Tag: America

A Presidents Day Problem: America Is Sick of Presidents

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McLaurin says sales balance out and remain healthy, but this seesawing of interest reflects a very different worldview from the one that helped his organization become a Washington cultural institution. “People in this mind think of the White House as now,” he says. “We don’t think of the White House as now. We think of the White House as a stage that American history has been played out on for 223 years.”
If that view is gaining a foothold among not-especially-radical folks who’d otherwise be glad to pay $24.95 for an ornament featuring Lyndon Johnson’s 1967 Blue Room Christmas Tree, it’s probably even more pronounced among the general public.
There’s no shortage of data on the public’s view of the sitting president. But polling on the presidency, that historic symbol of American nationhood, is harder to come by. And yet, anecdotally, it appears that having a country where any chief executive is lucky to crack 50 percent approval ratings is having an impact on the institution itself. The long weekend formerly known as George Washington’s Birthday may now be known as Presidents Day, but the country is in no mood to celebrate.
Consider the book market, where the decades-long run of doorstop-sized biographies of presidents seems to have slowed, with no author having yet assumed the mantle of the late David McCullough. Hardcover nonfiction is down across the board, as is history. “We talk about it all the time as agents and publishers, what do people want?” says Rafe Sagalyn, the prominent Washington literary agent. “Well, people want escapism. A book that takes them somewhere different is good.”
Sagalyn says one replacement for president books among readers of serious nonfiction involves tomes about what he calls “president-adjacent” characters, like Stacey Schiff’s 2022 book about Revolutionary War agitator Samuel Adams or Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s bestseller about longtime Washington fixer James A. Baker III. By their very subjects, these books tend to have more room for nuance — leaving readers with more sense of discovery, and relying less on a shared pantheon of heroes.
Even the comparatively few president books that are due out this year suggest readers’ curiosity isn’t consumed by larger-than-life statesmen. Instead, they’re focused on what Bruce Nichols, the publisher of Little, Brown and Company, described to me as “non-canonical” chief executives. For instance, a rare biography of James Garfield is due this summer. Garfield spent a scant six months in office in 1881 before dying of a gunshot wound by an assassin, but the rest of his life was fascinating — or at least readers had better hope it was. Likewise, Richard Norton Smith’s long-planned biography of Gerald Ford, a 2½-year White House resident, is expected in April.
In the broad sweep of American history, it’s no surprise that interest in the presidency would change over time. The framers themselves were wary of too much falderal around the office. Over the years, we’ve gone up and down, from pious lessons featuring George Washington and the cherry tree to dishy gossip featuring JFK and Marilyn Monroe. But these days, with significant portions of the country telling pollsters that the identity of the president affects their day-to-day happiness, we have a situation that might confound hero-worshippers and dirt-diggers alike: On any given day, around half the country is liable to find the institution itself a painful subject to think about.
That new reality may complicate life for the Washington cottage industry built around the assumption that America is always hungry for trivia and wisdom about presidents.

The industry’s output, so far, seems unaffected by the national mood. Books in the venerable genre of “presidents — they’re just like us” continue to be published: A 2021 book about presidential dogs (it sold poorly), a 2022 volume about presidential best friends (it beat expectations), a brand-new book about presidents and food. The former CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza’s book about presidents and sports will be published later this spring.
The anecdotes that populate books like these represent essential tradecraft for Tevi Troy. A former official in the George W. Bush administration and the author of books on presidential pop culture (2013’s What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted), presidential disaster-management (2016’s Shall We Wake the President?), and presidential staff rivalries (2020’s Fight House), he’s someone who has turned the marshaling of presidential arcana into a career, or at least a robust side hustle. (He’s also a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center.)
Last year, Troy combined his love for all things presidential with a business that’s potentially more lucrative than selling nonfiction books: management consulting. He launched 1600 Lessons, an executive-coaching series that builds its lessons around presidential leadership. “The idea is that the presidential concepts are really applicable in the business world, or in running any organization,” he says. “It’s actionable, specific recommendations. Educational because of teaching about these presidents, but also informative and entertaining, because it’s based on all these great stories of presidents.”
Priced in the five figures, the five-part workshop’s early clients have included Lockheed Martin and Eli Lilly.
Why would anyone — especially a publicly traded company — hire a D.C. think tank maven to craft management lessons based on an office that so many Americans associate with reviled figures? The answer is easy, Troy says: “Presidents are one of the few things that still connect us as a nation. The Super Bowl was the most watched event of the year, and only one-third of Americans watched it. Everyone knows who the president is.” So if you’re putting together management-coaching presentations about preparation or succession-planning, to cite two of Troy’s sessions, the presidency represents a relatable set piece. (He also makes clear he teaches about leadership errors, like Eisenhower’s failure to prepare the way for a successor.)
Thus, while most Americans may think of the upcoming long weekend as a time for linen sales, Troy is glad to be an outlier. Presidents Day, he says, is “like my Christmas and Thanksgiving Day rolled into one.”
One possibly surprising person who doesn’t share that sentiment: Michael Beschloss, the NBC presidential historian and perhaps Washington’s best-known source of stories about the presidency. Once upon a time, Washington’s Birthday on February 22 was a federal holiday, and many states also took off Lincoln’s birthday, 10 days earlier. But as the holiday calendar changed to be built around three-day weekends, the two were combined into a single day without a namesake.
“Many people think that Presidents Day is a moment intended for worship of all presidents equally — even Donald Trump, Warren Harding and James Buchanan. To my mind, this point of view is basically royalist and pre-1776,” says Beschloss, who has become increasingly vocal in his concern for the state of American democracy. “Underlying this would be a ridiculous premise that all presidents in history must be wonderful, just in differing ways.” By contrast, the founders’ view “was to assume that someone elected president could turn out to be a scoundrel or incompetent, and to build a system that protects the American people from such dangers.”
In the context of current events, Beschloss says he wouldn’t be surprised if readers’ interest turned away from themes that venerate presidents for their own sake.
“People are understandably more resistant to treacly stories of past presidents that assume that these 44 people were all basically good guys, trying, more or less, to do the right things,” he says. “In these anxious, often ugly times, sadly, that is an approach that many Americans will not find very convincing.”
For his part, the White House Historical Association’s McLaurin is planning to spend the weekend in a place where a more respectful attitude may still prevail: overseas. Working with American expats and the State Department, the association is organizing wreath-layings at statues of American presidents located in 13 foreign countries ranging from Australia to Bulgaria to Cameroon.
McLaurin says he will be on hand for six wreath-layings in London and one in Scotland.
“I think it’s a wonderful education tool,” he told me this week, shortly before flying across the Atlantic. “It gets attention in these local places, media attention and Americans’ attention that are living abroad and doing something on Presidents Day to honor an American president. And that’s the type of thing we do. There is political noise in the air, but our mission is to persevere and keep doing what we were founded to do 60 years ago.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 17, 2023
Skies over North America go quiet after 3 days of shootdowns, Austin says

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The spate of shootdowns followed the Feb. 4 downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast after it traversed North America for a week. The Biden administration’s decision to wait before shooting down that balloon touched off days of intense criticism from Republicans and Democrats, who claimed the delay left America vulnerable to China’s intelligence collection apparatus. Lawmakers have since called for more information from the White House after the weekend shootdowns.
On Tuesday, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that the U.S. does not believe the three unidentified objects shot down last weekend were from China or posed a national security threat.
“We don’t see anything that points right now to being part of [China’s] spy balloon program,” Kirby told reporters. It is also unlikely the objects were used in “intelligence collection against the United States of any kind — that’s the indication now,” he said.
The three objects, which were much smaller than the 200-foot-tall Chinese balloon, were likely “tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” Kirby added.
It’s not yet clear what this past weekend’s objects were, and the administration has offered scant details. There are also questions over the potential for the debris to be recovered. While the Chinese balloon landed in less than 50 feet of water close to the coast, the Alaska and Yukon objects landed in harsh Arctic terrain that is difficult and dangerous to access, and their small size may limit how much material actually remains. The situation is similar for the object that was downed over Lake Huron.
A statement from the U.S. Northern Command said recovery operations near South Carolina continue, and “crews have been able to recover significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified as well as large sections of the structure.”
Senators received another classified briefing from the administration on the incursions on Tuesday, but there has been little information offered publicly from that briefing.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 15, 2023
Opinion | The First Time America Was Attacked by Balloons

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Today, the history of the Fu-Go balloons holds three important lessons for the leaders of China and the United States as they navigate the current crisis.
First, there is something about unseen, high-altitude objects that invites a degree of alarm out of proportion to their direct harm for national security. Like the Fu-Go balloons, initial indications suggest that the military value of China’s spy balloons is minimal. But their impact on public perception and alarm has been hard to overstate.
Witness the reaction of Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, where the balloon was first spotted, who said, “We think we know what they were going to collect, but we don’t know. That scares the hell out of me.” Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, meanwhile, ripped Defense officials at a hearing for not acting when the balloon was above her state: “It’s like this administration doesn’t think that Alaska is any part of the rest of the country!” Beijing — or any other nation tempted to release high-altitude objects into American airspace — must understand this special sensitivity and take any measures necessary to avoid repeat spy balloon incursions.
A second lesson is that balloons can be surprisingly stealthy weapons. It took U.S. authorities several months to piece together Japan’s balloon bomb plot. China’s high-altitude balloons, meanwhile, appear to have exploited what a senior Air Force officer called a “domain awareness gap” — meaning the balloons passed through holes in America’s existing air defenses. Such gaps are especially concerning if, as in the 1940s, they create new avenues for adversaries to attack U.S. territory.
China, which possesses far more sophisticated weaponry than balloons, including hypersonic missiles, has little reason to exploit these gaps to mount an actual attack — but terrorists or rogue states might. That is of no less concern to national security experts. At a minimum, the prospect of weaponization is likely to increase the risk of confrontation, whether between the U.S. and China or another aerial adversary, in the event of any future airborne incursions. Leaders on all sides must redouble their efforts to strengthen crisis communication channels to defuse any future incidents as quickly as possible.
A third, final and much happier lesson of the Fu-Go balloons is that crisis and conflict can eventually be transformed into cooperation and even comity. Indeed, the story of the Fu-Go balloon bombs had a surprisingly happy ending, thanks to the actions of individual Americans and Japanese who worked to transform wartime tragedy into postwar partnership. In the 1980s, residents of Bly, Ore., which suffered the only casualties caused by the balloon bombs, began a correspondence with Japanese citizens involved in producing the bombs. The former American and Japanese antagonists even held a poignant in-person meeting in Bly after the war.
We must hope that a similar ending emerges from this latest crisis in U.S.-China relations. Fortunately, both sides have an opportunity to ensure that it does. Though blighted by the balloon incident, China recently re-opened itself to foreigners without onerous quarantine and Covid testing requirements for the first time in almost three years. This long overdue opening should be cause for celebration and a resumption of frayed people-to-people ties. In the coming months, large numbers of American businesspeople, researchers, students, journalists and others are likely to travel to China once again. Leaders in both Washington and Beijing must create the space for this exchange to thrive, whatever differences exist between the two governments. China, for its part, must start by preventing any further aerial incursions into U.S. airspace.
More than anything, the history of the Fu-Go balloons shows that when tensions are as high as they are between the U.S. and China, countries must use people-to-people ties to better ground their rocky relationship — or risk subjecting the world to far greater turbulence.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 14, 2023
The most expensive street in America gets the Eric Adams treatment

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Elected leaders are eager to draw people back to the area that has seen steep declines in foot traffic since the start of the pandemic, threatening tax revenue that funds essential city services and a hospitality industry that’s a major driver of tourism and jobs. But they must weigh any changes against the street’s function as a major transportation artery for hundreds of thousands of bus riders with connections to several subway lines.
The move comes three years after former Mayor Bill de Blasio first attempted to transform Fifth Avenue into an express busway but pulled the plan amid opposition from the high-end shops that dot the corridor, drawing outcry from public transportation advocates. Top city officials said this time is different, with real estate players coming to the table with a vested interest in revitalizing an area that has struggled to adapt to the era of hybrid work. How the city will balance competing interests is still unclear.
“The value of public space is elevated considerably after Covid,” Meera Joshi, the deputy mayor for operations, said in an interview. “It’s an investment in the community. It’s an investment in increased foot traffic for the stores, which translates into tax dollars, which translates into jobs.”
The city said it will contract with a design firm this year to put together a plan that will add pedestrian space, speed up buses and improve street safety. Other major municipalities, from San Francisco to Columbus, Ohio, have released their own proposals to reinvigorate office-heavy downtowns in part by restricting access to private vehicles.
More than half of office workers in major U.S. cities returned to their desks last week, a first since the pandemic began, according to swipe data tracked by Kastle Systems. But major New York employers don’t expect that figure to budge much higher anytime soon, according to a recent survey by the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit membership organization of more than 300 city executives.
Drawing people back will require some incentives, said Madelyn Wils, chief adviser for the Fifth Avenue Association, the business group that represents retailers in the area.
“It’s the spine of Manhattan, and when you come there, you should be experiencing something beautiful,” Wils said. “You should want to walk all the way from Central Park to Bryant Park.”
Retail spending has come roaring back in virtually every business district in the city’s outer boroughs, but remains down 9 percent in midtown Manhattan, according to “Making New York Work for Everyone,” the state and city’s post-pandemic recovery plan. Restaurant and bar spending has declined 35 percent in the area spanning 34th Street to 60th Street, with foot traffic down 23 percent.

Manhattan’s business districts generate nearly 60 percent of the citywide office and retail property tax revenues and 18 percent of overall citywide property tax revenue, making their stabilization key to pay for municipal services.
“What is clear today in the wake of the pandemic is that Midtown is the area that has suffered the most,” said Dan Doctoroff, a deputy mayor in Mike Bloomberg’s administration who led Sept. 11 recovery efforts and helped create the city’s new economic recovery plan.
“But, in order to make Midtown more vibrant, it’s not just about public places and making it more mixed-use,” he added. “You also have to address transportation issues, and you also have to grow.”
Elected leaders in other major U.S. cities also see a need to limit space for cars if they want to draw people back to downtown cores that are highly dependent on the Monday-through-Friday office culture, but many of the visions still preserve at least some space for personal vehicles.
The strategic plan for Columbus, Ohio, which still needs approval from its City Council, notes that most residents want alternative transportation to reduce car dependency. The plan includes renderings that add protected bus and bike lanes on multi-lane roads that have limited sidewalk space. San Francisco’s action plan similarly proposes strategies like “road diet” and “pedestrianized street” to bring more use to downtown corridors.
In New York, Adams will wade into a territorial dispute over how best to approach the most expensive shopping street in the world that also serves roughly 115,000 bus riders on an average weekday.
De Blasio’s plan to block most vehicle traffic on Fifth Avenue to accommodate a new busway faced steep opposition from major real estate players whom the progressive Democratic publicly shunned. Steve Roth, the CEO of Vornado, which operates 2.6 million square feet of street retail space, personally implored de Blasio to reconsider before the plan was ultimately pulled, the New York Times reported. The Fifth Avenue Association, whose chair is a Vornado executive, continues to oppose the elimination of private car access.
“That would have exacerbated the exodus of a lot of tenants,” Wils, of the Fifth Avenue Association, said of the busway plan. The real estate-backed nonprofit funds supplementary services that help maintain the corridor, such as street cleaning.
Adams, a more moderate Democrat, has taken a notably friendlier posture toward real estate than his predecessor, once declaring, “I am real estate.” He has received more than $150,000 in donations from people working in real estate in support of his reelection.
The Fifth Avenue Association is helping pay for the city’s new vision plan, along with three other private groups that manage different areas along the street: the Grand Central Partnership, the Bryant Park Association and the Central Park Conservancy.
Dan Biederman, president of the Bryant Park Corporation, a not-for-profit founded in 1980 to renovate and operate the nearly 10-acre park, similarly said his “bias” would be to preserve vehicle access in some capacity.
“You hate to, and I’m sure the merchants feel this way; you hate to say no private cars ever on Fifth. It would be very hard to do that,” Biederman said.
Transportation advocacy groups said they will be holding Adams to his early promise to use the planning process as an opportunity to increase bus speeds along Fifth Avenue. Adams must meet a local mandate to add 150 miles of bus lanes throughout the five boroughs by the end of 2025, a target he’s not on track to hit after his first year in office.

This rendering of the city’s vision for Fifth Avenue would preserve some private car access.
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Fifth Avenue Association
“Fifth Avenue is not just one of New York’s most famous luxury boutique destinations. It’s also a major bus corridor, which is to say the whole avenue isn’t just for tourists,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director for the Riders Alliance. “It’s also for New Yorkers, including folks from upper Manhattan and the Bronx, who elected Adams mayor.”
Early renderings from the mayor’s office showing Fifth Avenue’s potential transformation reflect the plan circulated by the Fifth Avenue Association in 2021 as an alternative to the express busway, said E.J. Kalafarski, the transportation chair of Manhattan Community Board 5, which plays an advisory role on local land use issues. It preserves two lanes for buses and reduces the number of lanes for private vehicles from three to one. It also adds a bike lane, widens sidewalks and improves green space.
“Mayor Adams’ proposal definitely sounded immediately like it was inspired by the Fifth Avenue Association’s proposal,” he said.
The board previously voted in support of the Fifth Avenue Association’s concept.
The goal this time around is to strike a potential compromise with all the vested interests, at a time where there’s big appetite for post-pandemic infrastructure improvements.
“Transit is central to this issue,” said City Council Member Keith Powers, whose district includes a sizable portion of Fifth Avenue. “But to do something there and ignore the pedestrian side of the equation, you’re missing a big component of it.”
Joshi, the deputy mayor, said the city’s goal is to make the street “more than just a shopping district,” with entertainment and seating that encourages people to spend the day walking the corridor. She’s pledged not to be swayed by the sizable real estate influence helping steer the project.
“It has to be grounded in reason and fact,” she said. “Private partners may have opinions about those things, but we can’t avoid our duty to the larger public.”
Areas of the city that closed their streets to traffic at the height of the pandemic recorded a 19 percent increase in average sales at restaurants and bars compared to before, the city reported in a recent study of its Open Streets program. A December pilot program that made a stretch of Fifth Avenue car-free for three Sundays helped increase foot traffic and resulted in a “moderate” boost in sales, Wils said, without giving specifics.
The Adams administration plans to make early improvements to Fifth Avenue this year and release a construction plan in two years. The ultimate cost — and who pays — is still unclear.
The city, which recently committed $375 million in the budget for new parks and plazas, expects it won’t be moving forward alone.
“Part of having a vested interest means you’re vested, and that often takes dollars,” Joshi said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 12, 2023
Biden pledges to protect America after Chinese balloon incident

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The balloon traversed U.S. and Canadian airspace last week before it was shot down off the coast of the Carolinas on Saturday, just days before Biden addressed Congress.
China has claimed it was a weather balloon that went off course and has lashed out at the U.S. over shooting it down. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a trip to Beijing over the incident.
The flap triggered bipartisan uproar at China on Capitol Hill — where confronting Beijing has garnered support from both parties — and calls for more information over the balloon and the administration’s handling of it.
Biden said last week he ordered the military to shoot down the balloon before Saturday, but top brass recommended waiting until it was over water so it would minimize risk to people on the ground. The military is now working to retrieve the debris.
Administration officials are set to brief lawmakers on the balloon this week, and a Senate panel is scheduled to hold a hearing Thursday on it.
Biden added Tuesday night that his administration has put the U.S. in “the strongest position in decades to compete” with Beijing. The U.S., he said, would cooperate where possible.
He added that he makes “no apologies that we are investing to make America strong” and competing with China. He touted efforts to modernize the military “to safeguard stability and deter aggression.”
Biden also highlighted the administration’s efforts to aid Ukraine to repel Russia’s invasion, a message that comes as some Republican factions question the need to continue to aid Kyiv.

As the war nears its one-year mark, Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion was “a test for the ages” for the U.S. and its allies in Europe.
“One year later, we know the answer,” he said.
Biden called out Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Oksana Markarova, who sat in the House gallery for the speech.
“We are united in our support for your country,” Biden pledged. “We’re going to stand with you as long as it takes.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 8, 2023
Pentagon says another Chinese spy balloon spotted over Latin America

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“We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America. We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said.
It remains unclear why China sent such vehicles above the United States and Costa Rica at the same time, especially since Beijing has space-based satellites that can surveil the same territory with more reliability. It’s possible, though unconfirmed, that other balloons were launched elsewhere around the world but not spotted.
But the news of the Latin American balloon adds to the mystery of why China sent another one to fly over Alaska, Canada, Idaho, Montana and Kansas this week. Earlier on Friday, Ryder said the aircraft in U.S. airspace is headed eastward.
While some have asserted that the Chinese balloons wandered into U.S. airspace by accident, “two balloons being coincidentally off course in two different places certainly seems to deflate that theory,” said Blake Herzinger of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
Senior Pentagon officials, including Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chief chair, recommended that the U.S. military not shoot down the balloon to eliminate the risk of debris harming civilians some 60,000 feet below the flight path. But lawmakers, mostly Republicans, insist that the U.S. should take the aircraft out of the sky.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken indefinitely postponed a high-stake visit to China over the discovery of the first balloon above Montana.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 4, 2023
Ransomware hacking campaign targets Europe and North America, Italy warns

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Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN) warned on Sunday of a large-scale campaign to spread ransomware on thousands of computer servers across Europe and North America.
France, Finland and Italy are the most affected countries in Europe at the moment, while the U.S. and Canada also have a high number of targets, the ACN warned, according to Italian news agency ANSA.
The attack targets vulnerabilities in VMware ESXi technology that were previously discovered but that still leave many organizations vulnerable to intrusion by hackers.
“These types of servers had been targeted by hackers in the past due to their vulnerability,” according to ACN. “However, this vulnerability of the server was not completely fixed, leaving an open door to hackers for new attacks.”
France was the first country to detect the attack, according ANSA.
The French cybersecurity agency ANSSI on Friday released an alert to warn organizations to patch the vulnerability.
It is estimated that thousands of computer servers have been compromised around the world, and according to analysts the number is likely to increase. Experts are warning organizations to take action to avoid being locked out of their systems.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

January 31, 2023
America in Decline? World Thinks Again.

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“The U.S. has taken the lead convincingly and quite deftly on Ukraine,” François Heisbourg, the veteran and often critical French observer of American foreign policy in action, told me. Referring to the same advisers who were dismissed as callow incompetents in Afghanistan, he said, “Most of them are adults. They are potty trained. This [kind of U.S. response] hasn’t happened in over 20 years,” since the Clinton administration’s intervention in the Balkans. “We’re back to a world that people my age recognize,” added Heisbourg, who’s in his early 70s.
Another source of American power? Chinese weakness. As Putin’s military got shredded on the battlefield, Xi Jinping mismanaged the Covid response and cemented one-man rule at his party congress in ways that spooked neighbors and investors. Add an aging population and slowing growth, and — at least by the new Davos Consensus — we’ve passed “Peak China” and are headed the other way. This doesn’t mean China won’t be a danger; its frailties could make Xi less predictable and more dangerous. But the idea once dominant here that China would soon succeed the U.S. as the world’s leading power sounds ridiculous to Davos ears — as much as the claims about Japanese supremacy in 1980s did a few years after they were made.
Bearishness on China and on Europe’s prospects adds to America’s appeal, in particular, for business elites. Here’s a typical sentiment: “The U.S., in almost any sector, is the most attractive market, not just in terms of size but innovation,” Vas Narasimhan, who runs the Swiss drug maker Novartis, the world’s fourth-biggest pharmaceutical company with a large presence in Massachusetts, told me. As the world worries about possible recession, another part of the new consensus is that the U.S. would weather it best.
This upbeat view on the U.S. isn’t intended to warm patriotic or partisan fires. For one thing, the Davos Consensus is often wrong; not so long ago, this crowd was long on crypto and short on the U.S.
It’s also worth listening to the anxieties. They’re as revealing as the bullishness — about America and the state of the world.
In the wake of the Trump era, everyone feels free to doubt the stability of the American system, even if the midterms sent a reassuring message of back-to-normalcy. Most global companies and players know the policy paralysis and political polarization firsthand. And yet: As often as an executive will bemoan that members of Congress care more about Fox/MSNBC bookings than grappling with complex legislation, in this same breath, they’ll mention a constitutional order going back 250 years and traditions of rule of law hard to find in many other places. Until proven otherwise, probably by its own hand, democracy in America is one of the safer bets in the world, they say.
The new anxiety: America’s back on the world stage, but what kind of America?
On multilateralism, through NATO or the U.N., and on security in Europe, the Biden administration harkens back to another century — not to the Obama era, which began the distancing from traditional allies (who recoiled over the “pivot to Asia” and the “red line” in Syria that wasn’t) that Trump continued. But its approach to trade, to an industrial policy that prioritizes “reshoring” and “buy American,” to many Davos eyes, resembles Trump more than any other recent president.

This continuity is what makes Europeans sound conflicted on the U.S. The Inflation Reduction Act, which will push billions in subsidies to American industry, and a CHIPS Act that seeks to repatriate the production of semiconductors, prompted dismay in Europe. As does the Biden Administration’s indifference to the World Trade Organization. Joe Manchin, the principal author of the IRA legislation, felt the backlash firsthand in Davos, as my colleagues Alex Ward and Suzanne Lynch reported Thursday.
“The hope about the Biden administration was that it would be less inwardly looking than outward looking,” Cecilia Malmstrom, a Swedish politician who ran EU trade policy in the last decade, told a small lunch gathering in Davos. A European leader, who was speaking on background in another private meeting, put it more bluntly: “The U.S. undermines globalization, the other pillar of U.S. leadership. This could be the biggest strategic mistake in global relations for a long time.” To them, this approach is a rebuke of America’s commitment to a global order built on open trade and democratic values – what was known at one point as the Washington Consensus, which, as opposed to any fleeting one reached in Davos, held for decades.
If America will be both strong again and more willing to go alone, “this is a big thing!” said France’s Heisbourg. “This is very unlike the America of the past. It looks like this will be a century of disorder, and that’s pretty scary.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 20, 2023