Across the spectrum of expertise and politics, the consensus is that China is the major challenger to the United States for global supremacy in the twenty-first century. Agreed.
But having reported from the Soviet Union decades ago and edited the books of so many Russian leaders and dissidents, and Western journalists and public figures who have written about Russia and China, I can make a case that in the coming years, China will be the major adversary, and Russia is already the enemy.
China is vast, immensely powerful, and ambitious. It wants Taiwan. It is intent on dominating global science, commerce, and manufacturing.
By most measures (other than land mass), Russia is a much smaller threat, heavily dependent on extraction for its economic stability. But it has nuclear weapons that could destroy the world and in Vladimir Putin a dictator unrestrained by any internal pressures and prepared to murder anyone who crosses him.
He blasted the renegade militia leader Yevgeny Prigozhin out of the sky. He eliminated the opposition hero Alexei Navalny in prison, after failing to poison him to death. He invaded Ukraine, determined to conquer the country, whatever it takes.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, completed the takeover of Hong Kong, a center of international finance and pragmatic values, and did so without force, repressing liberties and undermining but not destroying its economic base. As of August 2024, China holds 9.11 percent of U.S. debt, second only to Japan as a creditor nation.
At price-conscious U.S. retailers, a tariff on goods “Made in China” would make bargain shopping much harder. The notion of a national boycott of Chinese food is, well, remote.
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To fully explore the reasons the U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia relationships in 2025 represent such different threats to peace and security, exceeds the range of this format. But here are some thoughts.
The rise of China since the 197Os has been organic but also relentless. A country so long penurious and divided is unified and has created an economy that enabled its people to live in ways their ancestors could not have imagined.
The Soviet Union imploded in 1991 because of the collapse of what was an economy largely dependent on barter and an empire that was held together by bonds that turned out to be tenuous.
When Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, the breakthrough was celebrated in the United States by, among other phenomena, a storewide display of Chinese culture at Bloomingdale’s in New York and awestruck stories by reporters excited to glimpse the Great Wall. At the same time, the U.S. war in Vietnam, waged in part to forestall a Chinese takeover, persisted.
In the 1970s, during the era of U.S. Soviet détente and arms control negotiations, the only American-based consumer product available in the Soviet Union was Pepsi-Cola. The continuation of Most Favored Nation status was dependent on how many Jews the Soviets allowed to emigrate, a U.S. congressional requirement.
During the Cold War, the “Russia” that Americans generally referred to was actually fifteen separate republics, with hundreds of nationalities. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Kremlin ruled an empire like that of the Ottomans or the Romans, destined to fall apart — in what turned out to be less than seventy-five years.
Communist China was a scary place. It sent troops into Korea in the early 1950s, turning the tide of the war there. It was menacing for years after, even as periodic upheavals like the Cultural Revolution overwhelmed its intentions to directly intervene outside its borders. The U.S. warily opened the door to China with Nixon’s trip to Beijing in 1972 and Jimmy Carter’s establishment of full diplomatic relations in 1979. By 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army massacred democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, the U.S soon afterward sent envoys to Beijing to restore ties that were considered essential.
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Vladimir Putin has returned Russia to lawlessness — not at the scale of the Stalin years but recognizable in evil intent. He holds a profound grudge about the humiliations of the post-Soviet era. A country that turned back Napoleon and Hitler sees NATO as a comparable threat and vulnerable to Russian ferocity.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union faced off with nuclear buildups. The Soviets stepped back from confrontations in Berlin and Cuba. Today, the endgame in Ukraine remains unknown.
Would Putin really do whatever it takes to restore Russian glory? He has threatened to use nuclear force. Who is in a position to stop him?
For China, Taiwan is the potential flashpoint for a superpower conflict, as Berlin once was. If Xi Jinping chooses a violent takeover of the island, how can the West respond?
For now, when it comes to competition and potential confrontation, China is unquestionably a formidable adversary. But the country does have considerable and distracting economic and social stresses. Xi is a dictator, but he also constrained by a population expecting the continuation of better living standards in addition to accretion of international power.
By contrast, Putin answers to no one. From nearly all accounts the Russia people are accepting of their fate. His enmity towards the West, and the United States in particular, is a toxic brew of rage and contempt. Russia may be weaker than it wants the world to believe, but it is no less dangerous, possibly even more so.
That meets any definition of enemy.
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After months of posting weekly pieces — the eighteen parts of LBJ-McNamara -The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail and in the momentum of the election season, this Substack will return to a bi-weekly schedule. The challenge is to find ways to frame issues, ideas and stories that go beyond opinion (or what I consider, even when I do it, pontification) to add something to what is already known. When circumstances and instinct demand a piece off-schedule, I will do them.
So do read on. Subscriptions are free, which is what most people choose. If you go for the paid option, two NGOs will benefit: The Barth Syndrome Foundation and CIVIC –The Center for Civilians in Conflict.
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Cher: The Memoir, Part One was a major bestseller this holiday season. Her 1965 cover of Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” was her first solo hit.
A Complete Unknown, the new movie starring Timothée Chalamet about Dylan’s ascent, is playing well in theaters. In northern California, I can attest, they are sold out.
Dylan’s folk-rock rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was considered a turning point in the way music would be heard from then on, because he used electric amplification.
1965. That was sixty years ago!
Cher is seventy-eight years old. Bob Dylan is eighty-three.
And while we’re at it. Mick Jagger is eighty-one. The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” was recorded in 1966 and has been downloaded on Spotify over one billion times, according to its own count.
Paul McCartney is eighty-two. His “Got Back” global tour ended last month in London with a guest appearance by Ringo Starr and total ticket sales estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars. The Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road, was recorded in 1969.
Barbra Streisand is also eighty-two. Her nearly one-thousand-page memoir, My Name Is Barbra, was an Amazon bestseller from the time pre-orders started rolling in, ten months before it was published. Streisand had a number-one album in every decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, and her most recent album, 2022’s Live at the Bon Soir, was recorded in 1962 but not released for sixty years.
What are their genres? Rock, pop, standards, jazz, folk, country, R&B? (Rap not so much.)
How about classical? Not in the way of Beethoven, Mozart, or Chopin. But recording and performing at this level for so long is a tribute to endurance and quality, with an open timeline for the future.
Yes, but their Baby Boomer fans will die out, and in our multicultural world, they are all white.
Oh wait. Cher is the youngest. Dylan, Jagger, and the others are actually older than the Boomers, whose cohort — including Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Madonna, James Taylor, Bono and Stevie Wonder, standing on the revered shoulders of Berry Gordy’s Motown, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, B. B. King, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley — are all, based on tens of millions of downloads, still superstars.
Their works have transited the eras of radio and television play, singles, LPs, cassettes, CDs, videos, and stadium concerts.
So what, aside from talent, energy, and ambition, accounts for longevity in popular (because that’s what it is) music?
Here is where I veer away from data to opinion. Each of these definable classics has a distinctive persona:
Cher has a particularly notable style in dress, sass, and business instincts. Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift are adorned in finery that evoke Cher’s choices. And whatever her managers may have told her to do, Cher has devised strategies that keep her front and center, feminist and in charge.
Dylan’s presence is especially interesting to me. Critical reviews of A Complete Unknown complain that the mystery of Bob Dylan is not revealed. That is exactly the point. Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minnesota, devised his persona as a form of tribute to Woody Guthrie and his ilk. The album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , showing him on a Greenwich Village street in1963 with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, set standards for being young and cool that are immutable.
In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He accepted it months later in a private ceremony, having had someone else read his speech at the official ceremony.
In 1967, Mick Jagger was convicted in a British court of possession of four amphetamine tablets and sentenced to three months in prison, later overturned. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll were Rolling Stones signatures. And yet Jagger still defiantly has the bounce and moves of times long past. Whatever Mick Jagger has imbibed over the years, he has taken it in apparent stride.
Of the Beatles, Paul McCartney was the cute one and shared with John Lennon a mastery of song writing. In his group and solo incarnations since the Beatles split up he has never lost the soulful aura of his song “Yesterday,” composed in 1965, which has been covered more than two thousand times but never matched.
When Barbara Streisand dropped the second “a” in her name as a teenager in Brooklyn to become Barbra, she sent a signal of formidable, fierce identity. She has excelled in every way since — tenacious to an extent that exhausted many around her, but not herself. Streisand’s voice was naturally amazing, and it turned out she could act and direct with the same inherent drive.
What makes success on a scale of these eightysomethings possible? You may have read that age has been a subject of political consideration in recent years. The luck of genetic makeup is certainly a factor. A stoutness of heart and mind is essential. As is self-discipline. The sixties greats Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison all died at age twenty-seven in 1970 and 1971, succumbing to the temptations of fame and fortune.
Genius in some measure must be embedded from infancy. Being able to use it for so long and so well, as Cher, Dylan, Jagger, McCartney, and Streisand have done, is inspiring.
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The Simon & Schuster audio of “LBJ and McNamara The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail” including the bonus recordings of editorial sessions with McNamara is available everywhere today and on Sunday, Jan 12 at 5 p.m. Evan Osnos and I will be in conversation about the book at Politics and Prose 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington D.C.
Brian Lamb is the founder of C-SPAN and for many years host of the Sunday night broadcast Booknotes, in depth interviews with non-fiction writers. Lamb now hosts a weekly podcast called Booknotes+. In all, by his informal count Lamb has given “thousands” of authors the gift of an hour of conversation with a reader and questioner of remarkable skills.
We are good friends, but on the subject of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, Brian has strong personal views having served in the Navy during the Vietnam era which gave the session a challenging edge, unusual for a Lamb interrogation. Here is our interview:
Here’s the link:
For a decade, in the 1980s and ’90s, I was the editor and/or publisher of six books by Jimmy Carter. His wife, Rosalynn, coauthored one and wrote another of her own. The experience – we sat at the kitchen table in their house at meals in Plains, held hands and said grace – was indelible. In one of his acknowledgments, he said I was their “publisher, editor, referee, and friend.”
Carter’s great accomplishments will be described elsewhere. So I will focus here on one – Always a Reckoning and Other Poems, published by Times Books/Random House in 1994. I should also mention The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, a children’s book that his daughter, Amy, illustrated and we published a bit later.
Thinking about it now, I realize how far outside my usual specialties poetry and children’s books were. I have written an account of those years working with Carter in my book An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen. And I want to recognize his longtime literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, who understood that the president and I were, in some ways, unconventional partners.
When Carter and Nesbit first sent me the poems in a package, probably in 1992, I was baffled. I finally wrote him to the effect that he was “likely to be judged not as a former president but as an amateur poet and the reaction might well be harsh in what is a cynical world.” In other words, a rejection.
A few months later, Carter sent me a piece of paper headed “To Peter Osnos.” (Carter never used “Dear” in his communications.) On the page Carter had pasted a poem torn from The New Yorker called “The Sea of Serenity,” and underneath it he wrote, by hand,
Poems editors seem to buy
Don’t make sense, lack rhyme and rhythm
If they don’t amuse or edify
What else should we do with ’em.
Jimmy C.
As I wrote in my memoir, “Who am I, I wondered, to tell a former president of the United States he couldn’t publish a book of poetry if he wanted to? Carter had taken lessons from Miller Williams, a prominent poet who had appeared at his inauguration. I asked for the poems and sent them to three people in the Random House building for their judgment. Knopf had a proper poetry editor, Crown had just published poetry by Jimmy Stewart, and Villard had had a huge success with a book of bromides by Robert Fulghum called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
“We came out somewhere between genuine poetry and the cachet of a celebrated author. One of our copy editors was herself a poet and she took on the book. Carter asked a sixteen-year-old named Sarah Elizabeth Chuldenko to do the illustrations.”
Here is the start of a poem called “Rosalynn”:
She’d smile and birds would feel they no longer
Had to sing, or it may be I failed
To hear their song.
Within a crowd, I’d hope her glance might be
For me but knew that she was shy and wished to be alone.
Enough time has elapsed to disclose that the advance was $75,000, a large sum for poetry, but not much for an ex-president. The book went on the New York Times bestseller list as nonfiction and stayed there for two months.
The reviews were surprisingly friendly, while noting that the author was not your typical poet. I don’t remember a single snarky one. Booklist wrote: “If Carter’s book of poems represents vanity publishing on the grand scale – his poetic persona doesn’t sound or seem at all vain.”
After I left Random House, Carter began to be published by Simon & Schuster with considerable commercial success. We stayed in touch from time to time, as recently as when he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2015. He had had a good life, he emailed me, and was at personal peace with the outcome. And then he got well.
History’s judgment on Jimmy Carter will doubtless cover his trajectory to the presidency, his defeat, and his exemplary post-presidency. Poetry may not be one of his greatest legacies, but his commitment to honorable goals, which was so much of his character, was in that book
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On his way to Seattle in 1994 to launch the company he would call Amazon, Jeff Bezos stopped off at the Washington Post.
In a biographical introduction to Invent and Wander, a book of Bezos’s collected writings, Walter Isaacson wrote this about Bezos’s encounter with Craig Stoltz, who ran a technology magazine at the newspaper:
“He was short with an uncomfortable smile, thinning hair, and a somehow febrile affect,” Stoltz wrote later in a blog post. Totally unimpressed, Stoltz blew him off and declined to write a story about the idea. Years later, long after Stoltz left the paper, Bezos would end up buying it.
Jeff Bezos has come a long way. But today, his Washington Post by any measure is in a crisis of leadership and staff morale, with a business model that is not working. I worked at the Post for eighteen years when Katharine Graham was the owner and Benjamin C. Bradlee was the executive editor. I have been gone for decades but still associate myself with the institution, its values, and its impact.
In an interview at the recent New York Times DealBook Summit, Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin, “We saved the Washington Post once, and we’re going to save it a second time.” I take Bezos at his word. I was the publisher of Invent and Wander, the title Bezos chose for the book. He was a busy man, but when he turned his attention to our book, it was impressive. He signed off on the book’s title, cover design, and every word, including Isaacson’s introduction. And the book, copublished with the Harvard Business Review Press, sold well, especially overseas. In an inscription in my copy, he praised our “execution” of the project.
With that in mind, here are some thoughts on what Bezos might consider doing to “save” the Post again.
Step One: Make an unequivocal declaration that he does not intend to sell the Post. As a financial issue for a man of his wealth and other investments, the Post is a minor matter. Bezos has an evident passion for Blue Origin, his space company; a fascination with the potential of AI; and a reinvented personal life with his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez. His stewardship of the Post is, in his words, just a “complexifier,” for the paper and for him.
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So, make his commitment unequivocal.
Step Two: Repeat with clarity his pledge not to interfere in news coverage, which he has not done in his eleven years of ownership. A newspaper’s owner does have a right to set the editorial stance of the publication. His decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024 was timed badly but was within his rights.
Step Three: With a minimum of fanfare, choose a group of advisers, combining top-tier experience in journalism and proven skills on the business side of media. I have names in mind but will not mention them publicly, because the choices have to be Bezos’s alone.
Step Four: Ask each of them to write a short strategic memorandum—Bezos likes them to be six pages—and then convene the advisers to discuss their contents. Bezos’s preference is for “messy meetings” in which he speaks last. Use that approach.
Step Five: Don’t homogenize the ideas. Consensus is not the solution. Decide on a strategy. Begin to implement the decisions, being realistic about the time frame and what they will cost.
Step Six: Find the publisher and top editors who will understand the challenge and hire them. Bezos has provided successful leadership at Amazon and Blue Origin. Respect the culture of news media, where integrity and independence of mind are essential.
Now I’m going to share what may seem a surprising recommendation.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was the publisher of the New York Times for a quarter of a century. His son now has the job. Arthur, a friend of mine, is no longer involved. Over the years he made two decisions that have had a major impact on turning the Times around—at its worst, the situation there was terrible.
When the print newspaper was still the driving revenue source for advertising, Sulzberger made the daily paper truly available everywhere the morning it appeared, through home delivery or on newsstands.
The impact was significant. In Chicago, for example, where I knew a number of people with clout, they subscribed to the Times—and demeaned the hometown papers enough to undermine their status. “I don’t need the Tribune anymore, I get the important news in the Times,” was the refrain.
The print paper no longer counts as it once did. Digital subscriptions—for which millions of people around the world pay—are the business model, along with the add-ons of games, cooking, and sports. To establish a paywall in 2011, as I understand it, Sulzberger did so against the advice of some senior managers with specific responsibility for technology.
My guess is that there will be quibbles over the details of this scenario, but I am confident that the basic narrative is correct. Ultimately, one person has to render a final judgment. I know that this is Bezos’s style of leadership.
Whatever else may be said about Jeff Bezos, he created from scratch one of the most important enterprises in American history—comparable to the achievements of Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. If he puts his mind to it—and the best minds of others—this fraught period at the Washington Post will be part of its history and not the path to its extinction.
Hunter, Beau, Ashley, Jill and Joe Biden in his first run for the presidency in 1987
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Franklin D. Roosevelt was sixty-three when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage three months after his fourth inauguration. His wife, Eleanor, was shocked to learn that FDR’s mistress was in the room.
Harry S. Truman defied the political odds and won reelection in 1948. His postwar leadership is now extolled. Truman’s approval rating at the end of his term was 32 percent.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, a thousand days into his presidency, leaving a wife and two small children. Kennedy’s martyrdom has shaped memories of him, his brother Robert, and his son, who died in a plane he was piloting.
Lyndon B. Johnson did not run for reelection in 1968. He went home to Texas, by all accounts a broken man because of Vietnam, recognizing that the war he waged couldn’t be won. He died at sixty-four. His profound impact on civil rights is now fully acknowledged.
Jimmy Carter was defeated in 1980 and returned to Plains, Georgia, facing bankruptcy. His approval rating was 34 percent. He is now past one hundred years old, and after so many more years of service he is considered the greatest ex-president ever.
Bill Clinton won two terms as president and left with an approval rating of 66 percent. He will always be associated with fellatio in the environs of the Oval Office. He was the second president ever to be impeached. His wife fell short of the history she seemed destined to make.
Barack Obama served two terms, and he and his wife, Michelle, left the White House demonstrably fed up with the practice of politics; their oratory is brilliant. So far, in my view, their lives since January 2017 have been more glamorous than meaningful.
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Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, and was sworn in less than a month after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. Biden will leave the White House on January 20 with approval ratings in the low thirties and with the sting of bipartisan criticism of his pardon of Hunter, his surviving son. Beau, his other son, died of brain cancer in 2015.
The presidency is a great and powerful position — the most important that Americans can bestow on one of their fellow citizens. But as the examples above show, Democrats in modern times have left the White House in frustration or with a stain of one kind of another.
My sense is that only Joe Biden and his family really know how he feels these days. I have shaken his hand once and exchanged pleasantries at an event for a PublicAffairs book in 2019. We are the same advanced age, which along with race, gender, and sexual orientation is an identifier — for better or worse — in measuring where we fit in the national landscape.
I have watched Biden’s presidency with chagrin, not for his policies (which on the whole I have agreed with) but for the way he was regarded by the country — even by the voters who gave him the largest popular vote total in history.
The Biden shrug was dominant. I especially recall the day he was on his way to the Capitol to advocate for an important bill when Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democratic senator, said she would vote against him, dooming the legislation. I wrote that presidents need to be inspiring like Barack Obama or intimidating like Donald Trump. For all four years, Joe Biden was neither.
At the outset, he made a fundamental mistake in calling himself a “transitional” president, becoming essentially a lame duck from day one. Even before the 2022 midterms, commentators (including savants who had made their names and careers as political advisers to Clinton and Obama) were dismissive – first sub rosa and then publicly — about Biden’s prospects for reelection.
When the Democrats scored surprising victories in the 2022 midterms, Biden might have announced that he would not launch another campaign and would have been hailed. Instead, he adamantly insisted that he would run again. Why?
My guess is that the more people told him to get out, the more this proud man wanted to stay in. I then thought that with Trump running, he felt he could not drop out lest he would endure the assumption that he was afraid of his predecessor.
In his very rare interviews, Biden insisted he was up to serving another term and that his challenge was to persuade American voters that he could.
And then came the nationally televised debate on June 27, which only minutes after it began was the effective end of his candidacy.
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One fact I have observed in recent years is proof of the aphorism that matters tend to evolve slowly and then, often, resolve suddenly. The debate outcome was an example, settling the argument that Biden could not handle another four years.
In national politics, momentum was building to prosecute Trump for his crimes, enshrined in ninety-two felony indictments. And then, by a six-to-three vote, the Supreme Court gave him broad immunity for his actions while in office, answering a question about presidential power than had been around for almost 250 years.
In the Biden years, as wars have raged in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East, the battles were grinding. Afghanistan took an abrupt turn when American troops left after two decades and the Taliban immediately regained power. Israel’s assassination of the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, followed by the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, ending a fifty-year dynasty in a matter of days, reflected the volatility in a region where wars have raged virtually nonstop for decades.
With Trump returning to office, Ukraine must now accept that victory over Russia will be impossible. So there was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posing with Trump in Paris, prior to the reopening of Notre-Dame. Remember Trump’s attempted extortion of Zelensky, which led to the first impeachment trial?
Which gets back to Biden. Reversing statements that he was a transitional president and that he would not pardon Hunter were plainly mistakes — in both cases because of human nature rather than flaws of character, I contend
Will history restore a measure of respect for Biden’s presidency? My guess is yes, because of what it accomplished. But that will take time and will certainly not happen suddenly.
Seasonal Greetings. Back in January
The Rt Hon Mrs. Kemi Badenoch is the Conservative MP for North West Essex, and has been an MP continually since 8 June 2017. She currently undertakes the role of Leader of HM Official Opposition. In addition, she is Leader of the Conservative Party.
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Politics in the United Kingdom and the United States have taken some (to deploy this season’s adjective of choice) weird turns. The situation in the U.S. has been exhaustingly — obsessively — explored.
Great Britain’s twists have been comparably strange by modern historical standards, so this is an effort to explain them for an American readership, with apologies to those who may find it a bit didactic.
In 2016, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron (a graduate of Eton and Oxford, which is to say, in the classic mold of Tory leaders) called a referendum to decide — once and for all — whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union. On June 23, a majority of the voters chose Brexit, “leave” over “remain.”
Cameron resigned and was followed by four other Conservatives in eight years, all ousted, the most notable being Boris Johnson (also a graduate of Eton and Oxford) whose flamboyance eventually became intolerable, ostensibly because of parties held at 10 Downing Street during the Covid lockdown.
Then came Rishi Sunak (another Oxford alumnus) who was born in England of South Asian parents, is Hindu, and is married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire. In the 2024 general elections, after fourteen years in power, the Tories were trounced by Labour.
Following the election defeat, the Conservative party’s members selected as their leader Kemi Badenoch (a lawyer with degrees from the universities of Sussex and London). She was born in 1980 in London, to Nigerian parents who moved back to Nigeria shortly after her birth. She returned to Britain at the age of sixteen because of the hardship of life in Nigeria. She is adamantly far right-wing in ideology. She is Black and anti-immigration.
This is the party of Winston Churchill et al., so the ascension of two persons of color to leadership represents a remarkable transition. I lived in London in the 1960s, and Cypriots (whether of Greek or Turkish origins) were then considered colored, which meant social status below whites in a class conscious society.
The population of the United Kingdom is now almost 20 percent composed of “minority” ethnic backgrounds. The old slur “the wogs begin at Calais,” just across the English Channel in France, no longer applies. But Badenoch is off to a rocky start in polling — and that, as far as it is possible to detect, has nothing to do with race.
Instead, her standing reflects the prevailing British attitude toward politicians of all sorts. The London Times columnist Hugo Rifkind noted that Badenoch’s poor ratings were better than those of the new Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, “a bit like suggesting that the public prefers death by sharks to death by bees.”
Describing the political scene, Rifkind wrote: “Perhaps, in an age of populist promises, this is the cost. To win is to lie, and to serve is to disappoint. What if this is just how it works now? What if we never like anything, ever again?”
Following the 2024 elections, Labour has 402 members of Parliament while the Conservatives have 121, with many other smaller parties also winning seats. Labour’s share of the total popular vote was only 33.7 percent, meaning that its mandate was far less sweeping than it may have appeared.
I covered the British elections in 1983, when Margaret Thatcher ran against Michael Foot, a scholarly left-winger who told me that he had not been in the United States since 1953. Imagining him as a partner to Ronald Reagan was absurd, and he lost decisively.
More than a decade later, the Labour party moved to the center, and Tony Blair became prime minister. His style and his affinity with Bill Clinton, followed by his support for George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, led the prominent British journalist James Naughtie to write a book called The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency. When Blair aligned Britain behind George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the electorate’s mood darkened.
In recent years, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reverted to the far-left politics of Foot, with an uglier edge. Party policies were called “Stalinist” by opponents, and antisemitism, though denied, was clearly present among the party’s leadership and members.
Sir Keir Starmer, a knighted lawyer, represents a shift back toward the center left. His wife is Jewish and attends synagogue. Confronted with a raft of economic problems — and now the restored presidency of Donald Trump — the Starmer years will likely be fraught. On the other hand, the ideological swings in the Labour Party have precedents.
There is really nothing in the Tory past to prepare for the age of Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch.
What about the rest of the political scene? It’s worth remembering that while England and Wales are governed from Westminster, the seat of the House of Commons and the largely marginal House of Lords, a process of devolution has given Scotland and Northern Ireland major control of their regional governments. Even so, national policy and international affairs are still directed from Westminster.
The pro-independence Scottish National Party was increasingly powerful and theoretically could have chosen to remain in the European Union if it had achieved its goal of full political separation from England. But scandals in the party ranks have undermined its influence.
In American terms, think of “states’ rights” in what is a United Kingdom — which in Northern Ireland means the possibility someday of a unified Ireland and a revived breakaway movement in Scotland. To call everyone in Great Britain “English,” as is so often done on this side of the Atlantic, is not actually right.
Unlike the European countries, where many parliaments are comprised of multiple parties according to their proportional results in elections, often leading to coalition governments, British MPs — like our members of Congress — are people who win in their local contests.
The UK’s major third party, which has gone through several iterations and name changes, is the Liberal Democrats, with seventy-two members in Parliament. My sense has been that when Labour swings far left and the Conservatives veer far right (the meaning of which has changed over the years), there are many moderates whose votes don’t count unless they can muster a majority in their constituency. It is in those times that the Liberal Democrats gain strength and influence.
Sinn Fein, which originated as the political arm of the Irish Republican Army that battled the British for decades — the violent era known as the “Troubles” — has seven members. The Reform UK party, whose most prominent figure, Nigel Farage, is (my term) a mini-me of Donald Trump’s rambunctious style, has five.
The reality is that British domestic politics has no meaningful impact on the United States. But there is an alliance on security matters that extends to nuclear policies and the embedded cultural affinities that come from a lingua franca, English.
Still, the time-honored rituals of Parliament have a definite following in America; think of “hear, hear!” among other expressions of favor or contempt. For years, the Sunday night airing on C-SPAN of Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons was one of its most watched programs. It was certainly entertaining.
The United Kingdom has been through a Brexit upheaval and the Boris Johnson era. The country is now governed by Sir Keir Starmer’s center-left Labour Party. The Conservatives are led by Olukemi OIufunto Adegoke Badenoch. The recently crowned king and queen are in their seventies, their adultery in the past forgiven if not forgotten.
The United States has a president-elect, carrying thirty-four felony convictions and enormous fines for fraud and sexual assault and approaching eighty with a radical agenda based almost entirely on his personal preferences. He vows revenge on his opposition. So continues the decade-long Donald Trump political phenomenon.
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British publications usually feature a diary of items by an editor or columnist intended to frame matters in a personal way. In that spirit, here are notes from a family visit to London last week:
Just short of 250 years since the two countries did fierce battle to separate, the US-UK entente is as strong as ever. The “special relationship” in politics — epitomized by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill or Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — will be tested given what can be expected from the incoming Trump crowd. Think of defense collaboration with Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon and security secrets shared with Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. (If the Senate enables them to make it to confirmation).
But in many social and cultural ways, the countries are strikingly aligned. There is an economically challenged working class, a stressed middle class, and in the British parliament is Nigel Farage, a mini-me of Trump populism, who leads a Reform party that has the support, according to polls, of 20 percent of the British public. His rhetoric is meant to increase grievances about the present and unease about the future.
The popular culture and media overlap is expanding. Movies, books, and music are, as always, widely shared. CNN, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have British bosses. The New York Times has 100 people based in London and New Yorkers complain that the hometown is getting short shrift in coverage. In sports, American boys and girls starting at school age are playing soccer and their parents are watching much more of the professionals than in the past. And on our Thanksgiving day, there were three NFL games being streamed at pubs, I was told.
The bond between the West End and Broadway is exceptionally close. A Guys and Dolls revival is a current hit. Coming to New York next year is Operation Mincemeat, a musical based on the true story of how the British used a corpse carrying phony documents to fool the Nazis about where their troops would land in southern Europe. It has received the most five-star reviews ever recorded for a musical.
Buy tickets as soon as they are available.
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Two books I finished before our trip define our ingrained two-nation entente, although more in the traditional ways than today’s version. Both books’ protagonists are British, and they challenged convention in their lives. Anglophile Americans especially admire singular and dashing style (think James Bond, Mick Jagger, Princess Diana, Victoria and David Beckham, and the “Iron Lady,” Thatcher); these two, in their time, certainly had that.
Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue by Sonia Purnell (published by Viking) is the biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, an epic saga of how she straddled the Atlantic — to use a deliberately suggestive term — using charm, sex, and ambition to arrive in her later years at a position of genuine influence in American politics. What a story!
Over the years I encountered her in several ways that enabled me to understand at a distance how she pulled off her trajectory. In the mid-1970s, when my wife and I were living in Moscow for the Washington Post, we received an unexpected call from an aide to say that Governor Averell Harriman and Mrs. Harriman were in the Soviet capital and would like to have dinner with us.
In those years, restaurants were not really an option. So we invited the couple to our tidy little apartment in a foreigners compound. We took down a silver tureen wedding present, filled it with black-market-purchased caviar, added brown bread and vodka, and served a meal that our guests seemed to appreciate.
In the late 1980s, Random House acquired what were to be Pamela Harriman’s memoirs, for what I recall was an advance of two million dollars. I was designated to be the editor. I hadn’t yet really engaged in the process when I learned that she had decided to cancel the deal, even after sitting with her prospective ghostwriter for about forty hours of interviews.
Apparently, Pamela had concluded that the details of her life were just not ready to be revealed in a book. The writer, Christopher Ogden, took the position that as the interviewer he could hold on to the material. And, incredibly, her lawyers agreed. He then wrote a salacious book called Life of the Party that was devastating and a bestseller.
Somehow Pamela regrouped. Living in Georgetown, she had already become a leading figure as a major influencer and fundraiser in Democratic politics. She was instrumental in what became the presidency of her friend Bill Clinton, who appointed her to be the U.S. ambassador to France.
I last saw her there in a long receiving line at an embassy July 4th party. She greeted me warmly as a friend, which I really was not, but I did get the aura of charm I was doubtless supposed to. She died in February 1997 of a cerebral hemorrhage, in a hotel swimming pool, at the age of seventy-six.
The second book is Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism by his son Patrick Cockburn (published by Verso). Claud Cockburn is not well known in the United States, although his sons, Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick, have had notable journalism careers here and in Britain.
What makes Claud Cockburn so fascinating is that in writing style and impact he was the forerunner of what has become the American approach to journalism, combining ironic wit, snark, and reporting. Cockburn’s newsletter in the 1930s, The Week, is a direct antecedent of today’s popular commentators on late-night television and internet destinations like Substack. Cockburn was a respected correspondent in the United States for the Times of London, but he was also a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party, an affiliation that was not then disqualifying for acceptance. Today’s far right in the U.S. contends that journalists are still communists although the party has disappeared.
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So, a once great British Empire is gone, and while the United States increasingly finds its superpower status challenged, it remains vastly more powerful than Britain. For all the imbalance, it is still a “special relationship.” In both countries populations are much more multicultural than they used to be — immigration is a major and vexed issue. The large segment of the population who feel they are being left behind are damn angry about that. The United States was founded on the principle of defying rulers in imperial Britain. The 2024 election of Donald Trump and his political cohort is in many ways a rejection of our country’s more recent political leadership.
An observation often attributed to Churchill but more reliably credited to George Bernard Shaw is that “Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language.” Actually, the record shows that language is only one part of a much more intricate relationship.
Next week, Part Two: Parsing Britain’s Odd Political Scene
In July 2009 our daughter Katherine and her husband Colin —accompanied by their sons, Ben and Pete (ages five and three at the time) my wife, Susan and I — traveled to Beijing to meet the little girl they had adopted from an orphanage, wheren she had been for two years.
When the woman checking us in at Newark Airport learned why we were making the trip, she said, “God bless you,” and upgraded us all to business class.
In Beijing the morning after we arrived, two representatives of the orphanage brought Mae (the name Katherine and Colin had chosen for her) to our temporary apartment. She wore brand new shoes that squeaked with every step and delighted her.
Joining us to help with translation were Katherine’s brother, Evan, a New Yorker staff writer in China, and his soon-to-be fiancée, Sarabeth Berman, who was working for Teach for China.
The handoff went smoothly, and as I recall we all went to lunch nearby, a family enlarged by one.
That meal and those that followed over the next few days were festive with a bit of unsurprising disarray.
The next stop was Guangzhou, where formalities were scheduled at the U.S. consulate. Most families stay for those days at the White Swan Hotel, where I watched Katherine working two phones to locate a missing piece of official documentation that had to be retrieved from a mailbox in Greenwich, Connecticut (where we lived adjacent to each other), and faxed to the hotel.
The boys spent time in a White Swan swimming pool, watched by us, and Mae mainly slept as her parents successfully navigated the bureaucracy.
When we returned to Newark Airport, Katherine held Mae in her arms, determined that her first American steps be taken at home and not at an airport immigration desk.
As we came to know Mae over the next year, we recognized that she was not a typical toddler. Katherine had said that she and Colin would accept a “special needs” child. A medical report from the orphanage classified her as “epileptic.” A year later, as we all sat on a screen porch one night at our summer house in Michigan, Katherine said — calmly but clearly — that a number of tests had now concluded that Mae was autistic.
We all knew that the responsibility and challenges ahead would be formidable. When Katherine and Colin moved to Northern California in 2014, Katherine found a wooden sign in an antique store that I thought caught the essence of their little girl. “Warrior Mouse,” it said. She placed it over the door to Mae’s room.
Mae is now seventeen. Over the years Katherine has written extensively about the very largely misunderstood realities of complex disabilities. Her first piece was headlined “One in Sixty,” which was then thought to the prevalence of autism among children. Due in part to improved diagnostic techniques, the Centers for Disease Control currently sets this number at one in thirty-six.
Katherine’s writing for the Washington Post, Time, Mother Jones, and elsewhere is invaluable for its insights and (in my view) eloquence, humor, and distinctive voice. Here are links to her articles, well worth your time and sharing:
https://time.com/4740129/autism-special-education/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/when-inclusion-fails-kids-education-disabilities-idea/
To Those on the Vietnam Wall on the Mall
and their countless Vietnamese counterparts.
It did not have to happen.
—- The Dedication
The Substack series called LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail is available everywhere as a book, reasonably priced at $17.95 and as an ebook from Amazon, BN.com, and elsewhere at $8.99.
Simon & Schuster will be releasing an audiobook in January that will include a bonus of two hours of McNamara with me devising what he wanted to say in his book In Retrospect, an unusual glimpse into the editing process of a controversial but in its way historically important memoir about the debacle in Vietnam, for which he was considered responsible.
(And in the aftermath of the reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency, it seems relevant to reflect, after a half century, on how another era of upheaval in American history happened and was handled.)
The purpose of this piece is to explain how this book fits in today’s publishing and bookselling world, which has changed more than readers may realize. Buying a book today should no longer be the challenge it was when the prevailing thought for anything other than bestsellers was “I’ll see if I can find it.”
The book in print is available at any retailer that sells books — but you’ll have to ask for it to be ordered, using the title, the author’s name, or the ISBN identifier, which is 978-1-953943-55-2.
Why?
Because it will almost certainly not be on bookstore shelves, where space is always tight. The publisher, a small independent called Rivertowns Books fulfills orders efficiently and places the book into every database — but does not do the in-store solicitations by sales reps that were for so long the way bookstores chose what to sell. They are still done, but mainly by larger publishers.
To underscore the point, which is crucial: the book is available everywhere and is featured in vast online catalogues, the best known of which is Edelweiss, a digital database founded about twenty years ago and used by most stores. This is a promotion tool, offering advance copies which are then ordered from distributors.
The “Big Five” publishers, as they are known, have the highest profiles in stores. They are Penguin Random House (owned by Bertelsmann, a German company), HarperCollins (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation), Simon & Schuster (recently acquired by the private equity firm KKR), Hachette Book Group (owned by Vivendi, a French company) and Macmillan (owned by Holtzbrinck, a German company).
These five publishers tend to dominate the bestseller lists and generally pay the largest advances (guaranteed author payments), which are still regarded within the industry as the measure of a book’s presumed worth and potential.
Next are the independent publishers of some scale, including W.W. Norton, which is employee-owned; Bloomsbury, British-based and the originating publisher of the lucrative Harry Potter series; Scholastic, known for children’s books; and Grove Atlantic, which has defied the odds by making savvy selections.
The next tier down in size are the feisty (and therefore usually admired) publishers like Graywolf Press in literary works and Melville House, mainly publishing provocative nonfiction.
Many small publishers are for-profit entities — not a business model for the faint of heart. There are, of course, a good number of nonprofit university and academic publishers and thousands of micropublishers coming and going in a churning marketplace.
Finally, and least understood, is the range of publishers once derisively known as “vanity presses,” because the authors paid to have their books published. These have now evolved into an enormous self-publishing industry, in which anyone — anyone — can write and publish a book, usually by paying all or part of the cost of getting it released. My guess is that hundreds of thousands of books are published this way each year, selling anywhere from a few copies to family and friends to millions in categories like science fiction or “romantasy.”
The conventional belief is that consumers do not pay as much attention to the name or reputation of the publisher as the publishers would want. Instead, what is essential to selling books for them to be visible to consumers, the process called “discovery.”
Today’s world includes traditional media publicity, broadcast and reviews, although they generally have less impact than they used to. By any current measure, social media (essentially twenty-first-century word of mouth) like TikTok et al. are the most powerful.
Probably the greatest surprise of the modern era is that the overwhelming majority of books are still sold in print, around 70 percent. Digital or ebooks, once thought to be the inevitable leading format, amount to about 20 percent, with audio at 10 percent and growing faster than the other ways books are read.
The majority of book sales — to the consternation of everyone else — are on Amazon, where books can be ordered in print, digital, or audio and delivered overnight or immediately, usually at lower prices than standard retail.
Barnes & Noble, the largest of the chain stores, has revived in recent years under its CEO, James Daunt, opening and redesigning stores and updating the selection of books featured on its shelves. The range is even greater at BN.com, its online outlet.
The independent bookstore sector, almost always captioned as “beloved” or “revered,” is relatively small — around 10 percent of total sales. These locally owned stores are what people consider their favorite way to browse, where they engage with staff and visiting authors and increasingly spend time in the stores’ cafes. With Amazon and online ascendency, the “indies” were thought to be endangered, but the best of them have found their place in their communities as destinations and civic assets.
One enduring mystery for me is that the indies have never figured out how to sell ebooks. There is no real way to buy ebooks from them, which in turn drives consumers to Amazon and its Audible subsidiary. And in too many stores, buying books from a smaller publisher (like Rivertowns) demands persistence by the customer when the clerk is unfamiliar with the imprint, the author, or the title and says so.
My long-held belief is that when people enter a store and ask for a specific book, they should never be allowed to leave without at least ordering it and arranging for it to be delivered or picked up. If frustrated, the consumer will go to where the book can be had — which is mainly Amazon.
You may feel that all this marketplace description is more than you need or want to know.
So I will repeat the basic fact of this piece. LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail is available for sale. If interested, just order or ask for it. And if you find it worthwhile, please tell your friends.
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“Insightful and informative…benefits from Osnos’ unique insights.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred review)
LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail describes how decisions about policy strategy were made in the Vietnam era —which in the aftermath of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Ukraine and Gaza are worth knowing about now. The re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency certainly assures a period of upheaval in global affairs. The imperfections and consequences of decision making are always much clearer “In Retrospect.”
