Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
I’m not sure I’d ever watched Donald Trump lie so incessantly, extravagantly and unabashedly, and that’s saying something. On Thursday night he lied about the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He lied about the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. He lied about his relationship with the military, about his concern for the environment — about pretty much any and every subject that came up. He lied with a smile. He lied with a shrug. He lied with a sneer.
That should have been the main, maybe even the only, story of the debate, and it should have made him easy, pitiable prey for his opponent. But President Biden failed to take advantage of it. He seemed — there’s no getting around this — incapable of doing so. And that’s its own big story, one that will only grow over the hours and days ahead.
Biden, 81, came into his face-off with Trump knowing that many voters were concerned about his age and had doubts about his sharpness. His aides knew that, too. And he and they spent much of the past week devoted to preparation, preparation, preparation, pausing occasionally to assure nervous Democrats that Biden had this thing under control.
But from the moment the debate began, he seemed unsteady. Off. His expression was often frozen. His voice was often flat. He garbled words. He corrected himself midsentence, over and over again. He’d clearly memorized key talking points — key phrases — but he repeatedly used them without providing adequate context, swerved from one to another without any transition, halted sentences before they reached their destination, started sentences without giving them any bearings.
Ten minutes in, I had a knot in my stomach. Twenty minutes in, the knot was so tight, it hurt. “We finally beat Medicare,” he said early on, and I had no idea what he was talking about.
He got somewhat clearer as the night wore on. He found more animation. But the damage was done, and it may be significant. I shudder to type that, but there’s no sense in pretending. That’s perhaps what too many of his advisers have been doing up until now — ignoring or wishing away the obvious.
Then again, maybe Biden just had an uncharacteristically bad night. It’s possible. And even if this is now the diminished truth of him, it’s still preferable to the Big Lie of Trump, whose own sentences can be (and on Thursday frequently were) inscrutable, whose behavior is reliably unscrupulous and whose second administration would be stocked with corrupt, vengeful lackeys and would sully our democracy in ways from which we might never recover. As I’ve written before about the signs that Biden is past his peak, the presidency is more than the president: It’s the crew that the president assembles, the culture that the president creates. Biden at his least focused would establish a better crew and culture than Trump at his most.
But can Biden beat Trump? That question predated the debate and will be asked with even more urgency and panic in its aftermath. As will this one: Is it really too late for another Democrat to take Biden’s place? With stakes this high, mustn’t that be discussed one more time before the convention?
Again, I feel a bit sick saying that, because I believe that Biden is a decent man who, as president, has done a better than decent job. In both of those respects, he outpaces Trump by many miles, and if Republican politicians and voters had any decency of their own, they would have sidelined Trump long ago. (They had their chance. He was impeached twice, after all.)
But I’m not weighing in on Biden’s record. I’m evaluating his prospects. And I’m acknowledging that performances as shaky as the one he delivered on Thursday may hurt him badly with the small group of uncommitted voters who will decide what is almost guaranteed to be a very close election. Anyone and everyone who correctly understands the stakes of a Trump victory must grapple with that — and fast.
The best measure of Biden’s ineffectiveness on Thursday night was the dormant Vesuvius of Trump. He never even came close to erupting. Just as many people tuned in to the debate to see how much command Biden could muster and how much confidence he could project, many were curious about Trump’s degree of control. Would he rant, rave and remind voters of how dangerously erratic and fundamentally unpresidential he is?
He didn’t, at least not to the extent that he might have. Sure, he was pouty, petty and promiscuous with superlatives: Everything about him was the very best ever, while everything about Biden was the very worst. It was wholly unnuanced and utterly absurd. But he didn’t interrupt Biden. Didn’t shout. Didn’t scale the pinnacles of nastiness and mockery that he did in past debates.
And the reason was obvious in his bemused, pleased expression as Biden staggered through more than a few of his remarks. Trump realized that Biden was sabotaging himself. Trump reveled in that, at one point expressing puzzlement over some assertion that Biden had just made. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump scoffed. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
The astounding part was that Trump didn’t revel even more. The heartbreaking part was how Biden bungled what were clearly intended to be devastating lines. He connected the death of his son Beau, who did duty in Iraq as a major in the Delaware National Guard, to derogatory comments that Trump reportedly made about Americans who’d served in the military.
“My son was not a loser, not a sucker,” Biden proclaimed, but words that should have been immeasurably poignant just sort of hung there. “You’re the sucker,” Biden added. “You’re the loser.” I cringed. That’s Trump talk, not Biden talk, and its delivery was disjointed, unsettling, odd.
For most of the mere 90 minutes of the debate, Biden seemed to be grasping for something he couldn’t reach. I fear that’s a metaphor. I’m sure it’s a warning.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer.
It was the kind of vintage Biden that left MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace with demands of the campaign.
“That should be cut into an ad, and it should be the most money they’ve spent on TV TV so far. That should be running on every swing state digital and broadcast TV by tomorrow morning. That is a person who could win. And I think a lot of Democrats, to Cornell’s [Belcher] point, ran away from the president after coming to the conclusion that the person they saw last night.
Rev. Al Sharpton demanded the ad be put on immediately, not tomorrow.
“I got calls all night,” he said. “And I kept saying to them, do you have a short memory? Just a few years ago, to be exact, 3 1/2 years ago, I happened to be in Charleston, South Carolina, after the Democratic debate, having breakfast, and all of the candidates came. Joe Biden had just entered the race, and he was beaten in New Hampshire, and Jim Clyburn and him hooked up, and he took off. “
Wallace confessed that as a member of the media, she and others have “spent almost a grotesque amount of time trying to understand the bond of [Donald] Trump and his base. And compared to that very small amount of time to understand Joe Biden’s tie to his.”
What Rev. Sharpton was getting at, she said, is “something that has been missed by the, sort of, elite media, is that people see themselves in Joe Biden’s resilience and having to overcome to stutter. They see him in the agony of losing a child, a wife, and a daughter and in parenting someone who struggles with the disease of addiction.”
Now, I don’t think anyone can see themselves in him having to watch his own government prosecute his own son and then saying that he loves this country so much and the rule of law that he won’t pardon him; that’s almost next level. But there is something we miss about the voters and the Biden base’s ties to Biden that I think is really underscored by that clip from today’s speech.”
Team Trump Has a Ukraine Plan—and It’s a Total Nightmare
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling – June 25, 2024
Donald Trump’s advisers have revealed their new plan for resolving the war between Russia and Ukraine—and it involves Ukraine’s immediate submission.
The plan effectively promises an increase in U.S. weapons aid to Ukraine so long as it shows up for peace talks with Russia, reported Reuters. And while that deal may not sound so bad, the writing between the lines isn’t so simple. Trump’s advisers envision that the peace talks—which Trump would facilitate should he win the November election—would also quietly include Ukraine ceding part of its territory that is currently occupied by Russian forces.
The concept was drawn up by retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, both former chiefs of staff on Trump’s National Security Council. Trump did not immediately sign on to “every word” of the plan, but Fleitz told Reuters that they were “pleased to get the feedback we did.”
The Kremlin told Reuters that Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to peace talks, but that any proposal by a possible future Trump administration would have to reflect the “reality on the ground.”
When pressed on the details of the plan, Fleitz explained that Ukraine would not formally need to relinquish its land to Russian forces. He did concede, however, that Ukraine was unlikely to regain control of all of its territory in the near future.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said that ending the war on the borders of its current front lines—where Russia has gained a foothold in the southeast portion of Ukraine—would be “strange,” pointing to the fact that Russia had violated international law by invading it in the first place.
“Ukraine has an absolutely clear understanding and it is spelled out in the peace formula proposed by President [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy, it is clearly stated there—peace can only be fair and peace can only be based on international law,” Podolyak told Reuters.
The plan’s promise to send more military aid to Ukraine only if it admits defeat and ends the war seems a bit counterintuitive—and disingenuous, considering that Trump and his advisers have done practically everything within their power to undermine sending more military aid to the embattled nation since the beginning of the year. And the plan’s obvious benefit to Russia also raises further concerns over Trump’s notoriouslycushy—and sometimes subservient—relationship with Putin.
Panicking Trump Tries Yet Another Get-Out-of-Debate-Free Card
Edith Olmsted – June 25, 2024
Donald Trump’s campaign is hard at work manufacturing a reason for him to skip Thursday’s presidential debate, and his latest tactic is the most ridiculous one yet.
Trump and his former White House doctor Representative Ronny Jackson, who reportedly kept the former president’s administration “awash in speed,” have repeatedlysuggested that President Joe Biden will take performance-enhancing drugs before the debate, as part of their crusade to undermine the event and give Trump a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Now they’ve elevated their own bonkers conspiracy theory even further: Trump posted a letter to Truth Social on Monday that Jackson supposedly sent to the White House demanding Biden submit to a drug test before the debate.
“I demand that you submit to a clinically validated drug test in order to reassure the American people that you are mentally fit to serve as President and not relying on performance enhancing drugs to help you with your debate performance,” Jackson wrote. The pill-pushing Texas Republican demanded that the results of the president’s drug test be made public.
In his letter, Jackson echoed Trump’s and right-wing media’s insistence that Biden is suffering from cognitive decline, including a reference to a video of Biden that had been doctored to make him appear to wander away from a group at the G7 conference, and Robert Hur’s damning report casting public doubt on Biden’s memory. Hur’s characterization of their interview has been contested by the White House.
All of this concocted drama around drug use, as well as claims that CNN will host a biased debate, positively reek of desperation to get the former president out of Thursday night’s presidential showdown. It’s not surprising, as Trump is not suited to actual debate: His speech is often erratic and incoherent, and he’s prone to going off on tangents. Plus, Trump has historically taken a hit in the polls after debating with Democrats, in 2016, and again in 2020. While Trump loves to hype up a crowd, he’s just not that convincing when he’s sharing the stage.
It also appears that Jackson may soon want to focus on problems of his own. The House Ethics Committee announced Monday that it will review a report from a congressional watchdog that discovered “substantial reason” to believe that Jackson had converted thousands of dollars of campaign money for his own personal use.
Jackson was demoted by the U.S. Navy in 2022 after the Pentagon inspector general found that he regularly drank on the job, berated his subordinates, and acted inappropriately. Last year, Jackson was filmed unleashing a profanity-laced tirade on a Department of Public Safety officer.
Why Republicans Are Talking About Biden’s ‘Dictatorship’
Jamelle Bouie – June 25, 2024
Credit…Will Matsuda for The New York Times
The United States under President Biden is a “dictatorship,” according to Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota.
“Under Joe Biden,“ Burgum told Fox News, “we’re actually living under a dictatorship today where he’s, you know, bypassing Congress on immigration policy; he’s bypassing Congress on protecting our border; he’s bypassing Congress on student loan forgiveness; he’s defying the Supreme Court.”
Asked on Sunday to defend his claim, Burgum, who is apparently on the short list of potential running mates for Donald Trump, stood his ground, telling CNN that Biden is “bypassing the other two branches of government to push an ideological view of — whether it’s on economics or whether it’s on climate extremism — he’s doing that without using the other branches.”
It is an odd sort of dictatorship in which the head of state is bound by the rule of law as well as by the authority of other constitutional actors, one in which the dictator’s critics can organize to defeat him in an election without intimidation, penalty or threat of legal sanction — and in which he will leave office if he loses. If nothing else, it is hard to imagine a world in which Biden is both a dictator and someone who would allow Burgum, a regime opponent, to speak freely on national television as he works to defeat Biden at the ballot box.
In fairness to the North Dakota governor, he was trying to make a point about a perceived double standard, in which Trump and not Biden is blasted as an authoritarian for his use of executive orders. But even this is misleading, because the issue with Trump is not the use of executive orders per se. Instead, it is his demonstrated contempt for democratic accountability — he does not accept the right of an electorate to remove him from office — his desire to use the instruments of state to inflict punishment and suffering on his political enemies and his efforts to transform the office of the presidency and the broader executive branch into instruments of his personalist rule.
(That said, there is a conversation for another day about the overreliance on executive orders by presidents of both parties as a symptom of congressional weakness and a product of long-running structural transformations in the nature of the presidency, tied specifically to the growth and pre-eminence of the national security state.)
Governor Burgum is obviously wrong about the idea that Biden is a dictator. But he is not the only Trump ally to speak in such dire terms about the United States. As Politico’s Ian Ward noted, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio — another Republican hoping to stand with Trump as his second — believes that “the United States is on the verge of going up in smoke” and that “electing Trump represents the only hope that Americans have for getting off the path to literal civilization collapse.”
And Russ Vought, former budget chief in the Trump administration and one of the architects of the former president’s second-term agenda, believes that Americans are living in a “post-constitutional” moment that justifies the radical use of executive power to quash protesters with the military, the gutting of the federal civil service in favor of a spoils system for Trump loyalists and the seizing of the power of the purse from Congress. He urges his comrades in arms to “cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it.”
Just as Americans are not living under a Biden dictatorship — in which the watchful eye of Dark Brandon prowls the nation in search of malarkey — the United States is also not on the verge of collapse. Our economy is the envy of the world, we remain the pre-eminent military power, and for all of its serious problems of representation and inclusion, our political system is still capable of handling at least a few of the major issues that face the nation. It does not downplay the challenges we confront to say that we have the capacity and the resources to meet them head on. That, if anything, makes it all the more frustrating that we have not yet secured decent housing, health care, child care and education for everyone in this country. None of these things are beyond our material ability to accomplish — far from it.
Of course, even mentioning the reality of conditions in the United States is a bit beside the point, because the breathless catastrophizing by Trump and his allies is not an expression of ignorance as much as it is a statement of intent. Rhetorically, the MAGA political project of personalist rule in support of social hierarchy, unrestrained capital and the destruction of public goods depends on the conceit that the nation exists in a state of exception that demands extraordinary — and extreme — measures to resolve.
The cultivation of this notion of a state of exception, of a sense of emergency, is the overriding aim of MAGA political messaging. The targets change — in 2020 it was leftists and protesters, this year it is migrants and refugees again, as it was in 2016 — but the goal is always the same: to designate an enemy, to label that enemy an urgent threat to society and to try to win power on a promise to destroy that enemy by any means necessary.
Embedded in this maneuver is a radical claim of sovereignty. The so-called enemy is whoever Trump says it is, and once designated, the entire political system must bend to his will on the notion that he, alone, can fix it.
Sovereign power of the sort that Trump and his allies gesture toward does not exist in the American system as traditionally understood, and there is no provision in our Constitution by which the executive can set aside the rule of law to deal with threats and emergencies. But the point of this rhetoric of exception is to set the conditions for doing just that — for creating an actual state of exception in American politics.
Put another way, if we are on the verge of civilizational collapse, if we are in a post-constitutional moment, if we are already in a dictatorship, then anything is permitted in defense of the old order. And if democracy should stand in the way of recovery and restoration, then democracy should, perhaps, be set aside.
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln did not present himself as a bulwark of liberty who could resolve the crisis alone. He tried, as much as possible, to embody and act on his deep belief in the rule of law. For example, after taking unilateral steps to confront the rebellion and defend the Union at the outset of the conflict, he went to Congress to ask for its blessing and support. In his message, issued on July 4, 1861, Lincoln did not make demands or assert extraordinary powers.
Instead, the political scientist Nomi Claire Lazar wrote, Lincoln invited “Congress to share the burden of both reflection and action, to consider and judge the reasons he has given.” What guided his deliberations, she continued, is “precisely a commitment to the rule of law as a collective and collaborative project. What is the best we can do, given the constraints and imperatives, he asks, and how can we do our best together?”
If there is anything to know about either Trump or his closest allies, it is that they do not share this commitment to collaboration or deliberation or public reason. They know only force and dominance. And they want everything to be a crisis, not for an opportunity to affirm democracy, but for a chance to undermine it.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington.
Things to know about dangerous rip currents and how swimmers caught in one can escape
Curt Anderson – June 24, 2024
This image provided by NOAA, pictures a harmless green dye used to show a rip current. Rip currents are powerful, narrow channels of fast-moving water that are prevalent along the East, Gulf, and West coasts of the U.S., as well as along the shores of the Great Lakes. About 100 people drown from rip currents along U.S. beaches each year, according to the U.S. Lifesaving Association. (NOAA via AP)A no swimming flag is visible as waves crash against the rocks at Haulover Beach Park, November 18, 2020, in Miami Beach, Florida. About 100 people drown from rip currents along U.S. beaches each year, according to the U.S. Lifesaving Association, and more than 80 percent of beach rescues annually involve rip currents. (David Santiago/Miami Herald via AP, File)Beachgoers walk past warning flags and signs, Jan. 13, 2020, in Pompano Beach, Fla. About 100 people drown from rip currents along U.S. beaches each year, according to the U.S. Lifesaving Association, and more than 80 percent of beach rescues annually involve rip currents. (Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP, File)
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Stinging jellyfish, rays with their whip-like tails and sharks on the hunt are some ocean hazards that might typically worry beachgoers. But rip currents are the greatest danger and account for the most beach rescues every year.
About 100 people drown from rip currents along U.S. beaches each year, according to the United States Lifesaving Association. And more than 80 percent of beach rescues annually involve rip currents.
The National Weather Service lists 16 known deaths so far in 2024 from rip currents in U.S. waters, including the Florida fatalities as well as eight deaths in Puerto Rico and two in Texas.
Here are some things to know about rip currents:
What is a rip current?
Rip currents are narrow columns of water flowing rapidly away from the beach, like a swift stream within the ocean. They don’t pull swimmers under water, but can carry them out a fair distance from shore.
Low spots along the beach, or areas near jetties or piers, are often where rip currents form. They can be connected to stormy weather but also sometimes occur during sunny days. They can be hard to detect because the surface water often appears calm.
The current can flow as swiftly as eight feet per second (3.2 meters per second), faster than even a strong swimmer can overcome, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“If you’re caught in one and you try to swim straight in, you’re not going to be able to,” said Daniel Barnickel of Palm Beach County Ocean Rescue.
How can someone escape a rip current?
The most frequent advice from beach rescue teams and weather forecasters is to not panic and look for a chance to swim parallel to the shore until the swimmer is out of the rip current’s grip. It will eventually dissipate but might leave the swimmer out in deeper water.
It’s nearly impossible to fight the current directly. Many swimmers who get in trouble tire themselves out trying to get back to the beach, lifeguards say. If possible, it’s best to swim near a lifeguard station.
“Most of our rip current rescues happen outside the guarded areas because we’re not there to prevent it from happening,” Barnickel said.
What warning systems exist for rip currents?
Flags with different colors are used to warn beachgoers of various hazards.
Three flags warn of surf and rip current conditions. Red means a high hazard, yellow means a moderate threat and green means low danger. There’s also purple for dangerous sea life, like jellyfish, and double red when a beach is closed for any reason.
The National Weather Service posts rip current risks on its websites around the coasts and has developed a computer model that can predict when conditions are favorable for their formation up to six days in advance for the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Guam.
“Before this, forecasters were manually predicting rip currents on a large section of the ocean twice a day and only a day or two into the future. The earlier prediction has potential to substantially increase awareness and reduce drownings,” said Gregory Dusek, a NOAA scientist who developed the model, in a post on the agency’s website.
High risk warnings were posted for most Florida beaches last week, when the drownings occurred.
Should someone attempt a rip current rescue?
It can be dangerous to try to rescue someone caught in a rip current, officials say. Often the people trying to perform the rescue can get into trouble themselves.
It’s best to find a lifeguard, if there is one, or call 911 if a struggling swimmer is spotted. People on shore can also try to tell the person to swim parallel to shore.
“Never swim alone. And always make sure that there’s an adult. And make sure that you don’t overestimate your abilities. Know your limits,” Barnickel said.
Associated Press video journalist Cody Jackson in Palm Beach contributed to this story.
Grim Irony: Curbing Air Pollution Is Warming the Earth Faster
Frank Landymore – June 25, 2024
Cool Factor
Have industrial emissions been counteracting the worst effects of global warming? Scientists are starting to think so.
Burning coal, oil, and gas warms our planet by dispersing greenhouse gases, like CO2, into the atmosphere. And before the introduction of more stringent environmental regulations, these fuel sources would often contain deadly pollutants like sulfur oxide that contribute to the deaths of millions of people globally.
World governments have rightly fought to curb pollutants. But as a growing body evidence is beginning to show, these airborne particles, or aerosols, have likely mitigated rising temperatures by reflecting sunlight and boosting the reflectivity of clouds — and as a result, concealed just how bad global warming actually is.
The extent of the cooling they’ve caused is more contentious. Nonetheless, it’s a grim irony that exemplifies the complexities of understanding — nevermind protecting — our climate.
“We’re starting from an area of deep, deep uncertainty,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, told The Washington Post. “It could be a full degree of cooling being masked.”
Abandon Ship
One of the biggest drop-offs in pollutants may come from the shipping industry, whose regulatory body in 2020 started limiting the use of the dirty, sulfur-spewing fuels its massive vessels once relied on, in favor of cleaner alternatives.
But with the resulting decrease in aerosols, recent research has shown that these cuts in shipping pollution has directly led to more solar radiation being trapped in our atmosphere, which could explain why 2023 was the hottest year on record by a margin that alarmed even scientists.
That doesn’t augur well for the future: the authors of the research suggested that as we curb these deadly pollutants, we could experience double the rate of global warming compared to the average since 1880.
As WaPo notes, however, many experts think the warming will be less pronounced, contributing somewhere between 0.05 degrees and 0.1 degrees Celsius of an uptick — which, of course, is still significantly worrying.
Clear the Air
There is, perhaps, a silver lining. The same cooling principle of these pollutants could be wielded in an experimental technique called marine cloud brightening, which would involve deliberately injecting safe aerosols into the atmosphere to cause clouds to reflect more sunlight and to increase cloud cover.
This is unproven and controversial, though, and the researchers behind the shipping study have suggested that their findings are an example of the downsides of pursuing that technique: the minute we stop pumping aerosols into the atmosphere, global temperatures will soar again, perhaps even more drastically than before.
At any rate, clarifying these gray areas will be paramount for climate scientists. The picture is more complicated than we once thought, and determining how much aerosols figure into it will be essential if humanity is to keep global warming short of even more disastrous levels.
“It’s not just a story of greenhouse gas emissions,” Robert Wood, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, told WaPo. “Whether you clean up rapidly, or whether you just fumble along with the same aerosol emissions, could be the difference of whether you cross the 2-degree Celsius threshold or not.”
We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop
Shannon Osaka – June 25, 2024
Smoke ash spews from the chimney of the coal power plant owned by Indonesian Power in Cilegon, Sept. 2023 (Photo by Aditya Irawan/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming – it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.
Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.
And now, as society cleans up pollution, that cooling effect is waning. New regulations have cut the amount of sulfur aerosols from global shipping traffic across the oceans; China, fighting its own air pollution problem, has slashed sulfur pollution dramatically in the last decade.
The result is even warmer temperatures – but exactly how much warmer is still under debate. The answer will have lasting impacts on humanity’s ability to meet its climate goals.
“We’re starting from an area of deep, deep uncertainty,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and research lead for the payments company Stripe. “It could be a full degree of cooling being masked.”
Most of the cooling from air pollution comes through sulfur aerosols, in two ways. The particles themselves are reflective, bouncing the sun’s rays away and shading the Earth. They also make existing clouds brighter and more mirror-like, thus cooling the Earth.
Coal and oil are around 1 to 2 percent sulfur – and when humans burn fossil fuels, that sulfur spills into the atmosphere. It is deadly: Sulfur dioxide has been linked to respiratory problems and other chronic diseases, and air pollution contributes to about 1 in 10 deaths worldwide.
Over the past few decades, countries have worked to phase out these pollutants, starting with the United States and the European Union, followed by China and India. China has cut its sulfur dioxide emissions by over 70 percent since 2005 by installing new technologies and scrubbers on fossil fuel plants. More recently, the International Maritime Organization instituted restrictions in 2020 on the amount of sulfur allowed in shipping fuels – one of the dirtiest fuels used in transportation. Shipping emissions of sulfur dioxide immediately dropped by about 80 percent. Mediterranean countries are planning a similar shipping regulation for 2025.
“There has been a pretty steep decline over the last 10 years,” said Duncan Watson-Parris, an assistant professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.
These moves have saved lives – according to estimates, around 200,000 premature deaths have already been avoided in China, and the new shipping regulations could save around 50,000 lives per year. But they have also boosted global temperatures. Scientists estimate that the changes in aerosols from the new shipping rule alone could contribute between 0.05 and 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming over the next few decades.
Some researchers have suggested that the changes to ocean shipping regulations may have been a big contributor to last year’s record heat – and that aerosols may have been masking much more heat than previously thought. Satellite images have shown that cloud changes declined after sulfur emissions went down.
“The data from NASA satellites shows that in regions where this should be expected, there’s a very strong increase in absorbed solar radiation,” said Leon Simons, an independent researcher and a member of the Club of Rome of the Netherlands, pointing to shipping areas affected by the new rules. “And also in this period you see sea surface temperatures increasing in the same region.”
In one new paper, scientists at the University of Maryland argued that the decrease in aerosols could double the rate of warming in the 2020s, compared to the rate since 1980. But other researchers have critiqued their results.
Many experts believe the effect is likely to be modest – between 0.05 and 0.1 degrees Celsius. “I don’t think it’s possible to get better than a factor of two, in terms of how uncertain we are,” said Michael Diamond, a professor of meteorology and environmental science at Florida State University.
Some scientists see the shipping regulation as an analog to a way that researchers are exploring to halt global warming: purposefully brightening clouds using less polluting methods. In Alameda, Calif., researchers recently released sea salt aerosols into the atmosphere as a first step to study how the particles could brighten clouds and reflect sunlight. City officials later halted the project, despite reports showing that the experiment was safe.
But the real issue is still ahead. Currently, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that aerosols are masking about 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. But that value could be as high as 1 degree or as low as 0.2 degrees – and the difference could be the difference between meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement or not.
If aerosols have been masking cooling much more than expected, for example, the world could be poised to blow past its climate targets without realizing it.
Almost 200 of the world’s nations pledged in the Paris agreement to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to preindustrial levels. Scientists believe that many dangerous impacts, from the collapse of coral reefs to the melting of major ice sheets, will occur somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.
“It’s not just a story of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Robert Wood, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington. “Whether you clean up rapidly, or whether you just fumble along with the same aerosol emissions, could be the difference of whether you cross the 2-degree Celsius threshold or not.”
No scientists are advocating a halt to aerosol clean up efforts – the death tolls from air pollution are simply too high. “There are really good reasons to want to be cleaning up air pollution,” Diamond said. “The public health benefits are really important.”
But researchers worry that cleaning up air pollution without halting fossil fuel use – as, for example, in China – could be a recipe for even greater and faster warming. “We need to make sure that we’re doing it at the same time as cleaning up methane and cleaning up CO2,” Diamond said. Cutting methane emissions, he noted, could help offset the effects of declining aerosols. Methane has a warming effect, but like aerosols, doesn’t remain in the atmosphere for very long.
Still, a lot of scientific questions remain – and until they are answered, the world won’t know exactly how much warming falling aerosols will unmask.
The findings in JAMA Pediatrics show that infant deaths rose after Texas’ Senate Bill 8, which banned all abortion after about six weeks from conception. SB 8 became Texas law in September 2021 and U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion just over nine months later, on June 24, 2022. The high court ruling in the Dobbs case prompted more than a dozen states to issue near-total bans on abortion. Observers speculate that evidence will also show increases in infant deaths in those states, akin to what Texas has seen, the study said.
“It just points to some of the devastating consequences of abortion bans that maybe people weren’t thinking about when they passed these laws,” Alison Gemmill, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health who authored the study, told USA TODAY. She called the deaths following the Texas heartbeat law its “spillover effects on moms and babies.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, right, speaks at a pro-life leaders press conference on Feb. 28, 2022, outside the state capitol. The event was held to celebrate the six month anniversary of the Texas Heartbeat Act. Briana Sanchez, Austin American-Statesman
In the wake of the law’s passage in Texas, more babies died before their first birthday, likely due to birth defects or genetic problems that wouldn’t have allowed them to live, the study found. These pregnancies would typically have been terminated by abortion, according to researchers. The Texas heartbeat law does not provide exceptions for pregnancies involving such conditions. Mothers are legally obligated to carry these babies to birth under state law.
In the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association, Gemmill and researchers from Johns Hopkins and Michigan State University wrote that the Texas law was linked to “unexpected increases in infant and neonatal deaths” between 2021 and 2022. Prior research drew a correlation between the uptick in infant deaths and anti-abortion laws taking effect, however, no studies until now have attributed the fatalities directly to the laws prohibiting the termination of these pregnancies.
“Abortion care is an essential component of comprehensive healthcare, and when it is restricted, the human impacts are devastating,” Wendy Davis, a senior adviser for Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, said in a statement. Davis, who filibustered for abortion rights when she was a Democratic state senator, noted that the study only covered 2022, not the results in 2023 and 2024 in the wake of a more restrictive abortion ban that came with the Dobbs decision. This “likely means the situation on the ground today is even more dire,” Davis said.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not dispute the study’s findings but defended the Republican-controlled state’s anti-abortion record. This effort included the 2021 heartbeat law “to save the innocent unborn, and now thousands of children have been given a chance at life,” Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said in a statement to USA TODAY. He said the governor has taken “significant action to protect the sanctity of life” and offered resources to expectant mothers “so they can choose life for their child.”
Anti-abortion advocates also didn’t contest the uptick in infant deaths cited in the study. Advocates for the heartbeat law and other legislation to restrict abortions say such bans protect life. They say terminating a fetus with a terminal illness is “choosing to kill that child intentionally.”
The overwhelming majority of such abortions happen before the fetus is viable. In Texas, legislation has dramatically reduced the number of abortions performed in the state.
Amy O’Donnell, a spokesperson for Texas Alliance for Life, said the study’s findings didn’t come as a surprise. She said babies born with disabilities and even fatal anomalies deserve a chance at life, even if that means a newborn dies after birth from a condition doctors anticipated would be lethal. The death of a child is not easy, she acknowledged. She noted that her nonprofit offers resources for families grieving from such losses.
“In Texas, we celebrate every unborn child’s life saved. We treasure the fact that our laws are protecting women’s lives,” she said. “We don’t apologize for the fact that we don’t support discrimination against children facing disabilities or fatal diagnoses in or out of the womb. And that’s the line that we just believe should not be crossed.”
Gemmill, of Johns Hopkins, said babies that died shortly after being born with birth defects “probably caused a lot of unnecessary trauma to families.”
Abortion rights (in orange) and anti-abortion advocates (in blue) rally in the rotunda of the State Capitol, as the state Senate meets to consider legislation restricting abortion rights in Austin, Texas on July 12, 2013. Mike Stone, Reuters.
The researchers examined death records beginning after the heartbeat law went into effect. The study created a “synthetic Texas” that simulated outcomes that would have happened had the law not been in effect and compared the numbers to national trends during that period. In 2021, 1,985 Texas infants died before their first birthday. The next year, with S.B. 8 in effect, the fatalities jumped to 2,240, a 12.9% increase that came as the U.S. experienced an overall increase of less than 2%. Deaths attributable to congenital anomalies or birth defects spiked nearly 23% in Texas compared to a 3% decrease nationally.
“It suggests that, really, this policy was responsible for this increase in infant deaths in Texas,” Gemmill said.
The study is significant because of Texas’ role as a conservative state with urban and rural areas that may reflect what happens in the rest of the U.S., according to Dr. Tracey Wilkinson, an associate professor of pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Texas has been living under restrictions longer than other states that enacted abortion bans after the Dobbs ruling.
“When people ask me why this is happening, it’s really simple,” said Wilkinson, who was not involved with the new study. “When you take away people’s ability to make decisions (about) if and when they have pregnancies, you’re going to see outcomes like increasing infant and maternal mortality.”
In this file photo, anti-abortion activists stand in the Texas State Capitol to protest an International Women’s Day sit-in for abortion rights on March 8, 2023. Sara Diggins, Austin American-Statesman.
The study did not examine the effects of infant deaths on the health of mothers who were legally required to deliver dead babies to term, nor did it look at the mental health effects of carrying infants and delivering them, only to see them die. The study also raises but does not tackle questions about the financial cost to families of carrying and delivering terminally ill newborns.
Gemmill is now working to understand the impact of abortion restrictions on parents of different races and ethnicities. Prior research has shown that Black mothers and babies face higher death rates than other groups.
The study reflects what Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney at the abortion rights advocacy nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights, has seen in the courtroom arguing against Texas’ laws. She recently represented women who sued the state after they were denied medical abortions. One of her clients, Samatha Casiano, was required by law to carry a child that developed without a brain. In late May, the Texas Supreme Court ruled pregnant patients must have a “life-threatening condition” in order to terminate a pregnancy.
Duane questioned the claim by anti-abortion activists that Texas is a “pro-life” state, given the study’s findings. “Women are hurting, families are hurting, babies are dying, and no one in the state is taking responsibility for any of that real human suffering,” she said.
In late 2023, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found increases in infant deaths for the first time in more than 20 years. The states identified in the report with increased fatalities were states that restricted abortion access, however, experts cautioned at the time that they could not say what had caused the spike in fatalities.
The Texas study went one step further, finding one state where abortion restrictions resulted in more deaths.
By Ben Rhodes – July – August, Published on June 18, 2024
Álvaro Bernis
“America is back.” In the early days of his presidency, Joe Biden repeated those words as a starting point for his foreign policy. The phrase offered a bumper-sticker slogan to pivot away from Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership. It also suggested that the United States could reclaim its self-conception as a virtuous hegemon, that it could make the rules-based international order great again. Yet even though a return to competent normalcy was in order, the Biden administration’s mindset of restoration has occasionally struggled against the currents of our disordered times. An updated conception of U.S. leadership—one tailored to a world that has moved on from American primacy and the eccentricities of American politics—is necessary to minimize enormous risks and pursue new opportunities.
To be sure, Biden’s initial pledge was a balm to many after Trump’s presidency ended in the dual catastrophes of COVID-19 and the January 6 insurrection. Yet two challenges largely beyond the Biden administration’s control shadowed the message of superpower restoration. First was the specter of Trump’s return. Allies watched nervously as the former president maintained his grip on the Republican Party and Washington remained mired in dysfunction. Autocratic adversaries, most notably Russian President Vladimir Putin, bet on Washington’s lack of staying power. New multilateral agreements akin to the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris agreement on climate change, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership were impossible, given the vertiginous swings in U.S. foreign policy.
Second, the old rules-based international order doesn’t really exist anymore. Sure, the laws, structures, and summits remain in place. But core institutions such as the UN Security Council and the World Trade Organization are tied in knots by disagreements among their members. Russia is committed to disrupting U.S.-fortified norms. China is committed to building its own alternative order. On trade and industrial policy, even Washington is moving away from core tenets of post–Cold War globalization. Regional powers such as Brazil, India, Turkey, and the Gulf states pick and choose which partner to plug into depending on the issue. Even the high-water mark for multilateral action in the Biden years—support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia—remains a largely Western initiative. As the old order unravels, these overlapping blocs are competing over what will replace it.
A Biden victory in this fall’s election would offer reassurance that the particular risk of another Trump presidency has passed, but that will not vanquish the forces of disorder. To date, Washington has failed to do the necessary audit of the ways its post–Cold War foreign policy discredited U.S. leadership. The “war on terror” emboldened autocrats, misallocated resources, fueled a global migration crisis, and contributed to an arc of instability from South Asia through North Africa. The free-market prescriptions of the so-called Washington consensus ended in a financial crisis that opened the door to populists railing against out-of-touch elites. The overuse of sanctions led to increased workarounds and global fatigue with Washington’s weaponization of the dollar’s dominance. Over the last two decades, American lectures on democracy have increasingly been tuned out.
Indeed, after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, American rhetoric about the rules-based international order has been seen around the world on a split screen of hypocrisy, as Washington has supplied the Israeli government with weapons used to bombard Palestinian civilians with impunity. The war has created a policy challenge for an administration that criticizes Russia for the same indiscriminate tactics that Israel has used in Gaza, a political challenge for a Democratic Party with core constituencies who don’t understand why the president has supported a far-right government that ignores the United States’ advice, and a moral crisis for a country whose foreign policy purports to be driven by universal values. Put simply: Gaza should shock Washington out of the muscle memory that guides too many of its actions.
If Biden does win a second term, he should use it to build on those of his policies that have accounted for shifting global realities, while pivoting away from the political considerations, maximalism, and Western-centric view that have caused his administration to make some of the same mistakes as its predecessors. The stakes are high. Whoever is president in the coming years will have to avoid global war, respond to the escalating climate crisis, and grapple with the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Meeting the moment requires abandoning a mindset of American primacy and recognizing that the world will be a turbulent place for years to come. Above all, it requires building a bridge to the future—not the past.
THE TRUMP THREAT
One of Biden’s mantras is “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” As the presidential campaign heats up, it is worth heeding this advice. But to properly outline the dangers of a second Trump term, it is necessary to take Trump’s arguments seriously, despite the unserious form they often take. Much of what Trump says resonates broadly. Americans are tired of wars; indeed, his takeover of the Republican Party would have been impossible without the Iraq war, which discredited the GOP establishment. Americans also no longer trust their elites. Although Trump’s rhetoric about a “deep state” moves quickly into baseless conspiracy theory, it strikes a chord with voters who wonder why so many of the politicians who promised victories in Afghanistan and Iraq were never held to account. And although Trump’s willingness to cut off assistance to Ukraine is abhorrent to many, there is a potent populism to it. How long will the United States spend tens of billions of dollars helping a country whose stated aim—the recapture of all Ukrainian territory—seems unachievable?
Trump has also harnessed a populist backlash to globalization from both the right and the left. Particularly since the 2008 financial crisis, large swaths of the public in democracies have simmered with discontent over widening inequality, deindustrialization, and a perceived loss of control and lack of meaning. It is no wonder that the exemplars of post–Cold War globalization—free trade agreements, the U.S.-Chinese relationship, and the instruments of international economic cooperation itself—have become ripe targets for Trump. When Trump’s more punitive approaches to rivals, such as his trade war with China, didn’t precipitate all the calamities that some had predicted, his taboo-breaking approach appeared to be validated. The United States, it turned out, did have leverage.
But offering a potent critique of problems should not be confused with having the right solutions to them. To begin with, Trump’s own presidency seeded much of the chaos that Biden has faced. Time and again, Trump pursued politically motivated shortcuts that made things worse. To end the war in Afghanistan, he cut a deal with the Taliban over the heads of the Afghan people, setting a timeline for withdrawal that was shorter than the one Biden eventually adopted. Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal despite Iranian compliance, unshackling the country’s nuclear program, escalating a proxy war across the Middle East, and sowing doubt across the world about whether the United States keeps its word. By moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights, and pursuing the Abraham Accords, he cut the Palestinians out of Arab-Israeli normalization and emboldened Israel’s far right, lighting a fuse that detonated in the current war.
Although Trump’s tougher line with China demonstrated the United States’ leverage, it was episodic and uncoordinated with allies. As a result, Beijing was able to cast itself as a more predictable partner to much of the world, while the supply chain disruptions caused by trade disputes and decoupling created new inefficiencies—and drove up costs—in the global economy. Trump’s lurch from confronting to embracing Kim Jong Un enabled the North Korean leader to advance his nuclear and missile programs under reduced pressure. Closer to home, Trump’s recognition of an alternative Venezuelan government under the opposition leader Juan Guaidó managed to strengthen the incumbent Nicolás Maduro’s hold on power. The “maximum pressure” policy toward Venezuela and Cuba, which sought to promote regime change through crippling sanctions and diplomatic isolation, fueled humanitarian crises that have sent hundreds of thousands of people to the United States’ southern border.
Biden in Washington, D.C., May 2024Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters
A second Trump term would start amid a more volatile global environment than his first, and there would be fewer guardrails constraining a president who would be in command of his party, surrounded by loyalists, and freed from ever having to face voters again. Although there are many risks, three stand out. First, Trump’s blend of strongman nationalism and isolationism could create a permission structure for aggression. A withdrawal of U.S. support for Ukraine—and, perhaps, for NATO itself—would embolden Putin to push deeper into the country. Were Washington to abandon its European allies and promote right-wing nationalism, it could exacerbate political fissures within Europe, emboldening Russian-aligned nationalists in such places as Hungary and Serbia who have echoed Putin in seeking to reunite ethnic populations in neighboring states.
Despite U.S.-Chinese tensions, East Asia has avoided the outright conflict of Europe and the Middle East. But consider the opportunity that a Trump victory would present to North Korea. Fortified by increased Russian technological assistance, Kim could ratchet up military provocations on the Korean Peninsula, believing that he has a friend in the White House. Meanwhile, according to U.S. assessments, China’s military will be ready for an invasion of Taiwan by 2027. If Chinese leader Xi Jinping truly wishes to forcibly bring Taiwan under Beijing’s sovereignty, the twilight of a Trump presidency—by which point the United States would likely be alienated from its traditional allies—could present an opening.
Second, if given the chance, Trump has made it clear that he would almost certainly roll back American democracy, a move that would reverberate globally. If his first election represented a one-off disruption to the democratic world, his second would more definitively validate an international trend toward ethnonationalism and authoritarian populism. Momentum could swing further in the direction of far-right parties in Europe, performative populists in the Americas, and nepotistic and transactional corruption in Asia and Africa. Consider for a moment the aging roster of strongmen who will likely still be leading other powers—not just Xi and Putin but also Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Ali Khamenei in Iran, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. To say the least, this cast of characters is unlikely to promote respect for democratic norms within borders or conciliation beyond them.
This leads to the third danger. In the coming years, leaders will increasingly be confronted with global problems that can be managed or solved only through cooperation. As the climate crisis worsens, a Trump presidency would make a coordinated international response much harder and validate the backlash against environmental policies that has been building within advanced economies. At the same time, artificial intelligence is poised to take off, creating both valuable opportunities and enormous risks. At a moment when the United States should be turning to diplomacy to avoid wars, establish new norms, and promote greater international cooperation, the country would be led by an “America first” strongman.
A TIME TO HEAL
In any administration, national security policy is a peculiar mix of long-standing commitments, old political interests, new presidential initiatives, and improvised responses to sudden crises. Navigating the rough currents of the world, the Biden administration has often seemed to embody the contradictions of this dynamic, with one foot in the past, yearning nostalgically for American primacy, and one foot in the future, adjusting to the emerging world as it is.
Through its affirmative agenda, the administration has reacted well to changing realities. Biden linked domestic and foreign policy through his legislative agenda. The CHIPS Act made substantial investments in science and innovation, including the domestic manufacturing of semiconductors. The act worked in parallel with ramped-up export and investment controls on China’s high-tech sector, which have buttressed the United States’ lead in the development of new technologies such as AI and quantum computing. Although this story is more complicated to tell than one about a tariff-based trade war, Biden’s policy is in fact more coherent: revitalize U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing, disentangle critical supply chains from China, and maintain a lead for U.S. companies in developing new and potentially transformative technologies.
Gaza should shock Washington out of the muscle memory that guides too many of its actions.
Biden’s most significant piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, made enormous investments in clean energy technology. These investments will allow the United States to raise its ambition in meeting climate goals by pushing domestic industry and global markets to shift away from fossil fuels faster. Although this breakthrough enhanced U.S. credibility on climate change, it also created new challenges, as even allies have complained that Washington resorted to subsidies instead of pursuing coordinated cross-border approaches to reduce emissions. In this respect, however, the Biden administration was dealing with the world as it is. Congress cannot pass complex reforms such as putting a price on carbon; what it can do is pass large spending bills that invest in the United States.
Despite tensions over U.S. industrial policy, the Biden administration has effectively reinvested in alliances that frayed under Trump. That effort has tacitly acknowledged that the world now features competing blocs, which makes it harder for the United States to pursue major initiatives by working through large international institutions or with other members of the great-power club. Instead, Washington has prioritized groupings of like-minded countries that are, to use a catch phrase, “fit for purpose.” Collaboration with the United Kingdom and Australia on nuclear submarine technology. New infrastructure and AI initiatives through the G-7. Structured efforts to create more consultation among U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. This approach involves a dizzying number of parts; one can lose track of the number of regional consultative groups that now exist. But in the context of an unraveled international order, it makes sense to thread together cooperation where possible, while trying to turn new habits of cooperation into enduring arrangements.
Most notably, Biden’s reinvestment in European alliances paid off when Washington was able to swiftly mobilize support for Ukraine in 2022. This task was made easier by the administration’s innovative release of intelligence on Russia’s intentions to invade, an overdue reform of the way that Washington manages information. Although the war has reached a tenuous stalemate, the effort to fortify transatlantic institutions continues to advance. NATO has grown in size, relevance, and resourcing. European Union institutions have taken a more proactive role in foreign policy, most notably in coordinating support for Ukraine and accelerating its candidacy for EU membership. For all the understandable consternation about Washington’s struggle to pass a recent aid bill for Ukraine, Europe’s focus on its own institutions and capabilities was long overdue.
SLOW TO CHANGE
Yet there are three important ways in which the Biden administration has yet to recalibrate its approach to the world of post-American primacy. The first has to do with American politics. On several issues that engender controversy in Congress, the administration has constrained or distorted its options by preemptively deferring to outdated hard-liners. Even as Trump has demonstrated how the left-right axis has been scrambled on foreign policy, Biden at times feels trapped in the national security politics of the immediate post-9/11 era. Yet what once allowed a politician to appear tough to appease hawks in Washington was rarely good policy; now, it is no longer necessarily good politics.
In Latin America, the Biden administration was slow to pivot away from Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaigns on Venezuela and Cuba. Biden maintained, for example, the avalanche of sanctions that Trump imposed on Cuba, including the cynical return of that country to the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism just before leaving office, in January 2021. The result has been an acute humanitarian crisis in which U.S. sanctions exacerbated shortages of basic staples such as food and fuel, contributing to widespread suffering and migration. In the Middle East, the administration failed to move swiftly to reenter the politically contested Iran nuclear deal, opting instead to pursue what Biden called a “longer and stronger” agreement, even though Trump was the one who violated the deal’s terms. Instead,the administration embraced Trump’s Abraham Accords as central to its Middle East policy while reverting to confrontation with Iran. This effectively embraced Netanyahu’s preferred course: a shift away from pursuing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and toward an open-ended proxy war with Tehran.
Anyone who has worked at the nexus of U.S. politics and national security knows that avoiding friction with anti-Cuban and pro-Israeli hard-liners in Congress can feel like the path of least resistance. But that logic has turned into a trap. After October 7, Biden decided to pursue a strategy of fully embracing Netanyahu—insisting (for a time) that any criticism would be issued in private and that U.S. military assistance would not be conditioned on the actions of the Israeli government. This engendered immediate goodwill in Israel, but it preemptively eliminated U.S. leverage. It also overlooked the far-right nature of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which offered warning signs about the indiscriminate way in which it planned to prosecute its military campaign, as Israeli officials cut off food and water flowing into Gaza within days of Hamas’s attack. In the months that followed, the administration has been trying to catch up to a deteriorating situation, evolving from a strategy of embracing Netanyahu, to one of issuing rhetorical demands that were largely ignored, to one of partial restrictions on offensive military assistance. Ironically, by being mindful of the political risks of breaking with Netanyahu, Biden invited greater political risks from within the Democratic coalition and around the world.
The temptation to succumb to Washington’s outdated instincts has contributed to a second liability: the pursuit of maximalist objectives. The administration has shown some prudence in this area. Even as competition ramped up with China, Biden has worked over the last year to rebuild lines of communication with Beijing and has largely avoided provocative pronouncements on Taiwan. And even as he committed the United States to helping Ukraine defend itself, Biden set the objective of avoiding a direct war between the United States and Russia (although his rhetoric did drift into endorsing regime change in Moscow). The bigger challenge has at times come from outside the administration, as some supporters of Ukraine indulged in a premature triumphalism that raised impossible expectations for last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive. Paradoxically, this impulse ended up hurting Ukraine: when the campaign inevitably came up short, it made the broader U.S. policy toward Ukraine look like a failure. Sustaining support for Ukraine will require greater transparency about what is achievable in the near term and an openness to negotiations in the medium term.
Biden and U.S. officials meeting with a Chinese delegation in Woodside, California, November 2023 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
Gaza also showcases the danger of maximalist aims. Israel’s stated objective of destroying Hamas has never been achievable. Since Hamas would never announce its own surrender, pursuing this goal would require a perpetual Israeli occupation of Gaza or the mass displacement of its people. That outcome may be what some Israeli officials really want, as evidenced by right-wing ministers’ own statements. It is certainly what many people around the world, horrified by the campaign in Gaza, believe the Israeli government really wants. These critics wonder why Washington would support such a campaign, even as its own rhetoric opposes it. Instead of seeking to moderate Israel’s unsustainable course, Washington needs to use its leverage to press for negotiated agreements, Palestinian state building, and a conception of Israeli security that is not beholden to expansionism or permanent occupation.
Indeed, too many prescriptions sound good in Washington but fail to account for simple realities. Even with the United States’ military advantage, China will develop advanced technologies and maintain its claim over Taiwan. Even with sustained U.S. support, Ukraine will have to live next to a large, nationalist, nuclear-armed Russia. Even with its military dominance, Israel cannot eliminate the Palestinian demand for self-determination. If Washington allows foreign policy to be driven by zero-sum maximalist demands, it risks a choice between open-ended conflict and embarrassment.
This leads to the third way in which Washington must change its approach. Too often, the United States has appeared unable or unwilling to see itself through the eyes of most of the world’s population, particularly people in the global South who feel that the international order is not designed for their benefit. The Biden administration has made laudable efforts to change this perception—for instance, delivering COVID-19 vaccines across the developing world, mediating conflicts from Ethiopia to Sudan, and sending food aid to places hit hard by shortages exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. Yet the overuse of sanctions, along with the prioritization of Ukraine and other U.S. geopolitical interests, misreads the room. To build better ties with developing countries, Washington needs to consistently prioritize the issues they care about: investment, technology, and clean energy.
Once again, Gaza interacts with this challenge. To be blunt: for much of the world, it appears that Washington doesn’t value the lives of Palestinian children as much as it values the lives of Israelis or Ukrainians. Unconditional military aid to Israel, questioning the Palestinian death toll, vetoing cease-fire resolutions at the UN Security Council, and criticizing investigations into alleged Israeli war crimes may all feel like autopilot in Washington—but that’s precisely the problem. Much of the world now hears U.S. rhetoric about human rights and the rule of law as cynical rather than aspirational, particularly when it fails to wrestle with double standards. Total consistency is unattainable in foreign policy. But by listening and responding to more diverse voices from around the world, Washington could begin to build a reservoir of goodwill.
A FAREWELL TO PRIMACY
In its more affirmative agenda, the Biden administration is repositioning the United States for a changing world by focusing on the resilience of its own democracy and economy while rebooting alliances in Europe and Asia. To extend that regeneration into something more global and lasting, it should abandon the pursuit of primacy while embracing an agenda that can resonate with more of the world’s governments and people.
As was the case in the Cold War, the most important foreign policy achievement will simply be avoiding World War III. Washington must recognize that all three fault lines of global conflict today—Russia-Ukraine, Iran-Israel, and China-Taiwan—run across territories just beyond the reach of U.S. treaty obligations. In other words, these are not areas where the American people have been prepared to go to war directly. With little public support and no legal obligation to do that, Washington should not count on bluffing or military buildups alone to resolve these issues; instead, it will have to focus relentlessly on diplomacy, buttressed by reassurance to frontline partners that there are alternative pathways to achieving security.
Avoiding friction with anti-Cuban and pro-Israeli hard-liners in Congress can feel like the path of least resistance.
In Ukraine, the United States and Europe should focus on protecting and investing in the territory controlled by the Ukrainian government—drawing Ukraine into European institutions, sustaining its economy, and fortifying it for lengthy negotiations with Moscow so that time works in Kyiv’s favor. In the Middle East, Washington should join with Arab and European partners to work directly with Palestinians on the development of new leadership and toward the recognition of a Palestinian state, while supporting Israel’s security. Regional de-escalation with Iran should, as it did during the Obama administration, begin with negotiated restrictions on its nuclear program. In Taiwan, the United States should try to preserve the status quo by investing in Taiwanese military capabilities while avoiding saber rattling, by structuring engagement with Beijing to avoid miscalculation, and by mobilizing international support for a negotiated, peaceful resolution to Taiwan’s status.
Hawks will inevitably attack diplomacy on each of these issues with tired charges of appeasement, but consider the alternative of seeking the total defeat of Russia, regime change in Iran, and Taiwanese independence. Can Washington, or the world, risk a drift into global conflagration? Moreover, the reality is that sanctions and military aid alone will not stop war from spreading or somehow cause the governments of Russia, Iran, and China to collapse. Better outcomes, including within those countries, will be more attainable if Washington takes a longer view. Ultimately, the health of the United States’ own political model and society is a more powerful force for change than purely punitive measures. Indeed, one lesson that is lost on today’s hawks is that the civil rights movement did far more to win the Cold War than the war in Vietnam did.
None of this will be easy, and success is not preordained, since unreliable adversaries also have agency. But given the stakes, it is worth exploring how a world of competing superpower blocs could be knitted into coexistence and negotiation on issues that cannot be dealt with in isolation. For instance, AI presents one area in which nascent dialogue between Washington and Beijing should evolve into the pursuit of shared international norms. Laudable U.S. efforts to pursue collaborative research on AI safety with like-minded countries will inevitably have to expand to further include China in higher-level and more consequential talks. These efforts should seek agreement on the mitigation of extreme harms, from the use of AI in developing nuclear and biological weapons to the arrival of artificial general intelligence, an advanced form of AI that risks surpassing human capacities and controls. At the same time,as AI moves out into the world, the United States can use its leadership to work with countries that are eager to harness the technology for positive ends, particularly in the developing world. The United States could offer incentives for countries to cooperate with Washington on both AI safety and affirmative uses of new technologies.
Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 2022 Mandel Ngan / Reuters
A similar dynamic is required on clean energy. If there is a second Biden administration, most of its efforts to combat climate change will likely shift from domestic action to international cooperation, particularly if there is divided government in Washington. As the United States works to secure supply chains for critical minerals used for clean energy, it will need to avoid constantly working at cross-purposes with Beijing. At the same time, it has an opportunity—through “de-risking” supply chains, forging public-private partnerships, and starting multilateral initiatives—to invest more in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia that have not always been an attractive destination for American capital. In a sense, the Inflation Reduction Act has to be globalized.
Finally, the United States should focus its support for democracy on the health of existing open societies and offering lifelines to besieged civil society groups around the world. As someone who has made the case for putting support for democracy at the center of U.S. foreign policy, I must acknowledge that the calcification of the democratic recession in much of the world requires Washington to recalibrate. Instead of framing the battle between democracy and autocracy as a confrontation with a handful of geopolitical adversaries, policymakers in democracies must recognize that it is first and foremost a clash of values that must be won within their own societies. From that self-corrective vantage point, the United States should methodically invest in the building blocks of democratic ecosystems: anticorruption and accountability initiatives, independent journalism, civil society, digital literacy campaigns, and counter-disinformation efforts. The willingness to share sensitive information, on display in the run-up to war in Ukraine, should be applied to other cases where human rights can be defended through transparency. Outside government, democratic movements and political parties across the world should become more invested in one another’s success, mirroring what the far right has done over the last decade by sharing best practices, holding regular meetings, and forming transnational coalitions.
Ultimately, the most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own democracy, which is the main reason a Trump victory would be so dangerous. In the United States, as elsewhere, people are craving a renewed sense of belonging, meaning, and solidarity. These are not concepts that usually find their way into foreign policy discussions, but if officials do not take that longing seriously, they risk fueling the brand of nationalism that leads to autocracy and conflict. The simple and repeated affirmation that all human life matters equally, and that people everywhere are entitled to live with dignity, should be America’s basic proposition to the world—a story it must commit to in word and deed.
BEN RHODES is a co-host of the podcast Pod Save the World and the author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made. From 2009 to 2017, he served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting in the Obama administration.
