Quote:Very curious to watch Donald Trump's inauguration last week. These rituals are always heavy on signifiers and light on substance, as they are supposed to be, but Trump's confirmation as our 45th president was an extreme case. I was especially interested to see whether the media's cartoon rendering of reality during the campaign season would carry over once he moved into the White House. It will, as is already clear. We are treated to a preposterous rendering of Barack Obama's virtues, and we are in for yet more exorbitant accounts of Trump's shortcomings. Press reports this time around may be to journalism what graphic novels are to literaturefilled with stick figures and stock imagery, wanting in all complexity.

Let's be clear: There is plenty to brace for and defend as Donald Trump assumes the presidency. All those who marched in cities and towns across the planet last weekend did so with justification. But simplifications of the kind that our orthodox-liberal media foist upon us will not do. The obsessions with taste and style they encourage amount to schoolyard crudities when put against all that Americans ought to be concerned with. Contempt as a unifying principle, a thought that people who ought to know better now suggest, is unbecoming all around and holds no promise. The world and our moment, a moment of historical significance, whiz by. If you want to talk about resistance, the first thing to resist is blindness to events vastly more consequential than crowd counts and braggadocio.

"With the election of Donald Trump, the old world of the 20th century is finally over," Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote in Bild am Sonntag, the German tabloid, last Sunday. This is a very large assertion, not to be ignored. The German foreign minister, a Social Democrat in Chancellor Angela Merkel's across-the-aisle coalition, is a curious figure. Since taking office in late 2013, he has consistently, if occasionally, voiced objections to American hegemony in global affairs. Read the sentence again: Steinmeier makes his observation with subtly plain relief.

Should we Americans share Steinmeier's apparent sense of anticipation for the end of something and the beginning of something else? This is our question.

President Trump has faced unceasing resistance from the Pentagon, NATO, and the national security apparatus ever since he proposed a renewed détente with Russia. He has made clear his disapproval of Washington's "regime change" policies on many occasions. Trump has been preoccupied with the sacrifice of American jobs to corporate-written, corporate-indulgent trade accords for more than two decades, according to people who have followed him over the years. He may or may not succeed in doing much to remedy this abuse of the American working class, but that is a separate conversation. On Monday he formally killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama's breathtakingly anti-democratic framework for radical deregulation. (Let us dispense with the fiction that the TPP was a trade deal; it was nothing of the kind).
Another way to pose the same question as above: What do we think of Trump's positions on these issues? It is past time we all ask ourselves.

I wrote of the disgrace of our reigning Russophobia in a previous column. Nobody in Washington seems to have much to say just yet about "regime change," but they will in due course. You are not encouraged to applaud the demise of the TPP for the devastating impact it would have had on employment, product safety, drug prices, the environment, Internet freedom, the democratic process, and much else. It reflected "a more complex corporate calculus," as The New York Times preciously put it in Tuesday's edition. One is absolutely certain it did.

These are all fronts in a conflict. It is between those defending the "liberal order," as it is called, and those who propose either to alter it in significant aspects or to replace it. There is no precedent for this in my lifetime. One question at a time, it will be our responsibility to stand on one side or the other. No, Mama didn't say there'd be days like this.

"How the world will look tomorrow is not settled," Steinmeier wrote in his opinion-page piece. It is perfectly true, of course. And an excellent prospect, in my view. Any promise of change that purports to guarantee certainty cannot come to much. Sixty-odd years of more or less unchallenged pre-eminence have left most Americans fearful of change but also greatly in need of it. It has left our leadership incapable of it. Liberalism has grown illiberalwe know this nowand its order lies before us as a perilous disorder.

The customary phrase is "the post-1945 order," referring to the American-dominated Western alliance and the institutionsthe United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Tradeset up to provide a multilateral frame for it. Scores of nations came into being, for this was the "independence era" too. When President Truman and Dean Acheson, his secretary of state, declared the Cold War official in 1947, the world divided into two: There was liberal democracy, and there was the Communist bloc. Note, however: this account must be bracketed with "supposedly."

The post-1945 order was never so orderly, in truth. Many nations elected to remain neutral in the East-West conflict, making a third category. The four "Ns," as I call themNehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Nyerereall led nonaligned nations, or did until Washington alienated them. So did Mossadegh, Sukarno, Arbenz, Lumumba, Ho, and many others. Since nonalignment was unacceptable to the United States, to say nothing of the socialist bloc as an alternative, coupsmore than 30 US-cultivated, by accepted countsbecame a common feature of the post-1945 order. The multilaterals turned out to be instruments for the imposition, usually by coercion, of neoliberal economic structures. As to the UN, I count the corruption of the ideal it represented one of the century's great tragedies.

The post-1945 order is what is now at issue. But we are again stuck with "supposedly," for the post-1945 order, such as it was, gave way to the post*Cold War order after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. American triumphalism triumphed in the early 1990s, our "end of history" moment. Washington renamed coups as "regime changes" and observed no constraints whatsoever in conducting them. No pretense of abiding by international law remained, as the 2003 invasion of Iraq made plain. Deregulation, privatization, the wholesale dismantling of public-sector enterprises, the elimination of basic subsidies: The multilaterals made these and other such conditions mandatory in their country programs. "Savage capitalism," the Argentines took to calling it in the 1990s. At Treasury and State, sanctions against uncooperative nations became à la mode.

Unfortunately for Francis Fukuyama et al., American triumphalism coincided with the dramatic emergence of numerous non-Western poles of power, notably China, Russia, India, and Iran. The history that had (again, supposedly) just ended turned out to be turning its wheel, as anyone with an understanding of how the world works could have foreseen. As a defining feature of the 21st century, this was inevitable, in my view. Not to be missed is the extent to which Washington's persistent hubris and intolerance has come to turn natural affinities into economic and, vaguely for the time being, even strategic alliances: Russia-China, Russia-Iran, China*-Iran, and so on. China's Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is frontally intended as a reply to the TPP, just as the Beijing-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a response to the conditionality embedded in the multilaterals' country programs.

Those who think the Obama presidency did anything other than worsen the global disorder just described may benefit from some blunt language. Barack Obama backed neo-Nazis in Ukraine to precipitate a coup intended to be to America's advantage. In Syria he supported radical Islamists to induce yet another "regime change"a precise repeat of Zbigniew Brzezinski's foolhardy gambit in Afghanistan. Obama allowed his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to oversee the dispatch of Libya into chaos. His drone attacks, determined on the basis of an assassination list reviewed weekly, require no comment as to their legality or, indeed, decency. In my estimation, his most consequential legacies on the foreign side will be the wholly unnecessary animus toward Russia and China he has induced. This list is partial, but I add one more entry: Obama passed up a hundred opportunities to bring order to the 21st century by forging new relationships through which the United States could begin leaving the "post-1945 order" and its later offspring behind.

Can we count on Donald Trump to do what Obama did not?

What a question.

In another context, the editors of this magazine observed during last year's political season that Trump was an odd, unfortunate messenger who nonetheless bore a few important truths. So it is in the case of US foreign policy. There are questions on the table now that Obama never dared go near.

Given that these remain questions for the time being, most world leaders appear to be more anxious than anticipatory as to what Trump's foreign policy will look like in practice. I seriously doubt he or his people think in terms of disrupting "the old world of the 20th century," in Steinmeier's phrase, but they may, even if they do not intend to. I greatly favor the prospect. Many world leaders will not agree, and this you will read in the American press, but I do not think the matter is so easily disposed of.

As of the much-noted interview Trump gave The Times of London and Bild two weekends ago, Trump remains on the record favoring a renovated relationship with Russia based on shared interests. One must stand with him on this point without qualification. Many Europeans, weary of confrontation and the damage that sanctions have done them as well as Russia, will too. Of equal interest are stirrings, notably among the Germans, to the effect that Trump's assumption of office marks the moment they should find an independent voice of their own. Only those with a taste for disappointment will expect a Gaullist streak to appear in the Continent's capitals: The Europeans have shuffled their feet on this point for decades. But Steinmeier, who mentioned an "equal partnership" with Trump's America, is far from alone.

There is so far less promise across the Pacific. Given that the TPP was always intended primarily as a strategic device to isolate China, Beijing will be quietly pleased to read its obituary. But Trump and his secretary of state, the just-confirmed Rex Tillerson, do not appear to know what time it is in Asia. Telling the world's second-largest economy, soon to be largest, that it has no place policing the sea lanes off its shores is, open-and-shut, an unwise policy. The Sino-American relationship has a lot of moving parts: the dense economic interdependence, the diplomacy on Taiwan, the strategic balance in the Pacific, the islands in the East and South China Seas, and North Korea. Add to this that Washington has been short of good Asianists for decades, and the very best one can do is wait to see while hoping that Trump, Tillerson, or Defense Secretary James Mattis avoid accidental calamities.

A final question worth watching. There is no reversing the remarkable pace at which non-Western powers, as noted, are forging and deepening ties on the basis of mutual respect and shared interests in economic cooperation, investment, and so on. This is among the most fascinating features of our time: Trump or no Trump, the non-West is superseding the postCold War order before our eyes. But the tilt of Trump's foreign policies, if he gets them at all right, has the potential to dissipate the anti-American dimension this phenomenon is accumulating. It would give the United States a place among the century's emerging powers that is not now assured.

Dropping "regime change" as an established policy option would, by itself, take Trump in the right direction. Nobody other than Israel, Britain, and sometimes France has any taste for it and the incessant manufacture of disorder that goes with it. Various nations, not least Russia and China, are required to worry that they may be next. This is one reason Ukraine and Syria are historically significant: Russia has put Washington on notice that there will be no more coups without vigorous military responses.

Is the new president listening as the rest of the world speaks?

David Guyatt Wrote:Then there is this too -ming-boggling as it is. As I said on FB it raises the rather silly picture of "Ici Radio Etats Unis" - except it only shows that these latter day zealots won't die with dignity.

Quote:David Horowitz: the Democrats' agenda is creating "a US Government in exile"

Source

David Guyatt Wrote:

Tracy Riddle Wrote:

David Guyatt Wrote:The latest credentialed independent journalist, Seymour Hersh, blasts the media for uncritically promoting Russian hacking story.

But is he, like most other independent reporters just ::headbang::::headbang::::headbang:: in the face of a rampant psychological contagion?

Hersh also noted that Trump's counter-attack on the media was "right out of national socialism" and also warned about Trump's access to the unbridled power and snooping ability of the US Intelligence Community.

Seymour Hersh? The guy who accepts the official version of the JFK assassination and wrote that there may have been "some justice" done when he was killed?

::laughingdog:eople's perceptions about JFK is your guiding philosophy for making judgements today is it? Something that happened over 50 years ago?

Meanwhile, back in the land of reality some facts: Seymour Hersh has won the Pulitzer prize, two National Magazine awards, five George Polk awards and one George Orwell report - he's the guy who broke the My Lai massacre story and too many others to mention here - and who has regularly embarrassed and held power to account.

Tell us what amazing things have you done journalistically, Tracy?

Paul Rigby Wrote:Relevant to note that Hersh was used by Colby to oust Angleton; and that what Tracy has served up in this thread is nothing more than warmed over Angletonianism - guilt by Russophobic smear, non-sequitur, confabulation, and association. Truly dreadful stuff redeemed only by its manifest absurdity.

Quote:The theme of this morning's news updates from Washington is additional clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why it happened the way it did.

I'll separate what's below into the raw news reports and analysis; you may also find these two pieces from yesterday (heavily referenced below) to be useful.

News Reports

(1) Priebus made two public statements today. One is that the ban on Muslims will no longer be applied to green card holders. Notably absent from his statement was anything about people with other types of visa (including long-term ones), or anything about the DHS' power to unilaterally revoke green cards in bulk.

The other was that the omission of Jews from the statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day was deliberate and is not regretted.

A point of note here is that Priebus is the one making these statements, which is not normally the Chief of Staff's job. I'll come back to that below.

(2) Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that the intent of yesterday's order was very much a ban on Muslims, described in those words, and he was among the people Trump asked how they could find a way to do this legally.

(3) CNN has a detailed story (heavily sourced) about the process by which this ban was created and announced. Notable in this is that the DHS' lawyers objected to the order, specifically its exclusion of green card holders, as illegal, and also pressed for there to be a grace period so that people currently out of the country wouldn't be stranded  and they were personally overruled by Bannon and Stephen Miller. Also notable is that career DHS staff, up to and including the head of Customs & Border Patrol, were kept entirely out of the loop until the order was signed.

(4) The Guardian is reporting (heavily sourced) that the "mass resignations" of nearly all senior staff at the State Department on Thursday were not, in fact, resignations, but a purge ordered by the White House. As the diagram below (by Emily Roslin v Praze) shows, this leaves almost nobody in the entire senior staff of the State Department at this point.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*8IDunC3Egvsw1Lr9_o6yxA.png

As the Guardian points out, this has an important and likely not accidental effect: it leaves the State Department entirely unstaffed during these critical first weeks, when orders like the Muslim ban (which they would normally resist) are coming down.

The article points out another point worth highlighting: "In the past, the state department has been asked to set up early foreign contacts for an incoming administration. This time however it has been bypassed, and Trump's immediate circle of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Reince Priebus are making their own calls."

(5) On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy for 2020. Beyond being unusual, this opens up the ability for him to start accepting "campaign contributions" right away. Given that a sizable fraction of the campaign funds from the previous cycle were paid directly to the Trump organization in exchange for building leases, etc., at inflated rates, you can assume that those campaign coffers are a mechanism by which US nationals can easily give cash bribes directly to Trump. Non-US nationals can, of course, continue to use Trump's hotels and other businesses as a way to funnel money to him.

(6) Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven't noticed. On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia's state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the most that can be said with certainty now is that the money "paying" for it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the government's official bank), even though it's highly unclear who, if anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies.

Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier (the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the sale didn't happen until early December. And 19.5% sounds an awful lot like "19% plus a brokerage commission."

Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.

What does this all mean?

I see a few key patterns here. First, the decision to first block, and then allow, green card holders was meant to create chaos and pull out opposition; they never intended to hold it for too long. It wouldn't surprise me if the goal is to create "resistance fatigue," to get Americans to the point where they're more likely to say "Oh, another protest? Don't you guys ever stop?" relatively quickly.

However, the conspicuous absence of provisions preventing them from executing any of the "next steps" I outlined yesterday, such as bulk revocation of visas (including green cards) from nationals of various countries, and then pursuing them using mechanisms being set up for Latinos, highlights that this does not mean any sort of backing down on the part of the regime.

Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court's order, citing "upper management," and the DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to follow the President's orders. (See my updates from yesterday, and the various links there, for details) Significant in today's updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts' authority played a role in the decision.

That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.

Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup d'état against the United States. It gave them useful information.

A second major theme is watching the set of people involved. There appears to be a very tight "inner circle," containing at least Trump, Bannon, Miller, Priebus, Kushner, and possibly Flynn, which is making all of the decisions. Other departments and appointees have been deliberately hobbled, with key orders announced to them only after the fact, staff gutted, and so on. Yesterday's reorganization of the National Security Council mirrors this: Bannon and Priebus now have permanent seats on the Principals' Committee; the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have both been demoted to only attending meetings where they are told that their expertise is relevant; the Secretary of Energy and the US representative to the UN were kicked off the committee altogether (in defiance of the authorizing statute, incidentally).

I am reminded of Trump's continued operation of a private personal security force, and his deep rift with the intelligence community. Last Sunday, Kellyanne Conway (likely another member of the inner circle) said that "It's really time for [Trump] to put in his own security and intelligence community," and this seems likely to be the case.

As per my analysis yesterday, Trump is likely to want his own intelligence service disjoint from existing ones and reporting directly to him; given the current staffing and roles of his inner circle, Bannon is the natural choice for them to report through. (Having neither a large existing staff, nor any Congressional or Constitutional restrictions on his role as most other Cabinet-level appointees do) Keith Schiller would continue to run the personal security force, which would take over an increasing fraction of the Secret Service's job.

Especially if combined with the DHS and the FBI, which appear to have remained loyal to the President throughout the recent transition, this creates the armature of a shadow government: intelligence and police services which are not accountable through any of the normal means, answerable only to the President.

(Note, incidentally, that the DHS already has police authority within 100 miles of any border of the US; since that includes coastlines, this area includes over 60% of Americans, and eleven entire states. They also have a standing force of over 45,000 officers, and just received authorization to hire 15,000 more on Wednesday.)

The third theme is money. Trump's decision to keep all his businesses (not bothering with any blind trusts or the like), and his fairly open diversion of campaign funds, made it fairly clear from the beginning that he was seeing this as a way to become rich in the way that only dedicated kleptocrats can, and this week's updates definitely tally with that. Kushner looks increasingly likely to be the money-man, acting as the liaison between piles of cash and the president.

This gives us a pretty good guess as to what the exit strategy is: become tremendously, and untraceably, rich, by looting any coffers that come within reach.
Combining all of these facts, we have a fairly clear picture in play.

Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.

The regime's main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this.

The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterday's moves should be read as the first part of that.

The aims of crushing various groups  Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press  are very much primary aims of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off each other.

If you're looking for estimates of what this means for the future, I'll refer you back to yesterday's post on what "things going wrong" can look like. Fair warning: I stuffed that post with pictures of cute animals for a reason.

David Guyatt Wrote:Oliver Stone adds his name to the growing list --- saying that the Russian hacking story is "childish" and calls on America to Wake up! Before it's too late.

He also makes the point, that I also have made on this forum, that America has never suffered a war (or at least a modern war) on its soil. It always projects its war ecstasy overseas - for profit.

For those who don't know, Stone fought in Vietnam as a special forces LURP.

Quote:I don't like Donald Trump. I think his executive order barring travel from certain countries is rash and illiberal. And yet I cannot get behind the hyperbolic, Holocaust-citing protests against him. I cannot line up with the idea that he's a uniquely bad president, possibly the worst ever; that he's an aberration', abnormal', someone we must never normalise'. I can't do that for the simple reason that treating Trump as abnormal implicitly normalises that which preceded him. It whitewashes history. It forgives, or dilutes, the crimes of past politicians.

The idea that Trump is different scarily, historically different is everywhere. Don't treat Trump as a normal president', says a headline in the Guardian. Apparently Theresa May hasn't sufficiently absorbed that Trump is an aberration'. The New Yorker frets over the dangers of welcom[ing] Trumpism into the fold of mainstream American ideas'. Celebs warn against normalising Trump because in truth he's something terrifying'. Protesters insist he's an abnormal president, comparable only to one person in history. We are history teachers and we know how this ends,' said a placard at the Downing St demo last night, complete with images of Trump as Hitler. Pity the kids being taught by these people.

Let's leave to one side how implicitly anti-democratic is this haughty refusal to confer legitimacy on Trump. How it demeans, not only Trump (which is fine demean away), but also the 62 million people who voted for him. After all, what is their desire to have Trump run their republic in comparison with the insistence of the more switched-on that he isn't fit for that job? More importantly is what this de-normalisation drive does for other politicians. It absolves them. It flatters them. It tells them that what they have done the destabilisation of nations, the destruction of lives was normal, at least in comparison to this. The left's arrogant, aristocratic withholding of legitimacy from Trump by extension legitimises his predecessors, including those who did far worse things than Trump has even countenanced.

This is why some pretty unpleasant politicians have been able to rehabilitate themselves via the anti-Trump hysteria. Consider Madeleine Albright. She won heaps of Twitter praise last week when she said she might register as a Muslim in protest against Trump's travel order. This is the same Madeleine Albright who in 1996, as Bill Clinton's ambassador to the UN, was asked if the surplus deaths of Iraqi children following America's imposition of sanctions was a price worth paying for weakening Saddam's rule. Her reply? I think this is a very hard choice, but the price we think the price is worth it.'

Just think about this. Let it sink into your head. A woman who apologised for, and who was in an administration that was responsible for, great suffering among Muslims can now get brownie points for saying she will register as a Muslim. In what sort of moral universe is it considered worse to restrict the freedom of movement of the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries than it is to participate in the near-destruction of a Muslim country? In the warped moral universe of anti-Trump hysteria. In the historically illiterate world that has been fashioned by the protesters against him, who tell us he is abnormal and therefore the rest of them are normal; that Trump is evil and therefore others, Albright, were good, or at least better.

Then there's Hillary Clinton, who was retweeted tens of thousands of times for saying of Trump's order: This is not who we are.' But it is who she is. This is the woman who spearheaded the bombing of Libya, helping to plunge that nation into mayhem and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees in the process. Ed Miliband spoke at the Downing St demo. He was a fulsome supporter of the bombing of Libya. The people who helped to make swathes of humanity into refugees are virtue-signalling about Trump's tough line on refugees. The people who caused, or okayed, instability in Muslim nations are pontificating about Trump's tough words on Muslim nations. It is morally perverse. By any objective moral measurement, Clinton and Miliband did something worse to the people of Libya than Trump has, and yet this is ignored, or overlooked, drowned in the joyous moral kick that comes from hating Trump.

This is the true danger of historical illiteracy. To describe Trump as abnormal, as a break with proper American politics, makes normal the horrors of the past, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam, of McCarthyism, of Iraq, Afghanistan and all the rest. It tells us, implicitly, that all of that was normal, better even.

This is my problem with the protests: they promote emotional fury at the expense of historical thinking, and in the process they play down the sins of the past. This is really bad for younger, fresher protesters in particular. They're encouraged to think that until now, from the war to today, between Hitler and Trump, things had been pretty much okay, or at least normal'. The protests aren't radical at all. In fact they're a boon for the warmongers and liars in the corridors of power who spy in the Trump is Hitler' cry an opportunity to rebuild their own moral standing. The out-of-control hatred for Trump doubles up, unwittingly perhaps, as an uncritical, conformist apology for pre-Trump, for the rot that came before him. It redeems barbarism.