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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was forced to send everyone packing on Wednesday evening, after roughly 11 members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus voted down a procedural measure on Tuesday that would have allowed several Republican bills to come to the floor for votes.

The Washington Post reports that dissenting lawmakers are angry over a deal McCarthy struck with President Biden last week to raise the debt ceiling, claiming Republicans "got rolled" in the compromise.

The battle puts McCarthy in a particularly difficult position. Any concession to the far-right risks alienating more moderate Republicans, some of whom are already very publicly frustrated with the mutiny in their ranks.

“This is, in my opinion, political incontinence on our part. We are wetting ourselves […] and can’t do anything about it,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) told the Washington Post. “This is insane. This is not the way a governing majority is expected to behave, and, frankly, I think there’ll be a political cost to it.”

The Republican caucus is raucous over the debt ceiling deal struck between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden.

Some representatives have gone so far as to float the idea of using the vacate motion to try and remove McCarthy as speaker if this deal manages to go through. GOP sources told TAC that if someone were to move forward with a motion to vacate the chair, there would likely be enough votes to reignite the fight over Speaker of the House.

This is the week House Speaker Kevin McCarthy realized he was pinned down. A handful of his fellow Republicans had effectively taken the House floor hostage and were not quite ready to have a real negotiation. They wanted time to air their grievances. Rather than continue an active standoff for a third day or a worse outcome, the still-learning-the-job Speaker decided to pack it in for now, regroup in private over the now-unexpectedly-long weekend, and try to find detente with the far-right faction of his party before the lawmakers return next week.

“There’s a little chaos going on,” McCarthy acknowledged to reporters Wednesday evening, wrapping up a second day of stalemate. The whispers of a coming vote to boot the Speaker were spreading beyond the dozen or so Republicans who had been talking about it for weeks, the same group who were now openly defying McCarthy by holding up—and this is where it becomes Very Washington—legislation that they themselves actually support.

If House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has one defining trait, it’s his eagerness to please. He has used this acumen to compensate for his lack of policy wonkery and other skills associated with being an effective congressional leader.

When he led Republicans in California’s state legislature, he earned a reputation as someone who would keep his word with Democrats when the legislature needed to get a bill across the finish line.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has a blunt message for House GOP moderates: Impeach President Joe Biden or face a fierce backlash from voters next year.

“What’s going to hurt them is not supporting articles of impeachment,” Greene, the Georgia firebrand, told CNN.

As conservatives continue to snarl the House floor in protest, centrists are taking their turn to squeeze Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Behind closed doors on Wednesday, McCarthy’s No. 2 and No. 3 briefed about a dozen Republicans — mostly battleground-seat members — on their plan to take up two bills next week: Rep. Andrew Clyde’s (R-Ga.) bid to nix a Biden administration gun regulation and a separate proposal bill to strengthen limits on taxpayer funding for abortion.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) encouraged House Republicans to vote against Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) resolution to force a vote to impeach President Joe Biden this week, just days after Boebert and others in the Freedom Caucus ground legislating to a halt to get even with McCarthy for making a debt ceiling deal with the President, CNN reported.

In a closed door meeting on Wednesday, McCarthy told his caucus that it is not the right time to impeach Biden. He argued that Republicans should let ongoing committee investigations play out before voting on an impeachment article, adding that jumping ahead could threaten their ability to hold onto their slim majority in the next election.

At least two hardline representatives in the House Freedom Caucus have floated the idea of "purging" members who no longer meet the group's standards to Chair Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., as the group's internal tensions rise, three anonymous Republicans with knowledge of the discussions told Politico.

While the members who suggested the ousters did not declare who they'd like to remove, they have indicated that one potential target is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga, an ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. Some caucus members have honed in on Greene as an example of their concerns that certain members have grown too close to GOP leadership and too outwardly critical of the group when it disagrees.

House Republicans on Thursday neutered an effort to impeach President Biden, punting the resolution to a pair of committees and avoiding — for now — a politically perilous vote that threatened to split the GOP and undermine the party’s various investigations into the White House.

The 219-208 party-line vote ends a two-day clash between GOP leaders and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), a conservative firebrand who stunned Washington on Tuesday by introducing a procedural measure to force a floor vote on her impeachment articles despite the objection of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Speaker Kevin McCarthy's bid to appease Republican hard-liners and get the House moving again after a recent party rebellion on the floor has some Democrats warning of a difficult road ahead when it comes to passing legislation that will keep the government running.

Republicans teed up votes this past week on guns and on censuring one of former President Donald Trump's most prominent critics, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. Those votes helped get the House moving again, though the latter effort failed, with Schiff helped by some 20 Republicans.

I’ve lived through disease outbreaks, and in the previous chapter I showed just how unprepared we are to face a widespread pandemic of flu or another new pathogen like SARS. But a deliberate outbreak caused by an engineered pathogen would be far worse. We would face the same agonizing decisions that must be made during a natural pandemic: whether to ban travel from affected regions, how to keep overburdened hospitals working as the rolls of the sick grew, how to accelerate the development and distribution of vaccines and drugs. To that dire list add the terror that would spread once it became clear that the death and disease in our midst was not the random work of nature, but a deliberate act of malice. We’re scared of disease outbreaks and we’re scared of terrorism—put them together and you have a formula for chaos.

As deadly and as disruptive as a conventional bioterror incident would be, an attack that employed existing pathogens could only spread so far, limited by the same laws of evolution that circumscribe natural disease outbreaks. But a virus engineered in a lab to break those laws could spread faster and kill quicker than anything that would emerge out of nature. It can be designed to evade medical countermeasures, frustrating doctors’ attempts to diagnose cases and treat patients. If health officials manage to stamp out the outbreak, it could be reintroduced into the public again and again. It could, with the right mix of genetic traits, even wipe us off the planet, making engineered viruses a genuine existential threat.

The first argument is easily disposed of. Yes, the postwar world has been thoroughly imperfect, featuring nuclear arms races, genocides, widespread poverty and other scourges. But the world has always been imperfect, and by any meaningful comparison, the last seven decades have been a veritable golden age.

The liberal international economic order has led to an explosion of domestic and global prosperity: According to World Bank data, both U.S. and global per capita income have increased roughly three-fold (in inflation-adjusted terms) since 1960, with U.S. gross domestic product increasing nearly six-fold. The U.S. system of alliances and forward military deployments has contributed critically to the longest period of great-power peace in modern history, and the incidence of war and conquest more broadly have dropped dramatically. The number of democracies in the world has increased from perhaps a dozen during World War II to well over 100 today; respect for basic human rights has also reached impressive levels.

The future feels more threatening and ominous than ever. The sense of doom and gloom is deepening, not least in the West. The daily news headlines do not help. We are told that tensions between the US and North Korea, Iran, Russia or China could flare-up into a global conflagration.

We are informed that the rise of AI will eliminate most jobs and potentially humans. We are witnessing how social media is dividing societies and undermining liberal democracy. And we are reminded almost hourly about how climate change is leading to mass extinction.

The second thing to note about this vision of friendly fortresses is that it has been tried—and it failed spectacularly. All attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide. When the heirs of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Mickiewicz managed to overthrow the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, it proved impossible to find a clear line dividing Italians from Slovenes or Poles from Ukrainians.

This had set the stage for the second world war. The key problem with the network of fortresses is that each national fortress wants a bit more land, security and prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors, and without the help of universal values and global organisations, rival fortresses cannot agree on any common rules. Walled fortresses are seldom friendly.

The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known for decades, and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power rivalry could lead to great-power war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history.

Both Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington.35 In Syria, U.S. and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S. troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the corresponding potential for escalation.36 The world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of great-power struggle, with all the associated dangers.

It is no longer hard to see that the rising power and the mounting pugnaciousness of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have become a comprehensive challenge for the United States. China’s Machiavellian policies and actions at home and abroad have turned an otherwise naturally complementary Sino-American economic relationship into a near zero-sum, if not already a zero-sum, competition for market, jobs, technology, and financial primacy. Beijing now openly flexes its new muscles in its neighborhood and beyond to resist, reduce, and replace American leadership and presence everywhere possible, seeking to undermine the U.S.-led international economic order and American-anchored collective security arrangements. The PRC has been burning billions, for example, hoping to replace the U.S. dollar with the over-printed Chinese Renminbi (RMB). Extraordinarily heavy extraction of its own economy, the world’s second largest, and its enormous foreign currency reserve resulting from the gross imbalance in U.S.-China trade have enabled the PRC to massively expand its military. That military is already the world’s second largest; its navy, for example, is projected to soon surpass the U.S. Navy in fleet tonnage. At the same time, massive but opaque spending sprees has allowed the PRC to actively procure power and proxies even inside the United States, positioning Beijing to reshape international opinions and norms more easily than ever.

What is less known, perhaps, is that the rising PRC state also seeks an overhaul of the very world order that has enabled the greatest advances of human civilization over the past few centuries – the Westphalian system of nation-states. This world order was codified in the 17th century, expanded to a global scale in the 20th century, and now is in its post-World War II and post-Cold War iteration — the so-called America-led Liberal International Order (LIO). The rise of Chinese power, under the autocracy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is not just contesting U.S. national security and American global leadership but also the existing world order. Never since the heyday of the Cold War has the world seen such a full challenge to the United States and to the Westphalian system.

It all sounds so sensible. The problem is that, after decades of living within the protective bubble of the liberal world order, we have forgotten what the world “as it is” looks like. To believe that the quarter-century after the Cold War has been a disaster is to forget what disaster means in world affairs.

Which other quarter-century would we prefer? The first quarter of the 20th century included World War I and the birth of communism and fascism. The second saw the triumph of Hitler and Stalin, the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, World War II and the invention and use of nuclear weapons. Even the quarter-century beginning in 1950 included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, three Arab-Israeli Wars and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The liberal world order is under assault. Polls suggest an American ambivalence about upholding the rules-based global system. Populists are besieging governing elites in the West while Russia works strategically to destabilize European and American governments through propaganda and proxies. A rising China wants to create a global system that is not U.S.-centric, one in which smaller powers defer to bigger ones and norms of democracy and rule of law do not prevail. Meanwhile, the U.S. alliance system looks adrift while competitors in China and Russia appear to be on the march. If it holds, this trend could produce a spheres-of-influence world — which many, including the current presidents of the United States, China, and Russia, find intuitively attractive. But were such an order to replace one based on global integration and American leadership in the geopolitical cockpits of Europe and Asia, it would only engender insecurity and conflict. In a spheres-of-influence world, great powers order their regions. The United States would go back to a “Monroe Doctrine” version of grand strategy; Russia would dominate the former Soviet space; China would govern East Asia, and India South Asia. The problem with this kind of order, however, is several-fold. Too many spheres overlap in ways that would generate conflict rather than clean lines of responsibility. Japan would oppose Chinese suzerainty in East Asia, including by developing nuclear weapons; India and China would compete vigorously in Southeast Asia; Russia and China would contest the resources and loyalties of Central Asia; Europe and Russia would clash over primacy of Central and Eastern Europe. The Middle East would be an even more likely arena for hot war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and Turkey would contest regions also claimed by Russia, Europe, and possibly China. Russia, like the Soviet Empire before it, would keep pushing west until it met enough hard power to stop it. A spheres of influence world would also sharpen great power competition outside of each region. Regional hegemony is a springboard for global contestation. China would be more likely to challenge the United States out-of-area if it had subdued strategic competition in its own region. Russia, like the Soviet Empire before it, would keep pushing west until it met enough hard power to stop it. (The fact that Russian troops marched through Paris during the Napoleonic Wars demonstrates that the limits of Russian power need not be confined to the former Warsaw Pact). American leaders have long understood that a “Fortress America” approach is a source of national insecurity. Franklin Roosevelt made this case in a series of “fireside chats” in the run-up to America’s participation in World War II — even before the advent of the far more sophisticated power-projection technologies that exist today. Roosevelt and his generals well understood that the United States could not be safe if hostile powers controlled Europe and Asia, despite the wide oceans separating North America from both theaters. A spheres-of-influence world would also crack up the integrated global economy that underlies the miracle in human welfare that has lifted billions out of poverty in past decades. It would replicate the exclusive economic blocs of the 1930s, including an East Asia “co-prosperity sphere,” seeding conflict and undercutting prosperity. A real-world and real-time example of what happens when American power retreats in an effort to encourage regional powers to solve their own problems is the mess in Syria. It has produced the greatest refugee crisis since 1945 — a stain on the consciousness of human civilization — and has led many to conclude that the Middle Eastern order of states dating to the end of World War 1 is collapsing. President Obama pursued an express policy of retracting American military power from the Middle East, including withdrawing all troops from Iraq and refusing to intervene militarily when President Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, despite a red-line injunction from the United States not to do so. Obama and his White House political advisors believed that American withdrawal from the Arab Middle East (if not from the ironclad U.S. commitment to Israel) would lead a new balance of power to form, one policed by regional powers rather than by America. This flawed, amoral, and un-strategic approach has led to a series of hot wars — in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen — the collapse of Arab allies’ confidence in the United States as an ally, as well as an intensified cold war with Iran. Despite the international agreement freezing Iran’s nuclear program, Iran’s support for terrorism and hostile insurgencies targeting American allies across its region actually intensified during this period. A spheres-of-influence world leaves weaker states to become the victims of stronger or more aggressive ones, and it seeds insecurity by removing the reassuring variable of American military guarantees and presence This experience underlines a core problem with a spheres-of-influence world. It leaves weaker states to become the victims of stronger or more aggressive ones, and it seeds insecurity by removing the reassuring variable of American military guarantees and presence. It emboldens American adversaries and leads American allies to take self-help measures that themselves may undercut American security interests. A spheres-of-influence world would also produce contestation of the open global commons that are the basis for the unprecedented prosperity produced by the liberal international economic order. Should the Indian and Pacific Oceans, or the Arctic and Mediterranean Seas, become arenas of great-power conflict (like the South China Sea already has thanks to China’s militarization and unilateral assertion of sovereignty over it) as leading states seek to incorporate them into their privileged zones of control, economic globalization would collapse, harming the economies of every major power. The United States, because of its sheer power and resource base as well as its relative geographical isolation, might do OK in a spheres-of-influence world. Most of America’s friends and allies would not. Their weakening and insecurity would in turn render the United States weaker and more insecure — since U.S. allies are force-multipliers for American hard and soft power, and since norms like freedom of the global commons are in fact underwritten by that power. More broadly, such a transition would also likely lead to the kind of hot wars that reorder the international balance of power, including by incentivizing aggressive states to push out and assert regional dominion, knowing that America does not have the will or interest to oppose them. The fact that U.S. competitors such as Russia, China, and Iran — all of whom want to weaken the American-led world order — would welcome a spheres-of-influence world is another reason for Americans to oppose it. It would also be ironic if the United States were to back away from its historic commitment to shaping a world that is an idealized vision of America itself — one ruled by laws, norms, institutions, markets, and peaceful settlement of disputes.

The question is not whether the United States is still capable of prevailing in a global confrontation, either hot or cold, with China or any other revisionist power. It is. The real question is whether the worst kinds of hostilities can be avoided, whether China and other powers can be encouraged to pursue their aims peacefully, to confine the global competition to the economic and political realms and thus spare themselves and the world from the horrors of the next great war or even the still frightening confrontations of another cold war.

The United States cannot avoid such crises by continuing to adhere to a nineteenth-century view of its national interest. Doing that would produce what it produced in the past: periods of indifference and retrenchment followed by panic, fear, and sudden mobilization. Already, Americans are torn between these two impulses. On the one hand, China now occupies that place in the American mind that Germany and the Soviet Union once held: an ideological opponent that has the ability to strike at American society directly and that has power and ambitions that threaten the United States’ position in a key region and perhaps everywhere else, too. On the other hand, many Americans believe that the United States is in decline and that China will inevitably come to dominate Asia. Indeed, the self-perceptions of the Americans and the Chinese are perfectly symmetrical. The Chinese think that the United States’ role in their region for the past 75 years has been unnatural and is therefore transient, and so do the Americans. The Chinese believe that the United States is in decline, and so do many Americans. The danger is that as Beijing ramps up efforts to fulfill what it has taken to calling “the Chinese dream,” Americans will start to panic. It is in times like this that miscalculations are made.