July 4th
Crisis Response
America was formed in response to a crisis – an unaccountable monarch who sought to oppress the colonists. Some of the colonists stood up to him and his army, and they founded our nation, a popularly elected democracy with equal rights for all its citizens, guaranteed by the US Constitution with all of its amendments. It has been a struggle to transition from a tiny fledgling democracy, a form of government never tried before in the modern era, to the strongest, most powerful nation on the planet. We do have our flaws; we have made mistakes; it is time to take corrective action through our votes, our voices and with our steadfast follow through.
Response to crises is one of the most crucial aspects of the US Presidency, sometimes acting in conjunction with the Congress, and at other times not. When we elect a President, we never know what next crisis is in the offing, and it often takes most of us, the new President, and the new Administration by surprise. Whether it was an economic crash, a surprise foreign attack, an unforeseen and deadly epidemic, a huge destructive hurricane, a Civil War, a strike of essential workers, a catastrophic flood, a World War or two, or widespread rioting, and rising lawlessness.
The US President and Administration must deal with the unexpected. Intelligence agencies can only go so far in predicting the next crisis, and their warnings and advice may or may not be heeded by a President and a new Administration, or they may miss the boat entirely.
Sometimes like in Vietnam or Iraq, the American President makes a huge mistake in dealing with a crisis, with catastrophic consequences that last decades or even for generations. Sometimes, such as during the Clinton years, there are no major crises. Sometimes we have Presidents up to the challenges facing us; other times we do not. Sometimes we have phony crises ginned up by politicians or the media for their own ends – “Remember the Maine”, which started the Spanish American War and led the US down the paths towards imperialism in the Caribbean, Central America and the Pacific Islands. Sometimes, our American Presidents in whom we vest extraordinary powers straight out lie to our faces.
The 30’s
President Herbert Hoover presided over the fast economic growth and prosperity of the Roaring 20’s, then the massive Wall Street Crash of 1929 that led us into the Great Depression. Many lost all their savings as banks closed; many lost their jobs as businesses closed, and many lost their homes and farms to foreclosures or evictions. Hoover and the Congress proved unable to respond effectively to the cascading crises, leading to the election of Franklin Roosevelt.
President Franklin Roosevelt led the nation out of the economic and emotional depths of the Great Depression, then the response to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and through the perils of the Second World War. He broke the hold of isolationism in this country and established the United Nations. He established many of the federal programs that protect ordinary Americans ranging from Social Security to the Federal Deposit Insurance, from Farm Supports to Unemployment Insurance. He used Keynesian economics (deficit spending) to re-stimulate the economy devastated by the Depression. And he regulated the banks, stock markets, and financial systems whose egregious missteps had led to the nation’s collapse. He helped save the world from the fascism then rampant, not just in Germany and Italy, but in the US and UK as well.
The 40’s
After FDR’s death, President Harry Truman made the momentous decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan to bring an end to WW II in the Pacific, ushering in the nuclear age. Soon after that he faced two intertwined crises in Asia: the Chinese Communists’ victory over the Chinese Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, and then the surprise attack by North Korea (with the support of China and the USSR) on South Korea, that precipitated the Korean War, 1950-1953.
These issues remain unresolved today. Communist China still wants to take over (in their view reunify) the flourishing island democracy of Taiwan (where the Nationalists had fled). It is building up its military and making some aggressive military moves to intimidate the government there. The prior US diplomatic ambiguity over Taiwan’s status has vanished under Biden in favor of an ironclad commitment to help the democratically elected Taiwanese government defend their island nation against their large, powerful, and increasingly aggressive neighbor. We will see how this plays out over the next decade.
The people and nation of South Korea have prospered greatly since the Korean War ended in 1953; it has become a major economic and democratic success story. North Korea by contrast has become an isolated military dictatorship, plagued by sporadic famines and widespread poverty. It has ramped up its spending on the military – developing nuclear weapons and missiles, and it has increased its threats to invade South Korea and to use nuclear weapons against the US. It is helping to arm Russia in its battle with Ukraine and has recently entered a military alliance with Russia. Trump believed he could develop a friendship with the leader of North Korea that he would reconcile the two nations. This proved to be a fantasy.
Truman also had to deal with the start of the Cold War in Europe, as the Soviet Union by the end of WW II had taken over Eastern Europe and parts of Central Europe like Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Our wartime ally rather quickly became our peacetime adversary. This led to the formation of NATO as a defense pact against further Soviet expansion, and a deep division across Europe along ideological lines (the Cold War). The separation of Europe between two separate, ideological, economic, and military blocs endured until the late 80’s when the Soviet Union unexpectedly collapsed and broke apart, and the Eastern Bloc nations freed themselves from the USSR and their own Communist rulers. Many allied themselves with the Western European nations and the US, joined NATO, and the EU. Trump wants to dismantle NATO, believing it is outdated, and no longer needed, and to impose increases and high tariffs on the EU exports to the US. When there is a hot war going on with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump’s impulses seem far beyond ill conceived and baffling.
Under Truman, the US was the first nation to recognize the state of Israel and led the UN to recognize the state of Israel and its boundaries. Since that time, the US has been deeply involved in efforts to broker and negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians often to little or no avail with an occasional breakthrough. It has been a high wire act to broker peace, support the Israelis, and support Arab nations and vital allies throughout the Middle East. At times, US and Russia have made common cause in seeking Middle East peace. That is not the case today as Russia has allied with Iran, the principal funder of groups that seek to obliterate the state of Israel, while the US seeks to simultaneously support and restrain Israel’s efforts to inflict maximum damage on Hamas and Hezbollah — a tough act.
The 50’s
By comparison to Truman and Roosevelt, President Eisenhower had important but minor crises to deal with all over the globe, and in hindsight he made some big mistakes and made some courageous decisions. This was the period when British and French colonial rule and imperial rule were ending. Wars of liberation were being fought as country after country sought to free themselves from the old British and French empires. The armies of national liberation were often a mix of nationalists and communists joined by a common cause of ending colonial rule. The US sought to intervene to prevent the spread of communism and to protect and promote US business interests. Eisenhower helped overthrow newly elected leaders of the governments in Guatemala and Iran. Each ushered in decades of military rule and torture and extra-judicial killings. After the French were defeated in Vietnam, rather than work with Ho Chi Minh, he propped up the Diem government in South Vietnam, a decision which started us down the road to the Vietnam War. He sought to destabilize, isolate economically and diplomatically, and overthrow the new Castro government in Cuba, thus further pushing it ever deeper into an alliance with the USSR.
On the other hand, he forced the British, French and Israelis to withdraw from their attack on Egypt over its nationalization of the Suez Canal. He was loath to commit US military forces overseas and interested in negotiating an end to the nuclear arms race with the new Khrushchev government of the USSR that had replaced Stalin. He helped create SEATO and the Baghdad Pact to parallel NATO as defensive alliances against the China/Russia efforts to spread communism through military aggression. He envisaged and started to build the nation’s interstate highway system, the infrastructure so critical to our economic well being. And at the close of his second term, he warned the nation of the dangers in the rise of the military-industrial complex, a warning that was not heeded by his immediate successors. We had entered the arms race and Cold War, a military build up that persists to the present day, seeded with deep seated mutual mistrust.
The 60’s
His successor, President John Kennedy faced the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most severe threat to our nation and the whole world since WW II. The US launched Operation Bay of Pigs and then Operation Mongoose to overthrow Castro. The USSR sent missiles, troops, and military supplies to support Castro. The US imposed a naval blockade to prevent Soviet ships from bringing nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles to Cuba. A thermonuclear war nearly ensued between the US and the USSR, which was barely avoided by personal negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev to defuse the crisis. The Soviet ships turned around, and the Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba. The US in turn removed its ballistic missiles from Turkey on Russia’s southern border. It stopped trying to assassinate Castro. Over time, the two nations negotiated limits and reductions in nuclear warheads and missiles. These negotiations and nuclear arms reductions continued even after the USSR dissolved, and Russia inherited its nuclear arsenal, but the arms control agreements have now been mostly abandoned as the US/Russia relationship continues to deteriorate. Cuba/US relations have been frozen in amber since the early 60s – a short thaw under Obama, then back to the deep freeze under Trump. Cuba/US relations need a reset just as badly as Cuba’s economic policies do to revive their nation from its severe stagnation. There is an opportunity if Cuba and the US can seize it, but the politics are fraught.
Johnson led the nation into a crisis of his own making. After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 and his landslide election in 1964, President Lyndon \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam with large infusions of American troops, and widespread conscription. He was no doubt influenced by the rash of Communist takeovers after the Second World War, and by the bloody Korean War, as well as by advice from his own military-industrial complex. This rapid escalation in Vietnam led to ever increasing protests from young Americans appalled by the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians and the losses of young American lives. The opposition reached such a peak that Johnson in 1968 decided not to seek re-election, and too many disaffected youth voters sat out the election, assuring the victory of Richard Nixon.
In the 60’s, the reckoning with our race crisis consumed the nation. Under the leadership of Kennedy and Johnson, the US enacted legislation to end the nation’s disgraceful policies of racial segregation and denial of civil rights to individuals based on the color of their skin. Johnson signed the legislation with full awareness of the electoral backlash his party would receive in the South. Since the end of our nation’s Civil War in 1865 and the end of Reconstruction in 1876, white Democratic politicians from the South systematically oppressed black Americans during an era known as “Jim Crow” and lasting for over 90 years. In the North, de facto segregation likewise denied decent housing, jobs, quality education, and economic opportunities to black Americans. When the nation’s courts and civil rights activists and political reformers sought to change these systems of black oppression, “massive resistance”, killings of civil rights workers, and beatings of civil rights protesters ensued both in the South and the North. Federal troops had to be dispatched to protect Southern black children trying to go to school. Police and National Guard had to escort and protect Northern black school kids entering newly integrated schools in Boston. After yet another extraordinary American leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, was assassinated by a racist in Memphis TN, riots broke out in cities across the nation.
During his five-year tenure, Johnson passed and signed enormously consequential election: the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, Civil Rights legislation outlawing segregation, the Voting Rights Act to protect the right to vote for all US citizens, the Clean Air Act, the War on Poverty, the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the creation of the Department of Transportation, and immigration reform. As a result, poverty rates for Americans fell from 20% to 12%. As a result, every American senior had health coverage as did about half the poor. The Johnson era constituted the most far-reaching domestic achievements since FDR; however, due to his conduct of the Vietnam War, Johnson’s reputation remains badly tarnished and the nation is badly divided from the vitally needed reforms of the 60’s, which although it is hard to believe some still oppose them to this day.
The 70’s
During his tenure, President Nixon faced three interlocking crises: 1) Vietnam, 2) Revolts, and 3) Watergate. Nixon chose to further expand the Vietnam War, including bombing North Vietnam and secretive invasions into Cambodia and Laos; nothing worked, and the Communist insurgencies overthrew the governments and took over Cambodia and Laos. Eventually, Nixon and Kissinger negotiated the Paris Peace Accords with the North Vietnamese; the US withdrew its forces, and North Vietnam took over the South in the next two years. As Nixon expanded, broadened, and widened the war, the public’s opposition grew exponentially; peaceful anti-war protesters were shot and killed in Ohio and Mississippi. Peaceful protesters seeking civil rights and voting rights were killed by the Klan and local police forces in the South. Some in African American communities developed and engaged in collective self-defense against police violence towards young black men, joining the Black Panthers, Black Muslims and other groups, and their leaders and members were tried, jailed, convicted, or fled into exile. Some anti-war student radicals despairing of the lack of effectiveness of peaceful protests, the beatings, and tear gassing they endured, turned to targeted violence in groups like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Nixon compiled an enemies list and set loose the FBI, CIA, his political campaign, and even the IRS on his list of domestic political opponents. He was re-elected by a landslide in 1972, then all the illicit tactics blew up in his face; his fellow conspirators went to jail; some blew the whistle on Nixon’s conduct during the cover up, and to avoid the ignominy of his impeachment, Nixon resigned in utter disgrace.
Nixon had notable achievements despite his singular disgrace. For example, he visited and established diplomatic relations with China; he visited Moscow and negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet Russia, and he signed a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese. On the domestic front, he ended military conscription and supported the right to vote for 18-year-olds. He established a nationwide welfare program for the aged and disabled (SSI), and he signed the legislation to create the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). With his Southern strategy, the party of Lincoln began its morph from its abolitionist beginnings into the angry racist party of George Wallace, a process that has accelerated greatly under Trump’s leadership.
In 1973, Israel yet again had to fight several neighboring Arab states for its survival – the Yom Kippur War. The US airlift of arms to Israel helped Israel survive the surprise attacks from Egypt and Syria. Arab nations then embargoed oil sales to the US and other Israeli allies. The price of gas quadrupled, and it was in short supply, leading to long wait lines at service stations.
The gas crisis lasted only about 6 months, but the aftereffects still ripple and resonate throughout our economy today. Nixon, then Carter emphasized conservation, energy efficiency, and the development of alternatives to fossil fuels, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. The US car industry which traditionally produced large, flashy gas guzzlers for the American public proved unable to adjust and compete with Japanese car makers who were producing smaller, more fuel-efficient, better engineered vehicles. The beginning of the demise of America’s rust belt manufacturing stronghold and prowess was rooted in the inability of American car and steel manufacturers to quickly adjust to foreign competitors in Japan, then South Korea, and eventually China. Under both Nixon and Carter, the US became the early global leader in developing solar and other alternative energies. President Reagan however stopped the nation’s progress on these vital new technologies and shifted the emphasis back to oil and gas exploration, production and consumption.
President Jimmy Carter faced twin crises at home and abroad. The nation was stuck in stagflation, an economic quagmire of high inflation, high unemployment and slow growth that had started during the Nixon years, and a new revolutionary government in Iran that had overthrown the Shah took American embassy personnel hostage.
Carter took the following steps to stop inflation and stimulate economic growth – deregulation, sky high interest rates, and cutting the growth in government spending. He appointed Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve; the Fed raised interest rates up to 20% which sent the nation into a steep and sharp recession and stopped cold the annual double-digit inflation. He appointed Alfred Kahn to lead the charge to deregulate, and he persuaded Congress to deregulate the airline and trucking industries. The breakup of ATT, the phone monopoly, was ordered by the courts in 1982 in response to antitrust litigation begun in the 70’s. Congressional deregulation of the telecommunications industry did not happen until 1996 under President Clinton. Increased competition in these industries led to lower prices and greater innovation.
The 80’s
Iran’s Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah, an American ally, and took the few remaining American diplomats in the embassy hostage. They created a theocratic regime, headed by a Supreme Leader (a leading Shia cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini). Carter’s negotiations to free them took nearly two years, including an unsuccessful military raid. He imposed an arms embargo, an oil embargo, and otherwise isolated the new Iranian regime. The hostages finally returned home the day after the inauguration of newly elected President Ronald Reagan. This and subsequent incidents have poisoned US/Iranian relations ever since.
Under President Reagan, the US began to trade arms to Iran in violation of the embargo. The Iranians needed the arms because they were involved in a full-on war for the regime’s survival with Iraq then led by Saddam Hussein. Reagan needed the funds to support his effort to fund the contras, an opposition armed rebel group to the leftist Nicaraguan government. Reagan also needed Iran’s help to free US hostages, being held by Hezbollah (an Iranian allied militia) in Lebanon. Israel was used as an intermediary, a conduit, in this complex arms transaction.
In 1979, the USSR, surprising everyone, sent troops into its neighbor, Afghanistan, to prop up a failing Communist led government against a tribal led Islamic insurgency (Sunnis). The US, initially under Carter, imposed economic sanctions, and then increasingly under Reagan responded with ever growing military aid to the Islamic insurgency (the mujahedin) through the auspices of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Ten years of bloody warfare later, the mujahedin prevailed, and the USSR pulled out its troops, and the Taliban, Sunni traditionalists, took over.
In the mid 1980s, the USSR began an internal reform program under Gorbachev to allow for market-based reforms to boost its ailing and stagnant economy and to introduce democratic reforms to build popular support for the process of reforming the sharp decline in the economy, life expectancy, and the entrenched geriatric leadership of the USSR. Reforms had been too long delayed by the ruling Communist Party, and the 70-year-old communist system in the USSR wholly and totally unexpectedly collapsed. The USSR broke into 15 separate nation states of which Russia was the largest, and Ukraine was the second largest. The Baltic republics quickly joined NATO and the EU, and they have prospered. Germany reunited, and most of the Eastern European Communist countries began the difficult process of market reforms and democratization with the support of the US and the EU.
The 90’s
President George HW Bush, and then President Clinton managed the critical relationships with Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin as the USSR broke apart – an eventuality that no one foresaw. Serious threats of loose nukes, civil wars, coups, economic collapse, and armed conflicts between the new nation states over the national boundaries, resources, ethnic identities, power, and nationalistic aspirations had to be managed as they ensued. The disintegration of a large nuclear armed power had the very real potential to threaten the entire globe; that didn’t happen, or at least not immediately, and not in ways that were readily foreseen.
Russia, under Yeltsin, led the exodus of the constituent republics from the old USSR, thus dismantling the Russian Empire. Russia, the US, Great Britain, and Ukraine signed a treaty in 1992 to turn over the nuclear weapons stored in Ukraine to Russia in return for a guarantee of the territorial integrity of Ukraine; how did that work out? Belarus and Kazakhstan also surrendered their nuclear weapons arsenals to Russia. The US funded the collection and destruction of weapons of mass destruction.
The US and Russia collaborated at the UN in opposing the Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The end of the Cold War offered the potential for US/Russia collaboration in assuring global security for the first time since the USSR’s land grab in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.
Among the challenges for the new Russian state were that the more prosperous new nation states (except Belarus) wanted to affiliate with the US and the EU and to introduce market reforms and democratization, while the more impoverished new nation states (except Georgia) wanted to stay more closely aligned with Russia and with the old model of a centrally planned Russian economy to which they had been accustomed. In other words, the new state of Russia with its abundant natural resources was going through its difficult economic transition, and also it was being asked by its allies to continue to subsidize the successor states in the most poverty-stricken regions of the Caucasus and Central Asia using the old economic model that it was trying to abandon.
Russia divested itself of the “Russian Empire” without a bloody revolution and began to adopt the types of economic and political reforms that were successful in Western Europe. President Boris Yeltsin made mistakes, such as the destructive wars in Chechnya, transferring ownership of state enterprises to the new oligarchs, and anointing Vladimir Putin as his successor; however, he allowed democracy and market reforms to take root and flourish in Russia until his decline and demise. President Clinton worked closely with Yeltsin, and the IMF helped the new nation states make their difficult transitions towards a market economy.
Yugoslavia also broke apart. Ancient nationalistic enmities among the Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims broke out in a renewal of religious massacres, ethnic cleansing, and repeats of the wars for regional Balkan power dominance between and among the modern-day inheritors from the Byzantines, Turks, Venetians, Serbs, Greeks, and others, now living in the brand new nation states of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo. A repeat of the Balkan hostilities which ignited World War 1 was avoided through a combination of NATO power, the UN, the EU, and effective American diplomacy.
Shortly after the election of President George W. Bush, the terrorist attack of 9/11 wakened the world to a new terrorism rooted in the unresolved issues of the Middle East, nurtured in the struggles of Afghanistan, with aspirations to overthrow governments from Indonesia and the Philippines to Mali and Morocco and install an ancient caliphate throughout the Muslim world. The CIA had warned the new Administration of the emerging threat that first came to the US attention in the bombing of the USS Cole and the twin bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salam. The bombings of the twin World Trade Center towers in New York City utterly shook up the US complacency in ways comparable to Pearl Harbor though the threat was entirely different. Nations all over the world rallied to the US defense.
The 00’s
Fighters from throughout the Islamic world had been attracted to Afghanistan by the struggle to repel the Communist takeover and learned their craft on the battlefields with the USSR. After the USSR withdrew, they found common cause in trying to overthrow the oppressive regimes of the Middle East and to oust the US presence which supported the rulers of nations, such as Egypt, Jordan, and the sacred land of Saudi Arabia. They envisioned a caliphate stretching from the Southern Philippines to Morocco, including the Muslim parts of Africa, Russia, Indonesia, and China.
Bush and Putin shared common cause to extirpate the terrorist threat harbored and emanating from Afghanistan, but for very different reasons. Putin was focused on the growing internal threats to Russia in Chechnya, Dagestan, the Caucasus and even Moscow, while Bush was focused both on the domestic threats to NYC and DC, but also on the wider threats to US allies and oil interests throughout the Middle East. Putin helped assure US access to airbases in Central Asia and provided important intelligence and assistance to enable the US to pursue Al Qaeda and the Taliban in their home bases.
The budding alliance for a common strategic interest in destroying Al Qaeda foundered on the Bush decision to invade Iraq, a rogue nation prone to invading its neighbors and an old ally of the USSR, a secular nation which not only had nothing at all to do with 9/11 but indeed was anathema to the religious extremists of Al Qaeda. It turned out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and it was not developing them; it was bluffing to its neighbors in the face of its enmity with Iran.
Bush not only took his eye off the ball of the terrorism that produced 9/11, which was at that time based in Afghanistan and Pakistan not Iraq; he ignited sectarian violence throughout the Middle East, empowered Iran, and fueled Sunni terrorist networks that then became ISIS (centered in Iraq and Syria). We mistakenly bombed wedding gatherings and other gatherings of innocents in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush squandered the international good will for America, as the victim of the 9/11 attackers, just as Netanyahu has done for Israel in Gaza. In Iraq, the US alienated both the Sunnis and the Shia to the point that our only reliable allies were the Kurds, who wanted the US presence to assure their autonomy. Taking advantage of the chaos we created, Iran developed militias and other political allies among the Shia in Iraq.
This misguided military adventurism morphed the Sunni terrorists of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its successor ISIS into anti-American heroes that attracted Islamic adherents from North America and Europe to join ISIS, a murderous and villainous band that then took over substantial parts of Syria and Iraq and yet again expanded their reach from the Philippines to Nigeria. The US worked with a multi-national coalition, including Syria, Iran, Iraq, France, Turkey, Russia, the Kurds, and others, for six years from 2011-2017 to dislodge, destroy and defeat ISIS and its affiliates. It is still hard to understand why and how so many North American and Europeans fell under the sway of ISIS propaganda on the internet and elsewhere. There is still no resolution of what to do with the tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners and their families being held in the Syrian desert or the sleeper cells elsewhere still resonant to ISIS’ call for global terrorism.
Putin took his own lessons from the mess we made in Iraq and from the regime change revolutions springing up all around him in Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Serbia, the Arab Spring, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Kirghizstan, and he concluded that he could be next up. He rather quickly morphed into the Putin of today, or maybe that was who he always was, – an autocrat, a kleptocrat, a despot, a murderer of his political opponents – trying to reconstitute the Russian Empire, not by persuasion or good example, but by his amply demonstrated willingness to deploy brutal armed force against his weaker neighbors.
US Presidents Trump and Bush both believed they could get along with Putin in managing change with the rest of the world community. Bush discovered he was wrong; Trump still clings to his illusions and would-be bromances with Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Obama tried to forge a new start to the US/Russia relationship with President Medvedev of Russia, but he discovered this was to no avail when Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 and interfered in the US elections of 2016 to defeat his nemesis Hilary Clinton. He badly underestimated the damage that Putin’s Russia could wreak in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia because they were not an economic powerhouse. They had a third-rate economy, but they were married to first-rate nuclear armaments and a willingness to use force that was still not to be fully realized in the West.
Towards the end of Bush’s ill fated Presidential tenure, the housing bubble burst (2007-09), much of the US financial system collapsed, and it infected global banking as well, threatening all the US banks and shuttering some, people’s savings for retirement or college tuition, people’s mortgages and their homes, the auto, and the insurance industries, freezing the credit markets for businesses and individuals, and causing massive increases in unemployment. This was termed the Great Recession, and it shook the US financial system to its foundations and caused financial wreckage all over the world. The Obama Administration bailed out the banks, the insurance companies, and the auto industry, and it put them under far stricter regulations and restructurings to prevent a repeat; these bail outs were repaid with accrued interest. Obama and the Congress bailed out state governments where tax revenues had plummeted, and the need for government services had skyrocketed, so they could continue delivering social safety net, health care, and educational services. It did not bail out individual homeowners who had received the risky bank loans and mortgages and who were now losing their homes to foreclosure and worsening the nation’s homelessness crisis.
During 2009-10 Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) to cover the uninsured, slow the rise in health spending, and end noxious insurance practices that redlined those who were ill and needed medical care. This was and is the first major expansion of the safety net for the American people since the programs established in the 60’s, and early 70’s under Johnson and Nixon. Although it was modeled on the Romney plan in Massachusetts and the Nixon plan of the early 70’s, it was greeted with massive Tea Party opposition calling it socialized medicine, and half the nation’s Governor’s and the Republican legislatures tried to block its implementation. We now understand that this was a harbinger of harsh conflicts dividing the nation to come.
The 10’s
The decade of the 2010’s had a range of threats and crises; many of which were completely unanticipated: Covid, exploding social unrest, mass shootings, the rise of violent and dangerous right-wing extremism, rising isolationism, increasing racism and hatred among Americans, unwarranted police killings, and rising tensions with China, Russia, and Iran.
The US tried nation building and introduced democratic reforms in Iraq and Afghanistan, but to not much avail so far. Imagine forward 20 years or so, will Iraqis be thanking us for ousting their dictator, Saddam Hussein; will Afghans thank us for ousting their oppressive Taliban regime, albeit temporarily? We don’t know yet what the future holds for the two nations. Europeans both East and West (except the Russians) are fully appreciative of the US for its stalwart support for freedom from tyranny and building democracy during and after World War II and the Cold War. Same applies in South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. We have been far less successful and done ourselves and the world major harms and few favors with our interventions elsewhere.
Iraq has ended up divided between Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish politicians vying for power and control of the nation’s oil fields and revenues; they were elected democratically, but govern in the parochial interests of their co-religionists, not yet in the interests of the Iraqi nation. When ISIS invaded Iraq, the Iraqi Army simply collapsed, and the US ended up sending additional armed forces into Iraq and Syria as part of a large coalition to drive out ISIS, which had successfully taken over several of Iraq’s largest cities by the time they arrived. Only the Iraqi Kurds initially stood up for their country and fought to repel ISIS. Iranian militias arrived later to help stop ISIS. Although ISIS was defeated, it is not clear whether Iraq will be able to build a strong, united nation, or will it fall under the sway of the aggressive theocratic state of neighboring Iran, will the Kurds, Shia and Sunnis promote only their sectarian agendas, or will they find common cause investing their oil wealth for the health, education, and economic growth of all citizens of their country regardless of religious affiliation?
Afghanistan is desperately poor without the easy oil wealth of Iraq. After 9/11, when the US invaded to oust the Taliban, Afghanistan made some limited progress economically, educationally and in human rights with the support from the US and its many allies. They tried to build the Afghan Army into a strong fighting force. The Afghan Republic never developed a strong enough state or army to resist the Taliban who simply continued fighting to regain power from their bases in Pakistan, and Southern and Eastern Afghanistan. In February 2020, President Trump negotiated a peace agreement with the Taliban without the Afghan government; the treaty called for the withdrawal of all American troops. Trump stopped the American support for the Afghan forces, and President Biden, as was agreed upon in the treaty, withdrew the American troops in August 2001. The Taliban immediately took over, and further disasters have ensued. They have reversed the important progress in women’s rights and human rights, schools, and economic development. International aid groups have refused to work with the Taliban until girls’ and women’s rights to education and participation in the economy are restored. The Taliban has refused to budge on this and every other issue of basic human rights for their citizens. They have however curtailed poppy growing and the opium trade and reduced government corruption. Most of the population is now in dire poverty and terrible states of deprivation. The Taliban is fighting against ISIS for control of Afghanistan. They have no friends or allies and dim prospects for the immediate future. They could become once again a failed state, a haven for and exporter of terror, or could build a Sunni theocratic state, parallel to the Shia in neighboring Iran, and equally oppressive of the female half of their population.
After the lies that led us into Iraq and the ignominious retreat from Afghanistan and the triumph of the Taliban, it is hardly surprising that the neo-isolationism of Trump and quite a number of his colleagues falls on receptive ears in the US. During his four year tenure, Trump failed the nation on issues related to Russia, Ukraine, China, global warming, and was about to make his largest mistake in a wholly unanticipated pandemic.
The 20’s
Covid swept from China across Europe, and the US and South America, killing many, wreaking havoc on the global economy, and people’s lives. Africa, with a younger population, experienced far fewer deaths. Asian countries with strict lock-downs escaped the worst death rates. It was the deadliest global pandemic since the Spanish Flu in 1919.
The US deaths per capita varied widely by state and locality depending on the state and local governments’ vaccine receptiveness or hesitancy, masking, and social distancing policies. States including Oklahoma, Arizona, and Mississippi experienced very high death rates while the rates were three and four times lower in states like Vermont and Hawaii. The Trump Administration, through the foresight, vision, and persistence of Dr. Anthony Fauci, was strongly supportive of Moderna and other drug companies’ efforts to develop a vaccine quickly and effectively. Moderna and Pfizer did so in record time for a new vaccine. Trump should have taken a bow and promoted it. The severe problems that Americans experienced in combating Covid were due partly to Trump’s politicization of public health and prevention measures, and partly to the credulousness of a substantial and increasing share of the American public who distrusted science and trusted uninformed opinions they read on social media and/or heard from their President.
Trump was opposed to masking, testing, social distancing. He cast doubts on the severity of the pandemic and the need for and effectiveness of the vaccines. He promoted quack cures like bleach, tanning, oleandrin, hydroxychloroquine, and the like. As a result, we have harbored counterproductive vaccine denialism and absurd unfounded conspiracy theories about Covid, the vaccines, and treatments running rampant in too many sectors of the country.
One in three Americans caught Covid, and over 1.2 million Americans died as a result; most were ages 50 and up. I still cannot fathom what Trump believed were the political advantages of his behavior, and as we know he got deathly ill from the disease during the height of his re-election campaign, and he hosted White House events that became super spreaders. I am still stunned by the failures of our renowned public health agencies in the face of the pandemic and by Trump’s performance during the only and biggest crisis on his watch. When it was time for him to leave office, either he froze and watched TV when his foot soldiers invaded the Capitol, or he was complicit in sending them there. The US Supreme Court does not want to see a trial where we might get the answers and accountability on what actually happened with Trump and his colleagues on 1/6/21.
Covid isolated people in their homes, froze up the economy, froze up global supply chains, caused mass unemployment, shut down businesses, and caused people to hole up in their homes for prolonged periods of time. It caused global panic and social isolation. It allowed unfounded conspiracy theories to thrive on the internet. Many people continue to work from home isolated from the day-to-day social interactions at work that can serve to dispel the unfounded lies and rumor mills spread via social media bubbles. Children lost valuable schooling and learning due to school shutdowns that proved to be unwarranted, too long, and unwise — a failure of school leaders and politicians’ fealty to teacher’s unions.
Yet the US economy has bounced back quicker and stronger than most of the other developed nations under Biden. We have had a huge growth in jobs, major growth in real wages, and rapidly slowing inflation in the cost of living. This has been reflected in extremely high stock market growth and the unwillingness of the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates until the economy slows down. There are three major contributors to this economic boom: Trump and then Biden poured money into the economy to offset the impacts and hardships of the pandemic freeze up at same time when the supply chain producing consumer goods was frozen (too much money chasing too few goods led to high inflation); Biden’s long overdue investments in domestic infrastructure, and Biden’s investments in our manufacturing future and in the reduction of climate change -- through subsidies for domestic CHIP manufacturing, EV’s, solar, and batteries.
There has always been a dark undercurrent of racism, antisemitism, hatred of immigrants, lies, unfounded accusations, and isolationism in this country. Trump did not invent them, but he played to all of them. Racism and slavery were present in our first Constitution; isolationism from “Europe’s wars” was our national policy from our founding. It was present before the Civil War in the rise of the “Know Nothings” who opposed immigrants and Catholics in equal measure. It was present after the Civil War in the rise and terror of the Ku Klux Klan throughout the South. It was present again as a rising force after World War 1, as an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic repository of violence and racism. In the lead up to World War II, there was a rising confluence of isolationism, antisemitism, support for the Third Reich, and opposition to the New Deal spreading from Detroit to Boston to Los Angeles to New York that included such prominent Americans as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, and others. It resurfaced in the 1950’s under the aegis of Senator McCarthy who maintained with no evidence at all that the entire US government was infiltrated by Communists, particularly the Defense and State Departments. These lies and smears made him popular nationally and feared in DC government circles. His lawyer and counselor was the infamous Roy Cohn who later represented and influenced the young Donald Trump. During and after the Civil Rights litigation and legislation of the 50’s and 60’s, the Klan had a resurgence all over the South: killing activists, beating preachers, terrorizing families, burning churches, and bombing innocents with the connivance of some state and local officials. Once again, after the landmark Presidency of Barack Obama and with the not so very tacit encouragement from President Trump’s rants, we were beset by beatings, mass shootings by wanna-be insurrectionists, police killings, threats, and harassment targeting Muslims, Asians, Latin immigrants, gays, election workers, and African Americans. One might hope that this wave of neo Know Nothings may have crescendoed with the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Many are in jail, but the major ring leaders are still at large and have yet to stand trial in Georgia and DC, and the Supreme Court has just erected nearly insuperable barriers to holding Donald Trump accountable for his efforts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results. We will see after the election this November or not.
Putin and Russia were once welcomed as a new member to the Group of 8; there was hope that Russia would be better integrated into the European economy of the EU. Russia was a vital source of oil and gas for Europe, and there was hope for collaboration on global security as they shared concerns about the spread of ISIS terrorism both domestically and internationally. The Bush Administration turned its head when Putin sent troops into Georgia and Moldova. Then Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, starting with Crimea and the Donbas. US and its allies imposed economic sanctions and ousted Russia from the G 8, but under Obama, the US misjudged and underestimated the threat and was not willing to arm Ukraine.
Putin’s operatives (here and abroad) helped in the 2016 election campaign of President Donald Trump, and Putin found an ardent admirer of his toughness in President Trump, and a sympathetic ear to his concerns about NATO accepting Ukraine. Trump bought and echoed the Kremlin line that the Ukrainians, not the Russians, had interfered in our 2016 elections, and then he sought to trade and condition Congressionally authorized arms to Zelenskyy for evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption (of which there was none). For his efforts to strong arm Ukraine to advance his political campaign, Trump was impeached in the House, but not convicted by the Senate.
Putin (through the Wagner Group) meanwhile was fighting militarily to sustain the regimes in Syria, the Central African Republic, and Mali at the request of their governments, building his bona fides and alliances in the Middle East and Africa. His willingness to use force was welcomed by unstable regimes facing insurgencies.
Then in early 2022, Russia massively invaded Ukraine with the goal of ousting Zelenskyy and taking over the second largest (by land mass) nation in Europe and one of the major breadbaskets of the world. Russia was expecting a three-day war; so far it has been nearly two and a half years of unparalleled death and destruction. Biden has led the effort to rally democracies to Ukraine’s side. The US, NATO members, EU, and even Japan and South Korea responded with arms, financial and diplomatic support. It has settled into a stalemate with escalating Western arms to Ukraine to fend off the Russian advances now reliant on arms from Iran and North Korea; however, all the damage and destruction is happening on the Ukrainian side of the border, due to the restraints we have imposed on the Ukrainians use of our weaponry.
Today, Putin has alliances with China, Iran, and North Korea. Today Putin has the allegiance of growing right-wing parties and leaders in the US and Europe. Some of them blocked desperately needed aid for Ukraine for over six months in the Congress. It is important for us all to remember that Russia itself has rapidly changed over the last 30 years from a left wing, sclerotic, Communist dictatorship of the party to a right wing, aggressive, and murderous dictatorship under Putin. Nevertheless, as was true in the 80’s, it still has an aging, declining, population in poor health and with weak productivity in an economy dependent on oil and gas production (i.e. an economy built on fossil fuels that are being phased out). It lost half its population in the breakup of the USSR, Now it is losing untold numbers of its young brave soldiers on the battlefield and its young, educated talent to emigration out of Russia. Putin knows the stakes if he does not prevail, and the Ukrainians know the stakes if he does, making a negotiated settlement between the two extremely difficult.
China has the second largest population, economy, and military in the world; it is now allying itself with Russia in opposition to the US. Its economy has grown at about 9% a year since it adopted a market economy in the late 70’s under Deng Xiaopeng and transitioned from a rural impoverished peasant economy to a manufacturing powerhouse now far exceeding the US. Lately its growth has slowed considerably due to the shock of Covid to the world economy and its aging population. China has not adopted political liberalization; it is still dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. It has suppressed expression of political dissent whether in Tienanmen Square, Tibet, Xinjiang, or Hong Kong. It has an export driven, manufacturing economy and its biggest customer is the US. Chinese imports are mostly from the US, South Korea, and Japan, but its fastest growing imports are oil from Russia (due to European economic sanctions for starting the Ukraine War). It is no longer an insular, inward looking nation, its economic and political influence and aspirations are now widespread throughout the globe, including Africa and South America.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, there was a steady warming of relations between the US and China, started initially by Nixon and Kissinger with Mao and Chou Enlai. It was accelerated during the Sino-Soviet split; it carried through with bumps of course by each succeeding President; it may have reached its peak of good relations, during the Presidency of Barack Obama. Trump started a trade war with high tariffs aimed quite specifically at China manufacturing; China retaliated with tariffs targeted at US agriculture; Trump then bailed out farmers. US-China relations have badly deteriorated to the point that some think war between the superpowers is increasingly likely in the next decade. US consumers now pay more for imported goods due to the tariffs (basically a sales tax); both economies are being weakened as a result.
One of the hot button issues dividing the two nations is the status of Taiwan; the other is economic competition. US recognized a “One China” policy, and after the Nixon-Mao reciprocal visits, that “One China” is China, not Taiwan. Taiwan was once called Formosa, a Japanese colony, for the first half of the 20th Century. The US and Taiwan remain strong but unofficial allies, without so stating. China says that it wants to reunite the two parts peacefully. Taiwan has been edging towards independence rather than uniting with China, while China has been edging towards military action while declaring that reunification will come through peaceful means. Biden has said the US will defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression (the first US President to say so explicitly), but it will not support Taiwan declaring its independence, and wants their differences resolved peacefully. In the interim both the US and China navies are increasingly provocative towards each other in the Taiwan Straits, and also in the South China Sea where the Philippines, China and Vietnam have competing claims to the large oil and gas reserves under the sea. Under Biden, the US military has resumed dialogue with its Chinese counterparts to ease tensions and reduce the chances of unintended conflict, which is a big improvement from the Trump era. War would be unimaginably destructive to both.
Under Biden, the Trump tariffs on China have remained in place. The US/China economic conflicts over trade first intensified then relaxed, as the Biden Administration and Chinese officials began again to meet regularly to work on their economic cooperation and agreements on rules of the road and understandings for healthy competition – a process that Trump had ended. The Secretaries of State, Commerce and Treasury are now in frequent contacts with their Chinese counterparts to allay the prospects for conflict.
US and China strongly agree on reducing green house gases to reduce climate change, and they are the two largest emitters in the globe. China has become much more advanced in producing EV’s, solar panels and batteries than the US. The US under Biden is making a huge effort to produce solar panels, EVs, batteries and CHIPs domestically. Trump denies the reality of climate change, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, and has opposed (and threatens to discontinue) Biden’s tax credits for renewable energy and EV’s.
Taiwan is the global leader in CHIP manufacturing, having 50% of the market; US is #4 with a 12% manufacturing market share and trying to catch up, followed by China with a 9% manufacturing market share (but purchasing 50% of all CHIPs manufactured). Taiwan is critical to the economic health of both the US and China.
China is by far the world’s leader in sales and use of EV’s (37%), followed by Europe (24%), then the US (9.5%) lagging far behind in 3rd place. EV’s are critical to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; Trump wants to end the Biden subsidies for their production and purchase; EU nations want to impose tariffs on Chinese made EV’s flooding their markets.
Iran is one of the largest states in the Middle East with ample oil production and reserves; it aspires to regional domination and obliteration of the state of Israel; it is now allied with Putin. It has a proud history dating back to its wars with the Greeks and Romans, and often served as a safe refuge for the Jewish people until the 1979 revolution. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has declared itself a sworn enemy of the US and Israel. It has been developing a terror network throughout the Middle East, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria, and Hamas in Gaza. It is a theocratic state with a predominantly Shia population and little tolerance for other sects, especially the more populous Sunnis. For some time, it has been working to develop nuclear weapons. Obama negotiated a halt to their development in conjunction with the EU, Russia, and China. Trump abrogated the agreement, and Iran is now able to pursue nuclear weapons and is believed to be doing so; it has not yet exploded a bomb although it has the uranium enrichment capacity to develop a substantial number of bombs. It is now allied with Russia in the Ukraine war, and it is providing drones that are being used to bomb Ukrainian cities. It has allied with the Lebanese militias, the Hamas militias, the Syrian militias, Iraqi Shia militias and the Houthi militias, surrounding Israel and Saudi Arabia. There is a real danger that either Israel or Iran will attack the other and set off widespread war and destruction throughout the Middle East. Iran is also in a bad place economically and would benefit from the release of US and EU sanctions if it were prepared to normalize relations and reduce its support for terrorism across the Middle East — a decision it has been unable to make due to the influence and control of the old guard from the 1979 revolution. The election of a moderate as the new President of Iran gives some reason for hope.
Hamas has lit the fire that could lead to major warfare in the Middle East. When Israel was negotiating with Saudi Arabia about normalizing relations, Hamas concluded that they needed to attack Israel to forestall normalization. They succeeded beyond their expectations with a massacre of over 1200 Israelis and capturing more than 200 hostages. Israel has responded by trying to wipe out Hamas’ military and political leadership in Gaza with little regard for the innocent civilians who have lost their homes, lives, families, schools, hospitals, and all they hold most dear. Neither side is willing to give in from their maximalist positions – the destruction of the state of Israel and the destruction of Hamas. If a wider war breaks out, Iran and the US will be dragged in, which might be the goal of both combatants as Israel wants to put an end to Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran now has one and possibly two powerful nuclear armed allies to protect it.
Widening inequality and deteriorating living conditions for low and moderate income Americans.
Since the late 70’s, the US has cut income tax rates for the wealthy, and also reduced federal programs, such as housing and financial assistance for lower income Americans. For example, Reagan, Bush, and Trump all cut the tax rates for the very wealthy. Reagan and Clinton drastically cut housing and financial assistance programs for lower-income Americans, respectively. This has exacerbated income inequality, led to large federal budget deficits, increased homelessness, reduced government services, and caused widespread suffering and destitution. Biden proposes to allow the Trump tax credits for the wealthy to expire, as they are scheduled to do in 2025.
Under Biden, the real incomes for lower income working Americans have increased for the first time since they began to stagnate in the late 70’s. This is due to the low levels of unemployment and high demand for job seekers. Trump proposes to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy, and to expand tariffs on most imports, and to round up and deport over 10 million immigrants, primarily workers in some of our most low paid and hazardous professions. These in combination could reignite high inflation.
One of the most troubling canaries in the US coal mine are our growing numbers of homeless citizens. Most simply cannot afford a place to live, given high rents and soaring home prices; about a quarter suffer from debilitating and often untreated mental illness and addictions. One way to understand the nation’s terrible homelessness problem is to compare federal outlays on the tax expenditure for home mortgages with the federal outlays for programs like Section 8 subsidized private housing, and public housing. The federal tax expenditures for the home mortgage deduction so dear to homeowners, now dwarf by a factor of 400% what HUD spends on housing – the reverse of where we were in 1978. The economic benefits of the home mortgage tax deduction overwhelmingly enure to those in the top 20% of income brackets because they have the highest home values paired with the highest income tax brackets. So why don’t we have enough affordable housing? It’s two reasons: 1) federal housing policy favors building high-cost housing for high income individuals ,and 2) local zoning, housing, and planning departments erect barriers to constructing new affordable housing units for those of low and moderate incomes. The Fed’s high interest rates are a huge additional barrier to home ownership for first time buyers.
Trump wants to further cut and reduce existing housing and other social service programs for low-income workers and their families. Biden wants to fund construction of more new units of affordable housing through a new Low-income Housing Tax Credit.
Declining support for democracy
Democracy allows us to change leaders at designated intervals when the voting population so chooses. Many despair about the loss of fundamental democratic rights. What happens to a democracy when the losing party refuses to accept its election loss and calls upon its shock troops to take over the Capitol and change the outcome? What happens to a democracy when the nation’s Supreme Court insulates the chief instigator of January 6 from criminal responsibility for trying to overthrow an election? What happens to a nation when its representatives draw district lines to insulate themselves from electoral challengers? What happens to a democracy when its elected representatives erect barriers to the freedom of US citizens to exercise their right to vote? What happens to a democracy when the unelected members of its Supreme Court allow the armament of its citizens with military assault rifles and machine gun act a likes? What happens in a democracy when both parties are unable to persuade their geriatric leadership to step aside and make room for the next generation of leaders?
What we do know is that whatever his age, President Biden has done a remarkable job of cleaning up the messes from his successor: 1) on the economy, 2) on Covid, 3) on climate change, and 4) on our relations with NATO and the rest of the world. We are poised at a very delicate moment in terms of the safety of our democracy, the survival of life on our planet, and the peace of the world. We cannot afford to make huge mistakes. In light of his advancing age and diminishing electoral prospects. Biden has wisely chosen to step aside and endorse his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to carry the Democratic torch; she is by far the better candidate than her opponent, but she too will face the same massive challenges ahead, some anticipated and others coming totally out of the blue.
It is going to take massive voting turnouts from an educated, informed, and alarmed citizenry to preserve and improve our democracy from those seeking to undermine and destroy it, to build a vibrant, sustainable economy that rewards the necessary changes to preserve our environment, to harness new developing technologies, and to ameliorate the massive economic inequities that have accrued in our gilded age. Our chance is coming this November, let us live up to and be worthy of the courage and wisdom of our forebears.