US midterms expose the West’s leadership crisis
This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
On the morning of Tuesday 16 October 1962, John F Kennedy received McGeorge Bundy, friend of the President and national security adviser. The day before, the CIA had concluded reconnaissance photographs taken from a U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba showed the Soviet Union in the process of installing medium-range nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States. Bundy broke the news to Kennedy. The administration went straight into crisis mode.
How would Kennedy choose to respond to a move by the Soviets that risked turning the Cold War into a hot war, a conflict that could go nuclear? The President formed EXCOMM, an emergency executive committee of the National Security Council with additional advisers, and asked for options. Their meetings were recorded and the transcripts show they discussed everything from inaction, or diplomacy, through to a full invasion of Cuba by US forces.
The line-up of EXCOMM included Lyndon Johnson, Vice President, along with Dean Rusk, Secretary of State, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The President’s brother Bobby Kennedy, as Attorney General, was a member, as was Bundy, and Dean Acheson, the veteran former Secretary of State from the Truman administration.
There was a history of tension between Kennedy and the military top brass. The historian Robert Dallek, Kennedy biographer, attributed it to the senior military viewing young Kennedy as being too weak to press the nuclear button. In turn, Kennedy was appalled at the scope the military had to start a nuclear war, by accident or design, without adequate oversight.
According to Dallek, writing in 2013 in The Atlantic, when earlier in the administration Bundy asked the Joint Chiefs’ staff director for a copy of the blueprint for nuclear war there was a chilling exchange: “The general at the other end of the line said, “We never release that.” Bundy explained, “I don’t think you understand. I’m calling for the president and he wants to see [it].”
As Dallek says, no wonder the military didn’t want the mere President knowing about their Joint Strategic Capabilities plan in the event of a war with the Soviet Union. It envisaged 170 atomic and hydrogen bombs being used on Moscow alone, along with the flattening of Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern European cities. Hundreds of millions would die. Says Dallek: “Sickened by a formal briefing on the plan, Kennedy turned to a senior administration official and said, ‘And we call ourselves the human race’.”
During the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy pushed back when presented with plans to bomb Cuba. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force, said to Kennedy’s face that his reluctance was a mistake as bad as the appeasement of Hitler at Munich. An astonished Kennedy rejected the claim.
On this occasion, cool-headed Kennedy’s more cautious approach turned out to be right and his chosen course of action was vindicated. There was a deal and deescalation. The Soviet Union removed the missiles in return for NATO reciprocating in Turkey. The Cuban missile crisis, sixty years ago this year, did not turn into a nuclear war, thanks to Kennedy and on that occasion, at that crucial juncture for humanity, his good judgment .
Six decades later, how does US leadership today compare in a global crisis? The list of names convened by Kennedy on EXCOMM – Johnson, McNamara, Bobby Kennedy, Rusk, Acheson and more – tells its own story about the capabilities of the post-second World War generation and the contrast with now. While JFK had his flaws, well-documented, in his key moment in history he was intellectually curious, level-headed and realistic. Result, no nuclear war.
Today, with a potential war over Taiwan in prospect, even the few remaining supporters of Joe Biden could not claim plausibly he is in anything other than cognitive decline. This is not an observation related to his speech patterns. He has long, bravely, battled a stutter and shown nervousness when in front of cameras. Something else is in play now. His answers to basic questions are odd and littered with elementary confusion about the facts.
All this when the West is fighting a proxy war in Ukraine and the totalitarian Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears to be accelerating his plans to deal with Taiwan and start a conflagration that could spread to drag in the US, Japan and South Korea, and their allies, including the UK.
It should be clear by now that the invasion of Ukraine was not a blip, a short-term emergency. We’re in a war era, one that requires measured statecraft and sophisticated judgment of the kind Kennedy displayed over Cuba, or President Harry Truman when he courted public unpopularity and declined to escalate the Korean War in quite the way the military demanded. Instead of Kennedy, Truman or Reagan, we are in an incredibly dangerous period with the fulcrum of the West, the US, led by a failing Biden with Donald Trump’s return on the horizon.
In that troubling international context, America votes this week with inflation rampant and crime soaring. It seems likely – as Andrew Neil described it in the Daily Mail on Saturday – that the Republicans will take back the Senate as well as storming the House. As Andrew Sullivan put it on his Substack newsletter, Biden’s team has behaved appallingly, winning in 2020 by appealing to centrists to stop Trump and since then siding with the “defund the police” unmoored from reality far left that has taken over the Democratic Party, just as Trump populists have taken over the Republican Party. The American centre has been hollowed out.
If defeat for the Democrats is the outcome this week, Biden becomes a lame duck president waiting for a general election in 2024. In that election, could he really stand? If he doesn’t, his Vice President Kamala Harris would be a disastrous choice, and it is unclear there is anyone else credible available.
Mercifully, what for all its flaws might be termed the American permanent state – the military and intelligence establishment – has in spite of these excitements since Trump and Biden persisted quietly with a strong defence of the West. Trump threatened he would abandon NATO, while the US commitment to eastern Europe actually increased in that period. The US has set aside more than $50bn of military aid to Ukraine since the invasion. But how long before voices are raised saying the emphasis should instead be on hoarding resources and weaponry for the potential coming conflict with China?
Muddling through is all very well. At some point in this existential struggle, against totalitarian states with nuclear weapons, it might help if the dominant power in the cause of freedom produced a new President capable of leading convincingly. American friends, please hurry up.
Has the media lost the plot?
It was the Reaction annual dinner in support of our Young Journalists Programme last week, generously supported by companies and individuals who bought tables and hosted by our chairman Lord Salisbury. The funds raised are ring-fenced to provide paid internships, and training and mentoring.
When a small group of us founded Reaction in 2016, at the heart of it were the ideas that good journalism is more important than ever and helping the next generation of journalists matters. The media and the economic model of journalism has been turned upside down by the tech giants in the last 15 years or so. Many of the opportunities that were available when I started in the industry have been shut off, or reduced. The local and regional newspaper training route is not nearly as available as it once was. Many of those publications have withered or closed.
There are only a few thriving large publishers with trainee schemes. At Reaction – a boutique media company – we decided to do what we could to create more opportunities.
If you would like to help next year in any way, when we hope to expand the programme, email me and we’ll talk.
Our star guest speaker at dinner last week was asked if the contemporary media has grown addicted to outrage and scandal. He pointed out the press in Britain for several centuries has specialised in raucous coverage and cartoons chronicling public life and political shenanigans.
This is true and a fair point. Still, I can’t shake the thought something terrible has happened to parts of the media in Britain, and elsewhere, that is peculiar and new, driven by high-speed social media and changing patterns of news production.
The old filter between political reporters, the publication and the reader has been abolished, or at least blurred. In the olden days, and I remember this as a former political editor, you had to negotiate several times a day with the news desk, usually run by hacks who were not political obsessives. They had to list stuff for morning or afternoon conference, to be presented to the editor for consideration. Get too far into the weeds – we’re told she said X has failed to report Y, and then Z responded Y has been mean to X – and the desk would say something along the lines of “this is Westminster bollocks, got anything substantial I can list?”
Now, pretty much at anyone in the Westminster reporting eco system can go straight to Twitter and produce a twenty tweet thread hailing the new “massive crisis” which will, understandably, be retweeted by opponents of the target and appalled observers who hate the government, opposition or everyone in general associated with public life. Round and round it goes, ever faster and faster.
The best political correspondents and newspapers are still mindful of the need for perspective. Not everyone is. On Twitter it is common to see baffling stories and fights branded as massive crises by political reporters when they are actually quite boring and confusing. The PM leaving in disgrace, then the monarch passing, then a new PM blowing up? Now, that’s worthy of the name “national crisis”.
Perhaps it is no surprise. So much has happened so quickly in British politics, from Brexit, through Covid, Johnson, Truss and now Sunak, that many people in the system are used to everything being a crisis. We’re high on permacrisis.
In comparison, much of what has followed since the chaotic departure of Liz Truss seems inherently ridiculous or small when there is a war on. I have tried, in vain, to follow the Suella Braverman row. The Home Secretary was reappointed by new PM Rishi Sunak, after she was forced to resign over a security breach, shortly before he became PM. I’m a not a Braverman fan, at all. She seems to have a cartoonish understanding of complex problems. I’ll admit though I cannot make head nor tail of the row since she was reappointed. It involves lots of people on Twitter shouting, while the real scandal seems to be the epic failure of British state capacity in dealing with a wave of migration via small boats across the Channel, a problem it may be impossible to solve in this age of mass migration.
I am not claiming any special wisdom or exalted classification for my own journalism or that of my colleagues. I’m sure I’ve leapt on to Twitter too often of late, particularly when they tried the bonkers idea of bringing back Boris Johnson. But something has made politics and media speed up these last few years, and become even more intense and hysterical. If there are better candidates for blame than the prevalence of smartphone technology, instant communication and the fight for survival by the contemporary media, I don’t know what they are.
Counting with Carney
One of the weirdest of the many weird aspects of post-Brexit Britain has been the way in which some of those on opposite sides of the debate have come bit by bit to behave like their opponents, or in ways they began this odyssey condemning.
The anti-Brexit crowd began in 2016 making the perfectly justified and legitimate criticism that the Vote Leave gang played fast and loose with numbers. As someone who was for leaving the EU, I remember on the Beeb acknowledging mid-campaign that the claim of £350m extra for the NHS was a distortion, a deliberate device to force Remain to respond and lodge the idea in the imagination of the voters. Vote Leave was wrong to do this.
This came back to mind when Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and anti-Brexiteer, stuck by his claim the other day. The UK economy was before Brexit 90% the size of the German economy and it is now 70% of the German economy, he said. As critics observed, among them pro-Remain economists, this number is arrived at using currency fluctuations. Currencies are important but they are not really, at least on a short or medium term basis, a useful or accurate way of measuring the relative wealth of nations. Apply the Carney currency formula to Japan in a period of dollar strength and it has become 20% poorer than the US since Easter this year. Has it really? Of course not.
The Brexit wars have messed with people’s brains on both sides of the argument, among them some of the very grandest. A former central banker, an intelligent and highly educated finance professional, goes on broadcast media, says this stuff about Brexit as though it’s credible and then refuses to concede it’s naughty. Why?
This week
I’m taking a few days off later this week and this coming weekend to go to the rugby and generally do nothing involving British politics or journalism. This newsletter returns after that, by which time Britain’s Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will have delivered the latest “fiscal event”. Hopefully, this one will not be quite as exciting or disruptive as the Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss special in September.
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