1. Trump’s National Security Strategy Is a Farce
The
Trump Administration has put out its new national
security strategy. This is a farce. On any one issue, President Trump and his
team have several contradictory positions. That’s what happens when your
priority as president is to use foreign policy to throw red meat to your base
while other cabinet members are scrambling to stop Armageddon.
“It’s
impossible to know what the United States position is on any number of
subjects,” a European ambassador told me last week. “We could go sleepwalking
into a war.”
Let’s
start with North Korea, whose small but growing nuclear arsenal is overseen by
Kim Jong-un, a leader as volatile as Trump. Last week, Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson said the Trump Administration’s policy toward North Korea is “really
quite clear.” He said, “We’re ready to talk anytime North Korea would like to
talk, and we’re ready to have the first meeting without precondition.”
That
was Tuesday at the Atlantic Council. By Friday, at the United Nations,
Tillerson was setting conditions.
North
Korea must cease “threatening behavior” before talks can begin; it must “earn
its way back to the table;” and pressure will “continue until denuclearization
is achieved.”
Denuclearization
is not going to happen in the real world. If that’s the condition, there will
be no talks. As for Trump, he has said Tillerson is “wasting his time trying to
negotiate with Little Rocket Man.” He has warned that the United States is
“locked and loaded.” He has never embraced talks without preconditions, favored
by France, Britain and sometimes Tillerson.
Clear
enough already?
Oh,
I should add that Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the United
Nations, was not present when Tillerson spoke. Great optics there: Haley and
Tillerson are known to be at loggerheads, with the secretary of state (regarded
by some as a dead man walking) suspecting Haley wants to succeed him.
Now,
effective pressure on North Korea has three components: China, China and China.
Trump’s new national security strategy identifies China as “a strategic
competitor.” It suggests the United States will get tough on Chinese “cheating
or economic aggression.”
Great
timing there: Trump is asking President Xi Jinping to cut off crude oil exports to North Korea as
his “strategy” lambasts China. Our president believes everyone will do his
bidding because he says so. Hello! You want a favor? You don’t double down on
confrontation.
I
mentioned red meat: war with North Korea, tearing up the Iran nuclear deal,
recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and promising to move the American
embassy there some day — all this gets the blood up for Trump’s base. (Of
course, words exceed action and appearance is all, as with everything in
Trump’s world). I also mentioned Haley, who did not show up for Tillerson
but put on quite a show over Iran the
day before at a military base in Washington.
Before
I get to the Haley show, involving some Iranian-made missiles “on loan from
Saudi Arabia,” a little background on Iran is needed. The 2015 Iran nuclear
deal sent the country’s nuclear program into reverse, guaranteed rigorous
international inspections, and put the country much further from a bomb than it
had been. In return, Iran got sanctions relief. The deal, concluded with the
United States and five other world powers, is working. It was not intended to
usher in an American-Iranian love-fest or realign Iranian policy in Syria. It
was intended to stop Iran going nuclear. Tearing it up would be a colossal
strategic error.
Tillerson recognizes this; he’s urged preservation
of the deal. Trump calls it “the worst deal I’ve ever seen negotiated” and, in
October, declined to recertify it. This kicked to Congress the issue of whether
to reimpose sanctions within 60 days. It did not, and from what I
hear the White House did not press for sanctions. (Remember, noise without
action is Trump’s only discernible “national security strategy.”)
By
mid-January, Trump has to decide whether to sign waivers on Iran sanctions. My
guess is he will to avoid blowing up the deal. Meanwhile, the administration
is reviewing whether to block Boeing’s agreed $20
billion sale of jetliners to Iran. So what’s the policy here? Show implacable
hostility to Iran, possibly short of destroying the deal, barring a mishap.
Clear
enough, already?
Enter
Haley with her Iranian missiles of dubious provenance demonstrating no provable
infringement of international law. What a performance! “Absolutely terrifying,”
she declared, before saying that “the nuclear deal has done nothing to moderate
the regime’s behavior in other areas.” It was not supposed to do that.
Iran
has a nasty regime that does despicable things from time to time. It also has a
substantial moderate wing, headed by President Hassan Rouhani. Moderates
have been reinforced by the nuclear deal.
The best way to lock in hard-liners for the next two decades would
be to tear it up.
On
North Korea and Iran, on Israel-Palestine and Syria and Saudi Arabia-Qatar, the
Trump administration is all over the place. As Tillerson noted last week, it has
no “wins” in diplomacy. That’s not surprising. It also has no national security
strategy. It has outbursts.
2. The Tax Bill That Inequality Created
Most
Americans know that the Republican tax bill will widen economic inequality by
lavishing breaks on corporations and the wealthy while taking benefits away
from the poor and the middle class. What many may not realize is that growing
inequality helped create the bill in the first place.
As
a smaller and smaller group of people cornered an ever-larger share of the
nation’s wealth, so too did they gain an ever-larger share of political power.
They became, in effect, kingmakers; the tax bill is a natural consequence of
their long effort to bend American politics to serve their interests.
As
things stand now, the top 1 percent of the population by wealth — the group
that would primarily benefit from the tax bill — controls nearly 40 percent of
the country’s wealth. The bottom 90 percent has just 27 percent, according to
the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and
Gabriel Zucman. Just three decades ago these numbers were almost exactly
the reverse: The bottom 90 percent owned nearly 40 percent of all wealth. To
find a time when such a tiny minority was so dominant, you have to go back to
the Great Depression.
An Egregious Wealth Gap Returns
The
net worth of the richest Americans continues to eclipse that of almost
everybody else, more so than at any time since the Great Depression.
As
kingmakers, rich families have supported candidates who share their hostility
to progressive taxation, welfare programs and government regulation of any
kind. These big-money donors have pushed the Republican Party in particular
further to the right by threatening well-funded primary challenges against
anybody who doesn’t toe the line on tax cuts for the rich and other
pro-aristocracy policies. The power of donors has contributed to political
polarization and made the federal government less responsive to the needs of
most voters, a new book by Benjamin Page of
Northwestern University and Martin Gilens of Princeton University argues.
The
power of the one-percenters may help explain why President Trump, who ran as a
populist, has not only abandoned any pretense of fighting for the working class
but also joined Republicans in Congress in ripping up regulations that protect
families and the environment — in order to help business tycoons. Together,
they’ve tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Its repeal would have
deprived millions of people of health insurance while trimming taxes for
high-income families. Now, they want to cut taxes on corporations and offer new
loopholes to the rich, even if that means hurting their own constituents by limiting
the ability of middle-class families to deduct state and local taxes on their
tax returns.
Most
political campaigns now rely on a small group of wealthy donors who give tens
of thousands of dollars or more per election cycle. About 40 percent of contributions
to campaigns during the 2016 federal election came from an elite group of
24,949 donors, equivalent to 0.01 percent of the adult population. In 1980, the
top 0.01 percent accounted for only 15 percent of all contributions, according
to an analysis by Adam Bonica, a Stanford professor, and his collaborators.
Campaigns for the Very Few
An
elite group of “superdonors” — 24,949 people in the last federal election
— contributed an enormous share of campaign funding.
Of
course, the growing importance of wealthy donors is not exclusively a
Republican phenomenon. Democratic candidates have also benefited from the
largess of wealthy donors like George Soros, Tom Steyer and James Simons. But
on economic and tax issues, big-money liberal donors have not really shoved
their party to the far left. Donations from Wall Street and corporate America
have, in fact, pushed many Democrats to the center or even to the right on
issues like financial regulation, international trade, antitrust policy and
welfare reform.
Further,
liberal donors have been nowhere near as skillful at coordinating their giving
as conservative donors have been. No liberal organization comes close to
rivaling the network of donors and political activists created by the
conservative Koch brothers, says Theda Skocpol, a professor at Harvard, who has
written extensively about these issues. The Koch network has spent years
methodically pushing state and federal lawmakers to cut regulations, taxes and
government programs for the poor and the middle class. The leading donor
network on the left, the Democracy Alliance, is smaller and much less
successful.
Even
allowing for money “wasted” on losing candidates and failed causes, the donor
class has notched many impressive wins. Tax rates have fallen substantially,
with the top marginal income tax rate now just below 40 percent, from 70 percent when
Ronald Reagan won the presidency. The top corporate tax rate has dropped to 35 percent, from 46 percent in
1980, and many businesses pay an effective rate that is much lower than that. While supply-side
economics remain mostly a Republican fiction, politicians from both parties
have supported the effort to reduce taxes on capital — profits, capital gains
and dividends — on the grounds that this would spur investment and make
American businesses more competitive.
Decades of Falling Taxes
Under
the Republican plan, the top corporate tax would fall to less than half of what
it was for most of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
But
the cuts have done little to bolster the economy or the working class. In fact,
incomes have stagnated, and workers have been forced to part with a larger
share of their pretax earnings in the form of payroll taxes.
Meanwhile,
where are the political champions of poor Americans? Whoever they are, they
haven’t been producing results. Wages for the poorest have languished, partly
because Congress has been so slow to raise the minimum wage — $7.25 an hour
since 2009 — that its purchasing power is now about 10 percent less than it was in
1968. Lawmakers and conservative judges have also undermined workers by making
it harder for them to unionize, so they are not in a position to demand better
pay and better working conditions.
This
tax bill would exacerbate all these trends. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the Joint Committee on Taxation, both respected, both
nonideological, say the bill would primarily benefit the wealthy and would
leave most poor and middle-class Americans worse off over the long run. That’s
without Congress doing anything else to widen the gap. But even now, Mr. Trump
and Republicans in Congress are talking about cutting government programs like
Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security next year to help make up for the more than $1 trillion the tax bill would
add to the federal deficit.
Inequality
in America does not have to be self-perpetuating. When people turn up at the
polls, as they did recently in Alabama, they can produce unexpected results.
That’s why Republican lawmakers might want to think again about whether they
want to be the means through which their wealthy donors pull off this heist.
3. UN votes resoundingly to reject Trump's recognition of
Jerusalem as capital
The
United Nations body’s debate and vote highlighted for a second time in a week
the international isolation of the United States over the Jerusalem issue
The Guardian 2017.12.21
The
United Nations general assembly has delivered a stinging rebuke to Donald
Trump, voting by a huge majority to reject his unilateral recognition of Jerusalem
as Israel’s capital.
The
vote came after a redoubling of threats by Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to
the UN, who said that Washington would remember which countries “disrespected”
America by voting against it.
Despite
the warning, 128 members voted on Thursday in favour of the resolution
supporting the longstanding international consensus that the status of
Jerusalem – which is claimed as a capital by both Israel and the Palestinians – can only be settled as
an agreed final issue in a peace deal. Countries which voted for the resolution
included major recipients of US aid such as Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Although
largely symbolic, the vote in emergency session of the world body had been the
focus of days of furious diplomacy by both the Trump administration and Israel,
including Trump’s threat to cut US funding to
countries that did not back the US recognition.
But
only nine states – including the United States and Israel –voted against the
resolution. The other countries which supported Washington were Togo,
Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Marshall Islands, Guatemala and Honduras.
Twenty-two
of the 28 EU countries voted for the resolution, including the UK and France.
Germany – which in the past has abstained on measures relating to Israel – also
voted in favour.
Thirty-five
countries abstained, including five EU states, and other US allies including
Australia, Canada, Colombia and Mexico. Ambassadors from several abstaining
countries, including Mexico, used their time on the podium to criticise Trump’s
unilateral move.
Another
21 delegations were absent from the vote, suggesting the Trump’s warning over
funding cuts and Israel’s lobbying may have had some effect.
While
support for the resolution was somewhat less than Palestinian officials had
hoped, the meagre tally of just nine votes in support of the US and Israeli
position
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