At Geopolitical Futures George Friedman assesses the prospects for the Biden Administration’s reviving the JCPOA with Iran:

Politically, if Biden wants to make good on his promises, he needs to resurrect some version of the old treaty. The Iranians read this need as an opportunity to extract concessions, particularly removing sanctions but also, in the long run, minimizing the threat from the forces across the Persian Gulf. These are critical to Iran.

Biden’s problem is that he has not yet begun to govern. The first few months of any new administration is an extension of the campaign. Thus, Biden ordered an airstrike against Iran-backed militias in Syria to demonstrate that he is willing to strike at their prized covert operations. The Iranians are watching carefully to see if the left-wing of the party governs or if the center governs. Similarly, following his campaign commitment to human rights, Biden went after Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman – who, according to U.S. intelligence, authorized the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – before trying to heal whatever breach in relations it might have caused.

The United States needs the Israel-Arab coalition to block Iranian covert ambitions, so it needs Saudi Arabia to be part of it. All presidents must figure out how to square the circle of what they promised to do and what they must do. And in this sense, Biden has a problem: He is pledged to resurrect an agreement that did not really address the problem of Iran, and he must do it to show the Europeans that he is not Trump while making clear to the Iranians that he is not giving away Trump’s strategy without making a fundamental change in America’s Iranian policy. And Iran will make this as hard as possible for him.

There’s also some good stuff about negotiating strategy in the piece.

Along those lines I would observe that in negotiating and perhaps counter-intuitively a lack of options is a position of strength. That explains the Israelis’ situation. They only have one way of defending themselves against an Iranian nuclear attack. You can hardly have a stronger position than that. To the extent the Iranians believe that’s Israel’s posture it calls the rationality of their leadership into question.

Meanwhile the U. S. has lots of alternatives. The Biden Administration could just follow the Trump Administration’s lead with respect to Iran but that would be politically difficult for President Biden given his campaign rhetoric. The administration could continue to revivify the JCPOA but that’s pragmatically difficult. What do we have to offer the Iranians that won’t aggravate everyone else in the Middle East? Ending sanctions? A phlegmatic offer—they’re eroding anyway. The Germans will see to it that continues.

We could become much more aggressive with respect to Iran but that would alienate members of the president’s own caucus. Balancing politics and policy is always tricky but rarely more so than when you’ve positioned yourself as the grownup in the room.

At RealClearWorld Daniel L. Davis urges President Biden to withdraw from Afghanistan:

The best thing President Biden can do for America’s national security and the health and wellbeing of our troops is to end the war and withdraw our troops, on schedule, by May 1. Anything else will needlessly extend the futility into perpetuity.

and the only way he can do that is by rejecting the advice of the Afghan experts and be willing to take the heat for the inevitable collapse of the present Afghan government.

I would recommend that he also dump his Russia experts, far too many of whom have agendas of their own which have little to do with U. S. interests.

However, expert advice, the unsustainability of the Afghan government, and the inevitable heat when it collapses are among the reasons it’s unlikely that President Biden will withdraw our troops from Afghanistan.

I think that George Will is making some good points in his latest Washington Post column but I found it a bit disjoint. The points he’s making, both of which I agree with, are that the present state of journalism is terrible and suppressing the press freedom of news outlets you don’t like will not solve the underlying problem.

He attributes the problem to consumers of news:

There is, however, no government cure for what is, fundamentally, a problem with today’s consumers of journalism — too few readers and viewers insistent on quality and resistant to irresponsibility.

while I think that the problem goes deeper than that to the confluence of loss of gatekeeper status by major media outlets and the emergence of media outlets aligned with political parties, rather as they are in the UK. I’ve already provided my solution for that. If we’re going to have a partisan press like the UK we should have libel laws like those in the UK. The problem then would be standing but that should be resolved explicitly in the legislation.

The problem is not limited to Fox News as the House members who want to conduct an investigation would have it:

On Feb. 22, two California Democrats, Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, sent to AT&T and other entities letters declaring that “the right-wing media ecosystem” — they named Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network — has produced “our current polluted information environment.” The pollution is undeniable.

In response Mr. Will points out some egregious examples outside the “right-wing media ecosystem”:

So are progressives’ contributions to it, e.g., their obsession with 2016 “Russian collusion,” their ludicrously solemn and extensive interviewing of Stormy Daniels’s felonious lawyer, Michael Avenatti, and their beatification of New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) during the pandemic.

but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The problem didn’t start with Fox News et al. and it didn’t begin in the run-up to the 2016 campaign, gaining steam during Trump’s tenure as president. Dozens of examples could be cited, e.g. “if you like your healthcare plan you can keep it” which went from being fact-checked as true to being the lie of the year, and go back a century or more.

Keep in mind there’s more than one way for the press to slant the news including:

• What they report
• How they report it
• What they don’t report

That last is vitally important. Examples include FDR’s wheelchair and JFK’s sexual escapades while president.

It is blithe to suggest that people merely get their news from multiple sources with contrasting viewpoints and make their own judgments but that would require a commitment of time and energy most people are unwilling to make. We’ll never have the confidence in any journalist that we had in Walter Cronkite because the Internet just makes it too easy to do our own fact-checking and social media make it easy to make our criticisms public. I don’t see an easy workable solution to the problem of “fake news” other than the one I’ve proposed.

Responding to the charges of sexual misconduct against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that seem to be emerging on a daily basis, in her Washington Post column Ruth Marcus wonders what we’ve learned in these 30 years after Anita Hill’s charges against then-Supreme Court appointee Clarence Thomas?

Every high-profile sexual harassment case raises, and helps resolve, questions of crime and punishment: what behavior is acceptable, how workplaces should respond and what price must be paid.

At this late stage, in 2021, one could be forgiven for wondering, with no small degree of exasperation, whether the perpetrators will ever learn. So it is possible to examine the stream of allegations about Cuomo and ask: Really? Has nothing changed?

But there is another, more hopeful interpretation: What once was commonplace — bosses asking out subordinates, co-workers making crude sexual remarks — is now understood to be forbidden, a career-killer.

To be truthful I don’t think that’s what we’ve learned at all. I think there have been major transformations in private workplaces but for elected officials we’ve learned that as long as you don’t resign and the press doesn’t turn against you, you’ll weather the charges.

There are multiple reasons the press might not turn against an elected official accused of sexual misconduct including

• They like you
• They like what you stand for
• They’re afraid of you
• They harnessed their own fates to yours

In a New York Times opinion piece Spencer Bokat-Lindell underscores a point I made earlier—that the present pandemic may well proceed as the 1918 one did, calling out reasons to be optimistic:

• The vaccines are a scientific marvel.
• The rollout is speeding up.
• Cases have plummeted.

and reasons to be pessimistic:

• The U.S. outbreak is still very bad.
• The vaccine messaging has been confusing.
• Vaccine hesitancy is polarized.
• Rich countries are hoarding vaccines.

concluding when a remark about how we’ll know it’s over:

So how exactly will we know when the American outbreak is “over”? In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal proposes the “flu test”: 100 Covid-19 deaths or fewer a day, which is about the number of Americans who die every day from the flu.

“Right now, the country as a whole is still reporting close to 2,000 deaths a day, and just two weeks ago that number was more than 3,000,” he wrote last week. “So, if we’re going by the flu test, we still have a very long way to go.”

Left unasked is whether the ongoing deaths due to COVID-19 will be instead of the deaths due to seasonal flu, on top of those deaths, or some of each. I’m guessing largely instead of seasonal flu deaths but to be completely accurate some of both.

There are other reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic. The media have one less motivation for polarizing the policy responses to COVID-19 than they did six months ago which should change the landscape of messaging and public reaction. A year later and we still don’t have a good handle on susceptibility to COVID-19. We know that some people are more susceptible than others. For example, those over 65 seem more likely to develop serious COVID-19 and those over 80 more likely to die of it. But there may be many more risk factors than age. We just don’t know.

We don’t have a complete handle on the long-term implications of having contracted the disease. In all likelihood we’ll be dealing with “post-COVID-19 syndrome” for the foreseeable future.

And we don’t know what the long-term effects of the various vaccines will be. We’re presently conducting what are probably the largest field trials in human history.

In his latest grenade, John McWhorter unloads on the math curriculum update proposal that’s been produced by the Gates Foundation, taken seriously in school districts all over the country, and promoted by at least one state—Oregon:

There are two things. Racism and religion. Just those.

As in, first it is racism propounded as antiracism. Black kids shouldn’t expected to master the precision of math and should be celebrated for talking around it, gamely approximating its answers and saying why it can be dangerous? This is bigotry right out of Reconstruction, Tulsa, Selma, and Charlottesville.

Second, it is not science but scripture. It claims to be about teaching math while founded on shielding students from the requirement to actually do it. This is unempirical. It does so with an implication that only a moral transgressor numb to some larger point would question the contradiction. This is, as such, a religious document, telling you to accept that Jesus walked on water.

Humans may grievously sacrifice the 9-year-old, the virgin, or the widow upon the pyre in worship of a God. Too, humans may sacrifice the black kid from the work of mastering the gift of math, in favor of showing that they are enlightened enough to understand that her life may be affected by racism and that therefore she should be shielded from anything that is a genuine challenge.

This is not pedagogy; it is preaching.

For those who believe this report is inconsequential and just a cause célèbre for right-wingers I would submit that a) at least one state is promoting it and b) John McWhorter is no right-winger. So, not inconsequential.

If adopted such a curriculum would tarnish the futures of an entire cohort of young students. What’s important in science and engineering is not your intentions or your history but whether the chemical process you’ve designed explodes or produces polystyrene, whether the rocket actually gets to the moon, whether the bridge falls down, or the patient recovers. And China, Japan, and India will not be burdened with such claptrap.

This all sounds to me like the revenge of people who couldn’t do math.

The tragedy of it is that my experience, at least, is that black folk can do math. Some excel at it. Shielding them from it to end white supremacy is shielding them from what they can and what they need to succeed in the interests of, what? Patronization?

In a piece at Atlantic Joe Pinsker tries to predict how the American experience of SARS-COV-2 will change over the coming year. He ends with spring/summer 2022 and here’s his conclusion:

Life in the warmer months of 2022 should be normal, or at least whatever qualifies as normal post-pandemic. The virus will still exist, but one possibility is that it will be less likely to make people severely ill and that it will, like the flu, circulate primarily in the colder months; some people would still die from COVID-19, but the virus wouldn’t rage out of control again. Meanwhile, Americans should be able to do most, if not all, of the things that they missed so much in 2020 and 2021, mask- and worry-free.

Of course, this dreamy era is still more than a year away, and some unforeseen obstacle could delay the resumption of normalcy. Jha said he couldn’t picture what that might be, though. After a year spent gaming out how bad the pandemic could get, he can finally see ahead to a time when there are no more catastrophes to imagine.

On my part I don’t think events will be nearly as predictable as he apparently does. For example, I don’t know where he gets this:

The good news, though, is that even with these variants, existing vaccines appear to reduce the risk of severe illness, meaning more and more people will be protected as vaccinations continue. And vaccines can change individuals’ risk calculus.

That might be true if people’s present “risk calculus” were based in reason but it isn’t. It it were they’d think that their odds of contracting COVID-19 were much higher than they presently do but that the likelihood of their dying from it was much lower than they do. As it is it’s not too much of an oversimplification to say that they think it’s pretty unlikely they’ll contract it but if they do they’ll die. Sort of like they think of AIDS or Ebola when they should be thinking more like the seasonal flu.

For insight we should turn to how the Spanish flu pandemic wound down a century ago. That’s been covered to death, for example last fall in a piece at the Washington Post:

The longer the influenza virus existed in a certain community, the less lethal the sickness was. An epidemiological study cited by Barry in “The Great Influenza” noted that “the virus was most virulent or most readily communicable when it first reached the state, and thereafter it became generally attenuated.”

Experts say there’s this natural progression where a virus often — but not always — becomes less lethal as time wears on. It’s in the best interest of the virus for it to spread before killing the host.

“The natural order of an influenza virus is to change,” Barry told The Post. “It seems most likely that it simply mutated in the direction of other influenza viruses, which is considerably milder.”

By 1920, the influenza virus was still a threat, but fewer people were dying from the disease. Some scientists at the time started to move on to other research. Barry wrote that William Henry Welch, a famous pathologist from Johns Hopkins who was studying the virus, found it “humiliating” that the outbreak was passing away without experts truly understanding the underlying cause of the disease.

What Welch didn’t predict was that the virus never truly went away. In 2009, David Morens and Jeffery Taubenberger — two influenza experts at the National Institutes of Health — co-authored an article with Anthony S. Fauci explaining how the descendants of the 1918 influenza virus have contributed to a “pandemic era” that has lasted the past hundred years. At the time the article was published, the H1N1 influenza virus in public circulation was a fourth-generation descendant of the novel virus from 1918.

I think that’s almost exactly what will happen with SARS-CoV-2. It will never “go away”. We’ll be inoculating against it forever.

Another factor I can’t predict is how political leaders will respond. So far they’ve been very reluctant to relinquish the dictatorial powers they’ve been wielding for the last year. Will they be relieved to stop issuing directives, refuse to stop issuing them out of “an abundance of caution” or what? And will people just get tired of obeying them? I think there’s evidence that’s the case.

And then there’s the role of COVID-19 as a cudgel to beat over the head of your political opponents. That’s not as effective a weapon as it was a few months ago. Will the news change to fit the politics? Or will the major media outlets continue to promote hysterical reactions because they capture more eyeballs? I simply don’t know.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Rahm Emanuel admonishes the progressives in his political party:

Democrats need to tear a page from the Republican playbook. When interviewing for a job, you don’t lead with self-loathing. Democrats need to assert that they’ve got a record of success. If the GOP could claim that a past Republican president had created 20 million jobs, do you think they would disparage him as a RINO—a Republican in name only? If a GOP president had sparked the longest peacetime economic expansion in the nation’s history, do you think they’d label his efforts as “tepid”?

These aren’t trick questions—of course they wouldn’t. Nevertheless, it’s chic today in certain quarters of the Democratic Party to disparage Presidents Clinton and Obama, who actually did those things, on the misguided pretense that criticizing the progressive past will somehow open the door to a more robust progressive future.

and he recommends a version of Reagan’s “11th Commandment”:

Decades ago, Reagan coined what many call the 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Democrats don’t need to pretend that every Democrat who ever held office was infallible. But if they want to pursue a progressive agenda and win elections on the economy, they should burnish their own narrative of success.

Franklin Roosevelt established Social Security, and Harry Truman improved it. Lyndon Johnson’s Medicaid planted the seeds for Mr. Clinton’s Children’s Health Insurance Program and Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Mr. Clinton made the tax code more progressive by doubling the tax credit for the working poor, Mr. Obama doubled it again, and now Mr. Biden is working to take the next step. To build a movement, you shouldn’t talk down what you’ve already achieved on behalf of the American people.

I’m not sure of what Mr. Emanuel is trying to accomplish with this op-ed or who his target audience is. Is he trying to protect the Democrats’ tenuous control of federal power? Is it a somewhat desperate attempt on his part at maintaining his own relevance in today’s Democratic Party?

I think he fails to understand the essential nature of progressivism. It is focused on the future, disinterested if not dismissive of the past. Not only that but today’s progressives certainly seem insistent on applying their ever-changing standards to past behaviors. Lyndon Johnson, despite his being the Founding Father of today’s federal government, was effectively “canceled” by Baby Boomers. No Democratic president of the 20th or 21st century could live up to the standards of belief and behavior presently being applied. And former Republican presidents? Fuggedaboutit.

If the progressive wing of the Democratic Party actually achieves control of the party apparatus and the organs of government, who could survive its scrutiny? Certainly not Rahm Emanuel.

To a certain extent Walter Russell Mead’s characterization of differences between Saudi and Arabia in his latest Wall Street Journal column:

The Saudis and Iranians have responded to these changes in different ways. For all its faults and sometimes brutal behavior, the new Saudi power configuration has steered the country toward a recalibration that Washington can live with. As the kingdom warms toward Israel, reforms its textbooks, and gradually lifts selected restrictions on women, the radical Wahhabism that long held the country together is no longer as influential as it once was. There is no intention to make Saudi Arabia either a democracy or a Western-style secular society, and the authorities are tightly policing the boundaries of permitted dissent even as those boundaries shift, but the new direction is significantly better than the old.

and

Tehran is on another path. Seizing the opportunities that chaos offers in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, Iran has moved effectively to expand its regional profile even as it accelerates its nuclear program. American Iran doves hope this was largely a defensive response to Mr. Trump’s maximum-pressure approach and that Tehran will become more tractable as Washington’s hostility diminishes; we shall see. The multiethnic character of the country and the intimate linkages between the religious hierarchy and the state make it hard for Iran to de-emphasize radical religion and hard-line resistance to the West as the regime’s basis for legitimacy—and the military success of Iranian proxies around the region makes it hard to abandon a policy that seems to bring gains. Hard-liners are likely to point to any new U.S. concessions as a sign that their policies are working.

reminds me an old wisecrack I once heard. In a movie hat pits the Mafia against vampires who do you root for? There’s literally no one to root for in contrasting Saudi Arabia with Iran. Neither are our friends and they cannot be our friends, in Iran’s case as long as the present regime or any mullahocracy that replaces it is in power and in Saudi Arabia’s case probably forever.

I wonder what his evidence for this is?

the radical Wahhabism that long held the country together is no longer as influential as it once was

I think the comment reveals a flawed understanding of the government of Saudi Arabia, its society, and Wahhabism. Rather than thinking of the Saudi government as an absolute monarchy or autocracy, think of it more as resembling medieval England. Yes, there’s a king but he’s just one of many lords who wield power. Sometimes he’s the most powerful, sometimes not. As long as rich Saudis are promoting Wahhabism all over the world, as is the case today, its influence is waxing not waning. Just because the king and crown prince don’t emphasize their religious fanaticism doesn’t mean it’s not there, driving Saudi society. I see the monarchy’s moves to allegedly “liberalize” Saudi society by, say, allowing women to drive not as a mark of waning Wahhabi influence but as a sign that MBS wants to consolidate the monarchy’s power and a testament to Wahhabism’s continued power.

The situation in Iran is almost the opposite. There are plenty of educated, largely secularist Iranians who chafe at the restrictions the present regime imposes on them but as long as the regime remains in place and is supported by the military, the mullahs, the old revolutionaries, and conservative Islamist radicals largely consisting of people in rural areas and the urban poor, the regime will stay in control. Being nuclear-armed will provide insurance against being removed by foreigners.

He concludes:

This is the principal danger to the Biden administration’s so-far successful attempts to travel its own course between the Trump and Obama policies. The question going forward is whether the administration can impose its vision on Iran while keeping European and Middle East allies onside.

only we have no “Middle East allies”. We have a client (Israel), we have a hostile (Iran), and belligerent non-combatants (the Gulf States). And we have dwindling material interests. It’s time for our Middle East policy to change in a direction which those who’ve built their entire careers on the status quo will fight to oppose.

By the way the answer to the question in the title is that you root for the popcorn concession. I can’t root for them, either. They don’t have American interests at heart.