If you lived through the 70’s you might be forgiven for believing that the Biden administration has provided you with some version of the fountain of youth. Everything new is deja vu. A lady waiting in her car on line to get gasoline after the Colonial Pipeline was hacked remarked to a reporter “I’ve never seen anything like this”; obviously too young to recall the “Good Times” we had back then, when Americans used to hunt for gas the way pigs search for truffles. This is only one example of those “Happy Days”. And the number of eerie similarities to forty years ago seem to be growing.
When James Earl Carter was elected the 39nd President of the United States it was mostly as a refutation of the Nixon era. Carter was an Annapolis graduate but had a tenuous grasp of foreign relations and drifted to the left once in office. He also prided himself on an enlightened view of race relations, especially for a former governor of Georgia.
As is the case with most Presidents, Carter began his term with a store of popular good will. It didn’t last long. One of his first acts was to begin negotiating the transfer of the Panama Canal to its namesake. Engineered, financed, operated and defended by America, it was, and is, of enormous strategic and commercial importance. Carter thought that surrendering it would constitute an act of goodwill appreciated throughout Latin America. It did nothing of the sort. Instead, it set the conditions that resulted in the American invasion of Panama in 1989 with a tragic loss of life. This was a harbinger of things to come; good intentions, disastrous results.
Joseph R. Biden, Jr. was elected the 46th President of the United States largely as a refutation of the Trump era. He campaigned on a centrist platform of unity. He too began with a store, albeit constrained, of popular good will. He broke Carter’s record in depleting it.
His first act as president was to cancel the Keystone Pipeline which would have brought Canadian oil to Oklahoma. Without warning, thousands of jobs were lost and Canada, no friend of the previous administration, was angered by the lack of consultation. This, and the halt to oil exploration and drilling in Alaska threatens to quickly transform the U.S. from an energy exporter to a nation once again dependent on foreign oil. Prices at the pump have tripled leading millions of families to re-evaluate their expendable income, curbing their purchases and retarding the national economic recovery from the worldwide pandemic.
In the Carter years, America was a more innocent country which still believed in the essential worth of government and the beneficial bonds of citizenship. However, plagued by hyper-inflation, strikes by dockworkers, coal miners, teachers, farmers, and record trade deficits, a real sense of foreboding took hold. Urban areas began sliding into chaos and decay; Howard Cosell’s live running commentary of a fire in the ruins of the South Bronx during a Yankee baseball game shocked America. Interest rates soared, tax rates were cut but not sufficiently to offset the effects of inflation. Older people raided their safe deposit boxes for cash they had placed there for “a rainy day”.
For them, and others, the rainy days had come.
Paper money not seen since the Depression began making its way into circulation. People paid by the employers on Friday would do their food shopping that evening knowing that prices would be higher Saturday morning. Crime was rampant and the middle class continued its flight to the suburbs, draining many cities of their tax base.
In international relations, America was considered a doormat. Following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Carter’s solution was to ban American athletes from participating in the 1980 Moscow Olympics; a laughable diplomatic response. It seemed to say, “If you take over a country we, (literally), won’t play with you”. After that, the Russians, and everyone else, had no fear. Weakness was the signature of U.S. foreign policy. Carter believed in linking the cause of human rights to every foreign policy decision which is admirable provided that all other parties hold to the same principle. When that is not the case trouble quickly ensues, Iran is a perfect example. During a public address, President Carter proclaimed that the U.S. backed the Shah of Iran “1000 percent”. Then began a movement, centered in Paris, by exiled political opponents of the Shah calling for a religious reformation and an overthrow of the Imperial government. The Shah requested American aid and guidance in this matter not realizing the President’s penchant for blameless governance. Carter refused American support because of that ally’s reputation of stifling dissent and being generally less than democratic in his political dealings. This greatly aided the revolution planned by Iran’s religious fundamentalist leaders. With the success of the revolution and the exiling of the Shah, Iran was plunged into a 16th century theocracy which made the former Emperor’s rule look benign by any comparison. The firing squads worked overtime eliminating anyone who was a former supporter of the Shah or anyone who just wasn’t revolutionary enough. Tens of thousands “disappeared”.
Not to be forgotten is the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 which caused the deaths of approximately 1 million people, no one knows the real number. Since then Iran has steadfastly utilized terrorism as a weapon against the West and Israel and has destabilized the Middle East ever since. Carter’s tacit approval of the Iranian revolution in the name of human rights is the gift that keeps giving. And it all could have been prevented. Subsequently, our country’s solemn commitment meant nothing in that part of the world and when the American embassy in Tehran was invaded with 63 staff members taken hostage, Carter was totally bewildered. The United States seemed naive, incompetent and impotent.
President Biden is dealing (or not) with many of the same problems as his long-ago predecessor - but with a big difference; Carter faced these issues throughout his 4 year term, Biden has been president for only 7 months! Yet the similarities are too numerous to ignore. The inflation that we are experiencing now is the result of pumping 4 trillion dollars (an amount Carter could never have imagined) into the economy. Any high school student can tell you that “too many dollars chasing too few goods” leads to inflation. And many goods are not available because factories have been closed for a year due to the pandemic which both disrupted supply chains for parts and suppressed demand for finished goods because no one had the financial or health security to purchase them. As a rule, people do not buy cars or renovate homes if they think they may die soon. More inflation is coming, it must, but wages are not rising fast enough to absorb the effect. This may lead to a recession because Americans will stop buying non-essentials thus slowing the economy further. If interest rates are raised to slow inflation, stocks will suffer, impacting pension funds and savings.
Unemployment is still high, (higher than the official numbers), some say because of generous unemployment benefits and pandemic relief funds, but also because many of the businesses in which these Americans worked no longer exist. Not every store, shop and factory will reopen, some are gone forever. And you cannot retrain a Hallmark card clerk or a pet groomer into an IT specialist overnight even with free community college tuition. In addition, Biden’s de facto open door policy on immigration is a dangerous calculated risk he seems willing to take in order to placate the left-wing of his party. Such short-sightedness may ultimately lead to a national tragedy as thousands of individuals pour into the country without proper criminal background checks, health examinations or terrorist activity screenings.
And then there’s Afghanistan, Biden’s optical horror show. The sight of American armaments hurriedly left at Bagram Airport for our enemies to utilize against our allies will haunt his administration for years. The Taliban are racing through the country, occupying towns and cities at breathtaking speed, executing prisoners and destroying 20 years NATO’s efforts in a matter of days. As American soldiers pack the last equipment and prepare to fly home the Afghan army, deprived of air support and heavy artillery, flees in terror. At first President Biden said “the mission is not lost - yet”. Now we can see what the future will bring, if we even have the courage to look. And the lack of preparation to evacuate those Afghans who helped our efforts to fight the Taliban is a national scandal conveniently absent from the evening news. When Kabul falls, and fall it shall, the finger pointing will begin. Parallels to Iran where Carter abandoned a valued and committed ally are inevitable and in the Middle East, America will be viewed, once again, as weak and unreliable. Our work to build a strong and stable Afghanistan over two decades will be regarded as a passing phase barely worth mentioning; in the Middle East time is not measured in the same way as in the West. To the merchants in the bazaars and the students studying the Koran the Crusades just ended.
As for the unhappy isle of Cuba, its people have staged huge demonstrations against the decades old Communist government and have begged the United States for assistance in finally freeing them from a corrupt, inept, and compulsively repressive regime. The White House response: voice of the turtle. Ultimately a statement appeared along the lines of “We stand with the Cuban people”. At a critical moment in the tragic history of that Caribbean country, that was the best the West Wing could muster. It must have taken an all-nighter with some of the finest minds in the Biden administration to compose that press release. Truly, shame on them.
It did not end well for Carter. Ronald Reagan swept him from office. The same fate awaits future President Harris in 2024. By then Joe Biden will be a faint memory.
Until the mid-term elections next year, there is, sadly, little that Americans can do, except hope that the country can survive the two ensuing summers of arson and looting and whatever crisis our enemies are currently plotting. Meanwhile, we can pull out our polyester suits and silk jersey wrap dresses and go to the disco because that’s where the happy people go.