by Richard Schulman
Incoming President Joe Biden’s commitment to a green makeover of the US economy will be a huge gift to China’s rulers. The makeover will weaken the US economically and militarily. What more could the Beijing totalitarians ask for?
This is a shame not just because of the harm it will do to US national security but also because it scuttles the possibility of a bipartisan foreign policy. That would have helped bind the wounds from the bitter relations between the two major parties that have grown in strength over the past several administrations.
Defense is priority of national government
The US and its allies won the Cold War against the Soviet Union because a bipartisan foreign policy alliance held firm for four decades.
In communist China, the US now faces a more threatening adversary. A strong bipartisan policy to contain, if not roll back, China’s encroachments should be the glue to bind the nation and the two US parties together despite lesser differences.
The existential policy issue of our time is not saving our planet from CO2 but from the Beijing rulers.
Fuzzy idealism vs. great-power politics
As though enough concern had not already been generated by the Biden administration’s determination to make a green agenda central to its domestic and foreign policy, there is no less concern regarding the idealist virus that invaded the Democratic Party’s DNA following the demise of the party’s Scoop Jackson wing, which was strong on defense and foreign policy realism, unlike its current personnel.
This has been noted in op eds in both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. The Post ran a piece headlined “Biden’s foreign policy team is full of idealists who keep getting people killed.” Walter Russell Mead’s weekly column in the Journal warned that “It’s the new administration’s potential for…fuzzy thinking when it comes to great power rivals such as China that should worry onlookers.” The Trump administration, notably in the 2017 National Security Strategy,“ Mead continues, “put ‘great-power competition’ at the center of America’s international agenda.” Many leading people in the incoming Biden administration think this was a mistake “because they view climate change and pandemics as more frightening and immediate dangers than great-power rivals.” But “[t]he hard reality is geopolitics come first.”
A green energy source Republicans could support
Yet there is a way the Biden administration could forge a bipartisan resistance to China combined with a green policy that Republicans could support: nuclear energy. With natural gas and oil prices as low as they are, nuclear power wouldn’t necessarily be the cheapest, but unlike wind and solar power, it would be a plentiful and reliable source of energy. Indeed, one reason it is not so competitive with fossil fuels at present is the ceaseless court and regulatory war that environmentalists deployed for decades to cripple the nuclear industry. Before that, the US was world leader in this industry.
One of the most eloquent proponents of a nuclear policy turn is Michael Shellenberger. He comes with impeccable green credentials. He received a 2008 Heroes of the Environment award from Time magazine and Stevens Institute of Technology’s Green Book Award for science writing. An article he penned for Forbes in November was headlined “Why Biden Can Unite America With Nuclear Power — Or Divide It With Renewables.” He wrote: “[S]olar and wind… made California’s electricity rates rise nearly seven times more than they did in the rest of the US between 2011 and 2019…. Few environmentalists realize that solar farms require 300-400 times more land than natural gas or nuclear plants…. California came close to having ‘cascading failures’ this summer due to over-reliance on renewables.”
Kerry as fuzzy-idealist poster boy
Biden has selected as his Special Envoy for Climate former Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement on climate change and the JCPOA, the Iran deal that lifted the strategic embargo on Iran and provided it with $50-$100 billion dollars it used for arms, terrorism, and support of its Mideast proxies. Kerry is immortalized in a YouTube video in which he dogmatically assures a Brookings audience that “there will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world without the Palestinian process.” Well, it just happened. Kerry, in short, is poster boy for the fuzzy idealists that the Post and Journal op ed writers complain about in the incoming administration.
And yet, according to Rational Middle, “During a speech at MIT on January 9, 2017, Secretary of State John Kerry explained that he once did not believe nuclear was a viable solution and supported Bill Clinton in shutting down nuclear research. He went on to say that, given the challenge of climate change and the advances in nuclear proposed in Generation IV, that researchers should ‘go for it’.”
MIT is an engineering school, and his audience likely was filled with nuclear energy supporters rather than Jane Fonda fans. Would a shape-shifting Kerry, – who was for the Iraq war before he was against it, have dared to say the same before a Sierra Club audience?
Continued Republican control of the Senate would provide an urgently needed check on Biden administration tendencies toward fuzzy idealism, neglect of geopolitics, manipulation by allies, and pursuit of green policies that will fatally weaken the resistance to Beijing’s communists on which US and international well-being depends.
Richard Schulman can be emailed at hormel@ssl-mail.com.
Gen 1V reactors make too much sense for some. Safe, reliable, long term cheaper than all other forms of power. Dismantle dams, solar and wind farms. Saves rivers, increases food lands, clean energy for industry. Needs govt. backing to get started. Makes too much good sense.
Keep the pressure up on the new Administration.
Agree with 92% of what you say.