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It’s the Economy Again, Stupid

Politics

It’s the Economy Again, Stupid

Biden’s insistence that everything is fine cuts against voters’ actual daily experiences.

President Biden Meets With Mexican President Obrador In The Oval Office
(Photo by Chris Kelponis-Pool/Getty Images)

One of the most succinct campaign slogans of the modern era came out of the 1992 Clinton campaign: “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” which picked up on the feeling Americans were less concerned with the incumbent’s apparent foreign policy success (remember Desert Storm?) than the nation’s changing economy. Clinton spun his personal concern for voters’ well-being off this, with the catchphrase “I feel your pain.”

Things seem headed for some sort of through-the-looking-glass-style repeat in 2024, as the incumbent is hoping to sell voters on the strength of the economy when they are more than skeptical. Bidenomics’ thrust seems to be “The Economy Is OK, Stupid.”

“Bidenomics,” the word itself, melds two of the incumbent’s vulnerabilities: First, he is Joe Biden, 81 years old, “the Crypt Keeper”; second, the economy is fine, and just fine, if you don’t look at it too closely. Not much can be done with the first liability, but the second opens the door for Donald Trump to run on a populist version of the economy argument that could leave Biden looking uninformed and out of touch.

The New York Times paints the brightest picture of Biden’s economic world. Bidenomics propaganda points out that, in 2020, the average wage of workers who still had a job rose without talking about those who were laid off, disproportionately service workers. Growth in wages for everyone was then held down because those low-wage workers were being rehired at their old salaries.

Bidenomics fanboy Paul Krugman actually went as far as writing in the Times, “Until recently I thought everyone—well, everyone following economic issues—knew this.” Stupid voters, not keeping up with the Times. “There are two big questions right now about the U.S. economy,” says Krugman. “One is why it’s doing so well. The other is why so many Americans insist that it’s terrible.”

This dumb line of reasoning seems to attract progressives. One coined the term “vibe-cession” to describe the gap between the common perception and cherry-picked economic indicators. Others insist it’s poor perception and political polarization that are mostly to blame. Then, there is good old social media and its misinformation, reinforcing the “bad economy belief.” A former Federal Reserve economist quoted by, of course, the Times, wrote that a “toxic brew” of human bias for negative information and the attention economy lead to consumer pessimism. If only those rednecks who don’t subscribe to the New York Times could see the view from up there.

The problem down here is economic reality, off-limits in Bidenomics. Start with inflation. Things cost more, with some of the highest jumps in prices in decades. (With the exception of the pandemic, there hasn’t been a year with average annual inflation above four percent since 1991.) Even after years of the Fed raising interest rates (see mortgages, below), inflation coming down does not fix the everyday problems of Americans.

“Inflation,” as economists define the term, is nearly meaningless to most voters because it excludes food and energy prices: two significant parts of any household budget. To include those parts of most voters’ lives, you’re looking for the Consumer Price Index, which includes everything but which rarely appears in feel-good tales of the Biden economy. Even then, watch the magician’s hands closely; prices at the pump are down more than 30 percent since their peak last year, but still up considerably since Biden took office. Some 74 percent today say they’re “at least somewhat worried” that the cost of living will climb so high that they will be unable to remain in their community.

Now about those mortgages. As the Fed raised interest rates to push back inflation, loan costs rose in kind. Average monthly payments on a new home jumped to $3,322 in the third quarter of the year, data from real estate investment firm CBRE shows. It means they have risen 90 percent since the final quarter of 2020—just before Biden took office in January 2021—when it was $1,746. Home ownership is becoming an unattainable dream to many Americans. Interest rates above seven percent and soaring house prices mean buyers are facing one of the least affordable markets in recent memory.

The low unemployment Biden touts does mean more Americans are working, but says nothing about mediocre wages, underemployment, and those forced into two or more jobs to make ends meet. A Blueprint/YouGov poll on the economy found just seven percent of respondents were principally concerned about the availability of jobs, while 64 percent were most worried about prices.

Bidenomics, of course, famously focuses on jobs created. Even then the numbers are slippery; the vast majority of this touted job growth comes from restoring job losses from the pandemic. Check instead the broader unemployment rate that includes underemployed and discouraged workers, which, at 7 percent, is nearly twice as high as Bidenomics claims. And watch claims of rising wages—most rises have been negated by inflation growing at an even faster pace.

Perhaps most significantly among economic perceptions is voters’ view of the future. According to the New York Times, a poll from March found that “just 21 percent of respondents felt confident that life for their children’s generation will be better, matching the record low since this question was first asked. In 1990, 50 percent of those asked felt life would be better for their kids.” The national debt, $5.7 trillion when Bill Clinton left office, has reached $34 trillion. This constitutes a form of intergenerational theft; rising interest costs will eventually require higher taxes or cuts in federal programs or both.

Food prices are up almost 6 percent under Bidenomics. Some 59 percent of parents will spend more than $18,000 per child on child care in 2023. The overall average manufacturer’s suggested retail price of new vehicles in 2023 was $34,876, 4.7 percent higher than the previous year. Average annual health insurance premiums increased 7 percent in 2023. The average family premium has increased 22 percent since 2018.

The Biden people have it just 180 degrees wrong; perception does matter and is not “wrong.” And it does not matter that some of the economic effects listed here are not Joe’s “fault.” Past experience shows the guy in the Oval Office takes credit or accepts fault for what happened on his watch, at least in most voters’ minds.

This is because while a few economists are voters, very few voters are economists. What the economy feels like at the checkout, at the end of the month, at the pump, matters most and will drive voting choices. So a recent poll found just two percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” with only 16 percent saying they were “good.”

A majority of voters already trust Trump more than Biden on the economy. You can’t just tell the voters they are wrong and that all is actually well when it is not. Bill Clinton called it in 1992, Donald Trump will surely emphasize it this year, but Joe Biden hasn’t heard it yet with the election just about ten months away: It’s the economy, stupid.

The post It’s the Economy Again, Stupid appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Eps-Files

Culture

The Eps-Files

A new batch of unsealed documents holds new puzzles for those who want to believe.

Patrick McMullan Archives

Unsealed by a federal court in New York: The first two tranches of documents pertaining to Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against the now deceased financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s former lover and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

More documents are expected to be unsealed in the near future, but the first tranches released Wednesday and Thursday, about 60 of an expected 250, offered a treasure trove for those who have asked the essential questions surrounding Epstein’s mysterious death for the last four and a half years: What kind of blackmail scheme was the late Epstein running on his island and other properties? Was Epstein and his inner circle connected to intelligence agencies (and, if so, which ones)? Who was Epstein’s clientele? Did Epstein actually kill himself?

Readers were left with more questions than answers.

The hundreds of pages of documents revealed more than 170 different names of individuals associated with the lawsuit: victims, accomplices, associates, and clients. In December 2023, Judge Loretta Preska of the Southern District of New York ruled that the first tranche of documents were to be released on January 1, 2024; however, that timeline was briefly delayed for individuals, mainly Epstein’s victims, to petition to have their identities protected. Two individuals managed to keep their identities protected as they battle in court to maintain their anonymity in the Epstein affair.

Former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were among those named in the documents. 

In the tranche of documents released Wednesday, Giuffre testified that she never saw Trump on Epstein’s island, at other Epstein properties, or ever in Epstein’s presence. Furthermore, Giuffre testified that Trump never flirted with her, which conflicts with a previous report that claimed Trump flirted with Giuffre. Giuffre also testified that she was unaware of Trump attempting or performing any sexual acts on her or other girls victimized by Epstein. Trump went unmentioned in the tranche released Thursday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Epstein accuser Johanna Sjoberg testified in a 2016 deposition that Epstein once told her, “Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.” What’s more, Maxwell testified in 2019 that she flew on “Jeffrey Epstein’s planes with President Clinton,” a claim that is backed up by testimony of Epstein’s former pilot Dave Rogers and the planes’ previously released flight logs. Clinton was also mentioned in the second tranche of documents. In an unsealed email from Giuffre sent in 2011, Giuffre alleged Clinton sought to intimidate Vanity Fair into not publishing stories about Epstein’s sex trafficking. The email, sent to reporter Sharon Churcher of the U.K. tabloid Mail on Sunday, claimed that she feared retribution for going public with her allegations against Epstein, “considering that B. Clinton walked into VF and threatened them not to write sex-trafficing [sic] articles about his good friend J.E.” Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair at the time, told CNN that the alleged Clinton threat “categorically did not happen.”

Another person named in the documents was Doug Band, a former aide for Bill Clinton, who had said in an interview that he had tried to keep Clinton from meeting with Epstein but that the former president continued to associate with him.

Other names included in the list were previously known, like Prince Andrew, who has faced heinous accusations from alleged trafficking victims, and French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial for alleged sexual harassment and rape of minors over 15 years old.

One of the more bizarre episodes recorded in the documents released Wednesday involved the late physicist Stephen Hawking. In a typo-ridden email sent January 2015, Epstein told Maxwell he was willing to pay a reward to friends and acquaintances of Giuffre who could testify that allegations Hawking participated in an underage orgy were false. The email was sent shortly after an article was published claiming Hawking visited Epstein’s private island, but did not include any claims about Hawking participating in sexual acts with minors.

The two questions that will become thematic as more documents are unsealed: Will the justice system and media have any appetite be for holding the rich, the powerful, the few accountable? If they don’t, how will we manage to do so?

The post The Eps-Files appeared first on The American Conservative.

The New Nixonians

Par : Curt Mills
Politics

The New Nixonians

As the 2024 campaign and the national security scene heat up, the ongoing rehabilitation of the 37th president comes into play in the GOP civil war.

Screen Shot 2023-10-23 at 4.35.04 PM

To inaugurate proceedings at the Nixon National Security Summit on Thursday in Washington, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich shared striking writing from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. 

In a recently declassified letter, the 37th president counseled the 42nd: “I have reluctantly concluded that his situation has rapidly deteriorated since the elections in December, and that the days of his unquestioned leadership of Russia are numbered,” remarking on the then-President of Russia Boris Yeltsin. “[Yeltsin’s] drinking bouts are longer and his periods of depression are more frequent. Most troublesome, he can no longer deliver on his commitments to you and other Western leaders in an increasingly anti-American environment in the Duma and in the country.”

Comments on the doomed Yeltsin era can almost seem inane, close to thirty years on, at least amid the largest land war in Europe and in the shadow of Putin, the most fearsome Russian ruler since Stalin. A fait accompli makes for poor copy. Of course, Yeltsin was a shambolic wreck fated to failure (never mind the talent that enabled his ascent), and obviously the vulgarian Russian bear would only ever respect and understand animal force (disregard perhaps the most talented diplomatic force on the globe, and arguably the world’s finest literature). 

But one man who understood the truth, that fate is fluid, was Richard Nixon. He spent his sunset years rebuilding a reputation in tatters, crafting himself as a member of the “our son-of-a-bitch” school of foreign policy with the understanding his truest jury would be people he never met. As the last president to enjoy a drink to something like a fault, and whose own darkness seemingly never permitted him to fully trust his fellow man (even as they kept electing him), Nixon’s warning to Clinton about Yeltsin’s personal descent and the limits of democracy’s appeal came during the greatest bear market in history for such a view, the alleged end of history. 

Nixon is gone, but much less alone now. 

Indeed, something about the man, our Shakespearean president, is fitting for this moment, as the country careens toward its most chaotic presidential election since 1860 and ponders “a world which now seems terrifyingly near to a spiral into a world war,” as TAC’s founding editor Scott McConnell put it last week. 

As the 2024 campaign and the national security scene heat up, the ongoing rehabilitation of the 37th president comes into play in the GOP civil war as well. Teasing his new film, the preeminent conservative activist Christopher Rufo said, “I tell a new story about a man, reviled in his time, who left behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic.” 

At the very least, something’s in the water. 

Seeking to capitalize is none other than the Richard Nixon Foundation itself. Based out of Yorba Linda, California, but marinating this week in Washington, it is led by Jim Byron, who, in his early thirties, has really only ever worked for the organization. It is chaired by Robert C. O’Brien, the last Republican president’s national security advisor. O’Brien passed on a Utah Senate run earlier this autumn, but, with Americans held sword-on-neck in Gaza, he is back in the news as the former president’s chief hostage negotiator. That O’Brien could reprise his former position in a second Trump Administration or even be on the ticket—a Mormon national security-oriented upgrade to Mike Pence who could help in Arizona and Nevada—are facts also never far from the discussion around him. 

Notably, the Nixon Foundation is more Trump-curious than its friendly, Californian rival: the Reagan Foundation. Like its namesake, the Nixon Foundation has one foot in the establishment, and one foot in the populist id. It’s a difficult, perhaps even impossible balance. And yet. 

For instance, generally a hawk’s hawk, Florida’s Congressman Mike Waltz said at the event that the current American line on Ukraine is “not sustainable” and that hard conversations need to recommence with the Europeans. This is the legislator who once endorsed years and years more in Afghanistan to a dyspeptic CPAC audience response. Waltz is a former Special Forces officer, and whatever else, one with probably a large future. If he’s saying this, Ukraine skepticism is no longer ghettoized to the conservative avant-garde. 

Congressman Ro Khanna, a Golden State Democrat and former student of John Mearsheimer, and former Trump Defense official Elbridge Colby, also scouted for a big future role in a successor Administration, led a panel skeptical of the war in Eurasia. Colby is also a member of O’Brien’s American Global Strategies group, where he represents the realist edge of O’Brien’s big tent that at times has been more overtly committed to the Ukraine hardline. 

In many ways, it was striking who the defense of the Kiev’s government’s preferences fell to: the Democratic establishment. Jane Harman, the former L.A. Congresswoman and former president of the Wilson Center, remarked “Do I support more support for Ukraine? Yes.” More for Israel? Yes. More U.S. border funding? She opined that it is not a “zero sum game” while hailing the rosier times of budget surplus. She urged the gathered to “contemplate that.” 

Without missing a beat, former Congresswoman Harman said: “What did we miss in the nineties? Just about everything. We missed the rise of China. We missed the rise of terrorism. And we missed” Russian anxieties about the expansion of NATO. 

“They were totally offended,” she added. 

Harman closed by positively mentioning uber-internationalist Wendell Willkie, the 1940 GOP presidential nominee who failed to stop Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented third term and the solidification of the New Deal. Democratic reverence for Republicans who scantily disagree with them would seem to be an old tradition. 

To round it out for the hardliners, former NSA head and United States Cyber Command Michael S. Rogers blasted “incrementalism” on Ukraine, implying he believes true support for Ukraine has never been tried. The merger of America’s brass with the Democratic establishment (and its distance from the Republican rank-and-file) is, of course, perhaps the most important story in politics as America contemplates not just one war, but three. 

Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, attended the dinner the night before but passed on the main event itself. Pompeo was the surprise guest-of-honor at Governor Glenn Youngkin’s “Red Vest Retreat” in Virginia Beach, where the gathered discussed how the Commonwealth’s governor is absolutely not running for president. Notably, the state of Pompeo’s relationship with Donald Trump is a bonafide unknown. Would Pompeo be snubbed entirely from a second Trump team? Why did Pompeo pass on a 2024 race? (That now looks smart—ask Ron DeSantis.) Is Pompeo angling to be Youngkin’s VP or Defense Secretary?   

It should be said: O’Brien has not quite endorsed Trump. O’Brien jokes, given his service on Scott Walker’s Hindenburg-style effort, that if he endorsed him, that would actually cause Trump to lose. More seriously, O’Brien spoke of a side of Trump not flashed for the cameras. The 45th president is an “incredibly cordial man,” O’Brien claims, who exhibited tremendous “sympathy” for his fellow world leaders during the Covid crisis, frequently phoning to check on their health. 

Most relevant: O’Brien closed his remarks by discussing a “GOP approach” to foreign policy and national security, one that he said is quite different from the Democrats, but one (he implied) in which a thread can be weaved from Nixon, to Reagan, to Trump. 

For skeptics, there’s the rub. O’Brien also served in an administration not mentioned (to this writer’s knowledge) at the event: that of George W. Bush. And some that would see a far more restrained foreign policy of the United States do fear wolves in sheeps’ clothing. Or as Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, commented to me after the event: “Can the regime change doctrine be rehabbed or is it just California dreamin’?”

The post The New Nixonians appeared first on The American Conservative.

Richard Nixon’s Last Crusade

Foreign Affairs

Richard Nixon’s Last Crusade

America’s 37th president tried to save America’s Russia policy in the 1990s.

Milan,,Italy,-,February,11,,2019:,Portrait,Of,President,Nixon

It was 1994, and Bill Clinton had a problem. His foreign aid program to Russia, which he had inherited from the administration of his predecessor, George H. W. Bush, was faltering and under attack from all sides. According to the Russians, the aid was not enough. According to some Americans, including the rising Republican Party, the aid was being wasted by the Russians and was generally too high. At the same time, his ally and sometimes-friend, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, had just received a flattening in Russia’s legislative elections. Plus, the situation in the former Soviet Union was extremely fluid; after all, none of the newly created post-Soviet countries was more than five years old. No one could predict what would come next.

Well, almost no one. There was one person who America’s 41st president could turn to for advice: its 37th, Richard Nixon. That advice took the form of a seven page memo, the contents of which were, until recently, never revealed. Nixon died just over a month after writing it, and while Clinton has spoken repeatedly about the brilliance of the memo, it had until now remained confidential. However, a FOIA request by this author has allowed it to be released to the public. And its contents are shocking.

Nixon, over 81 years old and a month from death, had written a prescient piece full of warnings and pertinent advice, almost all of which went tragically unheeded. The memo capped a half-decade of Nixon’s attempts to get succeeding presidential administrations to see reason regarding Russia. The story of his crusade is worth telling, not only for its historical importance, but for its future importance as well.

After his presidency’s premature end, Richard Nixon rather quickly adopted the role of an elder statesman, traveling the world and burnishing his credentials as one whom American officials and foreign officials could trust. (He even went so far as to sign away his post-presidential Secret Service protection in order to travel more easily). By the 1980s, he was back in the Top 10 of Gallup’s poll of Most Admired Men. He was even more admired around the world than some incumbent presidents were; during his visit to the United States in 1979, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping reportedly refused to go to the White House to meet with then-incumbent President Jimmy Carter—unless Nixon was likewise invited.

By 1994, the last year of his life, Nixon was still going strong. In March, he embarked on a trip to Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These countries were not picked at random. Ever since the Cold War’s effective end in 1989, the West had watched Russia and the former Soviet bloc with worried eyes. In five years, the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation, had witnessed two attempted military coups and massive instability. In an effort to stave off collapse and introduce Russia into the world economy, America had undertaken a massive campaign of aid funding to beef up Russia’s private sector and advisors to help it develop.

Almost immediately, the program encountered problems. Under the administration of George H.W. Bush, the plan seemed almost an afterthought, with little care given to how money was being spent. Although he had quietly urged action to rectify this, Nixon’s advice had gone unheeded.

In 1992 he, pushed to his wits’ end over Bush’s failure to take the aid program seriously, had launched a respectful but forceful public attack on the administration’s inaction on Russia in a memorandum that received relatively wide circulation. Specifically, Nixon wrote, the U.S. had undertaken a “pathetically inadequate response” to the troubles in the former communist bloc. 

Shortly after the memo circulated, he held an event at the Nixon Library and spoke—with Bush giving the keynote address. Without more significant actions, which Nixon saw as ranging from opening Western markets to Russian exports to the creation of an organization overseeing a Marshall Plan–esque financial rescue of Russia, Nixon predicted that Yeltsin would fail and that “the leaders of a new despotism…will stoke nationalist passions and exploit the tendency of the Russian people to turn to the strong hand—even to dictatorship—during times of troubles.” He predicted war, as new Russian despots would “use force to restore the ‘historical borders’” of Russia, that China would “breathe a sigh of relief,” and that Russia would “cozy up to…Iraq, Syria, Libya, and North Korea.”

Today, this is rightly seen as prescient. But at the time, President Bush—who had, to Nixon’s chagrin, staked much of his policy on a personal relationship with Gorbachev—took offense at Nixon’s comments, later offering a pithy response dismissing Nixon’s suggestions: “I will think about [it].”

But Bush would not have much more time to do so, as the 1992 presidential election brought a change of administrations. Whereas Bush had a long history in foreign affairs, and therefore may have felt he did not need advice, newly elected Bill Clinton had no foreign policy experience whatsoever. Nixon soon forged a genuinely personal relationship with Clinton, and the latter began to regularly contact the former for advice.

It is not impossible to imagine that Nixon saw a second chance to get the United States government to take the aid program seriously. Indeed, before Nixon embarked on his March 1994 trip, Clinton called Nixon, asking him to convey some messages and to also report back his findings. His advisors, prepping Clinton before the call, also made sure to point out that Nixon’s critique of Bush in 1992 had been politically damaging for the 41st president.

Nixon obliged Clinton upon his return, reporting his finding in the form of the now newly-released memo to Clinton. Nixon, perhaps sensing that this was his last chance to alter America’s aid policy, did not hold back.

He began the memo with a stark warning to his successor: Push aside the foreign service. “Foreign service officers are seldom ignorant,” Nixon wrote, “but almost always arrogant.” They “get to the top by not getting into trouble” and “are more interested in covering their a*ses than in protecting yours.”

While starting it with the good news—that Clinton was roundly respected by Nixon’s hosts—Nixon quickly got to the bad, starting with a discussion on the Russian president. Yeltsin’s “days of unquestioned leadership” were numbered. “His drinking bouts are longer and his periods of depression are more frequent.” What was extremely alarming to Nixon was that Clinton’s Ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering, believed stories that Yeltsin was in good shape; this Nixon flatly and correctly labeled “bullsh*t.”

This led Nixon to his first concrete piece of policy advice: “Bush,” the 37th president wrote, “made a mistake in sticking too long to Gorbachev because of his close personal relationship. You must avoid making the same mistake in your very good personal relationship with Yeltsin.” While not telling him to break things off wholesale with his Russian opposite, Nixon was clearly urging Clinton to not put the weight of the American-Russian relationship on his personal relationship with Yeltsin.

His next topic was the state of America’s aid, which he deemed “a mess.” Businessmen from both countries were “ripping off the aid programs shamelessly,” and the IMF was acting with “stubbornness and stupidity.” Nixon derided “quick answers” like an increase in aid, and instead urged Clinton to better target and more efficiently administer the programs which already existed. In doing so, the elder statesman politely but firmly urged Clinton to fire Strobe Talbott, a personal friend of Clinton’s whom he had put in charge of the aid program.

After briefly urging Clinton to not appoint a foreign service officer in Talbott’s stead—“[foreign service officers] know very little about economics and much of what they do know is wrong”—Nixon moved onto his next subject: Ukraine. He was extremely concerned about the state of the country, calling it explosive and on the verge of making Bosnia “look like a PTA garden party.” While the then-discussed limits to nuclear arms was good, Nixon argued that it would be better to focus on what could lead to their use.

America’s 37th president had good things to say about Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, though he was quick to point out that Kravchuk possessed “political honesty,” not financial honesty. At the time, Ukraine had only privatized 2–5 percent of their economy, and Nixon felt that this sluggishness was the fault of Ukraine’s parliament, which he called “worse than the Russian Duma.” 

This all led him to his next piece of advice: A reluctant urging to rearrange America’s representation in Ukraine. Our embassy, according to businessmen Nixon met with in Kiev, was “piss-poor,” “pathetic,” and “understaffed and inadequately led.” Before moving on from Ukraine, he urged Clinton to give the country more attention, calling it “indispensable.”

Before ending the memo, Nixon briefly moved back to Russia in order to recommend that the Clinton administration attempt to bring together some of the workable members of the Russian opposition into a “united front for responsible reform.”

Nixon did not live to see the results of his memo. He died just about a month after writing it, to the end a firm believer in a realist foreign policy and a prophet of what could go wrong if America were to take a different tack. 

Unlike with his advice to Bush, it seems apparent that some of Nixon’s advice was followed. Clinton’s friend Talbott was seemingly “fired by promotion.” Soon after Clinton received the memo, Talbott was removed from oversight of America’s Russia aid and promoted to Deputy Secretary of State.

However, Clinton appears to have failed to listen to any of Nixon’s other advice. Both ambassadors whom Nixon critiqued stayed in their posts for years; Pickering stayed in Moscow until 1996 and Miller in Kiev until 1998.

Even with Talbott’s removal, Clinton does not seem to have changed his aid policy—nor does he even today seem to think much of it. In a defense of his Russia policy published in the Atlantic shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Clinton elaborated on his attempts to set Russia on the right path. Yet, in his long discussion, the aid program is mentioned only once. Nixon’s point that more money would be irrelevant—and that “better targeting and better administering…and an entirely new approach” is what would truly be needed—was clearly dismissed. In 1999, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that the Clinton admin’s policy was “Give [money] until it hurts.” It does not appear that the Clinton administration was closely watching where that money ended up.

The most serious ignoring of Nixon’s advice, however, was Clinton’s insistence on putting weight on the Boris-Bill relationship. In his Atlantic piece, Clinton defended his Russia policy by pointing out that he “met with Yeltsin 18 times,” stressing that that number was “just three short of all the U.S.-U.S.S.R. leaders’ meetings from 1943 through 1991.” But this was exactly contrary to what Nixon warned in his memo. Instead of heeding his warning, Clinton seems to have bet it all on Yeltsin. When he was floundering in the 1996 Russian presidential elections with an approval below 10%, Yeltsin demanded American aid, threatening that the Communist Party candidate, if he were to win, would invade Ukraine and take back Crimea. The White House seems to have sanctioned—or at least refused to stop—a team of American political advisors going to Moscow to beef up Yeltsin’s campaign in response. Yeltsin ultimately “won” the election by stealing it (as confirmed by his eventual successor, Dmitry Medvedev); the Clinton administration’s complicity in the actual theft remains a mystery, though it is highly unlikely the administration was not at least aware of it.

What did Clinton get for his insistence on personal diplomacy? Well, Yeltsin would, on future presidential trips, go on to run around DC at night drunk in his underwear, looking for pizza. “Yeltsin drunk is better than most of the alternatives sober,” Clinton would say at one point. 

Looking back, it’s unclear if that was truly the case. By aiding and potentially abetting Yeltsin’s stolen election, Clinton’s administration made a mockery of America’s commitment to political freedom. By failing to take the aid program seriously, both the Clinton and Bush administrations made a mockery of economic freedom. In doing so, Clinton ignored Nixon’s final warning in the memo: The protection of “political and economic freedom…in Russia” would be “the most important foreign policy issue the nation will face for the balance of this century.”

Nearly 30 years later, it is abundantly clear that both the Bush and Clinton administrations failed in their relationship to Russia. This is not to draw a direct line to today’s Russo–Ukrainian War; once Russia was lost, it was Vladimir Putin’s choice, and no one else’s, to descend further into the wilderness. But the United States did not need to do all it could to push it off the path.

There is no question as to whether or not the world would be better off today had America’s 1990s-era leadership taken Richard Nixon’s advice to stick to our principles and a realist path: The answer is an emphatic yes. The question that remains before America’s 2020s-era leadership is whether it will listen now.

The post Richard Nixon’s Last Crusade appeared first on The American Conservative.

Playing the Race Card to Protect Chinese Spies

Politics

Playing the Race Card to Protect Chinese Spies

The Wen Ho Lee case taught China that crying racism would trump incriminating facts.

Former Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee wal
Wen Ho Lee (Photo credit should read MIKE FIALA/AFP via Getty Images)

Is it racist to think that a Chinese person is more likely to spy for China than someone with no Chinese ancestry who was born in America?

That was the premise of much of the left-wing opposition to the Justice Department’s so-called China Initiative, its investigation of Chinese technology theft that was launched in 2018 and canceled by the Biden administration in 2022 over claims of ethnic profiling. It is the premise of many news articles written about Chinese scientists leaving the United States in increasing numbers, supposedly because they feel targeted by authorities. Yet if you asked the average man on the street, he would say that taking someone’s country of birth into account in an espionage investigation is just common sense.

Where did the Chinese get the idea that playing the race card would be an effective way to fend off reasonable investigations of suspicious conduct? From the precedent set by the case of Wen Ho Lee in 1999.

When I mentioned Wen Ho Lee at a panel in Washington, D.C., recently, none of the people in the room, mostly twenty-somethings, had any idea who he was. His case was a massive news story during the late Clinton era, one that taught the Chinese a lesson about American vulnerabilities that they are profiting from to this day.

The story of Wen Ho Lee, as it has gone down in history books, runs something like this: An absent-minded computer programmer at Los Alamos cut a few corners on security procedures and for this he was scapegoated as a Chinese spy by the Justice Department, which picked him because he was Taiwanese-born and ethnically vulnerable. The title of Lee’s ghostwritten memoir sums it up: My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy.

According to an August 2000 episode of 60 Minutes, the security lapses Lee committed were very ordinary, the kind of thing many other Los Alamos scientists did when they were in a hurry. The crime of mishandling restricted data, to which Lee pled guilty in exchange for the other charges being dropped, he says he did because he wanted to create backup copies of his work and so transferred the files from a secure to an unsecure network before putting them onto portable tapes.

But it was not just his own work that Wen Ho Lee downloaded. The program called “Big Mac” simulates a nuclear explosion in order to show the effects of design changes on the operations of a bomb. Running a test took hours or days on a Cray supercomputer. Out of 223,000 lines of code, Lee had contributed less than a thousand. He downloaded the whole thing, and more, including weapons designs and sketches.

As soon as Lee became aware that he was under investigation by the FBI, he began deleting the incriminating files from his computer and refused ever to tell authorities where the backup tapes were; he claimed he destroyed them. Far from being a shortcut taken in a hurry, analysts say creating his tape library would have taken Lee at least 40 hours.

Lee’s behavior drew the FBI’s attention because investigators had unrelated reasons to believe there was a spy at Los Alamos. China conducted a nuclear test in 1992 that indicated sudden advances in their miniaturization technology. Their breakthrough bore a striking resemblance to America’s W88 warhead, the kind used on Trident missiles, which meant that either the Chinese had converged on the same design overnight or someone gave it to them. “It’s like they were driving a Model T and went around the corner and suddenly had a Corvette,” one scientist said.

Investigators started with the small circle of people who would have had access to those designs and looked for red flags. Wen Ho Lee had three, in addition to his inexplicable tape library: the call, the meeting, and the hug.

In 1982, Lee called up a Taiwanese-born engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who had been forced to resign from his job after being caught at the airport on his way to China carrying classified secrets. Lee had never met the man, but he called him and offered to help him find out who had tipped off the authorities. This phone call was picked up on the FBI’s phone tap of the engineer and then forgotten about for 15 years until Lee himself came under investigation. Lee says he called his countryman merely out of sympathy. One FBI agent who investigated Lee said, “I’m Italian, but I don’t call John Gotti and say, come on, John, I hear the FBI’s after you, can I help you?”

In 1988, on one of his many visits to China, Wen Ho Lee met in his hotel room with Dr. Hu Side, the head of China’s nuclear weapons program. Lee claims nothing improper occurred at this meeting, only that Hu asked him to disclose classified information and he refused. But when Lee was debriefed after his trip and provided a list of all the Chinese scientists he had met, he left off Hu.

In 1994, a Chinese delegation including Hu Side visited Los Alamos. Wen Ho Lee crashed a private meeting to which he had not been invited in order to greet the visitors, and Hu gave Lee a hug. When the Americans asked their translator what the two men were chatting about in Mandarin, the translator replied, “They’re thanking him because the computer software and calculations on hydrodynamics that he provided them have helped China a great deal.”

To those three red flags we might add a fourth: Sylvia Lee, his wife. Officially, Sylvia Lee had an administrative job at Los Alamos; unofficially, she was the lab’s social ambassador to visiting Chinese delegations. Her unofficial duties soon outgrew her official ones, and her bosses were annoyed to find her racking up thousands of dollars in long-distance and international calls on the office phone bill.

Sylvia was a problem employee in other ways. Once, when given an assignment she thought was beneath her, she deliberately deleted the relevant files, including classified designs that belonged to a third-party contractor. Her bosses confronted her, and she admitted that she had deleted the files to teach them a lesson about valuing her work. “Then she played that game of ‘I don’t understand,’ and I was ready to fire her on the spot,” her supervisor recalled. He kept her on at the request of the H.R. department, and also because two CIA agents visited him and implied that they wanted Sylvia to stay where she was.

(Wen Ho Lee played “that game of ‘I don’t understand’” when under interrogation, too. You can observe it in his 60 Minutes interview, and no doubt he also used it with the FBI: Respond to a tough question with a generic answer and hope your evasiveness is chalked up to language trouble.)

The visit by the CIA agents is a reminder that nuclear espionage takes place in a world of mirrors where hidden actors are always at work. Sylvia’s bosses had no idea she was passing information to the FBI and the CIA. When Wen Ho Lee’s case came up for trial in the summer of 2000, the judge originally assigned the case suddenly recused himself without explanation. It was later revealed that a woman connected to the defense accused the judge of making a sexual advance. He denied it but bowed out to keep the allegation from being made public. The judge who replaced him was so sympathetic to Wen Ho Lee that during sentencing he apologized to Lee from the bench. Was this judge switch the result of a deliberate scheme? In the world of espionage, such things do happen.

Why is the Wen Ho Lee case remembered as an example of racist scapegoating? Clearly the FBI had many reasons to be suspicious of Lee apart from his ethnicity, even if, as is often the case with espionage investigations—including the Lawrence Livermore engineer caught red-handed at the airport—they did not have enough to get a conviction in court.

One reason is that Wen Ho Lee had a very good P.R. team. He became a cause celebre among Chinese-Americans, who showered him with donations, and Lee was able to hire high-powered lawyers and first-rate Los Angeles publicists. They knew exactly what kinds of emotional appeals would work on the American public: scientist vs. bureaucrat, one man vs. the system, and, above all, innocent racial minority vs. white bigots. According to the excellent book A Convenient Spy,by journalists Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, the entourage around Lee and his daughter Alberta grew so big and so controlling that his older supporters wondered, “Had Wen Ho and Alberta gone Hollywood?”

It was these consultants who set up the sympathetic press interviews and brought in prominent Chinese-American lesbian activist Helen Zia to help co-write Lee’s memoir. The book itself is not very convincing. For example, Lee says the reason he tried to sneak into his office at 3:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve after his security clearance had been revoked was not to destroy evidence but because “I wanted to continue working on the scientific paper I was preparing” and “somehow I thought that the swipe card might work again at off hours.” Still, the book reassured Lee’s defenders that he would continue proclaiming his innocence.

The second reason Lee was able to paint himself as a martyr is that many powerful people in the Clinton administration did not want to turn over any rocks having to do with Chinese espionage. It is often forgotten now, but Clinton’s second term was rocked by China scandals. Huge sums from foreign donors were funneled to Democratic campaigns by way of Chinese money men such as Charlie Yah-Lin Trie and John Huang. In exchange, bigwigs including People’s Liberation Army officers were given access to the White House, and Huang was given a position at the Commerce Department where he could encourage and monitor the export of sensitive items to Asia. Huang also received security clearance, intelligence briefings, and access to classified documents at Commerce.

A scandal this big should have resulted in an independent counsel and banner prosecutions, but it did not. In September 1999, FBI whistleblowers revealed that the Justice Department’s campaign finance task force had thwarted their investigation—refusing, for example, to pursue a warrant to search Charlie Trie’s office even after incriminating documents including photocopies of checks from foreign donors to Clinton’s legal defense fund were found shredded in his trash. A Wall Street Journal editorial summarized the whistleblowers’ testimony: “What emerges from these FBI accounts is a portrait of not merely a botched investigation but of an active coverup.”

The Wen Ho Lee case broke in the middle of the Chinagate scandal. (Incidentally, another Chinese-American who worked at the Commerce Department and was close friends with John Huang was Hoyt Zia, the brother of Lee’s co-author, Helen Zia.) Accusing Republicans of anti-Asian xenophobia was one way that Democrats downplayed the Chinagate revelations. When the Wen Ho Lee investigation failed to come up with a smoking gun that showed him passing secrets to China, the same people took up his cause as further evidence that only paranoid racists were suspicious of naturalized Asian-Americans.

It is impossible to know for sure, more than 20 years later, whether Wen Ho Lee was a spy. But one thing is certain. Wen Ho Lee is invoked today as an example of why racial profiling of Chinese scientists should be avoided at all costs to avoid targeting blameless people, when that is not, in fact, the lesson of his case at all.

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