.jpg)
+++
A Destructive Trump Indictment
Do prosecutors understand the forces they are unleashing?
By The Editorial Board
Breaking the news on his social media platform, Truth Social, Donald Trump responded to federal charges of violating laws related to his handling of classified documents. Images: Truth Social/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, his indictment by President Biden’s Justice Department is a fraught moment for American democracy. For the first time in U.S. history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former President who is also running against the sitting President. This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come.
Special counsel Jack Smith announced the indictment in a brief statement on Friday. But no one should be fooled: This is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s responsibility. Mr. Garland appointed Mr. Smith to provide political cover, but Mr. Garland, who reports to Mr. Biden, has the authority to overrule a special counsel’s recommendation. Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.
The indictment levels 37 charges against Mr. Trump that are related to his handling of classified documents, including at his Mar-a-Lago club, since he left the White House. Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the ancient and seldom-enforced Espionage Act for the “willful retention of national defense information.”
But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.
This doesn’t fit the spirit or letter of the PRA, which was written by Congress to recognize that such documents had previously been the property of former Presidents. If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense.
The other counts are related to failing to turn over the documents or obstructing the attempts by the Justice Department and FBI to obtain them. One allegation is that during a meeting with a writer and three others, none of whom held security clearances, Mr. Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack’” from the Defense Department. “As president I could have declassified it,” he said on audio tape. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
The feds also say Mr. Trump tried to cover up his classified stash by “suggesting that his attorney hide or destroy documents,” as well as by telling an aide to move boxes to conceal them from his lawyer and the FBI.
As usual, Mr. Trump is his own worst enemy. “This would have gone nowhere,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS recently, “had the President just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”
That being said, if prosecutors think that this will absolve them of the political implications of their decision to charge Mr. Trump, they fail to understand what they’ve unleashed.
In the court of public opinion, the first question will be about two standards of justice. Mr. Biden had old classified files stored in his Delaware garage next to his sports car. When that news came out, he didn’t sound too apologetic. “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” Mr. Biden said. AG Garland appointed another special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate, but Justice isn’t going to indict Mr. Biden.
As for willful, how about the basement email server that Hillary Clinton used as Secretary of State? FBI director James Comey said in 2016 that she and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” According to him, 113 emails included information that was classified when it was sent or received. Eight were Top Secret. About 2,000 others were later “upclassified” to Confidential. This was the statement Mr. Comey ended by declaring Mrs. Clinton free and clear, since “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
This is the inescapable political context of this week’s indictment. The special counsel could have finished his investigation with a report detailing the extent of Mr. Trump’s recklessness and explained what secrets it could have exposed. Instead the Justice Department has taken a perilous path.
The charges are a destructive intervention into the 2024 election, and the potential trial will hang over the race. They also make it more likely that the election will be a referendum on Mr. Trump, rather than on Mr. Biden’s economy and agenda or a GOP alternative. This may be exactly what Democrats intend with their charges.
Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump. But the indictment might make GOP voters less inclined to provide a democratic verdict on his fitness for a second term. Although the political impact is uncertain, Republicans who are tired of Mr. Trump might rally to his side because they see the prosecution as another unfair Democratic plot to derail him.
And what about the precedent? If Republicans win next year’s election, and especially if Mr. Trump does, his supporters will demand that the Biden family be next. Even if Mr. Biden is re-elected, political memories are long.
It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken. It didn’t need to be. However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia. The FBI recovered the missing documents when it raided Mar-a-Lago, so presumably there are no more secret attack plans for Mr. Trump to show off..
+++++++++++++++
A Strong Trump Indictment—but Is It Strong Enough?
The evidence against the former president is powerful, but the jurors aren’t the only ones who will need convincing.
By Alan M. Dershowitz
Special counsel Jack Smith is both confident in his case against Donald Trump and sensitive to political considerations—though those considerations are subtler than the kind of partisan advantage that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is after.
That’s why Mr. Smith brought the charges in Florida. He thinks the case is strong enough that a jury will convict Mr. Trump even in a jurisdiction of diverse party affiliations. His confidence may also explain why he alleged that Mr. Trump willfully rather than negligently mishandled classified material. He might also have wanted to distinguish Mr. Trump’s case from those of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Mike Pence, none of which allegedly involved willfulness.
What should have begun as a routine civil investigation under the Presidential Records Act has ended up with a multicount criminal indictment, the first federal prosecution ever of a former president or a leading candidate for the presidency. This is partially because prosecutors targeted Mr. Trump and partially because of the unwise way he responded.
Mr. Bragg campaigned for his office on a promise to hold Mr. Trump accountable and delivered when he persuaded a grand jury to hand up a weak indictment. Mr. Smith was appointed specifically to investigate Mr. Trump, and he did his job well. The problem inheres in the office of special counsel, which by its nature selects its target and looks for evidence against him.e
Mr. Smith had a lot of help from Mr. Trump. Had the former president cooperated with investigators and immediately returned all the classified material in his possession, as Messrs. Biden and Pence did, charges would have been unlikely. But Mr. Trump did what he always does. He attacked Mr. Smith and resisted his efforts. That provoked investigators to double down, which in turn led Mr. Trump to engage in the allegedly obstructive conduct that forms the basis for several counts in the indictment.
Mr. Smith subpoenaed Mr. Trump’s lawyers and persuaded a judge that Mr. Trump had vitiated the attorney-client privilege by instructing them that it would be “better if there are no documents.” The defense team will claim that Mr. Trump was entitled to maintain possession of classified material under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which establishes detailed procedures for handling the records of former presidents and a civil process for resolving disputes about them. It doesn’t carry criminal penalties for noncompliance. Remarkably, the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act, despite its apparent relevance to any possible prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917.
The indictment quotes tape-recorded conversations that form the basis for several charges under the Espionage Act. The critical recording is of a conversation between Mr. Trump, a writer, a publisher and two Trump staffers, who were discussing a claim that a senior military official had persuaded Mr. Trump not to order an attack on “country A,” which in context is surely Iran. Mr. Trump points to some papers he found and tells his guests they prove that military officials supported an attack. “This totally wins my case,” he says. “This is secret information. Look, look at this.” Mr. Trump then says: “See, as president I could have declassified it. . . . Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
It is possible that Mr. Trump merely waved the papers in front of his guests and never gave them an opportunity to read them, which is apparently not in evidence because the prosecutors don’t have the document. But even those hypothetical facts would be enough to support the charge of willfully possessing classified material in an unauthorized manner.
The reason this recording is so powerful is that it is self-proving. It doesn’t rely on testimony by flipped witnesses or antagonists of Mr. Trump. It is the kind of evidence every defense lawyer dreads and every prosecutor dreams about. This is particularly important because an appellate court could find legal error in the ruling that Mr. Trump had vitiated attorney-client confidentiality and reverse convictions based on his lawyers’ compelled testimony. A conviction that rests on a consensually recorded conversation would be harder to challenge.
Mr. Smith has made a stronger case against Mr. Trump than many observers, including me, expected. The question remains: Is it strong enough to justify an indictment of the leading candidate to challenge the president in next year’s election? Even with the recorded statements, this case isn’t nearly as strong as the one that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Nixon was almost certainly guilty of destroying evidence, bribing witnesses and other acts of obstruction. Many of the charges in this case are matters of degree. Nor have prosecutors any evidence that Mr. Trump’s actions damaged national security more than those of Mr. Biden, Mr. Pence and Mrs. Clinton did.
When an incumbent administration prosecutes the leading candidate against the president, it should have a case that is so compelling that it attracts the kind of bipartisan support that forced Nixon to resign. No such support is currently apparent, since many Republicans continue to be troubled by the targeting of Mr. Trump. Mr. Smith will have to convince not only a Miami jury but the American public, on both sides of the partisan divide.
Mr. Dershowitz is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of “Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process and Our Constitutional Rule of Law.” He represented Mr. Trump during his 2020 impeachment trial.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Ross Rant
Big cities are slowly collapsing into a financial and crime debacle. Take NYC. Office occupancy is around 50% and not going up. Rumor says two of the significant public office owners are in serious problems. But the real issue is the city. Property tax drops as office property values collapse and buildings default on their mortgages. It Is not just the property taxes, however. The high-paid people who pay all of the income taxes in NY City are leaving. Many people who commuted into the city daily were paid in NYC, were charged commuter taxes, and are now working from home or satellite offices in NJ, CT, or Westchester, so they no longer pay commuter tax. They are not utilizing city business services or shopping. No sales tax. No income tax from the people who worked in those retail and restaurant locations now out of business or doing much less business. At the same time, the city is spending over $1 billion on illegal aliens, aside from the social and criminal costs. The natural consequence of being a sanctuary city. Yet Biden does nothing about the border. The squeeze on finances will get to the point very soon that the city will face financial problems, and services will decline. With no consequences for petty crime, the crime problem will continue, with shoplifting worsening. The subway is much emptier than it once was due to crime, so the MTA is short on revenue. I rode the subway this week, and the decline in riders is very noticeable. From every direction, there is a rapidly declining source of income for the city, while its costs go up, and interest rates take more of the budget. In NYC, we have rent control, rent stabilization which limits rent increases on a certain group of buildings, and market rate rents which were exactly that for higher-end units. Now the state legislature is considering rent control on market-rate units. If that happens, you can kiss NYC real estate goodbye. The whole commercial residential property market will slowly collapse. Eric Adams and Kathy Hoekul are way over their heads. In San Francisco this past week, the big Hilton Hotel and Park Suites defaulted. That alone is $735 million of defaulted loans from one major city borrower. It is also a lot of property tax that will not get paid, and it emphasizes that tourism is way off, so there is less hotel tax. This whole collapse of major blue cities directly results from left-wing policies. In contrast, Miami and Tampa are thriving. That is not due to the good weather but to good fiscal and crime policies and management. And to top it off, NY state is now mandating no more natural gas hooks up for heating, creating another significant blow to landlords. A major financial and social crisis is unfolding in all the major cities now run by left-leaning administrations. This is not going to end well.
Just one more example of the insanity of the CA left. A bill before the legislature says it will be illegal for a shop owner to let his employees interfere with a shoplifter. It is unclear if even a professional security guard would be allowed to act. You read that right. So why pay for anything? Just take it all. This is even after they see downtown San Francisco closing down due to the rampant retail crime. I am left to wonder in these blue states if everyone in government is just stupid or if they are so indoctrinated in school that they cannot understand the basics of social contracts and a culture of crime that has taken hold. I believe it is; they are just stupid. It is all right before their eyes, yet they pass these laws and defund the police.
The Fed may not raise in June even though the IMF has pushed Powell to raise further. They have now moved to more likely a pause and raise 25 in July. Even if they pause in June, they still need to finish. They will not get back to 2% and likely will end up closer to 3% inflation. That means no rate cuts this year, and maybe not next year. Could you ignore the forecasts of a rate cut? It might mean even more raises sometime in the fall. Fed Funds will likely settle out at 5.25%-5.5%, exactly where I had forecast months ago.
It is now estimated that there is an increasing bifurcation in income levels. Lower-income people are now defaulting on credit cards and auto loans at a quickly increasing rate. However, higher-income people, especially upper income, still have $1.5 Trillion of excess savings and are in fiscally good shape, so they continue to spend for the moment. But they are not spending on capital goods. Due to the labor shortage, these people have good-paying jobs for now. Their mortgages are set at 3.0-3.5% +-, so their debt burden is not a problem. That is why there is continuing strength to travel and restaurants. What does seem to be happening now is many of these people are now going to Europe since it has reopened, and there is a noticeable decline at some hotels in the US due to this. However, that is being partly taken up with weddings, etc., and some return of group travel. Corporate travel has yet to be returned. With remote capability, business travelers extend their trips to Friday and then a weekend stay. So, the hotel business is doing better than I expected. These remaining savings and low unemployment at good wages are what is sustaining the economy for now. Corporate debt is in reasonably good shape because most companies locked in their debt cost while rates were low. Same as homeowners did with mortgages. The pandemic and remote work has fundamentally changed the economy's metrics. Labor remains short, prior Covid savings rates have allowed savings to stay better than usual, and debt has been locked at low rates in many cases. All are very different than in past economic downturns.
There is another new phenomenon that is changing labor markets and social behavior. Young people now see being temporarily unemployed as no problem and are happy with the time off. With the gig economy, they can quit or get laid off and earn enough from severance and gig jobs to pay their bills and take time to travel or screw around. The gig economy changed everything in labor dynamics. Now you can do Uber, Door Dash, part-time computer work, or whatever, earn some money, collect unemployment in between, live off savings from Covid payments, and live with their parents, so no rent. Because of the labor shortages, they know they can get another job whenever necessary. That is a game changer. We feared not eating. These kids fear nothing. A Silicon Valley laid-off worker got big severance and continuing health coverage for a few months, so they are happy. This is part of why there is such a labor shortage which creates more of this same dynamic. Labor economists need to study this new world and the social changes this will create. Combine this with women working and earning good incomes and delaying marriage and having babies, and a new social culture is developing. It is different than when we were young. This also has political ramifications that need to be clarified.
Young men over 25 are less employed now. Only 66% are full-time vs. 73% in 1980. Only 64% are financially independent vs. 77% in 1980. The emphasis on a college degree to get ahead being required has supposedly demoralized many blue-collar workers who have no degree. This is a further shift in labor economics and dynamics. It has also led many attending some community colleges or small-nothing colleges to get a useless degree and take on student debt they cannot pay. A welder, fine carpenter, or other skills earn more than many college graduates. The guy who owns the pool company I use here in the Hamptons lives very nicely, not far from me. Contractors are making very nice 6 figure incomes. Given how bad the education is in schools in many cities, private industry needs a national program to apprentice these kids and help them build a decent career, even if in a factory that now requires computer skills. They need fundamental skills to offset what AI is going to do. AI cannot fix the very minor plumbing problem, the pool pipe leak, or the chimney leak I have. There are very few issues for my house, but they highlight the need for skilled human labor who charge a lot to fix them. These minor problems I have will cost me thousands to fix.
As a result of all of this, it has become very hard to know where things are going in the economy, as we seem to be on a new set of metrics due to the aftermath of the pandemic and the massive spending and higher rates than we have had for over 15 years. The other issue is the huge increase in retiring people who have made the labor market tighter than it has been for decades. On the one hand, we have consumers at the upper end doing fine and low unemployment with good wages. On the other hand, we have the issues of inflation being the highest in 40 years, lower-income people struggling, massive problems in the big cities, open borders and a major burden on cities caring for millions of illegals., and high-interest rates, far reduced spend on capital goods, a slow mortgage market, a recession in Europe. And slowing the economy in China. Most CEOs forecast a further slowdown. Office defaults will create problems, as noted above. The bottom line is now is more likely a mild recession, a continued good labor market, good wages, and the upper end with material excess savings and home values, but lower-income people in real financial problems, with the middle income squeezed by continued high prices. The most significant factor is possible that home values are not plummeting, and that is the biggest asset most people have, so they remain feeling they are not being wiped out as happened in 2009. The stock market is down, and 401K’s are down, but not wiped out as in 2009. The banking system remains healthier than ever and will mostly be able to withstand the defaults in office loans. So, the stock market may float between 3800-4300 for a while and not drop as much as I had thought.
China is continuing to head to more serious economic problems. Exports were down 7% last month. Unemployment remains a significant problem. Capital investment and investment in Chinese stocks are declining rapidly. Big investors are net sellers of stocks as risk calculation has become the primary concern. $148 billion has come out of their stock market from foreign investors. Money is shifting to India and some other Asian nations. Xi has overplayed his aggressive crackdown on private enterprise and having the property sector grow the economy. The more China’s economy falters, and Xi cracks down, the more investment and production will leave. The pandemic forced many companies and nations to wake up to their total dependence on China, and the result is the reshoring and movement of key suppliers to other places and diversifying the supply chain risk. That leads to negative investment by foreigners, and the situation becomes a downward spiral. The China situation is far more than economic and will lead to other foreign policy and defense-related policy changes. Where this goes is unclear, but the whole world economy, supply chain, manufacturing cost, and Chinese influence will change over the next few years. A lot will depend on who the next US president is. Lyric Hale, who I have been touting with her EconVue newsletter, has called it right for months. You need to subscribe to her newsletter to know what is happening in China.
I have learned more about AI and what it can do. It is a game-changer. One tiny example is that a small company wrote an AI program with a computer listening to sales calls. Remember that your voice over the phone line is digitized so the computer can record every word and voice inflection. The AI program listens to all sales calls and, after a large enough sample, can tell management what words, intonations, and other characteristics work best to close a sale. It has now been tested, and the results have been very material in the rate of closings. There is a program for auto production lines that watches as the car is built and can immediately point out where there is a problem or error as the line moves. It can replace quality control inspectors better. In radiology, it can find tiny things that the radiologist might not detect and mark for the doctor to look more closely at. We are about to enter a whole new world with unpredictable ramifications, but you can see that the bad guys can do things that could lead to very bad situations. Musk and the others are right; this can be extremely dangerous.
Most legal actions against Trump are just political attacks that would never be lodged against anyone else. We have to wait to see what the Tuesday federal indictment is. Maybe it will be the one with substance and reality. However, it is unclear how this finally impacts the primaries. The much more serious issues are the bribery involving the Biden family. Peter Schweitzer claims the real payoffs amount to $32 million. The FBI document needs to be investigated, which it has not yet. There is clear evidence that Biden has been bribed and his whole family was on the take for decades. If the Republicans had not taken the House, we would never have known. The massive cover-up of the Russiagate scandal, the money the Clintons took through the foundation, and Hilary’s other crimes, have been covered up. But now it looks like the whole Dem corruption scandal will be revealed. What have we come to be? Both leading candidates are being investigated for crimes. The former president was committing criminal acts. Have we become another corrupt nation where the powerful can cover up crimes and pocket millions? Have we become just another corrupt government? It seems so. This election will flush all this out, which is why it is critical to our nation's future.
And now we have Goetz leading a small group of far-right members in a shutdown of the House. Goetz is an ignorant egomaniac who has no clue about anything. He is genuinely stupid. They do not understand the House is just one part of government and cannot dictate laws or budgets. Only 11% of the budget can even be touched. They do not understand the damage they will do to the financial markets by pushing this agenda, the dollar, and the economy generally. There was no possible way McCarthy was going to get what they want. Recall that the Dems required no negotiation of anything and increased spending. McCarthy has a detailed strategy, but it takes time to play out. There are several stages to finally get to where Republicans want to be, but they must win everything in 24. Elections have consequences. Goetz represents a tiny district in northern FL with very few voters. He does not mean more than a minuscule fraction of all voters. Taking the negotiation over the edge, and forcing a government shutdown, as they wanted, would have done real damage. We all need to let this all play out with the budget and the election. The budget negotiations will be very nasty, with lots of political theater and misinformation from the media. Don’t believe much of what you will hear, and wait to see what happens. Don’t expect a significant decline in spending this go around. It is just the next step in the strategy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Soros will continue to rule from his grave as he transfers $25 billion from his OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION to his 37 year old son, Alex.
+++
Hillary destroys court evidence and go's free. Biden had classified government documents scattered all over, no indictment, takes FBI 6 years to know what they already knew regarding Hunter's computer yet nothing done. Two efforts to impeach based on false information known by Democrats and FBI to be false and now Biden on tape regarding bribing incident as part of $10 million transfer and more. Sec. of State arranged for 51 intelligence senior officers to lie about Trump.
+++
Israel's Diaspora Minister condemns J Street as 'hostile' to Israel
Minister Amichai Chikli slams left-wing lobby group J Street over funding from George Soros, accuses the group of hostility towards Israel
By Amichai Chikli
Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli (Likud) excoriated the left-wing Middle East policy think-tank and pro-two-state solution lobby group J Street, after the organization’s Twitter account retweeted an unflattering photograph of the minister with the word “Shame.”
The photograph was taken last week by Forward reporter Jacob Kornbluh, while a group of anti-judicial reform protesters in Manhattan demonstrated against the participation of Israeli government officials in the annual Celebrate Israel Parade.
When a group of protesters harangued him, Chikli responded with an exaggerated grin while holding finders on either side of his mouth, in an expression he later explained was intended to signal to the protesters to smile. Critics, however claimed the minister was in fact making an obscene gesture.
Image of Chikli, modified by the group 'UnXeptable'Image of Chikli, modified by the group 'UnXeptable'Twitter
On Monday, Chikli responded to J Street’s retweeting of the image, dismissing the group as unimportant and accusing it of being anti-Israel, rejecting J Street’s claim of being a “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy” organization.
“It’s not an important organization, it’s hostile Chikli told Kan, blasting J Street’s support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which was condemned by parties from both the Israeli Left and Right. “It’s a hostile organization that harms the interests of the state of Israel.”
The minister also noted J Street has received financial support from billionaire hedge funder and left-wing donor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
“I have no expectation of J Street, which George Soros funded with $1 million, there’s no turning to him.”
J Street responded to Chikli’s comments, claiming they reflected the “extreme right” government’s frustration with opposition to the judicial reform.
"What a clear sign of how utterly out of touch this government is with the vast majority of American Jews, represented by J Street, who are deeply worried about their attacks on Israeli democracy and angered by their extreme right agenda," J Street Vice President of Communications Logan Bayroff told Ha’aretz.
++++++++++++++++++++
Anti-A I.
+++
Subject: Breaking News from Biden Admin
Press Release
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In an effort to establish government oversight of the growing role of artificial intelligence in our society, President Biden has appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as "A.I. Czar." The President expressed hope that Harris's track record of slowing the spread of intelligence will be of use. "She's been fighting against the threat of intelligence her whole life," Biden said in brief remarks when the announcement was made. "When it comes to creating an environment where intelligence is restricted and unable to advance too far, Vice President Harris is more qualified for the job than anyone else. "Fears among the general public and leaders of the tech industry alike regarding the increasing growth and prevalence of artificial intelligence have led to calls for more oversight, which Vice President Harris was more than willing to provide — as soon as she was informed what "oversight" means.
"It is my distinct honor to provide real leadership over the growth of artificial intelligence. Intelligence that is artificial is real, and intelligence that is real may, in reality, be artificial. It is within that reality that artificiality can become real," Harris said in something that seemed like a statement.
Sources within the White House indicated Biden was supremely confident that Harris's leadership in the area of intelligence would be just as successful as her tenure as Border Czar. At publishing time, Vice President Harris was reportedly already assembling a special task force to deal with the potential threat of intelligence, asking New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to serve as her advisor.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Time to declare war on Cuba before matters really get ot of hand but Biden beholden too much to China.?
+++
Russia, China and Iran in America’s Backyard
These adversaries threaten the U.S. with their moves into Latin America.
By Walter Russell Mead
The news from Latin America is grim. The reaction from the Biden administration is a yawn.
To reports in this newspaper that China is offering Cuba billions of dollars in exchange for the construction of a sophisticated intelligence facility to be used against the U.S., the White House responded with a classic nondenial denial. The report was “not accurate,” a spokesperson said, which translated from Washingtonese means that the story was largely correct, but it would be politically inconvenient to say so.
By Saturday the White House was into stage 2 of nondenial. Well, the White House conceded, perhaps there is such a facility, and perhaps China and Cuba are collaborating to upgrade it, but it’s all the previous administration’s fault, and in any case the current administration is addressing any and all relevant issues through diplomatic channels.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
But Cuba is the tip of the iceberg. From Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego, American interests are under threat as virtually every country in Latin America suffers from major and growing social, political and economic distress. Narcotrafficking cartels have tightened their grip across much of Central America and into the Caribbean. Law and order is collapsing in Ecuador, while political instability seethes across countries like Bolivia and Peru. Argentina is again reaping the catastrophic results of populist Peronist economic policy. The Venezuelan dictatorship continues to tighten its grip as it sucks the remaining wealth from what ought to be one of the richest nations in the hemisphere. Haiti no longer has even the ghost of a government. In Brazil neither the right-populist shenanigans of the Bolsonaro government nor the left-populist quack remedies of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party offer much hope to a stagnant, rapidly deindustrializing economy.
As is traditional, Latin populists are blaming capitalism and the U.S. for the otherwise inexplicable failure of their pet policies. They are also rolling out the red carpet for America’s opponents, literally in the case of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, who is following up his navy’s recent visit to the region with official visits to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Ties with Russia and China are booming. Moscow has resumed its Cold War efforts to subsidize a Cuban economy that somehow, despite 60 years of enlightened socialist planning, remains unable to meet the basic needs of the population.
But Moscow’s efforts are dwarfed by Beijing’s. Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean rocketed from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion 20 years later and is projected to reach $700 billion by 2035. From lithium mining in Bolivia to strategic ports at both ends of the Panama Canal, Chinese companies are getting involved in vital infrastructure. Eleven or more space facilities across five countries in the region give Beijing sophisticated tracking and surveillance capabilities, and China hopes to expand this network.
The steady incursions of U.S. rivals into the Western Hemisphere would have touched off a political firestorm at any time since James Monroe issued his famous doctrine. But Latin America and the Caribbean are the last remaining places where the American foreign-policy establishment appears to cling to post-Cold War complacency about America’s rivals. Just as the establishment once scoffed at the idea that Russian ambitions in the former Soviet republics could pose a threat to European peace, or that China’s military buildup around Taiwan could affect American interests, it now blandly dismisses the idea that focused Chinese, Russian and Iranian activism in the Western Hemisphere could undermine American security.
If there’s been one single besetting sin in the generational failure of American foreign policy that took us from the “end of history” of the early 1990s to our current grim global situation, it’s the fixation on grandiose and vague global goals at the expense of American national interests as traditionally understood. The security and prosperity of our neighborhood matters enormously to the U.S., but Latin America has been at most an afterthought in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.
Monroe had it right. The safety and security of the U.S. require that no hostile powers turn the Western Hemisphere into an arena of geopolitical rivalry. To prevent foreign interference in the affairs of the nations of this hemisphere, the U.S. must work with neighbors to prevent failures of governance from creating chaotic conditions in which hostile powers can fruitfully meddle.
Washington’s passivity as drug cartels undermined state structures and as hostile foreign powers established beachheads across the hemisphere handed China, Russia and Iran a historic opportunity. Unless Joe Biden learns to channel the spirit of James Monroe, the toxic cocktail of instability and foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere could soon undermine America’s ability to face challenges farther afield.
+++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment