Aeon: These should be the end times for American patriotism

One of the conceits of American patriotism – that it is a salubrious version of the pernicious nationalism that other countries have – has helped to protect it from critical questioning of almost any type. The kinds of 20th-century Leftist political movements that in principle opposed nationalism fared poorly in the US, and this might be why popular justifications for the country’s patriotism tend to be shallow. They are often based on appeals to treasured details of family or community life: patriotism is Little League baseball on a warm summer day, the courtesy of the small-town merchant, a neighbourhood rebuilding together after a destructive storm. All nationalisms make sentimental appeal to intimate but generic experience, and the effects can help to raise armies and start wars. They carry, in other words, formidable political force. But they are not any kind of serious moral or intellectual case for patriotism.  [...]

American patriotism has always depended on conjuring alleged conspiracies from migrants or outsiders bearing existential threats: foreign devils all. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, it was Catholicism. The Anglo establishment held Catholics to be unreasoning and beholden to priestly power, unfit for the obligations of citizenship. That’s why people who take the oath to become citizens must renounce allegiance to any foreign ‘potentate’, that is, the Pope. Then the Cold War made it communism: like Catholicism, a nebulous and formidable global power, yet also moving invisibly in the hearts and minds of immigrants, to undermine the country from within. Now rival camps differ as to whether the existential threat is sharia or Russia. [...]

This core component of American patriotism – the popular conviction in a world-historical role for the US – is unlikely to continue. First, it is increasingly difficult not to notice that in many basic matters of government and society, including healthcare, public education, gender equity, social mobility and prosperity, economic fairness, childcare, environment and more, the US has fallen behind most of the developed world. The US’s world-historical ambitions have simply not kept pace with world history. Secondly, the wars. Wars are nation-making events, but they can also be unmaking ones. If your patriotism is linked to pretensions of a world-historical role, what do you do when the world chooses not to emulate you, or when it (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) doesn’t want your Americanisation project? Mere military supremacy, especially when it proves ineffective at achieving its goals, is unlikely to be enough to sustain the exceptionalist heart of American patriotism.

read the article

The New York Times: Trump Bets Sanctions Will Force Iran to Bargain. There’s No Plan B.

Beyond betting that Iran’s leaders will return to the negotiating table, and seek a better deal, once they feel the sanctions’ bite, the president appeared to acknowledge that he has no Plan B for dealing with Tehran. [...]

On Wednesday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ultimately approved the terms of the 2015 deal, declared that his country will need 20,000 megawatts of nuclear electricity for its power grid. He did not explicitly suggest resuming uranium enrichment, but for years Iran insisted that its nuclear program was for civilian use — even though it was already buying fuel from Russia to power its one major reactor.

After Mr. Trump announced his decision, the leaders of Britain, France and Germany on Tuesday reaffirmed their support for a United Nations Security Council resolution that formally endorsed the accord. The European leaders asserted that the resolution was the applicable international law governing the Iranian nuclear problem — a way of suggesting that the United States is the first country to violate the accord.

They also noted that Mr. Trump’s own intelligence officials — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, when he was serving as C.I.A. director — have said he saw no evidence that Iran had violated the deal.

read the article

The Atlantic: The Defense That Failed White Nationalists

If a claim of self defense as justification for brutally attacking an unarmed man sounds familiar, Harris’s attorney, S. Lee Merritt, thinks it should.

"It works for cops, that's what I thought when I heard it. It sounds very familiar from police brutality cases,” Merritt told me. “Unfortunately in our culture black men are often seen as threatening even when they're the victims, as Mr. Harris clearly was." [...]

For police, the fear defense has been effective. The Supreme Court has held that police can use lethal force if they have a “reasonable” belief that a suspect might hurt them or others, and through the warped prism of America, any fear of a black male can seem “reasonable” to a jury, especially if that jury is all-white. Grand juries consistently fail to indict cops who kill unarmed black people, even when those killed are children, like Tamir Rice. And those officers that do go to trial often prevail on the grounds that they were simply scared, like when Chicago Police Officer Dante Servin was acquitted after he fired five shots into an alleyway at four people who had their backs turned to him, killing Rekia Boyd. Servin said he feared for his life. The first attempt to prosecute Michael Slager, the South Carolina officer who was recorded on video shooting Walter Scott in the back, ended in a mistrial. In perhaps the most famous example, the Los Angeles officers shown beating Rodney King senseless on video in 1991 were acquitted. [...]

Virginia state laws only contain hate-crime enhancements for lesser charges, which means that in pursuing the more serious malicious wounding charge, prosecutors had to avoid discussing Goodwin and Ramos’s ideological leanings—that is, their motive for showing up at a racist rally in the first place. "We charged the most serious offense that we could under state law with the highest maximum penalty," Joseph Platania, the Commonwealth’s attorney for the city of Charlottesville told me after Goodwin was convicted. "We are appreciative of the careful attention the jury paid to the facts and are satisfied with the result."  

read the article

Bloomberg: Reality Check: Europe Won't Roll Over on Iran

Trump’s attitude toward Europe is clear: He considers the European Union a collection of puffed-up small countries dependent on the U.S. for economic survival and military protection. In Trump’s view, these little nations will always cave to pressure. That stance was conveyed by the imperious tweet from the the newly arrived U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who ordered German companies that do business in Iran to “wind down operations immediately.” Grenell has since explained that the tweet followed “the exact language sent out from the White House talking points” on Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal. [...]

There is little respect for Trump in European capitals, except, perhaps, in Warsaw and Budapest, which don’t call the shots on trade. French, German and U.K. politicians consider his presidency an aberration and a temporary setback. The current plan, inasmuch as there is one, is to outlast Trump and preserve all the frameworks he’s trying to break until the next U.S. president takes office. That’s the case with the Paris climate accord as much as with the Iran deal. No one in Moscow or Tehran should expect moderate leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Emmanuel Macron or, especially, Prime Minister Theresa May, to suddenly turn anti-American just because Trump is in the White House. [...]

There’s no reason for Trump to count on weaker resistance today, especially since Iran presents a far greater economic opportunity than Cuba did. In Cuba, the biggest European investments were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Iran, a country that holds 7 percent of the world’s entire mineral reserves, attracted $7.38 billion in approved foreign investment projects between January 2016 and September 2017 after taking in only $2 billion in 2015. Most of the new money is coming from China and the EU. Still, the U.S. sanctions could have deep consequences: If France’s Total, which has a big U.S. operation, is forced to pull out of Iran’s South Pars project, China’s CNPC, which is now Total’s partner, would likely take over. It’s not clear to the Europeans why they should leave the investment opportunity to the Chinese. Total wants the EU to fight its corner.

read the article

Vox: Trump quits Iran nuclear deal, undoing years of diplomacy

Trump has been saying he wants to exit the Iran nuclear deal for a long time, a deal that has so far prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And now that he has, decades of negotiations could unravel, with far-reaching consequences for the US foreign policy.

BBC: The young Turks rejecting Islam

In the 16 years that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party has been in power, the number of religious high schools across Turkey has increased more than tenfold. [...]

But over the past few weeks, politicians and religious clerics here have been discussing whether pious young people have started to move away from religion.  [...]

While there are no statistics or polls to indicate how widespread this is, anecdotal evidence is enough to worry Turkey's leaders. [...]

Turkey's top religious cleric, the head of Religious Affairs Directorate Ali Erbas, has also denied the spread of deism and atheism among the country's conservative youth. "No member of our nation would ever adhere to a such a deviant and void concept," he said.

read the article

The Guardian: Corbyn 2.0 comes out swinging – and floors May with plain English

Corbyn 2.0 had a revolutionary plan. Talk in plain English. Keep things short and sweet. Stick to one subject. Don’t attempt the impossible of thinking on his feet. And ask the questions that everyone in the country wanted answered. He began by highlighting the government’s divisions on Brexit. Did she agree with her foreign secretary that her favoured “customs partnership” arrangement was crazy?

The prime minister couldn’t cope. May has been through several iterations of her own – no one is entirely sure if we are currently at Maybot 5.0 or Maybot 6.0 – but she has yet to find a system that is passably functional. Rather it seems that each upgrade only serves to further weaken her. Even though Boris Johnson’s contributions to cabinet collective responsibility had been front page news for a couple of days, she was totally taken aback by the question.  [...]

Boris Johnson had managed to prove his loyalty to May by refraining from heckling her – being so jet-lagged he could hardly keep his eyes open must have helped – but once she had left the chamber it was his turn at the dispatch box to explain how his one-man mission to nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel peace prize had ended with the US president canning the Iran nuclear deal. It wasn’t his finest hour, but even he seemed surprised that so many of his own MPs, including former defence secretary Michael Fallon, were so quick to hail Trump’s genius. With just a hint of Boris being in charge, the lunatics really are taking over the asylum.

read the article