America

Is Antony Blinken, President Joe Biden’s secretary of state, preparing to abandon Barack Obama’s powder-puff Asian foreign policies? It is now widely agreed that Obama, under whom Blinken served as deputy secretary of state, ceded to China uncontested control of the South China Sea. Obama’s so-called ‘pivot to Asia’ was all talk and no trousers. Blinken, who believes that diplomacy must be ‘supplemented by deterrence’, may be about to implement a more aggressive foreign policy in south-east Asia and elsewhere. In his first speech as general secretary of the Communist party in 2012, Xi Jinping made his intentions clear. He stated his commitment to ‘accepting the baton of history and

Having won more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, Joe Biden might have hoped for a triumphant entry into Washington. Instead, he travelled to the inauguration in a private plane to deliver his speech to more members of the National Guard than guests. A combination of the pandemic and security fears ruined normal proceedings: the event had become a target, crowds too great a risk. The emptiness embodies the problem Biden needs to overcome: not just the spats between left- and right-wing politicians, but the unravelling of trust in American politics. His challenge goes beyond governing. It is the question of how to unite the country — or,

Here’s a trick question: who said the following, and when? ‘Serious questions have arisen about the accuracy and reliability of new electronic voting machines, including concerns that they can be susceptible to fraud and computer hacking.’ A box of Roses chocolates for anyone who guessed correctly. That was Dianne Feinstein, Democrat senator for California, speaking aeons back in 2006. One decade later and another Democrat declared that she had lost the presidential election that year because Vladimir Putin had hacked the US voting system. A month after losing the 2016 race, a still-sore Hillary Clinton told party donors: ‘This is not just an attack on me and my campaign. This

So endeth the Trump presidency, not with a bang but a long and and predictably hilarious list of pardons and commutations. There’s 143 in total. It’s a last, parting gift for those of us who, in our sinfulness, have always regarded the rule of Trump as a sort of divine cosmic joke. The headline pardon is for Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who has been charged in connection with a scheme to launder funds from a crowdfunding campaign to ‘build the wall’ between America and Mexico. Trump reportedly dithered over whether to show clemency to Bannon. Publicly, the two men were not meant to have reconciled after falling out as

Today the Trump administration ends. The first time a President has failed to win re-election since 1992. The first time the Republicans have spent just four years in the White House since 1892. And America’s first President to have been impeached twice. No one, as Donald himself might say, has ever seen anything like it. The incoming President and his team, meanwhile, have been remarkably lucky in the cards they now hold. While Biden won the popular vote by 7 million and 4.4 percentage points, he only scored an Electoral College victory thanks to 42,844 votes across three states (Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin), a fraction of the total cast. His