The Atlantic: Obama and the Limits of 'Fact-Based' Foreign Policy

The very notion of “facts” has been demeaned by Republicans, and most of all by Team Donald Trump. As Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes put it, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts.” In response, Democrats have doubled down on their tendency to wield facts as cudgels, demonstrating their righteousness in the process. It would be a loss, though, if this came to be seen as merely another partisan schism. As it turns out, Obama’s foreign-policy legacy can offer an important window into whether facts—and being “reality-based”—are quite as critical to real-world policy success as we might like to think.

Unlike Kennedy and Johnson, Obama was very much the technocrat-in-chief, setting the tone for the people he would surround himself with. His intelligence was generally in little doubt. During his eight years in the Oval Office, the president was an almost unbelievably voracious reader, devoting around an hour on most days to books of history, philosophy, biography, or even sci-fi novels. But being smart and well-read doesn’t necessarily lead to good judgment or bold vision; in some cases, even, the former can undermine the latter. [...]

Matters of judgment still loom large four decades later. I, or any critic of Obama’s foreign policy, could sit with an Obama administration official, and, even if we agreed on all the facts and specifics of a particular country or conflict, it wouldn’t matter much. Divergences in how people interpret Obama’s legacy have much more to do with fundamentally different starting assumptions about America’s role in the world and even human nature—in other words, the very reasons why we do what we do. In fact, looking back at my own meetings with officials during the Obama era, rarely do I ever recall hearing something and thinking to myself that I had just heard some gross error of fact. This is why I found such meetings so frustrating and circular: The only things we disagreed on were the most important. [...]

Due to the formative experience of the Iraq war, as well as domestic political considerations, Obama hoped to reduce America’s footprint in the Middle East. This meant a general bias toward disengagement, irrespective of whether greater U.S. involvement could produce better outcomes in particular crises (even the Iran nuclear deal was basically about removing the possibility of an American war with Iran). There was also a general discomfort around the direct use of U.S. military force, a discomfort which was as ideological as it was practical.

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FiveThirtyEight: Can You Trust Trump’s Approval Rating Polls?

That third possibility is pretty much exactly what happened. Trump beat the final FiveThirtyEight national polling average by only 1.8 percentage points. Meanwhile, he beat the final FiveThirtyEight polling average in the average swing state — weighted by its likelihood of being the tipping-point state — by 2.7 percentage points. (The miss was larger than that in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Clinton met or slightly exceeded her polls in several other swing states.) This was nothing at all out of the ordinary. The polls were about as accurate as they’d been, on average, in presidential elections since 1968. They were somewhat more accurate than they’d been in the most recent federal election, the 2014 midterms. But they were enough to tip the election to Trump because Clinton had been in a precarious position to begin with. [...]

There’s one other critical distinction that people often miss. The margin of error, as traditionally described, applies only to one candidate’s vote share (“Clinton has 47 percent of the vote”) or one side of a yes/no question (“41 percent of voters approve of Trump’s performance”). The margin of error for the difference between two candidates (“Clinton leads Trump by 5 percentage points”) — or a candidate’s net approval rating (“Trump has a negative-10 approval rating”) — is roughly twice as high: [...]

But so many of the articles I read toward the end of last year’s campaign didn’t convey any sense of uncertainty at all. A small Clinton lead was misreported as a sure thing. And then a small polling error was misreported as a massive failure of the data. It’s a fairly minor part of the puzzle, but if journalists want to rebuild trust in their reporting, ending the boom-and-bust cycle in how they report on polling — first overrating its precision and then being shocked when it’s even a couple of percentage points off — would be one way to start. Doing so would make it harder for Trump, or other politicians, to undermine confidence in polls they don’t like.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Moment of Tangency: A Glimpse of What Might Have Been

The New Yorker: Draining the Swamp

There are moments in a hard-fought campaign when a catchy cluster of words can suddenly bubble up from the depths and become like a shiny new lily pad. “Drain the swamp” worked on many levels—it was active, it was funny, and it sounded like something a man in the real-estate business would actually say. It offered no details—another plus—and held a folksy charm.

It was also historically accurate. Indeed, the candidate had landed on a point the Founders had gone to some trouble to conceal—that the foundation upon which they built their capital included a great deal of water, sand, and mud. [...]

A scrap of paper in the Library of Congress, from around March, 1791, shows the earliest appearance of the plan. With a few quick strokes of his pen, Thomas Jefferson outlined a master vision: the single word “President” above the future location of the White House, and another word, “Capitol,” to the east. In between, there would be “public walks,” which was an accurate description of the Mall to come.

Jefferson was channelling the ancients as he daydreamed of the future. Over a small stream, he sketched the word “Tyber,” after Rome’s river. A nearby elevation called Jenkins Hill would soon be renamed Capitol Hill, after Rome’s Capitoline. Soon, elaborate street plans, with parks, grids, and slashing diagonals resembling those of Versailles, would be traced over a terrain that still housed more bears than people. [...]

Sometimes the waters demand attention more urgently. In 2006, the long-forgotten Tiber Creek reasserted itself, by rising up from its underground bed, where it still courses below Constitution Avenue, and threatening the actual Constitution of the United States. That document is preserved in a secure vault in the National Archives, along with the Declaration of Independence. After a severe rainstorm, the underground waters rose rapidly, stopping, fortunately, well short of the documents, but reaching alarming levels, coursing through the Archive’s basement and a theatre, where visitors could find an unwelcome reflecting pool the next day, lapping their feet.

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Vox: 100 years ago, Americans talked about Catholics the way they talk about Muslims today

This may seem absurd today, but there was a real fear among Protestant Americans back then that Catholics were planning to take over the country. As Pearce reported, the fears led to serious violence: Lynch mobs killed Catholic Italians, arsonists burned down Catholic churches, and there were anti-Catholic riots. It was a similar sentiment to the kind of Islamophobia today that’s led many Americans to call for shutting down mosques, forcing Muslims to register in a national database, and even banning Islam.

The point of the comparison is not to say that the US faces the same problems today as it did a century ago, or that the discrimination toward Catholics back then and Muslims today is exactly the same. But when looking back at the history of the US, it’s easy to see a pattern of consistent xenophobia and fears of outsiders. [...]

But this sort of rhetoric is not new to the US. As the Pew Research Center found, Americans have generally opposed taking in refugees even as they went through abhorrent, well-known crises. (Dara Lind reported for Vox that America even rejected some Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.)

Xenophobia has fueled other policies too. In the late 19th century, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to stop the flow of Chinese laborers into the US. During World War II, the US put Japanese Americans in internment camps after the country declared war on Japan. Throughout the war on drugs, lawmakers have regularly tapped into xenophobic sentiments to prohibit certain drugs — such as when San Francisco banned opium smoking that was perceived as popular among Chinese immigrants, and when prohibitionists built up opposition to marijuana by fearmongering about its use among Mexican immigrants.

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ArchDaily: Below The Extraordinarily Textured Surface of This Unique Polish Concert Hall

The CKK Jordanki (Jordanki Cultural and Convention Center) by Fernando Menis is located in the historical center of Torun. It respects the shorter height of the surrounding buildings to preserve the views of the river and better fit the natural environment that surrounds it. The building was designed to have a more natural look, like a 'rock' that marks the transition from the urban plot to the park that surrounds it. In this interview we spoke with Fernando Menis who explained in depth how the selection of project materials contributed to the design process, helped in the inclusion of universal accessibility, and the project’s construction.

What were the main materials used in the project?

FM: Concrete and "picado." "Picado," coming from the Spanish word for chipped, is a new material, certified by both Spain and Poland’s Institute of Construction Research, and consists of mixing concrete with other materials, and breaking it up after assembly, to achieve certain acoustic effects. In the case of CKK Jordanki the “chipped” effect has been achieved by mixing concrete with recycled red bricks or with volcanic stone.

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Vanity Fair: The Death of the British Dream

On Tuesday, Theresa May made an unusual choice for the backdrop of her historic announcement regarding the terms of Britain’s departure from the European Union. The prime minister chose not Parliament but rather a lectern at Lancaster House, the setting, astonishingly enough, where Margaret Thatcher, the hero of every Tory right-winger, outlined the largely British notion for a single market back in 1988. Thatcher’s role in the European project ranks pretty high in the extensive annals of conservative amnesia, but it was May’s contempt for the elected representatives of the British people that was most significant. It apparently occurred to almost no one that she should be making her speech to Parliament, whose sovereignty and independence the Brexit supporters claimed to champion during the referendum campaign, rather than to the media and European ambassadors. [...]

The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court may, over the next few days, force the government to allow a debate before the triggering of Article 50, which will start the two-year procedure of leaving the E.U. But, even now, government ministers are drafting a one-line bill that is so microscopic that it will allow for no amendments and little debate. I hate to be an alarmist, but this adds up to something of an executive coup on Parliament. And the worst part of the whole story is that M.P.s are conniving in the rapid process of their own obsolescence. Apart from a few honorable exceptions, they sit gravely watching the ship of state head for the rocks with absolutely nothing to say for themselves—no ideas, not one thought about the huge, avoidable disaster of Brexit, and nothing to observe about the sheer, wasteful inconvenience of it all. [...]

This executive coup is all the more surprising given the numbers involved. May, who has never led her party to an election victory and therefore has no personal mandate, has a majority of just 14 seats in the House of Commons, which could easily be overturned by those M.P.s who are in favor of remaining in the E.U. There is something approximating a two-thirds pro-E.U. majority across all parties in the Commons. And in the House of Lords, where a geriatric majority is in favor of leaving the European Union, there are enough activist Europhiles to cause trouble.

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Deutsche Welle: Chinese President Xi Jinping calls for nuclear disarmament

In a landmark address in Davos on Wednesday, Xi held a speech to campaign for nuclear disarmament and a global governance system based on equality among countries. "Nuclear weapons should be completely prohibited and destroyed over time to make the world free of them," he said in a 45-minute-long address. [...]

Speaking about his own country, Xi said, "we always put people's rights and interests above everything else and we have worked hard to develop and uphold human rights...China will never seek expansion, hegemony or sphere of influence."

China has been accused of abusing human rights and stifling dissent among its dissidents. It has also been accused by its neighbors of having expansionist ambitions in the South China Sea.

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Deutsche Welle: Yemen conflict all but ignored by the West

When the UN children's rights organization UNICEF recently released a report stating that at least one child dies every 10 minutes in Yemen, the expectation was that the news would be picked up by international news outlets. But barring a few exceptions, including Al Jazeera and DW, the news was not carried by much of the global media prominently, and some not at all.

In its report, the humanitarian organization estimated that more than 400,000 Yemeni children are at risk of starvation, and a further 2.2 million are in need of urgent care. How could it be that statistics this alarming, the result of a war involving regional superpowers with the backing of the US and UK, does not make headline news? [...]

It's not that the conflict isn't covered, but when it is, news outlets tend to focus on the 'Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia versus the Shia Iran proxy war' narrative which overlooks the country's deepening humanitarian crisis. [...]

"There isn't a direct or immediate threat coming to western countries from Yemen," Baraa Shiban, a London-based Yemeni human rights activist, tells DW. "There are no 'waves' of Yemeni refugees crossing the Mediterranean because it's too far and if there are refugees they remain few in numbers. This is also related to the threat western countries feel they are facing. Dealing with the 'Islamic State' (IS) tops the list for western politicians. IS has claimed attacks inside Europe and such attacks could happen again. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has been busy hitting inside Yemen - recently killing soldiers in Aden - but it's limited in its ability to hit in Europe or the US."

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