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Jan. 6 Committee’s opening night was not worthy of prime time

Your typical congressional oversight hearings are hard enough to script and choreograph to engage an otherwise distracted audience. Infinitely more difficult is when it’s not just one hearing, but several over the course of a month, based on information collected over an entire year, from 1,000 witnesses and 140,000 documents. And it’s not just any old committee, but the January 6 Select Committee — with resources, yes, but with the clock running, unbridled, toward expiration.

In such a case, circumstances demand, without a doubt, “shock and awe” — you need to “blow the roof off the house.”

That’s what many were expecting, given the hype from some of the committee’s members. That’s not what the committee gave the country last night.

Instead, they delivered a sober, methodical narrative stringing together mostly previously reported dots and facts that were loosely attached to witness testimony and other means. We also got a steady dose of what we are going to hear in future hearings, as if they were indisputable facts.

While the hearing had numerous solid moments of effectiveness, it was not prime time-worthy.

My experience of orchestrating such oversight hearings — covering 19 years in the Senate — would have moved me in a different direction, though it’s easy for me now to carp from the sidelines. This hearing was basically a recap of what we know, sprinkled with a few new tidbits. It was a tease for what lies ahead in future hearings.

I would have scheduled this hearing for a daytime affair, with a soft sell, low-key approach as merely a table-setter: Here’s what we know to date, with the latest facts we have learned, including the audio and video footage, and here’s what’s coming down the pike. In subsequent hearings, including in prime time, we will supply the shock and awe, with hard documentation and witness testimony.

If I were Mr. Joe Normal living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, turning on the tube at 7 p.m. (CT) last night — having heard the roof of my house was going to blow off — I would have been disappointed, or — worse — I’d have switched to the Food Network halfway through, or sooner.

The hearing — slated for 90 minutes — took 110. (Not bad for a congressional oversight hearing.) But half of that time was spent on just two opening statements. Opening statements are not where you find facts and compelling testimony. They are used to frame the hearings. Vice Chair Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) statement was solid in that regard. It was probably solid enough to keep Mr. Normal from switching to Guy Fieri.

But then comes a rerun of riot footage — much of it brand new to be sure — that Mr. Normal can’t really differentiate from other such footage he has seen for the past year and a half. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards gave a gripping first-hand account of her traumatic ordeal at the hands of violent rioters, and the physical, emotional and mental consequences she has endured. Though Mr. Normal might have found her testimony to be most compelling, he recalls seeing similar testimony last July from four other Capitol Police officers with their own gripping, first-hand accounts.

Most of what we saw from the committee was not new. There were some new additions to the narrative, but some may need clarification.

For instance, former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s comments that Trump’s claims of election fraud were “bullshit” and “complete nonsense” were revealed by him in his recent book. What’s new is that, rather than reading it from the book, the audience got to see Barr saying it in a taped interview by the committee staff.

The staff also taped an interview with former Trump campaign aide Jason Miller, who was shown saying the campaign’s data expert told Trump in no uncertain terms, just after the election, that he was going to lose. Miller tweeted last night that the clip shown by the committee was missing context. That won’t be clarified unless and until the committee releases the full transcript.

The committee’s clip showing First Daughter Ivanka Trump’s testimony suggesting she deferred to Barr’s assessment of Trump’s voter fraud claims seemed compelling on the surface — but will she, too, claim that the clip is missing context? Again, we won’t know unless the transcript is released.

There are other examples. This just goes to show that, without live witness back-and-forth with the committee members, merely uttering these assertions in an opening statement is not definitive.

There were some notable high points. Most obvious was the absence of your typical House food fight and disruptions by bickerers. The committee managed to keep the hearing under two hours by allowing only two members to speak, eliminating opening statements from the two witnesses, and adhering to a tight script. The hearing did not suffer from credibility issues, so long as contextual challenges from some of the witnesses can be cleared up.

In coming hearings, given the hype we’ve heard from some members, the committee needs to deliver on the public’s expectations. The committee needs to marshal its evidence, in a credible way, so that viewers are left saying, “Wow, I didn’t realize it was that bad!” This would be so for all the major issues the committee is examining: the attempt to overturn the election; how perilously close we came to losing our democracy; how threatened our democracy still is.

The committee’s performance and effectiveness are under scrutiny. We won’t know what grade to assign it until the polls come in.

Watching closely will be historians and a small but substantial body of the undecided electorate… and maybe also, even Attorney General Merrick Garland. Accordingly, the committee needs to ratchet up its performance of opening night to reach expectations. Perhaps its next prime time event can yet be a blockbuster.

Kris Kolesnik is a 34-year veteran of federal government oversight. He spent 19 years as senior counselor and director of investigations for Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Kolesnik then became executive director of the National Whistleblower Center. Finally, he spent 10 years working with the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General as the associate inspector general for external affairs.

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We want to prevent suicide in the military — Congress won’t let us

After nearly two decades of annual increases, the national suicide rate decreased slightly in both 2019 and 2020. Suicides among U.S. military personnel continued to rise, however, departing markedly from national trends. Reflecting the continued importance of this topic, both the Senate and the House recently held hearings focused on military suicide and the secretary of Defense convened an independent review committee to provide recommendations.

The Department of Defense (DOD), directed by Congress, has also provided an unprecedented level of funding to support research aimed to identifying, developing and testing strategies to prevent military suicides. Over the past decade and a half, our team has received some of these research funds and has published dozens of studies reporting the results of these efforts.  

One clear takeaway from this coordinated scientific effort is that little to no progress in suicide prevention will be made until we directly address the central role of firearms.

Nearly 70 percent of military suicides in 2020 were caused by self-inflicted gunshot wounds — and almost all of these were from personally owned firearms. Whereas the vast majority of individuals who attempt suicide by other methods survive their attempt and then never attempt suicide again, 85 to 95 percent of those who attempt suicide with a firearm die. Although firearms may not be the reason whymost service members die by suicide, firearms are certainly howmost service members end their own life.

Decades of research show that limiting or reducing access to lethal methods of suicide, also known as “lethal means safety,” reliably, dramatically and sustainably reduces suicide rates. These approaches work in tandem with efforts to address why people want to die by suicide — things like therapy, medication or other interventions to address risks — in that they first ensure that they are less able to fatally act on those thoughts. Basically, reducing access to firearms during times of risk makes the environment safer, giving people time and space to heal. It’s akin to a designated driver making sure an intoxicated friend can’t get behind the wheel until they’re sober again.

Guided by this research, the DOD has implemented several firearm injury prevention strategies, including distribution of firearm locking devices and revising the Joint Travel Regulations to make it easier for service members to ship gun safes when changing duty stations.

The problem? The ability for DOD leaders and researchers to evaluate the impact of these strategies on suicide and to report accordingly to Congress is profoundly limited by an obscure provision buried in the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The provision in Sec 1062 — intended to prohibit the unconstitutional infringement of service members’ right to lawfully acquire, possess or use firearms — has been interpreted in a way that even non-military researchers are now restricted from asking service members about firearm access and storage practices as part of DOD-funded research.

Because this prohibition extends even to anonymous survey studies funded and directed by Congress itself, the 2011 NDAA limits Congress’s own oversight capacity. Congress has directed DOD to evaluate the effectiveness of its suicide prevention programs, but it prohibits DOD and other researchers from asking about a method that accounts for the lion’s share of military suicides. This prohibition is as nonsensical as trying to prevent traffic fatalities while forbidding researchers to ask about car ownership, driving behaviors and seatbelt use.

After years of discouragingly limited impact, the DOD’s approach to suicide prevention has recently shifted due in no small part to newer, more innovative thinking and investments. Those investments mean little, however, if Congress prevents researchers and military leaders from asking even the most basic questions related to the method that contributes to nearly three-quarters of military suicides.

So, what to do? We call on Congress to repeal the language in Section 1062 of the 2011 NDAA that has inadvertently prevented researchers and DOD leaders from developing and testing strategies that could save the lives of so many service members. Should a full repeal be impossible, Congress should create exceptions for research studies that have received ethical review and approval by a registered institutional review board. 

We cannot solve complicated public health problems by refusing to talk about them. The lives of our servicemembers depend upon Congress creating the space for scientists to identify and test effective solutions. Until then, our ability to prevent military suicide will be unjustifiably obstructed.

Only Congress can fix this.

Michael Anestis, Ph.D., is the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, an associate professor in the School of Public Health at Rutgers University and the author of “Guns and Suicide: An American Epidemic.”

Craig Bryan, PsyD, ABPP, is an Iraq War veteran, as well as the Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (STAR) professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at The Ohio State University, and the author of “Rethinking Suicide: Why Prevention Fails, and How We Can Do Better.”

Emmy Betz, MD, MPH, is a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado Medical School and the director of the Colorado University Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not their employers.

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Janet Yellen dismisses Cardi B's recession prediction: 'I don’t have that much time for her'

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is pouring water on talk of a recession from one prominent albeit unexpected figure: Cardi B.

“Do you know who Cardi B is?” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Yellen on Thursday at the New York Times’s DealBook D.C. policy forum.

“I mean, I don’t have that much time for her. But I am alive,” Yellen, 75, replied in the affirmative with a laugh.

Sorkin then pointed to a recent tweet from the “Up” rapper, in which she asked her 23 million followers, “When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?”

“Don’t look to me to announce it,” Yellen said in response.

“I’m not going to announce it. I don’t think we’re going to have a recession,” Yellen said.

“Consumer spending is very strong. Investment spending is solid. I expect growth to slow down,” Yellen added.

“We have a very strong economy. I know people are very upset — and rightfully so — about inflation. But there’s nothing to suggest inflation if a recession is in the works,” Yellen told Sorkin.

Yellen’s comments came days after she testified in front of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee over soaring inflation. Data released Friday by the Labor Department showed that May’s annual inflation marked the fastest yearly growth in prices since 1981, when inflation hit 8.9 percent annually.

Cardi B, born Belcalis Almánzar, is known to frequently weigh in on politics and hot-button issues. In February, the 29-year-old entertainer lamented rising inflation, saying in an interview, “Everything is high.”

The Grammy Award winner, a frequent critic of former President Trump, was a vocal supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during the 2020 White House race.

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Thompson indicates connection between extremist groups and those around Trump

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the Jan. 6 panel, said there was a connection between far-right extremists groups and those around former President Trump leading up to and during the Capitol riot. 

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper after the committee’s first prime-time hearing on Thursday, the journalist asked Thompson if future hearings will have witnesses who can attest to conversations between extremist groups and those close to Trump.

“Yes,” Thompson responded. “Obviously, you have to go through the hearings but we have a number of witnesses who’ve come forward. People who have not talked before will document a lot of what was going on in the Trump orbit while all of this was occurring.”

During the hearing Thursday, the committee highlighted extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who were present during the Jan. 6 attack and encouraged to come to Washington, D.C. by Trump.

Thompson has said the panel is going to make the case that Trump was directly responsible for the deadly attack that killed multiple people and injured many others. 

“Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them: that the election was stolen, and that he was the rightful president,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 panel, said in her opening statement during the public hearing. 

Tapper asked Johnson if the committee was building a criminal case against Trump for authorities to charge the former president with seditious conspiracy as the panel has no power to legally charge a person. 

“Well, we are building a case based on the facts and circumstances that our investigation determined. We’ve filed with the court in California, certain aspects of what our findings have been. And the judge ruled that there were certain things that the president” could potentially be guilty of, Thompson said. “But, as you said, that’s not our job. We are there to look solely at the facts and circumstances and provide recommendations to Congress.”

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Yellowstone to rename peak honoring massacre leader to 'First People's Mountain'

Yellowstone National Park announced Thursday it changed the name of Mount Doane to First People’s Mountain as part of a larger effort to remove offensive place names in national parks.  

The announcement follows a unanimous vote by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to rename the 10,551-foot peak originally honoring the explorer and massacre leader Gustavus Doane. 

A statement from the National Park Service said the name change resulted from research showing Doane led the 1870 Marias Massacre where at least 173 American Indians, including children and the elderly, were killed. The attack was carried out in response to the alleged murder of a white fur trader. 

“Doane wrote fondly about this attack and bragged about it for the rest of his life,” the park service statement read.  

Yellowstone said it reached out to all 27 tribes associated with the park and received no opposition to the name change. 

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced in November the agency would create a process to review and replace derogatory place names on federal lands. 

“Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands. Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage — not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression,” Haaland said at the time. 

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A team of researchers created a tool earlier this year to identify and change place names in national parks that are deemed harmful or rooted in white supremacy. They analyzed 2,241 place names in 16 national parks across the U.S. and developed “decision trees” which enable them to group together place names with similar origins. The categories included language origin; derogatory; erasure; and dimensions of racism and colonialism. 

The team found 214 names that were appropriated without an Indigenous community’s consent, 254 names that memorialize colonialism and 21 names that commemorate historical figures with ties to racist ideas. The study said each of the 16 parks contained at least one place name for figures who supported racist ideologies or profited from Indigenous colonization or genocide.    

“There’s a process by which those names are chosen,” said study co-author and Oregon State University associate professor Natchee Barnd. “And if we’re operating within a system that has been grounded in white supremacy, it’s probably going to reflect that — some really explicitly and vehemently, and some by default or accidentally, such as the fact that a name is in English.” 

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Regardless of party, the Jan. 6 hearings ask Americans to put democracy first

The first hearing by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, violent attack on the U.S. Capitol presented new and compelling evidence of the actions by former President Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election to keep him in office.

Long before the committee hearing, it was clear that Trump’s refusal to admit that he lost the election —  despite over 60 court rulings throwing out lawsuits challenging his defeat — fed baseless conspiracy theories that led to the Jan. 6 attack. The committee’s opening hearing presented yet more evidence documenting this fact, along with a horrific new video of the assault on the Capitol. 

The hearing made me recall the overwhelming sadness I felt, as a former congressional intern and staffer, a resident of the District of Columbia and as an American citizen, on the day the citadel of democracy was physically attacked and assaulted.

We all know there are losers in every election and at every level of government. I know from personal experience that losing is tough and often terribly painful because many of the candidates I worked my heart out to elect came up short and were defeated.

But it doesn’t matter if it’s a race for your local city council or the presidency, it’s important that you try to persuade voters to support your candidate. For me, I had to learn it the hard way, but it has stuck with me after serving as campaign manager for Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential race. Though we wanted a full accounting of the vote, as the loser, he conceded, wished the winner well, called for national unity and moved on. 

As Jan. 6 committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) pointed out Thursday night, only Trump has refused to accept reality, in “an attempt to undermine the will of the people” with his Big Lie that he repeats to this day falsely claiming to have won reelection by a landslide. 

And only Trump summoned his supporters to Washington on the day Congress was scheduled to conduct the ceremonial counting of Electoral College votes and urged them to march to the Capitol in protest and “fight like hell.”

Only Trump urged his vice president to ignore the decision of voters in an effort to stay in power. Thankfully, Vice President Mike Pence placed his duty to uphold the Constitution over his loyalty to Trump and refused to disregard the lawful outcome of the election. 

There’s no question that the Jan. 6 attack would never have happened if Trump had conceded his defeat and not urged his supporters to come to Washington, not led a rally filled with lies and inflammatory comments on that terrible day, and not urged the crowd to fight to overturn the election of Joe Biden as president. 

We should all be grateful that Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who serve on the Jan. 6 committee, are working with Democrats to demand a full accounting of the insurrection. They are examples of the leaders then-Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote about in his 1955 book “Profiles in Courage.” So are Pence and many others who served in the Trump administration. 

As citizens, we must salute them for their patriotism and determination to put America’s national interest and their loyalty to the Constitution ahead of politics. We need more like them.

Unfortunately, too many Republican elected officials have fallen in line in support of Trump’s Big Lie, denying reality and endorsing all sorts of cockamamie claims and wild conspiracy theories to support it. Their embrace of partisanship before patriotism is a sad commentary on our national disunity.

Democracy is fragile. If one party claims elections it loses must be rigged and seeks to overturn the results — as many Trump loyalists do — and the American people lose faith in our free elections, we face the danger of seeing our democracy further wounded and dying. God forbid if our leaders attain power by violence rather than by the ballot box.

I’ve spent most of my life in politics, but I’m not speaking as a partisan when I say the work of the Jan. 6 committee transcends politics. It’s in the interest of every American, regardless of political affiliation, to get to the bottom of the attempt to overturn the results of the free and fair 2020 presidential election. We must ensure this attack on our democracy is never repeated.

Regardless of party affiliation, I hope the vast majority of Americans will agree that our democracy is our most precious national asset. That’s because our government will remain the servant of the American people only as long as the power of the vote remains in the hands of the people.

Every American needs to pay close attention to the serious and bipartisan House committee hearings investigating the Jan. 6 attack. I certainly will. I look forward to hearing the committee’s conclusions about the timeline of events leading up to the attack, its finding on who orchestrated the attack and who should be held accountable, and its recommendations for improving security at the Capitol and our future electoral count.

We must never allow the rule of the people enshrined in our precious Constitution to be threatened by power-hungry politicians of either party who put their self-interest and lust for power above our national interest.

Donna Brazile is a political strategist, a contributor to ABC News and former chair of the Democratic National Committee. She is the author of “Hacks: Inside the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.”

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Trump says Ivanka was 'checked out' following Jan. 6 public hearing

Former President Trump slammed his daughter and former advisor, Ivanka Trump, after the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot played testimony at its first public hearing Thursday night.

A short clip of Ivanka Trump was shown during the committee’s first prime time hearing Thursday, during which she was asked about former Attorney General William Barr’s assessment that the election wasn’t stolen.

Trump himself has long claimed that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” and tainted by widespread voter fraud. Barr as well as state and federal elections officials have said that there was no substantial evidence of widespread voter fraud.

“It affected my perspective,” Ivanka said in the video when asked if Barr’s comments impacted her view of what happened in the election. “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was said.”

On Friday, the former president said that his daughter was “checked out” in the days following the 2020 election, adding that she did not “study” the election results as he did.

“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!),” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The House select committee sought to demonstrate in their televised hearing that Trump’s scheme to retain power and refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election led to the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

The hearing incorporated testimony and rarely seen video footage from the day of the Capitol attack to lay the blame for Jan. 6 squarely with Trump.

“All Americans should keep this fact in mind: On the morning of Jan. 6, President Trump’s intention was to remain President of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election and in violation of his Constitutional obligation to relinquish power,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair of the committee, stated during the hearing.

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Remote work has caused housing prices to shoot up: study

A national shift to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic has caused housing prices to go up, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.  

The paper — written by Johannes Wieland from the department of economics at the University of California, San Diego and John Mondragon from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco — claims that remote work accounted for 15.1 percent of the 23. 8 percent increase in housing prices between 2019 and 2021.  

In addition, the study states, remote work has relocated national housing demands as workers move to places suited for remote work.  

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In the study, Mondragon and Wieland note that by the end of last November, over 42 percent of the United States workforce was working from home at least part time.  

“House price growth over the pandemic reflected a change in fundamentals rather than a speculative bubble, and that fiscal and monetary stimulus were less important factors,” the study crafters wrote. “This implies that policy makers need to pay close attention to the evolution of remote work as an important determinant of future house price growth and inflation.” 

A typical home in the United States has a value of $344,141, according to Zillow’s home value index, which only includes middle price tier homes.  

That price represents an over 20 percent increase from last year, the website adds.  

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Only Washington can solve the Swedish-Turkish impasse

Turkey continues to block Swedish and Finnish entry to NATO. While Finland has attempted to mollify the Turks, with whom they generally have good relations, Sweden is taking a hard line against Turkish demands to extradite 28 persons that it claims are affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Turkey considers the PKK a terrorist organization, as do the United States and the European Union. Ironically, both Sweden and Finland are members of the EU.

There has been much speculation that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is taking a seemingly uncompromising stance on the entry of the two Nordic states to the alliance because he could face a tough election in June 2023. Erdoğan launched his campaign in Izmir on Thursday and challenged the opposition to name their candidate. Bashing the PKK, and Kurds in general, is good politics in Turkey, especially with the nationalist base, and Erdoğan is nothing if not a masterful politician.

But politics is playing a role in Sweden as well. The Social Democratic government survived a motion of “no confidence” in the justice minister by one vote — that of Amineh Kakabaveh, an independent legislator of Iranian Kurdish origin. Kakabaveh has made it clear that any effort by the Stockholm government to capitulate to Erdoğan’s demands would result in its collapse.

Washington strongly supports Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO. In the matter of Erdoğan’s demands, however, America reportedly has told both the Swedes and the Turks to “work it out yourselves.” Yet, with both countries hostage to domestic politics, it seems unlikely that they can reach a compromise on their own any time soon.

For that reason, the United States should intervene to resolve the dispute. It needs to do so quickly, to ensure Swedish and Finnish accelerated entry into the alliance, and it needs to do so not merely as an honest broker but as an active contributor to any arrangement with Turkey.

Turkish-American relations have been strained ever since Ankara took initial delivery of Russia’s S-400 air defense system in July 2019. Washington responded by expelling Turkey from the F-35 fighter jet development program, a multi-nation effort that Turkey had joined in 2007 and which was worth billions of dollars to Turkish arms manufacturers. Turkey also had ordered more than 100 F-35 aircraft. Once dropped from the program, Turkey demanded the return of $1.4 billion, which represented its contribution to the development effort.

The American decision to expel Turkey from the F-35 program, which it took unilaterally, won bipartisan support in Congress, where Erdoğan has garnered little sympathy over the years. Yet a solution to the S-400/F-35 conundrum also may prove to be the key to enabling Erdoğan to drop his opposition to NATO’s latest expansion effort. Washington could offer to reinstate Turkey to the F-35 program, at least insofar as is feasible given that three years of work on the plane have passed since Turkey’s expulsion.

Turkey would have to take steps regarding its possession of the S-400s, however. In this regard, the statement by the chairman of the Turkish Presidency of Defense Industries that Ankara is inclined to acquire a second tranche of S-400 systems hardly was helpful. Instead, Turkey should consider offloading the systems — perhaps to Ukraine, which already has benefitted from Turkish drones that have wreaked havoc on Russian military targets.

Alternatively, Ankara could ship the S-400s to Northern Cyprus, which it alone recognizes as an independent state. No doubt such a transfer would anger Greece, which might then threaten its own veto of NATO’s two Nordic applicants. On the other hand, air defense systems on Northern Cyprus hardly pose an offensive threat to Greece, nor is Athens planning an air attack on the region, which only then could prompt the S-400s to come into play. Discreet pressure fromWashington could play a major role in placating the Greeks, however, and thereby help convince Athens to go along with such an arrangement.

Whatever shape a deal between Sweden and Finland on the one hand, and Turkey on the other, might take, however, it will come to fruition only if the United States is an active participant and contributor. President Biden has supported Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO enthusiastically. He and his administration, therefore, should leave unturned no stone to ensure that the alliance can expand in the shortest possible time frame.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was under secretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy under secretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.

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