June 13, 2021
President Joe Biden is currently in England, participating in a meeting of the G7, an informal group of wealthy democracies including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Today, the participants issued a statement reinforcing their shared commitment to “democracy, freedom, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights to answer the biggest questions and overcome the greatest challenges.” They promised to value individuals and promote equality, especially gender equality.
The document recognizes that the world is at a critical juncture for both humanity and the planet, and affirms that democracy, rather than autocracy, is best suited to tackle the crises at hand. To illustrate the ability of democracies to answer the world’s needs, the G7 focused on helping the world recover from the coronavirus. It pledged another billion doses of vaccine over the next year in addition to the billion already pledged—likely an attempt to rival the 260 million doses of vaccine China has sent to 95 countries—and it called for more investment across the globe to recover from the pandemic “so that no place or person, irrespective of age, ethnicity or gender is left behind.”
The G7 leaders offered a visible show of solidarity, with leaders talking and laughing together. Its statement repeated U.S. President Joe Biden’s slogan that we will “build back better,” and it painted a world that addresses climate change, prevents the exploitation of labor, demands gender equality, and protects human rights.
Right now, these promises are hopeful statements more than realities, but the show of solidarity in defense of democracy is no small thing.
Today, the New York Times broke yet more eye-popping news about the administration of former president Trump. In 2018, the Department of Justice subpoenaed Apple for information about White House counsel Don McGahn and his wife. This means that we now know that Trump’s people secretly investigated journalists, Democratic lawmakers and their families and staff… and the president’s own lawyer and his wife, apparently out of concerns about leaks.
Today, Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, voted 60 to 59 to support a new coalition and oust right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for 12 years and who is currently under indictment for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The session was heated, with people yelling and at least seven members escorted out. In Netanyahu’s final speech, he pledged to “topple this dangerous government and return to lead the country in our way.”
In Peru, right-wing presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori is challenging her recent defeat in the presidential election, claiming election fraud, although international observers say the election was clean.
Ahead of his meeting this week with President Biden, Russian President Vladimir Putin has reinforced his power, outlawing three organizations associated with opposition leader Alexei Navalny and putting troops on the Ukraine border.
But Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who spent the past several years building ties to Putin, appears to be moving back toward his country’s longstanding NATO allies.
There are lots of moving pieces in the world right now.
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/13/middleeast/israel-knesset-vote-prime-minister-intl/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/world/europe/G7-summit-biden-diplomacy.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/us/politics/justice-department-apple-donald-mcgahn.html
"...Trump’s people secretly investigated journalists, Democratic lawmakers and their families and staff… and the president’s own lawyer and his wife, apparently out of concerns about leaks."
Leaks? In a pig's eye!
The former president was looking for anything he could use to damage, blackmail, or otherwise coerce his percieved enemies, Adam Schiff being at the top of that list. In Don McGahn's case, there was likely added the question of loyalty to dear leader.
This is how dictators operate, especially the paranoid, megalomanic ones.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to hear the conversation that must have been going on when Joe Biden showed up with the Jill on his arm, smiling and waving and ostentatiously elbow-bumping. It would be like coming to a family gathering where your favorite uncle shows up after a very messy divorce, and where he got all of the community property; he has a story to tell, and everyone is ready to drop everything to hear all the dirty details! And Joe Biden is an Irish storyteller of the first-order. He will tell stories about Trump and his sleazy band of crooks that will make everybody's hair stand on end, and Trump's inconceivable stupidity that brought him down. There will be lots and lots of laughter, but everybody knows that Trump and those who believe and act like him are not going away anytime soon. Trump's ridiculousness does not detract the least from his dangerousness.
But, as we well know, the points that Joe wants to make come with the story; and undoubtedly, the point of Joe Biden's story is going to be about saving democracy and having us all pull together. Everything else is secondary. He will emphasize his points to highlight his concerns about democracy's vulnerabilities, noting that Trump failed because of his own personal incompetencies. The take away will be that a more savvy scoundrel, like Vladimir Putin, would have avoided Trump's mistakes, to Western culture's collective disadvantage. As the saying goes, we can hate Trump, but we cannot hate his supporters, because they are us. Pulling together will mean having to change some of our assumptions, and taking proactive measures to ward off abuse of political rights and social norms. I am confident that Joe Biden, along with Jill Biden, will make for entertaining, as well as sobering discussion about what we need to do. Like the President and Ms. Biden, we can take the problem seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. There are reasons why these things happened, and it took decades for the rot to set in that undermined our democratic institutions. For most of us, this is entirely new territory, and it will test our strengths and ability to think outside the box before we even begin to think this might be over soon.
Historical analogies are always inexact, and it is important to clearly differentiate what we see are similarities from what are clearly differences, and that the decisions made are likely to depend on those differences. The analogy that comes to mind is the meeting between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in April 1941, aboard the USS Augusta, anchored off the Newfoundland coast, when the United States and Great Britain joined together to formulate what was called the Atlantic Charter. Recently, we saw on the news that an updated version of that statement of principle has been agreed to between President Biden and Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister. I confess to not having read the revised and updated version, but I certainly know what the original Atlantic Charter stood for: no territorial aggrandizement; respect for the rights of all people to choose the form of government under which they would live; for all states to trade on equal access and on equal terms; improving the global standard of living; and freedom of the seas. This was a unified response to an external threat back by military force. Our situation today is no less dire, but the elements constituting an existential threat to our way of life are different, and far more subtle: internal subversion; a corrosive populism that destroys trust among people; a tidal wave of disinformation and anti-democratic propaganda emanating from Russia; and the de facto declaration of war by the Trump Republican Party against our constitutional form of government. Time will tell how this will turn out, but it looks to me that President Biden is off to a good start.