Why Isn't Washington Merry?

 Why Isn't Washington Merry?

Dec 7, 2021

ELIZABETH DREW

With yet another new viral strain threatening the recovery, US President Joe Biden's honeymoon period is long over, as evidenced by his falling approval ratings. But, in fact, morale is declining on both sides of the aisle as politicians navigate the no man's land between ineffectiveness and extremism.

WASHINGTON, DC – The lighting of Christmas trees notwithstanding, Washington is an unhappy place. Indeed, I’ve never seen the city so glum. This applies to members of both political parties as well as those without much ideology. Trajectories that measure a president’s performance have been going down, and, as President Joe Biden is learning painfully (if he didn’t know already), it’s easier for a president’s job approval ratings to go down than to propel them upward again.

The principal reason that Biden did well in his presidency’s early weeks is not difficult to identify: he isn’t Donald Trump. Biden appeared calm, confident, and sure-footed. He appeared to value governing and to know what he was doing. No surprise here, as Biden had been in the Senate for 36 years and then for eight years was vice president to the largely successful Barack Obama.

After some hiccups, Biden picked a largely respectable Cabinet. The emphasis on diversity, almost to the point of religious belief and with a touch of comedy, slowed down many appointments, and is still doing so with regard to ambassadorships. That a large number remain unfilled after nearly a year isn’t just the fault of a few obdurate Republican senators, in particular Ted Cruz, the undomesticated right-winger from Texas and his fellow agitator Josh Hawley, of Missouri. Both men also encouraged the attempt on January 6, 2021, to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

Among the long list of countries to which Biden has yet to even nominate an ambassador are South Korea, Italy, the Philippines, and the Czech Republic. Among the major countries to which ambassadorial nominations are stalled on Capitol Hill are China, Japan, France, India, and Pakistan. As an international crisis can erupt almost anywhere, at any time, the United States is woefully unprepared to cope in too many places.

The political fortunes of a president often depend on luck, and after a few months Biden’s began to turn. Numerous observers, myself included, believe that Biden would have survived the almost universally unfair characterizations of the withdrawal from Afghanistan had bad luck not followed. For a while, Biden appeared to have a grip on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic – in contrast to the reckless Trump. But Biden’s apparent competence in handling the pandemic was undermined by two successive variants: the Delta outbreak, the most virulent thus far, coincided with his approval ratings going south in August. And now the Omicron variant is spreading fast. The relentlessness of the pandemic has led to the dispiriting thought that life might now be masks and restrictions – and untimely deaths – in perpetuity.

Even more dispiriting, it’s actually the case that some key Republican governors – Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas – and members of congress such as Cruz and Hawley have been opposing vaccinations and mandates because this could damage Biden and other Democrats in upcoming elections.  

One more problem confronting Biden is his lack of a commanding presence. His normality, at first so welcome, has been transformed in the eyes of many into boringness. Biden lacks wit; we don’t quote him. Defenders of Biden point out, accurately, that, lack of dazzle notwithstanding, he’s won substantial legislative victories, and they dismiss the pizzazz of a John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Obama, or even Trump as a superficiality. But a president has to be able to lead, to move people.

Democrats’ morale isn’t helped by the evident flailing of Kamala Harris’s vice presidency. Under pressure to select a woman of color as his running mate – a first – Biden selected Harris despite her mediocre performance as a candidate for the nomination, a Senatorial colleague of hers and friend of his says, “because he wanted to win.” She had the backing of prominent blacks.

The same problems cited for her failed presidential campaign have plagued her vice-presidency: staff turmoil and a lack of clarity about what she stands for. The turmoil and extensive departures among her staff are particularly corrosive in Washington, which largely judges politicians according to the quality and loyalty of their staff. Politicians’ staffs don’t mind working hard or enduring the occasional berating if the aide admires the boss. But when berating elides into bullying – as has been reliably reported in the cases of Harris and one of her competitors in 2020, Senator Amy Klobuchar – this gets around town fast and besmirches the politician’s name.

Biden can do nothing to prevent the Supreme Court from overturning or severely limiting the near-50-year-old Roe v Wade decision. Except for the minority of Americans who support the pro-life – or anti-abortion – bent of six of the nine members of the Court, the oral argument, on December 1, was a dismaying if not depressing display of political arrogance rather than of judicial temperament. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s listing of Court decisions that overruled precedent, confusing the decisions he listed, which almost entirely expanded rights, with the case before them, Dobbs v. Jackson, which would substantially limit – and possibly end – abortion rights, showed that he might be more ambitious than intelligent.

Many critics of the conservative or even radical Justices’ performance on abortion warned that it might undermine the institution’s legitimacy, but it can be argued that that had already happened. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, after all, are now raw, partisan slug matches, with the last three Justices named by Trump under questionable circumstances. In the argument over the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs, all exposed themselves to be, as Trump promised, opponents of Roe. When asked by senators in their confirmation process whether they’d respect precedent (meaning Roe) they’d simply lied.  

Unless the Court decides something miraculously unrepresentative of the way that the reactionary Justices behaved on December 1, what remains of its legitimacy will be gone. Roe drew a clear line; muddy or remove that line and chaos will ensue. More than 20 states are ready to immediately outlaw abortion, with no exceptions for incest or rape, as provided under current law.

The raw slugfests that now characterize Supreme Court nominations are reflective of what has happened to American politics. The old norms that made the legislative process work, if with increasing creakiness, have virtually disappeared. Individual senators, of both parties, put their own interests, perhaps financial, above those of party – in the case of the Democrats even if it damages the political standing of their president, which in the end jeopardizes what they profess, however sincerely, to believe in.

Elizabeth Drew

ELIZABETH DREW

Writing for PS since 2015

Elizabeth Drew is a Washington-based journalist and the author, most recently, of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall.

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What Really Matters in the Sino-American Competition?

Dec 6, 2021

JOSEPH S. NYE, JR.

Although the United States has long commanded the technological cutting edge, China is mounting a credible challenge in key areas. But, ultimately, the balance of power will be decided not by technological development but by diplomacy and strategic choices, both at home and abroad.

CAMBRIDGE – The United States and China are competing for dominance in technology. America has long been at the forefront in developing the technologies (bio, nano, information) that are central to economic growth in the twenty-first century. Moreover, US research universities dominate higher education globally. In Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s annual Academic Ranking of World Universities, 16 of the top 20 institutions are in the US; none is in China.

RICARDO HAUSMANN shows how the relocation of energy-intensive industries will force a rethink of national economic strategies.

But China is investing heavily in research and development, and it is already competing with the US in key fields, not least artificial intelligence (AI), where it aims to be the global leader by 2030. Some experts believe that China is well placed to achieve that goal, owing to its enormous data resources, a lack of privacy restraints on how that data is used, and the fact that advances in machine learning will require trained engineers more than cutting-edge scientists. Given the importance of machine learning as a general-purpose technology that affects many other domains, China’s gains in AI are of particular significance.

Moreover, Chinese technological progress is no longer based solely on imitation. Former US President Donald Trump’s administration punished China for its cybertheft of intellectual property, coerced IP transfers, and unfair trade practices. Insisting on reciprocity, the US argued that if China could ban Google and Facebook from its market for security reasons, the US can take similar steps against Chinese giants like Huawei and ZTE. But China is still innovating.

After the 2008 global financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession, Chinese leaders increasingly came to believe that America was in decline. Abandoning Deng Xiaoping’s moderate policy of keeping a low profile and biding one’s time, China adopted a more assertive approach that included building (and militarizing) artificial islands in the South China Sea, economic coercion against Australia, and the abrogation of its guarantees with respect to Hong Kong. In response, some people in the US began to talk about the need for a general “decoupling.” But as important as it is to unwind technology supply chains that directly relate to national security, it is a mistake to think that the US can decouple its economy completely from China without incurring enormous costs.

That deep economic interdependence is what makes the US relationship with China different from its relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. With the Soviets, the US was playing a one-dimensional chess game in which the two sides were highly interdependent in the military sphere but not in economic or transnational relations.

With China, by contrast, the US is playing three-dimensional chess with vastly different distributions of power at the military, economic, and transnational levels. If we ignore the power relations on the economic or transnational boards, not to mention the vertical interactions between the boards, we will suffer. A good China strategy therefore must avoid military determinism and encompass all three dimensions of interdependence.

The rules governing economic relations will need to be revised. Well before the pandemic, China’s hybrid state capitalism followed a mercantilist model that distorted the functioning of the World Trade Organization and contributed to the rise of disruptive populism in Western democracies.

Today, America’s allies are far more cognizant of the security and political risks entailed in China’s espionage, coerced technology transfers, strategic commercial interactions, and asymmetric agreements. The result will be more decoupling of technology supply chains, particularly where national security is at stake. Negotiating new trade rules can help prevent that decoupling from escalating. Against this backdrop, middle powers could come together to create a trade agreement for information and communication technology that would be open to countries meeting basic democratic standards.

One size will not fit all. In areas like nuclear non-proliferation, peacekeeping, public health, and climate change, the US can find common institutional ground with China. But in other areas, it makes more sense to set our own democratic standards. The door can remain open to China in the long run; but we should accept that the run could be very long indeed.

Notwithstanding China’s growing strength and influence, working with likeminded partners would improve the odds that liberal norms prevail in the trade and technology domains. Establishing a stronger transatlantic consensus on global governance is important. But only by cooperating with Japan, South Korea, and other Asian economies can the West shape global trade and investment rules and standards for technology, thereby ensuring a more level playing field for companies operating abroad.

Taken together, democratic countries’ economies will exceed China’s well into this century; but only if they pull together. That diplomatic factor will be more important than the question of China’s technological development. In assessing the future of the US-China power balance, technology matters, but alliances matter even more.

Finally, a successful US response to China’s technological challenge will depend upon improvements at home as much as on external actions. Increased support for research and development is important. Complacency is always a danger, but so, too, is lack of confidence or an overreaction driven by exaggerated fears. As former MIT Provost John Deutch contends, if the US attains its improvements in innovation potential, “China’s great leap forward will likely at best be a few steps toward closing the innovation leadership gap that the United States currently enjoys.”

Immigration also will play an important role in maintaining America’s technology lead. In 2015, when I asked former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew why he did not think China would surpass the US, he pointed to America’s ability to draw upon the talents of the whole world – a possibility that is barred by China’s ethnic Han nationalism. It is no accident that many Silicon Valley companies have Asian founders or CEOs.

With enough time and travel, technology inevitably spreads. If the US lets its fears about tech leakage shut it off from such valuable human imports, it will surrender one of its biggest advantages. An overly restrictive immigration policy could severely curtail technological innovation – a fact that must not get lost in the heated politics of strategic competition.

JOSEPH S. NYE, JR.

Writing for PS since 2002

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is a professor at Harvard University and author of Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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