Spectator Editorial

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected,” wrote George Orwell in 1945. The public conversation soon caught up with the lethal realities of the nuclear age. The possibility of annihilation loomed over politics, domestic and foreign, for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Then, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it faded into the background. Thanks to Vladimir Putin, the threat has returned to the fore. The isolated and unpredictable strongman in the Kremlin is not shy when it comes to reminding the world of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

Rick Scott recently managed to elbow his way into a jam-packed news cycle with an eleven-point plan to “rescue America.” The Florida senator did not, however, get the headlines he wanted. Senator Scott’s proposals ranged from the trivial, such as a suggestion to name the border wall after Donald Trump, to the obvious: growing the economy was one especially helpful idea. But it was a tax plan that landed him in hot water with colleagues. “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount,” suggested Mr. Scott. “Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald wrote that in 1936 in an essay called “The Crack-Up.” At the time, the US economy was coming out of the Depression. A Democratic administration was expanding the reach and influence of the federal government, notably into areas of the economy where it did no good, and war was on the horizon. On the bright side, inflation in 1936 was 1.46 percent and GDP was growing at 12.9 percent per year, which is even higher than the capitalists of the CCP have recently claimed for China.

Meta is meant to be better — better than Facebook, better even than reality. In the future, a second Edward Gibbon may wonder not just whether it was a good idea for the federal government to encourage Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of talented techies to launch a Revenge of the Nerds coup against the minds and manners of America, but also what it was about reality that made us want to escape it so badly in the first place. There has never been a society more blessed than that of the United States.

'Welcome to 2030. You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” This is not a quotation from George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. It is not even supposed to be dystopian. If it is fiction, it is not because it is implausible, but because it has yet to be accomplished as fact. These are the opening lines from a social media video issued by the World Economic Forum in 2016, and generated from “the input of members of the WEF’s Global Future Councils.” These visionaries have further delights in store for us: “Whatever you want, you’ll rent... The US won’t be the world’s leading superpower… You’ll eat much less meat… A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job at welcoming and integrating refugees.

Every president is a hostage to fortune, but every president makes his own luck. The George W. Bush presidency was redefined by the 9/11 attacks and ruined by its response. The crash of the markets in 2008 pushed Barack Obama ahead of John McCain in the polls. The Democrats’ choice of Hillary Clinton in 2016 was their misfortune and a gift to Donald Trump. Would Joe Biden have won in 2020 without Covid-19 closing the global economy? The first year of the Biden presidency ends as it began, only with less luck. Biden tells us that the sky is falling and that legislation can heal the planet, but his administration cannot organize a vote in Congress. Through the fall, Biden’s wild spending plans were held hostage by the Squad in the House and by Democratic moderates in the Senate.

It is customary for presidencies to lose vitality and purpose in their last months. It is unprecedented for a presidency to lose its way in its first year, and when it still holds a majority in both houses of Congress. The Biden presidency has donned Jimmy Carter’s cardigan of shame in only nine months. If, that is, it ever was the Biden presidency. It was sold from the get-go as the ‘Biden-Harris presidency’. Double-barreled names are an inveterate mark of snobbery, and in this case the snobbery is that of the higher tokenism. Even the Democrats’ own members didn’t want Harris on the card in 2020. Harris’s symbolic merits as a woman of color seem to have been outweighed by her blatant falsity and opportunism.

President Biden’s impromptu remarks on 9/11 spoke volumes. His erratic and frequently irritated presence in recent weeks — when, that is, he has been present at all — reflects a presidency that is struggling to maintain its focus and its sense of reality. Biden was promoted in 2020 as the candidate of restoration. Despite nearly five decades of successful operation in Capitol Hill, one of the least normal places on Earth, Biden, we were told, represented normalcy, common sense and empathy. Candidate Biden did his best to deliver all three, when his handlers let him. President Biden has delivered none of them — when, that is, he has delivered at all, for no modern president has dodged the cameras and questions so assiduously.

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 will come in a matter of days. It will be marked by the victory of the Taliban in Kabul and the humiliation of America. The war in Afghanistan was one of the largest-ever undertakings of any major country, in any era. Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo Moon landing program cost the United States close to $300 billion. The Manhattan Project cost $30 billion. The Interstate Highway System, about $500 billion. Those three mammoth projects are dwarfed by the cost of 20 years fighting in Afghanistan, which will well exceed a trillion dollars when all is said and done. The amount spent on Afghan nation-building surpassed the cost of the Marshall Plan in 2014 and kept rising inexorably for seven years more.

The American war in Afghanistan is over. In the predawn hours of July 2, US troops slunk away from Bagram Air Base, without even informing the local Afghan commander. It was a sorry end to a sad and futile war. For 20 years Bagram was the Gibraltar of American power in Afghanistan, the single largest Nato base in the country, housing 10,000 troops, thousands more support personnel and a Pizza Hut. Now Bagram, and the adjacent prison holding 5,000 Taliban fighters, are in the hands of the Afghan military, which soon showed its mettle by letting an army of looters plunder the base.

'America is back at the table,’ Joe Biden wants us to know. ‘Diplomacy is back.’ After four years of Donald Trump, the new President seems rather too desperate to tell the world that the United States is on their side. It all sounds very positive, but what has Biden’s return to the global table actually achieved? What, if anything, is he likely to achieve over the next four years? Last month’s G7 summit in Cornwall, England, was full of grand talk of international cooperation, defending democratic values, confronting China and more.

The Republican party is in ‘the wilderness’, as insufferable political analysts describe the wholly normal phenomenon of a party being out of power. Yet, compared to their last camping trip in 2008, Republicans should have countless reasons for optimism. Joe Biden may not last until 2024. Even if he does, he is hardly a transformational leader, never mind all the newspaper editorials calling him a 21st-century Franklin D. Roosevelt. Republicans still hold most governorships and state legislatures. After redistricting, the Democrats’ tiny House majority could vanish entirely.

Joe Biden has spent his first couple of months in office enjoying what his predecessor never had: a presidential honeymoon. Americans have rewarded Biden with early approval ratings of 60 percent or higher. He may be benefiting from the inevitable diminishing of the coronavirus as cases decline and more states reopen. Or the public may simply be relieved to have a president who isn’t perpetually in the spotlight, even if he doesn’t always seem aware of the fact he is president. But no honeymoon can last too long, and Biden’s is coming to an end at America’s southern border, where a crisis is escalating. Eighty thousand people tried illegally to cross the border in January, double the figure of a year ago. In February, nearly 100,000 did the same.

Anything President Trump can do, President Biden can undo better. On his first day in office, Biden issued 17 executive actions, nine them simply reversing a prior Trump order. The Paris Climate Agreement returned like a ghost, revived to save the world from climate disaster with vague good intentions. The border wall was canceled. Critical race theory was re-enshrined as America’s state religion. In the weeks since the inauguration, dozens of additional orders have appeared. In most cases this administration’s stated principle is ‘what the Orange Man did, but the opposite’. But in trying to construct a foreign policy that maintains America’s status as a global superpower, Biden will find that simply repudiating Trump is not enough.