Welcome to Home & Away. This week overlapped with the final full week of the Biden presidency. So, we will devote a good deal of this edition of the newsletter to the 46th president.
Legacy
Joe Biden delivered his Farewell Address on Wednesday night. In the course of researching and writing my last book, I read all the farewell addresses, and quite a few are memorable. Washington’s is perhaps the most famous, but I am also a fan of Eisenhower’s and Reagan’s. The best look forward, not back. They are more about proffering advice of what to do and avoid than recounting their accomplishments.
Biden’s was a mixed bag. It appeared to be a speech written by committee. There was too much about his big initiatives tied to the hope they would be more appreciated with the passage of time. A grab bag of ideas was put forward: enacting term limits for Supreme Court justices; banning stock trading for members of Congress; doing more to combat climate change; getting rid of so-called dark money in political campaigns; placing limits on presidential immunity; finding a way to rein in the dangerous aspects of AI.
But the part of the address that got the most attention and is likely to endure was Biden’s calling out of the uber-rich and powerful in this country who will have considerable sway within and over the new administration. He warned of the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” Channeling President Eisenhower, Biden warned of a “tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.”
I saw this all as an attempt to define populism not in the Trumpian sense of opposition to the “Deep State” and highly-educated cultural elites promoting their agendas on climate change, vaccines, and wokeness, but instead in a manner Democrats and many Americans could rally around. There were clear echoes of the Progressive Era in the attacks on today’s robber barons. This is a theme that has the potential to resonate.
The farewell address will not do a lot to shape Biden’s legacy, and my take on his legacy as president is admittedly tough. For starters, while I agree with the allies-first bias of his foreign policy and much of what was done with and for Ukraine, I also disagree with a good many specific decisions and policies: the withdrawal from Afghanistan; the absence of any trade or international economic policy; not addressing war aims for the Ukraine war and thereby committing ourselves to a strategy that could not succeed; the unwillingness to confront the destructive aspects of Israeli behavior in Gaza or the West Bank; the failure for several years to thwart illegal entry into the country across the southern border; and the blocking of the Nippon Steel takeover of U.S. Steel.
And second, as the title of the piece I wrote and have linked below suggests, a good deal of Biden’s approach to the world is unlikely to survive four more years of his successor. And Biden is in no small part responsible for his successor being his successor on account of his border policy, the over-heating of the economy, and, more than anything, his decision to stay in the race even when it was increasingly clear he was no longer up to the job and had lost the support of a majority of the American people. Here is a link to my piece.
Post-Mortem
When it comes to the fires that continue to burn in California, we need a rigorous post-mortem, not in the sense of understanding why some two dozen people have perished, but in learning the right lessons to increase the odds we have fewer and less destructive fires like these in the future. Much of the conversation surrounding the fires has centered around the performance of officials. There has also been an emphasis on readiness: the number of firefighters, fire trucks, and specialized aircraft, available water, and so on. All these elements contributed to the response. From all accounts, the response could and should have been better, but even if it had been, there is little reason to believe it would have made more than a marginal difference given the scale and number of fires.
All of which leads to a second basket of issues: steps to reduce the susceptibility of the area to the sort of destruction we have seen. Here we are talking about building codes for houses, provisions for setbacks of trees and shrubs, zoning regulations regarding housing density, controlled pruning and burns, burying power lines, and the like.
Both of these baskets need to be an essential component of any conversation about the way forward and rebuilding the destroyed areas. The insurance industry and, at some point, the state will require it. It will be expensive and force some painful economic and lifestyle choices.
The focus on all of the above does not mean that climate change played no role in what happened. To the contrary, it is climate change that so contributed to making the area ripe for the sort of crisis that occurred. But the focus of Los Angeles and California should not be principally on climate change, as there is little either could do that would make a meaningful difference to global efforts to combat climate change or on what climate change has done or will do to make the region vulnerable to massive fires over the next decade or two. The focus at this juncture ought to instead be on increasing resilience and promoting adaptation.
Free At Last
We seem to have a deal, or phase one of a deal, between Israel and Hamas. According to reports, Hamas is to release 33 hostages in the first stage, which is to last 42 days. Israel in return is to release 30 Palestinian prisoners for each civilian hostage, and 50 for each female soldier. Israeli forces are also to gradually withdraw from populated areas in Gaza. Additional humanitarian aid will be sent in, and certain Gazan residents will be allowed to return to what is left of their homes.
Negotiations are to begin after some 16 days on the implementation of the second phase, also planned to last 42 days. (If these negotiations take longer, the ceasefire is meant to continue.) During this second phase, Hamas is to release the remaining living male hostages (soldiers and civilians) in exchange for the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. There is also a third phase, one meant to involve an exchange of the bodies of dead hostages for dead Hamas members along with the formal end of the war and the reconstruction and rebuilding of Gaza.
Despite reported last-minute hiccups that, depending on your sources, involve splits within Israel’s ruling coalition or backtracking by Hamas, I would think there is a high likelihood that the Israeli government confirms the deal today and the first phase actually happens. The second phase is much more uncertain given what it asks of Israel and the coalition dynamics of this Israeli government. But I still think it somewhat more likely than not to go ahead because of the pressure to secure the freedom of the remaining hostages. There is no reason to be at all optimistic about the ambitious third phase at this point.
Why did this accord come about now? My guess is the Trump administration-to-be, preferring not to have the hostages and an ongoing war in Gaza on its plate, leaned on Bibi Netanyahu (who didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the new U.S. president) to sign on even though Israel had failed to “eliminate” Hamas. And the weakening of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran led Hamas to agree even though it didn’t get the full withdrawal and open-ended ceasefire it sought in the first phase. Clearly, there is much more drama and disagreement to come.
Transition
Most of Home and Away this week properly focused on the 46th president along with the wildfires. But we are also entering the final few days of the presidential transition. Hearings are under way. Nominations continue to pile up. Most if not all appear likely to sail through, in part because Republicans have the votes, in part because Democrats have not been terribly effective in exposing the shortcomings of the nominees.
The questioning of Pete Hegseth was a case in point, as almost all of the questions were focused on personal behavior and views of women rather than on the nominee’s views on what more he would advise doing to deter China from attacking Taiwan, whether he agreed with the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, whether he favors a preventive attack against Iran’s nuclear installations, his views on the deployment of the military on American soil, lessons he has drawn from the Ukraine war and whether he endorses extending security guarantees to Ukraine, his plan to improve the defense manufacturing base, and so on. The Wall Street Journal editorial board put it this way: “It appears we are on track to have a secretary of defense whose real views are a mystery. Let’s hope he rises to the occasion.” Ok, but as someone once pointed out, hope is not a strategy.
I also want to say something about Marco Rubio, the nominee to be secretary of state. The good news is that he will easily win Senate confirmation. The not so good news for him is that he will then be in the job…and the job that awaits will be difficult and then some. The State Department he will inherit is weak and dysfunctional. Power has gravitated to the White House and what has become a large National Security Council led by a powerful national security advisor, someone who has the advantage of proximity to the president as opposed to the secretary of state who often finds himself half a world away. He will often find out about policy changes through social media posts by the president. Then there is the plethora of special envoys. Plus, Rubio doesn’t have a close personal relationship with his boss-to-be that even remotely resembles what existed between say James Baker and George H.W. Bush. None of this should be read as a criticism of Senator Rubio so much as a prediction and a depiction of the difficult reality that will soon be his.
I want to end with Ezra Klein’s recent podcast, “Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’.” Klein (along with Erica Frantz, a political scientist and associate professor at Michigan State University) puts forward the thesis that Trump represents a rejection of the traditional politics of parties and coalitions bound by shared interests and goals, replaced by a “personalist party” in which everyone is subordinate to Trump. “It works less like the political parties we’re used to and more like royal courts.” Everything revolves around relationships and transactions with the leader. Both Klein and Frantz worry that such a system all too easily morphs into an illiberal democracy or worse, as institutions, norms, and processes all become collateral damage. This is one possibility; another is that it simply leads to an undisciplined policy-making apparatus that leads to poor decisions and implementation alike. Neither possibility is reassuring, but do read or listen to the smart conversation.
As always, some links to click on. And feel free to share Home & Away.
Richard Haass in the news
Monday, January 13: Joe Biden’s Disappearing Legacy (Project Syndicate)
Monday, January 13: Channel Four (Biden ‘fighting for foreign policy legacy’ says Richard Haass)
Wednesday, January 15: Andrea Mitchell Reports (‘Beginning of the end’: Israel and Hamas agree to ceasefire deal and hostage release)
Thursday, January 16: Morning Joe (Biden in farewell address warns of an oligarchy taking shape in America)
Thursday, January 16: Quoted in “Top Trump Diplomat to Share Foreign-Policy Role With Army of Envoys” (Wall Street Journal)
Check out The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens