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A family member response: "At the level of how nation states deal with each other, I take little to no issue with current US policy efforts to strategically align with MBZ (in UAE), MBS (in Saudi Arabia) and Bibi against the influence of Iran's existing regime in the Middle East. Daring Europe to come out of its tortoise shell is a consistent act and eminently fair game. Using Putin as bait to wake-up Europe makes strategic sense, provided one appreciates the perils of that game. With that said, I believe that the three most dangerous leaders to American interests abroad are:
Xi Jinping in China
Putin in Russia
Erdogan in Turkey
...and US policy continues to sleep at the wheel with respect to all three. J---"
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Yesterday was one of the first days in a while when I had the opportunity to catch up on some back reading, even listen to CNBC and catch some other news.
I also had several conversations with friends and a family member whose views and opinions I respect and listen to because of their own connections, similar interests and concerns.
I believe this week produced some seminal events.
First, we had the Trump comments and Putin interview which I have termed "Hellsink" because , once again, Trump put his foot in his mouth thus, giving his many detractors another opportunity to go overboard in their reaction.
My son thinks some of Trump's actions are similar and designed to throwing red meat to lions knowing what the effect will be as radicals rip each other apart through one-upmanship attempts to smear and berate. Perhaps Trump is that clever and strategically tactical but I also believe his ego drives him to blurt out and undercut his effectiveness. The video of his shoving the Prime Minister from Montenegro aside, at a previous meeting, so he could ham the picture was ego driven.
The office is always bigger than the man and how each president adopts is important. Truman understood and was humbled by it, FDR rose above it as did Reagan, Clinton took advantages of its opportunities and Obama used it to to avoid the constitutional restraints.
Also, Trump's comment about allowing Americans to be interrogated by Putin's thugs, as being an interesting idea, was not only red meat but the meat was putrid.
So, the reactions I witnessed, as a result of all this, has to be alarming and of real concern if you are a caring citizen and love this country and what being American means..
I will cite just a few additional bothersome reactions:
a) Our former fired head of the FBI said policy does not matter , you must vote for Democrats. This from the head of the agency whose bias was noted by its own internal Inspector General, who stopped short of agreeing the obvious bias effected their decisions. (After the testimony and hearing I thought of The Brooklyn Bridge.)
b) If this was not bad enough, the former head of The CIA stated Trump's actions were treasonous and then, when he was called upon, in a subsequent interview, to explain, he simply re-affirmed. Once again we have a sample of bias by a former Obama Agency high official.
Perhaps Trump has some objective reason to feel there is a deep state among the upper echelons of various and critical government agencies that crave power, do not like to be disturbed and/or challenged and have their activities revealed in open public sessions. Witness the delay tactics regarding supplying information to authorized Congressional Committees and even the new FBI Head, Mr. Wray, at a conference yesterday, when questioned, defended/supported some of these tactics.
My son reminded me, because he worked in DC for several years as an intern for Tony Cordesman and as a staff member of an Agency that Sen's. Nunn and Boren created, how small and incestuous is the town. Nearly everyone there are there because it is the seat of power and the pay is beyond the average but so are the costs monetarily and personally. Careers are made and smashed by those who seek to climb and care not about their victims.
So what I witnessed yesterday were street mob calls for impeachment, speeches on the floor of The House and Senate from hungry Democrats siding with the radical street protesters. This is where I believe the real Russian collusion is taking place. They have planted themselves into our colleges and universities, seem to be wheedling their way even into the NRA and Christian Evangelists and we are being attacked both from without and within by those who are expert at stirring up the mob, raising tensions etc..
Our own comparable intelligence agencies use these same tactics which are drawn from the same playbooks and we now have evidence of the exposed bias of senior agency top officials , of their thirst for power, their effort to hang onto this power by tactics that castrate Congress and that, to me, are worrisome. Why? Because our republic is fragile, is based on trust and independent abeyance of the rule of law.
Because we are a more open society, we are also more vulnerable to exploitation and the ability, by others, to turn our freedoms against us as, I believe, we are now witnessing. This has been building since Wilson's presidency and was heightened by the activities and wars of the '60's in my humble opinion.
America's struggle over immoral segregation cannot be dismissed and the eventual reversal of this amoral Civil Rights abuse also opened wounds which, because we are a caring society, had begun to heal and then along comes the first black president and he re-kindled racial hate flame by his own in-sensitivities - purposeful or otherwise. Now Obama's torch has been used against Trump by those who impugn him , hate him because he was never intended to be president. In their minds he is an interloper, an historical mistake they cannot accept, deal with, and now are faced with the loss of power. The lust for power is powerful but to actually have power is even more powerful.
And then we return to Trump's red meat episodes and his ability to shoot himself in the foot and Putin has to be sitting back and observing our self-destructive behaviour. To me, this is the real collusion that we have allowed to grip us and it is a viral infection of great magnitude. We are engaged in activities that are ripping us apart and are the consequence of what happens when we are unable/unwilling to stand united.
Where this all ends I have no idea but I do believe Democrat's will do anything to re-capture The House and, if they do, I suspect open warfare will begin because the social divide will widen , the poisonous atmosphere created will truly begin to look like real global/domestic warming.
Humor: Distraught Mueller burns every piece of evidence In case after
hearing Trump's critique of U.S. intelligence community (The Onion
<https://politics.theonion.
nce-in-cas-1827661055> )
I always invite commentary and rebuttal and hope this stimulates your own thinking.
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Victor Davis Hanson on Germany and NATO. (See 4 below.)
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I re-read the article I posted on Soros this morning and it softened my view of him but it also caused me to think about "Atlas Shrugged" and "Who Is John Gault."
The world is always being manipulated by others and now the influence of wealth almost equals that of arms and ammunition.
This vast wealth is manipulated by those who have views they feel compelled to impose on Hillary's "deplorables." who have come to realize globalization did not serve them as well as forecast, big government has failed them, and progressive thinking and policies have evolved as a benefit for the growth in elitism so there is a reaction, as evidenced by Trump's election.
The world has witnessed such before and often this has led to war, destruction and tragedy. We are basically at peace but what is happening caused by the conflict between radical Islamism and Western/ former Colonial Democracies is a throwback to when religion formed the basis of conflict. This, along with the quest for destructive nuclear technology, gas and other weapons of calamitous destruction, now merging simply elevates the risks.
Wealth, power and those who have the burning desire to use it according to their philosophical bent still determine the world's direction. What's new?
My biggest concern remains our nation's debt including the unfunded portion. Nothing can be more explosive than crippling debt and the unwillingness to recognize the dangers as it mounts.
As to this, I blame politicians from both parties. Rising interest rates, gradual as they may be, will only serve to sap more GDP in the Government's direction.
Reagan beat the Russians at the poker table because we had more chips. Ain't that way any more.
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Looking at an university education. Apparently the author never heard of St John's College and/or Hillsdale College? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) Trump Fans, Acknowledge His Failings
The president has pursued bad trade policies and fouled relations with allies. His supporters are silent.
Is there a greater political virtue than honesty? Perhaps courage, the trait an honest man needs before he can tell the truth. I can’t say whether honesty or courage is greater, but I do know that we’ve not seen a lot of either in the debate over Donald Trump.
Anti-Trump politicians and commentators refuse to credit the president for turning the economy around. They say the tax cuts didn’t help anyone, and prefer to talk about collusion with Russian agents. With greater honesty, they would acknowledge that Americans’ bottom lines have improved, that there’s little evidence Mr. Trump colluded with Russia, and that conspiracy theories about his Monday meeting with Vladimir Putin are off the deep end. With greater courage, they would say all of this publicly.
Many of President Trump’s supporters defend him in the same knee-jerk way. They talk about the craziness of the left but seldom utter a single critical word about the president. So the debate between Mr. Trump’s critics and supporters amounts to a dialogue of the deaf.
This lack of candor has long characterized the left. But honest commentary is especially needed now on the right, since many of Mr. Trump’s recent moves have been highly questionable, and worse even than the embarrassment of Helsinki.
The White House’s escalating trade wars are likely to hurt American workers and consumers. Many administration officials admit that in private, although loyalty to the president prevents them from criticizing him publicly. That’s understandable, but the same excuse can’t explain the silence from Mr. Trump’s defenders in the media.
The president’s antagonism at last week’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit was similarly destructive. Mr. Trump called out German Chancellor Angela Merkel for free-riding on the U.S. military. But NATO was formed to defend the West from the Soviets, and Mr. Trump currently is trying to make Russia an ally. While our rapproachement with Russia is long overdue, if Russia is going to become an ally somehow why should NATO increase its military spending? Shouldn’t we be talking about a peace dividend instead?
Germany spends about 1.2% of gross domestic product on defense, less than the 2% target NATO adopted in 2006 and far below the 4% Mr. Trump wants. But Germany’s puny spending level is owing in part to its self-conscious decision after World War II to keep its armed forces small. Does the U.S. really want to change that? NATO’s first secretary general described the purpose of the alliance as keeping the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Mr. Trump and his supporters should seek to uphold that mission.
Mr. Trump’s biggest gaffe last week was criticizing British Prime Minister Theresa May for her handling of Brexit. Whether or not his critique has merit, Mr. Trump was wrong to opine publicly on Britain’s bilateral negotiation with the European Union, which is none of his business. Mr. Trump generally has championed noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. That was his justification for ignoring North Korea’s human-rights abuses while he tried to strike a denuclearization agreement. He signaled that Kim Jong Un could do whatever he wanted to his own people so long as the regime rolled back its threat to the U.S.
This approach abandons a long U.S. tradition of vocally criticizing others’ internal affairs, which Mr. Trump rightly notes has led to a few foolish wars. But he should at least be consistent in scrapping intervention, and it isn’t consistent to object to Ms. May’s handling of Brexit while passing over Mr. Kim’s mass murders.
Mr. Trump’s overall goals may be admirable, but his statements and actions often aren’t. Being honest, his supporters ought to show they are aware of the difference.
Mr. Buckley is a professor at Scalia Law School and author of “The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed,” forthcoming in September from Encounter.
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2) James Comey finally came clean the other night -- but he didn't just stop there. He went one step further... calling anyone who votes Republican this Fall 'Un-American.'
3) This Is the Art of the Deal?
Trump tweeted, ‘Big results will come!’ Putin already has the results he wanted.
The controversy overflowing the banks of the press conference between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is a moment to step back and assess the nonstop maelstrom called the Trump presidency.
Mr. Trump’s famous modus operandi is the art of the deal. Keep everyone guessing and off balance. Decision first, details later. Drive events, stay on offense, force everyone to react. In this, Mr. Trump has succeeded.
No one—from the individuals who work daily in the White House to friends and enemies in foreign capitals—knows what he may do next. A high-ranking official from an Asian ally who visited the Journal’s offices recently was asked if his government has a clear idea of what Mr. Trump wants them to do on trade. “No,” he said, “we do not.”
The whole world is back on its heels, which is where, according to theory, the art-of-the-deal master wants them.
There is another pop culture phrase nearly everyone knows: “Show me the money!” It means there comes a time when the man offering deals has to stop talking and start producing results.
Mr. Trump has three major foreign-policy initiatives going: North Korea, trade and Russia. So far, none have produced a deal or anything close. Instead, we get Mr. Trump’s repeated, Jerry Maguire-like assurances that something big is in the works.
Mr. Trump said shortly after his sit-down with Kim Jong Un, “The North Korean nuclear threat is over.” Then this Tuesday, Mr. Trump said there is “no time limit” on the negotiations. That deal sits at square one, the same tough starting point other presidents faced. Meanwhile, Mr. Kim’s scientists will spend every day improving his missiles’ survival and accuracy.
On trade, we don’t have a deal of any sort equal to the massive roll of the dice taken by pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, upending the North American Free Trade Agreement, and imposing tariffs on all the U.S.’s major trading partners.
The only deals getting done are among our trading partners, with the U.S. excluded. Japan this week signed a huge free-trade deal with the European Union. Europe is finishing similar trade deals with Canada and Mexico.
When U.S. allies, from Tokyo to London, become actively confused and doubtful about their lead partner’s commitments, they start looking for alternative arrangements of convenience. Two weeks ago, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced he will go to China and hopes for a reciprocal visit to Tokyo by Chinese President-for-life Xi Jinping. Germany last week signed significant trade deals during a meeting in Berlin between Angela Merkel and Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang. Slowly, the U.S. is being isolated.
On Tuesday at the White House, addressing the Putin controversy, Mr. Trump said his meeting with the Russian “was really strong.” He added, “They were willing to do things that frankly I didn’t think they would be willing to do.” Like what? Given the barrage of criticism this week, if anything resembling real progress had been accomplished in Helsinki, the White House would have made it public by now.
The only voice addressing the substance of the Putin meeting remains that of Mr. Trump, who in a tweet Wednesday promised, “Big results will come!” Mr. Putin got the results he wanted on Monday in Finland. The man with the Cheshire cat smile will be moving on now.
Mr. Trump’s supporters say he deserves more time to negotiate wins on these big foreign-policy bets. It’s not going to get better.
Boarding his plane for the meetings in Europe, Mr. Trump said, “Frankly, Putin may be the easiest of them all.” That confident insouciance can be endearing, but we are seeing the limits to Mr. Trump’s art of the deal. Past some point of complexity, such as the global supply chain or North Korea’s nuclear program, decision first and strategy later (“We’ll see what happens”) degrades into deadlock. Or what may be worse, happy talk, which in time erodes credibility.
When Mr. Trump entered office amid a generalized panic among political elites, the first thing some of us noticed was that he was filling his government with first-rate people. To revive the economy, they included economic advisers Gary Cohn and Kevin Hassett, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney. On taxes, Paul Ryan and Kevin Brady provided a detailed template. The economy raced to full employment. The stock market boomed.
On the Supreme Court, the most astute minds in the conservative legal movement gave Mr. Trump a list of stellar options. He picked Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. More wins.
Mr. Trump has said that in Mike Pompeo, Jim Mattis and John Bolton he has the foreign-policy team he always wanted. He also said he wanted to do one-on-ones with Messrs. Xi, Kim and Putin. He has done that. The moment has arrived to start listening less to America’s adversaries and more to his own good people. That, in his first year, was the art of the win.
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NATO's challenge is Germany, not America
By Victor Davis Hanson
During the recent
In an era when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are now ancient history, everyone praises NATO as "indispensable" and "essential" to Western solidarity and European security. But few feel any need to explain how and why that could still be so.
Does NATO still protect the West? Does it prevent destructive European feuding? Does it ensure the postwar global order of free trade, commerce, travel and communications? And is NATO -- or the United States and its leadership of NATO -- the real reason there has not been a World War III or a return to global tribalism and chaos?
The result was that the idea of NATO membership became more important to the countries that are part of it than the reality and responsibility of actual military readiness.
Ostensibly, NATO still protects Europe from Vladimir Putin's Russia , just as it once kept the Soviet Red Army out of West Germany . But over the objections of its Baltic neighbors and the Ukraine , Germany just cut a gas pipeline deal with Russia -- the purported threat for which its needs U.S. -subsidized security.
Stranger still is Germany's growing animosity toward the United States . At the end of the Obama administration, 57 percent of Germans expressed a positive view of America in a Pew poll. That figure dropped to 35 percent in the first year of the Trump administration. A recent poll reveals that Germans see Putin's Russia as more trustworthy than the United States .
Why is
When Russia will be providing more than half of Germany's natural gas instead of threatening to fire tactical nuclear missiles at Berlin , the U.S. military is no longer deemed so important to German security.
Add up all these disparate realities and the real crisis of NATO becomes clearer. The alliance's most affluent and dominant European member sets a pernicious example by failing to meet its alliance obligations.
Other fearful European NATO nations are used to being dominated by Germany and either keep quiet or follow its lead.
This is the NATO that Trump inherited and that he tried to shake up with his customary art-of-the-deal antics. Trump may be loud and uncouth, but his argument that NATO countries need to pay more money for their shared alliance's self-defense is sound. If successful, it would lead to a stronger NATO .
In contrast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel sounds customarily professional and diplomatic as she continues to weaken the alliance and pursue German commercial and financial interests at the expense of fellow NATO members.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++5) ‘The University We Need’ Review: Rethinking College
A new private university may be needed, one that reflects the intellectual opinions of a spectrum of educated Americans outside academe. John Leo reviews “The University We Need” by Warren Treadgold.
By John Leo
Higher education is in a lot of trouble, barely kept on track by massive price increases, grade inflation that keeps the mostly inattentive customers sedated, and a class of academic serfs, called adjuncts, who work for meager wages. The adjunct system is telltale: a classic bait-and-switch operation, wherein customers—that is, students and their parents—imagine that, for the money they are paying, they are accessing professors though they are mostly renting local substitutes.
And what does the money buy? The most detailed and rigorous research project aimed at measuring how much college students learn concluded, in essence, “not much,” in part because students don’t study. That finding—revealed in the 2011 book “Academically Adrift,” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa—caused a brief stir, but university administrators basically ignored the news and kept on their wayward course.
In “The University We Need,” Warren Treadgold, a professor of Byzantine studies and history at Saint Louis University, offers his own assessment of what ails America’s colleges and universities and ponders what might be done to improve them—if anything can indeed be done. While acknowledging the financial burdens of higher education—“even if the average price for a public college education could be cut by a third, $50,000 is still far too much to pay for students not to learn anything”—and many other problems, he focuses on the corrosive effects of identity politics.
In recent years, Mr. Treadgold argues, the campus left has tightened its grip on college and universities. The tighter the grip, he says, the simpler the message—that Western civilization, including the history of the American republic, is a long narrative of oppression. The essence of the humanities has thus been transformed into the study of victim groups and their supposed oppressors—capitalism, colonialism, religious belief, “privilege”—at the expense of other subjects. Relatedly, the demand for “diversity” now drives the curriculum, not to mention the admissions process.
One result of this approach has been, Mr. Treadgold says, a growing intolerance toward traditional points of view—including incidents of confrontation and virtual censorship. Another is a growing anti-white sentiment. Arguably, the sentiment was latent in the early stages of identity-politics protests, but it has become overt in recent years, with attacks on “white privilege” and courses deriding “white culture.” Some college teachers have adopted “progressive stacking” in class, calling on students by racial and gender category in a predetermined order with women of color first and white males last.
PHOTO: WSJ
THE UNIVERSITY WE NEED
By Warren Treadgold
Encounter, 184 pages, $23.99
Encounter, 184 pages, $23.99
At the same time, college administrators have often been unwilling to penalize disrupters and censors or to defend scholars attacked for stepping outside the left consensus. One pertinent example, though not one cited by Mr. Treadgold: Bruce Gilley, a political science professor at Portland State, wrote a peer-reviewed article in 2017 for Third World Quarterly titled “The Case for Colonialism.” The reaction: a storm of criticism and even death threats; the resignation, in protest, of 15 members of the journal’s editorial board; and two petitions signed by more than 16,000 academics and others demanding that the journal retract the article. In the event, the article was withdrawn with Mr. Gilley’s consent. Portland State has spent months investigating him over the article. From the classroom and campus to scholarly journals, an orthodoxy is decided upon and enforced.
So what is to be done? Senior professors and retiring presidents of august universities churn out books on our beleaguered colleges and universities without coming close to an original idea for reform. Often they settle on some favorite old idea, such as eliminating tenure or offering a bachelor’s degree in three years instead of four, neither of which would help much. The “no college” movement, ignited by Peter Thiel’s offer of $100,000 to selected students who (as he puts it) “want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom,” is gaining admirers. And Bryan Caplan’s recent book, “The Case Against Education”—arguing that a college degree is often not worth the price—has been well reviewed and much discussed.
Mr. Treadgold thinks that a new private university may be needed, not an explicitly right-wing one but one that reflects the intellectual opinions of a spectrum of educated Americans outside academe. When Leland Stanford founded Stanford University in the 1880s, Mr. Treadgold notes, he possessed a considerable fortune, though it would be too small in today’s dollars to put him on the Forbes 400. A lot of even wealthier donors are now available, and many of them are troubled by universities’ hostility to free speech, capitalism, religion and traditional education. A gift of $1 billion, he believes, would trigger the rest of the donations needed to launch such a university. A planning group could seek and find roughly 1,000 good scholars willing to join the faculty. The college itself need not, he says, be larger than Princeton—i.e., about 5,000 undergraduates.
Other universities are bogged down worrying about “elitism” and the need for diversity and “inclusiveness.” The new university would just try to be the best in the nation—offering a substantial curriculum untainted by mandatory leftism. But Mr. Treadgold thinks the time is short—in 20 years or so, he says, it may be difficult or impossible to find 1,000 first-rate scholars in the U.S. At the moment, founding a new university may seem like a fantasy. But if things get worse—and they will—it may well come to look like the only obvious option.
Mr. Leo is the founder and editor of Minding the Campus, a digital magazine that aims to bring intellectual diversity to public and private campuses.
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