| | | | How Trump Gets Immigration Right – And So Wrong: Frum | | Despite many of the headlines, President Trump has actually moved sharply toward his opponents' position on immigration, suggests David Frum in The Atlantic. Yet his own divisive rhetoric – on display again in last night's State of the Union – means reform remains elusive. Why? Frum argues that it's down to a big weakness of Trump's presidency: An inability to change people's minds.
"Leaders of the Democratic Party—and especially the 2020 presidential hopefuls—now seem to regard almost any form of enforcement against people illegally present inside the United States as a racist denial of human rights," Frum says.
"Yet Trump cannot make a political resource of his opponents' rising radicalism and intransigence. His trademark truculent imperiousness inevitably casts him as the unreasoning extremist. He cannot forbear falsifying his case even when he is right."
"[M]ajor changes only happen if they can command broad support from many different constituencies. Donald Trump acts as if he believed his own fantasy that he won a landslide victory in 2016 and—as he said at the opening of his speech—as if he 'speaks on behalf of the American people.' Neither of those things is true." "Republicans have been wondering what Trump's infrastructure initiative is going to look like. They're still wondering now that his speech is done; his comments on the subject were not informative. They have not been sure what form the administration wants paid family leave to take and whether it's a real priority: Will voting against his proposal cost them? Will there be a proposal? They still don't know. Ditto for opioids and vocational education," Ponnuru writes.
"The rap on most State of the Union addresses is that they are 'laundry lists.' This time the president, like his administration and party, was listless." | | Enough with the "Bloody Nose" Theory | | The "bloody nose" theory for deterring North Korea's pursuit of a nuclear weapons program is gaining traction among some Trump administration officials. The problem? It's a strategy that prizes hope over logic, writes Victor Cha in the Washington Post.
"If we believe that Kim is undeterrable without such a strike, how can we also believe that a strike will deter him from responding in kind? And if Kim is unpredictable, impulsive and bordering on irrational, how can we control the escalation ladder, which is premised on an adversary's rational understanding of signals and deterrence?" writes Cha, who was recently under consideration for the post of US ambassador to South Korea.
"An alternative coercive strategy involves enhanced and sustained US, regional and global pressure on Pyongyang to denuclearize. This strategy is likely to deliver the same potential benefits as a limited strike, along with other advantages, without the self-destructive costs."
Among Cha's suggestions: "[T]he United States must significantly up-gun its alliances with Japan and South Korea with integrated missile defense, intelligence-sharing and anti-submarine warfare and strike capabilities to convey to North Korea that an attack on one is an attack on all."
| | The Welfare State Has a Surprising New Champion | | | The strongest backing for Europe's welfare state programs used to come from the left and center-left. But government assistance has a new champion, The Economist argues: Right-wing parties.
Historically, welfare programs "were introduced precisely in order to keep extremists from winning power. Yet in Poland, it is the populist right that has seized the mantle of the party of welfare," The Economist says.
"And not just in Poland. In Hungary the nationalist Fidesz party of Viktor Orban, the prime minister, has launched New Deal-style public-works programs. In France Marine Le Pen's National Front defends the protections enjoyed by permanent employees against the 'neoliberalism' of President Emmanuel Macron. In the Netherlands Geert Wilders's Freedom Party lambasts the government over cuts to health care. The right-wing Alternative for Germany exploits anger over unequal pensions in the country's east and west. Meanwhile center-left parties that felt obliged to cut welfare during the euro crisis—the Dutch Labour Party, the French Socialists, Germany's Social Democrats—have been hammered in recent elections." | | Global Espionage: Where Size Doesn't Matter | | Reports last week that the Dutch intelligence service was spying on notorious Russian hacking group Cozy Bear – and provided the United States with information over Russian interference in the 2016 election – underscores an important development in espionage, writes Mark Galeotti in Foreign Policy: Size doesn't matter as much anymore.
"Although it is possible to sink huge budgets into cyberespionage, especially if one moves into the realms of mass data mining, the essence of hacking is simple: a few smart hackers, decent hardware, and access to the net," Galeotti writes.
"Cyberespionage also is a safe, clean kind of spookery. It doesn't involve putting your nationals into harm's way, spiriting defectors through checkpoints in the trunks of cars, ghosting spy planes into defended airspace, blowing up Greenpeace ships, or any of the other kind of potential dangers that less adventurous governments might want to avoid, especially smaller ones more vulnerable to retaliation.
"When small countries' intelligence agencies have a better chance of making big discoveries, that gives them something more: leverage."
| | It's a Big Election Year in Latin America. But Something Is Missing | | Latin America has no shortage of elections coming up over the next 12 months, with almost two in three voters in the region set to elect their leaders. But this "electoral supercycle" is missing something important – serious regional leadership, suggest Michael J. Camilleri and Ben Raderstorf in Americas Quarterly.
Voters will be heading to the polls "amid a significant – and historically unusual – leadership vacuum in the region. The United States is increasingly unpopular in its erstwhile sphere of influence, its comparatively weak footing in the Americas attributable to long-term trends as well as the Trump Administration's missteps, from trade to immigration to loose threats of military intervention.
"What's surprising, though, is that no other country is even attempting to fill the void," they write.
"Brazil, crippled by recession and a profound political crisis, has turned inward and curtailed its international ambitions. Mexico, consumed by corruption and violence, has an upopular president and a foreign policy establishment preoccupied with mitigating the impact of Donald Trump's presidency on NAFTA and immigration. Venezuela's economy has all but collapsed, rendering the late Hugo Chávez's diplomatic coalition a skeleton – although the divisions it sowed continue to occasionally paralyze regional diplomacy." | | | | | | |
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