Month: May 2020
Stevenson’s army, May 18
– I strongly favor a rapid development of an effective and safe vaccine against Covid-19. We all do. But I’m not persuaded that the White House is doing that. On Friday the president announced Operation Warp Speed. He named the head of the Army Materiel Command as “chief operating officer” and a former top official at GlaxoSmithKline as “chief advisor.” HHS put out a press release promising major activities. But I can’t find anywhere an executive order empowering this WH committee to give orders or allocate funds or do the things an executive agency needs to do. Government needs execution and execution relies on authorities.
– NYT has more on the Pompeo activities that triggered an IG investigation by the now-fired State Dept IG.
– Space Command launches a bidding war for its new HQ. [I’ll bet AF gets the announcement out before Nov 3]
– Politico tells what life is like at WH nowadays because of the coronavirus.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, May 17
– NYT has long story revealing that WH aide Peter Navarro, in addition to being a hawk on China trade and conduit for companies seeking coronavirus contracts, has regularly pushed government agencies in favor of arms sales, notably to Saudi Arabia.
After the Yemen war began in 2015 and the Obama administration made a hasty decision to back the Saudis, Raytheon booked more than $3 billion in new bomb sales, according to an analysis of available U.S. government records.
Intent on pushing the deals through, Raytheon followed the industry playbook: It took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials, who were not required to be registered as lobbyists, to press their former colleagues to approve the sales.
And though the company was already embedded in Washington — its chief lobbyist, Mark Esper, would become Army secretary and then defense secretary under Mr. Trump — Raytheon executives sought even closer ties.
They assiduously courted Mr. Navarro, who intervened with White House officials on Raytheon’s behalf and successfully pressured the State Department, diminished under Mr. Trump, to process the most contentious deals.
They also enlisted the help of David J. Urban, a lobbyist whose close ties to Mr. Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo go back to the 1980s, when all three men were at West Point.
As the nation turned against the war, a range of American officials — Democratic and Republican — tried three times to halt the killing by blocking arms sales to the Saudis. Their efforts were undone by the White House, largely at the urging of Raytheon.
– Dan Balz at WaPo details how the administration has “hollowed out” the federal government, weakening its ability to respond to the pandemic.
– WaPo Fact Checker discredits claim that Trump shipped 17 Tons of medical equipment to China.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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No one else
I’ve been wrong a lot about American politics, but I’m going to hazard one more prediction: President Trump is hurting his own re-election chances by urging earlier-than-justified reopening of the US economy. There is already a surge in Covid-19 cases in “heartland” (i.e. non-coastal, non-metropolitan) areas. He is losing support even among evangelicals. The epidemic is going to get a lot worse. Rural areas and white Evangelicals are Trump country.
The situation in “swing” states is also precarious for Trump. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan–the three states whose narrow margins brought him victory in the Electoral College in 2016–all have Democratic governors who are winning plaudits for their deliberate approach to reopening.
The overall picture is also grim for Trump. By August, close to 150,000 Americans will have died of Covid-19. If each of them has 100 relatives and friends of voting age, that is 15 million people with good reasons to vote against Trump. Thirty million Americans have filed unemployment claims, and more millions have lost their jobs but aren’t eligible for unemployment.
The Conference Board outlook for the economy varies from bad to miserable:
Our friends there have pretty much given up hope for the V-shaped recovery and are betting now on the U-shape, which would give Trump some bragging points during the fall campaign. He could continue to claim, as he has already, that we are on the way to recovery. But I suspect the early reopenings in states that have not met the Federal government criteria will make the W-shape, or something like it, more likely. There are no campaign-time bragging rights at all in that instance.
Trump will blame it all on China, claim Obama didn’t prepare properly, say the CDC failed to produce good tests, and assert that he acted early and decisively. There are elements of truth in all those allegations. Chinese local officials did try to ignore the initial outbreak and Beijing has not been as forthcoming as it should be. Obama did prepare, including a playbook handed to the Trump transition team, but it prioritized preparations for biological warfare over an epidemic. CDC did fail in designing its first tests. Trump blocked Chinese from entering the US early, but then did nothing for weeks and continued to allow American citizens to return home from China and Europe without proper testing and tracking.
None of that really matters, because the Trump Administration had adequate warning (even beginning in December), failed for three years in office to prepare while dismantling Obama-era programs intended to give early warning, and then dawdled for months doing almost nothing to make tests available, supply personal protective equipment to health workers, or counter the spread of the virus.
The buck should stop in the Oval Office. President Trump’s hope that the virus would just disappear, or more likely that he could convince people to ignore the virus and the fatalities is has caused, is the root cause of the American Covid-19 disaster. It has also wrecked the decently growing economy the present Administration inherited from Obama. No one else is to blame but Donald Trump. He should be held responsible November 3.
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Stevenson’s army, May 14
– TNSR has excellent piece urging greater coordination of US economic and national security policies.
– Doug Ollivant has assessment of new Iraqi leader.
-WH won’t let Peter Navarro testify before Congress. But remember this is standard practice for WH officials who lack Senate confirmation.
– The usually critical congressional commission on China has a new report on Chinese tech.
– Dan Drezner is in Twitter fight with Sen. Hawley.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, May 13
– Congress is at it again — naming proposed laws to fit clever acronyms [or are they retronyms?] Speaker Pelosi unveiled the House Democrats’ $3 Trillion wish list linked to pandemic relief. Section 1 of the bill reads:
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Health and Economic
Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act’’ or the
‘‘HEROES Act’’. For extra credit, who remembers the words behind USA PATRIOT Act without resorting to Google?
David Ignatius discusses SAIS-grad Chris Brose’s new book arguing the US is not ahead of China militarily.
NYT analyst warns of flaws in state election polls.
NYT looks at attack in Afghanistan last October where it was falsely reported there were no US casualties for diplomatic reasons.
Ezra Klein has strong critique of the administration’s failures in responding to the coronavirus.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, May 12
– The Supreme Court today takes up cases regarding the president’s financial records. Most of the focus has been on the 1927 law requiring the Secretary of the Treasury to turn over tax returns to Congress when requested. But a clever writer at Politico notes that a 1789 law, never questioned before the Court before, set the precedent for Congress to ask and receive reports from the Secretary. When looking at the legal authorities for different government departments, I long ago noticed that when Congress created Treasury, it demanded and got regular reports from Alexander Hamilton on fiscal matters. That’s the way oversight is supposed to work.
– The Peterson Institute has a new report reviewing recent changes in US export control policies.
– Irony alert: Reuters reports that Trump’s anti-China policy doesn’t extend to pork.
The disruptions mean consumers could see 30% less meat in supermarkets by the end of May, at prices 20% higher than last year, according to Will Sawyer, lead economist at agricultural lender CoBank.
While pork supplies tightened as the number of pigs slaughtered each day plunged by about 40% since mid-March, shipments of American pork to China more than quadrupled over the same period, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. tmsnrt.rs/2YLF1XN
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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