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Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis holds a rally in Clearwater, Florida.
Hard Numbers: DeSantis to do it all again, Sweden’s new government, China’s corruption party-pooper, flood toll in Nigeria
100: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is reportedly planning to send another group of undocumented migrants to a Democrat-run state, with about 100 people set to be put on flights to Illinois and Delaware. DeSantis, who has blasted the Biden administration’s immigration policies while positioning himself as a rising GOP star, is already facing legal blowback from the last time he shipped migrants northwards.
3: Ulf Kristersson, leader of Sweden’s center-right Moderate Party, will head a three-party minority coalition government that is backed, for the first time, by the surging far-right Sweden Democrats, whose critique of Sweden’s liberal immigration policies led them to a second-place finish in last month’s general election.
5 million: The Communist Party of China says it has investigated nearly 5 million of its members for corruption over the past decade. President Xi Jinping has made a point of tackling graft, though critics say he uses anti-corruption as a scythe to undercut his rivals. Spoiler: Cases have been brought in just .01% of the party member investigations.
1.4 million: Devastating flooding across much of Nigeria has displaced at least 1.4 million people from their homes and led to at least 600 deaths. The destruction of huge swathes of farmland is compounding food security pressures on Africa’s most populous nation at a time when global food prices are already punishingly high.
Biden attacks 'MAGA Republicans' at the nation's peril
Biden attacks 'MAGA Republicans' at the nation's peril
Joe Biden ran for president in 2020 as the unifier of a broken nation.
After four years of partisan rancor and chaos under Donald Trump, Americans elected him to lower the temperature and heal rifts inside what has become the most politically divided and dysfunctional of all major economies. In his inaugural speech, President Biden vowed to put an end to “the uncivil war that pits red versus blue.”
Things have changed. Two weeks ago, Biden called out Trump and his supporters as “semi-fascists.” Then, last Thursday, the president spent the bulk of his prime-time address about democracy at Independence Hall in Philadelphia vigorously denouncing those he labeled ‘MAGA Republicans’ as a threat to the republic.
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“The Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country,” he said. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.”
Why did Biden suddenly change his tune? After all, Trump is still the same man he was two years ago. The MAGA movement hasn’t changed, either. The threat is no different today than it was when Biden was inaugurated.
The clearest explanation is that he sees a short-term political opportunity.
Trump had been sinking a bit in the polls for the last few months. Most Republicans still liked him but weren’t as excited about him as before, and they were starting to consider other potential leaders like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The January 6 hearings got a lot of play with Democrats, but Fox News barely covered it and Trump supporters didn’t pay much attention to them. This was all bad news for Democrats, who need Trump to fire up their base and draw moderate voters away from the Republican Party.
Enter the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Trump was thrust back into the news cycle. His supporters rallied against the FBI and the Justice Department for what they saw as yet another witch hunt. Suddenly, Republican officials and candidates were forced to make a choice: either distance themselves from Trump or embrace him.
Biden’s strategy is to make hedging on this choice harder for them as the midterms near. Given that most Americans prefer moderate and centrist candidates, going full MAGA makes Republicans easier to beat in November. But if they take the Liz Cheney route instead, they risk losing their GOP primary bids to Trumpier candidates—who in turn would face longer odds of winning general elections. Either way, Democrats stand to benefit from sharpening the stakes.Indeed, this gambit may well be the Democrats’ best chance of holding the Senate and minimizing their loss in the House.
Yes, the Biden administration has notched meaningful policy wins like the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and student debt forgiveness that they can run on. Gas prices have come down from their highs, and the job market remains strong. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturnRoe v. Wade has energized Democratic voters and turned more than a few independents and suburban women off the GOP. But inflation is still very high, the average American is deeply worried about where the economy is headed, and Biden’s approval ratings are quite low. These fundamentals would normally spell trouble for the incumbent’s party.
By beating the drums against MAGA Republicans from the bully pulpit and making the midterms a referendum not on Biden’s tenure but on Trump, Democrats are keeping themselves in the race.
The downside of this strategy is that it will probably lead to more election deniers in office and strengthen Trump’s hold over the Republican Party, setting up a Biden vs. Trump contest in 2024. While Trump is more likely to lose to Biden than any other conceivable Republican nominee, he could win fair and square. Given how unfit for office he proved to be the last time around, the prospect of a second Trump presidency is extremely dangerous for the country.
And that’s not the worst of it. Should Trump lose, his efforts to overturn the election would be much more likely to succeed if there were more election-denying governors, state senators, secretaries of state, and attorneys general to aid him. This is a graver threat to U.S. institutions than a Trump victory.
Biden’s gamble may be a winner for the Democrats but a loser for America.
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Hard Numbers: Zero-COVID censorship, Russian default, NATO’s rapid reaction, Indian political shenanigans
5:Zero-COVID in China until 2027? A senior Communist Party official, in a notice published on Monday, said the policy would remain in place for the next five years. He probably didn’t run his statement by Xi Jinping, since Chinese censors immediately scrubbed it from news sites and social media.
100 million: About $100 million worth of interest on Russian government bonds was unpaid after the grace expired on Sunday night, marking the first technical default on its sovereign debt since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918. Still, the effect on the economy will be limited by the reality that Western sanctions have already made it extremely hard for Russia to borrow money anyway.
300,000: NATO plans to beef up its high-readiness forces to over 300,000 troops to counter big threats like Russia. The alliance’s leaders are gathering this week in Madrid for their first summit since the war in Ukraine began.
40: Maharashtra — India's richest state and home to Mumbai — is now effectively run by ... no one. Most of the cabinet is now in a hotel thousands of miles away in Assam state, talking to 40 rebel lawmakers from the “ruling” Shiv Shena party holed up there to demand the chief minister step down. They're rumored to be seeking to jump ship and form an alliance with their Hindu nationalist pals from PM Narendra Modi's BJP party.Opinion: January 6 failed but the threat to U.S. democracy is far from over
Opinion: January 6 failed but the threat to U.S. democracy is far from over
The select congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol kicked off a series of public hearings last Thursday to make the case to the American people that former President Donald Trump was directly involved in a violent and coordinated attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Already the initial proceedings have made two things clear, a stark reminder of just how divided and dysfunctional our political system is.
The first conclusion is that Donald Trump enthusiastically pushed the “big lie”—the debunked conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from him—even when he should have known it was false, that he was at the center of a systematic effort to unlawfully stop the transfer of power and overturn the election, that he deliberately encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol, and that he did little to stop the violence that predictably ensued, even going as far as expressing approval for chants to “hang Mike Pence.”
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In short, the former president was indeed responsible for the events of Jan. 6, in my view constituting the gravest violation of the oath of office by any president in the history of the nation.
Fortunately for us, Trump’s moral turpitude was hamstrung by his incompetence. The main reason January 6th failed to overturn the election and subvert the democratic order is not that the former president lacked the will or the power to do it—it’s that he was bad at it.
But while Jan. 6 failed, it still caused lasting damage. The event shattered democratic norms, fueled tribalism, deepened our crisis of truth, normalized political violence, delegitimized our system of governance, and pushed us closer to democratic failure than we’ve been since the failed election and constitutional crisis of 1876. Recent polls show that majorities of Democrats and Republicans doubt the other party will accept negative election results in states they control in the future, and 64% of Americans now believe US democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.”
The second conclusion is that the political impact of the January 6 committee will be next to zero, convincing few who hadn’t made up their minds in advance and having little effect on the electorate other than deepening their pre-existing feelings about Trump. Much like the two impeachment proceedings of the former president, this process is also broken and hyperpolarized—not along ideological partisan lines but along the Trump sympathy-antipathy axis.
The committee is actually bipartisan in the traditional sense of the word: it includes both Democrats and Republicans and is vice-chaired by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), a bona fide conservative who has voted with former president Trump and with the Republican Party more than 90% of the time.
But polarization in the United States today is driven by feelings toward Trump more than it is by party affiliation. And although the correlation between the two is high, it is far from perfect. My own antipathy toward Trump, for instance, has nothing to do with him identifying as a Republican and everything to do with him being unfit for political office. My views of Trump as a human being were equally negative when he was a Democrat!
This disconnect will render the committee moot. It doesn’t matter how conclusively it is able to prove that the former president tried to subvert American democracy; if half of the country doesn’t buy into the legitimacy of the committee in the first place, nothing at all will change.
That’s dangerous.
January 6 was the result of decades of growing anti-establishment sentiment boiling over, a product of declining equality of opportunity, of a weak safety net that lets so many of our fellow citizens fall through the cracks, of political institutions that are widely seen as rigged, and of the wholesale loss of faith in the system’s ability to self-correct. Trump or no Trump, those conditions are still present and growing.
That’s why there’s every reason to think something resembling Jan. 6 can and will happen again in the future. Two-thirds of Americans see the events of that day as a harbinger of increasing political violence rather than an isolated incident. More young Americans than ever now say they would support a political revolution even if its ends were violent in nature, and most people expect the upcoming presidential elections to involve violence regardless of who wins.The same can be said for the two Republican members of the committee, Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who often agree with Trump on policy issues but are nevertheless transparently and deeply anti-Trump. That’s why you’re not hearing any dissenting opinions in the hearings or seeing any efforts to defend the former president’s actions. Not even Fox News—the only network not to carry the June 9 prime-time hearings live—is trying very hard to defend him, instead choosing to not focus on the issue at all.
That’s obviously not the case for the rest of the country, which remains massively divided over the issue. Far from repudiating the events of Jan. 6 and Donald Trump for his role in them, polls show that the Republican base has embraced Trump, excused the insurrection, and doubled down on the myth of the stolen election, with three-fourths of Republicans refusing to hold Trump accountable, 58% believing Biden is an illegitimate president, and 40% saying violence against the government can sometimes be justifiable.
If we don’t get serious about fixing our social contract and our politics, the next time someone tries to overturn an election—and there will be a next time—they may actually succeed.
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The price of Russian defeat
The price of Russian defeat
In the span of eight weeks, expectations about the Russia-Ukraine war have swung drastically.
Before Russian President Putin’s invasion and in the days that followed, most people (myself included) believed Russian troops would take Kyiv, remove Ukrainian President Zelensky, and install a puppet regime relatively quickly. We all acknowledged that while the invasion was a clear strategic blunder for Putin, Russia would still eventually win on the battlefield due to its overwhelming military superiority over Ukraine.
That turned out to be wrong. Not only did Russian troops fail to achieve their initial objectives, but the outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainians, strongly supported by the West, humiliated them day in and day out.
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The latest instance of this was the sinking of the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, at the hands of a country that doesn’t even have a navy. The worst naval combat loss experienced by Russia since World War II was inflicted by a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles designed to impair, not sink, enemy warships. The attack was so unimaginable, and the Ukrainians so thoroughly underestimated, that Russians are convinced NATO must have been behind it. (Indeed, Russians are becoming increasingly convinced that the war they are fighting is no longer just against Ukraine but against the West as a whole.)Arguably, expectations have now overshot too far in the direction of believing the Ukrainians can hand Russia a decisive military defeat, perhaps even forcing it out of the Donbas territory it had illegally occupied in 2014. Sensing Russian weakness and momentum on their side, Western governments have been emboldened to intensify their support for Ukraine, supplying it with further military aid and imposing tougher sanctions on Russia. The idea: if Russia can be made to lose the war, everyone else—Ukraine and the West—will come out of it winners.
But can Russia actually be defeated militarily? Keep in mind it’s only been 55 days since the fighting began. When the Soviets invaded Finland in 1939, it took them more than 3 months and a total tactical overhaul to finally overcome Finnish defenses, after initially taking heavy losses. Russia still has plenty of staying power, equipment, and bodies to turn their military strategy around, send more troops into Southeastern Ukraine, and achieve at least some of its “second phase” military objectives, which include:
- Taking the entire Donbas, comprised of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, which they recognized as independent and only one-third of which they had been illegally occupying since first invading in 2014.
- Creating and controlling a land bridge between the Donbas and Crimea to connect the different Russian-occupied territories with each other and with mainland Russia.
- Seizing the city of Kherson to prevent the Ukrainians from cutting off the water flowing to Crimea from the rest of Ukraine, which they had done following Russia’s illegal annexation of the peninsula.
- Capturing some buffer territory to hold all of the gains comfortably.
I’m skeptical that the Russians will be able to accomplish all of these aims, especially by Victory Day (May 9) as most analysts and officials believe Putin wants, they are likely to take most of Luhansk and clear Mariupol to create the land bridge by then. Whether Putin considers that enough to declare victory at that time remains to be seen.
The Ukrainians have the wind in their sails after beating the Russians out of Kyiv and sinking the Moskva. Morale is running high and they are getting more and heavier weaponry from the West. Russian casualties and equipment losses are piling up, their military inadequacies on full display for the world to see. And on the international front, Russia is losing badly: their economy is cut off from the advanced industrial democracies, Finland and Sweden are about to join NATO, and the West will surely enhance its forward presence in the Baltics.
But even if we get to the point where it looks like Putin could be prevented from achieving an outcome that he can sell as a “win” at home, would Putin be prepared to accept defeat? I’m afraid that the answer is no, he’s not going to capitulate. Instead, when backed into a corner, he’s going to escalate, using any means he deems necessary.
After all, there’s only so much more the West can do to him in response. Russia is already a pariah for the advanced industrial democracies, the economy is well on its way to being cut off, the West is already throwing its full weight behind Ukraine, and Putin knows that NATO is not going to risk nuclear war by directly intervening in the conflict.
What’s to stop him, then, from responding to battlefield losses and international isolation by using scorched-earth tactics against Ukrainian cities, killing many more civilians, or from using chemical weapons or even tactical nuclear weapons, as President Zelensky warned last weekend? What’s to stop him from intensifying his asymmetric warfare against the West, including through more frequent cyber, disinformation, and subversion attacks? That’s the danger of acting as if Russia can be fully defeated without consequences. And that’s why I remain pessimistic about where the war is heading.
This isn’t to say that Russia should be allowed to carry on with impunity, or that Ukrainians should voluntarily cede a part of their country to an aggressor, or that the West shouldn’t continue to do all it can to help Ukraine defend its sovereignty. I’m certainly not calling for appeasing Putin, who deserves nothing less than total defeat. We all should want Russia to lose. The question is, how badly and at what cost?
Both morally and strategically, we have an obligation to consider the risks of forcing Putin into a position where his only options are to capitulate or escalate, knowing full well that he doesn’t have a capitulation button and that he can rain much more death and destruction on Ukraine than he has thus far.
It’s unpalatable to even think about giving Putin a “golden bridge” to retreat across. It feels wrong to cede a single inch of Ukrainian sovereignty. Needless to say, Ukrainians themselves would have to agree to a ceasefire, and Putin would have to be willing to grant it. The United States would have to stop pressing for escalation and come to terms with some of its allies eventually resuming relations with Russia. That’s a hard sell for all parties.
But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking the maximalist strategy Ukraine and the West are currently pursuing is not dangerous, or that the price of victory won’t be steep and paid in Ukrainian blood.
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China’s zero-Covid woes deepen
China’s zero-Covid woes deepen
In the developed world, Covid-19 has gone from pandemic to endemic. Americans and Europeans have long ditched their harshest restrictions and learned to “live with the virus.”
Not so in China. Two years after the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, the Chinese government is sticking to its “zero-Covid” strategy of draconian city-wide lockdowns at the first sign of infection. As a result, the country’s richest and largest metropolis is now facing unprecedented food shortages and civil unrest.
A global trade and financial hub home to 26 million people, Shanghai is in its second week of lockdown amid record numbers of cases, with many residents banned from leaving their homes, food and water shortages reported, and economic activity ground to a halt. While most cases appear to be asymptomatic and no deaths have been reported, the harsh measures have pushed Shanghai denizens to the brink and overwhelmed the government’s ability to care for them.For most of the pandemic, China’s zero-Covid policy worked extremely well at containing outbreaks, minimizing hospitalizations, and preventing deaths. While the rest of the world struggled to go back to normal, the Chinese economy rebounded quickly.
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But community spread of the highly infectious Omicron variant has made this playbook impossible to pull off. It has also made the policy increasingly costly for China’s and the global economy, as Omicron is forcing the Chinese government to mount more frequent and severe lockdowns that disrupt Chinese citizens’ lives, domestic economic activity, and global supply chains.
A government worker walks by a locked-down neighborhood in Shanghai.Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
Although the caseload in Shanghai is low by American and European standards, the very success of zero-Covid has made China especially vulnerable to even small outbreaks, deterring the government from abandoning the policy in favor of a more sustainable approach.
Back in January, I and my colleagues at Eurasia Group (the political science firm I lead) predicted this would be the top geopolitical risk for 2022. We said that while zero-Covid was clearly not fit for purpose against Omicron, the Chinese government would be very unlikely to acknowledge this and pivot away from the policy. Instead, we thought, Xi Jinping was likely to double down on the failed approach:
Keeping the country locked down for two years has now made it more risky to open it back up. It's the opposite of where Xi wants his country to be in the run-up to his third term, but there's nothing he can do about it: The initial success of zero Covid and Xi's personal attachment to it makes it impossible to change course. China's policy will fail to contain infections, leading to larger outbreaks, requiring in turn more severe lockdowns. This will in turn lead to greater economic disruptions, more state intervention, and a more dissatisfied population.
The reason I don’t say that is because Xi has a third option he simply refuses to consider: to accept Western-made mRNA vaccines that do work against Omicron and that would let China open up in short order without risking massive health consequences. There is a large surplus of vaccines globally that China could easily tap into, if only Xi could let his pragmatism get the better of his nationalism. Alas, the Chinese government is unwilling to license Pfizer and Moderna shots, instead banking on the development of homegrown mRNA vaccines that won’t be ready in large numbers until year-end at the earliest.
The fact is Xi doesn’t need to pick between perpetual lockdowns and uncontrolled Covid killing millions; he is choosing to. That choice will lead a lot of Chinese to lash out in frustration, as we’ve been seeing already in Shanghai.It also means that the Chinese government is going to have a very tough time meeting its goal of >5% GDP growth without reneging on its priority to deleverage and rebalance the economy. The cost of the Shanghai lockdown alone is estimated to be about $46 billion per month, close to 3% of China’s GDP. In fact, not only is that reform program getting kicked down the road, but the Chinese will need to engage in even more fiscal stimulus to meet their growth goal, which will only make the economic pain greater once the bubble finally does get pricked.
Ultimately, that’s what China’s insistence on zero-Covid will achieve on every front: to delay the inevitable at great cost to itself and the global economy.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping stands next to Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez during their meeting in Beijing
Argentina joins BRI, Azerbaijan releases prisoners, Australia set to reopen
23 billion: President Alberto Fernández has signed Argentina up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, hoping to secure $23 billion in investments from Beijing. Buenos Aires likely hopes this will offer more breathing room after years of its painstaking negotiations with the IMF aimed at refinancing outstanding debt.
8: After mediation by the EU and France, Azerbaijan has agreed to release eight Armenian prisoners as a goodwill gesture to get border negotiations between the two countries back on track. Though the two states agreed in November 2020 to end the military conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, longstanding disagreements over borders persist.
300: Riots and looting broke out across South Africa last summer after former President Jacob Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in prison for failing to appear at a hearing on allegations of corruption. A new report on the riots, which led to more than 300 deaths, found that police failed to adequately anticipate and respond to the upheaval.
24: Almost 24 months after closing its borders to foreigners amid the pandemic, Australia’s government plans to reopen to vaccinated tourists on Feb. 21. The tourism industry notably took a 17.6% hit in 2020, so a return to travel will be a boon for the economy.Grading Biden’s first year in office
Grading Biden’s first year in office
It’s been a year since Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. Elected as the anti-Trump, Biden was supposed to bring competence, stability, and decency back to the highest office in the land.
How has he done so far?
If you ask most Americans, the answer is “not great.” After entering office with 55% job approval ratings—decent by historical standards—Biden’s popularity has steadily fallen to below 41%. This is still higher than Trump’s approval after his first year in office, but lower than any other president’s one year in. The decline has been broad-based, as sharp among Republicans as it was among Democrats and independents. As a consequence, his party is now headed toward almost certain defeat in November’s midterm elections, and his own reelection prospects are looking increasingly shaky.
What happened? My take is that Biden has been more notable for not being Trump than for any major accomplishments of his own. For that, the president’s first year in office gets…a B-.
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Read on for Biden’s full report card.
Pandemic response: C
Biden entered office pledging independence from the pandemic by July 4 as long as Americans masked up and got vaxxed. He overpromised. Since then, almost half a million Americans have died of Covid, and the nation is now reeling from a third wave of infections from the highly contagious Omicron strain.
To his credit, Biden’s pandemic response was guided by science, a welcome change from the Trump era. He leaned hard on vaccines, making shots widely available and imposing a vaccine mandate for federal employees. More than 200 million Americans got vaccinated over the course of 2021, an important accomplishment. However, about one-quarter of the population—over 80 million people—didn’t, almost all of them Republicans with no intention of ever getting inoculated. Biden tried to nudge them with a vaccine mandate for large private employers, but he was promptly shot down by the courts. This failure has made America the country with the lowest vaccination rate in the industrialized world.
While no one could have done much more to bridge the partisan divide or prevent new variants like Delta and Omicron from emerging, the administration’s zeal to sell vaccines as a silver bullet raised expectations too high and led it to neglect other ways to stop the spread of the virus. The US never developed testing and tracing infrastructure to contain outbreaks. It took until January 2022 for the government to start distributing free at-home rapid tests and high-quality masks. And while the administration did restore funding to WHO, lift Trump’s vaccine export ban, and donate more doses than any other country, not enough was done to end the pandemic in the developing world (where the mutated strains developed).
That said, although pandemic fatigue and his (predictable) failure to deliver a “return to normalcy” have eroded public trust in the president, I believe Biden’s handling of the pandemic will look better from the rearview mirror. According to some studies, US vaccination efforts may have prevented more than one million excess deaths in 2021—no small feat.
The economy: A-
After experiencing a sharp pandemic-induced recession the year before, the US economy grew by 5.7% after inflation in 2021, the fastest pace since 1984. America is the only G7 country whose economy is now larger than it was before the pandemic.
Although part of this impressive recovery reflects a mechanical rebound from 2020’s contraction, the speed, scale, and breadth of the expansion is unprecedented by historical standards. It was fueled in significant part by Biden’s American Rescue Plan—the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed by Democrats in March that delivered checks to most Americans, expanded unemployment insurance benefits, and lifted nearly half of the country’s poorest children out of poverty—and the administration’s Covid vaccination campaign.
Consumer spending, private investment, and new business formation went up sharply, poverty is at all-time lows, and over 6.4 million jobs were created—almost as many as were added during the first three years of Trump’s term combined (excluding 2020, when almost ten million jobs were lost). Wages surged by 4.7% on average and by twice that for low-income workers, and the unemployment rate ended the year at 3.9%—lower than it was in January 2019.
It’s not all been rosy, though. Consumer prices rose by 7% in 2021—the fastest pace since 1982. This is a problem for people whose purchasing power is being eroded, and it’s a problem for Biden. But the moderate inflation we’re experiencing is not a policy failure: it’s a natural consequence of people having more money to spend. In this case, it’s also a consequence of pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions. This means there’s little Biden could do to control it without choking off the economic recovery. Thankfully, even taking inflation into account, the average American had more disposable income in 2021 than in either 2019 or 2020, and the poorest 80% of households saw their net worth increase. Real wages have also been going up, especially for the lowest-earning Americans. Still, even when they are a symptom of abundance, rising prices are a bad (and politically salient) look for an administration that has made the mistake of downplaying them.
Foreign policy: C+
Biden came into office promising to bring America back, but his first year was marred by several missteps and crises, starting with Afghanistan. The president delivered on his (and Trump’s) pledge to end America’s longest war, in my opinion a necessary and inevitable decision. But even as withdrawal was the right call—one that none of his predecessors had been brave enough to make—the execution was a disaster. The debacle tarnished America's image, damaged relations with our allies, put a gruesome regime in control of a deeply unstable nation, and precipitated a downward trend Biden’s approval ratings he has yet to recover from.
Then there was AUKUS, the US-UK-Australia submarine deal that led a betrayed France to momentarily recall its ambassador to Washington. Although the scandal was humiliating for Emmanuel Macron and dented his relationship with Biden, subsequent damage control managed to smooth things out.
Biden’s China policy also started off on the wrong foot after American and Chinese officials traded barbs in Alaska. Relations have since stabilized, although Biden has continued Trump’s hard line toward Beijing, including by building on the former president’s trade and investment restrictions. Credit is due for the high degree of coordination with allies and partners achieved through coalitions like the Quad and AUKUS, a shift from Trump’s “America alone” approach. Similarly, and despite the AUKUS diplomatic incident and the failure to coordinate with European allies on Afghanistan, transatlantic relations nonetheless improved markedly under Biden.
What we haven’t seen from Biden is a trade policy. Restoring America’s credibility and effectively competing with China requires that the US join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). But there’s just no domestic constituency for major trade agreements at the moment, so Biden has had to settle for small ball deals here and there while largely staying on the path set by his predecessor.
When it comes to the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump dismantled and Biden campaigned on restoring, the jury’s still out. After an initial burst of hope that an agreement could be reached, negotiations were dealt a death blow by the change of leadership in Tehran. However, it now seems like there’s an outside possibility of a limited agreement.
Finally, there’s the ongoing situation in Ukraine, where Biden has generally gotten policies right—treating Russian demands seriously, laying out clear (and bipartisan) consequences for Russian aggression, coordinating effectively with allies and partners—even if deterrence ends up failing.
Overall, I'd say Biden has done better than Trump on the international stage, but that’s a low bar. America’s not really back.
Climate change: B+
After four years of “clean coal” talk, Biden made climate change a policy priority once more, embedding it into US foreign and domestic policy and naming former secretary of state John Kerry as special envoy.
On the global stage, the president rejoined the Paris Agreement and took on a leadership role, convening several high-level summits through the year to boost international cooperation and pressure other leaders to increase their efforts. The COP26 summit in Glasgow went better than anyone expected, with movement and enhanced urgency on net zero targets, methane reduction, carbon trading, deforestation, and more. The US signed on to most initiatives and spearheaded some like the Global Methane Pledge. It’s not a stretch to say that almost none of the outcomes could have been achieved with a less climate-friendly president sitting in the White House.
At home, Biden adopted more ambitious decarbonization targets, revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, and signed a historic infrastructure bill that contains the nation’s largest-ever investment in clean energy, green infrastructure, and climate resilience. In the face of a closely divided Congress and a 6-3 Supreme Court, though, Biden wasn’t able to secure legislation for new regulatory tools like a clean energy standard or to salvage the $555 billion in climate spending that was included in the now-dead Build Back Better bill.
Legislative agenda: C-
Biden inherited one of the thinnest Congressional majorities in recent memory, which made passing any big bills difficult from the get-go.
The president therefore gets solid marks for jamming the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan through swiftly, which was key to cutting the pandemic-induced recession short and saving millions from poverty. He also managed to pass a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill with bipartisan support in November, containing $550 billion of long-overdue new investments in roads, bridges, rail, transit, power grids, water pipes, and broadband to fix the nation’s outdated physical infrastructure and address generational challenges like climate change and the digital divide.
On the flipside, Biden spent a lot of political capital trying to sell the Build Back Better bill—a $1.8 trillion social spending and climate bill that was his signature campaign promise—and a voting rights bill, both of which are now stalled in Congress with slim odds of ever passing. A closely divided Senate meant the president needed every single Democrat to support his legislative agenda, but he couldn't convince or compel Senators Manchin (D-WV) and Sinema (D-AZ) to back him.
Ultimately, for a man who was elected as a consensus-builder and seasoned aisle-crosser, Biden has been unable to unify the various factions within his own party—let alone to bridge the partisan divide—to advance the most ambitious parts of his (still moderate) agenda.
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