Germany actively explores new international policy options in the face of Trump's erratic foreign policy

Other nations around the world are obviously faced with making significant adjustments in their foreign policy in response to the new orientations and the high level of uncertainty in the Trump Administration's foreign policy.

Christoph Schult writes about German moves in "Allianz der Gleichgesinnten," Der Spiegel 28.07.2018. He takes as a starting point a meeting that German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) had with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. Haas, writes Schult, proposed to Abe:

... stellt Maas dem japanischen Regierungschef seine Idee eines neuen Staatenbundnisses vor. Sie konnte das weltpolitische Vakuum fallen, das Trump hinterlässt. In den kommenden Monaten soll ein Netzwerk global orientierter Staaten geknüpft werden, das sich in der Außen-, Handels- und Klimapolitik eng abstimmt. »Wir brauchen eine Allianz der Multilateralisten«, sagt Maas, ein Bündnis also, das für jene globalen Regeln und Strukturen der Nachkriegsordnung eintritt, die Trump ablehnt. >»Der Klügere gibt nach< ware in diesen Zeiten die falsche Maxime«, sagt Maas.

{ ... his idea of a new alliances of states. It could fill the political vacuum that Trump has left. In coming months, a network of globally oriented countries that agree with each other in foreign, trade, and climate politicies will be liked together. "We need an alliance of mulitilateralists," say Maas. Meaning an alliance that will engage for the global rules and structures of the postwar [post Second World War] order that Trump rejects. "'The cleverer give in', would be the wrong maxim in these times," says Maas.}

Trump's recent statements represented a turning point, in Schult's reporting:

Spätestens seitdem der US-Präsident den Nato-Partnern beim Brüsseler Gipfel mit dem Rückzug aus der westlichen Verteidigungsallianz gedroht und wenige Tage später die EU als »Gegner« bezeichnet hat, hat sich in Berlin, Brüssel und Paris die Hoffnung zerschlagen, dass Allianzen Trump überhaupt etwas bedeuten. Die USA hatten sich vom »Ordnungsgeber« zum »Ordnungszerstorer« gewandelt, heißt es in der Bundesregierung.

{At least since the US President threatened the NATO partners at the Brussels summit that he would withdraw from the Western defence alliance and a few days later described the EU as an "enemy," hope has been destroyed in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris that alliances mean anything at all to Trump. The US has changed from being a "provider of order" to a "destroyer of order," say people in the German government.} [my emphasis]

This article reads very much like a trial balloon floated intentionally by government officials, not so much like actual investigative reporting. That's how the press works. But it's another public indication that EU and NATO governments are moving to protect themselves from Trump's European policy, which - intentionally or not - is very much in line with the efforts of Vladimir Putin's Russia to undermine both NATO and the EU.

Schult's piece mentions several countries that the German government considers possibly important partners in this effort: Canada, Mexico, France, South Africa, Australia, and Argentina. It's strikes me that Canada and Mexico have a strong national interest in taking some part in this effort. Martin Hesse writes elsewhere in the same Spiegel ("America first, Dollar second") notes that Trump's currency policy (or just blundering actions) could destablize the world financial system. So countries all over the world have reason to be carefully considering options.

Also in the same issue, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen gives a suggestion that a sort of stalling for time is also part of the Merkel government's perspective:

Diese Fixierung begleitet ihn ja schon über Jahrzehnte. Lange bevor er Präsident war, hat er bereits über deutsche Autos und deutsche Exporte gesprochen. Seine oft abfällige Art gegenüber Deutschland ist aber alles andere als typisch amerikanisch. Ich war bei meiner letzten US-Reise im Abgeordnetenhaus und im Senat und habe erfahren, mit welcher Leidenschaft sich die Amerikaner über Parteigrenzen hinweg zur Nato bekennen und wie sehr ihnen an der deutschamerikanischen Freundschaft liegt, die für viele nicht nur schone Erinnerung ist, sondern vor allem ein wichtiges Element der Zukunft unserer freien und toleranten Gesellschaften.

{This fixation [on Germany as an antogonist] is something that [Trump] has held for decades. Long before he was President, he had already spoke about German cars and German exports. But his often disparaging manner toward Germany is anything but typically American. On my last trip to the US, I was in the House of Representative and in the Senate and experienced with what passion the Americans across party lines recognized NATO and how much they valued the German-American friendship, which for many is not only a beautiful memory, but above all an important element of the future of our free and tolerant societies.}

She mentions that in those meeting with the Members of Congress, they made a point of recalling that Germany was the country that took the lead in formally invoking the NATO alliance over the 9/11 attacks and in support of the Afghanistan War.

She also has this to say about Russia's current position toward Europe:

Helsinki hat wieder gezeigt, dass Russlands Präsident Putin eine klare Strategie hat. Seine wirtschaftliche Schwache will er dadurch überspielen, dass er sich als globaler Player positioniert. Ein Mittel dafür ist auch, den Konsens der Atlantischen Demokratien, die Nato und die EU zu spalten. Eine klare Strategie des amerikanischen Präsidenten im Umgang mit Russland ist nach dem Treffen indes nicht zu erkennen.

{Helsinki [the Trump-Putin meeting] showed again that Russia's President Putin has a clear strategy. He wants to gloss over its economic weakness by positioning himself as a global player. One means for that is to try to split the consensus of the Atlantic democracies, the NATO and the EU. A clear strategy on the part of the American President in dealing with Russia, however, is still not apparent after the meeting.}

Von der Leyen also notes that Germany gets 9% of its energy from Russia. Considerably less than the 70% Trump claimed in one of his endless tweets.

"Othering" immigrants with lies

Josh Marshall provides a succinct guide to understate a couple of key points on today's anti-immigrant hate-mongering agenda, with particular reference to the United States (Please Bookmark This Post. Seriously. TPM 06/25/2018). There's the "open borders" accusation the Republicans make against the Democrats:

... in 2013 the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, the most recent iteration of so-called ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’ ... it included a huge amount of money and laws for border security and efforts to prevent illegal immigration. It is demonstrably not an ‘open borders’ bill. All 52 Democratic Senators voted for it as did the two independents who caucus with the Democrats. This is the clearest, most concrete and dispositve [sic] evidence that this repeated claim by Trump, Sanders et al. is a provable lie. [my emphasis]

Then there's the scare talk about immigrant criminals:

The evidence is consistent and overwhelming. Immigrants commit crime at dramatically lower rates than the native born. And large influxes of immigrants actually appear to bring the crime rate down in areas of high concentration. Immigration does not drive up crime rates at all. If crime is our guide we should bring in more undocumented immigrants and boot some native scofflaws. The entire premise of Trump’s immigration arguments are based on a demonstrable lie. [my emphasis in bold]

Obama and the child kidnapping policy of the Trump Administration

It's nothing new for Trump and his minions to blame Obama for whatever Trump himself is doing. So they first claimed that Obama passed a law requiring them to kidnap the children of asylum-seekers (not true) and that the Obama Administration also practiced family separate (unfortunately true).

On Michael Brooks Show for 06/19/2018, Michael has a discussion about how Democrats and the left should approach discussing the conservative immigration politics that Obama practiced in connection with Trump's. Michael stressed the viewpoint that, yes, Obama's policy involved detention of minors, too, but his purpose was to practice a restrictive and punitive immigration policy as part of a strategy to get the Republicans to agree to comprehensive immigration reform. He argued that our legitimate criticism of Obama's policies detract the qualitatively worse and more cruel than Obama's. His concern is that a purist left harping on Obama's policies can function as a kind of concern trolling, validating Trump's claims that his child kidnapping policy is a continuation of Obama's approach.

Jimmy Dore and Abby Martin make the case that Michael Brooks probably considers more in the purist lane, Hillary: Undocumented Children "Should Be SENT BACK!" Jimmy Dore Show 06/21/2018. The Hillary anti-immigrant clips they feature are important to keep in mind. Hillary was set to play the same game on immigration that Obama did, despite the failure of the fundamental premise that harsh anti-immigrant policies by Democrats would persuade the Republicans to agree to something better.

Sam Stein in this clip calls the Obama Administration's family detention policy and its very explicit purpose to act as a deterrent to asylum-seekers "abhorent," while also characterizes the Trump kidnapping policy as "another level of disgustingness." Does Sam Want Completely Open Borders? Majority Report 06/22/2018. Michael Brooks is also part of that discussion on that clip, noting that the Trump policy has a "fundamental[ly] different premise behind" it.

Digby also joined Sam Stein on Friday to talk about the Trump Administration's child kidnapping, Casual Friday w/ Digby and Film Guy Matthew 06/22/18. Diby appears about 15 minutes into the show.

They also discussed the conservative political calculation behind Obama's related policies. What Digby emphasizes is the progressive critics were criticizing Obama's immigration and detention policies in real time. And also pointing out that the ConseraDem political strategy would not work. The critics were right.

Franco Ordoñez and Anita Kumar, Yes, Obama separated families at the border, too McClatchy Nenwspapers 06/21/2018:

No numbers on children separated from their parents under Obama is available because the Obama administration didn’t keep them, according to Trump DHS officials.

Leon Fresco, a deputy assistant attorney general under Obama, who defended that administration's use of family detention in court, acknowledged that some fathers were separated from children.

Most fathers and children were released together, often times with an ankle bracelet. Fresco said there were cases where the administration held fathers who were carrying drugs or caught with other contraband who had to be separated from their children.

“ICE could not devise a safe way where men and children could be in detention together in one facility,” Fresco said. “It was deemed too much of a security risk.”

One of the most controversial measures that Obama took was to resurrect the almost-abandoned practice of detaining mothers and children to deter future illegal immigration. [my emphasis]

Those of us who criticized Obama's immigration policies in real time obviously want to reject the attempts by Trump and Sessions to use Obama's bad policies to justify or excuse their own qualitatively worse child-kidnapping program.

But I said when Obama took office, his most important Constitutional responsibility was to make sure that the torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration was properly investigated and prosecuted. The torture policy had been approved and implemented by very senior Administration officials. Not only under American law but under the obligations of the Torture Convention signed by St. Reagan when he was President, the US Government was obligated to pursue those crimes. Here again, whatever failings of the Obama Administration in this regard, it's not a serious as the original crimes themselves. And it doesn't change the fact that the Justice Department was obligated to pursue those prosecutions, too. And didn't.

But Obama and Eric Holder did give Dick Cheney the one thing that his own Administration couldn't give itself: a subsequent Administration of the other party that granted the torture criminals de facto immunity. And now the mobsters and grifters of the Trump Administration are driving a fleet of trucks through that de facto immunity.

And, as despicable as the Trump-Sessions child kidnapping policy is, the Democrats should remember and reject the Bad things that Obama did on immigration. And if his motivation really was to get a good comprehensive immigration reform bill with Republican cooperation, it failed. And Hillary Clinton was wrong in her support of the same harsh policies. After the Clinton and Obama Administration, I don't see any excuse for Democrats to pretend that such an approach by future Democratic Administration is anything but bad.

Will Bunch in this column reminds not to be sentimental about Obama's immigration policy, because some of it really was bad. Some of the pictures of border kids that haunt me most are from 2014. Here's why Attytood 06/24/2018:

The immigration lawyer [R. Anderew Free] had been to two large detention centers in Texas where U.S. officials were holding hundreds of migrant families from Central America, often for months at a time. Free said some of the conditions at these makeshift detention camps were appalling.

“I remember hearing the constant, violent coughing and sickness of small children, and the worry of their mothers who stood in the sun outside the clinic all day only to be told their kids should ‘drink water,'” Free tweeted. “I remember nearly doubling over when I saw the line of strollers.”

When Free had a chance encounter with the president at a political event, he warned him that the detention centers would be “a stain on his legacy.” He said the president wanted to know if Free was an immigration lawyer — implying that everyday citizens weren’t worried about what goes on at the border — and then said, according to Free: “I’ll tell you what we can’t have, it’s these parents sending their kids here on a dangerous journey and putting their lives at risk.” The message that Free took away was that the president saw family detention as a deterrent to keep more refugees from coming.

This happened in 2015. The president with the looming stain on his legacy was Barack Obama.

Bunch also makes the important observation that he and Democratic critics generally concentrated at the time on the nasty rightwingers agitating the immigration issue.

US foreign policy in Latin America, including under Obama when it was pretty straightforwardly conservative (and that' not mean to be a compliment), has had and still has a major role in generating refugees and other immigrants to come to the US. This is something we need to keep in mind always on this issue. Because, as Bunch also notes:

But Obama also amped up deportations to record levels — which, in some cases, separated families here in the United States — and he did little to radically alter the sick culture of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that would be “unshackled” the moment that tinhorn despots like Trump and AG Jeff Sessions arrived on the scene. And, probably fearful of midterm election politics, Obama didn’t treat the 2014 event as what it really was: a humanitarian refugee crisis. [my emphasis]

Obama was also moving to phase out the use of privately-for-profit detention centers in immigration, which Trump and Sessions have dramatically reversed. This is a central problem in the child-kidnapping issue. We have private prisons companies with lobbyists who make money off excessive detention and child kidnapping. Private Prisons Cashing In On Migrant Crisis - But Who’s Paying? | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC 06/22/2018:

Stephanie Ruhle reports that three of the biggest private prison contractors for the federal government are The Geo Group Inc., CoreCivic, and MTC/Management & Training Corp.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton carried on much of the Obama the last several years.

Clinton: Send some immigrant kids home CNN 06/18/2014:

Clinton on unaccompanied children arriving in the US PBS Newshour 02/11/2016:

See also:

Immigration is still really dead this time PBS Newshour 07/01/2014

New surge of familes from Central America prompted immigration raids PBS Newshour 01/12/2016

Such concerns helped prompt the Department of Homeland Security, with the close involvement of the White House, to initiate crack-downs on migrants in several states over the holidays, picking up 121 people for deportation. In some instances people were detained during surprise early-morning home raids that have spread fear across immigrant communities and infuriated the president’s Democratic allies.

“Having people afraid to open their doors to strangers, not going to work, etc., is not a healthy development,” said Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who is attending a news conference Tuesday where House Democrats will release a letter signed by around 90 lawmakers demanding an end to the raids.

Lofgren said she shares concerns about a renewed Central American border crisis, but like other Democrats argued that the migrants should be treated as refugees. Many are fleeing brutal gang warfare in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the same countries whose violence and instability forced women and kids to make the dangerous trip north two years ago, overwhelming U.S. facilities and producing disturbing images of frightened children huddling in Border Patrol facilities.

Obama was wrong on this issue in important ways. And progressives, including some Democrats in Congress like Zoe Lofgren, were criticizing him for that in real time.

Stephanie Canizales, How unaccompanied youth become exploited workers in the US The Conversation 03/13/2017


Reunification process for immigrant children uncertain as court cases continue Corpus Christi Caller Times/WZZM13 06/21/2018

Family separation is something that happens constantly, said Diana Abrego, who works at Clinica De Immigracion De San Jose, an organization in Del Rio — about halfway between Brownsville and El Paso — which offers help with legal services such as applying for citizenship and completing legal forms.

“You’ll see those situations happening off and on. (Separation of families) has always been a continuous thing, but it’s just got a little more intense,” she said. “There’s a lot of people that get deported and one half stays here and the other in Mexico. You see that a lot in the border towns.”

And the Washington Post has a new report (Maria Sacchetti et al, Separated immigrant children are all over the U.S. now, far from parents who don’t know where they are 06/24/2018) describing:

...a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.

Why must they say those words, some of the children ask at the shelter in Brownsville, on the Mexican border in Texas?

“We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect,’ ” said one employee of the facility, known as Casa Padre, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.

On calling things (esp. bad Trump things) by their name

Josh Marshall is saying the press and TV commentators should stop tiptoeing around the serious of Trump's misdeeds by talking vaguely about how he violating "norms" (Stop Talking about ‘Norms’ TPM 05/23/2018):

The President is trying to obstruct and stymie and hamstring a lawful investigation into his own crimes and those of his associates: by repeatedly lying, firing and threatening to fire people, intervening in law enforcement decisions in his own interest, fabricating fake stories to impede the investigation. The list goes on and on and even those who know better are becoming inured to it. The President is in the midst of a massive, more or less public and months-long effort to cover up his own crimes and the crimes of his associates. That’s really clear-cut. It’s obvious to anyone why that’s not okay. So we need to state that clearly so everyone will know what is at stake. Otherwise, everything becomes a blur. [my emphasis]

He also takes issue with the euphemistic use of "conflicts of interest":

A ‘conflict of interest’ is a case in which the nature of a situation makes it impossible for a person to separate their personal interests from their public responsibilities (or to appear to do so). All previous Presidents put their private wealth into blind trusts. We assume they weren’t going to try to directly make money off the presidency. But they wanted to remove any question of it and avoid situations where there own financial interests would bump up against their public responsibilities. What we’re seeing now are not conflicts of interest. They’re straight-up corruption. It’s like “norms”. Defining “conflicts of interest” is meant to keep relatively honest people on the straight and narrow or create tripwires that allow others to see when people in power crossing the line. Nothing like that is happening here. We have an increasingly open effort to make vast sums of money with the presidency. It’s happening in front of our eyes, albeit not quite as visibly as the coverup. [my emphasis]

Transatlantic tensions

James Traub recently described a basic difference of perspective between the US and the EU countries when it comes to escalating confrontation with Iran (RIP the Trans-Atlantic Alliance, 1945-2018 Foreign Policy 05/11/2018):

As a simple matter of geographical proximity, Europe is threatened by conflict in the Middle East as the United States is not. The tidal wave of asylum-seekers from Syria in 2015 upended European politics and exposed a popular vein of xenophobia and illiberalism that has thrown a terrible scare into European elites. Europe simply cannot afford to follow the American lead if the United States is prepared to sow further chaos in the region.

He has a dramatically pessimistic diagnosis of the US-Europe relationship:

The Atlantic alliance, built to contain the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II, began to die when the Cold War ended. What kept it alive over the last three decades has been less strategic necessity than a convergence of values — the values of the liberal postwar order. Now, the senior partner of the alliance, the United States, has lost interest in those values. The alliance was already a corpse, but Donald Trump drove the last nail into its coffin when he decided this week to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran.

I wouldn't say that "the values of the liberal postwar order" loomed quite so large as that in the considerations on both continents. The US saw NATO also as way of amplifying its own standing and capability for power projection in the world. And as a way to enforce and enhance its dominance in the famous "unipolar moment." European allies, particularly those of the former Soviet bloc, wanted the continued protection of NATO in case Russian ambitions became threatening to them.

So the deterioration of liberal values in the US under the Trump Administration can scarcely be said to be the main reason for the current troubles in NATO right now. And Traub does discuss some of the conventional power-political considerations that affect the alliance.

Traub also uses the nails-on-the-blackboard characterization of Trump's foreign policy as a "Jacksonian moment," presumably on the mistaken notion that Jackson pursued an aggressive foreign policy as President.

But no breach of the NATO alliance itself is immediately in sight. One of the ways that could change would be if Trump's reckless Middle East policies wind up with a direct clash between US troops and those of our NATO ally Turkey.

Stumbling into tariffs and talks

Reymer Klüver comments in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the Trump foreign policy and his new tariffs in particular, Trump greift die kooperative Weltordnung an 9. März 2018. It seems to be largely based on standard pundit wisdom about the value of free trade. But this was a striking section:

So wie seine Kampfparole "America first" ein Rückgriff auf einen Slogan ist, den amerikanische Faschisten in den 1930er Jahren benutzt haben, so ist seine Unterschrift unter die Stahlzölle ein Angriff auf die kooperative Weltordnung, wie sie erst nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg auf Drängen und unter Führung der USA entstanden ist - und die Amerika und Europa beispiellosen Wohlstand verschafft hat.

Man könnte es fast eine Ironie der Geschichte nennen, dass ausgerechnet der Mann, der versprochen hat, Amerika wieder groß zu machen, daran geht, all das zu zerstören, was Amerika groß gemacht hat: den Glauben an die Überlegenheit demokratischer Institutionen und Strukturen. Das Vertrauen in die Vorzüge internationaler Kooperation. Die Überzeugung, ein Vorbild sein zu können für den Rest der Menschheit und damit verbunden die Einsicht, dass das ein besonderes Maß an Verantwortungsbewusstsein für die globale Gemeinschaft bedeutet. All das greift Trump mit seiner unüberlegten Unterschrift an.

[Just like his fighting slogan "America First" is reaches back to a slogan the American fascists in the 1930s used, so is his signature on the steel tariff an attack on the cooperative world order as it first took shape after the Second World War under the pressure and the leadership of the USA - and which has provided America and Europe unprecedented standard of living.

One could almost call an irony of history that precisely the man who promised to make America great again is on the way to destroying all that made America great: the faith in the survival of democratic institutions and structures. Trust in the merits of international cooperation. The conviction of being able to stand as a model for the rest of humanity and the insight that goes along with that it involves a certain amount of awareness of responsibility for the global community. Trump is attacking all that with his unreflective signature [on the tariffs].]

I haven't looked at enough material on the steel and aluminum tariffs to have a meaningful idea on what the effect may be. If it becomes the first of many new protectionist measures, then it will be one effect among others.

I'm not a member of the Church of Free Trade. Nor a devotee of Mont Pèlerin neoliberal economics. So I don't assume that protectionism is always and everywhere a bad thing, even for the United States and other developing countries. For developing countries like Argentina, protectionism is a necessary condition for healthy development and for protecting national independence.

I'm also not convinced that treaties like NAFTA facilitating free trade in goods is the primary reason for manufacturing jobs moving out of the US. And maybe not even a major one. My major concern about treaties like NAFTA and TTIP is that they are primarily corporate-deregulation treaties dressed up as trade treaties. Especially when they provide for business-controlled tribunals to litigate complaints about national laws protecting consumers and the environment. Deregulation of international financial trade has particularly dangerous effects by making financial crises more likely.

I would like to see a reindustrialization policy and strategy implemented in the US. But it's one things when manufacturing jobs are lost due to a temporary downturn. The physical facilities are still there, and the experienced labor that is idle at the moment. So if a downturn lasts a year, when the recovery begins companies have the ability to immediately expand production and have qualified workers available who can be put back to work or have their hours expanded.

It's a very different thing when large areas like the Rust Belt states have suffered massive losses of industry over decades. The factories that are still standing can be decades behind current standards for the industry. Experienced workers are scarce in a long-deindustrialized area. Once the existing factory infrastructure has become more valuable as nostalgic tourist attractions that as industrial facilities (Meet the latest tourist attractions: Abandoned factories Washington Post 03/09/2018), it requires large new investments to reindustrialize in that situation.

"Retraining" as a solution to deindustrialization may have sounded like a credible thing in 1993. But it's long since become the industrial-policy equivalent of "thoughts and prayers" in mass-shooting situations.

But a real industrial policy - even in the 1980s that was still a current term in the US political vocabulary - would have to involve a major increase in wages, especially minimum wages, in order to support new domestic markets for new industries. And there would have to be a major "retraining" component, although that word has become so discredited that a new label would need to be found. "Re-education" is probably not a good alternative. And even in the United States, a significant amount of protectionism might need to be involved. One thing is for sure. Reindustrialization would require some serious and sustained Keynesian/social-democratic economic policies.

Which brings me to Trump's first big stab at protectionism. Economic policy is complicated. By all appearances, this tariff decision was an impulsive (spastic?) decision by Trump. As impatient as I often am with lazy and bad assumptions of traditional diplomacy, these things still need to be done right. And a tariff like this will be regarded by most countries as a notable factor in a larger foreign policy context.

According to the Department of Commerce's December 2017 Global Steel Trade Monitor, the top five countries from which the US imports steel are, in order: Canada (16%), Brazil (13%), South Korea (10%), Mexico (9%), Russia (9%). That same report says, "In value terms, steel represented just 1 percent of the total goods imported into the United States in 2016." Trump exempted Canada and Mexico from this round of tariffs. And Trump said, "We're going to show great flexibility" in considering additional exemptions. So the immediate effects of the tariff on US prices could likely be limited, as the Trump Administration's flaks have been arguing. The Orange Clown is fixated on how things play on TV, not on the substance of such policies. (These figures are for steel imports only, not aluminum.)

But since Canada is exempt from the current round of tariffs, it means that South Korea is the country second most affected by the steel tariff. And, of course, another surprise announcement this past week was that Trump has agreed to meet with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for nuclear talks. Though, true to form, his people were frantically modifying Trump's initial announcement the next day. So this whole thing may be even more ill-considered than the steel and aluminum tariffs. South Korea is obviously a critical player in US relations with North Korea. So does it really make sense to be retaliating against South Korean steel imports at this moment?

As the tariffs and the spastic decisions on policy toward North Korea illustrate, Klüver is right in observing that Trump is throwing away many of the factors that have been sources of American power and security. And doing so without much careful consideration.

Trump the bold Disrupter?

Digby Parton called this piece by Michael Grunwald "he best 'Trump's first year' analysis I've yet read": Michael Grunwald, Donald Trump Is a Consequential President. Just Not in the Ways You Think. Politico 12/30/2017.

He makes this point about whether Trump is "normal." The Democrats in 2017 generally stressed how abnormal Trump's Presidency is. And it's not hard to find points in favor of that argument: the blustering nationalism, the reckless tweeting, the blantant authortarian actions and threats, the narcissistic bombast, his obvious contempt for members of the female gender, his crass mixing of the Presidency and his family business.

But Grunwald also makes a reasonable observation here:

The most consequential aspect of President Trump — like the most consequential aspect of Candidate Trump — has been his relentless shattering of norms: norms of honesty, decency, diversity, strategy, diplomacy and democracy, norms of what presidents are supposed to say and do when the world is and isn’t watching. As I keep arguing in these periodic Trump reviews, it’s a mistake to describe his all-caps rage-tweeting or his endorsement of an accused child molester or his threats to wipe out “Little Rocket Man” as unpresidential, because he’s the president. He’s by definition presidential. The norms he’s shattered are by definition no longer norms. His erratic behavior isn’t normal, but it’s inevitably becoming normalized, a predictably unpredictable feature of our political landscape. It’s how we live now, checking our phones in the morning to get a read on the president’s mood. The American economy is still strong, and he hasn’t started any new wars, so pundits have focused a lot of their hand-wringing on the effect his norm-shattering will have on future leaders, who will be able to cite the Trump precedent if they want to hide their tax returns or use their office to promote their businesses or fire FBI directors who investigate them. But Trump still has three years left in his term. And the norms he’s shattered can’t constrain his behavior now that he’s shattered them. [my emphasis]

To recognize Trump's antics and misconduct as a "new normal" is not the same as endorsing them.

Grunwald adds this accurate observation:

... after campaigning as an anti-establishment populist, Trump has mostly governed as a partisan corporatist, earning loyalty points from congressional Republicans by stocking his administration with movement conservatives and embracing their unpopular agenda, ditching his promises to protect Medicaid and close tax loopholes for hedge funds while consistently siding with business owners and investors over workers and consumers. Congressional Republicans, even those who once called him unfit to serve, have mostly ignored his antics and even his sporadic attacks on them, kissing his ring in public even as they roll their eyes in private. They’d prefer their tax cuts without the white nationalist retweets, but it’s a package deal.

As he puts it later in the long article, "The point is that the crazy stuff Trump does is not a distraction from the important stuff Trump does. It’s important when the president does crazy stuff."

In a similar vein, David Shribman writes in President without precedent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/01/2018:

An Inaugural Address that was at once a statement of triumph and a manifesto of change. A Supreme Court nomination fight that altered the Senate’s customs and transformed its rules. Repeated efforts to overturn Obamacare. Heightened tensions with North Korea — and with the mainstream media. A final push for a tax overhaul. Ferocious opposition, and ferocious devotion. ...

He has changed how presidents behave. He has changed how presidents talk. He has changed how presidents communicate. He has changed how presidents deal with Congress. He has changed how presidents approach the press. He has changed how presidents regard international trade. He has changed how prsidents deal with foreign countries. He has changed how presidents interact with scientists. He has changed how presidents treat the agencies and departments of their own government.

As Disrupter in Chief, Mr. Trump is arguably more in tune with the national zeitgeist than was former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton who, though she would have been the first female president, would have comported herself more like previous modern presidents, from FDR to Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama, than has Mr. Trump, for whom there seems no antecedent, although John Tyler, Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson might be the closest approximations.

Is this analysis, criticism, or praise? For Trump's fans, Trump being a "disrupter" is a good thing. He's shaking things up, challenging the Establishment, yadda, yadda, and - most importantly - doing it in the pursuit of goals that free-market zealots, white supremacists and corporate tax-cutters and deregulators can enthusiastically support.

Also, a special moment of garment-rending for Shribman's choice of Presidential comparisons: Jackson, Tyler and Andrew Johnson?!?

As Grunwald accurately notes, "Republicans have made it pretty clear that they don’t plan to stand up to Trump." And he reminds us of various ways in which the Republican Party has long been practicing a radical approach to politics while the Democrats take a conservative approach to preserving political norms even when it works to their disadvantage:

In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, which was perhaps the most effective shattering of Washington norms—first by helping elect Trump, by giving skeptical conservatives a pressing reason to vote for him, and later by enabling Trump to fill the vacancy with Justice Gorsuch, who will keep pulling American jurisprudence to the right long after Trump has left office.

Trying to grasp Trump's foreign policy

Any attempt to define a coherent plan behind the Trump Administration's foreign policy is bound to run up against the arbitrary, the petty, and the just plain goofy.

But Asli Bâli and Aziz Rana take a stab at it in America's Imperial Unraveling Boston Review 10/16/2017. They call attention to a key paradox of US unilateral tendencies in international relations:

... the reliance on a politics of unilateral force has produced an interesting disconnect. While during the Cold War the United States faced serious adversaries, it was nonetheless largely able to avoid any real experience of existential threat. Today, faced with far more limited foes, the country has adopted a politics that presents the real possibility of existential violence and nuclear confrontation.

They identify two important tendencies in Trump's foreign policy:

If there is something like a “Trump Doctrine,” it lies in two developments: the boldness with which a declared reliance on coercion and conquest now sits uncomfortably beside America’s professed moral authority; and the implications of Trump’s ethno-nationalism for how global allies and enemies are conceived. For starters, whereas earlier administrations emphasized the need for diplomacy even as they consistently preferred unilateral uses of military force, Trump eschews such niceties. Instead his administration is at pains to dismantle the infrastructure of the State Department, with the president declaring that the United States intends to “take Iraq’s oil” and plunder “Afghanistan’s minerals.” Trump’s bald reliance on strongman tactics is difficult for elites to reconcile with their persistent belief in American exceptionalism. Yet, this is simply the culmination of the last quarter-century’s cleaving of U.S. power from its classic justifications.

The other development is that by giving a seat at the foreign policy table to proponents of a virulent ethno-nationalism, Trump’s presidency marks a shift in U.S. self-presentation. Such ethno-nationalists contest the universalist and inclusive premises of Cold War rhetoric. They defend a harsh anti-immigrant position and proclaim the link between Americanism and European racial and cultural identity. These racialized premises are central to the fixation with Iran - rather than say Russia for example - and to the insistence that a country with which the United States was, until recently, able to conduct complex diplomacy now presents a paramount national threat. [my emphasis]

But they aren't making the suggestion that because Trump's foreign policy continues some major trends in US policy that we shouldn't consider it as especially radical.

They also suggest, without putting in exactly these terms, that Trump policy in the Greater Middle East may be the kind of laboratory for brutal mischief in something like the way Central America was for the Reagan Administration. "Trump’s posture on Syria is to treat the country as a sandbox where he can try out various regional alliances, without any actual plan for - or regard to - how lasting peace might be generated there."

They provide a useful description of the contradictory nature of the position the US established for itself in the world in the postwar period under the assumption that America had a legitimate mission to shape the world in our own image:

In practice, this justified restructuring foreign societies on U.S. terms by spreading abroad both market-based capitalism and the institutions of liberal democracy. It also called for the creation of an international framework marked by these same principles, especially through multilateral and consensus-based legal structures, to address the problems of global governance. The United States was at the forefront of establishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, the Bretton Woods institutions, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and a plethora of other interlocking institutions aimed at shaping everything from international monetary policy and global trade to health, education, and scientific cooperation. The overall aim was a U.S.-led world driven by collective security and capitalist economic principles, with U.S. military power and wealth as the ultimate backstop. [my emphasis]

They remind us of some of the mistakes and bad acts of US foreign policy in that process. But as long as the Soviet Union existed as a competing superpower, US policy also had a major stabilizing effect on international politics, as well. But, "While the end of the Cold War meant the end of the perceived Soviet threat, it also decreased the pressures that had led U.S. leaders to value international institutions as conducive to national self-interest."

The Clinton Administration embraced that process tending toward more unilateralism. The Cheney-Bush Administration embraced unilateralism with enthusiasm. "The George W. Bush administration repudiated the Geneva Conventions when justifying its use of force against al Qaeda, withdrew from arms control agreements, and promulgated a national security strategy premised on preemption." Yes, he did.

And then there was the Libya War, in which President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton willingly intervened:

If anything, the 2011 intervention in Libya, which recalled the chaos and violence of the Iraq invasion a decade earlier, raised doubts about whether the United States was legitimate - or even competent—in its uses of force. Whatever the stated aim—whether fighting terrorism, countering arms proliferation, or serving humanitarianism - U.S. military force seemed ill-suited for the task.

Yet, "For all the ways that the Obama years continued the basic orientation of U.S. foreign policy - highlighted specifically by the intervention in Libya and the arming of factions in Syria - the one break was his focus on using diplomacy with Iran to deescalate any nuclear confrontation."

This is a very useful piece in trying to understand the current direction - such as there is - of US foreign policy under Trump.

Conservative Christians and the Trump refugee policy

One bellwether of Christian Right opinion and commentary is the conservative Christian Post.

So what kind of stories are they running on Trump's anti-immigrant and anti-refugee ban, which to many Christians looks like a fundamental rejection of the Christian notion of the Good Samaritan and the last shall be first, and so on. And, as Joan Taylor of King's College London reminded us a couple of years ago, Jesus was a Refugee according to the Gospel of Matthew. (The Jesus Blog 09/07/2015)

The story in Matthew about Jesus' family's flight to Egypt is unlikely. And Kind Gerod's massacre of the babies from which they supposedly were fleeing has never been historically confirmed and is also unlikely. But the story is very much a part of the Christian tradition. (Although Taylor's article is more open to the possibility of a historical basis for the story.) And this is a valid observation:

The legacy of being a refugee and a newcomer to a place far from home is something that I think informed Jesus’s teaching. When he set off on his mission, he took up the life of a displaced person with ‘nowhere to lay his head’ (Matthew 8.20; Luke 9.58). He asked those who acted for him to go out without a bag or a change of clothing, essentially to walk along the road like destitute refugees who had suddenly fled, relying on the generosity and hospitality of ordinary people whose villages they entered (Mark 6.8-11; Matthew 10.9-11; Luke 9.3). It was the villagers’ welcome or not to such poor wanderers that showed what side they were on: ‘And if any place will not receive you and refuse to hear you, shake off the dust on your feet when you leave, for a testimony to them’ (Mark 6.11).

But today's Christian Post headlines reflect more of a white Christianist perspective.

There's Christian Right star Eric Metaxas, keeping the focus on persecuted Christians in Christians Not Welcome in India 01/31/2017. The Trumpist position, of course, is that the US should give a religious preference to persecuted Christians in our refugee policy. And Metaxas' Christian witness the week after Trump's xenophobia refugee ban targeted on Muslims is to promote the Trumpist position on Christian persecution. (India's current government does lean Hindu fundamentalist. But I don't consider Metaxas a good source on the factuals side of that story.)

The Christian Post also offers its readers an excuse to fear terrorist babies: Boko Haram Islamic Radicals Now Using Babies in Suicide Bombings: Officials by Stoyan Zaimov 01/25/2017. Trump's ban was announced two days afterwards but the headline is still features on the CP front webpage as of this writing. And I would caution anyone from taking the facts at face value as they are presented by a Christian Post story.

Then there's Susan Stamper Brown writing, Leftists' Heads Explode in Response to Keeping America Safe 01/30/2017. Guess what position she takes on immigration and refugees! She also writes in a post-fact mode with a revealing authoritarian picture of democratic and Constitutional legitimacy in America:

In my home, my father's word was law. When Dad said "no" he meant no. Throwing temper tantrums didn't help. In fact, it made things worse. It's obvious to me that America has suffered from a significant shortage of alpha male leadership in families, based on the number of people losing their minds over a true leader occupying the White House.

Leftists can chuck bricks, throw rocks, and start fires all they want, but Trump will still be president when they wake the next morning.

Well, there was a deadly fire started at a mosque in Canada, with a far-right extremist charged with murder in the case. I guess I missed the rock-throwing, brick chucking and fire starting at the airport protests over the weekend. Or maybe the Christian Post isn't much worried about fact-checking their columnists.

Michael Brown is also upset that Americans are protesting Dear Leader Trump's immigration ban, 5 Things Bothering Me About the Response to Trump's Executive Order on Refugees 01/30/2017. Does Brown support the Muslim ban? Check. Is he down with prioritizing Christian refugees in violation of the Constitution and international law? Check. Does he echo rank Trumpist propaganda about how the Muslim ban isn't a Muslim ban? Check. But he does resort to the mealy-mouthing common to Christian Right commentators by implying but not stating straightforwardly that the implementation of Dear Leader Trump's righteous ban-that's-not-a-ban may have been flawed: "One can be upset over the initial implementation of the order while still defending the order itself." But he does suggest that maybe sometime in the future there might be a case in which conservative Christians may not want to criticized Dear Leader quite so much: "I'm not saying that he has acted wrongly (although, as is self-evident, the implementation of his order was terribly messy and unnecessarily confusing). I'm saying that we can't simply have a gut level reaction of defending the president against all criticism, even if, in some (many?) cases, he is being unjustly accused."

I'll conclude by mentioning this article by Samuel Smith, Trump vs. Obama Refugee Ban: 9 Things You Need to Know 01/30/2017. The article ends with, "Next are nine things that readers must keep in mind when comparing Trump's executive order to the actions of the Obama administration." But none are, you know, actually listed. At least the way the story appears on my screen at this writing. But in what does appear, he calls attention to what he calls "hypocrisies in how the mainstream media and activist groups are responding to Trump's order, noting they did not voice outrage over similar measures taken by the Obama administration to increase scrutiny and precautions regarding visitors and immigrants from countries of concern."

I'm guessing the Christian Post editors aren't really down with this whole Jesus the Refugee thing.

South America and the Trump-Bannon Administration

"Hoy los Estados Unidos son una amenaza real, no una posibilidad de amenaza." ("Today the United States is a actual threat, not a possible threat.") - UNASUR Secretary Ernesto Samper

Martin Granovsky, one of Argentina's leading journalists interviews Ernesto Samper, the outgoing Secretary of UNASUR [Union of South American Nations], “Los Estados Unidos son una amenaza real” Página/12 29.01.2017:

–¿Por qué dijo que Trump podía ser una amenaza?

–No precisamente porque lo mío sea una expresión de chauvinismo antinorteamericano. Está todo a la vista. El cambio en los Estados Unidos fue radical. Antes fuimos relativamente complacientes con algunas políticas de Washington porque en parte ellos perseguían objetivos que compartíamos, como la lucha contra el narco. Pero si ahora Trump dice que se propone sacar diez millones de inmigrantes está hablando básicamente de latinoamericanos, no de húngaros. El muro no es una amenaza, es una realidad. Quedó claro que no era un chiste de campaña que México debía pagar el muro. La cancelación de la visita del presidente de México Enrique Peña Nieto a los Estados Unidos es una realidad.

My translation:

Whay did you say that Trump could be a threat?

Not precisely because it was an expression of anti-North American chauvinism on my part. It's there in plain sight. The change in the United States was radical. Before, we were relatively complacent about some policies of Washington, in part because it [the US] were pursuing objective that we shared, like the fight against drug trafficking. But if Trump now says that he proposes to expel 12 million immigrants [i.e., a common estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants in the US], we're basically talking about Latin Americans, not Hungarians. The wall is not a threat, it is a reality. It is clear that that it wasn't a campaign joke that Mexico should pay for the wall. The cancellation of Mexican President's Enrique Peña Nieto's visit to the United States is a reality.

Russia/Trump Tuesday: What plutocracy looks like

One of the best protest slogans I've heard in the last several years is one that goes, "This is what de-moc-ra-cy looks like."

Trump's assemblage of oligarchs and crackpots for his Cabinet of Deplorables opens a space for, "This is what plu-toc-ra-cy looks like."

Julian Borger reports on Trump's selection of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for his Secretary of State (Rex Tillerson: an appointment that confirms Putin's US election win Guardian 12/13/2016):

Rex Tillerson’s nomination as the next secretary of state confirms Vladimir Putin as one of the strategic victors of the US presidential election. ...

The 64-year-old Texas oilman spent much of his career working on Russian deals, including a 2011 agreement giving Exxon Mobil access to the huge resources under the Russian Arctic in return for giving the giant state-owned Russian oil company, OAO Rosneft, the opportunity to invest in Exxon Mobil’s operations overseas. ...

The 2011 Exxon-Rosneft agreement was frozen when sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2014, following the annexation of Crimea and covert military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Exxon Mobil estimated the sanctions cost it $1bn and Tillerson has argued strenuously for the measures to be lifted.

“We always encourage the people who are making those decisions to consider the very broad collateral damage of who are they really harming with sanctions,” he said, at a shareholders’ meeting.

Borger presents an optimistic take from one observer:

Nevertheless, Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Endowment Moscow Center, argued: “Tillerson as secretary of state would signify the greatest discontinuity in US foreign policy since the end of the cold war.

“Not just in US-Russian relations: a Trump-Tillerson foreign policy would be squarely focused on US national interests, rather than on its global pretensions or any ideology.”

Trenin added: “It would be hard-nosed and no-nonsense, not averse to the use of force, but in response to a real rather than imaginary threat. In one word: realist.”

That is a change that would be undoubtedly be welcomed by Putin, whose vision of foreign policy centres on spheres of interest controlled by global powers, run by strongmen like himself.

But an "realism" prioritizing the needs of his company and of closely associated fellow oligarchs is quite a different thing that the kind of "offshore balancing" realist strategy that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer advocate. (See Walt's Don’t Knock Offshore Balancing Until You’ve Tried It Foreign Policy 12/08/2016.

The PBS Newshour today presented a trio of experts to speculate about what kind of Secretary of State Tillerson is likely to be, Tillerson for State: What we know and why some are concerned about his ties to Russia 12/13/2016:

We’re joined now by John Hamre. He is the president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a thank tank in Washington, D.C., where Tillerson is a member of the board of trustees. Hamre served as deputy secretary of defense during the Clinton administration. Nicholas Burns was a career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to NATO. He’s now a professor at Harvard University. And Steve Coll is the author “Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power.” He’s also a staff writer for “The New Yorker” magazine and the dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Not surprisingly Hamre expresses great confidence in the realism and devotion to the national interest he sees in his board member Tillerson.

There will definitely be pressure within the Trump Family Business Administration for improved relations with Russia. Part will be justified by oil multinational "realism." There is also a strong Islamophobic element in the Republican Party that see Putin's Russia as a defender of Christian civilization and a welcome ally in a Long War against Islam. I'll refer again to Peter Beinart's Why Trump’s Republican Party Is Embracing Russia on the pro-Russian Islamophobia Atlantic Online 12/12/2016.

Another PBS Newshour segment presents some further factors in any attempt to adjust relations with Russia having to do with Syria, Iran and Turkey, The fall of Aleppo is a turning point. What’s next for Syria’s war? 12/13/2016

Cenk Uygar in a Young Turks segment on the Aleppo situation also talks about US-Russia relations, including a revealing statement from Congressman Dana Rohrbacher in the pro-Russia Islamophobia vein, starting just after 7:00 in "Complete Meltdown Of Humanity" Occuring In Syria 12/13/2013:

If you want a bigger dose of Rohrbacher, here's an MSNBC video featuring the Morning Joe segment, Dana Rohrabacher Joins Heated Debate On Syria Conflict: Assad Not The Enemy 12/13/2016. The first part is a discussion with others about the fall of Aleppo. Rohrbacher comes it around 5:45:

As far as I've ever seen, Dana Rohrbacher is an extremist whackjob. But I do note that the Morning Joe crew seems to be taking it for granted that the United States should be actively intervening in some way against Syria and Russia in the Syrian civil war.

Marcy Wheeler is carrying on her close reading of the news reports on the alleged Russian hack in The NYT's Legitimate email Detail Emptywheel 12/13/2016.

Here are more articles relevant to the issue of possible big changes in US-Russia relations:

• Europeans Debate Nuclear Self-Defense after Trump Win Spiegel International 12/09/2016
• Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims Consortium News 12/12/2016
• Mansur Mirovalev, Russia's Communist Party turns to the Orthodox Church Aljazeera 12/12/2016: "More than 25 years after the Soviet collapse, the party vocally appeals to Orthodox Christianity, Russia's dominant creed." (Okay, that's mainly interesting for other reasons.)
• Tom Switzer, What Rex Tillerson's Nomination Means for Russia Policy The National Interest 12/13/2016
• Nikolas Gvosdev, Russia Is Neither Friend Nor Foe The National Interest 12/12/2016
• And if you want to binge, here are links to a whole series of relevant statements, Symposium: Advice to President Trump on U.S.-Russia Policy that apparently is still being updated daily.

Trump Family Business Administration Foreign Policy, or, foreign policy of, by and for the oligarchs

Kurt Eichnwald has a new story out, How Donald Trump's Business Ties Are Already Jeopardizing U.S. Interests Newsweek 12/13/16, that focuses on the developing and highly problematic oligopolist style of conducting foreign policy under the Trump Family Business Administration that still doesn't take office for over a month. One excerpt, that is explained in more detail in the article:

Once again, follow the dominoes as they tip over. Erdogan is frustrated in his efforts to grab Gülen; Trump praises a Turkish executive who works with his business partner there, Dogan. A few weeks later, a senior Dogan executive is detained on threadbare allegations. If Erdogan’s government puts more pressure on the company that’s paying millions of dollars to Trump and his children, revenue flowing from the tower complex in Istanbul could be cut off. That means Erdogan has leverage with Trump, who will soon have the power to get Gülen extradited. The financier with contacts in the Turkish government explained the dynamic to Newsweek: “Erdogan has something he believes Trump wants, and Trump has someone Erdogan desperately wants.”

But the decisive thing is, will the Democrats make the most of their opportunities to use this against Trump and the Republicans? Like, for instance, by making it a central part of the hearings and floor debates over Trump's Cabinet of Deplorables nominees?

Critical looks at Trump's proposed infrastructure program

The infrastructure plan that President-elect Trump and his team are discussing the outlines of their promised infrastructure plan. So far, it looks like it's shaping up to be to a large extent, a scam.

Krugman warns that it will be weak tea for actual infrastructure but big bucks for crony capitalists (Build He Won’t New York Times 11/21/2016):

To understand what’s going on, it may be helpful to start with what we should be doing. The federal government can indeed borrow very cheaply; meanwhile, we really need to spend money on everything from sewage treatment to transit. The indicated course of action, then, is simple: borrow at those low, low rates, and use the funds raised to fix what needs fixing.

But that’s not what the Trump team is proposing. Instead, it’s calling for huge tax credits: billions of dollars in checks written to private companies that invest in approved projects, which they would end up owning. For example, imagine a private consortium building a toll road for $1 billion. Under the Trump plan, the consortium might borrow $800 million while putting up $200 million in equity — but it would get a tax credit of 82 percent of that sum, so that its actual outlays would only be $36 million. And any future revenue from tolls would go to the people who put up that $36 million.

He also notes that the so-called public-private partnership approach will also skew the program toward projects that offer the highest profit to the investors and against less potentially profitable projects that are nevertheless critical infrastructure.

Jared Bernstein notes that the so-called public-private partnership approach will also skew the program toward projects that offer the highest profit to the investors and against less potentially profitable projects that are nevertheless critical infrastructure in Trump’s Misguided Flirtation with Keynesianism Politico 11/21/2016:

Team Trump has proposed a complicated and misguided infrastructure plan, one that almost surely would not support the projects most needed—including lead-leaching water systems, deteriorating mass transit systems, public schools, and lots of roads and bridges off the beaten path—or provide much in the way of jobs.

Instead of just allocating the needed resources as in the traditional approach, they propose to “offer some $137 billion in tax breaks to private investors who want to finance toll roads, toll bridges, or other projects that generate their own revenue streams.”

Since the plan depends on private investors, it can only fund projects that spin off user fees and are profitable. Rural roads, water systems, and public schools don’t fall into that category. Neither does public transit, which fails on the profitable criterion (it depends on public subsidies).

Bernstein is following the emerging Trump Administration economic policies at his On The Economy blog. Including this recent post: Trump and the Dollar: They’re just not that into each other 11/18/2016.

I hope Democrats follow through on this:

Nancy Pelosi tells me Dems will oppose Trump's infrastructure plan if it's tax breaks/privatization: https://t.co/9lxcoaIM5k

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) November 22, 2016

The Democrats need to be willing to make a big fight over issues like this, even when they look sure to lose, in order to establishing a progressive Democratic framing on these issues.

Trump's rants at the corporate press lords

President-elect Donald Trump called in several representatives of the corporate press to bully them into giving him favorable propaganda coverage. By David Remnick reports for the New Yorker (Donald Trump Personally Blasts the Press 11/22/2016)

For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. When he was asked about the sort of “fake news” that now clogs social media, Trump replied that it was the networks that were guilty of spreading fake news. The “worst,” he said, were CNN (“liars!”) and NBC.

This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.

The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”

It was a star-studded group invited there (of course!), "The participants all shook Trump’s hand at the start of the session and congratulated him, but things went south from there. The attendees included around two dozen anchors and executives from CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and ABC, including Lester Holt, Chuck Todd, Wolf Blitzer, Gayle King, David Muir, and Martha Raddatz."

Emily Bazelonnov reports on a legal tactic of superrich plaintifss like Trump using liberal suits to intimidate reporters and publishers (Billionaires vs. the Press in the Era of Trump New York Times 11/22/2016):

In the half-century since [the Supreme Court decision] New York Times v. Sullivan, the United States has often held itself up to the world as a beacon for the free press. American libel law, the theory goes, protects writers and publishers better than the laws of countries like Britain, where it’s easier to win a libel judgment. Yet giant jury awards don’t topple publications in the United Kingdom: The country has an unofficial damages cap of about £250,000 (plus legal fees). British publishers can, in essence, treat compensating someone whose reputation they have harmed as a cost of doing business. And it’s less risky for them to apologize for a story that turns out to be wrong. “There are limits on damages for malpractice suits against doctors,” says Robert Post, dean of the Yale Law School. “Why not for journalists?” ...

What’s new here are two forces squeezing journalism like pincers. The first is a figure like Thiel, willing to place bets on lawsuit after lawsuit until he hits on a winning combination of facts, judge and jury. The second is the public’s animosity toward the press, now fueled by the soon-to-be president. Juries tend to reflect public sentiment and have recently penalized not just an irreverent new-media site like Gawker, but also a newspaper doing investigative work. In September, The News & Observer, which is more than 100 years old, went to trial over a libel claim brought by a former state ballistics agent in North Carolina, who sued regarding two articles from 2010 that included suspicions, by independent firearms experts, that she had falsified evidence to help prosecutors win a murder trial. The agent said that the suspicions were untrue and that she was effectively being accused of a crime. The News & Observer stands by its reporting. But the jury found against the paper and ordered it to pay about$9 million; the amount exceeded the state’s cap on damages and is likely to be lowered to $6 million. The News & Observer plans to appeal.

Election postmortems and reading the tea leaves on the Trump Administration

Serena Kutchinsky does an interview with the former Greek Finance Minister and one of the leaders of the DiEM, the left pro-EU activist gorup, Yanis Varoufakis: After Donald Trump’s awful victory, the left must be more ambitious New Statesman 11/13/2016

Varoufakis doesn't seem to be experiencing any trouble navigating the class vs. race/gender/identity dichotomy that is so vexing the left and center-left in the US in looking at what can be learned from the Trump election.

The narrative is already becoming that Trump managed to exploit a feeling of resentment among white working class men, to fuel his victory. Is this “whitelash” comparable to the anti-immigrant sentiment that helped swing the Brexit vote?

This is a prime example of how the left tends to over rationalise its defeats. Trump did mobilise blue collar voters but that was not enough on its own. What I am astounded by is the number of Latinos who voted for him, and the people who switched their political religion from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Anyone who voted for Obama last time can't be easily dismissed as a racist. The political scene is being shaken to its foundations in a way the world has not experienced since the Thirties.

Comparisons have been drawn between Trump and the fascist leaders of the Thirties such as Hitler. Is he a neo fascist?

Hitler was not a fascist, he was a Nazi. The best comparison with Trump, for me, is the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943. Mussolini and Trump have stylistic similarities in terms of their image and choice of rhetoric, but the connection between them runs much deeper. Mussolini was the man who introduced social security to Italy. He implemented welfare reforms that directly benefited the working class to harness their support to a divisive and ultra nationalist movement. There is nothing comforting about the thought of living under a new Mussolini, but we need to keep our historical comparisons as close to the truth as possible.

The comment, "Hitler was not a fascist, he was a Nazi," refers to the long-running analytic discussion about whether Hitler's regime and movement represented a form of fascism or whether it was different variety of dictatorship. Varoufakis obviously takes the latter view. (I should note that Varoufakis is taking at face value Trump's claims that he opposed the Iraq War, which he did not, at least not initially.)

Robert Kuttner, The Vulnerability of Trump’s Fake Populism The American Prospect 11/15/2016 makes a point that is relevant to early economic policies of the NSDAP (Nazi) regime in Germany:

... Trump could well produce an economic boom in the near term. The stock market certainly seems to think so.

He is very likely to cut a three-part deal with House Speaker Paul Ryan and company: Massive tax cuts. Reductions in social spending, perhaps by block granting food stamps and Medicaid. And increases in infrastructure spending. As guys like me have been writing for a long time, this is precisely the moment to increase outlays for deficit-financed infrastructure because interest rates are low and there is no sign of inflation.

His tax reductions will be advertised as supply-side cuts, but in reality their impact will be Keynesian. Larger deficits will stimulate demand, as will infrastructure spending.

Republican control of the Congressional Budget Office means that the deficit impact of tax cuts can be disguised with an old trick known as dynamic scoring. Supposedly, the cuts will produce so much growth that the revenue loss will be made up.

The deficit hawks will be thrown under the bus, but so what? A year from now, the unemployment rate could well be lower. This is a case of Trump selectively stealing the clothes of progressives on selected economic issues and it could work, at least for a year or two.

Laurie Penny punctures one of the favorite media and liberal-concern-troll narratives about the election (On the election of Donald J Trump New Statesman 11/09/2016):

When they told liberals and journalists and policymakers and anyone with the cheek to suggest that maybe immigrants weren’t the problem that we weren’t listening to “ordinary people”, they meant we weren’t listening to white people. When they told us we didn’t pay enough attention to “real Americans”, they meant to white Americans. When they told us that we didn’t take their concerns seriously, they meant that we didn’t agree with them. “White working class” voters have been given plenty of airtime in this election, just as they were in the EU Referendum, including in the mainstream press that they claim to despise, because sober facts don’t sell adverts like a mean-drunk playing with matches next to an arsenal of incoherent rage.

John Judis has paid close attention to the history of populism. He gives his take on the election in Why Trump Won - And Clinton Lost - And What It Could Mean for the Country and the Parties TPM 11/11/2016. "There is rarely one single reason why a presidential candidate wins an election. The results are 'overdetermined,' as Freud used to say of the content of dreams," he writes.

That's more than a rhetorical flourish. There are many elements that go into a Presidential vote. And there are several necessary perspectives to take into account in looking at such an event: the issues, the demographics, the messaging, the targeting of advertisements and get-out-the-vote operations, the performance of the news media.

Judis calls attention to this important aspect:

Presidential candidates from a party that has held the White House for the prior two terms have an uphill battle winning the White House. That was true of Richard Nixon in 1960, Al Gore in 2000, and John McCain in 2008. And that’s the case even when the incumbent president remains popular, as Eisenhower was in 1960 and Bill Clinton in 2000. The reason is that the candidate is burdened by many grievances against the regime in power that have accumulated over the last eight years and that allow the opposition candidate to run as the agent of change. Even though most Americans now recognize the Eisenhower years as a blessing, John Kennedy could still win on a promise to “get the country moving again.”

Trump was able to exploit that vulnerability with his promise to “make America great again.” And it showed up in the polls in the electorate’s desire for change. Nationally, 39 percent of the electorate –the first choice among four options – said “can bring change” was the quality that mattered most, and they went for Trump by 83 to 14 percent.

Clinton was hobbled by the third term curse. If she sought to distinguish herself clearly from President Obama by promising change, she risked aliening his followers; but if she didn’t distinguish herself from his administration, she appeared merely to offer “more of the same.”

Masha Gessen has a grim initial evaluation, its general perspective represented in the title, Autocracy: Rules for Survival NYR Daily 11/10/2016.

Mike Lux tries to separate out some of the factors in the overdetermined election result, The Years of Living Dangerously Huffington Post 11/14/2016. This is also a very important caution for his fellow Democrats, "I fear that the conventional wisdom gurus in our party think we will be able to just keep doing business as usual, never changing their tactics in the face of a radically dangerous president and Republican party." And also this: "We have to accept the fact as a party that the partisanship in this country has become so deeply ingrained that no matter how horrible the Republican candidate is, we are just never going to pick up very many Republican votes. "

Josh Marshall reminds us of how much Trump Administration will enthusiastically embrace the concept Jamie Galbraith describes as the Predator State. Including old-fashioned graft, legal and possibly otherwise, The Corruption Will Be Endless TPM 11/13/2016.

In a related point, Trump biographer David Cay Johnston in this October interview talks about Trump's shady connections to organized crime figures, Getting to Grips with the Trump Phenomenon New Economic Thinking 10/04/2016:

R.W. Johnson reflects a bit on the demographics and sociology of the Trump voters, Trump: Some Numbers London Review of Books Online 11/14/2016.

The process of staffing the Trump Administration is understandably attracting a great deal of attention and speculation. David Dayen analyzes what a scary picture that presents, Donald Trump Dredged Up His Cabinet From the Bottom of the Conservative Swamp The Nation 11/14/2016.