Vietnam, Israel, Ukraine, and the Fluidity of Global Politics

 

By David K. Shipler 

                We have entered a period of flux in international alignments. After decades of relative stability in the so-called “world order,” interests are being recalculated and affinities revised. It is a risky, promising, uncertain time.

Vietnam and the United States, once enemies, have just announced a comprehensive strategic partnership, whatever that might mean. Israel and Saudi Arabia are on the cusp of putting aside their longstanding antagonism in favor of diplomatic and commercial ties. The Saudis and Americans are exploring a mutual defense treaty. Russia seems poised to swap technology for artillery shells from its problematic neighbor, North Korea, once kept at arm’s length. Russia and China are making inroads in some mineral-rich African countries, at the West’s expense. A rising China has adopted a forward military posture, threatening Taiwan more acutely than in decades. Ukraine is lobbying anxiously for its survival against Russian conquest as doubts about continuing aid arise from a wing of Republicans in a party once hawkish on national security.

Upheavals such as these will require deft statesmanship. Both Beijing and Moscow are bent on denying Washington what they call the American “hegemony” that has mostly prevailed since World War Two. The Chinese and Russian leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, proselytize for a multipolar world, which appeals to developing countries resentful of post-colonial hardships. (Don’t they realize that Russia is the more recent colonial power, fighting to reimpose its historic colonialism on Ukraine?)

The global turmoil has tossed up a key choice for Americans: How engaged or how withdrawn shall we be? How entangled? How aloof? This will be an unwritten question on next year’s ballots. Both Putin and Xi will be watching. They surely hope for victory by the American neo-isolationism represented by hard-right Republicans—including Donald Trump. No such administration would stand astride the shifting tectonics of the emerging globe.

Ukraine is a litmus test. No matter the obscenities committed by Russia against helpless civilians. No matter Russia’s martial expansionism in the heart of Europe. No matter the mantle of democracy and freedom proudly worn by the United States. The extreme Republican right is playing on the ethnocentrism of its base and a weariness of foreign involvements.

The Republicans' Pro-Poverty Program

                                                             By David K. Shipler

                An irony of Donald Trump’s appeal to struggling, working-class Americans is his party’s complete indifference to their financial hardships. Wherever government can rescue people with direct cash assistance, Republicans are opposed. Wherever government can expand proven programs of aid—in health care, housing, food, day care--Republicans are opposed. See now how some Republicans are coming around to a thinly bipartisan infrastructure bill aimed at only things—bridges, highways, and the like—but are apoplectic over President Biden’s bill to help people. Things vs. people: no contest among the people’s representatives in the Republican Party.

                That coldness is compounded by uninformed moral judgments against those near the bottom. They have long been smeared by conservative Republicans as lazy, undeserving, and unlikely to strive upward without negative incentives—in other words, a whip at their backs.

Punitive provisions are almost invariably woven into Republican-sponsored policy. Assume that they don’t want to work, so cut off their $300-a-week cushion in unemployment benefits. Blame them for not taking low-wage jobs that can’t support their families, yet adamantly oppose raising the federal minimum wage to make those jobs worth having. Condition certain benefits on proof that they seek work or job training, pass drug tests, and avoid arrest—stipulations not made when the affluent get government subsidies and tax breaks such as the home mortgage interest deduction.

                Americans generally, even those technically below the official poverty line, don’t want to think of themselves as “poor,” since the society inflicts shame on the deprived. And those just above poverty, including many of Trump’s white supporters who are highly vulnerable to financial disruption, don’t display much empathy for those a notch or two beneath them. But they should, as many fell into disastrous misfortune during the pandemic and might well press the Republicans they elect to give them something back in return for their votes. 

Biden and Putin at a Crossroads

 

By David K. Shipler 

                If President Biden were to act on all the competing (and unsolicited) advice that he’s getting about how to handle Vladimir Putin when they meet tomorrow in Geneva, here’s how it would go: Threaten to harden sanctions, promise to relax them. Threaten to invite Ukraine into NATO, promise not to. Brandish cyber weaponry against Russian infrastructure, propose a cyber treaty against hacking and ransomware. Trumpet outrage over Russia’s rights abuses, make the points quietly and create a working group of mid-level officials for private discussions. Rattle the nuclear saber, seek new arms control. Compete in the Arctic, cooperate in the Arctic. And so on.

It is crucial to get this right, not only to reduce the risk of nuclear miscalculation but also to forestall a dangerous new alignment between Russia and China. A Russian-Chinese rapprochement has been discussed for more than two decades. “If the West Continues the Expansion, Moscow Will Drive East,” was the headline of a 1997 piece by Alexei Arbatov, head of the International Security Center at Russia’s Institute of World Economy and International Relations. It’s not a prospect that has delighted Arbatov. “We currently have wonderful relations,” he said a year ago, “but Russia needs to keep its distance. We cannot go back and forth between extremes, from China being the world's greatest threat to it being our strategic ally or partner.”

A couple of old jokes from Soviet days underscore the issue. One quotes a headline from fifty years in the future: “All Quiet on the Finnish-Chinese border.”

Another is one that Biden could update at his summit.

Putin: Joe, I had a dream last night that Washington was all in red. The White House was red, the Capitol was red, there were red banners everywhere.

Biden: What a coincidence, Vladimir! I had a dream last night that Moscow was all in red. The Kremlin walls were red, there were red stars on the towers, there were red banners across the streets.

Putin: What’s so strange about that? What did the banners say?

Biden: I don’t know. I can’t read Chinese.

Putin has surely heard this joke, so if he has even a shred of self-deprecating humor, he’d probably steal the punch line before Biden could get it out.

MACA: Make America Competent Again

 

By David K. Shipler 

The first in an occasional series 

                Perhaps the word “again” should be put in quotes or parentheses or followed by a question mark, because while the United States has done a lot of things very well through its history, incompetence has also plagued governmental behavior in areas ranging from foreign affairs to poverty. A frequent hallmark of failure has been the unwillingness to apply what we know to what we do. Expertise does not get translated into policy.

                The most obvious recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic, where the Trump administration’s floundering cost lives and worsened economic hardship. But the gap between knowledge and practice inhibits problem-solving in many fields. If you add up all of society’s accumulated understanding about the causes of poverty, for example, or about the sources of conflict in one or another region of the world, and then compare that knowledge with the actions being taken, it looks as if knowledge gets filtered out through a fine sieve before it gets to the policy level.

The Vietnam War was such a case. The US government saw North Vietnam as a Chinese and Soviet proxy in the vanguard of communism, and therefore a threat to American security. But historians knew that Vietnam had resisted China for centuries. And so could any American soldier or diplomat in Saigon who bothered to notice how many streets were named for Vietnamese heroes in the long campaigns against Chinese occupation. It should have been no mystery to American policymakers that the war, for Hanoi, was the continuation of a long anti-colonialist struggle, not one fought to spread global communism.

The dilution of expertise in making policy can be seen in the Middle East, Russia, China, and other parts of the world. The same is true at home. Much is known about how to treat prisoners to reduce recidivism rates, how to prevent police from extracting false confessions, how to provide good defense attorneys for indigent defendants, how to curtail global warming, how to clean up air and water, how to make workplaces safer, how to reduce suicides (gun control), how to treat mental illness, and on and on.

Accumulated knowledge about poverty is not put to good use. We know how to alleviate housing problems in America; it’s a matter of money. We know how to eliminate malnutrition—also a matter of money. We know how to raise workers’ skills and make work pay enough to sustain a family. We know how to provide decent medical care. We know how to improve education. True, some of our abilities diminish along the more difficult part of the spectrum—we are confounded by child abuse, drug abuse, gang violence, racism, white supremacy, and harmful parenting. But we know how to ease many other hardships.

The Religion of Democracy

By David K. Shipler 

                If America has a state religion, the historian Robert Kelley used to say, it is constitutional democracy. Among all the rancorous arguments across the American spectrum, no compelling bid to abandon the Constitution can be heard. No rhetorical attack on democracy is made. No threat to the nation, no fear of insecurity provokes such apostasy.

Even those who would undermine the Constitution, including the Capitol rioters, have acted in its name. Thus did Donald Trump’s appeals to “stop the steal” of the election intone the mantra of democracy, not the authoritarian rule he was attempting to install. Democracy was hailed by rioters who believed that they were fighting to defend it even as their insurrection moved to take it down.

That profound hypocrisy becomes less puzzling when Constitutional democracy is seen as religious. For religion can be perverted. It can be rationalized into destruction, as a world full of religious violence has witnessed. A creed can be selectively interpreted, twisted to fit parochial interests, and ignited as a call to arms. A religion’s righteous purity can be contaminated with hatred, which is then fueled by religion’s righteous certainty. No secular reasoning can rebut the divine inspiration, the holy cause. If it is for good, then that is good. But it is not always so.

American democracy is often elevated with religious language: “sacred,” “desecrate,” “temple.” Both sides in the Capitol invasion of January 6 used the terms. The lone police officer who tried to coax rioters out of the Senate chamber said gently, “Just want to let you guys know, this is the sacredest place.”

As the mobs roamed the halls searching for legislators to kidnap or kill, Trump tweeted, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots. . . . Remember this day forever!”

 Once the Senate was taken back, Senator Dick Durbin declared on the floor: “This is a sacred place. But this sacred place was desecrated by a mob today on our watch. This temple to democracy was defiled by thugs, who roamed the halls — sat in that chair, Mr. Vice President — one that you vacated at 2:15 this afternoon.”

President Biden, in his inaugural address, hailed the survival of democracy against those who sought “to drive us from this sacred ground.”