A modern addition to the pantheon is a university professor and writer who also worked in America’s National Intelligence Council, State Department and Defense Department.

Step forward Joseph Nye, the man who invented the concepts of “soft power” and “smart power” and set them beside “hard power.” Described by one of his Washington contemporaries as “the Grandmaster of the study of power,” Nye coined soft power to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce. The United States could use culture and communications to influence the decisions and behaviour of others in ways that military force could not reach. Nye stands with Talleyrand, who advised Napoleon: “You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.”

Military power can bully, economic power can buy, but soft power is blarney magic.

Ideas set international standards in the same way that American software set the standards for the world’s computers. Thus, the lifestyle promoted by American media and the promise of plenty of American supermarkets helped undermine the Soviet Union, backed by the hard power of military forces and nuclear weapons. Mickey Mouse stood with the Marines.

Hard power rests on command, coercion or cash — “the ability to change what others do.” Soft co-optive power, Nye wrote in his 1990 book on the changing nature of American power, is “the ability to shape what others want” through attraction.

Millions of Google citations show the reach of soft power, Nye writes, but “the most surprising was in 2007 when the president of China declared soft power to be their national objective.” For Nye, the result was “countless requests for interviews, including a private dinner in Beijing when the foreign minister asked me how China could increase its soft power. A concept I outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 was now a significant part of the great power competition and discourse.”

Nye has seen his idea become an instrument with practical effects: soft power shifts the way leaders talk and generals act. Attending a state dinner at the White House in 2015 (“the hall was filled with cherry blossom and a Marine band in scarlet jackets was playing”), Nye shakes hands with president Barack Obama to be told “everybody knows about Nye’s soft power.”

Nye’s recently published memoir muses about his “life in the American century,” the title taken from a famous 1941 editorial by Henry Luce, creator of Time and Life magazines. Nye, born in 1937, dates the American century from the moment the United States entered the second world war: “Some have referred to an American empire, but our power always had limits. It is more accurate to think of the American century as the period since World War II during which time, for better or worse, America has been the pre-eminent power in global affairs.”

The United States could still be the strongest power in 2045, he thinks; in which case the American century would, indeed, mark a hundred years. The caveats on that prediction are that “we should not expect the future to resemble the past, and my optimism has been tempered by the recent polarisation of our society and politics.”

This leading member of the American foreign policy establishment offers his biography as illumination for fellow foreign policy wonks and tragics. Most memoirs look inward; the chapter headings of Nye’s book are organised around the administrations of US presidents and America’s international role.

Nye and his friend Robert Keohane are identified as cofounders of the school of analysis of international affairs known as “neoliberalism.” While not disavowing that role, Nye writes that he and Keohane regard neoliberalism as an “over-simplified label.”

Whether in government or university, Nye’s life is one of constant travel, constant conferences and constant writing. In the Defense Department in 1995, “alliance maintenance” sent him to fifty-three countries. The military parades became a blur but the banquets were the real ordeal: sent abroad to eat for his country, Nye jested he would go out “in a blaze of calories.”

Emerging from an “unofficial meeting” with Taiwan’s defence minister, Nye is told that his father has died: “On Friday, November 4, 1994, I had the odd experience of picking up the New York Times and finding myself quoted in a front-page story on Saudi Arabia, while my father’s obituary appeared on page thirty-three. I wept.”

The motto of the public intellectual is “I think, ergo I write” (my words, not his). Nye exemplifies the dictum. He is the author of thirty books and contributor to or editor of another forty-five; his textbook ran to ten editions and sold 100,000 copes. (Here’s the Inside Story review of his book on the foreign policy morality of US presidents from FDR to Trump.) He writes a column for Project Syndicate; topics so far this year: “Is Nuclear Proliferation Back?,” “American Greatness and Decline” and “What Killed US-China Engagement?”

Graduating from Princeton at the end of the Eisenhower years, Nye planned to become a Marine officer. (“All able-bodied young men faced the draft in those days, and I was a healthy specimen and looking forward to the challenge.”) Instead, one of his professors pushed him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and he won:

One result was that, instead of joining the Marines after graduation and winding up as an officer in Vietnam, it took me thirty-five years before I saw service in the Department of Defense, and when I first went to Vietnam it was as dean of the Kennedy School to visit an educational program we had there. Any time I am tempted by hubris, I remember that much of where the roulette ball lands in the wheel of life is outside our hands.

Nye worked for two Democrat presidents. For Jimmy Carter, he was in charge of policy designed to slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under Bill Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council and then went to Defense to run the “Pentagon’s little State Department” as assistant secretary for international security affairs.

Professors who go to work in Washington can offer an anthropologist’s view of the tribes that serve the president and congress. Kissinger is good on this, but the best rules for working the swamp were penned by John Kenneth Galbraith: have the president behind you (or give that impression); adopt a modest aspect of menace — arrogance backed by substance can work; never threaten to resign because that tells your allies you might leave; but be ready to lose and leave town. Nye gets much outsider understanding into a paragraph:

In Washington, there was no shortage of bureaucrats and rival political appointees eager to take my job — or leave me with the title but empty it of substance. I had been issued a hunting licence, but there was no guarantee I would bag my game. My first instinct as an academic was to try to do things myself, but that was impossible… I realised I was drowning. I discovered that unlike academia, politics and bureaucracy comprise a team sport. The secret to success was to attract others to want to do the work for me. In that sense, I learned soft power the hard way.

Nye records two of the “major regrets” Bill Clinton offered about his presidency: “having an inexperienced White House staff and underestimating the bitterness of Washington politics.”

Because of his diaries, Nye’s memoir offers tone and temperature on how different the world felt as the cold war ended. Washington was optimistic about Russia and fearful of Japan: “economic friction was high, and many in both Tokyo and Washington regarded the military alliance as a historical relic now that the cold war was over.”

Japan debated the idea of relying on the United Nations rather than the United States for security. Nye argued against both the economic hawks in Washington and the security doves in Tokyo, pointing to the rise of China and problem of North Korea. “The logic was simple,” he writes. “In a three-country balance of power, it is better to be part of the two than the isolated one.”

During defence negotiations in Tokyo, Japanese officials took him out for evening drinks and cut to the fundamentals: “How much could they trust us? As the Chinese market grew larger, wouldn’t we abandon Japan for China? I answered no, because Japan was a democracy and was not a threat. It seemed to work.”

In 1995, with “moderates still in control in Moscow, there was a sense of optimism about the future of US–Russia relations.” That mood helped drive the expansion of NATO. At talks in Geneva, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev discussed the idea of a “new NATO” with a “collective security pact” and “partial membership in NATO” for Russia. Nye wrote in his diary that Russia would accept a bigger NATO “if it is done right — and if Russia doesn’t change.”

By 1999, the optimism was gone. The US now believed that “Russia would not collapse but would develop a form of corrupt state capitalism.” Talking to former colleagues in Washington, Nye is “struck that nobody seemed to know much about Putin or to have realised how important he would become.”

As the US century enters this century, China takes centre stage as the peer competitor. Asked by Xinhua News Agency whether he’s a China hawk or dove, Nye replies that he is an owl. At a dinner in Beijing in 2012 a member of the Communist Party central committee tells Nye: “We are Confucians in Marxist clothing.”

The following year, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi invites Nye to a private meal “to quiz me about how China could increase its soft power.” Nye replies that raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and celebrating a gorgeous traditional culture are “important sources of attraction for China. At the same time, as long as it had territorial disputes with its neighbours, and as long as its insistence on tight party control over civil society and human rights continued, China would face serious limits on its soft power in Asia and in the West.”

The US power equation has shifted significantly in two decades. In the early years of this century, as the United States invaded Iraq, Nye’s concern was about “unipolar hubris.” Today, he frets about a polarized America turning inward. He thinks the greatest danger the United States faces “is not that China will surpass us, but that the diffusion of power will produce entropy, or the inability to get anything done.”

In the final pages of his memoir, Nye assesses the balance of power between China and the US, and says America has five long-term advantages:

• Geography: the United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly neighbours, while China “shares a border with fourteen other countries and is engaged in territorial disputes with several.”

• Energy: China depends on energy imports far more than the United States.

• Finance: the United States gets power from the international role of the dollar and its large financial institutions. “A credible reserve currency depends on it being freely convertible, as well as on deep capital markets and the rule of law, which China lacks.”

• Demography: the United States is the only major developed country projected to hold its place (third) in the global population ranking. “The US workforce is expected to increase, while China’s peaked in 2014.”

• Technology: America is “at the forefront in key technologies (bio, nano, and information). China, of course, is investing heavily in research and development and scores well in the number of patents, but by its own measures its research universities still rank behind American ones.”

Nye’s fear is that domestic change within the United States could endanger the American century. Even if its external power remains dominant, he writes, a country can lose its internal virtue:

All told, the US holds a strong hand in the great power competition, but if we succumb to hysteria about China’s rise or complacency about its “peak,” we could play our cards poorly. Discarding high-value cards — including strong alliances and influence in international institutions — would be a serious mistake. China is not an existential threat to the US unless we make it one by blundering into a major war. This historical analogy that worries me is 1914, not 1941.

Nye ends his memoir with the humility that befits an old man: “I cannot be fully sure how much of my optimism rests on my analysis or my genes.” In his final paragraph, he ruefully notes that “the more I learn, the less I know… Though I have spent a lifetime following my curiosity and trying to understand us, I do not leave many answers for my grandchildren. The best I can do is leave them my love and a faint ray of guarded optimism.” •

A Life in the American Century
By Joseph S. Nye | Polity Press | 254 pages | $51.95

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Many Americans, and many of those watching around the world, see American democracy cracking, freedoms being eroded and the political system breaking. Much of the blame is sheeted home to Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again followers, and the case against them can clearly and forcibly be made.

But the United States has faced such crises before: in the 1790s, with the intense standoff between Federalists and Republicans; before, during and after the Civil War; in the Jim Crow period of the 1890s, which also saw five consecutive presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote; and after the Watergate revelations. The problems inherent in the American political system are thus compounded by problems and leaders unique to each era.

Trump’s presidency clearly damaged American democracy. Just how damaged and how long-lasting the effect is up for debate (a detailed 2023 report from Brookings discusses the issues well). During his term the United States was labelled a “backsliding democracy” by International IDEA, a European democracy think tank, and for some years the Economist’s Democracy Index has ranked the United States among “flawed democracies” including Greece, Poland and Brazil.

In a recent interview for the Democracy Project at Johns Hopkins University, political scientist Robert Lieberman stressed that democracy exists on a continuum. The United States started out as a constrained democracy, with citizenship limited to white men and only property-owners entitled to vote. For Lieberman, the key question is not “whether we are a democracy, but in which direction are we headed. Are we moving forward or are we moving backward?”

The current situation is arguably more serious than previous democratic crises because there are so many concomitant threats. There’s the pervasive partisan divide; conflicts over racism, immigration and nativism; growing socio-economic inequalities; the erosion of voting rights, particularly those of minorities; lawmakers’ attempts to undermine reproductive health, the rights of LGBTQI+ people, school curricula and library books; and the endless promulgation of lies and distortions that quickly come to be treated as facts.

Some of these threats have been decades in the making. Americans have long been sceptical of the power of the federal government: trust in Washington, which began to decline during the Vietnam war and continued to decline amid the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, is at an historic low. Fewer than one-in-five Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” (1 per cent) or “most of the time” (15 per cent) in 2023 Pew Research Center polls.

Individual institutions have suffered as well. The US Supreme Court’s  reputation has been damaged by recent rulings contrary to popular opinion, and trust in federal agencies like the Justice Department, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Reserve has eroded. It’s shocking to also see declining trust in the military, police and the medical system.

These troubles pile on top of problems intrinsic to American democracy: the unusual mechanism, an electoral college, for electing the president; equal representation for the states in the Senate regardless of vastly different populations; lifetime appointments for US Supreme Court justices; and the lack of a national system for overseeing elections.

Because of their distrust of the popular vote, the Founding Fathers created the electoral college and other structural protections against what they saw as the uninformed masses. Patently, this system no longer works. Twice this century the person elected president by the electoral college had lost the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016), and it could happen again in 2024.

Because small, less-populous and mostly White states like Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota have the same number of senators as populous and diverse states like Texas, New York and California, Republican majorities in the Senate this century have never represented a majority of the population. The impact on confirmations of judicial nominees and senior executive branch appointees has been profound.

Finally, there is the deepening polarisation of the American political system. This began post-Watergate, was boosted by Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, and is today exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus, the MAGA movement and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This deepening polarisation has been marked by an intensifying shift rightwards among each new cohort of Republican legislators, echoing the widening differences between red and blue states and the growing urban–rural political divide.

Bring an ambitious, narcissistic, embittered and malevolent Trump back into this setting and the weaknesses of both the political system and the guard rails of democracy will become very apparent. Trump has schemed to overturn legitimate election results (and is likely to do so again), encouraged violence and discrimination, attacked the media and government institutions, undermined the staff and bureaucrats who worked for him, courted dictators and appeared beholden to foreign interests, lied and denied, and profited from his public office. Most egregiously, he encouraged the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Three years on, amazingly, a majority of Republicans believe Biden was not legitimately elected. Despite Trump’s multiple indictments and legal jeopardy, they are willing to vote for him yet again. Republicans in the Congress increasingly follow his wishes on key pieces of legislation, and even those lawmakers he has belittled and besmirched end up endorsing him.

If Trump is re-elected he will be much less constrained and much more able to get his way than in his previous term. His rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail — dark, violent, authoritarian and vengeful — has generated alarm. We have been warned about a Trump kleptocracy.

Some observers think the worst cannot and will not happen (see, for example, this article by Elaine Karmack). But a Brookings Institution report, Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States, warns that “the electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive”:

People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.

The most obvious preventive measure lies at the ballot box — though that can only get rid of Trump, not Trumpism. And American voters themselves display some worrying tendencies. The Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 75 per cent of Americans believe that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election” and the Democracy Fund found that more than 80 per cent of Americans see democracy as a “fairly good” or “very good” political system; but the latter study highlighted that only about 27 per cent of Americans consistently and uniformly support democratic norms across multiple survey waves. Perhaps not surprisingly, this response differs by political allegiance: 45 per cent of Democrats consistently support democratic norms but only 18 per cent of Independents and 13 per cent of Republicans.

Many voters acknowledge Trump’s true character but rationalise their actions as support for conservative judges, anti-abortion legislation, overturning unfair trade agreements, retaining tax benefits or protecting the Second Amendment. Yes, there are Republicans who consider Trump a “grotesque threat to democracy” and won’t vote for him again, but there are also former Obama voters who see Trump as “our last shot at restoring America.”

Even with Trump gone from the political stage (and that endpoint may result in further efforts to upset democratic processes), considerable effort will be required to restore individual rights and freedoms and deliver the blessings of democracy to all Americans. Ending Trumpism will require a massive effort by the Republican Party to reconfigure its base and operations and find leaders who will promote a different kind of conservatism. For their part, Biden and the Democrats must work to understand the anger and despair that has driven Trump’s MAGA supporters to adopt his bleak and autocratic views. •

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But behind the hyperbolic headlines — “Trump Racks Up Massive Wins in Super Tuesday GOP Races,” “How Trump Steamrolled His Way to the GOP Nomination” or “How a Fighting Biden Took on the State of the Union” — are the many twists and turns that will determine the campaign’s eight-month trajectory and its outcome in November.

The only thing the two putative candidates agree on is the significance and consequences of this year’s vote. Trump says, rightly for once, that the 2024 election will be the “single most important day in the history of our country.” Biden says the election is “all about whether America’s democracy will survive.”

In the days since Biden’s State of the Union speech, duelling campaigns in Georgia and other swing states have offered glimpses of the two candidates’ strategies for courting an electorate less than enthused by another Biden–Trump showdown. It’s clear that this re-run of the 2020 faceoff will test the limits of campaign financing and political decorum.

The endgame is the pattern of voting in the general election — and, more particularly, in the swing states like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Using polling to make forecasts is complicated by the fact that the winner is the candidate who racks up the most electoral college votes, not the most votes.

Polls offer little in the way of accurate insight at this point in the election cycle. But as their current base of support stands, neither Trump nor Biden can win. The polling averages from FiveThirtyEight and 270toWin have them neck and neck, with their favourability ratings languishing in the mid-fifties.

The votes that will make the difference must be won from independent voters and those party voters who are not strongly committed to either Trump or Biden. Here, despite his age and the general lack of enthusiasm for a second term, Biden seems to have the edge. But he faces problems with some segments of the population: the Democrats’ longstanding advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than sixty years; his administration’s failure to end the Israel–Gaza conflict has upset young voters and especially Arab Americans and Muslims; and many young people are simply lukewarm about Biden. Nevertheless, the president has consistently gained more than 90 per cent of the Democratic vote in the primaries to date, and even in Michigan, where Gaza war sentiment led many to vote “uncommitted,” he scored more than 80 per cent.

Trump’s base is more galvanised, more rusted on, and smaller. His party’s “Never Trump” contingent remains strong, as seen by the support Haley attracted. On Super Tuesday she received more than two million votes across fifteen states. She pulled 37 per cent of the Republican vote in Massachusetts, 33 per cent in Colorado, 29 per cent in Minnesota, and a surprise victory in Vermont. A week later, after she suspended her campaign, she drew more than 77,000 votes in Georgia (a state Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes).

What is rarely pointed out is that Republican state primaries are increasingly a winner-take-all proposition for the convention delegates (a situation cleverly engineered by Trump campaign staff). On Super Tuesday Trump reaped 93 per cent of Republican delegates while winning only around 70 per cent of the vote.

Haley’s continuing support shows that Trump hasn’t been able to defuse his long-term problems with suburban voters (especially women), moderates and independents. These are the voters who cost him a second term in 2020 and could potentially cost him again in 2024.

A key issue for the Trump campaign is where the Republicans who voted for Haley will go in November. Quinnipiac University polling found that 37 per cent of Haley voters would vote for Biden and 12 per cent would stay home. Emerson College polling found 63 per cent of Haley primary voters would vote for Biden in the general election with 10 per cent undecided. Some exit polls have delivered even higher numbers of voters reluctant to commit to Trump.

Trump, who has derided Haley using sexist and racist language, has shown little interest in reaching out to her voters. In January he seemed to reject them outright, declaring that anyone who made a donation to Haley “will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” No surprise then that many of her supporters wonder whether they still have a place in the Republican Party, a perception that will only deepen as Trump, his campaign and his family take control of the Republican National Committee.

Trump’s efforts to appeal to independents have been desultory at best; he seems incapable of moving beyond the rhetoric of stolen elections, woke liberals, the deep state, threats from illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, and his own perceived victimisation. His speeches offer little more than a dark vision for his second term. His embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians, his suggestion that he was open to making cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and the persistent efforts of conservative Republicans to undermine women’s reproductive rights won’t win over these independents.

This inability to broaden his support is the biggest threat to Trump’s efforts to reclaim the presidency. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Biden will have an easier time sweeping up the independents and undecideds. Will those concerned about the Israel–Gaza crisis who opted for “uncommitted” in the primaries vote for Biden in the general election, or will they simply stay home? (Given Trump’s vilification of Muslims they are unlikely to vote for him.) That will largely depend on what happens in Gaza between now and November. And can Biden and the Democrats reverse their declining support among minority groups and young voters?

The changing demographics of the United States has seen a decline in the White, non-college educated voters who have been the mainstay of the Trump Republican Party, an increase in politically active young voters, many of whom don’t see either party as dealing with the issues that matter to them, and an increase in racial and ethnic diversity at a time when race is a central political issue.

The Pew Research Center has reported that Biden received more 90 per cent of the Black vote in 2020 while Trump received just 8 per cent. But this year these voters are frustrated with Biden over a range of issues, including the lack of progress on racial justice and the economic impact of soaring inflation.

Latino voters, who make up some 15 per cent of the electorate, are a heterogeneous group politically, with divergent opinions on issues like immigration. A recent poll from the New York Times and Siena College shows 46 per cent of Latino voters supporting Trump and 40 per cent supporting Biden (albeit with a large margin of error).

Recently Trump has touted his support among the Black community, though not always in flattering terms. He does have a growing contingent of Black hip-hop artists among his vocal supporters and most recently resorted to using AI-generated pictures to build his credentials with the African-American community. But there’s little evidence of a major shift in support; a December poll showed only 25 per cent of Black adults had a favourable view of Trump.

Jaime Harrison, the African American chair of the Democratic National Committee, has accused Republicans of promoting “fairy tales about their plan to win over Black voters.” He made particular note of the fact that Trump “pals around with white supremacists.” Just days after the Trump campaign began its overhaul of the  Republican National Committee came the announcement that the party is closing all of the community centres it established for minority outreach in California, New York, North Carolina and Texas.

Ideology aside, the issues that will drive voters to the polling booths in November are common to all Americans: the economy and its impact on family budgets, healthcare costs, immigration, gun control and abortion. America’s role in supporting Ukraine and as a potential peacemaker in Gaza will also be important. These issues often play out very differently for Democrats and Trump Republicans: abortion and reproductive rights, immigration policies and gun control are classic examples. Perceptions of other issues, including the economy, interest rates and the outcomes of Biden’s national security and foreign policy efforts, will change — perhaps dramatically — between now and voting day.

For many Trump supporters, policies (or lack thereof) are of little consequence; like Trump, they are not interested in a united country or a bipartisan approach to legislation. They share Trump’s story, described by Biden in his State of the Union speech as one of resentment, revenge and retribution, and, shockingly, many of them embrace his authoritarianism. As one supporter posted on social media, “I’m not voting Republican, I’m voting Trump.”

For Democrats, kitchen table issues also include the erosion of freedoms and the future of democracy in the United States. Historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham makes this stark statement about America today: “Historically speaking, the forces now in control of the Republican Party represent the most significant threat to basic constitutionalism we’ve experienced since the Civil war. That’s not a partisan point; it’s just the fact of the matter. And I’m not talking about particular policies, about which we can and should disagree. I’m talking about the self-evident willingness of a once-noble party to embrace lies and the will to power over essential democratic norms.”

The months ahead will be some of the most consequential in the nation’s history, with no guarantee this tense situation be overturned or resolved by the vote in November. •

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We may get a temporary ceasefire and the release of some hostages in exchange for some of the 4500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but we are unlikely to see a resumption of Middle East peace efforts scarred by years of failure.

Israel’s pursuit of the Hamas leadership — notably Yahya Sinwar, the political chief on the ground in Gaza, and military commander Mohammed Deif — will likely continue until both men are found, dead or alive. That’s assuming Sinwar and Deif are still in Gaza itself, which is far from clear.

In the meantime, the world is mobilising to funnel humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, sea and air. The American air drops into Gaza represent an extraordinary spectacle: on the one hand, Washington continus to arm Israel with munitions used to cause death and destruction among Palestinians; on the other, it is seeking to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the supply of aid across the strip’s land borders.

In the tortured history of the Middle East and America’s complex relationship with Israel — going back to Dwight Eisenhower presidency in the fifties, when pressure from Washington brought an end to the Suez crisis — there has scarcely been a more confounding moment.

In 1956, Eisenhower brokered a halt to what was known as the “tripartite aggression” after the nascent state of Israel had joined Britain and France in confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal. In some ways that was a high point of America’s playing an honest-broker role in the Middle East, matched by Jimmy Carter’s mediation of the  Camp David Accords in 1978, which ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

In the years since then, constructive US influence in the Middle East has waxed and waned depending on circumstance, with sporadic  interventions such as President George H.W. Bush’s push to kickstart a peace process in the wake of Gulf War I.

Bill Clinton tried but was let down by poor preparation for a Camp David II summit in 2000 between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat deservedly got much of the blame for the failure of Camp David II, but Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one, and Clinton’s feckless Middle East negotiators were also culpable.

Judged against the performance of his predecessors in managing a Middle East crisis, and depending on how the Gaza war ends, history is unlikely to be kind to Joe Biden. As things stand, the fair judgement is that Biden, with his sights firmly on his own re-election prospects, has been far too indulgent of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden might argue that his strategy of not allowing questions to arise about Washington’s support for the elimination of the Hamas leadership will prove to be correct, both politically and strategically. But his tardiness in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and his sanctioning of repeated US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding such a pause, has left him wide open to criticism that he has acted as Netanyahu’s enabler.

Belatedly, the US president appears to have realised both the political costs for him domestically, where many in his Democrat base are outraged, and the concomitant damage to America’s international reputation. He has consequently begun to step up his criticism, in public and private, of a war that has filled TV screens with shocking images of civilian casualties and deprivation.

This has taken far too long.

In remarks picked up last week by a “hot mic” after his State of the Union address, Biden told a Democrat legislator that a “come to Jesus” moment was approaching in his relations with Netanyahu. He made it clear he would regard an Israeli assault on Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip — where about half Gaza’s 2.3 million population are huddled — as the crossing of a “red line.”

Interviewed, Netanyahu rebuffed the president, saying he would not be deterred from pursuing the Hamas leadership at risk of adding further to Gazan deaths and injuries.

In all the history of a blood-drenched Israel–Palestine conflict one date stands out: 4 November 1995. That was the evening on which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians.

Not only did Yigal Amir assassinate Rabin, he also destroyed progress on the “two-state solution,” towards which Israel’s fallen leader and Arafat were groping via implementation of the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn in Clinton’s presence in 1993.

Among the bleak consequences of the Rabin assassination was the coming to power of Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist Likud bloc. To say Netanyahu has been a blight on Israeli and Middle East politics ever since would be an understatement.

In his years in power, either as prime minister or opposition leader, Netanyahu has contrived to stymie legitimate peace efforts to the point where any kind of peace in our time, even if the Gaza conflict subsides, has come to resemble a mirage.

Netanyahu may well be consigned to history if and when the war in Gaza ends and elections in Israel are held, but his malign influence will endure in the form of an explosion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and a less obvious transfer of Jewish settlers into Arab East Jerusalem.

By latest count, Israel has turned the West Bank into a Swiss cheese of settlements and settler outposts, with something like 200 settlements and 220 outposts on land occupied in the 1967 war. All are illegal under international law since they involve a transfer of members of the victor’s population into territory seized in war.

In all, some 500,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank and 250,000 in East Jerusalem, a total of about 10 per cent of Israel’s population.

Even as late as this month, in the midst of the Gaza war, the ultra-right Netanyahu government, whose leader is beholden to extremist elements, has continued approving new settler housing in the Occupied Territories. This could hardly represent a more pointed affront to international efforts to calm the situation, given the fact that settler violence in the West Bank has spiralled since the 7 October Hamas pogrom on Gaza’s boundaries.

Behind all this is an assumption that Netanyahu is hoping to hang on to leadership, and avoid jail on corruption charges, pending a return to the White House of a president who could be expected to look more favorably on his tenure. But there is a long way to go between now and January 2025, when Trump might get his hands on power and thus loosen restraints, such as they are, on an Israeli government.

In the meantime, there is much loose talk these days about a “two-state solution.” This is glib posturing: anyone who knows anything about the Middle East understands that we are very far indeed from a realistic consideration of two independent states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side.

When next you hear a politician talking about a two-state solution without any realistic prospect of such an outcome coming about, or of that politician actually doing anything about it, reach for the smelling salts. In reality, there is barely a pulse detectable in America, or among its allies, of a willingness to exert real pressure on Israel to engage realistically with the Palestinians towards a two-state solution.

Such is the depth of animosity and mistrust — and, yes, raw hatred — between Palestinians and Israelis that, short of divine intervention, or the arrival of an Israeli or Palestinian Nelson Mandela, or preferably both, there is little cause for optimism.

In fact, there is hardly any cause at all, not least because the Israeli right is adamantly opposed to a two-state outcome, leaving aside the likelihood of civil conflict if any leader in Israel proposes the dismantling of settlements and moves towards negotiations on a Palestinian state — even if there was a Palestinian entity capable of assuming leadership responsibility across the West Bank, and Gaza.

This might be hard to accept for the two-state-solution industry among academics, commentators and politicians groping for an off-ramp for the world’s most confronting conflict. But there has scarcely been a bleaker moment in a history burdened by failure and a feeble US presidency.

If there is a counterpoint to Biden’s weak hand, played weakly, it is Ronald Reagan’s example when he picked up the phone in the Oval Office in 1982, responding to what he was seeing on his television screen, and rang Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

In its invasion of Lebanon to rid that country of its Palestine Liberation Organisation presence, Israel was using its airforce fighters as “flying assassination squads” to pound Palestinian positions in Beirut.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan said. The Israeli offensive ceased.

Contrast that with Biden, who can’t even persuade Netanyahu to faciliate aid shipments into the Gaza Strip. This is both shameful, and farcical. •

The post Too little, too late appeared first on Inside Story.

Ambitious? Yes. Cyrus Vance, president Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, called it “a daring stroke.” Foolhardy? Many thought so, including members of Carter’s staff.

Failure was a real possibility and would reflect badly on Carter, already struggling with a perception that he lacked authority. Egypt and Israel were sworn enemies who had been fighting wars since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Carter took Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains outside Washington, and kept them there for the next thirteen days. A media blackout prevailed until an agreement was reached. Kai Bird, author of The Outlier, a 2021 biography of Carter, described his approach as “sheer relentlessness.”

Sadat and Carter wore down an intransigent Begin until he succumbed, agreeing to a peace treaty with Egypt, including relinquishing control of the Sinai Peninsula, taken from Egypt in the 1967 war, and the dismantling of Israeli settlements there.

The agreement also included the election of a self-governing Palestinian authority in the West Bank within five years, together with (according to Carter’s detailed record) a five-year freeze on Israeli settlements there. Within three months, Israel started on a major expansion of West Bank settlements, with Begin denying the freeze had been part of the official agreement and Carter telling his staff that Begin had lied to him.

The peace treaty with Egypt, the strongest Arab state, stuck, although it cost Sadat his life. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who condemned him as a traitor for the Camp David accords.

Carter’s hopes for a broader Middle East peace have proved elusive ever since, although he could clearly see the consequences. Near the end of his presidency he wrote in his diary, “I don’t see how they” — the Israeli government — “can continue as an occupying power depriving the Palestinians of basic human rights and I don’t see how they can absorb three million more Arabs in Israel without letting the Jews become a minority in their own country.”

Nevertheless the accords were a notable achievement and unimaginable in the context of the Middle East politics of recent decades. Carter reaped a political dividend but also paid a cost: relations with the enormously powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States were never the same again. They had not expected an American president to act as an honest broker.

Carter’s single term in the White House is generally rated among the less impressive in the presidential rankings. Yet his presidency has undergone a re-evaluation given his significant achievements in foreign and domestic policy, which look all the more substantial from today’s perspective.

In the tradition of the best political biographies, Bird gained access to volumes of material, including the copious personal diaries Carter kept as president as well as those of important figures in his administration. To learn that senior members were eating sandwiches at an important meeting in the cabinet room may not be vital to our understanding but it does point to a notable attention to detail.

Reading the narrative from the inside confirmed much of what I observed from the outside as a foreign correspondent in Washington during most of the Carter presidency. But it did so in much starker relief.

For example, the tensions between secretary of state Vance, the diplomat, and national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński, a cold war warrior, were evident at the time, but not their depth. Bird provides instances of what he called Brzeziński’s “highly manipulative” approach; Vance called him “evil, a liar, dangerous.”

Carter, a peanut farmer from small-town Georgia with a distinctive southern drawl, was an improbable candidate for the White House. He was a practising Baptist for whom, unlike many politicians, his religion was more than a veneer.

In a south where the echoes of the civil war still resonated and segregation continued in practice if not in name, he took a stand against racism. Yet he also was a skilled politician, elected as governor of Georgia despite his reputation as not being a typical white southerner and pragmatic when he thought he needed to be, including by downplaying his anti-racist credentials.

Still, running for president was a huge leap. He wasn’t taken seriously until he won the New Hampshire primary, and even then he was viewed with scepticism by leading members of the east-coast Democratic establishment. “He can’t be president,” said former New York governor Averell Harriman. “I don’t even know him!”

Sceptics dismissed him as self-righteous. His promise to voters that “I’ll never lie to you” prompted his friend and adviser Charles Kirbo to comment, perhaps not completely in jest, “You’re going to lose the liar vote.” But he came across to voters as sincere and authentic. And then, as now, coming from outside Washington was an advantage.

Circumstances played a large part: his Republican opponent was Gerald Ford, the sometimes hapless vice-president who had served the balance of president Richard Nixon’s term following Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Even then, Carter won only narrowly.

In elite Washington, Carter’s team of knockabout southerners were often dismissed as hicks. But, like Carter, they were not easily deterred.

Carter brought a luminous intelligence, idealism and diligence to the White House that stands in stark contrast to the era of Trump. He argued that the world was not so easily categorised in traditional American black-and-white terms — that there was more to foreign policy than a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. He preached against the “inordinate fear of communism” that had led to Washington’s embracing of some of the world’s nastiest right-wing dictators. The Vietnam war, he said of this approach, was “the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”

Bird writes that Carter rejected “any reflexive notions of American exceptionalism. He preached that there were limits to American power and limits to what we could inflict on the environment.” America didn’t go to war during Carter’s presidency — an exception up to that time and since.

He elevated human rights in foreign policy. It earned him derision from hardheads but it enhanced America’s reputation abroad, its so-called soft power.

Like any politician, though not as often, he compromised and backtracked when he judged that politics required it. Against his better instincts, he approved development of the MX missile, an expensive boondoggle championed by defence hawks, writing in his diary that he was sickened by “the gross waste of money going into nuclear weapons.”

In the wake of the OPEC oil embargo, when he was trying to persuade Congress to pass legislation to restrict energy consumption and provide funding for alternatives such as wind and solar, he diarised that “the influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable.” To set an example, he put solar panels on the White House roof and predicted that within two decades 20 per cent of the nation’s energy would be generated by solar power. He hadn’t count on his successor, Ronald Reagan, who removed the solar panels as one of his first acts as president, nor the ideological climate wars that followed.

While those actions were triggered by the energy crisis, he was receptive to the emerging issue of climate change. Just before leaving office, he released a report from his environmental think tank predicting “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if the world continued to rely on fossil fuels. It was a prescient warning almost half a century ago.

Carter’s domestic reforms included deregulation of sectors of the American economy, including banks and airlines, thereby increasing competition and reducing prices, though also bringing negative consequences. Consumer regulations led to mandatory seatbelts and airbags and fuel efficiency standards — something Australia is finally getting around to introducing almost half a century later. Environmental laws were passed to reduce air and water pollution; highly contested legislation locked up a large part of Alaska as wilderness and national parks, preventing oil and gas exploration.

In foreign policy, the Panama Canal treaties relinquished American control of the canal, returning sovereignty to Panama. Carter completed the normalisation of relations with China started under Nixon and negotiated an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

Other reforms proved to be harder sledding. Legislation on health reform that Carter thought could pass Congress was judged inadequate by Democratic liberals such as senator Edward Kennedy, who championed comprehensive national health insurance and used it as a platform to unsuccessfully challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. It would take another thirty years for Barack Obama’s administration to enact significant, if still not comprehensive, healthcare reform.

Carter was never completely accepted by the traditional Democrats that people like Kennedy represented. It came down to suspicion about his Southern roots. Too conservative for northern Democrats, he was too much of a liberal for many southern Democrats and Republicans.

By 1979, with Americans waiting in long queues to buy petrol and paying what were then exorbitant prices for the privilege (US$1 a gallon), Carter’s presidency was at risk of sliding into oblivion. Against the almost unanimous advice of his staff, he decided on another Camp David retreat, this time a domestic summit, inviting some of the nation’s leading citizens to come up with ideas for the nation’s future. What was unusual then seems extraordinary now.

Over ten days a parade of “wise men” travelled to Camp David to diagnose the nation’s ailments and remedies. As with the Begin–Sadat summit, the rest of the nation was kept in the dark by a media blackout.

Carter emerged to give an address to the nation like none other. Sounding more preacher than president, he said America faced a fundamental crisis of confidence that no amount of legislation could fix. Americans were losing their faith in the future, worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption.”

Taking the side of the people while lecturing them at the same time, he said he no more liked the behaviour of a paralysed Congress pulled in every direction by special interests. The immediate test was beating the energy crisis, on which he announced a series of initiatives taking in a windfall profits tax on the oil industry to finance the development of domestic sources of energy, including coal and a national solar energy “bank.” (His focus was on cutting dependence on imported oil, rather than climate change.) He announced plans for rebuilding mass transit systems and a national program for Americans to conserve energy.

Contrary to the fears of his hard-headed advisors, the speech was a great success, reflected in surges in Carter’s approval ratings of 11 per cent in one poll and 17 per cent in another. He was able to convey that most precious of political commodities — sincerity.

But these and other achievements were overwhelmed late in his term by the Iranian hostage crisis. Its origins lay in the Islamic revolution and the toppling of the Shah, who the CIA effectively had re-instated as ruler of Iran in 1953 following the previous Iranian government’s nationalisation of the oil industry. Concerned by the risk to Americans in Iran, Carter resisted efforts to allow the Shah to seek refuge in the United States; but he eventually succumbed to pressure from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other establishment figures to allow him in on the pretext of urgent medical treatment.

Two weeks later, Carter’s worst fears were realised when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages. When diplomacy failed, Carter authorised a complex and risky rescue mission involving ninety-five commandos, a C-130 transport plane and six helicopters. A series of mechanical failures and accidents, including a collision between one of the helicopters and the C-130, resulted in the mission being abandoned.

The hostage crisis plagued the remainder of Carter’s term, reinforcing perceptions of him as a weak president. It subsequently became clear that the campaign team for Republican nominee Ronald Reagan worked behind the scenes with Iranian representatives to delay the release of the hostages, promising a better deal if he won the election. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, had negotiated freedom for thirteen of the hostages the previous year and told Carter years later that he had rejected approaches from Reagan officials offering an arms deal if he could delay the release of those remaining.

The hostages were released on the day after Reagan’s inauguration following his landslide win in the 1980 election. Soon after taking office, the new administration, despite publicly maintaining Carter’s embargo on arms sales to Iran, secretly authorised Israel to sell military equipment to Iran.

The hostage crisis was not the only reason for the relatively rare election loss by a first-term president. Carter’s support was sapped by the 1970s ailment of stagflation — high inflation and stagnant economic growth — together with the energy crisis. Reagan, the former Hollywood actor, had an appealing personality and a now-familiar slogan: “Make America great again.”

James Fallows, speechwriter for the first two years of the administration, says that Carter invented the role of former president. He certainly had an active four decades of public life following the presidency, with the 110-strong staff of the Carter Centre in Atlanta working on human rights, preventive health care, election monitoring and international conflict resolution.

Carter raised millions of dollars for a program that virtually eradicated guinea worm, a parasitic disease that had disabled and disfigured 3.5 million people a year in Africa and India. His centre helped distribute twenty-nine million tablets in Africa and Latin America for the treatment of river blindness, another disease caused by a parasitic worm. “Americans got used to seeing this ex-president, dressed in blue jeans with a carpenter’s belt, hammering nails into two-by-fours for a house under construction by a team of volunteers for Habitat for Humanity,” Bird writes.

In the 1980s, he spoke out about the concerns he had developed about the Middle East when he was president but he had judged were too dangerous to express publicly. “Israel is the problem towards peace,” he said, citing particularly the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Accused of bias, he responded that “a lot of the accusations about bias are deliberately designed to prevent further criticism of Israel’s policies. And I don’t choose to be intimidated.” In 2006, he published his twenty-first book with the provocative title, particularly then, of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, earning him epithets such as “liar,” “bigot” and “anti-Semite.”

By then Carter had been awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”

After he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 he said, “I’d like for the last guinea worm to die before I do.” Nine years later, aged ninety-nine and in palliative care, he is still going, if not strongly — a metaphor for a lifetime of indefatigability. •

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He’d been born in Mississippi in 1968 and lived there in his formative years, so obviously he was a racist. He’d been raised in New Jersey, where he played centre on his high school football team, and then went on to play rugby in college, so of course he was brutish and crude. He had spent twenty-eight years in the US Army and had been in combat, so surely he had killed people.

Obviously, of course and surely, Brent Cummings eludes these reductive inferences. In An American Dreamer, Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Washington Post, unfurls Brent’s inner complexities and outer contradictions.

Brent appeared fifteen years earlier as an army major in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, an embedded account of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, and Finkel’s long connection to him has built the foundation for a work of gripping intimacy. An American Dreamer gets inside Brent’s skull, and those of his wife Laura and neighbour Mike, to capture the emotional landscape of contemporary American life from three diverging vantage points.

Brent is now working stateside at a college with his retirement from the army looming. His soul is troubled. He feels his country has lost its way in the last couple of decades, as if he’s come “out of one war and into another” against enemies on the home front. In a revealing slip, he remarks that the earlier time “felt… clean. No that’s not the right word… It’s slipping.”

What the pollutant might be is not clear to him. Trumpism is part of it. Despite being “probably more Republican than Democrat, probably more conservative than liberal,” he loathes the man for his egotism, ill-discipline and bullying more than for his policies. But the problem runs deeper: Brent has lost confidence in his country’s goodness and shared purpose. “Everything was fraying. That’s what it felt like.”

Brent’s concerns have more to do with meaning than with material or political realities. His belief in American virtue and progress is shaken, and while that abstract dream is disintegrating a real one disturbs his sleep. Not the post-traumatic image of desert horrors we might expect but a chorus of mocking voices from a profound darkness.

His sense that the ground has shifted under him is reinforced by a series of bafflements. He is shocked by the lack of support he receives from colleagues when he challenges the use of a confederate flag on an insignia, upset by activist attacks on his beloved military, appalled by the unthinkable assault on the Capitol. He finds himself in a vanishing middle where the mental habits of a lifetime, grounded in ideas of honour and fair play, have lost their traction. “Am I the one who’s wrong? Am I the one who’s missing something?”

Laura and Mike play second and third fiddle to Brent, but Finkel gives voice to them with the same empathic immediacy. Laura’s main register is anxiety rather than disorientation. She fears violent crime, feels a rising sense of menace in her neighbourhood and worries about the fate of her intellectually disabled daughter when she is no longer around.

Mike, for his part, overlays fear with anger, going full-bore MAGA while railing against the “socialist and communist” treachery of the Democrats. Why Mike, a quadriplegic of modest means, would set aside his early doubts about Trump and come to see him as his infallible saviour is a mystery. His political conversion creates tension with his neighbours, a microcosm of the severing of connections that has played out across the country.

Finkel is a wonderful guide to the inner terrain of his characters. He shows rather than tells, keeping their dialogue and the private thoughts behind it direct and relatable. Brent in particular is brought to vivid life through confrontations with events that confound him. Very occasionally these episodes seem a little forced, notably in the parallels between an encounter with the security wall on a visit to Jerusalem and Trump’s border wall. Mike’s characterisation can also appear ever so slightly two-dimensional by comparison with Brent’s, but the book as a whole is a triumph of compassionate and sympathetic attention.

Finkel inhabits Brent in a rare way, better than a life-long friend could hope to do. More a finely tuned recording instrument than a buddy, he makes no attempt to elevate Brent, hide his flaws or turn him into a morally instructive Everyman. He is an ordinary guy, standing somewhere on the slippery hump of the political bell curve, but he is also a creature of a specific time, place and tradition, not just a symbol of averageness. Witnessing his puzzlement at how things have changed, we might wonder how much his sense of loss comes from occupying a political centre that cannot hold and how much it is a sign that he is getting older and his generation is being unseated.

We hear so much about the growing polarisation of American life. Books like this one help to humanise the conflict, not only by plucking individuals from their political tribes but also by exploring the quieter emotional dimensions of their experience. Beyond the primal fears and hatreds, Finkel suggests, there are people seeking solutions to big, existential questions about purpose, meaning, legacy and value. An American Dream shows us that behind all the yelling and distrust and there is vulnerability and hope. •

An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country
By David Finkel | Scribe | $36.99 | 256 pages

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We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priest. Practice and policy. Show me the church manipulated the systems so that these guys wouldn’t have to face charges. Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again. Show me that it was systemic, that it came from the top down. We’re going after the system. I think that’s the bigger story.

The team, led by Walter Robinson, kept digging and eventually revealed not only the shocking extent of the abuse but the lengths to which the church hierarchy went to protect the abusers. The team’s 600-plus stories during 2002 eventually led to the resignation of Boston’s archbishop, Bernard Law.

The dramatisation of these events, Spotlight, was released in 2015 and won the Academy Award for best picture. Perhaps even more than All the President’s Men, it is a film that makes journalists feel proud of what their work can achieve.

Less than a decade later, though, Spotlight feels like a relic from a bygone era. Since 2015 the size and influence of the legacy news media have diminished markedly within a media ecosystem in which the majority of people in the United States and Australia get their news from social media.

As Brian Stelter documents in his books Hoax (2020) and Network of Lies (2023), news from established outlets like the New York Times sloshes around the internet alongside the toxic swill from Fox News and elsewhere. This tsunami of news and opinion is further polluted by torrents of misinformation and disinformation on social media, whether it’s about vaccines, the 2020 US presidential election or the Voice referendum.

Into this changed, and changing, environment comes Collision of Power, Baron’s memoir of a forty-five-year career in journalism that took him from the Miami Herald via the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times to eleven years editing the Boston Globe and eight years as executive editor of the Washington Post. He stepped down from that last posting, aged sixty-seven, in February 2021.

Baron has spent his entire career in newspapers and is resolutely old school in his belief in the continuing value of public interest journalism and orthodox notions of journalistic objectivity. Collision of Power reads as something of a collision between the world he grew up in, inspired by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1970s reporting on Watergate for the newspaper he eventually edited, and a world in which countless journalistic disclosures about Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness for office made not a jot of difference to his supporter base.

Does this mean Baron’s memoir should be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the dinosaurs of print? Well, unlike many journalists’ memoirs, this one is not marinated in tales of derring-do and all-night drinking marathons. Baron spent most of his career as an editor rather than on-the-road journalist and his book is all about the work.

I only know that Baron rarely drinks because he said so after winning the 2016 Christopher Hitchens prize, and then only to compare himself with the famously lubricated Hitchens and make a larger point — that they might have approached life differently but they shared the same journalistic values. But he does wryly acknowledge the accuracy of Schreiber’s portrayal of him in Spotlight as “humourless, laconic, and yet resolute.”

The three main threads running throughout Collision of Power are flagged in its subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.” Baron was appointed executive editor of that newspaper in 2013, a time when Donald Trump’s name was still good for a laugh, courtesy of Barack Obama, at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. He stepped down the month after Trump left office still proclaiming he had won the previous November’s election.

Baron reflects that the Post, like the rest of the mainstream news media, had underestimated Trump’s appeal to many Americans. After the 2016 election he resolved to devote more resources to getting reporters out across the country to tap into ordinary people’s experiences and concerns. He also concedes that the Post put too much weight on Hillary Clinton’s slipshod secrecy about her emails during her presidential campaign.

Before the election, Baron and his journalists had learnt how Trump dealt with the media — how he alternated between feeding them stories and gossip, as he had done for years as a New York property developer, and threatening to cut off access or, worse, if he became president, change the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to sue journalists. As Trump railed about “the fake news media” and levelled personal insults at individual journalists, Baron stressed that “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.”

The “work” was published continuously, including in a multi-authored book, Trump Revealed, that covered many aspects of the candidate’s life, from real estate to allegations of sexual harassment, and from his business ventures to his television career. The newspaper’s fact-checking unit tracked Trump’s runaway capacity for exaggeration and deceit, finding that during his presidency he told 30,573 lies.

When the Post’s David Fahrenthold decided to test Trump’s self-seeded reputation as a philanthropist, for instance, he found fallow ground. The Trump Foundation had received US$5.5 million but claimed to have pledged US$8.5 million to various causes. Notoriously, one donation made by Trump was for a portrait of himself that Fahrenthold’s citizen sleuths on social media found in his Florida golf resort. Fahrenthold also broke the story of the notorious Access Hollywood tapes.

Throughout the Trump presidency, the Washington Post and the New York Times competed hard to break stories that would hold Trump and his staff to account. The sheer number of important disclosures they made is easy to forget, partly because there seemed no end of chaos in the Trump administration and partly because no matter what Trump did he was exonerated because the Republicans had the numbers in the Senate. Almost without exception, they refused to examine issues on their merits and voted out of blind, fearful loyalty to Trump.

Baron’s careful recounting of the many scandals of the Trump administration is both a salutary and a dispiriting experience for the reader. Salutary because we may have forgotten how damaging Trump’s presidency was to so many (remember the one million–plus US deaths from Covid-19?) and dispiriting because he continues to evade responsibility for his actions.

As Trump heads towards the Republican nomination for the 2024 election, the various court cases brought against him are mired in process, delays and appeals. Baron’s memoir reminds us that it was the Post’s reporter Amy Gardner who broke the story that led to one of the most serious post–2020 election cases: how Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, received a phone call from Trump urging him to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the southern state.

According to the recording Gardner obtained, Trump said to Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Trump faces thirteen criminal charges for trying to undo the Georgia result.

Baron’s acute awareness of the threat posed by a second Trump presidency explains why he feels compelled to go over events in such detail. What he doesn’t reflect on is how and why Trump has been able to recover from the ignominy surrounding his 2020 loss. It is a commonplace of commentary to say that Trump’s rise is a symptom of disease in the Republican Party. But has there ever been a symptom so potent and deep-seated, given that the Republican Party is now the Trump Party in all but name?

The media’s role in aiding and abetting Trump’s rise from the ashes of 2020 is something Baron could also have reflected on. Trump is an attention magnet, and the news media has been unable to resist the pull of a figure who sees politics in the hyperventilating, hypermasculine style of pro wrestling. Unable but also, perhaps, unwilling: Les Moonves, the chairman of the CBS television company, infamously said in 2016 that Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The evidence is in on the “may not be good for America” part, so it is truly galling to see the news media rushing to cover Trump’s every recent move in classic horserace style. Left behind at the starter’s gate is context, history or a strong enough sense of the grave risk to democracy.

As New York journalism professor Jay Rosen says, the organising principle for the news media as it covers the 2024 presidential election should be “not the odds, but the stakes.” That is, “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy, given what’s possible in this election.” He points to a 2023 piece by Brynn Tannehill in the New Republic as an example of “stakes commentary” whose analysis is both plausible and terrifying. It’s well worth reading.

Collision of Power’s second thread is Jeff Bezos’s surprise purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post from the Graham family, which had owned it since 1933. Like many other media outlets, the Post was struggling to adapt its business model to survive commercially in the digital media age.

One of the world’s richest men (he was worth US$25 billion at the time), Bezos bought the paper out of his own pocket for US$250 million rather than through the company he founded, Amazon. According to Baron, he did so out of a commitment to sustaining public interest journalism.

Bezos’s motivation and plans for the paper attracted a lot of scepticism at the time. Why would a leader of one of the global tech behemoths that had laid waste to the print media’s business model want to buy one of these financially ailing newspapers? Would he allow the Washington Post to report without fear or favour on Amazon, especially given the company’s long history of stonewalling journalists probing its hostility to labour unions, to take one example among many? Would he be an interventionist proprietor?

Soon after buying the paper, Bezos met staff in the “windowless, cavernous and thoroughly charmless ‘community room’” next to the newspaper’s auditorium and fielded questions, including one from famed veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward: “How and why did you decide to buy the Post?” (“Hardball,” cracked another journalist.) Bezos answered that he had asked himself three questions before making the decision. Was the newspaper an important institution? Yes, of course. Did it have a future? Yes, in the right circumstances. Did he have anything to contribute, especially as he lived on the opposite coast, in Seattle? Yes, he could provide “runway”; that is, long-term investment that would allow time for experiments to succeed or fail.

And on the question of the newspaper’s coverage of him and his company? “Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.” According to Baron, the newspaper did just that. Its resolve was tested in 2019 when the National Enquirer revealed Bezos had been conducting an affair with a media personality, Lauren Sánchez, including sending her “dick pics.” Baron says the Post covered the issue professionally but acknowledges it could not quite nail down whether the National Enquirer’s story was a political hit job.

The Enquirer, known to be close to Donald Trump, is a supermarket tabloid that engages in “catch and kill”: using a legally enforceable non-disclosure agreement, it buys exclusive rights to “catch” the damaging story from an individual before “killing” it for the benefit of a third party. Trump had been pursuing a vendetta against Bezos and what he called “the Amazon Post.”

On the question of proprietorial interference, though, Baron is adamant: “Bezos never interfered in the Post’s journalism during my seven years plus under his ownership, even if coverage of Amazon put the company in an unfavourable light. For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exercise influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would. I got the sense Bezos relished the challenge of turning around the Post.”

Not that Bezos initially understood exactly how journalism is produced. Like Fred Hilmer, the management consultant who was Fairfax Media’s CEO between 1998 and 2005, Bezos was, and is, obsessed by metrics. He wanted the newspaper’s online website to devote more of its resources to “aggregating” other outlets’ stories into shorter pieces with clickbait headlines, and he wanted each story done in fifteen minutes.

Baron could see the idea’s commercial savvy — it was a “bargain-basement way to profit off the work of others” — but found it intensely annoying that the readers he wanted to consume the newspaper’s original reporting would be drawn in by these “digital gillnets.”

Bezos separated journalists into two categories: those whose work had a “direct impact on the product” (reporters) and those who had an indirect impact (editors). Hire more of the former and fewer of the latter, Baron was told, but he resisted. He believed good editors were essential to “directing and coordinating coverage and ensuring that it meets our quality standards.”

Baron tussled with Bezos on these issues throughout his tenure. He came to appreciate Bezos’s genuine insights into improving the company’s efficiency, and he welcomed Bezos’s commitment to deepening and broadening coverage by hiring more journalists. The number of political journalists at the paper doubled during Baron’s time there, and before the 2016 election an eight-person “rapid-response investigative team” was established. In time, improvements in how the paper’s stories were packaged and delivered to readers reaped rewards in both reach and subscription numbers.

Bezos also came to appreciate the particular role newspapers play in society and the particular culture a newsroom needs if its staff are going to publish stories that anger and upset powerful people, including presidents. When Ben Bradlee, a legendary predecessor of Baron who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, died in 2014, Bezos was not planning to attend the funeral until he received an email from Bob Woodward reminding him not only of Bradlee’s importance in the paper’s history but also that he was “the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos attended, and afterwards described it as an “awakening” for him.

The new owner imbibed the example of Katharine Graham, publisher between 1963 and 1991, whose steadfast support of the paper during Watergate earned her the ire of the Nixon administration, which planned payback by encouraging its allies to challenge the licences of the Graham family’s television stations.

Trump initially tried charming Bezos before asking him to use his position to secure favourable coverage. When Bezos rebuffed his demands, Trump launched a ferocious campaign against Amazon. He claimed the company should pay higher postal rates for its goods and more tax — a bit rich coming from someone who had boasted about not paying much tax.

Partly because of Amazon’s public unpopularity, many underplayed what Trump was doing. Baron, however, cites a 2019 article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine: “The story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage.”

Running alongside commercially oriented discussions are sharpening challenges to Baron’s sense of journalistic ethics. In the third thread in Collision of Power he discusses his stewardship of an important newspaper during what has been, and continues to be, a difficult period for the news media. He illustrates the challenges with detailed accounts of the cases of Wes Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.

Lowery won a Pulitzer for his reporting on police shootings in 2015; Sonmez was a breaking news reporter. Both fell foul of the newspaper’s social media policy by tweeting their views on various controversies, including Trump’s racist comments about four progressive congresswomen of colour (Lowery) and sexual assault allegations against high-profile sports stars and other journalists (Sonmez).

Lowery left the newspaper and began speaking out about what he saw as the bankrupt nature of objectivity in journalism. Last year he wrote a thought-provoking essay, “A Test of the News,” for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he highlighted how journalists from diverse backgrounds are feeling increasingly frustrated and disenchanted by how news stories are chosen and framed from what Lowery sees as a predominantly upper-class, white, male perspective.

The lack of diversity in American (and for that matter Australian) newsrooms has been a problem for many years. In 1971, according to the American Journalist Project, just 3.9 per cent of those working in newsrooms were Black. By 2013 the percentage figure had still only nudged up to 4.1.

Journalistic objectivity has also been the subject of controversy for many years. Historically, journalists and editors liked to think their decisions about news selection were arrived at dispassionately. At best they were discounting, and at worst they were oblivious to, the values — personal, cultural and ideological — underpinning their decisions. Even the language of the newsroom, with its talk of “a nose for news” or, more formally, “news values,” gives the game away. Whose nose, what values?

Behind the cloak of objectivity are hidden all sorts of journalistic shibboleths. The horserace coverage of electoral contests, for instance, has been analysed in the academic literature since at least 1980, but the news media seems unable or unwilling to recognise the problems of reporting politics as if it were a sporting event.

Another example: people in positions of power and authority, especially presidents and prime ministers, are accorded at least 50 per cent of space in news items simply because of their status. When an allegation is made against them, they must be asked for a response. When president George W. Bush built the case — spurious as it turned out — to invade Iraq in 2003, he was able to game the journalistic requirement for balance. Donald Trump, of course, has pushed that game several moves down the board.

Objectivity in a scientific sense is unattainable. Journalists are human beings. The news media industry’s relentless pushing of the idea that news reporting can be objective has simply sent an open invitation to everyone to play spot the bias.

What journalists can and should pursue is an objective method of verification, as is cogently outlined in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s essential guide, The Elements of Journalism. At its simplest, this means seeking out all perspectives on an issue, especially a contentious issue, and reporting viewpoints dispassionately. Drawing on a range of views blunts a journalist’s tendency to serve up their biases or simply opine.

That doesn’t mean accepting any and every view. As the quote variously attributed to Jonathan Foster and Hubert Mewhinney has it: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

First published in 2001, Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book has been revised three times to keep up to date with trends and debates, including on newsroom diversity. They cite a Black business executive, Peter Bell, who says arguments for greater diversity in newsrooms presuppose that all Black people or all women think alike. “What is the Black position on any given issue? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t one.”

Conversely, a Black journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, says the rage she feels about racial injustice drives her reporting. Rather than the word objectivity, she talks about meticulous research, evidence and transparency as guiding principles that strengthen her storytelling.

For Kovach and Rosenstiel, “Independence from faction suggests there is a way to produce journalism without either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it.” As much as greater diversity along racial, gender or gender-identity lines is needed, they argue that newsrooms also need intellectual and ideological diversity.

In 1971, 26 per cent of American journalists identified themselves as Republicans, 36 per cent as Democrats and 33 per cent as independents. By 2013, the number of Republicans had dropped to 7 per cent while the number of Democrats had fallen slightly to 28 per cent and the number of independents had risen to 50 per cent.

In practice, according to Kovach and Rosenstiel, this means “on the crush of deadline, journalists often expect everyone in the newsroom to think the same way rather than embracing debate inspired by personal background… It has been safer to default to a vision of journalistic consciousness that pretends politics doesn’t enter into it.”

Baron, for his part, supports the need for greater newsroom diversity and has seen the benefit of journalists using social media for their work. But he is also a socially conservative person for whom the story is what matters, not him or his opinions. As much as anything, that was what he disapproved of when Lowery (whose work he greatly admired) took to Twitter.

This is a valuable book by a self-effacing but outstanding editor. It is no small irony that, having been inspired by the newspaper’s Watergate reporting, Baron seems blind to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the first newspaper journalists to become celebrities. It was their book, All the President’s Men, and the film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (with Jason Robards as Bradlee) that created the Watergate legend.

The horse known as the unheralded journalist has long since bolted. The doors of the stable containing the social media horse were also flung open several years ago. The question now is whether media outlets and their journalists can find the balance between opinion and reporting and between free speech and company loyalty. •

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post
By Martin Baron | Flatiron Books | $74.99 | 548 pages

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By the beginning of 2024 a record-breaking 21.3 million Americans had signed up for health coverage through Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges — five million more than a record high at the same time last year. Intriguingly, the largest increases have come in Republican-dominated states. In Florida, one in four people under the age of sixty-five are enrolled in an exchange plan; in Georgia, Texas, Utah and South Carolina the figure is more than one in ten.

Much of the recent increase can be attributed to the unwinding of Covid-era rules that made it easier to gain access to Medicaid, the healthcare scheme for people on low incomes. Under Biden, marketplace subsidies for health insurance premiums have been increased and eligibility widened, although this enhanced assistance will expire after 2025 without an extension from Congress. The administration has also boosted publicity about how the insurance exchanges work — publicity substantially reduced under Donald Trump — and removed a glitch that deprived some families of subsidies.

Fourteen years on, the data show that Obamacare is increasingly doing what Obama and the Democrats wanted — not just providing the security of health insurance but also reducing income inequality and racial disparities in healthcare. It has reduced the out-of-pocket costs of preventive healthcare for all Americans and the burden of medical spending on families, particularly those on low and middle incomes. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, are getting close.

Trump and Republicans in Congress couldn’t repeal Obamacare in 2017 largely because it had become too popular. It’s even more popular now. Around 60 per cent of Americans support the healthcare law and the figure is even higher for some of Obamacare’s specific provisions, including protections for pre-existing health conditions.

When Trump vowed late last year to “never give up” his call for Obamacare’s repeal — claiming it is “too expensive, and otherwise, not good healthcare” and promising to come up with “a much better, and less expensive, alternative!” — he was offering a campaign gift to Democrats. The promise, which Trump has made frequently since his 2016 campaign without ever detailing a replacement, has contributed significantly to Republican electoral defeats since then. On this issue he has failed to attract a groundswell of support even among Republicans: polling last December by independent healthcare analysts KFF showed that only 32 per cent of self-identified Republican voters considered it very important for candidates to talk about the future of Obamacare, compared with 70 per cent of Democrats.

But that same polling indicates voters are eager to hear the presidential candidates discuss healthcare affordability. Eight in ten voters describe this topic, and the future of Medicare (the federal insurance program for older people) and Medicaid, as “very important.” They regard access to mental healthcare as a healthcare priority too, along with prescription drug costs, gun violence, the opioid crisis, abortion and climate change. (The pandemic barely makes it to the list — only 22 per cent of those surveyed said it was very important.) All these issues and more show up among Biden’s election commitments, whereas Trump’s election statements are vague or absent. (A recent article from KFF Health News outlines what a second Trump presidency could look like for healthcare based on Trump’s previous record.)

Abortion, gun control, immigration, LGBTQ rights and climate change — all issues relating to health — are now seen as “litmus test” issues that drive voting choices. Ironically, though, the most potent policy decisions in these areas in recent years have been made not by elected politicians but by the courts, with the US Supreme Court, now dominated by conservative Trump appointees, as the final arbiter.

This sort of policy rule-making has not always worked well for Trump, Republicans or voters. A classic example is the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the federal guarantee of abortion rights. This ruling delivered Trump and Republicans one of their most significant victories and one of their biggest political vulnerabilities.

Americans’ support for abortion is now at a record high; 69 per cent believe abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy and 61 per cent think that overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing.” Voter anger over abortion restrictions was widely credited with Democrats’ wins in the 2022 midterm elections. This is expected to be the case again in 2024, with abortion on the ballot in many states, even those where abortion rights are legally enshrined.

When asked which party best represents their views on abortion, more people say the Democratic Party (42 per cent) than the Republican Party (26 per cent). Women of reproductive age and young voters see abortion as a factor galvanising them to vote — and American women consistently vote more often than men. Some analysts believe angry Republican women could spell trouble for the party vote in 2024.

Litigation over abortion restrictions and access to reproductive health services is nevertheless proceeding in many Republican-controlled states, and the US Supreme Court is set to rule before November 2024 on two cases involving reproductive rights and healthcare: one on access to mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of US abortions, and another on emergency, life-saving abortions in hospital emergency departments.

Both Trump and his surviving rival in the primaries, Nikki Haley, struggle to articulate a coherent position on abortion that is acceptable to both conservative Republican Party officials and voters. Biden, by contrast, has put reproductive rights squarely in the middle of his re-election campaign. He has committed to enshrining abortion rights in federal law and has issued an executive order aimed at strengthening access to contraception.

The Affordable Care Act and its regulations guarantee coverage of preventive services, including birth control and contraceptive counselling, at no cost for women with health insurance. In 2020 the US Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration regulation that allowed employers with religious or moral objections to limit the birth control cover provided by Obamacare. Last month the Biden administration released proposed rules that would remove the moral exemption but retain the religious exemption, potentially restoring free contraception coverage to 126,000 women.

Abortion and contraception in the United States — a country where maternal and infant mortality rates and healthcare and pharmaceutical costs are shamefully high — are often economic decisions rather than moral or ideological ones. Even in some of the most conservative states with very few abortion services, rates of legal abortions are high. Access to reproductive healthcare services is crucial for many women, regardless of political affiliation, and especially those who are poor. Reproductive health researchers at the Guttmacher Institute say 75 per cent of American women seeking an abortion are either in poverty or just above the poverty line.

It’s worth noting that over the past forty years the sharpest drops in abortion rates have been under Democratic presidents, presumably because of their greater focus on delivering comprehensive healthcare services.

A study released in September 2023 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provides an interesting insight into partisanship more broadly in the United States. Since the Tea Party era there has been almost no policy overlap between the two major parties in Congress (and the situation grows more partisan by the day). Among voters, by contrast, considerable agreement exists even on hot-button issues like abortion and guns.

But voters’ policy views are not strongly held and the American political system doesn’t easily allow them to express their policy preferences. What is strongly held is a sense of identity: what is referred to as emotional or affective polarisation. Voters don’t like people from the other political party — largely based on misbeliefs, misinformation and misperceptions — and will alter their policy preferences to match their partisan identities. In this respect, media like Fox News and Newsmax are seen as having a bigger impact than social media and political campaigns.

The fate of the Affordable Care Act sees two key issues — rising economic pressures and the polarisation of politicians and voters — come together. The act was initially very unpopular because of poor messaging from Democrats and misinformation and disinformation from Republicans and the conservative media. Confusion about a complicated law that took years to come into effect was widespread. And many Americans didn’t realise that the Affordable Care Act (which they liked) was the same as Obamacare (which they despised and/or feared), though those who benefited soon became supporters.

The situation in Florida (an increasingly Republican state) exemplifies the split. Florida has far more people enrolled in Obamacare’s federal health insurance marketplace than any other state. Floridians, bombarded with misinformation from then governor Rick Scott (“everyone now realises that Obamacare was a terrible notion”) and from current governor Ron DeSantis (who wants a healthcare plan that would “supersede” Obamacare), were initially loathe to take up government-subsidised health insurance, deriding it as “socialism.”

But Medicaid has never been expanded in Florida, which ranks among the five most expensive states for healthcare, many local employers don’t offer health insurance, and many retirees are younger than sixty-five and not yet eligible for Medicare. Obamacare offers affordable options for all these groups. Its increasing uptake and popularity has been driven by Republican-leaning Hispanics in the Miami area, where it’s described as “ingrained in the community” and the Obama campaign logo is routinely used to promote insurance.

Despite all this, a November poll showed Florida’s Hispanic voters backing Trump. While only 30 per cent of those surveyed indicated they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Biden, 36 per cent opted for Trump. Results like these suggest that emotional polarisation will continue to drive voting patterns in November, even if this risks the loss of healthcare insurance and associated benefits.

On the upside, the Affordable Care Act no longer faces quite the same existential threat that once loomed. Despite Trump’s renewed threats, the scheme’s popularity continues to increase and Republican hostility is fading. It has become deeply embedded in the US healthcare system. (It would be no easy task to untangle its provisions from Medicare.) And it will be hard to sell voters a promise to take away the health insurance they know and value — even if there is a replacement, with all its own complicated and time-consuming details. •

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The mass adulation came as Albanese — like a swathe of Australia’s politicos, strategic thinkers and business leaders — embraced India as the best available escape from dependency on China. Add to that the fact that the fast-growing Indian community is made up of the ideal sort of migrant: well-educated, professionally skilled, prosperous, English-speaking, pious but moderate and even cricket-loving.

India may well turn out to play a key economic role for Australia one day, and the Indian community, now nearly 800,000-strong and the second-largest foreign-born component of the population (after those from Britain), has all the qualities claimed for it.

But since the mass rally in Sydney’s former Olympic stadium in May, the lustre has come off Narendra Modi. Longstanding concerns about where he is taking India are getting more air, and other members of the Quad grouping lined up against China, and their Five Eyes intelligence allies, are questioning his scruples.

Most pointedly, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau revealed in September “credible allegations” that India was responsible for the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist gunned down in British Columbia in June. Canada immediately expelled India’s chief intelligence official in Ottawa

India called the allegations “absurd” and responded to the expulsion by sharply cutting the number of Canadian diplomats in New Delhi. But the following month, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the ABC he had “no reason to dispute what the Canadian government has said in this matter.”

Then, on 29 November, the US Department of Justice announced the prosecution of an Indian man allegedly commissioned by a senior intelligence official in New Delhi to organise the assassination of another Sikh separatist, US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on American soil. The plot was thwarted when the hired gunman turned out to be an undercover anti-drug agent.

According to a contributor to the respected US journal Foreign Affairs, any intelligence plans to kill Pannun and Nijjar would most likely have been cleared with Ajit Doval, Modi’s national security adviser: “He is known to be hands on, and the Indian intelligence bureaucracy is too hierarchical for something as high stakes as an international assassination to happen without Doval’s approval.”

The ripples spread further. A well-regarded Indian news outlet, the Print, reports that the British government asked a senior official of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the external intelligence agency reporting to the prime minister, to leave his station in London. The US also expelled a senior official with the same agency from his station in San Francisco and blocked the agency from replacing its station chief in Washington. US president Joe Biden, has since declined an invitation to be chief foreign guest at India’s big Republic Day parade on 26 January.

That kind of foreign interference, and its alleged source, was not what Australia’s government and security apparatus had in mind when they introduced controversial laws to criminalise clandestine influence-building in 2017. Their aim was to keep an eye on Australia’s Chinese-origin community, numbering about 1.2 million, and on efforts by Beijing’s spy agencies and Communist Party “united front work” operatives to manipulate its members and recruit gullible or venal figures in the wider population.

Now it appears our spooks and analysts need to worry about the possibility of India’s intelligence service working in illegal ways to further the political aims of its ruling party. They need to educate themselves about how Modi’s brand of communal politics plays out in the diaspora, and reassess the lengths to which they believe New Delhi is ready to go.

This isn’t likely to be a short-term problem either: after nearly ten years in office, polls show Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to be as popular as ever and his Congress Party–led opposition failing to gain much traction, pointing to another Modi victory in elections due early next year.

Modi’s campaign to turn India away from the secular, minority-inclusive model of its modern rebirth into a Hindu-majoritarian state is likely to get fresh impetus after that likely win. At the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, he seemed to float a name change from India to the ancient, pre-Muslim, pre-British Bharat. The new Indian parliament building, opened in April this year, includes a mural showing India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and part of Afghanistan as forming Akhand Bharat (“unbroken India”), an idea pushed by the far-right, Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Order), or RSS, the movement from which Modi sprang.

On 22 January, Modi will inaugurate a lavish new temple at Ayodhya to mark the legendry birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. To hundreds of millions of poorly educated Hindus, mainly in India’s north, the new Ram Birthplace Temple marks a historical truth rather than a legend. It is described as a replacement for an ancient one torn down centuries ago by a Muslim conqueror and replaced with a small mosque. That mosque was notoriously destroyed in 1992 by Hindu mobs fired up by earlier BJP leaders, initiating decades of communal strife and friction between Hindus and Muslims.

No wonder Biden didn’t want to chance standing alongside Modi four days after the new temple is opened. If he did, he might also have gazed down New Delhi’s majestic Edwin Lutyens–designed avenue — the avenue that ends in a memorial arch to the Indian dead of the British forces in the world wars — and noticed a new structure alongside, inaugurated by Modi last year. Under a stone canopy is an 8.5 metre black granite statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the independence fighter who rejected the non-violent campaigns of Nehru and Gandhi and aligned himself with the Axis powers. After being smuggled by Nazi agents to Germany, where he met Hitler and Himmler, Bose was delivered by U-boat to the Japanese, for whom he raised an anti-British army among Indian prisoners of war. In Modi’s eyes, Australians, the British and the Americans were on the wrong side in the Pacific war.

Although Indians have been in Australia since first British settlement, the community’s present numbers were reached by a fivefold expansion only in the last twenty years. Its social and political streams are still in formation. But pointers to emerging internal pressures can be found in British historian Edward Anderson’s important new book, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora.

Of an estimated thirty million worldwide, Anderson focuses on those living in Britain, making comparisons with the United States, in both cases communities that grew large a generation earlier than Australia’s. If our diaspora follows the same pattern, a Hindu identity will grow in importance over an “Indian” one, and even more than a “South Asian” one, for its members of that faith. And that identity will increasingly be flavoured by a Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) wider than religious belief and worship.

Hindutva is almost synonymous with the Hindu nationalism pursued by Modi and his BJP: a majoritarian, conservative and militant political ideology and ethno-religious movement (in Anderson’s description) that rejects pluralistic secularism and is ascendant in contemporary India.

Strangely, Hindutva also has wide support among Hindus living outside India, who simultaneously favour a chauvinistic, majoritarian ideology in India while negotiating recognition and rights in their new homes as a “model minority” noted for peaceful and prosperous integration. “Why is it that some of the most outspokenly patriotic Indians are those who have chosen to live outside of their motherland, or may have never lived in India at all?” Anderson asks.

It’s not just an assertiveness masking insecurity or guilt about leaving for a better material life, he says, but the result of decades of cultivation by Hindutva idealogues centred on the RSS. Founded in the 1920s, the RSS has nurtured generations of pracharaks (cadres) dedicated to hardening up India’s Hindu population to throw off the influence of Muslim and then British overlords.

“The life of a pracharak,” Anderson tells us, “is in many ways modelled on an ascetic: itinerant (as and when required), abstinent and unmarried, and renouncing of material possessions (receiving no salary, but provided with accommodation and vegetarian diet).” They are often from middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, university-educated and English speaking, and well travelled, though they don’t mix much outside RSS circles.

Although he comes from a low caste, from where he was put into a teenage marriage (apparently unconsummated), Modi spent his early adult years as an RSS pracharak. He was then placed as the BJP’s chief minister in Gujarat, just ahead of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom there that stained his reputation and kept him barred from the United States until he became prime minister. His humble origins count as a plus for a BJP often accused of trying to keep the Hindu upper castes in charge.

The RSS began its external proselytising in the 1940s among the Indian communities in East Africa, mostly from Gujarat, which thrived as commercial intermediaries between the British and the Africans. Expelled after independence, they were able to settle in English cities, notably London, Birmingham and Leicester, by virtue of their British passports. The RSS followed them, setting up in 1966 in England as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, or HSS, an organisation that remains active today.

Living in group housing in Leicester, the pracharaks organise rank-and-file recruits, the swayamsevaks, at regular shakhas that start with a Sanskrit prayer and hoisting of the saffron-coloured flag of Hinduism, followed by marching drills and practice with bamboo staves, sessions of the Indian game kabaddi, closing prayers, and singing of the RSS anthem “Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhoomi” (Hail to Thee O Motherland).

Physical development is very much part of the ethos. The aim, Anderson says, has been “to ‘rebuild’ a population of strong Hindu male figures, largely to countenance (while simultaneously justifying) the threatening construction of the Muslim Other…” Tolerance and Gandhian non-violence have been shelved in favour of warrior models from history and legends.

“The promotion of physical training, toughness, and group unity also relates to the perception that individualism and material comforts of the West constitute a danger for Hindus,” he writes:

Second-generation Hindus overseas are considered particularly susceptible to picking up bad habits from morally bankrupt host societies, and many have discussed the “disdain” South Asian migrants have for the lax ethics of the West, its declining parental authority, licentiousness, culture of instant gratification, weakening family units, and so on. The HSS has performed a specific role in this context, providing segregated spaces for socialisation away from “corrupting influences,” in which curative “Indian” values can be transmitted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the following is not large: the eighty-two shakhas operating in Britain have an average weekly total attendance of 1903. They are notably more casual than those in India (where volunteers turn out in uniforms), many participants are female, and the dropout rate is high. The local volunteers often find visiting RSS cadres from India possessed of a much more hard line against Muslims than they themselves feel, or are willing to express.

Recognising this tension, the cadre-based RSS and its mass affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) have slipped into the background in recent decades, pushing forward more worldly figures to head councils claiming to speak for the one million Hindus among the 1.8 million Indian-origin residents of England and Wales. The same trend is found in the Indian diaspora of the United States, which has grown to 4.2 million from one million in 1990.

The message is also much the same, expounding the virtue of ancient Hindu theology and social organisation. All religions that began in India — Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism — are claimed to be branches of Hinduism. The theory that Hinduism itself flourished among Indo-Aryan migrants from Central Asia, imposing the caste system on darker-skinned Dravidians, is portrayed as being wrong. The real invaders were the Muslim conquerors of the last millennium. Marriage and the rearing of children are the principal roles of women. The ideal diet is vegetarianism. Homosexuality is “against nature.” Caste provides social space and closer identity, and was much more tolerant and accepted until the British raj started classifying everyone. And watch out for those young Muslim men waging a “love jihad” to seduce and convert Hindu girls.

Any criticism of these historical distortions and attendant social ills is increasingly attributed to “Hinduphobia.” In fact, Hindu councils in both Britain and the United States consciously borrow the example of Jewish organisations using charges of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism of Israel. Indeed, India’s previously lukewarm, sometimes hostile relations with Israel have been transformed under Modi, who made the first visit by an Indian prime minister in 2017 and often speaks of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beyond defence and corporate interests (Modi’s favoured entrepreneur Gautam Adani runs Haifa’s port) and shared suspicion of Muslims, Modi would like to follow Netanyahu’s pathway to a state with two-tiered citizenship that gives the religious majority more rights than minorities.

Alongside this assertive victimhood, which Anderson calls a “soft” neo-Hindutva, have been occasional flare-ups of a harder version, often attributed to new arrivals from India. In 2006, a vandal forced the closure of a London exhibition of paintings by the Mumbai artist M.F. Husain, a Muslim forced into exile for his depictions of Hindu goddesses. In Leicester last year, hundreds of masked young Hindus paraded through a Muslim neighbourhood shouting Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) after watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match.

Internet trolls in India and among the diaspora fire threats of murder and rape at academics who criticise Modi and Hindutva. In 2014, Wendy Doniger, an eminent Indologist and Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, came under attack by a US-based online firebrand, Rajiv Malhotra, for her book, The Hindus. Malhotra’s campaign eventually resulted in Penguin India pulping its local edition.

Although Hindu activists often accuse Muslims of living in ghettos, the Hindus in Britain are remarkably concentrated and have low rates of marrying out of their communities. Given the first-past-the-post voting system, this has made some British constituencies and their MPs captive to the Hindu vote. Periodically, British ministers invited to their functions are embarrassed when pictures circulate showing them standing next to dubious communalists visiting from India.

Where Indians were once more inclined to the Labour Party because of its warmer embrace of migrants, Hindu organisations have swung behind the Conservatives in the past decade. The diaspora’s advance into higher income brackets would have something to do with this, but the Tories are less likely to worry about human rights issues in India and have shelved a Labour initiative to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain itself. Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be more representative of the secular, US green card–holding CEO class, but he does wear his Hindu identity as a temple thread on his wrist.

Conceivably, the United States could get a president of Indian ancestry in Nikki Haley, a US-born daughter of Sikh migrants (although she converted to Christianity when she married out of the community), or a part-Indian one in Kamala Harris if she were to take over from Biden.

Australia is probably a generation off seeing an Indian-Australian close to national political leadership, though many are already at the top levels of professions and corporations. But the diaspora’s generally sunny picture is already showing some of the tensions Anderson portrays.

The RSS has a local outfit, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh Australia, running forty-nine regular shakhas with an average combined attendance of 1230 volunteers. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is also well established, as is a self-proclaimed umbrella body, the Hindu Council of Australia, which fits Anderson’s definition of soft neo-Hindutva. For Modi’s visit in May, a new body calling itself the Indian Australian Diaspora Foundation, which claimed to include 367 professional, caste, regional, religious, cultural and local groups as well as RSS and BJP branches, organised flights and buses for thousands of attendees at the Sydney meeting.

Hard neo-Hindutva showed up in 2019 when hecklers forced the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University, set up by Kevin Rudd’s government to further bilateral relations and knowledge, to revert from public lectures to closed seminars on issues relating to Modi and Hindutva. More than a dozen India scholars severed links with the institute in protest at the decision.

Probably in response, the Albanese government announced during Modi’s visit a new body to take over the task of promoting the bilateral relationship, implicitly leaving the Australia India Institute to function as an academic think tank. The new Centre for Australia–India Relations has a banker, Swati Dave, rather than an academic as its advisory body’s chair. It will be located in Sydney’s Parramatta, a focus for the city’s Indian diaspora, whose newly elected federal MP, economist Andrew Charlton, has just written an upbeat book about the India relationship, Australia’s Pivot to India.

But there’s an important reason to think that Hindutva’s appeal might never be as great among the Indian diaspora in Australia. Our Indian population is more diverse than the British one, with Hindus barely 50 per cent of the Indian-born population and many of them drawn from India’s southern states, which are resistant to the BJP message.

As well as a large number of Christians, the diaspora also includes as many as 200,000 Sikhs, some of whom support the movement for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan in India’s Punjab. In their meetings, Modi has ambushed Albanese with charges that these elements have vandalised Hindu temples with separatist slogans. Albanese doesn’t seem to have responded by pointing out that police suspect some of these to be “false flag” operations, or that the most violent clash so far has been an attack with bats and hammers on a Sikh group in Western Sydney in February 2021 by men recognised from a BJP–HSS rally. Or if he has, we have not been told about it.

In Sydney, as in London, New York and Texas, Indian groups opposed to Modi’s Hindutva campaigns picketed outside his mass reception. This book will help our politicians understand why. •

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
By Edward T.G. Anderson | Hurst | $57.99 | 488 pages

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Amid those anniversary moments, US president Joe Biden flew to Vietnam in September, the fifth sitting American president to visit since Bill Clinton re-established diplomatic ties in 2000 and “drew a line under a bloody and bitter past.”

In Hanoi, Biden and Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong “hailed a historic new phase of bilateral cooperation and friendship,” creating a strategic partnership that expressed US support for “a strong, independent, prosperous, and resilient Vietnam.”

With such flourishes, history delivers irony garnished with diplomatic pomp. Expect many shades of irony in April 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, when Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces. (Note the way the war is named: Australia joins America in calling it the Vietnam war; the Vietnamese call it the American war, the concluding phase of a thirty-year conflict.)

The shockwaves that ran through Asia after the second world war were driven by geopolitical fears that imagined nations as dominos toppling into communism. As France fled Indochina and Britain retreated from Southeast Asia, the United States stepped in to stabilise what it saw as a series of tottering states in Southeast Asia.

The proposition that the Vietnam war was “fought for, by, and through the Pacific” was the focus of a conference at Sydney’s Macquarie University that is now a book with nineteen chapters from different authors.

The editors of The Vietnam War in the Pacific World, Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall, describe a wide gap between US rhetoric and the military reality of the region. The US claimed it was acting to save the whole of Southeast Asia, they write, but “the documentary record suggests that Washington lacked a suitable appreciation of how the war in Vietnam was linked to the politics of the wider region.”

In a chapter on “the fantasy driving Australian involvement in the Vietnam war,” the historian Greg Lockhart, a veteran of the war, writes that the “red peril” rhetoric of the Menzies government “disguised its race-based sense of the threat from Asia.” By 1950, he writes, Australian policy had been shaped by an early British version of domino thinking and the “downward thrust of communist China,” a thrust that linked the perils of geography to the force of gravity.

Just before the defeat of French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, US president Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed the fear that drove US policy: “You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over fairly quickly.” The theory held that the Vietnam domino, with pushing by China, would topple the rest of Indochina. Burma and Malaya and Indonesia would follow. And then the threat would cascade towards Australia and New Zealand.

Lockhart scorches the way these fears led Australia to Vietnam:

Between 1945 and 1965, no major official Australian intelligence assessment found evidence to support the domino theory. Quite the reverse, those assessments concluded that communist China posed no threat to Australia. Shaped by the geographical illusion that “China,” or at least “Chinese” were “coming down” in a dagger-like thrust through the Malay Peninsula, the domino theory was the fearful side of the race fantasy, the nightmare that vanished once it had fulfilled its political function.

The US strategic ambition of containing communism in Asia “had been very largely achieved before the escalation of US forces in Vietnam in 1965,” Lockhart concludes, because Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia were already “anti-communist nation-states.”

The same quickly became true of Indonesia, where the military takeover in 1965 was a decisive shift towards the United States, destroying the largest communist party outside the Eastern bloc. Yet US president Lyndon Johnson used Indonesia to proclaim what American historian Mark Atwood Lawrence calls “the domino theory in reverse.” LBJ’s argument by 1967 was that the Vietnam war was necessary as a “shield” for a virtuous cycle of political and economic development across Southeast Asia.

Lawrence laments that few in Washington followed the logic that “Indonesia’s lurch to the right, far from justifying the war in Vietnam, made that campaign unnecessary by successfully resolving Washington’s major problem in the region.” He cites evidence to a Senate committee in 1966 by a legend of US diplomacy, George Kennan, that events in Indonesia made the risk of communism spreading through the region “considerably less.”

In 1967, the US Central Intelligence Agency appraised the geopolitical consequences of a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Lawrence says a thirty-three-page report “concluded that the US would suffer no permanent or devastating setbacks anywhere in the world, including even in the areas closest to the Indochinese states, as long as Washington made clear its determination to remain active internationally after a setback in Vietnam.” The study, as he observes, had no discernible impact on LBJ’s thinking. Instead, Washington stuck with its “iffy” and “problematic” assumptions about falling dominos and the interconnections among Southeast Asian societies.

For the new nation of Singapore, separated from Malaysia in 1965, the era offered the chance to build links with the United States and hedge against bilateral troubles with Malaysia and Indonesia. S.R. Joey Long writes that prime minister Lee Kuan Yew used Washington’s Vietnam focus to cultivate America for both weapons and investment: “The inflow of American military equipment and capital enhanced the Singaporean regime’s capacity to defend its interests against adversarial neighbours, further its development strategies, distribute rewards to supporters, neutralise or win over detractors, and consolidate its control of the city-state.” A later chapter quotes a CIA report in 1967 that 15 per cent of Singapore’s gross national product came from American procurements related to the war.

During his long leadership, Lee Kuan Yew always proclaimed the one remaining vestige of an argument for the US war — the “buying time” thesis, which claims that the US provided time for the rest of Southeast Asia to grow strong enough to resist domino wobbles.

Mattias Fibiger’s chapter on buying time calls the idea a “remarkably durable” effort to transmute US failure into triumph. What president Ronald Reagan later called a “noble cause” is elevated to a constructive breathing space. “America failed in Vietnam,” according to the Henry Kissinger line, “but it gave the other nations of Southeast Asia time to deal with their own insurrections.”

From 1965 to 1975, the region “became far more prosperous, more united and more secure,” Fibiger notes, and he finds “some truth to the claims that the Vietnam war strengthened Southeast Asia’s non-communist states, stimulated the region’s economic growth, and led to the creation of ASEAN — all of which left the region more stable and secure.”

The creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967 (with an original membership of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) is a milestone in the region’s idea of itself. ASEAN’s greatest achievement is to banish — or bury deeply — the danger of war between its members. This is region-building of the highest order. Earlier attempts at regional organisation had failed. Indeed, Fibiger notes, conflict seemed so endemic that a 1962 study was headlined, “Southeast Asia: The Balkans of the Orient?” ASEAN has helped lift the Balkan curse.

The founders of ASEAN certainly looked at Vietnam and knew what they didn’t want. While the war inspired “fear of American abandonment,” Fibiger thinks any relationship between the conflict and the strength of the region’s non-communist states is indirect. American military actions had little bearing on the ability of governments outside Indochina to command the loyalty of their populations.

Commerce, not conflict, became the region’s guiding star. In the quarter-century after 1965, the economies of East and Southeast Asia expanded more than twice as quickly as those in other regions. The eight “miracle” economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand — grew more prosperous and more equal, lifting huge numbers of people out of poverty.

Fibiger writes that the Vietnam war served as an engine of economic growth in Southeast Asia and fuelled exports to the US market. Growth legitimised rather than undermined authoritarian regimes in ASEAN, and deepened oligarchy. The war, he says, helped create strong states, regional prosperity, and ASEAN.

Beyond that summation, Fibiger attacks the buying time thesis as morally bankrupt because it is a metaphor of transaction, “implying that the Vietnam war’s salutary effects in Southeast Asia somehow cancel out its massive human and environmental cost in Indochina.”

America’s allies joined the war to serve alliance purposes with the United States. South Korea sent 320,000 troops to South Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, Australia 60,000, Thailand 40,000 and New Zealand 3800. The Philippines contribution was a total of 2000 medical and logistical personnel. Taiwan stationed an advisory group of around thirty officers at any one time in Saigon but sent no combat troops for fear of offending China.

For their part, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea fought “not for Saigon,” writes David L. Anderson, “but in keeping with their established practices of protecting their regional interests and constructing their national defence with allies.” By 1970, Australian opinion was divided over the war, Anderson notes, but the alliance with the United States still had popular support:

The war polarised the politics of the US, Australia and New Zealand. Antiwar sentiment in the three countries did not alone bring an end to their military engagement, but protest movements conditioned the political process to accept negotiation and withdrawal when government strategists decided national security no longer required the cost and sacrifice of the conflict.

In the years after the Vietnam war, Anderson says, the former junior partners maintained friendly relations with Washington even though the United States “was seen as a less reliable partner.” The new need was “greater self-reliance and independence from the US.”

Editors Cuddy and Logevall conclude that studying the regional dynamics of the Vietnam war is not purely of historical interest: “American foreign policy is turning its attention — even if haltingly and haphazardly — back to the Pacific… Understanding how the region reacted to the American war in Vietnam and how the war changed the region might help the United States and its Asia-Pacific partners navigate the currents of competition in the future.”

The Vietnam history offers cautions about the new competition between the United States and China. The United States again seeks regional allies and is gripped by vivid fears about the threat China poses to the system. The region again ponders the level of US commitment and its reliability.

The two giants compete to hold friends close and ensure no dominos fall to the other side.

Vietnam is a haunting demonstration that the Washington consensus can misread or even obscure Asian understandings and the complex politics of the region. Those truths from history matter again today. As America’s greatest strategic blunder of the twentieth century was in Asia, so in this century America’s greatest strategic challenge is in Asia. •

The Vietnam War in the Pacific World
Edited by Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall | University of North Carolina Press | US$29.95 | 382 pages

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Of course, DeSantis and Newsom would each willingly take up residency in the White House in January 2025. But DeSantis’s chances of victory in November next year appear sufficiently marginal that his presidential aspirations must now be deferred until 2028 — and that’s assuming his current campaign hasn’t already undermined that postponed effort, or will do so in coming months.

The consequences of a primary challenger to a sitting president are ingrained into the Democrats’ psyche. (The most recent, Ted Kennedy’s challenging of Jimmy Carter in 1980, was widely believed to have opened the way for Ronald Reagan’s win.) And Joe Biden has long cast himself as uniquely positioned to defeat Trump. Precedent and decorum require Newsom and anyone else with presidential ambitions to wait until Biden has concluded his presidency before they announce their aspiration to replace him.

There are, however, at least two elephants in the room that could upset the status quo, both in the upcoming election and in four years’ time. The first is the possibility that Trump will come under such legal duress that he is replaced as Republican nominee. Admittedly, a party so much in his thrall is unlikely to act in even those circumstances. And if Trump is elected in 2024, it isn’t far-fetched to assume he will subsequently refuse to leave the White House, try to declare himself president for life and/or undermine the 2028 elections. Former Representative Liz Cheney has warned of this threat.

The second, much larger elephant, is Biden’s age, which creates the possibility that an unforeseen health crisis could end his candidacy before November 2024 or his second term before 2028. Health issues aside, it’s just possible — perhaps after a family intervention over the Christmas break — that Biden will be persuaded not to run and instead declare that he will focus on managing current, pressing domestic and foreign policy issues to the end — as Lyndon Johnston did in March 1968. But it’s late in the election cycle to change candidates and doing so would raise fraught questions. Would Biden endorse his vice-president Kamala Harris? If so, would the kingmakers in the Democratic Party follow his lead?

Yet another elephant — for whatever reason dismissed by the media and the pundits — is that an unexpected health event is just as likely for Trump, only three years younger, visibly overweight and under severe stress as his business prospects falter in New York.

Trump’s departure from the scene before election day would most likely see Nikki Haley become the Republican nominee, although it’s not clear she could bring along the rusted-on, Make America Great Again gang she would need to win. Recent polling shows Haley leading Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head race by four points, but Trump leads Biden by a seven-point margin in the same poll.

If Biden dies or steps down in office during his second term, Kamala Harris automatically becomes president. Her nominee for vice-president would need to be confirmed by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress. (The last time this happened was after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, when Gerald Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller to serve as his vice-president.) If Biden serves out his term then the 2028 race for the Democratic nomination is wide open and Harris must join the field.

The line-up of Democrats eager for the presidential candidacy highlights both a recognition that any one of them could have the chance to step up ahead of 2028 — an incentive to strengthen their national profiles — and the fact that there’s a wealth of well-credentialled candidates. “So many people, it’s breathtaking,” says veteran Democratic strategist James Carville. “The level of talent in the Democratic Party in 2023 — and I say this with great confidence — is as high as any political party has ever had in my lifetime.”

Carville goes on to list party figures including state governors Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Jared Polis (Colorado) and Roy Cooper (North Carolina), senators Raphael Warnock (Georgia) and Mark Kelly (Arizona) and former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu. Other names can be added to that list: New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who all ran in 2020, along with Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and, of course, Newsom. Still others are likely to emerge, some with real chances and some who would be very long shots.

It’s impossible to predict four years ahead of time who will win a presidential race. Barack Obama, for example, was just a first-term senator when he first came to prominence courtesy of his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. As 2007 ended, his chances against Hillary Clinton, the early frontrunner, were considered slim. But in January 2008 he won the surprise victory in the Iowa primary that began to alter the contours of the campaign. Then African Americans, having previously looked to Clinton and hesitant about Obama, delivered him a stunning victory in South Carolina. After that he began to break away, gaining delegates and undermining Clinton’s claims of superior electability.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Senate — which has been called the “presidential incubator” and the “presidential nursery” — is a major launching pad for presidential contenders. In recent generations it propelled John F. Kennedy, Obama and Biden into the White House (but didn’t guarantee the success of the Bob Dole/Jack Kemp team in 1996). These days senators risk being tagged with the unfavourability ratings voters from both parties assign to Congress as a whole, now the highest in nearly four decades. Those voter sentiments might not bode well for Klobuchar (who has been in the Senate since 2007) and Booker (since 2013); both Kelly and Warnock are relative newcomers, having taken up their seats in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

State governors, especially those from the larger states, bring to presidential races their governing records. Seventeen of forty-five American presidents (counting two-timer Grover Cleveland only once) had been state governors. In the fifty-nine quadrennial elections held to date, governors have captured a total of fifty-five presidential nominations; the most recent are Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who all ran hard and successfully on their records in that job.

Once you factor in other key determinants of a viable presidential candidature like personality, ideology, fundraising capabilities, and the ability to gain early momentum by doing well in early primaries (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina) and then win in the states with large numbers of electoral college delegates (California, Texas, Florida), and then add — dare we say it — appearance, sexual orientation, race and religion, the potential winners’ list among the governors looking to run becomes much shorter.

Three people stand out: Shapiro, Beshear and Whitmer. Newsom could be added to this list — there is no denying his name recognition, donor base and political talent — but he comes with more baggage than the other three. California is troubled by an economic malaise; Newsom has pursued a salacious love life; his popularity in the state is falling. Regardless, and despite his claims to be campaigning for Biden, Newsom almost certainly sees himself as the leading candidate, and he has been busy playing that role by making official trips, with photo opportunities, to China, Israel and a series of prominent events in red states.

Having only taken office this year, Shapiro is still in the honeymoon phase of his gubernatorial stint. It remains to be seen whether the fifty-year-old moderate has staying power. Previously state attorney-general, he gained prominence by handily beating far-right Trump-backed Republican Doug Mastriano in the governor’s race by a fifteen-point margin, becoming the first Pennsylvania Democrat to succeed a Democratic incumbent in sixty-four years.

Pennsylvania’s status as a critical swing state has only enhanced Shapiro’s profile in national circles. He is seen as an ambitious politician with a history of playing the long game, as evidenced by the fact that he was a keynote speaker at the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention in September.

Beshear became a Democratic hero in November when he won a second term as governor of Kentucky, defying the usual political leaning of his red state. The forty-five-year-old, who was first elected as governor in 2019, has emulated his father, also a two-time Kentucky governor. In his first term Beshear was credited with having responded well to a series of natural disasters — the devastating tornadoes and horrific floods that ravaged parts of Eastern Kentucky — and the pandemic.

Beshear’s opponent, Daniel Cameron, the first African American to be elected attorney-general of Kentucky, was backed by Trump. Beshear blunted Cameron’s strategy by painting himself as above the partisan fray, touting an “economy on fire” and his commitment to “Team Kentucky” and public education, and warning about the future of abortion rights under the Republicans. These messages resonated well with voters; it’s an approach that should also work well on the national stage.

Whitmer, fifty-two, has been governor of Michigan, an important swing state that voted Trump in 2016 and 2020, since 2019. She was re-elected in 2022, winning by nearly eleven points over her Republican opponent. Her signature causes are infrastructure, healthcare and abortion access. With Democrats in control of the governor’s office and both the state’s legislative chambers following last year’s election, Whitmer has pushed through tax cuts, gun control measures and protections for abortion and gay rights. She has served as one of the vice-chairs of the Democratic National Committee since January 2021.

Whitmer was recently described in the Atlantic as having a “foul-mouthed irreverence, goofy humour, and ability to pound beers and disarm adversaries.” That may not play in Peoria or Washington, DC, but one thing is clear: she knows how to deal with Trump and his ilk. As a target of his nasty rhetoric, she has accused Trump of helping to incite, and later condoning, an October 2020 plot to abduct her. The planned kidnap by a group of men associated with the Wolverine Watchmen, a Michigan-based militia group furious over tough Covid-19 rules and perceived threats to gun ownership, was thwarted by the FBI and undercover agents — something for which Trump took credit, while simultaneously downplaying the threat to Whitmer.

Biden’s campaign team vetted her as a possible running mate in 2020 and Biden confirmed she was on his shortlist in March that year. According to reports, Whitmer removed herself from consideration, urging Biden to choose a Black woman instead — a smart and thoughtful move at a time when the nation was still in the midst of a reckoning over race and inequality following the death of George Floyd at the hands of white police.

Whitmer might be the best of the three, but she faces one clear obstacle — she’s a woman. On that basis alone she would be ruled out of consideration as Harris’ vice-presidential nominee if one were needed.

Is America finally ready for a woman as president? A paper published on the website of the distinguished political scientist Larry Sabato offers an in-depth analysis of the obstacles female candidates face on their paths to the White House. On balance, it finds, Democrats are more likely to support female candidates than are Republicans. A PRRI poll found in 2016 that more than two-thirds of Donald Trump supporters believe society as a whole has become “too soft and feminine.” And Trump has used the worst aspects of masculinity as a political strategy.

With each of the potential Democratic candidates already receiving donor support, it’s useful to look at where the money is going. Whitmer, Newsom and Pritzker have all recently launched national political groups. Whitmer has created a federal political action committee called “Fight Like Hell” to boost abortion rights as a plus for Biden and congressional candidates next year, giving her a visible role in the 2024 campaign. Newsom has “Campaign for Democracy,” which is focused on gun control; Pritzker’s “Think Big America” aims to protect reproductive rights and fight extremism.

For the moment, all of the Democrats who harbour presidential ambitions (hidden and not so hidden) must focus on the task at hand — getting Biden elected next year. Everyone’s political ambitions will end up in the dustbin if Trump is re-elected.

An opinion piece for CNN Politics artfully describes the current low-key jockeying as a “delicate and sometimes uncomfortable dance.” For the next eleven months, it goes on, “they are stuck being intriguing but not enticing, stoking flames but not fanning them. That task has been made more fraught when their very existence reminds voters — who have made consistently clear that they want another alternative to an eighty-one-year-old president — about what could have been.” •

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But Kissinger’s pleasure was surely mixed with bitterness at the outpouring of vitriol from the anti-imperialist left, who have long condemned him as a war criminal who deserves prison rather than praise. Marking the centenary birthday, Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC said he wanted to talk about “the many, many people around the world” who didn’t get to live even to the age of sixty because of Kissinger. He should be “ashamed to be seen in public,” Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters wrote in the Guardian.

They and many others trotted out the usual charges from his days as top foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: brutally and unnecessarily prolonging the Vietnam war, bombing neutral Cambodia, trying to help overthrow a democratically elected leader in Chile, greenlighting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, abetting genocide in East Pakistan, winking at state torture and killings in Argentina, and more.

The former secretary of state has heard this line of criticism for half a century, and the evidence suggests that it stings. Deeply protective of his honour, he has typically reacted angrily to challenges to his integrity and intelligence. In early 1970, for example, at Johns Hopkins University, a student asked whether he considered himself a war criminal — presumably referring to heavy civilian casualties in the Vietnam war. Kissinger walked out and refused to speak there again for the next twenty years.

In later years, his reaction to such questions changed very little. What did change was his willingness to be put in situations where he could be asked such questions. Being grilled about “crimes” was something that happened only when Kissinger was taken by surprise.

In 1979, for example, British journalist David Frost shocked Kissinger by posing hard-hitting questions about the bombing and invasion of Cambodia. Frost suggested that the policies Kissinger promoted had created conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge takeover and the genocide that left up to two million Cambodians dead. After the first taping, an irate Kissinger complained long and hard to the top brass at NBC, who leaned on Frost to go softer on the famed diplomat in the next taping.

There is little evidence that his skin has thickened since then. In 1999, when Kissinger was plugging the third and final volume of his memoirs, British journalist Jeremy Paxman challenged him about Cambodia and Chile. Kissinger answered, testily, and then walked out. At a State Department event in 2010, historian Nick Turse asked him about the number of Cambodians who were killed in the US bombings. “Oh, come on,” Kissinger said angrily. When Turse followed up later, Kissinger became sarcastic — “I’m not smart enough for you,” he said — and stalked off.

Last month, when Kissinger sat down to talk about his hundredth birthday with his long-time friend Ted Koppel, former host of the popular television show Nightline, he probably expected a softball interview like the ones the American media usually serve him. But Koppel felt obliged to point out that some people consider him a war criminal. He brought up the bombing of Cambodia, intending to suggest that Kissinger had valid strategic reasons for supporting it. “You did it in order to interdict…,” Koppel said, heading to the explanation Kissinger has always given: it was not so much Cambodia that was being bombed, and certainly not Cambodians, but North Vietnamese supply lines.

Kissinger heard only criticism. “Come on,” he interjected in an irritated tone. When Koppel tried to press him on the price Cambodia paid, Kissinger again interrupted with “Come on now.” For Kissinger, the topic is not worthy of discussion.

As this exchange indicates, Kissinger’s belief in his own righteousness is unbudgeable. In his view, then and now, the bombing of Cambodia was a strategic necessity. He long claimed, falsely, that bombs hit areas “either minimally populated or totally unpopulated by civilians.” In fact, American bombs killed and wounded tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians who were simply trying to live their lives in their own villages.

It’s not that Kissinger wants to argue that the costs of his (and Nixon’s) policies were worthwhile. He prefers to ignore the costs altogether. To him, counting the lives lost, in Cambodia and elsewhere, is a distraction. What matters is that the policies he advocated, in his perception, prevented American deaths and led to a more peaceful world order that saved millions of lives — indeed, potentially saved humanity from nuclear conflagration.

Detractors obsessed with the costs are, in his view, disingenuous and even deranged. In the 1970s he sneered at anti-war protesters as driven by “self-hatred.” Dismissing their arguments as irrational, he has said that leftists just want to “feel sorry for themselves.” Those who talk about his alleged criminality, in his view, merely show their “ignorance.” If you question the bombing of Cambodia, he told Koppel, you simply don’t want “to think.”

Hurt and resentful at being denounced, Kissinger has as little empathy for his critics and their perspectives as he had for the Cambodians and others who bore the brunt of his choices. If he had shown anything other than smug indifference to the price paid for his diplomacy, he might have diminished some of the zeal of his tormentors. But he remains locked in a maximalist position: unwilling to express any remorse, he ensures that his antagonists see only his guilt. •

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The great thing about Joe Biden as a subject is his verbosity. He does a terrible job at suppressing his internal monologue. His staff and friends have a clear understanding of his mind, because they are exposed to so much of it.

Biden’s tendency to bloviate — a word that has failed to establish itself this side of the Pacific despite favourable conditions — and his habit of veering dangerously off-script at critical moments are the stuff of legend. His ascent to the presidency drew a collective eye roll among some Democrats, but also the hope that his ordinariness would bring about a period of dull but competent politics. The nation might at last have a chance to catch its breath and lick its wounds.

Despite that hope, tedium has been in short supply. Beginning shortly after the Capitol riot, his administration had to cope with the continuing Covid crisis, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to mention punishing domestic battles over immigration, inflation and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The Last Politician leads the reader through the first two years of Biden’s presidency with an occasionally breathless immediacy. Foer’s liberal use of fabricated dialogue and rapid shifts of perspective among a large cast of key players enliven his book, which has become a bestseller in the United States. The product of around 300 interviews, it offers West Wing–style personal conflict and colour, and the same semi-heroic portrayal of the sleep-deprived governing elite.

Foer conveys the limitations and quirks of his protagonists without falling into easy cynicism or caricature. Criticism of politicians is muted except when their wrongdoing is blatant, the petulant obstructionism of the Trump administration during the transition of power being a case in point. The depiction of Joe Manchin, the senator for West Virginia who repeatedly held his party hostage as the fiftieth vote in the Senate, might have been scathing. Instead, Foer offers a humanising sketch of a self-important geezer with one eye on his legacy and another on his easily bruised sense of honour.

Biden is drawn in an equally generous light. He can be short-tempered when challenged but swallows his pride and breaks bread to bring legislative combatants back to the negotiating table. He is occasionally caught flat-footed, notably in response to the Supreme Court’s dismantling of abortion rights, but quickly finds his way back to clarity. His oratorical aspirations are undermined by faux pas, as when an off-script remark suggested he was seeking regime change in Russia. He owns his administration’s failures in the chaotic evacuation from Kabul and steers a steady course between his party’s progressive wing and what the electorate will tolerate.

To Foer, Biden has been consistently underestimated, partly for reasons of social class. As a “lunch-pail cornball” he lacks Obama’s Ivy League lustre but can arguably connect to people more authentically. (Biden told a friend that his former boss couldn’t even say “fuck you” properly.) For all his chronic “indiscipline and imprecision,” Biden’s term has seen significant achievements. He stood firm against Putin, helped to corral European states in defence of Ukraine, began to restore America’s global reputation as a responsible power, and averted the expected Republican “red wave” in the midterm elections.

The domestic achievement that draws the most attention from Foer but is less well known in Australia is the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides a transformational boost to solar and wind energy and other green technologies. The act’s path was littered with obstacles, and Foer credits Biden with the perspective, farsightedness, persistence and willingness to compromise that made it possible.

In praising these geezerly virtues Foer offers a partial and unconvincing defence of American gerontocracy. Age brings wisdom, but not reliably. Biden may have a rare and insufficiently acknowledged gift for getting things done within the political institutions he loves, but The Last Politician reveals those institutions to be open to abuse precisely because of their reliance on the transactional deal-making at which Biden excels.

Two senators can meet secretly to carve hundreds of billions of dollars from a piece of legislation to meet one senator’s idiosyncratic demands. Vast, nation-shaping agreements can be made on a houseboat over beer and pasta. Deals can be undone by perceived slights to a congressman’s honour. War efforts can be endangered because the leader of an embattled country’s tweets convey insufficient gratitude to his American funders. Members of Congress can be made to demonstrate their trustworthiness by looking one another in the eye.

The denizens of Washington can be divided into hacks and wonks, Foer writes. “You were either a political animal or a policy nerd.” Biden, he says, is an “old hack,” one of the last, wisest exponents of the dying art of congressional horsetrading. The Last Politician mounts a convincing case for Biden’s presidential achievements, but it is less clear that we should mourn the passing of his generation’s style of politics. •

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future
By Franklin Foer | Penguin Press | US$30 | 432 pages

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“There’s something dangerous happening in America now,” said Biden. “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy. I don’t think anyone today doubts democracy is at stake in 2024.”

If we’ve learned anything in the last seven years, it’s that democracy can’t be taken for granted. A 2021 report, Democracy Under Siege, listed the United States among twenty-five countries that have experienced a massive deterioration in freedoms fuelled by political corruption, conflicts of interest and lack of government transparency. The report describes the final weeks of the Trump presidency — as the incumbent strove to illegally overturn his election loss — as an illustration of the parlous state of American democracy.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has identified twin threats facing the nation’s democratic status. The first (acute) threat is the growing movement inside the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election. In 2022, more than 300 Republican candidates for state and national offices either denied or questioned the outcome of the presidential election. This, says the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, is unprecedented in American history and seemingly unique in the history of mature democracies around the world.

The second (chronic) threat is that the power to set government policy is increasingly disconnected from public opinion. Just a few examples highlight the trend. The US Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees, seems poised to shape American politics for many years with decisions on issues like abortion and gun rights that don’t reflect the views of anywhere near a majority of the population. Polls routinely show most Americans are alarmed or concerned about climate change, but its causes and impacts are denied by Republican lawmakers. A supermajority of Americans support voting rights with equal access for all eligible adults, but many states are working to limit voting access and some Republicans, led by Trump, have admitted that expanding voting hurts their party’s election prospects.

Other, equally disturbing, threats exist: the rise of political violence and intimidation; the erosion of rights for LGBTQI+ people, asylum seekers and other minority groups; book bans and political intrusions into educational institutions and curricula; increasing division along racial, religious, socioeconomic and political lines. It’s easy to see the long reach of Trump and Trumpism in every one of these threats.

Most recently, Congress was brought to a halt for three weeks because House Republicans caved in to MAGA extremists. They threw out House speaker Kevin McCarthy but then couldn’t agree on who should replace him. Trump’s social media criticisms of successive nominees and his loyalty tests carried more sway with House Republicans than a new speaker’s ability to oversee the House’s work.

Representative Mike Johnson from Louisiana was finally elected speaker after three others had been nominated but then withdrawn. Known as MAGA Mike and active in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he is a self-described evangelical Christian who is staunchly anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQI+ rights, anti-union and anti-immigration. He has embraced the far right’s culture wars and backed the House Republicans’ inquiry aimed at impeaching Biden.

Elected to Congress just seven years ago and having never held a committee chair, Johnson is the least-experienced speaker in more than a century. Senate Republicans openly admitted they didn’t know who he was. But experience and expertise are scorned and devalued by Trump and his cohort. As the Nation’s John Nichols wrote, Mike Johnson’s main qualification for the job was that he’s neither a Democrat nor a democrat.

In fact, Johnson has insisted the United States isn’t a democracy — a system he defines as “two wolves and a lamb deciding what is for dinner” — but rather a constitutional republic based by its founders on a “biblical admonition.” He shares this view with a number of his lawmaker colleagues who are eager to stress the republic’s restraints on democracy. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” posted Utah Senator Mike Lee in 2020. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

Johnson’s role in attempting to overturn the 2020 elections and his position as speaker, which places him second in line to the presidency behind the vice-president, has raised concerns about how he might seek to influence the outcome of the next presidential election (assuming he is still in that position in January 2025) should Trump (almost certain to be the Republican candidate) lose again. No wonder Trump is happy to claim credit for his election to the speakership.

Much has been written about the extent of Trump’s influence over the Republican Party. (Perhaps takeover is a better description.) That he played such a pivotal role in determining who was finally elected as speaker and was endorsing candidates for upcoming primaries even while campaigning on his own behalf and attending to his legal troubles explains why he is courted, feared and rarely out of the news.

Merging his campaigning with his courthouse appearances seems to be working. Legal woes that would distract or destroy most candidates are now marketed as a feature of his 2024 presidential run. So too is his ostentatious disrespect for legal processes and precedents. He has been castigated by several judges and fined twice for verbal attacks on courthouse staff. Judge Arthur Engoron even threatened to lock him up. “Why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal [sic] of a clear court order?” he asked.

Trump’s brand of authoritarianism, demagoguery and populism has deep roots in American history, but his spin on the tradition is amplified by his wily command of the media and fears among a segment of voters (primarily white, religious and without a college education) who see themselves and their values left behind in a racially and ethnically diverse economy and nation. Trump plays off what they see as an existential threat to their way of life.

In the aftermath of the 2022 elections, when the Republicans’ lacklustre performance could be read as a repudiation of Trump, the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb argued — correctly — that Trump is not solely responsible for the current levels of intolerance, racism, nativism, belligerence and anti-democratic behaviour in the Republican Party, and there is no reason to believe his absence would cause these to evaporate.

Presidential candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy might be lagging forty or more points behind Trump in the polls, but they are promulgating the same ideology and are keen to be seen as equally fierce cultural warriors. Those Republican candidates who aren’t toeing the Trump line — namely Nikki Haley and Chris Christie — are lagging even further behind.

Republican states, meanwhile, have mounted a frightening series of anti-democratic efforts. They are manipulating election administration by controlling secretaries of state and other executive offices. They are giving partisan state legislatures greater control over elections. They are reducing ballot drop box access for early voting. Several states, among them North Carolina and Louisiana, have resisted court decisions based on the Voting Rights Act that aim to make congressional district maps more accurately reflect the makeup of their population.

There is no such loss of the right to own guns. Nationally, thirty-five mass gun killings — incidents in which four or more people died, not including the perpetrator/s — have been recorded so far this year. More and more people are using guns to harass and intimidate others, including lawmakers, elected officials, school board members, voters and election workers. Although a significant majority of Americans support universal background checks, an assault-weapons ban and other priorities of gun-control advocates, stronger state and federal controls are elusive.

Links can be made between gun violence, democracy and trust. Research shows how eroded democratic institutions and declining trust in social structures lead to more lethal violence and increases in gun ownership. The Pew Research Center has shown that many Americans think the public’s trust in the federal government and in their fellow citizens has declined and that the interplay between the lack of trust in the public and the interpersonal spheres has made it harder to solve some of the country’s problems.

The latest Pew polling figures put trust in the federal government at almost its lowest in nearly seven decades of polling. Just 1 per cent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” and only 15 per cent trust the government “most of the time.” Writing in Politico, Max Stier and Tom Freedman argue that this statistic is more concerning than the rise of anti-democratic movements or efforts to steal an election: it reflects very poorly on the nation’s primary democratic institution, Congress, and its ability to deal with social, economic and foreign policy challenges.

Reviving American democracy means reversing the decline in political rights and civil liberties, improving public discourse, and reforming political institutions and practices to persuade Americans that politicians are representing them fairly and governments are working to solve pressing problems. Key among the essential reforms is a remaking of the Republican Party — or at least a rejection of its Trump-cult elements. That brand of right-wing populism may not be the only threat to democracy in the United States, but it is the biggest. •

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The first Australian legation was a modest double-storey building on Goose Ridge Hill, in the heart of the city, not far from the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The building is still there today, dwarfed by the forest of high-rise towers of what claims to be the world’s biggest city, its dazzling skyline a bold rival to Manhattan’s.

Australia’s initial diplomatic engagement with China came to an abrupt end with the communist victory in 1949. It wouldn’t resume for another quarter-century after a revolution of sorts in Australia swept away a generation of conservatism under Sir Robert Menzies and his successors.

Gough Whitlam had advocated diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China as early as 1954. It became Labor policy the following year. But it wasn’t until Whitlam’s election victory in 1972 that his vision became a reality.

Fifty years ago this week, Whitlam became the first Australian prime minister to visit the People’s Republic. A few days later, an RAAF Hercules landed in Beijing carrying a novel gift to mark the historic occasion — Saber Bogong, a 567-kilogram Murray Grey stud bull. Australia’s Beijing embassy had opened in January 1973 and the first resident Australian journalists soon followed. It would be another five years before the Americans turned up.

Whitlam’s maverick diplomacy — at the same time as the Nixon administration was taking its first halting steps towards normalising relations with China — set Australia apart.  We had been a firm and unequivocal ally of the United States since the second world war but we were prepared to make our own way in the region and the world — a fact that impressed the Chinese leadership and helped secure the foundations of a flourishing trade relationship that has underwritten Australia’s prosperity for half a century.

When he arrives in Beijing next weekend prime minister Anthony Albanese will find a city and a country largely unrecognisable from those Whitlam visited and receive a welcome that’s likely to be far less effusive if not overtly constrained.

Relations between China and Australia are slowly improving after reaching a nadir under the former government. The Chinese were infuriated in April 2020 when Scott Morrison demanded an independent international investigation with “weapons inspector powers” to reveal the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. Soon after, they imposed a crippling raft of sanctions on Australian coal, barley, meat, cotton, lobster, timber and wine. The measures wiped out an estimated $20 billion in Australian exports.

The tensions worsened after ASIO agents staged early-morning raids in June 2020 on the Sydney homes of three Chinese journalists, including the bureau chief of the Xinhua news agency, alarming their families and seizing computers and documents — raids for which no official explanation has ever been given. A few weeks later, Cheng Lei, a Chinese-born Australian journalist working for Chinese television was detained and accused of illegally sending state secrets abroad. In early September, the ABC and Australian Financial Review correspondents sought diplomatic sanctuary, later fleeing the country after police warned they were to be interviewed regarding a “national security case.” A period of “wolf warrior diplomacy” during which Chinese critics were aggressively targeted and sometimes physically abused inflamed the hostility.

Since the Albanese government was elected early last year a gradual thaw in the relationship has seen the lifting or promised lifting of about three-quarters of the trade restrictions and a resumption of high-level government contacts. Cheng Lei was released and reunited with her family in Melbourne earlier this month, but no Australian journalists have yet returned to live in China. Australian writer and activist Yang Hengjun, who was arrested in August 2019 and accused of espionage, remains in prison with his health reported to be deteriorating.

While there are strong expectations of further improvement in the relationship as a consequence of Albanese’s visit to Beijing and Shanghai, it appears highly unlikely that it will return to anything resembling the détente of the 1970s and 1980s in the near future, if ever. And that is due mostly to a hardening of attitudes in Canberra.

The Australian government’s position, first enunciated by foreign minister Penny Wong, and still the script closely followed by senior Australian officials, is that while we seek to rebuild a cordial and constructive relationship with China it can’t be as close as it once was because of growing cybersecurity threats from Beijing, its more aggressive posture on Taiwan and the South China Sea and its efforts to expand its influence in the South Pacific.

During his state visit to the United States last week, Albanese went further in defining his government’s view of a growing divergence driven by China’s more assertive global posture. “China has been explicit: it does not see itself as a status quo power,” he told a gathering at the State Department attended by US vice-president Kamala Harris and secretary of state Antony Blinken. “It seeks a region and a world that is much more accommodating of its values and interests.”

A day earlier, an avuncular Joe Biden counselled his youngish guest that he needed to “trust but verify” the responses in his meeting next week with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Albanese responded to this somewhat patronising advice by insisting that he was “clear-eyed” about the challenge Australia faced: “We’re two nations with very different histories, values and political systems. Australia will always look to cooperate with China where we can, but we will disagree where we must, but continue to engage in our national interest. Our approach has been patient, calibrated and deliberate, and that will continue when I visit Beijing and Shanghai.”

It won’t be lost on the Chinese leadership that Albanese has chosen to visit them straight after a state visit to Washington. While the ANZUS alliance has been a fact of life in Australia–China relations since the beginning, it has never been as bluntly inserted into the bilateral equation as it has been since Australia ratified its new AUKUS partnership with the United States and Britain.

The timing of the Washington and Beijing visits will feed the Chinese view that Australia remains an unquestioning acolyte in America’s global reach, as it was in Vietnam and Iraq. “Australia’s political situation is not stable. They are influenced too much by the US and others,” Liu Zhiqin, a senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute, told a group of visiting Australian journalists in Beijing last week. “It sometimes shows that they don’t have their own independent ideas. Sometimes, in my opinion, Australians behave like a fellow following the big brother.”

For years Western leaders recited the mantra that their defence and economic policies were never designed to “contain” China or thwart its inevitable emergence as a global economic and military superpower. Now that pretence has been abandoned. America is energetically pursuing efforts to “decouple” its economy from interdependence with China and to thwart China’s efforts to become self-sufficient in strategically critical industries. The AUKUS pact — along with the nascent Quad partnership between the US, India, Japan and Australia — is seen in China as part of an escalating effort to deny the nation its hard-earned place in the front row on the global stage.

Any Australian pretence that buying long-range nuclear-powered submarines from the United States under AUKUS is anything but a challenge to China was laid bare when deputy prime minister Richard Marles told a security forum in South Korea last week that if a war broke out over China’s determination to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, Australia would be in it. While mouthing the usual lines about the need for a peaceful solution, Marles added: “The consequences of a US–China conflict over Taiwan are so grave that we cannot be passive bystanders.” It sounded like an echo of Peter Dutton, his belligerent predecessor as defence minister, who declared in 2021 that in a war over Taiwan it “would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action.”

Chinese analysts scoff at the view that China’s military build-up poses any kind of threat to Australia. “China harbours no ambition at all in anything remotely close to Australia,” Renmin University’s Gong Jiong told the Australian journalists. “Why is it that politicians in Australia are even talking about China representing a security risk to Australia? That is something hard to accept and understand.” He says China’s increased engagement in the South Pacific was designed to counter Taiwanese influence in the region rather than challenge Australia.

Prominent Chinese also note the absurdity at the heart of Australia’s decision to spend an eye-watering $365 billion to buy a few hulking American nuclear-powered submarines on the grounds that they are essential to protect international trade routes vital to our economy. When a third of all Australian exports are sold to China and 90 per cent of Australian merchandise imports come from China, what exactly is the danger that requires us to give American and British industry a mortgage over the Australian defence budget from here to eternity?

While Marles was war-gaming in Seoul last week, ASIO chief Mike Burgess was joining his “Five Eyes” intelligence colleagues at a gathering in California to denounce the escalating cybersecurity threat posed by China. “The Chinese government are engaged in the most sustained, sophisticated and scaled theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Burgess declared. Yet if the cyber-security threat from China is indeed far worse than ever before, is it perhaps simply that they are getting much better at strategic and commercial espionage and we are finding it harder to keep up with countermeasures? In the spying games that all nations play, are we struggling to keep up?

The more measured and less confrontational diplomacy pursued by the Albanese government has undoubtedly been crucial to stabilising the China–Australia relationship after years of upheaval, but China has good reasons of its own to seek a return to greater harmony.

The Chinese economy is facing a range of serious challenges that make continued friction with the West, and particularly with one of its most important trading partners, an unhelpful distraction. Chinese growth between July and September slowed to 4.9 per cent, compared with 6.3 per cent in the previous quarter. A crisis in its property sector has seen several major construction companies face collapse with hundreds of billions of dollars in debts. And China’s unemployment is rising, with the jobless rate for sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds climbing to more than 20 per cent.

Despite the recent economic turmoil, the Chinese economy is still expected to finish the year with growth of between 5 and 6 per cent — well below the boom years of the past but still a creditable performance. And despite the headwinds, China’s modernisation remains breathtaking. Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing are bustling and glamorous modern cities, linked to the rest of the country by the world’s biggest fast rail network. In this month’s glorious autumn weather, restaurants, shopping malls and parks are thronged with well-dressed, well-fed and obviously happy people. If the Communist Party’s contract with the people was to end the abject poverty that blighted most of the country before the revolution, it has delivered in spades.

Last week China celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s signature global engagement policy which has driven US$1500 billion in new development projects around the world. While the BRI has been widely criticised outside China for saddling many developing nations with crippling debts, building excessively extravagant infrastructure and causing widespread environmental degradation, many of the 150 participating nations have embraced China’s global leadership, opened lucrative new markets for Chinese exports, and provided access to new sources of oil, gas and minerals for Beijing.

Washington’s mostly unspoken distaste for the BRI stems from a perception that it is a crude device to extend China’s political influence at the expense of the United States and its allies, not least in the South Pacific. At a joint media conference with Albanese at the White House last week, President Biden derided the BRI as a “debt noose” for most countries that had signed on — then offered Xi Jinping the flattery of imitation by declaring that the G7 nations were working on their own version of the scheme: “His Belt and Road Initiative, well, we’re going to compete on that.”

Among the guests of honour at the BRI celebrations in Beijing were Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, whose warm embrace of Putin outraged his fellow European leaders. What escaped most media attention was the fact that among the other guests were president Joko Widodo of Indonesia and prime minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea. In a week when Australia was preoccupied with its American alliance, the leaders of the two countries that are our nearest neighbours were building stronger partnerships with China.

In recent days, Albanese has mused about the potential for Australia to build a role as an intermediary in the increasingly volatile relationship between Washington and Beijing. “I think both China and the United States probably see Australia as playing a role. We are a middle power,” he told journalists. “My concern with the relationship between the United States and China is that there has been good engagement at the diplomatic level… but military to military, there is still a lack of engagement. We need to build guardrails.”

That might also be an opportunity to rebuild some of the respect for Australia as an American ally with an independent worldview that prevailed through the years of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments. “China wants to see a very independent, strategic and autonomous Australia,” says Zhou Rong, another senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute. “You don’t need to depend on other countries. You are a European Asian country or you are a white Asian country, so you can function as a bridge between Asia and America — North America — and Europe.” •

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Now their voices can be heard, clearly and sometimes passionately, in journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City, published this year to coincide with the invasion’s twentieth anniversary. This is a compelling, challenging, disturbing and ultimately illuminating account of what happened to the people of Iraq and their homeland over the two decades after they were invaded and conquered. It exposes the ignorance and demolishes the myths and false assumptions of many Western policymakers, think-tank analysts, pundits and correspondents — myths that Howard clung to in his speech.

Abdul-Ahad grew up under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, an absurdly quintessential Third World tyrant. It was a time of futile and costly wars with Iran and Kuwait and the West, of repression, poverty and hardship exacerbated by foreign sanctions. It was a period that made many Iraqis optimistic that the Americans would bring change.

If Abdul-Ahad — an architect and army deserter at the time — shared that optimism, it quickly faded on the day American tanks rumbled into Baghdad in April 2003. He watched with dismay as US marines pulled down a statue of Saddam one of them had draped in the American flag. He had thought the facade of liberation would last at least a day, “but no, with all the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, [the marine] covered the face of the defeated dictator with the flag of his victorious nation; briefly, but long enough to seal the fate of the invasion in the eyes of many.”

The next day, after a chance meeting with a correspondent from the Guardian, Abdul-Ahad was hired as a fixer and translator and eventually a reporter — in which job he embarked on a journey through a country he increasingly couldn’t recognise, a devastated human and physical landscape of unspeakable brutality, destruction, indignity and corruption. He felt like a stranger in a foreign land.

Whatever optimism his fellow Iraqis felt when the Americans arrived soon dissolved, too, eroded by the occupiers’ sheer inefficiency and shattered by the first car bombing. Abdul-Ahad witnessed and reported on many such atrocities in the coming years, so many that “they are all welded in my head into one newsreel of charred human remains mixed with shreds of tyres and crumpled debris.”

Instead of peace, the US occupation unleashed something terrible, imposing a political system that gave power and the spoils of office, along sectarian and ethnic lines, to a “coalition of corrupt, imbecilic religious warlords to rule the country for the next twenty years and create one of the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Militias — “hundreds of cells with hundreds of motives” — emerged soon after the invasion. Many were criminal gangs; others sought simply to protect their neighbourhoods; still others were nationalists humiliated by foreign occupation. Later came Iraqi and foreign jihadis chasing fanatical dreams of a pure Islamic state. The occupation ultimately transformed what had been a fissure between Shias and Sunnis into an abyss.

In Baghdad and elsewhere, men with guns controlled every aspect of life, even as the United States and its allies deluded themselves they were bringing democratic progress. A year after the invasion, “people started uttering the unthinkable, that maybe life under Saddam was better.”

Abdul-Ahad takes his readers through the bomb-shattered suburbs, shrines and markets of Iraqi cities and towns, across barricades and streets awash with sewage, to meet ordinary Iraqis — teachers, doctors, soldiers, refugees. With a reporter’s eye for detail and ear for a telling quote, he brings us their faces and voices. His writing is wry at times, sometimes caustic, usually sensitive but not sentimental.

A bridegroom in a mixed Sunni–Shia marriage recounts his wedding day — a perilous military-style operation to get the wedding party across militia checkpoints — and describes “my bride and her relatives yellow with fear.”

We meet a schoolteacher, a man with a cheerful face struggling in a collapsed education system, who insists to his students that Iraq is not a sectarian country, and who limps to and from class, the result of having been shot three times because he spoke out against the clerics and urged his students not to join their militias.

We join a dreary queue at the passport office where fear and anxiety fill the air. A Christian man in his sixties, a teacher accompanied by his three daughters, insists the official writes his occupation in his passport. But there is no space for profession on the new passport form. The teacher insists his occupation be included because he wants a visa to go to Australia. Don’t worry, a man in the queue tells him, no country will give Iraqis a visa anyway. A big-bellied bureaucrat openly boasts that he takes bribes — “I only take $500” — to speed up the passport process.

In the cramped waiting room of a medical clinic, a gaunt psychiatrist with a soft reassuring voice describes how “the pressure, the war, the economic situation, fear, anxiety — all chip away at patients’ resistance.”

A Sunni militia commander, a middle-aged man with soft brown eyes, acknowledges having rejoiced when Saddam fell, but also having then joined the insurgency: “As time passed, and the occupation became more visible, patriotic feelings inside me grew greater and greater. Every time I saw the Americans patrolling our streets, I felt ashamed and humiliated.”

Abdul-Ahad takes us into the courtroom for Saddam’s trial, the former dictator slowly and deliberately entering the room, sighing and sitting down “with the air of one settling down to a day’s work.” We learn how, after his hanging, Saddam’s corpse was flown to the house where prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was celebrating his son’s wedding: “The grotesque pettiness of Iraq’s new masters ran rampant as the shroud was pulled back to allow guests to photograph the corpse.”

On a sweltering and humid day we go to a Baghdad morgue, where crowds of anxious relatives press against the fence to find and reclaim the bodies of family members. The morgue is stacked with corpses, mostly the victims of death squads, and there’s no room for the crowd to enter, so officials improvise a “hellish slideshow” on a computer monitor that families watch in silence as pictures of the mutilated dead flicker on the screen.

Two years after the invasion, Iraq was sliding towards civil war, a conflict more complex than the West’s binary narrative of Sunni versus Shia. As Abdul-Ahad points out, this war included “a wide range of localised schisms and fault lines, feuds based on class or geography or long-dormant tribal feuds.”

These rifts were exacerbated by the Americans, who, “like conquerors, aimed to simplify their occupation by breaking it into components,” using Shias to fight Sunni insurgents, and in the process entrenching and exacerbating sectarianism.

Six years after the invasion, Maliki had concentrated unaccountable power through patronage, shadowy intelligence services and all-encompassing corruption. Security officers took bribes from families to release their sons from detention and torture, and then sometimes killed them anyway.

By the invasion’s tenth anniversary, Islamist jihadis had entered this ghastly scene, seeking to impose an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam not only in Iraq but in Syria and across the Middle East. Abdul-Ahad travelled to Syria to meet the groups who called themselves ISIS and were consolidating their power. He met an ISIS commander who spoke of his dreams of a borderless Islamic state: “I can’t remember much else of what he said in the meeting because I was terrified and trembling with fear.”

By the middle of the following year, ISIS had swept into western Iraq and on to Mosul, Iraq’s second city, where Maliki’s “brave new army” collapsed, partly out of a justified fear of the ISIS fanatics and partly because all-pervading corruption had eaten out its heart. Recruits who had paid to be enlisted to escape lives of dismal poverty found their wages stolen by their officers. Non-existent “ghost soldiers” padded out the payroll.

When ISIS captured Mosul many welcomed their discipline, administrative efficiency and promise to restore basic services and end corruption. Instead, the extremists turned Mosul into a huge prison controlled with brutality and viciousness. “They brought terror into our hearts and inside our own homes,” said one resident. “I feared my neighbour, my brother and my son… They used to say Saddam’s regime was brutal. Well Saddam was a picnic compared to them.”

The brutality of ISIS prompted many men to join the army, which was supported by US air power. Abdul-Ahad joined these soldiers — young but old before their time; devoted to war yet cynical about their senior officers — as they fought to reclaim Mosul. They were brave and selfless, too, but also capable of the worst acts of barbaric cruelty.

Abdul-Ahad portrays them dispassionately, with gritty, graphic, courageous reporting. While his writing is clear and compelling, at times it is so confronting that it’s hard to read — as when he describes captured ISIS prisoners being tortured for no purpose “beyond the primordial imperative to exact pain and revenge and prove to the soldiers that they had defeated ISIS.”

Having humanised the people he encounters — victims and perpetrators alike — he then goes beyond his masterful on-the-ground reporting. Placing these human stories in a wider political and social context, he demolishes the myth that the quick military success of US forces was subsequently marred by ill-advised decisions and a lack of planning for the second phase of the US adventure — the occupation and handover. In his 2013 speech, Howard understated these failures as “problematic.”

That’s not how Abdul-Ahad sees it. He argues that the occupation was bound to fail not because of lack of planning but “because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.”

A Stranger in Your Own City also debunks another central tenet of the pro-invasion narrative — that Iraq’s main religious sects are monoliths that had either uniformly supported and benefited from Saddam (the Sunnis) or uniformly opposed and suffered under him (the Shias). It’s another element of the narrative that Howard endorsed in his retrospective speech, declaring in coldly passive language that “it was inevitable that after Saddam had been toppled a degree of revenge would be exacted.”

Despite all that he has witnessed and Iraq has endured, Abdul-Ahad sees signs of hope in an outburst of popular dissent by euphoric young Iraqis in 2019, known as the Tishreen Uprising. While it failed to bring down the post-2003 system, it showed how young people led by secular activists recognised the US-bequeathed democracy to be a kleptocracy of fossilised hierarchies and archaic bureaucratic rules, with a security system of violence, torture and killings. The Tishreen protesters saw themselves as victims of a “terrible con perpetrated by those professing to defend them and their sect against the ‘other’.”

“Tishreen showed the power of the people when not cowed by sectarian fears,” Abdul-Ahad writes, “and indicates that the post-2003 state can no longer satisfy its own people.” He concludes that the failure of Iraq’s leaders to heed the warnings of Tishreen will lead to their demise. •

A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad | Hutchinson Heinemann | $59.99 | 480 pages

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Ahead of an American presidential election that might return to power an isolationist and avowed admirer of dictators, Australian national security insiders have been assured during their regular “leadership dialogue” with their American counterparts that, yes, protection and patronage remain. But whether or not Donald Trump returns, says Lowy Institute analyst Sam Roggeveen, the Americans will inevitably pull back from trying to maintain strategic primacy in the Western Pacific.

Eventually, Roggeveen argues in his important new book The Echidna Strategy, the Americans will come to terms with a power balance involving its adversaries — China, North Korea and Russia — facing off against strong friends like Japan, South Korea and Australia, with independent emerging powers Indonesia and India in the middle.

Roggeveen doesn’t envisage a sudden US withdrawal from the Asia-Pacific. But Australia will gradually lose great-power protection, forcing it to take a more independent path. “There won’t be a principled declaration of independence, but a hesitant and gradual process of separation triggered by America’s declining interest and motivation to protect Australia.”

Since this shift could conceivably happen over the first half of this century — during the next twenty-five or so years, that is — he believes it should be influencing the defence investments and foreign policy decisions we are making right now. Instead of placing a “big bet” on the United States remaining dominant, and acquiring nuclear submarines to assist, Australia should adopt a version of the porcupine strategy — by promising to inflict too much pain on the aggressor to justify any gains they may anticipate — for its own defence and go all out to keep Indonesia on side and help build its strength.

In a little over 200 pages of elegant logic, Roggeveen, who has led the security team at Lowy for the last fifteen years and before that worked in the Office of National Assessments, delivers a broadside at Canberra’s bipartisan consensus on the AUKUS agreement. He adds to the case made by figures like James Curran, historian and Australian Financial Review international editor, that the agreement still hasn’t been explained — and probably can’t be, except as a political fix.

As former ONA head Peter Varghese says, Roggeveen’s book “defies the echo chamber of current strategic policy” — the chamber that takes in the two main parties, the defence and foreign affairs departments, ONA’s successor the Office of National Intelligence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the ANU National Security College, and a federal press gallery captivated by gee-whiz weaponry and China panics.

Roggeveen builds on the thinking of strategic analysts Hugh White and the late Allan Gyngell, who could see an era of power contestation developing in Asia. Far from “appeasement” — the cheap slur thrown by junior minister Pat Conroy at Labor’s national conference last week — they urge a bristly defence of Australia and its approaches combined with efforts to avoid being roadkill if the big vehicles start moving.

Roggeveen looks first at America’s national will. So far, the cost of its post-1945 security presence in Asia has been manageable and the risks low. But China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear weaponry are changing the calculus. “When it comes to taking on China, the costs are too high and the stakes too low,” Roggeveen says.

The United States is uniquely secure, he points out, buffered by wide oceans east and west, and by benign neighbours north and south. It has the world’s largest military, its largest nuclear arsenal, and a young and growing population. With foreign trade only 23 per cent of its GDP, it can be economically self-sufficient.

“When Donald Trump said what was previously unsayable for a US president — that America’s allies are free-riders, that NATO had passed its use-by date, and that America gains nothing from its forward military presence in East Asia — the response from the US security establishment was swift and predictable,” Roggeveen writes. “America’s alliances, they said, are the backbone of global security.”

But Trump had grasped an important point. “America’s alliances are not a service the US offers to its allies and the world. Ultimately, they need to make the United States safer. If America’s alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia cease to have any benefit for the US, then it will stop making sacrifices for them.”

Cold war justifications for alliances are crumbling. East Asian allies are starting to question the “extended deterrence” of US nuclear forces and thinking about acquiring their own. “The US has learned to live with French, British and Israeli nuclear weapons. It can do the same for South Korea and Japan,” Roggeveen says.

And unlike Washington’s old enemy, the Soviet Union, China lacks an exportable ideology. “Communism in China is little more than a series of slogans (such as the ‘China dream’ and a ‘community of common destiny’). To be a communist in China today is to be committed not to the global spread of Marxist-Leninist ideology but simply to the preservation of Communist Party rule at home.”

Realistically, no nation of China’s economic weight would ever be content for its rival to be the leading strategic power in its own region, “any more than the US would tolerate China being the leading strategic power in North and Latin America. Imagine tens of thousands of Chinese troops based in Canada, an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in Cuba, and Chinese spy planes routinely patrolling just off the US east coast, and you get the idea.”

Should Trump be re-elected, or a “Trump-like figure” take the Republican Party back into the White House, his agenda would return, and probably with less institutional resistance. Trump might have been unexpected but he isn’t anomalous, says Roggeveen. His rise injected a new uncertainty into Australia’s strategic future.

The result will be “a long sunset of American power in Asia, in which China emerges as the leading nation but not the dominant one.” Australia’s alliance with the United States won’t be formally abrogated or repealed: too many people in both countries have a stake in its preservation.

“The treaty will remain,” says Roggeveen. “So will the troops, and the joint exercises, and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements, and the arms sales. What will erode is the credibility of the alliance. Australia and the region in general will simply stop believing that the alliance represents an implicit promise that the two countries will fight on each other’s behalf.”

Yet Australia is doubling its bet on the United States staying on top. The planned eight nuclear-powered attack submarines, or SSNs, more than the British or French navies possess, will operate as a one-eighth addition to the US navy’s SSN force. Aside from being able to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles with a 1500 to 2000 kilometre range, their role will be to find and chase China’s ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs.

For nuclear powers, such SSBNs are the guaranteed “second strike” capability against a successful “first strike.” Roggeveen could have said more about the fact that China has only six SSBNs, five operating from a base in Hainan island facing the South China Sea and one near Qingdao in the Yellow Sea. Maintenance and training mean that only one or two are likely to be on patrol at any time. The relentless “freedom of navigation” patrols in these waters by US and allied forces seem designed to stop those SSBNs slipping out into the open ocean, from where more of the continental United States would be in missile range. Or perhaps they are poised to destroy the subs before they can launch. Either way, are we out to remove this stabilising element of mutual assured destruction?

This is a case of capability determining defence policy rather than the other way round, Roggeveen says: “Once we have the capability to send a fleet of boats thousands of kilometres to our north around China’s coast, and the capability to fire missiles at the Chinese mainland, we are going to have to come up with reasons why we are choosing to withhold that capability in the event of war.” Equally worryingly, “by the time this question arises Australia will have been enculturated and integrated with the US Navy over decades. It is too much to expect that our leaders would turn their backs on all that in the decisive moment.”

Any sense that the United States might have to compel Australia into helping in a future conflict is contradicted by the continuing willingness of both major political parties to lock military planning into US thinking. As Roggeveen puts it, the AUKUS agreement shows that “Australia didn’t need to be talked into anything.” And from an American perspective, what’s not to like when Australia comes offering to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for US weapons?

All the costs of AUKUS weaponry will be carried by Australia, with no hard promises in return. “It is a project of vaulting ambition that is out of step with Australian tradition as a military middle power, wildly at odds with our international status and, most importantly, a wasteful expenditure of public money that will make Australia less safe,” Roggeveen says. “But having cancelled the French project and inaugurated AUKUS, Australia is now proposing to manage not two but three submarine designs. The Collins upgrade is still going ahead, and we are adding two nuclear-powered designs as well, a technology with which Australia has no experience. It will surely shock no one if this initiative fails entirely, or is severely cut back over time.”

Meanwhile, Canberra’s advocates of more defence spending are vague about what exactly Australia needs to defend itself against. At the same time, they assume that China is or will be so powerful that resisting it without US help is pointless.

Waging war on Australia wouldn’t be easy, says Roggeveen, and Australia can relatively cheaply raise the stakes even further. “Australia’s security commentators project their anxieties about Australia, their lack of confidence in it, onto China. They think we can’t manage the challenge of China alone because we’re not strong or mature enough. I say we are, and I say we can.”

The invasion scenario put up by defence hawks like late army general and Liberal senator Jim Molan are laughably implausible. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to defend ourselves against invasion,” says Roggeveen. “[T]his will remain beyond the capabilities of any rival military force for the indefinite future, and even if it becomes achievable, it will remain unnecessary and even counterproductive for the aggressor.” The only plausible reason to attack Australia would be to strike facilities being used to attack China — the US strategic bombers at the Katherine air base, for instance, and the SSNs at the Fremantle naval base.

Instead, Australia should rely on distance to put huge restraints on any Chinese military action. “Put simply, distance is Australia’s single biggest defence asset,” Roggeveen says, reminding his readers that Beijing is closer to London than to Sydney. That distance is invariably played down in the Australian defence debate in favour of a view that Australia is on the front line of military competition with China, or on China’s doorstep.

Australia should invest in forces that can punish and repel any antagonist who comes close — an antagonist gaining a military base in the Pacific islands, for example — but not attempt to project power any further. In other words, no capabilities aimed explicitly at hitting Chinese territory. Submarines, yes, long-range air power, yes, some missiles, yes, a lot of troops for restoring peace or providing disaster relief in the region, yes — but no heavily armoured army. Backing these capabilities would be hardened military bases, stockpiles of fuel and strategic materials, and deeper protection against cyberattack and other “grey” threats.

This is the “echidna strategy” of the book’s title — a version of which Roggeveen suggests for the defence of Taiwan. (He doesn’t favour a simple surrender of this democracy, and perhaps could have made this clearer.) It is essentially a strategy of denial.

“[This means] we are essentially planning to inflict the bare minimum damage on China so that we can persuade Beijing to stop but not give it a reason to hit us even harder,” Roggeveen says. It may not be heroic, “but such is the lot of a middle power when facing a great power. The alternative, which we are now pursuing, is a defence strategy which incentivises China to pay more military attention to us.”

Roggeveen does explore the ultimate defensive spike — nuclear weapons for Australia — but concludes that as nuclear weapons haven’t been used against non-nuclear adversaries since 1945, the chances of China raising the stakes that far against a much smaller, distant power are slim enough to discount.

But this doesn’t mean Australia should withdraw into a ball like a threatened echidna. It should be ambitious, but by using diplomacy and defence support. The focus should be Indonesia, the only emerging big power in the most contestable region around China capable of pushing back against the Chinese. “All the threat inflation, all the fever dreams conjured by our security pundits about China’s military threat to Australia — we are at risk of being surrounded; there is danger on our doorstep — would suddenly become real if Indonesia was ever hostile towards Australia.”

Then there is preserving Australia’s sphere of influence in the Pacific by doing more: more aid, more infrastructure, more investment, more labour mobility, more diplomacy and more defence cooperation. Though the smaller nations might be reluctant to surrender their China leverage, a European Union–style economic and political pact could cement island relations with Australia and New Zealand, with free trade, open borders, shared services, a regional airline and perhaps even a regional bank with a single currency.

This initiative could build on Roggeveen’s argument for a doubling of the Australian population to create a bigger economic base. With Papua New Guinea’s population now put tentatively at 11.8 million, and another three million or so in the other Pacific island nations, the region is there for us all to bulk up.

Roggeveen also puts the case for strong regional organisations. Not the Quad so much — its members are too dispersed, too divergent and too invested in China to agree to a NATO-style common defence, or even to explicitly mention China — but the much-derided Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its appendages. Instead of being disappointed about what ASEAN fails to do, we should look at what it’s been able to prevent — namely, wars between its members.

The Albanese government might sincerely believe in AUKUS, or it might be using it to help gain time in office in the expectation it will collapse on someone else’s watch. Either way, this book from such a seasoned and centrally placed figure in the defence and foreign policy sphere shows that our national future is being decided in panic and haste. •

The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace
By Sam Roggeveen | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $32.99 | 232 pages

The post Spiky questions about the US alliance appeared first on Inside Story.

But can the tide of disgust, disbelief and frustration really be turned back? It’s a question that calls to mind the British political scientist Bernard Crick’s insistence that democratic politics must be defended even from itself. It is only by strengthening forums in which conflicts between interests can be resolved with civil discourse — argument, persuasion and negotiation of common goals — that democracy can be sustained.

That may be the ideal, but adversarial politics has a dark shadow. “The individual is tied into politics by its capacity to draw deeply on his feelings,” the Australian political scientist Alan Davies once argued. “[P]olitical leaders are like sculptors, whose medium is public emotion. It is only because people momentarily feel in common that they can for a while think alike.” But he went on to caution that politics often seems to channel the negative emotions.

Other political scientists have been blunter. “Politics has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds,” Henry Adams, scion of the famous political family, remarked in 1905; later, his fellow American Harold Lasswell nominated hatred as the leading political emotion.

In 1974, Davies set out to explore these suppositions using diaries recording how successive cohorts of his students felt about politics. Reading through their diaries he couldn’t identify a single day on which the positive emotions they recorded outweighed the negative ones. “In politics,” he concluded, “we are evidently hard to please, disposed to blame… [and] adept at finding ourselves angered, disillusioned and pained.”

Davies and his Melbourne University colleague Graham Little warned that we are primed, when times are tough, to accentuate the negative — especially when we have leaders adept at identifying the cause of disquiet and giving it a target. That skill has long been a gift to media outlets that drive sales by “exposing” the sources of our rage and resentment, but it has lately been turbocharged by the anger algorithms of social media.

These emotions — and especially resentment — have become the go-to explanation for the rise of Donald Trump in the turbulent politics of the past decade. But do they really explain what has been going on?

The American historian Robert Schneider sets out to test the evidence in his new book, The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of Political Emotion. His subtitle immediately raises the question: did resentment ever go away? Given the emphasis that Davies, Little and their predecessors give to the ongoing role of emotions (including resentment) in mobilising political responses, it seems curious to argue that resentment might at some stage have dissipated.

Yet the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, published in 2003 and sponsored by the International Society of Political Psychology, contains no reference to resentment, and articles on the topic only began to accrue in the society’s journal, Political Psychology, when hyperpartisan politics and party fragmentation became more pressing concerns in the early 2000s. Theorists and historians of political thought, of which Schneider is one, might have more to tell us than do the current generation of political psychologists.

Schneider’s purpose is twofold. He wants to explore the gestation of the contemporary understanding of resentment in Western political thought; and he intends to demonstrate that resentment is complex and politically potent in ways that do not pertain to other emotions — which means that its re-emergence signifies something particular to our historical moment.

Much of The Return of Resentment is a compelling discussion of the identification of resentment, and debates about its meaning, from the sixteenth century until 2022. Schneider produces a tapestry in which certain threads are continuously interwoven. One thread concerns resentment’s contradictory elements: on the one hand, as a signal that something is wrong, that an injury demands a moral response and justice; on the other, as a destructive impulse with adverse effects both on its carriers and, at its extreme, on society.

He also traces resentment’s transition from the individual and interpersonal — as a product of proximity (think of witch hunts) to be ameliorated through civil discourse (one of the themes in eighteenth-century debate) — to the collective, after inter-class envy was sharpened by the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The rise of the bourgeoisie provoked a backlash from political and intellectual elites embodied most significantly in the “Nietzschean moment.” Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality (1887), with its supposedly historical depiction of the inevitable division between masters and slaves, sought to account for but also denounce the ressentiment of the latter. These “slaves” couldn’t aspire to the higher values of their betters so they wanted to drag everybody down to their level. Nietzsche’s book was complemented by works including Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (1895), which analysed the impulsiveness and irrationality of individuals seduced by crowd behaviour.

These nineteenth-century thinkers shifted the source of psychological disorder from the individual to the group. As contemporary institutions of governance emerged, their ideas fostered an implicit anti-democratic impulse among some intellectuals, political professionals and bureaucrats. Worried that people, lacking their expert knowledge, would too easily succumb to populist nonsense, they were all too ready to ascribe resistance to “rational plans” to the “pathology” of the crowd — a response that persists, as exemplified by Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate reference to the “basket of deplorables” supporting Trump.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40) took the argument a step further by pinpointing equality as the key value of the age. Although a levelling impulse might be expected to foster unity, in Tocqueville’s portrayal it instead generated heightened self-interest, individualism and an ever-vigilant jealousy lest any group gain an advantage over another.

Those threads persisted. But Schneider argues that a recognisable “resentment paradigm” was formulated after the twentieth century’s world wars and depression. Stimulated by the influential analysis of The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by the German sociologist Theodor Adorno and his co-authors, it was part of an attempt to make sense of Nazism and right-wing extremism and to guard against their return. Other sociologists and historians, including Talcott Parsons, Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell, attempted to distil the psychological disposition generated by economic and communal breakdown in interwar Germany that facilitated the anguish on which Hitler could draw.

This work was a warning that fairness and justice must be achieved lest conditions conducive to the heightened jealousy of some group over others should re-emerge. Normative codes of human rights and the Keynesian management of economic prosperity in the rebuilt Western economies were designed to facilitate relatively equal life chances and keep resentment at bay. The relative success of this postwar settlement saw the decline of resentment between the 1950s and the 1980s.

The 1960s generation mounted another form of resistance, hopeful rather than resentful, argues Schneider. This was a politics of authenticity and personal freedom against the stifling conformity that seemed endemic to the managed prosperity of the postwar order. To some extent it also opened the way for recognising the rights of the dispossessed and marginalised.

The justified resentment of the excluded — Black Americans, Indigenous people in settler societies, decolonising nations now free of imperial powers — persisted. Speaking for the oppressed, Frantz Fanon, an Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist and philosopher from the French colony of Martinique, called for a transformative break from colonial “negritude” through an assertion of Black humanity and pride. The instrument of change would be action to challenge the colonial state’s monopoly of violence rather than a plea for recognition on the colonisers’ own terms.

In the United States, human rights activist Malcolm Little discarded the “White slavemaster” name he was given at birth and became Malcolm X, advocating radical action to secure justice and Black dignity. Martin Luther King dreamed instead of a redemptive future where all enjoyed equal rights; but he also urged, “[Don’t] get rid of your discontent, channel it into non-violent direct action.” Both approaches informed civil rights movements of the sixties and thereafter. And both men, despite their differences, were assassinated.

Those deaths, says Schneider, are a reminder that there were “two sixties,” and the other was partly a reaction to freedom movements, which seemed inimical to the established order, and partly a calculated mobilisation of elements of society in support of a conservative agenda. It was here — rather than in the radical student movements, the demands for self-determination and authenticity, the protests against postcolonial wars, or the civil rights organisations asserting Black rights — that the politics of resentment was reinvented.

Richard Nixon led the charge, evoking a “silent majority” of put-upon Americans who feared that all the benefits they had accrued since the war were threatened by liberals, “privileged” student protesters, “so-called intellectuals” and Black activists. Others took up the theme in ways that reached out to the “working man” and to Middle Americans alike.

On the one hand was philosopher Eric Hoffer’s “wistfully reactionary” appeal to “salt of the earth” Americans oppressed by intellectuals whose rule “went hand in hand with subjection or enslavement of those who do the world’s work.” On the other was John Updike’s representative of Middle America, the resentful everyman Rabbit Angstrom, striving fruitlessly to recover lost glory and a sense of purpose, beneath whose animus for Blacks, counterculture proponents and rich people lies “an amalgam of sadness, confusion and… loss which would increasingly characterise the psychological disposition of white men for generations to come.”

And so was born the Republicans’ “southern strategy” to mobilise the disgruntled white working class while appealing to suburbanites and small towns to vote in defence of their entitled lifestyles.

Resentment would not flourish immediately: Ronald Reagan’s approach was upbeat. Heralding “Morning in America,” he eschewed resentment politics, and his “compassionate conservatism” persisted right through to George W. Bush. But the seed planted by “the other sixties” ensured that resentment was always in the offing, and with the next phase of economic and social change — precipitated by Clinton- and Bush-era neoliberalism’s failure to deliver prosperity and choice fairly and by rapidly accelerating inequality — it would flower.

These were the circumstances that facilitated “the return of resentment”: a sense of people “cutting in” on ordinary Americans waiting for their enterprise to be rewarded; of cultural resentment against “others” who don’t comply with the American way; of unfair competition and powerlessness as industries closed or moved offshore; of being left behind and disempowered while riches were grasped by the very “elites” who had trumpeted the benefits of neoliberal policies — all of it amplified by the balkanisation of the public by identity politics and social media.

Donald Trump’s populist appeal was anchored in the recognition of just those elements, and his adept mobilisation of the feelings of anger, humiliation, victimisation and marginalisation they provoked. He promised to be the voice of the aggrieved and proffered his own victimisation by “the deep state” as evidence that “they” were coming for him, as ordinary people’s tribune.

It has been common to tie the rise of Trumpian resentment to angry white men, especially those without a university education whose livelihood and status have eroded. But this is true only to a point. Schneider points to his other significant sources of support, with professionals, white-collar workers and solidly middle-class people among those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Others have shown the differences in life experiences, income, education, ethnicity and religious affiliation between Democratic-voting districts, with their preponderance of knowledge workers benefiting from the modern service and digital economy, and Republican-voting districts, whose industrial and agricultural workers are most prey to the depredations of local production by free trade and globalisation. Hence, household incomes have declined in Republican districts relative to Democratic ones, with the gap between upper-income households and their middle- and lower-income counterparts rising, and the share of income held by middle-income households falling.

In seeking to understand the history and the sources of resentment, Schneider makes four thought-provoking points. First, he returns to Tocqueville’s theory that resentment is always a risk in democracies that claim to value equality, which means that a balance in political settlements must ensure that some are not left behind and most feel that fair competition applies. The implication is that this was achieved for decades following postwar reconstruction, but that the neoliberal era ushered in the Trumpian moment.

Second, resentment is always anti-pluralist: a call for fellow patriots (defending core values of “the people”) to unite against all others. Hence it is disruptive of social cohesion in the relatively multicultural societies that are now common.

Third, when resentment is triggered by social conditions or certain leaders it can prevail against rational discourse more potently than can other emotions — anger, disappointment, frustration or envy — because it consolidates all of them.

Fourth, significant dangers face those policymakers and intellectuals whom the aggrieved are resisting. They may ignore or underestimate the factors provoking resentment and dismiss the resentful as a minority of “deplorables” incapable of understanding what is needed. It is on this failure that a resentment entrepreneur like Trump can prosper.

But those feelings of injustice and moral injury — and grievance — can also be indicative of wrongs that should and can be rectified. The rights of marginalised Blacks and minorities, and of dispossessed and brutalised Indigenous peoples in settler societies, and reparations due to them cry out for such a response. Empathy, recognition and an acceptance of their memories are needed.

Schneider concludes by conceptualising dual modes of contemporary political resentment: a “threatened/left behind” model (applying to the embittered and envious, who are reactionary and prone to extreme political expression) and a “comparison/discrepancy” model (that might also prove fractious and polarising but can alert us to injustices or inequities that should be addressed).

Despite the conceptual distinctiveness of these models, Schneider argues that we should conceive of a continuum of resentment, and in all cases try to empathise with the aggrieved to the extent needed to understand their disquiet. It is a warning against seeing resentment as an emotional trait of others, and against pathologising and delegitimising people’s claims and grievances.

What does all this mean for Australia? Bruce Wolpe’s recently released book, Trump’s Australia: How Trumpism Changed Australia and the Shocking Consequences for Us of a Second Term, translates the American experience — and resentment politics — into a message about how its ally must prepare for the possibility of a second Trump presidency.

This is a more contained and polemical exercise than Schneider’s. Wolpe starts with personal history: of growing up in Washington, working as a staffer in Congress, and seeing up close the transitions from Kennedy and his Democrat successors, through Reagan, Nixon and the Bushes, to the Republicans’ deal with the Devil, manifest in the election of Trump.

Like Schneider, Wolpe acknowledges Reagan’s upbeat optimism. He sees the source of the rot in Nixon and Watergate, and its coming to fruition in Sarah Palin’s failed candidacy for vice-president in John McCain’s campaign, which “scratched an itch among white voters who felt let down and driven out by establishment politics.”

His analysis, then, presents a version of the “threatened/left behind” model amped up by a leader who capitalised on fear and division. He doesn’t underestimate the likelihood that fear and threat will win again in 2024, but nor does he give much attention to the extent of disquiet that motivates Trump’s base. Arguably, he tells us nothing new about the extent of the chaos, disregard of norms and mendacious destructiveness of Trump’s term in office, but his deft touch and capacity to interpret political developments through personal history makes for a persuasive narrative.

Wolpe deals in detail with Trump and Australia’s foreign policy, Trump and Australia’s domestic policy, and the future of democracy in America and Australia. All of it is thought-provoking, though it boils down to an existential crisis for democracy captured in a series of “what-ifs.”

What if Trump cripples, even destroys NATO and the United Nations, smashes climate agreements, forms an alliance with Putin, surrenders Taiwan to China and withdraws troops and naval forces from the Asia-Pacific? What if he declares martial law, uses troops to contain protests, ignores court orders and legislation, jails political enemies, shuts down certain media, directs regulatory agencies to target individuals and companies deemed unfriendly, completes the process of ensuring compliant officials and Republican legislatures can overturn the popular vote in the electoral college? What if he even cancels elections?

Despite Wolpe’s useful attention to the danger of Australia’s adopting Trump-like policies — and our susceptibility to covert racism, inadequate campaign finance regulation, insufficient control of misinformation and disinformation in social media, and Trumpian appeals to division in mainstream media and campaigning — he points out that the most extreme domestic threat, to the electoral process, cannot succeed in Australia. Here, the electoral guardrails — mandatory voting, preferential voting, an independent electoral commission, and anti-corruption agencies at state and federal levels — will prevent executive excess and caprice. America would indeed benefit if such institutional guardrails could be introduced there.

We need to be attuned, meanwhile, to how we can resist the potential collapse of the rules-based international order: by strengthening alliances in the Asia-Pacific and with other middle-order powers, pursuing our own relations with China, not entrusting too much to great, powerful and electorally volatile friends (as we’ve done with AUKUS), and contributing to the strengthening of the United Nations.

Perhaps the missing ingredient in Wolpe’s book is a recognition of those times when political settlements served to abate inequality, enabling fair life chances, fending off resentment and promoting trust — in institutions and in each other — to prevent the erosion of democratic processes. Schneider is conscious of such cycles and the necessity of their restoration if democratic guardrails are to be reinforced. Wolpe see hope in the Albanese government and Biden’s efforts, but it is hope hedged by global challenges that foreshadow potential recession and disillusion.

All of which leads to the final great what-if: what if an America in accelerated decline in 2024 feels more like Germany in the 1930s than America in the 1990s? We know what the German people decided ninety years ago. Will the malign sculptors of public emotion be empowered once more? •

The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion
By Robert A. Schneider | University of Chicago Press | $47.95 | 312 pages

Trump’s Australia: How Trumpism Changed Australia and the Shocking Consequences for Us of a Second Term
By Bruce Wolpe | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post Democracy’s dark shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

This is just one strange, chillingly undemocratic, dimension to what promises to be a very strange election. The two oldest men ever to run for president are recontesting an election Trump believes was stolen from him in 2020 — a claim he will certainly propagate again if he loses again. Where he is burdened by historic indictments and a raft of legal probes, Biden’s ability to claim a successful term has been hampered by an intractable, do-nothing Congress and a series of US Supreme Court decisions that have rolled back federally enshrined rights.

Republican-controlled states, meanwhile, continue their efforts to gerrymander electoral districts and undermine voting rights. And the same polls that show Americans want neither Trump nor Biden also show they don’t know who they do want to see on the presidential ticket.

Into this scene emerges a little known, putatively bipartisan group enigmatically called No Labels, which claims to have an “insurance policy in the event both major parties put forth presidential candidates the vast majority of Americans don’t want.” The policy? It will put forward a yet-to-be-named bipartisan presidential/vice-presidential ticket. To this end the group is promoting a US$70 million effort to get its ticket on general election ballots across the nation.

Democrats and Never Trumpers are especially fearful that No Labels’s actions will divert support from voters who might otherwise back Biden. (Trump holds on to disaffected Republican voters more tightly than Biden holds disaffected Democratic voters.) Under the first-past-the-post system used in presidential elections, this would increase Trump’s chances of winning.

But Republicans have reason to worry, too. In a poll conducted for No Labels earlier this year, 59 per cent of respondents said they would consider a moderate independent ticket if faced with a Trump–Biden rematch. But, as others have pointed out, without names on the ticket these numbers demonstrate only a yearning for an alternative. To translate that desire into votes, No Labels needs candidates who can win real support from voters of both parties and independents.

Third-party candidates aren’t uncommon in US presidential elections. In some cases they are barely noticed; in others the evidence shows they affected the outcome. Ralph Nader’s candidature in 2000 is often seen as ensuring that George W. Bush won Florida, and hence the election. Jill Stein, the Greens candidate in 2016, received 49,941 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Hillary Clinton lost to Trump by 44,292 votes.

Perhaps the best-known of all, Ross Perot, received 18.9 per cent of the popular vote (the highest percentage of any third-party candidate ever). But he was seen to have pulled votes equally from George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Founded in 2010 by former Democratic operative Nancy Jacobson, No Labels was a response to the rising Tea Party’s attacks on Barack Obama’s legislative agenda. It describes itself as a bipartisan movement for Americans who are “tired of the extremes on the left and the right.” Rather than help Obama, its aim was to support lawmakers willing to meet in the middle, irrespective of their party affiliation. Current co-chairs are former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, former NAACP executive director Benjamin Chavis, and Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland.

Because No Labels is a non-profit organisation rather than a registered political party it needn’t declare its sources of funding. Most donors appear to be wealthy individuals working primarily in the finance sector who have also made big donations to the major parties. No Labels also oversees a number of political action committees, or PACs. Experts in campaign finance law say the organisation has reached the limits of what is permissible under electoral law.

Until recently, No Labels has mostly advocated procedural reforms aimed at limiting the power of the majority party in Congress. In 2017 it helped start the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and later it launched fundraising efforts to support candidates who backed the caucus’s agenda. That agenda is more centre-right than centrist: on healthcare, for example, it has pushed to compensate health insurance companies for the rising costs imposed by the pre-existing conditions that Obamacare requires them to cover, and for the elimination of a medical device tax that was also part of Obamacare.

Notably, the lifespans of No Labels and the Problem Solvers Caucus encompass the very period when Washington politics has become increasingly partisan and nihilistic. But whatever No Label once was, it is now clearly an organisation in transition, intent on a new agenda that would make it a player in the national political arena. Suddenly the “national movement of commonsense Americans pushing our leaders together to solve our country’s biggest problems” is in the business of proposing who voters might choose to be the president and vice-president.

Americans got a glimpse of what this might mean a few days ago, at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, when No Labels launched the group’s policy agenda, “Common Sense.” Headlining the event were West Virginia senator and rogue Democrat Joe Manchin, who has hinted at a presidential tilt, and Utah’s former Republican governor Jon Huntsman, who ran for president in 2012.

One think tank has described the policy plan as timid and vague. It is a mish-mash of middle-of-the-road pabulum, dodges tough issues like abortion (it urges “a sustainable abortion compromise most Americans can live with”) and provides no definitive solutions to the problems confronting the nation. Manchin and Huntsman, presumably there as exemplars of the proposed presidential ticket, were equally obtuse on how a bipartisan team might govern. The memo on the No Labels website laying out a third-party presidential plan also dodges crucial issues, including whether and how the campaign would avoid handing the election to Trump.

It is no easy matter to compete against the two major political parties in a presidential election. Just getting names on the ballot papers requires complicated efforts to meet a variety of state-specific filing requirements and timelines. Typically, petitions must have a requisite number of approved signatories.

The group has already gained ballot access in Arizona, Colorado, Alaska and Oregon and signature-gathering efforts are under way in other states. No Labels is providing the names of “placeholder” candidates who will be replaced by the actual presidential and vice-presidential candidates when they are selected. As part of this effort, the organisation has established a number of state affiliates, some with deep Republican roots, which have declared themselves political parties.

Presidential and vice-presidential candidates will be selected between Super Tuesday (5 March) and the No Labels convention, scheduled for April in Dallas, where the candidates will be endorsed. But who will make these decisions and endorsements is never stated.

Realistically, this push for political action is likely to be driven from the top of No Labels by Jacobson and Lieberman, with sidelines support from those, like Manchin, who may see personal opportunities looming — especially as he apparently faces a tough race to retain his senate seat, and buoyed by favourable polling. (No Label’s pollster is HarrisX, owned by Mark Penn, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton who has distanced himself from the Democratic Party and who is married to Jacobsen.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, splits have emerged inside the organisation and reports indicate a toxic work environment. One of the founders, William Galston, has resigned over the presidential push and the Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus are described as being in open revolt.

There does seem to be an element of outsiders’ revenge to what has been characterised as a spoiler intervention that will strengthen Trump’s chances. When challenged on this, Jacobsen has said that No Labels will nominate a ticket only if polling shows a viable path to victory (“if our rigorously gathered data and polling suggest an independent unity ticket can’t win, we will not nominate a ticket”) and that the ticket will be pulled from the ballot if the campaign tilts the race to a competitor, especially to Trump. “We will not spoil for either side. The only reason to do this is to win.” Lieberman told the Atlantic. “The last thing I’d ever want to be part of is bringing Donald Trump back to the Oval Office.”

But these statements only raise more questions. Can Jacobson and Lieberman be trusted to make these decisions? What is the metric they will use? Where do they think the votes to deliver a third-party win will come from?

Only the latter question can be answered here. At a time of hyperpartisanship, centrist and independent voters are, at least theoretically, up for grabs. Biden already occupies much of the centre and Republicans like Trump, Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence are preoccupied with the right. Pew polling shows that while 38 per cent of Americans describe themselves as independents, only 7 per cent identify as an independent leaning towards neither of the two major political parties.

What distinguishes the small share of Americans who are truly independent is their low level of interest in politics, and that makes them hard to engage in the swell of support No Labels needs. Most analysts (including at Third Way and in Politico) agree that No Labels’s hopes of any electoral college votes, let alone the 270 mentioned on their website, are based on flawed premises.

For the time being, though, Democrats and Never Trumpers must worry about No Labels’s intent. Some small reassurance comes in Aaron Blake’s Washington Post analysis of polling by Monmouth. The pollster found that Biden leads Trump by seven points (47–40) in a head-to-head among those who will “definitely” or “probably” vote for either candidate. In contrast to other polls (including HarrisX’s), Monmouth’s shows no significant shift when a third-party ticket is introduced. With a generic third-party ticket, Biden edges ahead by nine points; with Manchin and Huntsman named as candidates, Biden still has a six-point edge.

As Blake observes, while Americans generally like the idea of an independent candidate, what No Labels is offering is not an independent or a third-party ticket but a fusion Republican–Democrat ticket. And he reminds us that third-party tickets almost always poll better than they perform on election day because voters ultimately want to choose between candidates who have a chance of winning. •

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The crowd was there to bid farewell to more than 500 excited and slightly trepidatious passengers — 306 young men, fifty-seven young women, and 133 adults who were combining travel with education — and the sixty-three lecturers and staff who had signed up to join the Floating University: an around-the-world educational experiment in which travel abroad would count towards a university degree at home.

Over the next eight months they would meet some of the twentieth century’s major figures, including Benito Mussolini, King Rama VII of Thailand, Mahatma Gandhi and Pope Pius XI, and visit countries in the midst of change: Japan in the process of industrialisation, China on the cusp of revolution, the Philippines agitating against US rule, and Portugal in the aftermath of a coup.

In an era of internationalism and expanding American power, the leaders of this Floating University believed travel and study at sea would deliver an education in international affairs not available in the land-based classroom. It was through direct experience in and of the world rather than passive, indirect engagement via textbooks and lectures that they thought students could learn to be “world-minded.” The trip was promoted as an “experiment in democratic theories of education,” and New York University lent the venture its official sponsorship.

In championing the merits of direct, personal experience as a way to know the world, the Floating University was joining a set of public as well as scholarly debates taking place in 1920s United States about the relationship between professional expertise and democratic citizenship in increasingly complex industrial capitalist societies.

On the one hand, protagonists including secretary of state and future president Herbert Hoover and journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann argued for the principles of scientific management and technocratic governance, and emphasised the importance of well-informed and expert elites. It was specialised knowledge, they believed, that was needed to address the challenges presented by rapidly changing economies and societies.

On the other hand, popular technologies such as photography, film, radio, inexpensive novels and newspapers, as well as cheaper transatlantic travel, jazz and the latest improvised forms of dance, seemed to offer direct, embodied and experiential ways of knowing that were at once deeply personal and widely accessible. Questioning the concentration of power in the hands of experts, labour, social and civil rights activists as well as populist and agrarian groups advocated for more participatory forms of democracy.

Although their differences are often exaggerated, the debates in the 1920s and 1930s between Lippmann and the educational reformer and philosopher John Dewey are often taken to be emblematic of this apparent opposition between technocratic expertise and democratic knowledge and deliberation.

Dewey’s thinking had a huge influence on the founder of the Floating University cruise, New York University’s professor of psychology, James E. Lough. Fascinated by education and the learning process, Dewey argued that knowledge does not flow from experience, but rather is made through experience; it was by doing things in and with the world that students would best learn. As a psychology student at Harvard in the 1890s, Lough was attracted to these ideas and, following his appointment as director of the Extramural Division at New York University, had a chance to put them into action.

Education at university — as at the primary levels of schooling — should be connected to the environment, experiences, and interests of students, Lough argued. From 1913 onwards his Extramural Division began offering credit-bearing courses at a variety of locations across New York City: onsite commercial, investment and finance courses on Wall Street, courses in government in the Municipal Building, art appreciation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and engineering courses at Grand Central Station.

Extending this logic, NYU also began offering summer travel courses to Europe to study economic conditions and industrial organisation in Britain and municipal planning in Germany. These courses resumed after the first world war and then — towards the end of 1923 — Lough took his ideas one step further. If summer travel courses could work, why not a whole year at sea? As he told the audience assembled at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the Floating University’s departure, those aboard the ship would experience “a method of study which actually brings the student into living contact with the world’s problems about to be realised.” The difference between it and what was ordinarily served up to students was, as he put it, the difference “between reading a menu and eating the full course meal.”

Putting this educational vision into practice, however, was harder than Professor Lough had anticipated. Despite some hiccups, the formal part of the undertaking was relatively successful. Students took formal classes while the ship was at sea. When it was stopped in port they participated in a variety of activities that included officially arranged shore excursions, visits to host universities and free time.

Although some professors were more diligent than others, the best among them linked their curriculum on the ship to the experiences students were having onshore. Undoubtedly a good number of students didn’t attend to their studies, but the official Report of Scholastic Work on the University Cruise around the World stated that during the cruise, 400 college-level students had attended classes (79 per cent of whom sought university credit). Their aggregated marks were mapped onto a bell curve: 16 per cent of grades were As; 38 per cent Bs; 28 per cent Cs; 9 per cent Ds; 3 per cent incomplete; and 3 per cent fails. Those who were “negligent in their work on board” were, concluded the Floating University’s academic dean, George Howes, no doubt also negligent in their college studies onshore.

It was the behaviour of the students in port that proved the biggest problem. Reports of sex, alcohol and jazz made their way back to an American press hungry for scandal, and the Floating University became a byword for what could go wrong with educational travel. “Sea Collegians Startle Japan with Rum Orgy” read one newspaper headline. “More than a hundred students, among whom six girls were to be noticed, were doing intensive laboratory work this evening, in the bar of the Imperial Hotel” continued the article.

And there were plenty of unfavourable stories to follow: more trouble with alcohol, rumours of romantic relationships and sexual relations between the students, accounts of a split between the cruise leaders, and even reports of an outbreak of bubonic plague. These accounts proved such catnip to American editors that it is hard to read the newspapers of 1926 and 1927 and not come across the story.

It didn’t matter to the newspapers that unruly student behaviour was a common aspect of life on college campuses across the United States in the 1920s. “There was a certain amount of necking on board,” was how one of the students, George T. McClure, put it, “but not more than I saw at the University of Colorado last year.” Playing on the popular image of the frolicsome college student — the smoking by women, the drinking by men, and the sexual promiscuity of both — was a guaranteed way to sell papers. But not far beneath such discussions of the misconduct of American youth lurked a fear that ungoverned youthful bodies might threaten the foundations of civility at home, while also betraying a lack of national readiness for the new global role the United States was rapidly assuming abroad.

By the end of the 1920s, huge numbers of Americans were travelling abroad. Many of them were students taking advantage of new and cheap “tourist class” transatlantic fares. And while they were away, many enrolled in one of the “educational courses” frequently offered by the shipping companies. During their voyages these travellers were undoubtedly learning something about international affairs and spending huge amounts of money in the process.

In fact, a report of the time suggests that in 1930 more than 127,800 Americans travelled “tourist class” to Europe: that is 5000 more people than were awarded a BA degree in the United States that same year. This was big business. With the Floating University and his other summer travel courses, Professor Lough had recognised the potential of this market for what was already beginning to be called “international education.”

But on the whole American universities wanted to have nothing to do with it. Although the trend had begun earlier, the 1920s was the decade in which they really marked out the boundaries of their empire of expertise. With newly established schools in a whole range of fields — from business administration and retailing to journalism and education — they asserted their claim to authority over both how knowledge could be acquired and whose knowledge claims should be trusted.

Rather than crediting educational travel programs, universities set about establishing what the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation called the “scientific study of international relations.” While for graduates and academic scholars who were undertaking research this might necessarily have entailed travel, for the much larger American undergraduate population it meant enrolling in credit-bearing courses and degree programs taught on home campuses, with syllabi, reading lists and assessments.

And for universities, it meant an entirely new discipline of teaching and study. It meant journals, conferences, summer institutes, government consultancies, and new paying audiences for university-sanctioned expertise.

None of this was compatible with educational travel of the kind Professor Lough envisaged. It was the university and its qualified faculty members that stood as the source of authoritative knowledge about the world, not the experiences of sundry travellers. In 1926 NYU pulled out of its sponsorship of the Floating University and over the course of the next few years abolished all its other study abroad programs. Although in 1930 the university did offer a course called Literary Tour of Great Britain, it took place entirely in a classroom in Washington Square, with readings supplied. In this 1920s contest between different ways of knowing the world, it was academically authorised expertise that triumphed, and it has undergirded the claims of universities — in Australia as in the United States — ever since.

Why does this matter?

For the last century or more, universities have derived their social standing (not to mention their income) from their claim to have authority over knowledge. They are the institutions that undertake the research, distil the learning, and provide the training so crucial to our economies and societies — or so the generally accepted story runs. Within their walls students learn from experts about the world and each other, developing both general and specialised disciplinary knowledge that prepares them not only for careers but also to be active and informed members of society.

But as anyone paying even a little bit of attention to politics and current affairs over the last decade will be aware, the university’s authority over knowledge is by no means uncontested. On the one hand, a new politics has emerged that challenges experts and their long-privileged authority, and instead prioritises personal, embodied and experiential ways of knowing. On the other hand, the proliferation of highly granulated, linked and disembodied big data, and the artificial intelligence algorithms that process it threaten to make obsolete many of the tasks that experts and knowledge workers have traditionally undertaken. Who gets to know in this new world?

There are many ways of warranting or justifying knowledge claims. In 1926 Professor Lough argued for the legitimacy of personal experience, but doing so brought him into conflict with the universities’ assertion of the authority of academic experts and “book knowledge.” But there are also other warrants for knowledge — authority, testimony, culture, tradition, or even divine revelation; all these can be invoked to support a claim to truth, and frequently they come into conflict with each other. Thinking about these conflicts can tell us a lot about how power and knowledge work in a society, especially in moments of change.

In their book Leviathan and the Air-pump, science historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer examine one such moment of conflict: the historical controversy surrounding the experimental demonstrations of the vacuum pump conducted by Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke in the seventeenth century. Boyle’s approach, which emphasised systematic observation, measurement and repeatability, represented a new way of producing knowledge that conflicted with Thomas Hobbes’s emphasis on deductive reasoning and mathematical principles. But crucially, as Shapin and Schaffer show, Boyle’s effort to establish the credibility of this new, scientific form of knowledge relied heavily on the social status and reputation of those men who were performing experiments and observing them.

We might think today that scientific experiment and academic expertise are self-evident means of arriving at the truth. But as various people (from feminist, Black and anti-colonial thinkers to Trump supporters) have pointed out, they are underwritten by social conventions and forms of power. Or, to put it another way, the social recognition Robert Boyle was able to mobilise was something Professor Lough failed to muster.

Too often, expertise is cast as a neutral or natural phenomenon, but expertise also has a history, one that is intimately connected to shifts in the nature and mode of power and rule. Thinking about why the Floating University was deemed a failure in the 1920s matters because it highlights the failure in our own times to ground knowledge claims in ways that are recognisable to those outside the community of academically authorised experts.

Experience and academic learning may now not seem so far apart. Internships, service learning, study abroad programs, field studies, work-integrated and simulation-based learning, collaborative research, and capstone projects are all part of the way most universities today deliver their degrees. In the United States, the Semester at Sea program, which claims the 1926 voyage as its progenitor, even allows students to credit time at sea towards their college degree.

But these initiatives don’t really settle the questions the story of the Floating University’s 1926 world cruise ultimately provoke: Who gets to know in our society? What forms of status determine what knowledge counts as legitimate?

These are pressing questions for democracies seeking to navigate change, and they are as relevant for twenty-first-century Australia as they were for Lough and Dewey and Lippmann in the 1920s and 30s United States. •

The post What is a university? appeared first on Inside Story.

Thanks to three Trump-era appointments, the nine-member court is dominated by six conservative justices. While it has repudiated aggressive conservative litigation on immigration, tribal rights and the ability of states to control elections, in each case with the three Democratic appointees as part of the majority, it has also responded to the conservative agenda in decisions on affirmative action, gay rights and student loans. Divided along partisan lines — with the court’s three Democratic appointees in strong dissent — those decisions will have a significant impact on the rights of protected population groups in the United States.

The dominant news, and a cause for progressive celebration, is the court’s decision to reject the radical independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, a case brought by a group of Republican lawmakers from North Carolina. The theory rests on a relatively recent interpretation of the US constitution’s elections clause, which says that state legislatures can set the rules for national congressional elections in their states.

According to proponents of the strongest form of the theory, no other organs of state government — courts, governors, election administrators or independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s decisions about how federal elections are run. Trump lawyers used this theory in 2020 to argue, unsuccessfully, that Joe Biden’s victories in key states were illegitimate and that state legislatures could unilaterally reverse the outcome.

In the latest case, the court ruled that state legislatures can’t make decisions that ignore their state’s supreme court or violate their state’s constitution. This six–three judgement, which applies to all states, is being hailed as a major win for democracy and voting rights.

But the tireless efforts of hardline conservatives will mean further attempts to challenge the court’s ruling and invoke the independent state legislature theory are likely in 2024. And the decision will not change the commitment of the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature to the undermining of federal election processes and voting rights.

The genesis of the case was a gerrymandered electoral map drawn by the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature after the 2020 census. After it was rejected by the state’s supreme court, Republicans passed an emergency application in February 2022 asking the US Supreme Court to intervene. That court rejected the request for immediate intervention, and the election last November was conducted under a map drawn by experts appointed by a state court.

The result was a fourteen-member congressional delegation evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — a reasonable result in a state where 34 per cent of voters are registered Democrat, 30 per cent are registered Republican and 36 per cent are unaffiliated.

But the 2022 election changed the composition of the North Carolina supreme court, which is now dominated by Republicans with a five-to-two margin. The new court’s majority reversed course, saying the legislature is free to draw gerrymandered voting districts as it sees fit — as it is already doing. A political fight is developing in North Carolina over voting rights and what has been described as “headline-grabbing confrontations over nearly every lever of the electoral apparatus.”

Moreover, the US Supreme Court’s decision contains what some see as a time bomb. In his majority opinion, chief justice John Roberts reaffirmed his court’s capacity to overrule state courts when it so chooses. Importantly, he persuaded the three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, to go along with a version of judicial review that some experts fear could allow the court to meddle in future elections.

It is interesting to note that the justices pointed to Bush v. Gore, the 2000 Supreme Court opinion that stopped Florida’s recount and confirmed George W. Bush’s presidential victory, as a template for resolving election disputes, despite the fact that the court’s opinion in Bush v. Gore explicitly stated that it was not intended to create precedent.

A series of other just-released decisions reflect the court’s conservative leanings and seem part of a broader effort to overthrow long-supported rights and benefits for minority groups. Two decisions saw the six conservative members of the court invalidate admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that use race as a criterion, effectively ended race-oriented affirmative action admissions programs at public and private colleges and universities across the country and tossing aside yet another well-established federal right.

It is ironic that the justices ruled that the admissions policies violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to the constitution — an amendment that was ratified in 1868 to enable the federal government to deal with the profound racial discrimination against Black Americans that continued after the Civil war.

The majority decision was written by Roberts, a long-time critic of affirmative action programs. At both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, he wrote, the programs “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

As if to acknowledge these programs’ importance to ensuring greater diversity, though, Roberts stressed in a footnote that military academies are exempted from the decision. “No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context,” he wrote. “This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The only two Black members of the Supreme Court — Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson — openly traded barbs in their widely divergent opinions.

“As [Jackson] sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” wrote Thomas, himself a beneficiary of academic affirmative action. “The panacea, she counsels, is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field,’ all as judged by racial metrics. I strongly disagree.”

Thomas also accused Brown Jackson of ignoring the oppression of other groups, including Asian Americans and “white communities that have faced historic barriers.” (It’s worth noting that Thomas and his conservative colleagues don’t take issue with the legacy programs that perpetuate elite access to Ivy League universities.)

Justice Brown Jackson, who led the liberal dissent, didn’t mince words either, calling the decision “a tragedy for us all.” She defended the use of race-conscious programs to ameliorate the pervasive, present-day effects of America’s history of state-sponsored racism. “Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and wellbeing of American citizens,” her dissent began, and went on to argue that allowing colleges to consider applicants’ race has “universal benefits” because it helps to close those gaps and thereby promotes equality.

Not surprisingly, these US Supreme Court decisions have generated strong condemnation. Critics are concerned about the impact on Black Americans and on the diversity that is so needed in the healthcare workforce.

More is at stake than affirmative action in university admissions, including the central question of whether the law can be used to fix longstanding racial inequalities. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her strong dissent, “The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.”

Conservatives, long wary of race-based programs designed to benefit minorities, will be emboldened to leverage these decisions into attacks on affirmative action programs in other areas such as corporate diversity. “In the broadest sense,” wrote political analyst Ron Brownstein in the Atlantic, “the Republican-appointed justices have moved to buttress the affluence and status that allow white people to wield the most influence in society, and to diminish the possibility that accelerating demographic change will force a renegotiation of that balance of power.”

Disadvantaged students will also be affected by the court’s decision, in Nebraska v. Biden, to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan. This was a 2020 election campaign promise to deliver financial relief to up to forty-three million student loan-holders, including cancelling the full remaining balance for roughly twenty million, with these relief dollars targeted to low- and middle-income borrowers. Advocates argue that both student loan forgiveness and affirmative action are racial justice issues.

In a major win for Republicans, who had vehemently opposed the plan, the court’s six conservatives ruled that the Biden administration lacked the power to forgive loans for more than forty million borrowers. Facing Republican opposition to legislation to implement this commitment, Biden had used the HEROES Act, which was authorised in 2003 after the 9/11 attacks as a means of giving loan relief during times of war and other emergencies.

The plan’s hefty price tag also meant it had major economic implications. In striking down the plan the court thus relied on the “major questions doctrine,” which says that Congress must give direct authorisation for the executive branch to implement a policy that has major economic and political impacts on the country. The doctrine was first invoked in 2022 in a decision about the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Republicans and advocates of limiting the power of the federal bureaucracy cheered this most recent court decision, but the liberal justices and many legal experts are concerned it could prevent the government from taking decisive action on climate change, healthcare and other urgent problems.

“The Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have,” Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It violates the Constitution.” Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute was even blunter: “They created out of whole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

Another recent decision puts a question mark over the court’s decade-old judgement establishing the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In this latest case, the court decided that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law violated a web designer’s free speech rights under the first amendment, raising fears that the right of LGBTQI+ Americans to non-discrimination (including the right to marry) is being eroded.

The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, rests on several hypotheticals. Web designer 303 Creative is owned by Lorie Smith, who opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. But the company has never been asked to create a website for a same-sex wedding, and Colorado has never tried to force it to design such a website. In fact, Smith didn’t design wedding websites for anyone at all when the suit was filed.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion for the conservative justices, called the message conveyed by any websites Ms Smith designs “pure speech,” as if no services were being provided and the primary point of the websites would be to express the designer’s views on matrimony. The court’s three liberal justices disagreed. “Today,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

The decision came at a time when Republican legislators in many conservative-leaning states are targeting the rights of transgender and other LGBTQI+ people. In strongly criticising the decision, President Biden expressed a fear that the ruling could invite more discrimination. “In America, no person should face discrimination simply because of who they are or who they love,” he said in a media statement. “More broadly, today’s decision weakens long-standing laws that protect all Americans against discrimination in public accommodations — including people of color, people with disabilities, people of faith, and women.”

Not only do these recent decisions highlight the impact of the three conservative justices appointed by Donald Trump; the majority and minority opinions also highlight how divided the US Supreme Court has become. Observers have detected a new contentiousness during oral arguments and within justices’ opinions. The highly personal attacks in the affirmative action rulings are a far cry from the expected dispassionate legal interpretation.

In dissenting from the decision to strike down the student debt plan, for instance, Justice Kagan wrote that “in every respect, the court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our nation’s governance.” Chief Justice Roberts retorted: “It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticise the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.”

Moreover, when court decisions continually divide along the same lines as the divergence of political opinions — as has happened in most of these big cases — it is very hard for the public to see the distinction between law and politics.

A growing number of critics worry the court is losing its legitimacy by overturning abortion rights and using disingenuous legal reasoning to advance a reactionary political agenda. At the same time, public revelations of the close ties between Justices Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas and wealthy benefactors with business before the court have met with official indifference from the chief justice. Small wonder the court’s popularity has plunged to record lows as the public increasingly sees the court as a political body.

Biden is facing increasing pressure from Democrats to embrace far-reaching reforms to the nation’s highest court, including expanding the number of justices and imposing term limits and mandatory retirement. While he has harshly criticised the court’s sharp pivot to the right, calling it “not a normal court,” he has declined to endorse any of proposed reforms.

Together with abortion, these most recent decisions will be an ideological divide along which Republicans and Democrats — and voters — will line up for next year’s elections. The conservative push to erode rights for women and minority groups will galvanise both those who agree and those affected.

Biden is signalling he will run against the court and Republican lawmakers on a host of judgements, including abortions rights and student loans, hoping to appeal to women, people of colour and young voters. For this to be a winning strategy, he must get voters who are disappointed by the lack of action on these and other issues — including stricter gun rights and more liberal immigration laws — to see that their only hope of remedy lies with him and the Democrats.

Trump will certainly tout his success in stacking the US Supreme Court, and his Republican presidential rivals will presumably claim they will do more. This approach has deep appeal for the rusted-on Make America Great Again base but is unlikely to garner sufficient votes to gain a victory in the general election.

It is no accident that Trump, even as he takes credit for the decision to abolish legal abortion, has been dodging questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion bill into law — something many within the conservative movement see as the next frontier in this fight. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, his chief rival in the Republican presidential primary, has sought to outflank him on the issue by embracing it as a key feature of his campaign, as has former vice-president Mike Pence.

What the United States is seeing in 2023 — in Supreme Court decisions, state actions and the failure of Congress to enact any meaningful legislation — is a clawing back of the rights of Americans, especially those in minority groups, in a way previously unseen in modern times. This must surely be a key election driver next year. •

The post One step forward, three steps back appeared first on Inside Story.

The link: over a period exceeding fifty years the two have collaborated on five volumes of biography, four of them dealing with the same man. One a decade. Big, fat books, each a thousand pages or more in length. Doorstoppers.

Outside work, they have little contact. They aren’t particularly close. Each lives a quiet life, working, sleeping, seeing his family.

That’s it. That’s the story. That’s the movie.

And yet from these unlikely materials, Lizzie Gottlieb has made a wonderful film, Turn Every Page: a witty, loving portrait of two lions in winter, one of whom — Gottlieb — is her father.

In some ways the two men are quite similar. Urbane New Yorkers, each with his memories of reading books as a child in Central Park. And yet they are very different men — Gottlieb is opinionated and dripping with self-regard; Caro is quiet, thoughtful and modest.

Gottlieb is the former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and the New Yorker. He’s been responsible for hundreds of books and a stable of authors that has included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Bob Dylan. He’s fun, charming.

Caro is the winner of multiple Pulitzers and National Book Awards. He has written just five big books (along with a slim memoir); each of his bigger works is incredibly detailed, immersing its reader in particularities of times and places, and describes in great detail the ways in which talented, driven individuals — US president Lyndon Johnson and New York planner Robert Moses — made things happen that would not otherwise have happened (or that would perhaps have happened more slowly, and slightly differently).

This ability — of making things happen — Caro calls “power.” It is for his deeply informed and sensitive analyses of the particularities of power — intoxicating, deeply evidenced, personality-driven — that Caro is famous.

The title of the film nods to the lengths Caro goes to in researching his books. “Turn every page,” his first editor told him; certainly, that is the advice he has followed.

The accusation can be made — reasonably in my view — that Caro’s work sometimes verges on “great man” history, because it focuses so heavily on the acts of pivotal individuals, of men who sat at the heart of formal power structures, and pays too little attention to structural shifts and history-shapers that lie further out of the focus of state archives.

This criticism is not entirely fair; Caro’s greatest strengths lie in the deep effort that he puts into contextualising the lives of his subjects and explaining the cultural and political constraints — the power blocs, institutions and hidden barriers to change that locked in the status quo — within which these ingenious and creative people worked.

Caro is very popular; and the way he breathes life into these topics — which can seem so abstract — is the reason for that popularity.

Turn Every Page is at its best when it seeks to show how Caro went about adding this texture and depth to his research.

It describes, for instance, his decision to move from Manhattan to the Hill Country of Texas so as to better immerse himself in the world from which Lyndon Johnson came. It shows Caro and Ina, his wife and lifelong research partner, visiting the LBJ Memorial Library, home to forty-five million pages of documents. The two are filmed poring over document boxes as Caro talks of how happy he and Ina are working there, bathing themselves in presidential minutiae.

Interspliced through the whole is (wonderful) archival footage — snapshots of a past when these men were handsome, young and ambitious. When they were shapers of the future, rather than survivors from the past.

The film’s pathos lies in how it captures these elderly men continuing — fighting against the dying of the light — to live deeply analogue lives. One scene involves Caro and Gottlieb wandering around their publisher’s office looking (in vain) for a pencil. In others, we see Caro, dressed as always in a full suit and tie, sitting at his desk writing longhand drafts, before transcribing them, two-finger typing on an ancient typewriter.

We see him stuffing carbon copies into a cupboard for safe keeping.

Perhaps the best insights the film has to offer are at the level of craft. “He’s a word painter… he paints with words,” says Gottlieb of Caro. Gottlieb is certainly a man who knows a little about word artistry, and what he says is true.

Caro talks of finding writing hard, of how he struggles to get the details right. Of how important that struggle is. Non-fiction that lasts, he says, is non-fiction in which mood, setting and context are given as much attention as they are in the best novels.

Turn Every Page is a great little film. Nearly two hours long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I watched it on a train journey from London to Edinburgh, ears hidden under big noise-cancelling headphones, and I laughed the whole way through. •

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Directed by Lizzy Gottlieb | Streaming on Amazon Prime and other services

The post Does anyone have a pencil? appeared first on Inside Story.

Politico’s Jack Shafer suggested it was Murdoch rather than the Dominion Voting System company that had somehow emerged the winner, despite the size of the payout. This is what News Corp does to make messes disappear, he wrote. “A hundred million here, a hundred million there, might crimp your finances, but in the Murdoch universe, paying such settlements is just the cost of doing business Murdoch-style.”

The company’s history does suggest settlements are part of the Murdoch modus operandi. As Shafer noted, News paid $US50 million to women who suffered sexual harassment at Fox, another $US15 million to an employee who complained of wage discrimination and $US500 million to a competitor in three separate actions over allegations of anticompetitive behaviour. Of the numerous other payouts, many are subject to non-disclosure agreements. And then there’s the invasion of privacy and other unethical conduct exposed by the hacking scandal in Britain, which the company tidied away by settling with legions of people.

But the Dominion case is different. The quantum of the payout — $US787.5 million, or half the company’s annual profit — is off the scale. It dwarfs the total amount paid during the hacking scandal and is generally seen as the largest defamation payout ever, by anyone, anywhere.

And this could be just the beginning. Another voting company, Smartmatic, is suing Fox for $US2.7 billion and has made allegations similar to Dominion’s. If it also settles for half, then Fox can kiss goodbye to the rest of the year’s profits and much of next year’s as well.

Then there’s a derivative case in which some of the “60 per cent of shareholders who aren’t Murdochs” are suing because they claim Fox board members and managers left them exposed to financial loss. The shareholders will allege that Fox decision-makers failed, despite numerous warnings, in their fiduciary duty to stop the on-air lies. Several cases are likely, all with eye watering amounts at stake. There’s also speculation the company will struggle to find insurance cover in future, or that its premiums will become prohibitively expensive.

The settlement has been a huge news story across the nation’s rival, and often tribal, TV networks. If the coverage I’ve seen is any guide, Murdoch isn’t having a great time in the court of public opinion either. On the relatively progressive MSNBC network, presenters were lining up all day to kick Fox and its on-air presenters, but especially Rupert Murdoch.

The most scathing attack was meted out by one of the network’s hosts, Lawrence O’Donnell, who delighted in pointing out that Murdoch “surrendered today like you have never seen him surrender before.” he claimed that in any other company the boss would be kicked out for the “stupidity” Murdoch had displayed.

O’Donnell argued that Murdoch had failed to provide the most basic oversight, such as insisting hosts issue the magic words “if that’s true” when discussing contested claims on air. He also accused Murdoch of mismanaging the Dominion law suit. If the company was always going to settle, he asked, why didn’t it do so before the chief executive and the most controversial on-air hosts were forced to go on oath and hand over their phones.

On this point, other commentators expressed gratitude to Dominion for pursuing the case long enough to force Fox to disclose all those internal emails and memos. Some even argued this was central to Dominion’s strategy; that it was a kind of gift to the nation and proof that Fox’s behaviour had undermined democracy itself.

The pre-trial documents remain on the public record and will continue to provide fodder for Murdoch-watchers for years to come. They’ve already revealed dozens of embarrassing details, such as high-profile Fox presenter Tucker Carlson’s passionate hatred of Trump despite his on-air adoration. They reveal the cynical culture and radically populist agenda inside an organisation that’s often captive to its own audience’s prejudices.

Over at Fox there’s been barely an on-air mention of the settlement. It was given perfunctory treatment when the network’s media reporter read a corporate statement that ended with the claim that the settlement “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” The statement also said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

Back on MSNBC, contributors were quick to point out that an acknowledgement is not the same as an admission. In fact, the statement was little more than an allusion to the fact that judge Eric Davis had already ruled that Fox’s coverage was full of falsehoods. Davis was so convinced that he also ruled this conclusion couldn’t be disputed in the trial.

Observers noted that an acknowledgement also falls a long way shy of an apology, and it quickly became apparent that Fox wouldn’t be issuing one. An intriguing question is how much extra cash News handed over to Dominion to avoid having to say sorry. One suspects quite a lot: when you think about it, an appropriate apology would be quite a mouthful. To do justice to the matter it would have to say something like “Sorry for lying, systematically and knowingly, while trashing the Dominion business and amplifying the conspiracy theories of a president trying to overturn a democratic election and incite insurrection.” I suspect News would pay a lot of money to avoid saying that out loud.

Despite the cost, there appears to be little hope that Fox will change its ways anytime soon. On the day after the ruling, Tucker Carlson was hammering on about the same old issues — the spread of trans culture, the failures of the Biden administration, perceived security threats, the culture wars. As usual, no progressive voices were on hand to temper the fear-mongering. So perhaps Shafer is right? The business may have been bruised, but the business model is still intact.

Since I started writing this article we’ve discovered what the case means for Crikey and the lawsuit brought by Lachlan Murdoch against the Private Media masthead. You may remember that Lachlan’s case centres on Crikey’s decision to publish, and then re-publish, an article that claimed the Murdochs were the “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 6 January uprising in the Washington.

The Dominion case exposed the weakness of Murdoch’s argument. Fox chose not to defend the claim that it knowingly and repeatedly published false information and conspiracy theories that favoured the side advocating an uprising. To be clear, the United States is one of the toughest jurisdictions in which to bring a case against the media. It wasn’t enough that Fox was consistently wrong, Dominion had to prove actual malice by demonstrating a wilful motivation to damage Dominion through its falsehoods. The discovery process revealed that even with that protection Fox would be hard-pressed to defend itself.

The resulting trove of internal Fox documents was a boon for Crikey’s lawyers, who had to make the much stronger case under Australian defamation law that Fox made a concerted effort to undermine public confidence in the election result, contributing to the uprising. We’ve all seen what’s in the memos, and so has Lachlan Murdoch. This morning he bowed to the inevitable. •

The post Bruised but not yet beaten appeared first on Inside Story.

One reason Trump was an early entrant is his insatiable desire for media attention (good or bad, it’s all publicity, he obviously believes). But a strategy was at work too: his efforts to garner media attention, control the Republican Party, dominate discussions within the chattering classes, and hoover up donations were designed to intimidate rivals and leave little room for those brave enough to consider a challenge.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, former vice-president Mike Pence, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and several others are loitering hesitantly on the sidelines. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have declared their candidature but remain largely unknown to most voters. (National Public Radio has compiled a longer catalogue of declared and possible candidates.)

When Republicans are provided with a list of potential presidential candidates and asked who they would vote for, Trump is still the clear winner. The most recent FiveThirtyEight analysis shows Trump on 49.3 per cent and DeSantis on 26.2 per cent, with Pence (5.8 per cent) and Haley (4.3 per cent) lagging, though ahead of several others who barely register. The RealClearPolitics poll average has similar results. History suggests these very early polls say a lot: candidates polling more than 30 per cent have a decent chance of becoming the nominee; those polling below 10 percent are usually doomed.

Trump’s margin over DeSantis (his only viable competitor for the moment, despite not having declared his candidature) varies from thirteen to thirty-seven percentage points. The gap was narrowing until news broke of Trump’s recent indictment in New York. Since then his lead has surged, as has his fundraising.

Polls taken since the indictment, and with several other more serious indictments likely, reflect Trump’s two key strengths — his rusted-on Make America Great Again base and his control over the wider Republican Party, whose members are fearful of breaking with him.

Many Republicans seem to have been energised by the looming cases. Eighty per cent of self-identified Republicans told a national Marist poll that the investigations are a “witch hunt”; just 18 per cent said they were fair. By contrast, a majority of all Americans (56 per cent) say the investigations into Trump are fair and a significant majority (75 per cent) say Trump has behaved illegally and/or unethically.

Despite these apparent portents of success, though, there are growing signs that key support groups (primarily older, white Republican voters), senior members of Congress (including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell) and the Republican establishment (wealthy donors, the Murdoch empire and some right-wing commentators) are finally deserting Trump, or at least considering that possibility.

The evidence suggests Trump is losing older white Christian voters, key to his 2016 win, who have soured on his coarse and divisive language and his undignified persona. The six-point fall in their support for Trump between 2016 and 2020 may have been critical in the key battleground states that decided the 2020 election.

Support from this group continues to erode. The recent Marist poll, for example, found white conservative seniors were not as enthusiastic as other Republicans, with only 61 per cent calling the threats of indictment a “witch hunt” and 37 per cent saying they were fair. A March poll among Republicans in Iowa, a state with a significant older white Christian demographic, indicated that 74 per cent would “likely” vote for Trump if he were the party’s nominee in 2024 but only 47 percent would “definitely” vote for him.

As it stands, Trump’s support among Republicans is almost certainly enough to win him the presidential primary, regardless of who else enters the race. But it will not be enough to win him the general election. Even the New York Post, a News Corp publication well-recognised as favouring conservative candidates, finds Trump’s unfavourability ratings a huge hurdle. Closer to home, the Murdoch-owned Australian recently worried that “Tarnished Trump May Hand Biden a New Term.”

But Trump and his staff seem unable to crunch the numbers. Their focus is on his adoring MAGA base, and they have shown little interest in appealing to Republicans whose support is wavering, or to the independent voters essential for a win in 2024.

Trump narrowly won independents in 2016, but they swung to Biden in 2020 by a nine-point margin. Today, only 37 per cent of independents approve of Trump, and fully 64 per cent don’t want him to be president. They are appalled by his refusal to preside over a peaceful transition and his role in the violence at the Capitol on 6 January 2020; they are tired of his endless election denial and his focus on perceived slights; they reject his relentless campaign of political revenge against those who refused to stand with him.

This erosion of support from crucial voters in key battleground states like Pennsylvania has rightly been described as a self-inflicted wound. Trump believes that his capture of MAGA Republicans has made him the most powerful force in the Republican Party: he basks in their uncritical admiration and sees no reason to change or to compromise his campaign strategy. He has reportedly told advisers that he must “run as himself” in order to pull off a 2016-style victory.

Meanwhile dissent continues to grow inside the Republican tent and within a growing Never Trump movement. Mostly this sentiment reflects anger that Trump’s interventions in the 2022 midterm elections cost Republicans seats in the House and control of the Senate and that further losses are likely in 2024. These dissidents, too, are increasingly disgusted by his behaviour and concerned that his legal troubles will engulf him at the very time he needs to be focused on the 2024 election.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp is among those making the case for “anyone but Trump.” He has challenged Republicans to seek out a presidential nominee who gives voters a “reason to like us” and offers a vision for the future rather than an obsession with the past.

A potential rival for the Republican nomination, Chris Christie, was more forceful: “[Trump] is losing. And if he doesn’t change course, both in terms of the substance of what he is discussing and the way that he approaches the American people, then he will lose.” Even Mike Pence has suggested that he won’t support Trump again, saying “I think we’ll have better choices.”

Just as significantly, big-name Republican donors and fundraisers are looking to back alternatives to Trump. Both the Koch–affiliated Americans For Prosperity and the anti-tax Club for Growth have signalled they are seeking another candidate. “He is a metastasising cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party,” Republican fundraiser Eric Levine told Politico. “He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. Because of him Chuck Schumer is the Leader Schumer, and the progressive agenda is threatening to take over the country. And he is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”

We should note that a Never Trump movement existed in 2016, and at one point a key figure was senator Lindsey Graham, now a fully paid-up member of the suck-up-to-Trump camp. That first anti-Trump drive fell apart when he won the presidency, and today, if its members calculate that Trump could win, the movement may well do so again.

Trump’s ability to raise millions of dollars from his base means he doesn’t care that major donors are looking elsewhere. His campaign says he has raised more than US$34 million for his 2024 run since the start of the year, boosted by a big bump in donations (US$15.4 million) since the announcement of the New York criminal charges.

(It’s worth noting that these are not the figures reported to the Federal Election Commission. Trump’s April filing reports US$14.5 million raised during the first three months of this year, with at least US$2.7 million raised from individual donors in the two weeks after 18 March. This puts him well ahead of his rivals but lags behind the pace set in his earlier campaigns.)

Trump’s campaign is increasingly funded by hundreds of thousands of individual donations, the vast majority under US$200. It is estimated that Trump and his close allies have raised more than US$390 million since election day in 2020 through aggressive fund-raising solicitations to his MAGA crowds. A significant proportion appears to be being spent on the legal expenses of Trump and his cohorts.

Trump’s unwavering campaign formula faces one further set of risk factors: the changing political and demographic landscape of the United States.

Voter support has moved to the left on issues like guns, abortion and race. The rulings of the Supreme Court, dominated by Trump appointees, have gone against public opinion on abortion and guns and will soon encroach on key social policy areas like marriage equality, healthcare and protections for transgender people and immigrants.

For decades, Republicans relied on abortion to rally their conservative base, vowing to undo Roe v Wade and outlaw the procedure. But since last June’s Supreme Court ruling denying the federal right to a surgical abortion, and since a judge in Texas sought to ban the drug used for medical abortions, voters have been galvanised and abortion has emerged as a potent issue.

Although Trump boasted about his anti-abortion Supreme Court nominees and took credit for their Roe v Wade ruling, he has begun to uncharacteristically tiptoe around this issue, even in the face of Florida’s action to deny abortions after six weeks.

But Trump has grasped one issue with both hands, and that’s gun rights, a core issue for his MAGA base that will be a tough sell in a general election. At the recent National Rifle Association convention, he promised that, as president, he would make sure “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

A February Gallup poll showed Americans’ dissatisfaction with existing gun laws has risen to 63 per cent, the highest since Gallup started asking the question twenty-three years ago, and an increase of seven points in just a year. Many more mass shootings have occurred since then — thirty in the first seventeen days of April alone — and many more people have died from gun-related causes.

Voter demographics are also changing — a fact that has driven much of the Republican efforts to limit voting rights. The Brookings Institute sees younger voters, with their preference for Democratic candidates, as upending politics. Youthful racial minorities are seen as the primary demographic engine of the nation’s future growth, countering an ageing, slow-growing and soon to be declining white population.

Donald Trump long seemed immune to the rules of political life and the consequences of even the most outrageous conduct and the most obnoxious language. Now, perhaps, that is changing. In recent focus groups, most “persuadable” Republican voters stood by their past support of Trump but some — feeling “overwhelmed” and “fatigued” — are looking beyond Trump for the 2024 primaries.

Their exhaustion with Trump doesn’t mean they are looking for a break with Trumpist policies, of course. They aren’t necessarily seeking more moderate policies, or even more moderate messaging; they are looking for someone less divisive — and perhaps less self-centred.

“I and a lot of other Republicans who were supportive of President Trump are becoming less and less supportive,” said one Republican voter. “Not because I’m a ‘Never Trumper.’ I just don’t believe Trump is the best person to move this party forward.” •

The post Is Donald Trump losing his grip? appeared first on Inside Story.

The fallout of Brexit in 2016 brought an immediate souring of relations between the British and Irish governments, the likes of which had not been seen in decades. More critically, though, it rekindled communal tensions north of the border, culminating in the closure of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont and the suspension of power sharing in May last year.

Much is now riding on a new British government with Rishi Sunak at the helm, signalling a more pragmatic approach to the Northern Ireland border. The recently negotiated “Windsor framework” for regulating goods crossing the Irish Sea has produced a tentative thaw in relations with the European Union, renewing hopes that Stormont might soon be reopened. Biden’s hastily planned visit was thus a calculated move to tip the balance at a crucial juncture.

His devout Irish Catholic affinities, however, also risked achieving the very opposite by raising the question of whether a presidential visit was the very last thing Ireland — north or south — needed at this time.

At his first and only public engagement in Belfast on Wednesday morning, Biden called on the people of Northern Ireland to leave their history behind and embrace the opportunities of a shared future. “Renewal,” “progress” and “repair” were the dominant themes in a speech that made only scant reference to the divisions of the past.

It was a big ask of a community only just emerging from the “decade of centenaries” — a rapid succession of major anniversaries marking some of the most difficult moments in modern Irish history, from the Ulster crisis of 1912, through the Great War, the struggle for independence, and the fateful partition of Ireland in 1921.

Historian Ian McBride recently said of his country’s acute sensitivity to the weight of history, “We’ve come to believe that dealing with the past or working through the past is somehow good for us.” But it’s only ten years since many people feared that the coming wave of commemorations would be anything but good for the peace process in Northern Ireland. Academics, politicians and community leaders were enlisted to find ways of ensuring that raking over the past would not spark a recrudescence of communal discord.

In the end, the decade of centenaries came and went largely without incident, foreshadowed by a historic visit to Dublin by Queen Elizabeth II — the first of its kind since her grandfather George V in 1911. Even the bedrock enmities evoked by the iconic year 1916 — Dublin’s Easter Rising and the loyalist veneration of the Battle of the Somme — produced few complications when it came to the commemorative program.

But 2016 brought dim tidings of an entirely different kind with the Brexit vote of June that year. Ultimately, it was not the inner workings of Irish memory that tested the mettle of the peace process, but the entirely unforeseen exigencies of a crisis manufactured in England.

An extraordinary inattention to the past was arguably Brexit’s defining characteristic — and its most potent legacy in Ireland. The referendum was notable for the almost complete absence of debate about the possible effects of leaving the European Union on a key plank of the Good Friday Agreement — keeping the Northern Ireland border as invisible as possible. It was one thing to dispense with border checks when both sides were members of the EU single market, but another matter entirely after the imposition of a hard border between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Even as these problems came painfully to light in the referendum’s protracted aftermath, advocates of a so-called “hard Brexit” continued to display a callous disregard for the Good Friday Agreement’s brittle compromise. “Softer” options were available to successive Tory governments, but any dilution of Britain’s freedom to chart its own course proved unacceptable to the Brexit ultras. Polling data corroborates this, suggesting that the most passionate leavers were less likely to care about the peace dividend in Northern Ireland.

Biden’s heartfelt message to his hosts — that “for too long, Ireland’s story has been told in the past tense” — somehow failed to capture the issue in all its complexity. Much of the recent turmoil might have been avoided had the past tense — not least the astonishing gains of the last twenty-five years — been given considerably more airplay.

In any event, Biden soon dispensed with his own maxim as he crossed the border into his ancestral home of Carlingford in County Louth. Suddenly, talking “in the past tense” seemed the only thing on the president’s mind in a place that felt “like I’m coming home.” It was as though he had stepped into an entirely different world. The fifty-mile drive from Belfast might as well have been fifty years.

Addressing the Irish parliament in Dublin the following day, Biden notched up eighteen references to “history” and the “past,” reflecting on the “hope and the heartbreak” of his ancestors upon “leaving their beloved homeland to begin their new lives in America.” These stories, he urged, comprised “the very heart of what binds Ireland and America together” — a story of shared “dreams,” “values,” “heritage,” “hopes,” “journeys” and, crucially for Biden, “blood.”

The remainder of his trip was an act of personal homage, flying to County Mayo to visit a family history and genealogical centre before proceeding to the Catholic pilgrimage site of Knock Shrine (the scene of a purported holy apparition in 1879). He rounded off his visit with a major speech to a crowd of some 27,000 outside St Muredach’s Cathedral — another site of deep family significance. “I’ll tell you what,” he assured his audience, “it means the world to me and my entire family to be embraced as Mayo Joe, son of Ballina… the stories of this place have become part of my soul.”

As only the second Catholic president of the United States, Biden rivals John F. Kennedy for the sheer intensity of his identification with his Irish “soul.” As with Kennedy, his Irishness is bound inextricably to his Catholicism, which is why his equally English heritage (on his father’s side) consistently plays second fiddle. Moreover, it is a memory of Ireland rooted in a bygone age — “that fusion of ethnicity and religion,” as Fintan O’Toole puts it, “that has lost much of its grip on the homeland.”

Conspicuously, it is also an Irishness aligned with the very atavisms that the Good Friday Agreement was meant to transcend. Biden’s uncorked nostalgia for his family ties can be irresistibly endearing in its simplicity and humble authenticity. But it also carries unnerving undertones given the tragic consequences of tribal loyalties over the last fifty years.

Little wonder, then, that leading Unionist figures spent much of the week dismissing his credentials as a potential peace broker. Former first minister Arlene Foster was the most forthright in declaring that the president “hates the United Kingdom.” Other Democratic Unionist Party figures concurred that Biden was by far “the most partisan president there has ever been when dealing with Northern Ireland” — suspicions that were only compounded by Biden’s veiled criticism of a UK government that “should be working closer with Ireland” to resolve the wreckage of Brexit.

Though Biden seems largely unaware of the recidivist slant of his Irish colours, he nevertheless understands that his appeal is limited in the North. There would be no reprise of Bill Clinton’s celebrated role in brokering the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The trip itself was cobbled together hastily, at unusually short notice, with an itinerary shrouded in secrecy.

At no stage did the president sit down for direct talks with the key stakeholders or engage directly in problem-solving of any kind. Indeed, the total length of his stay in Belfast was barely sixteen hours (much of it in bed). No press conference ensued from his brief encounter with Rishi Sunak, nor was it possible to deliver his keynote address from the symbolic chair of the Stormont Assembly.

This may have represented a form of political leverage in its own right — holding Sunak and the DUP at arm’s length until they commit fully to implementing the Windsor framework and minimising the disruptions of Brexit. In that sense, the contrasting warmth in Carlingford sent its own clear message.

But if the president had hoped that his mere presence in Northern Ireland might move the dial on a rapid restoration of power sharing, the decision to mix the political with the personal was probably ill-judged. In a week when petrol bombs were hurled at police in Derry by the “New IRA,” he might have chosen instead to prolong his stay in Northern Ireland and leave the family history tour to his retirement. •

The post Mayo Joe, son of Ballina appeared first on Inside Story.

That the two officials — diplomat Nick Warner and former army officer Paul Symon — had gone on to head the Australian Secret Intelligence Service was a twist Sogavare must have noticed. Warner and Symon might have had close knowledge of the Solomons, and of Sogavare himself, but their ASIS links were also a reminder that Canberra could act behind the scenes if it wanted.

Which is what it did. Australian intelligence leaked the text of the Solomons–China security pact to Sogavare’s most feared domestic rival, Daniel Suidani, premier of the populous island of Malaita. Suidani, who had fallen out with Sogavare when the latter switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing in 2019, had continued to deal with Taipei and talked of possible secession.

Jawboning by Scott Morrison and Joe Biden’s administration had persuaded Sogavare to disavow any intent to allow Chinese military bases. Yet he went ahead and signed the security pact anyway.

In response to the leak, Sogavare’s critics in the national parliament moved a vote of no-confidence. It failed amid allegations that Chinese interests had bribed MPs to support the prime minister. Mobs opposed to the deal looted and burned large parts of Honiara, including its thriving Chinatown. Australia and New Zealand sent in police and soldiers. Australia and China then competed to supply weapons and vehicles to the Royal Solomon Islands Police. (The country of 700,000 has no military.)

Meanwhile, an attempt by Beijing to broaden its foothold turned into a debacle. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi stormed a Pacific Islands Forum session in Fiji offering a broad security pact with the ten island states that recognise Beijing. He was rebuffed for trying to pre-empt the extensive consultation that such regional initiatives require.

The crisis was over. But strategic rivalry simmers. Last year, thirty-three Solomons police officers went to China for extended training. Just before Anthony Albanese visited Port Moresby in January to cajole PNG’s James Marape into a bilateral security treaty and announce expanded seasonal worker places, Beijing gave the PNG defence force a new hospital. The United States might have reopened its embassy in Honiara, but when Sogavare hosts the South Pacific Games in a new Chinese-built stadium this November, a VIP from Beijing will no doubt be guest of honour.

In Australia, meanwhile, the perceived Chinese threat in the Pacific has created a school of academic and think-tank study. As Michael Wesley observes in the superb first chapter of his new history of RAMSI, Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, Australia’s worries tap into an old seam. Denial of the Pacific to anti-Western interests is “arguably the foundational imperative of Australian international policy,” Wesley argues. Hence the “disproportional reactions” when Pacific states court deals with potentially hostile interests, which have included the Soviet Union, Gaddafi’s Libya and Chavez’s Venezuela.

At such moments, Canberra is wont to call on its imperial friends, the British and now the Americans, to do the heavy lifting in defence and aid. “Australia’s engagement with the Pacific is a story of passion outstripping actions, of ambitions outstripping abilities,” Wesley writes. “It is a record of long stretches of lassitude and inattention punctuated by intense periods of concern and engagement.”

If pieces like David Kilcullen’s essay in the latest edition of Australian Foreign Affairs can get a run then we are in one of those intense periods. Stepping outside his usual field of counterinsurgency, Kilcullen makes much of China’s vaunted but largely untested claims to have “carrier-busting” steerable ballistic missiles, and conjures up a Chinese thrust down through the Pacific like that of Japan in 1942, using island missile bases to cut us off from America.

Why it would want to do this is unfathomable. Unlike Japan at that time, China has all the petroleum and strategic minerals it wants from willing sellers like Australia. Its military focus is on securing the South China Sea for its ballistic missile submarine force and keeping up pressure on Taiwan. Forces projected into the South Pacific would be sitting ducks. But, says Kilcullen, don’t look at intent, look at capabilities. By this measure, I’d add, India is also a threat.

Rory Medcalf, who heads the spook school known as the National Security College at the Australian National University, accepts China’s “neo-colonial ambitions” in the Pacific as a given, but is more nuanced. A Chinese military base would be a direct threat, he says. “But even absent that scenario, the prospect of a Pacific island government turning to the guns and truncheons of a one-party nationalist megastate to supress domestic dissent is confronting.”

Again unconsciously tapping into the buck-passing tradition traced by Wesley, he sees Australia acting as a “guide and an informal coordinator” for powers in Europe, North America and Asia “poised to help the Pacific cope with China’s disruptive power.” But he also has to acknowledge that the “Indo-Pacific” perspective of which he has been a leading proponent can be seen by Pacific islanders as diluting their regional identity and demanding they take America’s side against China.

On that score, there have been no takers. As Wesley remarked at the launch of his book, the attitude of Pacific governments to Chinese aid and investment is “bring it on.” The region has never had so much aid from, and access to, Australia and other US-aligned powers.

Peter Connolly, a recently retired Australian army colonel who recently finished an ANU doctorate on China in Melanesia, shows in his Australian Foreign Affairs essay, “Grand Strategy,” just how flexible, resourced and patient China’s approach to the region is becoming. The last few years have seen a leap in the quality of its diplomats posted to Melanesian capitals: two senior colonels of the People’s Liberation Army intelligence branch became defence attachés in Port Moresby and Suva in 2020; elsewhere, in countries without militaries, senior police officers are posted as liaison officers.

Senior colonel Zhang Xiaojiang found the PNG defence force less open to cultivation, so he has concentrated on the under-resourced Royal PNG Constabulary, upgrading its CCTV surveillance in Port Moresby, funding a new medical clinic and sending in riot-control equipment ahead of last year’s elections. “By sensing gaps and enquiring about needs he gradually discovered ways to develop appreciation for the PRC” — the People’s Republic of China — “and appeared to learn from PNG’s traditional partners in the process,” Connolly writes.

Police forces across Melanesia certainly have plenty of resource gaps. By focusing on a Chinese military threat that seems quite improbable, our security watchdogs are barking up the wrong tree, ignoring the real security issues facing Pacific islanders, particularly in Melanesia.

Only in Fiji do the police have anything like the numbers widely seen as appropriate to population: some 3000 officers for 900,000 people. And it was there, during Frank Bainimarama’s recently ended prime ministership, that the police became an instrument of political repression without much Chinese assistance.

Solomon Islands has 1150 police for its 736,000 population, and PNG only 7300 (including reserves) for a population generally put somewhere around ten million. The PNG force has hardly grown since independence in 1975, while the population has trebled.

Few citizens rely on the PNG police for help. If they do, they must pay, ostensibly for fuel and other call-out expenses but also with an element of straight-out bribery. The police can be brutal, corrupt and under-trained. Often, they act as guns for hire used by loggers and other commercial interests to repress local communities. It’s for these reasons that citizens report crime and conflict to traditional elders, pastors in their church or neighbourhood committees in urban settlements.

A recent study for the PNG-Australia Policing Partnership, a forum for the police leadership in both countries, urged a doubling of PNG police numbers, an annual budget lift of around $51 million and a one-off injection of $1.6 billion to provide the resources the force needs to do its job.

Sinclair Dinnen, a long-term ANU-based scholar of the region’s crime and security, doubts this is the answer. “The police have to be better looked after,” he tells me after his recent field trip to PNG. “But in some ways there’s an argument for having a small, well looked after, professional force who have enough fuel and access to transport, who are skilled up in investigations and doing the policing kind of thing.”

At grassroots level, Dinnen sees another tier of security modelled on the “community auxiliary police” New Zealand has been funding in Bougainville since the end of the civil war there two decades ago. The island has only three police stations, often unmanned. The auxiliary police, drawn from communities, are often better educated than the regular police; in consultation with local chiefs, they deal with less serious crimes.

In some parts of PNG, Dinnen concedes, restoring law and order requires more than this hybrid model. He points to regions like Hela and Enga, where winners and losers emerge from large-scale resource projects and rivals fight it out with military-grade firearms. “You get what are low levels of insurgency, in fact,” he says. “And no police force should be expected to deal with that.”

Wesley’s book shows us that RAMSI strayed into this field of community policing for a while. After the initial success in restoring peace, “a cultural divide between modes of policing, which came to be seen as ‘Western’ versus ‘Pacific’ ways, began to open up,” he writes. Australian and New Zealand officers were seen as enforcement-oriented and aloof. Police from the Pacific islands invested time and effort in building links to local communities, taking care to respect cultural and religious values and acknowledge traditional leadership structures.

The islands police “understood the importance of sharing food, attending church, and working with traditional kastom processes to help resolve disputes,” writes Wesley. With police likely to be underfunded once RAMSI packed up, it was a good model. But for reasons Wesley doesn’t explain the pilot scheme’s funding ended after five years; presumably the scheme was beyond Canberra’s comprehension.

Wesley, who was deputy director of the Office of National Assessments at the time, sees an unusual confluence in the circumstances that gave birth to RAMSI. The Solomons government was on its knees and bankrupt; John Howard was flush with his accidental success in East Timor; and, with the disaster of Iraq still to become apparent, it was the high-water mark of muscular Western nation-rebuilding intervention.

It is hard now to think of any government that would allow large numbers of foreign police and finance officials — with legal immunity, investigative and arrest powers, and tax-free status — to handle a country’s security.

For all the diplomatic nuances used to gain regional cover for Australia’s intervention and the initial restoration of civil order, though, RAMSI gradually ran out of steam as local politicos reasserted their role as distributors of state resources. Within five years of RAMSI’s departure, Australia was again sending in riot police and soldiers to quell unrest and providing more lethal firearms to local police.

Now, Canberra’s focus is elsewhere, as it orders longer-range anti-ship and land-attack missiles to fend off the perceived threat of an attack by China. The Australian Federal Police has set up a new Pacific branch directed at border security and drug smuggling — our problems — rather than nurturing models of policing that suit Pacific communities. Dinnen, for one, suggests Canberra needs to cool it. “Sogavare is not going to be there forever, and in Honiara and PNG below the elite level there’s a lot of anti-Chinese racism that breaks out in urban areas.”

In her essay in the latest Australian Foreign Affairs, Solomons journalist Dorothy Wickham cites community-level fears of where the Chinese embrace might take the government. But she also points out that islanders’ everyday contact is less with Australians than with Chinese people: “Australians are here as aid workers, diplomats and police, but they are not mixing with local people.” With thousands of young islanders getting involved with the Pacific labour schemes in Australia and New Zealand, a new familiarity and affection is possible — as long as abuses are seen to be punished.

As for geopolitical rivalries, “the Solomon Islands government should try to get what it can from foreign powers,” Wickham writes. “But we need to choose those things with long-term benefits in mind. We should be careful what we wish for.” •

Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands
By Michael Wesley | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 310 pages

Girt by China: Power Play in the Pacific
Australian Foreign Affairs | Issue 17, February 2023 | $24.99 | 128 pages

The post Ambiguous embrace appeared first on Inside Story.

The deal developed by the RAN’s vice-admiral Jonathan Mead and his project team, and accepted by the Albanese cabinet, is like a boy given carte blanche in a toy shop: we’ll have three to five of the US-model Virginia-class subs; then eight or more of the British follow-on to the existing Astute-class, to be built in Adelaide.

Albanese insists that Australian “sovereignty” will be paramount. But until 2033 or so, Australia will be protected in large part by US Navy and Royal Navy nuclear submarines patrolling out of the RAN’s Cockburn Sound base near Perth. The base will be expanded at a cost of $1 billion to accommodate them.

Only in 2033 will the RAN get its first nuclear-powered submarine, a Virginia-class boat transferred from the United States. It is unclear whether this — or the next two, three or four subs — will be new or second-hand. That will depend on how quickly the two US shipyards building the Virginia-class can ramp up production beyond the two per year demanded by the US Navy and concerned members of the US Congress.

To this end, Biden is asking Congress for US$4.6 billion. Canberra will be putting in A$3 billion, with a bit of that going to the British submarine yard at Barrow-in-Furness.

Rather than building new slipways, the extra capacity will be created by introducing a nightshift at the American yards. With US unemployment at a record low and the yards paying somewhat miserly wages to new staff, that might be hard to achieve. Australia is also hoping to rotate workers from Adelaide into the US and British yards to gain experience.

American experts think the transferred submarines will be second-hand, probably from the third and fourth production “blocks” commissioned since 2014. This means some will have as few as fourteen years remaining of their thirty-three-year reactor life when they are transferred in 2033 and beyond.

The price tag is put at somewhere between A$268 billion and A$368 billion over thirty years. The government insists that the initial $9 billion, over the next four years, won’t be felt at all: it will be met by $6 billion that would otherwise have gone to the cancelled French conventional submarines and $3 billion carved out of other defence programs. Expect protests over the latter, especially from the army, which is likely to see its heavy armour cut back.

The San Diego announcement by the three leaders has been greeted by a display of bipartisanship. The Coalition claims AUKUS as its own initiative, under the helmsmanship of Scott Morrison. But once it comes to finding the money — likely to be equivalent to 0.15 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product each year — the bipartisanship will start to fray.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has already nobly offered to support cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care to fit the bill. Expect some in Labor and the crossbenches to suggest the stage-three tax cuts and the capital gains tax discount are fairer sacrifices. What better excuse than national security and the Chinese peril for breaking election promises?

The biggest loser in the short term is South Australia. It is left with only the two-year-long refurbishments of the RAN’s Collins-class conventional submarines, one by one from 2026, when the first boat, the HMAS Collins, reaches thirty years in service.

Further work depends on progress in the joint British, US and Australian design work on the Astute-class follow-on submarine, known as the SSN-AUKUS. If it is ready to build, the first steel will be cut and laid down in the early 2030s and the first submarine commissioned in the early 2040s, with the rest to follow into the late 2050s. It is unclear whether the US will build some of these AUKUS submarines for itself, or continue developing the Virginia-class successor, known as the SSN (X).

BAE Systems has taken nine to eleven years to complete each of the seven Astutes for the Royal Navy, as against just under seven years for the American yards to turn out a Virginia-class boat. That relative slowness has already given rise to doubts about the promised schedule and cost of what is an entirely new design.

“Defence does not have a strong record in this area and the navy in particular has struggled to maintain design discipline,” Peter Dean, a professor and defence expert at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, wrote in the Nine papers. “Constant design changes have slowed projects, frustrated industry and blown out budgets,” Dean went on.

BAE Systems is also running the $45 billion program for nine Hunter-class frigates. They were originally priced at $30 billion, and the first was supposed to be laid down in Adelaide last year but work has not yet commenced. The frigate “was supposed to bring synergies by sharing the design between the UK, Canada and Australia,” wrote Dean. “But this project has blown out the budget, hit delays and fractured its initial approach as the design has constantly been modified, raising concerns about its viability.”

Former Coalition foreign minister Alexander Downer, for one, thinks the 40 per cent cost savings of building the SSN-AUKUS submarines overseas rather than in Adelaide will be tempting for a future government. “Assuming South Australia’s relative decline in its share of the national population will continue,” Downer wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week, “federal governments will become less concerned about holding a diminishing number of seats in South Australia and more concerned about how they’re going to pay for their other expensive and right-on plans.”

It’s tough, but Adelaide has declined the chance of sending a fourth generation of the Downer dynasty to Canberra.

Cameron Stewart, a former defence signals analyst who is now one of the Australian’s best strategic commentators, thinks it could go further than this, and Rishi Sunak or his successor could be in for the kind of treatment Morrison meted out to France’s Emmanuel Macron.

The decision to go for the British design is “madness,” he wrote. “After Australia has done all of the very hard work — overcoming the regulations, the red tape, the export control, the politics — in securing a system whereby we can acquire three to five Virginia-class submarines from Washington, it gives it all up. For what? To help build from scratch in Adelaide a completely separate next-generation British designed nuclear-powered submarine.”

“This all but guarantees a future nightmare of massive delays, development risk, price blow-outs and schedule nightmares — everything that we see on every first-of-type submarine project around the world,” Stewart went on. It would be better just to keep on acquiring Virginia-class submarines rather than making a “needless U-turn” to keep Adelaide and the British happy.

The long schedule at least means that if the balloon goes up over Taiwan — as feared within the next three years by the hawkish thinkers recently assembled by the Nine papers in their “Red Alert” series — conflict between the United States and China will happen without us being able to do much about it, nor China paying us much attention.

We still await a formal statement to parliament and the Australian people outlining why we need these very large submarines with the capability to cruise to China’s nearby waters and bombard it with cruise missiles. Defence of the archipelagic approaches to Australia will be left to smaller, silent conventional submarines: our own Collins-class for a while and then perhaps with some help from the Indonesian, Singaporean and Vietnamese navies. •

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Together with his companies and a number of his senior White House staff, Trump is facing an unprecedented array of state and federal legal investigations and lawsuits. He will have to navigate every one of them, and associated financial and reputational costs, during his campaign to secure the Republican presidential nomination for 2024.

Perhaps the most serious charges are those likely to emerge from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s role in inciting the 6 January riots and attempting to overturn the 2020 election result, and his obstruction of efforts to locate classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

In the case of the Mar-a-Lago documents, the improper handling of federal records and obstruction of a federal investigation could be the basis of charges under the Espionage Act. The 6 January case is more complex: it is looking at how Trump spent money raised purportedly to help pay for legal challenges to the election; at efforts to have his own slates of state electors file fraudulent official certificates; and at who organised and funded the 6 January rallies. It could result in charges that Trump and others engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the United States and/or obstruct official government proceedings.

In Georgia, a criminal investigation is looking at Trump’s attempt to persuade state officials to overturn Joe Biden’s win in their state. In a post-election call, Trump told Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, that he wanted “to find 11,780 votes” (Biden won the state by 11,779 votes). It is a federal felony to knowingly attempt “to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” through “the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.”

A grand jury convened to make a preliminary investigation has concluded that multiple indictments are warranted for Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the Georgia results. The decision whether to proceed will be made by the Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani Willis.

Trump also faces a raft of civil charges. These include a joint lawsuit from a number of members of Congress and Capitol police officers contending that Trump’s fiery speech incited the 6 January attack on the Capitol, and claiming damages, and two separate New York investigations into the Trump Organization and Trump’s web of related businesses. Both the New York probes are examining allegations that Trump misrepresented his companies’ finances in order to obtain bank loans or to reduce taxes.

This brings us back to the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into the money paid to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a tryst with Trump. Daniels was given US$130,000 in the closing days of the 2016 campaign by Trump lawyer and long-time “fixer” Michael Cohen, who was later reimbursed by Trump. Cohen confessed to violating New York State election law and served jail time in 2018.

In January this year, district attorney Alvin Bragg empanelled a grand jury to hear evidence about Trump’s role in the payment. Kellyanne Conway, who held a senior advisory position on the Trump presidential campaign and later became a White House counsellor, has given evidence, though it’s not clear whether she appeared before the grand jury or simply met with prosecutors. It was Conway who Cohen notified when the payment had been made, and who presumably then notified Trump.

To make this case a felony (a more serious crime punishable by a prison sentence of more than a year), prosecutors will have to show that Trump was involved in the falsification of business records. (The Trump Organization labelled the US$130,000 as legal expenses.)

As the shape of the 2024 presidential campaign starts to emerge, these proceedings will become political dynamite. Special Counsel Smith’s pace has quickened in recent weeks, signifying to observers that he is working to present his charges before the presidential primary debate season begins in August. Charging decisions in the Georgia inquiry are expected in the (northern) spring or summer.

These unusual and complex probes have turned some of Trump’s many current and former lawyers and senior presidential aides into witnesses or even potential targets of investigation. In recent weeks the special counsel has issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas to high-profile witnesses including former vice-president Mike Pence and Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with strict deadlines for responses. These have triggered multiple, closed-door legal battles that could delay proceedings for some months and may well be part of Trump’s management strategy.

Trump lawyers have asked a federal judge to block the subpoena for Pence to testify, citing executive privilege. Pence himself has said he is prepared to fight his subpoena “as far as it needs to go.” While he is obviously looking to protect himself and his own possible presidential bid, this might also be a feint to protect himself against attacks from Trump, who has already accused him of disloyalty.

Trump’s push for all-encompassing executive privilege is an ongoing attempt to enable him (and by extension his aides) to withhold information from the Congress, the courts and the public. But this presidential power may not reach as far as he hopes: the constitution gives presidents immunity from being sued only over their official actions, and the US Supreme Court has never held that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution. The question, then, is whether Trump’s 6 January speech and efforts to overturn the election result fell within his official job responsibilities.

A judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled last year that the case brought by the members of Congress and the Capitol Police could proceed because Trump’s various communications before and on 6 January amounted to a “call to action.” Trump’s lawyers appealed that ruling to the District of Columbia Circuit Court, which then asked for the justice department’s opinion.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, the civil division of the justice department said that if Trump’s speech incited the 6 January riot — the contention found credible by the District Court — then he was not shielded by immunity. Urging the appeals court to allow the suit to proceed, the department’s lawyers wrote that the “traditional function [of public speaking] is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence of the sort the District Court found that the plaintiffs’ complaints have plausibly alleged here.” If the justice department says this about a civil case, it should hold the same position in a criminal case.

This is not the only pending case that tests the limits of when Trump was acting in his capacity as president. A separate District of Columbia Court is weighing whether he was acting in his official capacity when he spoke disparagingly of writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in the 1990s and is suing him for defamation. In this case the justice department agreed with Trump’s lawyers that he made these remarks while answering reporters’ questions and was acting in his official capacity. This case against Trump looks likely to be dismissed.

Some of Trump’s lawyers are using another blocking tactic, asserting lawyer–client privilege. This argument can be overcome under the “crime–fraud exception” if prosecutors can show that Trump’s lawyers’ actions are part of a criminal scheme. Federal prosecutors are attempting to use the exception to compel further testimony in relation to the advice from lawyer Evan Corcoran used by Trump to obstruct the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation.

Legal jousting has been a way of doing business for Trump for decades. A USATODAY analysis in 2016 found that he and his businesses had been involved in at least 3500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the previous three decades. Even as he claimed the Oval Office he faced seventy-five active lawsuits.

Trump adopted his litigious nature early, after his family company was sued by the justice department in 1973 on grounds that its rental housing policy violated the Fair Housing Act. He and his father used the notorious and famously combative lawyer Roy Cohn to counter-sue, claiming defamation. There was no real victory, but his biographers see this episode as driving home the key lessons he learned from Cohn: deny, deflect, delay and don’t put anything in writing. Perhaps this last dictate explains why Trump doesn’t use email.

Trump has carried these lessons through five decades of lawsuits, tax challenges and business failures, two impeachments and more legal investigations than any other president. As one biographer, a former federal prosecutor, wrote, “[Trump] sued at the drop of a hat. He sued for sport; he sued to achieve control; and he sued to make a point. He sued as a means of destroying or silencing those who crossed him. He became a plaintiff in chief.”

Trump might often threaten to sue, but he rarely follows through and almost always loses when he does. This is partly a result of poor legal advice: infighting has always been rife in a legal team whose personnel has changed dramatically over the years.

More recently he has used many curiously incompetent, and sometimes fraudulent, legal advisers. These include Rudy Giuliani (now in legal jeopardy over his false claims about the 2020 election), Sidney Powell (the subject of a petition brought by the State Bar of Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline alleging that she violated legal ethics rules in working to overturn the 2020 election) and Jenna Ellis (who recently admitted to making false statements about the 2020 election).

Guided by these figures, Trump’s legal failures accumulated in the months immediately after November 2020. He and his allies filed more than sixty lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results, all of which — including direct petitions to the US Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices — failed for lack of evidence. Some were dismissed because of errors in filings and other procedural lapses.

Trump has a reputation for not paying his lawyers, and these days he is increasingly conducting his legal nastiness using other people’s money. The Republican Party has paid millions for Trump’s legal bills. Recently the chair of the Republican National Committee announced that the committee will no longer do so because Trump is running for the party’s presidential nomination. During 2021 and 2022, when many Republican candidates struggled with election finances, Trump spent more than US$16 million from his political action committee, Save America, on legal payments, including US$10 million on his own legal fees.

The House select committee that investigated the 6 January insurrection found that much of the money accumulated by Save America came from a Trump fundraising drive that took US$250 million in donations from supporters specifically to cover legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election results. The fund was never actually created, and the money was instead used mostly to cover Trump’s own legal fees and for payments to several pro-Trump organisations headed by former Trump administration officials.

Trump could be defending himself in as many as four criminal cases as he runs for the Republican presidential candidature next year. He believes, perhaps accurately, that an indictment would increase his poll numbers. He insists that he is a victim of political enmity and corrupt prosecutors, and that the investigations are an effort to silence his supporters. He refuses to acknowledge that his legal problems are entirely a result of his own actions.

When asked if he would stay in the 2024 race if indicted, he responded that he “wouldn’t even think about dropping out of the race.” It was a bold declamation, but one that may not be his to make. No president or former president has ever been indicted. (Richard Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, “for all offenses against the United States” that he “committed or may have committed” during his presidency.) But Donald Trump is in growing legal and political peril. •

The post Before the deluge appeared first on Inside Story.

Although the Murdochs strongly supported Trump during his presidency, and although the audience for their American media tended to be pro-Republican, they were ready to face facts after the election-night count. Fox News’s chief political correspondent, Bret Baier, saw “no evidence of fraud. None.” Murdoch’s New York Post urged Trump to accept the result. His “baseless” stolen-election rhetoric “undermines faith in democracy and faith in the nation,” said the paper.

Along with the Associated Press, the network had made an early call for Biden in the crucial state of Arizona on election night. It proved to be the right call, but it infuriated the Trump camp as premature, if not wilfully wrong.

As we now know from internal documents obtained by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its legal action against Fox News, key Fox figures were already railing against what they saw as an audience-alienating decision on election night. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” high-profile anchor Tucker Carlson wrote on 5 November. “Those fuckers” — senior editor Bill Sammon and reporter Chris Stirewalt, who had decided to call Arizona for Biden — “are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”

“The audience feels like we crapped on [them],” wrote Scott, “and we have damaged their trust and belief in us… We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” Sammon and Stirewalt were soon forced out of Fox, not for making a professional error but for their “arrogance” and for damaging the “brand.”

The clashes continued. On the night of 12 November, Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted that “top election infrastructure officials” had found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” An indignant Tucker Carlson wrote to his colleagues: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Again, Scott took the same line. Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this,” she wrote, “and if this gets picked up viewers are going to be further disgusted.” By morning Heinrich had deleted the tweet. (The New York Times later reported: “While she removed a tweet in which Mr. Trump had tagged her colleagues Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, she posted the same fact check in response to a different tweet from Mr Trump that made the same false claim but did not tag her colleagues.”)

Fox’s White House correspondent Kristin Fisher got similarly short shrift when she fact-checked fraud claims by lawyer Sidney Powell and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was immediately told by phone that higher-ups were unhappy and she needed to do a better job of “respecting our audience.”

Respect was suddenly Fox’s word of the moment, Fox’s prime-time anchor Sean Hannity was arguing that “respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical. Fox has spent the last month spitting at them.” For outsiders, though, nurturing the audience’s delusions and punishing staff who behave professionally might seem a strange sort of respect.

In the early days after the election, when Fox seemed ready to accept the result, the network’s rating began declining. It was “getting creamed by CNN!” wrote Murdoch, but much more troubling was the number of viewers who were switching — with Trump’s encouragement — to upstart rivals on their right, Newsmax and One America News.

On 9 November Trump retweeted a series of stories from Newsmax claiming election fraud. Three days later his attacks on Fox escalated in a flurry of tweets encouraging viewers to switch to other networks. By the end of that day, Fox stocks were down 6 per cent; by mid November the network’s daytime audience had fallen from a pre-election 2.4 million to just 1.6 million, and its prime-time audience from 5.3 million to 3.5 million. Newsmax’s viewer numbers increased sixfold, from 57,000 to 329,000.

Fox News had become prisoner of the monster it had created. An audience fed on fantasies couldn’t face the new reality. “To be honest,” one producer said, “our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.” A network executive conceded that “conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled viewer is looking for.” Commercial profitability and professional integrity were pulling in opposite directions.

This was the moment when management announced its dramatic pivot. Scott called 9 November, six days after the election, “Day One” and committed the network to pushing “narratives that would entice their audience back.” She was, she said, “trying to get everyone to comprehend we are on a war footing.” Two themes figured prominently in subsequent Fox News internal communications: “brand” and “respecting the audience.” Both would override accuracy and other professional scruples.

The on-air results of Scott’s directive were dramatic: by the end of the second week after Fox News had called the election for Biden, it had “questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it at least 774 times,” according to Media Matters for America. Off-air, Fox News’s chief financial officer reported on 8 December that Fox’s “ratings momentum has been extraordinary [and] it is feeding absolutely into advertising strength.” Scott was rewarded with a multi-year extension to her contract.

Newly focused on promoting claims of electoral fraud, the network’s primary targets were Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, the two companies that provided electronic voting equipment for the election. Powell and Giuliani were the Trump associates most vigorously accusing the companies of having conspired to alter the election results.

Powell asserted that Trump had won not just by hundreds of thousands but by millions of votes shifted in Biden’s favour by Dominion’s software. “It’s really the most massive and historical egregious fraud the world has ever seen,” she said. Her dramatic claims had audience appeal. When research showed that viewers were switching to Newsmax specifically to watch her as a guest, Hannity brought Powell onto his program.

Giuliani was equally emphatic: Dominion’s machine “was developed to steal elections.” Dominion was “an organised criminal enterprise… started in Venezuela with Cuban money.” The intemperance of his language was no barrier to repeated appearances on Fox.

Of the several Fox presenters who took up the theme, the most extreme was Lou Dobbs. “Read all about Dominion and Smartmatic voting companies and you’ll soon understand how pervasive this Democrat electoral fraud is,” he tweeted, “and there’s no way in the world the 2020 presidential election was either free or fair.” It was “an electoral 9/11 against the United States, with the cooperation and collusion of the media and the Democrat Party and China.” “It is a cyber Pearl Harbor,” he added. “We have technical presentations that prove there is an embedded controller in every Dominion machine.”

Even the Trump campaign distanced itself from the seemingly unhinged Powell and Giuliani. Trump ally Chris Christie called Powell a “national embarrassment” and Trump’s legal team thought Giuliani was “deranged.” Although the Trump campaign disavowed Powell on 22 November, she and Giuliani continued to appear on Fox for several more weeks.

Even after the 6 January attacks on the Capitol, Fox continued to host guests who claimed the election was stolen. On 26 January Carlson interviewed My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell after he was banned from Twitter for promoting lies about Dominion and the election. Lindell repeated those lies without any challenge from Carlson. Not coincidentally, Lindell is one of Fox News’s biggest sponsors. According to Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Lindell “pays us a lot of money.” “It is not red or blue, it is green” — it is about money rather than politics — he agreed when questioned by Dominion’s lawyers.

Given the frequency and severity of the attacks on Dominion, the company’s decision to sue Fox News came as no surprise. Dominion also sued Newsmax and its three most prominent accusers, Powell, Giuliani and Lindell. (The other voting machine company, Smartmatic, has also sued Fox News.) The fallout has already been spectacular. Dominion has gained access to thousands of internal Fox News documents revealing extraordinary cynicism and hypocrisy among executives and producers.

A media organisation can’t successfully be sued for defamation by a public figure in America unless malice can be shown, and any effort to do that usually relies on inferences and indirect evidence. Not in this case: “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

The contrast between what the Fox News personnel were saying to each other and what they were saying on air was stark. Disparaging descriptions of Powell, Giuliani and other fraud-pushers — “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails,” “crazy,” “absurd” and “shockingly reckless” — figure frequently in their internal communications, but didn’t stop “really crazy stuff” (in Murdoch’s words) being put to air. Commenting on one program, Fox president Jay Wallace observed that “the North Koreans do a more nuanced show.”

Not a single Fox witness testified that they believed the allegations about the voting-machine company to be true, according to Dominion’s account of the deposition evidence. Fox’s internal fact-checking department, the Brainroom, also said the claims against Dominion were wrong.

“Sidney Powell is lying; she is a complete nut,” Carlson told his fellow prime-time anchor Laura Ingraham. “No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” “Nut” seems close to the mark: in an email to Maria Bartiromo, whose show she had appeared on several times, Powell said her source of information on Dominion was a person who described herself as “internally decapitated,” capable of “time travel in a semi-conscious state” and able to speak to “the Wind” as “a ghost.” Apparently this raised no red flags at Fox.

These internal communications provide excellent ammunition for Dominion, and there are further reasons why the company is likely to receive extremely high damages. Most defamation cases involve a single article or a short series by a small number of individual journalists, whereas this one involves a blizzard of segments over several months.

Dominion’s suit focuses on twenty statements across six Fox programs. It argues that “literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility — from the top of the organisation to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves — acted with actual malice.”

Likely to add to the damages is the fact that Dominion communicated 3600 times with Fox during the broadcasting of the contentious segments in order to correct facts. Most importantly, it sent an email titled “Setting the Record Straight,” and a series of updates, to more than ninety of Fox’s reporters, producers and anchors.

Nineteen of the twenty statements were made after Dominion alerted Fox that they were lies and pointed the network to the correct information. But Fox kept defaming Dominion and failed to respond to demands for retractions. “To this day,” says the company, “Fox has never retracted the false statements it broadcast about Dominion.”

While most defamation cases focus on damage to the plaintiff’s general reputation, Fox’s claims went further, undermining Dominion’s very existence as a commercial entity. The company’s business relies on a bipartisan acceptance of its integrity and reliability. Since the Fox News onslaught, several of its contracts have been challenged by Trump Republicans. All Fox’s claims about its audience size and influence are now being used as evidence of the damage done to Dominion.

“As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved,” says Dominion, pointing to threats to its employees and the extra security it has been forced to employ.

Fox also showed a corresponding lack of interest in reporting developments counter to the narrative pushed by Trump and his allies. Unmentioned went the fact that Dominion machines are used in twenty-eight states — including battleground states Florida and Ohio, which Biden lost. On 11 November, for instance, Sean Hannity told his audience that the hand recount in Georgia would help resolve questions about Dominion. When the count was completed later that month and the governor of Georgia declared the voting machines had been accurate, Hannity was silent.

The Dominion lawsuit has also ushered in a new phase in the Donald Trump–Rupert Murdoch relationship. The mutually convenient bromance of 2016–20 is long gone. Murdoch’s American newspapers have consistently editorialised against Trump’s claims of a rigged election. The Wall Street Journal declared the charges against Dominion baseless. After the midterm Congressional elections, in which the candidates Trump most closely embraced performed poorly, the Journal called him an electoral liability. The New York Post was much cheekier, with a front-page caricature of Trump as Humpty Dumpty under the headline “Trumpty Dumpty.”

The initial cache of documents released by Dominion late last month showed that Murdoch thought Trump’s claims of fraud were baseless and that he strongly disapproved of them. Ironically, of course, it was one of his organisations, Fox News, that did most to give those baseless claims political currency. In mid December Fox reported a poll saying 70 per cent of Republicans thought the election was rigged because of voter fraud. Without Fox’s intense coverage, we can only guess how much lower that percentage might have been.

The revelation that Murdoch disapproved of Fox’s coverage in principle but encouraged it in practice shows him to be a hypocrite. But the stark contrast between on-air and off-air views also raises crucial questions about how other Fox personnel saw their responsibility. At one stage, Carlson texted Ingraham: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” It is as if Carlson thought he had to be a passive cipher for Powell and Giuliani’s views, however mistaken. When Maria Bartiromo’s producer was asked “If someone says something untrue on one of your shows, do you think that it’s important to correct it?” she simply replied “No.”

As a result of Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Trump discovered that after the 6 January Capitol riot Fox News’s owner aimed to make Trump a “non-person.” His response was characteristic:

If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged and Stollen, then he and his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS [Republicans in name only] should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding and abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS.

Much more will emerge when the court case begins in Delaware on 17 April. Apart from the huge sums of money involved, the case raises fundamental issues about the health of American democracy and the responsibilities of the media. “These lies did not simply harm Dominion,” the voting-technology company argues. “They harmed democracy. They harmed the idea of credible elections. They harmed a once-unshakeable faith in democratic transfers of power.”

Fox News was a crucial ally of Trump in his attempt to reject the election outcome, and many of the radicals who stormed the Capitol on 6 January would have viewed the claims of electoral fraud broadcast repeatedly on the network. It is this association that Crikey’s Bernard Keane probably had in mind when he attributed to the Murdochs part of the blame for the riots, an assertion that prompted Lachlan Murdoch to sue under Australian defamation laws.

Never has a court case in Delaware been more keenly watched in two Sydney law chambers than Dominion’s will be. •

The post Damaging the brand appeared first on Inside Story.

The big parties would continue to differ about government’s role in areas like education and health, and would keep disagreeing about desirable levels of taxation, but neither of them was threatening either a large-scale winding back of the welfare state or the widespread nationalisation of industry.

This convergence was fuelled by the increasing priority given to electoral pragmatism over ideology, and not just in the United States. In Australia, observers increasingly argued that winning elections was all about appealing to the middle ground rather than promoting longstanding ideologies.

In the event, though, politics in the English-speaking democracies moved in the opposite direction. Rather than more convergence, polarisation grew. Rather than more moderation, confrontation intensified. Rather than consensus, the lines of conflict became more numerous, deeper and increasingly rigid.

These trends were most pronounced in the United States, where political competition has become increasingly aggressive and coarse. And they were driven, above all, by the Republican Party.

In her new book, Partisans, Nicole Hemmer argues with much fresh and convincing detail that the forces that created present-day Republicanism began shaping the party in the 1990s. They set the course that culminated in Republican attempts to deny the result of the 2020 election and the wide reluctance within the party to criticise the mob that attacked Congress on 6 January 2021.

A large ensemble of strange and often unprincipled characters pass through Hemmer’s pages. But three individuals stand out, each embodying key ways in which the Republican Party has changed.

Interestingly, Ronald Reagan isn’t one of them. Although the Republicans who followed Reagan pay ritual homage to him, their appeal and style is the antithesis of his. He was certainly the apostle of small government they celebrate (“Government is not the solution; it is the problem,” he once said), but where he exuded confidence and optimism today’s party leaders cultivate resentment and fear. When Reagan was campaigning for his second term in 1984 his best-known TV ad proclaimed, “It’s morning again in America.” It’s impossible to imagine a similar appeal to shared hope from Trump and his imitators.

This is where the first of the book’s key characters, Pat Buchanan, comes in. Buchanan, the first to break from the Reagan gospel, was very much Donald Trump 1.0. He had worked for presidents Nixon, Gerald Ford and Reagan, writing speeches advocating free trade and other mainstream Republican policies. But Hemmer describes how, when he sought the Republican nomination against Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, in 1992, he electrified delegates by declaring that year’s presidential election to be “a war for the soul of America.”

Claiming to speak for the “forgotten man,” Buchanan said the United States needed a revolution to reverse its decline. He expressed white grievances about racial quotas and forced integration of schools and neighbourhoods, and called for a Trump-like security fence along America’s southern border.

He ran again for the Republican nomination in 1996, and for a time seemed to have a serious chance of winning. But even as his prospects faded it was clear that what Hemmer calls his “harsh, outrageous and uncompromising” style had evoked a strong reaction in the Republican base. He remained a prominent commentator well into this century, his comments sliding further towards outright racism.

Buchanan was the first figure to appeal to a new Republican base, with its sense of decline and displacement, its multiple resentments, its feeling of living on the wrong side of the country’s deepening regional inequalities.

During this period of disruption the most important Republican in Congress was Newt Gingrich. He was determined to develop a more militant and polarising strategy against the Democrats, and believed that waging political battles, even unsuccessfully, gained publicity, shaped agendas and created loyalties.

Gingrich’s high point came at the 1994 midterm elections, when his market research–driven platform, “Contract with America,” helped produce not only the first Republican majority in the House for forty years but also what Hemmer calls the most conservative Congress in American history.

As she observes, Gingrich pursued a mix of careful legislative compromise, over-the-top rhetoric and extreme procedural obstructionism. His willingness to compromise with Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration was largely, and consciously, hidden by his inflammatory rhetoric and legislative intransigence.

Eventually Gingrich was devoured by his own revolution. He was the first to confront the conflict between animating the Republican base and winning elections. He soon discovered he couldn’t turn the passions of the base and his hardline followers on and off at will. Congress’s shutdowns of the government in 1995 and 1996, popular with hardliners but not with the public, helped Clinton’s sweeping re-election in 1996.

Two years later, in the lead-up to the 1998 midterm elections, national politics was dominated by Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice following his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. But the Republican stress on polarisation and scandal didn’t bring electoral success. Unusually, the president’s party secured a strong swing, and Gingrich resigned.

Outside the political system another figure, broadcaster Rush Limbaugh — a third key character — had gathered a large following. The abolition of the fairness obligation in US broadcasting law in 1988 had brought an upsurge in right-wing radio shock jocks offering a new kind of political entertainment combining punditry and humour. By the early 1990s Limbaugh, by far the most successful of them, had hit “the sweet spot between outrage and disgust,” Hemmer writes. He neatly avoided outright bigotry, targeting “militant” homosexuals, for example, and “loving” Black people but not the Black leaders or the Democrats taking advantage of them.

As with Gingrich, Limbaugh’s high point was the 1994 congressional election, which he called “Operation Restore Democracy.” After the victory, the Republican caucus christened him “the majority maker” or, for some, the leader of the opposition.

Limbaugh was important not just as an individual but also as a type. Through the 1990s, radio programs like Politically Incorrect brought a new type of political entertainment, producing an array of right-wing pundits with little experience in journalism, politics or the academy but an ability to score political points in ways that entertained and infuriated.

Eventually the right wing established a more important media beachhead than shock jock radio. In 1996 a friend of Limbaugh’s, Roger Ailes, teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to establish Fox News. Within five years it was the top-rating cable news channel and an important player in Republican politics, with prominent commentators feeding the base “red meat.”

No one had foreseen the media fragmentation that began in the 1990s, or the accompanying decline in professional standards. Reinforcing prejudices became more important than weighing evidence; and falsehoods, deliberate or otherwise, went unpunished.

Nor had anyone predicted how the political agenda would change. The affluence of the 1960s had expanded the range of political issues to take in feminism, civil rights, consumer protection and anti-war sentiments. Although a backlash from the right was probably inevitable, what was most notable over the subsequent decades was that different issues excited different constituencies.

Perhaps the most surprising change among Republicans was in attitudes to immigration. Back in 1992, despite Buchanan’s efforts, opposition to immigration had little traction as a political issue; just four years later, as Hemmer shows, even “moderate” Republican Bob Dole was claiming that up to 10 per cent of immigrants might be criminals.

While the coarseness and crudity of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric brought a new low, hostility has not faded with Trump’s defeat. Indeed a new extremist conspiracy theory, the Great Replacement, has been imported from the French far right. Its adherents argue that elites are using mass immigration to force whites into minority status.

Underlying the changing agenda of the right-wing Republican base has been a new absolutism. Abortion, for example, had long been a matter of contention in America, but with the rise of the religious right it became a litmus test of conservative credentials. As late as 1993–94, legislation to control the availability of guns had been supported by presidents Reagan, Ford and Carter, and the overwhelming majority of the public; the National Rifle Association, captured by militant elements in 1977, responded by giving large donations to pro-gun candidates.

Crucial to the growing power of far-right groups was their access to large amounts of money combined with threats to challenge moderate Republicans’ candidacies with more conservative and better-financed rivals.

The absolutist tendency also encouraged the Republican base to see their opponents as fundamentally illegitimate. In 1992 and 1996, as Hemmer recounts, Clinton was attacked not for his policies but for his alleged character. He was “Slick Willie,” a fraudulent, corrupt politician. By the time of the 1996 election a video mixing plausible and clearly false accusations, The Clinton Chronicles, had been widely distributed. Buchanan’s biggest applause came when he declared that, if elected, his first move would be to place Bill Clinton under arrest. Twenty years later, when Trump ran against Hillary, his crowds chanted “Lock her up.”

After a long-time member of Bill Clinton’s staff, Vince Foster, committed suicide, unsubstantiated rumours proliferated. By effectively accusing the Clintons of being accomplices in his murder and suffering no consequences, Limbaugh and others showed just how far boundaries had shifted.

America’s first Black president was also considered illegitimate not because of what he had done but because of who he was. After Barack Obama’s election, Limbaugh simply declared, “I hope he fails.” Fox News’s star recruit Glenn Beck declared that Obama had a “deep-seated hatred of white people.” “We are really, truly stepping beyond socialism and we’ve started to look at fascism,” Beck said when the Obama presidency was fully two weeks old. Obama had a Kenyan anticolonial view of the world, contributed Newt Gingrich.

The longest-running story about Obama’s unfitness to be president was the so-called birther controversy. Fox News was its greatest promoter, and its coverage often featured Donald Trump. The lack of any factual basis for this controversy was no bar to its longevity.

Obama’s first term saw the creation of the Tea Party, which took its name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, a significant event in the lead-up to the American war of independence. The Tea Party called on “American patriots” to “take back” their country. The talk of patriotism obscures the fact that its targets were other Americans — Americans whose political legitimacy they refused to recognise.

This kind of anger also dates back to the 1990s. In 1993, when America was still riding high globally, Irving Kristol, dubbed the godfather of neoconservatism, declared:

There is no “after the Cold War” for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos… We have, I do believe, reached a turning point in American democracy. Now that the other Cold War is over, the real cold war has begun.

It is hard to know what social or political developments were driving such a dramatic rhetorical escalation.

The view that political opponents are illegitimate and compromise is weak has had a profound impact on how policies are debated and decided. Obama was elected president just after the American economy collapsed in late 2008. By the time he was inaugurated the stock exchange had lost half its value. But when the new administration launched an urgent and necessary stimulus package, not a single Republican member of the House of Representatives voted for it.

The economic record of recent Republican presidencies is a triumph of ideology and short-sighted expedience. Reagan cut taxes but was unwilling to cut popular programs, so he failed to deliver the balanced budget he’d promised. In fact, as Hemmer recounts, the budget deficit rose so sharply that his economic adviser, David Stockman, resigned. Reagan quietly introduced some tax increases late in his term.

Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, sought a campaign advantage over his Democrat opponent, Michaek Dukakis, in 1988 by declaring, “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Faced by the large-scale debt once he was in government, he raised taxes, only to be denounced by his own side, led by Gingrich, for betraying Reagan’s vision.

Bush’s son, George W. Bush, cut taxes and then embarked on two military exercises, in Afghanistan and Iraq, destined to become America’s longest wars. Rising budget deficits inevitably followed. Donald Trump also cut taxes drastically without parallel spending cuts, deepening government debt even before Covid struck.

When Democrats are in office, by contrast, Republicans are animated by the urgency of the debt problem, which must always be tackled by cutting government spending rather than raising taxes. A chance to dramatise their view comes each year when Congress engages in the peculiar American ritual of approving an increase in the debt ceiling. In their classic book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein document how the Republicans, seemingly willing to force the government to default, sought to hold the Obama administration hostage in 2011. (Another round of debt-ceiling negotiations began this month.)

The most obvious characteristic of the Republicans’ actions is hypocrisy. But their behaviour also directly affects the quality of governance, which they appear not to consider important. The strain on public sector infrastructure and public services in education and health is affecting Americans’ quality of life. Government has also been left without the institutional strength or the political will to deal aggressively with global warming, the Covid pandemic and other major new challenges.

Equally worrying is the effect of the Republicans’ institutional vandalism on democratic processes themselves. America is unique among established democracies in having such highly politicised courts. It is also unique in having one major party whose electoral strategy involves making it more difficult for likely supporters of the other side to vote. After the 2020 presidential election we saw a further escalation: when Trump dismissed the vote as rigged, he created a precedent that could well become a common tactic. If the public loses faith in the integrity of the electoral process, the consequences could be drastic.

Let us hope that in the 2030s Nicole Hemmer doesn’t need to write an equally insightful book about the destruction of American democratic institutions in the 2020s. •

Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s
By Nicole Hemmer | Basic Books | $57.25 | 368 pages

The post The war for the soul of America appeared first on Inside Story.

The tripartite pact known as AUKUS grew out of a Morrison brainwave some six months after he won what seemed an unwinnable election virtually single-handedly. Under the agreement, Australia is to acquire — and even build — eight US- or British-designed nuclear-powered submarines, known as SSNs.

According to senior political correspondents Peter Hartcher and Paul Kelly, Morrison started asking his officials about possible alternatives to the contentious contract with France’s Naval Group to build twelve Shortfin Barracuda-class conventional submarines in Adelaide. Not long after, in March 2020, he asked defence secretary Greg Moriarty to prepare an options paper, which was delivered two weeks later. Then, in May of that year, he asked Moriarty and defence force chief Angus Campbell to form a group to weigh up the nuclear-power option. Headed by then navy chief Michael Noonan, the group worked in a tight security bubble.

Efforts continued to try to resolve differences with Naval Group over the cost and local content of the French submarines. No one seems to have considered asking the French about the nuclear option, yet the Shortfin Barracuda was a special conventionally powered version of the Barracuda nuclear-powered attack submarine and the Americans had agreed to fit it with their most advanced war-fighting electronics.

One problem was the fact that the reactors in the French submarines use low-enriched (around 5 per cent) uranium in their fuel rods, which require replacing every ten years. This means fewer problems with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but would have meant relying on a foreign power. Without a domestic nuclear industry capable of enriching uranium and fabricating rods, any Barracuda submarine bought by Australia would have to sail to France every decade or else somehow arrange transfer of fuel rods from France.

The Australian team and its political masters were seized by the revelation that current American and British nuclear submarines are fuelled by highly enriched (92 per cent) uranium rods that work for the entire life of the submarine, thirty years. Once built, it was claimed, they could be operated by the Australian navy without recourse to American support. Despite the US and British submarines having operated for many years, that news somehow came as a surprise in Canberra.

So, in February 2021, a visiting Australian naval delegation broached the idea of a British or US purchase with the sea lords of the Royal Navy, who gave it a cautious nod as long as the Americans could be brought on board. Britain’s US-derived reactor technology is the product of a unique transfer of know-how by the United States in 1958.

Next, the Americans were sounded out. The first approach was made by Morrison’s handpicked director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer, and Australian ambassador Arthur Sinodinos at the end of April 2021, in a meeting with the Biden administration’s senior adviser on Indo-Pacific affairs, Kurt Campbell. Then, the following month, Morrison’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, met with Biden’s secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, and national security advisor Jake Sullivan.

Another few weeks later, Morrison was a guest at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, where he felt able to broach the plan with Biden himself. Strangely, British prime minister Boris Johnson was also at the meeting with Biden. The American president clearly detests Johnson for his role in Brexit and potential reopening of conflict in Northern Ireland, but his presence didn’t queer Morrison’s pitch.

Although Biden stipulated that the nuclear transfer must be a bipartisan exercise on the Australian side, Morrison gave opposition leader Anthony Albanese and his deputy just twelve hours’ notice of the announcement of the tripartite agreement to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and collaborate on futuristic technology. The announcement came in September last year in a video hook-up with Biden and Johnson.

Labor endorsed what became known as the AUKUS pact, no doubt seeing it as an attempted political wedge on Morrison’s part but presumably also trusting it to be a well-thought-out response to China’s increasingly confrontational approach and an equally considered lift in Australia’s defence capabilities. After securing government in May last year, though, the Albanese government might have been expected to take a harder look at the AUKUS deal and the SSN component.

There were early signs of such scrutiny. In August, the government appointed former Labor defence and foreign minister Stephen Smith and former defence forces chief Angus Houston to advise on what defence capability Australia needs to meet “the increasingly challenging geostrategic environment.” They were given until March this year to submit their findings (though speculation suggests they’ll report next month) and handed a secret preliminary report to Marles in November.

From hints thrown out by Albanese and Marles, the Smith–Houston review was encouraged to be iconoclastic. In particular, the army’s projected force of 127 heavy Abrams tanks for $2.5 billion and 450 new armoured fighting vehicles at a mooted $27 billion cost — or an average of around $60 million each — seems likely to come into question.

“Our defence assets need to not be about fighting a land war defending western Queensland because that is highly unlikely,” Albanese said in an end-of-year interview with the Nine newspapers, “but a lot of our assets are not really the ones that we necessarily need for this century and for the times — and also their location as well.”

Yet the SSN project seems off-limits. The review’s terms of reference don’t say that explicitly, but Smith and Houston are asked to recommend the “defence posture” needed in 2032–33 and beyond “in light of recently announced large-scale projects.”

This suggests that a parallel defence taskforce, given eighteen months in September 2021 by Morrison to find a pathway to acquiring the SSNs, has proceeded without any fear of being called off.

A defence briefing note describing how the Smith–Houston review relates to the AUKUS submarine project states that it “will help ensure we maximise the potential of this and other AUKUS partnership initiatives in Australia’s best strategic interests.” In other words, defence spending will be trimmed elsewhere if necessary to finance the SSNs, estimated to cost us $200 billion.

Meanwhile, Morrison’s submarine taskforce, with its staff of 360 defence and industry personnel, says it’s on schedule to report to the government in March. (Both it and the final Smith–Houston report are likely to be kept secret.) The SSN taskforce chief, Jonathan Mead, was giving little away in an interview with the Australian’s Cameron Stewart in December. The SSN, he said, would “deliver for Australia a potent war-fighting capability [and help] to deter anyone who may seek to do harm to Australia.”

Mead left a riddle about how the navy can avoid a “capability gap” between likely delivery of the SSNs in the 2040s and 2050s and the retirement of the existing six conventional Collins-class submarines between 2038 and 2046 — assuming that major refits can safely extend the operating life of the Collins boats. Mead said he is focusing only on nuclear submarines, not on stopgap acquisitions of conventional subs.

The capability gap could be even wider if, as British defence minister Ben Wallace and others have suggested, the three AUKUS partners work on a common design for a new generation SSN to replace both the current US Virginia-class and the British Astute-class, each designed in the 1990s and coming towards the end of their production runs.

Mead will also wrestle with the question of local production, which Marles still insists will happen. Ideas floated include building the submarine hulls in Adelaide and then barging them to the United States or Britain for the nuclear reactor to be inserted, or barging the nuclear reactor module with its bomb-grade uranium core to Adelaide. The latter prospect might unsettle some in the City of Churches: when the Astute submarines are fuelled up in Barrow-in-Furness on the west English coast, the local council hands out iodine tablets to residents.

Awaiting the two reports, a clamour of urgency has built up within Canberra’s defence commentariat. Even before last year’s election, Peter Dutton was expressing the hope that the Australian navy could lease one or two Virginia-class SSNs from the US navy to bridge the gap. Having ditched the French, and before them the Japanese, the then defence minister was ready to dump the British.

In November, shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie said Canberra should stop insisting the submarines be built here. Authoritarian powers are “on the move” and it would take too long to start with Australian domestic production, he said. We should try to order two submarines from US yards for delivery by the end of this decade.

But the two US naval yards that build submarines are flat out with orders from the US navy for more Virginia-class SSNs. A letter to Joe Biden in December from two senior US senators argued that adding orders from the Australian navy would stretch American industrial capacity to “breaking point.”

Purchased or leased, the Australian navy won’t have the engineering and command expertise to operate nuclear submarines for many years without importing talent from the US or British navies and arranging maintenance at American or British bases. The submarines will be Australian assets in name only. They will also spend a lot of time undergoing maintenance, and are likely to be available for six-month cruises only fifteen times in their thirty-three-year operational life.

Mixed in with this clamour has been the extension of another Morrison initiative, the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, with its goal of acquiring “more potent capabilities to hold adversary forces and infrastructure at risk further from Australia, including longer-range strike weapons, cyber capabilities and area denial systems.”

Compounding a sense of alarm during Morrison’s prime ministership was the abrupt deterioration in relations with China caused by his call in April 2020 for outside health inspectors to storm into China, invited or not, to find the origins of Covid-19, and the federal police raid on the homes of four journalists with Chinese official media two months later. China responded with trade sanctions to the tune of $20 billion a year and the arrest of Australian journalist Cheng Lei.

With Chinese leader Xi Jinping choosing to wear a military uniform to review huge parades of his armed forces, and Chinese ships and aircraft jostling US forces in nearby seas, it was not hard for defence hawks in Canberra to connect the military build-up and the relationship chill to produce the conclusion: China is a military threat to Australia.

Consequently, Morrison announced a $1 billion scheme to create a domestic missile manufacturing industry to build up ammunition stocks. This quest for greater lethality at longer range has continued under Labor with the planned acquisition of 800-kilometre-range US anti-ship missiles for the air force, 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and Norwegian anti-ship missiles for major navy surface ships and, just recently, twenty US 100- to 300-kilometre-range precision rocket artillery units for the army. The latter, known as HIMARS, have proved a devastatingly effective weapon for Ukraine.

It is unclear whether Canberra intends to acquire its own satellite reconnaissance and targeting systems to direct these missiles, or whether it will rely on American systems.

With multibillion-dollar arms purchases coming thick and fast, defence analysts have thrown off all restraint. A paper last month from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suggested the air force acquire a squadron of the newly unveiled US air force B-21 bombers. This bat-winged stealth bomber, with its unrefuelled combat radius of 4000 kilometres, could plug the long-range strike capability gap until the SSNs arrive, according to the institute. Still a prototype and yet to be tested in the air, B-21s are likely to cost more than $2 billion each.

Though this thinking was initially presented as a means of hitting any enemy planning to hit Australian assets between 2000 and 3000 kilometres away, and could thus be seen as an extension of the longstanding “Defence of Australia” doctrine, it has morphed in some quarters into a strategy of deterrence: that is, if any enemy thinks it can land blows against Australia it must expect blows in return.

Hence the preference for the larger of the two contending SSNs, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest version is 10,200 tonnes and can carry up to sixty-five torpedoes, Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles or other long weapons. Britain’s smaller Astute-class (about 7500 tonnes) carries thirty-six long weapons.

This extra capacity shifts the submarine’s role from denying access to Australian waters to retaliating or attacking. It should be an unsettling thought. Until now, deterrence against a rival superpower was left to the Americans. Are we having doubts about that, just as the South Koreans and perhaps some Japanese are?

And, for China, what kind of deterrence would be offered by the prospect of a couple of submarines coming close to its coast and firing off conventional-explosive-tipped missiles at a score of land targets?

This line of thinking also betrays unease in Canberra about the American nuclear umbrella. In countries anxious about nuclear-armed strategic rivals but without a reliable superpower protector, deterrence thinking goes in one direction, towards an independent nuclear capability: ask India, Pakistan, Iran and Israel.

But the nuclear submarine push is unlikely to be thrown off course by questions about its feasibility — and certainly not by suggestions from defence analysts like Hugh White, Brian Toohey and Clinton Fernandes that smaller and less noisy conventional submarines are a greater threat to enemy navies than nuclear subs, are better suited to operations in the archipelagic waters of Australia’s approaches, and are better matched with our budgetary and industrial capacities.

Nor will the hawks be thrown off course by the equally forlorn thoughts of some in the international relations community, along with figures like Paul Keating, that getting closer to the anglophone powers is a retrograde step. Australian proponents of the American alliance have long claimed that Southeast Asians are secretly pleased by our closeness with the United States and are not fussed about our tightening “interoperability” and now “interchangeability” with US forces. There is not a lot of evidence for this.

Hawkish commentators are thrilled that the stepped-up “rotation” of American forces through northern Australia will make us somehow pivotal to the US posture against China in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea, instead of a rear base to disperse forces away from Chinese attack. Their worry is that things will blow up before we have the SSNs to join in.

Unless Admiral Mead produces a technological surprise out of his braided hat, though, the sheer impracticality of Morrison’s grand scheme may soon become apparent. This may give more scope for foreign minister Penny Wong to work on giving AUKUS a less dominant place in Australia’s strategic position.

Morrison’s AUKUS plan raised “valid questions about Australia’s sovereign capability,” Wong said in a speech to Sydney University’s US Studies Centre a week after the September 2021 announcement. But, she added, “with the prospect of a higher level of technological dependence on the US, how does the Morrison–Joyce government assure Australians that we can act alone when need be; that we have the autonomy to defend ourselves, however and whenever we need to.”

The new pact had to be “additional to” and not “instead of” Australia’s contribution to existing regional architecture, Wong said. “It doesn’t replace the ANZUS alliance, the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, APEC or the Quad.”

For Wong, Southeast Asia remains a prime focus of Australian national interest. “Our strategic ambitions must be matched by equally ambitious efforts to respond to the region’s needs. This of course requires a bigger investment in our diplomacy, including in our economic engagement and development program. Submarines might help protect the region, but on their own they won’t build the region we want — a region that is stable, prosperous, as well as respectful of sovereignty. And submarines can help our national defence, but won’t of themselves prevent efforts at economic coercion.”

Judging by her round of regional visits and the more low-key tone of dialogue with China, these are surely the kind of thoughts she is expressing within the government. But having so warmly embraced what Paul Kelly has tentatively called the “Morrison doctrine” it may take a while for Albanese and Marles to loosen their attachment to the Anglosphere, return strategic policy to the mainstream represented by the Defence of Australia doctrine, and extricate themselves from what is turning into another Morrison fiasco. •

The post Time to rethink the Morrison doctrine appeared first on Inside Story.

Beijing has also raised the tone of its rhetoric on the unification of Taiwan with the mainland. But this move, if it ever came about, would be more likely to exacerbate China’s problems for years, if not decades, rather than solve them. Bali marked Chinese re-entry into the world while revealing the uncertainties that could undermine it.

China did make the most of its G20 presence. Unmasked and confident, Xi Jinping held court, giving or withholding favour from leaders eager to be seen with him. There was little doubt that he would meet Joe Biden, but other leaders seemed to compete for invitations. Emmanuel Macron and Anthony Albanese were invited in, with the latter’s visit seen as a sign of thaw in the icy relationship between Canberra and Beijing.

Others, including Britain’s Rishi Sunak, were not given a meeting, though it’s unclear whether the planned bilateral with Sunak fell victim to the erroneous report that Russia had bombed Poland, or Chinese anger at Sunak suggesting support for Taiwan.

Yet the demonstration of power by Xi belied the seeming hesitancy in Beijing about China’s international strategy. The years of the pandemic saw not only US–China relations entering a period of deep freeze, but also a general lowering of favourability for China in the Global North, in particular in the Anglophone countries. The Global South remained overall friendlier, but it was hard to avoid the impression that it was Chinese Belt and Road funding, not values, that kept them enthusiastic.

And all this was before the dramatic turn in Covid policy that followed mass protests in China in early December. China’s domestic woes, notably a weak economy, are not terminal but they are undoubtedly serious. And solving them is dependent on a clearer sense of where China’s international relations are going.

The Bali meeting did show the US and China speaking in a civilised manner. After the ill-tempered encounter between the two sides in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2021, the polite language on both sides about mutual respect and cooperation was a welcome shift.

Biden was fortunate the G20 took place just after midterm elections in which his Democratic Party did surprisingly well: Chinese analysts follow US politics almost as avidly as Westminster Americaphiles, and it’s likely that the Chinese (rather like the Republicans) were expecting a Democratic rout and a weakened Biden arriving in Bali. In fact, the results left the US president chipper, and the Chinese side less able to lament the supposed continuing slide of the US towards fascism.

However, the meeting also showed that American leadership continues to be tempered by its partners’ varying priorities on China. In Europe, it’s evident that German chancellor Olaf Scholz is uncomfortable with the idea of a Western decoupling from China. His recent trip to Beijing, accompanied by top German business executives, emphasised that point. Even within Germany, there is unease at his position: the Greens in particular have been prominent in demanding a tougher position on China, and at least one senior politician, Reinhard Bütikofer, has been sanctioned by China.

To American complaints, however, Scholz can point out that a range of US corporate majors, from Ford to Coca-Cola, still have a major presence in China. Beijing is quite aware of the power of the China market for at least some Europeans. Xi will understand that there is no prospect of Europe staying neutral between the United States and China, and that the European Union as a whole has moved away from the idea of China as simply an economic partner, regarding it as a competitor in areas ranging from trade to security. Yet he also sees opportunities to remind the continent that simply following the US line is not the only option.

There is one European power that China has yet to figure out: Britain. That the scheduled bilateral between Sunak and Xi did not take place might have come as something of a relief to London (as did the avoidance of a Justin Trudeau–style drive-by tongue-lashing; the Canadian prime minister appeared caught by surprise when Xi harangued him about supposedly leaking a private conversation). Britain’s China policy has been in flux. Under Boris Johnson, it was balanced between the desire to find a post-Brexit market and the desire to respond to growing security (Huawei) and human rights (Hong Kong) concerns.

During Liz Truss’s brief ascendancy, there were moves to declare China as a whole as a “threat.” Sunak’s first major foreign policy speech has declared that the UK will display “robust pragmatism,” a capacious term that seems to indicate a desire to keep trade relations plausible while acknowledging that stronger national security measures are likely in areas such as high-tech scientific collaboration.

Beijing’s hopes, post-Brexit, that Britain would be a vulnerable actor potentially open to a deal with China have faded. But, overall, the perception remains strong in China that Britain is still in flux on its long-term commitment to the Asia-Pacific.

The presence of the G20 in Bali also flagged up another area where US power has become patchier: Southeast Asia. Indonesian president Joko Widodo pointedly appealed to both sides to avoid a new “cold war.”

Overall, the region’s powers have a growing sense of resentment that they are being forced to choose sides, as Beijing and Washington raise the temperature of their language against each other. They are wary of the growing strength of China’s navy, particularly in the disputed South China Sea.

As a result, the news of the AUKUS submarine collaboration between Australia, Britain and the United States in 2021 led to muted reactions in the region, with some concern that the delicate regional balance might be disturbed but also some satisfaction that the United States continued to show commitment to security there.

Yet the Bali meeting also showed up the major absence in the US proposition for the region: an unwillingness to acknowledge the centrality of China’s massive economic presence in Asia. The US security presence still lacks an accompanying economic story (or indeed, an acknowledgement that economics and security are aspects of the same issue regarding China). The US Asia-Pacific Economic Plan is abstract, and does not make up for the link that went missing in 2017, when the newly inaugurated Donald Trump pulled the United States fully out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Nor is there any realistic prospect of the United States joining its successor, the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership): Britain is currently more likely to join. The flaws of these two agreements are many, but that is beside the point. Instead, while the United States is only partially embedded in the network of trade relationships that marks the Asia-Pacific region (primarily through APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum established in 1989), China currently sits in all the major groupings except for the CPTPP and is currently applying to join the latter as well.

The United States has been more successful at passing legislation that will hold China back (notably, the CHIPS act that denies China access to advanced technology) than shaping a new model of political economy for the region.

Two issues hung over the US–China relationship as the Bali meeting unfolded: Ukraine and Covid. Ukraine presents the United States with a dilemma: how best to deal with the tacit support China gives Russia while not provoking Beijing into anything like a full alliance with Moscow.

The danger of such an alliance has receded; Putin did not attend the G20, his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov made only a brief visit, and overall Xi has given little indication that he wants any deeper connection with the war. China does benefit from cheap fossil fuels from Russia and enjoys greater leverage that will enable it to pressure Russia in areas where China has special interests, such as Central Asia, or growing new interests, such as the Arctic.

However, China has hedged its bets by making it clear that it remains neutral, rather than officially supportive of Russia, at the United Nations. Nor is China’s hand entirely free. There is more caution in Chinese elite circles about the closeness to Russia than might appear the case at first glance.

One of the most iconic Chinese nationalists of the 1990s, Wang Xiaodong, author of the classic anti-Western text China’s Unhappy, has been writing thoughtful blogs recently reflecting on the rise of what he terms “Nazi” ideology in Russia. Although he scarcely mentions China, it is evident that Wang’s comparing of China’s partner to the Third Reich is not intended as a compliment.

The shadow of the zero-Covid policy hung over Xi at Bali, and his unmasked public presence certainly attracted attention at the summit and at home. The policy seemed to presage a long period of China being closed off to the outside world. But the demonstrations in the streets of China’s cities in early December led to a surprising, and sudden, reversal of policy in mid December. This shift will bring comfort to the many Chinese who have become victims of the country’s Covid-lockdown-influenced recession.

Winter 2022–23 now threatens to be a period of great domestic turmoil. The shift in policy has happened without an effective vaccine rollout, and most analysts inside and outside China think that a sudden spike in infections is inevitable in a country with little herd immunity to the virus.

Chinese New Year 2023 may be particularly testing: the normal phenomenon of millions of people on the move during those weeks has the potential to be a superspreading event, but cancelling the holiday would immediately lead to an outcry that the abandoned policy is coming back. Either way, the difficulty of judgement on these issues argues for a strong concentration on the domestic situation in 2023.

Does the improved tone of US–China relations imply a reduced risk of war between the two? This largely depends on how much it affects China’s readiness to launch a move to incorporate Taiwan in the near future. The official Chinese position remains as it has been for years: bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control is the last unfinished business of the cold war.

Xi has added to the urgency with his statement that bringing Taiwan into the fold “cannot be left to future generations.” The heightened tension after Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August 2022 has alerted governments and corporations in the region and beyond to the fact that they need to develop a viewpoint on any change in the island’s status in the light of a move from the mainland.

The likelihood of a full-scale invasion of Taiwan is still low. The island has difficult topography and beaches that are unfriendly to an amphibious operation. After seeing the build-up of troops on the Ukraine border in January 2022, the West would be on heightened alert if satellites showed troops and equipment massing on the Chinese coast. China has also seen that bold military moves can go horribly wrong, and that cities under assault can fight back. However, an action that does not involve a physical assault, such as a naval blockade of the island, as a challenge to US and Japanese naval power, might be more conceivable.

Still, such an action would have immense consequences. There would be a high likelihood of coordinated sanctions against China. Beijing might calculate that this is a price worth paying for a number of years in return for conquest of the island, but the medium-term effect on China’s economy would be huge.

Though there would also be a very damaging effect on the global economy as a whole, it would be China that would likely suffer most. In the next few years, the most obvious effect would be a breakdown in the supply of high-grade semiconductor chips from Taiwan, which would be a disaster for both China and the outside world since there seems little prospect of a diversified, reliable supply until sometime into the mid 2020s at the earliest.

Beijing and Washington are still inclined to talk past one another. Beijing insists that it is pushing back against any move towards Taiwanese independence. Washington reiterates that it has no intention of supporting independence (a position of which Taiwan’s politicians are well aware), but that it would defend Taiwan’s democracy, one of the most progressive in Asia, with full free media, multi-party elections, and an active civil society.

China’s latest (2022) white paper on Taiwan says very little about preservation of Taiwan’s freedoms, other than a vague statement that governance would be a “looser” version of the system for Hong Kong, hardly a reassuring response to the fears of Taiwan’s many democratic actors. There is little evidence that Beijing spends much time thinking about the reality that Taiwan is a vibrant society unwilling to give up its freedoms, and a danger that China’s leaders may, like Putin, believe their own propaganda that the island’s democracy is shallow and dysfunctional, and that Beijing’s control would win considerable support.

How likely is a blockade? Unexpectedly, we have more grounds to judge than even a few weeks ago because the sudden shift in policy over Covid gives a variety of clues about what might happen regarding Taiwan. Unfortunately, those clues point in different directions.

The first lesson is that the system does have some flexibility in it and that Xi can listen to advice. Although we have no idea what happens inside the notoriously opaque Chinese leadership bubble, it’s inconceivable that a change of that magnitude could have happened without Xi’s sign-off, and that must imply that he had to accept that his cherished zero-Covid policy had to change.

It’s also notable that the shift in tone turned attention to the economy and the need for growth: ironically, the subject of most concern to the members of the governing elite who seemed to have lost out in the announcement of the new Politburo top team (Wang Yang, Hu Chunhua and Li Keqiang among them). That might imply that an argument of economic rationality would also apply to any attempt to coerce Taiwan into unification, or to change a blockade policy if it showed major adverse economic effects with not much sign of a swift victory.

Just as reversing the zero-Covid policy doesn’t return China to the status quo, stepping back from a physical invasion would be immensely difficult. The government would experience a loss of credibility and the human and economic costs would mean a long period of recovery.

By contrast, in the short term, a naval blockade would be more easily reversible as long as it had not involved any physical attack on the island. If the effect of sanctions were to damage the Chinese economy even more than had been predicted, then the ships could be turned back (as in the Cuban missile crisis).

But that would not return matters to the status quo. International investors, already wary of putting their money in China, would not come flooding back. Foreign firms with production facilities in China would change their risk calculus, even though this would mean the sacrifice of huge sunk costs in China. (And after all, after such a debacle, how likely is it that a sullen Chinese public would buy Western-branded cars and toothpaste as if nothing had changed?)

Beijing’s analysts can make these calculations just as much as Washington can, which is why it is perfectly plausible that China will, in the end, decide that an attempt to subdue Taiwan simply poses too much risk to a Chinese economy under strain. Much of the Chinese public might want Taiwan to be unified in the abstract, but offered the actual price of doing so, might well recoil. (Not that such consequences are likely to be spelled out within China.)

In the last resort, it is another issue that may well persuade Xi that strong rhetoric on Taiwan should continue but it should not be accompanied by action, language that would still be likely to deter any declaration of independence from Taiwan.

That issue is China’s demographic decline. In 2022, new statistics made it obvious that China’s already swift acceleration towards a smaller population, exacerbated by the one-child policy, was heightening a crisis in pensions, eldercare and health provision. China needs to work out now how it can raise pension ages and deal with a fast-approaching reduction in the number of working-age taxpayers. To do this, it needs a stable economy with strong consumption-driven growth, as well as even more exploitation of its real advantages in technological innovation in hubs in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Beijing and beyond.

Overall, a range of economic problems, from a fragile property sector to rising graduate unemployment, are challenging China in the 2020s. None are insoluble, but an assault on Taiwan would do nothing to fulfil any of them. Avoiding such an assault, and growing the economy, by contrast, stands a chance of creating a “moderately prosperous” middle class that might genuinely stand as a challenge to the Western model.

Apocalyptic stories of Chinese global dominance or collapse should give way to a less glamorous but more probable reality: China will likely be a major power with global influence for decades to come, but its internal crises will continually force it to redirect attention inward. •

This article first appeared in the Substack newsletter Comment is Freed.

The post What next for China? appeared first on Inside Story.

Midterm elections — treated by many voters as a referendum on the sitting president’s agenda — are always fraught with danger for the party in the White House. This year the Republicans ran on issues like crime and the economy, seen as their bailiwick, and hoped to capitalise on lingering resentments over Trump’s 2020 election loss and the partisan divide opened up by the Democrats’ probing of the 6 January invasion of the Capitol. But Trump changed the dynamics fundamentally when he inserted his candidates, his policies and indeed himself into the campaign.

The expected Republican wave failed to eventuate not just federally but also in the states. Democrats lost fewer House seats than in any midterm election under a Democratic president in forty years. They retained the Senate and performed better in midterm elections for state governors than at any time since 1986.

With angry Republicans blaming Trump, the former president’s role as party kingmaker is under challenge from Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who emerged as the big Republican winner.

The election results have immediate consequences for the remainder of Joe Biden’s first term. They will help shape the 2024 elections, and provide important clues as to how changing demographics will influence the future of American voting.

In Biden’s view, the results showed that “the overwhelming majority of the American people” support his economic agenda. He might well be right: exit polling shows that voters see the economy and jobs as the most important issue facing the nation, and inflation as the most important issue in determining their vote.

Those polls also revealed other factors driving support for Democrats: anger at limits on abortions, concerns about healthcare costs and gun control, and a high turnout among young voters. As Biden had warned in a prime-time address ahead of the elections, the very future of the nation was on the line in the face of election denial, voter intimidation and political violence. His concern was no doubt driven by the large slate of extremist candidates for federal and state offices endorsed (and largely handpicked) by Trump on the basis of their loyalty to him and their support for his grievances.

Voters in crucial battleground states, perhaps tiring of the endless rhetoric about a lost presidency during a period of high inflation, rejected Trump’s election-denying candidates. Voting was peaceful, with few technical glitches and only muted Republican claims of election fraud. Biden summarised election day thus: “It was a good day, I think, for democracy.”

That optimism overlooks the fact that the president will have to deal with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives less interested in working cooperatively than in investigating and probably impeaching him, his family and Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi. Biden must push hard to get key elements of his agenda — and legislation essential for the operation of government, including a lift in the debt ceiling — enacted by the lame-duck Congress that lasts only until new members take their places in January.

The House promises to be a can of worms for both sides of politics. For all that Trump’s election slate has been deemed a failure, at least 145 of the Republicans elected to the House are election deniers. Importantly, they will constitute the majority of the GOP caucus.

This means that current House minority leader Kevin McCarthy might not have sufficient support to realise his ambition of becoming speaker; the position could instead be taken by someone as contentious as Representative Jim Jordan, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus and the top Republican on the House judiciary committee. With a slim majority, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other so-called MAGA Republicans will make electorally unpopular demands of the leadership. But perhaps the chaos that is almost certain to ensue will work in the Democrats’ favour in 2024.

In the Senate there is a very real possibility that the Democrats can win fifty-one seats, but this is dependent on incumbent senator Raphael Warnock winning a run-off against Herschel Walker in Georgia. With a Republican-controlled House, Democratic control of the Senate is essential if Biden is to win confirmation of any future appointments. A one-seat majority on the relevant committees will help, and will also provide a buffer during difficult negotiations with senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who often resist toeing the Democrats’ line.

In the states, meanwhile, Democrat victories will provide a bulwark against the erosion of electoral rights. Democrats won important gubernatorial races in Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, along with secretary of state positions (responsible for overseeing elections) in Minnesota and New Mexico. They also took the majority in state houses in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, long controlled by Republicans. For the first time in modern history, Democrats were elected to all twenty-six statewide and federal offices in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

In Michigan, governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has been heavily targeted by Trump, made abortion rights central to her winning campaign and Democrats won control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984. Michigan’s election lines have been determined since 2018 by an independent, nonpartisan panel.

In Florida, by contrast, incumbent governor DeSantis had made sure new electoral districts were heavily gerrymandered in his party’s favour He defeated his Democrat opponent Charlie Crist by nearly twenty percentage points and delivered four more Republican seats in the House of Representatives.

DeSantis, who contends that his state has become a (Republican) “promised land,” has positioned Florida in the vanguard of many of the nation’s most polarising culture war fights. His election success sets him up for a fascinating presidential primary battle — and simmering warfare — with Trump.

While DeSantis may not emerge as the Republican saviour, Trump’s status as party kingmaker is no longer secure. Republican leaders are openly blaming election losses on his poor-quality candidates and failure to financially support their efforts. Trump has responded with his usual denial of responsibility, lashing out at his advisers. Many wealthy potential donors are looking at other potential presidential contenders, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Virginia’s governor Glenn Youngkin, South Carolina’s senator Tim Scott and even former vice-president Mike Pence.

Where the money goes will be an important factor for the Republican presidential primaries. Trump’s early entrance into the field is as much about getting first access to donors as it is about trying to fend off other contenders — and is perhaps also an attempt to avoid prosecutions.

In a few short weeks (or sooner if Trump has his way) the United States will be plunged into the maelstrom of presidential primaries, and political operatives will start strategising for 2024. Far-thinking Republicans must recognise that rusted-on Trump supporters — mostly older, white and without a college education — are a diminishing demographic. On the other hand, Democrats can’t take for granted the longstanding support of Black voters or ignore evidence that Hispanic support is slipping.

Across the nation, the share of non-Hispanic white voters is declining. America’s youngest voters, millennials and generation X, are more racially and ethnically diverse than older generations. At the same time, the increasing proportion of voters aged sixty-five and over (19 per cent by 2024) will force a focus on social security and Medicare, programs Republicans have said they will cut.

The fevered gerrymandering and vote-suppressing efforts of Republican governors and legislators reveal their understanding that only these forms of election-rigging stand between their party — at least in its present form — and oblivion. Even the Republican-dominated US Supreme Court has pitched in, allowing states to use unlawfully gerrymandered congressional maps for last week’s elections and currently hearing a case that would undermine the Voting Rights Act.

The midterm results have delivered a sense of relief to many, including leaders in other democracies, but they also highlight the work still needed to protect American democracy and America’s place in the world. The new balance in Congress is hardly a prescription for the national unity that Biden seeks to promulgate, and the looming internecine warfare between Trump, DeSantis and the Republican leadership will work against any efforts to bridge the party divide. •

The post Game changers appeared first on Inside Story.

But if its perspective is accepted as the left’s view, it will be a disaster for progressive democrats and the idea of socialism. The call is profoundly misconceived, with respect to both Ukraine and Taiwan, especially Ukraine, and also in the general political analysis it offers.

I say this with regret. One of the main drafters is American law professor Richard Falk, a comrade from the struggle against the US war in Vietnam. His outstanding work helped lay the basis for the development of modern international law and human rights. I’ve worked with and admire two of the lead signatories.* So far there are thirty-eight of them, including Jeremy Corbyn.

“All Who Care” says wise things, including making a call for “a massive global awakening of human wisdom and energy.” The writers explain: “Important as governments and international institutions are, the initiative for a coherent response to the challenges we face lies largely with the people, with civil society.”

But it is primarily an intervention in conflicts of the moment, and it is in this respect that it needs to be judged.

On Ukraine, a call for peace that sets out to be principled should state that any threat to use nuclear weapons is an outrage. It does not. It must state that invading other countries is wrong. It does not. It was wrong for the United States in Iraq, it is wrong for Israel in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza, and it must now be reversed in Ukraine.

“All Who Care” demands that Ukraine be “neutral.” If its neutrality were guaranteed by military commitments from outside to safeguard the country’s independence in a way that satisfied the government in Kyiv and did not deprive it of weapons for self-defence, then this would be reasonable. Given the risk of a world war, those outside Ukraine have a right to say that it cannot become a base that might be used to threaten Russia, or any other neighbouring country.

But in any such call, tone and attitude are of vital importance: it has to be said respectfully as a request to the Ukrainian people. It is arrogant, and even a touch imperial, to demand the country’s neutrality without also making clear that this does not take away Ukraine’s democratic right to decide what economic and social trajectory it aspires to. Neutrality should not prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union if it so chooses (something even Putin’s Russia seems to have accepted). This, too, needs to be said.

The approach to Ukraine taken by “All Who Care” demands the “phased withdrawal of Russian military forces” and “an end to the delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine.” Why should the withdrawal be “phased” but not the end of military aid?

The document suggests that the underlying cause of the conflict is “the cynical use of the Ukraine war by great powers intent on pursuing their geopolitical ambitions.” But it was the uncynical resistance of Ukrainians themselves, much to the surprise of both Washington and the Kremlin, that shaped the war. “All Who Care” disregards Ukrainian agency and the commitment of a huge majority of Ukrainians to their country’s integrity and independence. Instead, it frames Ukraine as being manipulated by the United States. This echoes Vladimir Putin’s perspective.

What is the thinking that leads the authors and signatories to their conclusion? They sum it up in four short paragraphs which need to be quoted in full:

More troubling still is the toxic relationship between the United States on the one hand and China and Russia on the other. Here lies the key to both conflicts.

What we are seeing is the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement of global security. The United States has been unwilling to accept, let alone adapt to, the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. It remains unwilling to break with outdated notions of global dominance — a legacy of the Cold War and the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A global power shift is taking place. The West-centric world, in which first Europe and then the United States held sway, is giving way to a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world in which other centres of power and influence are demanding to be heard.

Failure to accept this new reality spells immense danger. A new Cold War is now in full swing, which can at any moment mutate into a hot war. In the words of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

But it is the authors and signatories who are unwilling to face up to new realities of the nature of the regimes now challenging the United States, the autonomy of the demands for democracy, especially those led by women, and the way these are responses to the fact of America’s irreversibly diminished role, which Washington is certainly aware of.

Historically, they are right: we are caught in the legacy of decades of gross behaviour by the US governing elite. But its ambition failed more than a decade ago. This in turn gave birth to monsters even worse than US hegemony. The problem the world faces is not that the United States has failed to relinquish “outdated notions of global dominance,” it is the struggle over how and by whom its dominance will be replaced.

The United States is not innocent nor a mere bystander in this process. Under Joe Biden it is striving to re-establish global “leadership.” But it is doing it from a position of weakness. A recent example of how emaciated US power has become is the behaviour of what historically was its client state, Saudi Arabia. Despite being courted by a humiliating personal visit from the US president, who wanted their help against high energy prices, the Saudis have cut back production to ensure the opposite.

This is a direct help to Putin as it keeps the price of oil high, as well as being an intervention in the American midterm elections designed to aid Donald Trump and his family by making Biden unpopular.

How did we get to a situation where Washington is so weakened?

A NEW WORLD: MULTI-CENTRED AND MORE UNEQUAL

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush celebrated US “primacy” and boasted that no other country need “dread” its influence. In fact, the United States exercised its post–cold war supremacy with catastrophic stupidity and greed. Across the Global South, the wealth extraction of colonialism was replaced with the wealth extraction of the “Washington consensus.”

In the West itself, the working and middle classes saw their incomes flatline as the financial system transferred riches upwards, generating unparalleled inequality. Russia, in particular, was treated to the most brutal “shock therapy” and its oligarchs were encouraged to loot the country, with the West providing safe havens for their theft. Ordinary Russians suffered a deep, humiliating loss of income and livelihood.

The rise and nature of Putin are rooted in the rage this engendered. Only China had the sense and political means to ensure its economy was governed rather than handed over to the “freedom” of Wall Street. It grew exponentially, while its low wages were instrumentalised to break and impoverish the working classes in developed countries.

The rise of China and its admission into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 birthed a genuine economic rival to the United States. Meanwhile, the US used the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to occupy Afghanistan and later to invade Iraq, to supervise the world’s second-largest oil deposits and almost encircle Iran. In this way, the world would understand that the United States’ unprecedented economic hegemony would be underwritten by an unparalleled military supremacy.

That was then. Unrivalled hubris led to catastrophic humiliation. Five years after the “shock and awe” of its assault on Baghdad, as it faced strategic defeat in the deserts and mountains on the other side of the globe, the great financial crash of 2008 terminated US primacy. It also put an end to the justification of its “neoliberal” economics — the claim that markets know best. Which in turn undermined the claim that voters are powerless, and the political fatalism essential to its ideological success.

With Washington’s global dominance shattered, the world became irreversibly “multi-centred,” as well as even more unequal. Because the left had been so systematically marginalised, it was the right that tolled the bell. Trump gained the leadership of the Republican Party by denouncing the Iraq invasion as “a big fat mistake” that cost the US$2 trillion and benefited Iran, and excoriated the globalists who had sold out American business and workers. He specifically abjured the ideology, as well as the costs, of US global leadership. He praised Russia, refused to condemn Lukashenko’s crushing of democracy in Belarus and admired China’s Xi Jinping for his strength.

In his last speech to the United Nations (unless he is re-elected, that is) he advocated a gangster’s division of the world. He told his fellow leaders: “I have rejected the failed approaches of the past. I am proudly putting America first, just as you should be putting your countries first. That’s OK. That’s what you should be doing.”

In this way, the US “accepted and adapted” to the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. Only it did so by proclaiming a pluralist modern fascism, built on corruption and surveillance, and expressed in the language of The Godfather. The fact that the Biden administration seeks to reverse this while also terminating US efforts at “regime change” in Afghanistan is welcome.

Today, the most pressing danger that humanity faces is the return to the White House of Trump or a Trump clone, who would rig the US system permanently. This is of world importance because once joined by the economic and military weight of a far-right America, the global network of authoritarian regimes would enjoy irreversible domination for at least a generation. Xi, Putin and Trump, together with India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Iran’s Ali Khamenei and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, would ensure that more nations joined them in Trump’s mobster international.

REJECTING THE RIGHT: UKRAINE ON THE FRONT LINE

The front line of resistance to such an outcome is, tragically, Ukraine. It did not ask for this role, but it is not just fighting for itself. Our democratic future, too, is at stake in its battle. To defeat Trumpism outside the United States as well as inside, we have to defy and frustrate Putin.

Of course, politically, this is not a clash between socialism and capitalism, but between capitalist democracies with some regard to the rule of law, freedom of speech and an open politics on the one hand, and lawless, oppressive capitalism on the other.

In this situation, the only way forward for the left, after decades of defeat, is through unconditional support for more rule-based democracy based on universal principles. Without this there is no hope for the democracy of feminism, of racial justice, of a sustainable environment, of a fair economy, of human rights, of participation, pluralism, deliberation and national self-determination. Or, to borrow from the inspiring slogan of the protests in Iran, “Women, life and freedom.”

This also means that the people of Crimea have the right to decide for themselves whether to be part of Ukraine or Russia, and the people of Taiwan must be free to decide for themselves if they want to be ruled from Beijing.

Some fear a Western victory in Ukraine would take us back thirty years to 1992, with Francis Fukuyama celebrating the triumph of liberalism over history all over again. But the younger generations are not going to be easily persuaded into passivity or believing that “the market knows best.” The United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan and can be prevented from ever again engaging in “regime change.” China is now its economic equal and this cannot be undone. The process in Ukraine is not one of collapse, as in eastern Europe, but the result of decades of effort to slough off the corruptions of Stalinism. Nor are Ukrainians alone. From Iran to Chile the genie of popular agency has shattered the bottle of neoliberal fatalism.

The authors and signatories of “All Who Care” are right to sound the alarm in one important respect. These are very dangerous times that demand wisdom, not glorification or the triumphalism that feeds arms industries.

Our larger aim should be to welcome the emergence of democracy in Russia — maybe the last thing that the Western security establishment actually desires.

The alternative is rule by a mobsters international, which would ensure that the world will fry. It is as important as that. •

* Of the thirty-eight initial signatories, Victoria Brittain, a pioneering editor of coverage of the Global South, is someone I was proud openDemocracy published. I worked with Yanis Varoufakis when I helped a little with the draft of the original DiEM 25 call for democracy in Europe (which we discussed together with the much-missed Rosemary Bechler).

This article first appeared in openDemocracy.

The post A betrayal of Ukraine and the left appeared first on Inside Story.

You can stop imagining because this is what happened to parents of the twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012. Infowars host Alex Jones told his audience that the mass shooting had been faked to strengthen the case for tougher gun control laws.

Infowars’s report on the day of the attack was headlined “Connecticut School Massacre Looks Like a False Flag Say Witnesses.” What was going through Jones’s mind, we might wonder, when he declared, “Don’t ever think the globalists that have hijacked this country wouldn’t stage something like this”?

What is remarkable, and is documented so compellingly in Elizabeth Williamson’s book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, is that these and other flagrantly untrue statements didn’t crush the parents.

One of them, information technology consultant Lenny Pozner, was already a regular listener to Jones’s far-right Infowars program when the shooting occurred. His six-year-old son Noah was among the victims. In January 2013 he heard a segment insinuating that Noah’s mother Veronique had “performed” an interview with Anderson Cooper in CNN’s TV studio while pretending to be in Newtown, Connecticut.

Pozner sent a strongly worded complaint to the program. Responding, an Infowars producer thanked him for sharing his “point of view” and said Jones would like to speak to him. But the producer wanted to know, “How can we confirm that you are the real Lenny Pozner?” Pozner later learned that the split-second glitch in the CNN broadcast that Jones had identified as evidence of fakery had actually been created by the Infowars production team when they converted the interview from its original format to the one used on their own platform.

Pozner was not interested in exposing his family to further hate by appearing on air. But he did begin assembling documents about Noah’s life and posting them on his Google+ page. The flood of negative, carping responses led him to contact the Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook group and subject himself to several hours of online grilling by people demanding he provide evidence for the most minute details of the shooting and accusing him of making money “trolling the internet.”

The group’s site manager drove off anyone who seemed willing to give him a fair hearing. Williamson is struck by the group’s determined defensiveness. “They were a ragtag army of errant thinkers holed up in a Facebook fortress, fending off intrusions of truth.”

Reading about these events is disturbing enough, but the feelings of Noah’s parents and other Sandy Hook families as the campaign against them unfolded are scarcely imaginable. Pozner tells Williamson he felt like a spectator to his own loss, adding: “We thought the internet would give us this accelerated society of science and information, and really, we’ve gone back to flat earth.”

Jones was only one of the early deniers, and he pursued the issue — according to Dan Friesen, who co-hosts a podcast, Knowledge Fight, devoted to critiquing Jones — because of the threat the massacre posed to his pro-gun agenda. “Once there are kids that are dead, Alex can recognise that denial may be a useful tool. On some level he knows that if these events are real, it’s a decent argument for gun control.”

So far, so bad. Williamson goes on to describe an ugly dance between Jones and a coterie of academics pushing conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, including Maria Hsia Chang, a retired China scholar from the University of Nevada, James Tracy, a journalism professor at Florida Atlantic University, and James Fetzer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota.

Chang posted the addresses of the families whose children were killed at Sandy Hook on her blog, Fellowship of the Mind, prompting people to appear at their homes, follow them and look through their rubbish bins searching for proof that the attack was a sham.

Tracy was among the first conspiracy theorists to use the term “crisis actors” — people employed to play the role of grieving families — about Sandy Hook. “Why are select would-be families and students lingering in the area and repeatedly offering themselves for interviews?” asked a January 2013 Infowars article drawing on Tracy’s speculation. “A possible reason is that they are trained actors working under the direction of state and federal authorities and in coordination with cable and broadcast network talent to provide tailor-made crisis acting that realistically drive [sic] home the event’s tragic features.”

Fetzer, for his part, drew on an undefined “research group” to compile a book whose title left no room for doubt about his view: Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It Was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control. (FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.)

Despite his dispiriting experience with the Facebook group, Pozner continued his efforts, this time by writing opinion pieces for newspapers pointing out the extent to which he and other Sandy Hook families were being besieged by online hoaxers and by Jones. In 2014 he set up his own online group, HONR, attracting volunteers willing to help him push back against the conspiracy theorists.

The new group began asking the online tech companies to take down blatantly false information, citing specific violations of their terms of service. But they were blanked. Notices about pornography would get the online companies’ attention but little else did, writes Williamson, noting both the irony and the hypocrisy. “The publication of pornography is supported by the First Amendment, enshrined by the courts as a signal test of free-speech principles,” she writes:

But here were the social platforms, scurrying to take down porn while trotting out the First Amendment to explain why they didn’t remove abusive content. Why? Because despite what they say, the platforms are all about pleasing their advertisers, most of whom don’t want their ads adjacent to sexually explicit content.

Pozner and his volunteers then found a stronger lever — copyright laws. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unauthorised use of copyrighted content on any digital medium, regardless of whether the material is registered with the US Copyright Office. The act doesn’t make internet service providers liable for unwittingly displaying infringing material, but it does require them to remove it once a complaint is received.

To illustrate their posts, the conspiracy theorists would copy images of Noah or other victims of the shootings and then upload them. That’s copyright theft, Pozner thought, and began filing takedown notices, with significant success. When he succeeded in having a picture of Noah removed from an Infowars item in 2015, Jones was apoplectic — admittedly his resting disposition — and spent almost two hours railing against this dire curtailing of his free speech.

Undeterred, Pozner and HONR continued filing notices. When James Fetzer’s book was published they shamed Amazon into removing it from sale. Mainstream media began publicising their efforts and eventually both Fetzer and Tracy were forced to leave their university posts.

In the way of the internet, though, Fetzer released a free PDF of his book that was downloaded at least ten million times. It was like playing Whac-A-Mole with the “conspiratorial–industrial complex,” as Williamson calls it.

Williamson, a journalist with the New York Times, begins her book by reminding readers of what happened on 14 December 2012 when Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old former student of Sandy Hook who had been showing clear signs of mental disturbance since he was eleven, shot and killed his mother at their home and then drove to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. There, he used three guns to kill twenty children aged six or seven, and six of their teachers, before turning one of the guns on himself.

The details Williamson provides are bleak. Lanza was 183 centimetres tall but weighed only fifty kilos and slipped through the school’s gates and bollards “like a letter through a slot.” The Lanza family gave their home to Newtown after the killings, and the small town’s officials ensured the Lanza house and all its contents were destroyed to prevent anything finding its way onto the murder-memorabilia market.

This was the worst school shooting in American history except for the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where twenty-seven students and five faculty members were killed before the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, committed suicide. As appalling as that shooting was, even more appalling was the age of the victims at Sandy Hook.

That in itself was a core reason for denying it happened, Williamson discovers when she tries to find what she terms “patient zero” — the origin of the conspiracy theories about the shooting. Although some inflammatory content from the time has been removed from the internet, the remaining records brought a disheartening realisation. “Within hours of the shooting,” she writes, “a mass of people more or less simultaneously decided that the shooting was faked.”

From the distance of a decade, writes Williamson, the shootings at Sandy Hook are clearly “the first mass tragedy to spawn an online circle of people impermeable and hostile to reality and its messengers, whether the mainstream media, law enforcement, or the families of the dead.” Since then, almost every high-profile mass tragedy — including the mass shooting at Uvalde elementary school in Texas earlier this year — has generated similarly disturbing online theories.

Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was among the seventeen injured at Virginia Tech in 2007, tells Williamson the reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings was familiar from her own experience except in one respect. “We didn’t have the disinformation campaigns and the fuel that social media platforms generally give them.”

Facebook had twenty million users globally in 2007; by 2012 the figure exceeded a billion. Around one hundred million YouTube videos were viewed daily on average shortly before the Virginia Tech shooting; by 2012 the “Gangnam Style” video had become the first on YouTube to be viewed more than a billion times. Twitter was barely a year old in 2007, with 5000 tweets sent each day; by the end of 2012 the number was 5000 tweets per second. When a University of Miami political scientist set a up a Google alert for the term “conspiracy theory” in 2011 he received five media articles a day; by 2016 the daily number was between fifty and one hundred.

In 2018, Lenny and Veronique Pozner, seven other Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent targeted by the conspiracists sued Jones for defamation. More or less simultaneously, the biggest social media companies, including Apple, Spotify, Twitter and YouTube, began dropping Jones and Infowars from their platforms. Even the streaming site YouPorn dumped Jones, saying without a trace of irony, “Hate has no place on YouPorn.”

In the four years since then, the defamation cases have been wending their way through the courts. They may seem straightforward: surely claiming parents faked their own children’s deaths for financial gain is about as egregious a statement as you could make? But, as one of the lawyers representing the families pro bono remarks, proving defamation in the United States is harder than proving personal injury.

This is especially so in the case of public figures, who must prove they were defamed with malice or a reckless disregard for the truth. Jones’s lawyers have argued the Sandy Hook parents are public figures because they have lobbied publicly for tighter gun controls. One judge described this as “a very interesting question of law” given the parents were “involuntary” public figures “speaking after their child was murdered in one of the most horrific shootings in American history.”

Alex Jones’s circumstances had meanwhile undergone a curious change that paradoxically rendered him more vulnerable, even as his notoriety has soared. His relentless fanning of conspiracy theories had turbocharged the popularity of Infowars, as had his bromance with Donald Trump, doubling traffic to his site to fifty million views a month and boosting viewings of its YouTube videos to in excess of a billion. In 2013 Jones’s business was already bringing in US$20 million in revenue yearly.

“Jones got away with saying all this stuff before because he didn’t have an audience,” says Kyle Farrer, a lawyer representing Pozner. “Who cares what some guy yelling at clouds is saying? But now his megaphone is significantly bigger. He’s talking to this big audience and now he’s saying this crazy stuff that has a real effect on people. It’s like his rise is his downfall.”

For Farrer’s fellow lawyer on the case, Mark Bankston, the only threat Jones takes seriously is one that threatens his business. “If you make him understand that these kinds of ‘journalistic’ practices have a cost and an effect, and that he won’t be able to profit off of causing pain to a family, I think that’s a victory too.” Particularly if that message is heard by his acolytes and imitators.

Jones’s growing problem was that no matter how ridiculous we might find his unhinged ranting or his non-stop promotion and selling of products with names like Prosta Guard, Real Red Pill, Superblue Fluoride-free Toothpaste and Combat One Tactical Bath Wipes (“Baby wipes for middle-aged men who serve in a thrown-together militia out in the woods”), he was slowly, ineluctably being drawn into courtrooms where he had to abide by others’ rules.

This was unforgettably illustrated in one of the lawsuits playing out since Williamson’s book went to press. As a clip from the Law and Crime Network shows, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble found that she needed to talk to Jones as if he were a disobedient third-grader.

Judge: You must tell the truth. This is not your show. You’re already under oath. You’ve already violated that oath twice today. It seems absurd to instruct you to tell the truth again while you testify but here I am. You must tell the truth while you testify. This [pointing to the witness box] is not your show… Do you understand what I have said to you?

Jones: Yes, I believe what I said is true.

Judge (cutting him off): You believe everything you say is true. But it isn’t. Your beliefs do not make something true.

In the end, the answer to the question of what went through Jones’s mind as he began spouting his bile against the relatives of the Sandy Hook victims in 2012 is: who cares? The reason why he is “angry, mendacious and heedless of the wreckage he creates,” as his former wife, Kelly Nichols attests, is less important than the fact he is at long last being held to account for his words.

So far he has lost every one of the defamation cases launched against him, not least because he has refused to cooperate in the standard legal process of discovery and given judges little choice but to rule against him. Now that he has filed for bankruptcy the key question is: will he be able to sequester his wealth from awards for damages or will his business be ruined?

That he is in this predicament rather than continuing to rant with a voice that sounds, as Williamson puts it, like “twenty miles of rough road” is because of the determination of the Sandy Hook parents, along with all those who lent their expertise to the task. Asking what has been going through their minds, not just on 14 December 2012 but in the ten years since then, is the more pertinent question. It is also a much harder one to answer, particularly if you really do stop to imagine walking a mile in their shoes. •

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
By Elizabeth Williamson | Penguin Random House | $49.99 | 482 pages

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Colorado has also done almost everything election experts recommend to protect its electoral system from hacking. County clerks are combating disinformation about the security and reliability of the system and refuting false claims of potential fraud in the wake of last year’s presidential election.

A large majority of Colorado voters have opted to be placed on a permanent mail-ballot list maintained by the state. As an overseas voter, I received an email link to the ballot papers from the office of the clerk and recorder of  Summit County (my district of residence) at the beginning of October. I needed some personal details to unlock these papers and a little tech savvy to fill them out and submit them. I returned my completed voting paper, along with an affidavit attesting my eligibility to vote, by email a few days later.

I have since received an email from Colorado BallotTrax to inform me that my ballot was received. A phone number and an email address are given for any questions I might have, and a link to the GoVoteColorado.gov website operated by Colorado’s secretary of state. Another email will let me know when my vote has been counted.

I voted in the same way in the Democratic primary races earlier this year (the results are here) and in every presidential and midterm election since I became an American citizen. A highlight was voting for the 2020 presidential primaries, in person this time, at the old County Courthouse in Breckenridge, using an unwieldy electronic voting machine. But it wasn’t very celebratory; although “I Voted” stickers were available, democracy sausages were nowhere to be seen.

In this election I could vote for one of the state’s two federal senators (incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet or Republican Joe O’Dea); for the representative for the second congressional district (incumbent Democrat representative Joe Neguse or Republican Marshall Dawson); for a state senator and a state House of Representatives member; and for thirteen state-wide offices, including governor and lieutenant governor (with Democrat incumbents Jared Polis and Dianne Primavera seeking re-election), attorney-general, secretary of state, treasurer, and four representatives each for the State Board of Education and the State Board of Regents, which oversee state spending in schools and universities respectively.

Voters who hadn’t run out of energy by that point could also say yes or no to eleven state ballot measures on public school funding, alcohol licencing and other matters. No judicial positions were on the ballot, but I could register whether or not I wanted those in current elected judicial positions to remain. (Full details of what was on the ballot are here.)

Colorado is a blue state with pockets of more conservative voters, including ranchers concerned about gun rights, petrol prices and more. (One rancher is currently spending US$11 million on anti-Polis billboards.) It also has five military bases, home to some 60,000 people, as well as military retirees and evangelical church members. But the political demographics are changing, with young, college-educated suburbanites making up a rising percentage of the population. After voting primarily Republican from 1920 to 2004, the state has voted with the Democrats in the last four presidential elections; Biden won in 2020 with a 13.5 per cent margin.

The Democrats hope that the 2022 midterms will defy historical precedent and enable them to retain control of the Senate and perhaps even hold the House. In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet holds a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent and has done well in fundraising, but it is critical that this low-key senator is able to stave off his Republican opponent, Joe O’Dea. O’Dea’s moderate positions on issues like abortion, his rejection of former president Donald Trump and his endorsement by former president George W. Bush make him a very real threat.

Controversial Republican Lauren Boebert, who represents Colorado’s third congressional district in the House of Representatives, is backed by Trump and has earned notoriety for her inflammatory remarks. She has positioned herself as one of the most far-right members of Congress. One poll has her in a statistical tie with her Democrat challenger Adam Frisch, and there are hopes that he has the momentum to make this a competitive race.

Boebert won in 2020 with just 51 per cent of the vote, in a district that includes the wealthy ski centres around Aspen and the middle-class cities of Glenwood Springs and Pueblo, and where 43 per cent of voters are unaffiliated. But the nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report rates this district as solidly Republican. This race matters, not just because it contributes to controlling the House of Representatives but also because more wins for Trump-endorsed candidates will boost his kingmaker status and increase the likelihood he will run for president in 2024.

In contrast to Boebert’s high-profile contest, the second congressional district where I vote remains a solidly Democratic seat. Our local congressman, Joe Neguse, who is running for a third term, is the son of Eritrean refugees (a significant number of whom have settled in Summit County) and the first African-American man elected to the US Congress from Colorado.  His Republican opponent Marshall Dawson is so low-profile I had to research him on the internet, and I still don’t know much about him.

Neguse, who is on House leader Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team, is one of the co-chairs of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. He was also chosen as an impeachment manager for Trump’s second impeachment trial. In recent years, this seat has been a strong jumping off point for politicians seeking higher office: of the last four to hold it, two went on to the US Senate and one (Polis) to the governorship.

Neguse has already marked himself as a man to watch, and he is expected to play an enhanced role in the House leadership as old hands like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer step aside.

State elections are an increasingly important feature of the American political landscape. State governors and legislatures oversee the drawing of electoral boundaries, determine voting rights, decide who is eligible for Medicaid, and now— after the recent decision of the US Supreme Court — make decisions about abortion access.

In this, too, Colorado is in a better position than most other states. Since 2020, the state’s legislative and congressional districts have been drawn up by two separate independent redistricting commissions created after the state’s voters resoundingly approved ballot provisions in the 2018 elections.

The state has also set up an insurance marketplace (as outlined in the Affordable Care Act) to help make health insurance more accessible, and more than half a million Coloradans are covered under Medicaid Medicaid expansion. Low-income undocumented pregnant people and children will gain eligibility by 2025. It is ranked in the top ten states for healthcare.

In April, Governor Polis signed into law the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which codifies protections to ensure that abortion and choice remain legal in Colorado; in July he signed an executive order further protecting reproductive health rights and clarifying that Colorado won’t cooperate with other states’ criminal or civil investigations of health decisions that are legal in Colorado.

Polis has a good track record: he has provided full-day kindergarten and universal preschool and he is entitled to tout his management of the pandemic. FiveThirtyEight’s poll average has him ahead of his Republican rival Heidi Ganahl by a widening margin of 14.3 percentage points.

The political climate has seen secretaries of state — who oversee elections and maintain voter registration files — become increasingly important. Colorado incumbent, Democrat Jena Griswold, made a name for herself in 2020 when she pushed back on national television against election disinformation and challenged Trump’s assertions that mail ballots are less secure. She has subsequently faced death threats from Trump allies.

Griswold successfully went to court to bar Mesa county clerk Tina Peters, who faced criminal charges for allegedly compromising voting equipment and election security, from overseeing both the 2021 election and this year’s midterms. Undeterred, Peters ran in the Republican primary but was beaten by Pam Anderson, a former head of the Clerk’s Association who has made standing up for the state’s election model central to her campaign. No polls are available for this race, but Griswold has to be seen as the frontrunner, although Anderson is a plausible opponent.

Voter turnout — always a problem in the United States and especially so in midterm elections — will be crucial for Democrats if they are to retain the seats they need to hold power in Congress. Campaign staff aim to keep the spotlight on abortion and women’s anger over the Republicans’ curtailing of their rights to reproductive health. Colorado’s progressive stance on abortion issues might turn out to be a two-edged sword, though, if voters don’t feel their reproductive health rights are under threat and aren’t motivated to vote.

Polling suggests the key issues for the state’s voters include inflation and the cost of living; housing shortages and homelessness; climate change, with the state exposed to wildfires and drought; and the cost of childcare. Still, protecting abortion rights and addressing racism and discrimination are in the top ten.

As voting begins around the nation, the FiveThirtyEight forecast has Democrats slightly favoured to win the Senate and Republicans slightly favoured to win the House — and the evidence is that all the races are tightening. Ten states in particular will play a significant role in deciding the balance of the US House and Senate and shaping the map of governorships: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

While Colorado doesn’t appear on that list, every race is important, never more so than this year. The United States is facing rising threats from domestic extremists and those who would undermine the sanctity of the right to vote. As vice-president Kamala Harris says, “everything is on the line in these elections.” •

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Biden’s speech in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall last Thursday may well come to be seen (in Biden’s words) as “one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come.” Biden castigated Trump and the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, wing of the Republican Party for pursuing an anti-democratic agenda and fomenting civil unrest, and underlined how the extremism of Trump and Trumpism threatens the very foundations of the nation.

That the current president was warning the nation of the dangers posed by the former president on the steps of the building where both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were debated, written and signed underlined the significance of Biden’s words.

He went on to remind Americans that they are “not powerless in the face of these threats — we are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy” — and concluded with a call to “Vote, vote, vote.”

Biden didn’t come lately to this theme. He says he was driven to run for the presidency again after the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Amid fears that the forces that drove the 6 January attack on the Capitol aren’t fading away, he recently convened private meetings with leading historians and political analysists to discuss growing dangers to American democracy.

Even as Biden’s speech was being written, Trump was urging his followers to attack the FBI and the justice department and demanding yet again that he be declared the rightful winner of the 2020 election or that the election be re-run. Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, was threatening civil violence if Trump was prosecuted for illegally possessing government documents.

The key Republican responses to Biden’s speech were also delivered in Pennsylvania. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy — the man who looks to be Speaker after the midterm elections — used a speech in Scranton to align himself with Trump’s efforts to undercut federal law enforcement over the search of Mar-a-Lago. He delivered a point-by-point condemnation of Biden’s policies and, in words that presaged Biden’s later that day, accused the president of launching “an assault on our democracy” with policies that had “severely wounded America’s soul.”

Two days later, at what was billed as a rally for Republican candidates in Wilkes-Barre, Trump delivered his own explosive, aggrieved response. He called Biden “an enemy of the state” and the FBI and the justice department “vicious monsters,” escalating the attacks he has made on his social media website. Dialling up the rhetoric, he called Biden’s words at Independence Hall “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.”

It’s no coincidence that Biden and Trump converged on Pennsylvania: with several high stakes, competitive races, the state is emerging as the nation’s centre of political gravity. The outcome of the open race for governor between Democrat Josh Shapiro, the former state attorney general, and Republican Doug Mastriano, a former state senator backed by Trump, may determine the future of abortion rights and free and fair elections in a state that has a Republican-led legislature.

Meanwhile, lieutenant-governor John Fetterman, recovering from a stroke, and Trump-endorsed celebrity TV physician, Mehmet Oz, are engaged in an ugly contest over who will replace retiring Republican senator Pat Toomey. The battle has included unedifying clashes over the price of the vegetables needed for crudités and concerns that Oz has spread misinformation and spruiked unproven medical treatments.

Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania to Hillary Clinton in 2016 (by around 50,000 votes) and to Biden in 2020 (by just over 81,000 votes) but polled well in predominantly suburban and rural counties. The question for 2022 is whether this political alignment will hold or whether moderate suburban voters and the white rural and working-class voters who once embraced Trump will now reject the candidates he backs. And if that’s the case in Pennsylvania, what of the rest of the United States?

The conventional wisdom in American politics is that the president’s party loses ground in midterm elections. Midterms are referendums on incumbents and almost no president has escaped a tough critique: in the nineteen midterm elections between 1946 and 2018, the president’s party only once improved its share of the popular vote for the House of Representatives. Only twice in the past 100 years has the president’s party gained seats in both the House and Senate.

The Democrats hold razor-thin margins in both the House and the Senate. House Democrats have a mere six-seat advantage, and Republicans are helped by partisan redistricting in Republican-controlled states and the fact that more Democrats (thirty-one) than Republicans (nineteen) are retiring. Republicans need to win only one seat to take control of the Senate, a victory that would kill any chance of Biden implementing his agenda during the second half of his term.

But political pundits are now seeing 2022 as a year in which precedents might be broken and assumptions cast aside, not just in Pennsylvania but across the nation. Democrats have a new sense of optimism about the possibility of blunting predicted Republican gains.

Just a few months ago, the discussion was about how big the “red wave” was going to be. (Confusingly, Republicans are labelled red and Democrats blue in the United States.) On 2 June the respected Cook Political Report declared that things looked ominous for the Democrats; on 30 August it concluded that Republican control of the House was no longer a foregone conclusion.

Last weekend, Race to the White House gave the Democrats a 61.34 per cent chance of retaining the Senate. FiveThirtyEight, which gives the Democrats a 68 per cent chance, attributed the surprise figure to poor candidates in battleground states. Other political analyses are more cautious, but it’s reasonable to postulate that the Democrats might gain one or more Senate seats.

It still takes a lot of optimism to believe the House will stay under Democratic control, but the twenty-to-thirty-seat gains once predicted for the Republicans have narrowed to ten to twenty. (The 270ToWin consensus forecast is here.) Under the circumstances, holding the Republicans to less than ten extra seats could be viewed by Democrats as a victory of sorts.

Several issues have brought the pollsters and the pundits to envisage what one Republican strategist described as “more like a shallow red puddle” than the red tsunami predicted earlier.

The first is that women, especially Democrats and Independents, have been fired up by the US Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the constitutional right to abortion, and subsequent state efforts to limit women’s access to abortions and reproductive healthcare. American women are engaging politically in a way that has not been seen before.

The number of women registering to vote has surged, especially in deep-red states like Kansas, Idaho and Louisiana, where abortion rights have already been severely curtailed, and in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, where the electoral stakes for abortion rights are highest.

“In my twenty-eight years analysing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in the past two months in American politics,” wrote political strategist and pollster Tom Bonier on Friday. “Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed.”

In August, Kansas — a red state that hasn’t backed a Democrat for president in nearly sixty years — voted overwhelmingly to keep abortion rights in the state constitution. An estimated 69 per cent of new voter registrations ahead of the ballot were women.

In a string of recent House special elections, Democrats have out-performed expectations. Again, abortion has been a key driver. A surge in women voters helped Democrat Pat Ryan prevail over Republican Marc Molinaro in the special election last month in New York’s 19th congressional district, a swing district in the Hudson Valley that Biden won in 2020 by just two percentage points. After the race turned into a clearcut battle over abortion rights, Ryan exceeded the vote of the Democrat in 2020 and ran 1.3 per cent ahead of Biden in 2020.

Despite the prognostications — and evidence — that abortion could be a winning issue for Democrats, all but a very few Republicans are not listening. But it’s telling that Republican candidates in critical races in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and North Carolina are scrubbing abortion language from campaign websites and adjusting their rhetoric on the hustings.

An election centred on the removal of a constitutional right has no precedent. And while the focus is on abortion rights, other minorities — LGBTQ and Trans groups, for example — are concerned that their hard-won rights will also be taken away by the Trump-appointed conservative majority on the US Supreme Court.

Also changing the election dynamics is Trump’s involvement in divisive primaries. He has hand-picked his acolytes for House and Senate races and for offices responsible for counting and certifying the votes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, the states that denied him victory in 2020.

The candidates he has backed have had mixed success in often-bitter Republican primaries and beyond, which might signal that his influence on his party has waned. But the Democrats’ prospects in the Senate are undeniably enhanced by his pick of inexperienced (to put it politely) Republican candidates including Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, J.D. Vance in Ohio, Hershel Walker in Georgia and Blake Masters in Arizona, all of whom have underperformed in polls despite Trump’s backing.

Trump’s support didn’t help Sarah Palin either; she lost the Alaska special election to replace Republican Representative Don Young, who died in March. Democrat Mary Peltola, who won under the state’s new ranked-choice voting system (which operates like Australia’s preferential system), becomes the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. She will face re-election in November, again against Palin and Nick Begich, a more moderate Republican. It will be interesting to see if Palin’s rhetoric changes after her unexpected loss.

Trump and his allies’ aggressive midterm strategy is seen in the Republican party as a double-edged sword. Republicans don’t win if they don’t turn out the Trump voters, and the former president can boost excitement among that group, but he can also turn off moderates and independents — and Republicans can’t win with Trump voters alone. Republican candidates also fear that his capacity to dominate the political news will undermine the task of making the election all about Biden and the Democrats.

This problem for Republicans has an upside for Democrats (and America). If Trump’s role in the campaign delivers losses rather than victories then his 2024 presidential candidacy will be less likely.

More trouble for Republicans comes from a slowdown in fundraising, a strong sign of flagging electoral support. With small donors pulling back, online fundraising has slowed across much of the party. Some Republicans suspect Trump’s relentless fundraising pitches and cash hoarding has exhausted a donor base also affected by cost of living pressures. Worryingly for Republicans, Democratic contributions have meanwhile surged.

Republican Senate candidates who spent big on bruising primary campaigns are now finding that the National Republican Senatorial Campaign, or NRSC, is pulling advertising, even in critical states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. The conflict has intensified between Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and the NRSC’s chairman, Senator Rick Scott of Florida. McConnell has argued that huge sums of money (some US$150 million so far this election cycle) have been spent on poor quality candidates; Scott has retorted that “trash talking” Republican candidates is “treasonous to the conservative cause.”

Despite his (justifiable) concerns, McConnell is investing millions of dollars from his Senate Leadership Fund to support J.D. Vance in Ohio and Oz in Pennsylvania, both of whom have been running poor campaigns. He has also pushed Trump ally Peter Thiel, who has been bankrolling MAGA candidates, to continue to fund Masters in Arizona and Vance in Ohio, but has reportedly been rebuffed.

McConnell’s preoccupation with ensuring he resumes the Senate leadership is also hindered by his increasingly bitter feud with Trump, which the former president revived after McConnell criticised the quality of Trump-backed candidates. “Mitch McConnell is not an opposition leader, he is a pawn for the Democrats to get whatever they want,” Trump said, calling for a new Republican leader in the Senate to be picked “immediately.”

Trump’s gripe is no doubt partly driven by the fact that Biden and the Democrats can lay claim to a significant list of recent legislative achievements. These include the Inflation Reduction Act, with its major climate change, healthcare and tax reforms, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the PACT Act, which expands medical benefits for veterans exposed to toxic fumes at military bases.

These bills have helped counter public perceptions of a do-nothing Congress. Biden has also used his presidential powers to tackle issues like student debt, gun control and access to abortion that would have been blocked in Congress.

At a time when American voters are worried about cost-of-living pressures and pessimistic about where the country is headed, will these achievements — along with historically low unemployment and gas prices finally going down — be enough to influence their votes in November?

Maybe, but to strengthen their argument that midterm defeats will bring dark times, Biden and the Democrats are also forcing the Republicans to play defence on issues like the rule of law and public safety (on which Trump’s vendetta against the FBI is no help). Biden has also moved to put democracy and political violence on the agenda. These are issues the polls indicate voters of both parties care about (although perhaps in different ways for different reasons) and polling shows they are beginning to affect voters’ intentions. FiveThirtyEight’s generic congressional ballot has the two parties basically even, with the Democrats leading by a little less than a point, on average, but trending up since the beginning of August.

After hitting a low of 37.5 per cent in July, Biden’s approval rating has risen by more than five percentage points on FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. When presidential approval ratings are less that 45 per cent their party tends to lose a lot of seats in Congress. Trump, though, with an approval rating of 39.8 per cent, is even less popular than Biden.

Neither Biden nor Trump is on the ballot in November, but their influence is important. A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows that Biden would defeat Trump by six percentage points in a hypothetical rematch this month. The more Trump is on people’s minds, says a CNN analysis, the better Democrats are doing.

While the non-MAGA Republicans want to ensure that the 2022 election cycle is a referendum on Biden not Trump, it is clear that Trump will do everything possible to stay in the news cycle and thus muddy the message. He brazenly demonstrated this by delivering what David Frum called “a protracted display of narcissistic injury” in Pennsylvania. Nothing could more perfectly have amplified Biden’s message. Can Democrats now widen the new but narrow path to winning in November? •

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Doshi makes much of what he describes as a “social science” approach to analysing China’s plans, drawing on Chinese Communist Party documents published over many decades. He cites documents identifying the United States as China’s principal opponent in world affairs, and others urging that China should “become a leading country in comprehensive national strength and international influence.”

China’s grand strategy, Doshi infers, is to replace the United States as the dominant world power and create a world order more congenial to its interests. I say infers because, on my reading and for all his effort, Doshi has not found a Chinese Communist Party leadership document that actually says so.

Let’s accept for a moment that China does indeed plan to supplant the United States as the dominant world power, and this intent can be ascertained by a reading of Communist Party documents. If true, what should the Americans do about it? What should Australia do about it? And can China achieve the global dominance Doshi says is its grand strategy?

Doshi recommends a strategy that (as he says) largely replicates China’s. China has blunted American naval power in its region by erecting missile defences, laying mines, deploying submarines and creating military facilities on islands. Doshi suggests the US counter-blunt by deploying carrier-based unmanned aircraft, hardening air and sea facilities on Okinawa to resist Chinese missiles, and developing greater mine-laying capacity to increase the cost of amphibious operations across the Taiwan Strait.

On the economic side, Doshi wants the United States to make it harder for Chinese businesses to acquire Western technologies. The United States should also crack down on China’s participation in US research projects. And he argues the United States should thwart China’s use of new multilateral institutions such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank by joining them and diluting Chinese control.

These suggestions would surely be unlikely to stop a truly determined China from ousting the United States as top dog, assuming that’s what it wants to do. Doshi’s is a program for a second-rate power to annoy a first-rate power.

If China really was planning to supplant the United States as the dominant global power, the most important part of the American response is not what Doshi suggests it do now, but what it has been doing for decades.

The United States spends three times as much on its military as China (and more than the combined total of the next twelve countries, China included). It has 750 military bases abroad in eighty countries, compared with China’s one (in Djibouti, jostling side by side with French, Italian, Japanese and US military bases). It has more than 5000 nuclear warheads to China’s 350. With its allies (Western Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, and so on), it has long banned weapons sales to China and long maintained a policy of doing what it can to keep China one or two techno-generations behind the leaders. The United States has formal military alliances with many powerful countries; China has none.

By contrast with what the United States already does, the striking thing about Doshi’s program is its marginality. It is an implicit recognition that China’s size, success, strategic gains and integration in the global economy cannot now be undone. It cannot be bombed, invaded or disarmed — or not without the corresponding destruction of the United States. China’s biggest “blunting” of US strategic advantages occurred sixty years ago when it developed nuclear weapons.

China could conceivably be isolated economically through import and export bans and financial sanctions. But America can’t do that alone, and who else would support it? The disruption to the world economy doesn’t bear thinking about. China is now one-tenth of the global economy. It is the world’s biggest exporter of goods and services. Its household consumer market is considerably smaller than that of the United States, but much bigger than any other country’s.

Decoupling? Rightly, Doshi doesn’t recommend it. Last year US goods exports to China were higher than they had ever been, 2017 excepted. So far this year US goods exports to China are even higher than over the same period last year. While foreign direct investment around the world tumbled last year, foreign direct investment in China actually rose.

And is China’s threat to the world order one that now requires a novel response? China’s rise relative to the United States won’t continue inexorably. At market exchange rates China’s GDP is two-thirds of the United States’ GDP. It may well surpass the United States in economic size in a decade or two, though it may not. With all its troubles the US economy has done quite well overall, while China’s “miracle economy” phase is long over. Its workforce is declining, and productivity gains are harder to find. By the time it matches the United States in economic weight its growth rate will highly likely have slipped towards that of the United States. They will be roughly evenly matched in economic weight and in growth rate. China’s income per head will be one-quarter of the United States’.

Doshi has gone to immense trouble to collect and translate documents. But it should surely come as no surprise that China finds US global dominance unsatisfactory. This is how great powers behave, and always have. Whether or not China has a grand strategy, we can infer from its conduct that it seeks to exert its weight in regional and world affairs. It would be a historical exception if it did not. No surprise either that this pressure should grate against America, the current top dog.

Yet given that China’s immense economic success has occurred within what Doshi describes as the US-led liberal world order, and given it is very heavily invested in a world economy not unlike the one we have today, is a fundamental change in the global order in China’s interests? If an American-led world order exists, is not China its greatest economic success? •

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It was not to be. The creation of the AUKUS alliance shows we have been lured back into our old Anglosphere fold, prioritising relations with Britain and the United States.

Electoral considerations undoubtedly played a role. Having failed to protect us from Covid-19, Morrison is now banking on pledging to protect us from China. The Coalition has a long tradition of using fear of China to try to wedge Labor. Indeed, the 2019 election campaign showed signs that it was gearing up for an assault on Labor as too soft on China. As a result, the opposition has been treading very carefully in response to AUKUS, acknowledging legitimate fears about China while questioning aspects of the government’s approach.

The military and trade implications of the AUKUS alliance have been widely canvassed. Australians are rightly concerned about an increasingly authoritarian, assertive and aggressive China. But after the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Vietnam decades earlier, many Australians are also cautious about being too closely aligned with American military strategy. Polling suggests that most Australians want our country’s complex relationship with China to be managed carefully.

The trade implications don’t stop with our worsening relationship with China. They also involve France. Under the Turnbull government, France was to be not just a key defence ally but also a key friend in facilitating relations with the European Union now that a post-Brexit Britain could no longer play that role for us.

Nor should we forget the cultural and intellectual implications of this shift. Australia’s projected role as an intersection society involved a different conception of our national identity. The hope was that we could forge a more independent, multicultural and cosmopolitan identity while still valuing our links with Britain and the United States. It was a vision that seemed to be developing an element of bipartisan support, at least during Malcolm Turnbull’s moderate Liberal prime ministership.

But Scott Morrison (ably assisted by Peter Dutton) is increasingly sounding like John Howard–lite when it comes to issues of cultural and national identity. Howard repeatedly emphasised Australia’s Anglo-Celtic identity and its closeness to Britain and the United States, thereby distancing the Coalition from Labor’s more cosmopolitan and multicultural view under Paul Keating.

It’s true that the government’s defence policy has also embraced the Quad of India, Japan, Australia and the United States. But Morrison’s comments regarding India often depict it as an extension of the Anglosphere with common values, including a commitment to democracy and religious freedom. It’s a view that seems particularly inappropriate given prime minister Narendra Modi’s increasingly authoritarian, Hindu-nationalist India, and has echoes of John Howard’s somewhat banal highlighting of the two countries’ shared love of cricket and experience of British influence. Kevin Rudd, by contrast, had a much more nuanced understanding of India’s postcolonial history.

A shift towards the Anglosphere also has implications for our cultural institutions and academia, and not just because of the increasing scrutiny of university research on security grounds. Many academics hoped that Australia could become an intellectual intersection society — that our universities would draw on all that is best of the knowledge produced in European and North American universities and all that is best from the great universities of Asia. We argued that this would position us well in the changing geopolitics of knowledge that characterised the Asian Century and would position us differently from the European and North American universities with which we compete for international students.

Such a vision would have built on and transformed the initiatives of past governments, Labor as well as Coalition. After all, it was a Liberal foreign minister, Julie Bishop, who oversaw the development of the brilliant New Colombo Plan, whereby Australian students would be encouraged to study in Asia. Such intellectual exchanges seem far from the Morrison government’s priorities. Indeed, the Coalition has been accused of carrying out a culture war against universities, starving them of funding at a time when the pandemic’s impact on international student enrolments is wreaking havoc on their budgets.

For all these reasons, AUKUS signals more than a defence decision about submarines and sharing other technology. It also potentially signals a cultural shift that has major implications for Australia and its role in the world. We have to hope that Paul Keating is wrong when he claims that AUKUS marks the moment when “Australia turns its back on the twenty-first century, the century of Asia, for the jaded and faded Anglosphere.” Because that would not be a good move at all. •

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Nor are his problems caused exclusively by a unified and implacable Republican opposition; they’re also a result of bitter divisions and competing demands within his own party. Thanks to political stand-offs between Democratic factions, the two bills to implement Biden’s domestic policy agenda — the bipartisan infrastructure bill (so-called because it garnered some Republican votes when it was passed by the Senate in August) and the social policy measures of the US$3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill — are stalled in the House.

For several days last week, obstreperous congressional Republicans looked like bringing the United States to the brink of financial collapse and a government shutdown. The last day of September marked the end of the financial year in the United States and, with that, the expiry of funds for federal government activities. Failure to reauthorise funding would mean all the chaos and costs of a government shutdown.

On top of this, the debt ceiling — an entirely artificial limit on how much money the US government can borrow — will be reached within days. A failure to increase the government’s borrowing authority would see the United States defaulting on its debt for the first time in history, putting at risk some six million military and government jobs, and threatening social security and child tax benefit payments. As Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has warned, the consequences would be “a self-inflicted wound of enormous proportions,” with both national and international consequences.

Those twin threats — a debt default and a government shutdown — aren’t new, but now Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, is doubling down on a Republican campaign to undermine Biden’s broader economic agenda.

Republicans have previously had no problems voting to raise the debt ceiling — indeed, more than a quarter of the country’s US$28.4 trillion federal debt was accumulated during the Trump presidency. But McConnell says no Republican will vote to raise the debt limit and the Democrats must shoulder the entire political burden of such a move. No principle is involved; this is pure politics.

Last Monday Senate Republicans blocked a bill already passed by the House that would fund the government until 3 December (by which time appropriations legislation for fiscal year 2022 would ideally be enacted). The bill would have provided billions of dollars in natural disaster relief and help for Afghan refugees, and would have avoided a default on the national debt. The Senate Republicans also blocked the Democrats’ procedural motion to allow a simple majority vote to raise the debt ceiling.

The brinkmanship partially collapsed on Thursday, probably because congressional leaders recognised that no politician or political party benefits from a government shutdown. The provision to raise the debt ceiling was stripped from the continuing resolution which then passed the Senate (65–35), having survived a Republican attempt to limit benefits for Afghan refugees. Back in the House, it was passed 254–175; then, just hours ahead of the shutdown deadline, it was signed by President Biden.

For the moment, the debt ceiling is a can that has been kicked a small way down the road; it’s calculated that it will be breached around 18 October. Failure to deal with it more comprehensively will cause a lot of pain and could trigger a recession and financial crisis. Already the financial markets are nervous.

Republicans are presumably looking to portray the Democrats as ineffective financial managers, but it’s a dangerous game. In the end, the debt ceiling must be, and will be, raised (even if none of Biden’s new policies are enacted).

It might also be a pointless game. In the midst of a pandemic, public concern about the budget deficit is down. Gallup polling shows Americans are less worried about the deficit than a decade ago (only 49 per cent worry about it “a great deal” in 2021, compared with 64 per cent in 2011). A recent Morning Consult/Politico poll found that a plurality of voters would hold both political parties equally responsible for a default, although more voters would assign blame to Democrats (31 per cent) than Republicans (20 per cent).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, is being kept busy wrangling with her Democratic colleagues over how to proceed with both the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better bill. She and her lieutenants have so far done an amazing job of shepherding the provisions and funding for the US$3.5 trillion Build Back Better package through thirteen House committees. The bill is proceeding under the budget reconciliation process, which means only a simple majority of votes is required in the Senate.

But it’s there in the Senate — where the Democrats can’t afford to lose a single vote — that two Democrat senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, are holding out. The progressive Democratic caucus in the House, with nearly one hundred members, has vowed to defeat the infrastructure bill unless the Senate is certain to ensure passage of the Build Back Better bill. The progressives rightly fear that the scope of the bigger bill will inevitably be whittled down as Biden and the White House endlessly negotiate with Manchin and Sinema, and more moderate House Democrats push for action.

Both senators are pushing for a smaller package. But while Manchin has publicly outlined his concerns, Sinema has been far more enigmatic and has largely declined to make her fears public.

Manchin, a centrist Democrat from a Republican-leaning state relishing the power he is wielding, has said he could support a US$1.5 trillion package and indicated his willingness to negotiate. He insists that the legislation must also include the Hyde Amendment (a legislative provision barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion). He seems to be running his own agenda here: Biden’s domestic spending proposals are immensely popular in the poor, coalmining state Manchin represents, even among those who voted for Trump.

Sinema, a first-term senator, might also be enjoying the spotlight. She too has baulked at the legislative price tag — and at some of Build Back Better’s tax-raising provisions — but she hasn’t been willing to discuss these concerns with the White House. Among Democrats in Arizona she is increasingly seen as an obstructionist; indeed, she was recently censored by the state party for her stance on the bill.

As progress on an agreement stalled on Friday, the president went to Capitol Hill for a closed-door meeting with House Democrats. Afterwards. his message was that the timeline is secondary to the content of the bill. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s in six minutes, six days, or six weeks,” he said. “We’re going to get it done.” Later reports revealed that he had indicated he would put the infrastructure vote on hold until Democrats pass his social policy and climate change package. Even though the infrastructure bill’s delay has already had consequences, he seems willing for it to continue for some time. Only emergency legislative action on Saturday to reauthorise the expiring transport programs in the bill prevented the furloughing of thousands of transportation department employees.

Weekend rumours suggest that Biden, Pelosi and Senate leader Chuck Schumer are telling Democrats that the final Build Back Better outlay will be US$2 trillion, on top of the US$1 trillion in infrastructure. That will require compromises on what can be funded. Underpinning such compromise is the fervent hope that Democrats across the ideological spectrum will recognise that a failure to agree will not only undermine the president and the party’s midterm election prospects, but also limit the opportunity for future legislative wins on gun control, voting rights, access to abortions, immigration and other important issues.

As E.J. Dionne, Bruce Wolpe and other commentators have pointed out, the drawn-out fight over Obamacare offers lessons for Democrats today. The protracted and ugly legislative saga that finally led to Obamacare’s enactment tainted what Americans thought about the bill and what it meant for them. Soon after, Democrats lost the House in the 2010 midterm rout.

What Biden is proposing is a massive across-the-board investment in the workforce, infrastructure, social programs, education and the environment that will make a significant difference in most Americans’ lives. Not only that: it is viewed quite positively even among Republican voters.

The fallout from 2010 shows why the Democrats must unite on a realistic compromise and get these provisions enacted quickly so that the results are already apparent in 2022. That offers the real possibility of overturning the killer history of midterm losses for the incumbent party in the White House. •

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So what went so terribly wrong? What could possibly explain last week’s sudden and abrupt decision to throw the project overboard and substitute a vague promise of embarking on a new build in two year’s time? Defence analysts increasingly believe the only way to make sense of the move is to see it as the first step in the creation of an independent nuclear deterrent.

The key is in the vessels themselves.

It’s evident the new submarine must offer something pretty special, although there’s been no indication, so far, of exactly what this might be. The public statements have been anodyne, simply emphasising the advantages of nuclear propulsion and building on an existing design. Both points are accurate. Conventional submarines regularly have to “snort,” rising to the surface to take in oxygen and expel contaminants, increasing the risk they’ll be located. Nuclear vessels don’t. They can remain on station for months and possess far greater range than normal subs. There’s much more to it, though, than just this.

These new submarines will be nuclear-powered general-purpose attack submarines, or SSNs. The critical issue is capability. The design that’s been abandoned, the so-called “Attack class,” would have delivered (roughly) 5300 tonne vessels with six torpedo tubes capable of firing Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which have a thirty-four-centimetre diameter and range of about 300 kilometres. At 7400 tonnes, however, the Astute class (on which the new design will be based) is much larger and with size comes huge potential. They carry larger, fifty-two-centimetre diameter silos capable of holding Tomahawk Block IV cruise missiles. As well as accurately hitting a small target (something the size of a house) from more than 1600 kilometres away, the route of these weapons can be changed in flight.

Perhaps most crucially, they can also be fitted with nuclear warheads.

The massive range of the weapon dramatically changes the nature of the boat’s capabilities. Instead of being forced to sail close in, where it becomes vulnerable, the vessel stands off, lurking deep in the ocean well away from land. This submarine represents a sudden escalation in Australia’s strategic capability, which perhaps explains why concern has come not only from China but more particularly from Indonesia and Malaysia. They understand how this decision could change the world.

There are, of course, no current plans to acquire nuclear missiles. Indeed, such a capability hasn’t been mentioned in all the speeches and interviews. But that’s not the point.

What’s relevant is that owning this sort of submarine is a game changer. It opens up options Scott Morrison (and, perhaps more particularly, defence minister Peter Dutton) are well aware of, and are probably seeking.

Perhaps this is the vital background to why the French project was abandoned.

Both weapons systems are potent. But the shift can’t be explained away as simply an acknowledgement that Australia’s submarines need to be nuclear-powered. If this was the only requirement, talks would have already begun with the French, who produce highly sophisticated nuclear vessels. Indeed, we’ve been working hard to convert one of their nuclear subs to a conventionally powered boat, so swapping in a new engine block would have been simple.

The only way to make any sense of the move is to understand it as, quite possibly, the most significant strategic decision Canberra has made since the second world war, wedding the country decisively to a US/UK alliance and catapulting Australia into the ranks of potentially nuclear-armed states.

This also explains the initial silence from navy officers who were surprised — or perhaps stunned is a better word — by Morrison’s out-of-the-blue announcement.

At press conferences like last week’s, viewers would normally expect politicians to be surrounded by a phalanx of uniformed commanders, bedecked with medals. But the military was conspicuous by its absence, underlining the implicit change in the strategic role such vessels might have and lending weight to the thesis that the change originated with the politicians rather than the strategists. Similarly, the lack of a plan to immediately commence work doesn’t sound like the way the navy would initiate work on the submarines. In fact, absolutely nothing other than “scoping” — perhaps another submarine analogy — will be done for at least eighteen months.

The other possibility — one that’s almost too depressing to contemplate — is that Morrison was persuaded to overturn decades of careful defence planning by a couple of determined advocates in his own inner circle of advisers. The remarkable secrecy surrounding this announcement suggests the PM’s office was well aware it faced the danger of significant pushback. Perhaps that’s why the deal was presented as very much a fait accompli. The possibility remains that Morrison has just tossed away billions of dollars and years of research, in return for vague promises of future cooperation on subs that will, inevitably, be built overseas.

The best way to understand what’s happened is to go back to the very beginnings of the fraught program that Defence once labelled SEA 1000: the project to build twelve “regionally superior” conventional submarines in Adelaide. Back in 2009 Kevin Rudd promised (with trademark aplomb, if slightly less engagement with possible realities) to build a fleet that would not merely defend the sea lanes but also provide a foundation for industry and kick-start a vibrant technological and scientific future. What was not to like?

It offered a single, neat solution to a multiplicity of different issues — defence, industrial and intellectual. It was about using knowledge to do things better.

But then, just two years later (and before any work on fleshing out ideas had begun) Rudd was gone, replaced by Julia Gillard. She didn’t hesitate to shelve the project and concentrating instead on budget repair. Then it was Tony Abbott’s turn to move the project forward. He chose to adopt a Japanese design only to have his plan aborted when a Liberal senator from South Australia threatened to vote against the government if the build didn’t remain in Adelaide.

Having caved in, Abbott bequeathed the problem to yet another PM, Malcolm Turnbull. By 2016 the prospect of building a dozen world-leading conventional submarines as a cornerstone of the country’s defence had become deeply problematic but the big difference was Turnbull had an energetic “can do” defence minister in Christopher Pyne.

Pyne engaged again with the original problem, never for a moment doubting that he could pull a solution out of the hat and, if it was one nobody else had thought of, well, so much the better. He looked around again, noticed the French, and liked what he saw. Voilà!

Naval Group — once known as Direction des Constructions Navales — had been around, in one form or another, since Cardinal Richelieu had taken command of France’s shipbuilding policy back in 1624. It had produced France’s ultimate deterrent, when Le Redoutable entered service as a ballistic missile submarine in 1971. It made everything from aircraft carriers to drones and, to Pyne, appeared as reliable as a good glass of fine Bordeaux.

Australia had already dated, and discarded, Japanese, German, and Swedish partners. A second-rate French conventional design — not the one that would be perused by Pyne — had already been ruled out as inadequate. Canberra’s traditional allies, London and Washington, only made nuclear submarines and, as these were out of contention, a flirtation with the French began. Perhaps they would be prepared to convert their nuclear boat to a conventional one?

Of course there would be problems because that’s what relationships are like. But “how hard,” Christopher asked, “how hard could it really be to pull out the nuclear power-plant and slip in a conventional engine?” Naval Group was willing.

There was enthusiasm, excitement, on both sides: a preparedness to experiment and, who knows, even the prospect of a massive breakthrough in submarine technology.

But the detail of the abandoned project reveals much more about Canberra’s incapacity to focus on the future than it does about the failure of a huge company to listen, or the simple preference of the French for a long lunch and fine wine. If this breakdown is the result of a culture clash, well, there were certainly two parties at fault.

It’s difficult to determine the exact moment disillusion entered the union.

Perhaps it was because this was never, really, a partnership of equals. Although both sides — the French builders and the Royal Australian Navy — wanted to end up in what was the same place, there were still fundamental theoretical disagreements about exactly where this might be. The rapid speed of technical progress further complicated issues. A pre-2020s design was attempting to anticipate an operating environment some twenty or thirty years into the future, but the constricting envelope of the submarine meant that difficult decisions needed to be made early in the process.

One simple example was propulsion. Obviously the system would involve some form of battery — but which type? The tested and reliable solution was lead-acid, but new advances in lithium–ion technology looked as if they’d soon offer significant advantages. It wouldn’t be simply possible to rip one type out and replace it with the other, though. The boats’ weight, trim and basic stability would be dramatically altered.

Technical arguments raged over this and other issues, including what used to be called torpedo tubes, or the way missiles would be launched from the vessel. Should these be located forward, in the bow, or would upward, as in the original design, and appropriate for firing a ballistic missile? How many and what size of missile would be stowed?

With limited space available choices like these inevitably affected not merely the capacity of magazines but also the number and type of weapons that could be carried. These questions are critical because they went to the task and possible missions the boats could be sent on. It was a given that there would never be enough space, so what should the room that was available be allocated to? Spare missiles, or room for commando teams and food? Extra diesel, or more batteries?

The real problem was there were no “right” answers, simply choices that would result in different outcomes. Fundamental disagreements were inevitable, and festered until minor cultural difficulties had grown to become seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The French team felt the Australians were making impossible demands, but they adopted the new requirements and the cost kept growing. The navy felt Naval Group wasn’t listening or working with them to achieve a positive result. Feelers were put out to SAAB Australia, the company that had built the earlier (and initially trouble-plagued) Collins class submarines and was now working on an interim refit of these vessels.

Details of what was happening were scarce — submariners aren’t called the “silent service” for nothing — but it was obvious big issues were in play. The original contract with the French had been broken into different parts precisely so that either side could opt out at fixed points. The conclusion of the design phase appeared to be the obvious point to make the breach final. As that came and went, however, it appeared as if both sides had reconciled their differences and would move forward together.

That was not to be.

On 13 June this year Morrison was in Cornwall, where he’d been invited as a guest to attend a scheduled meeting of G7 leaders. There, beside the sands, Morrison quietly sealed a deal with British PM Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden to scrap the French team’s efforts. Macron was also in town but had no idea a plot was being hatched behind his back to dump Naval.

Exactly what had happened is still obscure. Naval Group makes the damaging charge that it was string along while secret negotiations began with the British, first, and the United States second. They believe Morrison, prodded by new defence minister Peter Dutton, had already made a firm decision to switch builder long before he finally met French president Emmanuel Macron for private talks in Paris on his way home from Britain.

It was all smiles and warmth as the two leaders reviewed ranks of be-plumed soldiers from the steps of the Elysée Palace. Macron even dispensed with the cold elbow-bump and instead pulled the Australian PM into a traditional Gallic embrace. Incredibly, Morrison seems to have said nothing of his plans to his host. If he’d intended to give any hint to Macron that an irreparable breach was imminent, he failed badly. It’s the secrecy accompanying the Australian manoeuvre — together with the way the sudden switch to build a nuclear submarine was announced without any consultation or pre-warning — that’s more than partly responsible for the almost universal negative worldwide reaction.

What changed in Canberra was the political leadership. Morrison didn’t share Turnbull’s appreciation of the French or nuanced understanding of international issues. He and Dutton brought a new determination to make things happen and to do so in their own way. They looked for allies where they were comfortable; they found them in the Anglo-sphere.

The only other alternative is to assume the government really is completely incompetent and has been sold a pup.

This story really ends where it began — in politics, driven by personality.

Sometimes, huge defence industrial projects — like Australia’s attempt to build the best conventional submarine in the world — simply fail. And sometimes there’s more to the story than first appears. Nobody will, or is even likely to provide the full facts in the middle of all the acrimony. All one is left with are questions — but one, in particular, stands out.

After spending massive sums of money attempting to convert a nuclear submarine into a conventional one, if all that was required was a nuclear powered boat, then why not just revert to the original successful French design? What extra oomph did the British vessel (widely believed to be the frontrunner as replacement) offer to make it worth the angst and furore that’s accompanied the decision to scrap the project? Is it really worth a close to $3 billion write-off, simply so we can pay more to get an Anglo design that will probably be built overseas anyway?

This is especially the case when the British boats have been plagued for years with their own technical problems and also suffered (in the case of their first submarine) similarly huge cost blowouts.

Apportioning blame for what’s happened is as pointless as pontificating on the breakdown of a bad marriage. Perhaps, in the end, each partner just wanted something different and it simply took a while to work it out. Maybe in the end there were so many reasons cascading together, large and small, that dissolution became inevitable.

If so, the problem appears to spring from an attitude that seems to encapsulate Scott Morrison’s entire approach to politics. Change partners swiftly, strike and never look back; whether your aim is to become PM or buy a new submarine. By partnering in AUKUS, Australia’s back in an older, much more familiar relationship — and, what’s more, a threesome! What’s not to like about that? It comes with all the excitement and hope that springs from the sudden blooming of a whirlwind romance.

What could possibly go wrong? •

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Crisis had grown normal. Hard times had lasted so long, and so shrunk their horizons, that many people grew sick of their housemates and the limits of their lives, constrained by this long emergency, and by uncertainty, and by the inexorable dwindling of their resources and the apparently ineffective actions to reverse the destructive inactivity that plagued their nation, and others. Their houses smelled of the few meals they knew how to cook and for which they could get ingredients, and also of fear.

For an invisible enemy lurked outside, one that had gathered strength in Asia and Europe, and now threatened to pour out its unreasoning malice on the United States. You couldn’t see it; you didn’t know which of your neighbours might harbour it. So you kept to the people you knew best, you did your work if you still had some, and you hoped that in the evening you might find distraction from the news, all of which was bad.

And then, towards the end of that winter, there was something new to hear, because American voters had made a decision about their country. Even as the unending crush of desperation grew ever worse, they decided to dispense with what they knew and try something else. They had grown tired of sleek men assuring them repeatedly that they needed only to have confidence in the fundamentals of American business and all would be well. They had been told they need not turn to the government in Washington, DC for help, although the government was giving money to help those same sleek, reassuring men, even while it was turning guns on other, poorer people who went to the capital city to ask for aid from their representatives.

So the American voters decided they wanted a different government in Washington, one that pledged itself to pull the nation together, to do its utmost to solve their problems and to fight the global contagion of fascism that threatened to engulf them. They voted for a New Deal that they had been promised would mean federal jobs, laws protecting workers, relief for farmers, and all manner of things that the wisdom of bankers and businesspeople had thus far mandated they ought not to have because recognising these rights would fetter American ingenuity.

And so, with that decision made, and a few last weeks of winter to get through before the spring on which so many had placed their hopes, the families huddled in American homes were able to take comfort one weekend, for the first time in a long time, in what the president of the United States had to say to them: that with the “money changers” out of power, it was time to “apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” The president promised the “joy and moral stimulation of work.” The country must pull together, and “realise as we have never realised before our interdependence.” None of us alone could survive, or prosper, so well as if we all worked to survive and prosper together. That way, we could ensure “the future of essential democracy.”

The New Deal mattered then, at the cusp of spring in 1933, because it gave Americans permission to believe in a common purpose that was not war. Neither before nor since have Americans so rallied around an essentially peaceable form of patriotism. The results of that effort remain with us, in forms both concrete and abstract; the New Deal therefore matters still because Americans can scarcely get through a day without coming into contact with some part of it.

It matters, too, as a message for Americans from the past: democracy in the United States, flawed and compromised as it was, proved it could emerge from a severe crisis not only intact but stronger. Even at that moment, in that winter, the nation of Germany was taking a different path than the one of “essential democracy.” When the New Deal began, fascism was on the march around the world and its agents were working within the United States; it ended with the United States and its allies triumphant over that ideology and establishing a New Deal for the world — or at least a framework for one — and an improved democracy within the United States.

We might do well to heed that message now, taking note of our predecessors’ successes and failures alike as we consider how we can find our way out of a hard, strange, isolated winter of our own.

When I started writing my new book, Why the New Deal Matters, I wanted to show how easy it was to demonstrate how much the New Deal matters to Americans’ daily lives. You don’t even really need to know where to look; you just need someone to tell you what you’re looking at: evidence of the New Deal is everywhere even now, nearly a hundred years since it started.

I walked for ten minutes, over to the library on the campus of the University of California, Davis, where I work, and sat in the reading room there. Readers and writers always crowd the desks; it is a fine spot for us on account of its high ceilings and the good light that fills the space. I wanted to count the windows myself so I could report them to you: there are nine, each nearly 200 feet square. There are also twenty-seven custom-designed, streamlined, aluminium chandeliers with frosted glass.

Under ordinary circumstances, anyone can walk in there, sit down, and read, or write, or just enjoy the northern exposure. Surely hundreds of thousands of people have done so since the library’s completion in 1940, although it’s impossible to say exactly how many have come in here: this is an open-stacks library with no turnstile, a genuinely public place.

This was a project of the Public Works Administration, or PWA, established in 1933 as one of the earliest agencies of the New Deal. It was created by an administration that would build libraries to save books at a time when the Nazis were burning or banning them. Eventually, the PWA published a glossy, beautifully illustrated volume of its achievements that begins with the words, “Men build temples to the things they love,” and — setting aside the exclusionary language; men are surely not the only creatures so inspired to construction — you might agree with the sentiment if you were to stand in this reading room. It is a temple to books and the love of reading, and it is a place open to all who share that love — ordinarily.

As I write now, you cannot visit it, nor can I, and I cannot say when either of us might again be able to: like so many of the nation’s shared spaces, it has been shut in the interest of public safety. To prevent the spread of the virus that causes Covid-19, states and municipalities around the country urged Americans to keep away from the places where we ordinarily congregate. Forced to retreat into our homes we — at least for the time being — surrendered access to our temples.

Perhaps, like me, other Americans were suddenly able to feel keenly during this time how precious these public things were, having lost them even momentarily. Parks, libraries, gardens, swimming pools, sidewalks, airports, seaports, schools, stadiums — all these things, suddenly shut, constituted the public sphere that Americans built for themselves under the New Deal.

My brother was going to take his family to visit our parents in Florida over spring break; they would have flown into Tampa International Airport, where a series of murals depicts the history of flight — murals commissioned by the Federal Art Project of the New Deal in 1939; it was part of the Works Progress Administration. That did not happen, nor did other Americans’ planned trips to state and national parks given shape and structure by the workers of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

But my parents, like millions of Americans sheltering in their homes, were still able to draw old-age pensions, just as millions of Americans filed for unemployment insurance — both legacies of the Social Security Act of 1935, a centrepiece of the New Deal. Stuck in our homes, many of us continued using electricity generated in dams built by the PWA. If we live in rural America we may well have sat somewhere literally powered by the New Deal, perhaps by the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Rural Electrification Administration. If the local government telling us how to handle the current crisis belonged to a Native nation, it was probably legally empowered by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934; if we live near the range, the common pastures were set up under the New Deal grazing law of the same year.

Americans who have taken out a small-business loan backed by the federal government, have perused the financial disclosures of a corporation offering stock for public sale, or — right now — haven’t the slightest worry that the bank where we have parked our savings will block our access to our money, crisis or no, then we have benefited from the New Deal. As indeed we have if we have ever earned the minimum wage, drawn disability insurance, or joined a labour union. Even Americans living outside the United States are subject to the New Deal’s institutional legacy in the form of the organisations that regulate global finance and trade and seek to protect the international laws of human rights.

Sometimes Americans suffer, of course, from the New Deal’s failings, particularly its leaders’ willingness to bow to racism. For Japanese Americans, it is quite possible a family member was imprisoned without trial in a camp built by the Works Progress Administration during the second world war. Black Americans might live in a neighbourhood with inordinately high pollution and historically low home-ownership rates because residents have found it difficult, if not impossible, to take out a mortgage, and that is partly a result of the New Deal too. For such Americans who continued thereafter to cast ballots for the Democratic Party because they believed that, however bigoted it was, it was better than the alternative, that too is a result of the New Deal — because the 1930s marked the beginning of a historic shift that turned the Democratic Party into the party of civil rights.

The New Deal matters because Americans all live in it; it gives structure to their lives in ways we do not ordinarily bother to count or catalogue. When we Americans imagine the end of the world as we know it, the world we are thinking might end is the one the New Deal built. And if we tell ourselves we need a new New Deal to build the world afresh so it will be proof against crises like this one and the others that plague our imaginations — like, for example, the anthropogenic warming of the planet — we are drawing inspiration from the transformative project of the original New Deal and its concern for the sustainable use of natural resources.

Like the proverbial fish that does not know it is wet because it never leaves the water, Americans sometimes have trouble discerning the properties and extent of the New Deal because it is the medium through which we move all the time. We scarcely know where it begins. Which helps to explain why many of us, like that fish whose watery habitat is imperilled by poisons it cannot see, are not entirely aware of how the New Deal has eroded over the past few decades.

The New Deal matters most of all because it marked a dramatic shift of power away from corporate boardrooms and bank headquarters, a shift that accompanied an unmatched period of widespread prosperity. This change proved so popular among American voters that for a time even the most conservative of politicians did not dare challenge it directly. •

This is an edited extract from Why the New Deal Matters, recently published by Yale University Press.

The post Why the New Deal still matters appeared first on Inside Story.

Even before the airlift of foreign citizens and at-risk Afghans has ended, the question presents itself: do we have any continuing interests in Afghanistan? That has just been answered: preventing terrorism, if nothing else. So, does the West work with a Taliban-run Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan or against it?

Much will depend on the nature of that government. Taliban leaders have promised that an amnesty will be applied to former government soldiers and civil servants, that women can work and girls study wearing only headscarves or cowls rather than the full-body covering, and even that the right kind of music will be allowed. Many with long knowledge of the Taliban will believe all this when they see it.

Future relations will also depend on who beyond the Taliban leadership the new government includes in more than a token way. Hamid Karzai, the president installed after the United States helped eject the last Taliban regime in 2001, is back in Kabul talking to them. Abdullah Abdullah, a veteran of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of the 1990s and a senior figure in the ousted Ashraf Ghani government, is another.

Afghan resistance is also a factor. Ahmad Shah Massoud, son of the legendary anti-Soviet mujahideen warlord of the same name killed by al Qaeda in 2001, is holding out in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. He may have been joined by Amrullah Saleh, vice-president in Ghani’s government, who stepped down and fled the country just ahead of Kabul’s fall — which Saleh says makes him the “legitimate caretaker president.” Unless Massoud can lever his way into power sharing and policy moderation, a new phase of civil war might be starting.

The Taliban must also grapple with an Afghanistan that is vastly more sophisticated than the one they ran in their previous five years of rule to 2001. In those days, non-violent resistance was by word-of-mouth and anonymous letters. In Herat, Mohammed Nasir Kafesh circulated his unsigned satirical poetry on scraps of paper, unsigned, and Leila Razeqi, after being expelled from university for being a woman, organised tutorials for herself and friends under the guise of a sewing circle.

As Financial Times correspondent Jon Boone has noted, Afghanistan had very few telephone lines twenty years ago. Now 90 per cent of the country’s forty million people have access to mobile phones, with twelve million using data services. Even illiterate people have smartphones and Facebook accounts set up by village phone shops. Journalism is thriving. Cities are full of young Afghans returned from study and work experience overseas. Taliban leaders themselves are adept users of social media.

All of this could be turned off, of course. During the advance on Kabul, Taliban units shut down local mobile networks at night to prevent tip-offs about their movements. But once safely in power, would the leadership rob themselves of this channel to the population, as well as all its potential developmental leaps in e-commerce and banking?

The Kabul airport bombings also provide an early test of assurances that Afghanistan will no longer be a base for external terrorists, as it was for al Qaeda under the previous emirate. At a meeting with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Tianjin on 28 July, Taliban co-founder and political wing chief Abdul Ghani Baradar gave an assurance that the Taliban “will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for plotting against another country.” Wang asked the Taliban to “deal resolutely” with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an underground movement among the Uighurs of Xinjiang, adjacent to Afghanistan across the Pamir mountains. Baradar also welcomed continuing Chinese investment in Afghanistan.

Similar assurances — in their case, about Chechen jihadists and cooperative engagement — are thought to have been given to the Russians.

The Taliban also promised during the two years of negotiations in Qatar with Donald Trump’s special envoy not to let Afghanistan again be the base for terrorist groups. Trump didn’t achieve his second aim — getting the Taliban to enter power-sharing talks with Ghani’s government — despite releasing 5000 hardcore Taliban prisoners, who promptly went back into the fray. He went ahead anyway with his drawdown of US forces, to be completely out by 1 May this year, on the basis of the Taliban’s agreeing not to attack them. (Joe Biden extended the deadline to 11 September, the twentieth anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks that led to the US invasion, but later shortened it to 31 August.)

Separately, the Sunni-based Taliban assured Iran that it would no longer discriminate against or persecute its fellow Shia Muslims in Afghanistan, including the Hazaras, who streamed out as refugees, many to Australia, during the last Taliban ascendency.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, security analysts are cheering what they see as the severing of India’s post-2001 engagement with Kabul, which has seen about US$3 billion in investments and an array of civil society and state-building projects, including 2000 scholarships a year for undergraduate study in India.

Behind this upbeat appraisal is some nervousness about possible blowback into Pakistan itself. The Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency fostered the formation of the Taliban from the country’s Koranic schools and launched them across the border. Now analysts worry that Pakistan’s own Taliban will feel encouraged to step up attacks on the state. Prime minister Imran Khan sent his foreign minister around Iran and the Central Asian republics this week to enlist them in his push to urge the Taliban to reach out beyond its ethnic Pushtun base.

The same goes for Beijing. Beneath the derision at the failure of twenty years of US state-building is thought to be great unease at a radical Islamist regime being installed in the centre of the Eurasian network of its Belt and Road Initiative.

In Kabul itself, China, Russia and Pakistan have kept their embassies open. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which along with Pakistan were the only countries to recognise the last Taliban emirate, are likely to be back, along with Qatar, the recent intermediary between the Taliban and the United States. India has withdrawn, evacuating citizens as well as Sikh and Hindu locals, and is taking a wait-and-see position on reopening its embassy in consultation with Russia.

The Americans, of course, made a priority of helicoptering their embassy staff out to Kabul airport. But the two years of Qatar negotiations, circumventing the US-backed government in Kabul, have given Washington a greater familiarity with some of the Taliban leadership. On 23 August, Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns flew into Kabul to meet the Taliban’s             , presumably to talk about problems in the evacuation operation, but perhaps also to discuss longer-term issues. It can’t have been warm — the outfit that rained down Predator drone strikes talking to the one that set off roadside bombs — but it showed some pragmatism.

Two days later, US secretary of state Anthony Blinken said the Biden administration is not abandoning Afghanistan but rather shifting its focus from military power to diplomacy, cybersecurity and financial pressure. He said that the administration has worked hard to build alliances and that the United States would continue to work with allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The financial pressure involves the conditions Washington has placed on the release of the US$9 billion foreign reserves of the Afghan state, which are held in US institutions, and the US$450 million in special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund, in which Washington and the Europeans pull the strings. It doesn’t sound very friendly so far; more like war by other means.

And Australia’s role? When Biden announced in April his target of fully withdrawing forces, Scott Morrison’s government didn’t wait around. On 28 May, Canberra closed its embassy in Kabul, and withdrew the ambassador, Paul Wojciechowski, and his staff to the United Arab Emirates, from where they were to operate on a fly-in, fly-out basis, as required.

With its implied lack of confidence in Kabul, the rapid exit is said to have met with strong disapproval in Washington and London. In retrospect, it also pre-empted two and a half months of embassy operation on the ground that could have expedited visas and passages out for Afghans at risk because of their work with the Australian military and civil projects.

Veteran diplomats hear that a contributing factor was a fear among foreign affairs department figures that they would be blamed for “occupational health and safety” failings if anything went wrong. But some also believe that statements by defence minister Peter Dutton — that some former Australian army interpreters might have switched to the Taliban or Islamic State, or even steered Australian troops onto improvised explosive devices — suggest a cynical “playing to the base” in abandoning Afghanistan.

Just before yesterday’s bombing, Dutton reacted to intelligence warning of an imminent attack by withdrawing Australia’s small detachment of soldiers and officials from the airport, leaving the Americans and British to hold the line. He said it was “wheels up” on the evacuation that had brought out 4000 citizens and visa-holders, leaving behind an uncertain number. The defence minister indicated the operation is unlikely to resume in the days remaining to the Taliban and American deadline of 31 August for an end to the military evacuation of civilians.

Nor is Canberra likely to reopen an embassy any time soon. Morrison would be wary of offending the 26,000 veterans who served in the 2001–14 military campaign against the Taliban, with forty-one of their comrades killed and hundreds of them suffering physical injury and mental trauma. Voices among the 70,000 Afghan-Australian population also object strongly to any recognition of the Taliban they or their parents fled, even though an Australian mission would help them to bring out relatives.

Aid organisations are keen to resume operations, with one official telling me a working relationship with Kabul is necessary. A US congressional report on 30 April described how Covid-19 and rising urban poverty levels mean that 16.9 million people are facing a “crisis” of food insecurity, including 5.5 million people experiencing “emergency” levels — the second-highest in the world after the Democratic Republic of Congo — and almost half of children under five years old are projected to face acute malnutrition in 2021.

No doubt this will weigh little with the Morrison government, nor indeed the Labor opposition. Next week present and former leaders, John Howard and Julia Gillard among them, will join celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the ANZUS treaty, glossing over the hasty exits from Kabul. It’s wheels up on that alliance exercise. Or is it? •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Our enemy’s enemy appeared first on Inside Story.

As international politics turned more murky, though, the emerging conflicts didn’t fit the 1945 template. An early example was the Korean war of 1950–53. There, Democrat president Harry Truman viewed the North’s invasion of the South as part of a systematic communist challenge to world order. He sent US troops to defend the South — but then ordered them not to achieve total victory.

Truman was fearful that a more decisive campaign would expand across the Chinese border, perhaps triggering a third world war with the Soviet Union. Instead, a restricted but protracted conventional conflict destroyed the Korean peninsula and claimed the lives of more than 30,000 American troops. South Korean independence was preserved, but the aggressors in the North remained in place, a stalemate unfamiliar and distasteful to American voters.

Strategy became a political hot potato. Accusing Democrats of being soft on communism, Dwight Eisenhower’s incoming Republican administration adopted a policy of “massive retaliation.” If communists tried another attack, they wouldn’t be permitted to set the terms of the fight. Communist encroachments, it was proclaimed, would be met by an all-out nuclear response.

By the 1960s, John F. Kennedy’s Democrats were arguing that using nuclear weapons to stop limited communist advances in the developing world would be suicidally reckless given the Soviet nuclear build-up. Kennedy offered a more flexible and innovative approach to combating leftist insurgencies in Southeast Asia: rather than the sledgehammer of nuclear bombs, the scalpel of special forces.

But the scalpel proved inadequate to defeat communists in South Vietnam. The next president, Lyndon Johnson, desperate to prove American credibility to friend and foe, gradually escalated the violence, eventually deploying hundreds of thousands of troops and dropping millions of tons of bombs. That approach also failed.

Eventually, in the early 1970s, president Richard Nixon extricated US ground forces from an increasingly unpopular conflict. To cover the withdrawal he upped the bombing and adopted a policy of “Vietnamisation,” bloating the South Vietnamese military with more equipment. That failed too, with the South’s large army unable or unwilling to defend the Saigon regime. Aside from the devastation of Vietnam, the costs included the lives of some 50,000 American soldiers.

Defeat fuelled public cynicism and increased isolationist sentiment. With America having supposedly become battle-shy — the Vietnam syndrome, as it was labelled — Washington had a credibility problem: who would now believe in its readiness to defend its allies and interests? The risk, it believed, was that the global chessboard would be abandoned to Moscow.

Partly to deal with that worry, the United States invaded small-fry Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). These morale-boosters demonstrated how Washington could avoid the mistakes of Vietnam while keeping force as a politically viable policy instrument. Pentagon officials codified the criteria for prudent armed intervention: wide political support; clear objectives serving the national interest; readiness to use decisive force; avoidance of protracted engagement; and acceptable costs and risks.

Then, in 1991, along came Saddam Hussein, a villain from central casting, whose aggression fitted America’s post-1945 template of a good war. Hussein’s Iraq ticked all the above boxes, and more. Its invasion of Kuwait provided a just cause as recognised by the United Nations; there was a clear, limited objective (eviction of the Iraqi army); and American generals were granted unfettered use of overwhelming force. Moreover, the military’s success demonstrated Washington’s status as a superpower, with the White House declaring, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

But the real world kept presenting messy problems, like peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, that failed to match the preferred Pentagon model. They are too numerous to discuss all of them here, but some stand out. In 1992, after being criticised for inaction, president George H.W. Bush sent troops to protect the UN humanitarian effort in Somalia from local warlords. By intervening in the anarchy, US forces became a participant in a civil war; the mission creep led to the Black Hawk Down battle of 1993, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed. President Bill Clinton reacted by withdrawing, creating a perception that the United States had been thwarted by a rabble.

Americans had had enough. Sending troops to help apparently ungrateful foreigners in intractable squabbles became politically unsustainable. Washington would be damned if it did, and damned if it didn’t. It’s one reason why Clinton stood back as the 1994 Rwandan genocide unfolded.

Clinton later latched on to long-range precision munitions as a way of continuing to use force while minimising the domestic political costs. In 1998 he fired cruise missiles at Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq in half-hearted punitive strikes that didn’t seem to achieve anything. The strategy took a more serious turn in the 1999 humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. Contrary to expert predictions, the US air force (with NATO) managed to bomb the Serbian government into submission without “boots on the ground.”

Two years later, the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington reset strategy once again. For the first time since the 1940s, American troops were used to defend the homeland. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan hammered al Qaeda and overthrew the supporting Taliban government.

But president George W. Bush’s framing of the war on terror as all-encompassing and open-ended had been ill-conceived. He also accepted the neo-conservative fantasy that 9/11 presented an opportunity to remake the Middle East. The result was strategic incontinence and the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, and all that went with it. To borrow an expression from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “stuff happened.”

The Iraq folly exacerbated anti-American feeling in the Muslim world and diverted Washington’s attention from Afghanistan at a critical time. The Taliban regrouped, leaving Washington with a “now what?” moment. For years American officials switched between counterterrorism (killing remnant al Qaeda operatives), counterinsurgency (suppressing Taliban guerillas) and state-building. In practice, this meant American blood and treasure underwrote the corrupt Afghan regime. The signposts to failure became well known in Washington, but were only faced up to when Joe Biden won office and followed through on a promise to withdraw.

The post-Afghanistan chapter of US intervention doesn’t begin with a blank sheet. For example, the CIA and special forces continue to hunt Islamist terrorists in Africa. America remains key to NATO’s containment of Russia as well as the deterrence of North Korea. These opponents of the West, and others such as Iran and China, will be reaching their own conclusions about the implications of the shambolic collapse of the American position in Kabul. Some will be considering whether to test Biden’s resolve.

Allies who haven’t weaned themselves off American power will worry about either being abandoned if Washington loses interest or being dragged into unwanted conflict as it reasserts its superpower status. Canberra will fret about Washington either backing away from the South China Sea or trying too hard to prove itself.

Perhaps, after the dust settles, US credibility might not be as badly damaged as many suppose. After all, Biden didn’t back down on his Afghanistan policy; he persisted, despite considerable political heat. And, in theory, the move out of that country allows Washington to reinforce its position in the balance of power and frees it to more assertively police its revised version of world order. •

The post From Korea to Kabul, and beyond appeared first on Inside Story.

After president Joe Biden announced the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in April, the Morrison government quickly followed suit. But the stories they are telling about why the withdrawal is happening differ in important ways.

In the United States, Biden’s reasoning was straightforward: the war had already dragged on for too long, and there was no justification for its continuation. It had spanned four presidential administrations; he refused to allow it to continue into a fifth. When we’re so accustomed to hearing the United States described as a defender of freedom and democracy in the world, Biden’s reasoning seemed uncharacteristically resigned.

Biden speaks not of freedom or high-minded ideals but of his responsibility to bring American troops home. Even months ago, faced with the accusation that he was abandoning America’s commitment to the people of Afghanistan, he was unapologetic. Asked if the United States, and he personally, would bear responsibility should the Taliban regain control of the country, he was unequivocal. He felt, he said, “zero responsibility.” This would be a full, unconditional withdrawal.

In the end, that withdrawal happened very quickly. Fittingly, Biden’s deadline was 11 September this year, but American troops are mostly already gone. They left quickly and quietly, no doubt hoping to avoid the kind of iconic images of desperate evacuations that now characterise American withdrawal from its second-longest foreign war. As we now know, that effort has failed spectacularly.

The obvious comparisons to the war in Vietnam were not lost on Biden — he has already insisted, repeatedly, that this is “not Saigon.” He is at least partly right; while the comparison is apt, it relies on the vantage point of American power and a repeat of American mistakes. The “fall” of Saigon and Kabul were equally predictable, but the future is not — while the Communist Party of Vietnam is many things, it is not, and was not, the Taliban.

And in Biden’s case, the historical comparison lies not with the president who oversaw the end of America’s war in Vietnam but with the one who didn’t: fellow Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson’s catastrophic failures in Vietnam destroyed his presidency and dramatically constrained his domestic agenda. Biden seems intent on not making the same mistake, making the calculation that American fatigue with the “forever war” is stronger than any latent desire to be seen as the guardian of freedom and democracy in the world. He’s probably right.

The Australian government seems less cognisant of that history, and perhaps even more inclined to repeat it. When it came to the withdrawal, the Australian government was all too happy to outsource decision-making to the Americans, just as it was during the Vietnam war. But unlike Biden, Australia’s prime minister has continued a long tradition of justifying American military interventionism, and Australian support of it, in grandiose terms.

Echoing Richard Nixon’s invocation of “peace with honour” in Vietnam, Scott Morrison insisted in April that “freedom is always worth it” and “the world is safer” as a result of the war. That freedom and safety, as usual, is ours rather than that of the people of Afghanistan. It barely extends even to those Afghans who helped both the American and Australian campaigns directly.

Both the United States and Australia have, rightly, faced significant criticism for failing to do everything possible to protect even the local translators who worked with US and Australian forces and who were, by all accounts, integral to those operations. Those “locally engaged employees,” in the jargon of Western military interventionism, are now targets, along with their families, and many of them are desperate to get out.

The Biden administration is looking to spend US$1 billion on evacuations, and thousands have already been moved to either the mainland United States or military bases elsewhere. The Australian government has been much slower, and has faced significant criticism for it.

Visa processing, always deliberately unhurried and arduous, was slowed even further when the Australian government shuttered the Australian embassy in Kabul. Faced with an atmosphere of distrust, former local employees are forced to prove they did indeed work for the very Western forces that should know full well whether they did or not.

The Australian government’s shirking of its obligations was foreseeable months, if not years, in advance. It was bad enough to prompt intervention from the architect of Australia’s involvement in the war. Former prime minister John Howard weighed in in July, telling SBS News that granting asylum to former local employees “is a moral obligation we have. And it was a moral obligation that was shamefully discarded many years ago when we pulled out of Vietnam. I do not want to see a repetition of that failure in relation to Afghanistan.”

Unsurprisingly, Howard didn’t mention other historical failures repeated during the war and in its aftermath. That would mean examining the comparison between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam too closely, and asking too many questions about why those failures echo each other so clearly.

While the Australian and American approaches to withdrawal might vary by degree, they share much in common. The historical comparisons are ever-present, but any real “lessons” that history might offer are ignored. In neither country is there any real effort to understand and change the processes and structures that dragged us into both the longest and the second-longest foreign wars we’ve ever been involved in.

Even this year, the seventieth anniversary of the official security treaty between Australia and the United States, and the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, neither the US nor Australian government has shown any interest in understanding why it is that the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam mirror each other so closely.

In their refusal to engage with that history, both the Morrison government and the Biden administration shut down the possibility of any kind of learning that involves more than just mild regret. And so the risk that all of this will be repeated remains. •

An earlier version of this article appeared in Footyology.

The post Lost in translation appeared first on Inside Story.

Biden was right about one thing, at least. The abrupt collapse of another bankrupt regime — propped up for years beyond its deserved expiry only with the lives and largesse of the United States and its dutiful allies — didn’t end on an embassy rooftop. Instead, there was a terrified stampede across a nearby airfield.

This time the spectacle was more shocking as it unfolded in graphic live streaming around the world. The humiliation of the fall of Saigon was etched in the iconic black-and-white image, taken by United Press International photographer Hugh van Es, of a helicopter lifting desperate refugees from a rooftop near the American embassy. The capitulation in Kabul would be captured on scores of smartphones — defined with appalling images of desperate Afghans clinging to the fuselage of a departing US transport plane before plunging to their deaths.

Biden was also right to call out the unfair comparison between the defeat in Vietnam and that in Afghanistan, but not in the context he implied. The Taliban is certainly not the North Vietnamese army. In the Vietnam war, the United States was beaten by millions of North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong fighters backed by massive military and economic aid from the Soviet Union and China. In Afghanistan, it took just 80,000 Taliban fighters with rudimentary weapons and an unshakeable fundamentalist faith to exhaust the will of the most powerful armed forces in the world.

The waste, however, has indeed been comparable. As Biden confirmed on Monday, close to US$1 trillion has been squandered in Afghanistan over the past two decades — only to see the Taliban come full circle from a stunning victory in 1996 to a stunning return to power in 2021. And although the casualties are nothing like the 47,000 American military personnel who died in Vietnam, more than 4000 American troops and contractors have been killed in Afghanistan and another 20,000 wounded — along with the 50,000 Afghan civilians and a similar number of Taliban fighters estimated to have perished.

As Biden ruefully conceded, the speed with which the Taliban swept across the country recapturing cities and towns before reaching the capital in just ten days — and the correspondingly rapid disintegration of the 300,000-strong Afghan army — has been breathtaking. As recently as early last week, the Washington Post was reporting US military estimates that it would be at least another month before the city fell.

But the inevitability of this week’s events should have surprised no one, least of all the Republican rabble now baying for Biden’s blood. “What we have seen is an unmitigated disaster, a stain on the reputation of the United States of America,” intoned Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. “Every terrorist around the world, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Africa, are cheering the defeat of the United States military by a terrorist organisation in Afghanistan.”

In truth, Biden is little more than a late-shift janitor charged with clearing up the mess created by his predecessors, most recently the man for whom McConnell ran a shameless four-year protection racket, president Donald Trump. Trump’s decision to cut a deal with the Taliban in February last year made their return to power inevitable. Under the agreement, the United States and NATO promised to withdraw all their troops within fourteen months in return for the insurgents pledging not to allow al Qaeda or any other extremist group to operate again in the areas they control. Whether or not the Taliban kept their side of deal — many analysts believe their links with al Qaeda remain strong — the die was cast.

Of course, ultimate responsibility for the debacle rests with Trump’s Republican predecessors in the Bush administration, which drove the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001 in their fumbled pursuit of Osama bin Laden. As former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr said this week, “They’ll blame Biden, but Afghanistan, like Iraq, was the work of the neo-cons who fooled the Bush administration and seized 9/11 to prove American weaponry could dominate. Tribesmen with Kalashnikovs prevailed.”

The speed with which the Afghan government fell apart over recent weeks has laid bare how thin the veneer of its control was all along, and how utterly dependent it always was on US dollars and the Western military. As Biden rightly postulated, another year, five years or ten years on US life support would not have changed the prognosis for the corrupt and bitterly divided administration — and would have done nothing to blunt the stubborn resistance of the Taliban. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future,” said Biden of the fallen government. “We could not provide them with the will to fight for that future.”

Not surprisingly, the return of the Taliban has triggered alarm around the world. The images from Kabul over recent days seem like a flashback to 1996: a movement frozen in time, at least sartorially, as the same sullen men with beards and turbans brandished their weapons while posing with flags and banners in newly captured government offices, or roamed the largely deserted streets of the city.

It was almost inevitable that thousands of panicked residents remembering the brutal first coming of the Taliban would overrun the airport in a desperate and mostly vain bid to escape from the country. And it was grimly predictable that the women of Kabul — banished from their jobs and schools and ruthlessly suppressed last time around — would flee indoors and hunt for their mothballed burqas.

The decision by president Ashraf Ghani to flee last Sunday — reportedly aboard a plane overloaded with bags of cash — has been denounced by his former political partners and ridiculed by Joe Biden. While Ghani sought to clothe his escape with the virtue of seeking to avoid bloodshed, it is likely the blood he worried most about was his own. He would have been acutely aware that when the Taliban first came to Kabul, his predecessor, the Soviet-installed Mohammad Najibullah, was abducted from his refuge in the United Nations compound and tortured to death, his body dragged through the streets behind a truck before being suspended from a traffic light pole in front of the presidential palace.

While first appearances can certainly be deceptive, the return of the Taliban has so far been remarkably peaceful, a largely bloodless coup. While there were reported episodes of fighting and reprisals as the insurgents swept across the country in the face of token resistance from government forces, their arrival in Kabul this time came without violence or loss of life.

The Taliban leadership, so far at least, has been true to its word. “We want a peaceful transfer of power,” declared spokesperson Suhail Shaheen, as the Taliban forces paused at the entrances to the city, only proceeding as it became clear the regime’s soldiers and police had abandoned their posts. Shaheen told the BBC the Taliban wanted to form an “inclusive” government to run its new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: “There will be no retaliation and revenge.” There would also be an amnesty for those who had collaborated with the former regime and foreign governments: “We once again invite them all to come and serve the nation and the country.”

In a media conference on Tuesday, Taliban representative Zabihullah Mujahid indicated that the new regime would honour its undertakings not to allow the country to again become a sanctuary for terrorism: “We will not be allowing the soil of Afghanistan to be used against anybody.” And he promised that women’s rights would be protected: “All our sisters, all our women are secure… They can work. They can get education. They are needed in our society and they will be actively involved.”

Such pledges should rightly be viewed with great scepticism given the Taliban’s brutal track record, but there are reasons to believe their leadership will proceed more cautiously and perhaps more inclusively this time around. One of the movement’s highest priorities will be to win international legitimacy. Already Russia and China have effectively recognised the new order. Having engineered the negotiations that opened the way for the Taliban’s return, the United States can hardly now deny the reality of that return to power nor, more importantly, fail to acknowledge that for the first time in the modern history of Afghanistan a single political group controls the entire nation.

It was the US’s refusal to allow the Taliban to take Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations after their victory in 1996 that was widely credited with driving the isolated regime into the embrace of Osama bin Laden, who then plotted the devastation of 9/11 from within Afghanistan. Western governments and Afghanistan’s neighbours will be acutely vigilant watching for any signs of a renewed embrace of extremist allies now that the Taliban’s own revolution has been re-won. And the purportedly more pragmatic new leadership group will be mindful that it was the enabling of al Qaeda that visited the wrath of the West on their last government and saw them driven into the political wilderness for twenty years.

As Western governments consider the parameters of their relationships with the new Afghanistan, they would do well to contemplate anew the dangers and costs of adventures in foreign nation-building. Once more Afghanistan has taught a humiliating lesson to foreigners seeking to impose their will and way of life on its proud and ancient civilisation. First, it was the imperial British whose noses were bloodied in a series of presumptuous military campaigns in the nineteenth century. Then it was the Soviet Union, whose ten-year occupation in the 1980s saw 15,000 of its soldiers killed and more than one million Afghans perish before the Russians were driven out by the Mujahideen alliance. Now it is the turn of the United States to make its inglorious exit.

The failure of the latest Afghan misadventure is a failure shared by all of the American allies, including Australia.

Australia stumbled into Afghanistan on the coat-tails of our powerful ally — desperate as ever to ingratiate ourselves by delivering a marginal military contribution. In Vietnam, our war for the asking, as Michael Sexton revealed it to be, cost more than 500 Australian lives. In Afghanistan, we lost forty-one — each of them killed in a fight not of their making. And like their forefathers thrust onto the shores of Gallipoli a century before them, many must have wondered what exactly they were doing on such a strange battleground so far from home.

In the midst of the chaos and confusion of events in Kabul this week, prime minister Scott Morrison had the temerity to cast a military defeat as a success — and to swaggeringly place Australia in a starring role in that supposed success.

“Let me say this about our presence there,” said Morrison. “We went there to stop Osama bin Laden and to stop al Qaeda having a base of operations in Afghanistan. And that’s what was achieved. We were there in the cause of freedom. And every Australian who fell in that cause… is a national hero. And for that we are forever thankful and they’ve died in a great cause.”

A great cause? In fact, despite the bloody invasion of Afghanistan twenty years ago, Osama bin Laden brazenly evaded capture and remained at large for many more years before the Americans finally tracked him down in Pakistan. Al Qaeda was forced to relocate and regroup but would remain a dangerous and elusive terrorist network. In truth, our continued presence beyond these initial military objectives served only to help prolong the violence and instability in Afghanistan. The ambition of building a new and freer society is now exposed as the profligate fantasy that it always was. •

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Back in March Biden signed into law the US$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, and since then approximately 171 million payments of up to US$1400 per person have gone out to households. Democrats touted the plan as a godsend for the middle class, but perhaps its greatest achievement will be to lift more than five million children out of poverty this year. Although the bill passed without a single Republican vote, many Republican lawmakers have proclaimed its benefits to their constituents.

Biden’s sweeping plans for infrastructure, jobs and families go well beyond tackling the impact of the pandemic. In size and ambition, his US$4 trillion in domestic policy commitments rivals Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.

In a move that was both astute and characteristic, he chose to split the key legislation into two parts for congressional action. With infrastructure and jobs first up, the White House and congressional Democrat leaders took a gamble that they could get Republican votes. It took months of negotiations, but the US$1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed the Senate last Wednesday with nineteen Republican votes, including the vote of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who has declared stopping the Biden agenda to be his priority.

The bill will fund the largest upgrade of roads, bridges, transport systems, ports, power generation and broadband in decades. Fully US$550 billion — mostly from unspent coronavirus relief funding and tighter monitoring of gains by cryptocurrency investors — will fund new investments, including electric car charging stations, zero-emission school buses, better water infrastructure and environmental remediation.

With the passing of that bill, Biden has achieved something that eluded both of his Democrat predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama: winning sizeable bipartisan support for a top legislative priority. And he did it despite noisy opposition and threats from former president Donald Trump.

Why Biden’s gamble paid off better than anyone could have predicted can be explained by several factors. He used a centrist coalition of senators to lead the negotiations. He did the hard work needed to get the deal over the line, including making significant concessions. (The Senate bill is about US$1 trillion less than that initially proposed.) And he recognised how difficult it would be for Republicans to explain to their constituents why they had refused to support funding to improve the obvious failings of the nation’s infrastructure.

“Today, we proved that democracy can still work,” he proclaimed after the Senate passed the bill. It was a vindication of his election commitment to work with lawmakers across the political aisle.

That was never going to happen with the more expensive remainder of his 2021 legislative agenda. Even getting the more moderate Democrats to support a US$3.5 trillion expansion of federal safety net programs — paid for by winding back Trump-era tax cuts for corporations and wealthy families — will be challenge enough.

But Biden’s wins continued all the same. Just before leaving for the summer recess, the Senate passed a budget resolution that will provide the blueprint for legislation to implement this agenda. The vote was 50–49, the narrowest of margins, but the vital fact is that Biden didn’t lose a single Democrat senator.

Important as they are, these victories are only stepping stones towards enacting the Building Back Better plan. The path will quickly become harder, rockier and dramatically more partisan when Congress returns for the autumn session, when the House must pass its versions of the infrastructure bill and the budget resolution, to be agreed with the Senate in conference. Only then can the infrastructure bill be signed into law and work begin on translating the budget resolution into legislative language that must be passed by the House and the Senate. This package will be brought forward as a budget reconciliation bill, avoiding the Senate filibuster and requiring only a simple majority vote to pass.

The arcane legislative processes are further complicated by the Byrd rule, which limits what can be considered in a reconciliation package, and looming disagreements among House Democrats over the order in which the bills will be considered.

House leader Nancy Pelosi has said that the House will take up the budget resolution as soon as it returns on 23 August but won’t deal with the infrastructure bill until the Senate has passed the reconciliation bill. She is intent on ensuring the Senate includes all the major programs in this bill and is tying the two packages together to keep her whole caucus on board, as moderates grow wary of additional spending and progressives look for more.

The budget reconciliation bill will include a range of measures that will divide Democrats and Republicans on the basis of ideology, not least because of the significant roles (revived if not new) it gives the federal government. Its investments in families, education, healthcare, climate change and immigration include universal preschool for three- to four-year-olds; two free years of community college; the addition of dental, vision and hearing benefits to Medicare coverage; lower prices for prescription drugs; a new Civilian Climate Corps along with many of the climate provisions that didn’t make it into the infrastructure bill; historic levels of investment in affordable housing; and permanent residency for millions of immigrants.

The Republicans have no interest in supporting measures they have derided as “radical Democrat tax-and-spend.” McConnell and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy have been divided on many issues — including the infrastructure bill — but are united in opposing the budget reconciliation proposals.

Daunting as the task might seem, Biden has reason to believe the wind is at his back. Above all, these measures are very popular among voters. Sixty-five per cent of respondents to a recent Quinnipiac poll supported the bipartisan infrastructure proposal, and 62 per cent are in favour of the Democrats’ reconciliation plan. These levels of support are echoed in other polls, even including a Fox News poll.

The reason is simple. Most Americans see Biden’s policies as benefiting the rich, poor and middle class alike, so he is avoiding the divisions that Trump traded on. Employment is up, unemployment is down, and hourly rates in low-wage industries are finally starting to climb.

Biden can also rely on the expertise of Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and his own White House aides to wrangle and cajole congressional Democrats, and juggle their concerns and needs against those of the president.

At the same time, though, other urgent and contentious issues are looming. Unless legislation to fund public agencies is enacted in a timely fashion, a government shutdown is on the cards after the end of the government’s financial year on 30 September. The federal debt limit, already extended by extraordinary measures, must be extended by November.

Important constituencies are eager to see action on voting rights, gun control and social justice reforms. And the pandemic is far from beaten. The partisan divide on issues like masks and social isolation, combined with the conspiracy theories, misinformation and hesitancy, means this is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The momentum of the vaccinations has slowed and the Biden administration is struggling to revive it in the states and counties where resistance is high.

Biden’s approval ratings have taken a small hit as a result, although his handling of the pandemic still attracts 55 per cent approval. The most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found 51 per cent of those surveyed approved of his overall performance and 45 per cent disapproved. (At the same point in his presidency, Trump’s approval rating was 37 per cent.) The same polling found that public health was the key issue for both Democrats and Republicans, ahead of the economy, the environment, healthcare and immigration.

Biden knows his window of opportunity is closing. What doesn’t get legislated by Christmas won’t get done once next year’s midterm elections are looming — a key argument that should work to keep congressional Democrats aligned on the votes ahead. The enactment of these two legislative packages is imperative both for the perceived success of Biden’s first term and for Democrats to have any chance of overturning precedent and keeping their (already razor-thin) majorities in the House and the Senate.

The elephant lurking in the room is Trump. He has a war chest and is intervening in Republican primaries, determined to punish enemies, keep his agenda at the centre of the party and keep himself in the media spotlight. Some fear that the 2022 elections, at least in part, will be a referendum on Trump rather than Biden, particularly if Trump makes them a form of revenge for his 2020 loss.

Biden’s response is to reach out to disaffected Republicans and independents, and his legislative efforts are helping to garner their support. The early success of his infrastructure deal has helped loosen Trump’s grip on Republicans’ decision-making, vindicated the president’s faith in bipartisanship, and affirmed the rationale for his presidency. As he said following Senate passage of his infrastructure bill, “This is what I call governing.” •

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The case the court has agreed to hear, Jackson Women’s Health Organization v Dobbs, challenges the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that bans almost all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions for medical emergencies or foetal abnormalities. A federal district judge and a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit have both upheld an appeal against the law launched by the women’s health organisation that runs the only abortion clinic in Mississippi.

The case effectively reopens both Roe v Wade and the US Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v Casey, which held that “the state’s interests” in relation to a foetus that isn’t yet viable “are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.” In accepting the Mississippi case, the court says it will examine whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” The state’s attorney-general will argue that the capacity to survive outside the womb is the wrong place to draw the line.

Among developed nations, the longstanding and increasingly partisan political battle over women’s reproductive rights is uniquely American. Continual challenges to legal guarantees encapsulated in Roe v Wade and elsewhere not only undermine women’s freedoms but are also likely to be contributing to the appalling rates of maternal and infant mortality in the world’s richest nation.

A quick history lesson highlights how precarious the legal right to abortion is for American women. While Roe v Wade is commonly seen as guaranteeing a right to abortion, it secures only the right to privacy when seeking access to an abortion, thus protecting a woman’s autonomy in the decision to have an abortion.

Even this is mitigated by what the distinguished legal journalist Linda Greenhouse calls “a physician-centric framework.” To a remarkable degree, indeed, Roe v Wade is about doctors’ rights. The majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, actually says that “the attending physician, in consultation with his [sic] patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the State, that, in his medical judgment, the patient’s pregnancy should be terminated.” This doctor-knows-best rhetoric could well have helped enable the limitations since placed on American women’s reproductive rights.

It is important to note that Roe v Wade is essentially superseded by the 1992 decision. When this case reached the US Supreme Court, only Justice Blackmun remained of Roe’s seven-member majority, and a majority of the justices had been appointed by presidents who openly sought its reversal. Even so, the court surprised everyone by reaffirming Roe’s central tenet of the right to an abortion; but it also instituted an “undue burden” standard that permitted the state to regulate abortion to protect unborn life from the beginning of pregnancy, so long as women’s authority to decide whether to give birth was protected. In taking this approach, the court created opportunities for restrictions on abortion that Roe itself never sanctioned.

In the wake of the Roe v Wade decision, anti- and pro-abortion groups were galvanised. At the same time, Republican strategists were staking out anti-abortion positions as part of a strategy to appeal to Catholic and evangelical voters. This was the beginning of a growing partisan divide on the issue, which has become almost a litmus test for aspiring Republican lawmakers.

Efforts to limit abortion soon turned to focusing on funding for reproductive services. The Hyde amendment, introduced in 1976 and enacted by every Congress since, bans the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion services, with exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest and pregnancies that would endanger the mother’s life. It is particularly harmful to women of colour and those with low incomes, who disproportionately rely on Medicaid for their healthcare coverage. (Note that the Hyde amendment does not block states from using their own Medicaid funds; currently fifteen states pay for more abortions than those permitted under the amendment.)

Gallup polls report that around 50 per cent of Americans agree abortion should be legal “under certain circumstances” and another 29 per cent “under all circumstances.” This level of public support makes the federal political fight difficult, leading anti-abortion activists to be more relentless in their use of the courts and to target Republican-dominated state legislatures.

Donald Trump oversaw a major effort to curtail abortion. The “gag rule” was applied to recipients of US global health aid (a hard line that was particularly punitive for female victims of sexual violence during conflicts), access to contraception was restricted, and insurers and healthcare professionals were given more latitude to deny reproductive health services. He also made good on his promise to load up the Supreme Court with justices who would overturn Roe v Wade by appointing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Joe Biden has been reticent about speaking out on abortion. His election campaign didn’t highlight the issue, and he hasn’t taken it up since moving into the Oval Office. Perhaps his Catholicism has played a role, but more likely his silence reflects the many other important issues that need to be tackled.

But he has made a good start on rolling back Trump’s undermining of women’s health. He has reversed the restrictions on funding Planned Parenthood and overseas groups that provide abortion referrals; reversed restrictions on the supply of medical abortion drugs; and removed hurdles to medical research that uses foetal tissue derived from abortions. He has appointed vocal advocates of abortion rights to key federal posts, including Xavier Becerra as health and human services secretary.

The mere fact that the Supreme Court agreed to take up this case indicates it is likely to overturn or severely limit the judicial basis of abortion rights. None of the usual criteria for accepting a case were satisfied — there was no split in the circuit decisions and no unsettled question of federal law — and the case had languished on the court’s docket since before the death of Justice Ruth Ginsburg, an ardent support of Roe v Wade. Moreover, the newer, more conservative justices have already shown their willingness to overturn longstanding precedents and expand the scope of decisions.

Biden will be under enormous pressure to do more to protect abortion rights, not just because of fears about the outcome of Jackson Women’s Health Organization v Dobbs but also because of even more draconian state-level anti-abortion provisions. Sixteen states have attempted to ban abortion before viability, mostly with “heartbeat” bills, which seek to ban the procedure from the time a foetal heartbeat can first be heard. (This is six weeks from conception, at which time many women are still unaware they are pregnant.)

The anti-abortion legislation recently passed by the Texas legislature highlights what the future could look like without Roe v Wade (which originated in Texas). It not only bans abortions after six weeks but also allows private citizens the right to sue anyone who aids or abets an abortion — including healthcare workers and facilities, insurance companies, counsellors, families, the person who drives the patient to the clinic, and even those who donate funds to support abortion services. As lawyers opposing the legislation have argued, it enables anti-abortion groups to “weaponise the judicial system” to paralyse women’s healthcare services, isolate women who need abortions, and intimidate these women’s supportive networks.

All of these bills have been blocked by court orders, and await the undoing of constraints imposed by Roe v Wade. Many more bills are coming: since January, 549 abortion restrictions, including 165 abortion bans, have been introduced across forty-seven states; sixty-nine of these, including nine bans, have been enacted.

Biden made an election commitment to codify Roe v Wade into federal law and abolish the long-time ban on federal funding for abortions via the Hyde amendment. Vice-president Kamala Harris campaigned on a proposal to create a “preclearance” system, analogous to that in the Voting Rights Act, whereby states that want to change abortion access must seek approval from the justice department. In a first step, Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget request, just released, omits the Hyde language.

To enact any or all of these provisions, Biden must determine how much pressure he wants to put on the Democrats in Congress to tackle these fraught issues ahead of the 2022 elections. And there is an additional problem: all of these measures can only be passed if the Senate filibuster (a requirement for sixty votes rather than a simple majority) is abolished.

A more contentious way to tackle this issue — one that is already on the table for some Democrats —is to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court (there is precedent, although not recent). A group of Democrats has introduced a bill to do this in the House of Representatives; and, not surprisingly, Republicans have been scathing in their opposition. But the bill has a doubtful future even without Republican opposition: House speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she has no plans to bring it up for a vote.

Although the court’s composition is clearly on Biden’s mind, he has been in no hurry to make a decision. In April he signed an executive order setting up a bipartisan commission to examine the court’s size, the justices’ lifetime appointments and other court-related matters, thus fulfilling a campaign commitment.

The key issue that may drive Biden and his administration to apply more effort to abortion rights specifically and women’s reproductive health more generally is his strong commitment to improving access to healthcare and creating a more equitable society. “We are deeply committed to making sure everyone has access to care — including reproductive health care — regardless of income, race, zip code, health insurance status, or immigration status,” Biden said in a joint statement with Harris on the forty-eighth anniversary of Roe v Wade in January.

The hard line against abortion rights that is so prevalent in American politics puts women’s lives, livelihoods and health at risk and widens the disparities between rich and poor that are already a feature of US healthcare. More importantly, the current battles ignore the real-life complexity — ethical and financial — of ending a pregnancy. That is not likely to change any time soon. •

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The son of an industrial chemist from northern England who brought his family to Australia in 1957, Barton was raised in the working-class Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth and gained degrees in microbiology and biochemistry from the University of Adelaide. But what to do with this classic STEM education?

A vaguely worded advertisement he spotted in the government gazette in 1972 sought a junior scientist for the Department of Defence. He applied, and the job turned out to be an analyst position with Australia’s intelligence assessment agency, the Joint Intelligence Organisation.

Hired by the JIO’s Defence Science and Technical Intelligence directorate, and shuffled into the arcane field of Middle Eastern nuclear chemical and biological weaponry, Barton went on to spend thirty-plus years as an Australian intelligence analyst and assessment officer. His scientific and technical skills, plus some training in spycraft, led him from Canberra to London, Somalia and, ultimately, Iraq, where he found himself in the vortex of the biggest intelligence controversy of our time: the search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, Barton was acting director of intelligence analysis at the Defence Intelligence Organisation. It was his job to brief prime minister Bob Hawke about the risks — chemical, nuclear and biological — facing Australia’s naval vessels supporting the US-led coalition in what we now call the first Gulf war.

“I told him that we knew what kind of chemical agents and weapons Iraq had, and what the [Australian ships] might expect to face in the Gulf region,” writes Barton. “As for nuclear weapons I assured him that Iraq was a decade away, and probably more, from developing a bomb. We had little intelligence on Iraqi biological weapons, and although I thought the threat was low, I believed it would be prudent for our forces to be prepared. He nodded and seemed satisfied with this. Perhaps if he had learned what I discovered later, he would have felt differently.”

These “later” discoveries came through Barton’s intensive work as a weapons inspector in Iraq, where he was a member of the UN inspection teams, UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, under Swedish diplomats Rolf Ekéus and, in the lead-up to the second Gulf war, Hans Blix. Separately, he was attached to GATEWAY, a CIA-run operation to gather intelligence alongside, and about, the UN inspectors. He later joined the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group as special adviser first to David Kay and then to Charles Duelfer.

As recounted by Barton, the life of a weapons inspector involves dangerous field assignments, frustrating interrogations of uncooperative Iraqi scientists and military leaders, jigsaw-like puzzling through caches of seized documents, detailed tracing of the movement of potentially lethal chemicals, and a delicate balancing of international political and intelligence interests. Barton entered smouldering warehouses and bunkers containing stockpiles of unknown chemicals and live munitions, seized documents that revealed sophisticated Iraqi weapons programs, and prepared reports for the UN Security Council.

It is exciting stuff. Barton writes in an easy conversational style with plenty of anecdotes, and he negotiates many of the more confidential passages with the use of false names, nicknames, first names or, sometimes, simply no names at all.

One seized document he studied demonstrated that as early as May 1990 — seven months before the first Gulf war — Iraqi scientists had put that country “on the brink” of making a nuclear bomb. Having briefed Hawke that an Iraqi bomb was at least a decade away, Barton has spent troubled nights wondering if this much more threatening knowledge would have changed Australia’s calculations about the merits of sending those ships to the Gulf in 1991.

The Hawke briefing aside, there is little in this account of what any of the revelations about Iraqi weaponry may have meant for Australian decision-making as part of US president George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” That story is better told in more analytical and comprehensive accounts elsewhere.

Instead, Barton’s target lies elsewhere. A consistent thread through the weave of his narrative is its severe indictment of the intelligence performance of our closest ally. He writes to make a point, to demonstrate how the CIA’s intelligence capacity was distorted by its excessive responsiveness to political pressure.

Barton’s first confidence-shaking experience of CIA intelligence occurred early in his career. In mid 1981 reports emerged from Laos and Cambodia of sickness caused by “yellow rain.” CIA analysis pointed to a chemical agent the Soviet Union was supplying to its Vietnamese allies, leading then US secretary of state Alexander Haig to accuse the Soviets of chemical warfare. For the Australian investigators, though, led by Barton, the data didn’t add up: sickness reports were inconsistent and didn’t tally with the fungal-borne mycotoxins the CIA had identified in the samples.

In their report at the time, Barton and a colleague “concluded that there had been no chemical warfare in Indochina. The CIA had gotten it dead wrong.” Barton explains: “Bees often defecate in swarms, and their faeces falls to the ground in sticky droplets like rain. Since a food source for bees is pollen, their droppings are yellow. What the CIA had actually collected was dried bee poo, some of which had become mouldy, perhaps in transit, and so was contaminated with tiny amounts of toxin.”

Barton attributes the intelligence error to political influence — in other words, the analysis was shaped to fit the political conclusions that had already been announced. He was also shocked by the CIA’s response to his report: a personal letter went to the head of JIO questioning Barton’s analysis and accusing him of “perverse and mischievous” behaviour. The insult clearly rankles with him to this day.

In Iraq, as the drums of war were beating ever more loudly, the CIA was under ever greater pressure to find what it had been told to look for. Indeed, George W. Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, had declared not only that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction existed but also that they posed an existential threat. Barton, by contrast, had become convinced that the Iraqis had destroyed most of their weapons of mass destruction, and that whatever remained was likely to have passed its use-by date — in other words, that the Iraqi program posed no continuing threat.

Yet the United States and Britain accused Iraq of possessing capabilities that the UN inspectors under Blix — and, Barton suspected, the Iraqis themselves — had no knowledge of. Even more emphatically, at the Iraq Survey Group, “everything was premised on the belief that there were hidden weapons out there, and all they had to do was find them.”

This dilemma led the ISG’s first director, the highly regarded David Kay, to walk away. When his successor, Charles Duelfer, was introduced to staff in an excruciating scene witnessed by Barton, CIA director George Tenet bluntly asserted, “Iraq has hidden weapons out there, and it’s your job to find them!” Barton, remembering the saga of the bee poo, concluded: “Politics was once again taking precedence over intelligence findings.”

So it turned out. The intelligence was wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction — or none any longer. “It was the politicians who made the decision to go to war, but it was the massive failure of CIA intelligence that facilitated it,” writes Barton. “In my view the CIA was as culpable as their political masters.” This lesson alone is worth the price of the book.

Barton writes as probably the best-informed Australian on the subject of Iraqi weapons development. His only rival for the title would be diplomat Richard Butler, who followed Ekéus as head of UNSCOM; but though Barton’s involvement was at a lower level, it was for a longer period and arguably gave him more on-the-ground knowledge. Curiously, Barton doesn’t mention Butler at any point.

Even so, it is not entirely clear how an intelligence agent who held senior positions in the Australian system and operated in elite international networks is able to write any sort of memoir. To be fair, much of his account deals with his service with the United Nations, in Mogadishu as well as Iraq, when by definition his activities and reports were ultimately public. But he was employed by Australian intelligence for most of the time and he is still bound, as he acknowledges, by the Official Secrets Act.

Bob Hawke’s 1994 memoir, for example, is much more circumspect about the intelligence briefings he received at this time. Though Barton’s story doesn’t show Hawke in a negative light, I suspect the late prime minister would hardly have approved of discussion of his highly confidential briefings. And for what it’s worth, I doubt that a more accurate representation of the Iraqi nuclear threat would have deterred Hawke, who was determined not to appease an aggressor. •

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The Pentagon Papers, famously leaked by Ellsberg, had their genesis in American defence secretary Robert McNamara’s growing pessimism about the war in Vietnam. McNamara was one of the key architects of US involvement under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but by 1967 he was experiencing grave doubts about the likelihood of victory. He commissioned an official history that would bring together the major  internal documents so that future policy-makers could trace the key decisions and assumptions.

This massive study — 3000 pages of historical analysis and 4000 pages of government documents in forty-seven volumes — was completed in January 1969. It covered the years since 1945, concentrating on the escalation of American involvement in the 1960s. Only fifteen copies were made and the entire contents were classified “top secret — sensitive.” Two and a half years later Ellsberg leaked most of the contents of what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

Almost four decades later, Manning sent four batches of classified material to WikiLeaks. First came a video of Americans in an Apache helicopter killing several innocent people in a Baghdad street. Then came the Afghanistan war logs and the Iraq war logs: 392,000 US military communication records. Finally and most spectacularly came a massive tranche of US diplomatic cables.

When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers it was the largest unauthorised release of classified material in history. In the estimation of New York Times editor Bill Keller, the leak amounted to around two and a half million words. But the Pentagon Papers, for all their impact, were dwarfed in sheer volume by the quarter of a million diplomatic cables Manning sent to WikiLeaks. Unlike the Pentagon Papers, though, which had been selected and analysed by expert staff, Manning’s leak was a jumble of undigested historical and contemporary material.

With that one act, Manning and WikiLeaks ushered in the era of digital mega-leaks. The Panama Papers, released in April 2016, represented another massive leap in size. Their 2.6 terabytes of material — roughly 1500 times the size of Manning’s leak — provided an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly detailed, insight into how offshore companies are used for tax evasion and international money-shifting.

Then, a year and a half later, came the Paradise Papers. Gerard Ryle, a former Canberra Times deputy editor who now heads the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, argues quite plausibly that this was the biggest leak of all: 13.4 million files (also detailing tax evasion) compared with a mere 11.5 million for the Panama Papers.

Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to leak the Pentagon Papers was the culmination of his growing disaffection with the war. He had completed a Harvard doctorate on bargaining theory in 1962, having previously served in the Marine Corps. He then took a job with the RAND Corporation, a civilian think tank with close ties to the military. In 1966 he went to Vietnam to work with the legendary counterinsurgency expert, Major General Edward Lansdale.

Ellsberg was well connected among the top US officials involved in the war, and was initially a fervent believer in America’s mission in Vietnam. But by 1967, when he was forced by severe hepatitis to return to the United States, he had developed a deep sense of the war’s futility, and soon concluded that America should withdraw. He was asked by the coordinators of the McNamara study, Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, to participate, and worked on the project for some months.

He was also still involved in official policymaking. In early 1969, he worked for the incoming Nixon administration, and particularly for Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on options for the war, although his withdrawal scenarios were immediately rejected. Ellsberg and Kissinger had known each other at Harvard, and indeed Kissinger once said he learned more about bargaining from Ellsberg than from anyone else. Later in the year, again working at RAND, Ellsberg was able to read the entire McNamara study for the first time.

Increasingly distraught about the war, he borrowed a photocopier in late 1969 and spent hours each night copying the Pentagon Papers and smuggling them out — a pattern he continued for months. Rather than leaking them straight away, he urged that the study be declassified and asked various members of Congress to release it. Eventually he approached Neil Sheehan of the New York Times, one of the most experienced and informed American reporters on the Vietnam war. After a long and uncertain courtship, the paper acquired the material and decided to publish.

Bradley Manning — as Chelsea was then known — could hardly have been a more different character. Having left school, he drifted through various unsatisfying jobs before joining the military in 2007. His expertise in IT brought a posting to military intelligence, although only with the rank of private. He was neither a high-flyer nor well connected.

Serving in Iraq, already alienated from the military and somewhat of a loner, Manning became disgusted by how America was conducting the war. Despite his low rank, lax security gave him access to huge amounts of classified diplomatic and military material (although not to documents classified as top secret).

In contrast to Ellsberg’s lonely evenings at the photocopier, Manning was able to download large volumes of material onto discs disguised as Lady Gaga albums and blithely walk past security. He then began to feed increasingly large amounts of the classified documents to WikiLeaks.

From the moment the Pentagon Papers were published, a large number of central figures suspected Ellsberg was responsible. Manning, by contrast, could have retained the anonymity that Assange had always envisaged for WikiLeaks informants. Leakers were able to submit material to the organisation without anyone, even WikiLeaks, knowing who they were. (Since then, many news organisations have set up anonymous drop boxes where leakers can deposit documents.)

But Assange’s vision overlooked the human dimension. When WikiLeaks gave no sign that it had received the material, and the army no sign it knew anything was amiss, Manning became increasingly anxious. Lacking support, he reached in a fellow hacker, Adrian Lamo. Lamo told the FBI, and Manning was arrested.

Manning’s leaks were greeted with immediate and extravagant denunciation. The Italian foreign minister described them as “the 9/11 of world diplomacy,” and the title of a book about Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, captured the views of many officials. But even while the initial furore over Manning’s leaks was raging, US defence secretary Robert Gates conceded that the damage to American interests had been minimal.

A similar pattern had followed publication of the Pentagon Papers. There was much talk of the damage to national security and the dreadful consequences that would flow. In their memoirs, Nixon, Kissinger and many other senior government figures recorded the shock they felt following their publication, and denounced the irresponsibility of the newspapers, but none of them cites any major adverse consequence.

Ellsberg was arrested in late June 1971 for violating the federal Espionage Act but the prosecution eventually collapsed when procedural abuses became apparent. The Nixon White House, wanting dirt on their adversary, had raided his psychiatrist’s rooms without a warrant and illegally tapped Ellsberg’s phone and those of several witnesses.

Ellsberg escaped imprisonment, but he had decided to leak knowing full well that it would ruin his career. He later described how his former colleagues regarded him with neither admiration nor disapproval, but with amazement, as though he were a space-walking astronaut who had cut his lifeline to the mothership.

Manning was held for a long period without trial and then sentenced to an unprecedented thirty-five-years in jail. Now Chelsea Manning, she was held at five different facilities in conditions a UN expert called cruel and inhumane, and made at least two suicide attempts. She had served seven years — double the second-longest sentence in any leak case — when Barack Obama, in one of his last acts as president, commuted most of her remaining sentence.

Next month marks fifty years since the New York Times published the first excerpts from the Pentagon Papers on Sunday, 13 June 1971. Two days later, the Nixon administration sought an injunction to stop the Times from publishing any further reports, the first time in American history that the government had sued the press to stop it from disclosing information on the grounds of national security. Later that week, the Washington Post published material from the study, and also received an injunction in return.

Both cases went to the Supreme Court, which in a six–three decision on 30 June found in favour of the press. What is perhaps the key argument was put best by District Court judge Murray Gurfein: “The security of the nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions.”

Ellsberg had hoped publication might bring the war to a speedier end. Although that hope proved forlorn, the Pentagon Papers did fortify the already strong antiwar forces. They also provided incontrovertible evidence of how early and extensive America’s clandestine war efforts against North Vietnam had been, and demonstrated that America had sabotaged the Geneva Accords of 1954. They revealed that the strategic hamlet program — a program of relocating and “pacifying” rural Vietnamese — had failed and, most importantly, that the bombing of North Vietnam had been futile.

Running through the New York Times stories was proof that official statements had often deceived the public. When President Johnson was running as the “peace candidate” against the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, planning was already well advanced for American combat troops to participate in the conflict; that involvement began in 1965 and peaked at half a million troops in 1968.

In August 1964, following the Gulf of Tonkin incident (in which Vietnamese boats allegedly launched unprovoked attacks on American vessels), the Johnson administration secured an almost unanimous congressional resolution, which it treated as legal authorisation for all its future actions in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers revealed the analysts’ profound doubts about the official version of what happened in the Gulf and how the sense of crisis generated by the alleged attacks fitted into the administration’s long-term strategy.

By the time the papers were published, the Nixon administration was well advanced in its strategy for continuing the war. It had widened the war’s arena with military action in Cambodia and Laos. It had launched the Vietnamisation program, which involved reduced US troop levels, an emphasis on South Vietnamese leadership, and intensified bombing — a policy one official delicately described as “changing the colour of the corpses.” Finally, Nixon’s moves to ease wider cold war tensions — with spectacular visits to Beijing and Moscow in 1972 — helped to minimise the political impact of the war.

Ironically, perhaps the greatest impact of the Pentagon Papers was on the Nixon White House itself. Although the revelations showed that much of the predicament in Vietnam was not his fault, Nixon was outraged and determined to stop publication. One result was his unprecedented (and unsuccessful) legal action against the New York Times and the Washington Post. Kissinger was equally determined to resist further revelations, partly because of his personal animosity towards Ellsberg.

Several White House insiders later wrote that Nixon’s reaction to the leak of the Pentagon Papers was his first step on the road to Watergate. The team of undercover operatives ordered to pursue Ellsberg was set up as a self-styled “plumbers unit” in the White House basement. Nixon was already obsessed by leaks and convinced that the press was his enemy; now, he became fixated on the idea that not only the Pentagon Papers but also other classified documents were being held by “liberals” at the Brookings Institution.

Plans were made to mount an arson attack and, under cover of the resulting confusion, take back all the documents Brookings held. Wiser heads eventually prevailed, but not before plans to acquire a fire engine were well advanced. Eventually, this appetite for undercover operations led to the abortive raid on the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate building in 1972, and to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

The White House’s corrupt behaviour ultimately had positive effects. Court decisions upheld press freedom and  asserted the primacy of the law; checks on the executive arm of government were strengthened. With lawyers having played a role in the illegal acts, law schools introduced ethics classes and bar associations introduced codes of conduct.

The impact of Manning’s WikiLeaks disclosure is less clear. Manning’s punishment was severe. Assange, still in prison in Britain, continues to face the possibility of extradition for his work on WikiLeaks to the United States, where the courts seem much more politicised than they were a generation ago.

A popular view of the Vietnam war was that America took a series of small steps and each time found itself sucked further into the quicksand. Daniel Ellsberg disagreed. In an article called “The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine” he argued that key presidential decisions had been made not in the expectation that they would change the course of the war but merely to avoid withdrawal or defeat. For domestic political reasons, no recent president had been willing to be the one who “lost” Vietnam. So the war continued without a prospect of victory, but with defeat forever delayed.

The Vietnam and Afghanistan wars are different in many ways, but the pattern of policymaking Ellsberg outlined certainly resonated during the long years of US involvement in the fight against the Taliban. •

An earlier version of this article was published in Inside Story in June 2011.

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Despite its flaws, and despite a decade of attacks by congressional Republicans, the ACA — or Obamacare, as it is often called — is more popular than ever. A February poll showed support at 54 per cent, with many of those saying they oppose Obamacare supporting its provisions when they are spelt out. But that popularity seems only to have hardened Republicans’ resolve to fight its expansion.

On his first day in office Biden use presidential authority to rescind an array of healthcare-related executive orders made by his predecessor and implement his own policies. He appointed a new Covid-19 response coordination team. He withdrew Donald Trump’s Medicaid waiver, which allowed states to restrict eligibility using work requirements. He rolled back restrictions on reproductive health and the use of foetal tissue n research. He revived US membership of the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord.

Biden also restored science and scientific expertise’s central role in health-related policymaking, reinstated workplace and environmental protections, and reversing the Trump administration’s hostile stance on gay rights and racial justice — all decisions just as important for Americans’ health as expanded health insurance coverage and improved access to healthcare services. (Kaiser Health News keeps a list, aptly titled The Great Undoing, of his ongoing efforts to undo Trump’s health policies.)

But the real work of restoring and expanding Obamacare involves writing the detailed legislation that must then pass Congress. With a Democratic majority of only six votes in the House of Representatives and just one (the vice-president’s) in the Senate, and with little or no chance of Republican support, that will be an enormous challenge.

Biden signalled where he was heading early. The US$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, the first of three bills that make up the Build Back Better plan, was made public before he took the oath of office. It focuses on pandemic relief, rescuing the American economy, opening schools, scaling up vaccination, and in other ways controlling the pandemic.

Aside from one-off payments to all Americans and increases in tax credits — measures that will temporarily lift many children out of poverty — short-term funding was also provided to lower the cost of health insurance premiums and pay the private health insurance of laid-off workers. Unemployment, nutritional assistance, rental and mortgage assistance benefits were boosted; Native American communities received US$8.3 billion for health, housing and education programs; and new financial incentives were introduced to encourage the twelve remaining states (led by Republicans, mainly southern and poor) to take up Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

Biden’s time in the Obama administration had brought home to him the hazards of endless and ultimately fruitless negotiations with Republicans. He knew that bill must be passed in full, and quickly.

The American Rescue Plan Act was signed into law on 11 March, having passed through Congress without attracting a single Republican vote. As a result, Biden could mark his first hundred days in office with most Americans having received their promised relief payments, some 200 million Covid-19 vaccinations having been carried, out and many other achievements. The economy is roaring back, if unevenly, and the White House is characterised by action, transparency and an air of normality. Polling shows Americans are the most optimistic they’ve been about the nation’s direction in nearly fifteen years.

This gives the president the political capital to proceed with the two other parts of his Build Back Better agenda — US$2.3 trillion over the next eight years for the American Jobs Plan and $1.8 trillion for the American Families Plan — both of which include health and healthcare provisions.

Although the American Jobs Plan is primarily about rebuilding America’s rundown infrastructure, investing in green energy and creating jobs, it will also provide funding for the social supports that advance equity and aid access to healthcare. These include investments in broadband access, public transport, affordable housing and safe drinking water, all of which will especially benefit low-income and minority communities.

One of the package’s ground-breaking initiatives is the US$400 billion allocated to expand and upgrade community-based care for the elderly and people with disabilities, and an almost doubling of current spending under Medicaid. Although these funds seem unlikely to meet demand — especially given fears about the safety of residential care in the wake of Covid-19’s toll — they could dramatically improve the lives of those in home care and their carers. The latter are mainly immigrant women, often living below the poverty line without health insurance, whose median hourly wage is only US$12.60. During his election campaign, Biden spoke out about the need for this important part of the healthcare workforce to be given pay raises, workplace protections, paid family and medical leave, job training programs and collective bargaining rights.

The third component of Build Back Better, the American Families Plan, covers education, childcare, paid family leave and healthcare. It expands the American Rescue Plan’s premium tax credits for health insurance and provides US$2 billion to train skilled healthcare workers. It also tackles the social determinants of health by providing free meals to children in areas of high poverty and creating a healthy foods incentive program.

Education is directly linked to self-rated health, infant mortality, life expectancy and compliance with medical advice. Programs that close gaps in educational outcomes between low-income or racial and ethnic minority populations and higher-income or majority populations are essential to achieving health equity.

Congressional Republicans are predictably outraged by these US$6 trillion spending plans. They have accused Biden of pursuing a radical agenda that will turn the United States into a failed socialist state, and reject even job creation and infrastructure initiatives they (and Trump) once supported. They don’t see broadband or the removal of lead pipes carrying drinking water as infrastructure, and they claim that home care services were “shoehorned” into the plan.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell declared that the Biden administration “wants to jack up taxes in order to nudge families toward the kinds of jobs Democrats want them to have, in the kinds of industries Democrats want to exist, with the kinds of cars Democrats want them to drive, using the kinds of childcare arrangements that Democrats want them to pursue.”

Just as anathema to the Republicans are the increases in corporate taxes and taxes on individuals earning more than US$400,000 needed to pay for these bills, measures designed to avoid boosting an already huge federal deficit. Unsurprisingly, the Republicans’ appetite for remaking the economy is small, as evidenced by their US$568 billion infrastructure counter-proposal, which deals narrowly with roads, bridges and other transport infrastructure and ignores the economic possibilities of green jobs and clean energy.

Biden recognises that he has a unique opportunity to make what he has called a “once in a generation series of federal investments in our nation’s future.” With the pandemic having highlighted the consequences of relying on the market to deliver affordable and accessible services, a majority of Americans now supports a single-payer health insurance system and 69 per cent favour a public option that would compete with private health insurance.

Recognition is also growing that the much-touted American exceptionalism involves lower life expectancy, higher suicide rates and higher rates of avoidable deaths than in comparable countries. Many Americans now see the consequences of what happens when healthcare is neither universal nor affordable and paid family leave isn’t guaranteed.

Joe Biden is acutely aware of the Democrats’ narrow majorities in the current House and Senate and the distinct possibility these could be overturned in the next election cycle. His response is to go big, go fast and go partisan to get his plans in place before the 2022 elections.

The president has found considerable bipartisan support for his proposals in the community. Indeed, his ideas are often more popular than he is (his approval rating is currently around 54 per cent) and in most polls that support also comes from many Republicans. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted on 18–21 April found that 65 per cent of Americans support the now-enacted coronavirus relief package. Several different polls indicate that a majority of voters want Congress to pass the American Jobs Plan, and the more people know about it the more they approve. Polling also shows strong approval of the care-giving provisions, with a Morning Consult/Politico poll showing 76 per cent support (including 64 per cent among Republican voters). A Monmouth poll shows widespread enthusiasm for the American Families Plan, with 64 per cent support and 34 per cent opposition.

Nor are American voters particularly fazed by the price tag, or the increased taxes needed to pay it. A CBS News/YouGov poll, for example, found that Americans support raising taxes — on individuals earning more than US$400,000 a year and on corporations — by the same wide margin of 71 per cent to 29 per cent. A Monmouth poll found support for higher corporate taxes at 64 per cent and for raising taxes on those earning more than US$400,000 at 65 per cent. Some Republican lawmakers have even been touting the benefits Biden’s Covid-19 relief plan has delivered to their districts.

The president’s problems with Congress are not confined to managing the Republicans; there is obstinacy and dissent among the Democrats, especially those on the left who want more, and want it quicker. Biden campaigned on giving Americans universal healthcare coverage, and that is still a long way off. Estimates put the percentage of uninsured Americans at 12.5 (rising to an average of 15.5 per cent in states that have not expanded Medicaid): that’s twenty-nine million people, mostly low-income and people of colour, with another 21.3 per cent under-insured.

To reduce those figures significantly, two things need to happen: the cost of health insurance purchased privately and through the Obamacare exchanges needs to fall, and the recalcitrant states need to expand Medicaid. Biden is already tackling these issues, but more needs to be done. The new supplements for purchasing health insurance run for only for two years, and twelve states (with some four million eligible people) have yet to expand Medicaid.

In the absence of universal healthcare, Medicaid is an important, if shaky and uncertain, safety net. It provides mental health and substance abuse treatment for millions and covers almost half of all births. The states holding out against expansion are losing money they can ill afford, especially as coronavirus infections continue. Just last month, the Texas State House rejected Medicaid expansion because of continuing opposition from Republicans. Expansion would have enabled some 954,000 adults to receive healthcare coverage (about 75 per cent of whom are people of colour) and brought the state US$5.4 billion in federal dollars to pay for it.

Rather than funding expanded health insurance coverage through private insurers, progressive Democrats and some policy experts argue for a public option (as originally proposed in Obamacare) and/or for people aged fifty-five or sixty qualify for Medicare (an idea that was championed by Hillary Clinton in her 2016 presidential race).

Congressional Democrats led by Senator Bernie Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus are pushing to have Medicare expansion included in the American Families Plan. They see this as a precursor to an eventual Medicare-for-All program. A broader group of Democrats is pushing for the American Families Plan to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. Biden has endorsed these, and the public option, in the past.

In his speech to the Congress Biden promised that he would strive “this year” to lower insurance premiums, reduce drug costs and pursue other reforms to Obamacare. Presumably he feels that including these provisions in the American Families Plan would draw fire from the powerful health insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical corporations, making its passage through Congress even more difficult.

Sometime between now and 1 October the administration and Democrats must also confront the decision of the US Supreme Court in the California v Texas, a case brought by Republican state attorneys- general and supported by the Trump administration. The decision will essentially decide the fate of Obamacare and the survival of the entire Affordable Care Act. Analysis shows that it would adversely affect the lives of almost all Americans.

Should the worst happen, re-enacting a version of the Affordable Care Act in today’s political climate would be almost impossible, even as more Americans than ever are signing up for the health insurance coverage provided by the federal Obamacare exchange. It would be a dreadful irony if Trump’s legacy, delivered after he left office, was — finally — the end of Obamacare.

For this reason alone, but for so many others besides, Biden’s efforts to provide the United States with the kinds of government services that other wealthy, democracies already take for granted and to build voter support for a stronger social safety net are a national imperative. •

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Four days earlier, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited a naval base on Hainan island for the commissioning of three new warships, including a giant amphibious landing vessel capable of putting hundreds of marines ashore by helicopter and hovercraft. Two more are under construction, and Chinese media listed Taiwan among their potential targets.

Here in Australia, Michael Pezzullo, the powerful secretary of the home affairs department — a man given to dark warnings — spoke on Anzac Day about the “drums of war” beating louder, declaring the need to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s by arming to deter aggressors.

In Canberra’s political, official and media circles, Taiwan is suddenly a big strategic question. Will China use force to gain control of the island of twenty-four million people it claims as ancestral territory? If so, when? How far will the United States go to defend it? And if Joe Biden is drawn into a war over Taiwan, will Australia be fighting alongside him?

Answering the last question is possibly the easiest for many of our most seasoned officials. “There’s absolutely no doubt that if the Americans were to go to war over Taiwan we would be in it,” says John McCarthy, a former Australian envoy to the United States, Japan, Indonesia and India.

“Australia is not a major player,” Cavan Hogue, a former ambassador to Russia, South Korea and the Philippines, tells me. “But if the Americans decided to defend Taiwan they would expect us to join in — or at least offer our flag even if the military contribution were minimal.”

The Americans would be hoping for a fair bit more than that, says Scott Harold, a senior China analyst with the RAND Corporation think tank in Washington. “US policymakers would be expecting, at a minimum, intelligence support, political-diplomatic support, probably facilities access of some sort,” he tells me, adding it would not be surprising if Washington also expected some “niche” capabilities, such as special forces, anti-submarine operations and air and surface ship deployments.

The Australian Defence Force has spent decades working up the capability to join in such an operation. The navy operates three Aegis destroyers that can be networked into a theatre air-and-missile defence system. Its submarines have American combat systems and weapons. Its two landing ships can each carry a battalion of troops to take back islands. The air force flies American F-35, P-8 and Wedgetail aircraft. All three services have senior officers rotating through US command positions. Seamless “interoperability” with US forces is the doctrine.

It would be hard for Canberra to decline. “If we lost a war against China over Taiwan and Taiwan was forcibly absorbed, and our allies stood on the sidelines,” says RAND Corp’s Harold, “then it’s quite clear that would be the end of the liberal international order in the Indo-Pacific, and quite possibly worldwide.”

Even if the United States did fight off a Chinese assault on Taiwan without visible help from Australia, it would mean the effective end of the ANZUS alliance, according to Australian strategic thinker Paul Dibb.

Only in recent years has a war of this kind become a contingency that the United States and its allies needed to worry much about. In the early decades after nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his Kuomintang forces in 1949, it became something of a pariah state. Washington transferred its recognition to Beijing in 1979, leaving the Chinese nationalist regime in Taiwan in a kind of diplomatic limbo. American defence assistance was promised only so long as the Taiwanese didn’t start a fight with China or provoke one by declaring independence.

But circumstances began changing after Chiang’s son ended martial law and his successor, a native of Taiwan, opened up contested elections. Since then, government has alternated between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party, which promotes a Taiwanese identity and has veered close to outright separatism.

Under president Tsai Ing-wen, the DPP has held power since 2016. Elections, a female leader, and liberal social policies have made it a successful testbed for Chinese democracy. Its handling of Covid-19, a danger it recognised before Beijing sounded the alarm, has added to its kudos. The transformation has weakened the argument, still held in some quarters, that Western powers and Japan, with their records of meddling and exploitation, should stand back and let two not-entirely-admirable Chinese regimes settle their differences.

Rather than the convergence many expected in the 1970s, the democratic transition set Taiwan on a path of political divergence from the communist mainland. The gap has widened, especially since Xi became China’s leader, tightening internal political and ideological control, promoting an expansion of China’s global influence, and crushing hopes of autonomy in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. He has raised the recovery of Taiwan to a sacred goal and has devoted huge budgets to converting the People’s Liberation Army into a high-tech force that can contest American control of nearby seas.

Xi’s deadline for taking back Taiwan is unknown. It is unlikely to be the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China in June this year — the preparations would have been apparent to US satellites. Xi himself has set 2035 as a target for some of his other plans.

In recent weeks, US Pacific fleet commanders have signalled to Washington their concern about a window of vulnerability within the next five or six years, before their own modernisation programs take effect. Scott Harold points out that America is responding to China’s growing power by dispersing its forces from bases vulnerable to Chinese strikes. It could be seen as a window of opportunity closing for PLA commanders.

Would Xi risk an all-out attack on Taiwan? It would almost certainly involve missile strikes on US bases in Japan, drawing Japan into the conflict by triggering the carefully drawn provisions about self-defence in its constitution. PLA generals talk about using nuclear weapons, which would invite retaliation in kind, shattering the carefully built-up economy and perhaps the party’s domestic grip.

“Would a communist regime really put those equities at risk when Xi Jinping knows that as long as I don’t do something incredibly stupid, I’ll still be the effective emperor of China tomorrow?” asks Harold. But hidden power plays within the Chinese Communist Party could work a different logic: “Xi could be pushed to be more hawkish than anyone else.”

Mark Harrison, a China specialist at the University of Tasmania with a deep knowledge of Taiwan, thinks all-out invasion is highly unlikely. China’s leaders know that seizing the island would be just the start, involving an occupation force of hundreds of thousands of troops who would be vulnerable to blockade. “It’s a crisis that would go on forever, and be incredibly testing of the PLA and China’s military infrastructure,” he says.

“Australia would be involved” in such a large-scale scenario, says Harrison. “But China is more likely to act in a way that makes it much more equivocal for the US and its allies, including the Taiwanese, about their best response. What we’re much more likely to face is a smaller event where you don’t have a clear choice. And Beijing will seek to use that to its tactical advantage.”

Smaller operations could include grabs for the Taiwan-held islands on the Fujian coast — islands like Kinmen, which the nationalists held against attack in the 1950s, or the remote Pratas islands in the South China Sea.

“It’s almost a version of grey-zone coercion,” says Harold, referring to China’s use of swarms of fishing boats and coastguard vessels to push its maritime claims. “A little bit beyond that because it’s actually occupying territory and kills a limited number of Taiwanese people. That’s a pretty serious threat, and to not respond to it would feel a bit like the militarisation of the Sudetenland” — Hitler’s occupation of German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

“There would be some people saying it’s either this or we fight the big war, and are we going to fight the big war over this small thing?” Harold adds. “The reality is that’s how status quo powers get manipulated by aggressive, risk-accepting, risk-manipulative rising powers.”

Since taking office, US president Joe Biden drawn Washington back behind the Chinese “red lines” that Donald Trump trampled all over when he sent high-ranking officials to Taiwan. But his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has declared “rock-solid” support for Taiwan, and supplies of missiles, extra F-16 fighters and other advanced munitions continue. When Biden met with Japan’s Yoshihide Suga the two leaders reiterated their support for “peace and security” in the Taiwan Strait — a coded signal that alarmed Beijing.

“In a sense,” says Harold, “this is in some ways more threatening because it suggests the US is returning to a recognition that it needs to be an active leader, not necessarily the only one but certainly the most capable one among others. If you look at the calculations of Tokyo and Canberra, clearly those are much more closely aligned with trying to respond to and support Taipei’s continued de facto independence from Beijing.”

Taiwan itself has been angling for more explicit support from Canberra, notably during a long interview with foreign minister Joseph Wu on the ABC last year. Some analysts see a division between Australia’s defence and foreign affairs departments. But foreign affairs secretary Frances Adamson, who has served in Beijing and Taipei, told a Senate estimates inquiry that Canberra had made several representations to China about Taiwan recently. Nor are defence secretary Greg Moriarty or his deputy secretary for strategy Peter Tesch — both former ambassadors — noticeably pushing for change. ADF chief General Angus Campbell says a conflict over Taiwan would be “disastrous.”

Australia’s official position is still strictly “one China” — that Taiwan is part of China — while urging that reunification happens by consent, which is now a forlorn prospect. Yet reports do suggest that the defence department is updating its scenarios for Taiwan to include some major military assets. ANU strategic expert Brendan Taylor sees this move as a response to pressure from Washington for Canberra and Tokyo to add their weight to American deterrence.

“Because of the capabilities that the Chinese have been developing it’s going to become more and more difficult for the Americans to come to Taiwan’s defence in the way they were able to, not without cost but relatively easily in the past,” says Taylor.

Harrison, at the University of Tasmania, sees no likelihood of an upgrade in relations with Taiwan. “There is a view in certain quarters that Australia is particularly belligerent towards China, but that really isn’t the case,” he says. “In really significant areas — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang — Australia’s actually been very reticent.”

Canberra’s loudest drumbeat of war comes from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, whose dire scenarios are lapped up by the media and some politicians. “The place is getting a lot hotter under the collar than it should,” complains former ambassador McCarthy. “Everybody is whipping everybody else up.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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What explains this shift? It is largely a matter of generational change within the Democratic Party. Despite being led by the oldest president in American history, the Democrats are predominantly the party of the young. Exit polls revealed voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine overwhelmingly supporting Biden over Trump by a margin of 62 to 35 per cent. Biden also won easily (52 to 45 per cent) among voters aged thirty to forty-five. Young Democrats have little interest in the centrist politics of the Clintons, or even of Barack Obama.

It’s worth distinguishing this observation from the pop sociologists who divide the population into “generations” — boomers, millennials, gen X and so on. Most talk about the differences between generations mainly consists of repackaged age-old clichés about the laziness and irresponsibility of the young, the growing conservatism of the middle-aged and the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old. And the idea of sharp distinctions between groups like boomers, millennials and gen Xers is nonsense: most of the time, differences in class, race and gender are far more important than the fact of being born in the same year, let alone within the spans of fifteen years or so taken to define generations.

But some experiences shared by members of a given generation can make a permanent difference in the typical attitudes of that generation. (Bear in mind that these are only averages, with lots of exceptions.) Among the most important of these is the state of the economy when people make (or fail to make) the transition from education to employment. Entering the labour force during a recession has a permanent adverse effect on lifetime earnings, and that experience flows on to social and political attitudes.

Political views formed in early adulthood are quite durable, particularly when they are the result of very good or very bad economic outcomes. While the New Deal of the 1930s produced a generation with large numbers of lifelong Democratic voters, the prosperity of the 1950s gave rise to the Republican majorities elected by the “silent generation,” a very early attempt to sum up a whole generation using a catchy label.

Until recently, the leading voices among Democrats came from a cohort whose views on economic policy issues were formed during the rise and seeming triumph of neoliberalism, from the early 1970s to the end of the twentieth century. The ideal among this group was to be “socially liberal and economically conservative” without going too far in either direction.

Rather than focusing on birth dates, it may be better to identify this cohort with a cultural reference. The TV apotheosis of “soft neoliberalism,” The West Wing, aired from 1999 to 2006, just as the times that created it were coming to an end. The character of Matt Santos, elected president in the final series, was apparently modelled on Barack Obama.

West Wing Democrats like Obama are being replaced by party figures who experienced only the growing inequality and periodic crises of the twenty-first century. No one under forty can have any clear memory of the “end of history” announced in 1992 by Francis Fukuyama or of the boom years of the 1990s. No one under thirty (with the exception of a few precocious teenagers) watched The West Wing.

Americans who have come of age since 2000 (millennials and gen Z, in the standard typology) have seen few if any positive outcomes from financialised capitalism. The century began with a recession caused by the collapse of a speculative bubble in dotcom stocks, similar to the current bubble in absurdities like Bitcoin. Although that first recession of the new millennium wasn’t severe, recovery was achieved only by an expansionary monetary policy that sowed the seeds of its own destruction. In an underregulated financial market, low interest rates are bound to lead to speculation, unsound financial innovations, and ultimately disaster.

Even as the economy slowly recovered, the combination of growing inequality and greatly increased college debt left middle-class millennials with the prospect that they might never be as well-off as their parents. For those without a college education — people whose real wages (on standard measures) peaked around 1980 — that prospect was already a grim reality. The boom in “deaths of despair” is one outcome of this process. Among Democrats, the result has been an abandonment of the 1990s rhetoric about “rising tides lifting all boats” and the implicit assumption that those tides are generated by the gravitational pull of the free market.

A striking illustration of the shift is the recent ostracism of Rahm Emanuel, a special adviser to the Clintons who went on to be Obama’s chief of staff and later mayor of Chicago. Emanuel, who is generally assumed to have been the model for Josh Lyman, arguably the central character in The West Wing, is an outcast in today’s Democratic Party. His attempts to secure a position in the Biden administration were met with furious opposition.

This is not because Emanuel has changed his views but because he has stuck to the same positions he held twenty or thirty years ago. He was close to big business, a promoter of Bill Clinton’s draconian 1994 crime bill, hostile to teachers unions, and contemptuous of “liberal theology” ( “liberal” in the American sense). Joe Biden, by contrast, who shared many of the same positions then, has shifted left along with the party as a whole.

These shifts are not yet set in stone. But if Biden succeeds, as he seems to be doing at present, the cohort of young Democrats who elected him will be a powerful force in US politics for decades to come. •

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But despite their differences in politics, personality and style, they enlisted in US president George W. Bush’s modern march of folly that led inexorably to the invasion of Iraq and the multiple calamities that followed.

Why and how they joined Bush’s crusade to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is the subject of Judith Betts and Mark Phythian’s new book, The Iraq War and Democratic Governance. The two academics show how democratic structures and processes — parties, parliaments, cabinets and bureaucracies — can be co-opted, sidelined or neutered when prime ministers, driven by sentiment and perceived national interests, are determined on a course of action — in this case, to follow a powerful ally on the road to disaster.

Betts and Phythian tell the tale well, methodically comparing the factors and processes that led Howard and Blair to send armed forces to support the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The two men’s shared belief in the importance of their countries’ relationship with the United States was the primary reason they went to war, though they downplayed its importance when justifying their decisions.

Britain has seen its much-vaunted “special relationship” with the United States as a way of retaining global influence after its empire disintegrated and America supplanted its physical power in the wake of the second world war. Australia’s alliance with the United States, expressed in the ANZUS treaty, was based on the fear of abandonment made real when Imperial Japan gave the country the fright of its life in 1942.

Both countries adorn this relationship with sentimental references to common ties of democratic values, cultural affinity and shared wartime service. (US officials go along with Australia’s mawkish marketing of the alliance as “one hundred years of mateship,” politely overlooking the fact that Australia’s contribution to US military adventures is sometimes tokenistic and always carefully circumscribed — as was the case with Iraq.) Implicit in the relationship, particularly for Australia, is the view that military contributions are insurance premiums, periodically paid to maintain the alliance.

For Blair in particular, a strategic assessment of the relationship’s benefits was overlaid by an emotional belief in America’s fundamental goodness. Howard was determined to strengthen the alliance, which also had the political benefit of wedging the Labor opposition. Already mentally and politically attuned to the importance of the United States, both leaders were galvanised by the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Blair’s reaction was evangelical in its tone: standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush against al-Qaeda was an opportunity to reorder the world, or at least the Middle East, by influencing US policy.

While Howard’s outlook was narrower, his response was heightened by the fact he was visiting Washington at the time of the attacks. He knew then that the Americans would respond militarily. He, too, promised to stand by the United States. Britain and Australia both sent forces to support the US action in Afghanistan in late 2001 to overthrow the Taliban government that had sheltered al-Qaeda. Both knew Bush and his crusading advisers already had their sights set on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, despite the fact he was not involved in 9/11, as part of a bigger project to rearrange the Middle East and rid it of despotism.

By mid 2002 they knew Bush was planning an attack on Iraq, and both had given clear indications of support, which they kept from the public. Howard carefully crafted his response to allow him to insist that he had made no commitment until the very eve of the invasion. Yet, as Howard writes in his memoir, after he met Bush in June 2002 the American president was entitled to assume that if the United States took military action “in all likelihood Australia would join.”

Getting troops into position meant months of managing and manipulating parties, parliaments, cabinets, bureaucracies and the media, in an environment where public opinion in both countries opposed military action. On the evidence forensically mustered by Betts and Phythian, Blair and Howard managed this task with considerable skill.

Blair believed modern decision-making meant that traditional ways of doing things — bureaucratic advisers drafting policy papers to be subjected to cabinet debate leading to consensus decisions — were slow and dated. Having risen to power through an obsessive control of media messaging, he made sure his government was on a perpetual election footing. Old ways of governing created the risk of dissent and media leaks. In this controlled environment, as former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock observed, “disagreement was only characterised as rebellion, not as a divergence that was based on rational consideration and open to persuasion.”

To manage dissent and minimise debate, the detail of Iraq policy was kept to a small circle of insiders, with potential leadership challengers — principally Gordon Brown — excluded. Although Iraq was mentioned in twenty-six meetings of Blair’s cabinet in the twelve months before the invasion, only five substantial discussions took place. Blair limited the information that went to cabinet and ensured there was never a frank and open consideration of risks, options and alternatives. Robin Cook, who was to resign as leader of the House of Commons in protest at the invasion, wrote in his diary: “Tony does not regard the cabinet as a place for decisions.”

Howard’s challenges were different and somewhat easier. His cabinet and MPs were united behind his election-winning leadership and were, in any case, controlled by strict party discipline. Unlike Blair, he faced an opposition that was against the war but had cracks in its unity that Howard could wedge. While he increasingly confined discussion on Iraq policy to cabinet’s national security committee, Howard ensured wavering MPs were soothed by an informal process of consultation, sometimes lubricated with a calming cup of tea.

If Blair shut dissenters out, Howard sought to lock them in while leaving the traditional sources of strategic advice — senior public servants in key government departments — on the sidelines. The heads of the foreign affairs and defence departments later recounted how their advice was neither sought nor offered because the government had already made up its mind. The only advice the government sought was on the nuts and bolts of logistics and capabilities — how Australia could contribute to the war — rather than on the merits, risks and consequences of doing so.

Betts and Phythian offer two explanations for the silence of top bureaucrats who are paid to provide frank and fearless advice. One is that they were cowed into compliance by Howard who, in his first days in office, had sacked six department heads. The second possible explanation is that they agreed with Howard that joining the war was the price that had to be paid to maintain the alliance. This, of course, was not the main reason Howard gave for joining Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” Mention of the alliance was subsidiary to discussion of the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, his potential nuclear capabilities, and his links with terrorism.

Claims about WMD dominated prime ministerial messaging in the months leading up to March 2003 — most notoriously in the dossier produced by Blair’s government a month before the invasion, which, in the words of Betts and Phythian, “did not so much report on a threat as create one.” The dossier, including the headline-grabbing assertion that Saddam could deploy biological weapons in forty-five minutes, led to claims the government had “sexed up” inconclusive intelligence assessments.

The failure to find WMD prompted a series of post-invasion inquiries in Britain and Australia. The most exhaustive of these, chaired by Sir John Chilcot in Britain, was initiated by Gordon Brown after he succeeded Blair as prime minister in 2009. Chilcot confirmed that the US alliance was the determining factor in Britain’s decision to join the war, found that claims about the threat posed by WMD were “presented with a certainty that was not justified,” and concluded that, despite clear warnings, the consequences of invasion were underestimated.

Chilcot also revealed that the pressure on intelligence agencies to provide unequivocal evidence of WMD verged on the farcical. At one stage, British intelligence was citing an Iraqi source who falsely claimed first-hand knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs. It turned out the source was passing on information from a “sub-source” who had been coached by the source to fabricate reports.

Parallels exist between Chilcot and the two post-invasion Australian inquires, the most significant of which was conducted by the joint parliamentary committee on intelligence, chaired by Liberal MP David Jull. It found the government had exaggerated the “moderate and cautious” assessments of Iraq’s weapons made by the Office of National Assessments and the Defence Intelligence Organisation. It found the DIO to have been the most accurate and sceptical, and that the two organisations diverged in their assessments from September 2002, when ONA was influenced by US intelligence reports, some of which were based on the untested claims of Iraqi defectors.

Despite this divergence, the agencies both found that any Iraqi threat was limited and in decline; its nuclear program was unlikely to be advanced; its long-range missiles were in poor condition; there was no known chemical weapons production; and no links existed between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Jull totally discredited Howard’s stated reasons for going to war. Howard, however, deftly dodged any subsequent storm. In February 2004, selected portions of the Jull report were leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald, the only major metropolitan newspaper that had opposed the war. The leak was a master stroke of media manipulation, as the Herald’s report, based as it was on carefully culled excerpts, largely focused on the finding that the government had not doctored the intelligence it received.

This reporting effectively absolved the government and framed subsequent news coverage when the entire Jull report was released two weeks later. With just a few exceptions — notably Patrick Walters in the Australian — most of the media declared the government had been cleared of “sexing up” the intelligence, while missing Jull’s key conclusion that, on the basis of the intelligence the government did have, no compelling case existed for war. Betts and Phythian rightly judge this to be a massive failure by the media, “which by and large had either not read the [Jull] report or failed to grasp its significance.”

Despite the inquiries’ findings, and well after the war, Blair and Howard continued to insist they acted in good faith while being let down by poor intelligence.

The consequences of the invasion differed for the two prime ministers. Politically, Blair never recovered, the revelations of Chilcot and other inquiries leading to disillusionment and a loss of trust in the Labour Party and among the general public. A total of 179 British personnel died in Iraq, most of them after Bush declared in May 2003 that major combat had ended and that the United States and its allies had prevailed.

Howard had a better war. Unlike Blair, he didn’t face internal party dissent. He had carefully crafted his words in the run-up to the invasion by maintaining he had not made a commitment until the eve of the war, thereby keeping the opposition off balance. Crucially, he ensured Australian forces remained in Iraq only for the invasion phase and in carefully limited roles to avoid casualties. No Australian troops were killed. By June 2003, when the troops were back in Australia for welcome home marches and medals, the insurgencies triggered by the invasion, which would rip Iraq apart, were only beginning.

Betts and Phythian set out to examine how democratic institutions operated in a decision to go to war. They tell this story systematically, comprehensively and with clarity, drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews with key players. On any reading, our democratic institutions failed. This book is all the more powerful because of its sober style. It deserves an audience much wider than international relations specialists. Members of parliament and press gallery journalists should be first in line.

Thirteen years on from the invasion, Howard said that “the hardest decision I ever took as prime minister, along with my cabinet colleagues, was to commit the men and women of the Australian Defence Force to military conflict.” In the wrong circumstances, based on the evidence in this book, crafty prime ministers can quite easily lead their countries into wars. •

The Iraq War and Democratic Governance: Britain and Australia Go to War
By Judith Betts and Mark Phythian | Palgrave Macmillan | €79.99 | 236 pages

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Pottinger was travelling with Alexander Gray, the NSC’s newly appointed director for Oceania and Indo-Pacific Security. Gray’s appointment was a first: never before had a US administration appointed a White House NSC official responsible not only for Australia and New Zealand but also for the Pacific islands.

The White House’s concern was justified. Six months after the visit, Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare announced his country would end its long relationship with Taiwan in favour of diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic. Days later, President Taneti Maamau of Kiribati followed suit, leaving Taiwan with just four diplomatic partners in the region. Donald Trump, already in the midst of his trade war with China, announced that the United States would engage more deeply with the Pacific islands.

The Biden administration looks likely to try to maintain this outreach. Island leaders have welcomed the new US president’s early commitments on development funding in the region and his decision to rejoin the Paris agreement on climate change. But they’re aware that Biden’s Pacific strategy is largely driven by the US defence department, and that his emerging “Indo-Pacific” policy is focused less on island nations than on India, Australia, Japan and other larger strategic partners.

Island leaders are particularly worried that they will be trampled in the intensified competition between the United States and China. Some of them are voicing fears that the new Western-initiated strategic concept of the “Indo-Pacific” will downplay the region’s own security priorities. “The big powers are doggedly pursuing strategies to widen and extend their reach and inculcating a far-reaching sense of insecurity,” says Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. “The renewed vigour with which a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy is being advocated and pursued leaves us with much uncertainty. For the Pacific, there is a real risk of privileging ‘Indo’ over the ‘Pacific.’”

Donald Trump’s foreign policy failures were many, but his administration did bolster staffing and resources for Pacific island engagement. To promote the administration’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy, Matt Pottinger and Alex Gray intensified White House engagement with security and intelligence officials in Australia and New Zealand, and — in an unprecedented move for National Security Council officials — visited Canberra, Wellington, Port Vila and Honiara in early 2019.

Pottinger also played a key role in preparing the top-secret 2018 “US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” which was unexpectedly declassified during Trump’s final chaotic days in office. Prioritising strategic competition with China, the strategy aimed to strengthen ties to India, Japan, Korea and Australia and “ensure the Pacific Islands (e.g. the US territories, Freely Associated States, the Melanesian and Polynesian states) remain aligned with United States.” (The freely associated states, which have a formal compact with the United States, are the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands.) Among its action proposals were efforts to “solidify our diplomatic, military, intelligence, economic, development assistance, and informational advantages across the Pacific Islands.” The sentence immediately after these words was redacted.

Even as the Trump administration deepened its trade war with Beijing, Australia and New Zealand were becoming increasingly concerned about growing Chinese influence in the islands region. Both ANZUS allies were working on the “step change” in engagement proposed by prime minister Malcolm Turnbull at the 2016 Pacific Islands Forum in Pohnpei.

Three months after deposing Turnbull in August 2018, Scott Morrison announced his own “Pacific step-up” in a major speech at Lavarack army barracks in Townsville. To complement the intensified US engagement, Morrison outlined a range of economic, diplomatic and military policies. Major focuses were infrastructure investment and defence cooperation, including new aircraft and patrol boats under the Pacific Maritime Security Programme, a new Australia Pacific Security College and a new Pacific Fusion Centre for real-time intelligence sharing. Despite its policy differences with Washington, Jacinda Ardern’s government in New Zealand also expanded its “Pacific reset.”

Coinciding with these efforts by the ANZUS allies were media scares about purported Chinese bases in Vanuatu and French Polynesia, and propaganda about Chinese “debt-trap diplomacy.” (The latter has since been debunked by studies showing that most Pacific debt is owed to the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.)

Despite the hyperbole, the growing concern that Pacific Islands Forum countries are engaged in “South–South” cooperation with China is not misplaced. Over the past two decades, Beijing has expanded its economic links with island nations to the point that even Micronesian countries aligned with Taiwan — including Palau and the Marshall Islands — trade extensively with China and receive investment from Chinese corporations.

One of the United States’ northern Pacific allies, the Federated States of Micronesia, has long maintained diplomatic ties to the People’s Republic of China rather than Taiwan. In early 2017, the island nation’s president at the time, Peter Christian, was welcomed to Beijing by president Xi Jinping and accorded a full military review outside the Great Hall of the People. “China was impressive,” Christian said later. “If that’s the way they welcome other countries, we were flattered. I was flattered that for a small country they would exhibit such formality.”

Christian’s state visit was one of Beijing’s many diplomatic exchanges with Pacific nations since 2000 (though these have actually declined in number over the past decade). After visiting Fiji in 2014, Xi Jinping made his second visit to the Pacific islands in November 2018, attending the APEC Summit in Port Moresby along with US vice-president Mike Pence. With US and Chinese diplomats battling over trade policy, the summit ended without a formal communiqué. Pence joined Australia’s Scott Morrison and Japan’s Shinzo Abe to offer infrastructure funding to the islands in competition with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Concerned by Xi’s high-profile engagement, the Trump administration launched a series of diplomatic initiatives across the islands, proposing new diplomatic posts and sending defence attachés to Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia and Papua New Guinea. In January 2019, US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats issued the intelligence community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment, which charged that “China is currying favour with numerous Pacific Island nations through bribery, infrastructure investment and diplomatic engagement.”

On 21 May 2019, Trump held an unprecedented Oval Office meeting with the then presidents of the three freely associated states: Palau’s Tommy Remengesau Jr, the Marshall Islands’ Hilda Heine and the Federated States of Micronesia’s David Panuelo.

Later that year, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo visited Australia and Micronesia, including a first-ever visit to the Federated States of Micronesia by a secretary of state on 5 August. The same month, US interior secretary David Bernhardt led an interagency delegation to the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu. Bernhardt stressed US action on climate change and oceans management — a sharp contrast with his predecessor Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL who hectored the 2018 Forum meeting in Nauru about the strategic threat from China and the blood shed by US marines across Micronesia during the second world war.

The new White House engagement was also reflected in Congress. In 2019, congressman Ed Case of Hawaii co-founded the bipartisan Congressional Pacific Islands Caucus to raise awareness about the region in the US Capitol. In short order, the caucus introduced the Boosting Long-term US Engagement in the Pacific, or BLUE Pacific, bill, which proposed a comprehensive, long-term US islands strategy, an expanded diplomatic presence, greater US security and law enforcement cooperation, diversified trade and strengthened people-to-people relationships.

Then, in September 2019, the Trump administration announced a “Pacific pledge” of US$100 million in additional aid, an increased security presence in some countries, Peace Corps deployments, and revived USAID programs and staffing in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. As an alternative to China’s infrastructure programs, the United States also made an initial grant to the Asian Development Bank’s Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility, including US$23 million to a joint Papua New Guinea Electrification Partnership with Australia, Japan and New Zealand.

For all this, the administration’s overtures to Pacific nations were undercut by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement and stop payments to the Green Climate Fund. In November 2019, Pacific Islands Forum chair Kausea Natano stressed that withdrawal from global climate action undermined the United States’ credibility in the Pacific: “Statements of friendship, expanded aid programs and high-level visits,” he said, “must be better backed by domestic policies and action to reduce emissions, as outlined in the Paris agreement, in order to avert a climate catastrophe.”

Wolf-warrior diplomacy by Pence and Pompeo also reinforced scepticism about Washington’s real interest in island affairs. “The United States and Australia are neighbours, united rather than divided by the vast emptiness of Pacific waters,” Pompeo declared in Canberra during an August 2019 visit, erasing the history, heritage and identity of the Pacific islanders who inhabit that “vast emptiness.” As Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Dame Meg Taylor remarked at the time, Pompeo’s comment “stands in stark contrast to histories of Pacific people and the Blue Pacific,” a regional effort to resituate the Pacific in international affairs.

To counter the perceived challenge posed by the Chinese military, Mike Pence’s bombastic APEC speech in 2018 proposed more US military deployments, war games and bases in the region. “We’re forging new and renewed security partnerships, as shown by our recent trilateral naval exercises with India and Japan,” he said. “Today, it’s my privilege to announce that the United States will partner with Papua New Guinea and Australia on their joint initiative at Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island. We will work with these nations to protect sovereignty and maritime rights of the Pacific islands as well.”

The US Pacific Command has long held responsibility for military operations across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but the point was underlined when it was renamed “the Indo-Pacific Command” in June 2018. It now seeks to upgrade the US base network spanning the northern Pacific from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii to Naval Base Guam, which dates back to the late nineteenth century. Under Joint Region Marianas, a navy-led joint command, the Pentagon also operates Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and military facilities on Tinian and Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The US base network in the northern Pacific is complemented by new marine and air force rotations through northern Australia.

In the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a Military Use and Operating Rights Agreement guarantees separate funding outside the US-RMI compact of free association. Kwajalein Atoll hosts the US Air Force Space Fence program and the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.

Despite US aircraft carriers becoming vectors for the spread of the coronavirus, US military forces have ramped up deployments and war games across the region, including RIMPAC 2020 and Cope North 2021. Even as the United States and Australia agreed to upgrade Papua New Guinea’s Lombrum naval facilities, Palau has begun discussions with Washington about hosting US forces. “Palau’s request to the US military remains simple: build joint-use facilities, then come and use them regularly,” then president Tommy Remengesau said last September.

While welcoming US and Australian investment in wharfs and facilities, most island leaders have long sought to redirect resources to tackling more pressing security concerns, including the existential challenge of climate change. Steven McGann, former US ambassador to Fiji, Nauru, Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Kingdom of Tonga, highlighted this tension during a recent webinar on Pacific regionalism. “The United States is always searching for mechanisms in which all of its interests can be combined and also meet the growing needs of Indo-PACOM” —  Indo-Pacific Command — “which has to figure out how to pursue the national security objectives of the United States with the human security concerns of Pacific islanders.”

Against this background, the three freely associated states — the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands — have been negotiating the terms of an extension of their compacts of free association with the United States, due to expire in 2023. A recent RAND Corporation study of Chinese influence in the islands notes the strategic importance of the three states, arguing that they are “tantamount to a power projection superhighway, running through the heart of the North Pacific into Asia. It effectively connects US military forces in Hawaii to those in theatre, particularly to forward operating positions on the US territory of Guam.”

Despite his diplomatic postings across the southwest Pacific, Steven McGann acknowledges that US security interests are focused in the Micronesian states. “It’s clear that the United States has an overriding interest in the north Pacific,” he said. “But as it renegotiates the compacts of free association it also needs to investigate how it strengthens the existing treaties with Kiribati.” The compacts of free association forbid the island states from allowing foreign military forces to enter their territory without US permission. “Taken together, the security and defence provisions of the compacts form an essential foundation for US national security interests in the region,” says the RAND study.

The strategic importance of these northern Pacific island nations came to a head in February during an online summit of the Pacific Islands Forum. After their joint candidate for the post of Forum secretary-general was rejected, Nauru, Kiribati and the three freely associated states — all members of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit — announced they would withdraw from the regional organisation. Although the five Micronesian countries have diverse colonial histories and contemporary partnerships, they are united by cultural connections, shared memories of Japanese invasion and US nuclear testing, and the economic interests created by their vast ocean territories.

US officials often see this crisis through the prism of US–China competition and conflict between Beijing and Taiwan. (Last month, Palau’s new president, Surangel Whipps Jr, made a state visit to Taiwan, accompanied by the US ambassador to Palau.) As Alex Gray wrote in February, the United States, Australia and New Zealand should watch with “grave concern” the “unfolding dismantlement” of the Pacific Islands Forum. “Not only does a diminished PIF mean a diminished voice for the Pacific islands on the world stage, it also means the central multilateral institution in this critical region will lose the very voices most sceptical of Beijing’s malign activity and open to US and allied leadership. A PIF without Micronesian voices is likely to be one far less interested in US priorities and perspectives.”

In the past, budget cuts in Canberra and Wellington have downgraded programs in the freely associated states and American territories like Guam. Despite new diplomatic postings under Australia’s “step-up” and New Zealand’s “reset,” the ANZUS allies still perceive the northern Pacific as America’s turf, a reality acknowledged by Surangel Whipps: “As we know, it’s always been the position of Australia and New Zealand that the north Pacific is ‘Oh, you’re with the United States, you’re kind [of] over there, we stick together in the south.’ It wasn’t about the Pacific brotherhood, let’s bring the Pacific together. It was about ‘We are going to protect our region.’”

Three months into its term, the Biden administration is promising to continue Trump’s engagement, though with more diplomacy, multilateralism and alliance building. Recognising China’s increased profile in the region, Ambassador McGann suggested that Australia and New Zealand needed support. “The United States is moving away from an ‘I’ll hold your coat’ position to much more active engagement,” he said, “largely because there are national security reasons for doing so.”

The Biden administration has yet to prepare a full national security strategy to guide its foreign policy. It has, however, issued an “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” which, among many global priorities, pledges to recognise “the ties of shared history and sacrifice,” to “reinforce our partnership with Pacific Island states.”

A fundamental difference between this administration and its predecessor is climate policy. “We will move swiftly to earn back our position of leadership in international institutions,” says the interim guidance, “joining with the international community to tackle the climate crisis and other shared challenges. We have already re-entered the Paris Climate Accord and appointed a Presidential Special Envoy for climate, the first steps toward restoring our leadership.”

Biden’s choice of Deb Haaland as secretary of the interior is significant, given her department is responsible for liaison with the freely associated states in the Pacific as well as America’s First Nations tribes. (This is the first time a First Nations woman has held a US cabinet post, and stands in sharp contrast to her Trump-era predecessors, including Ryan Zinke, a Montana businessman who resigned in the midst of justice department investigations of his conduct in office).

The congressional BLUE Pacific bill lapsed after the 2020 presidential elections, but congressman Ed Case continues this work under the Biden administration. Once the bill has been improved in consultation with congressional figures and the White House, he says, it will be reintroduced “on a bicameral, bipartisan basis.”

The key official driving Asia-Pacific policy will be Kurt Campbell, the National Security Council’s new Indo-Pacific affairs coordinator. Campbell served under Barack Obama as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs between 2009 and 2013, and was a key architect of Obama’s “Pacific pivot” strategy. “The Biden National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific team is set to be the largest in the NSC, with up to twenty officials in the directorate once it’s fully staffed,” says Foreign Policy magazine. “Personnel is policy, as the age-old Washington aphorism goes, and the new president has made clear that China is the top national security challenge for the United States.” The shift was confirmed when US secretary of state Antony Blinken described the US relationship with China as “the biggest geopolitical test of the twenty-first century” in his first major foreign policy speech on 3 March.

Meeting for the first time at leaders’ level, last month’s summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, boosted ties between the United States, India, Japan and Australia. The Quad communiqué highlighted a “shared vision for the free and open Indo-Pacific” and flagged joint action on climate change, cyber security, Covid-19 recovery and vaccine distribution — adding to existing geopolitical jousting over Covid support to Pacific island states.

Ten days after the summit, on 22 March, the Biden White House announced the Small and Less Populous Island Economies Initiative, designed to strengthen US collaboration with island countries and territories in the Pacific, Caribbean and North Atlantic (despite the different demography, geography and colonial history of the three regions). The US state department has also launched a tender for a project to promote investigative journalism and anti-corruption efforts in Pacific island countries, in line with its “vision of a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific.” (It will be interesting to see how explicitly Pacific journalists will be encouraged to look at corrupt relations between island politicians and Chinese state-owned enterprises.)

This all adds up to lots of noise, but will the initiatives be sustained? Island leaders have seen it all before: more than three decades ago, congressman Stephen Solarz led a commission on islands policy, arguing that the Pacific should remain an “American lake” in the post-Soviet era. Solarz’s May 1990 report proposed that the United States should play the role of “balancer,” providing regional order and stability through “forward deployed” US forces. Little has changed except the main strategic rival.

Later that year, as the United States began to celebrate its triumph over the crumbling Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush met Pacific island leaders in Hawaii, pledging economic and commercial opportunities. A Joint Commercial Commission was opened with great fanfare in Hawaii. As the years wore on, however, yet another US commission revealed the JCC to be a failure, with little new US investment or trade in the islands.

Fast-forward to Barack Obama’s “pivot” to the region, and Hillary Clinton’s attendance at the Pacific Islands Forum in 2012 — a first-ever appearance by a US secretary of state. Despite her many pledges, the Obama pivot was focused on Asia rather than the islands, and the follow-through was limited.

Through the waning years of the Soviet Union, successive US administrations warned that “the Russians are coming” to the Pacific, a catchcry echoed by conservative Australian and New Zealand think tanks. Three decades later, the Chinese (unlike their Soviet predecessors) are a major trading partner for many island nations and a significant source of grants and loans. China’s state-owned enterprises are looking to the Pacific islands for timber, minerals and fisheries, even as Beijing seeks more votes at the United Nations. Given the failures of China’s own environmental regulation, “the China alternative” is worrying environmentalists and human rights activists across the Pacific. Island leaders, meanwhile, welcome the leverage provided by this “non-traditional” partner, which has seen Canberra open the purse strings at a time of historically low aid budgets.

Will the Biden administration follow through on its intentions more vigorously than its predecessors? Changes in US climate policy are winning friends, but the remilitarisation of the islands holds little attraction for countries still dealing with the radioactive legacy of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and Kiribati, or the unexploded ordinance that still litters the region from the last time Washington took on a rising Asian power. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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The passing of Biden’s legislation is the result of both his presidential election victory and the run-off elections in Georgia, which gave the Democrats fifty votes in the US Senate (with vice-president Kamala Harris holding the casting vote). The central issue in the Georgia elections was the choice between the relatively modest stimulus package passed by Congress in December 2020 and the much more ambitious proposals from the Democrats. In hip-pocket terms, the distinction was between the payments of US$600 per taxpayer from the Republicans and a total of US$2000 offered by the Democrats.

That wasn’t the only difference. The Republican legislation allocated nearly a third of funds to the Paycheck Protection Program, a version of Australia’s JobKeeper, but gave nothing to state and local governments. Because their tax revenues have been reduced by the pandemic, and because they have little or no capacity to run deficits, state and local governments in the United States have been forced to cut spending and employment. Biden’s package includes large-scale support for these levels of government.

The measures in the Rescue Plan are temporary and most are expected to cease as the economy recovers. But the package includes funding for policies the Democrats would like to make permanent, the most important of which are increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, the two main measures that assist families with children. If sustained, these increases would reduce child poverty by an estimated 40 to 50 per cent.

Republicans’ opposition to the package may safely be dismissed as political posturing, given their eagerness to pass the Trump cuts. But some more credible commentators, most notably Larry Summers (who held senior economic positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations), have expressed concern about the scale of the stimulus.

These concerns have mostly focused on inflation and the growth of budget deficits and public debt. A more useful way to consider the problem (an approach sometimes referred to as functional finance) is to ask whether the resources available to the economy are sufficient to meet both the extra public expenditure in the stimulus package and the rise in consumption and private investment expenditure that follows.

For the moment, finding those resources isn’t a problem. The conditions created by the pandemic have reduced private consumption and investment expenditure. Households whose incomes have been unaffected by the pandemic have used the money saved by working from home and limiting holidays to pay down debt. Businesses have held off big investment decisions.

But once life returns to normal, and spare capacity in the economy is exhausted, households will want to start spending the liquid assets they have built up. Their increased demand will collide with permanently higher levels of public expenditure and renewed investment to produce a level of aggregate demand beyond the capacity of the economy to supply.

The outcome will create shortages, rationing and bottlenecks — which means none of these demands will be satisfied. Eventually, the shortages will produce higher prices and wages, and a renewed burst of inflation. But inflation is just a symptom of excess demand; it’s the shortages, and the problems they create, that are the real source of economic damage.

Once the economy recovers, the only way to meet the need for increased public expenditure, given the productive capacity of the economy, will be to reduce the spending power of private households through taxation. Given the highly unequal distribution of income in the United States, most of the reduction must be borne by those in the top 10 per cent of the income distribution and particularly those in the top 1 per cent. Since these groups were the biggest beneficiaries of the Trump tax cuts, the immediate response must be to repeal part or all of those tax cuts.

What about the public debt built up during the pandemic, and the further increases in debt implied in sustained budget deficits? In the short run, much of the debt has been monetised: the US Federal Reserve has bought around US$4 trillion in Treasury bonds since the pandemic began, and will be able to buy more to offset the increase in public debt associated with the latest stimulus. But the Reserve’s capacity to do this is limited by the public’s willingness to hold cash and zero-interest deposits rather than spend their wealth or invest it in higher-yielding assets. Once this willingness is exhausted, further monetary expansion will translate into higher expenditure and therefore run the economy into resource constraints.

To resolve the situation, the ratio of debt to GDP will need to be reduced during the expansion created by the stimulus package. Fortunately, low interest rates mean that will happen automatically, as long as tax revenue is sufficient to cover government “primary” expenditure (exclusive of debt).

But a faster reduction is probably desirable. The small policy adjustments (such as twenty-five basis points in central bank interest rates) that seemed to work in the couple of decades before the global financial crisis aren’t adequate for managing the unstable economy we can expect for the foreseeable future. The larger the stimulus we want government to provide in bad times, the bigger the surpluses it should run when private demand would otherwise be excessive.

All that is for the future. If Biden’s stimulus plan achieves its goals, it will be the clearest demonstration in many years of the central role of government — in the United States and countries like Australia — in stabilising the economy and delivering outcomes more sustainable and equitable than those of unregulated capitalism. Let’s hope it works. •

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The United States is the stand-out failure. For decades, enormous spending on healthcare has failed to produce better health and longer lives than in many other countries that spend less. Covid-19 has added hugely to the mortality toll, with a disproportionate number of deaths among already-lagging minority populations. But even before the pandemic, average life expectancy in the United States, and in Britain, had fallen in recent years.

Life expectancy is the traditional broadbrush measure of population health. It gauges the effectiveness of the healthcare system and the effectiveness of healthcare spending. But it also gauges the impact of the social determinants of health — poverty, housing, education, discrimination and other non-medical factors that play a major role in health and wellbeing. Because life expectancy figures are an average across the population, some groups could actually experience decreases in a particular period while the population as a whole is going forward.

On the basis of the 275,000 US deaths attributed to Covid-19 by early December (the figure is now more than 470,000), University of California researcher Patrick Heuveline estimated average life expectancy for American babies born in 2020 to be lower by more than a year, the biggest fall since the end of the second world war. Heuveline compared the expected mortality rate in 2020 with the actual rate, which included deaths from Covid-19 and the “excess” deaths among people who didn’t get necessary medical care. The more young people are affected, the worse the impact on life expectancy. By comparison, the HIV epidemic reduced the US life expectancy at birth by 0.3 years at its peak in 1992. Covid-19’s impact on US mortality can be expected to cancel a decade of reductions in all other causes of mortality combined.

These findings are confirmed and extended in a study published just this month. American researchers Theresa Andrasfay and Noreen Goldman estimate that US life expectancy at birth has fallen by 1.13 years, to 77.48 years, lower than any year since 2003, and they project a 0.87-year reduction in life expectancy at sixty-five. The African-American and Latino populations, which have experienced a disproportionate burden of Covid-19 morbidity and mortality, are estimated to experience declines in life expectancy at birth of 2.10 and 3.05 years respectively.

This has the effect of increasing the Black–white life expectancy gap from 3.6 years to more than five years, eliminating the progress made in closing the gap since 2006. Latinos, whose mortality rates are consistently lower than white Americans’ (a phenomenon known as the Hispanic paradox), will see their three-year-plus survival advantage reduced to less than one year.

The picture is almost certain to look bleaker in 2021. Further reductions in life expectancy can be expected beyond 2020 because of continued Covid-19 mortality and the long-term health, social and economic impacts of the pandemic. Moreover, most epidemiologists consider that the number of infections in the United States has been severely underestimated and that excess mortality (deaths from causes other than Covid-19) will be higher with hospitals and healthcare systems operating under pressure.

The United States is not the only country to have suffered such a setback. Life expectancy will fall in any country or region that has experienced a coronavirus infection rate higher than 1 per cent, especially if the mortality rate in younger patients is high. A 10 per cent Covid-19 prevalence rate in North America and Europe means a loss of at least one year of life expectancy at birth.

In Bergamo in Italy’s Lombardy region, where serological tests have shown a 50 per cent infection prevalence rate, a group of European researchers has estimated a loss of life expectancy of 4.1 years for men and 2.6 years for women. (In this case the measure is average life expectancy for the population as a whole, so direct comparisons with US findings are not possible.) Demographers at Oxford University’s Leverhulme Centre calculate that life expectancy for both men and women in England and Wales was reduced in 2020 by more than a year (one year for women and 1.3 years for men) as of December 2020, wiping out gains made on life expectancy in the past decade. Australia has escaped this trend, thanks to low infection rates and a high concentration of deaths in the oldest age groups.

For Americans, this dismal news comes on top of several decades’ evidence that life expectancy at birth is lagging, the existence of a large and rising “mortality gap” between Americans aged fifty and older and their international peers, and data showing that even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their international peers.

In 2013 the US National Academies of Science (then the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine) issued a report, Shorter Lives, Poorer Health, that ranked the United States last in life expectancy for men and second-last for women among high-income countries. Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations described the report’s findings as “a catalogue of horrors.” (I was commissioned by the Institute of Medicine to write a discussion paper, Reducing Disparities in Life Expectancy: What Factors Matter?, for the report.)

The research team that produced Shorter Lives, Poorer Health aimed to elucidate why the United States suffers the health disadvantages it documented. Common explanations — obesity, lack of access to healthcare, health disparities between population groups — were all at play, but the exact cause, or combination of causes, wasn’t clear.

Despite the glaring deficiencies this report exposed, the situation has only worsened. The United States now ranks forty-third out of 195 countries for life expectancy at birth (Australia is fifth). In the absence of significant action, is expected to rank sixty-fourth by 2040. The figures are worse for African Americans, Native Americans, and people in poor and rural areas. The US maternal mortality rate ranks last among similarly wealthy countries and its infant mortality rate thirty-third out of thirty-six OECD countries. Many Americans are not living to see old age; the United States has consistently had the lowest or second-lowest probability of surviving to fifty.

The overall pace of mortality improvement has slowed in a number of European countries, and even in Australia, over the past decade. Dementia is the major contributor, along with rising obesity and diabetes and adverse trends in inequalities. The distinguished epidemiologist Michael Marmot succinctly outlined the challenges for Britain — but generally applicable in other developed countries — in his Marmot Review 10 Years On last February.

While access to healthcare is important, it contributes only modestly to longevity. Between a third and a half of these life expectancy gaps are explained by differences in the social determinants of health, including rates of poverty and educational disadvantage.

Poverty has a major impact on health and premature death. The longer people live in disadvantaged circumstances, the greater the risk of ill health. People who are unemployed, and the families of those who are unemployed, experience a much greater risk of premature death. Education is also key. Highly educated adults in the United States have lower yearly mortality rates than less-educated people in every age, gender and racial/ethnic subgroup of the population. These differences are somewhat wider among men than women.

The United States is also confronted with rising mortality rates caused by alcohol, drug overdoses, the opioid epidemic, gun violence and suicide. These “deaths of despair” are exacting an increasing toll on middle-aged, non-Hispanic white Americans, especially those without a college education. Indeed, the most meaningful risk factor for such a death is not having a university degree.

It’s not hard to see how these risk factors were all in play during the pandemic, with access to healthcare and social services more important than ever, employment and income at risk, and the demoralisation and grief brought on by the loss of jobs, social contacts and loved ones. The Trump administration must obviously be blamed for the pandemic’s disastrous impact in the United States, but the foundations for failure were decades in the making. The Shorter Lives report’s catalogue of horrors was a harbinger of things to come.

In the search for answers about inequalities, the report contains a final chapter (regarded by the research team as almost an afterthought) that discusses whether values seen as typically American — individual freedom, free enterprise, self-reliance, a major role for religion, federalism — influence the development of policy and its enactment in ways that are detrimental to Americans’ health.

Recent analysis of state politics and policies has found that American states with more progressive policies have longer life expectancy rates than those with more conservative policies. On this measure, American states have increasingly diverged since the early 1980s, shortly after the federal government began transferring policymaking authority for Medicaid and welfare programs to them. In 1959 Connecticut and Oklahoma had the same life expectancy; by 2017, Connecticut had gained 9.6 years while the more conservative Oklahoma had gained just 4.7.

The researchers estimate that if all states adopted policies similar to those of Hawaii (which has strong laws on labour rights, prohibiting tobacco and environmental protection, and a healthcare system that acknowledges the Native Hawaiian culture), US life expectancy would be on par with those of other high-income countries. These findings are partially countered by an analysis that found even if everyone achieved the health outcomes of white Americans living in the richest counties, health indicators would still lag behind those in many other countries.

The relationship between politics and health is also reflected in voting patterns. In 2016, counties with stagnating or falling life expectancies were more likely to vote Republican. This aligns with the strong support for Trump and Republicans among white Americans without a college education. Many of these Republican-voting areas are now also those with the highest infection and mortality rates from coronavirus.

For president Joe Biden and his team, these data highlight the size of the task ahead. Primacy, of course, must be given to controlling Covid-19, getting everyone vaccinated, and tackling the pandemic’s economic fallout ahead of boosting access to healthcare (including mental health and substance abuse services), housing, employment and education. But if these efforts are not targeted at the most needy communities they will simply widen existing socioeconomic gaps.

There are lessons in these figures for Australia, too. The pandemic has highlighted the inadequacy of the social services safety net — hence the large but temporary lift in the JobSeeker rate — along with the fragmentation of the healthcare system and the widening health disparities. For too many Australians life expectancy is a postcode lottery. For Indigenous Australians the life expectancy gap has not narrowed since 2006.

Better health is undoubtedly related to social expenditure, and social protection may be more important for health outcomes in more unequal societies. In a recent edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, Shane Kavanagh, Anthony LaMontagne and Sharon Brennan‐Olsen warn of the likely impact of calls to prioritise rapid reductions in government debt through cuts to health and social services. Government spending on health, education and social supports has the potential to increase economic growth, they argue, and “avoiding austerity measures will better serve the health of Australia’s population, and indeed the health of the nation.”

The political preference is too often for policy solutions that are readily to hand and simple. A medicine that allows patients to live with diabetes is seen as a more desirable announcement for the health minister than the grinding job of changing food and exercise policies so that fewer people are overweight and prone to the disease. Evidence from the United States suggests that policies on tobacco, labour, immigration, civil rights and the environment appear to be particularly influential for life expectancy.

It is shocking how quickly the hard work of improving life expectancy can be overturned. But there is also evidence that better policies can turn things around relatively quickly. Within four years of the introduction of mandatory health insurance, known as Romneycare, in Massachusetts in 2006 the death rate had fallen by 3 per cent, with the steepest declines seen in counties with the highest proportions of poor and previously uninsured people.

Joe Biden has committed to tackling the social inequalities and inequities in the United States. He quickly appointed a White House health equity task force headed by physician Marcella Nunez-Smith, which will make recommendations on mitigating and preventing health disparities. The task force’s initial focus will be on the equitable allocation of resources, vaccines and relief funds to deal with the pandemic.

The new president has also signed executive orders aimed at improving racial equity across the nation. These include measures to strengthen the anti-discrimination housing policies weakened under Trump and to enhance the sovereignty of Native American tribes. More far-reaching changes are expected in the months ahead.

Biden says he plans to infuse a focus on equity into everything the federal government does. All Australians — but especially those whose lives are shortened and diminished by the lack of an adequate income, housing, education, healthcare and employment — would benefit from a comparable commitment from Scott Morrison and his government. •

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“Normally, Marshall, I wouldn’t send you to a place like Australia, but right now it is critically important,” Nixon told him, as recounted in James Curran’s book Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War. Then followed a string of presidential expletives about Whitlam. “Marshall, I just can’t stand that c—t.”

By most accounts, Green is the heaviest Washington hitter ever appointed to Canberra. Originally a Japan specialist — as secretary to ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo before Pearl Harbor and then in wartime intelligence — he moved to the State Department, where he headed missions around Asia before becoming assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In that capacity, he accompanied Nixon to his historic meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972.

“He was regarded as ‘Mr Asia’ at a time when [Henry] Kissinger’s expertise on the region was regarded as relatively thin, and indeed there is some speculation that Kissinger wanted him out of Washington for that very reason,” says Curran, a professor of modern history at the University of Sydney who closely studies the US relationship. “Green had the capacity to show him up.”

For this reason Green’s appointment was widely welcomed. “Even the Labor people were saying ‘we got Marshall Green,’ as if to underline that DC was at last taking Australia seriously,” says Curran.

In reality, Canberra got Green because several members of Whitlam’s government had seriously irritated Nixon by condemning the bombing of North Vietnam, which was designed to force concessions at the Paris peace talks. Whitlam’s people might have noted that Green’s postings tended to precede attempts to overthrow the host government — successfully, in the case of general Park Chung-hee in Seoul in 1960, and as a pretext for a crackdown by General Suharto’s group in Jakarta in 1965.

Concerns that Whitlam might blow the cover of the Pine Gap satellite spy station or even close it down were part of the drama around the 1975 dismissal of his government, but Curran found that Green had already helped soften the animosity between the two leaders.

“It was Green, along with Peter Wilenski in Whitlam’s office, who fixed the embarrassing problem where Whitlam had been frozen out of getting a White House meeting with Nixon,” Curran tells me. “By the end of his posting Green was pouring a whole lot of cold water on the ‘all the way’ mentality and rhetoric, saying that Washington now agreed with Whitlam’s call for a ‘new maturity’ in the relationship. Doesn’t that seem another world!”

Green is thus often seen as an exception among the twenty-six ambassadors sent to Canberra since the American embassy opened in 1940. “My bottom line on this is that by and large the US has sent to Canberra generous campaign donors and political bagmen,” Curran says. “We usually get the runt of the American litter in this regard.”

The posting gained most attention in Washington when George H.W. Bush sent Republican fundraiser Melvin Sembler to Canberra in 1989, not long after he donated US$100,000 to the Bush election campaign. The controversy inspired a celebrated Doonesbury cartoon strip.

Several ambassadors have fitted the stereotype of a back-slapping networker, among them Harry Truman’s appointee Pete Jarman, a former member of Congress described as a “big, good-natured, Rotarian type of man,” and Lyndon Johnson’s envoy Edward Clark, a Texan lawyer and oil lobbyist who came to be known here as “Mr Ed” after the talking horse in the popular TV series.

But the appointees also include several highly experienced career diplomats, more commonly but not entirely when a Democrat was in the White House. The first two wartime ambassadors were long-time China hands, and William Sebald (1957–61), like Green, had been assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Bill Clinton used Canberra to show inclusiveness as well as diplomatic professionalism, with Edward Perkins, the first African American in the post, followed by Genta Holmes, the first woman. Obama sent John Berry, the first openly gay ambassador to a G20 nation.

In February 2018 another Marshall Green moment seemed to be looming when Donald Trump nominated the retiring US Pacific commander, admiral Harry Harris, who was noted for his strong views about standing up to China. “If we’d got Harry Harris, in my view, that would have been the first time since Green that we’d been given a real heavy-hitter,” Curran says. “The US alliance true believers were like Pavlov’s dog when they heard he was coming. They howled when he got diverted to the ROK [South Korea].”

A year later, after a record two-year vacancy, Trump sent Washington lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse, best known for choosing Sarah Palin as running mate for Republican candidate John McCain in 2008 and Mike Pence as Trump’s in 2016. In Canberra he came to be known as an “honorary” member of the parliamentary group of China hawks.

Some of Australia’s top diplomats say that the two most effective American ambassadors of the past twenty years have come from outside the Foreign Service. Tom Schieffer (2001–05), a former business partner of George W. Bush in Texas, was in Washington with John Howard on 11 September 2001 and attended many of the war conferences about Afghanistan and Iraq. Jeff Bleich (2009–13) was an old lawyer friend of Barack Obama who helped guide the annual rotation of a US marine corps battle group through Darwin, the Australian end of the “pivot” to Asia.

Did the friendship of these political allies with their president make a difference to their usefulness to Australia? “Tom Schieffer did have a close relationship with Howard forged in 9/11, and as security and intelligence relationships got closer and closer in the post-9/11 period,” says Peter Varghese, former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Office of National Assessments, now chancellor of the University of Queensland. “But I can’t think of any intervention by Tom that was decisive. They help the flow that’s already got a bit of momentum and maybe give it a bit more momentum.”

Allan Gyngell, another former head of ONA and career DFAT official, and now national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, asked around about examples of successful interventions by US envoys. “The most specific response anyone could give was that we were able to fix a problem with steel tariffs through Tom Schieffer at some point in the Bush administration,” he says.

John McCarthy, who was Australian ambassador to Washington in the 1990s, also thinks Schieffer was the closest thing to a direct line to the president, and points out that he went from Canberra to Tokyo, a post usually reserved for very senior ex-senators.

But he says any US envoy here would struggle to get attention in the White House. “Most American ambassadors in Australia would pick up the phone and talk to the Asia guy in the National Security Council on almost any issue,” McCarthy says. “Or on a trade issue to one of the deputy US trade representatives. Or even someone lower down. It’s a question of how often you make the phone call.” Even a close presidential ally couldn’t ignore the State Department, where they would work with the assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs.

“A US ambassador with a close relationship with the president is going to be very cautious about raising anything with him as US president,” adds Varghese. “In the US system it would have to be something extraordinarily important and urgent for even a friend of the president to use that relationship and burn up capital as it were.”

Significantly, the most recent crisis in the relationship, when Trump was considering including Australian steel and aluminium in his higher tariffs in 2017, was settled despite the US ambassadorship’s being vacant. Australia prevailed simply on the merits of the economic argument.

Allan Gyngell argues that a political appointee can be preferable because “Canberra never really gets a professional high-flyer, as opposed to a nice competent State Department person, anyway, because the job is just too easy — at least since Marshall Green had it.” The top people with the best connections will go to key postings like Moscow and Ankara. “But you could, of course, get duds of both types, and in the end the competence of the appointee is what matters most.”

Unlike the United States, whose ambassadors are nearly all White House–appointed, Australia normally has about half a dozen politically appointed ambassadors at any one time. Under prime minister Tony Abbott that grew to about nine, a number Varghese thinks will be exceeded in the future.

The conventional argument is that appointing a senior ex-politician to Washington means the Americans can deal with someone who has a direct line to our prime minister. And their former career and profile might also give political appointees better access to American leaders.

Varghese has his doubts. “The reality is that a career diplomat in Washington ends up having a direct line to the prime minister anyway,” he says. “It’s in the nature of the job and the nature of the prime minister’s interest. Dennis Richardson and Michael Thawley both had very regular contact with Howard when they were ambassadors.”

Are ex-politicians better at schmoozing Congress? “At one level, yes, because there’s a kind of a style to those interactions which comes very naturally to an ex-pollie and maybe not to a bureaucrat,” Varghese says. “But we’ve had professional diplomats who’ve worked the Hill very effectively, like Thawley, Richardson and Michael Cook.”

McCarthy, who had an earlier congressional liaison post in the Washington embassy, says the capital is full of former politicians, foreign ministers and even prime ministers appointed as their countries’ envoys. It is a constant battle for access, and ex-politicians are not necessarily the best at it.

“If someone is known to be a very senior politician it can help a bit,” he says. “But again the basic work is wearing out shoe leather.” Most of the time a foreign diplomat ends up seeing congressional staff rather than politicians anyway. “You have to understand how important these guys are. [Biden’s new secretary of state] Antony Blinken was a staffer, chief of staff of the House foreign affairs committee. These are the people you need to contact. They know their subject. They’re not really into the good-ole-boy stuff.”

Varghese and McCarthy both see political appointments working best in familiar, English-speaking capitals with an envoy — like Alexander Downer as high commissioner in London — who knows how to work the system back in Canberra. “I’m not one who thinks all political appointees are a waste of space,” says McCarthy.

But Varghese is generally sceptical. “Frankly, I worry deeply that our system is going to have more political appointments. It would be unrealistic to have none, but they are ultimately an act of patronage. They are dismissive of diplomacy as a profession. What they are basically saying is: anyone can do this job.”

In terms of presidential access, McCarthy gives the accolade to former ambassador Joe Hockey, who got to play golf with Donald Trump. “If a guy can get a couple of golf games with the president that’s a plus,” he says. “I certainly never could with Bill Clinton. I take my hat off to him.” Hockey had hoped to trade that closeness as a lobbyist in a Trump second term. “But now Trump’s gone, he’s stranded,” adds McCarthy.

Arthur Sinodinos, the former Liberal senator appointed in Hockey’s place, will now be working very strenuously to see Morrison isn’t stranded too. How long Biden waits to appoint an envoy to Canberra might be a gauge of his success. And a high-calibre envoy could be a reverse compliment: it might mean Biden sees Morrison as a problem. •

President Joe Biden nominated Caroline Kennedy as the next US ambassador to Australia in December 2021.

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Over here, on ABC’s Planet America, hosts John Barron and Chas Licciardello introduced their inauguration special with no signs of accelerated ageing. The mood was almost jocular as Barron recounted the 6 January assault on the Capitol, though due emphasis was given to its most disturbing aspects. Licciardello followed up with some derisive comments on Republicans’ responses to the mayhem.

They were not omitting the worst of what had transpired in the previous two weeks so much as failing to communicate the gravity of the situation. “Pretty serious stuff there,” Barron remarked airily, following a clip of the clerk from the House of Representatives reading the second impeachment finding against Donald J. Trump on the charge of “incitement to insurrection.” Licciardello quoted from a trenchant statement by Republican senator Liz Cheney, then quipped that, regardless of what happens at Trump’s Senate trial, “someone is going to get punished. And that’s Liz Cheney.”

Like many of the leading television commentators in America, Licciardello has a background in comedy. But distanced from the emotional force of the crisis, he seemed to lack the instinct to recognise that this is not a time for quips. In a powerful monologue delivered on the evening of 6 January, Seth Myers began by stating baldly that jokes were off the menu. After a day “filled with horrifying scenes of surreal and armed insurrection… images that should be seared into our collective consciousness for the rest of our lives,” he said, it was important to be “as plain-spoken and as clear-eyed as possible.”

Something critically important is at issue here. For those in the midst of it, the crisis in American democracy amounts to a moral emergency. With the confusions of judgement that lead to mob violence compounded by the moral contortions of Trump’s congressional supporters, disseminated at length on Fox News and other right-wing channels, the entire nation risks losing its moorings in the bedrock of sanity. And when sanity is on the line, plain speaking is vital. Parody and satire are redundant; irony doesn’t work. Humour, that most ancient and lethal of political weapons, must be laid aside.

Myers chose his words as if they were stepping stones across quicksand. Democracy, he said, requires “vigilant stewardship,” and at this harrowing moment its survival depends upon the “sedition caucus” in the Republican Party being shamed and disgraced. “No one who aided and abetted today’s actions should be allowed to serve in a democracy they so clearly detest.”

In the aftermath, it is all about consequences, and where Myers articulated the need for prosecution as both urgent and imperative, Planet America focused on the ifs and buts. Former Trump security advisor John Bolton, a guest on the program, gave the view that Trump’s incitements had had an “unfortunate effect” on his supporters and that overall his conduct had done “considerable harm.” The leadership of the Republican Party “did not do an adequate job” in refuting the election fraud claims. Although the former president’s actions were “unacceptable,” Bolton did not see a Senate trial as either constitutionally viable or good for the country. Better, he said, to ignore Trump, which for Trump himself would be the worst punishment.

Although the tone of the interview was reasonable, I watched it with growing unease. A moral emergency is a real phenomenon, and raises some counterintuitive challenges, one of which is the need to recognise that there is such a thing as dangerous understatement. Moral compromise can compound a situation in which the political bastions of the nation have been compromised. Hence Myers’s insistence on the severest legal consequences.

On 29 January, when some semblance of order had been established by the first week of the Biden presidency, the matter of consequences was front and centre on American news channels. Rachel Maddow commenced her program by reading parts of a letter from 270 congressional staffers. Their collective voice came through loud and clear.

“Our workplace was attacked by a violent mob… who charged into the building with body armor and weapons,” they wrote. For hours they were in fear for their lives, hiding under desks or barricaded in offices. Among those killed was a police officer, “one of our co-workers who guards and greets us every day,” who was beaten to death. Some of those who incited the violence were people they still passed every day in the hallway. Urging all senators to convict the former president, the letter set out an equation: the gravity of the consequences for the nation are in inverse relationship to the gravity of the consequences faced by Trump and his enablers.

Someone who knows there is no escape from this equation is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Selensky, interviewed for Axios by Australian journalist Jonathan Swan. A few hours before Maddow went to air with the letter from congressional staff, Swan spoke to Nicolle Wallace, host of MSNBC’s White House, about Selensky’s reaction to the evolving situation in America. “It’s a reminder that what happened echoes well beyond American shores,” said Swan. “This is not theoretical. Ukraine is on the edge, defending a struggling democracy against Putin, and he [Selensky] is seeing this horrific sight. It’s a really troubling conversation that we had, a really strong reminder that the world is watching here.”

As part of the watching world, Australia has a significant role to play in the formation of perspectives. Is this just another political drama from wacky old Planet America? Or is it a defining crisis in an increasingly stressed world order? “What lessons will America learn from this deep rupture to its soul?” asked presenter Sarah Ferguson on Monday night’s Four Corners.

The program provided a narrative reconstruction of events on 6 January, drawing on footage from a wide range of sources to assemble a chronological account of the insurrection. Close-up views of what happened during the assault on the Capitol were shot on phones in the midst of a crowd whose chaotic surges caused strange angles and jolts. While much of the material was available from prior compilations, the editors have created what may be the clearest and most graphic overview to date.

Interviews with those caught up in the maelstrom were concerned with the immediate experience rather than analytical background. The distress on the faces of witnesses was in stark contrast to the overweening confidence of those addressing the rally beforehand and those who led the crowd through the grand entrance hall, shouting in triumph.

An absence of challenging questions has led to some criticism from viewers, especially in the case of Proud Boys spokesman Enrique Tarrio. Tarrio is an ambiguous figure, an FBI informer according to some reports, and his absence on 6 January because of an arrest two days earlier looks like convenient timing.

Among those unhappy with his inclusion in the program was Tim Soutphommasane, who tweeted, “You wouldn’t give al Qaeda a platform, so why would you give one to white supremacists and fascists?” It’s an important caution, but this wasn’t exactly a platform, and Tarrio was fairly evasive, though he made one disturbing statement. “There’s a saying that a federal prosecutor can prosecute a ham sandwich. Right? If they wanted to. But I think they’re going to have a very, very hard time with me. I got full faith in it.”

It’s a faith evidently shared by Trump himself, and a few notorious Republican members of Congress. If it proves well founded, American democracy is terminally fractured. •

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US nuclear planning is largely a legacy of the cold war, when the key aim was to deter a surprise Soviet attack, or “first strike,” on the American homeland. The Pentagon’s solution was to devise a system that guaranteed massive retaliation with thousands of weapons. This encouraged preparation for “launch under attack” and the overlapping “launch on warning,” which demanded extremely fast presidential decision-making and a military that appeared to Soviet worst-case planners to be geared to pre-emption. The result was a dangerously unstable situation in which both sides, fearing the worst, might be tempted to beat the other to the punch.

To meet another strategic aim — deterring a Soviet invasion of Western Europe — the United States developed options for limited, premeditated nuclear escalation (“first use,” employing perhaps a dozen warheads in a defined region). Clearly, this could easily have spiralled out of control.

Although much changed when the Soviet Union collapsed, cold war thinking left its mark. The American arsenal was scaled back, but a readiness for first use persisted, as did the system for promptly transmitting a president’s nuclear attack orders.

While the details are classified, the principles underlying the command of nuclear weapons are a matter of public record. The president, as commander-in-chief, has sole authority to order the firing of nuclear weapons. Although this authority can be delegated, and would pass down the line of succession in the event of incapacity, it still springs, undivided, from the office of the president. While they may be consulted, neither Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor cabinet has a veto. Once a presidential order is given, the only obstacle to implementation would be mutiny, or perhaps resistance based on the laws of war (such as the requirement for proportionality). It is this system that Biden inherits.

Biden’s presidency also comes in the wake of Trump’s toxic impact as a noisy disrupter. He panned and then withdrew from the carefully crafted 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal between Tehran, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris and Berlin. (If this was meant to rein in Tehran, it backfired.) He withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and 1992 Open Skies Treaty. He resisted Moscow’s invitation to extend the soon-to-expire New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty).

Trump also adopted a melodramatic approach to North Korea, making bombastic threats, boasting that he had solved the problem, and making bizarre references to “falling in love” with Kim Jong-un. In the real world, this performance did nothing to stop North Korea progressing towards an intercontinental nuclear weapons capability.

What can we expect from the new administration? There are plenty of clues because Biden has had so much time and reason to think about nuclear matters. He was elected to the Senate in 1972, and repeatedly re-elected, eventually chairing the Foreign Relations Committee before becoming Obama’s two-term vice-president.

Other clues lie in his picks for top national security positions, who are centrist establishment figures, many from the Obama years. This has disappointed some commentators, and reinforces a back-to-the-future tone. And it’s worth noting that Biden’s pick for secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, is a retired general who, until last week, was a well-remunerated member of the board of Raytheon, a defence contractor that makes, among other things, nuclear weapons.

Over the decades, though, Biden has argued that measured arms control ought to be considered integral to national security. As presidential candidate, he called for ratification of the nuclear test ban treaty, an extension of New START, and a relaunching of the Iran nuclear deal. He also wants to trim “excessive expenditure” on nuclear weapons, which might involve a review of the force structure, especially the balance between missile-firing submarines, intercontinental-range missiles based in the American heartland, and nuclear bombers like the B-2. In his more radical-sounding moments, Biden even says he wants to move towards a world free of nuclear weapons, an echo of Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review.

A putative stepping stone came only days after the inauguration, when he agreed to a sensible but quite modest five-year extension of the New START deal with Russia. This will leave him in command of about 3800 nuclear weapons, with more than 1000 deployed to military units and ready for use at short notice.

But Biden shows no sign of significantly altering presidential nuclear launch authority, for instance by reinterpreting congressional war powers to allow broader participation in nuclear orders.

And his overall strategy for the use of nuclear forces? “I believe that the sole purpose of the US nuclear arsenal should be deterring — and, if necessary, retaliating against — a nuclear attack,” he wrote last year. “As president, I will work to put that belief into practice.” That this needs to be said will surprise many, but the comment suggests we can expect a review of current policy reserving a right to use nuclear weapons first. This would receive support in the arms control community, although some believe the Pentagon ought to stop short of unequivocally rejecting that longstanding option.

Any attempt by Biden to reform nuclear policy will face constraints and distractions. He has to tackle the more pressing pandemic, as well as climate change, the economy and the bitter political aftermath of the Trump presidency. He also has to deal with the Senate. Despite losing control of the chamber, Republicans remain well placed to block arms control ratification, a particular problem with the nuclear test ban treaty.

Only time will tell how congressional politics influence efforts to revive the Iran deal, but many members will run interference. Besides, Washington isn’t the only player: Tehran has long seen the United States as hostile and unreliable, a perception accentuated by Trump’s reckless abandonment of the painfully worked-out pact. In response, Iran has already moved past previously agreed limits on uranium enrichment.

Days after Biden’s inauguration, the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force. But there’s no prospect of the new president, or his Russian and Chinese peers, ever signing it. As far as he (and Obama before him) is concerned, nuclear abolition is an aspiration pushed onto hypothetical future world leaders.

This leaves Biden set to steer policy to a modified version of the old normal. After the political vandalism of the Trump years, this won’t seem so bad to old strategy hands. And, given apparently intractable domestic and international constraints, it is all Washington seems capable of delivering. •

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Plenty of blame can be sheeted home to different government agencies and jurisdictions and some specifically American risk factors, but just one individual stands at the apex of the pyramid of failures.

Donald Trump leaves office with a legacy and under circumstances that will engage historians and political and social analysts for decades. He is one of only three presidents to be impeached, he sought to overturn the results of a presidential election that he clearly lost, and he refuses to acknowledge his rightfully elected successor, Joe Biden. But these strikes against him will be secondary to the swathe of illness and death he knowingly failed to prevent.

He will forever be known as the man under whose presidency the richest and most powerful country in the world, a country that abounds in scientific and medical innovation, was brought to its knees by a viral foe. Trump’s “America First” slogan and his oft-touted American exceptionalism are being measured in daily death numbers that surpass those of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the terrorist acts of 11 September 2001.

Other countries much less well-endowed with the means to deal with a pandemic — countries like Vietnam, Mongolia, Malawi and Fiji — have shown how a shrewd combination of public health measures can control this virus. How and why did the United States fail so badly?

The seeds were planted long before the arrival of the pandemic by what Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during George W. Bush’s presidency, calls “an orchestrated war on science.” Trump and his administration rolled back public health regulations, dismantled the agency charged with tracking and preparing for pandemic threats, undermined other scientific institutions, and suppressed and censored government scientists.

For reasons that remain obscure but probably relate to concerns about the economy, and hence the November election, Trump lied about the dangers posed by the virus and undermined efforts to contain it. Too many Americans — including state governors and mayors, who must take a share of the responsibility — joined in with his belittling of masks and his encouragement of public protests against lockdowns.

His appointees made political pawns of key agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, ordering them to issue inaccurate information and ill-advised health guidance, and tout potentially harmful treatments. This was “not just ineptitude,” as one epidemiologist remarked, it was an effort to “sabotage” the quest to keep people safe.

The damage has been compounded by the socioeconomic and racial inequalities that riddle the nation, the prevalence of risk factors such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, poor access to healthcare services for many (aggravated by Trump’s efforts to destroy Obamacare), and little in the way of safety nets to protect those who lose jobs or must quarantine. Meanwhile, Trump and those members of his circle who tested positive to coronavirus used their privileged access to the best, most expensive treatments to drive home their message that the infection was inconsequential.

Trump has revelled in his ability to bestow (or withhold) needed funds, equipment and therapeutics. Too often this has been done in accordance with political ideologies and favouritism, if not wilful carelessness. Figuring prominently in the growing revelations about mismanagement is the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose Project Airbridge, set up to deliver testing supplies and protective equipment, operated outside the standard federal channels for competitive bidding, disclosure and transparency. How the products were sold has gone undocumented, as have the way prices were determined and which facilities received supplies. Kushner hired his college roommate over credentialed medical experts to develop a national testing plan that never eventuated.

The list goes on. The administration mismanaged a contract for the manufacture of ventilators and ended up paying US$500 million more than necessary for 43,000 breathing machines. It’s not clear how many of these were received and distributed. Trump claimed he had inherited a Strategic National Stockpile with “bare” cupboards, but we now know the stockpile had 16,660 ventilators available in March but the administration had distributed considerably fewer than this by June. Reports suggest that ventilators were being sent overseas to countries that didn’t need or couldn’t use them.

Just as disturbing, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, Rick Bright, made a detailed whistleblower complaint about how he was pressured to approve unproven chloroquine drugs and award contracts to friends of the administration.

Meanwhile, most of the US$525 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program, designed to help small businesses retain their employees, instead went to larger businesses. The Brookings Institution has detailed how Trump family businesses, Trump associates and Trump allies benefited from these funds. Numerous other reports have revealed cronyism, corruption and conflicts of interest, extending as far as the White House coronavirus task force and Operation Warp Speed, set up to deliver coronavirus vaccines.

This shocking litany serves not just to highlight Trump’s mendacity and his administration’s criminal negligence, but also to underline the task ahead for Joe Biden and his team.

Faced with the policy vacuum around the pandemic and the erosion of trust in government and scientific experts, Biden is running an active transition. His overarching election commitments on the coronavirus were to listen to science, ensure public health decisions are informed by public health professionals, and restore trust, transparency, common purpose and accountability to government. Within a week of election day he announced a bipartisan coronavirus task force. Later, speaking immediately after the electoral college sealed his victory, he highlighted that his attention remained firmly on the pandemic.

Biden comes to the presidency with more inside knowledge of the presidency and its interactions with other federal and state jurisdictions than perhaps any of his predecessors. His selection of key staff is reinforcing that advantage: Ron Klain as chief of staff, Xavier Becerra as health and human services secretary, Dr Vivek Murthy to an expanded role as US surgeon-general, Dr Rochelle Walensky as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and, of course, Dr Anthony Fauci as his chief medical adviser.

Recognising the need to heal the divisions exacerbated by Trump and the coronavirus, he has pledged to tackle the pandemic’s impact on minorities, to deal with the socioeconomic divides that mean many Americans must risk infection or lose their jobs, and to acknowledge and reward the work of carers. His planned structural reforms depend on reining in the pandemic and delivering immediate relief.

Biden’s economic team includes Neera Tanden as head of the Office of Management and Budget, Janet Yellen as secretary of the Treasury, and Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey as members of the Council of Economic Advisers. Each has the background and commitment to carry out Biden’s program with skill and dispatch.

Those who charge that Biden is attempting to recreate the Obama years fail to recognise the value of having an experienced team made up of people who know how the systems and levers of government work, and who know each other. Biden is choosing a team that is ready to go from day one — indeed, a team that is already at work.

These people will bring their own histories and conflicts of interest to their positions, but the vetting and ethical and legal concerns will undoubtedly be better managed than under the Trump administration. Lawyers for the presidential transition are drafting new rules for White House staff that are likely to be more restrictive than those that governed the Obama administration.

Despite all the planning, two key external issues will shape how Biden’s agenda is implemented.

The first is whether the Democrats can win control of the Senate. If not, they will face the continuing obstinance of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and his conservative caucus. Winning both of the Georgia run-off races will be an enormous challenge for the Democrats, but a bigger task might be persuading McConnell not to cripple the Biden presidency by disrupting his legislative agenda and blocking his nominees for positions that need Senate approval.

The second is the enormous challenge of getting the coronavirus vaccine out across the nation in an equitable manner. Biden has called vaccine distribution a “huge, huge undertaking.” Fretting when his team was initially denied access to the Trump administration’s distribution plan, he commissioned his own plan in consultation with state governors.

To date Trump has been the loudest cheerleader for his administration’s role in getting vaccines developed through what he correctly proclaims to be “one of the miracles of modern medicine.” But he has shown much less interest in getting the vaccines where they are most needed. In the final days of his presidency, a focus on this effort, which currently lacks a detailed national plan and any sort of communication and education strategy, could have helped buff his legacy. Instead, he has chosen to undermine public trust in the vaccine by ordering Food and Drug Administration officials to approve it or be fired.

Trump was not present at the first vaccinations in Washington, DC, and issued no statement beyond a tweet saying “First Vaccine Administered. Congratulations USA! Congratulations WORLD!” His inner circle and officials are looking to jump the vaccine queue, regardless of their vulnerability.

In this vacuum, Biden has assumed the mantle of chief vaccine communicator. He has pledged “one hundred million shots in the first one hundred days” of his presidency, promising that this will change the course of the disease, and has emphasised the vaccine’s safety. But he also acknowledges that his first hundred days will not end Covid-19 and continues to plead with Americans to wear masks and obey public health guidelines.

Will Americans, now so cynical, weary and divided, listen to the very different message Biden is sending? Will they start to follow the example set by Biden, Harris and their people and wear masks, practise social distancing and limit gatherings? While the president-elect lacks the authority to mandate such measures, recent research offers some reassurance that communicating the importance of social distancing is only marginally less effective than imposing distancing measures by law.

The release of the first vaccine (with more likely to be approved) has signalled to Americans that there will be an end to the pandemic. If the rollout falters — because supplies are limited, because required services are not available, because there are disagreements over priority groups, or (disastrously) because of unanticipated side effects — then public confidence will be shattered.

Managing these challenges will require Biden and his team to communicate clearly and with one voice. Trying to persuade those who believe in conspiracy theories is generally a wasted effort, but strategies exist for limiting the spread of misinformation in the first place.

Joe Biden laid out the central task (and the primary burden) of his presidency in his acceptance speech given on 7 November: “I believe it is this: Americans have called on us to marshal the forces of decency and the forces of fairness. To marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.” America will be waiting and the world will be watching. •

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Preferential voting — known as “ranked-choice voting” in America — has now been adopted by ballot initiative (a kind of citizens-initiated referendum) in two states: Maine, in 2018, and now Alaska for all post-2020 elections.

How did the two northernmost states in the Union come to adopt a voting system that has been used for over a century in Australia but remains largely unknown in the United States? Like many aspects of American politics today, the answer is to be found in the increasing dysfunction and polarisation of American electoral democracy.

Although it would typically elect the same candidate as a standard US-style plurality contest, preferential voting offers politicians a different route to victory, and thus different incentives.

In close contests, as Australian politicians know, it pays to attract not just a strong primary vote but also a healthy flow of preferences from minor parties and independent candidates. Labor, for instance, would never win a federal election in the absence of preference flows from the roughly 10 per cent of the electorate who support the Greens — which explains the unwillingness of Anthony Albanese and Mark Butler to indulge Joel Fitzgibbon’s road-to-nowhere plan to renege on Labor’s climate commitments.

Transferred to the United States, preferential voting means that a supporter of the Libertarian Party — which garnered 1.2 per cent of the national vote in 2020 — could avoid helping split the conservative vote (as arguably happened in several states this time). Similarly, America’s Green voters could give their second preference to the more pro-environment of the major parties, just as their counterparts do in Australia.

But a newfound embrace of minor parties is not what is driving this reform. Rather, ranked-choice voting is seen as a way to shift the tone of American politics in a more civil and cooperative direction, or at least a less negative and polarising one.

America’s combination of primary elections with plurality (and non-compulsory) voting means that centrist voters face an invidious choice at the ballot box. In 2020, this was typically between a pro-Trump Republican and an increasingly left-wing Democrat.

The political centre, where many American voters still profess to be, has emptied out. As former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower put it, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

Where compulsory and preferential voting pushes Australian politicians to contest the political centre, the incentives push the other way in the United States — towards mobilising one’s base vote.

Party primaries are prone to capture by radicals on both sides who want to ensure that only “pure” ideologues and true believers nominate. The most effective way to do this is by advocating the kind of extreme policies that are highly attractive to party diehards but may repel everyone else.

By rewarding those with broader appeal, preferential voting can deter such extremism. Candidates who command a solid base of support but attract few preferences from others — Donald Trump, for example — are less likely to be nominated and win under preferential voting than under plurality rules. Switching to preferential elections at all levels, from primaries to presidential contests, is thus seen as a way to bring back the “missing middle” in American politics.

While the idea of giving voters the opportunity to rank candidates is familiar and indeed unremarkable to Australians, it is being hailed as a major reform in the United States. As democracy scholar Larry Diamond put it, “Many reforms are needed, but ranked-choice voting can be the Archimedean lever of change, enabling a small force to move a great weight.”

Maine shows how this can work in practice. After repeated split-vote wins by divisive Republican governor Paul LePage — who styled himself as “Trump before Trump” — a grassroots movement pushed for and won a ballot initiative in 2016 to introduce preferential voting. When this was stymied by the legislature, Maine voters forced the change via a special “people’s veto,” overriding the politicians.

In Maine’s first use of ranked-choice, in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrat Jared Golden won the state’s knife-edge 2nd congressional district by securing enough preferences from two Independents to leap over the Republican incumbent.

Golden’s receipt of what turned out to be an election-deciding flow of preferences came after he publicly pledged to reciprocate with his own rankings, signalling to Democrat voters to do the same. His Republican rival, by contrast, spurned the idea and hence received few preference flows from excluded candidates — becoming the first incumbent to lose the district in over a century.

While cooperative signalling of this kind can make sense under preferential voting, under plurality rules there is nothing to be lost by “going negative” in campaigns.

Golden’s upset victory led to a series of legal challenges (and the Republican state secretary’s scrawling “stolen election” on the official certification of results), but the system was upheld by the courts and Golden was elected again, with much less drama, in November 2020.

At that same election, on the other side of the continent, Alaskan voters narrowly approved a proposal to adopt preferential voting as well, along with new disclosure requirements to prevent “dark money” in politics. In a new and potentially influential twist, the state’s preferential contest will take place after a single primary election for all parties, with the four best-polling candidates going on to a general election in which voters can rank from one to four.

The Alaska campaign benefited from a cross-party coalition of Independents, Libertarians, Democrats and some Republicans. By contrast, a similar initiative in Massachusetts championed predominantly by the Democrats failed to win majority support on 3 November.

Whether preferential voting can actually lower the temperature of American politics in the hyper-polarisation of the post-Trump era remains to be seen. Studies from other jurisdictions that use ranked ballots — including Australia, Papua New Guinea and over a dozen American cities and local governments — have found that they produce more moderation than plurality elections. But these either tend to be non-partisan contests, in the case of local elections, or have very different political cultures.

Nonetheless, leading American thinkers have seized on the idea of preferential voting as “the leading institutional reform that could potentially reduce polarisation in the country,” as the high-profile political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it. Others endorsing preferential voting include Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, the late John McCain, newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Economist, five winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, and nine winners, including Fukuyama, of the Skytte Prize, the highest honour in political science.

Amid this heavyweight support, the unlikely duo of Maine and Alaska — blue-collar, rural and remote — have thus become testing grounds for whether a seemingly modest electoral reform can help arrest America’s democratic decline. Despite their locations on America’s periphery, they could be at the centre of national democratic renewal. •

The post Small force, great weight appeared first on Inside Story.

But the collective relief is tempered by an understanding that a return to an earlier era of US foreign policy is not on the cards. Even if Americans had decisively repudiated Trumpism — and they have not — the world has changed. Four years of Trump’s rants, the devastating effects of a global pandemic, growing fissures in the post-1945 international system — all these have reconfigured how Americans view the world and how the world views America.

In two key areas in particular, the new political environment will sharply constrain what Biden can do. The first is relations with China, where record levels of public and elite hostility will block most roads to cooperation. The other is US global leadership, where surging nativism, the danger of a Republican-held Senate (to be decided in January) and a lack of imagination within the Biden team will hamper the administration’s capacity to generate popular support at home.

Trump made China an American obsession. Thanks to his rhetoric, his policies and the pandemic, Sino-American relations have sunk to their lowest point in decades. Just fifteen years ago, only a third of Americans polled said they had somewhat or very negative views of China; now, it’s nearly three-quarters. Trump and other Republicans have fed Americans a steady diet of vilification about China’s role in spreading SARS-CoV-2, stoking anger and a desire to “make China pay.”

States, individuals and companies have launched more than a dozen lawsuits against the Chinese government and Chinese entities. Republicans have floated proposals to coerce China into paying $1 trillion in bonds dating back to before 1949 while suggesting, without blinking, that the United States repudiate debts to China. Democrats in Congress, who agree with Republicans on almost nothing else, eagerly reach across the aisle on measures to confront Beijing. Worries about Chinese control of the supply and price of health-related commodities like antibiotics and PPE are among the reasons why the new buzzwords are “decoupling” and “reshoring”: an economic breakaway of the United States from China.

On market access, tariffs, industrial policy, the South China Sea and Taiwan, the political climate will push Biden towards confrontation. He may find it expedient to adopt some of Trump’s trade goals, but using softer tools. Added to the mix will be his own tough rhetoric about human rights concerns in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Chinese leaders and many intellectuals since the 1990s have viewed human rights criticism as part of an American plot to halt China’s rise, and US human rights talk has hardened Chinese nationalism. In the face of America’s own failings around Black Lives Matter, voter suppression and the erosion of democratic norms, lecturing from the Biden administration will strike the Chinese as ludicrously disingenuous. All of these issues will acutely complicate another urgent priority for Biden: working towards engagement with China on climate change and pandemic management.

More fundamentally, Biden will find a country deeply divided about its relationship to the rest of the world. The notion that the United States should play a global leadership role underpinned by a sense of common interests has become anathema to the many Republicans who embrace the unleashed and undisguised selfishness of America First. A recent poll showed that half of Republicans feel that the United States is “rich and powerful enough to go it alone.” Asked what the pandemic made clear, 58 per cent of Republicans responded that it is most important to be self-sufficient and not depend on other nations. Hyper-nationalists on the far right will scream loudly at every multilateral move by Biden, reviling him for having “used American sovereignty as a doormat” and acting as though the United States were “just another member of the UN.”

Republican sentiment, if buttressed by Republican control of the Senate, will likely lead Biden to the same kind of reliance on executive orders that Obama resorted to in the face of congressional obstruction. Obama signed the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear agreement without seeking congressional approval, and Biden can do the same. But without the new spending commitments that only Congress can enact, executive action on many issues will be hollow. And a judiciary firmly in the hands of Republicans will be ever more emboldened to check this use of executive power.

Democratic voters remain committed to multilateralism. They recognise the need to cooperate with allies and others in solving what they regard as the world’s most urgent problems: climate change and the pandemic. But the Democratic foreign policy establishment has been remarkably unimaginative in developing visions to counter America First. Although internationalists admit that the post-1945 world order is no longer fit for purpose and that liberal internationalism needs to be reconfigured, the proposals they offer tinker on the margins — calling, for example, for “ad hoc clubs” of like-minded nations to work on specific problems or for adding pandemic preparedness to NATO’s responsibilities. Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is from the traditional internationalist mould: keen on using military power in exactly the kinds of ill-conceived interventions and endless wars that have fuelled public disenchantment with an activist foreign policy.

The vision on the reinvigorated Bernie Sanders–aligned left is simple and largely negative: renounce military supremacy. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, launched a year ago with funds from the unlikely combination of the Koch brothers and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, was founded out of frustration with what its leaders call a lethargic and dysfunctional foreign policy establishment. “America has no need to be so powerful” was the headline of Quincy Institute co-founder Stephen Wertheim’s recent op-ed in the New York Times. But what does it need to be?

The country has a staggering array of domestic problems to deal with, and managing those is essential if it wants to play an effective role in the world, whatever that role might be. But Americans also need a positive vision for their place in the world. A successful foreign policy vision rests on emotions that inspire and motivate. America First was powerful because it sparked and harnessed an outpouring of fear and pride. What do Biden and liberal internationalists have to offer in its place? Ad hoc global clubs? A return to normalcy? Globalism lite? More endless wars? A “democracy summit” led by one of the world’s least inspiring democracies? Tepid revisions of the old order will quickly lead to disillusionment and disaffection.

The incoming president, a consummate twentieth-century politician, is among the most linguistically inept of all political leaders. And yet it falls to him to find the words to inspire Americans through their great twenty-first-century challenges. Is the age of miracles over, as the proverb has it? Let’s hope not. •

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The problem was still unresolved when Scott Morrison flew into Tokyo on Tuesday, on his first foreign prime ministerial excursion since the coronavirus lockdown, to meet his Japanese counterpart, Yoshihide Suga. Nonetheless, the two went on to declare their commitment, “in principle,” to a “reciprocal access agreement” governing their armed forces training in or operating from each other’s territory.

The banal title belies the significance, highly symbolic at least, of Japan’s entering the first such agreement to allow foreign troops to operate on its soil in sixty years. That 1960 treaty with the United States allowed American forces to hold on to the scores of military bases they had occupied since Japan’s defeat in 1945.

With this “landmark” defence treaty, said Morrison, “our special strategic partnership became even stronger.” And, indeed, it represents a historic shift from the future presaged in the early postwar era, when Australia helped disarm Japan and then, in 1951, gained its own US protection — partly against a resurgent post-occupation Japan — through the ANZUS treaty.

After the culture shock when Japan replaced Western countries as Australia’s leading trade partner, a significant investor and a major source of tourists, the relationship settled into a cosy familiarity, with thousands of young people using the working holiday visa scheme started by the two countries in 1980, a first for Japan.

But the strategic setting is far from cosy now. China eclipsed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy some years back, and by some estimates has already taken the top position from the United States. It is contesting US hegemony in the Western Pacific, and has a particular historical bone to pick with Japan over the Senkaku Islands.

Canberra is also alarmed, and wants to join with Japan and other regional powers to push back against Beijing — though not to the extent of severing economic ties, since China is the top trading partner for Australia and most of these other countries. Starting with an agreement signed by John Howard’s government in 2007, Australia has moved steadily towards this week’s deal.

Alongside that push, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service has been helping Japan set up its own MI6-style external espionage service, and the then Japanese defence minister recently floated the idea of Tokyo’s being admitted to the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement between anglophone powers.

The basis of the new cooperation is “shared values,” and this week Suga repeated the mantra that Australia and Japan were mutually committed to democracy and the rule of law, and would “cooperate to realise a free and open Indo-Pacific.” It wasn’t necessary to state that both countries were backed by the power and values of the United States.

But something has changed to bring these members of separate US alliances together in an alliance of their own. “Historically Australian diplomacy has attached primacy to exchanging views with the United States on Asia,” John McCarthy, a former ambassador to Washington and Tokyo, wrote this week. “Since the lack of follow-through on President Obama’s pivot to Asia, and latterly the quixotic behaviour of the Trump regime, it has made equal — and arguably more — sense to talk to the Asians about the United States. Our most important interlocutor is Japan.”

Morrison and Suga would have spent much of their time swapping notes on what incoming US president Joe Biden might do in the region, and what damage Donald Trump might do on his way out. While signals from Biden’s camp showed determination to keep standing up for US interests, they also indicated a “much more structured” policy approach than Trump’s, and readiness to cooperate with China in areas like health, nuclear nonproliferation and climate.

“If this sort of thinking develops into policy, it makes sense to encourage Biden towards receptivity to indications, should they come, of a Chinese desire to wind back tensions,” McCarthy wrote. “Here, Japanese thinking is almost certainly more nuanced than our own. While rigorous on adherence to the security relationship with the United States, there is more two-way flexibility in Japan’s dealings with China.”

Instead of Canberra concentrating on naval power by promoting tighter integration among the “quadrilateral” of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, McCarthy suggested that a deeper and broader engagement by America and Japan in Southeast Asia would be more effective. Getting the Americans to focus on that region might require patience, though, given that the pandemic, economic recovery and restoring North Atlantic alliances will be immediate priorities for Biden.

As well as the China relationship, Biden’s administration will have to formulate a new approach to Korea, following Trump’s theatrics with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Under current president Moon Jae-in, South Korea has declared itself uninterested in joining the Quad, especially as a junior to Japan.

The capital punishment question, meanwhile, was left hanging, as it were. Reporters were briefed that it will be tackled on a “case by case” basis — a reminder that not all values are shared in the Quad. Australia is the only member to ban capital punishment, and the other three have, if anything, stepped up their execution rates.

As the Australian National University’s eminent Northeast Asia historian Gavan McCormack points out, Suga has been at the forefront of efforts by Japan’s “Shintoists” to return their country to something like the state the United States, Australia and British India opposed before 1945 by restoring the emperor as the source of sovereignty and centre of a cult of cultural uniqueness.

“What committed Shintoists such as Abe and Suga seemed to find most offensive about the postwar Japanese state was its democratic, citizen-based, anti-militarist qualities and its admission of responsibility for war and crimes of war by the pre-war and wartime state,” writes McCormack. Referring to this week’s agreement, he adds that Suga proceeded under laws that the government’s own constitutional experts unanimously declared to be in violation of the postwar Japanese constitution’s famous Article 9, which restricts military action to self-defence. “The new ‘quasi alliance’ Tokyo–Canberra link seems to commit Australia to a view in support of Japan’s government and in opposition to its civil society on this most sensitive of issues,” says McCormack.

A similarly retrograde trend is seen in India too, where Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party is trying to impose majoritarian religious supremacism, often with sanctioned mob violence. And the last four years has even shaken the trust of many Australians in their country’s “shared values” with America.

If inclined, Morrison would have had much to reflect on during his nine-hour flight back to quarantine at the Lodge, unbroken by an abandoned stop-off in Port Moresby to meet Papua New Guinea’s James Marape, who is defending his leadership against a sudden defection of his ministers and MPs to the opposition — a reminder that domestic politics can trump diplomacy anytime. •

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The outgoing president’s intransigence also reveals the seams in the patchwork of American laws governing presidential transitions. Despite numerous amendments, they evidently remain as vulnerable to mischief as they were the last time a defeated incumbent sought to stymie his successor by prolonging a crisis, in that case in the depths of the Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover lost the presidency to Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the election of 1932, winning majorities in just six of the then forty-eight US states. He conceded in a telegram sent before election day was over on the Pacific coast, where he was monitoring results. But he would remain president until 4 March, and he planned to use those four months to win in substance what he had lost in the canvass: the argument over how to manage the Depression.

Hoover would be the last president to spend so much time in office after voters chose his successor. Earlier in 1932, Congress had asked the states to ratify a constitutional amendment moving the presidential inauguration to 20 January and the first meeting of the newly elected Congress to 3 January. Those shifts would first apply in 1937, and in the meantime the old rules prevailed. The constitution prescribed a fixed four-year term for a president, so Hoover’s time in office would end on 4 March 1933, four years to the day after he had been sworn in.

As soon as Hoover conceded, the constitutional machinery devoted to presidential elections — built in the eighteenth century and modified by statute — creaked into its quadrennial action, as it still does today. The president is elected by a college of electors chosen by the states, but the states delegate the choice of electors to citizens. Voters therefore cast their ballots not for a presidential candidate but for a slate of electors who have pledged to vote for that candidate. Those electors then vote by sending their ballots to the president of the Senate (who is also the vice-president of the United States). Once they are counted, a special session of both houses of Congress accepts the result of the vote as the official basis of the new president’s election.

The months of transition allow time for these proceedings to unfold. Until the process is complete, the outgoing president and members of Congress retain the authority of their positions — even if it might embarrass the more conscientious of them or give the more opportunistic a chance for mischief.

The hard-fought 1932 election turned on the question of how to manage the Depression. For nearly four full years the economy had got steadily worse. Unemployment rose to somewhere around 25 per cent. The jobless drew down their savings, then depended on their families, and then turned to charities and local governments, each of which failed them in turn. People began to die of starvation — not because the land could produce no food but because the mechanism for distributing it had somehow broken down. Crops fetched so little at market that farmers couldn’t afford to harvest them; food rotted on the stalk and vine even as Americans went hungry.

The Hoover administration had supplied some assistance, if too little, to suffering Americans. Hoover believed that his fellow citizens, lacking in confidence, simply needed to think positive thoughts and then go out and buy things. His encouragement failed. He tried to persuade businesses to band together voluntarily to try to limit wage cuts and keep prices up. This blandishment failed as well. Banks began to fail as people took out their savings and stopped repaying their loans.

Hoover supported modest employment creation through public works projects, and in 1931 announced with apparent satisfaction that 700,000 Americans were employed on such federal worksites. By that time, though, the ranks of the unemployed had swelled to more than seven million. He also remained opposed in principle to large-scale public works. They would “break down the enterprise and initiative of the American people,” he believed, and result in the “destruction of equality of opportunity amongst our people.” Private enterprise must hire Americans if the American system were to continue.

Opposing Hoover, Roosevelt campaigned on a program he called the New Deal, which drew on a Depression-era employment scheme he had instituted as governor of New York state. But the New Deal went beyond such emergency measures. As he said, the crisis made it clear that Americans must not only “restore” but “remodel.”

Emergency public works programs would be accompanied by a drastic overhaul of the nation’s economy. Rural life would become more sustainable, with a rationalised use of the land. Constructing dams and power plants would not only create jobs but also bring the benefits of modern machinery to chronically poor areas. City life would become more bearable, with factory work regulated to provide higher wages and shorter hours. The United States would at last catch up with other industrial nations, adopting programs for unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. The New Deal would fit the engines of capitalism with new governors to prevent them running too hot.

Roosevelt wanted to balance the budget, he assured voters, but not at the expense of the New Deal: “if starvation and dire need on the part of any of our citizens make necessary an appropriation of additional funds which would keep the budget out of balance, I shall not hesitate to… recommend to them the expenditure.” He also promised inflation of the currency — although that he did off the record, lest publicising the intention ruin the effect of the policy.

Roosevelt made these pledges not only to meet the needs of the economic moment but also to tackle what he saw as an existential challenge to democracy in the United States and around the world. Nazism was on the rise in Germany, and he worried it could take hold in the Americas. He wanted the New Deal to create a more active state “to help restore the close relationship with its people which is necessary to preserve our democratic form of government.”

For his part, Hoover regarded the New Deal as close kin to Bolshevism. He smelled on Roosevelt’s proposals the same “fumes of the witch’s cauldron which boiled over in Russia.” No public works program could dispel Depression levels of unemployment, he said, and if it tried it would “crack the timbers of our constitution” and “destroy the very foundations of the American system of life.” Voters should be grateful for him and all he had done: “Let’s be thankful for the presence in Washington of a Republican administration.” An apparently unimpressed electorate voted him out, choosing Roosevelt and the New Deal instead.

Hoover might have conceded the election in substance as graciously as he had conceded it in form. Some observers suggested he appoint Roosevelt his secretary of state and then resign together with his vice-president; under the law as it then was, Roosevelt would immediately have become president. Hoover dismissed the notion as “silly.” Still, short of quitting the office, he could have cooperated with his successor, helping to smooth the transition and start the New Deal.

So Roosevelt set about getting his program for fighting the Depression under way by other means. Intending first to relieve the nation’s farmers, he directed his aides to meet the leaders of agricultural groups and have them endorse a policy for raising commodity prices by subsidy. The Roosevelt team then worked with legislators to propose this measure in Congress.

But rather than let the infant New Deal proceed, Hoover blocked it, threatening to veto this law or anything similar that might make it through Congress. “I don’t want them to do anything,” he told an aide. “Whatever they do will be bad legislation from our point of view.”

Moreover, Hoover decided on principle that he would not attempt to stop the bank panics that were reaching a new pitch of terror in the last months of his presidency. Mistrustful of the wobbly financial sector, Americans had begun to withdraw money even from sound banks — thus rendering them unsound. Lawyers advised the president that he had the authority to use an enforced bank holiday to order inspections of their books, allowing only those certified as healthy to reopen. But Hoover refused. The panic, he believed, was a necessary if regrettably uncomfortable purging of the system. “I felt,” he said, “our effort should be to keep banks open, not closed.”

He did do one thing, vigorously and repeatedly: he tried to get the incoming president to swear off implementing the New Deal. Roosevelt must promise, Hoover said, to stay on the gold standard, balance the budget, and abandon the massive program of public works that had been the centrepiece of his campaign. As he admitted privately, “I realise that if these declarations be made by the president-elect… he will have ratified the whole program of the Republican administration; that is, it means abandonment of ninety per cent of the so-called new deal.”

Roosevelt declined to abandon the program on which he had been elected. As he told one of his staffers, his “most important task was to revive the confidence of the people in their government.” If he wanted to do that, he had to keep his promises. So he spent the months of the transition reassuring his supporters that he would do as he had pledged. He assembled a cabinet of devoted New Dealers and continued to develop the policies he would implement upon his inauguration: closing the banks and stopping the panic; taking the nation off the gold standard to inflate the currency and induce spending; and securing employment legislation from Congress to put Americans to work.

Recovery from the Depression began the very month of his inauguration, and continued apace during the New Deal. And that is the cost of Hoover’s intransigence: for the recovery might have begun sooner had the outgoing president accepted the results of the election. Jobs and — in a time of starvation — lives could have been saved. But as one newspaperman wrote then, even “with the world on fire,” there was no “extinguisher until after March 4.” The handover date might now be earlier, but the problem persists: a poor loser can make a nation suffer grievously. •

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Across town, the other America was taking its stand at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a lawn centre alongside Fantasy Island Book Store, a purveyor of sex toys and erotica, and opposite the Delaware Valley Cremation Center. The industrial park served as the backdrop for a press conference held by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who had brought along a stack of specious claims about voter fraud. In the middle of the event someone interrupted to tell him that the election had been called for Biden. Giuliani waved the news away. “Don’t be ridiculous. Networks don’t get to decide elections. Courts do.”

It was an alarming claim — courts don’t decide elections in the United States, with one notable exception — but by the end of the weekend it had become an article of faith on the right. The president has refused to concede, and conservative media outlets and Republican politicians have, with few exceptions, lined up behind him. On talk radio, hosts like Rush Limbaugh insist that Trump won the election and Democrats have stolen it. His callers agree.

And here’s where the two Americas stop being a cliché and start to become an existential crisis. With loyalty to Trump superseding loyalty to democracy, the right is turning the country’s last scrap of common ground into a fatal fault line.

Few Americans are surprised that Donald Trump has refused to acknowledge he lost the election. After all, back in the 2016 campaign he said Americans would have to wait and see whether he would concede, a waiting game delayed four years by his unexpected victory. It’s easy to dismiss this as Trumpian bluster, a spray of lies and conspiracies to conceal that he has no recourse for a lost election.

It’s also easy to dismiss the calls for lawsuits and recounts as just another grift. The Trump campaign flooded supporters’ inboxes with fundraising calls for the “Official Election Defense Fund,” ostensibly created to raise money for whatever legal battles ensue. But squint at the fine print and you’ll see that 60 per cent of the money goes not to a legal fund but to paying off the Trump campaign’s debt. One more con as he walks out the door.

But don’t write this off as an ego trip or a shell game. This is a coup attempt. As Ezra Klein wrote in Vox, while Trump’s efforts seem laughably ineffective, they have serious consequences. “What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites.”

That is precisely the argument that you’ll hear in the prime-time hours on Fox News and in the wall-to-wall right-wing radio broadcasts that blanket the United States. “We all believe that Donald Trump won this election. We all believe that he won it handily,” Rush Limbaugh told his audience on Monday. “In Democrat cities, they purposely were holding back counting the early voting and mail-in votes in order to know how many they would need to find in order to win. There’s no other explanation for this.” (There is an alternative explanation, one rooted in evidence: Republicans blocked the counting of early votes in certain states like Pennsylvania, resulting in the delayed counting that followed.)

But this conspiracy is not being contained to just right-wing media and the Trump team. As they have throughout the Trump presidency, Republican leaders have, by and large, fallen in line. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News on Thursday and declared, “President Trump has won this election.” Senator Lindsey Graham, who habitually follows wherever Trump leads, told Fox News, “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again” — a dark intimation of fraud and conspiracy.

The myth of a stolen election is already beginning to crystallise into a new article of faith for the American right. And it is already being teed up to justify all sorts of anti-democratic behaviour, including a new round of voter suppression aimed at preventing methods like mail-in voting that allowed a record number of Americans to participate in this year’s election despite the pandemic. Even as he was warning of a permanent Democratic hold on the presidency, Graham also pointed to a solution: “From a Republican point of view, mail-in balloting is a nightmare for us.” End mail-in voting to suppress the Democratic vote and the Republicans — who have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — may be able to eke out a few more wins in the electoral college.

That’s the path the right is headed down — indeed, the path they’ve been on for at least a decade now. The arrival of Donald Trump accelerated and metastasised the anti-democratic trends in the Republican Party, but they’ll continue long after he’s gone.

In some ways, the United States had a lucky near miss. Trump turned out to be a lazy autocrat. The next few months will likely follow a predictable script. “No one seriously thinks the results will change,” a Republican official told the Washington Post, downplaying Trump’s refusal to concede. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.” Yet even a lazy autocrat can inflict serious damage on democratic systems — especially when he has one of the two Americas solidly behind him. •

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With the president refusing to concede defeat, it’s unclear how closely the process will resemble the usual orderly handover of powers. There’s every chance that the disregard for niceties, precedents and laws so evident over the past four years will continue until — and even on — Inauguration Day.

Normally, the General Services Administration acts quickly once the result is known. Even before the electoral college meets to finalise the results, the GSA provides the transition team with funding, access to government services and space for headquarters. Concurrently, the president-elect begins receiving classified briefings from the CIA and other security agencies, and exchanging information and background papers with all government agencies.

The Biden–Harris transition team has been gearing up since June and is expected to number some 350 people. Funds of more than US$7 million have been raised to cover costs, including the expense of shepherding nominees through the Senate approval process. Unusually, the GSA’s administrator, a Trump appointee, has yet to sign off on the provision of the agency’s assistance.

Presidential transitions can be fraught, but George W. Bush’s handover to Barack Obama in 2008–09 is seen as the gold standard. At the height of the global financial crisis, with the nation’s economy on the verge of collapse, their interactions were smoothed by the two teams’ knowledge of each other from briefings, group crisis training and a series of one‐on‐one meetings between senior Bush and Obama staff. A terrorism threat in Washington on Inauguration Day was dealt with by national security personnel from both the Bush and Obama teams.

The White House reportedly has a transition team headed by Chris Liddell, assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for policy coordination. Much needs to be done, including providing security clearances to enable key Biden advisers to access classified briefings during the transition period. But this work — mostly hidden from Trump amid fears he would try to derail it — appears to have ground to a halt since election day. Reports suggest that the mood is dark and chaotic, and that staff are disheartened and already leaving, a situation not helped by another outbreak of Covid-19 in the White House.

Rumours suggest that Trump might signal his lack of engagement by decamping to Mar-a-Lago in Florida (presumably at taxpayers’ expense). Alternatively, he might take to campaigning again, making his case about a “stolen” election. He is also expected to deliver a series of pardons, perhaps even for himself and his family — an act whose legality is yet to be tested. The Republican National Committee and Trump’s campaign organisation are fundraising to support his legal tactics and retire his campaign debts; they need some US$60 million to fund his legal challenges alone.

Fortunately, Joe Biden has little need for a formal handover. He has already been part of a well-executed transition, and he and his family know their way around the White House.

A new Biden–Harris transition website lays out the five key policy areas already outlined by the president-elect: the pandemic, rebuilding the economy and jobs, healthcare, climate change, and racial justice.

The first order of business will be to tackle the health and economic impacts of a pandemic whose reach has grown exponentially during the election campaign. Hospitals in many states have been overwhelmed, the economy disrupted, and families and communities left in grief and crisis. Experts now consider Covid-19 to be out of control nationally.

The urgency of the problem is highlighted by forecasts released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They predict that the week ending 28 November will see between 450,000 and 960,000 new coronavirus infections and between 4600 and 11,000 deaths. These estimates might even be overly conservative: 6 November saw 132,797 new cases and 1147 deaths across the United States. More than ten million Americans have been infected and significant numbers remain disabled by long-lasting side effects. Without effective interventions, the toll by Inauguration Day will be crippling and intolerable — yet the Trump administration seems unconcerned that this will be its lasting legacy.

Biden has announced a bipartisan coronavirus taskforce headed by three physicians — former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler, and Marcella Nunez-Smith, who is recognised for her work promoting health and healthcare equity among marginalised populations. All are well known in public health, science and political circles. Murthy and Kessler have been outspoken about the need to avoid any perception of political interference in pandemic decision-making and have signalled they will approach pandemic control far differently from the Trump administration.

The taskforce will build on consultations and planning in recent months, echoing work on Obama’s healthcare reforms by former senator Tom Daschle’s team throughout December 2008. The taskforce will need to reach out to red and blue states alike, whose cooperation will be vital to implementing the Biden plan’s federal initiatives (including possible mask mandates) and improved supply chains for personal protective equipment, testing supplies, therapeutics, vaccines and supplemental healthcare services.

This work is unlikely to step on the toes of the White House coronavirus advisory group, which has largely ceased to function. Trump has threatened to fire Dr Tony Fauci, and former chief spokesperson Dr Deborah Birx has been reduced to issuing an urgent plea for more aggressive action, which was leaked to the Washington Post. Trump now listens only to Dr Scott Atlas, whose views on the pandemic are decidedly renegade.

The administration’s approach to the pandemic in recent months was succinctly summed up by Mark Meadows’s proclamation (so ironic in light of his own infection last week) that “we are not going to control the pandemic.” By contrast, a coronavirus briefing was the first order of business for Biden and Harris, followed by a public statement on plans to tackle the pandemic and rebuild the economy. Biden’s statement coincided with encouraging news from Pfizer about its coronavirus vaccine.

In 2008, the lame-duck Bush administration was willing to take advice and guidance from the Obama transition team on tackling the global financial crisis. Most notably, Bush agreed to Obama’s request to ask Congress to release more funds for the economic bailout. Biden will now push the lame-duck Senate to pass the coronavirus relief bill that is so urgently needed.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell have both indicated their interest in passing such a measure, but their last attempt failed when they were unable to agree on the scope of legislation. Can Biden’s input now help them find common ground? Complicating this push, Congress will be distracted by the looming 11 December government funding deadline. Failure to reach a deal on that issue will result in a government shutdown. And there’s another possible obstacle: Trump would need to sign any new spending bill.

Covid-19 and its economic impacts are challenging enough, but the Biden–Harris team will also need to work simultaneously on a range of other difficult issues. In quick order, Biden must announce his cabinet members and get them working on their agendas; assess which of Trump’s actions need to be undone (including his withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement on climate change); develop legislation and, if he can’t get the Senate to cooperate, issue executive orders; and develop a contingency plan in case the US Supreme Court overturns Obamacare in 2021.

Dramatic policy changes have been promised in areas such as climate change, environmental protections, immigration and education. Here Biden will have to balance different policy positions and concerns inside the Democratic caucus (especially those from the left) and the reluctance of Republicans to work cooperatively. One way to tackle ambitious agendas is to work stepwise, in a planned series of bills, but that requires a firm hand and strong control of the levers of government and policy implementation.

Unless Biden can work with the Senate, he will be forced to resort to executive orders. McConnell was the enabler-in-chief to Trump and he will look to play a controlling role with Biden. But Biden has worked with McConnell over many years and is arguably every bit as familiar with Senate procedures. It will be interesting to see whether Republican allegiances to Trump remain strong during the upcoming lame-duck session, or whether Biden can use his longstanding relationships to persuade at least some Republicans to moderate their positions.

Whether McConnell retains his role as majority leader in the new Congress depends on the outcome of two run-off Senate races in Georgia in early January. The Democrats need to win both of them to control the Senate with vice-president Harris in the chair. (Harris will resign her ordinary Senate seat, and the Democrat governor of California will replace her with another Democrat.) If that doesn’t happen, McConnell is once again in the catbird seat. Whether Trumpism will remain rampant in the Republican caucus once Trump is off the scene is unknown.

Democratic control of the Senate would make a big difference to Biden’s appointees and agenda. As incoming president, he will appoint more than 4000 people to his administration, a quarter of whom will require Senate approval. The media are already compiling lists of likely cabinet appointees and White House advisers. Biden has a surfeit of well-qualified people to choose from, many of whom have served in previous administrations. He will face a balancing act between experience and new faces, and has promised an administration that “looks like America.”

Axios reports that a Republican Senate would work with Biden on centrist nominees but block any “radical progressives” or other figures who are controversial among conservatives. This could result in Biden’s having a more centrist cabinet and a more centrist legislative agenda than anticipated.

While work must proceed apace in Washington, Biden must also look beyond America’s borders and begin the long and difficult task of restoring relationships and trust around the world. He has committed to end Trump’s America First approach but is expected to move carefully, providing international reassurance that the United States is re-engaged with the world with a few big, symbolic acts.

It is tricky to do this sort of work when the outgoing president still remains in charge. This time around, concerns have been voiced about the unscripted actions Trump might take in the remaining weeks of his tenure and how these could damage national security.

Biden’s choice of a secretary of state will send a clear message nationally and internationally. Former UN ambassador Susan Rice is a leading candidate, but her unpopularity among Republicans might mean that the position goes to William Burns, deputy secretary of state under Obama. Placing someone with substantial state department experience at the head of that agency would restore morale there, which is reportedly at an all-time low, and provide a strong pair of hands to take on this important work while Biden is consumed with domestic issues.

The most important task for Biden in the days ahead is to project calm and order. He must continue as he has begun: turning away from harsh rhetoric and divisive language; seizing the momentum and turning it into decisive action; listening to those who didn’t vote for him — people fearful of the future thanks largely to Trump’s rhetoric — and offering them hope and substantive change. Biden has set out the vision, saying, “Let us be the nation that we know we can be. A nation united. A nation strengthened. A nation healed.” Now he and his administration must work to deliver it. •

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One by one, Trump attacked these things. He attacked Australia indirectly by undermining the things we rely on for our prosperity and security. He attacked Australia directly by threatening our exports and threatening to rip up bilateral deals agreed with the Obama administration. Uncertainty around the longstanding Australia–US alliance saw prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison scramble to keep Washington happy, often forced to choose between the alliance and Australia’s broader economic and security interests.

Many in Canberra breathed a sigh of relief when Joe Biden finally secured the 270 electoral college votes needed to become the forty-sixth president of the United States. But they shouldn’t celebrate too quickly. They should remember that, on the current numbers, almost 48 per cent of US voters backed Trump. President Biden will give the world a much-needed reprieve from Trump’s chaotic foreign policy. But he will only buy us time. The structural forces that produced Trump — most notably America’s rising inequality — haven’t gone away, and the Democrats’ failure to win the Senate means Biden will struggle to do much to deal with them. Given Trump 2.0 may be just a few years away, the question needs to be asked: is Australia too dependent on America?

President Trump was always quick to blame the rest of the world for America’s woes. Covid deaths? Blame China. Lost jobs? Blame trade. Declining wages? Blame immigrants. Declining manufacturing? Blame Germany. Declining coal industry? Blame Paris.

It was good politics. A president has little influence over domestic policy, particularly when the president’s party doesn’t have both the House and the Senate. Framing domestic problems as having global causes gave Trump policy levers to pull and the appearance of being in control. But this only worked for so long. Reality eventually caught up with him: these challenges weren’t international, they were domestic.

The evidence is clear. Countries with strong social safety nets haven’t seen the disastrous outcomes experienced in America’s rust belt. Countries with strong social safety nets have been better at spreading the benefits of trade, better at managing the downsides of trade and better at managing the transitions that come from automation and technological change. Countries with strong unions, strong productivity growth, strong competition between firms and generous social welfare payments haven’t seen the declines in wages and household incomes on the scale America has. Countries that don’t borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from overseas each year to finance government, household and business debt don’t have the big trade deficits that America has. And while Covid-19 came from overseas, almost every country in the world has used domestic policies more effectively to manage the pandemic better than America has.

So it’s little surprise that, after four years of Trump’s misdirected blame game, none of these challenges has gone away. In fact, most have got worse. It’s evidence of a failed Trump presidency. But it’s also evidence of the massive challenge facing president-elect Biden. While the race to the White House determined whether Biden would become president, the race in the Senate determined how successful his presidency would be.

There’s only so much Biden can do with regulations and executive orders. Addressing rising inequality and disadvantage in America will require deep reforms of tax and welfare systems, healthcare, labour markets and product markets, and an expanded social safety net. This is a tall order after an election in which the main line of attack was that Biden and his associates are rampant, frightening socialists.

A Trump re-election would have confirmed what America’s structural challenges already revealed: that Trump was no accident. His re-election would have sparked a global rethink of foreign policy towards America. A narrow victory for Biden is no different.

This raises difficult questions for Australia. The US alliance is the cornerstone of Australia’s foreign policy. It underpins our defence strategy. It’s more vital than ever in a world with a more assertive China, an aggressive Russia and an unstable Middle East. But the more the United States attacks the rules, norms and institutions that underpin Australia’s prosperity and security, the more strained that alliance will become. As America’s behaviour becomes more extreme, and as the cost–benefit ratio of the alliance shifts, Australia will need alternatives.

For many, the answer is a strengthened military, and even developing an Australian nuclear arsenal. But that conversation typically ends once we acknowledge the sheer scale of the investment needed, the toxic domestic politics that it would provoke, the threat of prompting a regional or even global arms race, our obligations under international law, and a host of other considerations that could actually make Australia less secure.

A better option is to build coalitions in the region, make war more expensive and strengthen multilateral institutions. Numerous countries in Asia are in the same position as Australia in trying to balance an assertive China and an unreliable America. Substantially deepening economic and military cooperation with those countries will build a powerful coalition that leverages Australia’s position.

Strengthening trade and financial links throughout the region, and bringing China and the United States into those agreements as much as possible, will make war more expensive and diplomacy the more attractive option. Strengthening multilateral institutions by better using the G20 and APEC to coordinate global actions, particularly in response to Covid-19, will help redirect difficult bilateral relationships with superpowers to forums where Australia can work collectively with like-minded countries.

These are all long-term propositions, but Biden’s election buys us the time to get started. Australia had best start preparing now so we are better placed for when Trump 2.0 arrives. •

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After eight months of scrambling to campaign during an uncontrolled pandemic and to fight off an onslaught of voter-suppression tactics, the Biden campaign found the votes it needed.

Now comes the hard part.

The lesson of these early results is twofold: proponents of democracy have reason to celebrate, and they also face a difficult road ahead. Nowhere were these twin lessons more fully on display than in Trump’s speech at 2am on election night. Over the course of a falsehood-filled ten minutes, the president declared the ongoing ballot count a “fraud on the American public,” despite no evidence of voter fraud. He announced he would go to the Supreme Court to freeze the ballot count and falsely declared himself the winner of the election.

It was precisely what he had said he would do, confirming once more that he will use any combination of threats and power to maintain his hold on the American presidency. This has been the core of Trumpian politics since his first campaign, when he frequently encouraged violence at his rallies — even offering to bail out any supporter who got arrested for assaulting a protester — and repeatedly refused to say he would accept the results of the election.

It has also been the case throughout his presidency. He has transformed the Department of Justice, especially the attorney-general, into his personal fixer. He also sought to leverage US support to Ukraine for help creating a scandal about Joe Biden’s family (that’s why he was impeached).

But it’s the escalation over the past several months that has been the most alarming. In June the president sent federal forces to gas peaceful protesters outside the White House. The White House erected a new fence that pushed back the perimeter around the building, which was pushed back even further earlier this week. And now he has made good on his promise to try to have lawfully cast ballots rejected so he can retain his hold on the presidency.

It’s good for supporters of democracy that, in three months, Donald Trump will no longer have access to the power of the presidential office. But to move away from the minoritarian structures that gave rise to the Trump administration, the United States needs fixes that go far beyond a single election held under extraordinary circumstances. It needs significant institutional reforms: for voting rights, for courts, for districting.

Should the Senate remain in Republican hands, those reforms will remain out of reach, as will almost all of the Biden agenda for pandemic relief, immigration, climate change and healthcare. Americans remain smitten with the idea of bipartisan governance, but seem to forget that it requires two willing parties. As Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has repeatedly demonstrated, the Republicans have little interest in working with Democrats. In fact, a Biden administration will almost certainly struggle to fill Senate-confirmed cabinet positions and open judgeships.

That is the bleak reality a Biden administration will likely face come January. But it matters that Barack Obama’s vice-president is the one preparing to assume the presidency. Even before the end of his first term, Obama’s team had begun working on a plan to carry out its agenda without legislation. And what they found is that they could make people’s lives significantly better even as Republicans in Congress blockaded Democratic bills.

So what can a Biden administration do? First, it can reopen the country to refugees and asylum seekers while repealing the entry ban targeting majority-Muslim nations. It can work to reunite the families shattered by child separation. It can restore recognition and protection for trans people. It can reinstitute consent decrees with police departments across the country — a critical tool for criminal justice reform — and continue the Obama administration’s project of extending clemency to nonviolent drug offenders. It can rebuild the independence of the Justice Department and return to the strict ethical standards of the Obama administration, key moves that can begin restoring the rule of law.

Is it enough? No. But it’s a start — a beginning to a generational effort not just to renew Americans’ faith in democracy but to create, perhaps for the first time, a fully inclusive democracy in the United States. •

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This might be the most important election in our lifetimes, a critical moment for a nation in crisis and a world facing complex challenges. The size of the turnout (both early and on the day) attests to voters’ awareness of that fact.

As I write this, Joe Biden is ahead in the popular and electoral college votes, but key states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan can’t yet be called. Although he appears to have lost some states he was hopeful of winning, he is still more likely than Trump to gain the 270 electoral college votes necessary to take office.

Whether Democrats will win back the Senate is also unclear. A failure to do so would hamstring Biden’s capacity to make key appointments and pursue his legislative program. Whatever the final outcome, this isn’t the result Democrats hoped for; but neither is it the one Trump touted.

Trump voters see his return for four more years as the nation’s safeguard against internal threats from socialism, anarchy and violence, and external threats from nuclear attack and biased trade deals. They are worried about the erosion of their freedoms and fearful of “big government.”

Biden voters primarily want a return to normalcy. That means bringing the pandemic under control, creating the conditions for people to go to work or school, and seeing Congress and an administration focused on dealing with their needs and concerns, including high-quality affordable healthcare, education, climate change and racial justice. They abhor Trump’s language and behaviour and their impact locally and internationally.

Essentially, though, the election was a referendum on Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic. But even that issue played out in a highly partisan way, with CNN exit polls showing that about seven in ten Trump voters say the economy should have priority over containing the coronavirus, while nearly eight in ten Biden voters see managing the pandemic as more important than rebuilding the economy. Trump supporters view law and order as important; Biden supporters rank racial equity higher.

For Australians, it is shocking to see the Trump administration, despite the pandemic’s huge toll and impact on the healthcare system, still pressing the US Supreme Court to abolish Obamacare. Yet, with local economies in ruins and job losses climbing, people still came out to vote in such substantial numbers for Trump and the Republicans.

On the other hand, despite the Biden campaign’s efforts not to repeat the recognised failures of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and despite Biden’s commitment to the Black Lives Matter cause, it is clear that there was a failure to pay sufficient attention to the concerns of African Americans and Latinos, perhaps because their support was taken for granted.

The behaviour of the candidates late on election night was typical of the way the campaign was conducted. Biden made a public statement saying “it ain’t over yet” and calling on people to be patient. Trump tweeted that Democrats are trying to steal the election, then gave a speech that derided current counts as “a fraud on the nation,” prematurely declared victory, and pledged to ask the US Supreme Court to stop further counting of votes. This was incendiary stuff, the like of which has not been seen before on election night in the United States. As anticipated, Trump is trying to delegitimise the election process.

As reported by Jonathan Swan of Axios, Trump and his White House have long planned to ensure that election night didn’t end with a concession speech. He apparently talked through in some detail plans to declare victory if it looks like he’s “ahead,” even if large numbers of votes were still uncounted in Pennsylvania and other key states.

While he denied he would do this, he then went on to state that ballots should not be collected and counted after election day. “I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election… We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers… [I]f people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before that.”

Typically, this kind of wrangling has been pre-empted when news outlets have declared winners on the night of the election using partial counts and exit polls, which allow them to see how much of the vote is going to which candidate and calculate whether a candidate has a path to victory.

What happens now is that the electoral process proceeds as it has always done, slowed a little because of the enormous numbers of early ballots to be counted under rules that differ from state to state. Each state has its own laws governing when it needs to certify the election’s results, and none stipulate election day itself. (Biden’s home state of Delaware, in fact, is the only state that will certify its results within the same week as election day.) Most states will certify their results in the last two weeks of November, with some extending until the second week of December. The winner should be clear well before then, however.

In the lead-up to the election, American voters described their fundamental unease about America’s future. The delay in a clear result will test whether the American people can at least unite in exhibiting patience with the process, and whether the nation’s institutions are strong enough to withstand authoritarian efforts to override due process. •

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