One Good Term Deserves Another: Biden Declares

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Ora Ugumbi. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. A recently launched campaign requires 97 million 1 million Communist Party members to study Xi Jinping's ideas. Although this kind of policy isn't unusual for China, this one looks quite different to any that have come before. And the land along Ukraine's front lines is dotted with undetonated explosives, but the Russians aren't the only ones who put them there. Mining is part of a defensive war tactic that seems to be working. First up, though—

Freedom. Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans. There's nothing more important, nothing more sacred.

That's been the way of my first term, to fight for our democracy. It's official. America's President Joe Biden is running in the 2024 election. Democrats that were once tipped to contest the nomination have cheered the announcement. But the decision to seek a second term has also been met with a fair amount of criticism from the American public.

He's got the experience of decades in Congress, but it would be nice to kind of get out of the old male white patriarchy. I think he's just old. I'm actually a little bit indifferent. You know, I really haven't seen a lot of the policies and things that he was stating while he was campaigning. So, you know, I'm kind of at the point where I really don't care.

Biden was born before the Second World War. He's America's oldest president and beats that record every day he's in office. And his age has shown on the podium.

Now, Sleepy Joe would say the unemployment rate in the great state of Ohio— no, no, you're in South Carolina.

Biden's Republican opponents have been all too happy to capitalize on his various slip-ups.

I did that like 7 times. If I did that once, it would be the end of the road, right?

And while these are challenges Biden has faced before, the 2024 presidential campaign is set to be a very different contest from the one he faced 3 years ago.

After a lifetime of public service, 2 previous tries at the presidency, Joe Biden ran in 2020 and unseated a sitting president, and he got more done legislatively, I think, in 2 years than few of us, certainly I, imagined possible.

James Bennett is The Economist's Lexington columnist.

But I do worry that choosing to run again, he's making a mistake. He's got an uphill fight on two big fronts. One is biological and the other is political. Not seeking to run again would have been, I think, a historic act of leadership that would have neutralized some of his opposition in Congress. And also allowed him to be what I think America could really use right now, which is what he's becoming naturally, an elder statesman.

Okay, let's get into that politically. Why do you think he's making a mistake by running again?

Well, he's beginning in a pretty deep political hole. His approval rating has been stuck at very low levels since the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And so he has a real fight on his hands. And, you know, he's facing an implacable opposition in the House already. Republicans who are intent on investigating him and his family. He might have defanged some of that if he chose not to run. His chances of making any progress legislatively are not good, even if he doesn't run again. But this only makes it harder for him to reach agreement even on crucial questions like raising the debt ceiling. And I do think he's going to have to spend the rest of this term struggling to keep the lights on in Washington and in Kyiv, where he's got to maintain support for the war in Ukraine.

And James, let's talk about that biological factor that you mentioned.

This is a tricky issue to talk about. It's hard to discuss it without sounding disrespectful or even insensitive, but there's a reality here we can't look away from. We all know somebody who's in their 80s, and we all know how much wisdom they have, and we value and even love them. That's different from being able to say we know that they would have the energy, the drive, the vigor to be up to the demands of what is probably the hardest job in the world. And that's going to be an issue that Joe Biden will struggle with on the campaign trail. He was lucky in a sense last time around to be campaigning during lockdown. He wasn't out in public. He wasn't having to keep up with the demands of a presidential campaign, a traditional one. And this time around, he won't have that luxury. And obviously he'll be 4 years older and By the time he finishes the next term, if he is reelected, he'll be 86.

So why do you think Biden has chosen to do this regardless?

Joe Biden has sought the presidency for much of his adult life. He has it now. I think he would be right to take considerable satisfaction in the job he's done, and I think it'd be hard for anybody to walk away from that. He's pitched his announcement in terms of finishing the job.

When I ran for president 4 years ago, I said we're in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are.

That's why I'm running for reelection.

And he, he really thinks he is standing between the country and a return to the presidency of Donald Trump.

Okay. But despite being the incumbent, Biden could still face a primary challenge, right?

Actually, I no longer think he's likely to face a primary challenge. Every Democratic politician knows the history of this and that incumbent presidents who get challenged tend to lose. And I think the risk of looking like the spoiler who does return Donald Trump to the presidency is too great for another Democrat to pitch their hat in the ring. It's possible that we will see a third-party challenge of some sort that would take votes away from Mr. Biden. So far, there are a couple minor candidates who've gotten in the race who don't represent much of a threat.

Okay, but it's not just Biden who the Democrats would be reelecting. Kamala Harris has also announced that she'll be his running mate. What do you make of that?

Yeah, and she was featured very prominently in his announcement video. And look, I mean, she's part of the challenge facing this ticket. She's also quite unpopular, even with lower approval ratings than Joe Biden himself has. The White House has not done a great job of getting her before the American people. She has struggled to connect and to communicate well when she has been visible. And I do think, you know, this is a concern too, when voters who look at Joe Biden and wonder whether his health will sustain him through a second term will be paying a lot of attention to who his running mate is. Thinking that she could well wind up being president of the United States, and that's going to put tremendous pressure on that part of the ticket.

So with all that said, how likely is it that Donald Trump and Joe Biden could face each other off again in 2024?

I mean, right now it's looking very likely that we're going to see this rematch that the American people in poll after poll have made quite clear they do not want. They don't want to see Donald Trump run again. They do not want to see Joe Biden run again. But the polling for now has Donald Trump clearing the field. The White House has been pretty clear that they want Donald Trump as the opponent, thinking he would be the easiest Republican to beat. And I just think that's a very, very dangerous way to think. Donald Trump was able to construct a very narrow path to the presidency in 2016 despite losing the popular vote. He came very close to doing that again in 2020. And there's so many variables here well beyond Joe Biden's own age and his own performance on the stump, including what could happen with the economy, developments in foreign policy, all of which make it very, very hard to be confident, as confident as Joe Biden appears to be, that he's the guy to prevent Donald Trump from achieving a second term. I think what is going to be frustrating to the voters about this is that Donald Trump is also an elderly candidate. And what we're presented with here is these two elderly men refighting what may well feel like kind of a grudge match rather than projecting the kind of optimistic forward-looking politics that I think Americans are kind of desperate for, particularly at a moment the future just feels so uncertain and the pace of change is so rapid. It just feels like a campaign that's going to be dragging all of us back into the past.

James, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me, Laurie.

The Chinese Communist Party has not historically prized independence of thought among its party members. During Mao Zedong's Rectification Movement of the 1940s, thousands of people were killed in purges as he attempted to reform their thinking. For the modern Communist Party in China, the push for collective thought is thankfully less violent and more restrained. But it is certainly there, and new technology has given it a Black Mirror twist.

The Chinese Communist Party has recently launched a new campaign to educate its members, to bring them up to speed with Xi Jinping thought. And that means the Chinese leader's entire range of thinking on everything from security matters to Chinese culture and everything in between.

James Miles is The Economist's China writer-at-large.

It involves endless meetings to study his speeches and certainly will involve use of an app that was developed a few years ago by the Party. It allows Party committees to monitor the progress being made by individual party members and how much attention they're paying to the campaign.

And is this type of political education campaign unusual in modern China?

Well, Xi Jinping has been a particular fan of this kind of campaign. Yes, there have been education campaigns in the past before he took over in 2012, but he has mounted them on a scale and with a regularity that we really hadn't seen before, at least in most of the post-Mao era. Every couple of years on average, Xi Jinping has launched a new one. And often these campaigns have been about how to be a good Communist Party member, how to serve the people. This one is highly unusual, however, in that it is focused on Xi Jinping. It has his name on it. And Overall, the focus of this campaign will be to teach Communist Party members Xi Jinping thought. And it's a massive business. It involves the mobilization of 97 million members of the Communist Party, officials, business people, students, members of the armed forces. This is a huge chunk of Chinese society that over the next few weeks and months will be having to devote a huge amount of time to learning the thoughts of Xi Jinping.

Now, tell us a bit more about some of the tenets that make up Xi Jinping Thought. What are we talking about here?

Well, Xi Jinping Thought is a term often bandied around, although the full title of it is Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics In the New Era. It's a ponderous title, but his thought is really a hodgepodge of ideas drawn from communist leaders, from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping and others in between. And really with no kind of coherent thought in it, but there is a sort of core idea in them. And that is that Communist Party control is essential. Loyalty to the highest leader is essential. In other words, it's about stressing the importance of loyalty to Xi Jinping himself. And in the external domain, in terms of how China behaves globally, it's about China's rise as a great power, how in Xi Jinping's view China has a lot to offer the rest of the world, how other countries should pay respect to China and its system. And so it's a sweeping range of ideas with at its center the idea that the party and Xi Jinping control absolutely everything.

So this campaign to teach Xi Jinping Thought, how's it going to work in practice? Are people going to have to sit some kind of test at the end?

No, it's not quite as regimented as that, but Everybody will have to attend numerous meetings. You know, once, twice a week, party members will get together and sit around, listen to speeches by party officials about this or that aspect of Xi Jinping thought. They will all have to pay close attention and take notes. They may, in a group setting, have to engage in what's called self-criticism, involving confessing to ways in which They haven't been ideal Communist Party members. And the kind of language that's used to describe this process is one that has echoes of the Mao era. In other words, officials are saying that the whole point of these criticism and self-criticism sessions is that people should emerge red-faced and sweating after them. There's talk of getting out knives and scraping the bone in a metaphorical sense. In other words, officials are stressing this should be a psychologically tough process as well as one that involves sitting around reading Xi's speeches. And of course, there is this app, Xièxìjiāngbó, which has two meanings. On one level, it means simply study the strong country, but it also happens to mean study Xi to make the country strong. And that's really the sense in which everybody interprets this name. It is full of Xi Jinping's speeches over the years, nuggets of Xi Jinping wisdom, hardly most of this riveting stuff. And what is, from the official point of view, particularly useful about this app is that it allows party committees to monitor exactly how much progress people are making because it shows how much time you're spending using the app, how much progress you're making. And that enables not only people to assess the progress of individual party members, but of course it then becomes highly competitive. And, you know, this adds a huge amount of stress to ordinary party members' lives.

And what does all this say about the future direction of China under Mr. Xi?

So questions were asked among some analysts as to whether Xi Jinping coming out of the zero-COVID policy, whether he might have suffered some damage to his prestige, whether there might be some questioning of his power. And I think what we can see in the way that this is unfolding, the scale with which it's being conducted, the blitz of publicity in the state media emphasizing again and again the importance of party control, loyalty to Xi, that there is absolutely no indication, at least on the surface, that Xi Jinping is threatened. And this campaign is yet another sign that the system is functioning politically just as it was before the pandemic, and that Xi Jinping remains just as determined to wield absolute control over the party and the entire country.

James, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

To hear more about how Xi is trying to govern and where he looks to for inspiration, listen to this week's episode of our sister podcast, Drum Tower. It's available wherever you get your podcasts. Ukraine has become one of the most mined countries in the world. Undetonated explosives litter the forests, farmers' fields, the backyards, and even the beaches all across the south and east. This is a threat that both civilians and soldiers alike have had to become accustomed to. Many of them are learning crude methods of minesweeping, clearing unexploded devices by throwing items at the mines and by marking off safe pathways to walk. But removing the mines will be a process that goes on for years. This is partly because mines are being laid by both sides for a range of tactics. —including by the Ukrainians themselves to defend against Russian advances.

The Ukrainians have huge stockpiles of these Soviet-era anti-tank mines. These are about the size of a dinner plate, and it's basically set off by a tank rolling over it, by the pressure of a vehicle above it.

David Hambling writes about technology for The Economist.

They're being used in front of defensive positions to slow down or stop Russian attacks, and they have been very successful. Obviously, the disadvantage is that you're laying minefields in your own country, but because these are fairly large and obvious and laid on the surface, they should be relatively easy to remove afterwards.

So tell us, how does that mining tactic play out more practically?

So we've seen some of the best examples in the defence of Vuhledar this winter, which is a city in southeast Ukraine that Russia was trying to take And although a lot of the action was described as tank battles, in fact, mainly we just saw Russian tanks rolling forward into minefields, blowing up, getting into trouble, and the advance coming to a halt. So in tanks versus anti-tank mines, the mines definitely came off best.

And is that normally the case when tanks are faced with mines?

We don't know exactly what the thinking on the Russian side is. Because it may be that they were just expecting very narrow or very thinly sowed minefields that they could just push on through. A mine as a rule will not destroy an armoured vehicle, it just destroys the track or it blows off a wheel. So it will halt it without necessarily killing anyone inside, and the vehicle can then be recovered afterwards. So driving into a minefield isn't necessarily that dangerous for the crew. But in Vuhledar and elsewhere, What we've seen have been quite large, very densely laid minefields with lots of mines packed together. So the Russians haven't been able to get through. There are a lot of instances where we've seen one tank gets blown up by a mine, the next tank tries to drive around it, also hits another mine and gets blown up. Another one drives around that, same result. And it really does seem that the Russians haven't been able to break through, and also very significantly they have completely failed to do any effective demining of the minefields.

And tell us, what does demining entail, and why has Russia failed to do it effectively in Ukraine?

Normally, a minefield will be defended, so you're trying to clear it under fire. And generally, the easiest way to do this is with a thing called a mine plough or a mine roller. And the Russians have a lot of these KMT devices, which which combines a mine plough and a mine roller. So it's got heavy wheels which should set off any mines ahead of the tank, and it's got plough blades to push mines out of the way. And it's got devices to deal with magnetic mines. So the idea is that your lead tank in each column has one of these mine rollers, and that just clears a path through the minefield and all the other tanks follow that through. Now the Russian tank crews don't really seem to trust these very much. We've seen reports that they've been ditched, and we've also seen videos where a tank equipped with one of these rollers actually hits a mine and gets blown up itself because the mine waited until the tank went over it before going off. So they may very well have reason not to trust those.

So without them, what else can they use to navigate minefields?

Well, the Russian Army, like other modern armies, does also have engineers with specialist demining equipment. So those include more sophisticated mine ploughs, but also these rocket-propelled devices. So basically you've got a rocket pulling something like a garden hose that's filled with explosives. So they launch that into the minefield, blow it up, and that will then blast a path wide enough for a tank to drive through. So again, that should give you a clear path through the mines. However, even if it does that, the problem is the path is only one vehicle wide. So if somebody knocks out the lead vehicle in the column, the whole thing grinds to a halt. And also when the shooting starts, and we have seen this in videos, sometimes drivers will panic and drive out of the safe lane, again with predictably bad results.

So David, what does all this mean for the broader progress of the war for both sides?

Well, in some ways it's not a great surprise. The Russians have been very incompetent when it comes to dealing with minefields, but then they've shown themselves to be quite incompetent in many other minesfields as well, so it's not that surprising. The more concerning thing is, will the Ukrainian forces be able to break through Russian minefields when it's their turn to launch a counter-offensive? Because the Russian positions we know are heavily mined, and they are using for the most part exactly the same type of mines that the Ukrainians are using themselves. We have reason to believe that the Ukrainians may be better trained, better equipped, and generally more competent at handling minefields, but that really is something that remains to be seen.

David, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Let us know what what you think of the show by emailing us at podcasts@economist.com. And if you're not a subscriber to The Economist, what are you waiting for? Dive in, get a free 30-day digital subscription by going to economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.