POLITICO NIGHTLY: Russia and China break the ice in Beijing

 

BY RENUKA RAYASAM With help from Chris Suellentrop NOT JUST FUN AND GAMES — The geopolitical significance of the 2022 Winter Olympic games, whose Opening Ceremonies are Friday in Beijing, extends far beyond which country takes home the most gold medals. The U.S. and its allies, including the U.K., Australia and Canada, have imposed a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games because of China’s human rights record, which includes genocide against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang and a crackdown on anti-government voices. India joined the boycott today, after a Chinese soldier involved in a border skirmish took part in the Olympic torch relay. China’s president Xi Jinping seems to have shrugged off the boycott. He said today in a video message to the International Olympic Committee, “The world is turning its eyes to China, and China is ready.” A potential Russian invasion of Ukraine also looms in the background of the games, further threatening its peaceful tenor. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Xi plan to meet before the Opening Ceremony in a public display of their deepening ties. Nightly chatted with China Watcher host Phelim Kine over Slack today about this strange moment for the Olympics, and the world. This conversation has been edited. How is Russia using the Beijing Games to advance its agenda? Putin will be the first foreign leader to have one-on-one, in-person face time with Xi since he effectively went into seclusion in China at the start of the pandemic. Both Russian and Chinese media are depicting Putin’s visit as proof of bilateral warmth and solidarity and partnership against Western country leaders who are staying home. That gives Xi a breather in terms of China’s diplomatic isolation during the Games, and it also provides Putin a narrative of him as an international statesman who is reinforcing ties with the world’s second largest economy in the face of a potential barrage of damaging economic sanctions by the U.S. and the E.U. if Putin does indeed take military action against Ukraine. Athletes from The Netherlands sit at the edge of the ice during a practice session ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. | AP Photo/Ashley Landis But U.N. Sec. General Antonio Guterres will also be at the games? Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) told me during a POLITICO Twitter Spaces event that Guterres’ decision to attend the Games meant that “the U.N. has basically failed in its human rights role here and it’s shameful for Guterres to appear at the Games.” Guterres’ presence at the Games compounds the damage that the U.N. has been taking for delaying the release of what is expected to be a damning report on human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. There is speculation that the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, is holding back the report pending long-awaited official permission from Beijing for an official visit to Xinjiang. The Chinese Foreign Affairs ministry has made clear that any such visit will be strictly on its terms and that it will not tolerate what it describes as “political manipulation.” What has changed since 2008, when the Summer Games were held in Beijing, with relatively little controversy? Back in 2008 there were reasonable hopes that China was on the path toward becoming a gentler, kinder authoritarian one-party state, with greater respect for human rights, wider space for freedom of expression and association. Instead what happened is that Xi Jinping came to power in 2013 and has piloted a drastic worsening in human rights abuses, particularly in Xinjiang, and has rolled back even what limited space existed for honest dialogue about the country’s problems and direction. The hope is gone, replaced by the emergence of a totalitarian surveillance state helmed by Xi who models himself the heir to Chairman Mao Zedong, complete with a budding personality cult. Sen. Merkley compared the 2022 Beijing Games to the 1936 Berlin Olympics “when you had Hitler proudly flying the Nazi flag next to the Olympic flag.” That rhetoric underscores how drastically international perceptions of the Chinese government and its role in and perceived threat to what the Biden administration calls “international rules-based order” has shifted for the worse since the 2008 Games. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Medicare enrollees will now be able to get eight free Covid tests a month, the same benefit that the Biden Administration has already provided to those with private insurance. Flashback to our piece highlighting the gap in Biden’s testing plan. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam. WHAT'D I MISS? — U.S. alleges Russia weighing fake video as pretext for war: The Biden administration alleges the Kremlin could create a pretext for a Ukraine invasion by distributing a fake video of Kyiv’s forces targeting Russian territory or Russian-speakers — thereby giving Putin what he needs to send troops rolling over the border. A senior administration official told NatSec Daily that Moscow has already recruited people to be in the video and that Russian intelligence officials are “intimately involved” in the plot. — Senators worry Russia will invade Ukraine before they finalize sanctions bill: Senators in both parties emerged from a classified briefing on Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine today with fresh doubts about whether a legislative response would come together in time to deter an invasion. While upper-chamber negotiators insist they are close to an agreement on a bill to sanction Moscow and boost U.S. support for Kyiv, the briefing from top Biden administration officials — while designed to heighten lawmakers’ sense of urgency — left some concerned that the talks are moving at too glacial a pace. — Biden targets gun violence in New York City visit: President Joe Biden called for more funding for law enforcement and anti-violence programs during a visit today to New York City to grapple with increasing crime. Mayor Eric Adams joined Biden, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Merrick Garland on a stop by police headquarters in lower Manhattan, where they planned to attend a meeting on gun violence strategies between local and federal law enforcement. — IRS shuffling workers to cut giant mail backlog: The IRS is returning employees who used to process tax returns and other paperwork back to their old jobs for the next eight months to help the agency cut through its massive backlog, Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in an internal email Wednesday night. Current resources aren’t enough to overcome the challenge, he said, so he’s pulling people out of their new posts to leverage their prior experience. — Staff at Dem firm revolt over work for Sinema: Since the beginning of 2020, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s reelection campaign has paid the Democratic consulting firm Authentic nearly a half million dollars for digital work and list acquisition. Inside the firm, staffers have revolted over the contract, expressing shock and agitation that a company that professes fidelity to a set of progressive values has worked alongside a lawmaker many believe are standing in the way of progress on those values. “I am doing the devils work,” said one employee at Authentic of the work done for Sinema, according to internal union messages reviewed by POLITICO. — Adams defends dinner with Cuomo: New York City Mayor Eric Adams defended his decision to have dinner this week with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned from office in August after the state attorney general corroborated claims he had sexually harassed multiple women. “I’m going to sit down with everyone. No stone will be left unturned to get my city back up and operating,” Adams said this morning in an interview on PIX11 News in New York. Adams and Cuomo dined Tuesday night at Osteria La Baia in midtown Manhattan. AROUND THE WORLD President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the White House on a U.S. Special Operations raid targeting ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. | Win McNamee/Getty Images U.S. STRIKES ISIS IN SYRIA — Biden heralded the success today of a large-scale counterterrorism raid carried out by U.S. special operations forces in northwestern Syria that resulted in the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group, Quint Forgey writes. “Thanks to the bravery our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said in an address delivered from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Biden also said he directed the Defense Department “to take every precaution possible to minimize civilian casualties” during the operation. “At a much greater risk to our own people,” Biden said, he ultimately decided to authorize a special operations raid rather than an airstrike in an effort to preserve the lives of innocents. Biden announced in a statement earlier today that all Americans involved in the operation returned home safely. But first responders at the scene — in the village of Atmeh near the Turkish border — reported that 13 people were killed, including six children and four women, according to The Associated Press. Senior administration officials said al-Qurayshi died in the same manner as former Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who detonated a suicide vest — killing himself and three children — after he was cornered in a tunnel during a U.S. raid in northwestern Syria in 2019. NIGHTLY NUMBER 15 The number of days until government funding runs out. Democratic leaders have started a now-familiar song and dance: preparing to pass a continuing resolution to punt the funding deadline for a few more days or weeks, to avoid the risk of a government shutdown come midnight on Feb. 18. Congress has already passed two of those funding patches since the new fiscal year started in October. PARTING WORDS THE COVID DOCTOR IS IN … THE CAMPAIGN — The pandemic has turned the intensive-care unit doctor into a cultural superstar on the order of Peloton and Zoom. ICU docs are everywhere: in your Twitter feed, on your cable news channel, on your op-ed page. They’re saving lives, sure, but they’re also a new brand of public intellectual — and political candidate. There’s even one running for governor of Tennessee. Nightly editor Chris Suellentrop talked to Jason Martin, a 46-year-old critical care doctor from Nashville who’s never run for public office before, last month about his quest to win the Democratic nomination this summer in the party’s long-shot bid to unseat the incumbent Republican, Bill Lee. This conversation has been edited. Do you agree that the pandemic has changed the perception of the ICU doctor in our society? I joke with my friends that this is an opportunity for me to get involved, because no one is ever going to care what a pulmonologist/critical care doctor thinks in a year or two. There’s some credit here that we can spend. So I think that’s totally true. I lost my dad in an ICU in 2014. That was a life-changing, and career-changing, experience for me. Being on the other side allows you to know what empathy means. The right answer is not always clear. You have to try different things. You have to listen to people. You have to put together a plan and a collaborative group. Those are skills that translate directly to government. People ask me all the time: “You’re not a chief executive. You don’t have business experience. What makes you think you can jump into being governor?” I tell people: Government is not a business. Government exists to solve big problems that we can’t solve on our own. And that’s exactly what I do in the ICU every single day. What was the start of the pandemic like for you? For seven, eight weeks, I was completely separated from my family. We were hit very early on with a nursing home outbreak. So in like three days time, we got 100 octogenarians, basically, admitted to our hospital. And it’s a 100-bed hospital. We were overwhelmed at the outset. This was the first time since training, since I was an intern, that I walked into the building and everything looked unfamiliar. How does that compare to how the pandemic feels right now? We are way understaffed. We can’t hire or keep nurses. And it’s not the administration’s fault. It’s a national problem. We’ve got three dozen nurses out with Covid, currently, because it’s so rampant in our community. In mid-January, we were down to one ventilator in the hospital. We’ve got a contingency plan. The state will bring us more ventilators. It’s not like someone’s going to go without a ventilator. But that’s where we were. Our supply of 18 ventilators for an 18-bed ICU was down to one. And the curve and tendency was still straight up. And all this is happening in the setting of nobody caring anymore. I don’t mean for me. I feel this, too. People are fatigued. They’re over it. In the improbable circumstance that you become the governor of Tennessee, what policies would you adopt to manage that tension, that there’s an ongoing health care crisis at the same time that people are really tired of the pandemic and want things to be normal again? I think there needs to be someone who is not actively working against us. What we were feeling was never matched by our governor. I think school districts should have some local control. If you feel like masks are necessary in your schools to keep your students and your kids safe, the governor should not override that with an executive order, which is what happened here. I would not threaten to defund the Department of Health for vaccine outreach to minors. Getting people vaccinated is the way we reduce severe and life-threatening disease. I tell people all the time that freedom without responsibility is not liberty. It’s adolescence. And that’s what we’re dealing with right now in state government.   Follow us on Twitter Chris Suellentrop @suellentrop Tyler Weyant @tweyant Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam Myah Ward @myahward   FOLLOW US

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