The Huffington Post: Is the American Century Over?

Charles Dickens wrote that the Americans always think they are in “an alarming crisis.” After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, we believed we were in decline. When Japan’s manufacturing outstripped ours in the 1980s, we thought the Japanese were ten feet tall. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, a majority of Americans mistakenly thought that China was about to overtake the United States.

The result is a foreign policy debate that is often divorced from reality. The Middle East is in turmoil and American influence in that region has diminished. But the causes are the revolutions in the Middle East, not American decline. It is a mistake to generalize from the Middle East to the rest of the world. [...]

The distinguished British strategist Lawrence Freedman notes that among the features that distinguish the U.S. from “the dominant great powers of the past: American power is based on alliances rather than colonies.” Alliances are assets; colonies are liabilities. [...]

A key question for American foreign policy is how to bolster institutions, create networks and establish policies for dealing with the new transnational issues we will confront in this century. Leadership by the largest country is important for the production of global public goods, but domestic political gridlock often blocks such leadership.

read the article 

Politico: The Melania Trump of the 19th Century

If Donald Trump becomes president, his wife, Melania, who was born in what’s now Slovenia, will become the second foreign-born first lady in the history of the United States. Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, whose husband was elected president in 1824, was the first. Although Melania’s origins have made her the object of some interest during the 2016 campaign, no one has used them to argue against Trump’s claim to the White House, or even his well-known views on immigration. But that was not the case with Louisa—whose birthplace was used as a weapon against both her and her husband. To John Quincy’s political opponents, Louisa’s origins implied that she and her husband were undemocratic, tainted by the Old World, antithetical to the new republic. [...]

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, had been shocked when he saw how women “mix promiscuously in gatherings of men” in Paris. He would form friendships with some of them but remained suspicious of women in power. “I have ever believed that had there been no queen there would have been no [French] Revolution,” he wrote in his autobiography. Female courtiers were suspected of being capable of ruining a country, both morally and financially. They were seen at once as too weak and too dangerously powerful, capable of “omnipotent influence,” in the words of one American founder. Marie Antoinette was not the only one. When the French-Swiss writer Madame de Stael’s book Delphine reached American shores at the start of the 19th century, everyone read it, and buzzed about its scandalous defense of divorce.

read the article

The New York Times: Separate Bathrooms by Religion? Oklahoma Opens New Front in Transgender Debate

The Senate bill introduced on Thursday in Oklahoma defined “sex” as the “physical condition of being male or female, as identified at birth” by an individual’s anatomy.

It says any student can request a “religious accommodation” from a school for restrooms, athletic changing facilities or showers that are exclusively used by people with the anatomical sex at birth that is similar to their own. This means that a male student could request that the school provide facilities only for use by other students who were male when they were born.

It said a student can do so based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

read the article 

Radio Free Europe: Ukraine Renames Third-Largest City

The Ukrainian parliament has voted to change the name of the country's third-largest city from Dnipropetrovsk to Dnipro. [...]

The city was originally known as Katerynoslav. It was named as Dnipropetrovsk in 1926 after the Dnipro River and Ukraine's Soviet Communist Party leader Hryhoriy Petrovskiy.

read the article 

Time: If a Bomb Brought Down EgyptAir 804, the War on Terror Is About to Change

First, the caveats: No hard evidence of a bomb has been found, and no claim of responsibility has been announced. But because of the way EgyptAir Flight 804 dropped out of the sky, and the fact that it was headed to Egypt—scene of the only airliner bombing in 14 years—government officials and outside experts agree that the odds favor a terror strike.

No one yet knows how it might have happened, but two main possibilities present themselves—and both present mind-boggling implications. [...]

But here’s the thing: There are 100,000 flights every day around the world. Airport security monitors the safety of every one. If that task is expanded to take in the recent itinerary of every plane—with a leery eye cast toward stops in the Middle East—the mind boggles again, and goes right on boggling. We quickly approach the level of paranoia that is the ultimate aim of any terror attack, and, with that paranoia, a creeping suspicion toward all Muslims that ISIS explicitly says it wants to encourage. And what’s the good in that? Everyone wants to feel safe. And the best way remains to look out for one another, and not only in the security sense of the expression.

read the article 

The Guardian: US torture of prisoners is 'indisputable', independent report finds

A 580-page report published on Tuesday by the Constitution Project, a non-partisan Washington-based thinktank, concludes that the programme was unjustified and counterproductive, damaging to the country's reputation, and has placed US military personnel at risk of mistreatment if they are themselves taken prisoner. [...]

In one of their most damning conclusions, the panel says: "In the course of the nation's many previous conflicts, there is little doubt that some US personnel committed brutal acts against captives, as have armies and governments throughout history. But there is no evidence there had ever before been the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 11 September, directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody."

read the article 

Vox: China's latest idea for cleaning up air pollution could be horrible for climate change

Reuters reports that China has just approved three new plants in its western provinces that would turn coal into synthetic natural gas. The idea is that this gas would then be shipped to population centers in the east, where it would burn much more cleanly in power plants and detoxify the air in cities like Beijing.

Except there's a huge catch: The coal-to-gas (CTG) plants themselves are highly energy-intensive and can create far more CO2 overall than coal alone. It's basically swapping less smog for more climate change. China currently has three CTG plants operating, four under construction, three newly approved, and plans for another 17 in preparation. If even a fraction are built — a big "if" — that could have a sizeable impact on global warming.

read the article 

The Guardian: Are EU migrants really taking British jobs and pushing down wages?

HMRC figures also show that EU migrants more than pay their way. Those who arrived in Britain in the last four years paid £2.54bn more in income tax and national insurance than they received in tax credits or child benefit in 2013-14. The Office of Budget Responsibility has estimated that their labour contribution is helping to grow the economy by an additional 0.6% a year. [...]

The LSE’s Jonathan Wadsworth said: “The bottom line, which may surprise many people, is that EU immigration has not harmed the pay, jobs or public services enjoyed by Britons. In fact, for the most part it has likely made us better off. So, far from EU immigration being a “necessary evil” that we pay to get access to the greater trade and foreign investment generated by the EU single market, immigration is at worse neutral, and at best, another economic benefit.” [...]

A recent UCL study showed that the typical profile of a European migrant in Britain was no longer a Polish plumber, but a young, single French or Spanish graduate working in the financial, technology or media industries.

read the article 

The Guardian: Israel has turned right and exposed the battle within

So this is a critical battle in Israel. It’s not between left and right, but rather a division within the right over the rule of law. Tellingly, in his resignation speech – in which he vowed to return to politics and one day compete for the top job – Ya’alon also defended Israel’s supreme court, a frequent punchbag for the ultra-nationalists. That his job has been offered to Lieberman – who during the last Gaza war called for Jewish Israelis to boycott Arab shops, and who once suggested Israel punish Egypt by bombing the Aswan dam – tells you on which side of this crucial divide Netanyahu now stands. [...]

For the optimist, the consolation comes in noting that, if Netanyahu were minded to make a move, he would now face no opposition on the right. The most seasoned Palestinian negotiators concluded long ago that their best shot at a deal is with a united Israeli right: the left might mean well, but would always be overcome by domestic resistance. Hopeful types also note that Lieberman may be brutal and a xenophobe, but he is also a pragmatist: unlike the more ideological rightist Naftali Bennett, he supports a two-state solution.

read the article