The prospects for Joe Biden’s package of aid for allies

“NEVER LET a good crisis go to waste” is a Machiavellian maxim even if it is sound political advice. But when Washington is paralysed by divided government, the suggestion becomes something closer to a necessity: hardly anything gets done unless there is a crisis. Compromises are enacted only when some forcing mechanism—a government shutdown, a default on the federal debt, a natural disaster, a war—threatens to snap shut.Tapping that sense of urgency and imminent disaster is how President Joe Biden hopes to get his request for $106bn to fund his administration’s aims in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan despite the objections of tight-fisted America First Republicans in Congress. “We can’t let petty, partisan, angry politics get in the way of our responsibilities as a great nation,” Mr Biden said to Americans from the Oval Office on October 19th. “Just as in world war two, today, patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom,” he said in one of the finer addresses of his presidency.