Do NOT go back to normal

Boring, reassuring, normal – these are Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be careful. They could also be his great weaknesses.

That’s because any return to “normal” would be disastrous for America.

Normal led to Trump. Normal led to the coronavirus.

Normal is four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top. Normal is 40 years of shredded safety nets, and the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world.

Normal is also growing corruption of politics by big money – an economic system rigged by and for the wealthy.

Normal is worsening police brutality.

Normal is climate change now verging on catastrophe.

Normal is a GOP that for years has been actively suppressing minority votes and embracing white supremacists. Normal is a Democratic party that for years has been abandoning the working class.

Given the road we were on, Trump and Covid were not aberrations. They were inevitabilities.

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If the underlying trends don’t change, after Biden we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see.

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Hence the paradox. America wants to return to a reassuring normal, but Biden can’t allow it. Complacency would be deadly. He has to both calm the waters and stir the pot.

It’s a mistake to see this challenge as placating the progressive wing of the Democratic party. It’s about dealing with problems that have worsened for decades and if left unattended much longer will be enormously destructive.

  Robert Reich @ The Guardian

Already have been.

Robert Reich is one Clinton-Obama official I would be happy to see returned to government.  I don't expect to see it happen.

Trump’s boorish attack on traditional pieties understandably makes Washington traditions seem like comfort food after a hangover. The darker truth this response conceals is that generations of foreign policy mistakes both preceded and precipitated Trump – who often went on to continue them anyway. The record of Washington’s “wise men”, who coddled dictators, militarised the globe, and entrenched economic unfairness at home and abroad, opened an extraordinary opportunity for any Trump-like demagogue – making his ascendancy less a matter of atavism than another form of the blowback to mistakes that America perpetually made abroad. If his presence shamed US foreign policy elites, it was because they helped make him possible.

There is no doubt that Trump altered national security policy in a host of ways. But the idea that the old international order was actually rules-based is a fiction that is impossible to sustain – especially regarding the US, which bent or broke the rules across the world throughout the cold war, fearful of its Soviet adversary. After September 11, the US crafted its own version of international law, shaped in its own interests – under both George W Bush and Barack Obama, and against much resistance from others across the world.

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For decades after the second world war, the system allowed other governments considerable room for manoeuvre in their economic policies. But then the US helped to impose a draconian neoliberal order that persists to the present day, including through international financial institutions it dominated.

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Trump became the latest president to condemn “dumb” US wars – as Obama did before him – while building a bigger military, and ordering even more drone strikes and special forces missions. Still, he not only reversed Obama’s incursions deep into parts of Africa but continued the shift away from heavy-footprint wars to light- and no-footprint modes across Central Asia and the Middle East, facing the “resistance” of the military for trying to pull troops from Afghanistan and Iraq in his final days for doing so. Biden will rightly restore the Iran deal if he can, and re-enter the Paris climate accords. He and his staff will talk more about the importance of standard parts of US foreign policy of the past, from human rights to multilateralism and from Nato to the United Nations. He will offer slightly less support for Israel’s rightwing leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman (though still a lot). But the transformation will likely halt there, for there is little further evidence that Biden understands the need to deal with America’s belligerent traditions.

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[Biden] needs to be held to his promise of ceasing US support for the calamitous Saudi war in Yemen, which Obama enabled and Trump has continued with a vengeance. Unfortunately, however, a more cautious approach to US military power may only come in exchange for restoring enmity with Russia, and continuing the path to a cold war with China that Trump blazed.

The chance Biden will end the misbegotten “war on terror” is vanishingly small – and not merely in Afghanistan and Iraq. Antony Blinken, Biden’s pick for secretary of state, will undo much of the damage Trump did to America’s foreign service and international reputation. But as he explained on a recent podcast, the new administration will ratify the shift away from the “large-scale” to the microscopic and visible to invisible strategies that Bush and Obama pioneered, as if the problem were just that Trump used them with even more gusto.

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While the wars of the future are hard to predict, a better indicator of whether Biden intends a restoration or a renovation will be his economic policy. In spite of campaign promises to restore US manufacturing, Biden has a long record of supporting free trade in America’s foreign relations, as a diehard supporter of Nafta and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (before the latter became politically controversial). Biden has been cagey about whether he will join the latest such agreement. Either way, how he will balance the benefits of free trade with its grievous results for inequality and stagnation remains to be seen.

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[I]f Biden’s presidency stands for little more than nostalgia for a lost foreign policy, it will not only miss a historic opportunity for a US reboot. Reviving old mistakes will only lead some new rough beast to slouch toward Washington, promising to save America from them.

  Samuel Moyn @ The Guardian