A dangerous duo for Biden administration
In North Korea and Taiwan, President Joe Biden faces two of the world’s most dangerous problems. His challenge is to convince potential adversaries that a politically divided United States is stronger than it looks.
Biden sounded a firm note on both fronts Thursday during his first formal news conference. He warned North Korea that “there will be a response” if it continues its recent missile tests, but he also offered “some form of diplomacy” with “the end result of denuclearization” of North Korea.
On China, Biden pledged “steep, steep competition” by reinvesting in science at home and U.S. alliances abroad. But he also affirmed his personal relationship with President Xi Jinping, whom he called “a smart, smart guy.”
Biden’s performance on Thursday underlined that his priority, for now, is domestic reconstruction rather than foreign intervention. On Afghanistan, for example, he came close to setting a year-end deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops, even though a political framework for power sharing and a cease-fire aren’t yet in place. This position will disappoint some of Biden’s military advisers, who favor an open-ended, conditionsbased approach.
North Korea recently delivered a fiery calling card by launching a series of short-range missiles. Biden initially dismissed the tests as “business as usual,” but he said yes when asked Thursday whether he agreed with former President Barack Obama that North Korea was the most important foreign policy issue.
The president’s aides are debating how to frame a peace initiative that would take up where the Trump administration’s showy diplomacy left off.
North Korea offers a rare example of where President Donald Trump prepared carefully for a diplomatic pressure campaign. After just three months in office, Trump hosted Xi at his Mar-a-lago Club — enlisting Xi as a diplomatic partner in squeezing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. In the end, Trump got little to show for his leverage, except three meetings with Kim.
Biden has taken the opposite opening move with Xi’s China. Instead of sunny Palm Beach, Fla., the initial venue was the deep freeze of Anchorage. During the encounter this month between
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and their Chinese counterparts, both sides sought to demonstrate resolve for what Chinese official media have called a period of “protracted struggle.”
Taiwan is where Chinese overconfidence seems most likely to produce a dangerous miscalculation. U.S. officials in Anchorage came away worried that Xi might be preparing to abandon the ambiguous but relatively stable status quo in Taiwan — described in the nearly 50-year-old formula of “one China” but two governments — in favor of a risky push for reunification.
Taiwan poses an interesting test of whether Chinese leaders really believe their rhetoric about American decline. If Xi thinks the United States’ demise is permanent and irreversible, the wise course presumably would be to wait until America is even weaker. But if Xi instead fears a U.S. rebound, then he might be tempted to act more quickly.
“China seems to be believing its own narrative about U.S. decline — thinking, ‘This is China’s moment.’ If they believe that, it raises the risk of miscalculation,” Michèle Flournoy, former undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, warned tlast week.
But Bonnie Glaser, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, took a more sanguine view.
“Xi’s priority is to deter Taiwan’s independence, and China has achieved that objective, at least for the time being,” Glaser argued. “Reunification is a clear goal, but it isn’t an urgent priority. Xi is not willing to risk all his other domestic objectives to achieve it.”
For all of China’s newfound confidence, its leaders seem to want regular dialogue with the United States, rather than a sharp rupture. As diplomats Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi left the meeting with Blinken and Sullivan, they proposed a reciprocal meeting in China.
“Thank you,” said Blinken, and the Chinese kept pressing (apparently without success) to find out whether that meant yes.
Since Anchorage, Chinese think tanks have been using a phrase that means “hit, hit, talk, talk” to describe what’s ahead with the United States, according to one top Sinologist.
The “hit, hit” part of that formula carries significant risks — especially if China continues to believe that a weakened America isn’t ready to fight back.
President Joe Biden’s performance Thursday underlined that his priority, for now, is domestic reconstruction rather than foreign intervention. This position will disappoint some of Biden’s military advisers.
The recent immigration surge at the Texas border is manufactured by decades of America intervening to prop up right-wing, South American dictators. This faux “crisis” is the new threat used by Republicans to deflect attention from the forthcoming trials of those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
In Texas, the “immigration crisis” serves as a counter-narrative to the winter 2021 debacle under Gov. Greg Abbott’s watch and the looming battle to rein in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
U.S. foreign policies have drained Latin American countries of their natural resources — such as coffee, sugar, bananas, oil and cotton products — while destabilizing their economies and making them interdependent, author Roberto Saviano wrote in “The Migrant Caravan: Made in USA,” published in 2019. When South American farmers shifted to harvesting cocoa leaves for cocaine and marijuana for consumption in America, the U.S. drug war went into full bloom.
Another example of U.S. exploitation is the infamous Irancontra affair in the late 1980s involving Ronald Reagan’s fall guy, Oliver North. Documents declassified from the National Security Archive cite North as informing Robert Owen, a liaison for the State Department, on Aug. 8, 1985, that a “DC-6 which is being used for runs (to supply the Contras) out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S.”
Our country’s history on immigration is a complex battle of ideology: One side is inextricably bound by bigotry; the other is tied to the spirit of generosity and renewal of America shaped by people who come here.
Immigrants take the low-paying, backbreaking jobs many Americans refuse to do. “The Immigration Charade,” written by Christopher Jencks in 2007, states that “employers say that foreign-born workers tend to work harder, be more reliable, and complain less than the natives they can hire at the same wage. Unskilled immigrants have seldom finished secondary school, but they have overcome all kinds of obstacles both to get here and to stay here.”
Of course, many of these immigrants would prefer to live in their own countries — but hurricanes, climate-change crop failures and failed U.S. foreign policies have disrupted their economies. These are the political consequences of empire-building and massive immigration that Juan Gonzalez explains in “Harvest of Empire.”
About half of undocumented U.S. workers pay income tax. They help fund public schools and local government services by paying sales and property taxes like any resident. They contributed “about $10.6 billion in state and local taxes in 2010,” according to research from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
But what about undocumented migrants who use fake Social
Security cards? The Social Security system has become reliant on their contributions as baby boomers retire.
Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, estimated that in 2010 about 1.8 million immigrants worked with fake or stolen Social Security cards but expects that number to reach 3.4 million by 2040. According to his calculations, “undocumented immigrants paid $13 billion into the retirement trust fund that year, and only got $1 billion in benefits.” That’s a nice tidy sum for baby boomers.
Former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party turbocharged the nastiest rhetoric about immigrants since Woodrow Wilson and calculatingly stoked xenophobic fears through Ann Coulter’s “¡Adios America!” — turning its racist theories of immigrant “invasion” and “infestation” into existential threats aimed toward an implicitly evangelical conservative America.
Are the words “In God We Trust” only for show and exchange of capital?