Quartz: Europe, China and Russia are making a special fund to get around US sanctions on Iran

On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the European Union agreed with China and Russia to create a new financial institution to aid companies seeking to do business in Iran. They hope such trade will induce Iran to keep its end of a 2015 deal to restrict its ability to develop nuclear weapons. [...]

The “Special Purpose Vehicle” described in a joint ministerial statement would provide a way around the US banking system for companies seeking to purchase Iranian oil or sell goods there, allowing them to make payments back and forth.

Sanctions experts are skeptical that will be enough to bring commerce back to the country, given US willingness to apply economic punishments to companies no matter how they do business in Iran. The new financial vehicle would only be useful to companies that operate outside the US system.[...]

“That’s what people are concerned about—that people will move away from the dollar, or try to find ways to do trade other than going through the New York banks,” Smith says, cautioning that it is too early to know if this new mechanism will be a significant source of trade, much less a harbinger of economic change. “The fundamental story here is that the EU and US think about the world differently in this regard.”

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Politico: Democrats Aren’t Moving Left. They’re Returning to Their Roots.

What’s fueling this argument? For one, more Democrats have rallied, either noisily or cautiously, around such policy innovations as “Medicare for all,” universal college and a universal basic income. That a smattering of Democratic candidates have elected to call themselves “democratic socialists” has only fueled the claim that such programs are “socialist.” “The center is Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not Eugene Debs and Michael Harrington,” warned New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens recently. (Debs and Harrington were self-identified socialists.)

But there’s something wrong with this historical interpretation: Truman strongly supported single-payer health care. Moynihan supported a universal basic income in the 1960s. Dating back to World War II, Democrats sought to make a government-paid education available to as many Americans as possible. If Democrats are marching to the left, that road leads directly back to platforms and politicians who, in their day, commanded wide support and existed firmly in the mainstream of political thought.[...]

What pundits today decry as a radical turn in Democratic policy and politics actually finds its antecedents in 1944. With the country fully mobilized for war, President Franklin Roosevelt called for “a second Bill of Rights … an economic bill of rights” that would entitle all Americans to a “useful and remunerative job,” “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” the “right … to a decent home,” “the right to adequate medical care” and the “right to a good education.” His speech found partial inspiration in a report by the National Resource Planning Board, which advanced the necessity of a “socially provided income.”[...]

Only in the 1960s did Democrats abandon the concept of universal, single-payer health care and champion a narrower program of guaranteed hospital insurance and voluntary medical insurance for the elderly—the program that we now know as Medicare. They didn’t abandon universal coverage because they viewed it as too radical. Rather, they believed it was no longer necessary. After World War II, major employers began extending unprecedented benefits to workers, including annual cost-of-living adjustments to wages, defined benefits pensions and private health insurance. Given this reality, they turned their focus to a narrower subset of the population that, by definition, would not benefit from employer-based health programs: senior citizens.[...]

The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, Christian Democrats in Italy, the Austrian People’s Party, and the Popular Republican Movement in France are prime examples of center-right organizations that collaborated with socialist and centrist parties in establishing a welfare state that defined what historian Tony Jundt called the “‘European way’ of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations.” The contours of this welfare state varied from country to country, and to be sure, socialists, liberals and conservatives contested—and continue to contest—just how generous the state should be to its citizens. But by the turn of the 21st century, Jundt argued, the “European Way” had become “a beacon … and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life.’”  

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Foreign Affairs: Is Major Realignment Taking Place in the Middle East?

Alignments in the Middle East have long been shifting tectonic plates. For decades, regional powers—particularly Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—have competed to maximize power against the backdrop of interventions by Russia, the United Kingdom, and, later, the United States. Until recently, the United States and its regional allies—Israel, the majority of the Arab Gulf states, and Turkey—were aligned against Iran. In the aftermath of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, it seemed certain that these regional powers, backed by Washington, would succeed in isolating the mullahs. But myriad domestic, regional, and international factors have combined to obviate this long-standing status quo. The most significant result of these developments has been Turkey’s drift away from the United States and toward Iran and Russia.[...]

Erdogan’s beliefs shape his perception of the regional order. The Turkish president appears to see himself as a modern-day sultan, the rightful heir to Sunni leadership. He has gone so far as to claim that his “is the only country that can lead the Muslim world.” This makes the House of Saud less of an ally and more of a competitor. [...]

These developments have occurred against the backdrop of the Syrian conflict, where the United States and Saudi Arabia have remained united by a long-standing partnership, their respective enmity toward Iran, and the ongoing war in Yemen. For Turkey, the Iran-Russia nexus now seems to be a better fit than NATO. Ankara is preoccupied with stabilizing Syria, even if this means that President Bashar al-Assad remains in power. This objective aligns with Iranian and Russian goals. Moscow and Tehran have worked closely together in Syria—with Russia providing air cover to Iran’s ground troops—to secure both Assad’s grip on power and their own regional status. Both they and Turkey have an interest in preserving Syria’s territorial integrity, which could help them avoid a possible regional fragmentation and state failure that could spill over and threaten their own survival. [...]

In the morass of Middle East geopolitics, Turkey appears to be the big winner, capitalizing on this realignment to improve its image in the Muslim world as a leading nation willing to stand up to Saudi Arabia—whose closer relationship with Israel and leading role in the disastrous war in Yemen have tarnished its reputation. Ankara seems to be playing both sides of the Syrian conflict, perhaps in an attempt to maximize its leverage in future negotiations. Indeed, the success of U.S. Syria policy depends in part on Turkey. As a result, Washington should understand Ankara’s main regional objectives and assess NATO’s ability to forestall an undesired shift in the regional balance of power.

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Foreign Policy: The Economic Crisis Is Over. Populism Is Forever.

The larger significance of Merkel’s fate is that the materialist assumptions of Western liberalism no longer capture the reality of Western politics and culture. It is in the nature of liberalism, a credo founded on rationalism, secularism, and utilitarian calculation, to regard material interests—i.e., your pocketbook—as real and the realm of values as ephemeral. That is why in What’s The Matter With Kansas?, the economist Thomas Frank could argue that Republicans had hoodwinked working-class Americans into voting against their true interests by seducing them with traditionalist values. That is also what Barack Obama was thinking when he said during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign that working-class voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

It is, of course, no coincidence that the wave of populist nationalism now breaking over the West began in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, when millions of working- and middle-class voters lost savings, jobs, and future prospects. But the wave engulfed liberal politics even where economic pillars remained intact. Poland was Eastern Europe’s economic engine—its Germany—when the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party defeated the classically liberal Civic Platform in 2015. Civic Platform Prime Minister Donald Tusk had described his platform as the maintenance of “warm water in the tap.” When I was in Warsaw the following year, Konstanty Gebert, a columnist and former Solidarity leader, said to me, “He thought that was enough, but he was wrong. People wanted history, they wanted glory, they wanted meaning. And PiS offered a meaning. Their meaning was, ‘We’ll make Poland great again.’”[...]

It is also no coincidence that hostility to immigrants and refugees runs much hotter in eastern Germany than in the wealthier and more open west. Yet during several visits to Dresden, near the country’s eastern border, I found that economics was not uppermost in the minds of either the officials of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party whom I met nor even among the marchers in the weekly rally of the anti-immigrant group Pegida. The demonstrators were not lumpen; most were small-town folk who had seen a few Muslim refugees—often very few—and concluded that their world was under siege. The nationalist spirit has begun spreading westward: In elections this month in wealthy and worldly Bavaria, the AfD won more than 10 percent of the vote and entered parliament there for the first time. The right of center fell, the left of center collapsed, and both extremes profited.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Keeps Lying About Having Started His Wall, And His Supporters Don’t Care

Donald Trump keeps claiming that construction on his promised “great wall” is well underway although not a single yard of it has been built, and his supporters are getting mad ― not at the president, but at those who point out his lie.[...]

“All politicians are liars. They’re all weasels,” said the 60-year-old from Panama City. “You know why he’s so good? Because he’s up there breaking all the furniture. If he wanted to shoot somebody on Broadway, I’d vote ‘not guilty.’”[...]

Trump promised hundreds of times during his campaign that he would force Mexico to pay for the wall’s construction. Yet nearly two years into his presidency, he has not even once broached the topic with that country. In fact, he acknowledged to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto just days after taking office that he understood Mexico would not pay for the wall but asked Peña Nieto not to say that publicly to avoid embarrassing Trump with his supporters.  [...]

With most of Trump’s thousands of falsehoods, it is unclear whether he knows he is saying something untrue. Trump has proven to be deeply ignorant on any number of issues important to the presidency, so in many cases, a given falsehood could be a matter of him lacking information about a topic but forming a strong opinion nonetheless.

But on the matter of the wall, Trump does seem to understand that Congress has not provided any funding for its construction. In fact, he threatened to veto a massive $1.3 trillion spending package in March because it did not pay for his wall. He wound up signing it anyway, and said he did so because of all the money it contained for the military.

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