Europe needs to take primary responsibility for its own defense

Europe needs to take primary responsibility for its own defense

Mitt Romney is one of two Republicans I’ve voted for in my life (the other was a failed D.C. Council candidate). I think he did a good job during his one term as governor of Massachusetts. And while it wouldn’t have earned him my vote as a presidential candidate, I think he probably would have beaten Obama if he’d run on his record as a moderate technocrat rather than embracing hard-right austerity economics. Over the past few years he’s done a lot to get back in my good graces though, standing up against some of the toxic elements of Trumpism and outlining a solid child allowance proposal.

But one of the positive re-evaluations of Romney I don’t agree with is the idea that “Romney Was Right About Russia” (Chris Cillizza) or “Romney Was Right About Putin” (McKay Coppins) because Romney didn’t say that Vladimir Putin is bad. He said that Russia was the biggest geopolitical threat facing America. I thought that was silly then and it remains silly today.

Still, I respect that even though he maintains he was right in 2012, Romney is actually open-minded enough to tell Coppins in the middle of the Ukraine War that he doesn’t believe that anymore (emphasis added):

I guess politics can be blinding. My guess is the Obama team thought that would be politically advantageous to say, and the compliant media picked up the message and drove it home as hard as they could … I mean, I think it was The New York Times that said, “This proves Romney is unqualified to be president.” Like, oh my goodness, guys. Come on. Who do you think was our geopolitical adversary back in 2012? I’d love to know what their suggestion was. Clearly, today, China is a greater threat to our security and our economic vitality. But they weren’t a geopolitical player in the sense that Russia was back in 2012.

This just underscores the extent to which Obama was right all along. It’s not like China’s continued economic growth was some unforeseeable turn of events.

My biggest critique of Obama’s foreign policy is that he wasn’t sufficiently forceful in executing the pivot to Asia. In his defense, he was pushing against deeply entrenched political forces that made it hard to actually pull off. But conceptually, he was right all along, and the idea that we should have gone all-in on anti-Russian foreign policy 10 years ago doesn’t make sense. Of course today, after the seizure of Crimea, the 2016 election hacking, and now the renewed invasion of Ukraine, it makes more sense — especially because now we have European partners who are working with us. But the basic question of priorities remains. And I think the stark reality is that China is a more formidable adversary and America’s democratic friends in Asia objectively need support more than our European allies.

All of this means that while “the West” in some sense does need a sustained focus on Russia-related threats, the United States really should find a way to offload this responsibility primarily to Europe, with us remaining helpful but with a lighter touch.

Against sentimental oversimplification

My big thing across a range of contexts is prioritization, prioritization, prioritization. And I think many aspects of the political and media ecosystems push against that. You can see anti-prioritization in the internal coalition politics of the Democratic Senate caucus, and also in takes like this from my step-uncle George Packer, where he posits a kind of cosmic unity of geopolitical conflicts:

Now Putin, along with his patron and enabler, Xi Jinping of China, has pushed into American and European faces a truth we didn’t want to see: that our core interests lie in the defense of those values. To be realist in our age is not to define American interests so narrowly that Ukraine becomes disposable but to understand that the world has broken up into democratic and autocratic spheres; that this division shapes everything from supply chains and competition for resources to state corruption and the influence of technology on human minds and societies; that the autocrats have gained the upper hand and know it. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, following its earlier efforts to stifle independence and democracy there, as well as in Georgia and Belarus, is the most dramatic but far from the last point of conflict between the two spheres.

There is obviously something to this global clash of values, but there are also lots of very real limits.

The European countries most enthusiastically supporting Ukraine are not the most solidly democratic ones, but the ones with the most historical conflict with Russia. This includes the deeply admirable Baltic states but also the fairly illiberal and at least a bit autocratic governing group in Poland.

Israel has refused to back Ukraine, largely because of considerations related to Russian forces in Syria.

But Turkey, which has taken a very autocratic turn under its current government, has given Ukraine critical assistance in the form of military drones in what seems to be an extension of conflicts between Turkey and Russia in Libya, Syria, and the Caucuses, none of which have anything to do with democracy.

In an extension of its Cold War-era alliance with the USSR, India has largely backed Russia during the current crisis.

It is perfectly possible for autocratic regimes to avoid being geopolitical troublemakers (Singapore) and for democracies to run off the rails and launched unproved invasions of weaker states (the USA in Iraq).

The United States will want to collaborate with autocratic (Vietnam) and semi-autocratic (Philippines) states in geopolitical competition with China.

Taking advantage of the falling-out between the USSR and China in the 1970s was smart, and we should be prepared to try to do the same thing again in the future — ideally because Russia becomes a cuddly pro-western democracy but really under any circumstances where they are prepared to be reasonable.

Again, none of this is to deny that there is something to what Packer is saying.

Democratic, rights-respecting publics feel special obligations to uphold the rights of other democratic, rights-respecting nations. Democracies are also capable of engaging in deeper, longer-term forms of cooperation than non-democracies, so it serves our interests to see democracies spread. And while democratic states are not immune to capricious lashing out (again, Iraq), this is at least less likely to happen in open societies with accountable rulers.

That said, adopting democracyism as the basis for American foreign policy — as George W. Bush tried to do in his second inaugural address — would be dangerously destabilizing. The Ukraine situation went from manageable to outrageous when Putin tied himself irrevocably to the idea that Ukrainian nationalism (and therefore the Ukrainian state) is per se illegitimate. If the United States says to Russia and China (and Qatar and Uganda and Vietnam) that their governments are fundamentally illegitimate, that eliminates any basis for cooperation and greatly raises the risks of apocalyptic outcomes.

My point is just that pro-democracy considerations, while real, are not big enough or important enough to eliminate the need for strategic prioritization or to think about tradeoffs.

Europe should be able to defend itself

The key to prioritization is that, fundamentally, Europe should not need significant American help to achieve its continental security goals.

Russia has roughly the population of Germany and France combined and is dwarfed once you start adding other European countries into the mix.

And while Russia is not a poor country by any means, it is considerably poorer than the other large European states. Indeed, Russia is so much poorer than western Europe that at pre-sanction market exchange rates, Russia’s GDP was smaller than Italy’s and dramatically smaller than France’s or Germany’s. With purchasing power parity adjustment (basically accounting for the fact that stuff is cheap in Russia), they pull even with Germany but are clearly swamped by a European aggregate.

What’s more, even with the PPP adjustment, Russia is poorer on a per person basis than all of these countries, including relatively poor Spain and Poland. That means that in principle, almost any individual European country could outspend Russia on a per person basis on military-related items while maintaining higher civilian living standards.

This is not what happens in practice, and Russia has spent a much larger share of its GDP on the military, so at market exchange rates they are spending more than any European country.

That said, even though Europe is relatively stingy with its military spending, its combined military spending of $165 billion is more than Russia’s $62 billion.

Russia’s spending goes up with the PPP adjustment, but the PPP concept is only partially applicable to defense issues. For personnel spending, the fact that a dollar goes further in Russia than in Germany is a big deal. But for defense hardware, the market rates matter more.

The bigger thing of course is that to keep the figures manageable, I’ve been comparing Russia to just five EU members. But if you set those five countries aside, the Netherlands + Belgium + Sweden + Romania + Austria + Czechia + Ireland + Portugal combine for a GDP that (in PPP-adjusted terms) is equal to Russia’s. And there are still a bunch more small EU states, plus the non-EU United Kingdom, whose GDP is about 75 percent of Russia’s. All of which is just to say, again, that from a material resources perspective, the United States does not obviously need to be a major player in securing Eastern Europe.

How you spend it is what matters

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s announcement that Germany will raise defense spending to two percent of GDP was a political earthquake and a welcome sign that major European countries are stepping up to the plate.

But it’s worth saying that the whole fuss over the two percent threshold is much more a political issue than a military one. NATO member states, at the behest of the U.S. and the Baltics, keep agreeing to this number. But because most NATO members are also in the European Union and subject to its deficit strictures, they’ve found it politically challenging to make that fiscal commitment. If Germany is going to do it (and especially because they appear to be bending their fiscal rules in order to do so), that’s a good sign for the continent as a whole.

At the end of the day, though, the combined EU defense budget is much larger than Russia’s, even without hitting the two percent target. Aggregate PPP-adjusted EU GDP is four to five times higher than Russia’s, so spending just 1.5 percent of the EU’s GDP on defense would yield a combined military budget far larger than Russia’s.

But while Europe could mount a powerful defense without spending more, my basic understanding is that the problem is twofold.

One problem is that a lot of European countries treat their military spending as essentially a make-work jobs program, concentrating their spending on personnel rather than on high-tech (and often imported) equipment. That’s the opposite of how countries at war operate. Ukraine is happy to rely on cheap volunteers and conscripts to fight Russia, but it needs foreigners to give them effective weapons and ammunition or money to buy them. And Ukraine, because they are actually at war, just wants the best stuff available; they don’t care where it’s made. A peacetime country free-riding on American security guarantees tends to go the other direction, under-investing in foreign hardware and supporting domestic economic interests.

The other issue is that while Europe could match Russia by adding up a bunch of different countries, for that to work, the countries need to specialize to some extent. It’s not really constructive for Denmark and Norway and Belgium and the Netherlands and Portugal to all have miniature versions of full-spectrum militaries. Ideally, each small European country would field a relatively small number of really high-quality military units. Since the Netherlands isn’t going to go to war with Belgium or France, it doesn’t need to meet the full spectrum of defense needs, complete with lots and lots of overhead. It needs to coordinate with its allies and identify one or two specific things that it can take responsibility for. Then Belgium can be responsible for something else and Portugal for something else.

Both of these are tough issues politically. But that’s why I don’t love the emphasis on the two percent threshold. Part of the deal here should be that if you spend the money wisely, you don’t actually need to spend that much. It’s really a political question of coordinating and procuring things that are useful. That’s also why I focused mostly on the biggest countries: coordination among the largest countries is easier than coordination among everyone, and it’s also vastly more important. The five largest countries (especially when joined by the UK and the Baltics) have ample resources to counter Russia.

America needs to want this

But the United States needs to want this to happen.

France, which is kind of wishy-washy on the NATO command structure, has long been the big proponent of European strategic autonomy. Meanwhile, the United States has been torn between urging Europe to spend more on defense while being quite happy to let European countries rely on the United States for things like airlift and basic satellite surveillance. And obviously, from a strictly American viewpoint, the best outcome is one in which Europe spends generously to create well-equipped, highly effective military forces that basically only work as auxiliary troops to U.S.-instigated missions.

But that’s not realistic. The question facing us is whether it’s second-best for Europe to have strong and capable forces that can operate autonomously or for Europe to have forces that are largely weak and ineffective. As Max Bergmann details in this excellent report for the Center for American Progress, back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States very specifically pushed against the creation of EU defense capabilities because they didn’t want Europe to be able to do anything outside of the framework of NATO — i.e., without the United States.

Bergmann’s view, which is correct, is that this was ultimately short-sighted and our second-best option is a strong and capable Europe.

And from a more cosmopolitan viewpoint, a Europe capable of independent operations is even more desirable. The American military is an important upholder of certain liberal values, but also an extremely imperfect one. Having an additional liberal superpower would be very good.

The complication is that apart from the United States, a bunch of NATO members aren’t in the EU (Canada, UK, Norway, Turkey) and a bunch of EU members aren’t in NATO.

Bergmann writes that “EU defense will in no way replace or displace NATO,” but I think that’s a little bit facile. If an EU defense entity existed, then NATO would overwhelmingly be an alliance between the U.S. and the EU with a handful of other countries along for the ride. The UK is big enough and militarily capable enough to be a third wheel in that partnership, but it’s a weird situation for Norway. More to the point, in effect, Finland and Sweden and the other EU neutrals would be joining NATO, which is a big deal for their domestic politics. Frankly, I think the current situation where Finland is formally in a currency union with Germany but not a mutual defense pact makes very little sense. And with the neutrals participating in the support of Ukraine, it’s clear that they’re not really neutral anyway. So I see this as a solvable problem, but a problem nevertheless.

A true pivot means saying “no”

The tough part of this is that just as you sometimes need to let your kid make his own mistakes, if we want Europe to sustain a real defense capacity we need to create a situation where we’re not going to bail them out.

This shouldn’t be accomplished with Trumpy bluster and hectoring or done in a rush or the middle of a crisis. But we need to set a timeline on which we say that while we are happy to help in various ways, we are just not going to be primarily responsible for the defense of Poland and Latvia. That, in our opinion, there should be forward-deployed forces in those countries but they should not be Americans, not because “AMERICA FIRST!!!” but because American support is truly needed in Korea and Japan and Australia and the Western Hemisphere while it’s dispensable in Europe.

What we don’t want is the threats and bargaining around the two percent number.

Right now, a lot of the dialogue is grounded in conditionality. Americans say we’re impatient with European underspending and if they don’t make concessions, we’re going to stop underwriting their defense. Then they move a bit toward our position and we say “okay.” This, to me, is how we should think about our Asian allies — we ought to help them, but we need to demand that they do their fair share.

With Europe, the point shouldn’t be that we’re mad at them or demanding that they do anything. It is simply that in a huge world of limited resources, it does not make sense for the American military to be undertaking that mission, so we want to walk away with a handshake and a smile and no ill-will. That means doing it gradually over time. But it does mean really doing it and pulling American forces out of Europe and probably putting them somewhere in Asia so they’re not just sitting around waiting to be redeployed.

Let’s puncture some myths about Democrats’ struggles

Let’s puncture some myths about Democrats’ struggles

Perry Bacon Jr. — Read time: 11 minutes

Democrats didn’t lose because of ‘defund the police’ in 2020

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There is a lot of chatter about Democrats needing to move right on crime — in part, the argument goes, because they got hurt by campaigning on defunding the police in 2020.

That analysis focused on congressional Democrats. But Joe Biden didn’t run on defunding the police, either. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the most prominent figure in the left wing, disavowed the idea. A small number of progressive Democrats, most prominently Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), did embrace the defund rhetoric, it’s true, but those Democrats largely won, in part because they ran in very liberal districts. It’s not clear that a single congressional Democratic candidate who could have won a race lost it while emphasizing defunding the police.

A second faulty narrative, closely related to the first, concedes that few 2020 Democratic candidates embraced “defund” but focuses instead on the role of activists. This version of the story goes like this: Progressive advocates pushed defund into the national discourse and a small number of Democratic officials embraced it, which in turn allowed the Republican Party to peel away voters by falsely casting the broader Democratic Party as pro-defund.

If this narrative were true, it’s not clear that Democrats could have done much about it. The party can’t tell activists what to say and shouldn’t try. The idea that liberals can’t tout ideas that are fine in the areas they represent but potentially off-putting elsewhere runs counter to the very notion of local representation. And of course, Democrats can’t stop Republicans from caricaturing their positions.

But here’s the thing — this narrative isn’t true, either. Numerous election analysts have concluded that defund, while an unpopular framing of police reform, didn’t specifically hurt Democrats electorally in 2020. Defund, these analysts conclude, was just one of a broader series of attacks from Republicans that played on frames long used against Democrats — namely that the Democrats are too left, socialist and overly supportive of Black causes. Many Republican ads in 2020 hammered the Democrats not on defund but on the notion that Democrats were allowing “rioting” in cities in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.

“The ‘defund’ narrative about 2020 solidified in many people’s minds before most evidence was even available,” said Robert Griffin, research director at the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. “Since then, there’s been an increasingly stark contrast between the continued strength of that narrative in the media and the relative scarcity of evidence to support it.”

It’s complicated to isolate how a single issue motivates voters. But we do have polling from the summer of 2020, when defund became a major part of the national debate. Biden’s numbers didn’t change much then, nor did those for congressional Democrats. Compare that with August 2021, when Biden’s numbers plunged as the Afghanistan withdrawal went poorly.

When a political event shifts voter preferences, it usually shows up in polls. Defund never did.

So why did “defund cost the Democrats” become such a pervasive narrative? I think there are four primary reasons.

First, Biden’s victory was narrower than anticipated, leaving Democrats looking for some ready explanation for that. But they went looking in the wrong place — the polls were overstating Biden’s lead the whole time, in part because they missed first-time voters who turned out to support Donald Trump.

Second, Democratic leaders, including influential Black Democrats such as former president Barack Obama and Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.), suggested publicly that backlash to “defund the police” was a major factor in the outcome. Obama and Clyburn are great politicians, but they aren’t experts in political data. Clyburn, for instance, argued that Jaime Harrison, a Senate hopeful from South Carolina in 2020, was severely harmed by defund. But I wrote a piece a month ahead of the election predicting Harrison’s almost exact margin of defeat based on previous showings by South Carolina Democrats.

But defund was also a convenient story for Democratic leaders to embrace — they could blame activists for the party’s worse-than-expected performance instead of examining the decisions of Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other party officials who barely managed to defeat one of the worst presidents in American history.

Third, Democrats lost a net 12 seats in the House even as Biden won, driving a narrative that Biden did “well” because he successfully navigated issues like defund while congressional Democrats did not. But Biden didn’t actually do much better than House Democrats. He defeated Trump by 4.4 percentage points, while House Democrats ran 3.1 percentage points ahead of Republicans. Put another way: Biden won 224 House districts, and House Democrats won 222.

Fourth, voters in focus groups said they didn’t like defund and suggested it was one reason that they voted Republican. I’m not arguing that defund helped the Democrats. But what focus-group participants say motivated their votes isn’t a perfect indicator of what actually motivated them, particularly on a fraught issue such as defund.

In the summer of 2020, a host of things were happening at once: There were huge racial protests; some of them involved rioting; some activists invoked defund and other anti-police rhetoric; and Republicans argued that the protests were a violent rampage destroying American cities. It would be virtually impossible to isolate the slogan “defund the police” from the broader protests — and of course a Republican voter might rationalize their vote by talking about defund, even if they also opposed the broader protests against systemic racism.

Since the 2020 election, there has been a real electoral battle happening on crime policy — between more centrist Democrats and more left-wing ones. Some cities did reduce police funding in the aftermath of the protests, and a surge in crime has led to reversals and, in some cases, even increases in police budgets. In the New York Democratic primary for mayor, Eric Adams defeated a progressive opponent who favored reducing police funding. Voters in San Francisco and Los Angeles, both heavily Democratic, might vote to recall progressive prosecutors.

At the same time, some advocates of major criminal justice reform are winning their races, including district attorneys in New York and Philadelphia, and some of the 2020 police reforms remain in place.

If most Democratic officials, particularly those in swing districts or states, had been running on defunding the police or much more lenient crime policies, that would likely pose a big risk for the party. But that has not happened. The narrative that issues around crime are clearly hurting Democrats is just not accurate.

‘Wokeness’ has not pushed voters without college degrees away

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This narrative is related to the one around defund. Policing is part of a broader series of issues on which the Democrats are said to be too “woke” and too prone to speaking in language that appeals to progressive White college graduates but turns off less educated voters, including many voters of color who usually back Democrats.

There are two shortcomings to this narrative. The first is that “wokeness” is so undefined that it’s hard to specifically attribute anything to it. While “woke” was once a term used by Black people to signify awareness of racial issues, it is now largely employed as a catchall pejorative against liberals.

If being woke means taking issues of racial inequality seriously, that in theory could be a problem for Democrats — but it’s not. In the last cycle, they won control of the House, Senate and presidency after talking about racial disparities more bluntly than ever.

But wokeness critiques are often about, say, liberals using the term “Latinx” instead of “Latino” or being too focused on transgender rights. Since it is hard to quantify or specify this kind of wokeness, we can’t credibly attribute many of the Democrats’ challenges to this. That said, I find it unlikely that there is a single voter in America who was going to back a given candidate but then didn’t after hearing the candidate use the term “Latinx.”

The deeper problem with this narrative is that the Democratic Party doesn’t have some new problem best understood as trouble with voters without college degrees.

Over the past decade in particular, there has been a decline in Democratic Party support among White Americans without degrees, while White Americans with four-year degrees have become more Democratic. Biden won about 55 percent of the vote among White Americans with degrees in 2020, compared with 37 percent among those without degrees, according to data from Catalist.

But that huge difference in education background isn’t as apparent among voters of color. Democrats won about 90 percent of Black college graduates, about 65 percent of Asian college graduates and about 60 percent of Latino college graduates in 2020 — and a similar number of those in those groups without degrees.

The big problem is that Democrats lost ground among Latinos in particular in 2020. They do seem to have lost more ground with Latinos without degrees than those with degrees, although we have limited data on this question.

The better, more nuanced narrative is that Democrats are slipping backward with Latinos, and should do more to address that, but their biggest problem is the same as ever: White people.

The focus on degrees and so-called education polarization is particularly wrongheaded. What is happening is that voters are increasingly aligning their broader philosophical views to their votes. So voters, particularly people of color, who view themselves as conservative but might have voted Democratic in the past are now aligning with the GOP. Democrats aren’t specifically losing voters without college degrees — they are losing voters, with or without degrees, White and non-White, who consider themselves ideologically to the right of the current Democratic Party.

“Trump did better in 2020 among conservatives who identified as White, Black, Hispanic and Asian American,” said John Sides, a Vanderbilt University political scientist and co-author of an upcoming book about the 2020 elections.

And these voters probably see the Democratic Party as too left of them not strictly on racial issues but on other issues as well. It’s not about “Latinx.”

Education issues are not crushing Democrats

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The narrative here is rooted in the argument that some combination of school closures, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe’s comments playing down the role of parents in education policy, and Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin’s attacks on critical race theory led to the Democrats’ defeat last fall in Virginia. The recall a couple of weeks ago of three San Francisco school board members further bolstered the case.

San Francisco voters did vote out three members of their city school board in part because they changed the admissions processes at an elite public school in an effort to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students there.

But that wasn’t a case of Democrats being defeated by Republicans. In San Francisco, Democratic voters, based on the recommendation of the Democratic mayor, voted out extremely-left-leaning school board members, who will almost certainly be replaced by very-left-leaning people. I suppose Biden and congressional Democrats should not run on changing the admissions requirements at elite high schools — but I don’t think they ever had much intention of doing that.

In Virginia, an analysis by Michael Hartney, a political science professor at Boston College, found that places where school closures lasted longer were more likely to back Republican nominee Youngkin in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race. But Hartney found that the closure effect explained only about 0.8 percentage points of Youngkin’s margin. Youngkin ran almost seven points better than Trump did in Virginia a year earlier, so school closings were far from the whole story.

Saying “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” no doubt didn’t help McAuliffe. But in New Jersey, where education issues weren’t as prominent, Democrats also did much worse than in 2020. And Democrats remain more trusted than Republicans on education. The Democrats’ weak showings in New Jersey and Virginia are much better explained by the general anti-incumbent-party sentiment that usually arises after a presidential election and the very high turnout by Republicans in those races than anything else.

Why are these narratives so pervasive? For two reasons.

First, the Democratic Party is increasingly divided between a left wing and a more centrist wing. In city politics, where Democrats are dominant, these tensions are clearest, and they matter greatly. Police funding is likely to be increased more by center-left Democrats, while more left-wing Democrats are more willing to push policies to make schools more racially equitable. And each side works to elevate their local-level victories into the national conversation as part of this broader and larger intra-party battle.

But mayoral elections in New York and school board elections in San Francisco tell us little about the broader Republican vs. Democratic conflict. These localized fights are getting elevated nationally right now for another reason — the two wings of the Democratic Party are battling over who is to blame for the party not doing as well as Democrats hoped.

“Defund/wokeness/equity/Latinx is killing us,” goes the centrists’ argument, “The Biden-Pelosi ‘be moderate plan’ isn’t working” is the left’s answer.

I think neither side is to blame. The portrayal of Democrats as wide-eyed hyper-liberals policing everyone’s speech is coming from Fox News and other conservative outlets — and that can’t really be stopped. Biden’s governing approach basically had no chance of succeeding after the emergence of high inflation and more covid variants, neither of which he had much control over. And the party that controls the presidency basically always loses the midterms.

Most important: It’s the voters, stupid.

Lots of Americans prefer the conservative party to the more liberal one. It’s not clear that any tactical changes by Democrats could prevent the GOP from winning at least 45 percent of the vote nationally and a majority of the White vote, which means Republicans always have a fighting chance to win presidential and most Senate elections. Republicans successfully cast Democrats as too left for many voters before anyone had ever heard of Ocasio-Cortez, “defund the police” or wokeness.

Of course, candidates and tactics matter. It is obvious Biden should not promise to defund the police. But the clearest evidence we have is that messages, candidates and tactics don’t matter a lot — and we can’t be sure which ones will work or how much they will work ahead of time.

Democrats are muddling through, but they can’t change the fundamental dynamics. We have two parties about equal in size in a zero-sum fight for power.

State of the Union Address Review: Biden Tries to Cheer Up the Country—and His Party

TUESDAY, MARCH 01, 2022

Posted by David A. Hopkins at 11:18 PM 

In the early weeks of Joe Biden's second year in the presidency, the nation he governs is by some important measures moving in the right direction. Job, wage, and economic growth are all positive; the prevalence and deadliness of COVID-19 is (at least for now) fading rapidly; and there are no ongoing domestic crises or major scandals. But the national mood has become increasingly sour over the past year, a pessimism reflected in Biden's declining job approval ratings and an emerging Republican advantage in midterm election polls.

Biden's State of the Union address contained a familiar sequence of policy proposals and details—the "laundry list" approach to speechmaking that is especially beloved of leaders in the Democratic Party, where many different constituencies all demand recognition. (And it won't be hard to find complaints that he didn't say enough about this or that pet liberal priority, as if these speeches are capable of exerting transformative effects on the policy agenda of the American public.) Biden's own communication instincts were reflected in his emphasis on economic issues over cultural matters; his aversion to overly abstract or metaphorical oratory; and his regular claims to stand for bipartisanship, pragmatism, and common sense. 

Biden's State of the Union address did not "make news" in the sense of revealing a major new initiative or governing approach; even the planted media hints from earlier in the day that he would be signaling a redoubled focus on deficit reduction or inflation-taming seemed to oversell the novelty of the speech. What the address seemed to represent, most of all, was something like a national halftime pep talk. "I want you to know that we are going to be okay," Biden said while discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though this sentiment seemed to apply to his message on the economy, COVID, and domestic policy as well. Rather than invoke the constitutional purpose of the annual address near the beginning of his remarks, as most presidents do, Biden saved his "report . . . that the State of the Union is strong because you, the American people, are strong" for his conclusion of his speech, adding, "we are stronger today than we were a year ago and we will be stronger a year from now than we are today."

While the White House would be happy to convince anyone of this view, there's little doubt that a particularly important audience for Biden's words are the members of his own party, who are less enthusiastic about the Biden presidency than they once were and whose energetic mobilization will be necessary to avoid a national Republican sweep in the fall midterm elections. Biden cannot count on the personal devotion or symbolic importance that his immediate predecessor enjoyed. His voters will not reward him for merely picking a fight on camera with a reporter or mocking an opponent at a rally; they expect much more tangible returns on their support. 

And so even the opening language in tonight's speech that detailed the Biden administration's efforts to assist Ukraine and punish Russia, for all its appeal to national and political unity, had a clear second meaning that extended to later passages on infrastructure and COVID. You can be proud of your president, they said; all things considered, he's doing okay. So cheer up a little, America—and cheer up a lot, Democrats.

Republicans are so eager to see Biden fail that they’d let Putin succeed

Republicans are so eager to see Biden fail that they’d let Putin succeed

By Dana Milbank

After her fellow Republicans booted her from party leadership last year, Rep. Liz Cheney posed a question: “Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country?”

Now, with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we are hearing Republicans answer that question in the affirmative.

The dictator is betting that division within the United States will sap American resolve and thereby sow disunity between the United States and European democracies — allowing him to crush Ukraine’s democracy and potentially others. And Republicans are giving him exactly what he wants. They are so determined to see President Biden fail that they would let President Putin succeed.

On Tuesday, hours before Biden was to deliver his State of the Union address, Rep. Michael McCaul (Tex.), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, likened Biden’s actions toward Russia to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, saying, “We have a weak president, and he’s creating a very dangerous world.”

Also Tuesday, Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the No. 3 House GOP leader, said Biden “failed to engage in meaningful deterrence against Russian aggression,” and asserted that “the war on Ukraine represents one of the greatest foreign policy failures in modern history.”

Rep. Steve Scalise (La.), the House GOP whip, blamed Biden for giving “leverage to Vladimir Putin” and “billions of dollars in his pocket to finance this war against Ukraine.”

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) condemned Biden for failing to deter the invasion, saying, “If Ukraine had just half of the weapons that were left in Afghanistan … I imagine Putin would not have entered.”

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And Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), head of the Senate Republican Conference, said Biden’s “policies from Day One have enabled, emboldened Vladimir Putin to do what he has done,” adding that it’s “as if Vladimir Putin were Joe Biden’s secretary of energy.”

Some Republican candidates have even been fundraising off calling Biden “weak” on Ukraine.

The relentless assault no doubt undermines Biden — but it also weakens America. Biden’s response — the U.S. response — can be only as strong as Republicans allow. Suppose, for example, that Biden were to follow the advice of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and slap sanctions on Russia’s energy sector. Would Republicans tell supporters that this necessary fight against Putin will require sacrifice in the form of higher prices — and potentially much more, if the conflict escalates? Of course not: They would blame Biden for the added inflation.

Meanwhile, the attacks’ effect on public opinion is ruinous. A poll released Monday by Yahoo News-YouGov found that while an overwhelming 74 percent of Americans say the Ukraine invasion is unjustified, Trump voters actually had a more favorable opinion of Putin than of Biden. Ninety-five percent of Trump voters expressed an unfavorable view of Biden (including 87 percent holding a very unfavorable view), compared with 78 percent of Trump voters expressing an unfavorable view of Putin (with 60 percent very unfavorable). Only 3 percent of Trump voters said Biden is “doing a better job leading his country” than Putin, while 47 percent said the dictator, who has brought isolation and economic crisis to Russia, is doing a better job than Biden. By sabotaging the commander in chief, Republican leaders have made impossible any sense of national unity behind any effort in this war.

It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that Republican voters hate their political opponent more than they hate their country’s enemy. Their leaders have told them to. Trump, while opposing the Ukraine invasion, has called “peacekeeper” Putin’s actions “very savvy,” “genius” and “smart,” while “our leaders are dumb.” And Tucker Carlson’s Fox News long promoted Putin’s propaganda on Ukraine before finally pivoting to blame Biden for the invasion and faulting his response as inadequate.

That’s a bit rich, after Trump threatened to blow up NATO, unsuccessfully tried to persuade other world leaders to readmit Russia to the Group of Seven (it was kicked out after its last Ukraine invasion), and infamously tried to condition military aid to Ukraine on the country’s willingness to provide Trump with political dirt on Democrats. Republican lawmakers, eight of whom spent the Fourth of July holiday in 2018 on a kowtowing pilgrimage to Moscow, defended Trump by parroting Russian propaganda falsely blaming Ukraine for 2016 U.S. election sabotage, which Russia actually did.

After the foes of democracy attacked the Capitol, Republican legislators decided it was to their political advantage to side with the insurrectionists. They fought attempts to investigate Jan. 6. They enacted a raft of measures to suppress voting. And they labeled the insurrection itself “legitimate political discourse.”

Now, the enemies of democracy are attacking Kyiv. Republican leaders aren’t siding with them explicitly, but they still face a similar choice: do the right thing, and rally their supporters first against Putin’s invasion, or do the politically expedient thing, and rally their supporters against Biden’s response.

Can Putin keep the oligarchs and Russian elites on his side?

Can Putin keep the oligarchs and Russian elites on his side?

Sharon Werning Rivera — Read time: 5 minutes

War with Ukraine may make that harder, my research finds.

Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST

A police car patrols near St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow on Feb. 24. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg News)

With Russia deep into its invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin faces challenges beyond the military ones. Like all authoritarian leaders, Putin must be careful to keep the highest-ranking members of Russian society on his side. That will be especially difficult, given the West’s sweeping countermeasures designed to impose economic pain, such as increasing sanctions, imposing export controls and halting authorization of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe.

Scholars and analysts have stressed that Russians’ mass support for military intervention in Ukraine is precarious. Data from our Survey of Russian Elites suggest that elite backing is likely to be tepid, as well.

Every four years, the SRE interviews approximately 240 high-ranking Russians based in Moscow who work in a broad range of occupational sectors. The most recent survey was conducted in February and March 2020, with 245 respondents selected using a quota sample. Respondents are drawn from Russia’s legislative branch, executive branch, military and security forces, state-owned enterprises, private businesses, scientific and educational institutions with strong international connections, and media outlets; respondents are connected in some way with foreign policy issues.

Here are two reasons, according to the SRE, why elites will be ambivalent about a costly military campaign in Ukraine.

Elite support for the unification of Russia and Ukraine has consistently declined since 1995

Each wave of the SRE since 1995 has asked elites to explain how Russia and Ukraine should relate to each other. Specifically, we asked respondents to choose their preferred status for the two countries, using a five-point scale, with 1 signifying that they should remain “completely independent countries” and 5 that they be “united into a single country.”

Our findings in the figure below, discussed in our 2020 policy report co-authored with Hamilton College students, show that peak support for merging Ukraine and Russia into one country came in 1995, reaching 65 percent. Since then, the desire for unification has steadily declined. In 2020, that support fell to its lowest level ever, only 5 percent — while support for maintaining Ukraine and Russia as independent countries reached an all-time high of 67 percent.

Over the three decades since the collapse of communism, Russian elites have steadily come to terms with the independence of the two countries.

Putin and the Russian elite diverge on prioritizing foreign policy

Russian elites give Putin high marks for increasing Russia’s international influence and respect for the country while in office. In 2020, the SRE asked elites to evaluate Putin’s accomplishments during his two decades in power. We presented issue areas and asked respondents to say whether they had increased, decreased or remained the same since 2000. Exactly 87 percent responded that Russia’s military readiness and strength had grown during this period. Another 80 percent stated that Russia’s world influence had increased, and 68 percent credited Putin with increasing Russia’s respect in the world.

However, Russian elites’ assessments of Putin’s domestic achievements are markedly less sanguine than those of his performance on the international stage. We queried respondents about domestic issue areas, including official corruption, income inequality, and democracy and human rights in Russia. Elites noticed marked improvement in only one of these measures: political stability. On all other domestic indicators, less than half of the sample perceived any improvement over the past two decades. On the economy, only 12 percent believed that Putin had reduced income inequality, and a sizable minority of 37 percent said the standard of living had fallen since 2000.

Crucially, elites have consistently been more concerned about how failing to solve domestic problems threatens Russia’s security than about threats emanating from the West. We asked respondents to rate threats to Russian security on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 corresponding to the “absence of danger” and 5 to the “utmost danger.” The figure below shows that almost three-quarters of all elites, or 70 percent, in 2020 rated Russia’s “inability to resolve its internal problems” as either a 4 or 5, compared to 62 percent who were worried about the growth of U.S. military power.

Elites also largely do not appear to share Putin’s concern about two other supposed threats from the West: an information war seeking to tarnish Russia’s reputation in the world, or a Western-backed attempt to change Russia’s regime (or a “color revolution”). Since Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, Putin has frequently warned that the West was trying to prompt regime change in Russia. But only 44 percent of all elites surveyed in 2020 assessed the threat of Western information warfare as a 4 or 5 (with 5 meaning “the utmost danger”), and only 22 percent were worried about the possibility of a color revolution in Russia.

War in Ukraine could complicate Putin’s plans to stay in office after 2024

Research has shown that Putin-era elites follow Kremlin cues, and we should expect many to echo the talking points emitted by the Kremlin. Since 1993, the SRE has tracked Russian elites’ perceptions of neighboring Georgia, where Russia intervened militarily in 2008 on the pretext of defending the breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The percentage characterizing Georgia as “hostile” as opposed to “friendly” to Russia rose sharply during the hostilities leading up to the Russo-Georgian War, and with one exception, remained elevated in every survey period afterward.

But if living standards continue to decline and other domestic problems remain unresolved, those in the elite power “pyramid,” as political scientist Henry Hale describes it, that Putin carefully seeks to maintain may grow increasingly dissatisfied. If military action in Ukraine and its consequences for the Russian economy make it impossible for the Kremlin to progress on key domestic concerns such as infrastructure, health care, inflation, and climate change, Putin may lose elite support for any bid to stay in power beyond 2024.

Sharon Werning Rivera is professor of government at Hamilton College and principal investigator of the Survey of Russian Elites.

Republicans know exactly how to handle the fanatics in their party

Republicans know exactly how to handle the fanatics in their party

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

“There’s no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or anti-Semitism,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), after two House Republicans appeared at a white nationalist conference.

“There’s no place in our party for any of this," agreed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) chimed in to call them “morons.”

Your response might be that this is akin to the board of directors of Domino’s Pizza saying, “There’s no place in our company for gooey, fattening cheese. Now, who wants pizza?”

But the story is rather more complicated. The question of how to deal with extremists in their ranks is something every party confronts from time to time, but it’s particularly pressing for Republicans, and has been for decades. You could argue that they’ve never been able to figure out how to handle it — or instead, you could look at episodes such as this one and say they’ve figured it out just perfectly.

In this case, it involves Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and her sidekick in zealotry, Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), a figure so repellent his own siblings regularly warn against returning him to Congress. The two appeared at a conference organized by Nicholas Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist who’s so extreme he was even banned from a pro-Trump social media site.

The problem figures such as Greene, Gosar, or Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) pose for their party isn’t just their views, it’s that their entire political project is built on provocation. They couldn’t care less about lawmaking; they’re basically social media trolls who happen to have offices in the Capitol. Getting attention is what they do, which means party leaders will have to keep answering for them.

There’s a long history of the Republican Party moving forward and back when it comes to extremism, with the issue never completely settled. The nature of that extremism doesn’t change much: It’s usually some combination of conspiracy theorizing and white racial backlash.

For instance, in the 1950s and 1960s, conservatives struggled with what to do about the John Birch Society, a group of right-wing radicals who believed (among other things) that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent. The truncated story people remember is that William F. Buckley denounced the Birchers from the pages of the National Review, thereby purging them from the movement and restoring sanity to the GOP.

The truth was much more complicated; Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and other conservative leaders spent years accommodating the Birchers before finally breaking with them. As they are today, Republicans acted when they decided the support they drew from their own side’s radicals was outweighed by the cost those radicals imposed.

Sometimes the change comes because the broader society has shifted. Consider Trent Lott, then the Senate Republican leader, who offered a 2002 tribute to Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). Referring to Thurmond’s explicitly segregationist 1948 presidential bid, Lott noted that his home state of Mississippi had voted for Thurmond, and said: “If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years."

Lott forgot that it was one thing to welcome a racist such as Thurmond into the party, but by 2002 it was something else to praise his racist presidential campaign. In the ensuing controversy, Lott stepped down from his leadership position.

The lessons Republicans take from such episodes is that extremists have to be handled with care, and pushed back only when they bring too much attention to ideas that threaten the party’s image. They can’t simply be cast out, because for Republicans the optimal result is one where millions of people whom the extremists represent remain committed to the GOP while the party presents a responsible face to independent voters.

Today, they don’t want moderate suburbanites to think they’ve been taken over by QAnon crazies. But they also can’t completely reject the QAnon crazies, because by some measures they constitute a quarter of all Republicans.

And while Democrats might deal with some roughly analogous issues from time to time, the problem is nowhere near as acute for them. Left-wing radicals tend to exist outside the Democratic Party, while right-wing radicals are enmeshed deeply within the Republican Party.

To outward appearances it might look like Republicans are stumbling about, getting defensive when asked uncomfortable questions about people such as Greene. In fact, they have an extremely effective formula for dealing with their fringe.

Leaders such as McConnell and McCarthy will let nuts like Greene and Gosar do their thing most of the time. Then when controversy flares up over something they said, the leaders will deliver a mild rebuke, enough to make it clear they’re displeased, but not so harsh that they alienate the extremists’ supporters.

Then they hope that everyone forgets about it for a while. Rinse and repeat.

In the big picture, it’s working out great for Republicans. They control the Supreme Court, a majority of state legislatures and governorships, and they’ll probably capture Congress in November. Why would they change anything about how they handle their side’s fanatics?

The Supreme Court is getting more ‘activist’ all the time

The Supreme Court is getting more ‘activist’ all the time

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

I have a fantasy about Supreme Court confirmation hearings. A nominee, after getting yet another question about whether they’ll avoid “judicial activism,” gives a heavy sigh and says, “Look, senator. How about we set aside the baloney? We all know your definition of ‘judicial activism’ is ‘decisions I don’t like.’ Everybody wants sweeping, aggressive rulings as long as they’re in service of their preferred outcomes. Why don’t we admit it?”

That would be a bracing dose of candor. Instead, nominees navigate their confirmations by saying as little as possible and presenting themselves as blank slates, free of policy preferences or personal opinions that might somehow find their way into the court’s rulings.

And as Ketanji Brown Jackson prepares to run that gauntlet, the court she hopes to join is showing just how hollow the Republican protestations about “judicial activism” really are.

On Monday, the court heard a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The conservatives on the court — the same ones who promised fervently in their own hearings that they had no agenda other than fair interpretation of the law and the Constitution — made clear that they are itching to take a hatchet to the government’s ability to address climate change.

It was strange that the case was heard at all. What’s at issue — Obama-era regulations known as the Clean Power Plan — are not in effect, after a long legal and political road, and the Biden administration is working on entirely new ways for the EPA to reduce emissions from power plants.

Ordinarily the court wouldn’t bother with a case about a nonexistent regulation. “Here there is no regulation in place and no regulation will go into effect no matter what the court does,” as NYU law professor Richard Revesz told me.

But the justices were so eager to address it that they took the case anyway. Which brings us to the “major questions doctrine,” on which this case is likely to turn. Despite the august-sounding word “doctrine,” it isn’t written into law or the Constitution; it’s more of an idea, that agencies shouldn’t make enormously consequential rules unless they’re explicitly instructed by Congress to do so.

It has been around for decades, but as Revesz notes, until recently it was rarely invoked by the court, perhaps once every few years. Yet today, it’s as though the conservative supermajority is playing a video game and just unlocked a powerful new weapon it can use to slay its regulatory foes.

“It has become extremely promiscuous,” Revesz told me, and advocates now know they should include major questions claims in their arguments whenever they challenge a regulation, knowing the court’s conservatives will look kindly on it. “It happened very quickly.”

Just in recent months, the major questions doctrine came up when the court struck down the Biden administration’s eviction moratorium and its attempt to require vaccines or regular coronavirus testing for employees at large companies. And in oral arguments in the EPA case, it figured again.

But a doctrine like that one is extremely elastic, allowing a justice to apply it whenever and however they want to produce whatever result they like. And their ambitions are hardly modest. “This court is being extraordinarily activist,” Revesz told me.

We see something similar in all kinds of cases: The court creates some kind of standard that can be selectively applied, then Republican judges in lower courts take the ball and run with it. Which is one of the hallmarks of this moment: Republican judges are becoming increasingly bold in their decisions, either not caring whether they get reversed on appeal or knowing there’s a good chance the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold them.

For instance, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, a body dominated by Republican appointees, just blocked the Navy from making its own decisions about whether and how to deploy unvaccinated service members. You might find that an outrageous usurpation of the military’s authority to make military decisions — but not if you’re an anti-vaccine Republican.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, a district court judge ruled that a congressional map created by state Republicans likely violates the Voting Rights Act. But in light of a recent decision by the Supreme Court saying states shouldn’t change voting laws too close to an election, the maps will stay in effect for this year.

How close is too close to an election? As with most standards the court creates, there’s no hard and fast answer, which leaves them free to interpret it any way they want.

When Jackson appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she’ll be grilled by Republicans insisting that she forever forswear “activism” — exactly what those same Republicans cheer on when they like how it turns out. Imagine if we could all tell the truth about it.