The prospects for Joe Biden’s package of aid for allies
“NEVER LET a good crisis go to waste” is a Machiavellian maxim even if it is sound political advice. But when Washington is paralysed by divided government, the suggestion becomes something closer to a necessity: hardly anything gets done unless there is a crisis. Compromises are enacted only when some forcing mechanism—a government shutdown, a default on the federal debt, a natural disaster, a war—threatens to snap shut.
Tapping that sense of urgency and imminent disaster is how President Joe Biden hopes to get his request for $106bn to fund his administration’s aims in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan despite the objections of tight-fisted America First Republicans in Congress. “We can’t let petty, partisan, angry politics get in the way of our responsibilities as a great nation,” Mr Biden said in a speech to Americans from the Oval Office on October 19th. “Just as in world war two, today, patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom,” he said in one of the finer addresses of his presidency.
After the rhetoric comes the details. The spending package unveiled on October 20th proposes a trade to the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, who have been busy squabbling amongst themselves while the world burns. The White House is seeking $61.4bn to fund the war effort in Ukraine, which Donald Trump and his allied faction of Republicans in Congress ardently oppose. At the current burn rate of American funds, that amount of military and economic aid would be sufficient to support Ukraine from now until September 2024. In exchange, the White House is offering other spending that might be tempting to the holdouts: $14.3bn to the Israelis to help their war effort against Hamas in Gaza by replenishing stores of missile interceptors used by the Iron Dome and Iron Beam systems; $13.6bn to secure America’s southern border with Mexico and process…
2023-10-21 11:18:56
Article from www.economist.com
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