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      The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?

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      “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…… ” So goes the opening sentence of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, referring to the Jewish American couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sent to the electric chair exactly 68 years ago today. Their execution casts a morbid shadow over Plath’s book, just as it did over the United States, and it is seen by many as the nadir of America’s engagement with the cold war. The Rosenbergs are still the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for espionage, and Ethel is the only American woman killed by the US government for a crime other than murder.During their trial, Ethel in particular was vilified for prioritising communism over her children, and the prosecution insisted she had been the dominant half of the couple, purely because she was three years older. “She was the mastermind of this whole conspiracy,” assistant prosecutor Roy Cohn told the judge. But questions about whether she was guilty at all have been growing louder in recent years, and a new biography presents her in a different light. “Ethel was killed for being a wife. She was guilty of supporting her husband,” Anne Sebba, author of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, tells me. And for that, the 37-year-old mother of two young children had five massive jolts of electricity pumped through her body. Her death was so brutal that eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose out of her head.The killing of the Rosenbergs was so shocking at the time and is so resonant of a specific period in American history that it has become part of popular culture. In Tony Kushner’s play Angels In America, Ethel haunts Cohn. In Woody Allen’s Crimes And Misdemeanours, Clifford (played by Allen) says sarcastically that he loves another character “like a brother – David Greenglass”, referencing Ethel’s brother, who testified against her and Julius to save himself and his wife. The most moving cultural response to the Rosenbergs’ deaths was EL Doctorow’s 1971 novel, The Book Of Daniel, which imagines the painful life afterwards of the Rosenbergs’ oldest child, whom he renames Daniel. In reality, the older Rosenberg child is called Michael, and his younger brother is Robert. It is a bitter, rainy spring day when I interview the Rosenbergs’ sons. Only three and seven when their parents were arrested, six and 10 when they were killed, they are now grandfathers with grey beards and known as Michael and Robert Meeropol, having long ago taken the surname of the couple who adopted them after the US government orphaned them. When their parents were arrested, Michael, always a challenging child (“That’s putting it kindly,” he says), acted out even more, whereas Robert withdrew into himself. This dynamic still holds true: “Robert is more reserved and I tend to fly off the handle,” says Michael, 78, a retired economics professor, whose eyes spark with fire when he recalls old battles. Patient, methodical Robert, 74, a former lawyer, considers every word carefully. We are all talking by video chat, and when I ask where Robert is, he replies that he’s at home in Massachusetts, in a town “90 miles west of Boston and 150 miles north-east of New York City. To be more specific… ” Michael is in his home in New York state, in a town he describes as “just south of Pete Seeger’s home”, referring to the folksinger and leftwing hero.The differences between the brothers are obvious, but so is their closeness: Michael calls Robert “Chando”, a childhood nickname, and since Michael’s wife, Ann, died two years ago, his younger brother has called him every day.“Rob and I are unusual siblings in so many ways. We have dealt with so many struggles, so we are very enmeshed,” says Michael. I ask how it would have been if he had gone through it all on his own. He recoils, poleaxed by the thought. “I think it would have been very, very hard,” he says eventually. Perhaps just as importantly, they have been there for one another as adults, as more evidence about their parents’ case has trickled out, and they’ve had to keep reframing their own past. “Throughout the 70s and 80s, we believed our parents were just communists who were framed. Do you want to add anything, Chando?” says Michael. “Yes, I would add: you can frame guilty people,” says Robert.The brothers’ struggles began on 17 July 1950 when their father, Julius, was arrested in the family’s home on New York’s Lower East Side on suspicion of espionage. Michael had been listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio, an episode in which the Lone Ranger was framed, and now the show seemed to be happening in front of him. The previous month, Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, had been arrested for the same crime. Equally significantly, the Korean war had just begun, which was seen by the US as a fight to stop communism destroying the American way of life. Senator Joseph McCarthy was warning Americans about “homegrown commies”. By the time Julius was arrested, America was in a red panic. A month later, Ethel was seized by the FBI and charged. She called Michael at home and told him that she, like his father, had been arrested.“So you can’t come home?” he asked.“No,” she replied.The seven-year-old screamed.Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, like David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, were communists. Like a lot of Jews, they became interested in the movement in the 1930s when it seemed like a means to fight against fascism. Unlike many others, they stuck with it after the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, ostensibly, if not officially, allying the countries. “It’s easy today to criticise them, but these were people who grew up in poverty during the Depression and saw the rise of fascism. They thought they were making the world a better place,” says Sebba. As a historian, Sebba has built up a reputation for writing in particular about women, such as Wallis Simpson. “I do like writing about a woman who has been misunderstood,” she says, and few, according to her, have been more misunderstood than Ethel Rosenberg.The Rosenbergs are almost invariably discussed as a duo, but as her sons have slowly realised, and as Sebba shows in her book, their stories were very different. While Julius had a close relationship with his mother, Sophie, Ethel and her mother, Tessie, had a difficult one. Tessie favoured David, the baby of the family, and for Ethel, communism was a means of educating herself and separating herself from her mother.David briefly worked as a machinist at an atomic power laboratory called Los Alamos Laboratory. He was arrested when he was identified as part of a chain that passed on secrets about the technology to the Soviets. David quickly admitted his guilt, and his lawyer advised him that the best thing he could do for himself, and to give his wife immunity, would be to turn in someone else. Then the Rosenbergs were arrested. The FBI believed that Julius was a kingpin who recruited Americans to spy against their own country, and that he had used David to pass on secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians. The initial allegations against Ethel were that she “had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg and others in November 1944”, and “had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass and others in January 1945” – in other words, that she talked to her husband and brother. It was feeble stuff, as the FBI knew, yet Myles Lane, the chief assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, told the press: “If the crime with which she, Ethel, is charged had not occurred perhaps we would not have the present situation in Korea.”Michael played hangman with his father on prison visits, although he didn’t realise the irony until he was an adultInitially, David testified that his sister had not been involved in any espionage. However, his wife, Ruth, said that Ethel had typed up the information David had given Julius to pass on to the Soviets. David quickly changed his story the week before the trial to corroborate his wife’s version, probably under pressure from Roy Cohn, the ambitious chief assistant prosecutor. This was the key evidence against Ethel, and the chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol, conjured up an image for the jury of Ethel at the typewriter, pounding the keys, striking “blow by blow, against her own country in the interest of the Soviets”. But even with that, Myles Lane, who had publicly laid the blame for the Korean war at Ethel’s feet, admitted privately in a closed-door meeting of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: “The case is not strong against Mrs Rosenberg. But for the purpose of acting as a deterrent, I think it is very important that she be convicted, too, and given a stiff sentence.” FBI director J Edgar Hoover agreed, writing “proceeding against the wife will serve as a lever” to make her husband talk.At the trial, under Cohn’s questioning, David testified that in September 1945 he gave Julius a sketch and description of the atomic bomb, and that Ethel was deeply involved in the discussions between them. Because he had given names, David was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and ended up serving nine. Ruth was free to stay home and look after their children. The Rosenbergs, who insisted they were innocent, were found guilty. Judge Irving Kaufman carefully considered their sentence. Hoover, aware of the tenuousness of the case against Ethel, and how it would look if America executed a young mother, urged against the death sentence for her, but Cohn argued for it and won.Michael and Robert never saw the Greenglasses again after the trial, and all Michael remembers of them is: “David looked like a nondescript schlub and Ruth was a cold fish. But is that true, or just a nephew who wants to expose the people who lied about my parents?” he asks. They constantly question their own memories of the past. Robert says that when he thinks of his family before his parents were arrested he has, “this feeling of a golden age, of a wonderful loving family before it was ripped apart. But is that just fantasy?”Ethel has long been portrayed as a cold woman, one who, as Kaufman said in his sentencing, loved communism more than her children. In reality, as Sebba reveals in her book, she was a particularly devoted mother, with a progressive interest in child psychology. Before her arrest, she regularly saw a child therapist, Elizabeth Phillips, for help with Michael and to learn how to be a better mother. During her three years in prison, she faithfully kept up her subscription to Parents magazine. But when she was arrested, all the aspirations she had harboured for giving her boys the kind of happy childhood that had been denied to her imploded spectacularly. At first the boys lived with her mother, Tessie, who made no secret of her resentment of the situation. Things got even worse when they were put in a children’s home. Eventually, Julius’s mother, Sophie, took them in, but two little boys were too much for their frail grandmother to handle. None of their many aunts or uncles would take them, either because they sided with David and Ruth, or they were scared. So they were shipped around to various families. All Ethel could do was write letters to her lawyer, Manny Bloch, desperately laying out her parenting theories in the hope they would somehow be followed (“One cannot behave inconsistently with children… ”) For the sake of the boys, she always maintained a happy front when they visited.“We always had a good time on the prison visits: singing, talking, enjoying ourselves,” says Michael. He even used to play hangman with his father, although he didn’t realise the irony until he was an adult.The US government said that if Julius gave them names of other spies, and he and Ethel admitted their guilt, their lives would be spared. The Rosenbergs issued a public statement: “By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence, the government admits its own doubts concerning our guilt… we will not be coerced, even under pain of death, to bear false witness.” On 16 June 1953, the children were brought to Sing Sing prison in New York State to say goodbye to their parents. Ethel kept up her usual brave appearance, but on this occasion Michael – who was 10 and understood what was happening – was upset by her outward calm. Afterwards, Ethel wrote a letter to her children: “Maybe you thought that I didn’t feel like crying when we were hugging and kissing goodbye huh… Darlings, that would have been so easy, far too easy on myself… because I love you more than I love myself and because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying.” On 19 June, Ethel and Julius wrote their last letter to their children: “We wish we might have had the tremendous joy and gratification of living our lives out with you… Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy and Mommy.” Just after 8pm that day, the Rosenbergs were executed. They were buried on Long Island, in one of the few Jewish cemeteries that would accept their bodies.With their extended family still unwilling to look after them (“People later said to me, ‘A Jewish family and no family members took in the kids?!’” says Michael wryly), the boys were eventually adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, an older leftwing couple. They could finally grow up in anonymity among loving people who told them their parents had been brave and admirable. Abel Meeropol was a songwriter whose biggest hit was Strange Fruit, so the boys were raised on the royalties from the most famous song of the civil rights era. “I never thought about our aunts and uncles not taking us in, because living with Abel and Anne, it felt like we won the lottery,” says Michael. But memories of their parents were always there. Robert developed a strong physical resemblance to Ethel. “It made me want to hug and kiss him all the time,” says Michael.The boys enjoyed a happy, academic, leftwing upbringing as Meeropols. They told almost no one their real surname, and Robert, who was a toddler when his parents were imprisoned, never considered reverting to it. It was more complicated for Michael, who could remember playing ball games with his father in their apartment (“If it went in Robby’s playpen, it was a home run.”) Eventually, he decided as an adult that reverting to Rosenberg would be “artificial”. It soon didn’t matter, because in 1973 the local media unmasked them, ignoring their pleas to retain their anonymity. They decided to put the exposure to good use by campaigning for their parents. They wrote a memoir, We Are Your Sons, and sued the FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, obtaining more than 300,000 once secret documents which they believed proved their parents’ innocence. But the story had only started to unfold.In 1995, the Venona papers were declassified. These were messages sent between Soviet intelligence agencies that had been intercepted and decrypted by US counterintelligence from 1943 to 1980. The Rosenbergs were named in them. Julius, it was now clear, had definitely been spying for the Soviets, so much so that he was given the codename “Antenna” and later “Liberal”. David and Ruth Greenglass were also sufficiently productive as spies to be given codenames – “Calibre” and “Wasp”. But there was little about Ethel. She didn’t have a codename. She was, one cable noted, “a devoted person” – ie a communist – but, the cables also stressed, “[she] does not work”, ie she was not a spy. But when describing the recruitment of Ruth, the cable said, “Liberal and his wife recommend her as an intelligent and clever girl.”“At first, I hated that transcript, because it made Julius look guilty of something,” says Robert. “But then I realised this was as close to a smoking gun we would ever get, because it said that Julius and Ethel didn’t do the thing they were killed for. Ethel didn’t work and Julius wasn’t an atomic spy, he was a military-industrial spy,” he says, meaning that although Julius passed on details of weapons, he wasn’t passing on details about the atomic bomb.When our father got involved with the Soviets, our mother stayed out of it so that if he got arrested, she could take care of usMichael was more sceptical of the Venona papers and wondered if they were “CIA disinformation”. But in 2008 he finally accepted them when Morton Sobell – who had been convicted for espionage along with the Rosenbergs and served 18 years in Alcatraz – gave an interview to the New York Times. He said that he and Julius had been spies together, and confirmed that Julius had not helped the Russians build the bomb. “What he gave them was junk,” Sobell said of Julius, probably because he didn’t know anything about the bomb. Of Ethel, Sobell said, “She knew what he was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.” This corroborated what Aleksandr Feklisov, a retired KGB agent, said in 1997 when he admitted that he had been Julius’s handler. Feklisov agreed that Julius had passed on military secrets but, “he didn’t understand anything about the atomic bomb, and he couldn’t help us”. Ethel, he said, “had nothing to do with this, she was completely innocent. I think she knew [what her husband was doing], but for that you don’t kill people.”Michael has made peace with the revelation that his father was a spy. “As Robby’s daughter Jenny said to me, there is a positive to not thinking of our family as hapless victims. We want to be people who take charge of our lives,” he says. But he and Robert repeatedly emphasise that their uncle David’s claim that he gave Julius atomic information in September 1945 is extremely dubious. Recent research corroborates their argument: Soviet sources state that Julius stopped working for them in February 1945. “[The government] took a small-fry spy and framed him to be an atomic spy,” is Michael’s take on his father. Ethel, however, was a very different story.In 1996, David Greenglass gave an interview in which he finally admitted he lied about his sister: “I told them the story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife. I mean, I don’t sleep with my sister, you know.” He added, “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.” It is possible that Ethel helped to recruit Ruth and David, but they needed little encouragement. Many Jews of their milieu were communists and the Greenglasses’ letters show they were even more enthusiastic about communism than the Rosenbergs. Ruth died in 2008, David in 2014.Robert launched the campaign for Ethel’s exoneration in 2015 – not for a pardon, because that would suggest she had done something wrong, but a full exoneration. He is, he says, “more focused” on his mother than his father. “Perhaps my willingness to separate Ethel from Julius is a sign I don’t feel the same way about my parents,” he says.I ask what he means.“I wonder if there’s a little voice in the back of my head that’s saying, ‘You know, Julius, you really shouldn’t have done it, because you had kids,’” he says with some effort. I ask how he feels when he looks back at his father’s letters from prison, in which he insisted he was innocent. “I think he was spinning: he wasn’t an atomic spy, like they said, but he was a spy, so it wasn’t the whole truth. And I think he thought if he confessed to anything they would kill him, so denying everything was the best option. But yes, I have some ambivalences.”Michael, who has clearer memories of his parents, sees his father’s behaviour differently: “Should a man not have children if he goes off to war? In those days, that wasn’t the thought process. For a Jew and a communist, this was about survival.”Ethel’s innocence raises more questions than it settles. First, given that she was a true believer in communism, why didn’t she join her husband, brother and sister-in-law in spying?“Robby and I think that when our father got involved in helping the Soviets, our mother stayed out of it so that if he got arrested, she could take care of us,” says Michael.This sounds to me like a son hoping that their parents at least tried to protect their sons. But Julius and Ethel seemed to have little understanding of the danger they were putting the family in. After all, Greenglass was arrested a month before Julius, so they had plenty of time to flee the country, but didn’t. Sebba’s theory strikes me as more likely: “I think she just had other concerns: she was looking after her children and trying to be present for them. She gave up activism when her children were born. Her main identity was as a wife and a mother, and that’s what mattered to her,” she says.So why didn’t Julius save Ethel? The FBI was right: he had recruited spies, so he could easily have given names and probably saved her life, and very possibly his own, too.“Dad’s unwillingness to rat out his fellows wasn’t about him wanting to be a soldier of Stalin,” says Michael. “It was more personal. These were his friends! My father was not going to cooperate with the government, and that’s why they arrested my mother. So now he’s going to turn around and say, ‘OK, I’m going to save my wife by ratting out my friends?’ No! He had a naive belief that the American justice system was going to work because half the case against him was a pack of lies, so he thought he could deny everything and save them both.” Almost until the end, Julius believed that they wouldn’t go to the chair. The government and FBI hoped that, too. They never wanted to kill this young mother and father – they wanted names. After Ethel was killed, the then deputy attorney general William Rogers said, “She called our bluff.”Then there’s the question that baffled officials at the time, and has become the defining mystery about her: why did Ethel choose to stay silent and die with Julius, over staying with her children? We know she was deeply in love with her husband, and her letters to him during their imprisonment are filled with her longing to “lift my willing lips to yours”. But they are also full of her anxiety about the boys. Yet she said nothing.“Ethel absolutely did not want to be separated from Julius, and her letters show that she thought she was the one who had done him wrong by introducing him to her ghastly family,” says Sebba. “I believe that Ethel thought her life without Julius would have been valueless because her sons would never have respected her, because she would have had to make some kind of confession and name names.”If Ethel did think this, she might have been right.“As a child, it might have been easier if Julius had cooperated” says Robert. “He’d have been in prison and Ethel would have been released to take care of us – that’s the deal the government made with the Greenglasses. But as an adult I would much rather be the child of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg than the child of David and Ruth Greenglass.”Michael and Robert’s campaign for their mother’s exoneration was struck a major blow with the election of Donald Trump, whose original mentor was none other than Roy Cohn. Like many on the left, the Meeropols were shocked by Trump’s victory. “We just didn’t believe people could be so conned [into voting for Trump], but of course they can: the Salem witch trials, the antisemitic blood libel, communists under the bed, all the crap people have believed through the ages,” says Michael. It felt, Robert says, as if Cohn had won again, and they knew there was no point in asking Trump, of all presidents, to exonerate their mother. But the Meeropols got their revenge: in 2019, Michael’s daughter, Ivy, made a documentary about Cohn, in which Michael features, called Bully Coward Victim, in which she made the connection between her grandparents’ execution and Trump. “I’m a very revenge-oriented person, but it’s never about beating people to a pulp. I like exposure,” grins Michael.The campaign to exonerate Ethel is starting again, and the Meeropols are “optimistic” that President Biden will look at it favourably. They know their argument defies the confines of bite-size headlines, and so is a difficult one to sell to the public: Julius was guilty, although the extent of his guilt was exaggerated in an attempt to scare him into naming names; Ethel was possibly complicit, but not culpable. “There’s a very binary idea of the political world, in which people are guilty or innocent, right or wrong. But understanding nuance is essential to understanding how politics work and how society works,” says Robert.I ask why it matters so much to them what people understand. Their parents’ lives were destroyed by this case; instead of spending so much of their lives reliving it, why not leave it in the past? “It’s personal as well as political,” says Robert, emphasising both words. “That the US government invented evidence to obtain a conviction and an execution is a threat to every person in this country, and to not expose that is to become complicit in it. The personal stuff is obvious, but the political stuff is equally powerful.”The biggest question about Ethel for me relates to her sons. After our initial interview, I end up speaking to them, together and separately, several times over the course of a month, mainly because I have so many questions, but also because they are so delightful to talk to: wildly intelligent, always interesting, completely admirable. How on earth did they triumph over such a traumatic childhood? Sebba tells me that she asked the same thing of Elizabeth Phillips, the child therapist Ethel used to consult, whom she interviewed before her death.“She told me it was down to three things,” Sebba says. “She said, ‘One, they have an extraordinarily high level of intelligence. Second, they had amazing adoptive parents. But we now know how important those early years of life are, and Ethel must have given those two boys so much in those years that it lasted all their lives. Ethel must have been an extremely good mother.’” More

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      in US Politics

      Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all too

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      Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a 336-page indictment of Donald Trump, Trumpworld, America’s lack of social cohesion, greed and big pharma. He laments needless deaths, hyper-partisanship and populist disdain of experts and expertise. The word “evil” appears. So does “privilege”.Slavitt, recently departed as a senior adviser to Joe Biden on Covid response, is himself a product of the Ivy League: the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard business school. He also did stints in the Obama administration and at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and United Healthcare.His book reads like Covid-porn for blue America. Unfortunately, he does not reflect on how the US reached this place.The saga of Albion’s Seed – English Protestants who slaughtered each other in the old country, overthrew the crown in a new land then waged a second civil war – does not figure in Slavitt’s calculus. Said differently, if kin can repeatedly raise arms against kin, the social fabric can never be taken for granted – especially not as demographics convulse. E pluribus unum has limitations.Slavitt sees Trump’s cruelty at the southern border but fails to acknowledge the grievances of those in flyover country. Brexit and Trump were not one-offs. They were inextricably related. Displacement exacts a price.Slavitt’s book is subtitled “The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response”. He lauds pandemic responses in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand and criticizes Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, governors of Texas and Florida.But he ignores the fact that cases and mortality rates in those two states were lower than in New York and New Jersey – states called home by coastal elites.To his credit, Slavitt does take to task Bill de Blasio, that hapless and tin-eared mayor, for urging New Yorkers to “go out and enjoy themselves at restaurants” as the pandemic took root.“The impact of New York’s delay was significant,” Slavitt writes.Similarly, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s performative Republican governor, is derided for her “freedom-first” strategy. But unlike De Blasio she remains popular in her state and her party. A DeSantis-Noem Republican ticket in 2024 is not out of the question. In the eyes of voters, Noem did something right – much like Andrew Cuomo in New York, now beset by allegations of sexual misconduct but apparently on the verge of dodging a political bullet.On the other hand, the New York Times reports that even in east Asia and the south Pacific, supposed world leaders in containing the coronavirus, the fight is not yet won. Variants and their dangers loom. Vaccinations lag.To quote the Times, “people are fed up” and asking: “Why are we behind and when, for the love of all things good and great, will the pandemic routine finally come to an end?”Patience is never in limitless supply. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Slavitt makes insufficient allowance for this very human quirk.Trump was callous and mendacious but he grasped what made folks tick. Despite Slavitt’s vilification of big pharma, in those countries that possessed sufficient capital and foresight, vaccine manufacturers came through. Markets can work, even if they result in asymmetries.As expected, Preventable catalogs Trump’s failings in granular detail: his false promises of Covid quickly disappearing, his embrace of medical quackery, his rejection of testing as a crucial weapon. Slavitt also reminds readers that Trump chucked his predecessor’s pandemic response playbook and gutted the supply of personal protective equipment, just for the sake of blotting out the past.Politicians are self-centered. Trump more so than others. According to Slavitt, he saw himself as the smartest person in the room and expected to be flattered accordingly. One way to win his attention was to compliment his parenting skills. But being the owner of a debt-laden company forced to pay for golf course upkeep with no one on the greens may have injected additional anxiety. The public was expected to feel Trump’s pain.Slavitt also describes Trump’s difficulty in coming to grips with the possibility of the pandemic costing him the election, and his decision to offload to the states the mission of combating Covid. The White House became the backdrop for a reality show while the Confederate flag emerged as a symbol of pro-Trump, “liberate the state” sentiment.Jared Kushner told Slavitt: “We’re going to put testing back to the states.” The White House “can’t be responsible”, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser explained. “Some [governors] don’t want to succeed. Bad incentives to keep blaming us.”As an administration insider told the Guardian in April 2020, Trump was “killing his own supporters”.And yet, not surprisingly, Slavitt struggles with the reality that Democratic nay-saying almost lost Biden the White House and Nancy Pelosi the speaker’s gavel. Voters yearned for hope and wanted to know their sacrifice mattered.Being told “we are in this together” when “we” are manifestly not is more than a problem with messaging. For example, Slavitt omits mention of Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and his infamous dinner at a Napa Valley restaurant in November as Covid cases mounted. On being found out, Newsom acknowledged: “We’re all human. We all fall short sometimes.” Whatever.Slavitt does upbraid the Fox News host Tucker Carlson for downplaying the dangers of Covid and recounts the inane pronouncements of Richard Epstein, a libertarian-minded New York University law school professor, to a similar end. Slavitt calls Epstein “disconnected from reality and remarkably self-assured”.This week, the US death toll passed 600,000. The vaccine works only on the living. The world has experienced more deaths halfway through 2021 than in all of 2020.Slavitt ends his book wondering whether “the lessons of the past year might be forgotten”. Don’t rule that out. More

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      in World Politics

      The Reality of Abortion in Northern Ireland

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      In April, the UK House of Commons formally approved a new directive requiring Northern Ireland’s Department of Health to take “concrete steps” to ensure full abortion services in the north before summer. The directive, which came after years of pressure from inside and outside the north, is the result of the Northern Ireland executive’s delay in commissioning services that were formally decriminalized in 2019.

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      It is time for Northern Ireland’s secretary of state, Brandon Lewis, to ensure that reproductive rights in the north are safe, legal and accessible to all who need them. The complicated politics of Northern Ireland have led to this dilemma of jurisdiction. The House of Commons was able to decriminalize abortion services in the north specifically because there was no sitting Northern Ireland executive in Stormont. However, now that there has been a sitting government in Stormont for over a year, many are calling for an end to the executive’s stall tactics.

      How Did We Get Here?

      Abortion services in the United Kingdom were legalized by the 1967 Abortion Act. Despite the fact that Unionists in the north of Ireland repeatedly call for increased recognition as part of the UK, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has refused to allow this to extend to reproductive rights. Northern Ireland remains home to one of the most restrictive abortion regimes in the world, forcing pregnant people to travel across the Irish Sea to access services.

      UN committees and the Human Rights Council have released numerous reports stating that the UK has been breaching the rights of pregnant people in the north by limiting their access to abortion services. These same reports were a driving force behind the 2018 referendum on abortion in the Republic of Ireland, which passed affirmatively with nearly 70% of civilians supporting wide-reaching abortion reform. Pregnant people in the north have been forced to travel either to the republic or to mainland UK, which presents an enormous barrier to access.

      Despite the majority of Northern Ireland’s citizens saying that they would like abortion to be legalized, consistent vetoes by the DUP have blocked the power-sharing government from passing abortion reform.

      Lack of Government: An Opportunity

      The legacy of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland requires a power-sharing government between the nationalist and unionist communities. This means that neither party can be in position without the other. While this has been the reality for the past two decades, the issue rose to prominence in January 2017, with the resignation of the nationalist Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness as deputy first minister. This led to the collapse of the executive in Stormont, which continued until January 11, 2020.

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      During this period of three years, the country had no power-sharing assembly to carry it through Brexit negotiations with the European Union, deal with rising turmoil in the north over the impact of these talks, and no opportunity to potentially build on momentum around abortion rights coming from the Republic of Ireland.

      The collapse of the executive allowed the British Parliament to pass legislation legalizing gay marriage and abortion in the north, bringing it in line with mainland UK laws, the Republic of Ireland’s laws since 2018 and international human rights norms. The move — which is only possible due to the legacy of The Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement, which allows for direct rule from London — was cause for enormous celebration by abortion rights activists.

      The proposal from Labour MP Stella Creasy was supported by 332 votes to 99, which forced decriminalization on October 21, 2019, if the Northern Ireland government was not restored. Despite attempts by the DUP to form a government in order to avoid the decriminalization, Michelle O’Neill and Sinn Fein resisted efforts, allowing the laws to be passed. Notwithstanding arguments against direct intervention from Westminster, the decision was applauded by pro-choice activists across the island.

      The new directive requires the Department of Health to take “concrete steps” to ensure full abortion services in Northern Ireland before the summer. This comes after pressure from within and without, with the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission recently issuing legal action against the Stormont executive over the delay in commissioning services.

      What Does the Decision Mean?

      Over a year and a half after the British Parliament decriminalized abortion, the UK government has formally reprimanded the Northern Ireland executive for “dragging its feet.” Parliament has formally approved regulations that enable Secretary Lewis to roll out abortion services across the north. This move is long overdue and is a response to stall tactics by the DUP government over the past year.

      The delays have meant that the burden has fallen on health trusts to carry out interim services for abortions up to 10 weeks, forcing pregnant people seeking terminations beyond 10 weeks to travel to mainland UK for services. Without adequate funding or resources from the Department of Health, these trusts have been had to either provide limited services or suspend them altogether.

      The Northern Irish executive must move, without delay, to create an abortion regime that adheres to international human rights norms and that is accessible to all those who need to access care. However, it appears unlikely that the two majority parties, the DUP and Sinn Fein, will be able to reach an agreement on the services after the resignation of First Minister Arlene Foster. Her successor, Edwin Poots, caters toward the hyper-Christian base of the DUP, publicly opposing adoption by gay couples, supporting conversion practices and restrictions on abortion.

      Through the rules that govern the Northern Ireland executive and power-sharing agreement, Lewis has both the legal authority and the financial abilities to “compel Stormont to commission full abortion services if there is no movement by the summer.” However, in the absence of clear decisions from Lewis, coupled with a Stormont executive that refuses to move forward with their own directives, the responsibility has fallen on community organizations such as the Alliance for Choice to provide access to abortion services across the north.

      The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the fact that health professionals are already stretched thin throughout the north. Many of them do not have the financial or staffing resources to continue to provide services for those seeking an abortion. While a truly free, safe and legal abortion regime will look different everywhere, it is clear that the current model in the north is not working. In the absence of appropriate action from the Northern Ireland executive, and to assume the burden from already-stretched-thin community organizations, Secretary Lewis must act now to create a government-financed and government-run centralized model for abortions without restrictions in the north.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.]

      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 US Politics

      Republicans dig in and prepare to sink Democrats’ voting rights bill

      by

      Senate Republicans are preparing to unanimously block Democrats’ marquee election reform legislation, in a move that sets the stage for a bitter showdown over the future of voting rights across America and the survival of the filibuster rule.The Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and a dozen top lieutenants said on Thursday that they would vote down the bill known as S1, predicting that not a single Republican would cross the aisle to join Democrats.McConnell also said Republicans would not support S1 even if a revised version, with changes amenable to Republicans, was introduced.“Equally unacceptable, totally inappropriate – all Republicans, I think, will oppose that,” he said.The opposition from McConnell, who commands deep and authoritative control over Republicans in the Senate, is all but certain to ensure the failure of S1 when the bill is set to be introduced on the Senate floor next week.Democrats are relying on S1 to expand ballot access and tighten controls on campaign spending as they attempt to roll back a wave of new Republican voter restrictions, passed in response to Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 presidential election. The Republican measures are set to have a particular impact on communities of color, and are seen as likely to suppress the Democratic vote.The bill was revised this week to include a number of Republican priorities, including voter ID requirements, after longtime Senate Democratic holdout Joe Manchin indicated he would extend his support if his party made the changes to secure bipartisan support.But McConnell’s forceful denunciation, making clear that no election reform bill has a chance of passage, suggests the futility of seeking bipartisanship with a Republican party openly committed to thwarting Democrats’ legislative agenda.The expected blanket opposition from Republicans came soon after the revised S1 bill gained a notable endorsement from senior Democratic figure and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, who said on CNN she would absolutely support the proposal, and heralded it as the first step to preserving democracy.Abrams, a former Georgia candidate for governor credited with helping deliver Joe Biden the presidency, is unpopular with Republicans – and they quickly used her words of support to call the revised S1 bill unacceptable.“When Stacey Abrams immediately endorsed senator Manchin’s proposal, it became the Stacey Abrams substitute, not the Joe Manchin substitute,” said Roy Blunt, the top Republican on the Senate Rules committee, which oversees election issues.The resistance from McConnell and his lieutenants is likely to head off the growing push for election reform legislation, but it also threatened to reopen the simmering tensions over whether to impose new limits on the filibuster.McConnell’s hard-line approach to doom S1 is backstopped by the filibuster – the 60-vote supermajority rule that gives a united minority party ability to block any legislation – and his knowledge that Manchin remains opposed to changing that rule, even though its existance thwarts the passing of much of Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda.But now, with Manchin’s own version of S1 in peril, some Democrats are suggesting that a party-line vote that confirms the legislation would have become law were it not for Republican opposition, would force the West Virginian to confront a reckoning with the filibuster.The Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has already started making the case for imposing new limits on the filibuster by lining up votes on measures certain to be blocked – and demonstrate that Republicans have turned the rule into a weapon of bad-faith politics.Schumer’s idea is to show Manchin, and a handful of other Democrats opposed to curbing the filibuster, that Republicans are only interested in sinking all Democratic policies, and that he has no choice but to defuse the rule in order to pass their legislative priorities.The pressure to change Senate rules is also growing from Democrats in the House, where the majority whip Jim Clyburn is pushing for Manchin to support carving out an exception to the filibuster for election reform bills, according to a source familiar with the matter.It was not immediately clear on Friday how Manchin might proceed should Republicans filibuster his own version of S1.But as Republicans sounded the death knell for the bill, Manchin, on a recent Zoom call reported by the Intercept, told the centrist group No Labels that he was considering whether to call for lowering the filibuster threshold to 55 from 60 votes.Such a change would still not pave the way for the passage of S1, but it would significantly improve the prospects of other Democratic measures just short of 60 votes, from narrower voting rights bills to a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack. More

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      in World Politics

      Biden’s Optimism vs. the Media’s Pessimism

      by

      Media commentators initially gave good ratings to US President Joe Biden after his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They expressed a sense of relief, in large part due to the contrast in tone with Donald Trump’s performance in similar situations, guaranteed to produce a sense of unexpected drama. Biden confirmed his image of a seasoned diplomat capable of engaging in civil dialogue, setting the stage for eventual problem-solving.

      But the event left US media with mixed emotions. Calm problem-solving may be good in the abstract, but isn’t Russia the evil empire? Isn’t a president’s mission the humiliation of the enemy? The New York Times, for example, has recently been praising Biden as a transformative president. But the Gray Lady has also been locked in a pattern of blaming Russia for every bit of unwelcome news affecting the US, from cybercrime and UFOs to directed energy attacks and more.

      Biden’s Binary Battle Against Putin

      READ MORE

      Prior to the summit, the Times and other outlets prepared their public to expect Biden to charge Putin with a litany of accusations he could not deny. Though no serious journalist expected the script of the meeting to result in a first-round knockout, followed by Putin’s emotional confession of all the crimes he has shamelessly committed against American democracy, they clearly were interested in counting the punches Biden might land to make the Russian leader wince.

      That clearly didn’t happen. Less obsessed by the Russian bugbear, Axios coolly analyzed what it called “Biden’s two-step negotiating process,“ highlighting the fact that his “approach with Putin followed his approach to Congress: try to take the most optimistic path, give it some time and be prepared to march ahead with consequences.”

      CNN and The New York Times showed the kind of impatience outlets obsessed with prosecuting Russia for its endless crimes feel obliged to display. Kaitlin Collins, a reporter at CNN, accused Biden to his face of being “confident” Putin would “change his behavior,” clearly unnerving the president. Michael D. Shea, the White House correspondent at the Times, made a point of expressing that impatience when he wrote: “Mr. Biden’s response to his Russian adversary underscored a persistent feature of his presidency: a stubborn optimism that critics say borders on worrisome naïveté and that allies insist is an essential ingredient to making progress.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Stubborn optimism:

      The only kind of optimism pessimists recognize

      Contextual Note

      Some attribute to P.T. Barnum the phrase, “Never give a sucker an even break.” Barnum did say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The idea that they never deserve an even break has become the equivalent of a wise saying for many Americans in the world of business.

      The US owes its position as the world’s dominant economy to its ruthlessly competitive business culture. But this harsh reality sits alongside a deep-seated belief in popular democracy and the rosy fantasy of the power of the people. This contrast has spawned an interesting divide within society itself. The capitalists — the makers and doers — in the business world tend to be pessimists. Believers in democracy are optimists. Successful capitalists with a true competitive spirit see most other people — competitors and customers alike — as suckers who deserve to be taken advantage of. This pessimistic disdain for other people is sometimes highlighted as the virtue of assertiveness.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In contrast, the conviction that democracy is the true model of social relations correlates with optimism and trust. For many, this sums up the distinction between the culture associated with Republicans and Democrats. Individualistic Republicans celebrate the assertive winners, whose winning takes place at the expense of the losers, the suckers. Democrats pity the losers, believing they should be encouraged to succeed. Success is most satisfying when it is shared.

      Biden will always play the role of optimist. But that doesn’t imply that he always thinks like an optimist. To be successful during a long career usually requires applying the lessons of pessimism. The “liberal media” in the US — which includes The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN and others — must pay lip service to optimism. But to achieve the success they have achieved, they must also be ready to criticize the optimists and even accuse them of naivety. And when it comes to Russia, everyone has been taught to be a pessimist.

      Explaining his diplomatic approach, Biden seems to be saying: I start as an optimist and then shift to pessimism when things start to become serious. It is a well-worn strategy in the American tradition. The problem for media like the Times or CNN is that they have designated Russia as the arch-villain in the story. True heroes must never be indulgent with the dragons they are on a mission to kill.

      Historical Note

      During Joe Biden’s jaunt to Europe, the media focused on deciphering his attitude not only toward the enemy, Vladimir Putin, but also to his allies at the G7 summit. None showed an interest in the clues Biden provided of his thinking about the rest of the world. At his June 13 press conference in Cornwall, Biden’s improvised remarks tell a subtle but sad story about his vision of the world. It is fundamentally that of the leader of an increasingly rudderless empire posing as an enlightened democracy.

      Biden began by defining the role of the US and the G7 in these most condescending terms: “Everyone at the table understood and understands both the seriousness and the challenges that we’re up against, and the responsibility of our proud democracies to step up and deliver for the rest of the world.” Perhaps Biden thinks of himself as the equivalent of Jeff Bezos, whose mission is to deliver goods to the rest of the world at a profit.

      The president follows that with this syntactically broken train of thought: “The fact is that we — the U.S. contribution is the foundation — the foundation to work out how we’re going to deal with the 100 nations that are poor and having trouble finding vaccines and having trouble dealing with reviving their economies if they were, in the first place, in good shape.” On one side, there is “the foundation,” the US. On the other, there are 100 helpless, nameless struggling nations. This is Biden’s polite version of Donald Trump’s standard motif: We are the winner and everyone else is a loser.

      He then embarrassingly explains the importance of what he repeatedly calls the “COVID project,” having apparently confused the disease with COVAX, the international program to distribute vaccines to low and middle-income countries. In its transcript, the White House discreetly added COVAX after each mention of “COVID.”

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      Perhaps the most rational and realistic — but at the same time troubling — thing Biden had to say in his speech was what sounds like his promise that “there will be future pandemics.” In other words, he looks forward to new occasions where the US will “step up and deliver for the rest of the world.” He even repeats the promise a few lines later: “And there will be others.”

      After applauding his own effort to impose a 15% tax on corporate profits — which may even lead to more inequality among nations — Biden lauds his Build Back Better World Partnership (B3W) designed to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. To anyone familiar with the history of US marketing, it sounds a lot like Pepsi seeking to dethrone Coca-Cola. At least Biden has his acronym and maybe will soon have a logo.

      In the most embarrassingly stupid moment, which should make professional marketers cringe, Biden describes the B3W strategy: “By harassing the full potential of those who are harassing, we’re going to have to try and change things.” Apart from the difficulty of harassing someone else’s “full potential,” we are left wondering how he could think he is doing a service to needy countries by proposing a policy of harassment. It may be better than a military invasion and decades of drone warfare, but if that’s the best the US has to offer the developing world, it might be better just to stay at home and focus on America’s own infrastructure needs.

      From that point on, his speech, Biden’s syntax and train of thought become even more incoherent, but there is too much to highlight in this short article. More to come next week.

      *[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

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in World Politics

      How the G7 Intends to Build the World Back Better

      by

      The US Senate recently demonstrated that the only adhesive capable of uniting the two parties is a good, old-fashioned enemy. Although the Democrats and Republicans continue to bicker over the Biden administration’s infrastructure legislation, they achieved rare accord in passing a major technology bill that directs investment into key sectors of the economy.

      Why the sudden bipartisanship? China. The $250 billion investment into semiconductor production, scientific research, space exploration and the like is intended to decrease dependency on inputs from China and maintain a US lead in critical technologies.

      Does the World Need to Contain China?

      READ MORE

      The Biden administration is now eager to replicate that experience on the global level. At last week’s G7 summit in the UK, the United States again used China as a threat to forge transnational solidarity around a global infrastructure deal. Despite some misgivings from Germany and Italy, President Joe Biden managed to steer the group toward something called the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative, which incidentally sounds a lot like Biden’s 2020 campaign slogan. But that slogan itself echoed a catchphrase adopted by the UN in 2015 to characterize its response to humanitarian disasters. So, B3W can sound both authentically multilateral and distinctively Bidenesque at the same time.

      In the face of the global tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change — not to mention the sustained attacks by Donald Trump and other right-wing populists on the global order — it was entirely appropriate for the G7 to come up with a bold approach to addressing global economic inequities in a sustainable manner. Alas, B3W raises as many questions as it addresses.

      For instance, is B3W more than just a fancy name attached to already committed financing and existing institutions like the Blue Dot Network? Isn’t the World Bank supposed to be closing the infrastructure gap between the have-lots and the have-littles? And shouldn’t China be a collaborator in this effort rather than its chief antagonist?

      Improving Upon Belt and Road?

      China launched its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. Its aim has been thoroughly Keynesian: to pump money into the economies on China’s borders — as well as some further away — in order to sustain China’s own economic growth. The more these economies are dependent on Chinese financing, Chinese inputs and Chinese know-how, the more they will ultimately contribute to China’s global economic dominance.

      Is China creating some kind of global alternative to capitalism like the Soviet Union’s old Comecon? No, Beijing is thoroughly capitalist in its orientation, though it pushes a version that rubs many laissez-faire purists the wrong way.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Is China determined to use BRI to consolidate an anti-democratic bloc of nations? Although Beijing may well prefer to deal with more predictable partners — and democracies can elect some pretty outrageous wildcards — it is ultimately agnostic about the political governance of its BRI collaborators. There are 140 nations participating in the BRI, including 18 countries in the European Union. For every Belarus and Cuba, there’s an Estonia and a Chile.

      Well, then, isn’t China using BRI to build a kind of covert military bloc? Critics, for instance, have pointed to the deal China negotiated with Sri Lanka around the port it helped to finance in Hambantota. Struggling with loan repayments in 2017, Sri Lanka signed a 99-year lease arrangement with a Chinese firm. Couldn’t Beijing now turn this port into a military base?

      In fact, Sri Lanka continues to own the facility, though the Chinese commercial firm operates much of the port and thus gets much of the profit. Despite US government claims, China is not and doesn’t seem to have any intention of conducting military business at Hambantota. Two Chinese subs entered the port before the 2017 deal, and Sri Lanka has barred such visits ever since.

      The Sri Lankan example has often been used as exhibit A in the case of China’s use of the “debt trap” to advance its global objectives. According to this scenario, Beijing extends loans through BRI, the target country defaults, and China grabs the assets. It sounds plausible. Except that there’s no evidence that China actually operates that way, including in the Sri Lankan case.

      The Belt and Road Initiative has many flaws, to be sure. It has facilitated large-scale corruption, for instance, in Malaysia. It has promoted dirty energy, including 240 coal projects and billions of dollars in oil and gas investments.

      But it’s not as if China is the only country with dirty hands. Corruption is endemic in infrastructure projects, accounting for as much as 45% of construction costs. And when it comes to fossil fuels, the US was the largest oil exporter in the world last year as well as the fourth-largest exporter of coal.

      So, why did the G7 think it was so important to come up with an alternative to China’s Belt and Road rather than work with Beijing to build back better together?

      Beat ‘em Rather than Join ‘em?

      The United States likes being number one. The success of Trump’s political campaign and his various hyperbolic slogans testify to the endurance of American exceptionalism. The stridency of these exceptionalist claims, however, introduces a measure of doubt. Front-runners who are anxious about their status generally compensate by raising their voices and thumping their chests harder. In this way, we betray our simian origins.

      China has challenged the US status by growing what is now, measured by purchasing power parity, the world’s largest economy. Thanks to its performance in 2020 during the pandemic, China will likely become the world’s undisputed number one economy sometime around 2026.

      But China is also challenging the global economy by establishing its own institutions parallel to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The BRI, by encompassing so much of the world, is just the kind of grand initiative that number-one economies set up to maintain their dominance.

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      The United States is not so enthusiastic about relinquishing its top status. Ditto all the countries that have hitched themselves to the US economic locomotive. With Trump out of the White House, Washington has eschewed machismo in favor of multilateral and moral arguments against the Belt and Road Initiative: China is throwing developing countries into debt dependency; China is bolstering the power of authoritarian leaders; China is fostering unacceptable work environments including forced labor.

      Those criticisms ring hollow. The developing world is already in debt dependency to the G7 and its financial institutions. The World Bank and IMF worked closely with dictators for decades. Western corporations long turned a blind eye to horrifying working conditions in the countries where they set up operations.

      And the $40 trillion infrastructure gap between have-lots and have-littles that B3W is supposed to bridge? It’s because of this gap that China was so successful in reaching out to the Global South in the first place. In charge of the global economy since 1945, the richest countries failed miserably to achieve a modicum of global economic equity — because that was never really their goal.

      But Can It Help?

      For the sake of argument, let’s put all this history aside. Regardless of the mixed intentions of its backers, can B3W actually help countries that want to catch up to the rest of the world in a way that doesn’t further accelerate the climate crisis?

      The experience of the Blue Dot Network is not encouraging. Established by Japan, Australia and the US in 2019 — after a series of failed infrastructure initiatives like the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor and the Trilateral Partnership — the Blue Dot Network essentially establishes a Good Housekeeping seal of approval for infrastructure deals that meet more stringent requirements around governance, finance, labor conditions and the like. But here’s the problem: The Blue Dot Network doesn’t actually provide credit-hungry countries with access to any new pots of money.

      B3W looks like it might be a similar example of grand rhetoric and few resources. It is articulating the same kind of criteria for investments as the Blue Dot Network. As for the financing, the G7 has promised to mobilize private sector funding — in other words, they aren’t ponying up any money of their own. This is no surprise. The Biden administration is hard-pressed to pass its own domestic infrastructure bill. Fat chance it can get Republicans on board to send similarly earmarked funds abroad, even under the rubric of challenging China.

      Nevertheless, the White House is talking big: “B3W will collectively catalyze hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure investment for low- and middle-income countries in the coming years.” The word “catalyze” sounds very dynamic, but frankly, it’s just a fancy way of saying: We will beg and wheedle and maybe twist an arm or two, but frankly we can’t promise much of anything. As Reuters wryly concluded in its article on the initiative, “It was not immediately clear how exactly the plan would work or how much capital it would ultimately allocate.”

      The bottom line is that the world desperately needs a green B3W. It needs to find a way to close the infrastructure gap by providing the funds and financing for the developing world to leapfrog into a clean energy future. At the moment, the Belt and Road Initiative does not do that. And neither does B3W.

      So, how about it, Washington and Beijing? Why not get together to see if you can turn two wrongs into a right and collaborate on a global Green New Deal?

      *[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