Tax the rich and end Republican welfare for the wealthy

Sabrina Haake
March 17, 2024 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (center) arrives at the 2021 Met Gala in New York City wearing a dress reading "TAX THE RICH." (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images)

Over the past 50 years, before the GOP went all in on fascism and isolationism, the most dramatic difference between Democrats and Republicans lurked in the driest of places: tax policies.

Democrats essentially wanted to tax the rich to help the middle class and working poor, while Republicans argued that helping the rich would lift all ships and eventually help everyone.

Trickle-down economists gave the GOP political cover for decades, providing Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush and Trump the plausible justification they needed to pass massive tax cuts for their donor class. Conservative economists-for-hire claimed that gifts to wealthy individuals and corporations would drive economic investment. Tax breaks for top-bracket earners, they argued, would result in the creation of more jobs, higher average wages, and an overall upturn in national economic indicators.

But decades of Republicans’ welfare-for-the-wealthy have finally delivered enough data to put trickle-down where it belongs: in the political scam column.

And Democrats need to fiercely own that fact during their campaigns for Congress and the White House.

Research debunks trickle-down as a scam

Economic indicators reveal that helping the rich helps only the rich.

As National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard told the Economic Club of New York last year, although tax cuts for the wealthy added trillions to the national debt, the cuts didn’t deliver measurable gains in jobs, they didn’t cause an increase in wages earned by the average worker and they didn’t — despite a promise of more “capital to build factories, to buy equipment, and hire more people” — lead to any increase in investment whatsoever.

ALSO READ: Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Squad’ dying?

Instead of delivering these — or any — economic benefits to the middle and lower classes, tax gifts to the rich caused economic inequality to increase, as many communities suffered from stagnated investments in infrastructure and sustained disinvestment.

For the first four years following Trump's 2018 corporate tax cuts, the largest corporations spent their savings to enrich themselves and their shareholders through stock buybacks. Instead of investing the money in plants, employees or equipment to increase production, they spent the tax windfall on themselves.

Reduced tax income from the top, which increased the national debt, also led to higher interest rates overall, increasing the costs of day to day necessities. In result, while top earners retained even more disposable earnings, income for other Americans failed to keep pace with rising costs of living.

A con job

The U.S. economy is not alone in debunking the GOP’s trickle-down con job.

A joint paper by the London School of Economics and King’s College of London tracked data from 18 developed countries over a 50-year period. Researchers compared economic data from countries that passed tax cuts for the rich in a specific year with countries that did not pass tax cuts for the rich that same year, between 1965 to 2015.

The conclusion? “Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t.”

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Forbes reported the same thing about Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy. Noting that “Trump tax cuts helped billionaires pay less taxes than the working class in 2018,” Forbes reported that for “the first time in American history, the 400 wealthiest people paid a lower tax rate than any other group,” citing economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s book, The Triumph Of Injustice: How the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay.

In 2022, after President Joe Biden had been in office for nearly two years, income inequality finally declined for the first time since 2007. But the disparity remains striking: 10 percent of households in 2022 had income above $216,000 (a 5.5 percent reduction from the 2021 estimate of $228,600), while 10 percent of households had income at or below $17,100.

Biden’s budget vs. Trump’s tax giveaway to the rich

Seeking to reduce such aggressive imbalances, which lead to other costs which increase other taxes, the Biden administration last week released its proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

Biden’s plan requires wealthy and high earners to contribute more in taxes (cue the massive dark money contributions to Trump), while keeping Biden’s promise not to raise taxes on anyone who makes less than $400,000 a year.

Biden’s proposed budget also reigns in national debt after Republicans added an unprecedented $8 trillion to the nation’s debt under Trump. In 2017, Republicans reduced the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, gifting corporations — strong political donors — with a 40 percent reduction in their tax burden, largesse that did not trickle down.


President Joe Biden talks about his proposed FY2024 federal budget during an event at the Finishing Trades Institute on March 9, 2023, in Philadelphia. 

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

As former Republican Rep. David Jolly of Florida observed, a quarter of the nation’s total debt was incurred under Trump alone: “Roughly 25 percent of our total national debt incurred over the last 230 years actually occurred during the four years of the Trump administration.”

Following Trump’s colossal $2.3 trillion tax giveaway to corporations and the nation’s wealthy, Trump reminded his rich donor friends, “You all just got a lot richer.”


Did they ever.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that, over the next 11 years, Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts would increase the national debt by another $1.9 trillion. As Trump so sagaciously observed, “This is the United States government … you never have to default because you print the money.”
Biden’s proposed budget

Fast forward to when there’s an adult in the room.

Under Biden’s plan, wealthy individuals and corporations would pay more in taxes — partially rescinding Trump’s gifts to the rich — which would pay for tax credits to the working poor and middle class. Economists project that Biden’s plan will cut $3.3 trillion from the deficit over 10 years as it lifts families with children out of poverty and cuts annual taxes by an average of $2,600 for low to middle income families.

According to Biden’s fact sheet, the plan would also close the windfall for high wage earners who stop paying Social Security payroll taxes after they’ve earned $168,000 in income, which, for the highest earners, happens in the month of January alone, leaving the rest of their annual earnings free of Social Security taxes.

Biden’s proposed budget would also help young people become first-time home buyers after the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s student debt forgiveness that would have benefitted the same group. It calls for an annual $5,000 tax credit a year for two years, effectively reducing the mortgage rate by more than 1.5 percentage points for those two years. Biden’s plan also encourages people to move out of starter homes and put them on the market, and commits to build and preserve 2 million homes.

Biden also tackles rising rents by subsidizing new construction and renovation and seeks to “curb unfair and illegal pricing across the economy” to “combat egregious rent increases and other practices driving up rents.” David Dworkin, president and chief executive officer of the National Housing Conference, told the Washington Post that Biden’s plan, as revealed in his State of the Union address, was “the most consequential set of housing recommendations in a State of a Union in over 50 years...”
Democrats need to recognize Biden’s seeds of success

When they review Biden’s proposed budget, Republicans will howl about redistributive wealth and pennies to welfare recipients, without acknowledging their $2 trillion tax giveaway to their uber-wealthy donors.

Democrats — during this election year when the White House, U.S. House and U.S. Senate are all in play— should counter the gaslighting with economic fact.

Bidenomics are working, but lasting effects will take time. When compared to other G7 industrial economies post-COVID, the U.S. economy recovered faster and with lower inflation — a credit to both the Federal Reserve and the Biden administration’s investment in key industries. In less than a year, the Inflation Reduction Act prompted massive investment in a manufacturing and transportation buildout across the states.

As Biden predicted, private investment and hiring did, indeed, follow public investment. This stands in stark contrast to the previous administration’s gifts to the rich. The U.S. Treasury department reported that more than 10½ million businesses started up in 2021 and 2022, leading to the creation of 3 million new jobs, as a direct result of federal investments under the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan.

Since Biden took office, companies have announced over $500 billion in investments in the United States, including over $200 billion in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing and nearly $225 billion in clean energy, electric vehicle, and battery investments. Overall, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, spending on manufacturing construction has nearly doubled since the end of 2021.

Although Biden’s budget faces significant pushback from donor-protective Republicans, years of disinvestment from the GOP’s trickle down scam are finally over. Manufacturing trends are demonstrably, undeniably and remarkably moving up.

Democrats can do themselves- and the nation- a favor by owning this success and selling it to a public that sometimes forgets, even as they begin to reap the benefits.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.

Spanish farmers stage fresh protests in Madrid

Madrid (AFP) – Hundreds of farmers paraded through the Spanish capital on foot and by tractor on Sunday in the latest protest over the crisis facing the agricultural sector.

Issued on: 17/03/2024

Protesting farmers drive tractors through central Madrid 

© PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU / AFP

The farmers marched from the Ministry of Ecological Transition to the Ministry of Agriculture after the European Union proposed legislative changes to drastically ease the environmental rules of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Friday.

Rallied by their trade union, farmers carried banners proclaiming "We are not delinquents" to the sound of horns and whistles. One decorated his tractor with a mock guillotine.

"It is as if they want to cut off our necks," said Marcos Baldominos explaining his guillotine.

"We are being suffocated by European rules," the farmer from Pozo de Guadalajara, 50 kilometres (30 miles) east of Madrid, added.

Friday's concessions in Brussels aimed to loosen compliance with some environment rules, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said.

While the move was welcomed by Spain’s left-wing government, some environmental NGOs criticised the measures.

"We are faced with a pile of bureaucratic rules that make us feel more like we are at an office than on a farm," the trade union behind Sunday’s march, Union de Uniones, said with reference to requirements "that many small and medium-sized farms" cannot "cope with".

Sunday marked the fourth demonstration in Madrid since the start of the wider European farm protest movement in mid-January.

© 2024 AFP

OPINION: Western Values Are Not Just Western, They Are Universal

Many of the Western ideals autocrats claim to reject are universal. Not only are the critics unable to offer an alternative, but they even go so far as to imitate the West.

By Charles Cockell
March 17, 2024, 

Protesters hold a Ukrainian flag and a placard during a demonstration in support of Ukraine, during a Foreign Affairs Council meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on January 23, 2023.

 John THYS / AFP

In this day and age, people feel reticent about saying that some Western values are universal. Very reasonably, it brings back unpleasant memories of missionaries and other Westerners traveling the world to enlighten the local savages in our civilized ways.

However, there are aspects of the Western world, and the values for which Ukraine fights, that I argue are universal.

For a start, despite the repudiation of the West and the criticism of our apparently untraditional values, it is an irony that Russia commits much effort to convincing its people that it adheres to one of the central precepts of modern Western civilization – an accountable executive branch of government determined by elections.

Indeed, Russia aside, it is a telling characteristic of many present-day autocracies that they clothe themselves in the garb of Western-style presidential elections. This is an explicit and unambiguous recognition that people want to choose who their leaders are, even when it is blindingly obvious that only one candidate is on offer.
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In the old days, dictatorships didn’t bother with that façade. I am your Emperor, get used to it. Then Western society came along, embraced the democratic ideas of ancient Greece and Rome, and some others besides, and built governments whose executive branch could be dismissed by the will of the people.

If you can’t criticize the structure of your democracy, it’s unlikely you have a functioning democracy at all

In the modern relatively educated world, there are very few people who will look you in the eye and tell you that they prefer to be ruled by a despot with unlimited power and who is never beholden to their authority being withdrawn. Democracy is accepted so ubiquitously that even modern dictatorships realize they must pretend to be doing it. In so doing, they negate themselves, but that doesn’t stop them from putting on the spectacle anyway.

OTHER TOPICS OF INTEREST
Accepting New Realities at Home and Abroad

Ukraine in the conditions of a protracted war and changes in the approaches of the US.

Beyond democratic principles, the ideas of freedom of conscience, speech, and religion, I would be bold enough to say, are universal. Of course, the extent to which they are implemented, where we draw the line in those freedoms, and what we even mean by them, is always something to debate. Yet most people agree that constructing an environment where we can argue about these issues makes for a better society. To put it simply, one of the most fundamental freedoms is the freedom to disagree on what we mean by freedom.

The reason why this is an ironclad concept is that society cannot advance unless we are willing to engage in discussion about its purposes and goals. We cannot open the field to improvements in social conditions unless we are keen to hear out people’s ideas. This is neither controversial nor an especially complicated thought.

In the legislative sphere, there are broad propositions that seem to meet a criterion of being universally agreed upon by reasonable people. One of them is that people who transgress the laws laid down by the democratically elected powers, which I have already mentioned, should receive humane treatment.

I can’t speak for others but let me say that not at a single time in my life has anyone said to me: “If I was to be arrested by the police, I’d like to be tortured and treated as a political prisoner.” It seems to me trivially the case that all members of the public, if they find themselves under the glare of society’s disapprobation, would at least like to be handled fairly.

Western society’s legal systems are hardly utopian, but in a general sense, our societies do make a conscious effort to strive towards impartiality. Any law student in a Western university, if they are worthy of their institution, considers the purpose of their education to be to learn how to become an impartial lawyer and to advance improvements in that tradition.

Indeed, I don’t think it would be hubris to say that the construction of such a legal system, assembled from the juridical branch of government, law courts, university training in law, and so forth, is one of the most stupendous achievements and intellectual edifices of Western civilization.

We have the Romans to thank for a lot of inspiration, but let’s not be demure about our own hard work to bring into being a system that, with all its imperfections, we should cherish and defend. Its ambitions in legal decency are as admirable as they are fundamentally universal.

Yet another tradition of the West is allowing the introspective criticism of the political and economic order. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently gave a speech in which he said: “We will no longer tolerate criticism of our democracy. Our democracy is the best.”

However, one feature of democracy, and one of its purposes, is to question itself and to discover whether it is indeed the best.

If you can’t criticize the structure of your democracy, it’s unlikely you have a functioning democracy at all, let alone discover impartially whether it is the best.

If you want proof of the universal reach of Western ideas, the evidence is in autocratic states that reject Western society, yet at the same time do their best to offer their people a mirage of Western-style democracy.

Western society isn’t a liberal, flower-festooned paradise. But largely, we do try to encourage critique; and it is noteworthy that this ability to self-criticize was one factor that led to the abolition of systematic slavery, a curse that blighted all human societies. Western society, in its imperfect and haphazard manner, does at least create educational institutions that allow for self-deprecation of its own systems of power.

I suggest that the foundations of Western society and the girders that hold it up are not especially Western. They have been designated as “Western” only because they have been trenchantly, and quite robustly, built here. But there is nothing intrinsically Western about them.

Seen at the larger geopolitical level, a belief in these things is what unites the democratic world, politically and militarily. When asking: “What is common to Western societies?” the answer is not: “We dislike this or that country.” It is that we place a high value on the ideas that I have suggested and we wish to defend them, without reference to other countries. We feel moved to help other countries aspiring to these ideals.

However, ask the same question of the alliance of the world’s current autocracies. If the answer is: “We oppose Western values,” then this is a non-answer. You must say what it is that you stand for, not what you are against. Other answers, like “We believe in a multipolar world” are equally nebulous.

These are veiled statements of opposition to the West rather than any manifesto for a better society with clear goals and unambiguous and honest arguments about the freedoms on offer.

I think the West should be less reticent about stating a view that many of the things we stand for are universal, not Western. This isn’t presumptuous. It’s the product of many centuries of trial and error and the result of much sacrifice and fighting to secure liberties and the dignity of the individual. We have sought to throw off the old habits of absolute rule and build open societies.

If you want some proof of the universal reach of so-called Western ideas, don’t look to Western society. The evidence is in autocratic states that reject Western society, yet at the same time do their best to offer their people a mirage, a palimpsest, of Western-style democracy.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Scottish childminder numbers almost halve in a decade

The number of childminders in Scotland has almost halved in just over a decade.

Scottish Labour obtained the figures in response to a written question at Holyrood.

The number of childminders dropped from just over 6,200 in December 2012 to 3,530 in December 2022. The latest data shows the figure has dropped further.

The government said it valued the role of childminders and was working to recruit and retain staff.

As of December last year there were 3,225 people working in the profession.

Warning of crisis in Scottish childminding sector

Nurseries warn of closure risk without new funding

Call for financial support for childminders

Scottish Labour's children's spokesman Martin Whitfield said: "The consistent decline in the number of childminders operating in Scotland over the past decade is proof positive that the SNP has failed families in Scotland.

"These figures paint a worrying picture of the erosion of vital childcare services in our communities."

He said childminders played a crucial role in supporting families and providing flexible, high-quality care for young children.

"Dwindling numbers of childminders will have serious implications for parents seeking childcare options and for the early years development of our children," he said.

"It's time to draw a line under a decade of failure and act to support families."
'Important work'

The Scottish government's promise to provide 1,140 hours of free childcare has been rolled out over the past decade.

Appearing before a Holyrood committee last year, Scottish Childminding Association chief executive Graeme McAllister said local councils had been slow to integrate childminders into the 1,140 hours policy, warning there needed to be "urgent action" to stem the tide of closures in the sector.

A Scottish government spokesperson said: "The Scottish government values the important work that childminders provide in communities and is committed to supporting and growing the sector.

"We want to attract 1,000 new childminders to the workforce and are working with the Scottish Childminding Association on a programme of recruitment and retention work, to ensure that more families have access to the unique and flexible experience of childcare that childminders can offer. We expect this programme to launch in spring.

"Through this programme, we also want to help ensure childminders are better supported with their workloads and to safeguard the long term future of childminding in Scotland."

Brady Calling Gun Control Forces to Focus on National Shooting Sports Foundation After NRA Verdict

GUN CONTROL IS AN ISSUE IN NOVEMBER

By Michael Clements

March 17, 2024The Epoch Times

Attendees check out pistols on display at the National Shooting Sports Foundation's annual Shooting, Hunting, Outdoors Trade (SHOT) Show in Las Vegas, Nev., on Jan. 23, 2024. (Michael Clements/The Epoch Times)

A national gun control organization is taking responsibility for the NRA’s legal problems, setting its sights on a firearms industry trade organization, and calling on people to join its fight.

In a March 14 email, Brady—formerly The Brady Campaign—is soliciting signatures on a petition for Congress to pass more gun control laws to end the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF).

Neither Brady nor the NRA responded to emails requesting comments on this story.

Mark Oliva, Managing Director of Public Affairs for the NSSF, said he is not surprised by the email. He said Brady is only one of several groups assaulting Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

“I think, if anything, [the email] is a testament to the effectiveness of NSSF and our ability to advocate for our industry,” Mr. Oliva told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Oliva expects anti-gun groups to continue, and even intensify their attacks. The Brady email indicates he is correct.

“The National Shooting Sports Foundation … is the firearm industry’s biggest trade group … and, as the NRA crumbles in disgrace, they are poised to take on [the NRA’s] deadly ‘guns everywhere’ agenda,” the Brady email reads.

The NRA has had many public issues in the past several years. Allegations of corruption, infighting, and misuse of funds soured many former members of the organization that billed itself as “America’s oldest civil rights organization.”

As membership declined, the group’s political enemies found chinks in the NRA’s political armor.

Last February, a New York jury found Wayne LaPierre, former CEO and face of the NRA for decades, liable in a civil case. He must pay $4.3 million in damages for the mismanagement and misuse of charitable funds.

The verdict resulted from a civil lawsuit brought by the New York Attorney General’s Office, accusing Mr. LaPierre and the NRA of questionable financial and administration practices during his tenure from 2014 to 2022. Mr. LaPierre, who had resigned weeks before the verdict, and the NRA said the lawsuit was a political witch hunt meant to kill the NRA.

“A parade of NRA witnesses and independent experts established that the NRA was the victim of actions that were pursued in secrecy and not in the interests of the association—by former vendors and fiduciaries,” NRA counsel William A. Brewer III said.

The Brady email hailed the verdict as a result of its work and called on Brady supporters to turn their attention to the NSSF.

“Luckily, we at Brady know how to fight the NSSF because we’ve been fighting the NRA for years, and we’re seeing the disgraceful end of their organization play out because of our dedicated work. We may know their tricks, but we’re going to need all the support we can get if we’re going to overcome another extremist gun lobby group, and that’s why I’m reaching out today,” reads the email written under the name Kris Brown, President of Brady.

The email doesn’t specify how Brady assisted New York Attorney General Letitia James. But, it does provide a list of its complaints against the NSSF.

According to the email, the NSSF spends millions of dollars lobbying on behalf of the gun industry. The email says the NSSF opposes universal background checks, state laws to allow lawsuits against gunmakers whose products are used in the commission of a crime, and has branded President Joe Biden as “waging war on the Second Amendment.”

Mr. Oliva said the email contains tiny bits of truth while leaving out significant facts.

When it comes to background checks, he said groups like Brady are late to the party.

“I think it’s important for everyone to understand that the firearms industry was actually the progenitor. We came up with the point-of-sale background check system,” Mr. Oliva said.

According to Mr. Oliva, this resulted in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

He added that NSSF came up with the Fix-NICS plan after it was clear that not all states were sending relevant records to the FBI for NICS. This resulted in federal legislation to make the background check system truly keep guns out of the wrong hands, he said.

“Brady had nothing to do with that,” Mr. Oliva said.

Making a Right a Reality

As for the other points, Mr. Oliva said it boils down to the NSSF working on behalf of an industry that makes the Second Amendment more than a political ideology. He said he stands behind his work and the claims that the Biden Administration is working to stifle a Constitutional Right.

He pointed to the recently established White House Office for the Prevention of Gun Violence, staffed by long-time gun-control advocates, as proof of his claims.

He said the exercise of the Second Amendment begins at the gun store counter. He vowed to continue his work.

“You would not have the ability to keep and bear arms if you didn’t have the ability to approach the gun counter and buy one legally,” he said. “I’m not going to apologize, and NSSF will not apologize for our effectiveness.”

COMMENTARY

Facing three global crises, the American empire may be nearing final collapse

Joe Biden is already struggling to manage wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with China waiting for its moment

By ALFRED MCCOY
SALON
PUBLISHED MARCH 17, 2024 

Joe Biden | A view of damaged houses as Russia-Ukraine war continues in Dolyna, Ukraine on March 13, 2024.

 (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

Related

America in 2024: Blind, blundering Colossus on a downward slide

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S. and Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

In 1994, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Bill Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999); three onetime Soviet republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Barack Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

Between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach … [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the U.S. (even as Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the Times of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On Oct. 18, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichaean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s-length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul and Dakar, among other places.

Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world, and weakened his domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African Americans nationwide and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated ceasefire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force … that would jeopardize the security … of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the U.S. would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The sum of three crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.


ALFRED MCCOY  is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power." His new book is "To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change."