In an op-ed in the Washington Post Rahm Emanuel gives Democrats some good advice:

With health care, climate change and tax reform all on their to-do list, Democrats shouldn’t waste political capital attempting a political maneuver — court-packing — that not even Franklin Roosevelt could pull off at the height of the New Deal. Rather than expand the court, Democrats should expand the playing field. With the filibuster curtailed, they will be equipped to establish a new national voting rights regime that addresses not only the legacy of bigotry in the South but also conservative efforts to disenfranchise people of color across the country.

They will have an opportunity also to expand the district and appellate courts, where much of the key case law gets made, as Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) has proposed. And they can move to bring a new level of transparency to our politics, exposing how dark money not only influences the legislative branch but also funds junkets and exotic retreats for judges and justices as well.

Rather than wasting their time on whining about the composition of the Supreme Court or threatening to “pack the Court” or, even worse, redefining what is meant by “packing the Court” so they can claim that both sides do it, they should do something truly remarkable: their jobs. The real power is in the hands of the legislatures whether the Congress or state and local legislators.

My first question about this is where was this guy during the eight years when somebody who strongly resembled him and was also, coincidentally, named Rahm Emanuel was mayor of Chicago? Or during the six years when another guy named Rahm Emanuel had a seat in the House of Representatives?

My second question is why didn’t those Rahm Emanuels see things that way, too? I think I have an explanation. When legislators actually take stands on issues that aren’t particularly popular, they risk losing elections. There are priorities, after all. It’s a lot less risky to let the Supreme Court carry the weight for them.

The acronym above represents “illegal, unreported, and unregulated” and you might be interested in Tabitha Mallory’s and Ian Ralby’s article on IUU Chinese fishing activities at Center for International Maritime Security. Here’s their conclusion:

The response to high seas fishing must be global. Scientific understanding of high seas fisheries is not as robust as that of coastal fisheries, and thus a precautionary approach is important. Not only does unsustainable fishing threaten long-term food security and the economic viability of the industry, but it may also decrease marine biodiversity, which is already under threat from climate change. At the national level, the U.S. Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) could be expanded to cover squid, which is the main genus the fleet targets. Regionally, organizations like the Comisión Permanente del Pacífico Sur, which looks after the collective fisheries interests and management of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile, can collaborate on high seas management and protection. At the international level, we must support the efforts of the United Nations to establish an agreement on protecting biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). And the outcome of the World Trade Organization negotiations on fisheries subsidies, concluding possibly at the end of 2020, is crucial—China is currently seeking exemptions arguing that it is still a developing country.

Development, however, can never be to the detriment of the entire planet, and unsustainable fishing practices around the world have put extreme pressure on global fish stocks and dramatically diminished ocean health. Our ability to sustain human life depends on our ability to maintain the resources needed for our sustenance. As much as this matter is up for legal, political or environmental debate, it is most fundamentally a concern for all humanity.

It’s pretty obvious from the statistics they cite that the Chinese authorities don’t give a damn about the sustainability of their fishing practices, the health of the ocean, or human life. It is also clear, as Peru and Argentina may have learned to their sorrow, that the Chinese authorities really don’t want to import food from other countries or anything for that matter and will do whatever is necessary to be self-sufficient.

For some reason I feel the need to remind people of one of the oracular pronouncements of the late Mayor Daley: regardless of how it looks now someone will be elected.

I can’t agree with John Faso’s highly optimistic claims in his piece on “Operation Warp Speed” at RealClearPolicy:

There is encouraging news on the development of vaccines to beat the coronavirus.

No fewer than four vaccine candidates are in advanced clinical trials. Major pharmaceutical companies such as Astra Zeneca and Moderna are working round the clock to bring an effective vaccine to market.

AstraZeneca did an emergency reset of its clinical trial last week while it looks to me as though Moderna were as interested in goosing its stock price as much as in developing an effective vaccine against COVID-19.

I remain with the poll of pharma executives taken last year: the likelihood of a safe, effective vaccine being available this year approaches zero. IMO we shouldn’t be surprised if such a vaccine is never available.

I have noticed that there are some people prudently considering the logistics of vaccine administration at the scale at which it’s being contemplated. The waste problems alone will be daunting.

There’s a rather lugubrious post at City Journal by Nicole Gelinas that reviews the state of New York City’s economy. It has a number of eye-catching infographics which I won’t sample here. Here’s a snippet:

efore mid-March, New York City’s economy boasted nearly 4.1 million private-sector jobs—a record. No one industry dominated, meaning that the collapse of one would not mean disaster for the city. More than 800,000 people worked in “professional and business” sectors, which include corporate law and software design; another 800,000 worked in health care. Nearly half a million people labored in finance and real estate, and another half-million in leisure and hospitality. Retailers provided nearly 350,000 jobs; manufacturing, about 70,000; building construction, 50,000. There was basically a job for everyone, whether the investment-bank CEO or the dishwasher newly arrived in New York from Central America. Two earlier crisis periods—the tech bubble bursting, soon followed by 9/11, and then the 2008 financial meltdown—showed resiliency in this employment variety, as Gotham’s economy recovered far faster than the rest of the nation’s.

What was hard to imagine in early March is an awful fact now. Shutting down entire industries for months, even for a justified reason, brings mass-scale job destruction. As of late July (the last month for which data are available), New York City was missing 16 percent of its jobs, or 646,100 positions, relative to last July. After the financial crisis, by contrast, New York lost 206,300 jobs.

And in this crisis, New York is faring far worse than the rest of America. By late July, the nation had lost 8.1 percent of its jobs. But locally, industry after industry isn’t just in recession; it’s virtually nonexistent. New York is missing 53 percent of its 471,800 pre-Covid leisure and hospitality workers. The arts and entertainment field has lost 65,200 jobs, or more than two-thirds, and the restaurant and hotel field has hemorrhaged 184,500 jobs, or 49.2 percent. Retail outlets have laid off 45,300 people, or 13.2 percent. All these declines outpace national losses.

It seems to me that many of Ms. Gelinas’s prescriptions are wishful thinking. The city can’t give a property tax holiday or a sales tax holiday. At least if it’s like Chicago it didn’t lay off any city workers while everything else in the city shut down. They were deemed “essential workers”. It had to pay them then and now. It needs the money.

What I see when I look at her statistics and graphs will not make Ms. Gelinas happy. I grew up in St. Louis, second only to Detroit in having lost population since 1950 both in numbers and in percentage. When I use Google’s Street View to look at the house in which I spent my first ten years, I see many empty lots around it and most of the businesses that were nearby are gone. The house in North St. Louis that was owned by my great-grandfather and then my great-uncle and, finally, by his widow, having been occupied by members of my family for nearly a century, has been torn down as have many of the houses nearby. Whole city blocks are derelict.

Maybe many of the jobs lost in the restaurant and hospitality sectors were filled by (mostly illegal) immigrants and they can return to wherever it was they came from. But probably not.

New York City must shrink. If it can’t save itself, we can’t save it.

I imagine that the Biden and Trump campaigns are asking a lot of questions of themselves about now. Consider this report from the Gallup organization as of a month ago. Republicans have a one point advantage in party affiliation. That’s within the range of error. It also doesn’t tell the whole story. If you scan down the page a bit you’ll find that more independents lean Democratic than lean Republican by three points. That’s a pretty narrow difference as well.

In both cases the trend is going in the wrong way for Biden. Is that continuing, stopped, or has it reversed?

I found this piece by James Holmes at RealClearDefense, attempting to place a remark by Chinese President Xi into a Clausewitzian framework, thought-provoking. Here’s the remark as reported by CNN:

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on troops to “put all (their) minds and energy on preparing for war” in a visit to a military base in the southern province of Guangdong on Tuesday, according to state news agency Xinhua.

Presumably, he was addressing multiple audiences: the troops themselves, the Taiwanese, us, other potential adversaries. For the troops he was attempting to promote élan. As Mr. Holmes put it:

Xi was simply entreating the PLA Marines to do their job, not announcing that war is imminent. That’s the banal part.

As Clausewitz noted there are three dominant tendencies in a society:

• rational subordination of military endeavors to policy
• chance and creativity and
• passions like fear, rage, or spite

and three ways of winning in martial strife:

• overcome your opponent and dictate terms
• discourage your antagonist or
• convince your antagonist that the cost of victory will not be worth the price

That last is undoubtedly the message that President Xi is sending to us.

My last word on this subject consists of an observation. Our adversaries, from Admiral Yamamoto to Osama Bin Laden, have routinely miscalculated our reactions. Honestly, it isn’t just our adversaries but our allies as well. I doubt that President Xi would do a better job.

Following up on my last post, I think that to understand U. S. foreign policy you need to be able to answer several questions:

1. Why did Bush invade Iraq?
2. Why did Obama bomb Libya so as to enable the removal of Moammar Qaddafi?
3. Why has no president ended our military involvement in Afghanistan?

If your answers are limited to being evil or politically motivated, you’re not seeing the whole picture.

In a piece at TomDispatch Andrew Bacevich predicts the likely foreign policy of a Biden Administration:

On the eve of the upcoming presidential election, the entire national security apparatus and its supporters assume that Trump’s departure from office will restore some version of normalcy. Every component of that apparatus from the Pentagon and the State Department to the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations to the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post yearns for that moment.

To a very considerable degree, a Biden presidency will satisfy that yearning. Nothing if not a creature of the establishment, Biden himself will conform to its requirements. For proof, look no further than his vote in favor of invading Iraq in 2003. (No isolationist he.) Count on a Biden administration, therefore, to perpetuate the entire obsolete retinue of standard practices.

As Peter Beinart puts it, “When it comes to defense, a Biden presidency is likely to look very much like an Obama presidency, and that’s going to look not so different from a Trump presidency when you really look at the numbers.” Biden will increase the Pentagon budget, keep U.S. troops in the Middle East, and get tough with China. The United States will remain the world’s number-one arms merchant, accelerate efforts to militarize outer space, and continue the ongoing modernization of the entire U.S. nuclear strike force. Biden will stack his team with CFR notables looking for jobs on the “inside.”

Above all, Biden will recite with practiced sincerity the mantras of American exceptionalism as a summons to exercise global leadership. “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.” Those uplifting sentiments are, of course, his from a recent Foreign Affairs essay.

So if you liked U.S. national security policy before Trump mucked things up, then Biden is probably your kind of guy. Install him in the Oval Office and the mindless pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” will resume. And the United States will revert to the policies that prevailed during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — policies, we should note, that paved the way for Donald Trump to win the White House.

I think he’s being unduly optimistic. Although he correctly predicts how a Biden Administration will frame its actions and what it will probably seek to do, today is not the same as 1950. It’s not even the same as 1990. Liberal interventionism won’t pursue dominance in the name of internationalism unless, of course, you mean Chinese dominance under the guise of U. S. internationalism. International institutions are now so thoroughly distorted by the PRC that they’ll probably have us pursuing Chinese foreign policy goals.

At the bottom line, I agree with Dr. Bacevich. We should follow John Quincy Adams’s advice and avoid going forth in search of monsters to destroy but should follow Voltaire’s advice: tend our garden. The United States is an outlier and not only am I not troubled by that I would prefer that it remain so. We need to tread an increasingly narrow line between isolationism and internationalism against U. S. interests.