by Rick Rozoff

Recent clashes between civilians, border guards and troops of Central Asian nations Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan over a long-standing water dispute have resulted in the deaths of over 30 people, the wounding of 150 and the displacement of more than 10,000.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are members of the Russian-led Collective Treaty Security Organization (CSTO), which did nothing to defend member Armenia in the Turkish-Azerjbaijani military onslaught against hopelessly outnumbered Nagorno-Karabakh last year. Russian officials went out of their way to claim that as Nagorno-Karabakh was not part of Armenia the CSTO had no obligation to defend it. Even after a Russian military helicopter was shot down and two of its crew killed by Azerbaijan over Armenian territory. Employing the same logic, Russia should not have intervened when Georgia invaded South Ossetia in 2008, nor express any concern over the fate of the people of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the Donbass. South Ossetia and the Donbass republics also aren’t members of the CSTO.

Although one might expect the CSTO to be the ideal mechanism for discussing disputes between two of its member states, the only organization that has issued a statement on the conflict is the Turkish-controlled Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States, better known as the Turkic Council, consisting of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan considers itself a Turkic nation; Tajikistan speaks an Iranian language related to Farsi and Dari.

The secretary general of the Turkic Council, Baghdad Amreev, today called on both sides to desist from further violence, citing the religious backdrop of Ramadan, and stated, “The Turkic Council will continue to maintain close contact with brotherly Kyrgyzstan, a founding member of the Turkic Council, on this issue.” One can’t expect the Turkic Council and its member states, especially Turkey, to remain neutral in the conflict.

At the beginning of the year the leaders of the Turkic Council held an informal virtual conference and issued a declaration which proclaimed the city of Turkistan [in Kazakhstan] “a spiritual capital of the Turkic World,” and that “other prominent ancient cities of the Turkic world might be accorded with similar statuses on a rotating basis in the future.” The participants also applauded the preparation of the Turkic World Vision – 2040 document. Intriguing title to be sure.

Last month the same Amreev said to a meeting of Turkic Council personnel: “We are very glad that Azerbaijan has liberated its de-occupied territories. We, the Turkic states, express our solidarity with Azerbaijan.” He was of course referring to the Turkish-backed war against Nagorno-Karabakh last year. A 44-day war that was celebrated in a victory ceremony in the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, in December where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the guest of honor.

Also last month Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, posed in combat garb in a so-called War Trophy Park amid the helmets of slain Nagorno-Karabakh defenders. His government proudly released a photograph of that event to news agencies around the world, one that to a healthy mind would be grotesque if not ghoulish. On the occasion of the opening of the museum he said: “We have created a new reality. We created it by shedding blood, showing courage, driving out the enemy. Today everyone should reckon with us and will reckon with us.”

He not only celebrated his dubious success against a largely defenseless opponent, but revealed the pan-Turkic motive of the war in these words: “Our Victory is not only the victory of our people, the entire Turkic world is proud of it.”

The Kyrgyz government and armed forces are aware of Aliyev’s statement as they are of Amreev’s. With sponsors like Azerbaijan and Turkey – whose slogan is one nation, two states – and their combined population of 95 million, Kyrgyzstan has little reason to negotiate with Tajikistan, which has no one to defend it. Surely not the CSTO.

If anyone in Tajikistan thinks otherwise, they may want to read these words of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov of two days ago:

“Turkey and Turkey’s commitment to its independent course of development…this is a subject of US concern and the way the United States is trying to raise its voice at Ankara…obviously indicate that Washington does not like how [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is confidently leading Turkey forward and that they would prefer a more compliant Turkey.”

After successful and mainly uncontested Turkish military actions in Iraq, Syria and Libya; proxy roles in the armed conflicts in the South Caucasus and Yemen; ongoing territorial disputes with Greece and support for its Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus client against the Cypriot government in Nicosia, why not move further east into Central Asia? Neo-Ottoman aspirations are being realized in the Middle East and North Africa, and the pan-Turkic road lies open to the Chinese border.

Rick Rozoff is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is the manager of Stop NATO. This originally appeared at Anti-Bellum.

Covid, brexit, trump: last autumn offered plenty to distract world attention from the war that started on the sunny morning of 27 September. The immediate belligerents were the small Caucasian nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan, fighting over the perennially disputed territory of Nagorno Karabagh—or such at least was the standard ‘even-handed’ Western headline, lost in the stream of news. Yet Azerbaijan brought in—or was actually led by—Erdoğan’s Turkey, mobilizing low-wage Syrian jihadis along with expensive Israeli drones. Pakistan took Azerbaijan’s side, in exchange for recognition of its rights over Kashmir, and no doubt more tangible incentives. Baku’s vast arsenal, imported from Russia over the years, was supplemented by advanced ballistic missiles from Belarus and Czech heavy artillery, through shady deals involving Azeri petrodollars. The Republic of Georgia, for historical reasons never too friendly towards fellow-Christian Armenians—and deeply traumatized by the pro-Russian separatisms of its own ethnic fringes in Abkhazia and South Ossetia—proclaimed its neutrality, which in effect meant turning a blind eye to the massive transfers of military hardware and manpower from Turkey to Azerbaijan through its famed ‘east–west corridor’. Consult the map: the Caucasus mountains stand as tall as ever, constraining even the most modern forms of transportation.

Iran, for its part, hurriedly amassed Revolutionary Guards on the south bank of the Arax River, fearing that the Azeri-Turkish offensive on the other side could provide cover for an American-Israeli attack. China, unsympathetic to any separatism, including Armenian, nevertheless monitored with some anxiety Erdoğan’s hymning of a pan-Turkic brotherhood extending across Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea into the ‘Greater Turkestan’ of Inner Asia: where does that end—in Xinjiang, Mongolia? On the opposite flank of Eurasia, Macron was cordially advised by the irrepressible Erdoğan to consult a psychiatrist about his ‘Islamophobia disease’; traditionally pro-Armenian, France did nothing more than issue a symbolic ban on the Grey Wolves, the Turkish neo-fascist network (whose existence Ankara denies). In a parallel set of conflicts, the United Arab Emirates and Egyptian governments began squeezing out Turkish companies working in their countries in revenge for Erdoğan’s proxy advances in Libya, Iraq and Syria. The un Security Council was predictably incapacitated by a veto, purportedly that of the uk representative, either due to mi6’s long-running Turcophilia, bp’s request on behalf of its Baku partners or, in more conspiratorial minds, the Ottoman ancestry of Boris Johnson.

Last but by no means least came Russia’s intervention, after 44 days of ferocious fighting, just when the beleaguered Armenians looked doomed. On 9 November 2020, with Azerbaijani forces poised to assail Stepanakert, the enclave’s capital, Putin issued an ultimatum: if Baku did not halt operations, Russia would intervene. A few hours later, he announced a peace deal. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, appeared on tv to proclaim the end of the fighting. Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, had no choice but to sign off on the deal Putin had brokered. A day later, Russian ‘peacekeepers’ arrived in a spectacular airlift operation—transport aircraft, military helicopters, armoured personnel carriers, some 2,000 heavily armed troops from the 15th Motorized Rifle Brigade, bomb squads and engineers.

Turkey, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China: at play in the 2020 battle for Nagorno Karabagh were the latter-day avatars of once-formidable Eurasian agrarian empires. To grasp what is going on in the Caucasus today, it helps to consider their back stories. At the start of the sixteenth century, contributors to a geo-political roundtable—commenting in Arabic, Chinese and maybe Church Latin—might have pointed to the gunpowder revolutions that helped seal the end of the dreadful medieval epoch and characterized the new era. Guns battered the walls of fortified cities and subdued the scourge of nomadic invasions. A whole new generation of empires could emerge, following Ming China, including three great Islamic powers: the Mughals, striving to encompass India; the Safavids’ restoration of Greater Iran; and the Ottomans, claiming the eastern Roman inheritance, who partitioned the southern Caucasus with their Safavid rivals. This was Modernity, Act One, in which Asia had a prominent role. Rising outliers like Muscovy, or the once-ferocious Burma, could also be mentioned. In the West, the Hapsburgs charted the way to the ascendancy of a commercial, bureaucratic and conservatively religious universal edifice; but the long wars of religion, improbably ending in a stalemate, helped to guarantee the sovereignty of multiple nation-states. It remained to the Westerners to put their guns and well-practiced soldiers onto ocean-going ships and recapitulate, at world scale, the pillaging and trading enterprise of the Viking era.

Modernity’s Act Two saw the rise of the industrial-capitalist European powers. To varying degrees, India, Persia and China were semi- or wholly colonized. Two sprawling empires, Russian and Turkish, leftovers from Act One, preserved footholds on the European continent. Over the nineteenth century, the Ottomans—like the Persians—would see chunks of territory hacked away. Imperial Russia, however, emerged diplomatically and militarily strengthened from its clash with Napoleon, symbolic harbinger of Act Two. Having colonized the eastern steppes, it now absorbed the lands to the south, annexing the Black Sea coast and expanding across the Persian-held khanates of the southern Caucasus, establishing its rule over present-day Armenia and Azerbaijan with the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay. The region constituted Tsarist Russia’s military frontier with the Ottoman Empire, which still held western Armenia. In the vortex of World War One—another extraordinary occurrence in the history of capitalism: the core of the modern world-system at the pinnacle of its power apparently went for collective suicide—the entire region would be shattered and re-forged.

The twentieth century saw the advent of Modernity’s Act Three, under the aegis of the us—a non-European world power. Continental Europe was forcefully reunified by fascism, a pathological outgrowth of colonial strategies and racist ideology, which was removed in the hugely bloody surgical procedure of World War Two. The operation was performed by continental-scale American industry, put on a war footing under what amounted to the biggest of social democracies. Most of the fighting was done by the Soviets, the military-industrial superpower built by communists in another improbable turn of world-historical proportions. After 1945, the Cold War pacified Europe at the expense of dwarfing it. The European Union evolved as a club of former empires, intent on avoiding the fate of the Italian Renaissance city-states—once-brave pioneers of a proto-capitalism that ended up in a museum.

Once again, however, the two former Eurasian empires remained outside the Euro-unification project. Both Turkey and Russia were historically European, though culturally not Western. Turkey, a nato member from the early years of the Cold War, remained perennially suspended at the threshold of European prosperity. Russia, or rather the ussr, attempted at least twice—in 1953, when the utterly cynical Lavrenty Beria attempted to steer a new course after the death of Stalin, and again in the 1980s under Gorbachev’s perestroika—to re-enter Europe on honourable terms. However, the project of a Big Europe, stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, always begged the question of the role of America. Instead, Washington began cultivating Maoist China, as improbable (and safe) as that looked at the time. The Soviet Union collapsed of its own accord, with tiny Karabagh playing a surprisingly destructive role, as we shall see. Turkey then got its chance to profit economically and politically from the pillage of Soviet spoils. But in the main, Turkey offered itself to Europe as a kind of local China: a large pool of young, low-skilled labour, disciplined by its own variety of Asian values, and advantageously located between the continents.

Azerbaijan has been used as a jumping platform for various counterterrorism operations. Additionally, the country has served as an important listening post as tensions mounted between the United States and Iran.

by Michael Rubin

The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks brought a brief moment of unity to Americans but also ushered in a period of partisan foreign policy. During the Bush administration, Democrats drew partisan lines on the 2003 Iraq war, at least after they found little evidence that weapons of mass destruction existed. Republicans repaid the favor first on the Libya intervention, at least after the Benghazi debacle, and then on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Israel and Saudi Arabia remain firmly within progressive crosshairs. 

Joe Biden has made healing partisan discord a pillar of his campaign. Should the former vice president wish to carry that promise over to foreign policy, then he would find no better place to start than leading a bipartisan effort to stop the Azerbaijani assault on Nagorno-Karabakh, or Arsakh as locals call it. Nagorno-Karabakh is a mountainous region historically populated by Armenians. Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, however, transferred the region to Azerbaijani control as he sought to undercut nationalism in the Caucasus. Decades of communism imposed from afar were not enough to undo millennia of culture and history, however. As the Soviet Union crumbled, violence erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan while Armenians in the mountainous region fought ethnic cleansing and sought to rejoin Armenia. In the fighting that followed, Armenians largely re-asserted control over Nagorno-Karabakh, and the region has acted as a de facto independent republic ever since.

Against the backdrop of the initial fighting and credible reports of ethnic cleansing, Congress passed the Freedom Support Act, Section 907 of which determined U.S. aid “may not be provided to the Government of Azerbaijan until the President determines, and so reports to the Congress, that the Government of Azerbaijan is taking demonstrable steps to cease all blockades and other offensive uses of force against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.” Azerbaijan has long argued this sanction was unfair given that the U.S. State Department recognizes and affirms the Stalin-era border changes, but initially found little support in Congress or the White House. 

This changed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev, father of current leader Ilham Aliyev and mastermind of the initial attempt to encircle Nagorno-Karabakh and drive out Armenians, allied himself with the United States in the wake of the Al Qaeda strikes and declared itself an ally in President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror.” Aliyev allowed Azerbaijan to be used for a number of counterterrorism operations, and the country also served as an important listening post as tensions mounted between the United States and Iran. The United Kingdom, perhaps motivated by British Petroleum’s interests in Azerbaijan, encouraged the rapprochement as did Israel, which Azerbaijan cultivated both directly and through Jewish organizations in the United States. 

As a reward for Azerbaijan’s positioning itself as a U.S. ally in a time of need, Congress  amendedSection 907 to allow a presidential waiver of restrictions on aid to Azerbaijan if such a waiver “is necessary to support United States efforts to counter international terrorism; is necessary to support the operational readiness of United States Armed Forces or coalition partners to counter international terrorism; is important to Azerbaijan’s border security; and will not undermine or hamper ongoing efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan or be used for offensive purposes against Armenia.”

The current Azerbaijani offensive, however, violates each condition of the Section 907 waiver, most recently extended in March 2020 by Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun. Whereas first Heydar and then Ilham Aliyev once stood against Al Qaeda, Azerbaijan now works in conjunction with Turkish-backed Syrian mercenaries, many of whom previously served Al Qaeda-linked groups or the Islamic State. In essence, Azerbaijan is following the lead of both Turkey and Pakistan, both of which often depict themselves as counterterrorism partners while covertly supporting anti-Western terrorists. As the aggressor, Azeri forces further make a mockery of their own border security concerns and also act to undermine any pretense to a peaceful settlement. 

Azerbaijan publicly denies its aggression, but it hemorrhaged its credibility when its defense ministry posted a statement on Twitter that accused Armenia of ceasefire violations on Oct. 26, a move reminiscent of the 2013 incident when Baku accidentally released election results before the polls opened. Baku has also denied the presence of Syrian mercenaries transported into the theater by Turkey even as Azerbaijan-friendly journalists have interviewed the Syrians. 

Since 2018, the year popular revolution restored democracy in Armenia, the U.S. government has provided over $100 million in security assistance to Azerbaijan, even as that country continues its descent into authoritarianism. Rather than bring peace, this money now funds ethnic cleansing. On Oct. 28, Biden issued a statement calling on “the [Trump] administration [to] fully implement and not waive requirements under section 907 of the Freedom Support Act to stop the flow of military equipment to Azerbaijan, and call on Turkey and Russia to stop fueling the conflict with the supply of weapons and, in the case of Turkey, mercenaries.”  

During presidential campaigns, it is easy to play the role of backseat driver and question every decision the incumbent makes but let us hope that Biden and his aides are not merely posturing for political advantage. The current waiver of Section 907 violates the law upon which it is based and should be revoked immediately. That the State Department has turned a blind eye to Azeri violations and maintains the waiver is an affront to all Congressmen, whether Democrat or Republican.

Azerbaijan has shown the insincerity of both its counterterror commitments and its pledge to pursue a peaceful resolution of its dispute with Armenia. If Biden is victorious, then he can prove his rhetoric about working across the aisle to be sincere by establishing a broad, bipartisan coalition to end Azerbaijan’s free pass and descent into terror complicity. As he rebuilds confidence across the aisle, he might then leverage that domestic coalition to restore consensus on other issues, from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Middle East to Asia. There is no stronger foreign policy than one rooted in bipartisan consensus and cooperation. 

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Saudi Arabia will close eight more schools associated with Turkey’s education administration, Anadolu reports, citing diplomatic sources.

The Saudi Arabian education ministry has informed the school administration of this decision.

Relations between Ankara and Riyadh have escalated since the 2018 Istanbul assassination of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi

Saudi Arabian authorities have been advocating an unofficial boycott of Turkish goods and services since October after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the Gulf kingdom and its allies of destabilizing the region.

Five Turkish schools in the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina were closed late last year, despite attempts by the Turkish authorities to intervene.

Underground Heritage Researcher in Azerbaijan

Andran Abramian – March 27, 2021

An Interview by Andran Abramian

The loss of irreplaceable monuments and, indeed, of the whole history of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabagh/Artsakh, now partially under Azerbaijani control, is greatly feared by millions of people of Armenian heritage. That fear is based on the reality of past acts of destruction by the Azerbaijani government of thousands of medieval Armenian monuments, especially in Nakhichevan.

Cultural Property News is privileged to publish a rare interview with Argam Ayvazyan, a researcher who underwent many risks to secretly document the history and monuments of the Armenian people in the Nakhichevan. The interviewer, Andran Abramian, is a documentary filmmaker who graduated from FAMU film academy in Prague. Abramian’s work focuses primarily on topics related to nature, psychology, society and ideologies. The Argam Ayvazyan interview is a part of a project in progress dealing with the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Abramian and Ayvazyan spoke most recently in December 2020.

Geographically, Nakhichevan is an exclave belonging politically to Azerbaijan but separated from the bulk of the country by a section of Armenia. Nakhichevan borders both Turkey and Iran. The best-known case of systematic destruction of Armenian heritage at the medieval cemetery of Julfa (also called Djulfa of Jugha) was actually witnessed and filmed from across the border in Iran.

In his surveys in the Nakhichevan region of Azerbaijan between 1964 and 1987, Argam Ayvazyan personally recorded 89 standing churches and cathedrals that now no longer exist. He counted and documented 5,840 elaborate khachkars (cross-stones) and estimates some 22,000 flat tombstones which are now smashed, plowed under or removed. Eyewitness accounts – supported by statements in an Encyclopedia issued by Azerbaijani authorities – report that every remaining monument was destroyed by 2008 in the state sponsored campaign to eliminate Armenian history in the region.

Ayvazyan (born 1947, Arinj, Nakhichevan) is an Armenologist, cultural historian and author of more than 300 articles and 55 books, 48 ​​of which deal with the material and cultural heritage of Nakhichevan. On November 2-19, 2007, an exhibition of Argam Ayvazyan’s photographs of Nakhichevan monuments was held at Harvard University, displaying over 250 pictures. He worked in the Monument Protection Department of Armenian SSR, in the Art Institute and Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. Today, he is a senior researcher at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography.

THE LAST JOURNEY TO THE HOMELAND – FRIENDLY ENCOUNTERS AND A NARROW ESCAPE

When was the last time you visited Nakhichevan?

I

t was the end of October 1987. At that time I worked at the Monument Protection Department of Armenia. My female colleagues wanted very much to visit Nakhichevan and asked me if I could arrange a trip. So I asked the head of our department, who gave us his consent to go for a business trip to Meghri, in south Armenia. At that time, the road from Yerevan to Meghri passed through the territory of Nakhichevan. But he warned us to be careful, as the Karabakh movement[1] was already emerging at that time. We took our department’s van. We visited the city of Nakhichevan, where we saw the magnificent Seljuq tomb of Momine Khatun[2] and the Armenian Church of St. George. Then we went to Abrakunis, where we took photos at St. Karapet Monastery[3] and continued to Tsghna, a famous settlement of Goght’n region[4]. We arrived there in the late afternoon and by chance we met one of my old friends, Martin, who lived in Yerevan, and he wouldn’t let us go. In an hour, Martin set up a sumptuous table on the large balcony of his father’s 18th century two-story house.  He hosted us with barbecue, village crops, homemade spirits… Ten other people from Tsghna gathered around the table and our party went on until 3 o’clock in the morning.

Did you ever get to Meghri [in Armenia] then?

Yes, we reached Meghri at dawn. After staying there for two days, we planned to visit the town of Agulis on the way back. As we entered Agulis[5] and parked the car at one of the Armenian cemeteries, I was completely stunned. The cemetery, which had held about 300 tombstones, was gone. A building had already been built in its place.

n less than five minutes, twenty or thirty [Azerbaijani] people gathered around us and started asking questions. Of course, they did not believe my explanations and I could hear them telling each other “Let’s go get gas and burn the car.” I ordered the girls to get in the car. They said, “How come? Why can’t we see the wonderful place and go later?” At my urging, we all got in the van and drove off. The mob started throwing stones and sticks at us and followed us with their cars all the way to the highway. I explained in the car what the people who surrounded us were saying and what could have happened to us. We might not have got out of the village alive.

I also planned to visit Julfa on the way back to retake pictures of 200 khachkars that I had photographed a year before, but the KGB had confiscated the films. In Julfa we visited the house of my old acquaintance, Mrs. Mariam, an elderly Armenian who lived there alone. By the time we set up the table to eat, the autumn weather changed; fog-like clouds accumulated and that’s why I didn’t try to enter the Julfa cemetery. I thought I would come and take the pictures next spring, when the weather would be better. Unfortunately, it was a fatal mistake. After the Karabakh movement started in February 1988, it became clear that it would no longer be possible to return there.

See more: https://culturalpropertynews.org/argam-ayvazyan-spy-researcher-for-nakhichevan-armenian-culture/

Joe Biden has received much praise from the US’s allies. At home, he has an approval rating of 54% after his first 100 days in office. This is the moment for him to consolidate his political power, DW’s Ines Pohl writes.

The leaders of the US’s historical allies have been particularly enthusiastic in their applause for President Joe Biden. The 78-year-old has displayed more energy in his first 100 days in office than many much younger people can dream of. The new man at the reins of the US government has a clear agenda and he is moving along with it.  

For domestic policy, Biden has tools at his disposal that his equivalents such as the German chancellor do not. He can bypass Congress by issuing executive orders to enforce unilateral decisions. On day one of his term, he did just that and returned the US officially to the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Executive orders are not legislation and require no approval from Congress. The president has since signed 40 such directives. The problem with ruling by executive order is that a president’s successors can undo decrees with the stroke of their own pens.  

A split Congress

The Democrats enjoy only a very slim majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. To get regular bills passed, the Democrats need the support of at least some Republicans.

Nobody outside of the United States should forget this when applauding Biden.  Yes, his infrastructure plan would give a much-needed modernizing to the United States that could leave many EU countries far behind. And, yes, his pledge to confront climate change could have positive effects for the United States and the world.

But will his plan even get through Congress? Can Biden get a majority of legislators to back his proposal to tax the rich more? Does Biden have the power to effect real change? There is a discrepancy between the expressed desire to shape global policy and his real capacity to radically change domestic politics in the United States. 

The midterm legislative elections are just 18 months away. Will the Democrats still have a majority in the Senate after November 8, 2022? Biden may be doing much better in the polls 100 days in than his predecessor was, but the United States remains a deeply divided country. 

Biden is already on the campaign trail. He is presenting the US as a reliable partner to its international allies, but his focus is on the domestic situation. If the Democrats are to have any chance of winning the next election, Biden has to succeed at home.