Weapons of the Week #10: Half-Awake
As the president gets a new bedtime, who's minding the empire? Plus: decisions on Ukraine, measuring the space sector, trade doves in the Pentagon, and more!
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Sunsets in evening’s empire
In 2007, the indie rock bank The National released a song with the refrain: “We’re half-awake in a fake empire.” I was in high school; George W. Bush had been president since I was in fourth grade. “Fake Empire” has been described as “a veiled critique of American imperialism, but even that might be too strong. It’s hard to detect much critique beyond the decision to put that adjective in front of that noun. But there was no question the vibe felt somehow related to the 2008 election. Obama used an instrumental version for a campaign video (“Signs of Hope and Change”), and the song played at the Democratic National Convention in late August.
“Fake Empire” expressed Bush-fatigue, and gestured at the reality that Bush’s failures ups had opened up a space for critical discussion which had not existed since the end of the Cold War. It also suggested that the problem of imperial decadence wasn’t an especially agonizing one. As you sleepwalked through it, you could still find things to enjoy, perhaps even aspire to a certain eerie grace.
And maybe things could still be set right: this was why the song, or at least the instrumental, could be used to score a pro-Obama video, not just an anti-Bush one. If there was a tension between the autumnal music and the promise of hope, this just meant that change would come not not through exertion or disruption, but by the natural process of generational turnover, a change in the seasons which would naturally express itself in style as much as substance. In journalistic accounts of this period, Brian Deese—the 30-year-old assigned responsibility for saving the auto industry on November 4, 2008—is invariably described in imagery like “a brilliant young guy with the beard of an indie rock lead singer.” The economic policy director of Obama’s campaign, thirtysomething Jason Furman, was a fierce defender of Walmart, but it seemed just as important that he wore black plastic glasses.
As a historian, you never want to say “It was a more innocent time.” But as long as we load the concept of innocence with a pejorative charge—naive, unworldly, willfully blind—I think you can call it that. In 2008, Obama was “absolutely certain” that his election could mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow.” By 2016, he was asking Brian Deese if climate scientists could help him “figure out which property would be safe to buy in Hawaii so it wouldn’t be underwater, someday.” In 2008, Joe Biden told Obama, “I’m 65 and you're not going to have to worry about my positioning myself to be president.” I don’t have to tell you the punchline to that one.
Reporting on what’s happening inside the White House has recently come to resembling the Cold War arts of Kremlinology and Pekingology: vague deductions about which blocs or advisors appear to be in power. Semafor, a gossipy and elite-oriented outlet, reported (based on conversations with an anonymous Biden aide) that:
It’s unclear even to some inside the West Wing policy process which policy issues reach the president, and how. Major decisions go into an opaque circle that includes White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients (who talks to the president regularly) and return concluded. (The big exception to this pattern, they said, is foreign policy.)
It would be interesting to know more about the foreign policy exception. Does this mean it’s transparent to everyone inside the West Wing policy process which foreign policy issues reach the president, and how? Or do foreign policy decisions go into a different opaque circle? Back in March, Osita Nwanevu asked “Who is in charge in the Biden White House?” Based on Franklin Foer’s book about the administration, Nwanevu picked out Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, and Mike Donilon, a trio who “have known Biden and one another for around 40 years.”
There was also one younger member of the inner circle. As Nwanevu wrote, it sometimes “seem[s] like we’ve been living these past three years under a [Jake] Sullivan administration as much as a Biden one.” Sullivan, per Foer, is not just Biden’s National Security Advisor but “the primary architect” of his domestic policy. No one else under 60 enjoys the same level of trust from Biden (family members obviously excepted). But unlike Klain and Donilon, Sullivan’s name has not appeared much in post-debate speculation about the inner workings of the White House.
One of my favorite historians, Bruce Cumings, once described the special power of the National Security Advisor within the government:
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