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From Afghanistan to East Palestine and Hawaii, Biden's Pattern of Behavior Lacks the Empathy He PromisedBy Salena Zito
Bloomberg reporter Justin Sink tweeted Biden's "no comment" response as the president left for his home in Delaware.
With over 100 people dead and 10 times that number still unaccounted for, how hard would it have been for Biden to say something evoking the empathy the people of Hawaii need, the country needs, in those brief moments as he walked in the sand from his day at the beach?
But he didn't. And we've seen this craven indifference before.
Almost to the day two years ago, a chaotic two-week evacuation of 125,000 people from Kabul resulted in the horrific deaths of 13 American service members; it took Biden over a week for him to address the deaths to the public, and when he did in a speech to the nation, he spent the entire 23 minutes forcefully rejecting any criticism of his decision and hailed the effort as an "extraordinary success."
In fact, despite the terrorist bombing killing 13 service members at the Kabul airport during a tumultuous rush to leave the country, Biden said he believed with "all of my heart" that he had made a wise decision and stubbornly dismissed any assessment that he should have conducted that final moment evacuating people in a "more orderly manner."
He projected to the American public, and to the families by proxy, a sordid lack of empathy, compassion and indifference.
Eighteen months later, the White House continued that chilling tone when spokesman John Kirby shrugged and smiled in reaction to the publication of the Biden administration's report on the Afghanistan withdrawal and said he didn't notice any mayhem. "For all this talk of chaos, I just didn't see it, not from my perch," Kirby, the National Security Council's coordinator for strategic communications, said.
Recommended
Tucker’s Latest Episode Blows the Lid Off the Narrative About the War in UkraineLeah Barkoukis
In February when a Norfolk-Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, causing the spillage of thousands and thousands of gallons of hazardous chemicals in the air, soil and water in Columbiana County, Ohio, arguably changing their lives for at least a generation, it took Biden a whopping 18 days to make any kind of public statement about the situation.
Newsweek searched through the 380 messages released from the White House press pool from the date of the crash (Feb. 3, 2023) to Feb. 22, 2023, a deep dive that revealed no direct statements from Biden.
It wasn't until Feb. 21 that Biden said anything, finally tweeting about the derailment. Biden once again stubbornly refused to concede any morsel of compassion. Even when pressed about when he would visit the site of the derailment and subsequent controlled burn, he said on Feb. 27 he had no plans to go there.
Five days later, he said he now would go to East Palestine in the future, but that was the last he mentioned the massive disaster.
In February 2020, Biden tweeted a clip of him in a moody ad filled with warm and fuzzy scenes of him interacting with voters as music crescendoed when he bragged that his promise as Empathizer-in-Chief would be fulfilled if voters elected him.
"Empathy matters," he said. "Compassion matters. We have to reach out to one another and heal this country, and that's what I'll do as president."
By noon on Aug. 14, many days after the Hawaii fires broke, Biden (or an aide) tweeted, "As residents of Hawai'i mourn the loss of life and devastation taking place across their beautiful home, we mourn with them. Like I said, not only our prayers are with those impacted-but every asset we have will be available to them."
Less than an hour later, the White House said Biden would be traveling to Lake Tahoe for a week, leaving Friday and returning Thursday -- not all that different than when he chose to go to Ukraine rather than going to East Palestine.
When Biden was running, the narrative coming from the Democrats, Republicans weary of Trump, and the media looking for signs of grace during the pandemic was that Biden was the standard-bearer of empathy because he had lost his first wife and daughter early in his career in a car crash and lost his son Beau to glioblastoma while he was vice president.
And yet despite all of the empathy hype, when it comes to the people he serves, in particular the working class, he has failed miserably in conveying he feels their pain. The nation has noticed, and his job approval ratings have never recovered from September 2021 when voters saw him as he really was, not as he wanted you to believe he was.
Heck, he even pretended his own granddaughter did not exist until New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd scolded him for his callousness, and he changed course in a Friday afternoon news dump.
By Monday afternoon, the White House defended Biden's response and said the president is "deeply concerned" and sending federal aid as the nation looks on to a president who gave the impression of being emotionally detached about the fires, mounting deaths and overall emotional and economic devastation.
For Biden, the chance at redemption has vanished. At least when it comes to showing empathy, his misreading of what the country needs when a crisis affects fellow Americans has gone from a one-off to a pattern of behavior that chills even some of his most ardent supporters.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.jpg)
Democrats aren’t laughing about the Hunter Biden debacle anymoreBy Jonathan Turley
“There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them.”
Those words from Inspector Jacques Clouseau may have to be emblazoned across the hearing room of the House Oversight Committee. It was a month ago that House Democratic members mocked the testimony of two whistleblowers who testified about the rigged investigation to protect Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden.
Now it appears that the controversial “sweetheart deal” was not the first choice of US Attorney David Weiss. He actually was planning to let Hunter walk without even a misdemeanor charge despite massive unpaid taxes, gun violations, and work as an unregistered foreign agent, among other alleged crimes.
The reason for his change at Justice, according to the New York Times? Those pesky whistleblowers.
One of the most insulting moments for the respected IRS agents came from ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who mocked the allegations as part of “this Inspector Clouseau-style quest for something that doesn’t exist [that] has turned our committee into a theater of the absurd, an exercise in futility and embarrassment.”
Raskin assured the public that these “disagreements” are “routine” matters in investigations (a position echoed by his junior colleague, Rep. Dan Goldman of New York). The IRS agents tried to object that they had never seen anything like what happened in this case.
Then the case became anything but a laughing matter for Democrats. The plea agreement with Hunter Biden collapsed within minutes of a federal judge asking a few basic questions.
When District Judge Maryellen Noreika balked at sweeping language on immunity, she asked the prosecutor if he had ever seen any agreement like this one. He answered “no” and the deal quickly fell apart, with Hunter Biden’s lawyer finally saying exasperatedly, “Just rip it up.”
The language was anything but routine.
Then an FBI agent spoke to Congress and confirmed testimony of the IRS agents, including that Hunter Biden was tipped off on an attempt to interview him. The agent said they were forced to sit a block away and told not to approach the house. The interview was then cut off. He described being “upset” and how this was not routine.
U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss.Hunter Biden’s controversial “sweetheart deal” was reportedly not the first choice of US Attorney David Weiss (above).
The New York Times, which has spent years downplaying the Hunter Biden scandal, has published an internal account of the investigation. The Times reported that US Attorney David Weiss was actually preparing to let Hunter walk “without requiring a guilty plea on any charges.” However, that “changed in the spring, around the time a pair of IRS officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.”
In other words, according to the Times, those two mocked whistleblowers prompted the Justice Department to prosecute. Why would that be? Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted that no political pressure or political considerations would affect the investigation.
Yet it appears that the Biden team did raise the potential embarrassment for the president and the Justice Department if Hunter faced serious charges. New emails reveal that Hunter Biden’s lawyers told the prosecutors that, if there were serious charges, it would be President Biden in the spotlight.
Hunter’s lawyer Chris Clark (who just asked the court to be allowed to leave the Biden team) wrote Weiss and the prosecutors that the best thing for everyone was to just walk away: “This of all cases justifies neither the spectacle of a sitting President testifying at a criminal trial nor the potential for a resulting Constitutional crisis.”
So the Justice Department had the Biden team warning that it needed to avoid the embarrassment for the president from any trial while their own investigators were threatening to reveal embarrassing details on the special treatment afforded to Hunter.
The solution appeared to be a plea deal that would involve minor crimes with no jail time. The appearance of prosecution without any real consequences for the Bidens. No time would be served and, again, the investigation could be shut down without further complications or controversy.
Then the wheels fell off in court and left everyone in a bit of a muddle.
There was no way now to kill the case.
There was no way to ink the original plea deal.
Congress was calling Weiss and key Justice Department figures to answer questions about this investigation, the compromised investigation, and the sweetheart deal.
Weiss had agreed to supply answers when he thought the plea deal was a done deal. Now that “spectacle” was becoming more and more likely.
It got even worse. If Merrick Garland finally yielded to demands for a special counsel, the regulations specified that the person had to come from outside the Justice Department. That meant it could not be Weiss. That person would presumably start by reviewing not just the evidence but the crimes that might have been charged years earlier.
Yet the Justice Department reportedly allowed the statute of limitations to run on major crimes, including the tax offenses related to the suspicious payments to Hunter Biden from Ukraine and other countries.
Garland decided to violate the regulations and appoint the most controversial person (with the possible exception of Hunter himself) to offer an independent examination of the case: Weiss.
While Weiss may be able to justify his actions or contest these allegations, he is clearly viewed as compromised by many in the public. He stands accused of running an allegedly fixed investigation and, now according to the Times, only pursued the “sweetheart deal” when whistleblowers moved to expose the allegations of special treatment for the president’s son.
The question is why, knowing the distrust over the past handling of the investigation, Garland would make an appointment guaranteed to further deepen that unease. According to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll, almost half of Americans lack trust that the Justice Department will conduct the Hunter Biden investigation in a “fair and nonpartisan manner.”
For these Democratic members and Garland, the case has truly become the “theater of the absurd” that Raskin predicted … only no one is laughing.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Are we in a new Cold War, and if so, who is winning?
As policy makers wrestle with the consequences of the sharpening geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and its allies and partners on the one hand and the Sino-Russian-Iranian axis on the other, there is not a lot of consensus about the nature of the conflict. For some, we are engaged in a new Cold War. Others warn that the current situation is so different from the long struggle with the Soviet Union that the Cold War label doesn’t fit.
This is a tempest in a teapot. Call it Cold War II, call it a global Game of Thrones, call it a new era of geopolitical competition. Whatever we call this thing, our goal must be the same that we had in the Cold War: to preserve the American way of life and the security of our allies without triggering nuclear war. But the world situation is more complicated today than it was in 1948, and the U.S. and China have economic ties that we never had with the Soviet Union. Our approach to the contest will have to take these complexities into account. Competition over resources like rare-earth metals, competition in cutting-edge technologies, competition in space, alliance building, military power projection—these are all part of the larger struggles
It’s harder to see who is winning. In the realm of diplomacy, the U.S. for the moment seems to be running rings around its opponents. Last week’s trilateral leaders’ summit among the U.S., Japan and South Korea was an unqualified success. Driven by mutual concerns about China’s growing military might and diplomatic assertiveness, the two most important technological and economic powerhouses of Northeast Asia have, at least for now, buried the hatchet to work more closely with the U.S.
China responded to the summit with fury. Promoting hostility between Japan and South Korea has long been a Chinese priority. That looks increasingly difficult as South Korean public opinion reacts to Beijing’s aggressive diplomacy—and its support for North Korea. According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of South Koreans in a recent survey expressed unfavorable attitudes toward China and 79% had favorable views of the U.S. Attitudes toward Japan are changing, with South Koreans under 30 significantly more open than their elders to deepening relations. With China and Russia backing North Korea, Seoul seems likely to continue looking to the U.S. and Japan for defense in its dangerous neighborhood.
There was other bad news for China last week as its economic outlook worsened. With the real-estate bubble seemingly imploding, local governments awash in debt, and sky-high youth unemployment, analysts are ratcheting down their expectations of Chinese growth, and some believe that the size of China’s economy will never surpass that of the U.S.
Yet Beijing continues to advance. It is building an airstrip on an island it seized from Vietnam. Work on a naval base in Cambodia that could accommodate one of China’s new aircraft carriers moves steadily forward. China’s grip on the oceans and skies around Taiwan is tightening as Beijing steps up military exercises in response to Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te’s recent “transit stops” in the U.S.
We can see something similar in Ukraine. The Biden administration has triumphed in the salons but fumbled on the field. It has built an extraordinary diplomatic coalition to support Ukraine, but the clinking of champagne glasses and the cascade of communiqués can’t conceal the reality of stagnation on the ground. Russia has not only, for the time being, frustrated Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive. The Wagner Group, beleaguered at home though it may be, has successfully extended Russian influence across Africa even as it helps Bashar al-Assad consolidate his position in Syria.
This is all too reminiscent of American policy in Afghanistan, where for years American diplomats dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, coordinated a complex international coalition, pursued a political and military agenda ranging from counterinsurgency to women’s empowerment, and outclassed the Taliban’s feeble efforts at tasks like economic development—only to suffer humiliating defeat at the end.
During the post-Cold War decades when American power was largely uncontested around the world, too many American policy makers forgot that our adversaries are impressed by our will and power rather than our virtue or diplomatic dexterity. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that it didn’t matter how many inspiring ideas went into the Atlantic Charter or how brilliant the design of the Bretton Woods monetary system was if the U.S. and its allies couldn’t defeat Germany and Japan on the ground.
We need to recover that realism today. Diplomacy matters, but power matters more.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Judicial Watch Sues CIA for Records about Its Role in Intel Letter Attacking Hunter Laptop Story Just Before Election
READ MORE++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Judicial Watch announced recently that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA for all communications of the spy agency’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) regarding an October 19, 2020, email request to review and “clear” a letter signed by 51 former intelligence community officials characterizing the Hunter Biden laptop story as having “all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign”
Bloomberg reporter Justin Sink tweeted Biden's "no comment" response as the president left for his home in Delaware.
With over 100 people dead and 10 times that number still unaccounted for, how hard would it have been for Biden to say something evoking the empathy the people of Hawaii need, the country needs, in those brief moments as he walked in the sand from his day at the beach?
But he didn't. And we've seen this craven indifference before.
Almost to the day two years ago, a chaotic two-week evacuation of 125,000 people from Kabul resulted in the horrific deaths of 13 American service members; it took Biden over a week for him to address the deaths to the public, and when he did in a speech to the nation, he spent the entire 23 minutes forcefully rejecting any criticism of his decision and hailed the effort as an "extraordinary success."
In fact, despite the terrorist bombing killing 13 service members at the Kabul airport during a tumultuous rush to leave the country, Biden said he believed with "all of my heart" that he had made a wise decision and stubbornly dismissed any assessment that he should have conducted that final moment evacuating people in a "more orderly manner."
He projected to the American public, and to the families by proxy, a sordid lack of empathy, compassion and indifference.
Eighteen months later, the White House continued that chilling tone when spokesman John Kirby shrugged and smiled in reaction to the publication of the Biden administration's report on the Afghanistan withdrawal and said he didn't notice any mayhem. "For all this talk of chaos, I just didn't see it, not from my perch," Kirby, the National Security Council's coordinator for strategic communications, said.
Recommended
Tucker’s Latest Episode Blows the Lid Off the Narrative About the War in UkraineLeah Barkoukis
In February when a Norfolk-Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, causing the spillage of thousands and thousands of gallons of hazardous chemicals in the air, soil and water in Columbiana County, Ohio, arguably changing their lives for at least a generation, it took Biden a whopping 18 days to make any kind of public statement about the situation.
Newsweek searched through the 380 messages released from the White House press pool from the date of the crash (Feb. 3, 2023) to Feb. 22, 2023, a deep dive that revealed no direct statements from Biden.
It wasn't until Feb. 21 that Biden said anything, finally tweeting about the derailment. Biden once again stubbornly refused to concede any morsel of compassion. Even when pressed about when he would visit the site of the derailment and subsequent controlled burn, he said on Feb. 27 he had no plans to go there.
Five days later, he said he now would go to East Palestine in the future, but that was the last he mentioned the massive disaster.
In February 2020, Biden tweeted a clip of him in a moody ad filled with warm and fuzzy scenes of him interacting with voters as music crescendoed when he bragged that his promise as Empathizer-in-Chief would be fulfilled if voters elected him.
"Empathy matters," he said. "Compassion matters. We have to reach out to one another and heal this country, and that's what I'll do as president."
By noon on Aug. 14, many days after the Hawaii fires broke, Biden (or an aide) tweeted, "As residents of Hawai'i mourn the loss of life and devastation taking place across their beautiful home, we mourn with them. Like I said, not only our prayers are with those impacted-but every asset we have will be available to them."
Less than an hour later, the White House said Biden would be traveling to Lake Tahoe for a week, leaving Friday and returning Thursday -- not all that different than when he chose to go to Ukraine rather than going to East Palestine.
When Biden was running, the narrative coming from the Democrats, Republicans weary of Trump, and the media looking for signs of grace during the pandemic was that Biden was the standard-bearer of empathy because he had lost his first wife and daughter early in his career in a car crash and lost his son Beau to glioblastoma while he was vice president.
And yet despite all of the empathy hype, when it comes to the people he serves, in particular the working class, he has failed miserably in conveying he feels their pain. The nation has noticed, and his job approval ratings have never recovered from September 2021 when voters saw him as he really was, not as he wanted you to believe he was.
Heck, he even pretended his own granddaughter did not exist until New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd scolded him for his callousness, and he changed course in a Friday afternoon news dump.
By Monday afternoon, the White House defended Biden's response and said the president is "deeply concerned" and sending federal aid as the nation looks on to a president who gave the impression of being emotionally detached about the fires, mounting deaths and overall emotional and economic devastation.
For Biden, the chance at redemption has vanished. At least when it comes to showing empathy, his misreading of what the country needs when a crisis affects fellow Americans has gone from a one-off to a pattern of behavior that chills even some of his most ardent supporters.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Democrats aren’t laughing about the Hunter Biden debacle anymoreBy Jonathan Turley
“There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them.”
Those words from Inspector Jacques Clouseau may have to be emblazoned across the hearing room of the House Oversight Committee. It was a month ago that House Democratic members mocked the testimony of two whistleblowers who testified about the rigged investigation to protect Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden.
Now it appears that the controversial “sweetheart deal” was not the first choice of US Attorney David Weiss. He actually was planning to let Hunter walk without even a misdemeanor charge despite massive unpaid taxes, gun violations, and work as an unregistered foreign agent, among other alleged crimes.
The reason for his change at Justice, according to the New York Times? Those pesky whistleblowers.
One of the most insulting moments for the respected IRS agents came from ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who mocked the allegations as part of “this Inspector Clouseau-style quest for something that doesn’t exist [that] has turned our committee into a theater of the absurd, an exercise in futility and embarrassment.”
Raskin assured the public that these “disagreements” are “routine” matters in investigations (a position echoed by his junior colleague, Rep. Dan Goldman of New York). The IRS agents tried to object that they had never seen anything like what happened in this case.
Then the case became anything but a laughing matter for Democrats. The plea agreement with Hunter Biden collapsed within minutes of a federal judge asking a few basic questions.
When District Judge Maryellen Noreika balked at sweeping language on immunity, she asked the prosecutor if he had ever seen any agreement like this one. He answered “no” and the deal quickly fell apart, with Hunter Biden’s lawyer finally saying exasperatedly, “Just rip it up.”
The language was anything but routine.
Then an FBI agent spoke to Congress and confirmed testimony of the IRS agents, including that Hunter Biden was tipped off on an attempt to interview him. The agent said they were forced to sit a block away and told not to approach the house. The interview was then cut off. He described being “upset” and how this was not routine.
U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss.Hunter Biden’s controversial “sweetheart deal” was reportedly not the first choice of US Attorney David Weiss (above).
The New York Times, which has spent years downplaying the Hunter Biden scandal, has published an internal account of the investigation. The Times reported that US Attorney David Weiss was actually preparing to let Hunter walk “without requiring a guilty plea on any charges.” However, that “changed in the spring, around the time a pair of IRS officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.”
In other words, according to the Times, those two mocked whistleblowers prompted the Justice Department to prosecute. Why would that be? Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted that no political pressure or political considerations would affect the investigation.
Yet it appears that the Biden team did raise the potential embarrassment for the president and the Justice Department if Hunter faced serious charges. New emails reveal that Hunter Biden’s lawyers told the prosecutors that, if there were serious charges, it would be President Biden in the spotlight.
Hunter’s lawyer Chris Clark (who just asked the court to be allowed to leave the Biden team) wrote Weiss and the prosecutors that the best thing for everyone was to just walk away: “This of all cases justifies neither the spectacle of a sitting President testifying at a criminal trial nor the potential for a resulting Constitutional crisis.”
So the Justice Department had the Biden team warning that it needed to avoid the embarrassment for the president from any trial while their own investigators were threatening to reveal embarrassing details on the special treatment afforded to Hunter.
The solution appeared to be a plea deal that would involve minor crimes with no jail time. The appearance of prosecution without any real consequences for the Bidens. No time would be served and, again, the investigation could be shut down without further complications or controversy.
Then the wheels fell off in court and left everyone in a bit of a muddle.
There was no way now to kill the case.
There was no way to ink the original plea deal.
Congress was calling Weiss and key Justice Department figures to answer questions about this investigation, the compromised investigation, and the sweetheart deal.
Weiss had agreed to supply answers when he thought the plea deal was a done deal. Now that “spectacle” was becoming more and more likely.
It got even worse. If Merrick Garland finally yielded to demands for a special counsel, the regulations specified that the person had to come from outside the Justice Department. That meant it could not be Weiss. That person would presumably start by reviewing not just the evidence but the crimes that might have been charged years earlier.
Yet the Justice Department reportedly allowed the statute of limitations to run on major crimes, including the tax offenses related to the suspicious payments to Hunter Biden from Ukraine and other countries.
Garland decided to violate the regulations and appoint the most controversial person (with the possible exception of Hunter himself) to offer an independent examination of the case: Weiss.
While Weiss may be able to justify his actions or contest these allegations, he is clearly viewed as compromised by many in the public. He stands accused of running an allegedly fixed investigation and, now according to the Times, only pursued the “sweetheart deal” when whistleblowers moved to expose the allegations of special treatment for the president’s son.
The question is why, knowing the distrust over the past handling of the investigation, Garland would make an appointment guaranteed to further deepen that unease. According to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll, almost half of Americans lack trust that the Justice Department will conduct the Hunter Biden investigation in a “fair and nonpartisan manner.”
For these Democratic members and Garland, the case has truly become the “theater of the absurd” that Raskin predicted … only no one is laughing.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Liberals never learn this lesson. They love feeding bullies!
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Power Matters More Than DiplomacyIt is time to inject some realism into the post-Cold War era of geopolitical rivalry.By Walter Russell MeadAre we in a new Cold War, and if so, who is winning?
As policy makers wrestle with the consequences of the sharpening geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and its allies and partners on the one hand and the Sino-Russian-Iranian axis on the other, there is not a lot of consensus about the nature of the conflict. For some, we are engaged in a new Cold War. Others warn that the current situation is so different from the long struggle with the Soviet Union that the Cold War label doesn’t fit.
This is a tempest in a teapot. Call it Cold War II, call it a global Game of Thrones, call it a new era of geopolitical competition. Whatever we call this thing, our goal must be the same that we had in the Cold War: to preserve the American way of life and the security of our allies without triggering nuclear war. But the world situation is more complicated today than it was in 1948, and the U.S. and China have economic ties that we never had with the Soviet Union. Our approach to the contest will have to take these complexities into account. Competition over resources like rare-earth metals, competition in cutting-edge technologies, competition in space, alliance building, military power projection—these are all part of the larger struggles
It’s harder to see who is winning. In the realm of diplomacy, the U.S. for the moment seems to be running rings around its opponents. Last week’s trilateral leaders’ summit among the U.S., Japan and South Korea was an unqualified success. Driven by mutual concerns about China’s growing military might and diplomatic assertiveness, the two most important technological and economic powerhouses of Northeast Asia have, at least for now, buried the hatchet to work more closely with the U.S.
China responded to the summit with fury. Promoting hostility between Japan and South Korea has long been a Chinese priority. That looks increasingly difficult as South Korean public opinion reacts to Beijing’s aggressive diplomacy—and its support for North Korea. According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of South Koreans in a recent survey expressed unfavorable attitudes toward China and 79% had favorable views of the U.S. Attitudes toward Japan are changing, with South Koreans under 30 significantly more open than their elders to deepening relations. With China and Russia backing North Korea, Seoul seems likely to continue looking to the U.S. and Japan for defense in its dangerous neighborhood.
There was other bad news for China last week as its economic outlook worsened. With the real-estate bubble seemingly imploding, local governments awash in debt, and sky-high youth unemployment, analysts are ratcheting down their expectations of Chinese growth, and some believe that the size of China’s economy will never surpass that of the U.S.
Yet Beijing continues to advance. It is building an airstrip on an island it seized from Vietnam. Work on a naval base in Cambodia that could accommodate one of China’s new aircraft carriers moves steadily forward. China’s grip on the oceans and skies around Taiwan is tightening as Beijing steps up military exercises in response to Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te’s recent “transit stops” in the U.S.
We can see something similar in Ukraine. The Biden administration has triumphed in the salons but fumbled on the field. It has built an extraordinary diplomatic coalition to support Ukraine, but the clinking of champagne glasses and the cascade of communiqués can’t conceal the reality of stagnation on the ground. Russia has not only, for the time being, frustrated Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive. The Wagner Group, beleaguered at home though it may be, has successfully extended Russian influence across Africa even as it helps Bashar al-Assad consolidate his position in Syria.
This is all too reminiscent of American policy in Afghanistan, where for years American diplomats dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, coordinated a complex international coalition, pursued a political and military agenda ranging from counterinsurgency to women’s empowerment, and outclassed the Taliban’s feeble efforts at tasks like economic development—only to suffer humiliating defeat at the end.
During the post-Cold War decades when American power was largely uncontested around the world, too many American policy makers forgot that our adversaries are impressed by our will and power rather than our virtue or diplomatic dexterity. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that it didn’t matter how many inspiring ideas went into the Atlantic Charter or how brilliant the design of the Bretton Woods monetary system was if the U.S. and its allies couldn’t defeat Germany and Japan on the ground.
We need to recover that realism today. Diplomacy matters, but power matters more.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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