Congress’ November 14 and 15 votes to keep funding in place for a few months, and the November 15 meeting between Biden and Xi, suggest that people know not to keep doing origami on a hot stove. This evidence is welcome. But it offers no real relief from underlying perils. Until Americans can see a durable baseline for what we want, these diverse adversaries can’t negotiate meaningfully, let alone resolve any differences.
In Congress, Democrats and Republicans remain committed to blocking each other from gaining any legislative points. For fear of a triggering a shutdown, a bipartisan majority agreed to leave what’s been in place in place for a few more months – including, notably, neither spending reductions nor provisions for aid to Israel or Ukraine. Serious debate has not occurred for a long time, and this move only lets the legislators go home for Thanksgiving, and perhaps dream up new antics for partisan posturing. Stalemate will continue as will piling up of debt, deterioration of national credibility abroad, and decline in respect for our institutions.
Xi and Biden, after several months of cabinet level meetings, effected a suspension of overt unfriendliness. Both are in weakened positions, Xi facing a sputtering economy, Biden facing vexing international problems. Agreements to seek ways to collaborate on AI and fentanyl, and to re-open some degree of military to military communications, are revocable and relatively small matters – they amount precisely to a pause in belligerent posturing. Our differences over Taiwan, technology theft or transfer, supply chain openness or vulnerability, rule of law and human rights, Israel and Hamas, Ukraine and Russia, all remain unaltered. So do each side’s avowals to keep their stances, and the specter of hostility or chaos that lurks in them.
In these matters, and too many others, the nation and the world stand a few steps away from real catastrophe – whether of triggering nuclear war over Ukraine or Iran and Israel, of US government insolvency, of migration overwhelming institutions and societies, of climate disaster, of pandemic and the disorders that follow, or of something we haven’t yet noticed. Steps like those of the 14th and 15th do, as noted, show active players pulling their hands back from the fire. But only for today, and without assurance that they see the fire behind the heat.
As to either Congress and government funding, or our relations with Xi and the Chinese regime, real steps to reduce the danger require candor and clarity. In Congress, Americans are seeing more clearly that the two political poles focus primarily on opposing each other, not governing competently. At the moment, the Republican party also suffers from an extremist insurgence – not of extreme conservatives but extreme disruptors – while Democrats have enabled the extremists – e.g. voting with the eight of them to oust a Speaker just to highlight GOP deficiencies. Polarized stalemate will continue to block serious government until Americans find a way to undo the politicians’ game.
Only on some fundamental and durably consensual understanding of America’s basis for unity will any possibility for competent government arise. And duopolies dislike third perspectives, so both parties will find ways to pre-empt, co-opt, or undermine any ideas in that spirit.
Between Communist China and the US, we cannot know or directly influence PRC perceptions of their interest. But we are also not clear about ours, even to ourselves. Of all the concerns listed earlier, which would we soft peddle first and on which would we stand adamant? Until we know, and until American and Chinese actors can say what comes first for them, the two sides could not even open real negotiations over their differences, since no one knows quite what those differences really are. So a general hostility will hang over even the most polite set of meetings, with no mechanism to engage on any particular issue.
What America could do, if our internal discourse would permit, would be to settle, in some form, on what drives our deepest priorities, and how the various concerns fit that drive. This blog aims to remind that we were founded on a creed of personal rights and that governments exist to secure those rights. If we decide – and there are many feasible pathways to pursue this purpose – that Taiwan’s self -governance under impartial rule of law and elected authority is most important to our core, then we will have more flexibility to accommodate PRC interests in, say, tariffs. Or, if we see the CCP beginning to liberalize speech as well as economic enterprise, we might become less averse to their expansion of investments overseas. If we can express and embody our priorities in our actions, their responses might tell us that we can reduce tensions or, if they react negatively, we can see where and how deeply they oppose us.
This week’s easings have still left all the substantive problems exactly where they were. The question is whether the pullback from total insanity means that ameliorative steps are possible. We will know that only after we determine what we really want, at bottom.
Common Conviction 