Tag Archives: U.S. politics

how a U.S.-China war could happen

A full-blown U.S.-China war seems so stupid for both countries and the entire world as to be unthinkable. But it is thinkable because both countries may think they have something to gain from brinksmanship, and the Trump administration seems willing to take a lot of risks and to be unlikely to back down. Here is a scenario described in Foreign Policy:

Consider the testimony offered by Trump’s Secretary of State pick Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, in his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 11, as he warned of a more confrontational South China Sea policy: “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.” There are only so many ways the Trump team can go about sending such signals given its vow to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which America’s allies had been hoping the United States would complete. By preemptively eliminating tools like economic statecraft from its foreign-policy toolbox, the Trump administration will be leaving itself with only hard power to counteract China’s ambitions. That would probably mean an attempted military blockade against the Chinese navy in the South China Sea…

Trump’s demonstrated willingness to toss out the rulebook on the one-China policy, with his phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, has already ratcheted up tensions with Beijing to a level not seen since 1996, when President Bill Clinton sent two carrier battle groups through the Taiwan Strait. The passage of China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait at the end of December was largely interpreted as a stern indictment directed at Taipei and the incoming Trump administration. The carrier group then transited past Okinawa, which hosts more than half of the 50,000 American troops in Japan, into the South China Sea. A simultaneous op-ed appearing in China’s state-affiliate mouthpiece, the Global Times, warned, “If the fleet is able to enter areas where the US has core interests, the situation when the US unilaterally imposes pressure on China will change…”

Moving more U.S. naval assets into the Pacific will add to Beijing’s perceptions of U.S. containment while increasing the odds that a minor accident or hostile encounter could trigger armed conflict. One could imagine China deploying underwater submarine detection defenses in the South or East China Sea to monitor U.S. Navy movements. If Washington were to seek to destroy these assets to preempt Chinese primacy or look to extend American military superiority in the region, Beijing would feel compelled to retaliate. Trump’s team might then be tempted to think a shocking use of force could deter Beijing from escalating conflict. It’s not clear at what point Trump would decide the costs of conflict outweigh the benefits of winning such a clash.

free trade and big ag

When I think of the controversial side of trade, I tend to think of manufactured goods being produced cheaply abroad and imported to the U.S. But there is also a huge global trade in food and agriculture, and the U.S. is a huge player in it, both in exports and imports. It is not only big business but big politics too. This industry has lobbied heavily for trade deals like NAFTA and TPP. This Mother Jones article has a lot of interesting facts and figures. Okay, maybe Mother Jones is not a completely apolitical non-partisan voice, but this article has a lot of links you can follow up on if you want to draw your own conclusions from the raw data.

It’s interesting, we have a nominally business-friendly administration elected by voters in rural states that seems hostile to the priorities of politicians bought and paid for by the biggest and most powerful business lobby in those same rural states.

Trump’s infrastructure priority list

Here is a list of priority infrastructure projects the Trump administration has supposedly released. I guess these is the equivalent of Obama’s much-derided “shovel ready” projects, but they are smart enough not to revive that term. Here’s my very low tech data analysis:

  • transportation (39)
    • passenger rail/subway/stations (10)
    • freight rail (1)
    • highway/bridge (11)
    • R&D (1)
    • water transport, locks and dams, harbors/ports (12)
    • airport/air traffic control (4)
  • energy (7)
    • electric grid (3)
    • hydroelectric (2)
    • wind (1)
    • pipelines (1)
  • water (4)
    • wastewater (1)
    • reservoir (2)
    • desalination (1)

It’s an interesting list. Political discussion of infrastructure has a tendency to focus on highways and bridges, and this list is transportation heavy. But mass transit has almost equal representation. And looking at the projects, there is no sign that the administration is favoring red states or trying to punish Democrat-leaning coastal cities. There are more renewable energy projects than fossil fuel pipelines. There are a lot of dam, lock, and port projects presumably because the Army Corps of Engineers has a tendency to study and design these projects to death for decades, just waiting for a funding source to finally materialize. There are many cities that need billions in dollars in wastewater infrastructure (full disclosure: I am sitting in one of them and work in the industry), and Cleveland is the lucky winner in the list above. Cleveland is certainly a poor city and the wastewater rate payers there deserve some relief, but there are plenty of other cities (like Detroit, Newark, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia where I happen to be sitting) need help too. There must be 10,000 academics pitching research projects of various sorts, and Ohio State is the lucky winner. Ohio must have some savvy politicians who know something politicians in other states don’t know, or else they just care about their cities and infrastructure a little bit more. People sitting in Cincinnati and Akron could argue with me, I suppose.

Obama’s word clouds

Obama read 10 letters a day while in office. He received about 10,000 pieces of mail and email a day, and his staff had to pick the 10. Also interesting, the staff made a word cloud out of all emails received and posted them in the White House. I find that kind of nice, the idea that words you write were received and might have had an influence in some form even if they weren’t all read.

I’ve always liked the idea of elected officials setting up some kind of voting site where constituents could weigh in on issues or even specific bills. The official could get a daily “report card” of where his or her constituents stand, and this could help to influence his or her decisions. If there were a concern that people logging on to the website were not representative, some form of demographic weighting could be used.

how the ATF traces guns

This is one of those in-depth articles that GQ puts out every now and then.

Anytime a cop in any jurisdiction in America wants to connect a gun to its owner, the request for help ends up here, at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eastern panhandle of the state, a town of some 17,000 people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and various dollar stores sucking the life out of a quaint redbrick downtown. On any given day, agents here are running about 1,500 traces; they do about 370,000 a year…

The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data… That’s been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America’s gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It’s kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name…

All the out-of-business records that come in here—2 million last month—are eventually imaged and organized according to the store that sent them. It might be 50,000 Form 4473s from one Dick’s Sporting Goods in some suburb of Cleveland. So, say you need to find one particular 4473 from that store. “We go through them,” Charlie tells me. “Just like photographs from your Christmas party, and we look through every one. Until we find it.”

the Twenty-Fifth Amendment

the text of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment Section 4, via Wikipedia:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Afghanistan and the return of the “Great Game”

This BBC article talks about the post-occupation (the most recent U.S. occupation, that is) geopolitical intrigue, or Cold War II as I think of it, that is developing in Afghanistan.

In December 2015, a senior Russian diplomat declared that “the Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours” in the fight against IS and that his country and the Taliban “have channels for exchanging information”.

Taliban sources also confirmed that the group’s representatives met Russians inside Russia and “other” countries several times over the past two years.

But Moscow’s current assertiveness in Afghanistan can also be seen as a tactic to put pressure on the US and to enhance its role and regional influence.

Taliban contacts with Russia and Iran might also help Pakistan to distribute and dilute the international pressure it is under for hosting the Afghan Taliban leadership.

The Great Equalizer

The Great Equalizer by David Smick book is #8 on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list. Here’s the Amazon description:

The experts say that America’s best days are behind us, that mediocre long-term economic growth is baked in the cake, and that politically, socially, and racially, the United States will continue to tear itself apart. But David Smick—hedge fund strategist and author of the 2008 bestseller The World Is Curved—argues that the experts are wrong.

In recent decades, a Corporate Capitalism of top down mismanagement and backroom deal-making has smothered America’s innovative spirit. Policy now favors the big, the corporate, and the status quo at the expense of the small, the inventive, and the entrepreneurial. The result is that working and middle class Americans have seen their incomes flat-lining and their American Dreams slipping away. In response, Smick calls for the great equalizer, a Main Street Capitalism of mass small-business startups and bottom-up innovation, all unfolding on a level playing field. Introducing a fourteen-point plan of bipartisan reforms for unleashing America’s creativity and confidence, his forward-thinking book describes a new climate of dynamism where every man and woman is a potential entrepreneur—especially those at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

Ultimately, Smick argues, economies are more than statistical measurements of supply and demand, economic output, and rates of return. Economies are people—their hopes, fears, dreams, and expectations. The Great Equalizer is a call for a set of new paradigms that inspire and empower average American people to reimagine and reboot their economy. It is a manifesto asserting that, with a new kind of economic policy, America’s best days lie ahead.

 

election hacking

Looking for the declassified report on Russian election hacking. Look no further. Here are a couple juicy phrases from the whopping 25 page report:

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence…

Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards. DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.

I agree with Trump on virtually nothing, but I agree with him on one thing. These are the same people who brought us weapons of mass destruction. Which will always undermine their credibility in my eyes, along with the President, the State Department, Congress and the New York Times. I was a naive, trusting, patriotic young adult when I figured out that I had been lied to by basically all the branches of government and the media I trusted to keep an eye on them. And that was long before I read Legacy of Ashes and realized just how pathetic the CIA is and just how good the KGB is and always has been. And of course, that is who we are dealing with here.

Meddling in another sovereign country’s elections is one the worst things a country could do, right? Certainly the greatest democracy in the world, let alone the greatest democracy in the history of the world, would never do that, right? Well, the CIA isn’t good at spying, which is why the U.S. lost the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. They never really understood the motivations of the Soviet Union because they had no real intelligence on it whatsoever, whereas the KGB infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels all along. But the CIA was always actually pretty good at influencing elections and they have done it often, sometimes with and sometimes without the knowledge of the President and Congress.

Here’s an article about the U.S. and Russia meddling in elections around the world. So I don’t like the fact that the Russians meddled in our election, and I hate the outcome of the election, but there is some element of hypocrisy in our government expressing such moral outrage about it.

Partisan electoral interventions by the great powers: Introducing the PEIG Dataset

Six decades of rigorous scholarship have greatly increased our knowledge about the causes and effects of various military and non-military forms of foreign interventions.

One blind spot in the international relations (IR) literature on interventions has been interventions designed to affect election results in foreign countries; i.e. as most famously occurred in Italy’s 1948 parliamentary election and more recently in the 2009 Afghan presidential elections. Despite a few, very recent exceptions (Corstange and Marinov, 2012; Levin, 2016; Shulman and Bloom, 2012), such interventions have not been studied by quantitative IR scholars who have preferred to focus on more violent or usually more overt types of interventions.2

However by not studying partisan electoral interventions, quantitative IR scholars miss an important, common form of intervention. Between 1946 and 2000, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia have intervened in about one of every nine competitive national-level executive elections. Partisan electoral interventions have been found to have had significant effects on election results, frequently determining the identity of the winner (Levin, 2016). Overt interventions of this kind have also been found to have significant effects on the views of the target public toward the intervener (Corstange and Marinov, 2012). Some qualitative scholars who have studied particular cases of electoral interventions at times credit, or blame, them with playing an important role in the subsequent nature of the regime in the target country and influencing the direction of its domestic and foreign policies (Rabe, 2006: chap. 5; Trachtenberg, 1999: 128–132). With the growing realization among IR scholars of the importance of regime type (Huth and Allee, 2002; Park, 2013 Ray, 1995; Reiter and Stam, 1998; Russett, 1993) and, more recently, the nature of the leader in power (Chiozza and Choi, 2003; Colgan, 2013; Horowitz, 2014; Keller and Foster, 2010; Potter, 2007) for their countries’ foreign and domestic policies, electoral interventions are a factor that cannot be ignored.