Kurdistan

President Trump's most recent whim is removing American troops (roughly 2200 of them) from Syria, proclaiming that ISIS has now been 'defeated'. While this seems to come out of the blue, actually Trump has been saying he'll do this since he first got into office, so are we to assume that this time he will actually do it? Or is he just continuing his empty rhetoric?

The American position in Syria has always been precarious because outside of getting rid of the Assad regime (to be replace by....?), we've never really had any clear sense of what we want in/from Syria. Syria has never been in the American sphere of influence, outside of occasionally sticking up for the Kurds, so we've never known what to do there.

The emergence of Daesh (ISIS) gave the Obama administration the opportunity to weasel our way into Syria and with the dissolution of any consistent Syrian culture due to ongoing civil war, that was quite a clever grab at influence, I thought. Obama's policy in the Middle East was to steadily remove forces and hand the whole mess over to Russia, which seemed like a bad idea to me at the time but I've very much come to embrace it. I believe that our foes and allies alike in the Middle East share the fundamental American desire: to get oil out of the ground and into markets around the world. Since we're all on the same page, what is the need for American force there any more?

Except for one thing: the Kurds. The Kurds are one of many ethnic minorities in the Middle East and though they are arguably the largest stateless population in the Arab world, they have been divided by the 20th century drive to impose strict borders on nation-states. So there are four distinct blocks of Kurds rather than one unified people.

The Iranian Kurds are a relatively safe population, their place within Iran is minor but well-established and they are more or less left alone as long as they don't enter the political discourse (which they've been doing more than usual lately). The Iraqi Kurds are a large portion of the Iraqi population and while they have had clearly delineated territory for decades, they have long lived in fear of Sunni-dominated Baghdad and seem to have already given up on finding a Shia-dominated Baghdad any easier to deal with (though I suspect as Shia factions battle each other, the Kurds may find succor if they chose wisely). The Turkish Kurds have been at odds with the Turkish polity since...well, since Ataturk, meaning they've been perceived as terrorists and malcontents since the very formation of modern Turkey (they've had forays into mainstream politics and radical violence in equal measure during that time). The Syrian Kurds are perhaps the weirdest of the bunch and given the current state of Syria's civil war, violence is looming in their future.

The Americans relied on the Syrian Kurds to fight Daesh and the two were willing accomplices against these Iraqi Sunni foes. But now that Trump considers Daesh 'defeated' (*), he is willing to forego our Kurd allies and take Americans out of harm's way. Getting out Syria is, for whatever reason, one of the core tenets of Trump's hardcore base (worth noting that Trump's base is paranoid of Muslims more than anything in the world and worshipful of American military power first and foremost...but wants to avoid war in the Middle East at all cost...?) and Trump has been saying he'll do this for well over a year. And the Americans have left the Kurds high and dry before, so by now they have learned that the Americans are fair weather friends at best.

But I think this is a bad move. I think the Kurds are America's best ally in the Middle East and aiding them should be a top priority there.

What Trump doesn't want is a fight with Turkey. I'm not really sure why this is. Trump has happily thrown Erdogan under the bus whenever it suits him (though always properly respectful of Erdogan's ghoulish grip on power) and has happily presided over the ruin of Turkey's economy (largely through the Fed's recent interest rate increases). Until recently the Americans have fought with the Syrian Kurds against Daesh and protected them from the Assad regime and the Turks. But with the Russian-Turkish negotiated cease fire in Idlib, the battle has been moving away from the Turkish-held areas of Syria in the west to the Kurdish-held areas of the east (Erdogan's plan all along). The Americans have been providing cover, less through its 2200 soldiers in country than through the American flag perched on each soldier's uniform: killing even one American potentially brings an apocalyptic wrath. But if the Americans just turn around and leave, the Kurds will be as naked as the day they were born.

Turkey has endured mostly nothing but bullshit from her Western allies over the last 30 years or so. Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has been patiently awaiting an invitation to join the European Union, jumping through all manor of economic and cultural hoops that the Europeans have largely ignored (though it seems now like the Turks dodged a bullet as the EU is rapidly eroding). Turkey was marginalized through all of the Americans' various shenanigans in Iraq during this period even though those NATO airbases in Turkey would seem like the perfect bases of operation, but because Turkish troops streaming into Kurdish territory would have been even more of a nightmare than Saddam or Daesh the Turks had to be pushed aside. Turkey has been dangerously near the conflict between Russia and Ukraine (**) with little help from her NATO allies. Is it any wonder that Turkey has turned inward and suspicious of her traditional western friends? (This alienation stands to get a lot worse as Turkey pursues energy claims in the eastern Mediterranean, the claims that Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Israel and Egypt are salivating over)

The American rationale for hanging around in Syria has been to thwart the imperialist ambitions of Iran. Apparently the American view of Turkish imperialist ambitions has suddenly changed and letting the Turks thwart Iran, stifle the Assad regime and fight what remains of Daesh now seems to be the plan. The Kurds are collateral damage in this equation as they will not be able to hold their positions without American fortification. This will lead to either immense bloodshed or a Kurdish refugee influx into Iraq (and probably both). If the Syrian Kurds and Iraqi Kurds find common cause (maybe but not necessarily), the long run result could be a boon for Kurdish positions in Iraq but a bloodletting will come first.

Iran's economy is in turmoil and the population seems restless in the face of Iranian foreign policy outlays. Iran's imperial ambitions have generally been fed by finding allies in various parts of the Arab world and if Tehran chooses to pull back funding, then these ambitions go dormant. But they don't disappear completely: if/when Tehran finds the funds to reach out again, then the alliances in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, even over to Tunisia and Western Sahara, will reappear. Turkey is betting that Iran is waning and that they can slaughter some enemies (Kurds and Sunnis) and claim territory before the Assad regime can reclaim it first.

The Assad regime was pointing its efforts toward Idlib, a chunk of northwestern Syria that has been a rebel stronghold buffeted by Turkish troops to the north. Assad wants all of Syria back and as his grip on power gets ever so slightly stronger, he will eventually march on Idlib and then eventually on the Kurdish regions in the northeast. But he's not strong enough yet and as Iranian influence fades, his grip will get stronger as his territory gets poorer. For so long the Americans were unopposed and now the Turks are aiming to take up that position and hold it with force (whereas the Americans held power with just that flag alone). The war on the Kurds now bodes for war on Assad later (and war with Iran after that).

And what of Russia? I think they'll be eerily silent about all of this. Russia wants Syria for an airbase and Mediterranean port. Well...they have those. Assad was weak, Russia had what it wanted; as Assad gets strong Russia will still have what it wants. So why does it need Assad to get strong? Well...it doesn't. Turkey killing Kurds probably doesn't interest Russia and the farther future of Turkey fighting Iran is a joyous one for Russia. Russia and USA appear to be in agreement on this at the moment. (And what will China think of all this? They'll be fighting these wars eventually)

The American public likes to believe that pulling out of Syria and the recent Congressional action to cease activity in Yemen will bring a more peaceful world. This is far from the case. With minimal effort the Americans saved a lot of lives in Syria and had virtually no influence on Yemen (***). But without that minimal influence, Yemen and eastern Syria will turn back to bloodbaths. (And I wouldn't be surprised to see Israeli incursions into Lebanon, also to head off Iranian advances and/or take advantage of declining Iranian investment) Really what the American public wants is to go back to a time when foreign people used to kill other foreign people and it seemed like none of our business. With American troops out of harm's way, we'll soon be able to pretend like the rest of the world doesn't matter.

The Middle East is (and has long been) the battle of Turks, Persians and Arabians. In the days of the Caliphate (whether in Baghdad or Damascus) the Sunni Arabs and the Persian Shia fought for control. When that completely collapsed (due to raging hordes of Mongols), the Turkish Ottomans appeared on the scene and for a few centuries, the Middle East was as peaceful as it has ever been. But by the 18th century restless Russia began intruding and in the 19th the British appeared and then in the 20th came the Americans. But it was always about the fight between Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and it will be for the foreseeable future.

But the Kurds are the people USA should be fighting for. In Iraq, in Syria, even in Iran if need be. We've abandoned them before, I suspect we'll abandon them again before it becomes apparent that an independent Kurdistan is what the Americans should've been fighting for all along. The rationale of thwarting Iran worked just fine for me and 2200 troops is not a large presence (not enough to take and hold an Ohio State football game), but protecting the Kurds is what we were really doing and now we've given up the idea of protecting once again. 

Idlib was to be the next big battle, but Idlib will wait for now. The Middle East may well change a lot before that finally happens.


(*) You can be sure to expect a variety of takes from the chattering classes about how defeated ISIS actually is. I will go ahead and embody both sides of the debate: as long as there are grumpy Iraqi Sunnis with nothing better to do there will always be the potential for a re-emergent Daesh; that said, unless they have major power support, they'll never be more than, as Obama said, the JV team. So the range of discourse then will be: a) we must be ever vigilant to b) they were never really that dangerous (both of which incidentally are true).

(**) Fun fact: Crimea has actually traditionally belonged to Istanbul. It wasn't until the 1750s that Russia wrestled it away from the Ottoman Empire and the 1950s that Krushchev gave it to Ukraine. In the sticky diplomatic world of what land belongs to who, Crimea goes right up there with Palestine, Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabach, Tibet, etc. (Woe is the day we add Texas, Hawaii, Yucatan, Haiti and Panama to that list)

(***) When Iran pulls out of Yemen, that won't be the end of the fighting. It will usher in a new fight between Saudi Arabia and UAE, with Americans supporting both sides. With or without the Iranians, with or without the support of Congress, Yemen is decades away from anything like peace.

How Trump Spent His Summer Vacation

The setup: When the G7 got together in Quebec, the vibe was already uptight by Trump's trade shenanigans and his non-stop rhetoric that Europe should pay more for its defense. By all accounts Trump was fine throughout the week but then refused to sign off on the Friday press release--which is the whole reason get-togethers like this happen--thus resulting in this already-classic photo. 

G7 Summit (June 10, 2018)

The takeaway: These meetings are pre-planned down to the last detail, there's no reason to meet unless you're all going to agree on something bland like the Friday communique. I suspect all week long, Trump told them he was going to be a jackass and they should prepare for his bull headedness, so I suspect all week long they worked on this precise pose: Trump being an obstinate ass and the other leaders of the world looking like exasperated parents. By now these leaders have properly internalized Trump for their own constituencies: Merkel is an inch away from a no-confidence vote, at least she can go back home and say it's all Trump's fault (and find much succor from her citizenry). Macron looks like a tough guy, John Bolton looks like a fucking ghoul, Abe is above all this. That said, let's be sure to remember that the G7 means nothing, these meetings mean nothing and, again, working out how best to make Trump look like a party pooper is in everyone's best interest. If the G7 disappeared tomorrow, no one would notice or care, it doesn't matter and its existence at the moment merely produced this already-classic photo (and nothing else because there's nothing for the G7 to do except produce photo ops).

The setup: If the G7 is an annual photo op, then the Singapore Summit was a seemingly impossible photo op. For decades the Kims of North Korea have demanded a public audience with the President of the USA and for decades American presidents have demurred. But Donald Trump is a different kind of president and he took Kim up on his offer. So here they are shaking hands shortly before signing an utterly meaningless piece of paper that pretty much matched the last piece of paper we signed with North Korea (in the Obama years). So what happened? Well...this now-classic photo...and not much else.

Singapore Summit (June 12, 2018)

The takeaway: I dunno, I can't for the life of me figure this one out, except that they each called each other's bluff...but they were both bluffing...so neither of them had anything in the end. It's like a theater company that booked a bunch of shows then forgot to rehearse. The world talked up this meeting like it was gonna be important and nothing happened. They shook hands, Trump looks more like Alfred Hitchcock than I'd ever noticed before and Kim is actually a little taller and fatter than I would've thought...but otherwise...that was pretty much it. Since then, Kim met once more with Xi in Beijing, called off all further meetings with South Korea, may have made a secret trip to Vladivostok, and otherwise has done nothing, said nothing and blown off most of his meetings with Sec State Pompeo and his underlings (where the actual work of diplomacy gets done). So who got played? Trump got nothing out of it, Kim got nothing but this now-classic photo (though I'm betting a top drawer Singapore hotel would probably be a pleasure palace to a great leader such as this), and the world isn't any safer. Indeed! The USA-North Korea relationship seems to be exactly where it was this time last year. After all the weird shit that has gone down in the last 12 months, we're in the exact same place! The Singapore Summit will go alongside Al Capone's Vaults for all-time over-hyped letdowns.


The setup: Unlike the G7 which could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice, NATO is so rock solid that dissolving it would likely take a major war or multiple presidential administrations. The general perception that Trump clamoring for the Europeans to spend more on defense was some great crisis to the institution is just hogwash. The POTUS complaining about money is the purest indication that there isn't anything more important to complain about. So, though NATO is important while the G7 is not, this meeting was pretty much the same (though Shinzo Abe doesn't appear in this now-classic photo).

NATO 2018 (July 11, 2018)

The takeaway: I think Trump genuinely believes the Europeans should pay more for their defense. And since the USA is paying so much for European defense, if POTUS really had something he wanted to discuss about the defense of Europe, I think he'd be eager to talk about it. Turns out there isn't anything to say about Ukraine or Serbia or Montenegro, so Trump went back to complaining about money. Now personally I agree that the Europeans should be paying more for their defense, it is unifying and empowering on their part to exert their control over NATO (and letting American presidents have this much power over their borders sure looks kinda dumb right now, don't it?); but the Europeans aren't ready to go down that road, they're still figuring out how their money works, so letting the Americans shoulder the burden in staring down Putin is something that will continue for a while. Rather, the Europeans will go back to their constituencies and turn Trump's NATO rhetoric back to his trade war (presumably his method of extracting value from allies) and blame all their local problems on Trump (and they'll be successful because...well, he's a total douche). The good news is NATO is so rock solid and without problems, they can spend an entire summit together and just goof around on nonsense (like producing this now-classic photo).


The setup: Supposedly Trump called for a one-on-one summit with Putin a few months back and now the time had come for the two to go mano-a-mano (and the interpreters to go lingua-a-lingua). Tongues wagged worldwide but no one knew what Putin and Trump discussed even after this now-classic press conference.

Trump-Putin Summit (July 15, 2018)

The takeaway: I dunno. What do I care what they talked about? At this particularly point in time, neither of these guys has anything to offer the other. There's no room for USA to budge on Ukraine or sanctions, no room for Russia to budge on Syria, Iran or oil. (If they were talking about anything really juicy it was probably North Korea, who knows what Putin knows about Kim?) Trump's one taboo back home is anything related to Russia, so I suspect this meeting is purely for Trump to annoy his political foes (they are his lifeblood). There's nothing for Trump and Putin to talk about,so this meeting was likely purely social, just a coupla joes ditching their wives and commiserating over political nonsense. (Or perhaps they peed on hookers together or whatever the conspiracy theory du jour is, I can see that, too) At any rate, there's nothing for them to talk about, so what difference does it matter what was said?


We increasingly live in a world where people want their leaders to take pictures together. The G7, for example, is of little use but a photo op, the organization does nothing, discusses nothing, administers nothing, and isn't even what it purports to be (top 7 economies in the world....so why isn't China there? India? Saudi Arabia? Or even *gasp*...Russia?). Seriously, the G7 does not need to exist and if Donald Trump harrumphs around and ruins the get-together, then honestly....who gives a shit? I got a better idea: let's never have another G7 meeting ever again! I'm all for multi-lateral organizations that can get stuff done but the G7 is not one of those, it can be done away with. No way POTUS can screw up something that doesn't happen.

NATO, on the other hand, is not going away and if there were grave matters to discuss, they would get discussed....not by the leaders, of course, the serious matters would get discussed by the various under-secretaries that actually do that kind of work. When this many national leaders get together it is either to discuss something very important or something not important at all. (I got two grand on the latter, who's taking the former?) This is a meeting that doesn't need to happen and the only point of it is the sure spectacle of getting this many leaders together (want a grave matter? How about discussing how comfortable everyone is with NATO member Turkey invading two other countries for the purposes of genocide and seems to be intent on annexing their ill-gotten territory...are we cool with that? Hmmm....never came up). If any one of those leaders wants to grandstand and make it all about him/herself, they are free to do so because these meetings don't mean anything.

Now the Kim summit and Putin summit would appear to be different, right? These aren't annual meetings where nothing but a photo-op can possibly be accomplished. These are wildly out of the ordinary affairs where important stuff must be going on, right? Well, no. In the case of Trump, he clearly loves to engineer moments like these to grab the attention--and Americans love nothing more than giving Trump attention. Meeting with Kim felt like it was going to be a breakthrough, it was not; it was all whimper, no bang. And the meeting with Putin was meant to be confusing and anticlimactic, it was meant to produce an awkward press conference and nothing more because, again, these guys have nothing to offer each other except an ambiguous public appearance together.

Trump is really good at playing the American media. The media is a 24-hour beast that needs constant feeding and Trump loves to feed. Perhaps this is undignified of the office of President...meh, it is the media that devalues the presidency by failing to differentiate between the G7 (unimportant) and NATO (indispensable). It is the media that pisses in the pool by not differentiating between the presidency and some other attention-hungry celebrity (like, say, Stormy Daniels).

Trump is the effect, not the cause. We've been on this road a long time and Trump is the end of it. I don't know what comes next (at the moment it feels like another 4 year term for Trump, which is even more shocking than his original victory!) but after Trump all this shit will be different. I never really felt it before but a third party seems to be in the offing. The Republicans and Democrats are gradually skewing to their extremes, time for a middle way to emerge.

As for foreign policy, North Korea is the same problem it always was. Libya is a mess, Yemen is embarrassing for all thinking, feeling human beings, Syria is still a clusterfuck, Ukraine is no closer to resolution. Otherwise, not bad. Trade wars are not anyone's idea of a good time but the worst of it has yet to hit the fan and its not hard to imagine all this trade kerfuffle actually leading to new and improved trade relations for everyone. Our world leaders still have time for photo-ops and perhaps that is a good thing.

As for the state of Trump, here's the good news:

Trump just needs to not be the 6th guy, right?

Russia

Immediately after 9/11 it occurred to me that if USA allied with Russia then no force in the world would be able to compete with that alliance. There was a brief moment when that looked like it might happen when USA's military turned toward Arab terrorism rather than great power conflict and Russia was dealing with similar enemies (as was China) rather than being an inhibitor to American goals. That alliance didn't take shape.

Vladimir Putin was still fairly new at the job of Russian premier and when George W. Bush said that he felt that he could "trust" Putin, it brought down a firestorm from the Western intelligentsia. Rather than seeing a Bush-Putin accord as an overwhelming force, the critics saw a potential detente as a sign of Bush's stupidity in the face of Putin's cold calculation. Whether Bush actually took this criticism to heart is debatable (though I believe he probably he did) because USA's response to 9/11 was a unilateral move that shrugged off traditional American allies and enemies in a desire to go it alone. I don't think this was a response to Putin, rather I'd say it was triggered by France (in the Security Council) and Germany (in NATO) instead. I think Bush saw unilateralism as a preferred option anyway, as going in with UN and/or NATO approval would've limited USA's military capabilities, would've put Syria (a Security Council member at the time) in the chain of command, would've put Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds at odds, and might've sparked a militaristic movement in Germany, which would only have complicated the task of tracking down al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, Putin fought Islamic terrorists on his own instead of in concert with the Americans.

The way Bush backed away from a potential Russian alliance was indicative of the general American opinion of Putin. Presidents are American political animals that aren't terribly close to foreign leaders so they are reliant on military and intelligence advisers to shape their perceptions (and/or their rhetoric). The Pentagon's initial perception would've been that Putin was the iron fist behind the velvet glove of Yeltsin, that Putin was a return to the norm of Russian dictators after a brief period of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. That Putin is nothing but trouble has remained the American attitude for the last 20 years. Bill Clinton had no interest in dealing with Putin, George Bush had a moment of wanting to make Putin an ally but that passed quickly, and Obama was resolved to keep Putin at arm's length (*) for his entire tenure in office. And that's just the Oval Office response. Think of all the high level advisers during that time who saw Putin as the #1 threat to American interests in the world: Madeline Albright, William Cohen, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Admiral Mullen, Robert Gates, General Shalikashvili, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, and I think we can comfortably add General Mattis, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton to that list, as well.

I listened to two Russian author interviews recently that left me with a coupla details about Putin that have stayed with me: 1) when Boris Yeltsin was grooming Putin to succeed him back in the 1990s, Putin actually wanted to be made the CEO of Gazprom instead; Yeltsin refused to hear it but Putin didn't really want to be the leader of Russia; 2) all Putin has ever wanted to is to be down with the President of the United States; he thought he had that with Bush after 9/11 but that honeymoon never really got started before Bush was done with him (and virtually all other foreign leaders). I bring these details up because Donald Trump represents a clear difference from previous administrations. And though Trump is surrounded by Generals, he is clearly a guy that shrugs off advice when it suits him.

Trump, a non-politician, has met Putin in social company before. And would he have been paranoid of Putin? No. Quite the opposite! Trump probably sees Putin as a failure, a guy that's never really accomplished anything, a guy whose power has steadily eroded since he first appeared. Trump would respect Putin for being a really rich guy who has a firm grip on the Russian electorate, but a guy's whose foreign influence keeps shrinking and is hardly a threat at all. Trump would pity Putin for getting stuck with Russia when he really wanted a Gazprom (isn't Trump in the same situation now?Could've been a media tycoon instead he's stuck running the country). Since Putin came to power NATO and EU have grown right to his border, numerous former Soviet states are homes to Islamic Jihad, China is poaching central Asia, the Americans keep banging on North Korea, Turkey is pushing back in the Black Sea, Iran is pushing back in the Caucuses, Ukraine fell from his grasp and is now just a quagmire (**), and outside of Syria, he has no allies and no prospects for the future. Why on earth are we so afraid of him? He's done nothing but get smaller since he took power, yet we continue to act like he's Genghis Khan leading hordes to our doorstep.

Russia is naturally isolated. The terrain and the climate are harsh and the population is self-reliant and hearty. Diplomatically they continue to get even more isolated to the point where to me the danger is that Russia descends into a North Korea-like state where weapons and tough talk are their only exports. The difference is that Russia is a mighty nation that already has a nuclear arsenal--and knows what to do with it! And a population of 150 million people that have lurched toward becoming a productive middle class since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ehhh....okay....not sure Russia has really embraced the potential of free markets to give people opportunities free from gov't interference but a steady diet of embargoes and sanctions isn't helping the Russian economy. Yeah, the society is still riven by inequality, the electoral process is clearly a joke and there is only the slightest burgeoning of a free media, but it feels like more people have more control over their time and money than in the Soviet days. Russia could've collapsed into pure chaos and instead has soldiered along fairly well considering the West hasn't been any more helpful than any other time in history.

I've always kinda liked Putin because I think he's tried to navigate through the post-Soviet economy in a manner that allows a middle class to develop, that allows people to get educated and make the most of their economic opportunities. And if that strikes you as a rosy-glass observation, take a look back at Russia's history--there are no Abe Lincolns, no George Washingtons, not a single Gandhi in 1000 years of history! Russians have had a steady diet of iron-fisted tyrants and Putin strikes me as the most progressive leader they've ever had. Putin has a firm grip on his domestic constituency (as shown by his recent "landslide" re-election) but in terms of foreign policy he's at the mercy of global markets that are mostly unavailable to him or simply not in his favor.

The recent National Defense Strategy paper that signaled a move away from international terrorism and back to a focus on great powers (meaning Russia and China), takes us back to a potential alliance--in the long run. Making enemies is, for USA, the first step to making friends. When we fight an enemy, we beat the enemy, then we re-build a friend (***). That's the American way. But in this case we don't have to make war with Russia. Russia is in desperate need of friends, all we have to do is ally with them.

Now the news is filled with stories of Europeans expelling Russian diplomats and recalling their own from Russia in response to the attempted murder of a former Russian spy living the UK. (****) An already isolated Putin is about to get even lonelier. I don't see this as a good policy. Isolation leaves Russia with only military options and pushes them to ally with those that bedevil the West. We're allowing vague talk of Russian spycraft to cloud our judgement. We're letting domestic political memes to shape our foreign policy agenda. Instead of using Trump to make peace, we're encouraging him to make war. Instead of the Brits covering up spy stuff--which stays hidden 99% of the time--they're using it as political ammo.

The idea that the West can bully Russia into belching up another Yeltsin seems foolhardy at best. Putin's guaranteed to last another five years and though there is talk of his potential retirement, if he feels Russia is under attack, he'll stick around. Or worse: he'll be replaced by Putin 2.0.

Mikhail Gorbachev ain't walking through that door, folks. If we keep pushing Russia we may just push them into full fledged paranoid nihilism. Are we ready to topple all of civilization over some fucking Facebook ads? Putin still craves respect from the West. And the potential for war is all he's got left. It's going to get worse before it gets better--and I think it will get better. But not any time soon.


(*) During the 2008 election I thought the only clear advantage McCain had over Obama was Putin. I thought Obama was too green and Putin might eat him alive. I think Obama had a similar feeling and basically stayed away from Putin as much as possible for 8 years seeing him as nothing but a fox seeking a hen house.

(**) In the West we see Putin's aggression in Ukraine as a sign of his thirst for dominance. I'd suggest it's the exact opposite: he used to control Ukraine, he used to wake up every morning knowing that Ukraine was all his, then that fell apart and now he has to send in troops just to keep it half-together. That's not power, that's the erosion of power. And isn't Syria the same way? Syria was a reliable ally for decades but in the last 5 years or so, the place has fallen to shit and Putin has to exert all his energy just to keep it from completely shattering. That ain't how Bill Belichick wins games.

(***) And the flip side: we never went to war with Brazil, for example, we've just subtly bullied them for 200 years so we don't see them now as an enemy or an ally. We see Africa as a charity rather than an investment because we've never feared it enough to make war with it or needed it enough to co-opt it. We still don't know what to do with Cuba because, outside of two weeks in 1962, we've never thought about besting it and thus don't know how to be friends or enemies now. Our wars shape our peace.

(****) This may come off as incredibly naive but what the fuck do I care if spies kill each other? The initial reports I saw said that he was retired but lately I've seen more that say he was still in contact with British agencies, so was he working on something that makes this attack meaningful? Indeed, why would the British gov't even acknowledge his existence or his attempted murder--isn't outing a spy in public a crime?--so what is significant about this guy? If this is just old fashioned spy-vs-spy payback, then why are embassies around the globe removing diplomats? So should we assume that this guy was...say...spying on Russia...in which case, back to my previous question of why the fuck do I care if spies kill each other? This is either much deeper than it looks or just a lame excuse to get pissed at Putin, either way we're not getting the full story. (And isn't the guy's current condition awfully similar to how Yassar Arafat and Ariel Sharon both went out? Should the conspiracy theorists be digging up those bodies, too?)

Cambridge Analytica

Here's a BBC4 expose on how Cambridge Analytica worked for Donald Trump's campaign:


(Spoiler alert) These guys are taking credit for Trump's victory in 2016 because of their ability to target on-line media toward undecided voters which they say tipped the scale for Trump. The men shown here are pleased with their ability to inject ideas into the social fabric with virtually no record of having done so.

Okay. Is that illegal? Based on all those books in the library, I'm going to suggest that disseminating ideas through words and pictures is not illegal (or even out of the ordinary). Did this make any difference in the 2016 USA election? Possibly, but I don't see how the effect of this is any different from ordinary political advertising. I worked briefly for a political ad agency that specialized in 1-page mailers targeted to specific neighborhoods during specific elections (*). Did these mailers turn the tide for the incumbent? I don't know. Maybe. But I assure you my bosses took credit for the win.

So, assuming these Cambridge Analytica guys are not completely full of shit (a big assumption, actually), is this illegal activity? Maybe, but let's dig deeper into their methods.

Here's an interview with a Cambridge Analytica insider (Christopher Wylie):


So they created an app (well, they paid someone else to develop it, so not even proprietary technology--sheesh!), that collects the Facebook profiles of the friends of the users of the app. Is that illegal (**)? Aren't Facebook profiles out there for free to be collected? Data collection of public profiles doesn't strike me as illegal, indeed all they did was expedite the ability to collect the data. And how many profiles did they actually collect and how important was it to the mission? This whistleblower doesn't seem to know.

So the collection of the data doesn't seem illegal, what they did with the data doesn't seem illegal, so what just got exposed here?

Social media allows people to communicate with each other on-line in clumps, such that the exponential effect of your friends and their friends and the friends of their friends can get very large very quickly. Mining all of that data can give you a big pile of information and what Cambridge Analytica seems to have done is create a method for quickly piling up Facebook profiles. (I'm going to ignore the sidebar about private messages because Wylie is not specific about how that is even possible or what that info yielded) This amount of info is fine for creating big broad abstractions but I'd suggest it's of virtually no use to get people to vote a certain way. You can pick out which voters are more important than others (hardly an exact science, but it could be useful for targeting your message) and then pummel them with the types of ads you want them to be susceptible to (which incidentally is what Facebook itself is doing to you all day every day). But if that were actually effective then Coke would've run Pepsi out of business years ago (or vice versa).

How is any of this out of the ordinary? How is any of this illegal? How does any of this relate to Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter, who was surely using some other company that wasn't good, I presume)?

The candidate hires people to do all this political stuff. The candidate hires people to tell him what speech to give to what audience, for example, or which donors are more likely to give up big bucks and which should just be ignored. The candidate hires people to print handbills and bumper stickers and then distribute them in different times and places. The candidate doesn't do any of this stuff--indeed, it's better if they don't really understand how this stuff works.

And does it work? Well Cambridge Analytica is eager to make people think this system works. Remember: Cambridge Analytica gets paid for what it can make people think it can do, not for what it actually does....which is virtually impossible to detect--by its own design! Perfect for conspiracy theorists (and dimwitted but extremely wealthy political candidates).

Meanwhile, the FBI is also probing college basketball and getting splashy headlines about shoe companies and assistant coaches paying for players to go to certain schools and sign with certain agents, managers, etc. Why do I bring this up? Because college coaches are similarly insulated from the recruiting tactics of their underlings and boosters (over whom the coaches have no control whatsoever). The coach is given a list of players to pursue and puts on his best salesman smile to greet the parents in the living room. The money that changes hands never goes through the head coach (it better not anyway!). We all know money changes hands...this is hardly surprising, right?

College sports is thoroughly corrupt, it always has been and we know this. Like politics, college sports has a framework that has been in place for years that is thoroughly corrupt and everyone has always known it. This is not a grand conspiracy theory, this is just the way of things: players don't always get paid....but some do.

But if the corruption itself is always meant to skew competitive balance, then how did this happen:

UMBC 74-54 Virginia


Why aren't we blaming Putin for this? This is waaaaaay more shocking than Trump defeating Hillary! And waaaaay more out of the ordinary than any of the shenanigans so far reported in the 2016 election--that was a 135-game winning streak that went down.

Look, social media is full of nonsense messages from unknown sources. So is the Bible, so is the Encyclopedia Britannica, so is virtually any history book ever written and your daily horoscope. Even well known stories sometimes turn out to be mostly false, such as this new investigation into the Tulip Mania of the 1630s shows (https://theconversation.com/tulip-mania-the-classic-story-of-a-dutch-financial-bubble-is-mostly-wrong-91413). The opposite happens too: the Iliad and the Odyssey were thought to be merely fanciful works of imagination until Heinrich Schliemann dredged up evidence of just such a battle in ancient Troy.

The difference now is there are more people than ever before spreading more versions of "truth" than ever before and more people listening to what everyone else is saying. There's more content for more audience and ever larger emotions that must go into it all. We all know what a viral video is, the concept by now is well-ingrained. Still my favorite:


Rather than proving collusion--or even criminality--during the 2016 election, this shows me that that was as perfectly normal an election as we've ever had in this country. This isn't out of the ordinary at all, this is just how we do things. I still believe--more firmly than ever!--that the reason Donald Trump is president is because the American people went to the polls and voted for him. I still don't know why, maybe crappy viral videos on Facebook is the answer. I doubt it but I suppose its possible. But even if that were true...so what? How is this different or criminal? Did we get into the Spanish-American War based on great information? Did we really understand the implications of the San Francisco Gold Rush or the Mexican War or the brokered Democratic Convention of 1852? Why on earth did Americans vote for Richard Nixon or Benjamin Harrison or Warren G. Harding? Who knows? People do weird shit.

Personally I think these Cambridge Analytica guys are just a bunch of shit talkin' capitalists. They get paid to help candidates do stuff that candidates typically know nothing about, thus these guys are bragging about their achievements when I'm not convinced they achieved anything at all. (***) This is the digital version of alchemy. Don't forget: for hundreds of years the best educated minds of the Western world spent their time trying to convert lead into gold...didn't work. Smart people do stupid shit, too. Furthermore, this does not prove collusion with Donald Trump (in fact, I'd say it proves the exact opposite) or Vladimir Putin (who I'm guessing had never heard of Cambridge Analytica until BBC4's "expose"). I can't help thinking this investigation is just a grand effort of sublimation, this is the gov'ts way of helping the citizenry to ignore the fact that we spend way too much time on Facebook.

As for the 2016 election: hey, don't blame me, I voted for Grumpy Cat.


(*) The run-off of the 1999 San Francisco mayor's race to be precise, which you can read about here: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_mayoral_election,_1999). Hmmm....the Wikipedia page doesn't mention soft money coming in from Sweden, but I heard tales about it at the time.
(**) He does suggest that they were also getting "some" private messages, though he doesn't explain how that happened or how many people were affected by this or how they used the information collected. This is almost surely illegal but doesn't seem to have been the key to any of their technical successes.
(***) Isn't the lesson here that a 3rd party can pick out states with enough electoral votes, then cherry pick the 4 or 5 things those districts have in common and then groom a candidate to say nothing but those things? I presume you wouldn't even need the whole states, just a bunch of districts within those states that could turn the whole electoral count. Isn't that what Cambridge Analytica basically saying that they just did?

Me (Part Two)

Generally on this blog I look at the world the way a gambler looks at football: I want to predict an outcome, not simply root for one team or the other. Of course the difference between foreign policy and sports is that sports actually has outcomes where foreign policy just keeps going and going and going... In my previous posts I'm sure I have dribbled out a fair amount of rooting interest--I certainly have my prejudices--but mostly I'm just trying to wrap my head around what I encounter when I read about the world. What I want to do here is actually come to grips with what I hope happens or what I think the best or highest outcome for the world as whole.

I don't see the globe as a fractious place where various peoples of the world battle for dominance. Quite the opposite. I see the world as more connected than ever before, where transportation and communication technologies are quickly shrinking the differences between us. I see a rising population of people contributing to a global rather than regional economy (and getting rewarded for it), I see the rules and norms of the world subtly blending into one unified vision of Humanity. I envision a world where everyone is...let me say...on the same page. That needn't be USA's vision of the world, but a larger structure where everyone's interests flatten, come together and prosper in concert rather than in opposition. We're not there yet--might not be for hundreds of years--but I think that's where we're going and each day is a heavy footfall in that direction.

Lovely vision, right? Harmony for everyone, Humanity all in unison as no time since the Garden of Eden (or...well...even earlier than that, huh?). Yeah, that's the long run vision, the Aristotelian Golden Mean writ large, where everyone works and plays in relative equanimity. But that's an abstract. Aristotle tells you that you should average everything out but that doesn't tell you whether your next choice will be good or bad. That doesn't tell you when to say 'yes' or  'no', doesn't protect you from moment to moment defeats, rebukes or disappointments.

Pessismism about the world arises out of 1) the endemic nature of the media, which can only focus on what goes wrong in the world rather than what goes right; and 2) the political world, which sees itself as problem-solving and thus can only see the problems of the world. I am convinced that the good things are vastly more pervasive than the bad things but go unnoticed because our empathy is toward suffering rather than happiness and our attention is to improving rather than maintaining. I am convinced there are more happy people than sad and more happy people now than at any other time in history. But the sad people (and there are more of those, too) get more attention because as problem solvers we focus on the out of the odinary rather than the ordinary.

Social media is a platfrom capable of finding like-minded individuals who in previous times never would've found each other. This is a boon for gamers, gawky teenagers, homosexuals, cat owners, musicians, porn enthusiasts, art lovers, lovely singles, collectors and craftsmen of all sorts, etc., but also for political radicals, the vengeful, the discontented, the aggrieved, the suicidal, the homocidal and (especially!) the passive aggressive. The trick is: those are all the same people drifting back and forth betwen categories. At any rate, these social media platforms bring us in contact with people in a way apart from traditional social and political milieus. We can connect on something more than our immediate surroundings. 

The closer we become suddenly the more we care about the World (yes, capital "W" World). Social media is a full time presence in our lives now (*) and makes us care about People, Ideas, Cultures, etc., in ways Humans never really have before, or have only on the Family level. We are now having those meaningful and productive interactions on the Species level and that's a whole new ballgame historically speaking. Most of the current animosities we see today are ancient but the way we deal with them is entirely new to us as thinking creatures. It also makes the pain more immediate. The fear, the anger, the sadness, the regret, the disappointment all over the world is now front and center all day long.

Imagine the Thirty Years' War. It lasted (as you might've guessed) 30 years and considering the build up to it was probably another 30 years, it was pretty much an ever present reality to an entire generation (or two or three) of Humans. In that time and that place, there was a batch of people that lived with this constant threatening presence called the Thirty Years War. But its worth noting that they fought wars different in those days: they didn't fight when the weather was bad, they generally tried not to interupt planting or husbandry seasons, they didn't fight in the winter, etc. They mostly just got together every now and then, went out into a field and kicked the shit out of each other til one side quit fighting. Then maybe they'd come back the next day and do it again (as long as it wasn't raining). So the "war" as a political issue was every single day of their lives but "war" as a battlefield death match was an occasional feature, probably predictable as clockwork and much more formalized and ritualized than we would recognize today. (**) There was an overal feeling of war and there was an immediate feeling of war that were entirely separte and distinct feelings.

As we gradually advance to the higher state of evolution that we are just now embarking on, each day will come with more calamity than progress. Some calamities will seem shocking and new, some calamities will be as old as time. Some calamities will be minor and local, some will be massive and indelable upon human development. Some will last entire lifetimes, others will be over in the blink of an eye. Some will ultimately make the world a better place, some will fester far into the future.

At this point the most far-reaching shocks to the system will be financial more than military. And the great power that strong countries will exert on weak countries will be economic rather than military. China is attempting to clear out and reconfigure Central Asia and there will be much conflict. But most of that conflict will be in stock markets, currencies and local economies rather than raining fire from the sky. (There will be some of that, as well) India and Japan are going to be bribing as many nations as they can find to choose Japanese or Indian Coke over Chinese Pepsi, but they won't be doing it with tank divisions or fighter bombers. They'll be co-opting nations through bond purchases and trade packages and infrastructure development (and kickbacks and slush funds and propaganda campaigns...these Asian political systems are as advanced as the West!).

So while I see things getting better over time, in the short run there will be no shortage of accidents, wars, atrocities, skirmishes, embarassments, and setbacks. Things may even appear to get worse. In the past, imperial armies raged through territories prized for their food production or simply because of an inherent military advantage; but now we have well-delineated nations and a system of int'l law that seeks to protect the agreed-upon borders. This hasn't stopped war nor are the lines drawn in a manner that pleases all people, but it is the beginning of a world order where war is less likely and, more importantly, less advantageous. Wars are harder and less profitable than ever before because of a system of alliances that punish even the victors of battle. But individually we are more free from our national or tribal alliances than ever before. Like the 30 Years War, the abstract reality of conflict  will always be there but the day-to-day reality free from great power war will expand to more and more people.

In all of this must come a consideration of simple population. As the numbers of humans rises, there are more people living good lives and more people living bad lives simultaneously. There are more people with more access to wealth and privliege and more people with less access to wealth and privelege. There are more people pleased with the order of things and more people displeased with the order of things. The borders are drawn but the borders are still brand new and not everyone will agree on the current configuration. The riches are growing but they will not be evenly distributed--they never were in the past and they aren't likely to be in the future. (***) And regardless there will always be sad stories, there will always be people that don't have enough, children that don't make it to adolescence, disasters that upend entire cities even as the threadcounts of sheets continues to soar.

Does the slow sleazy spread of int'l finance (what the kids would call "capitalism") and crony Democracy (ehh, I'm using the term loosely, really I just mean some sense of nationalist popular representation regardless of its electoral composition), across the globe worry you? Ehh, it ain't the greatest but it has a soothing effect on the overall mood of the world. The interlocking nature soothes more than it ruffles--though the ruffles are felt most immediately.

Beware: the danger of this world is that the "haves" never have enough, so while the "have nots" get steadily marginialized, their numbers will be perpetually regenerated, though with ever-changing but permanently mal-formed grievances. What I'm painting is a world of abstract stability but local instability, where the great powers generally agree on stuff but individual citizenry virtually never agrees on enough. This is called "World Peace" and we're getting closer to it every day. And though the wars will fade away, the battles will never cease. They will just move from bigger to smaller (re: fewer to more numerous).

The aforementioned Chinese incursion into Central Asia, for example, will (I believe) eventually lead to a more incuslive, larger, healthier, better educated population of humans in those territories in the long run; but in the short run, revolutionary elements (Uighars specifically and jihadis in general) will be fought (and I suspect defeated), leading to a new future of chaos, oppression, paranoia and full fledged war. And in the long run, even if those populations find themselves living longer, healthier, more productive lives, they will want even longer, even healthier, even more productive lives and will still burn with resentment of their foreign overlords. Do you see how it works? Wealth produces stability, which only produces a desire for more wealth. We can empathize with suffering and while suffering will never cease, the nature of suffering will become something all together frustrating and harder to sympathize because stability produces restlessness.

"Better" only creates a new threshold of want. Survival only creates a new threshold of bitterness. Education only creates a new threshold of anguish and frustration. Helping disadvantaged people reach modernity will not necessarily create more happiness. But it is where markets and governments feel compelled to go. And the people will be brought along whether they like it or not.

Wait...what happened to lovely vision? It's still there. The good and the bad are simultaneous and will remain so as the world gets better (or worse, depending on where you stand). Yes, the borders are in place, the international relationships are in place and they will create a steady move toward stability. But they have much evolution ahead.

I believe bringing more people into modern economies and cultures and educational and professional systems will bring more inventions, more innovations, more discoveries, more cure for diseases, more saving of lives, more improvement of lives (and tons and tons more art). But it will also produce huge chunks of people that do not see the benefit: some because they will not have access to it, others because they don't believe in it, others because they're simply unlucky, others because they yearn for something that is long gone (or never was to begin with). The world is moving toward longer life spans, more opportunities for personal enrichment and fulfillment; but this will only create a larger population of people who want more stuff, more respect, more recognition. The demand curve for happiness never goes down, thus can never be satisfied.

I had meant to discuss what I wanted for the world but really I just ended up talking about where I think it will go. In short, large institutions with the most financial resources and large gov'ts with the most military resources will continue to bend the world's humans into its sway. And even though most people will be better off physically and materially, they won't necessarily be any more satisfied philosophically or spiritually. And while that sounds bad....my assumption is that's what was going to happen anyway...and I think it'll will come with a lot less bloodshed that the direst of us imagine.

A quick example of what I mean: the Islamic State is a Sunni Arab creation meant to harken back to the days of the grand pan-Arab Caliphate from the 7th century (that, more or less, went out of business in the 1920s); the organization as we know it arose from Western Iraq where the Sunnis had been pushed from power and took to terror tactics and hit-and-run military techniques to amass an impressive swath of territory along the Euphrates River. The organization was militarily defeated but most of the adherents simply returned home where they will wait until called back into service (which has actually happened several times before already). They will continue to fight modernity and yearn for a by-gone time...by staying connected on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube on their iPhones in their SUVs.

So you tell me: has the West defeated the Islamic State? The Islamic State will come back again and again...but only if Western technology survives. The West has created a digital platform that will keep its enemies intact and fighting ad infinitum; but the enemy would eventually turn to dust without the West's technological innovations. (Interconnectedness is a bitch, man)

So in short: I see the world falling intro regional collectives like Europe, NAFTA, East Asia, Arab League States, Sub-Saharan Africa, Mercosur States, Central America/Caribbean, with Russia, Australia and maybe India, Israel and Iran always staying relatively distinct). It is in these larger structures where technological advances are made, where economic smoothing and cultural integration gradually become a set of agreed-upon standards. Then ever larger standards can emerge built around politics and commerce rather than warfare. What I'm suggesting is a world where more people live longer, more productive, more stable lives; though unfortunately, these things, strangely enough, rarely lead to true happiness or fulfillment. The world is getting better but that in and of itself will only lead to a grander feeling of dissatisfaction.

The lot of wealthy individual is a steady diet of malaise and such is our collective fate. Personally, I'm looking forward to it.



(*) Facebook as a company is the leader at the moment. What it does is invaluable to us as a people, but Facebook itself can be replaced by next Tuesday. It may have a first mover advantage on the business end but it can flame out and die on the cultural end that could be catastropic and immediate. The technology will advance and continue on, but the culture may well reevaluate Facebook out of existence with a quickness.

(**) In the West we have more or less replaced these pitched battles with soccer and football (both actually derived from rugby). We have turned the grubby, ugly, dangerous business of battle into a money making mass entertainment. Not to everyone's tastes but I enjoy it and there are a plethora of other educational and/or time killing endeavors out there for those that don't care for sport.

(***) Basically put: wealth is not equal in society because it was not equal in nature. The Arabs got all that sand, the Eskimos got all that snow, how do we ever make them "equal"? What would that mean and what would be the purpose of it? Is there a single definition of "equal"?

Me (Part One)

I listened to a podcast the other day of two foreign policy gurus trying to rigidly define their own philosophical beliefs. Frankly I thought it was an annoying conversation and kinda pointless. But I invariably found myself trying to define my own views in reference to their beltway delineations. I'd like to get to an examination of my larger philosophical views but I feel like I have to place myself within the contemporary political milieu before I move on.

I've written this here before but just to reiterate: I grew up in a Libertarian household. I am not a Libertarian but I highlight this for two reasons: 1) I have never been a Democrat or a Republican and feel no fealty to either party and 2) I believe the gov't's purpose is to protect and promote the citizenry's access to free markets, anything else discussed is just politics, not gov't. I am not a natural born political person, indeed I eschew all that partisan stuff with a fury. The parties are not the gov't and their manipulative bickering is utterly self-serving and only tangentially beneficial to the republic (if at all). The flaw of the Republican Party is that they want unlimited economic growth but they don't want anything to ever change socially (which clearly ignores the fact that economic growth is a result of innovation (re: new stuff) which by its very nature is either a cause or effect of some change in the society); the flaw of the Democratic Party is they want unlimited personal expression but they don't see that as a function of living in a thriving economy (I'm not going to make the argument that rich people are better than poor people, but its clear that wealthier people have more opportunities of expression and by extension more self to express and by locking people into poverty you are cutting off their ability to grow as human beings; thus the point is to grow as many people wealthy as possible)). Also, I'm a foreign policy watcher as opposed to being a domestic political animal, which makes the Libertarian Party pretty much useless to me, as they seem to think that beyond America's borders is nothing but ocean. So I have no political affiliation and I find our contemporary cultural fascination with making everything political to be self-defeating (and really annoying).

The current political obsession (at least what I get from NPR each morning when my alarm goes off) is Donald Trump's relation to Russian provocateurs during the 2016 election. My gut feeling is that in an investigation of this sort Trump and his crew are the easiest part to follow, such that anything there is to find has already been found. What smoking guns could possibly be out there at this point? In the political realm, this doesn't matter. The point is to extend the investigation merely to besmirch Trump's reputation (wow, that's like throwing rotten fruit at a pile of rotten vegetables!) and I expect the investigation to last at least through the mid-term elections in November with or without new revelations. Do I have a rooting interest? No, not really. This is just what politicians do to each other nowadays. Ever since Newt Gingrich went full throttle after Bill Clinton in the 1990s, this is just par for the course (I'm sure this behavior goes further back than that, but that's my personal recollection). And if Trump is guilty (or guilty-looking enough) to get impeached, what do I care? We'll just get a new president that I probably won't pay much attention to and who will inherit a large chunk of population dedicated to thwarting him on day one regardless of his interactions with Russian trolls (indeed, if we think of Trump as illegitimate, wouldn't we think that even more of Pence?).

Do I think Donald Trump is guilty of collusion with Russian agents? No, but that doesn't really matter. I have no doubt that foreign agents are cyber-attacking the USA every single day, which is why I paid no mind to the original accusations against Hillary Clinton before the election. Dude, I assure you the Pentagon and the State Department are getting hacked right now (and will be again if you read these words again), it's just the way of things these days. I doubt Hillary Clinton did less than her duty in protecting the contents of gov't servers and I doubt Donald Trump did either--which is not to say that either or both of them are innocent of malfeasance. Cybersecurity is a full time job and I doubt Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump (or Vladimir Putin) have ever held that job or pondered very deeply on the topic. And why stop at the gov't? Amazon, Wal-Mart, Facebook and Google have much more valuable stores of info waiting to be hacked--the difference is they're actually going to do something about it whereas the gov't is always last to figure out what's going on.

I'll go ahead and say something controversial: I believe that Donald Trump won the 2016 election because Americans went to the polls and voted for him. I don't know why they did and I'm convinced that Trump was as surprised by that as I was, but I believe the Americans chose the person they wanted to be president free from Russian interference. Were Russians interfering? Oh, undoubtedly, as Russians hackers attempt to interfere with everything all the time, whether or not there's an election on. But Americans aren't swayed by Facebook, it is a place to confirm what they already believe, not a place to encounter new ideas.

Investigations have already proven that Russian agents took out numerous Facebook ads in 2016...this is proof to me that there was no Russian interference. How many Japanese Facebook ads were there in 2016? How about Ethiopian? French? Lithuanian? Or do we assume that Russia is the only country that has access to Facebook and a rooting interest in American elections? And let me get this straight: is the Mueller investigation trying to prove that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in a hotel room in Atlantic City so that Trump could help Putin....buy some Facebook ads? Hmmm, I doubt that happened and even if it did, it doesn't have anything to do with the election. Were Russian hackers meddling in American affairs? Yes, of course they were. They still are and have been for as long as computers have been available in Russia. What does that have to do with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? Nothing. Why would it?

I say all that to dismiss this political witchhunt stuff pronto. I doubt that anything nefarious happened, I doubt that it would matter even if nefarious things did happen, I doubt there'd be proof available to find if anything happened anyway, and I doubt that any of it had any effect on the election. And even if I'm completely wrong and Trump is guilty, I still don't care. I am convinced this is all just political noise (*). Putting the executive under permanent investigation isn't necessarily a bad thing, though in this environment, it's just prurient entertainment rather than serious inquiry, which is sad and wasteful but not atypical in our culture. I would note at the moment that the waste is mostly on the Left: every morning that NPR babbles about Trump it's a morning they're not babbling about the environment or labor relations or healthcare or race issues, etc. NPR is abrogating their responsibility to a myriad of other issues because they'd rather feed the schadenfreude of their Hillary-voting listeners. Oh well, their loss.

Do I like Donald Trump? No. The nicest thing I can say about him is I rather enjoy having a president that I can comfortably ignore. My problem with Barack Obama for example was that I kept trying to like the guy, but what was there to like? His empty rhetoric was more gentle and soothing than most politicians...but every bit as empty. At least with Trump I am confident I have no chance of liking him or in any way needing to hear anything he says. A friend of mine recently lamented the awful spectacle kids today are growing up with, but I think its good for children to learn early on that the President of the United States is not really someone worth paying attention to. POTUS is a fungible commodity and as I've suggested in previous posts, it is a purely political position with more responsibility than power and thus mostly just a suffering of slings and arrows. I don't need the President to reassure me or entertainment me or whatever it is people get out of listening to the President talk. And with Trump around, that feeling is only magnified.

As a foreign policy guy, have I seen any changes in American policy in Trump's first year? Not really. North Korea has dominated Trump's agenda so far but I would suggest that North Korea is a can that presidents have been kicking down the road for decades and the end of the road seems to be approaching. Trump has seized on it for the purpose of selling weapons systems in Asia the way Obama seized on Putin's adventures in Ukraine to sell weapon systems in Eastern Europe. Trump is a little louder than previous presidents but the policy itself is no different. (I think as soon as the Winter Olympics is over all the rhetoric from both sides will ramp back up and I think military action is a strong possibility; I'll expand on this in a future post)

Trade policy is clearly something Trump...well, talks a lot about. Yes, he kinda talks like a Neanderthal but rhetoric is part of the process. The reportage of rhetoric is part of it too: NAFTA re-negotiations were set to take place regardless of who won the election but if Hillary had been elected I'm sure we'd hear less about it. The American public would probably just get random vague updates of 'everything's fine' whether it was fine or not; whereas Trump's style is to bluster around in public when this is the kind of thing most politicians would soft pedal in the press. Oh well, that's the man's style. Maybe it'll work, maybe not. I dunno. I can understand why people wouldn't like his style but I wouldn't say that the style in and of itself is illegitimate or guaranteed to fail. I don't know that it is. Is the actual negotiation any different? Probably not. The negotiations themselves will be handled by a variety of under-secretaries steeped in farm subsidies and tobacco regulations and emissions measurements and blah blah blah details that no single person could possibly understand. I think the public relations is unique to Trump but the actual deal itself is not likely to be wildly different from what President Hillary would've ended up with.

Both disavowed the TPP (which actually perfectly dovetailed with Trump's wariness of China though he never seemed to notice that), with Trump suggesting that multi-lateral deals are inherently bad; I don't mind more bi-lateral deals but to suggest the multi-lateral deals are a priori bad is just a dumb thing for a president to say even if he actually believes it.

Trump removed USA from the Paris Climate Accord. Meh. The Accord itself is nothing but symbolism and removing USA from the Accord is also nothing but symbolism. And when the next president puts USA back in the Accord, it'll still be nothing but symbolism. I don't see that it has any effect whatsoever on the actual environment or even on the nature of int'l environmental negotiation. In short, the Accord never meant anything to me so USA not being in it doesn't mean anything to me (and USA inevitably triumphantly returning to it will still mean nothing to me). Removing USA from the Accord was just a piece of pure rhetoric designed to be a finger in the eye of Trump's political enemies (because...well, honestly, the Accord doesn't have any other purpose). Yeah, I think it's stupid but the way politicians talk to each other has been stupid for hundreds of years (**).

Trump pledged to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, causing much uproar around the globe. But why? Do you realize that Congress just passed that same resolution last summer? Do you realize that every American president since HW Bush (and most all of the losing candidates) have made the same pledge? Moving the embassy to Jerusalem is something that has been pledged numerous times in the last 20 years, why does everyone care now? Moving an embassy will take at least 10 years, no way this happens until after Trump's well out of office--which is the same as saying it won't happen. So this move that won't happen that has been promised many times before...why does everyone care now? Y'all pay much too attention to Trump. He's just a doofus with a Twitter account. But he's president, you say; yeah, the president is a doofus with a Twitter account. He's president so most everything he says is gonna be empty nonsense and he's Donald Trump, which only ups the percentage of empty nonsense to come from his mouth. So why does everyone pay attention to him? I don't get it, I find him very easy to ignore.

Trump constantly threatens to revoke (or rescind or not renew or whatever the proper language is) the Iran nuclear accord. Critics of Trump suggest this is simply a move to un-do the Obama legacy and while that is certainly part of Trump's calculus, I think these critics are underestimating the power this talk has on Iran's actions. The recent protests in Iran were largely about the Iranian population's dissatisfaction with gov't spending and foreign policy signaling a desire for a gov't more responsive to the citizenry. Now I don't think the Iranian leadership is feeling particularly threatened by this but they have been warned that the people will be pissed if the economy returns to its pre-nuclear deal state. And Trump can exert a great deal of leverage over that. Most presidents are more politic about how they use their leverage, most aren't as naked as Trump, but all presidents do what they need to do to get the best deal. All of them. So, again, while his style is kinda crass, in this case the end effect is not wildly out of line from what US presidents do all the time.

Trump's obsession with border walls, travel restrictions and trade embargoes strikes me as a serious step backward that I cannot endorse in any way. But realistically they are tools available to an executive and politically speaking they're not wildly out of left field. Bill Clinton built most of the wall we currently have with Mexico (which was initially built by Mexico, incidentally). Countries have borders, sometimes delineated by walls but virtually always accompanied by some kind of bureaucratic formality. I personally don't believe more walls are necessary, barriers work both ways and I'm never in favor of more of them. But discussing how best to protect our borders is not inherently racist or even xenophobic. It wouldn't be the top of my agenda if I were president--and I don't agree with Trump's position--but the fact that he has a position is not shocking or particularly threatening. This is all part of the debate that gov'ts have.

As for travel restrictions I'll resort to another contemporary political argument: gun advocates like to suggest that regulating guns will only leave guns in the hands of the criminals as the laws are only effective on the law-abiding. Likewise with travel restrictions: the 'bad dudes' you're trying to keep out will find some other method to get here because they're not coming here to follow the laws. The only people affected by travel restrictions are the people that will honor our customs--which is precisely the people we should welcome! This is is the one area of Trump's potential alienation of our allies that worries me: we're more likely to keep out allies than enemies with policies or even rhetoric like this.

Trade barriers are stupid 100% of the time. Trade should be unfettered forever. Even in the middle of war, I'd be inclined to trade with our enemies. Trade is a human right not a hostage of the State!

Trump wants to increase military spending, but that's certainly nothing new. I perceive this as a subtle reach toward bi-partisanship more than militaristic bluster.

Trump is critical of NATO and while I don't want to say I agree with him, I do think he has a point: Europe should be embracing their own defense as a means of establishing a common identity and to funnel their energies into their own protection rather than waiting for someone else to do it. I don't say that as an aggrieved American but as someone that wants to see a strong Europe. I think Europe is missing a big opportunity to coalesce and industrialize and become truly more independent. The EU merely takes baby steps in this direction and Trump hasn't actually instituted any kind of diminution of American influence in NATO, which I think even he would see as a mistake. I would suggest NATO is a clear example of the difference between his rhetoric (riling up voters for America first-ness) and reality (NATO gives USA ungodly amounts of control over Europe, foolish for any president to give that up).

Cyber-security, for better or worse, is something Trump is going to reshape considerably. I know nothing about that stuff but I can tell it's high priority in the bureaucracy these days. I can only hope the powers that be (and that surely does not include Trump) will make the right choices and allocate wisely. (Won't stop Russian trolls--or other foreign entities--from meddling in our elections, though. Just saying...)

Domestically, Trump was able to push through a tax cut, which his benefactors must've truly appreciated (and given the looming interest rate hikes coming in 2018, probably not a bad idea for economic stimulation). And he was more or less able to deconstruct Obama-care but I'm undecided on that topic: the larger population needs something but I don't know that Obama-care was it. I was impressed by its ability to make insurance available to more people but not impressed with its ability to make AFFORDABLE insurance available to more people. (And, oh by the way: insurance is not healthcare, it is the monied bureaucracy behind healthcare, which is not at all the same thing. The fact that we started with more bureaucracy rather than more healthcare was the red flag that Obama-care was not the savior of our republic. That said, scrapping it without a new plan in place is hardly a bold leap forward) I suspect that after November Trump may introduce some new health care plans (I recall him being a fan of dedicated savings accounts for healthcare, which isn't a bad start).

And, yeah, Trump talks talks talks in a manner that the NPR crowd really can't stand. But what do I care? 30 seconds of NPR and I'm out of bed turning off the radio like a champ. Otherwise...I dunno....is there something truly noteworthy about Trump? He's an idiot (Touche. But hardly America's first idiot). He's sexist and racist (Oh, he's a pig but I'm not sure how deeply that touches his legislative or foreign policy agenda; his weakness is blind support for the people that support him). He's bad for our children (Too much TV or social media is bad for everyone and that's where you're most likely to see Trump, so to preserve your health, turn it off). He's bad for gov't (I'd say the worst part of Trump on that level is that he was so shocked to win that he was way behind on a proper transition team which has left him with numerous unfilled posts and surrounded by folks that can't survive the political tribulations; but I can't help thinking that that's his problem, not mine). I dunno....are there other complaints?

I don't like Trump, I just don't care about him or his pointless talk (I suspect I'd think the same of President Hillary). I wanted to like President Obama but he was such a weak executive and he wasn't a foreign policy guy. I wanted to dislike George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but rather liked them both. I didn't realize how much I liked HW Bush until he was long out of office. To echo the author David Halberstam: I didn't care for President Reagan but a lot of folks that I respect liked him a lot, so I feel conflicted. I only vaguely remember Jimmy Carter (but my studies have led me to believe he was one of the worst presidents we've ever had and that the mid-1970's in general were among America's most difficult periods to govern in a variety of ways). I don't remember Ford (and he doesn't really count anyway) and Nixon was gone by the time I was of TV-watching age. Those are the presidents of my lifetime. (***)

I was hoping to avoid ever talking about Trump on this blog but I felt I had to get a belch of it out of the way before I moved on to other things. So in future posts I will return to the opening paragraph and try to define myself as myself now that I've tried to place myself within the contemporary landscape. (Whew! I look forward to never thinking about most of this domestic junk ever again!)


(*) If the goal is to get Trump impeached, I'd suggest going after these porn star liaisons that are coming out of the woodwork. If he's paying them off out of campaign funds, then lawsuits start happening and Congress gets moving. This Russia stuff is not really meant to be discovered--do you think Congressional Republicans really wanted to know what was going on in Benghazi? No, they just wanted to look like they were trying to get to the bottom of something. And Mueller is hoping every day that he finds only enough to string this along and let other events dictate whether he condemns Trump or not.

(**) Go back and study the election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams--those guys are on your money!--saying the most embarrassing, mean-spirited lies about each other just to be president. Its sad and stupid and wasteful and the way we've been doing it since the very beginning. If you think it used to be better then you've never studied history.

(***) And just for good measure, here's a quick rundown of the thwarted candidates of my lifetime: Mondale (good god, I think he would've been awful), Dukakis (such a poor candidate, so uninspiring, had so little to offer), Dole (born to be in the Senate, don't see why he even wanted the White House), Gore (don't get me started: one of my least favorite humans of all time), Kerry (didn't even looked like he wanted to be president, though I thought a shockingly competent Secretary of State), McCain (meh, he was too old, didn't really think one way or the other about him), Romney (the ultimate stuffed shirt Republican), Hillary (I've written on this blog that I thought her presidency would have been like George W. Bush's presidency with a bit more success in pragmatic bi-partisanship).

The Mueller Investigation

After a year of diligent searching, the Mueller investigation has finally handed down its first indictments: a handful of Russian hackers working for a few minor Russian corporations. The crime was identity theft and some mail fraud, etc.: Russian agents stole identities to create bank accounts which in turn were used in social media events. Their aim seems to have been thwarting Hillary Clinton and using American social networking sites to generally spew out hamfisted propaganda against her and in favor of her opponents. There is no mention of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin being anywhere near this stuff, though we may assume that this is the initial volley of indictments rather than the culimnation of the process.

Okay...so what? Russian trolls are hacking the United States in some way every single day and have been for years. I would submit China, Israel, France, UK, Iran and any number of Latin American countries have been, too. This is the way of modern technology, it has little to do with politics. If I were a hacker I wouldn't care about the gov't, I'd rather get into Amazon or the banks (who get hacked all the freakin' time!), those are the places with worthwhile information. And, as for American elections, well, as an American I've been unimpressed with them my whole lifetime, don't really see why any foreinger would care. But the scuttlebutt around this is Putin was angry with Hillary Clinton (and Goldman Sachs, another great target for hackers) over the release of the Panama Papers in 2015, which damaged Putin's money laundering schemes and which he took as a personal attack by Hillary. The 2016 election meddling seems to have begun with an 'anyone but Hillary' mindset that favored Bernie Sanders initially and Donald Trump later on.

Does this prove collusion? No. It doesn't even suggest collusion. Foreign agents wouldn't need collusion--indeed, trying to reach out to any American politicians in the middle of this would probably be a really bad idea! They wanted to rile up the voters--not the politicians--and with Facebook, etc., that is easily done because Americans are in a permanently riled up state anyway.

So does this prove that the Russian interference made a difference in the 2016 election? No. To my mind, it shows the exact opposite. Americans are primed to support the candidate they like and to hate the candidate they don't like and any piece of info that confirms their initial prejudices is likely to be seized on regardless of its source. Undecided voters (the ones that actually swing the elections in America) are probably less prone to this kind of propaganda because they're likely to give it very little of their attention.

Americans tells lies about each other all day long, why would a foreigner saying it make any difference? Foreigners with access to the internet can participate in this on-line discussion just like everyone else, doesn't strike me as illegal or out of the ordinary in any way. Now identity theft and wire fraud are a different story and that's why these folks will get prosecuted (if they ever come to America). (Incidentally, identity theft, foreign or domestic, is going to be the real scourge of the digital future and something we as a society ought to be more worried about)

The thing that gets me is that it took Mueller a year to get to some rather minor identity theft and not much else. Well, this is pretty ordinary Russian spy stuff, this undoubtedly went on all through the Cold War, nothing special about this at all. But Obama suggested in a press conference before the election that there was Russian interference and there is a kinda famous (though possibly apocryphal) story that Obama pulled Putin aside at the G-20 Summit in September 2016 and told him to stop meddling in USA's elections. What info did Obama have at the time? Surely he had more than these minor incidents that it took the Mueller investigation more than a year to come up with.

I don't have a problem with the FBI investigating foreign interference in our culture (though that's basically what the NSA was invented to do, why aren't they more prominent in this?), actually I assume there is a division of the FBI that does nothing but track down foreign hackers. And it does seem like there is credible reason to specifically aim at interference in the 2016 election, that investigation should be taking place. But we needn't talk it about 24 hours a day, cranking it up to the most important story of the day is ridiculous, unrealistic, interferes with the investigation and is precisely what our enemies were trying to accomplish.

But why haven't investigators discovered anything more than this in the year and a half that we've known about it? And is this what Obama knew back in September 2016? Come on man, there must have been more indication than this back then for the Presdeint of the United States to pull the leader of another country aside to comment on.

Initially I tried to characterize this story as the confluence of two other recent stories: the FBI's inability to prevent a school shooting in Florida despite warnings of the assailant's potential for violence and a number of Russian mercenaries killed in combat with American forces in Syria (who worked for one of the companies indicted by Mueller, by the way). Something about the FBI's lack of will to detain someone simply because of nonsensical rantings on Facebook and the Russian gov't using private citizens to perform state-related functions but this is just a collection of rabbit holes I'd rather leave uninspected. Suffice to say, citizens do things their gov'ts can't stop but may manipulate to their own ends sfter the fact.

Hackers, Russian and otherwise, are at work 24 hours a day on the internet. Potentially deadly killers are out there, too, plotting the next atrocity. The FBI can investigate but can't predict their crimes or prevent them; the Putin administration can pay agents to commit acts of Russian nationalism but won't acknowledge them or protect them or give them a state funeral in the end. And all the while Ameicans will continue to look to the collective madness of Facebook for self-definition, where soundbites, snapshorts and initial impressions lead to vitriole and suspicion rather than knowledge. 

At any rate, we're no closer to impeaching Donald Trump, protecting our digital Republic, or concluding the endless swirl of propaganda this story has unleashed. We live in a stream of digital propaganda, Mueller's mission is to step in it twice.