coverage.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Live coverage:

      The last increasingly feeble attempt by the media to acknowledge the abiding importance of reality in a culture that expresses a clear preference for hyperreality

      Contextual Note 

      Live coverage has always been a risky endeavor for the media, except in sports, where people understand the rules of engagement. Live coverage of a popular sporting event happens to be the most profitable form of entertainment. “Broadcasters pay heavily for sport because it is the best live, unscripted drama they can get,” according to one media commentator.

      War in some ways resembles sports because it pits two very serious adversaries against each other. US television networks in the 1960s sensed that live coverage of an emerging war could be profitable. But, in contrast with a sporting event, it entailed four serious problems beyond the physical risk to journalists themselves.

      Embed from Getty Images

      First, broadcasting unadulterated violence might violate the reigning standards of “decency.” But that could be solved with good editing.

      A second drawback lay in the fact that programming and planning became far more complex to manage since there was no official pre-announced schedule.

      The third was even thornier. It concerned the question of truthful reporting. Being too honest about what is happening on the ground risked alienating indispensable sources inside a government that desperately wants people to applaud “our side” and perceive the noble and even glorious side of combat.

      That consideration of honesty defines the fourth problem related to live coverage: Viewers keep expecting more reality at the very moment when the people promoting war decide they should see less of it. That leaves two options for news services: either scale back their reporting or begin misrepresenting or airbrushing the truth. But in the consumer society, the problem with scaling back (for example, offering sitcom reruns instead of Senate hearings) is that consumers always want more. In the end, misrepresentation — fake news — becomes the only viable solution. The key to manufacturing consent, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman made clear in their book with that title, is giving consumers not only what they want to hear, but what you (the media and the government) want them to want to hear.

      The Vietnam War brought home to both the government and the media the difficulty of managing live reality. The Nixon administration that followed both intensified the war and worked on molding the public’s mindset rather than either debating critics or seeking to hide from public scrutiny. Richard Nixon introduced the notion of “the silent majority” to neutralize the voices of protest and shame the refractory media by accusing them of failing to respond to the will of the people, “real Americans.” Nixon’s war on the media eventually backfired with the Watergate scandal, leading to his resignation in 1974. But it effectively drew attention away from his policies and onto his person, something Johnson was never able to do.

      From that point on, and thanks in part to the Watergate scandal itself, the media acquired the habit of focusing on the personality of presidents and neglecting critical discussion of their policies. Suddenly, there was plenty of live coverage of the Watergate affair itself and less and less of Vietnam, Indonesia and Chile, where the kind of foreign policy Fulbright denounced was being carried out with greater and greater impunity.

      Perhaps CBS and other audio-visual media had learned that live broadcasting of the reality produced by a president’s policies was too problematic to manage safely. In contrast, live broadcasting the dramas of the president himself excited their audiences. The public lapped up the scandals the media featured about Richard Nixon, the crook, Bill Clinton, the seducer, and George W. Bush, the bumbler and gaffer who, while launching disastrous wars, so charmingly failed even to put a coherent sentence together. Ronald Reagan, the incarnation of the wisdom attributed to Nixon’s silent majority, stood as an icon of Hollywood hyperreality, where scripted fiction distracted attention from the spontaneous and often duplicitous truth hiding behind it. Barack Obama, as the first black president, was protected by his own iconic status while, at the same time, silently polarizing the fears of the silent white majority. For them, his very presence in the White House was a scandal.

      As a living and breathing fountain of permanent scandal, Donald Trump was the godsend enabling all news outlets — for and against him — to thrive during a golden age of media. For four years, the kind of rational, critical discourse aiming at achieving some perspective on reality that Fulbright was known to promote disappeared from the airwave. The very idea of letting it be heard became anathema to media producers. This was as true of Fox (Republican, conservative) as of MSNBC (Democrat, liberal). The media relished every speech and tweet that emerged from Donald Trump’s creative impulses.

      Historical Note

      One problem with the American war in Vietnam was that, despite its superficial resemblance to a contest between “our team” and “their team,” it fundamentally failed to conform to the binary model. Americans never quite understood why the South Vietnamese government should be called our team. Lyndon Johnson’s massive deployment of troops was designed partly to convince Americans that it was a war not between two Vietnamese rival organizations with a claim to governing, but between American democracy and an illegitimate enemy that had no clear defining characteristics other than an apparent belief in Marxist theory. Those who delved into the people’s history understood that the North Vietnamese were nationalists whose goal was to finally break free of French colonial rule.

      The next serious problem with the conflict was the fact that once an American war starts, unless it is quickly won, it will go on forever. No excuse ever exists for stopping it. When, in his Senate hearings, William Fulbright called to the witness stand George Kennan — a highly respected presidential foreign policy adviser, considered by many to have written the ground rules of the Cold War — Johnson reacted. Knowing that Kennan judged the intervention in Vietnam to be a mistake, Johnson put pressure on CBS to replace its programmed live coverage of the hearings by stale reruns of popular sitcoms. This immediately provoked the resignation of Fred Friendly, the head of CBS’ news division. 

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      Friendly’s reaction tells us something about how the standards for truth that once existed even in corporate news media have evolved over time. Those who take the job now are only too aware of what’s expected of them. Like an Amazon or Uber driver, they obligingly deliver. They would never consider resigning simply because of orders from the White House. In any case, presidents no longer bother to put pressure on news editors to kill a story or live coverage. They prefer to send their message straight to the corporate executives who hire the news editors.

      Fulbright lived in a world that hadn’t yet fully realized that news could be entertainment and that politics and corporate interest could be seamlessly merged into a politico-media complex. In the 1960s, the idea persisted that political decisions could and should derive from rational analysis of historical context. But as President Dwight Eisenhower warned at the beginning of the decade, the military-industrial complex now occupied the government’s existential core. Its decision-making was based on cynical, irrational, profit-driven and power-hungry reasoning. William Fulbright, Walter Cronkite and Fred Friendly confronted that emerging world. They themselves belonged to a universe that no longer exists today.

      *[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