Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
I read this entire piece and there wasn't a single word on whether using a cell phone is class is okay, or whether there should be consequences for students who not only disrupt class, but who defy their teachers.
That's why the police have to come take the students away. They've literally taken over the classroom and teachers are overwhelmed and can't teach.
Canadians may support a guaranteed minimum income in principle, but they don’t want to pay for it and they suspect it may turn people into shiftless louts, according to a new survey by the Angus Reid Institute.
As many as 67 per cent of respondents backed a guaranteed income set at $30,000, provided that the payment would “replace most or all other forms of government assistance.”
However, nearly as many (66 per cent) said they would not be willing to pay more taxes to support such a program, and 59 per cent said it would be too expensive to implement.
A further 63 per cent said it would “discourage people from working.” Among Conservative voters, this sentiment jumped to 74 per cent of respondents. But even in the NDP camp respondents were split 50-50.
“It’s not as though you see people on the left of the spectrum incredibly supportive of this,” said Shachi Kurl with the Angus Reid Institute.
At various times in the last 100 years, the concept of a guaranteed minimum income has been embraced by everyone from hardline conservatives to hardline progressives.
Conservatives, including U.S. president Richard Nixon, have touted it as a way to dismantle the welfare state by merely cutting the poor a cheque each month.
Progressives, meanwhile, counter that it’s a necessary way to support workers idled by outsourcing and automation.
Indeed, the Angus Reid survey even hinted that this issue could rise in prominence as more and more jobs are taken by robots...
Well, dismantling the welfare state would be good, but then if everyone's getting a basic income, you'd dismantle the workforce as well, heh.
The highly politicized Department of Justice swatted down pesky FBI requests to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, CNN reported yesterday.
CNN buried the lede, as it frequently does on news stories that make Democrats look bad. The online version bears the innocuous-sounding headline, “Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation.”
It is not until the 25th paragraph that the article states that an unidentified law enforcement official gave CNN a heads-up earlier this year. As the probe of Clinton’s private email servers was ramping up “several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.”
At that time, the article continues, the Justice Department “declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn't sufficient evidence to open a case.”
Not even enough evidence to look into the foundation’s affairs?
Not more than a year after the publication of Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, opened the floodgates for investigative reporters to dig into the matter.
As I’ve written before, various lawyers have told me there is already a strong legal case against Mrs. Clinton. The fact that she destroyed email evidence -- evidence subject to a congressional subpoena, no less -- is already evidence in itself that she obstructed justice through spoliation of evidence. Spoliation means you can take as evidence the fact that evidence has been destroyed. Courts are entitled to draw spoliation inferences and convict an accused person on that basis alone.
The only reason FBI Director James Comey didn’t recommend she be prosecuted is because, well, he lacks a spine and he’s corrupt. He said there was no evidence of Clinton’s “efforts to obstruct justice,” a requirement that does not actually appear in the Espionage Act.
Evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation is everywhere, yet CNN and much of the mainstream media are still doing everything they can to ignore, misrepresent, or downplay the questionable things Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did through the foundation.
The congenitally corrupt Clintons created their private email system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requesters, shield Hillary's correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to their corrupt foundation, which, amazingly enough, still enjoys tax-exempt status.
These illegal, insecure private email servers Clinton used while at the State Department are at the heart of the scandal over her mishandling of an Islamic terrorist attack in militant-infested Benghazi, Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. Even now, four years after the assault, the Obama administration has failed to provide an autopsy report about Stevens who was initially reported to have been ritualistically sodomized before being murdered by Muslim terrorists.
Every few days Judicial Watch has been releasing emails obtained under FoIA that may ultimately lead to evidence of political interference at the highest levels that provided cover for the anticipatory presidential bribe processing vehicle known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation...
Major U.S. stock indexes set records again Thursday, the first time since Dec. 31, 1999, that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite have hit those milestones on the same day.
The rally was sparked by higher oil prices and earnings reports from U.S. retailers that weren’t as weak as feared.
Consumer-discretionary and energy stocks led broad gains across the market. The Dow industrials rose 118 points, or 0.6%, to 18614, above its previous record close of 18595 hit July 20. The S&P 500 gained 0.5% and topped its Aug. 5 record. The Nasdaq Composite added 0.5%, surpassing its previous high set at Tuesday’s close.
Investors are “into stocks because there’s nowhere else to go,” said Tim Rudderow, president of Mount Lucas Management, which oversees $1.6 billion.
Shares of Macy’s rose 17% as the department-store operator reported better-than-expected sales and said it plans to close 100 stores. Kohl’s gained 16% after reporting a surprise increase in profit even as it cut its earnings forecast for the year.
The two retailers were the S&P 500’s best performers Thursday, but they were still among the worst over the past 12 months. Retail-store owners have been hit in part by the growth of Internet-based competitors, and even Macy’s well-received results included a sharp drop in quarterly profit and another period of declining sales...
For one thing, if it wasn't for social media you wouldn't be hearing about "rampant" sexism against Ms. Mendoza. Women have been making their way into the top ranks of sports journalism for awhile, and mainstream media hacks are bending over backwards for more "diversity."
Yeah, the Twitter abuse is reprehensible, but then, that's the name of the game nowadays. You know what they say: "If you can't stand the heat..."
Jessica Mendoza, a former athlete and MLB’s first female TV analyst, brings a player’s sensibility to her job. But she’s still subject to the routine abuse directed at women in sports journalism.
The United States has long enjoyed what Barry Posen has termed “command of the commons”: worldwide freedom of movement on and under the seas and in the air above 15,000 feet, with the ability to deny this same freedom to enemies. This command has contributed to a remarkable era of military primacy for U.S. arms against potential state rivals.
Many observers now fear that this era may be coming to an end in the Western Pacific. For more than a generation, China has been fielding a series of interrelated missile, sensor, guidance, and other technologies designed to deny freedom of movement to hostile powers in the air and waters off its coast. As this program has matured, China's ability to restrict hostile access has improved, and its military reach has expanded. Many now believe that this “A2/AD” (antiaccess, area denial) capability will eventually be highly effective in excluding the United States from parts of the Western Pacific that it has traditionally controlled. Some even fear that China will ultimately be able to extend a zone of exclusion out to, or beyond, what is often called the “Second Island Chain”—a line that connects Japan, Guam, and Papua-New Guinea at distances of up to 3,000 kilometers from China. A Chinese A2/AD capability reaching anywhere near this far would pose major challenges for U.S. security policy.
To avert this outcome, the United States has embarked on an approach often called AirSea Battle (ASB). Named to suggest the Cold War continental doctrine of “AirLand Battle,” AirSea Battle is designed to preserve U.S. access to the Western Pacific by combining passive defenses against Chinese missile attack with an emphasis on offensive action to destroy or disable the forces that China would use to establish A2/AD. This offensive action would use “cross-domain synergy” among U.S. space, cyber, air, and maritime forces (hence the moniker “AirSea”) to blind or suppress Chinese sensors. The heart of the concept, however, lies in physically destroying the Chinese weapons and infrastructure that underpin A2/AD. As Chinese programs mature, achieving this objective will require U.S. air strikes against potentially thousands of Chinese missile launchers, command posts, sensors, supply networks, and communication systems deployed across the heart of mainland China—some as many as 2,000 kilometers inland. Accomplishing this mission will require a major improvement in the U.S. Air Force's and Navy's ability to find distant targets and penetrate heavily defended airspace from bases that are either hard enough or distant enough to survive Chinese attack, while hunting down mobile missile launchers and command posts spread over millions of square kilometers of the Chinese interior. The requirements for this mission are typically assumed to include a major restructuring of the Air Force to de-emphasize short-range fighters such as the F-35 or F-22 in favor of longer-range strike bombers; development of a follow-on stealthy long-range bomber to replace the B-2, and its procurement in far greater numbers than its predecessor; the development of unmanned long-range carrier strike aircraft; and heavy investment in missile defenses and information infrastructure. The result would be an ambitious modernization agenda in service of an extremely demanding military campaign to batter down A2/AD by striking targets deep in mainland China, far afield from the maritime domains to which the United States seeks access.
ASB has thus proven highly controversial. Many observers object to its likely cost: a military program this ambitious will surely be very expensive in an era of increasingly restricted U.S. defense budgets.5 Others cite its potential for escalation: U.S. air and missile strikes against targets deep in the Chinese mainland could easily spur retaliation against U.S. or allied homelands and a possible global war against a nuclear power.
The need to incur any of these costs or any of these risks, however, turns on the underlying question of exactly how effective Chinese A2/AD can become. Many mainstream arguments, on both sides of the debate, take for granted a substantial A2/AD threat: ASB advocates would respond to this threat by battering it down; many ASB opponents would avoid it via a distant blockade of China at straits beyond A2/AD's reach; both sides tend to grant A2/AD an ability to deny U.S. access to large parts of the Western Pacific absent a massive U.S. offensive inland. Just how large a part of the Western Pacific the Chinese could close is often vague, however; many are skeptical that China can extend control all the way to the Second Island Chain, but few policy analyses have yet focused on the foundational military question of A2/AD's actual effectiveness and the range at which this capability can be expected to deny U.S. access or threaten allied shipping.
This article thus provides a more systematic assessment of the potential military effectiveness of Chinese A2/AD. We ask not whether ASB would be escalatory, but whether it is necessary. That is, to what extent will ongoing technology trends allow either side to deny freedom of movement to the other, and over what area? Will China be able to push U.S. forces far enough from its shores to threaten U.S. alliances? If so, which ones, and how gravely? And what, given this, represents the best military strategy for the United States to adopt for the long term?
To answer these questions, we focus on the long-run potential of key technologies rather than on an assessment of existing or even programmed forces, equipment, and doctrine, and we do so in the context of an extended competition between mutually adaptive peer competitors, neither of which can simply outspend the other. The A2/AD debate is mostly about the future, not the present. For now, there is little real A2/AD threat to confront: most analysts still see U.S. naval and air superiority over the Pacific except for the immediate Chinese littoral and sometimes the airspace over Taiwan. The Chinese today field only a handful of weapons with ranges anywhere near the Second Island Chain, and their military lacks experience in power projection beyond the vicinity of the Chinese coast. The chief reason for concern lies not in China's current arsenal, but in the trajectory of technical and acquisition trends whose maturation could take decades or even generations. Similarly, the ASB agenda for the United States is also mostly about the future: given the long service lives of warships, and the long lead times for developing new programs such as a stealthy long-range bomber to replace the B-2, the stakes in the A2/AD/ASB debate are mostly about the military prognosis for ten to twenty years from now, not tomorrow or next year. And by the time such major programs mature, faster-moving developments such as electronic countermeasures or tactical innovations may go through multiple rounds of adaptation, measure, and countermeasure, on both sides. The A2/AD debate is thus less about the military balance in 2016 or even 2020 than it is about the military future a generation from now, after an extended two-sided competition; below we use 2040 as a representative time frame for an environment with mature A2/AD technology on both sides.
Our focus on the long-term future motivates two critical framing assumptions. First, just as we cannot limit ourselves to today's Chinese arsenal, neither can we limit ourselves to today's Chinese military doctrine or current Chinese assumptions about the course of a war with the United States. Much can change in a generation. Perhaps Chinese doctrinal adaptation will be constrained by deep-seated cultural or historical factors, but twenty-five years of technological change will create strong incentives for doctrine to adapt, and it would be risky to assume that China will not respond. We thus focus on what technology will make possible for either side, from which we infer strategies and operational concepts that would be advisable, but we leave to others whether China will act on the incentives these changes will create.
Second, we assume that the United States cannot prevail by outspending China over this longer term. In the Cold War, the United States could do just that: a declining Soviet Union could not keep pace with Western economic growth, enabling the West to exhaust the Soviets in a protracted arms race. China, however, is not the Soviet Union: its gross domestic product is widely expected to exceed the United States' in coming years. A strategy that requires the United States to outspend a rising economic peer is unsustainable in the long run: it would simply lead to faster relative economic decline and ever-greater difficulty over time in keeping up. Calls to overwhelm Chinese A2/AD with superior expenditure are self-defeating for the time horizon at the heart of this whole debate.
Given such a long-run, two-sided assessment, we find that by 2040 China will not achieve military hegemony over the Western Pacific or anything close to it—even without ASB. A2/AD is giving air and maritime defenders increasing advantages, but those advantages are strongest over controlled landmasses and weaken over distance. As both sides deploy A2/AD, these capabilities will increasingly replace today's U.S. command of the global commons not with Chinese hegemony but with a more differentiated pattern of control, with a U.S. sphere of influence around allied landmasses, a Chinese sphere of influence over the Chinese mainland, and contested battlespace covering much of the South and East China Seas, wherein neither power enjoys wartime freedom of surface or air movement.
This finding derives from the physics of the key technologies coupled with inherent asymmetries in the operating environments of the land, air, and sea surface. Improvements in reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) technology underlie much of A2/AD's defensive potential, but RSTA effectiveness varies widely with the complexity of the background against which it must detect targets. The sky and the surface of the sea present much simpler backgrounds than the land. Land-based missiles deployed amid a complex background thus enjoy systematic RSTA advantages against airborne or sea-surface foes. As RSTA improves, land-based mobile missile launchers are likely to remain much harder to target than more-exposed aerial or surface-naval combatants of comparable sophistication. This asymmetry will make it increasingly expensive to sustain air or sea-surface operations over or near hostile territory defended by such missiles. The same underlying asymmetry, however, makes effective A2/AD control of the air or sea surface harder the farther away from a controlled landmass it must reach. For long-range RSTA, radar is essential and is likely to remain the most robust solution to the demands of sensing mobile targets over wide areas in a long-term competition. Radar, however, is inherently vulnerable as an active emitter whose physics require an unobstructed line-of-sight to the target for location information precise enough to direct weapons. Whereas mobile missiles can launch from concealment amid complex terrain, radar must reveal its location through the act of sensing. Radar can be defended, but its defenders must themselves survive preemptive attack; the farther one must operate from a friendly shoreline, the more challenging this defensive requirement becomes and the more difficult it becomes to provide the RSTA needed for A2/AD to control the air or sea surface. A2/AD's achievable reach will vary over time, but it will be especially difficult for either China or the United States to extend A2/AD's reach beyond about 400–600 kilometers from a friendly coast, a limit defined by the Earth's curvature and the physical horizon this establishes for airborne radar operating over survivable land-based protectors. Reach on this scale, however, falls far short of what either side would need to dominate a theater the size of the Western Pacific.
These findings imply that, with astute U.S. policies, A2/AD is not a decisive long-term threat to most U.S. allies in the region. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are all either mostly or entirely beyond the likely reach of Chinese A2/AD given appropriate allied military choices. The threat to U.S. alliances often raised in the A2/AD literature can thus be mostly averted even without ASB.
Our analysis is not, however, a straightforward good-news story for the United States and its allies. Taiwan, for example, is much closer to the Chinese mainland than Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines, and it is much more exposed to a Chinese A2/AD threat that U.S. arms are unlikely to be able to preempt. Its proximity to China will not necessarily expose Taiwan to a credible invasion threat—the same technologies that enable Chinese A2/AD will enable Taiwan, with U.S. assistance, to extend its own A2/AD zone around the Taiwanese landmass in a way that would make a Chinese amphibious invasion prohibitively costly. But while Chinese military shipping would not be able to survive long enough to sustain an invasion, China could prevent Taiwanese or neutral shipping from sustaining the Taiwanese economy. The fate of Taiwan in such a contest would rest on the threat of distant blockade by the United States against Chinese seaborne trade and the relative vulnerability of insular Taiwan and continental China to trade cutoffs. If AirSea Battle could preempt Chinese A2/AD, this scenario could be avoided—but it cannot. To do so would require sustained penetration of defended airspace on a scale that A2/AD will make cost-prohibitive by 2040; it is unlikely that ASB would be able to lift a Chinese blockade of Taiwan once China deploys mature A2/AD capability.
Second, our analysis does not indicate that Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines—or for that matter Vietnam, Singapore, or even Australia and the continental United States—will be wholly invulnerable to Chinese coercion. Technological change is progressively reducing the net cost of striking fixed targets such as power plants, cities, transportation hubs, or other civilian value targets with precision-guided ballistic missiles at ever-increasing ranges. This change will not enable A2/AD-like military control at great distances from China or the landmasses of U.S. allies, but it will make a form of coercive strategic bombardment available to any state that chooses to field the needed missiles, including China. Of course, China would be vulnerable to retaliation, either in kind or from distant blockade or other means. The outcome of such coercive campaigns would be shaped by the much-discussed dynamics of resolve and stakes. The ideal solution from the U.S. standpoint, however, would be an ASB-like preemptive capacity to destroy before launch the missiles that China would use for such missions, thus averting this threat altogether. This ideal solution, however, is at odds with the nature of the relevant technological trends.
To support these findings, we proceed in six steps. First, we establish an analytical context by sketching the political and geostrategic aims that the United States and China might pursue in potential future warfare in the Western Pacific and the role A2/AD and ASB might play in such a war. Next we describe A2/AD and its technological foundations in more detail, explaining why it constitutes a uniquely important issue for U.S. strategy in the Western Pacific. We then explore some critical weaknesses inherent in these technologies, especially the vulnerability of the long-range RSTA systems on which all else rests. This analysis implies a real but limited A2/AD ability to deny freedom of movement to an opponent. Next we consider the potential of ASB to deny China such a real-but-limited A2/AD capability; we reject this ambition as unachievable without sustained expenditures that would exceed China's. We conclude by summarizing key points and developing in greater detail their implications for policy and scholarship...
Many assumed the U.S. would withstand the import threat as it had with Japan, Mexico; devastation in Hickory, N.C.
HICKORY, N.C.—In the late 1990s, this furniture-making hub seemed sheltered from the disruptive forces of globalization. Laid-off steelworkers from West Virginia, Tennessee and beyond streamed here for new jobs building beds, tables and chairs for American homes. The unemployment rate fell below 2%.
These days, Hickory is still suffering from a series of economic shocks, none more powerful than China’s rise as an export power. The invasion of imported furniture drove factories out of business, erased thousands of jobs and helped drive unemployment above 15% in 2010.
Stuart Shoun, 59 years old, has been laid off three times since 1999. After one layoff, the Hickory machinist studied architecture at a community college but then couldn’t find a job and returned to the furniture industry. He makes $45,000 a year, the same as he did nearly 20 years ago and $14,000 a year poorer after adjusting for inflation.
Mr. Shoun ’s son, Steven, a trained furniture upholsterer, manages a junkyard and discourages his own son, now in college, from working in the industry that gave North Carolina the nickname “Furniture Capital of the World.” Steven Shoun says he blames “the people who run our country and who run our companies” for Hickory’s economic turmoil.
Mr. Shoun and his father say they favor Donald Trump for president, even though they don’t plan to vote. “I don’t think one vote will make any difference,” says Stuart Shoun.
When import booms from Japan, Mexico and Asian “tiger” economies such as Taiwan arrived in the U.S., many cities and towns were able to adapt.
China was different. Its emergence as a trade powerhouse rattled the American economy more violently than economists and policy makers anticipated at the time or realized for years later. The U.S. workforce adapted more slowly than expected.
What happened with Chinese imports is an example of how much of the conventional wisdom about economics that held sway in the late 1990s, including the role of trade, technology and central banking, has since slowly unraveled.
The aftershocks are sowing deep-seated political discontent this election year. Disillusionment with globalization has fed one of the most unconventional political seasons in modern history, with Bernie Sanders and especially Donald Trump tapping into potent anti-free-trade sentiment.
Both presidential candidates aimed much of their criticism at 1994’s North American Free Trade Agreement, which boosted imports from Mexico. Even then, though, the real culprit was China, economists now say.
Many U.S. factories that moved to Mexico did so to match prices from China. Some of the new Mexican factories helped support U.S. jobs. For example, fabrics made in the U.S. are turned into clothing in Mexico for sale globally by U.S. companies.
David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who has studied trade, labor markets and technological change, calls China’s economy a “500-ton boulder perched on a ledge.” At some point, it would tumble and splatter what was below, but “you just didn’t know when,” he says.
Economists have long argued that while free trade creates winners and losers, the net results are beneficial. Americans gained from inexpensive imports and filled their homes with low-price bicycles, jewelry and kitchenware. U.S. companies won access to overseas markets.
Workers in industries exposed to imports were expected to upgrade their job skills or move somewhere offering fresh opportunities.
Japan’s invasion in the 1970s largely hit industries in cities with broad manufacturing bases on which to fall back. In Akron, Ohio, long the center of the U.S. tire industry, chemists trained at the University of Akron helped create a local polymer industry that employs tens of thousands of workers, said David Lieberth, a former Akron deputy mayor who chronicles the city’s history.
China upended many of those assumptions. No other country came close to its combination of a vast working-age population, super-low wages, government support, cheap currency and productivity gains.
Imports from China as a percentage of U.S. economic output doubled within four years of China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. Mexico took 12 years to do the same thing after Nafta. Japan took just as long after becoming a major U.S. supplier in 1974.
By last year, imports from China equaled 2.7% of U.S. gross domestic product, a percentage point larger than Japan or Mexico ever won.
Japan’s import wave also challenged a limited group of advanced manufacturing industries, largely autos, steel and consumer electronics. China’s low-cost imports swept the entire U.S., squeezing producers of electronics in San Jose, Calif., sporting goods in Orange County, Calif., jewelry in Providence, R.I., shoes in West Plains, Mo., toys in Murray, Ky., and lounge chairs in Tupelo, Miss., among many other industries and communities.
“If we encouraged China to trade, we needed domestic policies in place that would minimize the impact that would follow,” says Gordon Hanson, a University of California, San Diego economics professor. He calls the lack of such policies “a catastrophic mistake.”
A group of economists that includes Messrs. Hanson and Autor estimates that Chinese competition was responsible for 2.4 million jobs lost in the U.S. between 1999 and 2011. Total U.S. employment rose 2.1 million to 132.9 million in the same period.
In the 2000s, congressional districts where competition from Chinese imports was rapidly increasing became more politically polarized, the two researchers and two coauthors concluded from examining vote totals. “Ideologically strident” candidates replaced moderates, they wrote in a paper.
In this year’s Republican presidential primary races, Mr. Trump won 89 of the 100 counties most affected by competition from China, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. Those counties include Hickory’s Catawba County, where Mr. Trump got 44% of the Republican vote in the March primary against 11 other candidates.
Mr. Sanders won Democratic primaries in 64 of the 100 most-exposed counties in northern and Midwestern states. That pattern didn’t hold in the South, where Hillary Clinton was strong among black voters...
It's a media manufactured meltdown. It's their reality. And that's a problem, especially as Trump remains wedded to going without paid advertising. Earned media's going to earn him an epic loss in November. The press is bought. They're in the pocket of leftist globalist elite.
Donald Trump's sinking polls, unending attacks and public blunders have the GOP reconsidering its strategy for November.
When Donald Trump mucks things up, the first person to let him know is usually Republican Party boss Reince Priebus. Almost every day, Trump picks up his cell phone to find Priebus on the line, urging him to quash some feud or clarify an incendiary remark.
The Wisconsin lawyer has been a dutiful sherpa to the Manhattan developer, guiding him through the dizzying altitude of the presidential race and lobbying the GOP to unite behind a figure who threatens its future.
But every bond has its breaking point. For this partnership, the moment nearly arrived in early August. Priebus was on vacation when he learned that Trump had declined to endorse Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House and a close friend. The chairman had a frank message for the nominee, according to two Republican officials briefed on the call. Priebus told Trump that internal GOP polling suggested he was on track to lose the election. And if Trump didn’t turn around his campaign over the coming weeks, the Republican National Committee would consider redirecting party resources and machinery to House and Senate races.
Trump denies the exchange ever took place. “Reince Priebus is a terrific guy,” Trump told TIME. “He never said that.” Priebus could not be reached for comment. But whatever the exact words spoken on the phone, there is no doubt that the possibility Republicans will all but abandon Trump now haunts his struggling campaign.
Since his convention in Cleveland, Trump has done almost nothing right by traditional standards. He has picked fights with senior Republicans and Gold Star parents, invited Russian spies to meddle in U.S. democracy, appeared to joke about gun enthusiasts’ prematurely removing a U.S. President from office. He’s shuffled campaign messages like playing cards and left GOP elders fretting that he lacks the judgment to be Commander in Chief. During a dismal two-week stretch, he surrendered a narrow lead over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and now trails by an average of 8 points in recent nationwide polls.
Trump has overcome rough patches before. But with fewer than 90 days until Nov. 8, he now faces a reckoning. There are daunting demographics to surmount. Allies complain of massive staff shortages in battleground states. And voters are skeptical of a billionaire reality star who seems to study the rules of campaigning only so he can break them.
Then there are the challenges entirely of Trump’s own making. More than three months after he effectively clinched the Republican nomination, he has yet to settle on a strategy to match the demands of a broader electorate. In an interview with TIME on Aug. 9, the improvisational candidate sounded torn between conflicting pieces of advice, unsure of how much to hold back and when to let loose. “I am now listening to people that are telling me to be easier, nicer, be softer. And you know, that’s O.K., and I’m doing that,” he says. “Personally, I don’t know if that’s what the country wants.”
Polls show that Trump has failed to grasp one of the essential truths about this extraordinary contest: in a race between the two most unpopular major-party nominees in modern history, it’s in each campaign’s interest to train the spotlight on the other. Clinton wants the race to be about Trump. Which is what the publicity-addled Republican wants too. And why not? It worked for him in the Republican primaries. “I got 14 million votes and won most of the states,” he boasts. “I’m liking the way I ran in the primaries better.”
But the general election will likely be decided by groups of voters who are rarely among the cheering throngs at his rallies. This is a fact that Trump is only now starting to confront. “I don’t know why we’re not leading by a lot,” he admitted to a crowd of thousands in Jacksonville, Fla., on Aug. 3. One reason is that he’s getting crushed by minority voting blocs that Republican strategists have suggested courting, such as blacks, Hispanics and young women.
Ask him about these struggles and the braggadocio fades to fatalism. “All I can do is tell the truth,” he says. “If that does it, that’s great. And if that doesn’t do it, that’s fine too.” Even the best salesman must bow to the realities of the marketplace.
The trouble started before Trump even left Cleveland. Twelve hours after accepting his party’s nomination, he arrived in a half-empty hotel ballroom for a victory lap. It was a chance to thank supporters and bask in the previous night’s afterglow. Free’s “All Right Now” echoed through the speakers. And then, as Priebus’ team watched live from their hotel a few blocks away, everything went wrong.
Two evenings before, Trump had crushed the last vestiges of Republican opposition, orchestrating an outburst of boos as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas delivered the ultimate snub: refusing to endorse his onetime rival. But for Trump, that victory wasn’t enough. Rather than mend fences, he told fans he didn’t want the GOP runner-up’s endorsement and might bankroll a super PAC to kill Cruz’s career. Apropos of nothing, he revived a dormant controversy involving an unflattering picture of the Texan’s wife, boudoir shots of Trump’s and a tiny super PAC that no longer exists. He once again linked Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassination, a false conspiracy fed by a 50-year-old photo published in a supermarket tabloid. For good measure, Trump fired a parting shot at Ohio Governor John Kasich, another vanquished rival whose political machine could provide a boost in a critical swing state.
The riot of recrimination was a vivid reminder that some of Trump’s worst traits as a candidate–paper-thin skin, an absence of discipline, a bottomless capacity to nurse grudges–are not going away. Republicans waiting for the long-promised presidential pivot seemed like characters in a Beckett play, trapped in Trump’s theater of the absurd.
As Democrats hurled criticism during their convention, Trump tried to compete with press conferences. But his counterprogramming verged on the bizarre. In a striking breach of protocol, he urged Russia on July 27 to hack Clinton’s emails. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said, essentially urging a geopolitical adversary to commit espionage against his opponent. Establishment-minded Republicans phoned one another. Was this really happening?
The next night, a Virginia lawyer named Khizr Khan stepped to the microphone in Philadelphia. The Pakistani émigré turned American citizen spoke of his son Humayun, a U.S. Army captain killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004. “If it was up to Donald Trump,” he thundered, his son “never would have been in America.” Brandishing a pocket-size copy of the Constitution, he addressed Trump directly: “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”
The return volley was predictable. Trump seemed to question whether Khan’s wife Ghazala, who had stood silently alongside her husband, was barred from speaking because of her religion. “It’s Queens,” one Republican operative mused, invoking Trump’s birthplace. “If they hit you, you hit back.” A stirring moment became a multiday feud. And Trump lost. More than 70% of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC News poll said they disapproved of his handling of the dispute, including 59% of Republicans. The emergence of the Muslim parents, blistering Trump’s policies through the scrim of their own patriotism, was more than karmic irony. It was strategic success. A hook had been dangled by the Clinton campaign that he could not help but bite.
Trump goes with his gut, and when his instincts betray him, no one can rein him in. “No one puts words in his mouth, and nobody decides what he says other than him,” says longtime adviser Roger Stone. “Politics is nine-tenths discipline.”
For party officials, the Trump campaign has become like the sign inside factories: X days without an accident, with the tally regularly resetting to zero. “I think what he wants to do and what he does do are two different things,” says another senior GOP official...
But oh my goodness, Donald Trump starts pushing a non-interventionist approach to U.S. foreign affairs, and the hateful anti-Zionist author or "The Israel Lobby" declaims anything to do with the Manhattan mogul's allegedly "ignorant, offensive, and toxic" approach to American foreign policy.
Apart from his other shortcomings, Donald Trump is giving a sensible approach to U.S. foreign policy a bad name. In recent years, a number of scholars and policy analysts have labored to articulate and explain why the United States would be better off with a foreign policy that was less interventionist, less costly, less hypocritical, less beholden to special interests, and above all more successful than the strategy of liberal hegemony pursued by the past three U.S. administrations.
This more restrained approach seeks to advance the U.S. national interest first and foremost. In other words, it maintains that the first goal of U.S. foreign policy is to make Americans safer and more prosperous. This alternative grand strategy would eschew ambitious attempts to remake the world in America’s image and would press key U.S. allies to take more responsibility for their own defense. The United States would not disengage from the world or retreat to Fortress America, but it would be much more selective in its use of military power and focus primarily on preventing potentially dangerous concentrations of power from emerging in Europe, Asia, or the Persian Gulf.
Unfortunately, because these ideas overlap with some (but by no means all) of Trump’s pronouncements on foreign policy, his increasingly incoherent, ignorant, and incompetent campaign threatens to tarnish this alternative in the minds of some observers. Assuming he loses — fingers crossed — the end result could perpetuate America’s present grand strategy despite its many shortcomings.
To give The Donald his due, he has thus far said three perfectly sensible and uncontroversial things about foreign policy. First, he has made it clear he believes the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to advance U.S. interests. In other words, he thinks most states pursue their own interests first and foremost and the United States should do the same. Though most of the foreign-policy establishment claims to have loftier goals (i.e., spreading democracy, promoting human rights, halting proliferation, etc.), Trump’s emphasis on U.S. interests is hardly beyond the pale.
Second, he believes many U.S. allies are wealthy countries free-riding on American protection and failing to bear their rightful share of collective security burdens. He’s correct, and plenty of other U.S. leaders — including President Barack Obama and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — have said exactly the same thing on numerous occasions.
Third, Trump is skeptical of ambitious efforts to “nation build” in far-flung corners of the world, and he now claims to be opposed to dumb wars. It’s hard to argue with him on this point either, though let’s not forget that he supported the Iraq War in 2003 (and then denied that he had done so). Moreover, he sometimes sounds like he’d be willing to go to war at the drop of a hat. But a disinclination to enter more open-ended quagmires is hardly a controversial position at this point.
Reasonable people can disagree about these three assertions, but they are hardly bizarre or outside the boundaries of acceptable discussion. If Trump stuck with them and made them the centerpiece of his foreign-policy platform, the 2016 campaign might actually feature an instructive and long-overdue debate on the global role of the United States and the proper use of American power. Unfortunately, those three elements pretty much exhaust Trump’s wisdom on foreign affairs, and the rest of his views are a farrago of ignorant, offensive, and toxic beliefs that have no business anywhere near the Oval Office.
For starters, Trump’s views on international economics reflect a protectionist outlook that was discredited a couple of centuries ago. Tearing up the North American Free Trade Agreement or leaving the World Trade Organization would not restore American manufacturing or make the country “great” again; it would instead be a body blow to the United States and the world economy and could quite possibly trigger another global recession. Trump simply doesn’t seem to understand that trade is not a zero-sum game where one state “wins” and the rest “lose”; it’s not like one of his shady business deals, which have lined his own pockets and left lots of unhappy customers feeling bilked. Furthermore, Trump’s claim that he can single-handedly negotiate “great” deals to replace the existing global trading system just tells you that he doesn’t know how such deals are actually negotiated or how that order works.
On top of that, Trump’s thinly veiled racism and his penchant for insulting rivals are a recipe for diplomatic disaster. Seriously, how can someone who routinely demeans Hispanics and Muslims expect to conduct effective diplomacy with our neighbors in Latin America or with the entire Arab world?
Stephen Walt lecturing us on "veiled racism"? That is really rich.
To respond as plainly as possible here: Stephen Walt is a bad person who pushes evil anti-Israel tropes, and who hangs out with even worse people in real life.
I've documented this myself many times, but of course the facts are out there for anyone who dares to look.
And of course, it's been 10 years now, but who can forget the debate over "The Israel Lobby"? Here's a quick reminder, from Eliot Cohen, at WaPo, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic."
Say what you will about Donald Trump's movement (and a lot has been said about the "alt right" components of his support), if you're morally consistent, you speak out against all of it. Israel-hatred has no place in American politics, much less in this election.
The fact is, Trump's a firm defender of Israel and his own daughter, son-in-law, and grandson are Jewish.
RIO DE JANEIRO—The Rio Olympics’ green-water crisis claimed another victim: the water polo pool.
Officials scrambled to contain the new embarrassment, which shocked television viewers and spectators Tuesday when the pool hosting the women’s 10-meter synchronized diving finals turned a deep, bright green. Wednesday, even as officials insisted they had the problem under control, they acknowledged that the problem was also affecting the adjoining water polo pool, which also displayed a greenish tint.
“Yesterday mid-afternoon there was a sudden decrease in the alkalinity of the pool,” said Mario Andrada, spokesman for the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee. “Obviously, the people in charge of maintaining the pool and of checking could and should have done more intensive tests.”
Andrada said the pool color would get back to normal “very shortly.” However, he added, Wednesday’s rain in Rio was complicating things.
Several possible explanations emerged on Wednesday, though not all seemed to fit together.
FINA, swimming and diving’s world governing body, said the change occurred, because “the water tanks ran out of some of the chemicals used in the water treatment process. As a result the pH level of the water was outside the usual range, causing the discolouration.”
FINA also added that its sport medicine committee had deemed the water safe for competition...
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