Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guest will be James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee. Last week he offered a proposal for how to replace President Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. We’ll talk about the pressure inside the party on Biden to bow out, and what might happen if he does.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
The transcript of Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Rabea Eghbariah talks about why the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews tried to censor his article on the Nakba as a legal concept.
Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.
A long and fascinating interview with Rashid Khalidi in The New Left Review.
Olivia Nuzzi on the conspiracy of silence to conceal Biden’s decline.
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
It seems pretty clear at this point, to me, that Joe Biden is probably not going to be the Democratic nominee, that there’s been a kind of a tipping point that’s gonna play out in the days to come. And I almost—almost—feel a little bad for Biden because he wasn’t that bad in the George Stephanopoulos interview on Friday compared to the debate. He was, actually, I think significantly better. But people now realize they’re judging him on such a low bar and have so little faith that he can come back and defeat Donald Trump.
And I think the media is in a kind of remorse because they didn’t actually put more pressure on this question earlier in the reporting, has now swung into in a direction where they’re basically just nitpicking every single phrase, looking for some signs of mental decline that I just don’t see how this is sustainable. And I think that’s a good thing. I think the Democrats are a lot better off rolling the dice, and at least giving themselves a chance of beating Donald Trump since I just don’t see how Joe Biden could change the dynamics of this race and make it a race about Trump because it is now really a race about his fitness to serve. And even many of the people who tend to agree with him ideologically just don’t think he is.
But what I thought was interesting about the Stephanopoulos interview that’s gotten less attention was less what it revealed about Biden’s mental decline in the kind of how old he is, but more just about the way his thinking is very old. And I think this is a problem that still hasn’t gotten enough attention. This is a man who, I think, when he thinks about America’s relationship with the world, is really in a Cold War paradigm that I’ve always thought was very, very dangerous, and since the war in Gaza just seems to me even more so.
So, in that interview, when he was trying to tell George Stephanopoulos why he had been a good president and why Americans needed to reelect him, if you notice the thing that Biden kept coming back to again and again—he mentioned it six times—is NATO. He says, ‘I was the guy that expanded NATO.’ He talked about what he’s doing in Europe with regard to expansion of NATO. ‘I’m the guy that put NATO together,’ he says. ‘I’m doing a hell of a lot of other things, like wars around the world, like keeping NATO together. Who’s gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?’
He talks about NATO again and again and again. And it seems to me somewhat disconnected from reality. Where is the chorus of people in America who want to be expanding NATO? I think, morally, the case for defending Ukraine was a very strong case. But it’s really clear at this point that that policy on Ukraine has not really been a success. Maybe it was a success initially in preventing the Russians from taking Kyiv. But the sanctions have not basically been able to get Russia to stop this war. And Ukraine is closer to losing than it is to winning. And there’s gonna have to be some peace agreement that’s probably gonna leave Ukraine worse off than it was before this war.
And so, I think that this notion that what he’s falling back on again is the fact that they kept pushing NATO forward rather than, in retrospect, thinking that maybe actually some kind of negotiation with the Russians—at least in retrospect—might have been a better deal just to me suggests a disconnection from reality, and a way in which this Cold War kind of great power competition really dominates Biden’s way of thinking about what his purpose is as president.
And he also talks that way about China. He talks about the South Pacific Initiative with AUKUS. This is with, you know, the United Kingdom and Australia to get them these better nuclear submarines. And he says, ‘we’re checkmating China now.’ He never mentions climate change. He is a Democratic president. When he’s talking about the most important issues, and he actually does have some accomplishments on climate change, he never mentions that. He never mentions the word Gaza. He does say he has a peace agreement that’s coming with the Middle East. But this, again, seems to me like completely delusional, right? This notion that there’s gonna be some peace agreement that’s gonna bring us towards a Palestinian state when the Israeli government is vehemently opposed to it, and when the Biden administration is not willing to hear any pressure to make it happen, right.
So, to me what struck me about this interview that made me even more, you know, relieved that I think we may be headed toward a new nominee is that a new nominee could rethink this paradigm that Joe Biden is not just old in terms of, you know, his age, and is not just experiencing mental decline, but his paradigm for America’s role in the world is so much a kind of repeat of the Cold War with this kind of moral Manicheanism between America and its enemies, in which the world is just automatically a better place when America has more power. And it’s just assumed that America is standing for these values like, you know, the rule of the international liberal order and these kind of things, even when the war in Gaza that America’s support of has made a complete mockery of that now in the eyes of so many people, and in which it’s more and more obvious that climate change, not geopolitical competition, is the existential threat to the world, and that that needs stronger international cooperation and international institutions.
Now, this is not what Trump is saying, of course. But Trump, in a way at least, is recognizing and responding to—even, you know, in his kind of horrific and disastrous ways—the sense that Americans have that actually they don’t want to be fighting another cold war, right? That they want a less-costly form of intervention around the world, even though, again, he has no moral code, and though he doesn’t recognize climate change and all these things. But there is at least a possibility, I think, that a new nominee—a younger nominee, less formed by the set of experiences that Biden has been formed by, perhaps with a different set of advisors—might think anew a little bit about America’s role in the world, about the war, about the relationship with Israel, about the war in Gaza, and with a less Cold War-driven view of foreign policy. And that would be a kind of change that would mean not only that we’re getting someone who is younger and had more energy and who is mentally sharper, but I think someone who is more in touch with the genuine threats and the genuine realities that America faces in the world today.
