PicoBlog

Welcome to Home & Away. I want to begin by reassuring readers that neither Home nor Away will focus on Taylor Swift, although both could. Ms. Swift will soon embark on a tour of Asia (what the cognoscenti now call the Indo-Pacific) but will hurry back to Las Vegas in time to catch the Super Bowl. All this has MAGA types in a frenzy that she and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce will announce their engagement, their endorsement of President Biden, or both that Sunday. But, like I said, I will show rare discipline and not go on at length on this matter despite its potential to boost my readership numbers big time.

There is, as you would expect, considerable political news. I will discuss three developments. First is the border issue. What is going on is mind-boggling. President Biden has embraced legislation that, if enacted, would go a long way towards addressing this national problem—legislation that could have reduced the scale of the current immigration crisis if Biden had supported it from the outset of his presidency.

Yet most House Republicans are resisting this legislation, even though they once called for much of what Democrats and Biden have come to the table with. Behind their reversal is a thinly veiled desire to exploit this issue to improve the political prospects of their likely nominee for president. This is cynicism on stilts.

While Republicans in the House are focusing their efforts on a dubious impeachment trial against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and avoiding a vote on the bipartisan immigration deal, a good many cities and states are being overwhelmed by an unprecedented influx of migrants. An additional cost is that much of what is happening is discrediting immigration writ large despite the many contributions that legal immigration has made and continues to make to this country. And it is feeding the populism that accounts for much of the extremism we are witnessing throughout the country.

In my view, President Biden should make a bigger public push for the legislation and attempt to lay the responsibility for inaction where it increasingly belongs, on House Republicans and Donald Trump. If that doesn’t work, he should use every ounce of executive authority he possesses to impose a severe limit on the scale of entry into this country, regardless of buy-in from Republicans or progressives.

Speaking of the border, we are also seeing the governor of Texas (supported by all but one of the other Republican governors across this country) assert that he has the right to override the policies of the federal government to implement his preferred immigration policy—in this case, making a barrier of concertina wire so that Texas can defend itself against what he labels an invasion. The Supreme Court ruled against him, but the fact it was an unexplained 5-4 decision is hardly reassuring, and Governor Abbott rejected its authority nonetheless.

This moment is enough to make one think there is nothing new under the sun. This assertion of states’ primacy over the federal government was central to the Articles of Confederation and their failure…and to what led to the Constitution. The same argument was also central in the run-up to the Civil War. One might have thought such obviously unconstitutional thinking was a thing of the past, but clearly not. Bad ideas do not necessarily die.

There is again some irony here. If Republican governors can get away with this, they shouldn’t be surprised if and when blue states take a page out of their playbook and assert their right to ignore federal laws that restrict abortion or allow the sale of AR-15s. Our republic is closer to dissolution than many realize.

The third political item I want to discuss is not about the border or states’ rights, but it is unfortunate all the same. In this case, the excess comes from the left, from the Biden administration’s decision to put a hold on any new permits for building liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals needed for export. This is the primacy of politics over policy, designed to shore up support from young voters who care deeply about climate change and are frustrated with the lack of progress on climate issues, Biden’s Middle East policy, or both. Paradoxically, it is both bad climate policy (LNG is a necessary transition fuel with lower harmful emissions than coal or oil) and bad foreign policy as it raises additional doubts among allies regarding American reliability during a time when multiple wars are threatening energy security.

As for Away, I will highlight three developments as well, if only to be symmetrical. The first involves the Middle East, more specifically, the aftermath of the attack by an Iran-empowered militia on a U.S. military outpost in Jordan that killed three Americans and injured some three dozen. I wrote about the incident in a special edition of this newsletter earlier this week, in which I argued that the United States should respond but in a measured manner, i.e., targeting Iranian-backed militias and Iranian interests in Syria but refraining from launching attacks on Iranian territory.

Since then, we have learned that the air defense system or operators at the U.S. outpost got confused and failed to intercept the hostile armed drone, thinking it was a U.S. drone. There was nothing new about the attack in terms of its sophistication or scale that distinguished it from the previous 150 plus attacks. What was different was that it “succeeded” whereas others did not.

For the Iranians, it looks to have been something of a catastrophic success. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commander stated publicly that Iran was “not after war” with the United States but would respond to any U.S. retaliation. Even more interesting was the announcement by Kataib Hizballah, the group assumed to be responsible for this weekend’s drone attack, that it would suspend military operations against U.S. troops for the time being. All of which suggests the United States should carefully calibrate its retaliatory action lest it lead to an escalatory spiral that no party seems to favor and would further threaten U.S. interests given all else it must contend with in the region and beyond.

A second development in the Away realm was the convening of another high-level meeting (this time in Thailand) between National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and China’s senior foreign policy official Wang Yi. The meeting, along with the inaugural U.S.-China Counternarcotics Working Group meeting in Beijing on Tuesday, builds on and strengthens the diplomatic momentum bolstered by November’s Biden-Xi summit in San Francisco. This commitment to diplomacy reflects and reinforces both China and the United States’ desire to avoid a crisis in their relationship—China because it has its hands full with economic challenges and wants to avoid new U.S. export controls and investment restrictions, the United States because with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East it wants to avoid a crisis in Asia.

The two governments may well succeed…for now. But no one should harbor illusions. Tensions in the economic or geopolitical realm are poised to ramp up next year, after the U.S. election. The two dominant powers of this era have yet to agree to a formula for managing their economic or geopolitical relationship and are unlikely to any time soon.

A third Away development involves Ukraine and reports of a growing rift between President Zelensky and the country’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny. It caps what has been a frustrating year for Ukraine given that its much-anticipated counter-offensive appears countered and that future U.S. aid remains blocked by a handful of Republican zealots in the House, leaving Ukraine in an increasingly precarious position regardless of who leads its military. It was not a good way to go into the third year of the war, a year that is unlikely to bring about significant change, certainly not in Ukraine’s favor. More on this in next week’s newsletter.

As always, some links to click on. And feel free to share Home & Away.

Share

Monday, January 29: MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports on conflict in the Middle East.

Tuesday, January 30: MSNBC Morning Joe on attack of U.S. base in Jordan (audio-only; begins at 9:43) 

Check out The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens

ncG1vNJzZmiqmZi1or7DoZiaq6NjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89opaisXai8br%2FWop2tZZaar7PBwKuwZmpdZ31zgA%3D%3D