Haaretz: There May Be an Innocent Explanation for Trump’s Helsinki Fiasco: Sheer Stupidity

By the by, Trump managed to tie his own weekly record for most mistakes, misstatements and falsehoods - the Toronto Star counted 57 - including his claim that the U.S. provides 90 percent of NATO’s funding (it’s actually 22 percent), that Russia provides 60-70 percent of Germany’s energy (more like 7-9 percent), that he didn’t insult Britain’s Theresa May (he did), that, in his honor, the queen reviewed her first military guard in 70 years (she does so on a regular basis) and in his particularly peculiar branding of Montenegro as an “aggressive” nation unworthy of NATO protection (they last fought in the Yugoslav wars of the early '90s, and before that, in World War II). And that’s a modest sampling. [...]

Some of the attacks from former top intelligence community officials, even if one accounts for their association with past Democratic administrations, were admittedly harsher than anything ever hurled at past presidents. Former CIA Director John Brennan said Trump’s behavior was “treasonous," his predecessor Leon Panetta opined that “the Russians must have something on him” and former White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke said that Trump was a “controlled Russian asset.” But many mainstream Republicans were also shocked, with usually sycophantic Fox News presenters lashing out at the president, describing his Helsinki performance as “shameful” and “disgusting.” One wonders if the breach with his media hinterland merits comparisons to Walter Cronkite’s critical February report on the faltering Vietnam War, to which President Lyndon B. Johnson is said to have reacted - though perhaps he didn’t - with the prescient observation: “If I’ve lost Walter, I’ve lost Middle America." [...]

But therein lies the rub. If Trump really owes Putin, and certainly if he is a Kremlin stooge, as many Democrats asserted this week, why does he go to such lengths to prove it? Why does he make such an effort to look like he’s guilty? Trump refuses to say a bad word about the Russians. He ignores the Kremlin’s crimes and belittles its sins, spouts fulsome praise at strongman Putin, does his best to undermine the Mueller investigation and freely admitted that he fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russian probe. Even Putin, who knows a thing or two about handling moles from his time at the KGB, appeared ill at ease with Trump’s overstated fawning. He emphasized ongoing U.S.-Russian disagreements and vouched that Trump really doesn’t trust him one bit. [...]

Stupidity, Cipolla asserted, has immense power: Intelligent people tend to underestimate its prevalence and are often helpless in fighting it. Acts of stupidity are powerful because, by definition, they are illogical, unreasonable and unexpected. The third of the five basic laws of stupidity outlined by Cipolla defines a stupid person as one “who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” On the assumption that Putin doesn’t really own Trump, it’s an accurate description of the president’s achievements over the past week.

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Politico: Macron and Salvini face off over Continent’s future

Macron has charged Christophe Castaner, En Marche’s chief executive, with pulling together potential allies across the Continent, including Italy’s former center-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and the liberal Spanish Ciudadanos party. [...]

It’s a battleground on which Salvini is eager to engage. “Next year’s election will be a referendum between the Europe of the elites, banks, finance, mass migration and precariousness versus the Europe of peoples, work, tranquility, family and future,” he said earlier this month at a rally of party members and supporters in the northern Italian town of Pontida. [...]

En Marche officials have been courting members of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe parliamentary group (ALDE) with the hope of forming a large pro-European force after the election. But so far “Macronmania” has not infected the European Parliament; few believe Macron’s group will be able to rival the EPP for dominance.

Salvini’s problem is that Euroskeptics are heterogeneous and divided, and in some areas ideological enemies. On economics, for example, the National Rally and Alternative for Germany (AfD) sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Creating a large Euroskeptic group would require him to bridge those differences. [...]

A new Macron-centered political group would draw on the most progressive of the liberal ALDE parliamentary group, “and all those who don’t identify themselves with the EPP or Socialist forces,” said Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade, a French member of parliament from En Marche and one of Macron’s point men in preparing the 2019 election campaign. “What we offer is an alternative to populists,” he said.

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Foreign Policy: Who’s Afraid of Judith Shklar?

 “The Liberalism of Fear” is fundamentally an essay about the boundaries of liberalism. Over the course of the mid- to late 20th century, liberalism became encumbered by considerable cultural baggage in Western politics. It had come to be associated with the progressive technocracy of a self-appointed best and brightest and the judicial enforcement of substantive policy outcomes; it was a school of thought that both claimed to represent the people and seemed to avoid the messy practice of democratic politics. In part for that reason, some thinkers on both the right and the left came to use it as an epithet, shorthand for a halfhearted and weak-kneed lack of conviction. Think of Robert Frost’s joke that a liberal is someone who won’t take his or her own side in an argument or — in the immediate past as Shklar was writing her essay — George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign disdaining liberalism as culturally elitist and effete.

In her essay, Shklar tries to recenter liberalism by insisting it is essentially a political, not a philosophical or legal, doctrine. Liberalism is concerned with freedom, but the substance of freedom is to be determined by the individuals seeking it for themselves, not the philosopher divining its nature from her office. By placing limits on liberalism, Shklar also wanted to give it more force, in the service of protecting people from undue power — state power, above all. She thought the philosophical and juridical liberalism of rights and justice associated with Immanuel Kant and Rawls, as well as the aspirational liberalism of self-development found in John Stuart Mill’s work, ultimately went astray because it distracted from the most urgent political task associated with freedom: restraining state violence.  [...]

 As such, Shklar’s attention was focused on the political actors most capable of organizing violence — the state’s military, paramilitary, intelligence, and police and law enforcement agencies. Shklar’s discussion of the potential cruelty and lawlessness of armed agents of the state helps illuminate contemporary issues such as overincarceration, police violence, the legacy of the use of torture since 9/11, and, particularly timely, the sweeping powers of immigration enforcement agencies. In the 1990s, this struck many critics as an excessively modest vision, one that gave up on morally valuable aspirations and ambitions. But by 2018 it should be clear that liberalism as Shklar understood it cannot be taken for granted — and if liberalism hopes to win more widespread support among the people it is meant to serve, defending it on Shklar’s more modest and democratic terms may be the solution. [...]

Gatta identifies themes that have been underappreciated in Shklar’s work: an orientation toward the well-being and the voices of the less powerful, a need for democratic participation and inclusion, a worry about economic power that is subordinate to the worry about state power but never absent. Gatta is right, for example, to highlight Shklar’s commitment to active, competitive politics and to note that her partial skepticism about democracy in “The Liberalism of Fear” is far from her only word on the matter: Liberalism, Shklar says, is “monogamously, faithfully, and permanently married to democracy — but it is a marriage of convenience.” Gatta shows that Shklar’s thought prescribes an open-ended democratic process to identify people who are subject to fear and cruelty, listen to their accounts of it, and think creatively about how to respond. In that way, Shklar’s failure to build a schematic political doctrine wasn’t an accident; in emphasizing fear and cruelty, she gave greater moral weight to interaction and communication than the stability offered by a political blueprint or a legal constitution.

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Vox: The latest protests against the Chicago police are about more than one shooting

It’s not, then, just about this police shooting. It’s also a reaction to the 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. It’s about the US Department of Justice investigation, released in 2017, which found that the Chicago Police Department repeatedly used excessive force and often treated people, particularly minorities, “as animals or subhuman.” And it’s the decades of incidents before that, including a scheme under which a police detective tortured hundreds of people to force confessions out of them. [...]

This is reflective of the broader national story with Black Lives Matter since 2014: While one incident may trigger protests — like the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore, or Tamir Rice in Cleveland — the fallout speaks to a much longer history. And that history involves not just police killings of black people but also other abuses, from petty traffic stops to downright torture, hand in hand with a lack of police attention to black communities when they actually need the help of law enforcement. [...]

In the days since the shooting, the police department has defended its officers, noting in a July 15 press conference that Augustus was armed and that he did not have a concealed carry permit for his weapon. Community members and activists meanwhile, have countered that the mere presence of a gun does not justify the shooting. They noted that Augustus was licensed to own a firearm and that it would be impossible for officers to know about Augustus’s lack of a permit when the initial stop occurred. [...]

Local activists and policing experts alike have noted that there are a lot of things still unanswered when it comes to the Augustus shooting. One of the first is exactly why Augustus was stopped for appearing to be armed, given that the state allows for concealed carry. Activists have also noted that video of the shooting shows Augustus attempting to pull what looks like an Illinois Firearm Owners’ Identification card from his wallet shortly before being grabbed by an officer, leading them to question why the interaction escalated so quickly. [...]

For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts. The Justice Department described this as an example of how “residents in black neighborhoods suffer more of the harms caused by breakdowns in uses of force, training, supervision, accountability, and community policing” routinely seen across the police department.

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The New Yorker: “No Way to Run a Superpower”: The Trump-Putin Summit and the Death of American Foreign Policy

Days after the Helsinki summit, Trump’s advisers have offered no information—literally zero—about any such agreements. His own government apparently remains unaware of any deals that Trump made with Putin, or any plans for a second meeting, and public briefings from the State Department and Pentagon have offered no elaboration except to make clear that they are embarrassingly uninformed days after the summit. [...]

At the same time, the fragmentary evidence that has emerged, from the Russian comments and Trump’s various interviews, suggests there is reason for serious concern. In an interview on Fox, Trump questioned America’s commitment to the nato alliance’s Article 5 mutual-defense provision, disparaging the new nato member Montenegro as an “aggressive” little country that just might provoke us into “World War Three.” The criticism seemed to parrot Putin’s thinking on nato and Montenegro—where Russia mounted an unsuccessful coup attempt last year in an effort to block the country’s nato accession. The exchange left observers justifiably wondering if this was part of the agenda in the private Trump-Putin talks. Trump has also, in his tweets and other interviews, alluded to substantive discussions with Putin on issues such as Syria, where Trump is already on record as saying he wants to withdraw U.S. troops. If Trump, in fact, struck a secret deal with Putin in Helsinki to pull back U.S. troops from Syria, or otherwise limit the American presence, that would prove deeply controversial among many in his own party.  [...]

We are witnessing nothing less than the breakdown of American foreign policy. This week’s extraordinary confusion over even the basic details of the Helsinki summit shows that all too clearly. We may not yet know what exactly Trump agreed to with Putin, or even if they agreed to anything at all; perhaps, it will turn out, Putin and his advisers have sprung another clever disinformation trap on Trump, misleading the world about their private meeting because a novice American President gave them an opening to do so. But, even if we don’t know the full extent of what was said and done behind closed doors in Helsinki, here’s what we already do know as a result of the summit: America’s government is divided from its President on Russia; its process for orderly decision-making, or even basic communication, has disintegrated; and its ability to lead an alliance in Europe whose main mission in recent years has been to counter and contain renewed Russian aggression has been seriously called into question.

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The New York Review of Books: Why Trump’s Hawks Back the MEK Terrorist Cult

In the 1980s, the MEK served as a private militia fighting for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. Today, it has a different paymaster: the group is believed to be funded, in the millions of dollars, by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Washington, D.C., as in Paris, France, the MEK pays tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to US officials. Bolton, in particular, is a long-time paid supporter of the MEK, reportedly receiving as much as $180,000 for his appearances at the group’s events. [...]

The MEK goes back a long way. Founded in the early 1960s, it was the first opposition group to take up arms against the repressive regime of the Shah. Its ideology was based on a blend of Marxism and Islamism, and the group enjoyed widespread support inside Iran in the 1970s. But a series of missteps saw its popularity dramatically dwindle. After the Shah was deposed, the group’s rivalry with Ayatollah Khomeini came to a head not long after the MEK opposed Khomeini’s decision to release the fifty-two American embassy staff held hostage by Iran, and instead, called for their execution. In fact, only a few years earlier, as part of a campaign targeting the Shah’s regime, the MEK assassinated three US Army colonels and three US contractors, in addition to bombing the facilities of several US companies. [...]

The MEK’s human rights abuses have been well documented by human rights organizations. The MEK leadership has reportedly forced members to make taped confessions of sexual fantasies that are later used against them. In Iraq, disobedient members were routinely put in solitary confinement—in at least one case, for as long as eight years, according to HRW. Other members were tortured to death in front of their kin. As one US official quipped to me in 2011 when the organization was running its ultimately successful multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to be removed from the State Department’s terrorist list: “Al-Qaeda actually treats its members better than the MEK treats its.”[...]

Al-Qaeda may treat its members better, but rest assured, neither al-Qaeda nor ISIS has ever rented office space in Washington, held fundraisers with lawmakers, or offered US officials speaking fees to appear at their gatherings. But the MEK did this openly for years, despite being on the US government’s terrorist list. The money that Maryam Rajavi (Massoud Rajavi’s wife, who has taken over leadership of the organization since Massoud’s mysterious disappearance in Iraq in 2003) offers to American politicians and the organization’s aggressive advocacy and lobbying only partly explain the group’s freedom of action at the heart of America’s political capital. Certainly, some politicians have likely been duped by the MEK’s shiny image, but Washington’s better-informed hawks are not duped; they simply like what they see, even at the risk of running afoul of federal ethics laws.

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The Atlantic: The Unmonitored President

However, what that analysis gains in drama it loses in scientific necessity. The essence of “Trumptalk” is something quite ordinary, what linguists call unmonitored language. The kink is that formality, impact, and gravity typically elicit monitored language. Writing is deliberate, allowing us to edit, amend, and correct. The formal statement—as in, to the American public and the world beyond—is typically either read from writing, or even if ad libbed is couched carefully and reflectively in the same air as writing. Unmonitored language is most of the language in the typical person’s life: casual speech, texts, tweets. Humans are genetically specified to use it and none has ever been known to lack it—it comes easily.

Trump takes it easy. It only compounds the pain and embarrassment so many Americans feel when watching spectacles such as his taking a knee before a foreign power accused of harming the U.S. electoral process. It’s bad enough that Trump lacks the substance to care about his job beyond how it impacts his score-keeping sense of ego. What makes it worse is that—in line with his lecturing government leaders on the basis of gut feelings, blithely stepping in front of the Queen, scarfing his Big Macs, and lacking an impulse to even pretend to have any interest in the arts—he is the first president who, rather than striding forward and speaking, just gets up and talks. Welcome to the queer circumstance of unmonitored language as officialese. [...]

Or take the fact that in the very tweet in which Trump trumpeted his right to use capitals for emphasis, he told us that “the Fake News constantly likes to pour over my tweets looking for a mistake.” Unless Trump intended the liquid connotation, this is a typo, and a rather glaring one—suggesting again a basic lack of attention. Here is a president who is sharing with us without checking it over first. Generously, we might imagine that he uses a spell-check but that even such programs miss misspellings that are other words, such as pour. But this analysis founders upon Trump’s references in other tweets to “unpresidented” acts, such as President Barack Obama daring to “tapp” his phone. Trump clearly is no champion speller—“NO COLUSION” was scrawled on the typescript of his “double negative” script. Many of us aren’t—but we’d make sure nobody knew it if we were president. Trump can’t be bothered.

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The Atlantic: Barack Obama Still Doesn’t Understand Donald Trump

Obama offered his trademark: a hopeful series of solutions. He encouraged “an inclusive market-based system,” criticizing both “unregulated, unbridled, unethical capitalism,” and socialism. He emphasized the role of youth, and the need for free speech and open democracies. He also chided opponents of white-nationalist regimes across the world. Taking familiar jabs at identity politics, the former president said that liberals can’t beat their opponents if they dismiss them out of concern that “because they’re white, or because they’re male, that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling—that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”   [...]

His prescription for the world’s economic state, which continues to see a robust recovery from the last recession, didn’t address why even in that recovery the forces of populism and racism still appear to be on the advance. It was flawed given the setting, too. His praise of a global, liberal, market-based economic framework is an incomplete take on the life and philosophy of Mandela, who led a Marxist party that might now be best described as social democratic, and whose major postapartheid challenge was unlocking the vast reserves of wealth held by a minority elite. Obama’s recommendations were in conflict with the words of Madiba himself, who said in a 1996 address: “We need to exert ourselves that much more, and break out of the vicious cycle of dependence imposed on us by the financially powerful: those in command of immense market power and those who dare to fashion the world in their own image.” [...]

In speeches like these, Obama often tries to play the role of a moderator attempting to set the terms of debate so that sides can reach each other in good faith. But this is a romantic view, and it does nothing to counter the obvious disregard Trumpism has for dialogue, mutual empathy, or facts. Nor is it supported by the real histories of freedom, struggle, and movement in both South Africa and the United States. South Africa’s black people overthrew their oppressors, and while careful debate was certainly a critical part of the process, so were shame, dispossession, and outright violence. Indeed, Mandela himself helped lead an armed sabotage campaign against the Afrikaner government, and later refused to pledge to renounce violence in order to secure an early release from prison.

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Politico: Barnier dismantles UK’s Brexit white paper

Barnier went to great lengths to avoid saying that the white paper is a nonstarter — a position that EU officials and diplomats have been reluctant to voice aloud for fear of creating further chaos in Britain or even helping topple May’s government. But Barnier’s reiteration of the EU’s commitment to the single market, and the indivisibility of its four freedoms — notably the freedom of movement for workers — effectively rejects the core elements of May’s plan. [...]

Barnier then punched a hole in Britain’s proposal for regulatory alignment only on certain manufactured goods. “The U.K. said it was ready to align with Union standards for goods but only for those controlled at the borders — so it would not be aligned with our agrifood standards likes GMOs, pesticides, since there is no control over whether or not these rules are respected,” Barnier said. [...]

However, Barnier was unable to explain why the backstop issue had to be solved before the conclusion of the formal withdrawal agreement, which currently provides for a 21-month transition period in which nothing would change on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Barnier insisted that the backstop is needed “now” and noted that May has twice previously agreed that a backstop for Ireland is necessary. In a speech Friday in Belfast, May said the EU’s own version of the backstop is unworkable and potentially violates the Good Friday Agreement, and called for Brussels to renegotiate it.

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