A New Year’s Revolution

TUCSON — By now in past Januarys I had already broken a long list of New Year’s resolutions: quit pipe smoking, escape Facebook, learn to say fruit in French with the right “r” and the like. This time is different. All of us, everywhere, need a New Year’s Revolution.

It is beyond urgent. If enough of the 7.5 billion people who share an overheated and over-armed planet cannot get it together fast, neither the meek nor anyone else will be around to inherit the earth. As endgame looms, conflicts inevitably deepen.

Yet now when the world badly needs the United States, it is at war with itself. Audio tape reveals a soundly defeated president’s hour-long criminal, subversive attempt to cheat. Invoking party loyalty, he told Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” the votes.

If America is hardly “first” among 195 countries, it is best able to affect change, for better or worse. But while nearly half the nation clings to a distorted view of reality, China muscles it aside with a colonial approach that stamps out whole cultures as well as individual rights.

Americans waste time quibbling over small stuff like those four-letter words, fuck and shit. Both are as innocuous these days as punctuation marks. We need to focus on two others, news and fact, along with two five-letter words: truth and its polar opposite, Trump.

I began the Mort Report to sketch big-picture frameworks around linked global challenges with brushstrokes of quotes and color to bring stories to life. But it got sidetracked in 2016 by a self-obsessed madman with boundless greed and demagogic designs.

A retired Associated Press friend emailed me in 2019: “You used to be known and respected as a special AP correspondent (who) covered fairly the world. I think you have lost direction. We do get it, you hate Trump; nevertheless, isn't there something else you can report about?”

He tossed back my own tagline — firsthand reportage and fact-based analysis — and listed ideas for stories in which Donald Trump was not mentioned. That, I replied, would have been like a synopsis of Little Red Riding Hood without mention of the wolf.

The old wire-service style is no longer enough. What we call “news” is now a torrent of words and images. Much of it excels; a lot of it is unspeakable crap. Unprincipled executives can pile up profits by zeroing in on a bombastic bullshitter, adding neither filters nor factual context.

We need news agencies that attempt objectivity. We also need reporters of proven credibility to skip false equivalence, freed from walking a tightrope to mollify countless mothers-in-law – publishers, editors, advertisers, sponsors and censorious kibitzers of every political slant.

Once Trump got into office, he was the story. Reporters can’t ignore a president, particularly one bent on unmaking America and destabilizing the world. But the TV cameras that gave us that monstrosity can now point elsewhere and spare us from him. We have a planet to save.

Future Trump-free dispatches will delve into detail as the plague subsides, and my passport emerges from a desk drawer. For now, here are some overall thoughts.

Deadly pathogens, our new normal, are no more stoppable at borders than greenhouse gases, refugee flows or rising seas. Covid-19 blindsided America because Trump dismantled a network of health snoops that ferreted out threats other countries tried to hide. But that is a small start.

We desperately need what the United Nations was supposed to be, not a global government but rather a world congress with specialized agencies and a Security Council that could agree on binding action to confront crises. 

The World Health Organization sounded the alarm but, like other UN agencies, it is toothless. It gets only the access and authority that member states allow. Trump ignored its guidance, then crippled it by stalking out with unpaid dues when he needed a scapegoat for his own inaction. 

All UN bodies face the same problem, from UNHCR, the refugee agency, and UNICEF to peacekeeping missions. Failures outweigh successes because field people are thwarted by bureaucracy or national interests. Look no farther than the 1994 Rwanda genocide; 800,000 Tutsis died while a Canadian general pleaded for orders to intervene. 

Those 2015 Paris accords emerged from COP21, a yearly meeting of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Most countries agreed to minimal non-binding reductions. But Trump withdrew the United States, encouraging others to renege on their promises.

The UN won’t change until the United States, China and Russia and the European Union take it seriously. Yet again, Trump did the opposite. His UN ambassador, Kelly Kraft, is a rich Kentucky Republican who spends less time at the job than she did as Trump’s envoy to Canada.

Essential global action is unlikely if the big dogs can’t establish enough trust to scale back national priorities in favor of common goals. It comes down to complex bilateral statecraft, which is no job for amateurs or ideologues. 

Major powers need an effective foreign minister, seasoned diplomats and intelligence services that are above politics. Rex Tillerson gutted the State Department. Mike Pompeo shaped it into a hypocritical corrupt arm of partisan evangelicals. Trump drove off top analysts and agents.

Democracies face a disadvantage. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and the like don’t face voters. America’s power depends on its word, from one administration to the next. Trump welched on every commitment. Allies’ mistrust soured to contempt; adversaries rushed into a vacuum. 

Diplomacy demands groundwork at lower levels. Summits are mostly show, but they bring leaders together to talk privately in backrooms. Joe Biden gets that. Yes, he told Chuck Todd, he had hard words for Putin. Asked if the public would hear them, he replied: “Hope not.”

But then there is the Congress. New legislators used to spend some time sniffing the air before weighing in. In 2015, Tom Cotton, freshly elected, got 46 senators to co-sign a letter telling Iranian leaders to ignore Barack Obama; they would revoke or alter any agreement he made.

With that precedent, Republicans invited Benyamin Netanyahu to address Congress, bypassing the president to strengthen hardliners in Israel.

Today, with so much at stake, activist legislators are bound to speak out from the outset. This is a mixed blessing. Elections showed how many voters, easily misled, recoil at what Republicans depict as extremist. Not all freshmen have the tact and depth of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In Ohio, Nina Turner, a firebrand close to Bernie Sanders, is running for the House seat Marcia Fudge will vacate if confirmed as Housing and Urban Development secretary. I know nothing about her, but this quote leaped out of a Vanity Fair profile:

“Turner — who once likened voting for Biden over Trump to eating half ‘a bowl of shit’ instead of the ‘whole thing’ — has no patience for half measures as the COVID-19 crisis ravages the country, making societal inequities impossible to ignore.”

Progressives may well disagree, and that’s part of our problem. Too many people expect reporters to take sides. I’m not arguing a point of view but rather analyzing facts to draw what seem to be logical conclusions. When Democrats need unity, that is not helpful.

Domestic issues — social justice and the rest — are crucial. But political realities are what they are. Recalcitrant opponents are not won over by fiery rhetoric. If democracy is deadlocked by entrenched positions, those global crises push us all farther toward the edge.

In the end, the main challenge is Americans’ collective indifference. Some delve deep into global issues. But many more tune it all out, easy prey to fabulist politicians whose own grasp of world realities is shockingly thin.

Nicholas Kristof wrote an amusing if unsettling piece in late 2019 about New York Times columns only his mother reads – if she’s not busy. His worst-read, “Straining Through the Tear Gas,” warned of echoes in Hong Kong of Tiananmen Square, which he covered in 1989.

Another, “China’s Orwellian War on Religion,” explained how Xi’s cultural genocide in Xinjiang and his policy of “absolutely no mercy” foreshadow what we might expect if the Middle Kingdom achieves a millennia-old goal of dominating the world.

I was troubled by ignored columns on Venezuela. In 1963, I took a break from school to work for the (now-defunct) Caracas Daily Journal. An elected president had just succeeded another. Venezuela, awash in oil earnings, had a thriving middle class. A penchant for splashing Coca-Cola in good Scotch was a minor drawback. Look at it now.

Kristof analyzed how and why misguided decisions in Washington played a part in the country’s collapse. But, he noted, a typical Trump column gets three to four times more readers than anything about Venezuela. He concluded:

“I count myself very lucky that I work for a news organization that lets me fly off to Venezuela or Yemen on expensive, potentially dangerous reporting trips even though we all realize that my readership will plunge as a result.”  

Uninformed, we get policy wrong. America loves its westerns. A guy in a white hat outdraws a black-hat villain, who skulks out of the bar. In real life, the bad guy’s buddies wait outside with barrel staves. High Noon tactics are temporary. Strategy is long term.

Up to now, our debacles were regional. Vietnam overcame our meddling in time, but we learned little from it. Now, facing a collapsing planetary ecosystem, mass human movements, pandemics and rivals with cyber weapons as well as nukes, we are nearly out of time.

New Year’s resolutions are quickly forgotten. Inauguration Day offers us a chance to finally get things right. We need a New Year’s revolution.