Category Archives: Trump administration

Wars often result from bellicose rhetoric and bad information

David Ignatius writes: When today’s historians look at the confrontation between the United States and North Korea, they’re likely to hear echoes of ultimatums, bluffs and botched messages that accompanied conflicts of the past, often with catastrophic consequences.

“The one thing that’s certain when you choose war as a policy is that you don’t know how it will end,” says Mark Stoler, a diplomatic and military historian at the University of Vermont. This fog of uncertainty should be a caution for policymakers now in dealing with North Korea.

History teaches that wars often result from bellicose rhetoric and bad information. Sometimes leaders fail to act strongly enough to deter aggression, as at Munich in 1938. But more often, as in August 1914, conflict results from a cascade of errors that produces an outcome that no one would have wanted.

World War I is probably the clearest example of how miscalculation can produce a global disaster. As Stoler recounted to me in an interview, each player was caught in “the cult of the offensive,” believing that his nation’s aims could be fulfilled in a short war, at relatively low cost. [Continue reading…]

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Bad news, world: China can’t solve the North Korea problem

Max Fisher writes: If China complied with every American request to cut trade, it could devastate North Korea’s economy, which especially relies on Chinese fossil fuels.

But repeated studies have found that sanctions, while effective at forcing small policy changes, cannot persuade a government to sign its own death warrant. North Korea sees its weapons as essential to its survival, and tests as necessary to fine-tune them.

Jeffrey Lewis, who directs an East Asia program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, called notions that China could impose costs exceeding the benefit North Korea draws from its weapons “sad and desperate.”

Imagine, Mr. Lewis said, that you are Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, and China turned against you, joining your enemies in pressuring you to disarm.

“The last thing you would do in that situation is give up your independent nuclear capability,” he said. “The one thing you hold that they have no control over. You would never give that up in that situation.”

When sanctions aim at forcing internal political change, they often backfire, hardening their targets in place.

In the 1960s, the United States imposed a total embargo on its neighbor and onetime ally, Cuba. Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, ruled for half a century, even surviving the loss of Soviet support.

When Americans rage at Beijing for failing to toughen sanctions, Mr. Lewis said, “The Chinese response is, ‘Because they’re not going to work.’ And the data is on their side.” [Continue reading…]

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How it feels to be a Dreamer

 

Aaron Blake writes: It’s often been said that President Trump is a man of no true political convictions (apart from “winning”). And as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes today, it often seems that Trump takes every position on an issue in hopes of never being fully pinned down — or blamed.

But Trump’s malleability is rarely as striking as it has been on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. His decision Tuesday to phase out the Obama-era executive action exempting the children of undocumented immigrants from deportation was pitched in all kinds of hugely inconsistent ways. Some of the justifications for the decision ran counter to Trump’s own past statements; others were contradicted by Trump himself within a matter of hours.

The biggest contradiction came in a tweet late Tuesday, in which Trump suggested — after a day of stating that Obama’s program was illegal and that Congress was required to act on it — that he might be able to revisit the issue himself. [Continue reading…]

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White evangelicals have made a desperate end-of-life bargain with Trump

Robert P. Jones writes: The general decline of white Catholics and white mainline Protestants, the more liberal branch of white Protestantism anchored in the Northeast and upper Midwest, has long been noted by sociologists. But until recently, their white evangelical cousins in the South and lower Midwest had seemed immune to these trends. This evangelical exceptionalism was not lost on white evangelicals themselves, who frequently pointed a judgmental finger at their more liberal cousins, arguing that there was a direct link between more progressive theology and denominational decline.

But one of the most important findings of our survey is that as the country has crossed the threshold from being a majority white Christian country to a minority white Christian country, white evangelical Protestants have themselves succumbed to the prevailing winds and in turn contributed to a second wave of white Christian decline in the country. Over the past decade, white evangelical Protestants have declined from 23% to 17% of Americans.

During this same period, the proportion of religiously unaffiliated Americans has grown from 16% to 24%.

The engines of white evangelical decline are complex, but they are a combination of external factors, such as demographic change in the country as a whole, and internal factors, such as religious disaffiliation — particularly among younger adults who find themselves at odds with conservative Christian churches on issues like climate change and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. As a result, the median age of white evangelical Protestants is now 55, and the median age of religiously unaffiliated Americans is 37. While 26% of seniors (65 and older) are white evangelicals, only 8% of Americans younger than 30 claim this identity.

The evangelical alliance with Trump can be understood only in the context of these fading vital signs among white evangelicals. They are, in many ways, a community grieving its losses. After decades of equating growth with divine approval, white evangelicals are finding themselves on the losing side of demographic changes and LGBT rights, one of their founding and flagship issues. [Continue reading…]

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Trump gets millions from golf members. CEOs and lobbyists get access to president

USA Today reports: Dozens of lobbyists, contractors and others who make their living influencing the government pay President Trump’s companies for membership in his private golf clubs, a status that can put them in close contact with the president, a USA TODAY investigation found.

Members of the clubs Trump has visited most often as president — in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia — include at least 50 executives whose companies hold federal contracts and 21 lobbyists and trade group officials. Two-thirds played on one of the 58 days the president was there, according to scores they posted online.

Because membership lists at Trump’s clubs are secret, the public has until now been unable to assess the conflicts they could create. USA TODAY found the names of 4,500 members by reviewing social media and a public website golfers use to track their handicaps, then researched and contacted hundreds to determine whether they had business with the government.

The review shows that, for the first time in U.S. history, wealthy people with interests before the government have a chance for close and confidential access to the president as a result of payments that enrich him personally. It is a view of the president available to few other Americans. [Continue reading…]

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House Intelligence Committee subpoenas DOJ, FBI for dossier documents

The Washington Post reports: The House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed records from the Justice Department and the FBI pertaining to a salacious but unverified dossier over objections from the committee’s minority members, the panel’s ranking Democrat said Tuesday.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) confirmed the details of the subpoenas, initially reported in the Washington Examiner, during an appearance Tuesday evening on MSNBC. But he also complained that the subpoenas were “uncalled for,” accusing Republicans of attempting to “discredit” the author of the dossier “rather than looking into how many of the allegations he wrote about were true.”

“What we should be most concerned about is whether those sources of the information in the report are true, not in discrediting the author of that report,” Schiff said. [Continue reading…]

John Sipher, former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, writes: I spent almost thirty years producing what CIA calls “raw reporting” from human agents. At heart, this is what Orbis did [when compiling what has come to be known as the Steele dossier]. They were not producing finished analysis, but were passing on to a client distilled reporting that they had obtained in response to specific questions. The difference is crucial, for it is the one that American journalists routinely fail to understand. When disseminating a raw intelligence report, an intelligence agency is not vouching for the accuracy of the information provided by the report’s sources and/or subsources. Rather it is claiming that it has made strenuous efforts to validate that it is reporting accurately what the sources/subsources claim has happened. The onus for sorting out the veracity and for putting the reporting in context against other reporting – which may confirm or deny the new report – rests with the intelligence community’s professional analytic cadre. In the case of the dossier, Orbis was not saying that everything that it reported was accurate, but that it had made a good-faith effort to pass along faithfully what its identified insiders said was accurate. This is routine in the intelligence business. And this form of reporting is often a critical product in putting together more final intelligence assessments.

In this sense, the so-called Steele dossier is not a dossier at all. A dossier suggests a summary or case history. Mr. Steele’s product is not a report delivered with a bow at the end of an investigation. Instead, it is a series of contemporaneous raw reports that do not have the benefit of hindsight. Among the unnamed sources are “a senior Russian foreign ministry official,” “a former top-level intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin,” and “a close associate of Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.” Thus, the reports are not an attempt to connect the dots, but instead an effort to uncover new and potentially relevant dots in the first place. [Continue reading…]

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Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election

The Washington Post reports: Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that it has discovered it sold ads during the U.S. presidential election to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.

Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.

A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said. Most of the ads focused on pumping politically divisive issues such as gun rights and immigration fears, as well as gay rights and racial discrimination.

The acknowledgment by Facebook comes as congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller are probing Russian interference in the U.S. election, including allegations that the Kremlin may have coordinated with the Trump campaign. [Continue reading…]

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A third war in sixteen years?

Michael Krepon writes: Donald Trump spirals downward. He has no other place to go. Due to circumstances comprehensible only in retrospect, he became president. The corners he has cut and the deals he has struck will be his undoing. He is temperamentally unsuited to be president and to have sole authority to launch a nuclear strike. In due course, he will be ushered out, the victimizer posing as ultimate victim. Bipartisan sighs of relief will accompany his departure. He will rally what remains of his base, until they, too, will eventually move on, disinterested in whatever shiny object he tries to sell.

The first order of business for American citizens during the Trump presidency is to do everything in our collective power to limit the damage he can do. Since the most harm could result from a preventive war to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons, this aspect of damage limitation must have the highest priority.

Kim Jong Un is doing his part to prompt another preventive war. As provocations go, overflying Japan with a ballistic missile and carrying out another nuclear test are almost, but not yet, chart-toppers. These actions warrant even greater economic penalties, especially from China and Russia, as well as other clarifications of the folly of this young Maximum Leader’s current course. Tit-for-tat military rejoinders to his provocations also merit consideration — but only if they do not prompt conventional warfare and the use of nuclear weapons. [Continue reading…]

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Are conservatives more worried about the streetlights going out in Peoria than the destruction of Los Angeles?

Following the latest threats from Pyongyang, Jeffrey Lewis wrote:

The North Koreans also went out of their way to taunt us about electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effects, I suppose because they think we’re worried about them. I think its laughable to imagine that North Korea would waste a nuclear weapon hoping to knock down parts of the power grid. For my part, I would much prefer the North Koreans waste nuclear weapons trying to achieve an uncertain EMP effect than incinerating cities with real people pushing strollers with real babies. KCNA is really stepping up its trolling game.

This trolling game is, however, clearly working: “Millions of American lives could be at stake as North Korea threatens to attack power grid,” warns Fox News.

The Sun reports: “Homeleand security expert Peter Pry has warned Pyongyang could put a nuclear weapon on a satellite that could be detonated on command over the States.”

What’s strange about these warnings about the dangers of an EMP attack is that they are coming just as North Korea has tested a weapon almost ten times as powerful as the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima — in other words, a weapon whose devastating effects should hardly be a matter of conjecture.

Frank Gafney may provide the answer as to why the EMP fears are getting amplified to such a degree:

The imperative of protecting the nation’s bulk-power distribution system, better known as “the grid,” must now take precedence over other improvements. The U.S. military has known for decades how to “harden” electrical and electronic gear from EMP. These techniques must now be applied on an emergency basis to ensure that the civilian grid – upon which both our armed forces and our population and economy critically depend – is made as invulnerable as possible to enemy action.

Translation for Trumpsters: Not only do we need a border wall; we now also need a space wall — and thus a massive increase in defense spending.

All warnings about EMP refer back to a 1962 nuclear test that involved a bomb ten times as powerful as the one just tested:

When the U.S. tested a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific in 1962, it resulted in lights burning out in Honolulu, nearly 1,000 miles from the test site. Naturally occurring electromagnetic events on the sun can also disrupt power systems. A 1989 blackout in Quebec came days after powerful explosions on the sun expelled a cloud of charged particles that struck earth’s magnetic field.

Skeptics generally acknowledge that an EMP attack would be possible in theory, but they say the danger is exaggerated because it would be difficult for an enemy such as North Korea to calibrate the attack to deliver maximum damage to the U.S. electrical grid. If a North Korean bomb exploded away from its target location, it might knock out only a few devices or parts of the grid.

The 1962 U.S. nuclear test, which involved a bomb with a force of 1.4 megatons, didn’t disrupt telephone or radio service in Hawaii, although those who stress the threat say today’s electronic devices are much more vulnerable. North Korea said its hydrogen bomb had explosive power of tens of kilotons to hundreds of kilotons.

Others say that even if North Korea had the technical capability to deliver a damaging electromagnetic pulse, it wouldn’t make strategic sense to use it because Pyongyang could wreak more destruction with a traditional nuclear attack directed at a large city.

A rogue state would prefer a “spectacular and direct ground burst in preference to a unreliable and uncertain EMP strike. A weapon of mass destruction is preferable to a weapon of mass disruption,” wrote physicist Yousaf M. Butt in a 2010 analysis.

Just to be clear again: those experts who downplay the EMP threat are in no sense understating the nuclear threat.

“It is beyond me why we think an enemy would waste a perfectly good nuclear weapon to experiment with a hypothetical EMP when they could destroy an actual city,” arms control expert Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, told The National Interest.

“EMP is a loony idea. Once an enemy uses a nuclear weapon—for any reason—it crosses the nuclear threshold and invites a nuclear response. U.S. military commanders would not say ‘Well, it was only an airburst. We should just respond in kind.’ They would answer with an overwhelming, devastating nuclear counter attack. And our nuclear weapons and command and control are designed to operate in a nuclear war environment, not just some puny EMP blast.”

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Trump’s move to end DACA and echoes of the Immigration Act of 1924

Jelani Cobb writes: From the outset, the rearguard movement that is Trumpism has been honest, at least, about its intentions to deliver the United States back to an earlier era in its history. We have heard this sort of appeal to an Edenic past from conservative politicians for decades—for so long, in fact, that those who wished to avoid the more alarming implications of Donald Trump’s resentment agenda could see him as simply a more rough-hewn version of that variety. They imagined him capable of the fabled “pivot” that would allow a more mature, statesmanlike version of Trump to emerge. When this didn’t happen—when his campaign compiled such a vast collection of bigoted actions and statements that it began to seem as if a case study from a syllabus for a course on intersectionality had sprung off the page and run for high office—they held out hope that he would “grow into” the Presidency. That faith was never warranted, but the past month effectively revealed the difference between unfounded optimism and an outright delusion.

In the span of three weeks, Trump has equivocated on the moral character of Nazi sympathizers, pardoned a former sheriff found guilty of racial profiling (though that is possibly the least egregious of the sheriff’s list of civil-rights affronts), and, finally, announced his plan to rescind President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, imperilling the future of eight hundred thousand people who are Americans in all but the most technical sense of the term. This move is part of a larger vision of immigration. Last month, Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s senior policy advisers, sparred with CNN’s Jim Acosta during a press briefing on the proposed RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy) Act. If passed, the legislation would slash legal immigration by fifty per cent, and prioritize highly skilled English speakers among those who are allowed to immigrate. But even the preference for highly skilled immigrants should be viewed skeptically, given Trump’s campaign rhetoric about reducing the numbers of people allowed into the country on H-1B visas. The issue is not whether these immigrants are in the country legally; it’s that they are in the country at all. [Continue reading…]

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The economic senselessness of Trump’s DACA repeal

The Atlantic reports: The president’s statement makes it sound like Dreamers are often violent members of society who, even when they’re not committing crimes, are busy stealing native-born Americans’ jobs and draining scarce government resources. The facts, however, paint a starkly different picture. There is little evidence to suggest that Dreamers are more violent than average Americans, and criminals were never eligible for protection under DACA anyway. Instead, there is considerable evidence that Dreamers are productive members of society.

The typical Dreamer is young and employed at a job that earns about $17 per hour, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Dreamers pay taxes and are not eligible for federal welfare. As a result, far from being a drain on government, they are a boon. Cato estimates that ending DACA could cost Washington nearly $280 billion in lost tax revenue over the next decade.

Dreamers’ youth is an asset on its own, since the U.S., like most advanced economies, is beset by an aging population and a low natural birth rate. As the economist Paul Krugman points out, a slow-growing population hurts economic growth, exacerbating what economists fear might be long-term, or “secular” stagnation. This is a lesson that Europe and Japan have learned all too well after many years of lackluster GDP growth. “What would make secular stagnation more of a problem?” Krugman asks. “Hey, let’s expel hundreds of thousands of young people from the current and future work force.”

As a group, Dreamers over the age of 25 are more than twice as likely to start a new business than the national average, according to a survey from the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP). The same survey found that more than 90 percent of Dreamers over the age of 25 are currently employed, and, on average, they work 40 hours a week and earn an annual income of $37,000. More than 98 percent of them speak English, and more than 70 percent of them are pursuing (or have attained) a bachelor’s degree. Since the initiative was signed, these young people have increased their college enrollment, found better jobs, and earned more money.

This is the group that the president’s note has accused of being overrun by gang members and criminals. For an administration that has been accused of sympathizing with white supremacy, it may significant to point out that less than 2 percent of Dreamers self-identified as white in the CAP survey. More than 90 percent said their ethnicity was “Hispanic/Latino.” [Continue reading…]

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Don’t let Trump hide behind the Constitution in ending DACA

Adam Cox and Cristina Rodríguez write: On Tuesday, the Trump administration formally announced its decision to end one of President Obama’s signature immigration accomplishments—the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy (DACA). Designed to protect Dreamers, that policy has insulated from deportation as many as 800,000 young people who were brought to the United States as children. Attorney General Jeff Sessions claims that the Obama Administration violated the Constitution when it decided, as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, not to deport Dreamers and instead to invest enforcement resources elsewhere. But Sessions’ position is both wrong and disingenuous. The Constitution’s Take Care Clause has never barred under-enforcement of the law. And Sessions knows that. Since assuming office he has spearheaded the under-enforcement of several laws. Dreamers simply don’t count in his and Trump’s books the way others do. That’s a policy choice. Not a constitutionally required one.

Jeff Sessions knows all too well that, when fulfilling the constitutional duty to enforce the law, administrations from both parties have historically had broad discretion to decide when and how the law should be enforced. This is true not just for immigration, but also with respect to criminal prosecutions, civil rights laws, and regulatory enforcement actions on matters as diverse as the environment, antitrust, and labor law. And it is not at all uncommon for the Department of Justice or other agencies to decide that enforcing the law against a particular group of people is neither just nor worth their limited time and resources.

In fact, Sessions himself has already announced radical shifts in enforcement priorities, particularly in the domain of civil rights. He no longer intends for the Justice Department to exercise supervisory authority over state and local police departments to ensure that they comply with basic civil rights laws. The Department appears to be looking for ways of abandoning consent decrees in school desegregation cases. And it almost certainly has no intention of enforcing the voting rights act in a rigorous fashion. [Continue reading…]

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Attorneys general across the U.S. threaten to sue Trump over DACA

The Hill reports: Democratic attorneys general across the country have threatened to sue President Trump over his decision Tuesday to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, opening another front in the growing legal war between blue states and the Republican administration.

In public statements and letters to the Trump administration, 20 attorneys general urged Trump not to follow through on threats to end the five-year-old program, which allows those brought into the country illegally as children to work and live free of the threat of deportation.

“Ending DACA is un-American, and it’s going to threaten the health and safety of many individuals,” New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas (D) told The Hill. “Various attorneys general from across the country are preparing to defend DACA recipients. The Constitution applies [to them] as well in terms of equal protection and due process.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama calls Trump’s decision to end DACA ‘wrong,’ ‘self-defeating’ and ‘cruel’

The Washington Post reports: Former president Barack Obama said Tuesday that it is “wrong,” “self-defeating” and “cruel” for the Trump administration to end an Obama-era program that allowed younger undocumented immigrants to continue to live in the United States without fear of deportation.

“Let’s be clear: The action taken today isn’t required legally. It’s a political decision, and a moral question,” Obama said in a lengthy statement posted on his Facebook page on Tuesday afternoon, following an announcement earlier in the day that the Trump administration will unwind the program, pending action from Congress in the next six months. “Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us. … Kicking them out won’t lower the unemployment rate, or lighten anyone’s taxes, or raise anybody’s wages.” [Continue reading…]

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Hurricane Harvey and the storms to come

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: On August 29, 2005, at six-ten in the morning, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, just east of New Orleans. Katrina had spent days wobbling over the Gulf of Mexico, and by the time it reached the coast it was classified as a strong Category 3 storm. As it pressed inland, its winds, which were clocked at up to a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, pushed water from the Gulf westward into Lake Pontchartrain, and north, up a mostly abandoned shipping canal. The levees that were supposed to protect New Orleans failed, and low-lying neighborhoods were inundated. That day in Louisiana, at least six hundred and fifty people died.

Katrina was widely described as a “wake-up call” for a country in denial about climate change. President George W. Bush and his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, during their first term, had withdrawn the United States from a global climate agreement and dismissed the findings of the government’s own climate scientists. Now, a few months into their second term, the nation was facing just the sort of disaster that the scientists had warned about. Even if global warming hadn’t caused Katrina, clearly it had intensified the damage: with higher sea levels come higher storm surges. And, with sea surface temperatures rising, there was more energy to fuel hurricanes, and more evaporation, which inevitably produces more rain. “How many killer hurricanes will it take before America gets serious about global warming?” the journalist Mark Hertsgaard asked at the time.

Last week, as Hurricane Harvey lingered over Houston, dumping so much water on the city that the National Weather Service struggled to find ways to describe the deluge, this question sloshed back to mind. Again, climate change can’t be said to have caused Harvey, but it unquestionably made the storm more destructive. When Harvey passed over the western part of the Gulf, the surface waters in the region were as much as seven degrees warmer than the long-term average. “The Atlantic was primed for an event like this,” Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told the Guardian.

Harvey was less lethal than Katrina; as of this writing, forty-six storm-related deaths have been confirmed. But in financial terms the storm’s costs are likely to be as high or even higher. One estimate put the price of repairing homes, roads, businesses, and the petrochemical plants that line the Houston Ship Channel at a hundred and ninety billion dollars. And that estimate was made before storm-damaged plants started to explode.

As misguided as the Bush Administration was about climate change, Donald Trump has taken willful ignorance to a whole new level. [Continue reading…]

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Russian politician says ‘let’s hit Trump with our Kompromat’ on state TV

The Independent reports: A Russian politician has threatened to “hit Donald Trump with our Kompromat” on state TV.

Speaking on Russia-24, Nikita Isaev, leader of the far-right New Russia Movement, said the compromising material should be released in retaliation over the closure of several Russian diplomatic compounds across the US.

When asked whether Russia has such material, Mr Isaev, who is also director of the Russian Institute of Contemporary Economics, replied: “Of course we have it!”

The exchanges were first translated and reported by Russian media analyst Julia Davis. [Continue reading…]

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Trump ‘crushed’ by planned departure of one of his closest confidants

Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump’s allies are worried that the most damaging of the many recent departures from his White House may be that of Keith Schiller, a little-known former bodyguard who’s one of the president’s closest confidants outside his family.

Schiller is leaving the White House soon to return to the private security business, according to three people familiar with his plans, for a job that will pay far more than his $165,000 government salary. His title, director of Oval Office operations, hardly begins to describe his importance to Trump, who is “crushed” by his planned departure, according to one person close to the president.

Multiple people interviewed described Schiller as an emotional anchor for the president in a White House often marked by turmoil. Schiller has worked for Trump for nearly two decades, and within the West Wing he serves as the president’s protector, gate-keeper and wing man, according to people close to Schiller and Trump. Most of the people requested anonymity to candidly discuss relationships between the president and his aides.

“He’s a confidant and friend,” said Stuart Jolly, a former national field director for Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump “trusts Keith, and Keith trusts him. Trust is a really big deal at that level.”

Schiller has also acted as Trump’s hatchet-man. It was Schiller who told James Comey that the president had decided to fire him as FBI director. Two weeks ago, after Trump was angered by preparations for a rally in Phoenix, Schiller delivered the message to another longtime aide, George Gigicos, that Trump no longer wanted him to organize such events, according to three people familiar with the matter. [Continue reading…]

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Cold War lessons in coercive diplomacy for dealing with North Korea today

Michael McFaul writes: Unfortunately, like many national security debates these days, our national discussion about how to address the growing North Korean threat has quickly become polarized between two extreme positions. In one corner, President Trump has threatened a preemptive military strike in response (I’m paraphrasing his remarks into more analytic terms) to new threats from the North Korean regime. In reaction, Trump opponents have advocated the exact opposite — talks with Kim Jong-un. Both of these options are insufficient. In fact, threatening nuclear war or proposing talks are only partial strategies at best, slogans at worst, for dealing with one of our most pressing national security challenges. What we need instead is first a clearly defined objective, then second a smart mix of both diplomacy and pressure — coercive diplomacy — to achieve that national security goal.

Coercive diplomacy served the United States well in deterring and then reducing the Soviet threat during the Cold War. This same strategy can also work against a much less formidable North Korean foe. Like Stalin, Kim Jong-un is a ruthless dictator, capable of unspeakable crimes against his citizens. But he is not irrational. Like his grandfather and father, he can be deterred. And he might be capable of doing a deal.

All effective national security policies must start with defining the objectives before pivoting to discussions about how to achieve them. Right now, our objectives regarding North Korea are ill-defined and many. Some, including Trump administration officials, argue for denuclearization. Others seek regime change and reunification. Diminishing the North Korean nuclear program through limited military strikes is a third objective proffered. A fourth camp advocates the removal of Kim Jong-un, or decapitation of the regime. A fifth group advocates a more modest goal — the resumption of talks with the North Korean government. The Trump administration itself sends conflicting messages about its objectives.

All of these must be set aside for now. While Kim Jong-un and his regime remain in power, denuclearization is not a realistic goal. The North Korean leader rationally believes that possession of nuclear weapons helps to deter threats to his regime, including first and foremost from the United States. No amount of coercion or diplomacy will ever convince him otherwise. Foreign induced regime change or leader decapitation also is not a realistic goal. Tragically, the North Korean dictatorship has demonstrated real resilience in the face of famine, sanctions and international isolation. American efforts to strengthen internal opposition have not produced pressure on the regime. Assassination or decapitation, even if it could be done (and I am skeptical) would not compel the next North Korean leader to give up his nuclear weapons. On the contrary, the effect would be the exact opposite. And nothing more will rally North Koreans to defend their government than such an action. Nor should resumption of talks be the goal of our efforts. Talks are the means to achieve other objectives, not the objective in and of itself.

Instead, our singular focus for the short term must be to freeze the North Korean nuclear weapons and missile programs. Early arms control during the Cold War (SALT) slowed the acceleration of nuclear weapons acquisition, creating the predicate for eventual weapons reduction in later negotiations (START). The same sequence must be embraced now with North Korea. The objective of freezing North Korean nuclear and missile programs would enhance American national security as well as the security of allies. This objective is also obtainable. [Continue reading…]

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