The Week in Blob
Biden’s nukes, Bibi’s downfall, Chinese vaccines, etc.
Welcome to The Week in Blob, our weekly summary of international news and the nefarious doings of the US foreign policy establishment. This feature always goes out to paid subscribers and sometimes goes out more broadly. If you like it we hope you’ll share via email or social media and also consider subscribing.
Biden goes (very) nuclear
President Biden drew criticism from progressives this week for his proposed defense budget, with many arguing that some of the $753 billion he sets out for the military would be better used at home. Less widely remarked upon was what the budget could mean for arms control efforts.
During his campaign, Biden criticized Trump-era efforts to expand our nuclear arsenal with “low-yield” bombs, saying that the US “does not need new nuclear weapons.” He also promised to reduce the US’s “excessive expenditure” on nukes. But Biden has changed his tune. His proposed budget is quite faithful to Trump’s nuclear policy. It allocates $43 billion to nuclear weapons compared to the $44 billion appropriated last year and maintains the low-yield weapons program Biden attacked on the campaign trail.
Biden’s budget signals that he will continue to modernize the entire nuclear triad (which confers the ability to launch atomic weapons from land, sea, or air). Progressives and arms control advocates criticize the land-based missiles as dangerous because they are kept on high alert at all times. Modernizing this potentially destabilizing weapon will cost more than $100 billion over the next two decades.
Biden’s proposal also calls for new missiles whose range would exceed limits set out in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). The Cold War-era accord, which Trump tore up in 2019, had been among the few bilateral arms control pacts still in force between the US and Russia, and Biden’s plan would end hopes of its revival.
Biden’s team justified maintaining high levels of spending on conventional and nuclear arms as necessary for deterring Chinese aggression. A number of Chinese security experts called on their government to respond by expanding its own arsenal.
The budget wasn’t the only bad news for arms control: Earlier last week, the State Department announced that the US will not rejoin the Open Skies Treaty—which allowed mutual surveillance flights in the interest of stability—because of alleged Russian violations. In Responsible Statecraft, Daniel Larison argues that the violations could have been addressed through the treaty’s dispute resolution mechanism. “Once again, Biden has allowed a reckless Trump decision to stand for the wrong reasons, and he has undermined U.S. diplomacy with Russia before it even begins,” Larison writes.
In Brief
Various parties to the Iran nuclear talks reported progress this week, with some saying a deal could come as early as next week and others saying a deal in August is a more realistic hope.
Benjamin Netanyahu's tenure as prime minister of Israel may finally be over now that Naftali Bennett, leader of a far-right party, has agreed to join a complex and ideologically diverse coalition assembled by centrist Yair Lapid. If the deal survives Bibi’s last-minute machinations, Bennett will become prime minister later this month, with Lapid scheduled to take the reins in 2023. But the new government may struggle to, well, govern, given that the only thing holding it together is shared disdain for Bibi. The patchwork of parties—ranging from the once-dominant Labor Party to the first Arab (and Islamist) party to ever join an Israeli governing coalition—would control 61 of 120 Knesset seats, so a defection by any legislator would bring the whole thing crashing down. Hours after Lapid announced the deal, Netanyahu took to Twitter to attack the "dangerous left-wing government," taking aim at Labor and the Islamist United Arab List. His goal is reportedly to pick off a member of Bennett's hardline Yamina Party. The new government would be unlikely to moderate Israeli policies toward Palestine, as Bennett is to Bibi’s right on that issue.
The World Health Organization approved China's Sinovac vaccine, making it the second Chinese vaccine to earn the organization's endorsement in recent weeks. The approval will allow the shots to be used by COVAX, an international initiative aimed at equitably distributing covid vaccines. China has already exported over 200 million doses to low- and middle-income countries and has pledged to export another 500 million this year. Meanwhile, the US announced that it will share 25 million excess vaccine doses, most of them distributed via COVAX. Biden has promised to donate 80 million shots by the end of June.
The Intercept reported that Biden is "filling top Pentagon positions with defense contractors." This should come as no surprise to NZN readers (we did write about it last week, after all), but there are two people in the Intercept article worth highlighting. The first is Heidi Shyu, who is poised to become Under Secretary for Defense Research. Shyu spent much of her career at Raytheon—a leading weapons maker—before joining the Obama administration, where she worked in acquisitions. In 2016, Shyu went back through the revolving door and became a consultant, with clients including defense giants Boeing, General Electric, and Northrop Grumman. The second person is Ronald Moultrie, Biden’s recently confirmed Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Moultrie served on the board of a defense contractor that recently received a Pentagon contract worth nearly $1 billion.
Readings
Have you ever wondered why authoritarians bother to hold elections? In the Washington Post, Elizabeth Tsurkov provides some answers through a case study of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who “won” reelection in a landslide last week.
Richard Atwood, interim president of the International Crisis Group, writes on the ICG website that “a flurry of recent diplomacy” suggests that tensions are easing along two Middle Eastern fault lines. The first pits Turkey and Qatar (supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood) against Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (enemies of same), and the second pits Iran against Saudi Arabia. Atwood sees this incipient détente as resulting from several factors, including Biden’s being less indulgent of the Saudi regime than Trump and Biden’s pursuit of a restored nuclear deal with Iran. And the implications of détente could be far reaching. As Atwood notes, that first set of tensions “now plays out in the Horn of Africa, notably exacerbating rifts among Somali factions.”
In the Nation, Christopher Morten and Matthew Herder take aim at the argument that global vaccine scarcity is an inevitable result of limited manufacturing capacity. “[I]n recent weeks, drug companies in Israel, Canada, Bangladesh, South Africa, and Denmark have all said they have unused vaccine manufacturing capacity that could be brought online in a matter of months, not years, to fight Covid-19.”
In Foreign Policy, political scientist Stephen Walt argues that it’s time for the US to end its “special relationship” with Israel. “[D]ecades of brutal Israeli control have demolished the moral case for unconditional U.S. support,” Walt writes.
In Responsible Statecraft, Andrew Latham reviews a new book by Brookings scholar Michael O’Hanlon: The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint. The final word in that subtitle suggests that O’Hanlon may have switched tribes—from a liberal internationalist with an interventionist bent to a “restrainer,” a member of the growing coalition of progressives and conservatives who oppose a militaristic foreign policy. But he hasn’t moved as far as Latham, a restrainer, would like. O’Hanlon embraces some elements of restraint, characterized by Latham as including “not seeking to export liberal democracy at bayonet point, not firing the first shot in a crisis, not exaggerating minor provocations, [and] not seeking full-spectrum military dominance.” But “ultimately, what O’Hanlon offers is less a third-way between liberal internationalism and restraint than a kind of ‘liberal internationalism-lite’.”
In the Intercept, Nick Turse writes that the Pentagon “vastly undercounts the dead and wounded from U.S. military operations.” The US recently claimed that it only killed 23 civilians in 2020, while conservative estimates from non-governmental watch dogs put the number at more than 100.
—Robert Wright and Connor Echols
My weekly conversation with famous frenemy Mickey Kaus can be found after 9:30 p.m. ET (give or take an hour) this evening on The Wright Show podcast feed or at bloggingheads.tv or the bloggingheads YouTube channel. And our after-podcast podcast—the Parrot Room conversation, which is available to paid subscribers and Patreon supporters—can be found around the same time by going to the NZN Substack home page—right here—and clicking on this week’s Parrot Room episode.
Illustration by Nikita Petrov.