Raise your hand if you ever heard of Daleep Singh? Not many, a few deplorables in the back. Mr. Singh was head of devising the White House Ruski sanctions, then left to go back to Wall Street, and now, incredibly, returns.
The FT writes, “In 2022 he was one of the chief architects of sanctions against Russia. They have been, at best, a mixed success.” A mixed success? They've been an outright shambles of failure. For the last couple years, the Russian economy has been one of the most vibrant on the planet, better than the Germans and these United States.
There is no accountability in the DC cesspool, the bigger the fuck-up, the higher you float. The FT humorously adds of failure to date, “In order to remedy this deficiency, Singh argues, the US government machine needs to do sanctions better.” That's just funny.
Mr. Singh writes of his return, “Dating back to at least ancient Greece, great powers have deployed economic tools to advance foreign policy objectives” — makes you want to crawl into the nearest hole. Mr. Singh replaces his replacement, another you never heard of, Mike Pyle, who came from Vice-President Harris, well sort of, as Politico writes,
“Pyle is one of three top administration officials who previously worked at the investment giant BlackRock, where he was global chief investment strategist. Wally Adeyemo, Biden’s deputy Treasury secretary nominee, and Deese also worked for BlackRock. (Pyle also worked with Tom Donilon the chair of BlackRock’s Investment Institute, who served in the Obama administration and whose brother and wife now work in the White House.)”
No such thing as failure in incestuous DC, as long as the money keeps flowing. The FT adds of Singh’s plans for our collective future:
“Singh insists that ‘no economy is too big to sanction’. But in a telling concession, he feels it necessary to remind his colleagues that in targeting China ‘there isn’t an obvious knockout blow that coercive statecraft could deliver by itself without incurring severe collateral damage’.”
That’s how they talk.
Reuters on Singh replacing Pyle writes, “Pyle, who joined the Biden administration as Vice President Kamala Harris' chief economic adviser, took over Singh's job as Biden's Group of Seven rich nations ‘sherpa’". Sherpa!? It's in quotes, came from somewhere, the “Group of Seven rich nations”? Can you call Mr. Singh a sherpa? I dunno know, seems kind of racist.
Reality is always more pathetic than the imagination. Well at least in DC.