August 25, 2025: Federal Assault on American Cities - This Week, Chicago

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what's happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they're saying you're trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”

Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”

The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”

Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city's sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”

But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Notes From An American |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh; via

[ed. A speech for the ages, summarizing nicely where we are and how we got here (and echoed by others (below). I think this country is primed for a massive disobedience event. It would be a good bookend to Woodstock (and provide some atonement for what we've done to this world, our lives, and future generations). Democracy Day(s): D-Day.]

via:

Constitutional Collapse in Real Time

This morning, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton—former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president’s surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A “national security investigation in search of classified records”—the same bureaucratic language once used to investigate Trump’s actual document theft, now weaponized against Trump’s critics.

We are no longer operating under constitutional government. We are witnessing its systematic dismantlement by the very people sworn to preserve it. This is what constitutional collapse looks like in real time—not dramatic overthrow or military coups, but the patient corruption of every institution designed to constrain power until they serve only to protect it.

Nobody wants to admit this reality because admitting it requires confronting what it means for everything else we’ve assumed about American democracy. But that comfort is a luxury we can no longer afford. The Bolton raid isn’t an aberration—it’s observable evidence that we’ve already crossed the line from constitutional republic to authoritarian protection racket.

The Bitter Irony of False Equivalence

There’s a devastating irony in Bolton becoming one of the first high-profile victims of Trump’s weaponized Justice Department. Throughout the 2024 election, Bolton and many establishment figures operated from the “anti-anti-Trump” position—treating both candidates as equally flawed, seeing no meaningful moral distinction between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, flattening existential differences into ordinary political disagreements.

Bolton couldn’t bring himself to endorse Harris despite understanding perfectly well what Trump represented. Like so many sophisticated voices, he was too committed to maintaining his independent credibility to make the obvious moral choice that democratic survival required. He performed the elaborate intellectual gymnastics necessary to avoid acknowledging the clear distinction between a candidate committed to constitutional governance and one openly promising to dismantle it.

Now Bolton experiences personally the constitutional crisis he refused to prevent politically. The FBI agents who ransacked his home weren’t rogue actors—they were following orders from an administration he couldn’t oppose when it mattered. His decades of public service, his genuine expertise, his legitimate policy concerns—none of it protected him once he crossed the regime he helped normalize through sophisticated neutrality.

This pattern extends far beyond Bolton. Across the political spectrum, intelligent people convinced themselves the stakes weren’t really that high, that institutions would constrain Trump’s worst impulses, that the “adults in the room” would prevent constitutional catastrophe. The anti-anti-Trump stance provided permission structure for millions of Americans to vote for authoritarianism while telling themselves they were making a normal political choice.

By flattening the moral difference between Harris and Trump, these voices enabled the very outcome they claimed to fear. Harris represented continuity with constitutional governance—flawed and frustrating, but operating within democratic frameworks. Trump represented systematic destruction of constitutional governance—openly promising to weaponize federal power and eliminate civil service protections. These weren’t equivalent positions requiring sophisticated analysis to distinguish.

The Propaganda Function of “Objectivity”

The most insidious aspect of this false equivalence is how it masquerades as intellectual sophistication while functioning as authoritarian propaganda. When someone with a platform responds to Trump’s systematic weaponization of federal law enforcement by invoking the “Biden Crime Family,” they’re not demonstrating objectivity—they’re selling surrender.

What exactly is the “Biden Crime Family”? Hunter’s laptop? Business dealings investigated by Republican committees for years that produced no criminal charges? Meanwhile, we have documented evidence of Trump selling pardons, accepting foreign bribes, conducting government business at his properties, and now using the FBI as his personal revenge service. These aren’t comparable phenomena requiring balanced analysis—they’re manufactured distractions designed to normalize actual criminality through false equivalence.

When public figures invoke “both sides” rhetoric during an active constitutional crisis, they’re not rising above partisanship—they’re providing cover for the side that systematically benefits from confusion and paralysis. They’re giving their audience permission to remain passive while democracy dies, to treat the collapse of constitutional government as just another partisan disagreement where reasonable people stay neutral.

This sophisticated-sounding neutrality serves the same function as “just asking questions” or “maintaining balance”—rhetorical devices that sound reasonable but provide cover for unreasonable things. The “Biden Crime Family” talking point in response to the Bolton raid essentially argues: “Well, both sides weaponize law enforcement, so this is just normal political hardball.” But one side investigated actual evidence through proper channels, while the other raids former officials for writing books critical of the president.

Authoritarians don’t need everyone to support them actively—they just need enough people to remain confused and passive while they capture the machinery of state. When people with influence treat constitutional governance and authoritarian rule as equivalent, they’re not maintaining objectivity—they’re actively participating in the normalization of authoritarianism.

The Observable Reality of Systematic Collapse

We need to stop pretending this is normal politics conducted by unusual means. The evidence of constitutional collapse surrounds us daily: the executive branch operates through fake emergency declarations to bypass Congressional authority. Trump conducts trade policy through personal decree, ignoring constitutional requirements for legislative approval. The Supreme Court creates immunity doctrines that place presidents above accountability. Congress suspends its own procedures to avoid constitutional duties.

Federal law enforcement has become a revenge machine targeting political opponents while providing protection services for regime loyalists. ICE operates as domestic surveillance apparatus building algorithmic dossiers on American citizens. The FBI raids critics while ignoring documented crimes by allies. The Justice Department empanels grand juries to investigate Barack Obama while dropping cases against Trump.

This is the systemic destruction of a government constrained by law. Not merely political dysfunction. The people orchestrating this understand exactly what they’re building: a protection racket masquerading as constitutional government, where loyalty determines legal consequences and opposition becomes criminal activity.

The Bolton raid demonstrates this logic perfectly. FBI Director Kash Patel, Trump’s personal enforcer now wearing federal authority, tweeted “NO ONE is above the law” while his agents searched the home of a man whose crime was exercising First Amendment rights. Attorney General Pam Bondi amplified: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.” This is justice as theater, law enforcement as performance art, federal power as instrument of personal revenge.

by Mike Brock, Notes From The Circus |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock.com

[ed. For real. See also: Who Are the “Real” Americans Here? (NFTC); and, We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong (NYT).]

New Crewless Warships

DARPA christens dagger-like, crewless ocean warship (New Atlas)

Images: DARPA

"Along with the lightness and sleekness, the systems aboard Defiant are more like those of a deep-space probe, with an emphasis on reliability and redundancy that allows it to operate at sea for up to a year without human intervention. It can even refuel itself autonomously. Where a conventional ship would have technicians aboard for repairs and routine maintenance, Defiant can tolerate wear and tear on its system and can switch to backups as needed.

Another aspect of the design is that it's highly simplified, so it can be manufactured quickly and refitted in any port that can handle yacht, tug, and workboat customers. This means that in the near future, autonomous ships can be deployed in large numbers to act as force multipliers for the US Navy, take over boring routine duties like sub hunting or harbor patrols, and carry out missions in hostile waters without risking human lives."

[ed. Sea drones.]

Why Putin Thinks Russia Has the Upper Hand

Why Putin Thinks Russia Has the Upper Hand (NYT)

Vladimir V. Putin exuded confidence. Sitting back, surrounded by foreign dignitaries, the Russian president explained the futility of Ukrainian resistance. Russia had the advantage on the battlefield, as he saw it, and by rejecting his demands, Ukraine risked even more for peace.

“Keep at it, then, keep at it. It will only get worse,” Mr. Putin said at an economic forum in June, as he taunted the Ukrainian government. “Wherever a Russian soldier sets his foot, it’s ours,” he added, a smirk animating his face.

His self-assurance is born out of the Russian military’s resurgence.

In the depths of 2022, his underequipped forces were disoriented, decimated and struggling to counter Ukraine’s hit-and-run tactics and precision-guided weapons. Instead of abandoning the invasion, Mr. Putin threw the full strength of the Russian state behind the war, re-engineering the military and the economy with a singular goal of crushing Ukraine. In his push, the country revamped recruitment, weapons production and frontline tactics.

This is now a war of attrition favoring Russia, which has mobilized more men and arms than Ukraine and its Western backers. While their casualties are mounting, Russian forces are edging forward across most of the 750-mile front, strengthening Mr. Putin’s resolve to keep fighting until he gets the peace deal he wants.

via:
Image: Production of the Geran-2 drones at the Yelabuga plant; Russian television.]

via:
[ed. American terrorists... making their nut and enjoying authority (incognito, of course.) (South Park).] 

Border Patrol Wants Advanced AI to Spy on American Cities

The recent passage of Trump’s sprawling flagship legislation funnels tens of billions of dollars to the Department of Homeland Security. While much of that funding will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bolster the administration’s arrest and deportation operations, a great deal is earmarked to purchase new technology and equipment for federal offices tasked with preventing immigrants from arriving in the first place: Customs and Border Protection, which administers the country’s border surveillance apparatus, and its subsidiary, the U.S. Border Patrol.

One page of the presentation, describing the wishlist of Border Patrol’s Law Enforcement Operations Division, says the agency needs “Advanced AI to identify and track suspicious activity in urban environment [sic],” citing the “challenges” posed by “Dense residential areas.” What’s considered “suspicious activity” is left unmentioned. (...)

The reference to AI-aided urban surveillance appears on a page dedicated to the operational needs of Border Patrol’s “Coastal AOR,” or area of responsibility, encompassing the entire southeast of the United States, from Kentucky to Florida. A page describing the “Southern AOR,” which includes all of inland Nevada and Oklahoma, similarly states the need for “Advanced intelligence to identify suspicious patterns” and “Long-range surveillance” because “city environments make it difficult to separate normal activity from suspicious activity.”

Although the Fourth Amendment provides protection against arbitrary police searches, federal law grants immigration agencies the power to conduct warrantless detentions and searches within 100 miles of the land borders with Canada, Mexico, or the coastline of the United States. This zone includes most of the largest cities in the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, as well as the entirety of Florida.

The document mentions no specific surveillance methods or “advanced AI” tools that might be used in urban environments. Across the Southwest, residents of towns like Nogales and Calexico are already subjected to monitoring from surveillance towers placed in their neighborhoods. A 2014 DHS border surveillance privacy impact assessment warned these towers “may capture information about individuals or activities that are beyond the scope of CBP’s authorities. Video cameras can capture individuals entering places or engaging in activities as they relate to their daily lives because the border includes populated areas,” for example, “video of an individual entering a doctor’s office, attending public rallies, social events or meetings, or associating with other individuals.”

Last year, the Government Accountability Office found the DHS tower surveillance program failed six out of six privacy policies designed to prevent such overreach. CBP is also already known to use “artificial intelligence” tools to ferret out “suspicious activity,” according to agency documents. A 2024 inventory of DHS AI applications includes the Rapid Tactical Operations Reconnaissance program, or RAPTOR, which “leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance border security through real-time surveillance and reconnaissance. The AI system processes data from radar, infrared sensors, and video surveillance to detect and track suspicious activities along U.S. borders.”

The document’s call for urban surveillance reflect the reality of Border Patrol, an agency empowered, despite its name, with broad legal authority to operate throughout the United States.

“Border Patrol’s escalating immigration raids and protest crackdowns show us the agency operates heavily in cities, not just remote deserts,” said Spencer Reynolds, a former attorney with the Department of Homeland Security who focused on intelligence matters. “Day by day, its activities appear less based on suspicion and more reliant on racial and ethnic profiling. References to operations in ‘dense residential areas’ are alarming in that they potentially signal planning for expanded operations or tracking in American neighborhoods.”

by Sam Biddle, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Jenny Kane/AP
[ed. See also, via The Intercept:]

***

~ Guess Who’s Eligible for Student Loan Forgiveness: New ICE Agents

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday it will offer student loan forgiveness and repayment options to new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits — along with a $50,000 signing bonus.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration works to limit the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program for groups the president considers political enemies.

***

~ National Guard Ordered to Do ICE Paperwork at Immigration Facilities in 20 States

The Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to immigration facilities in 20 states beginning early next month, further entwining the military in civil and law enforcement functions.

The move undermines long-standing prohibitions on the use of the armed forces in domestic operations, sidestepping the Posse Comitatus Act and accelerating the U.S. transition into a police state, experts said.

The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, among other states, according to a defense official who was not authorized to disclose the information. (...)

Guard members will assist ICE officials in “alien processing” – administrative work preceding detention — in 20 states while ICE leadership will “direct” troops assigned to the mission, which will begin in early August, according to a memo first revealed on Wednesday by the New York Times.

***

~ “Intense Culture of Fear”: Behind the Scenes as Trump Destroys the EPA From Within

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency had taken “significant actions” to protect public health and the environment while working “to Power the Great American Comeback.” The agency said it was also working to fulfill Trump’s promises to revitalize the auto industry, “restore the rule of law,” and give decision-making power back to the states.

In practice, the agency has done the opposite, several EPA staffers told The Intercept. 

Under Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA announced a set of new core priorities that includes making the U.S. the artificial intelligence capital of the world and revitalizing the auto industry. (...)

“A lot of us are really confused about what our new mission is, when they’re coming out with these pillars of serving the auto industry and bringing back auto industry jobs,” Hagen said. “I don’t know how we fit into that.”

The EPA’s role is not to create jobs; it’s to regulate and protect people from pollution, she said.

“Our mission is not to promote AI or energy dominance,” she said. “That’s not our mission.” (...)

Last week, the agency said it is planning to dissolve the Office of Research and Development, which does life-saving research on toxicity and developing sampling protocols, and helped in emergencies after the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio and the Covid-19 pandemic.

As a result, more than 1,500 scientists will have to compete for 300 jobs, Hagen said.

“It’s essentially like lobotomizing our agency. If we don’t have the brain — the research behind protecting the environment — we can’t do that effectively, and I think that’s exactly what they want,” she said. “They’re doing all this under the guise of efficiency, but what they really are doing is dismantling this agency from doing its job.”

On China’s Rise, America’s Dysfunction, and the Need for Cooperation

Kishore Mahbubani is a renowned diplomat, scholar, and one of the most insightful analysts of global power dynamics. He served as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations and as President of the UN Security Council, and is the author of books including Has China Won? and Has the West Lost It?

Mahbubani joined Current Affairs to explain why the United States is losing ground to China—not because of Chinese aggression, but because of internal dysfunction, elite failure, and strategic incoherence. He critiques the emotional, zero-sum mindset dominating U.S. foreign policy and calls for a more rational, cooperative approach to global affairs. (...)

Robinson

You pointed out that global economics is not a zero-sum game, and another theme that comes across in your writing is that essentially, if we are going to have a prosperous, peaceful 21st Century that deals with the major crises that we face, such as climate change, we will have a world that cooperates, a world of mutual respect, and a world where countries are capable of understanding one another. And in the rhetoric that you hear in the United States, Donald Trump openly says China is our enemy. That’s his quote. The rest of the world is ripping us off. It is really quite the opposite of the story that you’re telling. You tell the story of us all inhabiting one planet and a need to work things out. In the United States, the Trumpian narrative is that we inhabit a world of enemies, those enemies need to be tamed or destroyed, and we need to build up our ability to crush them militarily if necessary. So, it would seem that much of the story told in the United States is really going in the opposite direction of the one that you feel generates the understanding necessary to live well in the 21st Century.
Mahbubani

Well, you’re absolutely right about that, but I can fully understand why Donald Trump wants to try and improve the livelihoods of the bottom 50 percent of Americans. I think that’s a noble goal that he has. I can understand why he wants to make American industries more competitive and re-industrialize America. That’s also an understandable goal. But I think he will find that the best way to achieve those goals is actually to work with the rest of the world. And one thing I’ve learned after studying geopolitics for 55 years is that you’ve got to be cold and calculating if you want to succeed in geopolitics, and if you’re emotional, then you’re at a major disadvantage.

So, for example, how did China become so wealthy so quickly? What they did was to work closely with the United States. Even though, technically, during part of the Cold War the U.S. was an adversary, China worked with the United States to grow its economy. And I think that’s one thing that is taboo in the United States, that actually the best way for the United States to regenerate its economic growth and make it grow faster is not to try and bring down China, but to work with China. Just as in the time when you were worried about Japanese cars taking over the United States, what did you do? You have voluntary export restraints. You encourage the Japanese to set up factories—Toyota factories, Honda factories—in the United States. The same thing can be done with China. It can only be done if you are rational and calculating in your moves and not emotional and say, oh, no, we can never work with China. Why can’t you work with China? If working with China is going to bring benefits to the American people, why not work with them? Because at the end of the day, it’s very clear that all efforts to stop the rise of China by the United States will fail. You cannot stop a 4,000-year-old civilization that has its own civilizational cycles, and as it is rising, depriving them of this technology or that technology is not going to stop the rise of China.

Robinson

And you point out that for most of human history, the Chinese and Indian economies were among the largest in the world. They have the largest global population. And so to try and reverse the trend towards a more equal balance of power in the world, you argue, is futile.

Mahbubani

Yes, that’s a fact that everyone should know, that from the year 1 to the year 1820, for 1,800 out of the last 2,000 years, the two largest economies of the world have always been those of China and India. It’s only in the last 200 years that Europe and North America have taken off. The last 200 years of Western domination of world history have been a major historical aberration, and all aberrations come to a natural end. So it’s perfectly natural to see the return of China and India. But what’s important to emphasize is that the reason why China and India are coming back is that they are studying, absorbing, and implementing Western pillars of wisdom, and that’s why they’re succeeding. And paradoxically, at a time when, for example, China—a Communist Party run country—is discovering the virtue of free trade agreements, free trade agreements have enabled China to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and the United States is walking away from them. But this is where Economics 101 theory is right. The United States should be signing more free trade agreements and not walking away from them.

Robinson

Now, you mentioned there China being a Communist Party run country, but one of the points that you make in your book, Has China Won?, is that one of the major misunderstandings of China comes from seeing it as an ideologically communist entity in the kind of classic Marxist-Leninist sense.

Mahbubani

Well, I think anybody who thinks that China is a communist country should go visit China. I mean that literally: every American who believes that should go visit it. I actually visited Moscow in 1976, and trust me, that place was so controlled, so oppressed. And when you went into the biggest department store in Moscow, and you wanted to buy a toothbrush—I’m not exaggerating—you had a huge cabinet, and you had one toothbrush separated from the other toothbrush by one foot. Even the toothbrushes were scarce commodities. A small 7-Eleven in the United States has more toothbrushes than the largest department store in Moscow. Everything was scarce.

Now, you go to China today, and you will see the most advanced economy in the world in terms of how it produces both private goods and public goods. If you go and see the infrastructure of China, you begin to realize that after going from Kennedy Airport to Beijing Airport, you’re going from a third world airport in the United States to a first world airport in China. And by the way, incidentally, also a first world airport in New Delhi and Mumbai. So there are areas in which Asia has surged ahead, clearly, of the United States, and the United States should consider the possibility that it could possibly try to emulate what the East Asian economies have done. (...)

Robinson

I want to go back to something that you said earlier. People might have been a little surprised to hear you talk of the virtues of being cold and calculating. And when you read your books, one of your prescriptions is to become more Machiavellian. I think this is very interesting because people might be surprised to hear Machiavelli praised—staying on the subject of political philosophy. But one of the interesting things that comes out of your books, your analysis, is that actually, when the United States thinks it’s being cold and calculating—there’s certainly no lack of callousness or coldness in a lot of American foreign policy, or willingness to destroy the lives of others, but there is a certain absence of strategic thinking. And one of the things that you point out is that we mistake what real strategic thinking is. For example, you cite Sun Tzu saying, if you don’t know your enemy as well as yourself, you’re going to lose half your battles. It seems like in the United States, we don’t know either our enemy or ourselves. It might be considered non-strategic or sappy or excessively empathetic to try and understand China, but you say, no, understanding China, understanding how Putin thinks, these are not things you do out of an excess of emotion and sympathy. These are things you do because you are a strategic, careful thinker.

Mahbubani

Absolutely, and it’s a bit sad that the United States, when it launches geopolitical contests against China, decided to do so without first working out a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan. In an early chapter in my book, Has China Won?, I say there are 10 questions that anyone should ask if they’re formulating a strategy. And I’m actually trying to help the United States formulate a comprehensive long-term strategy, because if you don’t have a comprehensive long-term strategy, you just carry out emotional actions and end up hurting yourself. So, for example, the Biden administration thought they could stop the development of semiconductors in China by imposing all kinds of sanctions. And you can see the result a few years later: China’s share of the semiconductor market used to be 10 percent, and now it’s 50 percent. So all the efforts to stop China didn’t work because no one thought strategically. And just to make a very important point of detail, when the United States cut off supplies of advanced semiconductors to China, it was cutting off his nose to spite his face. Because by depriving yourself of 30 percent of your revenue, you lose all your R and D budget, and when you lose all your R and D budget, you’ve lost your capacity to compete. So, you’ve got to think strategically when you carry on an action—is it going to do more damage to my opponent, or is it going to do more damage to me? And I’m actually trying to help the United States work out policies that will be beneficial for the United States.

Robinson

Yes. Another example of this kind of this kind of paradox, where the thing that the United States does to counter China is actually helping China and not the United States, is as you say, irrational and wasteful defense spending. This might surprise some people, but you say it’s in China’s national interest for American wasteful defense spending to continue. The more money America spends on weapons systems that will never be used against China—because, as you say, a war between the two countries would result in the destruction of both countries—the better off China will be, and American military expenditures are geopolitical gifts to China. That is certainly something that those authorizing those expenditures don’t believe.

Mahbubani

Yes, and the tragedy here is that the way America spends money on defense expenditures, in theory, you should first work out a strategy and say, what kind of weapons do we need? And then you work backwards and say, okay, in this new strategic environment, maybe instead of piloted jets, we need pilotless jets, because drones today are as good as piloted jets. You spend so much money on an aircraft trying to protect the body of the pilot, but once you have a pilotless jet, everything is much cheaper, and the planes can go faster—they don’t have to worry about the human body in there. Similarly, today, with advanced missiles, aircraft carriers have become sitting ducks. You no longer need aircraft carriers anymore to project power. But the reason why you cannot change course is that in America, and this is part of being a plutocracy, the arms industry can lobby the US Congress to pass bills to buy weapons that are outmoded and that are no longer needed. So America is producing a lot of weapons that will not be useful when the real war comes. The aircraft carriers will be sitting ducks in the face of all these hypersonic and supersonic missiles that are being developed. You have vested interests in deciding what should be purchased. But if you do a zero-based thing, you can actually defend the United States much more effectively with half the budget, or one quarter of the budget, with much more effective weapons. But of course, a large part of the military industrial complex will complain, then they will go to Congress, and you won’t be able to arrive at a rational decision. So in that sense, it is not China that is distorting your defense expenditures. It’s the American political system that is preventing the United States from having rational defense policies.

Robinson

We’ve been talking here about how United States policy towards China is ultimately irrational and self-defeating and pseudo-Machiavellian, without actually thinking sensibly about what is in the interests of this country. But it’s not the only example that you give of self-defeating Western policy. Just opening up your book here, Has the West Lost It?, you have a section, “Strategic Errors: Islam, Russia and Meddling in World Affairs.” And you make a series of arguments there that, for example, the United States’ treatment of Russia after the Cold War actually led to the rise of Putin, which was preventable, and that the United States, through its disastrous wars in the Middle East, has created, in many ways, or exacerbated, the problems that they that supposedly we are trying to solve.

Mahbubani

Yes. Certainly, the Iraq war was completely unnecessary—completely unnecessary. You spent $3 trillion of blood and treasure, and at the end of the day, delivered a broken state which is not safe for Americans to live in. And similarly, by the way, the removal of Gaddafi was a huge mistake, especially for the Europeans, because Gaddafi was acting like a cork in the bottle, preventing a surge of migrants from Africa towards Europe. But as soon as Gaddafi was removed, the floodgates opened up. So it’s not in your interest. It’s important to do a rational calculation of where your interests lie, and it is not in America’s interest necessarily to fight forever wars and to have 800 military bases around the world, because the United States is a very safe country. You are protected by two wonderful, huge oceans, and you’re protected by Canada and Mexico. You don’t have hostile republics as your border, so you can actually cut down your defense expenditures dramatically. And instead of making it a sole American mission to keep international waterways safe, work with other navies in the world cooperatively, because we all share common interests in keeping international sea lanes safe.

Robinson

I believe you were in the UN Security Council in the lead up to the Iraq war.

Mahbubani

That's right, 2001-2002.

Robinson

Can you tell us a bit about that?

Mahbubani

Yes, you could see the tension building up in the Security Council because the United States was trying to pass a resolution to justify an invasion of Iraq, and it was very clear that Russia, China, Germany, and France thought it was a wrong decision. And frankly, if the United States had listened to its good friends, Germany and France, who said, you shouldn’t fight this war, you will lose a lot of money, and you will be worse off, the United States could have saved $3 trillion, and by the way, used it to develop the infrastructure of the United States and make it as gleaming as that of China. So why spend $3 trillion fighting an unnecessary war? And I’m surprised that no one has been held accountable for this unnecessary war. I should also mention that I’m making these points because I actually believe that the United States can become, once again, a very strong country. And the goal of all my prescriptions is not to weaken the United States, but to strengthen the United States and to make it a more effective actor in a complex world environment.

by Nathan J. Robinson and Kishore Mahbubani, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Pretty straightforward assessment, I think (there's more). As someone once said "You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you!"]

Don't Go Near the Water

Israel has warned Gazans to stay out of the Mediterranean Sea or risk getting killed under wartime restrictions that critics say serve no security purpose and are meant to deprive Palestinians of a key source of sustenance—and respite from the horrific realities of 21 months of constant death and destruction.

"Strict security restrictions have been imposed in the maritime area adjacent to Gaza—entry to the sea is prohibited," Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote on the social media site X Saturday. "This is a call to fishermen, swimmers, and divers—refrain from entering the sea. Entering the beach and waters along the entire Gaza Strip endangers your lives."

While Israel has imposed a maritime blockade on Gaza since 2007 following Hamas' victory in legislative elections and subsequent takeover of the coastal enclave, restrictions were tightened after the October 7, 2023 attack as part of the "complete siege" that has caused deadly malnutrition throughout the strip, where Israel's 646-day U.S.-backed onslaught has left more than 211,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

However, the IDF appears to have not enforced the post-October 7 ban on entering the sea against swimmers and bathers. Only Palestinian fishers have been targeted, with more than 210 killed since October 2023, according to United Nations data.

"We live off the sea. If there's no fishing, we don't eat," Munthir Ayash, a 52-year-old fisher from Gaza City, told the Emirati newspaper The National Monday. "Me, my five sons, and their families—45 people in total—depend entirely on the sea. With it closed, we face starvation."

It is unclear why the IDF issued Saturday's warning, which came amid excessive heat warnings as temperatures rose to over 30°C (86°F). With Gaza's infrastructure obliterated by 21 months of Israeli onslaught and safe running water in severe shortage, the Mediterranean Sea provided a place to cool off and clean up.

"I used to go every day. The sea was where I bathed, where I relaxed, where I ran from the horror of war," Ibrahim Dawla, a 26-year-old Palestinian man forcibly displaced from Gaza City's Zaytun, told The National. "Now even that's gone." (...)

"We are camped by the sea," Qudeih added. "Where else can we go? Are they going to ban the air from us next?"

The IDF claims the maritime blockade is a security measure aimed at preventing weapons from being smuggled into Gaza.

However, Zakaria Bakr, head of the Palestinian Fishermen's Syndicate in Gaza, and many other residents of the embattled enclave believe there is another reason why Israel is prohibiting them from entering the sea.

"This is not about security. It's economic, social, and psychological warfare; a weapon of slow, deliberate suffocation," he told The National.

Dawla said that "people here die a million times every hour; we needed the sea just to feel human again, even if only for a few minutes. And they knew that. That's why they shut it down.

by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams |  Read more:
Image: Omar AL-QATTAA/AFP
[ed. Sick. From the Times of Israel:]

***

The vast majority of the Palestinian population in Gaza is concentrated in areas on the coast, with tent camps set up on the beaches.

The IDF has not enforced the restriction against Palestinians seeking to cool off in the waters on the beach, but only those heading out deeper into the sea.

When Revolutions Sputter

Revolutions have a logic. The revolutionaries start with a big, transformative, impossible goal. They want to remake society, smash existing institutions, replace them with something different. They know they will do damage on the road to their utopia, and they know people will object. Committed to their ideology, the revolutionaries pursue their goals anyway.

Inevitably, a crisis appears. Perhaps many people, even most people, don’t want regime change, or don’t share the revolutionaries’ utopian vision. Perhaps there are unplanned disasters. Smashing institutions can have unexpected, sometimes catastrophic, consequences, as the history of post-revolutionary famines shows very well.

But whatever the nature of the crisis, it forces the revolutionaries to make a choice. Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence.

The bloodiest, most damaging revolutions have all been shaped by people making the most extreme choices. When the Bolsheviks ran into opposition in 1918, they unleashed the Red Terror. When the Chinese Communists encountered resistance, Mao sent teenage Red Guards to torment professors and civil servants. Sometimes the violence was mere theater, lecture halls full of people demanding that victims recant. Sometimes it was real. But it always served a purpose: to provoke, to divide, and then to allow the revolutionaries to suspend the law, create an emergency, and rule by decree.

I doubt very much that Donald Trump knows a lot about the methods of Bolsheviks or Maoists, although I am certain that some of his entourage does. But he is now leading an assault on what some around him call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the U.S. government. This assault is revolutionary in nature. Trump’s henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all of which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state. The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy.

Trump and his allies also have revolutionary methods. Elon Musk sent DOGE engineers, some the same age as Mao’s Red Guards, into one government department after the next to capture computers, take data, and fire staff. Trump has launched targeted attacks on institutions that symbolize the power and prestige of the old regime: Harvard, the television networks, the National Institutes of Health. ICE has sent agents in military gear to conduct mass arrests of people who may or may not be undocumented immigrants, but whose arrests will frighten and silence whole communities. Trump’s family and friends have rapidly destroyed a matrix of ethical checks and balances in order to enrich the president and themselves.

But their revolutionary project is now running into reality. More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump’s decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process. Judges have ordered the administration to rehire people who were illegally fired. DOGE is slowly being revealed as a failure, maybe even a hoax: Not only has it not saved much money, but the damage done by Musk’s engineers might prove even more expensive to fix, once the costs of lawsuits, broken contracts, and the loss of government capacity are calculated. The president’s signature legislation, his budget bill, has met resistance from senior Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who fear that it will destroy the U.S. government’s credibility, and even resistance from Musk himself.

Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence.

For the moment, the administration’s demonstration of force is mostly performative, a made-for-TV show designed to pit the United States military against protesters in a big Democratic city. The choice of venue for sweeping, indiscriminate raids—Home Depot stores around Los Angeles, and not, say, a golf club in Florida—seems orchestrated to appeal to Trump voters. The deployment of the U.S. military is designed to create frightening images, not to fulfill an actual need. The governor of California did not ask for U.S. troops; the mayor of Los Angeles did not ask for U.S. troops; even the L.A. police made clear that there was no emergency, and that they did not require U.S. troops.

But this is not the final stage of the revolution. The Marines in Los Angeles may provoke more violence, and that may indeed be the true purpose of their mission; after all, the Marines are primarily trained not to do civilian crowd control, but to kill the enemies of the United States. In an ominous speech at Fort Bragg yesterday, Trump reverted to the dehumanizing rhetoric he used during the election campaign, calling protesters “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” language that seems to give permission to the Marines to kill people. Even if this confrontation ends without violence, the presence of the military in Los Angeles breaks another set of norms and prepares the way for another escalation, another set of emergency decrees, another opportunity to discard the rule of law later on.

by Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Spencer Platt/Getty

Anthony Blinken: Trump’s Iran Strike Was a Mistake. I Hope It Succeeds.

Former secretary of state.

The strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States was unwise and unnecessary. Now that it’s done, I very much hope it succeeded.

That’s the paradox for many former officials like me who worked on the Iran nuclear problem during previous administrations. We shared a determination that Iran never be allowed to produce or possess a nuclear weapon. Iran without a nuclear weapon is bad enough: a leading state sponsor of terrorism; a destructive and destabilizing force via its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq; an existential threat to Israel. An Iran with a nuclear weapon would feel emboldened to act with even greater impunity in each of those arenas.

So why was the strike a mistake?

First, it never should have come to this. In 2015, the Obama administration, together with Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union, reached agreement with Tehran on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A. The nuclear deal effectively put Iran’s program to make fissile material, the fuel for a nuclear weapon, in a lockbox, with stringent procedures for monitoring Iran’s nuclear program. The deal pushed “breakout” — the amount of time it would take Iran to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a single nuclear weapon — to at least one year. If Iran reneged on the agreement or refused to extend it when certain provisions expired after 15 years, we would know it and have plenty of time to respond, including, if necessary, militarily.

In 2018, President Trump tore up the agreement and replaced it with … nothing. In response, Iran accelerated its enrichment, quite likely reducing its breakout time to a matter of days or weeks. Mr. Trump, in essence, is now trying to put out a fire on which he poured gasoline.

Second, fissile material is a necessary but insufficient element for a bomb. You also need an explosive weapon. As of now — and there are conflicting messages coming from within the Trump administration — our intelligence agencies believe Iran has not yet made a decision to weaponize. If and when it does, it would take Tehran 18 to 24 months to produce an explosive device, according to some estimates. In other words, there was still time for diplomacy to work, and the situation wasn’t nearly the emergency that Mr. Trump portrayed it to be.

Third, experts I’ve spoken to had real doubts about the ability of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or M.O.P. — the 30,000-pound bombs unique to America’s arsenal that were dropped on Iran’s nuclear sites — to fully incapacitate the Fordo site and other deeply buried or fortified components of Iran’s nuclear program. Initial reports suggest that while Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was severely damaged, it was not destroyed.

Fourth, in war-gaming the military option during my time in the Biden administration, we were also concerned that Iran had or would spread its stockpile of uranium already enriched to just short of weapons grade to various secure sites and preserve enough centrifuges to further enrich that stockpile in short order. In that scenario, the Iranian regime could hide its near weapons-grade material, green light weaponization and sprint toward a bomb. Thus, Mr. Trump’s strike has risked precipitating what we want to prevent. In this, it may prove a repeat of Israel’s strike against Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 — after the strike, Saddam Hussein accelerated an underground program.

Finally, while there is no doubt the American strike set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Iran could rebuild quickly, in locations and at depths virtually immune to airstrikes, while pursuing weaponization at the same time. So while their program has been significantly disrupted, and buying time is a good thing, it underscores that sticking with the J.C.P.O.A. was the better option. It bought us at least 15 years instead of just a few. And it avoided the risk of Iranian retaliation — such as Monday’s missile attacks directed at our forces in the region — as well as the potential for further escalation, including threatening global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, conducting terrorist operations on American soil or carrying out sophisticated cyberattacks.

And, perhaps paradoxically, Mr. Trump’s actions were possible only because of the work of the Obama and Biden administrations.

The Obama administration accelerated development of the M.O.P. and had contingency plans for the type of operation that Mr. Trump authorized. Mr. Biden instructed his team to rehearse, test and refine those plans. We also conducted, in 2023, the largest-ever joint exercise with Israel — something of a dry run for this latest action.

As important, Mr. Biden supported Israel’s successful efforts to grievously weaken Iran and its proxies. Our deployments, deterrence and active defense of Israel when Iran directly attacked it for the first time allowed Israel to degrade Iran’s proxies and its air defenses without a wider war. In so doing, we set the table for Mr. Trump to negotiate the new nuclear deal he pledged years ago to work toward — or to strike. I wish that he had played out the diplomatic hand we left him. Now that the military die has been cast, I can only hope that we inflicted maximum damage — damage that gives the president the leverage he needs to finally deliver the deal he has so far failed to achieve.

by Anthony J. Blinken, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters

[ed. If you're going to have opinions, best to have all relevant context and details. See also: Intel Report on Iran Upends Victory Lap Trump Was Hoping for at NATO (NYT):]

***

"As President Trump landed in the Netherlands on Tuesday for the annual meeting of NATO allies, he was desperate to hold together the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Iran, cursing and cajoling to make sure that history would remember him for bombing Iran’s nuclear sites over the weekend and brokering a peace deal days later.

But just hours after he landed, the leak of a new U.S. intelligence report cast doubt on his repeated claim that the American strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programs. Mr. Trump started using the word “obliterated” before he received his first battle damage report, and since then, he has closely monitored which members of his administration have used the same language.

The report’s finding, while preliminary, was particularly damaging because it emerged from inside the Pentagon, which had carried out the strikes, and it concluded that the military action had only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a number of months."

No Increase in Radiation After US Strikes on Iran, Says UN Nuclear Watchdog

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Sunday that there has been no increase in off-site radiation levels after US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

The UN nuclear watchdog sent the message via the social platform X on Sunday.

The IAEA can confirm that no increase in off-site radiation levels has been reported as of this time, it said. The IAEA will provide further assessments on situation in Iran as more information becomes available.

Iran said early Sunday there were no signs of contamination at its nuclear sites at Isfahan, Fordo and Natanz after US airstrikes targeted the facilities.

by Business Standard |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

[ed. See also: Officials Concede They Don’t Know the Fate of Iran’s Uranium Stockpile (NYT/DNYUZ). And apparently have no obvious contingency plans or long-term strategy for dealing with whatever Iran decides to do. Hmm... sounds familiar.]

American Brownshirts

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that the House passed is objectionable for many reasons, most obviously because it is the most regressive economic bill of my lifetime, the class war condensed in legislative form. Its tax policies and spending cuts will erode the well being of Americans slowly for decades to come. Its most immediate destabilizing impact, however—the one that has the potential to push our democracy to the brink—is its vast expansion of the Homeland Security budget, which will be used to build ICE into a huge national army of loyalists under Trump’s control. The money to build America’s brownshirts is in the pipeline. Whereas our military-industrial complex is a threat to the rest of the world, this force will be a direct threat to all of us in the USA. This is the Proud Boys, at national scale, with badges. It is a very dangerous prospect.

Everything I am writing about here has been previously reported in the past few weeks since the House sent the bill to the Senate. But, from my vantage point, the public has not quite grasped just how horrifying a precipice we are on. When you consider the scale of protest already unleashed by the ICE raids in LA; Trump and Stephen Miller’s clear intent to double and triple and quadruple down on the ICE raids and crush the protests with military force; Trump’s unhinged declaration yesterday that “we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York” to achieve “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History”; and then connect this deep well of poisonous intent with the staggering expansion of ICE’s size and scope that will occur if this bill’s funding comes through, what you will see is the setup for not just a mass deportation program, but a violent national clash between a militarized, government-sanctioned army of Trump loyalists and everyone else. (...)

Let’s focus on the most dangerous funding of all: the direct funding for law enforcement agencies. To level-set you here, understand that right now, before this bill passes, the combined funding of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and all other federal law enforcement is only half the size of the federal funding for immigration and border enforcement. So we are already pouring an inordinate amount of money into stalking immigrants. If the new bill passes, we will add $167 billion to immigration enforcement. Cato helpfully produced this chart to illustrate just how insane this would be: (...)

Part of this funding increase would go to hiring 10,000 new ICE agents, and more than 8,000 new Customs and Border Patrol agents. That would give ICE more agents than the FBI has in the field. It goes without saying that this would be a disaster for not only undocumented immigrants, who would be ruthlessly hunted down like fugitives, but also to any brown-skinned person in America, who can expect to be subjected to harassment by agents sent out to please Stephen Miller’s insatiable desire for public displays of racism at all costs.

It’s even worse than that. Think about this expansion of ICE in the context of the entire arc of Trump’s rise to power. This man falsely claimed to win the 2020 election, tried to have his supporters overthrow the government to keep him in power, came back and won again, and pardoned the people who tried to overthrow the government on his behalf. The main thing he learned from his first term was to surround himself only with fanatical loyalists. The entire top level of the federal government is now staffed with a buffet of lunatics, incompetents, and extremists whose defining characteristic is their loyalty to Trump above the law. This includes the military and the federal law enforcement agencies.

Within the ranks of the military and law enforcement, however, absolute loyalty cannot be achieved so quickly. Even though those constituencies are strongly Republican, there is also some significant level of anger at Trump as well. FBI agents have seen colleagues purged just for working on January 6 cases; Army soldiers were forced to march in Trump’s stupid parade; Marines, many of them from immigrant families, have been outrageously deployed to patrol Los Angeles. These things create dissatisfaction in the ranks that is hard to measure, but real.

So how can Trump be sure that the absolute loyalty he demands extends all the way down to his foot soldiers? By hiring new ones. Who do you think those ten thousand fresh new ICE agents will be? Well, one thing we can say for sure is that they will be people who are okay with the proposition of taking a job with ICE as it is run under Donald Trump. This is not a job anyone will take by accident. It’s on the news every day. Hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets protesting against it. This creates a self-selecting pool. It will attract only those who are not repulsed by it. Job applicants will consist of those who see pictures of dudes wearing tactical vests and face coverings jumping out of unmarked trucks and grabbing people and think to themselves, “that looks cool.”

The new and expanded version of ICE will not just be immigration enforcers. They will be the most ideologically reliable armed branch of government for Donald Trump. They will be the 2025 parallel of the brownshirts. They will be the most obvious place for the president to turn for dirty work in the streets. Because of this, I guarantee, once they are in place, you will see their sphere of activities expand. Enforcing immigration laws will be defined to include “going after those who try to impede the enforcement of immigration laws”—a group that, according to Trump and Miller, includes protesters, journalists, and Democratic politicians. The increasingly outrageous expansion of ICE activities will certainly be rubber stamped by a Republican Congress which is already busy trying to make it illegal to report the identities of the masked men who have come to arrest your neighbor.

The question to ask yourself about what is coming is not, “Is that legal?” It is, “With Donald Trump and Stephen Miller fully in control of the government, and with no checks on their power within the government’s three branches, what is the next thing they need to achieve their agenda?” What they need is a loyal private army. And that is what they’re building.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

Point

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism

George W. Bush may think that a war against Iraq is the solution to our problems, but the reality is, it will only serve to create far more.

This war will not put an end to anti-Americanism; it will fan the flames of hatred even higher. It will not end the threat of weapons of mass destruction; it will make possible their further proliferation. And it will not lay the groundwork for the flourishing of democracy throughout the Mideast; it will harden the resolve of Arab states to drive out all Western (i.e. U.S.) influence.

If you thought Osama bin Laden was bad, just wait until the countless children who become orphaned by U.S. bombs in the coming weeks are all grown up. Do you think they will forget what country dropped the bombs that killed their parents? In 10 or 15 years, we will look back fondly on the days when there were only a few thousand Middle Easterners dedicated to destroying the U.S. and willing to die for the fundamentalist cause. From this war, a million bin Ladens will bloom.

And what exactly is our endgame here? Do we really believe that we can install Gen. Tommy Franks as the ruler of Iraq? Is our arrogance and hubris so great that we actually believe that a U.S. provisional military regime will be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people? Democracy cannot possibly thrive under coercion. To take over a country and impose one’s own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy. And it is doomed to fail.

A war against Iraq is not only morally wrong, it will be an unmitigated disaster.

Counterpoint

No It Won’t

No it won’t.

It just won’t. None of that will happen.

You’re getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You’re really overreacting.

“This war will not put an end to anti-Americanism; it will fan the flames of hatred even higher”?

It won’t.

“It will harden the resolve of Arab states to drive out all Western (i.e. U.S.) influence”?

Not really.

“A war against Iraq is not only morally wrong, it will be an unmitigated disaster”?

Sorry, no, I disagree.

“To take over a country and impose one’s own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy”?

You are completely wrong.

Trust me, it’s all going to work out perfect. Nothing bad is going to happen. It’s all under control.

Why do you keep saying these things? I can tell when there’s trouble looming, and I really don’t sense that right now. We’re in control of this situation, and we know what we’re doing. So stop being so pessimistic.

Look, you’ve been proven wrong, so stop talking. You’ve had your say already. Be quiet, okay? Everything’s fine.

You’re wrong.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Here we go again. F**king idiots. See also: A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq (Pew Research Center).]

A U.S. War With Iran Would Be a Catastrophe

The United States is alarmingly close to getting dragged into yet another military entanglement in the Middle East, this time by Israel — which is looking less and less like a true friend.

Israel’s surprise attack on Iran on Friday has almost certainly blown up any chance of reaching the nuclear deal the United States was pursuing for months. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has also recklessly endangered the 40,000 U.S. troops deployed in the region, putting them at immediate risk of Iranian retaliation, which could draw America into a war with Iran.

However Iran interprets our role in the attacks, Israel appears to have acted without giving the United States enough warning to take adequate precautions. Though President Trump acknowledged on Thursday that an Israeli attack might be imminent, the United States only began voluntary evacuations of military families and nonessential embassy personnel on Wednesday afternoon, while the State Department began drawing up plans for mass evacuation of U.S. citizens mere hours before the attack.

Mr. Trump, and all Americans, should be furious. Now Mr. Netanyahu and hawkish voices in the United States will almost certainly put pressure on Mr. Trump to assist Israel in destroying Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites, something that will be difficult for the Israeli military to do on its own and that even the U.S. military might be unable to accomplish. It would be the worst mistake of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

A war with Iran would be a catastrophe, the culminating failure of decades of regional overreach by the United States and exactly the sort of policy that Mr. Trump has long railed against. The United States would gain nothing from fighting a weak country halfway around the globe that causes problems in its region but does not pose a critical security threat to us. And the United States would lose much: most tragically, the lives of U.S. service members, along with any chance of escaping our tortured past in the region.

Americans of all political stripes oppose war with Iran, presumably because they understand the two big lessons from U.S. experiences fighting in the Middle East over the past 25 years. Not only do preventive wars not work; they also have unintended consequences with lasting impact on America’s national security.

The misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq was also a war to forestall nuclear proliferation. Disaster ensued, and not just because Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. invasion triggered chaos and civil war in Iraq and tipped the regional balance of power toward Iran by allowing it to establish new proxy militias in the country. It also led to the eventual rise of ISIS.

There is no reason to think that a war with Iran would go any more smoothly — and it could turn out considerably worse. If drawn in, the U.S. military’s involvement would likely begin with airstrikes rather than a ground invasion, given Iran’s large size and forbidding mountainous terrain. But as the fruitless $7 billion campaign against the Houthis showed, airstrikes are exorbitantly expensive, entail significant risks of American casualties and are likely to fail anyway. The United States never even gained air superiority over the Houthis, a ragtag militant group with the resource base of an impoverished country, Yemen, over which it couldn’t even consolidate control.

Iran is far more capable of defending itself than the Houthis are. If airstrikes fail to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, pressure would dramatically increase on U.S. forces to pair an aerial barrage with a ground component, perhaps something akin to the “Afghan model” the United States used to topple the Taliban. We know how that went. Despite the intent to keep that war small and brief, an engagement that started with just 1,300 U.S. troops in November 2001 snowballed into a disastrous 20-year occupation that reached some 100,000 U.S. troops at its height in 2011 and ultimately caused the deaths of 2,324 U.S. military personnel.

Even a best-case scenario, in which the United States helps destroy the majority of Iranian nuclear sites, would only delay Iran’s progress toward developing a bomb. War cannot prevent weaponization in the long term, which is why either diplomacy or benign neglect have always been better choices for handling Iran. Its enrichment program is over 20 years old, spread across multiple sites in the Islamic Republic, and employs untold thousands of scientists — 3,000 at the Isfahan facility alone. It’s probable that enough Iranian scientists know how to enrich weapons-grade uranium that Israel would not be able to kill them all, despite its airstrikes explicitly targeting them.

Assuming some continuity of technical knowledge persists, Iran would likely be able to rebuild its nuclear facilities quickly. And a defiant Iranian regime would no doubt be determined on weaponizing to deter future Israeli and U.S. attacks.

That likelihood, coupled with Israel’s insistence that Iran must never get the bomb, suggests that Mr. Netanyahu’s theory of victory could be premised on an underlying logic of regime change. Supporting that point, Israel appears to be engaging in strikes aimed at disabling the regime’s leadership in Tehran.

The Israeli leader has long embraced the desirability of regime change in Iran, and hinted in September that it could happen “sooner than people think.” As a French diplomatic source told Le Monde last fall, “The idea is circulating in certain circles that perhaps the Israelis are leading us toward a historic moment, that this is the beginning of the end for the Iranian regime.” The fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in December intensified speculation about similar upheaval in Iran. Some U.S. policy hawks and members of the Iranian diaspora now claim regime change is becoming inevitable; as Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton put it, “It’s now time to think of the campaign for regime change in Iran.”

That is magical thinking. History has shown again and again that bombing a country turns its people against the attacker, not against their own regime, despite its deep unpopularity. Images already show Iranians demonstrating in the streets — not to oppose their government but to urge retaliation against Israel. And even if the regime were to be deposed, what then? For all the Iranian government’s faults, a bad government is preferable to the chaos of no government. Do we really want to turn Iran into a failed state, like Iraq or Libya after the United States attacked those countries?

Mr. Trump often touts his record during his first term of having started no new wars. That is a record worth turning into a legacy. He must resist pressure from Mr. Netanyahu and hawks at home to avoid tragic, irreparable self-harm.

by Rosemary Kelanic, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Middle East Images/Redux
[ed. Netanyahu is a warmonging, ethnic cleansing, civilian killing criminal with a large arsenal of lethal toys courtesy of the U.S. (over decades). He should've been reigned in a long time ago if there were any spines left in Washington. Better late than never. It isn't antisemitic to reject a person, their politics, and their actions, regardless of religion or race, if what they're doing is dangerous and unconscionable. Sometimes assholes are just assholes. See also: Three angry old men who could get us all killed (Guardian).]