Tag: 2022 Election
Stevenson’s army, May 17
– Biden reverses Trump Cuba policy.
– Biden sends US troops back to Somalia.
– Supreme Court further weakens campaign laws.
-NATO expansion may not be blocked by Turkey.
– NYT sees problems in Russian military reform.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I 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, April 28
– WSJ says Russia making slow progress in southern Ukraine.
– Microsoft says Russia has been hacking Ukraine.
– Moldova events raise fears of wider war.
– Axios says pro-Israel groups have been involved in primary fights.
– RollCall notes that the Senate has been having only 1/3 as many votes on amendments as 30+ years ago. Only in passing does it mention what I think is the cause — repeated filling of the amendment tree.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I 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, January 20
– NYT explains how & why White House walked back Biden statements on Ukraine at news conference.
– BTW,the CIA director made a secret visit to the region shortly before SecState Blinken’s trip there.
– After CODEL to Kyiv, Senators are planning Ukraine support legislation.
– CIA says Havaan Syndrome does not seem to come from a foreign power’s worldwide effort. CNN has one report; WaPo another.
– WH released a new directive on NSA role in DOD cybersecurity. I think WSJ exaggerates the significance. In my view, this is just the latest in an administration planned clarification of duties within government. The bigger problem, as Lawfare noted last month, is that the US now has officials with overlapped authorities and only one is legally an “officer of the United States” with real authority. This question of authorities is an important one we’ll talk more about in class.
– It’s hard to show unity when leaders are seated 20 feet apart, but Russia and Iran tried that yesterday.Look at the photo!
-Amy Zegart discusses the role of nongovernmental sources doing spying.
– A think tank studying presidential transitions has a report on the Trump/Biden change.
– Deja vu: GOP plans rerun of 1994 campaign to capture Congress.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I 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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Voting rights can cure the fantasy
The prevailing wisdom these days is that America is polarized. Accordng to PBS, Democrats and Republicans are living in alternate realities. Both see the threat to democracy as real, but coming from two different directions. The implication: we need to come together and heal our deep divides before something even worse than the January 6 attack on the Capitol happens.
This is nonsense
We are not living in alternate realities. Some of us are living a fantasy. They think Biden stole the election, that COVID-19 is not a big problem, and that public health requirements infringe on their freedom. They deny that the January 6 riot was a riot, that Trump incited it, or that Trump supporters were violent.
None of this is true. The evidence is plain. No one has demonstrated election fraud capable of affecting the outcome of the 2020 election. COVID has killed more than a million Americans. Wearing a mask and social distancing are not the equivalent of the Nazi requirement that Jews wear a yellow star and live in ghettoes and concentration camps. January 6 was a violent insurrection Trump encouraged to block consitutionally-mandated certification of the election results. The courts have already convicted 75 of the miscreants and are prosecuting hundreds more.
The fantacists among us are lying, not putting forward an alternate hypothesis.
The “other side” is firmly based on reality. Biden was elected in accordance with the Constitution. Stemming the epidemic requires vaccination, masks, and social distancing. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6 and violently tried to block a constitutionally mandated procedure.
There is no doubt about these things. Fantasy is not an alternate reality.
The question is why?
Why would people choose a fantasy, one they know the facts do not support?
The main purpose is to consolidate identity. To be a Republican these days, you have to say you believe at least parts of the fantasy. That’s what holds the party together. It has no coherent governing proposals. It was not only unable to formulate an alternative to Obamacare but also abandoned fiscal conservatism during four years in the White House. Under Biden Republicans helped pass a giant infrastructure spending bill, but now oppose his social spending bill on fiscally conservative grounds.
Republicans now have an identity, one that its adherents can be relied upon to sustain, however flimsy its contact with reality. That identity is tightly entwined with white supremacy. The dog whistling about election fraud is all about tacitly claiming that black people can’t be trusted to count votes. The opposition to sensible public health measures originated when Americans thought the epidemic was mostly affecting black people and other minorities. The January 6 rioters were good people, as they were overwhelmingly white and Trump supporters.
Voting rights are the only cure
January 6 was a violent protest against a shift in demographic power. America is no longer as dominated as once it was by whites who alternate politely in power. It is doubtful whether any Republican can win a majority of the popular vote. Only one (George W) has done so, once, since 1992. Biden’s Electoral College margin was the same as Trump’s when he beat Hillary Clinton. But Biden ran 7 million votes ahead of Trump, even though Trump ran millions of votes ahead of his own popular vote count in 2016.
The January 6 rioters know this. Those who enouraged the riot also know that the Electoral College and the Senate favor less populous, more Republican states. And they know that state legistures, according to the Constitution, have the power to determine how Electoral Votes are cast, even if all have long since decided to do it in accordance with the popular vote. Republicans control more state legislatures, which are busy trying to restrict voting, get rid of non-partisan election officials, and open the possibility of determining themselves how the Electoral Votes will be case, no matter the popular vote outcome.
The only cure is national voting rights legislation, not “coming together.” If it forces Republicans to compete fairly in 2022 and 2024, they will see the need to drop the dog whistling and lying. They might even return to their former role as fiscal conservatives. Senate Majority Leader Schumer had better not be bluffing in promising limits on the anti-democratic filibuster, which has so far prevented passage, by January 17.
Remember January 6 for what it was: an attempted coup against a democratically elected President. Make sure it can’t happen again. Voting rights can cure fantasy.
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Stevenson’s army, January 5
– Cook Political Report says redistricting is a wash.
– Defense appropriations heading to higher figure.
– Austin & Blinken together testify on Afghanistan before SFRC next week, in closed session.
– DefenseOne criticizes US hypersonic missile program.
– Vox sees flaws in legal opinion on SEAL refusal to vaccinate.
Charlie also published this yesterday:
I’m always looking for good cases to illustrate the policy process. For diplomatic and military policies, the supply is vast. For foreign economic policy, however, I haven’t found many. Until this week, when I finally had a chance to read Edward S. Miller’s 2007 book for the Naval Institute Press, Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor.
Miller also has a revealing summary of U.S. economic sanctions policies starting with World War I, showing how reluctant U.S. officials were to use sanctions for foreign policy purposes. The key law empowering the president for almost any economic sanctions, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act [IEEPA] of 1977, is actually based on a section of the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act. That law resulted from a bureaucratic fight between the Commerce Department, which historically ran export controls, and Treasury, which claimed jurisdiction over financial transactions laws. Treasury won that fight, not least because the assertive secretary was also President Wilson’s son in law.
A similar bureaucratic struggle occurred in 1940-41 over Japan.Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the key interlocutor with the Japanese, resisted harsh sanctions because he considered them too provocative. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, however, favored pressure but had only an advisory role on sanctions. In key meetings with FDR in July, 1941, the president decided on freezing Japanese assets in the United States and restricting exports of various commodities but not a full embargo. Roosevelt and his cabinet officers even expected to sell oil to Japan, but only after some delay and on a case-by-case basis.
At the sub-cabinet level, however, Dean Acheson dominated the interagency committee that wrote the rules implementing FDR’s executive order and did so to prevent any oil shipments to Japan, a red line that many historians argue made war inevitable. Hull was upset to learn of the impact of the rules when he returned from medical leave, but was reluctant to force a change that might be viewed as favorable to the Japanese. FDR himself was preoccupied with his meeting with Churchill in August and the growing naval conflict with Germany and did not force a change back to his original policy.
Miller cites a 1976 paper by a researcher at the National Archives which has even more details of the hawkish cabal in the bureaucracy on the broad range of export restrictions on Japan, including redefining “aviation gas” so as to prevent any oil exports.
The key lesson for me is the power of the sub-cabinet bureaucracy to shape policy by implementation rules, regardless of presidential-level decisions. It happens all the time. The formal policy was to deter Japan from greater conquest by limited but significant export restrictions, not a full embargo. The actual policy Japan faced was an existential threat.
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, December 28
– WSJ reports on decline of civility in Congress because of Jan. 6 insurrection.
– NYT reports power struggle in Somalia.
– Biden signs NDAA, which allows $25 Billion increase for defense over current CR. But remember, this is a policy bill, not a money bill.
– WSJ sees Hispanic shift toward GOP.
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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