The Promise, a new 4-part drama from acclaimed writer/director Peter Kosminsky, stars Claire Foy (Little Dorrit, Upstairs Downstairs) and Christian Cooke (Cemetery Junction) in the lead roles.
The Promise tells the story of two British characters - Erin (Claire Foy), an 18-year-old Londoner who visits present-day Israel for the first time, and her grandfather, Len (Christian Cooke) - a soldier in the British peace-keeping force in 1940s Palestine.
Erin's best friend Eliza (Perdita Weeks) has joint British/Israeli nationality although she lives in the UK. She travels to Israel to carry out National Service in the army and invites Erin to join her for the summer.
Erin is anticipating a summer of parties and attractive, young Israeli men but just before she departs she finds her sick grandfather's diary. She starts to read it en route to Israel and learns about his life in the army in the then Palestine. She discovers Len witnessed first-hand the atrocities of the Holocaust and the violent events that occurred when the modern state of Israel was established.
In a speech Saturday in Claremont, New Hampshire, and then in his Veterans Day greeting yesterday on social media, former president Trump echoed German Nazis.
“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day [sic] we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream…. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
The use of language referring to enemies as bugs or rodents has a long history in genocide because it dehumanizes opponents, making it easier to kill them. In the U.S. this concept is most commonly associated with Hitler and the Nazis, who often spoke of Jews as “vermin” and vowed to exterminate them.
The parallel between MAGA Republicans’ plans and the Nazis had other echoes this weekend, as Trump’s speech came the same day that Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that Trump and his people are planning to revive his travel ban, more popularly known as the “Muslim ban,” which refused entry to the U.S. by people from some majority-Muslim nations, and to reimpose the pandemic-era restrictions he used during the coronavirus pandemic to refuse asylum claims—it is not only legal to apply for asylum in the United States, but it is a guaranteed right under the Refugee Act of 1980—by claiming that immigrants bring infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
They plan mass deportations of unauthorized people in the U.S., rounding them up with specially deputized law enforcement officers and National Guard soldiers contributed by Republican-dominated states. Because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t have the space for such numbers of people, Trump’s people plan to put them in “sprawling camps” while they wait to be expelled. Trump refers to this as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Trump’s people would screen visa applicants to eliminate those with ideas they consider undesirable, and would kick out those here temporarily for humanitarian reasons, including Afghans who came here after the 2021 Taliban takeover. Trump ally Steve Bannon and his likely attorney general, Mike Davis, expect to deport 10 million people.
Trump’s advisors also intend to challenge birthright citizenship, the principle that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen. This principle was established by the Fourteenth Amendment and acknowledged in the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision during a period when native-born Americans were persecuting immigrants from Asia. That hatred resulted in Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, being denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. Wong sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court agreed. The children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Trump immigration hardliner Stephen Miller told the New York Times reporters. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
In addition to being illegal and unconstitutional, such plans to strip the nation of millions of workers would shatter the economy, sparking sky-high prices, especially of food.
For a long time, Trump’s increasingly fascist language hasn’t drawn much attention from the press, perhaps because the frequency of his outrageous statements has normalized them. When Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 referred to many Trump supporters as “deplorables,” a New York Times headline read: “Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers ‘Deplorables,’ and G.O.P.* Pounces.” Yet Trump’s threat to root out “vermin” at first drew a New York Times headline saying, “Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction.” (This prompted Mark Jacobs of Stop the Presses to write his own headlines about disasters, including my favorite: “John Wilkes Booth Takes Visit to the Theater in a Very Different Direction.”)
Finally, it seems, Trump’s explicit use of Nazi language, especially when coupled with his threats to establish camps, has woken up at least some headline writers. Forbes accurately headlined yesterday’s story: “Trump Compares Political Foes to ‘Vermin’ On Veterans Day—Echoing Nazi Propaganda.”
Republicans have refused to disavow Trump’s language. When Kristen Welker of Meet the Press asked Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel: “Are you comfortable with this language coming from the [Republican] frontrunner,” McDaniel answered: “I am not going to comment on candidates and their campaign messaging.” Others have remained silent.
Trump’s Veterans Day “vermin” statement set up his opponents as enemies of the country by blurring them together as “Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs.” Conflating liberals with the “Left” has been a common tactic in the U.S. right-wing movement since 1954, when L. Brent Bozell and William F. Buckley Jr. tried to demonize liberals—those Americans of all parties who wanted the government to regulate business, provide Social Security and basic welfare programs, fund roads and hospitals, and protect civil rights—as wannabe socialists.
In the United States there is a big difference between liberals and the political “Left.” Liberals believe in a society based in laws designed to protect the individual, arrived at by a government elected by the people. Political parties disagree about policy and work to change the laws, but they support the system itself. Most Americans, including Democrats and traditional Republicans, are liberals.
Both “the Left,” and the “Right” want to get rid of the system. Those on the Left believe that its creation was so warped either by wealth or by racism that it must be torn down and rebuilt. Those on the Right believe that most people don’t know what’s good for them, making democracy dangerous. They think the majority of people must be ruled by their betters, who will steer them toward productivity and religion. The political Left has never been powerful in the U.S.; the political Right has taken over the Republican Party.
The radical right pushes the idea that their opponents are “Radical Left Thugs” trying to tear down the system because they know liberal policies like Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection, reproductive rights, gun safety legislation, and so on, are actually quite popular. This weekend, for example, Trump once again took credit for signing into law the Veterans Choice health care act, which was actually sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and signed by President Barack Obama in 2014.
The Right’s draconian immigration policies ignore the reality that presidents since Ronald Reagan have repeatedly asked Congress to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws, only to have Republicans tank such measures to keep the hot button issue alive, knowing it turns out their voters. Both President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have begged Congress to fund more immigration courts and border security and to provide a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. as children. They, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, have tried to slow the influx of undocumented migrants by working to stabilize the countries from which such migrants primarily come.
Such a plan does not reflect “hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country.” It reflects support for a system in which Congress, not a dictator, writes the laws.
A video ABC News published tonight from Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis’s plea deal makes the distinction between liberal democracy and a far-right dictatorship clear. In it, Ellis told prosecutors that former White House deputy chief of staff and social media coordinator Dan Scavino told her in December 2020 that Trump was simply not going to leave the White House, despite losing the presidential election.
When Ellis lamented that their election challenges had lost, Scavino allegedly answered: “‘Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave.” Ellis replied: “‘What do you mean?” Scavino answered: “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.” When Ellis responded “Well, it doesn’t quite work that way, you realize?” he allegedly answered: “We don’t care.”
*The GOP, or Grand Old Party, is an old nickname for the Republican Party.
Actually the henchman who delivered that warning, Steven Cheung, toned it down a bit :
Quote:Cheung later clarified that he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence" instead of their “entire existence.”
Quote:A New York civil liberties group is suing Joe Biden for allegedly failing in his duty under international and US laws to prevent Israel committing genocide in Gaza.
The Center for Constitutional Rights’ (CCR) complaint on behalf of several Palestinian groups and individuals alleges that Israel’s actions, including “mass killings”, the targeting of civilian infrastructure and forced expulsions, amount to genocide. The CCR said that the 1948 international convention against genocide requires the US and other countries to use their power and influence to stop the killing.
“As Israel’s closest ally and strongest supporter, being its biggest provider of military assistance by a large margin and with Israel being the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II, the United States has the means available to have a deterrent effect on Israeli officials now pursuing genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” the complaint argued.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, asks the court to bar the US from providing weapons, money and diplomatic support to Israel. It also seeks a declaration that the president, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, are required “to take all measures within their power to prevent Israel’s commission of genocidal acts against the Palestinian people of Gaza”. These include pressing Israel to end the bombing of Gaza, to lift its siege of the territory and to prevent the forcible expulsion of Palestinians.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/13/biden-lawsuit-alleged-failure-prevent-genocide-israel-palestine
Joe Biden’s response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 was to fuse the wars in Israel and Ukraine into a single struggle. Immediately after he returned from his visit to Tel Aviv, where he had both literally and figuratively embraced Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden addressed the US public from the Oval Office. “You know,” he said, “the assault on Israel echoes nearly twenty months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine.” Those echoes sound more and more discordant as Israel’s retaliation becomes ever bloodier. The accusations that Biden fired then at Vladimir Putin have been ricocheting back, damaging both his own moral authority and international solidarity with Ukraine.
Biden was not wrong to imply that what Hamas did to civilians in Israel was morally comparable to the atrocities the Russians inflicted on Ukrainians in Bucha and other towns they invaded. The president’s political calculations were also logical enough. Funding for Israel’s invasion of Gaza is a popular bipartisan cause. Support for Ukraine is not. Shortly before October 7, around half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives opposed the White House’s request for a minor supplementary aid package of $300 million for Ukraine. By linking Ukraine so closely to Israel, Biden was clearly hoping to use one political appeal to boost the other. The energy unleashed by a shared determination to rally around Israel would galvanize the right’s flagging enthusiasm for Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression.
The opposite is happening. The pairing of Israel and Ukraine has not created a single moral cause. It has exposed a double standard. From the early days of Putin’s war on Ukraine, as evidence began to emerge of the extensive war crimes committed by his forces, it was clear that there was a weak spot in America’s accusations of Russian depravity. The US has a history of deep ambivalence toward war crimes—evident in, for example, its refusal to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Its inconsistency on this score has long threatened to undermine the belief, so important to the struggle being waged by the people of Ukraine, that Putin is violating not just territorial borders but moral boundaries. For Putin it is good news indeed that the US, so fierce in its denunciation of his attacks on civilians, has been so forbearing in its attitude to similar assaults on Gaza. His cynical belief that ethical standards are just weapons in the propaganda war is being vindicated.
In the story that Biden wanted to tell in his TV address, Israel’s war against Hamas and Ukraine’s against Russia are equally intertwined with the interests of Americans at home: “Making sure Israel and Ukraine succeed is vital for America’s national security.” What makes them so important, he suggested, is not just reality but perception. The issue in both cases is not only what the US does but what it is seen to stand for: “Beyond Europe, we know that our allies, and maybe most importantly our adversaries and competitors, are watching.” One of the most gleeful observers must surely be the ruthless killer in the Kremlin, for what the world is seeing is a painful attempt to face in two directions at once.
*
There has been nothing secret about Israel’s intent to punish the whole population of Gaza by depriving them of electricity and water. On October 9 the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a “complete siege” of the Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” The following day the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Major General Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
We do not have to guess how the Biden administration would have responded to such statements had they come from Moscow rather than Tel Aviv. In November 2022 Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, spoke to the security council about Russia’s destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, which had left millions of people without power or clean water:
It is hard to overstate how horrific these attacks are…. I felt that toll when I met a ten-year-old named Melina, who lived in a facility where displaced families were gathered to prepare for a bitterly cold winter. A facility which itself had once been hit and damaged by Russian missiles.
Later that month the secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, used even stronger language to condemn Russian attacks on vital infrastructure: “Heat, water, electricity—for children, for the elderly, for the sick—these are President Putin’s new targets. He’s hitting them hard. This brutalization of Ukraine’s people is barbaric.”
When the target is Ukraine, the Biden administration has apparently endorsed efforts to prosecute Putin for attacks on civilian infrastructure. In March Biden explicitly supported the ICC’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against Putin on charges that he had committed war crimes, even though, as Biden acknowledged, the US itself refuses to be subject to the court. In July, when the US began to share evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the ICC, The New York Times reported that “American intelligence agencies are said to have gathered information including details about decisions by Russian officials to deliberately strike civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.” Assuming such reports are accurate, this means that the Biden administration has been actively helping the ICC prepare a possible indictment of Putin for deliberately depriving civilians of electricity and clean water.
Ukraine has already convicted some captured Russian soldiers of war crimes. In January The Washington Post reported that these included “two who admitted shelling residential buildings in the first weeks of the war.” The US has repeatedly asked the international community to pay attention to the visual evidence of what bombs do to the places where ordinary people—and especially children—try to live their lives. In July, for example, Thomas-Greenfield told the UN security council that “Russia’s forces have rained missiles down on Ukraine causing unconscionable death and destruction. We have all seen the images of bombed-out homes and schools and playgrounds.”
*
The Biden administration has, moreover, gone further than accusing Russia of war crimes; it has suggested that countries supplying Russia with weaponry used against Ukraine may face the same charges. In January, while accompanying Biden on a state visit to Mexico, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that Iran had chosen “to go down a road where their weapons are being used to kill civilians in Ukraine and to try to plunge cities into cold and darkness, which from our point of view puts Iran in a place where it could potentially be contributing to widespread war crimes.”
In July Sullivan told NBC News where America’s “moral authority” in relation to Ukraine comes from. He implicitly conceded that it did not rely on international treaties, since the US has not signed some of them. It came, he suggested, from the obvious unacceptability of Russia’s decision to place Ukraine “under a brutal, vicious attack…with missiles and bombs raining down on its cities, killing its civilians, destroying its schools, its churches, its hospitals.” The implication is clear: the moral authority of the US rests on its opposition to certain kinds of violence, specifically the deliberate destruction of civil infrastructure and the killing of civilians with bombs and missiles. If this so, the foundations of American moral authority now seem very shaky indeed.
Each recorded fatal Israeli airstrike on Gaza since October 7 has reportedly caused an average of ten civilian deaths. The Biden administration has acknowledged that killing innocent people at this rate is unacceptable. As Blinken put it on a visit to India, “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks.” By the logic it applied to Iran, the US has to take responsibility for its indirect part in those deaths. Yet there is no evidence that it is willing to hold itself to the moral standards it insists on for others—and very little evidence either that the influence it seeks to wield behind the scenes in its dealings with Netanyahu has had much effect on the ground in Gaza. The administration’s tacit moral case—that its backing for Israel’s war allows it to save Palestinian lives by restraining what Biden, on his visit to Tel Aviv, called “an all-consuming rage”—seems more and more like wishful thinking.
Ukrainians must have a wish of their own: that Biden had left them out of it. He has done their cause no favors. The Gaza crisis has already knocked Putin’s war off the front pages and shoved it down the list of priorities for most Western governments. As the conflict in Ukraine looks increasingly attritional and settles into a bloody stalemate with no obvious endpoint, it has become harder for democracies to sustain the idea that this is not a proxy war between power blocs but a genuine struggle for decent values and an international order based on universal laws. What will those Western governments say this winter when Putin again tries to destroy Ukraine’s power grids? Can they say, as they have before, that these attacks are horrific and barbaric? Or must they now preserve an awkward silence because such language has lost the power to express a shared sense of revulsion at all inhumane acts, whoever perpetrates them?
An Unstable Structure
Don’t worry, the Supreme Court said to America yesterday. Though it may not be enforceable, the Court at least has a formal code of conduct now. The Court has been facing an onslaught of public pressure after reports that justices, particularly Clarence Thomas, had engaged in behavior that an average person could deem improper for representatives of the highest court in the land, such as receiving undisclosed gifts from wealthy conservatives. This code, the first in the Court’s history, is signed by all nine justices, and lays out “rules and principles” for the justices’ behavior. Its publication is an acknowledgment that the public is dissatisfied with the Court, but beyond that, it is more symbolic than anything else.
The 15-page document opens with a paragraph-long statement emphasizing that the rules contained within it are largely not new. Their codification is an attempt to “dispel” the “misunderstanding that the justices of this court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” The code does not explicitly restrict any of the activities, such as undisclosed gifts and travel, that have been drawing attention to the justices in recent months, and its guidelines on recusals in the event of potential conflicts of interest are vague. (A progressive group noted that the document includes should 53 times and must just six.) It also doesn’t acknowledge the existence of any current or past misbehavior, Noah Rosenblum, an assistant law professor at NYU, told me. But the introduction of the code, he said, “does suggest that, in fact, the pressure is getting to the Supreme Court, which, if you believe that the Supreme Court has gone rogue, is a really useful and important thing to know.”
The Supreme Court has long operated, as the justices explain in the opening statement of the code, according to “the equivalent of common law ethics rules,” using guidelines derived from a variety of sources, such as historical practice and the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary. The idea of the Court formalizing its ethics guidelines had been percolating for a while. Back in 2019, Justice Elena Kagan said at a budget hearing that John Roberts was exploring the idea of establishing a code of conduct for just the Supreme Court. In 2022, a group of legal scholars wrote an open letter to Justice Roberts urging the Court to adopt such a code. “We simply believe that a written Code, even if primarily aspirational, would have a broad salutary impact,” the professors wrote.
But public pressure, including from lawmakers in Congress, picked up starting in the spring, when ProPublica released the first in a series of stories about Clarence Thomas’s close relationship with the Republican billionaire Harlan Crow. Other outlets soon published reports on the lavish gifts and trips Thomas received from wealthy businessmen and donors. As Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Cornell, told me, Thomas is seen as the “violator in chief.” But, Dorf noted, other justices’ behavior has been called into question as well. Those wishing to present this as a bipartisan issue, Dorf said, have also pointed to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose staff reportedly urged libraries and colleges to buy her books. And conservative Justice Samuel Alito took a luxury fishing trip with Paul Singer, a billionaire who had cases before the Court in following years. (The Supreme Court responded that it works with Sotomayor and her staff to ensure compliance with ethics guidance during book events. Alito said that he never discussed Singer’s business and that he was unaware of his connection to the cases.)
My colleague Adam Serwer, who covers political and legal issues for The Atlantic, told me that “much of the conduct that has exposed the justices as partisan actors” would not seem to be prohibited by these guidelines. The code is not a move toward stricter ethics rules; rather, Adam argued, it might have the opposite effect: “It is an attempt to remove any motivation for Congress to impose restrictions on the Court that have actual teeth.” Adam added that the only apparent punishment for breaking the rules will be public shame—of which the Court has seen plenty lately. As Adam reminded me, “public outrage and tarnishing of the Court’s prestige” is why the justices likely felt pressured to adopt the code in the first place.
The American public has soured on the Court in recent years, in the midst of ethics scandals and controversial decisions on topics such as abortion, student loans, and affirmative action. According to a Pew Research Center poll from July, voters are more likely to see the Supreme Court as conservative than they were a few years ago, and just 44 percent of Americans now have a favorable view of the Court—the lowest since the survey began, in 1987. The new code of conduct is not likely to change things. For those concerned that the justices’ behavior compromises the integrity of the Court, “there’s nothing in this code of ethics that should reassure them,” Rosenblum told me.
The Supreme Court is an anomaly in America’s justice system; other judges have to adhere to strict, enforceable ethics rules. To understand the ethics mechanisms ruling most American judges, picture a three-legged stool, Rosenblum suggests. Leg one is a code of conduct, leg two is an advisory body, and leg three is an enforceable disciplinary procedure. The Supreme Court has long had no such stool. Now, with its new code of conduct, it has one leg. That does not make a very stable structure.
Extremist Republicans today shut down House business by refusing to pass a procedural vote to take up a spending bill, as they had threatened to do in retaliation for the passage yesterday of the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year. This is the fourth time the extremists have defeated special rules in the House this year, and as deputy chief of staff for Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) Aaron Fritschner pointed out, their doing so is highly unusual. In the previous 20 years the House voted down no such measures at all.
Although they were in the middle of a 17-vote series, the Republicans then recessed the House until after Thanksgiving.
Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus made it clear they are angry that their own demands are not being met. “We’re sending a shot across the bow,” caucus chair Scott Perry (R-PA) told reporters. “[W]e are done with the failure theater here.”
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) angrily said to his colleagues: “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. One! Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”
In contrast, the Democrats with the same slim majority in the last Congress passed a series of sweeping bills that are already changing the country. Today marks the second anniversary of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that invested $1.2 trillion—$550 billion of it new spending—in roads, water systems, electrical grids, broadband, bridges, and so on.
So far, that act has seen the start of more than 37,000 projects across the country. Bridges, airports, and supply chain projects are underway, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Democrats today emphasized that they are delivering on the things that make people’s lives easier, and the White House listed a number of Republicans who voted against the measure only to boast of the benefits of the infrastructure investments to their constituents.
“And,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a video in which he echoed the tagline of the administration: “the great news is, we’re just getting started.”
The investment in infrastructure is part of what has created a booming U.S. economy. Growth is far better in the U.S. than in Europe or China, where a property bubble and local government debts have led to deflation.
That economic strength is standing behind President Joe Biden in San Francisco, where he traveled yesterday for a summit of the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum (APEC groups economies, not nations). APEC economies make up almost half of world trade and about 62% of global gross domestic product.
Today, Biden met with Chinese president Xi Jinping in a much anticipated second meeting since Biden took office. But even before today’s discussion, the two leaders announced a new climate agreement. The U.S. and China are the world’s two largest climate polluters, accounting for 38% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
China did not agree to phase out coal, which is the dirtiest fossil fuel, but both countries agreed to ramp up renewable energy capacity around the world and to reduce emissions in their power sectors overall. This is the first time China has agreed to cut emissions. In two weeks the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place in Dubai. Observers hope the willingness of China and the U.S. to make this announcement, even with its limitations, will jump-start negotiations there.
Remarks by Biden and Xi before their meeting were cordial but tense. Biden emphasized that their “meetings have always been candid, straightforward, and useful,” telling Xi: “I value our conversation because I think it’s paramount that you and I understand each other clearly, leader to leader, with no misconceptions or miscommunication. We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict. And we also have to manage it responsibly—that competition.”
Xi responded that the China-U.S. relationship “is the most important bilateral relationship in the world,” and while it “has never been smooth sailing over the past 50 years and more…, it has kept moving forward amid twists and turns. For two large countries like China and the United States, turning their back on each other is not an option. It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other, and conflict and confrontation has unbearable consequences for both sides.”
In their four-hour meeting, the two leaders agreed to recommence military communications more than a year after China broke them off when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. The two countries also agreed to strengthen cooperation on stopping the flow of what are known as precursor chemicals—the chemicals needed to make street fentanyl—which are produced in China and shipped to drug operations primarily in Latin America. The U.S. has cracked down hard on that trade; additional Chinese cooperation will be welcome.
They agreed to continue to work together to address climate change, as well as to address the risks of artificial intelligence.
On the rest of their discussions, concerning Taiwan, human rights, the Middle East, and Ukraine, the two leaders “exchanged views,” according to the White House readout. Later in the day, meeting with business leaders who have grown nervous about investing in China, Xi assured them that China wants to be friends with the U.S., and “does not seek spheres of influence, and will not fight a cold or hot war with any country.”
In his remarks welcoming APEC leaders this evening, in the city of the famous Golden Gate Bridge, Biden emphasized the power of building bridges to span space and time, the past and the future. He spoke of connecting diverse communities: “All across the traditions, cultures, and languages, we find the common dreams we share for ourselves and for our children.”
Biden urged his audience to “take full advantage of this summit to make new connections and spark new partnerships, because every step we take to deepen our cooperation, to launch a new venture, to tackle the challenges that impact on all of us is a step toward realization of the enormous potential of our Asian Pacific future…, a future where our economics are strong, vibrant, and sustainable because our workers are empowered and protected; women and girls are full and equal participants in every aspect of our society; young people…can envision for themselves the lives and hope for unlimited possibilities.”
The strongest tools we have to meet this era’s challenges, he said, are “connection, cooperation, collective action, and common purpose. That’s why we’re all here.”
Late tonight, by a vote of 87 to 11, the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year. One Democrat and ten Republicans voted no.
It’s streaming on Max, which used to be HBO. If you get to watch the first 2 seasons, I think you’ll see a stronger likeness to Olbermann. McAvoy had chilled out a lot by the third season - especially towards the end.
