Weapons of the Week: "Let's See What Happens"

Civilian honors; Nippon Steel; Jake rattles the nukes; Trump's awful appointments.

“I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test.” - Joe Biden

Joe Biden awarded the presidential medal of freedom, “the Nation's highest civilian honor,” to an motley crew, including Robert F. Kennedy and George Romney, two dead men who ran unsucessfully for president in the year of the Tet Offensive. Celebrity chef José Andrés, three of whose World Central Kitchen employees were executed in a triple-tap strike in Gaza last April Fool’s Day, said that Biden’s generosity towards an immigrant like himself proved that “if you love America, America will always love you back.” The sort of people who made the weapons that killed the WCK workers were also honored, with another medal going to David Rubinstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group who hosts the Bidens for Thanksgiving dinner every year. The private equity group once scandalized Washington for its naked practice of access capitalism, gaining a reputation “as a bunch of second-rate tax scammers, greenmailers and influence peddlers who traded on the names of partners.” It has since acquired an aura of respectability (Rubinstein is chairman of the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery, and the Council on Foreign Relations) but, like carbon monoxide, it remains deadly no matter how odorless. In addition to countless interlocks with the military-industrial complex, Carlyle has also recently deepened its investment in natural gas extraction off the coast of Israel.

Among his final moves as president, Biden announced that he would block the purchase of US Steel by its Japanese competitor, Nippon Steel. The justification of the decision on national security grounds is controversial within the establishment. The Washington Post reports that the officials who “argued against or expressed reservations” about killing the deal included “[Jake Sullivan’s] deputy Jonathan Finer, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, his deputy Kurt Campbell, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Jared Bernstein and top Commerce officials." Reasons for skepticism are many: Japan is an ally (and a counterweight to China); the US does not depend on any single country for steel, and our largest source of imports are Canada, Brazil, and Mexico; provisions already exist to ensure US-made sources of speciality steels used in military production (according to William C. Greenwalt, former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy, “the steel that is most important to DoD is of high quality and bought at low volumes, primarily from two plants in Pennsylvania that produce the armored plate for Navy ships and Army ground vehicles.”)

The question remains: who supported the decision, and why did they prevail?