Category: foreign affairs

Trump’s Immaturity Defense

Are you guilty if you don’t know right from wrong?

Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if the inability to tell right from wrong is a sign of insanity.  What I know of it comes from TV shows, movies, and written fiction. In those cases not knowing right from wrong  is a symptom of either insanity or serious mental defect, which exempts the defendant for responsibility for their acts. 

This line of thinking appears to be the line which the defenders of the President are taking.  Trump said the phone call was “perfect”—that’s the one where he was shaking down the president of Ukraine for political purposes.

The Republican defenders are now casting this manipulation of the newly elected president of a vulnerable, militarily dependent ally as a proper exercise of diplomacy. No matter that this is preposterous—when you are forced to defend the indefensible, any weapon that comes to hand is better than nothing.

It boils down to, the President gets a pass because he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. Based on a life in which Donald Trump has been largely unaccountable for his actions, this is perfectly plausible.

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Iran: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Time to pity Donald Trump

Looming over the verbal skirmishes  concerning Iran’s recent attack on the Saudi oil facilities and Mike Pompeo’s calling the attack “an act of war” is the fundamental problem that Donald Trump has created: putting himself between a rock and a hard place. There’s no wriggling out of it without either losing face or getting into a hot war with Iran, which would incur the involvement of Russia and the Chinese—too hot for Donald Trump to handle.

At this point, the end result appears to have been a loss of face—not that Donald Trump would ever admit it. The Treasury Department is to clamp down further on Iran’s financial system—somewhat short of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric. This will wreak further havoc on Iran’s economy, but if the Iranian government asks its people to make big sacrifices to oppose the U.S., they will be ready to starve rather than knuckle under.

We saw a similar Trumpian backpedaling from explosive rhetoric back in July of 2018 as Trump, personally aggrieved by standard Iranian bluster,  thundered back at Hassan Rouhani with threats of annihilation.

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Cruelty Paired with Environmental Havoc: Border Barriers Harming Wildlife

U.S. border wall – a looming crime against wildlife

Before getting to the matter of barbed wire fences in Europe, let’s address the never=ending saga of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico—which the Trump administration keeps alive despite budget-busting increases in defense spending and, not coincidentally, the cost of beefing up border security with police and ICE agents.

A wall substantial enough to keep out immigrants would also stop the comings-and-goings of animals across the U.S.-Mexico border: more environmental havoc by the Trump administration. Scientists have risen up in opposition, now having accumulated more than 2,500 signatures in support of a paper describing the damage to wildlife that the wall would entail.  Read about it at: Wildlife-hostile border wall

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Gambling with Other People’s Money: Trump Trade Wars

How easy to win are trade wars?

Vainglorious boaster President Trump, having declared trade war against much of the developed world,  assured us that trade wars are easy to win.

??  Maybe, and maybe not. I’m no economist, but I have noticed that the majority of mainstream economists and many business leaders have opined that trade wars are bad for everyone.  They are particularly bad when they slow down the global economy as a whole, in an age where the global economy is increasingly THE economy that really matters in the long run.

On the other hand, seasoned economist Irwin Stelzer proposed that Trump’s trade war “really might be easy to win.” Stelzer on trade war

The basis of Stelzer’s conjecture is that the U.S. economy dwarfs that of any one of its economic adversaries (euphemistically called “trading partners”), excepting China, and they need the U.S. market more than the U.S. needs theirs. Secondly, if foreign tariffs really were as relatively disadvantageous to us as Trump claims (and Stelzer seems to agree), greater parity could put those foreigners on the ropes.  As Stelzer points out, a German auto industry’s proposal to eliminate tariffs is a sign that some foreign businesses are seeing trouble ahead with the status quo.  The status quo is that EU tariffs on U.S. automobiles have been five times that of the America’s on theirs.

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Climate of Fear: Short Term Effectiveness, Long Term Error

[Preface: since I wrote the comments below, Trump has, by executive order, changed the zero-tolerance anti-immigration policy to end—supposedly—the separation of parents from children.  Done not on humanitarian grounds, but because of bad optics.  But the optics won’t improve much any time soon, since the administration has no answer to the question of how to reunite the families already separated—records of who belongs with whom, and where they are, have evidently not been systematically kept.  The prospect exists of some children never being reunited with their parents. There is also no answer as to how they are going to house the thousands of families who are not being separated. Callousness and inattention to human rights have become hallmarks of the Trump government, and now we can add incompetence to that list.]

Fear here, there, and everywhere

Donald Trump has fear working for him on both sides of the Mexican border: he galvanizes his base with fear of immigrant hoodlums, and scares refugees with the prospect of separating children from parents, and sending  asylum-seekers back to the horrors from which they fled

The U.S. “will not be a migrant camp,” asserted the President in defense of the zero-tolerance policy that has resulted in more than 2,400 children, many of them toddlers and some infants, being separated from their parents, beginning in April.  He added he would not let migrants “infest” America.

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Vladimir Putin Sitting Pretty

The gift that keeps on giving: Trump presidency

Vladimir Putin must be rubbing his hands with glee* over any and all of the events precipitated by, or connected with, the United States, since January 2017.

For starters, his man in the White House continues to keep the U.S. domestic political scene in turmoil, with each day’s opening tweets sowing discord and confusion among lawmakers, media, foreign governments, entertainers, and the public.  Trump has done much to thwart the effort by intelligence services and the Department of Justice to investigate and counter Russian influence on our elections, by portraying it as a Deep State plot to undermine his presidency.

For seconds, Trump has refused to implement the strict sanctions on Russia passed by Congress in summer 2017. (Regardless, he continues to claim that “no one has been tougher on Russia than I have.”)

For thirds, Trump continues to dismay foreign allies on four fronts:
(1) pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords;
(2) pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal;
(3) imposing trade sanctions such as tariffs on aluminum and steel imported from Canada, Mexico, and Europe as well as such traditional trade foes as China.
(4) leaving it to other nations to deal with massive refugee crises in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, while the Trump administration strengthens barriers against refugees from anywhere trying to find asylum in the U.S.

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Expecting Iran to Break Is a Risky Bet: Lessons from the Iran-Iraq War

Can bullying succeed against fanatics?

President Trump has bet that pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Iran will force Iran to come to accept major changes in the deal or go under economically.  Furthermore, he has gone beyond invoking crippling sanctions to make an implied threat of military action if Iran continues its outlaw ways in the Middle East. Does Trump think Iran is trembling in fear of a U.S. attack?

I wonder.  I just took a backward look at the Iran-Iraq War, that lasted from 1980-1988 and cost Iran more than 150,000 lives.*  The minimum age for military service in Iran is 15; estimates put the fraction of fatalities aged 15-19 at one third (50 thousand).  Iran also sent even younger children into battle.  Although Iraq attacked first, Iran pushed the offensive for most of that time.  As a fraction of the 1980 population of Iran (38.67 million), it is about 1 out of every 258 Iranians.  A proportional loss inflicted on the U.S. today would cost 1,163,000 lives—more than twice the number of U.S. military killed in WWII (405,400), and close to twice the number killed in our Civil War (618,000).  Given such past sacrifices, I expect that Iran is ready to let its people starve rather than yield to the U.S.  After all, the North Koreans have been doing so for a long time, and Iran has far greater resources, and more friends, than North Korea.

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Swaggering Swamp Creatures?

AMERICA FIRST.  AMERICA FIRST. AMERICA ÜBER ALLES
Mike Pompeo, Sultan of Swagger

Nominee for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he intends to “put the swagger back into the State Department.” But just who swaggers? Bullies and braggarts, for two, plus others who want you to believe there’s more to them than meets the eye when usually there’s less. Look up “swagger” in any dictionary and you’re hard put to find anything positive about swaggering. Here’s definition #1 from Webster’s 11th: “To conduct oneself in an arrogant and superciliously pompous manner; esp: to walk with an air of overbearing self-confidence.”

That having a tone-deaf person take over the State Department actually looks like an improvement over the do-nothing leadership of Rex Tillerson, shows us the depths to which we’ve sunk in the Trump administration.

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Yes, There is a There There: Now, What to Do?

Trump Inaction on Russia: the Clincher

For a long time, some of us were willing to give Donald Trump the slim benefit of a doubt as to why he is actively trying to smother the three investigations (DOJ, House, and Senate) into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.  The benefit was to accept that Trump couldn’t acknowledge the charge against Russia because it would have cheapened his electoral victory.

As disgraceful as the vanity explanation was, at least it tended to let Trump off the hook for being played for a fool by Vladimir Putin, or, more seriously, being compromised by involvements with Russian oligarchs and business interests and/or the Kremlin itself.

Now that he has, grudgingly, admitted that Russia did meddle in the elections, he has taken to excoriating Obama for not doing more to stop it. That has been the pathetic extent of his leverage against Moscow.

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Another Tick in the Doomsday Clock – Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Modernization means escalation

It’s hard to say what is the most disturbing thing president Trump said in his State of the Union address, but there’s one that was not just disturbing, but frightening—the idea of “modernizing” our nuclear arsenal.

“Modernization” means, for starters, modifying our strategic force (i.e. big bombs, 100 kilotons of TNT equivalent yield on up) to make it more flexible and deadly.  Sounds bad, right?  Exactly what Donald Trump wants–as always, he wants to be the biggest and baddest dude on the planet. Whatever the cost.  The cost in dollars, of course, will ultimately be measured in hundreds of billions.  The increased risk of strategic nuclear exchanges will be immeasurable.

For a look at what modernization portends, read the executive summary of the latest Nuclear Posture Review to be found here.

On the strategic side, the upgrading will be a bolstering of our forces of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) with Russia.* 

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