Headline: Beware Trump’s admiration for Putin, Xi and Erdogan

Sub-headline: The US president has made little attempt to hide his respect for strongman leaders

The fate of ‘The West’ was sealed with the ascendancy of Thatcher and Reagan, that gave free reign to the Neo-Liberal Swindle! Too historically sophisticated an answer to Luce’s -the imperative of historical determinism is the natural enemy of the newspaperman confronting a deadline.

The water-shed of the 2008 ‘Economic Downturn’ was the ‘Gig Economy’ that institutionalized ‘worker insecurity’ i.e. the breeding ground for Trumpism, and other forms of political irrationalism. Is ‘The Decline of the West’ in full swing? Or is it just the decline of the once treasured Post-War Liberal Order?

Trump’s political victory has sealed ‘our fate’? All that is left is the hand-wringing of Pundits like Mr. Luce. He attempts to knit together a ‘rational explanation’ for such diverse political phenomenon: the cast of characters is at once small Xi Jinping and Putin, that experiences a kind of rhetorical bloat, to embrace  Modi,  Recep Tayyip Erdogan,  Viktor Orban,  Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. This by way of an exercise of political prescience? Or a self-serving riff on Ferguson’s Counter History before the fact?

The Democrats, under the leadership of Pelosi, Schiff and Nadler, and their  Show Trial of Trump will end in ignominious defeat in the Senate. No matter the histrionics of these political incompetents.  Not to forget the lackluster New Democratic candidates Biden, Warren, and Plutocrat Bloomberg. Where might a Pundit put the Socialist  Sanders in this political equation?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/28e1e7da-37fb-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4

Mr. Ferguson’s bellicosity is unslakable, and never a surprise. The Qassem Soleimani murder forces Ferguson to  resort to Walter Russel Mead’s Wall Street Journal celebration of ‘Jacksonian foreign policy’. And his ‘Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World’  This, part of the long tradition of a toxic American Exceptionalism.

Yet, as Walter Russell Mead explained in The Wall Street Journal, this is a quintessentially Jacksonian foreign policy move, in the spirit of Andrew Jackson, the president whom the former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon told his old boss to make his role model. Like his supporters in red-state America, Trump has no appetite for the “endless wars” they associate with George W Bush’s administration. But he and they also believe that the United States should retaliate against attacks on Americans. (Nawres Hamid, a naturalised US citizen, was killed by an Iranian-backed militia attack while working as an interpreter near Kirkuk on December 27.)

As Mead put it in his 2001 book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, a Jacksonian believes “that the most important goal of the US government in both foreign and domestic policy should be the physical security and the economic wellbeing of the American people”. Neoconservative nation-building or liberal interventionism are not on the Jacksonian menu. It’s all about “Don’t tread on me” — the rattlesnake’s warning on the American Revolutionary War battle flag.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/the-don-made-iran-an-offer-it-couldn-t-refuse-3ljvtn7m5

Next, as part of his weak rhetorical framing device, is the American Gangster film ‘The Godfather’ a celebration of terror, murder and thuggery, that is the perfect vulgar Pop Culture reference point of that ‘Jacksonian foreign policy’. The perfect blend of high and low?  Along with other Hollywood dreck: Bloodsport, Goodfellas, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Mr. Ferguson’s fascination with Hollywood kitsch is surprising for an Historian of some renown! Instead of actual history, the newspaper reader gets the Readymades of Hollywood, as reference points!

Note that ‘Jacksonian foreign policy’ had as its domestic corollary The Trail of Tears:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Trail-of-Tears

Mr. Ferguson’s special talent is to studiously ignore the crimes of the White Male Elites, that Colonized the World for profit. And its instruments of oppression: Sykes-Picot and Balfour Declaration- and now wonder at the active Rebellion, that has manifested itself since 1979, as The Islamic Republic of Iran!

Old Socialist

This vulgar melodrama from Hisham Melhem, newspaperman and hireling of the The Arab Gulf States Institute, headed by the son of the CIA’s Frank G. Wisner and financed by nearly 4 Million budget. This has CIA Front Group written all over it. Mr. Melhem follows the Party Line on the monster that was Soleimani :

‘The general and his men have the blood of hundreds of American soldiers on their hands and, more gruesomely, they inflicted tragedy and otherworldly pain on innumerable civilian victims in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Isis brought ruin on abandoned, if splendid, historic cities, but Soleimani’s marauders helped destroy Aleppo, a jewel of a modern-day metropolis in Syria.’

Should American readers think of the careers of Curtis LeMay , William Westmoreland or  David  Petraeus?

From Sykes-Picot, the Balfour Declaration, to the Coup of 1953, or to the present, The West and its cadre of Apologists deny that the Iranians can, and will make, their own history, without the tutelage of the superior White Male! There is the rub!
Where else but The Economist or Wall Street Journal  would readers find this brazenly incompetent propaganda?

Political Dissident

https://www.ft.com/content/3fa20ba4-320f-11ea-a329-0bcf87a328f2

Mr. Ganesh’s forgettable political chatter is rescued from the territory of the jejune by his attack on his literary/political better Gore Vidal . Not the ‘Sage of Amalfi’ but ‘The Patrician Rebel’ who was almost a big a snob as our Posh Boy!

Mr Pompeo this week said that “endless wars are the direct result of weakness”, unconsciously recalling Gore Vidal’s screed against militarists, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.

Vidal was a polemicist, so ‘screed’ is the lowest form of insult to one its the masters of the genre

Pure isolationism, of the kind that still regrets US entry into the world wars, did not outlive Vidal, and did not deserve to either. It tended to pair easily with some distasteful views and the Sage of Amalfi was not above them.

Ganesh attributes ‘distasteful views’ to Vidal, while leaving this as free-floating, or even an instance of common knowledge, without the requisite examples-this passes for ‘argument’? Or call it what it is the purest kind of hyperbole. Mr. Ganesh is a writer whose acidulous commentaries can’t quite meet the standard set by Vidal’s Collected Essays!

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/92fe41b8-3201-11ea-9703-eea0cae3f0de

After a quick search for the proper historical analogy for the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Mr. Ferguson provides the ‘correct analogy’, and dismisses any notion that this will lead to WWIII. But note that Ferguson echos the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution, at its most shrill:

My response to the news that US forces had assassinated Qassem Soleimani was: “Good riddance. Now what?” No tears should be shed for Soleimani. As the mastermind of Iran’s numerous proxy wars beyond the Islamic Republic’s borders, he had the blood of countless people on his hands, including hundreds of American and coalition soldiers killed by the Shi’ite militias he helped to train and finance. Second only to the Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in personal power, Soleimani had come to personify the ruthless, bloodthirsty spirit of the regime in Tehran.

Soleimani: the blood of countless people on his hands, Soleimani had come to personify the ruthless, bloodthirsty spirit of the regime in Tehran.

Ferguson begins his attack on Obama as ‘squandering all that had been achieved in the “surge” that ended the last Iraqi civil war.’

This assassination does nothing to solve the problem created by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, when he decided to liquidate the US presence in Iraq in excessive haste, squandering all that had been achieved in the “surge” that ended the last Iraqi civil war.

Here is Stephen Walt on the “surge”

Headline: The myth of the “surge”

Sub-headline: With the level of violence rising and the Kurds pressing for a level of autonomy that borders on independence, can we finally dispense with the myth that the 2007 “surge” in Iraq was a success? The surge had two main goals. The first goal was to bring the level of violence down by increasing U.S. …

With the level of violence rising and the Kurds pressing for a level of autonomy that borders on independence, can we finally dispense with the myth that the 2007 “surge” in Iraq was a success?

The surge had two main goals. The first goal was to bring the level of violence down by increasing U.S. force levels in key areas, forging a tactical alliance with cooperative Sunni groups, and shifting to a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasized population protection. This aspect of the surge succeeded, though it is still hard to know how much of the progress was due to increased force levels and improved tactics and how much was due to other developments, such as the prior “ethnic cleansing” that had separated the contending groups.

The second and equally important goal was to promote political reconciliation among the competing factions in Iraq. This goal was not achieved, and the consequences of that failure are increasingly apparent. What lies ahead is a long-delayed test of strength between the various contending groups, until a new formula for allocating political power emerges. That formula has been missing since before the United States invaded — that is, Washington never had a plausible plan for reconstructing a workable Iraqi state once it dismantled Saddam’s regime — and it will be up to the Iraqi people to work it out amongst themselves. It won’t be pretty.

With the passage of time, the “surge” should be seen as a well-intentioned attempt to staunch the violence temporarily and let President Bush hand the problem off to his successor. Hawks will undoubtedly try to pin the blame on Obama by claiming that we were (finally) winning by the time Bush left office, in the hope that Americans have forgotten the strategic objectives that the “surge” was supposed to achieve. It’s a bogus argument, but what would you expect from the folks who got us in there in the first place?

The myth of the “surge”

 

Political Observer

Headline: Middle East braced for backlash after killing of Qassem Soleimani

Sub-headline: Fears grow that death of Iranian general will suck region into broader conflict

https://www.ft.com/content/52a2fce4-2e0f-11ea-a126-99756bd8f45e

 

The Financial Times ‘reports’ on the Soleimani killing with the aid of quotes from :  London School of Economics Middle East expert Toby Dodge, an anonymous Gulf official, Anwar Gargash, UAE’s minister of state and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Call this understatement?:

“No one in the Trump administration will have had a clear idea of its consequences so risk mitigation is almost impossible. Retaliation, in the first instance, is likely to be focused on Iraq,” said Toby Dodge, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics Anwar Gargash and

The guarded comment of one anonymous Gulf official :

“There’s a great sense of relief,” said a former Gulf official. “However, Gulf states will be reserved in their official reaction given the fact that although everyone wants Iran to be contained within its borders, no one wants to see escalation.”

The statement of Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs:

“Rational engagement requires a calm and unemotional approach,” Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, said in a tweet on Friday. Saudi Arabia also called for restraint after Soleimani’s killing.

The statement of Benjamin Netanyahu:

Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, told Israeli reporters in Greece that Israel completely supported US actions. His office said he was cutting his trip short and would return to Israel to “follow developments” after the killing.

This reads almost like an actual news story!

Political Observer

Its an American tradition to ‘meddle’ in Iran. Recall Kermit Roosevelt? The particulars here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Roosevelt_Jr.

And his book Countercoup, a political self-apologetic.

Former senior adviser to the Obama administration and Council on Foreign Relations Iran expert, Ray Takeyh,^[16] writing in 2014, states that “Contrary to Roosevelt’s account [in Countercoup], the documentary record reveals that the Eisenhower administration was hardly in control and was in fact surprised by the way events played out.”^[17] William Blum wrote that Roosevelt provided no evidence for his claim that a Communist takeover in Iran was imminent, but rather “mere assertions of the thesis which are stated over and over”.^[18] Abbas Milani wrote that “Roosevelt’s memoir inflated his own and, in turn, America’s centrality to the coup. He tells the story with the relish of a John le Carré knock-off. … Eisenhower, for one, considered reports like this to be the stuff of ‘dime novels.'”^[19]

After Bush The Younger’s declaration of the War On Terror and an invasion and subjugation of Iraq, and the mendacious incompetence of Viceroy Paul Bremer, what need the reader think of the latest chapter in this murderous political melodrama?

Headline: Iran’s top military leader Soleimani killed in US air strike

Sub-headline: World powers call for restraint after killing fuels fear of fresh conflict in Middle East

https://www.ft.com/content/4e8f9fbc-2dcf-11ea-bc77-65e4aa615551

Beside the usual cliche mongering, three quotations captured my attention:

US officials in the region said they were braced for Iranian retaliation across the Middle East. “It’s one of the most consequential assassinations in the Middle East in years and will have violent and first order implications primarily for the US, Iran and Israel,” said Aaron David Miller, a former state department official at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The so-called shadow war will intensify with terror and additional assassinations,” he added. Mr Miller said there was a risk of full-blown war between the three countries.

Aaron David Miller is a stolid member of America’s Foreign Policy Technocracy : whose mendacity, and record of continuous failure, allied to bogus claims to that expertise can  be born out, by the exercise of the weakest of empirical tests.

Next, in order of appearance, is the certifiably comic political figure of Joe Biden:

Joe Biden said the president had thrown “dynamite into a tinderbox” with the assassination. Mr Biden, who is leading the Democratic nomination race to challenge Mr Trump in the November presidential election, criticised the air strike as a “hugely escalatory move in an already dangerous region.”

Last to be quoted is former CIA analyst Helima Croft , now an employee of a global investment bank:  https://www.rbccm.com/en/

Helima Croft, a former CIA analyst who heads up commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, said that the strikes increased risks for US oil companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron that are active in Iraq, should Iran retaliate.

“But it is not just Iraq,” she said. “Iranians have the ability to target Americans anywhere where their proxy groups operate.”

The central concern for this newspaper is always economic , or more accurately stated  the protection of profit over people.

Political Observer

Headline: Steven Pinker: what can we expect from the 2020s?

Sub-headline: Look beyond the gloom of the daily headlines and the case for progress is still strong

Dr. Pangloss’ essay  presents many compelling aperçus :

On Human Nature as Determined :

And our species evolved for advantages in the struggle to reproduce, not for happiness or wisdom.

On thinking about the future: 

The first step in thinking about the future is to reconcile human progress with human nature.

On Journalism: 

But this progress is invisible to most people because they don’t get their understanding of the world from numbers; they get it from headlines. Journalism by its very nature conceals progress, because it presents sudden events rather than gradual trends.

On Un-Reason:

It’s true that the parent ideal of reason is under assault by fundamentalism, fake news and conspiracy theories, as it always has been.

These just a sample of the Dr.’s pronouncements early in his long essay. The reader can only wonder at The Dr.’s choice of a publication to spread his good news, or should we call it a Gospel, on ineluctable human progress? Did he miss Mr. Rachman’s December 23, 2019 essay on the persistence of human anarchy ?

Headline: 2019: the year of street protest

Sub-headline: Mass demonstrations around the globe show no sign of fizzling out

https://www.ft.com/content/9f7e94c4-2563-11ea-9a4f-963f0ec7e134

Or the fact that a General Strike in France that began on December 5, 2019 is ignored by this newspaper, except to report on possible travel delays?

Headline:December strikes in Paris: travel disruptions to look out for

Sub-headline: Protests at pension reforms have disrupted rail and air links, plus national and international services

https://www.ft.com/content/53644d0c-16ab-11ea-9ee4-11f260415385

This paragraph demonstrates that the Dr. is suffering from an advanced case of political/economic myopia. Those ‘regulated markets’ were victim to the ascendant Neo-Liberal Swindle!

These gifts were amplified by ideas and institutions advocated during the Enlightenment and entrenched after the second world war: reason, science, liberal democracy, declarations of rights, a free press, regulated markets, institutions of international co-operation.

The Dr. betrays his particular form of apologetics for the political present , an admixture of fatalism and cynicism, masked as optimism, in this paragraph.

…

But — as the sustainable goalkeepers emphasise — “progress is possible, but it is not inevitable”. Poverty, disease and conflict are natural, not unnatural, parts of the human condition, and only the concerted application of reason, science and humanism can push back against their creep.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/e448f4ae-224e-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96

 

There is nothing more that the editors of The Financial Times fears, than the comments of its regular readership!

‘Comments on this artice have been disabled and will reopen on Monday’

Political Observer

Mr. Sullivan’s Anti-Trump hysteria seems to reach many denouements, here is part of his December 20, 2019 essay:

Headline: What We Know About Trump Going Into 2020

…

The two core lessons of the past few years are therefore: (1) Trumpism has a real base of support in the country with needs that must be addressed, and (2) Donald Trump is incapable of doing it and is such an unstable, malignant, destructive narcissist that he threatens our entire system of government. The reason this impeachment feels so awful is that it requires removing a figure to whom so many are so deeply bonded because he was the first politician to hear them in decades. It feels to them like impeachment is another insult from the political elite, added to the injury of the 21st century. They take it personally, which is why their emotions have flooded their brains. And this is understandable.

But when you think of what might have been and reflect on what has happened, it is crystal clear that this impeachment is not about the Trump agenda or a more coherent version of it. It is about the character of one man: his decision to forgo any outreach, poison domestic politics, marinate it in deranged invective, betray his followers by enriching the plutocracy, destroy the dignity of the office of president, and turn his position into a means of self-enrichment. It’s about the personal abuse of public office: using the presidency’s powers to blackmail a foreign entity into interfering in a domestic election on his behalf, turning the Department of Justice into an instrument of personal vengeance and political defense, openly obstructing investigations into his own campaign, and treating the grave matter of impeachment as a “hoax” while barring any testimony from his own people.

…

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/andrew-sullivan-what-we-know-about-trump-going-into-2020.html

The editorial about Trump in Christianity Today: 

…

Character matters. This has always been a conservative principle but one that, like so many others, has been tossed aside in the convulsions of a cult. And it is Trump’s character alone that has brought us to this point. That’s why the editorial in the Evangelical journal Christianity Today is so clarifying. Finally — finally — an Evangelical outlet telling the truth in simple language:

…

And J.K. Rowling:

…

This is how J.K. Rowling tweeted her support of Forstater’s freedom of speech: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?”

…

Both play their parts in Mr. Sullivan’s rambling polemic, although he attempts to segue from subject to subject,  it always reads ‘as if’ it were just an extended rant. The most primitive part of his ‘thinking process’ wedded to his rhetorical skill.

On to Mr. Stephens, of December 26, 2019:

Headline: What Will It Take to Beat Donald Trump?

Sub-headline: It’s not what the progressive left is talking about.

…

Second, the progressive left’s values seem increasingly hostile to mainstream ones, as suggested by the titanic row over J.K. Rowling’s recent tweet defending a woman who was fired over her outspoken views on transgenderism. Third, the more the left rages about Trump and predicts nothing but catastrophe and conspiracy from him, the more out of touch it seems when the catastrophes don’t happen and the conspiracy theories come up short.

…

The most obvious point is not to promise a wrenching overhaul of the economy when it shows no signs of needing such an overhaul. There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity, including a declining birthrate, national debt north of $23 trillion, the erosion of the global free-trade consensus, threats to the political independence of the Federal Reserve, and the popularization of preposterous economic notions such as Modern Monetary Theory.

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/opinion/trump-2020.html

Mr. Stephens’ essay may not be a perfect match with Mr. Sullivan’s polemic, but the ‘attack’ on J.K. Rowling’s ‘defense of women’, and the perpetual political menace of ‘The Left’ , are two key points, to that proffered political moralizing propinquity. Recognizing that Stephens expands that list,  demonstrating the he is a more sophisticated moral/political/economic scold! I’ve rendered these portions of this run-on sentence in bold type. The reader must be impressed with Mr. Stephens’ mastery of such complex, indeed vexing questions, that he presents as ‘There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity… ! Where might he place the Climate Crisis ? Or is this a creation of malcontents,now led by a child Greta Thunberg? These ‘risks’ are framed in economic terms. So might the reader look upon Trump as the only political threat to us? Or are ‘the self-styled saints’ who are perusing the Impeachment an equal threat ‘to our prosperity’?

Political Observer

The new anger

Headline: 2019 in review: protest and populism in Latin America

Sub-headline: Scandals, autocracy and anger at inequality stir unrest across the continent

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/12/25/2019-in-review-protest-and-populism-in-latin-america?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/2019inreviewprotestandpopulisminlatinamericathenewanger

Under the rubric of ‘The new anger’ needs further explication provided by the headline and sub-headline of this ‘News Story’. The use of the lower case in this framing as ‘The new anger’ softens what looks like hysteria.  The causes this reader might offer for this ‘protest & populism’ are American Imperialism & its NGO’s subversion of the indigenous Reformers, on the Left,  by way of the Neo-Liberal cudgel. E.g. Macri’s utter failure & de Kirchner’s political rehabilitation provide an object lesson?  Note that Macri defaulted first, using the euphemism of payment delay, on the Argentine debt according to The Financial Times December 20.2019:

Headline:Argentina delays payments on $9bn in dollar-denominated debt

Sub-headline: New government asks bondholders to show ‘good faith’ amid wider restructuring talks

…

The last payment delay was announced by the previous government of Mauricio Macri, shortly after a primary vote result that signalled he would lose his bid for re-election in October’s national election, which sent the peso reeling and increased the cost of insuring against a debt default.

The announcement came as little surprise to investors, given Argentina’s record on debt repayment and the central bank’s dwindling stock of foreign reserves, used in the battle to control high inflation and a weak currency.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/d18ab022-235d-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

Should the reader take Argentina as a paradigmatic case of  Neo-Liberalism’s failure. An object lesson on how the IMF operates in that that ‘forgotten continent’?  Not to forget that the Posh Boys & Girls @TheEconomist are a reliable source for Capitalist Apologetics, heavily garnished with the pretense of something resembling prescience?

Old Socialist