The French Connection (June 2, 2023)
Welcome to Home & Away. Once again the debt ceiling dominated the news here at home (this is getting boring; I will say what I expect many of you are thinking). The welcome news is that a crisis was averted, with a majority of both Democrats and Republicans in the House voting for the package. And although the Senate vote was more along party lines, the result was the same. The outcome is a win for both the President and Speaker McCarthy as well as for the country. Any time the political center holds we need to stand up and applaud. I identified staying open to compromise as one of the ten habits of good citizens in my latest book for a reason: in a democracy, working with the ostensible opposition is often necessary if anything is to get done. It is also desirable as well in that policies are more likely to endure if there is bipartisan support for them from the get-go.
All that said, we should not exaggerate what has been accomplished. The deal will do little to reduce the size of the increasingly costly federal debt. The reason is simple: almost all of the focus was directed at discretionary domestic spending, which accounts for only some 15 percent of the budget. Financing the debt is obviously untouchable, and there is good reason not to cut defense given the number and magnitude of the threats we face. But we will never get close to where we need to be with the debt if both entitlement spending, i.e., social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and taxes are off limits.
There was a canary in the coal mine story this week that failed to garner the national attention it deserved. Citing the mounting cost of rebuilding in the wake of more frequent catastrophic fires and other extreme weather events, State Farm was the latest insurance company to announce it would no longer issue new homeowners policies for California. It is another sign that climate change is a present reality as much as a future threat. And it also shows that our politics are unprepared for what is both here and coming, as there has been little in the way of a serious public conversation about whether states or the federal government should pick up the tab for those who want to live (and rebuild) in exposed areas, be they in California, Florida, Louisiana, or wherever.
As for abroad, I read with interest a story about Bi-khim Hsiao, Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the United States. She voiced her support for Western efforts to help Ukraine, saying “Our best hope is that Beijing also takes the lesson that aggression will not succeed, that there will be tremendous international pushback against aggression.” She appears to understand what some of the most rabid China hawks in this country do not, namely, that it is essential for the United States and its partners to demonstrate they have the will and the capacity to uphold international order.
I expect the Ukraine war has been a sobering teaching lesson for China, one that demonstrates both the strength of the West and the unpredictability of war. One can only imagine what lessons would have been learned or could still be learned by China and others in the absence of such Western resolve. This is not to say that we should discount China’s determination to subjugate Taiwan. Nor should we assume that our posture in the Indo-Pacific is where we need it to be, and indeed much work needs to be done. In short, we can and should support both Ukraine and Taiwan.
Speaking of Ukraine, I also saw there is a push coming from some of its leaders as well as from French President Emmanuel Macron to convene a peace summit, possibly just before NATO leaders gather in Lithuania in July. While in principle fine, I fear the idea being floated is at best useless or potentially worse. For starters, Russia would not be included. As Yitzhak Rabin pointed out, you don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies. And second, I worry about gathering the friends of Ukraine, in large part because they may not agree on war aims and how to achieve them. So what is meant to signal unity and strength to Putin may not.
Then there was the statement on AI released this week by the great and the good, that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” It is hard not to be against extinction. But beyond being surprised that the signatories failed to note climate change, which I would put up there with nuclear weapons and pandemics, I was put off by the one-sided alarmism of the statement (What about the good that will come from AI?) coupled with the absence of any guidance whatsoever for what the world ought to do to mitigate the alleged risk.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will be in Singapore this weekend attending the Shangri-La Dialogue, where his approximate Chinese counterpart Li Shangfu will also be in attendance. Typically, this event provides an opportunity for representatives of the U.S. and Chinese militaries to meet on the sidelines.
But it appears as though that will not be the case this year. China’s ostensible reason for rejecting the meeting is that Li is currently under U.S. sanctions, although those sanctions would not preclude such a meeting. Some may view China’s rebuff as curious given recent high-level meetings such as that between Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi in Vienna and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and her Chinese counterpart in Washington.
But I’m not sure there is any inconsistency. China wants to restart economic dialogues in an attempt to prevent further export controls and the introduction of rules on outbound investment into China, and also advocate for the removal of tariffs. While the United States is pushing for risk reduction measures between the militaries, China has an interest in raising the risk of U.S. operations in the Indo-Pacific, with the hope that the United States will conclude that the risks are too great and cease these activities. The PLA’s unsafe intercept of a U.S. aircraft operating in the South China Sea this past week is further evidence of this.
I want to end on a lighter note, with a Wall Street Journal review of Fugue Americaine, a 471-page novel by Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister. One would have thought the minister had enough to do what with fighting inflation, but I digress. What captured the interest of the reviewer were the graphic sex scenes: “The prose veers into ribald and almost clinical technology, landing somewhere between erotica and shoptalk at a proctologists’ convention.” It is the sort of reaction that leads one to question the aphorism that there is no such thing as bad publicity. The good news is that Mr. Le Maire has no plans for another book until he is no longer in office, a development that might well have been hastened by this literary venture. Et c'est tout pour cette semaine.
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Richard Haass in the news
Tuesday, May 30: MSNBC Morning Joe on the war in Ukraine, U.S.-China relations, and the reelection of Erdoğan in Turkey (begins at 36:40).
Wednesday, May 31: The Michael Medved Show on Ukraine, Taiwan & Turkey.
Thursday, June 1: MSNBC Way Too Early on the war in Ukraine and the state of U.S.-China relations (begins at 33:33).
Check out The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens.