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We hope Senators will see this historic confirmation process as an opportunity for bipartisanship and unity, in a time too often devoid of both. The confirmation of lower federal court nominees over the past year has been an encouraging vestige of bipartisanship and this confirmation should be no different. On the heels of the last three Supreme Court confirmation processes, which made a mockery of the Senate’s “advice and consent” responsibility, we look forward to a process that is respectful of Senate norms and the nominee. This hope is especially warranted considering Judge Jackson was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit with a bipartisan vote less than a year ago. Our democracy is confronting a moment of truth, torn between succumbing to autocracy and forging a genuinely multiracial democracy. The Supreme Court is at the center of this inflection point, with the ability to preserve the guardrails of democracy or to continue its systemic erosion of our rights and liberties. This moment underscores the importance of this nomination, of a nominee with a proven track record of upholding constitutional rights and safeguarding the rule of law. We look forward to heralding Judge Jackson’s impact and contribution to the Court and to our country for years to come.”2

What are the consequences of the current wave of autocratization? Research has clear answers to this question. First and foremost, autocratization paves the way for more (and bloodier) conflicts. According to Kant’s idea of perpetual peace, democracies do not attack other democracies. For a resurgent autocrat like Putin, however, the idea of attacking other states is no longer out of bounds, with the invasion of Ukraine being a case in point. Even in domestic conflicts such as the war in Syria, it is evident that there are more casualties when autocracies are involved in the conflict. The world map in Figure 3 shows democracies as well as autocracies, indicating whether they were involved in armed conflict (domestic and international) in 2021. Most democratic countries were peaceful in 2021 (dark purple). For autocracies, however, we find the opposite: the majority of autocratic states were involved in armed conflict in 2021. Second, democratic political institutions function as a kind of economic safety net offering protection against economic meltdowns (such as crises or excessive exploitation of natural resources by dictators). If this net is not in place, autocrats whose power is unchecked by parliaments or the judiciary can cause lasting economic damage to their country. Third, as mentioned earlier, data manipulation and disinformation in the digital age, aside from obviously misleading the population, means an enormous challenge for liberal democracies trying to pursue evidence-based policies. The example of Covid mortality rates illustrates that a scientific evaluation and international comparison of anti-Covid measures is impossible if the statistics from autocratic countries contain manipulated figures. As a consequence, joint international efforts to address crises are hampered. The current wave of autocratization involves more and economically stronger countries than in the past 120 years. Targeted disinformation, toxic polarization, and autocratization reinforce each other, creating a vicious cycle that affects both democratic and authoritarian regimes. The possible effects of the autocratization wave can be observed in Russia, for example: Resurgent autocrats run their country without concern for human and economic harm, deceiving both their own population and the international community. This development needs to be further monitored and evaluated in order to explore the extent to which the expected consequences actually materialize. In addition, targeted measures are needed to protect democracy in affected countries.

What exactly is the role of the United States Senate in providing "advice and consent" to presidential judicial nominations? This Article argues that the Senate's power to advise and consent is indeed a broad one. At the same time, however, it will show that there are in the Constitution itself norms for the responsible use of that broad power.

#4: Inflation would rise. A sudden increase in the cost of labor for businesses will lead to inflation throughout the economy because of higher business costs that will need to be passed on to consumers. In addition, when only those at the bottom of the income distribution get a defacto raise to $15, there are upstream consequences. Workers who were making $15 an hour may demand $20 an hour now. Workers making $20 an hour might want $25 an hour and so on. This may seem like a benefit, but “this is a story of serious wage-price spiral, unless we introduce other measures,” warns progressive economist Dean Baker.5 We have been very fortunate that inflation has been well under control for the last few decades. A federal jobs guarantee could change that pretty quickly.

#5: It would be an administrative nightmare. Finally, matching millions of workers to the jobs envisioned under a jobs guarantee would be an administrative nightmare to implement. State and local governments will be tasked with finding the productive work to do, but how do we train millions of people to do these jobs? How does the Department of Labor oversee the millions of new jobs to make sure they’re legitimate? What are the qualifiers for the kind of work that’s eligible? What if a right-leaning state wants jobs done that a left-leaning federal government deems unproductive or socially unacceptable like building an oil pipeline or opening up a coal mine?

Jackie Benson, "The Economics of Inflation and the Risks of Ballooning Government Spending," United States Joint Economic Committee, 10-06-2021, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2021/10/the-economics-of-inflation-and-the-risks-of-ballooning-government-spending-- 嘉玮

What Causes Inflation?

There are many manifestations of the practical consequences of deconstructive resistance across a range of academic disciplines and activist sites. Drawing on the work of scholars and activists who have explicitly linked their radical political projects to deconstruction, whether through endorsing or critiquing it, this section provides two accounts of deconstruction read as a form of activism, followed by a brief snapshot of three examples of its praxio-logical utility in the contexts of feminist, queer, and post-colonial political interventions. Crucially, I am not trying to claim for deconstruction the successes of these latter movements, nor am I suggesting that the actors involved by any means do or should self-identify as proponents of deconstruction. To do so would be a crude and colonising appropriation. Rather, the point made is that the movements and interventions discussed share with deconstruction a commitment to disrupting prevailing norms and assumptions reflective of the second- and third-order critiques outlined above, specifically as regards problematising essentialised or naturalised agents of resistance. One pertinent account of the concrete consequences of deconstruction is provided by Martin McQuillan. He suggests it can be conceptualised as a form of ‘textual activism’: in deconstruction’s movements, he argues, ‘an intervention takes place (a textual activism) which produces the movement, history and becoming of a necessary political analysis which links the political to critical thought today’ (2008, p. 6). This is because deconstruction (unlike philosophy) reads. Such reading qua reading does not generalise from the exemplary but accepts the challenge of the exemplary to thought as an articulation of the troubling otherness which presents itself as an arrival in reading. Reading in this sense has very little to do with the quiet spaces of university libraries... Rather, this reading is an interminable, unconditional critical liveliness to the world around us, its histories and its futures. (2008, p. 6–7) In elucidating this notion of textual activism, McQuillan makes the point that deconstruction intervenes not simply at the level of thought or philosophy but rather in ways which have substantive material effects. Simply put, this is because the ways we think have a direct bearing on the ways we act; in the post-9/11 world, the stupefaction and mystification of domestic thought is inseparable from the military violence which is only one aspect of this world-wide struggle. Thus, critical reason and deconstruction are more important now than ever and this textual activism will be affiliated in unpredictable ways... to the material processes of the political. (2008, p. 9) McQuillan emphasises here the extent to which ‘textual’ readings and interventions are by no means dissociable from the concrete sphere of global politics. While certainly not their sole origin or source, socio-political framings and discourses of war and militarism in the post-9/ 11 world clearly functioned to provide the conceptual foundations and parameters without which the justifications proffered by statespersons in the USA and elsewhere for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan could not have been convincing or indeed intelligible. Many scholars of global politics using Derrida’s thought have made similar points in a range of empirical con- texts (Arfi, 2012; Bulley, 2009; Edkins, 1999; Fagan, Glorieux, Hasˇimbegovic ́, & Suetsugu, 2007; Zehfuss, 2002). Concurrently, Paul Bowman frames deconstruction as a form of ‘martial art’. He suggests that ‘although Derrida mainly read and wrote (monstrously faithfully) about “mere” philosophical texts, these texts are to be understood as “indices of real history”, produced by and productive of particular biases: effects that have effects’ (2010, p. 38). This analogy emerges in part from the embeddedness of deconstruction in relations of violence: it is ‘construed as responding to challenges, intimately attentive, listening, sticking, yielding, inverting and displacing, always patient, calm and adaptive’ (2010, p. 40) in a manner reflective of martial arts, particularly t’ai chi. Bowman elaborates on parallel misreadings of deconstruction and t’ai chi as ‘philosophical, isolated, inward-looking, navel-gazing: as not really real’; both are framed as ‘digressions away from reality, truth, and direct, practical engagement’ (2010, p. 41). However, like t’ai chi, deconstruction has, he demonstrates, a series of concrete praxiological implications. For instance, deconstruction makes possible a form of engagement with political antagonists which emphasises ‘listening’: in contrast to simply denouncing and dismissing interlocutors, deconstruction ‘listens by sticking to the other... Derrida listened, stuck and yielded to the texts and institutions of philosophy, in order to invert and displace conceptual orders and foci’ (2010, p. 44). Bowman suggests that in academic contexts, this might mean, for instance, seeking to publish in journals other than those reflecting one’s own disciplinary and ethico-political commitments, dealing with difference in terms and contexts other than the familiar.

With these assumptions as a background (and they are better viewed as assumptions than as facts), what points can be made about the North Korean military threat and US security policy? First, the fact that threats are constructions rather than photographs of reality is worth keeping in mind. What is seen as threatening at one time or to one person may not appear threatening at another time or to another person. Most threats are not self-evident. An excellent example of threat construction – and deconstruction – is the case of North Korea and Iraq, both included in the axis-of-evil triumvirate by President George W. Bush in his January 2002 State of the Union address. At the time, Iraq was continuing a decade-long evasion of required UN inspections. North Korea, on the other hand, appeared to be honoring its 1994 nuclear freeze agreement (although the President was aware of intelligenceinformation suggesting that the North Koreans were cheating on that agreementby pursuing a clandestineuranium-enrichment program). The threat theme for North Korea was containment. The threat theme for Iraq was terrorism and flagrant violation of UN sanctions. And so the Bush administration launched a highly publicized campaign to jus- tify preparations for military action against Iraq. When in early October 2002 the North Koreans admitted to nuclear cheating, the raw material with which to construct a perception of North Korean threat was significantly augmented. And after the North Koreans began to unfreeze their nuclear installations in December 2002, everything pointed to the conclusion that North Korea was a more imminent threat to the United States than was Iraq. North Korea's conventional military was much stronger than Iraq's; the North Koreans had nuclear materials, perhaps even nuclear weapons, along with the means to manufacture more in a short period of time; and the North Koreans had the demonstrated capability to manufacture long-range missiles that might deliver nuclear weapons to the United States. But the Bush administration's carefully constructed threat theme was that Iraq was the greater threat, and so the North Korean threat had to be downplayed. The administration's threat framing actors worked overtime to convince the public that the North Korean issue was not a crisis, and that it could be handled with diplomacy. But few bought the story, and framing actors in the domestic and foreign media questioned the administration's threat assessments. The artificiality of threat perceptions, and the role of trade-offs in addressing threats, were clearly revealed. The apparent reason that North Korea was not treated as a threat was that the United States did not have the military resources to fight two wars simultaneously. Beyond that consideration, it was widely suspected that even without an Iraqi challenge the United States lacked the military means to effectively address a North Korean threat, giving rise to the paradoxical proposition that a provocation from a weak country is more likely to be framed as a threat than provocation from a strong country. The arbitrariness of threat perception – and the actions that are taken to counter threats – is illustrated by an exchange that President Bush had with a reporter at the end of December 2002. Responding to the reporter's widely-shared observation that the United States was preparing for war with Iraq, the President remonstrated, "You said we're headed to war in Iraq – I don't know why you say that. I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you.''~8 The President is, after all, the first threat framer. The counter-intuitive observation that threats are not self-evident is of more than academic interest, because those who feel threatened are inclined to devote their attention and resources to avoiding or eliminating what they fear most, and in doing so, they necessarily neglect other threats or endeavors. To make the best decision in a trade-off situation, it is necessary to make a careful calculation of costs and benefits. And because no single person or small group of persons can make such calculations with complete (or sometimes even acceptable) accuracy, a transparent decision making process is needed to allow diverse input to be fed into the final decision. Such transparency is often lacking in both Washington and Pyongyang. It is well not to overlook the potential for triggering or exacerbating a conflict spiral, or in this case, a threat spiral. Improvements in North Korean military capabilities, or a heightened threat rhetoric, may invite US-ROK military improvements and counter-threats ("axis of evil"), which in turn invite another round of responses from the North Korean military (Kim Jong-il vows to counter a US "hard line" with Pyongyang's own "ultra-hard line." Measured responses and repeated attempts at communication are the best means to defeat such spirals. For North Koreans as well as for Americans, threats appear to be coming from all directions. The Kim Jong-il regime is convinced that its greatest foreign threat comes from the United States. The George W. Bush administration is not as clear about either the absolute or relative danger posed by North Korea. For both countries, part of the threat perception, based as it is on subjective estimates of a potential adversary's intentions, is self-generated. Given the constructivist nature of threats, it is possible for both Americans and North Koreans to reconfigure their views of reality. The tools that can be used to do this shaping include dialogue, propaganda, promises, and incentives, as well as threats, counter-threats, and the military means to back them up. Policy makers in Pyongyang and Washington need to continuously monitor the environment for changes in threat contours, balancing the danger of over-reaction against the danger of complacency.

Finally, the introduction and consolidation of the rogue states narrative enabled the return of a familiar concept in US defence policy: containment. As discussed earlier, the concept of containment implies a real threat from an aggressive enemy that must be restrained, if necessary by military force, and establishes a link with the interpretive framework that guided Cold War defence planning. Indeed, as Roland Bleiker (2003: 721) has observed, ‘[t]he rhetoric of rogue states is indicative of how US foreign policy continues to be driven by dualistic and military Cold War thinking patterns’ (see also Smith, 2000). Yet how actors draw lessons from the past — and how they apply these lessons in the present — is shaped ‘less by history than by the frames applied to that history’ (Levitt and March, 1988: 324). This is important because the discursive construction of a link between contemporary security challenges and historical ‘lessons’ helps to orient policy solutions to new security threats in a familiar direction. Moreover, because terms like ‘containment’ retain a strong political resonance in America that elides the contextual differences between the present and the past, they frame and limit political debates on the use of US force by representing contemporary security challenges and the ‘evils’ of the past as equivalent (see Homolar-Riechmann, 2009). The construction of an overarching security narrative that located the principal threat to US national security in the behaviour of rogue states built upon the three primary components discussed earlier: human rights violations, international terrorism and the pursuit and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Of these three components, the latter two were usually given the most prominence during the 1990s (cf. Tanter, 1999; Litwak, 2000). Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, while the connection between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction was significant for the development of the rogue states narrative, it is the oppressive nature of a regime that has provided the rationale for US policymakers to include the first and second main components of the US rogue states concept under a single umbrella term. In particular, this enabled the interpretation by key actors in US defence policymaking after the end of the Cold War that rogue states’ disregard for the fate of their own populations constituted a threat to the US and a risk to the stability of the international system. This interpretation of rogue states’ intentions is based on the assumption that a regime that severely restricts and violates civil liberties — and exhibits a willingness to commit ruthless crimes against its own population — has less interest in avoiding human casualties in the conduct of its foreign policy, and is not simply the consequence of the violation of international human rights norms. Combined with the high degree of domestic control that the leadership of a ‘rogue state’ arguably enjoys over its own society, this apparent indifference to the domestic consequences of its actions in the international arena is believed to grant an oppressive regime greater freedom of action in its foreign policy conduct. This assumption about rogue states’ internal behaviour has provided the main rationale for how their international behaviour is interpreted, which key actors in US defence policymaking after the end of the Cold War have used to portray rogue states as constituting the chief threat to US national security and the main source of uncertainty in the international system. Because they violate human rights norms, rogue states are assumed to act outside the standards of ‘civilized’ international society and international law. Moreover, because the loss of civilian lives is not considered to be a dominant feature in their strategic calculations, rogue states are assumed to be insensitive to traditional instruments of statecraft to influence a country’s foreign policy, such as economic sanctions or the threat of military retaliation. By definition, rogue states are ‘undeterrable’. As a result, such regimes are believed to be inherently ‘unpredictable’ — and may therefore behave ‘irrationally’ in the international arena. This series of assumptions about deviant regimes has constituted a new overarching security narrative that became widely shared among US defense policymakers in the aftermath of the Cold War, and which has enabled a diverse range of US adversaries to be discursively represented as posing a common threat to US national security interests. Ironically, while rogue states’ assumed irrationality has served to justify the US preoccupation with ballistic missile defence and military planning for ‘uncertainty’, the core of US security policy towards rogue states emphasizes both containment and deterrence as key to counter the threat posed by these deviant regimes (cf. Lake, 1994). Furthermore, although US involvement in peacekeeping operations — including Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo — were the prevalent US military engagements during the 1990s, the US defence community regarded these uses of US military force as mere ‘irregularities’ and refrained from major revisions to both the US defence architecture and contingency plans. As a result, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the structure, equipment and scenario planning of the US armed forces were little different than at the end of the Cold War, and have proven to be wholly inadequate for contemporary US military operations such as fighting small-scale contingencies, pursuing peacekeeping operations or dealing with asymmetric warfare. The US force that entered the 21st century was essentially just a smaller or shrunken version of the Reagan-era Cold War force (Korb, 2000; Williams, 2001). As a consequence, although the US military easily defeated the Iraqi armed forces in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, it proved ill-equipped for US engagement in the subsequent insurgency. Conclusion During the George W. Bush presidency the US preoccupation with the potential security threat posed by militarily inferior rogue states reached new heights, and has continued to shape the (more conciliatory) defence policy agenda pursued by the Obama administration. This article has shown that the rogue states security narrative did not originate with either the Bush administration or America’s response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The main contribution of this article to the existing literature on contemporary US foreign and defence policy and the ‘rogue states’ doctrine has been to comprehensively demonstrate how a new security narrative centred on deviant regimes was gradually pieced together by key actors within the US defence policy community during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s as policymakers struggled to formulate a new strategic rationale for the purpose of US military power and the definition of the US national interest in the context of declining Cold War tensions. Too often, the starting point for scholarship on contemporary US foreign and defence policy is the moment when strategic policy shifts become more apparent following key events such as 11 September 2001, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, and apparent public acceptance in the US of the use of military solutions to the rogue states ‘problem’. This article suggests the need for further research that concentrates on examining how the discursive foundations of security policy shifts are gradually built behind the scenes through narrative competition among US defence policymakers. As the article has illustrated, the two distinct security episodes that were most important to the initial development of the rogue states security narrative during the 1990s were the Gulf War in 1991 and the North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993–4. How these two events were interpreted by defence policymakers set the scene for the further consolidation of the rogue states narrative in the late 1990s following the renewed crisis with North Korea, the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, and the publication of the report of the Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. The deliberate alignment of particular interpretations of these events with an emerging rogue states security narrative helped proponents to provide a strategic rationale for continued high defence spending, the maintenance of Cold War-era weapons systems and force-planning models, and contributed to policy continuity across different presidential administrations in the US. Perhaps most important, because the new rogue states security narrative reflected the collective interests of defence policymakers in maintaining ‘business as usual’ rather than entering an uncertain process of radical restructuring and transformation, this helps to explain why potential alternative security narratives — such as those based on the need to restructure the US armed forces for multilateral peacekeeping operations and asymmetric warfare rather than conventional wars using major weapons systems and existing force-planning models — failed to achieve the same level of influence on US security policy. Deviant state behaviour increases ‘analytical uncertainty’; that is, uncertainty about how particular regimes view the world and how they act in the international arena, even if there is little strategic uncertainty about the means and capabilities of a particular state (Iida, 1993). Because it is rooted in a perception of irrational behaviour, the US rogue states concept overlaps with this understanding that deviance from fundamental behavioural norms in international society complicates interpreting and predicting how a regime may act in the international arena. What lies at the core of the US conception of rogue states as irrational actors is not their behaviour in international affairs per se, such as the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring or engaging in terrorist acts. Rather, in the contemporary US defence policy context, how states treat their own populations has evolved as the crucial marker to determine whether they are recognized by US policymakers as ‘rational’ actors in international affairs. This article has demonstrated how, during the 1990s, US defence policymakers actively engaged in the construction of rogue states as the primary threat to US security interests in an attempt to rationalize the discursive uncertainty of the post-Cold War era. The successful construction of a new US security narrative centred on the rogue states threat relied on discrete events that could be discursively framed and understood within this new strategic vision for US defence policymaking. The deliberate concatenation of two unrelated security episodes within a single interpretive framework enabled key actors in US defence policymaking to subsume previously independent discourses on human rights violations, international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction under a single umbrella term — rogue states — and to portray ‘irrational’ regimes as a major source of analytical uncertainty in the international system. As this article has illustrated, these two catalytic events served to cement the interpretation that rogue states now pose the main risk to international stability, which contributed to the consolidation of rogue states as the defining feature of the post-Cold War security narrative in the United States over the course of the 1990s. In such an uncertain and unpredictable security environment, the political possibilities for greater cuts in US military spending and radical restructuring of the US defence architecture during the 1990s quickly diminished, and the stage was set for the aggressive defence policies the George W. Bush administration subsequently pursued once the rogue states threat was further amplified following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.

The modern day China ‘threat’ to the United States is not an unproblematic, neutrally verifiable phenomenon. It is an imagined construction of American design and the product of societal representations which, to a significant extent, have established the truth that a ‘rising’ China endangers US security. This is an increasingly acknowledged, but still relatively under-developed, concept within the literature.121 The purpose of this article has been to expose how ‘threats’ from China towards the United States have always been contingent upon subjective interpretation. The three case studies chosen represent those moments across the lifetime of Sino-US relations at which China has been perceived as most threatening to American security. The ‘threats’ emerged in highly contrasting eras. The nature of each was very different and they emerged from varying sources (broadly speaking, from immigration in the nineteenth century and from ‘great power’ rivalry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). Yet in this way they most effectively demonstrate how China ‘threats’ have repeatedly existed as socially constructed phenomenon. Collectively they reveal the consistent centrality of understandings about the United States in perceptions of external danger. They demonstrate that, regardless of China's ability to assert material force or of the manner in which it has been seen to impose itself upon the United States, the reality of danger can be manufactured and made real. China ‘threats’ have always been threats to American identity so that the individual sources of ‘danger’ – whether a nuclear capability or an influx of (relatively few) foreign immigrants – have never been the sole determining factors. As James Der Derian notes, danger can be ascribed to otherness wherever it may be found.122 During the mid-to-late nineteenth century and throughout the early Cold War, perceptions of China ‘threats’ provoked crises of American identity. The twenty-first-century China ‘threat’ is yet to be understood in this way but it remains inexplicable in simple material terms. As ever, the physical realities of China are important but they are interpreted in such a way to make them threatening, regardless of Beijing's intentions. Most importantly, this article has shown how processes of representation have been complicit at every stage of the formulation, enactment, and justification of US China policy. Their primary purpose has been to dislocate China's identity from that of the United States and introduce opportunities for action. Further, those policies themselves have reaffirmed the discourses of separation and difference which make China foreign from the United States, protecting American identity from the imagined threat. Ultimately, this analysis has sought to expose the inadequacy of approaches to the study of US China policy which privilege and centralise material forces to the extent that ideas are subordinated or even excluded. Joseph Nye argues that the China Threat Theory has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Based upon a crude hypothetical assumption that there exists a 50 per cent chance of China becoming aggressive and a 50 per cent chance of it not, Nye explains, to treat China as an enemy now effectively discounts 50 per cent of the future.123 In such way he emphasises the ideational constitution of material forces and the power of discourse to create selected truths about the world so that certain courses of action are enabled while others are precluded. Assessments such as those of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in March 2011 should therefore not only be considered misguided, but also potentially dangerous. For while they appear to represent authoritative statements of fact they actually rely upon subjective assumptions about China and the material capabilities he describes.

This article focuses on the political narratives of the Ukrainian crisis. In Ukraine, the escalating media wars, harsh political rhetoric, and use of historically-powerful images and language to describe and prescribe courses of action need to be understood as fundamental elements in the management of the crisis and of our understanding of what is at stake. This is not to say that the presence of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border is not real, or that the violence on the streets of Ukraine is not important; rather it is to underline that a strict focus on the ‘facts’ of the crisis fails to address the deep connections between the emotional, discursive and ideological dimensions on the one hand and, on the other, the political, military and economic decisions, which they entail. The Historical Narrative: Evoking World War II One of the central features in the media and in the political discourse during this crisis is the comparison to World War II. Images of President Putin transfigured into Hitler circulated widely in social media, opinion pieces comparing Russia’s imperialist ambitions to Hitler’s appeared in important outlets, and even important politicians, such as the German Minister of Finances Wolfgang Schäuble and former U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton compared President Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland. In fact, there are remarkable similarities between President Putin’s argument that ethnic Russians in Crimea required protection and Hitler’s claims to protect ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia. However, one must acknowledge that the choice to use comparisons with World War II and Hitler serve a more immediate purpose: to shock and mobilize Europeans against their worst fears, which remain, as Thomas Diez has argued, “in Europe’s own past”.1 Also important are the reasons why this ethnic discourse has been activated in Moscow. This needs to be understood from the perspective of the changes ongoing in the Russian Federation since the end of the Soviet Union and especially since President Putin’s second term. Igor Torbakov and Lilia Shevtsova both underline the consolidation of a new vision for the Russian regime, named Putinism. Power is personal and highly centralized around a small group of people near President Putin; political and economic power has been merged and protected by the absence of the rule of law; and the statist-militarist view of authority remains in place.2 This process has been accompanied by revisionist state rhetoric, including neo-Stalinist trends (the rehabilitation of the Soviet leader),3 a reconstructed narrative around Russia’s role in the Great Patriotic War (Word War II), and the reintroduction of the Soviet national anthem and of the military parades in the Red Square, all coupled with President Putin’s statement that the end of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. These trends are a fundamental element to understand the current crisis in Ukraine, since it sets the stage both domestically and abroad for a more relevant and powerful Russia. Domestically, this new discourse has been accompanied by more restrictive laws on demonstrations and protests and by a narrative of the “internal enemy” and “foreign agents”, as the new restrictive laws on NGO funding illustrate. In the current Ukrainian crisis, the fear of the “fascists” in Kiev is also reminiscent of the Great Patriotic War. Although one can easily justify Russia’s concern with subversive movements funded by external actors – just look at Ukraine and Georgia, for instances, or the Arab Spring – and with the nature of some members of the interim Ukrainian government, the choice to combat and denounce this by resorting to this type of speech further serves the purpose of rallying those longing for the glory days of imperial Russia behind a renovated image. A neo-Soviet identity has been gradually reestablished as an alternative to western promises of democracy and prosperity under liberal democracy, and it has ample appeal throughout the former-Soviet countries. Thus, we see that both in Western media and in Russia, the evocation of World War II memories and language serves a manipulative purpose more than a guide for action. By demonizing President Putin, the possibilities of dialogue with the West have been severed. By appealing to an imperial image that is linked to an authoritarian past, Russia patches over its weak democratic credentials and proposes an alternative approach to the post- Soviet societies, amply frustrated with western policies. The Cold War Rhetoric and Proxy Wars One of the remarkable aspects of the Ukrainian crisis is that it quickly became a crisis of U.S.-Russia relations with increasing similarities to Cold War rhetoric. The U.S. Propaganda From Washington, the message to Russia has been a denunciation of the illegal military incursion into a sovereign country and annexation of its territory, against all the principles founding the European security order, including the Helsinki Final Act. President Obama has underlined this, as has Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Samantha Power. Based on this logic, the Obama administration has pursued a strategy of international isolation of Russia in the UN. On March 27, 2014, a resolution was approved at the UN General Assembly supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity, with 11 votes against and 58 abstentions out of 168 votes, after a similar resolution was vetoed by Russia on the UN Security Council. Also, the G7 leaders together with the European leaders approved a statement condemning the Crimean referendum and suspending their participation in G8 meetings. The imposition of economic sanctions, in which the United States has closely coordinated with European partners, is a further step in this isolation strategy. However, the choice of economic instruments is contested inside the U.S. political establishment, and more extreme voices have used this crisis to play domestic politics. Senator John McCain calls President Obama’s policy “feckless”, and says it fails to demonstrate American strength in the face of adversaries.4 Senator McCain and U.S. Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland were in Kiev during demonstrations, and showed their support for the opposition forces, including the Nationalist Svoboda Party. This position seeks to pressure President Obama to act tough and portrays Russia not as a valuable partner to the U.S. – as it was for most of the last 13 years of the War on Terror – but as an adversary, the new enemy. By doing this, the hardline strategy delegitimizes President Obama’s attempts to establish dialogue with Russian authorities, and it facilitates a military escalation to the crisis, especially within the NATO framework. In a recent op-ed published in the Washington Post, several U.S. Senators further reinforced the idea that European partners are weary of U.S. reluctance to reinforce NATO members’ security. They argue for repositioning the West vis-à-vis this new Russia, which “has taken a dark turn [and with which] there is no resetting [and no] business as usual”.5 These steps include: the expansion of sanctions to “where it hurts”; the development of a “strategic response” to Russia, which would include a refocusing of NATO on “its core missions of deterrence and collective defense”; increasing military investment and reposition of more NATO troops along Russia’s border; the development of a new transatlantic energy partnership to reduce Europe’s energy dependence on Russia; and new efforts to win the war of ideas among Russian speaking populations of Europe, namely through the “private sector”. These steps spell out where U.S. interests lay in this crisis, in a changing international context. It also reinforces divisions inside Europe, between those defending a more visible U.S. presence in the continent due to perceptions of Russia as an imperialist state with expansionist policies and those willing to develop a more autonomous path for Europe’s security, which requires more constructive and less antagonistic policies towards Russia. Various media outlets, think tanks and academics have replicated these divisions. Public opinion on the crisis has changed as a result, only adding to pressure on decision-makers. In democratic context, public opinion is fundamental to justify actions, but regrettably it leaves unanswered many of the questions regarding the role of the United States and European countries in the crisis, and it fails to address Russian foreign policy as legitimate, if illegal. Ultimately, official rhetoric serves the purpose of justifying a specific set of actions, rather than shedding light on ongoing dynamics. The Russian Propaganda Russia’s rhetoric serves similar objectives. Foremost, the domestic and Russian-speaking populations are the main target of Russian propaganda. The focus on the legality of Russian action in Ukraine is presented side- by-side with the narrative of the threat and illegality of the government in Kiev. This message is declared by all elements of the Russian political establishment, starting with President Putin in several of his speeches and press conferences.6 This approach serves two main goals. The first is the actual contestation of facts and their meaning, namely regarding the agreement reached on February 21, between the Polish, French and German Foreign Ministers, on the one hand and the Ukrainian President and opposition forces, on the other. According to Russian authorities, the Ukrainian opposition breached the agreement when they occupied government buildings and passed illegal laws ousting President Yanukovych. By this logic the current government is illegal because the ouster constitutes a coup d’état. Remarkably, in his March 4 press conference, President Putin suggested that the opposition had used the fact that President Yanukovych left Kiev to attend a conference in Kharkiv (according to Russia Today’s translation) to take over power.7 That the Ukrainian President would leave Kiev at the height of tensions to attend a conference (or even a meeting) is highly unlikely and even disingenuous. The European and U.S. version of events is that the President Yanukovych refused to sign the agreement reestablishing the 2004 constitution and had fled the country to Russia during the night, leaving power.8 Another example of the contestation of crucial facts of this crisis is the situation of the Russian minorities in Ukraine, especially in Crimea, and the threats to their security, following the seizure of power by opposition forces in Kiev. The official discourse in Russia states clearly that an imminent threat was upon these minorities and that an official letter by the legitimate President Yanukovych, requested that Russian troops be deployed to Crimea, “to establish legitimacy, peace, law and order”.9 Not only the work of the OSCE observers was not facilitated, which could serve to prove these charges, it is not clear which Russian minorities Russia will protect. There is a great deal of confusion over whether Russia is looking to protect Russian citizens (those holding Russian passports), ethnic Russians or Russian-speaking minorities. Either way, there is large scope for intervention throughout the post-Soviet space, which naturally creates anxiety. This links to the construction of an area of legitimate intervention for Russia, which is designed based on what Gearóid Ó Tuathail calls the “eternal national geo-imaginary”. This is a political and territorial space of the Russian nation that is bound not by legal borders, but by “imaginary affective ones”.10 This includes the territories with historical links to Russia, the places where Russian soldiers have been buried, and where historical injustices have been committed, such as the decision by the Bolsheviks to award Crimea to Ukraine. The second goal of Russian propaganda, which was particularly strong from February 21 to March 16, day of the referendum in Crimea, is to construct a reality that justifies future Russian action. What this means is that rather than discourse reflecting the reality in Ukraine, discourse is part of the process of constructing a new reality, which will create the conditions for intervention. Timothy Snyder makes this argument brilliantly: “Propaganda is thus not a flawed description, but a script for action. If we consider Putin’s propaganda in [...] Soviet terms, we see that the invasion of Crimea was not a reaction to an actual threat, but rather an attempt to activate a threat so that violence would erupt that would change the world. Propaganda is part of the action it is meant to justify. From this standpoint, an invasion from Russia would lead to a Ukrainian nationalist backlash that would make the Russian story about fascists, so to speak, retrospectively true. If Ukraine is unable to hold elections, it looks less like a democracy. Elections are scheduled, but cannot be held in regions occupied by a foreign power. In this way, military action can make propaganda seem true”.11 Both goals are equally dangerous. On the one hand, the situation in Ukraine will continue to be destabilized and hard to manage, especially if the May 25 elections fail to provide a legitimate government capable of repositioning the country and managing the challenges it faces. On the other hand, the focus on the Russian intervention and its justification through propaganda also fails to address the shortcomings in EU and U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine and Russia, prior to the crisis, preventing the West from a self-reflective critical analysis. Conclusion The current crisis in Ukraine represents simultaneously a continuation of U.S. and EU irresponsible and highly destabilizing policies of regime change and the violation of basic principles of international law by Russia. Both approaches represent a potentially fatal blow to the European security order constructed since the 1970s and a dangerous new contention for influence in the European continent. Understanding the crisis therefore demands clarifying facts, and critical analysis, in order to gain a better grasp of the actors’ underlying motivations and the role of propaganda in the construction of more per- missive contexts. It is not clear who stands to benefit in the current context, considering the heavy sanctions that are being imposed on Russia, the remilitarization of Eu- rope and the breakdown of years of mutual accommodation between the European nations and Russia. The coming years will see important changes in the current statu quo both in Europe and globally. The financial crisis has underlined the shortcomings of the European integration process and has repositioned the EU globally vis-à-vis other emerging powers. The withdrawal of NATO troops from Iraq and Afghanistan will also demand a new purpose for the Alliance. Russia’s authoritarian turn and the inability to modernize have reduced its interest in closer cooperation with the West. Changes in energy markets will also demand a restructuring of Russia’s economy, which will most likely focus increasingly on Asian markets, whereas Europe might look at the U.S. and new energy sources to limit its dependence on Russia. In these scenarios, the future of Ukraine is but one part of the bigger problem facing decision-makers. What is clear in this crisis, are the fragile foundations of international cooperation, the failures of diplomacy, and the importance of deconstructing propaganda efforts conveyed through mass media, in order to take sound decisions.

My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy – that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity – militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction – derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more. When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.9 This would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?

The end of the Cold War sparked a debate over ideas of security in IR between ‘narrowers’ and ‘wideners’. The narrowers were concerned with the security of the state and often focused on analysing the military and political stability between the United States and the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with this, wideners sought to include other types of threat that were not military in nature and that affected people rather than states. This expanded the security agenda by including concepts such as human security and regional security – together with ideas of culture and identity. Feminism had an important role in widening the agenda by challenging the idea that the sole provider of security was the state and that gender was irrelevant in the production of security. On the contrary, the state was often the cause of insecurities for women. Widening the agenda from a feminist perspective brought gender into focus by placing gender and women as the focus of security calculations and by demonstrating that gender, war and security were intertwined. It was an important development in the rise of a wider perspective on security. Whether one agrees with the wideners or the narrowers, the end of the Cold War indicated that security was an essentially contested concept – ‘a concept that generates debates that cannot be resolved by reference to empirical evidence because the concept contains a clear ideological or moral element and defies precise, generally accepted definition’ (Fierke 2015, 35). By pointing at the essentially contested nature of security, critical approaches to security argue that ‘security’ is not necessarily positive or universal, but context and subject dependent and even negative at times. Because some administer security while others receive security, security produces uneven power relations between people. For example, in the context of the Global War on Terror, a person who looks Arab has been regarded with suspicion as a dangerous ‘other’ and there has been an increase in surveillance operations in Muslim communities on the presumption that because they fit a certain profile, they may be connected to terrorism. Viewed in this light, surveillance becomes a security apparatus of control and a source of insecurity. It is by questioning the essence of security in cases such as this that securitization theory developed and widened the scope of security to include other referent objects beyond the state. A referent object, a central idea in securitisation, is the thing that is threatened and needs to be protected. Securitisation theorists determined five sectors: the economic, the societal, the military, the political and the environmental sector. In each sector, a specific threat is articulated as threatening a referent object. For example, in the societal sector, the referent object is identity, while the referent objects in the environmental sector are the ecosystem and endangered species. It is only in the military sector that the referent object remains the state. By ‘sectorialising’ security, we understand that existential threats are not objective but instead relate to the different characteristics of each referent object. This technique also highlights the contextual nature of security and threats. Suicide bomb attacks, for example, are a greater source of anxiety for some people today than they are for others. Yet we often hear suicide terrorism framed as a ‘global’ threat. Securitisation shows that it is incorrect to talk about issues such as terrorism as if they concern everyone around the world equally. By talking about referent objects we can ask: Security for whom? Security from what? And security by whom? Central to securitisation theory is showing the rhetorical structure of decision- makers when framing an issue and attempting to convince an audience to lift the issue above politics. This is what we call a speech act – ‘by saying the words, something is done, like betting, giving a promise, naming a ship’ (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998, 26). Conceptualising securitisation as a speech act is important as it shows that words do not merely describe reality, but constitute reality, which in turn triggers certain responses. In the process of describing the reality we see, we also interact with that world and perform an action that will greatly contribute to seeing that reality in a different way. For example, referring to an immigration camp in Calais as ‘the Jungle’ is not simply describing what the camp really is, but portraying it as a lawless and dangerous place. Hence, threats are not just threats by nature, but are constructed as threats through language. In order to convince an audience to take extraordinary measures, the securitising actor must draw attention and often exaggerate the urgency and level of the threat, communicate a point of no return, i.e. ‘if we do not tackle this problem, everything else will be irrelevant’, and offer a possible way out (lifting the issue above politics) – which is often framed in military terms. In so doing, the securitising actor makes some actions more intelligible than others and enables a regime of truth about the nature of the threat and about the referent object’s nature.

What are the consequences of the current wave of autocratization? Research has clear answers to this question. First and foremost, autocratization paves the way for more (and bloodier) conflicts. According to Kant’s idea of perpetual peace, democracies do not attack other democracies. For a resurgent autocrat like Putin, however, the idea of attacking other states is no longer out of bounds, with the invasion of Ukraine being a case in point. Even in domestic conflicts such as the war in Syria, it is evident that there are more casualties when autocracies are involved in the conflict. The world map in Figure 3 shows democracies as well as autocracies, indicating whether they were involved in armed conflict (domestic and international) in 2021. Most democratic countries were peaceful in 2021 (dark purple). For autocracies, however, we find the opposite: the majority of autocratic states were involved in armed conflict in 2021. Second, democratic political institutions function as a kind of economic safety net offering protection against economic meltdowns (such as crises or excessive exploitation of natural resources by dictators). If this net is not in place, autocrats whose power is unchecked by parliaments or the judiciary can cause lasting economic damage to their country. Third, as mentioned earlier, data manipulation and disinformation in the digital age, aside from obviously misleading the population, means an enormous challenge for liberal democracies trying to pursue evidence-based policies. The example of Covid mortality rates illustrates that a scientific evaluation and international comparison of anti-Covid measures is impossible if the statistics from autocratic countries contain manipulated figures. As a consequence, joint international efforts to address crises are hampered. The current wave of autocratization involves more and economically stronger countries than in the past 120 years. Targeted disinformation, toxic polarization, and autocratization reinforce each other, creating a vicious cycle that affects both democratic and authoritarian regimes. The possible effects of the autocratization wave can be observed in Russia, for example: Resurgent autocrats run their country without concern for human and economic harm, deceiving both their own population and the international community. This development needs to be further monitored and evaluated in order to explore the extent to which the expected consequences actually materialize. In addition, targeted measures are needed to protect democracy in affected countries.

What exactly is the role of the United States Senate in providing "advice and consent" to presidential judicial nominations? This Article argues that the Senate's power to advise and consent is indeed a broad one. At the same time, however, it will show that there are in the Constitution itself norms for the responsible use of that broad power.

No scholar has had a greater impact on the field of election law than Professor Richard Hasen.[1] Accordingly, when Professor Hasen warns that our democracy is in trouble, we should listen. In his superb new book Election Meltdown,[2] he puts the country on notice that the election law wars of the past decade pose a growing threat to American democracy itself. The central argument of Election Meltdown is that our hyperpolarized political age has dangerously undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our election system. Consequently, as Professor Hasen explains, the United States risks a democratic breakdown in the event of a razor-thin presidential election.[3] The reason is because for the first time in over 150 years, America faces the prospect that a defeated party may not accept the election results.[4] As Hasen persuasively contends, “Few things are more important to democratic legitimacy than the losers’ acceptance of the results of elections, yet this new rhetoric shows that the country’s faith in elections, which we have long taken for granted, may be fraying.”[5] In Election Meltdown, Professor Hasen explains how four factors—voter suppression, pockets of electoral administrative incompetence, dirty tricks, and incendiary rhetoric—have combined to threaten our democracy in the event of an exceptionally close election. Since the book’s publication earlier this year, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the threat by jeopardizing the health of voters who cast ballots in person, especially among high-risk groups like seniors.[6] The virus also endangers the health of poll workers, 58% of whom were over age 60 in the 2018 general election.[7] Voting by mail has thus become more important than ever before.[8] Yet, the underfunded U.S. Postal Service may not be able to deliver all the ballots in time if a late rush of ballots floods post offices on the eve of the November election.[9] For all of these reasons, therefore, Professor Hasen’s concerns about the health of American democracy are well-founded. Moreover, as he points out, there are “no miracle cures” to the challenges we face in administering elections.[10] As medium- and long-term solutions, he advocates improved election administration, uniform standards, federalized automatic voter registration, and a renewed national focus on civics education.[11] In the short term, however, he warns that there is “no easy way out should the election be extremely close or targeted for manipulation of the results.”[12] The threats to our democracy that Professor Hasen identifies should trouble every American. But the picture is not entirely bleak. American democracy in 2020 possesses underlying strengths that could help it successfully navigate a disputed election, even one held amid a pandemic and during a time of intense political polarization. I. Honest Vote Counting The first reason for cautious optimism stems from the fact that the honesty and accuracy of American electoral administration has improved dramatically in the last fifty years. Although Professor Hasen is absolutely right that pockets of administrative incompetence still exist, the overall quality of election administration in all fifty states and the District of Columba is far superior to the vote counting systems of previous eras. Although politicians often boast of America’s democratic heritage, the truth is election fraud plagued our democracy in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century. In the mid-1800s, for example, the Tammany Hall Democratic machine dominated New York City politics through a combination of blatant corruption and stolen elections.[13] Tammany Hall became most notorious under the leadership of William “Boss” Tweed, a man whose name was synonymous with democratic dysfunction.[14] He made no attempt to hide his dishonest tactics. After his arrest on corruption charges, Tweed admitted that his machine had routinely changed tallies to manipulate election outcomes.[15] When investigators asked him about specific acts of fraud during the particularly notorious 1868 election, Tweed replied, “I don’t think there was ever a fair and honest election in the City of New York.”[16] Tammany Hall captured the public’s imagination as the preeminent example of corrupt urban politics, but chronic fraud extended far beyond the big cities of the industrial northeast. The 1876 presidential race, for example, saw voter suppression and election fraud on an appalling scale in the ex-Confederate states.[17] Across the South, white-supremacist Democrats engaged in terroristic acts of political violence to prevent Black people from voting for Republicans.[18] In Hamburg, South Carolina, for example, a paramilitary group of Democrats murdered six Black people.[19] The governor of South Carolina warned President Grant that the Hamburg murders represented the first volley in South Carolina Democrats’ bloody campaign to achieve the “political subjugation and control of the State.”[20] The governor was right. In September 1876 several hundred white-supremacist Democrats murdered at least thirty Black people in Ellenton, South Carolina.[21] An observer in Edgefield County declared that “Democrats are riding through the county striking terror in the hearts of Republicans.”[22] When Black people did manage to vote in the 1876 election, southern election authorities often changed the votes cast by Black voters from Republican to Democratic in a massive campaign of election fraud.[23] The 1876 election reflected a systemic pattern of racist election corruption that poisoned southern politics for nearly one hundred years. By driving Black people out of the political sphere in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment, white-supremacist violence and fraud tainted virtually every election in the ex-Confederate South from the Reconstruction Era until the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.[24] The twentieth century also saw significant cases of election fraud in the Midwest. The Pendergast political machine in Kansas City provided a case in point. It dominated western Missouri politics in the early twentieth century, encouraging its members to vote “early and often.”[25] Under the leadership of Tom Pendergast, the Democratic machine stuffed ballot boxes with fraudulent votes, paid voters for their support, intimidated the machine’s opponents, and started brawls at polling places.[26] In 1937 the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City indicted 278 members of the Pendergast machine “for conspiring to interfere with the right of citizens to vote in Kansas City.”[27] Ultimately, juries rendered guilty verdicts for 259 of the defendants.[28] The national uproar over Pendergast’s crimes eventually reached as far as the White House. President Harry Truman began his political career as an ally of the Pendergast machine.[29] Without Pendergast’s support, Truman would probably not have won election to the U.S. Senate from Missouri in 1934.[30] Although he never participated in any of Pendergast’s crimes, the connection created a stigma that pursued Truman for the rest of his career..[31] When Franklin Roosevelt selected the Missouri senator as his running mate in 1944, the Chicago Tribune blasted Truman as “the pliant tool of Boss Pendergast.”[32] Truman, however, refused to repudiate Pendergast. As Vice President, Truman even attended Pendergast’s funeral.[33] The most momentous example of election fraud in the twentieth century came during the 1960 presidential election between Vice President Richard Nixon and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. In the official results, Kennedy finished ahead of Nixon by about 118,500 votes out of nearly 69 million cast, which enabled the Massachusetts senator to carry a majority in the Electoral College.[34] Kennedy’s Electoral College victory depended on his narrow defeat of Nixon in Illinois and Texas.[35] But allegations arose almost immediately that the Democratic Party machines in those states had manufactured thousands of votes out of thin air, thus corruptly delivering the election to Kennedy.[36] Whether the ballot-box stuffing made the difference in Kennedy’s election will never be definitively known.[37] But the historical evidence is compelling that fraud on a significant scale did indeed occur in Texas and Illinois.[38] Historians’ doubts about the integrity of the 1960 presidential election powerfully demonstrate the flawed nature of the American election system deep into the twentieth century.[39] The election system of the 2020s, however, is vastly superior to that of 1960. As Professor Hasen has persuasively argued, evidence of election fraud is extremely rare in the twenty-first century.[40] Indeed, a study by Professor Justin Levitt found only thirty-one potential incidents of voting fraud out of one billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014.[41] Likewise, a 2015 study by the Electoral Integrity Project gave American election administration high marks for preventing fraud and accurately counting votes, even as the report sharply criticized American redistricting and campaign finance policies.[42] The progress the United States has made in driving corruption out of election administration is impressive, and Americans should be proud of it. Ironically, however, polls indicate that the American people harbor pervasive fears that fraud and chicanery taint the election system, even as the vote counting process has become far more honest and accurate than before. A 2016 poll found that only 43% of Americans had “a great deal of confidence that their vote would be counted correctly.”[43] The disconnect between the perception of rigged elections and the reality of fair elections is disconcerting. The history of election fraud—and the successful reforms adopted in recent decades to improve the quality and integrity of election administration—is a story that Americans need to know.[44] While it is far from perfect, election administration in the United States today is far superior to what it was in the past. Accordingly, in the event of a razor-thin election, we can at least take solace from the fact that the votes will be counted far more honestly and accurately than in previous eras. II. The Electoral College as Safeguard The second reason for cautious optimism about our democracy’s ability to weather a close election is the Electoral College. To be sure, the list of arguments against the Electoral College is long.[45] I share them. There are many reasons to abolish the Electoral College—an institution undemocratic by design. Foremost among them is the fact that five times in history it has produced a different winner than the nationwide popular vote, including in 2016.[46] Even more concerning, population distribution trends in future elections could increase the frequency of splits between the popular vote and the Electoral College.[47] But the Electoral College has one redeeming quality: it dramatically reduces the size of the recount battlefield. Accordingly, deeply flawed though it is, the Electoral College provides a constitutional safeguard that reduces the likelihood of election meltdowns.[48] The reason is because of the Electoral College’s winner-take-all nature. In forty-eight of the fifty states (as well as the District of Columbia), electoral votes are awarded on a winner-take-all basis.[49] The only exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which award their electoral votes based on a combination of the statewide and congressional district results.[50] Thus, in the vast majority of states, a candidate receives all of a state’s electoral votes regardless of whether the candidate wins by 1% of the vote or by 51% of the vote. The winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College makes it unnecessary to confirm the precise vote totals in states where the candidates finish outside the recount margin. The trigger margin for automatic recounts in most states is less than 1%, and in some states it is as low as 0.1% or 0.25%.[51] In this highly polarized era, presidential race results in most states rarely come down to a margin of less than 1%. In the 2016 presidential election, for example, only three states had a vote margin of 1% or less between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton: Michigan (0.1%), New Hampshire (0.4%), and Wisconsin (1.0%).[52] In only three other states was the margin between Trump and Clinton less than 2%: Florida (1.2%), Pennsylvania (1.2%), and Minnesota (1.5%).[53] The other forty-four states (plus the District of Columbia) saw much larger margins separate the candidates.[54] Indeed, in this age of red versus blue, most states see lopsided results in presidential elections. In California, for example, Clinton defeated Trump by more than 4.2 million votes.[55] In Oklahoma, Trump won with 65% of the vote.[56] In Massachusetts, Clinton beat Trump by over twenty-seven percentage points, 60% to 32.8%.[57] In Louisiana, Trump won by almost twenty percentage points, 58.1% to 38.4%,[58] and in North Dakota, he won by over thirty-five percentage points, 63% to 27.2%.[59] The point is clear: the Electoral College’s focus on individual states has the effect of rendering the vast majority of state results uncontestable in presidential elections. We should welcome that fact, at least so far as we seek to avoid an election meltdown. Take Iowa as an example. In 2016 Trump won Iowa by 800,983 votes to 653,669 votes for Clinton.[60] However, three months after Iowa certified its results, the auditor in Dallas County discovered that the county had inadvertently failed to report 5842 votes.[61] In the event of a nationwide popular vote for president decided by a razor-thin margin, the belated revelation of Iowa’s missing votes could have caused a constitutional crisis. County election authorities did not discover the error until February 2017, two weeks after the presidential inauguration. But under the Electoral College system, Iowa’s winner-take-all approach rendered the 5842 missing votes nothing more than a historical footnote. Trump would have carried Iowa even if all 5842 votes had gone to Clinton. Even when the Electoral College system has experienced weeks-long, high-stakes recounts, the universe of battle has been relatively modest. For example, the 1876 election controversy concerned the results in Florida, Mississippi, Oregon, and South Carolina, and the 2000 election controversy only concerned the results in Florida. In the grand scheme of things, both election controversies remained manageable because the Electoral College contained the size of the partisan battlefield. In contrast, under a nationwide popular vote, a close election would require a fifty-state recount as well as a recount in the District of Columbia. The spectacle of fifty-one recounts would be chaotic and potentially destabilizing. If the Florida example in 2000 is any guide, litigation would likely ensue in all fifty-one jurisdictions.[62] Indeed, with the precise vote total in every jurisdiction becoming crucially important, the campaigns would be incentivized to engage in scorched-earth legal tactics in each and every state. The cacophony of cases, motions, injunctions, and hearings could potentially drag on for months. And, unlike the 2000 election, when the Supreme Court only dealt with an election dispute under Florida state law and federal constitutional law, the justices in a nationwide recount would be confronted with fifty different and often conflicting bodies of state law. A nationwide train wreck could easily materialize as a result. Thus, although replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote would be a victory for democratic principles, it would risk precisely the type of election meltdown Professor Hasen warns about. If we adopted a national popular vote without also adopting the reforms—such as uniform standards, updated election procedures, and transparent laws and regulations—that Hasen advocates, a nationwide popular vote recount would sow the seeds for a full-blown constitutional crisis. Accordingly, for the time being at least, we have reason to be grateful for the Electoral College. III. History of Muddling Through A third reason for cautious optimism is the fact that the United States has had bitterly contested elections in the past and yet, each time, has found a way to muddle through to a solution. On three occasions in American history the losing candidate has had at least some cause to feel cheated by the result of the presidential race: the elections of 1876, 1960, and 2000.[63] Yet, none of them resulted in a democratic breakdown. In each case practical and legal realities compelled the aggrieved candidate to accept defeat. The gravest election crisis in American history came in the 1870s, when sectional and partisan bitterness over the Civil War still ran deep. The 1876 election dispute concerned which candidate—New York Governor Samuel Tilden, the Democratic nominee, or Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican nominee—had carried four states: Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina.[64] The 1876 election dispute was decided when a congressionally appointed Electoral Commission voted eight-seven along partisan lines to award the disputed electoral votes to Hayes.[65] When House Democrats mounted a filibuster on March 1, 1877, to prevent Hayes from being inaugurated on March 4, the Democratic Speaker of the House Samuel Randall defied his own party and ruled the delaying tactics out of order.[66] The matter was definitively resolved on March 2 when Tilden conceded the race in a telegram to Randall.[67] Despite fears that the dispute might erupt into another Civil War, partisan tempers cooled quickly. After having survived the devastating conflict of the 1860s, Americans had little appetite for a resumption of hostilities in the 1870s. Cooler heads also prevailed in 1960. Although Richard Nixon is remembered today as a lawbreaking President who resigned from the White House in disgrace in 1974, during the 1960 election controversy, he accepted his fate with surprising grace. In the days after the election, the suspicion that the Democratic Party machines in Illinois and Texas had manufactured fraudulent votes put a cloud over John Kennedy’s narrow election victory.[68] Many Republicans urged President Nixon to bring public attention to the alleged fraud by demanding recounts.[69] But President Nixon ultimately chose to bow to legal and practical realities. As he explained in his autobiography, “[W]hat if I demanded a recount and it turned out that despite the vote fraud Kennedy had still won? Charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career. After considering these and many other factors, I made my decision and sent Kennedy a telegram conceding the election.”[70] In fact, the most compelling reason for President Nixon to accept defeat was the lack of a recount procedure in Texas, a state dominated by the Democratic Party. [71] As Professor Edward Foley has observed, “Even if there had been a formal procedure available for Nixon to invoke, it would have been biased against him by the Texas Democrats, loyal to Johnson, who thoroughly controlled its operation.”[72] Thus, Nixon had quite valid grounds for feeling robbed of a fair chance to reexamine the 1960 results. But he felt compelled by political and legal realities to abandon the idea of challenging the legitimacy of the election’s outcome. Consequently, on January 20, 1961, the Republican Eisenhower Administration transferred power without incident to the Democratic Kennedy Administration.[73] The 2000 election controversy lasted far longer—thirty-six days in all—but it also ended with a pragmatic concession of defeat.[74] The dispute arose from Texas Governor George W. Bush’s extraordinarily narrow victory over Vice President Al Gore in Florida, a crucial state that gave the Texas governor a 271-267 victory in the Electoral College.[75] It initially appeared as though Bush had won a clear victory on election night. At 2:30 a.m. Eastern time, with Bush seemingly ahead in Florida by 60,000 votes, Gore called the governor to congratulate him on his victory.[76] But one hour later, with Bush’s margin of victory down to less than 2,000 votes and shrinking fast (Bush eventually ended up with only a 537-vote margin in Florida), Gore retracted his concession.[77] A five-week legal battle immediately ensued over recount procedures.[78] When the Supreme Court finally ended the Florida recount on December 12—effectively freezing in place Bush’s narrow lead in the state[79]—Gore accepted defeat and urged his supporters to do the same. In his concession speech, he eloquently explained why a defeated candidate must concede defeat: “I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”[80] Although the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore[81] elicited sharp condemnation by many observers,[82] the controversy did not disrupt the peaceful transfer of power from the Democratic Clinton Administration to the Republican Bush Administration on January 20, 2001.[83] Thus, the United States has successfully weathered three major presidential election crises, two that involved serious allegations of cheating (1876 and 1960) and two that required weeks to resolve (1876 and 2000). Yet, in none of the cases did the election controversy cause lasting damage to the nation’s political stability. To be sure, the United States in the 2020s is a more divided—and thus more vulnerable—nation than it has been in decades. The reason is because political polarization in the United States has skyrocketed in the twenty years since the 2000 election.[84] For example, a 2017 report by the Pew Research Center revealed that partisan divisions over fundamental political values have reached record levels during Donald Trump’s presidency.[85] In addition, surveys in recent years have consistently found a disturbing increase in the level of personal animosity expressed by Democrats and Republicans for members of the opposing party.[86] Yet, despite this era of toxic partisanship, bitterly disputed election results have not triggered a democratic breakdown in any state. For example, in 2008, Minnesota witnessed one of the closest and most acrimonious elections in its history.[87] In the days immediately following the November 2008 election, it appeared that the incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Norm Coleman had defeated the Democratic candidate Al Franken by 215 votes out of 2.9 million votes cast.[88] The close margin triggered an automatic recount.[89] In January 2009 the State Canvassing Board certified Franken as the winner by 225 votes.[90] The election dispute ended up before a three-judge court, which ultimately confirmed Franken’s victory.[91] And, on June 30—almost eight months after the election—the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the three-judge court’s findings.[92] In response, Coleman conceded defeat in dignified fashion, declaring: “The Supreme Court of Minnesota has spoken, and I respect its decision and will abide by the result . . . . It’s time for Minnesota to come together under the leaders it has chosen and move forward. I join all Minnesotans in congratulating our newest United States senator: Al Franken.”[93] The nation’s democratic foundations have proved remarkably resilient even in two recent, high-profile elections marred by incendiary rhetoric and wild allegations. In 2018 Republican Brian Kemp narrowly defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race.[94] The Abrams campaign rightfully complained that Kemp, as the incumbent secretary of state, had implemented strict voter registration rules in a self-interested fashion.[95] But Abrams went beyond the evidence and clearly implied that the election had been stolen.[96] A similar episode unfolded in Kentucky one year later. In the 2019 Kentucky governor’s race, Democrat Andy Beshear defeated the Republican incumbent, Matt Bevin.[97] After the election, Bevin claimed without evidence that “we know there have been thousands of absentee ballots that were illegally counted.”[98] Bevin’s baseless allegations elicited a storm of criticism. As Professor Joshua Douglas of the University of Kentucky warned, “[T]o throw around allegations of election irregularities without any proof at all is just really dangerous.”[99] But what is striking about the bitterly contested Georgia and Kentucky elections is that in both cases the controversies ended with a whimper. Bevin ultimately conceded defeat a few days after the election, acknowledging: “We’re gonna have a change in the governorship based on the vote of the people, and what I want is to see the absolute best for Kentucky. I am not going to contest these numbers that have come in.”[100] Abrams was less conciliatory. As late as April 2019—five months after the election—she still claimed that Republicans had “stole it [the 2018 election] from the voters of Georgia.”[101] But in neither case did civil disorder result. The stability of the state governments in Georgia and Kentucky continued unabated. This history suggests that even in this intensely polarized era, America’s democratic institutions continue to exhibit great resilience. IV. The Trump Factor But there is a powerful counterargument that can be summarized in two words: Donald Trump. America’s history of successfully muddling through disputed elections may have no predictive value when it comes to the current occupant of the Oval Office. President Trump has consistently defied democratic norms and engaged in irresponsible rhetoric of the most reprehensible kind.[102] As just one example of many, Trump questioned the fairness and legitimacy of the upcoming November 2020 elections on at least ninety-one occasions during the first seven months of 2020.[103] In July 2020, Trump went so far as to suggest that he may not accept the results of the presidential election.[104] Two weeks later the president even floated the idea of postponing the November election because of his completely false allegations of voter fraud.[105] There is simply no precedent for Trump. He is so far outside the historical mainstream that one can make no safe predictions about how he would respond to defeat. Trump’s track record certainly gives no reason to assume he would show the same patriotic dignity as Tilden, Nixon, or Gore. After all, Trump has claimed that he was a victim of fraud even in an election that he won. After his Electoral College victory in 2016, he alleged without a shred of evidence that three to five million fraudulent ballots had been cast for his opponent, Hillary Clinton.[106] A member of Trump’s own voter fraud commission later admitted that Trump’s claims of widespread fraud during the 2016 election were “baseless.”[107] If Trump will falsely claim to be a victim of election fraud when he wins, we have every reason to assume that he will immediately claim fraud if he loses in November. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the President’s history of irresponsible rhetoric, there is heartening evidence that the worst-case scenario can be avoided. In an uncharacteristically strong response, Republican elected officials overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s proposal to postpone the 2020 elections.[108] As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made clear in no uncertain terms: “Never in the history of this country, through wars, depressions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time. We will find a way to do that again this November third.”[109] House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy was similarly emphatic, declaring: “Never in the history of federal elections have we ever not held an election and we should go forward with our election . . . .No way should we ever not hold our election on the day that we have it.”[110] Congressional Republican after congressional Republican likewise rejected the president’s suggestion. As Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa put it, “All I can say is that, it doesn’t matter what one individual in this country says. We still are a country based on the rule of law. And we must follow the law until either the Constitution is changed or until the law is changed.”[111] The vigorously hostile Republican response to Trump’s reckless idea provides at least cautious grounds for hope. With the sole exception of Trump himself, the evidence suggests that our elected officials will—in the end—seek to maintain political stability in the event of a razor-thin 2020 presidential election. A full-fledged democratic collapse would serve no reasonable American’s interest. Conclusion: A Healthy Democracy The United States has experienced a democratic breakdown only once in its history: the Civil War.[112] Approximately 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War in fighting that raged from Pennsylvania to Texas.[113] Nevertheless, despite the chaos, the northern and border states administered free and fair federal and state elections throughout the war. The parties hotly contested the elections and many Democrats engaged in rhetoric that undermined the war effort.[114] Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham even called on foreign powers to intervene in the war on the side of the Confederacy.[115] Yet, American democracy carried on. Lincoln won reelection in 1864 in one of the most momentous elections in history.[116] The key point is American democracy—in all its messiness—worked in the 1860s under the most extreme pressures imaginable.[117] As Lincoln himself put it, the 1864 election “demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war.”[118] The same was true of the 1918 elections, conducted during the deadliest pandemic in modern history.[119] In 1918 an H1N1 virus (described inaccurately at the time as “Spanish Influenza”) killed 675,000 Americans and cost the lives of over 50 million people worldwide.[120] Amid the pandemic crisis, the country held the 1918 midterm elections. Although the midterms saw a decline in voter turnout and some states struggled with administrative problems, a study by Jason Marisam concluded that “surprisingly, in most places the election was held with relatively few complications.”[121] Indeed, to a remarkable degree, the 1918 election results looked like a normal midterm.[122] Accordingly, Marisam notes, “There was no national debate about the legitimacy of the election results.”[123] The election produced a peaceful transfer of power from the incumbent Democrats—who lost control of both houses of Congress—to the Republicans.[124] When viewed in historical context, therefore, America’s democratic foundations look much stronger and more robust than the overheated partisan rhetoric of the 2020 campaign would otherwise suggest. Most important of all, American democracy is far more inclusive today than it was for much of the nation’s history. Women did not possess full suffrage rights in all states until the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Black people in the South only truly realized the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote with the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And prior to the 1970s, Presidents could send eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old Americans to fight and die on battlefields around the globe even though those same young adults could not vote in most elections.[125] By virtually every measure, therefore, the quality of American democracy is vastly superior to what it was 50 or 100 or 200 years ago. Accordingly, the history of American democracy should be a central part of the civics education that Professor Hasen proposes.[126] As he puts it so well in Election Meltdown: In the end, this form of civics education aims to convince the American public that what unites us and helps us thrive is our multi-faceted plural democracy, in which losers respect fair election outcomes and vow to fight another day, and that our democracy’s value is much greater than the issues dividing us.[127]

To be sure, the partisan rancor of this acrimonious era is deeply troubling and profoundly disheartening. But we should not overlook the abiding strength of American democracy. Although the dangers we face as a nation in the 2020s are all too real, there is nevertheless reason for cautious optimism that American democracy will continue to display resilience and a robust capacity for growth and improvement.

Humans have fought over food and the means of producing it for 20,000 years, as rock art in Australia shows. Food, water and land scarcity are primary drivers in two thirds of modern conflicts today. Indeed, many people seem to have forgotten that the primary German war aim in World War II was to take farmland from the Soviets and put German farmers on it. It is very likely that controlling the Ukraine’s bountiful and reliable food bowl is among Putin’s main aims also. In the short run this is imposing hunger and even starvation on hundreds of millions of people far beyond Europe. Spreading hunger in turn snowballs into government failures, civil wars and refugee tsunamis around the world – as it did in 2008 when a shortfall in Ukrainian grain exports led to revolutions in three Arab countries. Already, a third of a billion people – equal to the entire population of Europe – leave their homes each year, either as refugees or economic migrants, to seek better lives in countries which seem more stable and food secure. War will add to the flood. Thus, in developing a new food system for the world of the 21st Century, we also have to find a way to curb the human appetite for war. In , I trace the links between food and conflict through human history, explore the role of food in recent conflicts and examine nine regions of the world which are at high risk of food failure and conflict in the foreseeable future – conflicts ranging from riots and government failure to nuclear war. My aim is to show that the link between food and war is inexorable – but that it can be broken. And that having enough good food is the most under-rated, under-recognised and precious ‘weapon of peace’ in the world today.

The war raging in Ukraine has exacerbated food insecurity across the world — and food aid experts are looking to the 2023 farm bill for solutions. Ukraine’s massive grain supplies typically feed 400 million people per year, but the war has “drastically cut supplies” and driven up food costs for consumers in rich and poor countries alike, according to the World Food Program (WFP). U.S. legislators are currently drafting the farm bill, an omnibus agriculture act passed every five years, which includes provisions for international food assistance. The farm bill authorizes a number of domestic and international food aid programs. The legislation doesn’t fully authorize funding for this aid, which must be decided in separate appropriations, but it outlines how each program runs and how it can use future funds. Lawmakers can use the must-pass farm bill draft to amend these programs as needed. Experts like Rebecca Middleton, chief advocacy and engagement officer for World Food Program USA, are hoping to see “robust authorization” for food aid support in the 2023 farm bill — especially the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, Middleton said. The Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust builds up over time and then can be cashed out at the authorization of the secretary of Agriculture. In April 2022, $282 million was withdrawn from the Emerson Trust to support countries in need after the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict threatened food supplies in six major countries facing food insecurity: Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen. The withdrawn money was used to obtain U.S. commodities and bolster existing aid in those countries, according to a U.S. Agency for International Development spokesperson. The Emerson Trust was renamed to honor former Mississippi Rep. Bill Emerson in 1998 but was originally established in 1980 as a wheat reserve. Because of rising food prices, in 2008, the Department of Agriculture converted the trust into a cash reserve that can be used to purchase U.S. commodities in times of need. The trust was most recently reauthorized in the 2018 farm bill, and Congress must reauthorize the Emerson Trust in the 2023 legislation. Congress also has the authority to replenish funds after they are withdrawn. “For all of those accounts [in the farm bill], the one that we’re really interested in is the Emerson Trust because it’s an account that’s not very well known, but is absolutely vital in situations like the one that we found ourselves in in 2022,” Middleton said. “It’s really absolutely vital assistance that the U.S. was able to provide because of that emergency account in this time of historic need.” The 2018 farm bill did not account for such crises like the COVID-19 pandemic or the Russia-Ukraine conflict, both which have had severe effects on supply and triggered more aid from the federal government, so the Emerson Trust was an essential resource in recent years. “I mean, the need was extraordinary and then just compounded with the shock to the global food supply chain with the Ukrainian crisis,” Middleton said. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the former ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee’s subcommittee on nutrition, said in a statement that he supports keeping international food aid well-funded in the new legislation. “The FY 2023 farm bill reauthorization needs to continue to build on the trajectory of the past two decades and ensure that the U.S., in partnership with American farmers and non-profits, can respond swiftly and comprehensively to global humanitarian emergencies and invest in longer-term resilience and sustainability, especially for small farmers, so that they may more successfully withstand future economic and climate shocks,” McGovern said in a statement to The Hill. In addition to the Emerson Trust withdrawal, the Biden administration committed $2.76 billion toward global food security last summer, on top of Biden and other G7 leaders’ contributing $4.5 billion to the issue in 2022. High prices for fuel and fertilizer, theft of farm equipment, destruction of agricultural facilities, and the blockade of Black Sea ports all threatened to push millions of people internationally into poverty, hunger and malnutrition starting in 2022, according to the White House. The Horn of Africa faced a particularly acute crisis due to prolonged drought and famine. Dalton Henry, vice president of policy for U.S. Wheat Associates, is hoping to see solutions in the 2023 farm bill that prioritize using U.S. commodities as a “cornerstone” of donations to regions in need. “We have a tremendous priority placed on making sure that hungry people around the world get fed and the farm bill programs do such a good job at doing that with commodities,” Henry said. He added that it’s “hard to say” how much farm bill policies will change from past years, but that the Russia-Ukraine war has inflamed existing hunger and food insecurity due to global conflicts like those in Ethiopia and Yemen. Henry said the war in Ukraine has made the need for international food aid more prominent. “I think that, if anything, one of the big impacts is that the war has put global food security much more front of mind for a lot of folks,” Henry said, “and probably shone a little bit more of a light on some of these programs that normally kind of fly under the radar.”

On the surface, the politics seem as stuck as ever. , introduced bills   to set up pilot programs in 15 cities and regions that would offer training and a guaranteed job to all who sought one, at federal expense. Both efforts failed.

In sum, the debate over JGPs is fraught. Even those who support the aims of a JGP, and are favourably inclined to activist public policy, may still be wary of a JGP for economic and political economy reasons. Implementing a JGP will require political capital and the right political conditions. It might be better to use that favorable moment to introduce new policies (e.g. a UBI) and upgrade a collection of existing different policy modalities that together deliver the same or more benefits without the political economy risks.

President Biden invited a bipartisan group of lawmakers to the White House this afternoon to discuss the upcoming farm bill reauthorization. Invitees include Rep. G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.), Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. Stabenow labeled the session as a chance to “have a broader discussion about the farm bill and all the implications for it,” and that it will show “we are working together in a bipartisan way.” She also noted it was a chance for both sides to share their priorities for the bill. Thompson signaled he wants to hear a “commitment from everyone including the president that we will get this done and done in the manner I've been speaking about. Bipartisan, bicameral, on time and highly effective." Boozman said the session is a “step in the right direction” and he wants to see the discussion focus on “the fastest path forward” for the omnibus legislation. Farm Bill Meeting Perspective It’s always good to have a president’s attention on a big topic like the farm bill. It will be interesting to see if Biden/Vilsack detail any must-haves in a new farm bill. Food stamp funding and implementation flexibility, conservation and climate-smart programs are key possible administration topics. History has a lot of examples of how some White House officials wanted to take a more active role in a farm bill only to find that lawmakers write it, not the executive branch. However, a president must sign the omnibus bill and if it is vetoed, override votes are needed--a situation that has occurred before.