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malonema1

Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize, South Korea's Moon says - 0 views

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US history politics

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration has led a global effort to impose ever stricter sanctions on North Korea.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday that Trump would maintain a “pressure campaign” of harsh sanctions on impoverished North Korea until Kim scraps his nuclear weapon program
malonema1

What does 'America first' really mean? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9072-f6d4bc32f223_story.html

US policy

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • In the past three weeks, President Trump has bombed Syria, hosted his first state dinner, signaled that he’s open to brokering a new deal to constrain Iran’s nuclear weapons program and explored rejoining a trade deal with Pacific Rim countries that he pulled out of last year. He has praised North Korea’s leader as “very honorable” for considering negotiations, and he appeared to take some credit Friday for the “historic meeting” between the leaders of North and South Korea.
  • As part of The Washington Post’s Of America series, we dispatched seven reporters across the country to ask what “America first” really means — and what role the United States should play in the world.
  • “I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but as dumb as he sounds sometimes — when he goes up there and acts like a 12-year-old bully — I think at the end of the day, he has good intentions,” said Jones, 45, a stay-at-home mother of two from Syracuse, N.Y., as she wrapped up a recent visit to the National Museum of American History on the Mall in Washington with her college-age son. “If you want someone to keep you safe, I think he’s the guy that’s going to keep you safe.”
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  • She’s not sure what should happen in Syria or when, saying that Americans have to trust the leaders they elected to make such decisions.
  • He had joined other military officers in demanding the resignation of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, and was forced into hiding. He eventually slipped across the border into Colombia and got a plane ticket to Miami. He thought his training with the U.S. military would help him when he arrived.
  • Colina discussed U.S. policy as he sat in El Arepazo, a bustling restaurant connected to a Doral gas station that serves Venezuelan comfort food. He is grateful that Trump has placed heavy sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — but he hopes Trump will also establish an oil embargo, challenge Maduro’s authority and make it easier for refugees like him to move to the United States.
  • “I don’t think Haitian immigrants should be rejected if they’re trying to get to this country,” said Brown, 51, a longtime community organizer in Chicago who votes for Democrats but doesn’t think the party does enough for African Americans. “I think that our immigration policy should be humane.”
malonema1

No Apologies: Trump Doesn't Back Down On Remarks About African Nations Or Immigr : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...gerias-leader-muhammadu-buhari

US crisis trump culture

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • In his first meeting at the White House with a sub-Saharan African leader, President Trump said controversial remarks he reportedly made, in which he referred to some developing nations as "shithole countries," didn't come up. Trump, however, didn't deny making the comment, and as Nigeria's president, Muhammadu Buhari, chuckled, Trump said at a news conference Monday, "You do have some countries that are in very bad shape — and very tough places to live in." Trump also chose not to apologize, when given the opportunity, for his immigration
  • Apologizing, Trump said, "wouldn't make 10 cents' worth of difference." Instead, he called U.S. laws "a disaster" and said the U.S. and those laws are laughed at all over the world "for their stupidity."
  • NPR and other news outlets reported in January that during a closed-door meeting with lawmakers at the White House Trump questioned why the United States continues to admit immigrants from "shithole countries" like Haiti and African countries.
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  • The allegation Monday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran has lied about pursuit of nuclear weapons, Trump said, means, "I've been 100 percent right." And he said that while he wasn't ready to reveal his decision on whether to withdraw from the Iran deal, "that doesn't mean we won't negotiate a real agreement." Netanyahu said that "in a few days' time, President Trump will decide what to do" about the Iranian deal. He added, "I'm sure he'll do the right thing."
oliviaodon

World War II: After the War - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...100180

war history

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • At the end of World War II, huge swaths of Europe and Asia had been reduced to ruins. Borders were redrawn and homecomings, expulsions, and burials were under way. But the massive efforts to rebuild had just begun. When the war began in the late 1930s, the world's population was approximately 2 billion. In less than a decade, the war between the Axis the Allied powers had resulted in 80 million deaths -- killing off about 4 percent of the whole world.
  • Allied forces now became occupiers, taking control of Germany, Japan, and much of the territory they had formerly ruled. Efforts were made to permanently dismantle the war-making abilities of those nations, as factories were destroyed and former leadership was removed or prosecuted.
  • The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine paved the way for Israel to declare its independence in 1948 and marked the start of the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. The growing tensions between Western powers and the Soviet Eastern Bloc developed into the Cold War, and the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons raised the very real specter of an unimaginable World War III if common ground could not be found.
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  • War crimes trials took place in Europe and Asia, leading to many executions and prison sentences. Millions of Germans and Japanese were forcibly expelled from territories they called home. Allied occupations and United Nations decisions led to many long-lasting problems in the future, including the tensions that created East and West Germany, and divergent plans on the Korean Peninsula that led to the creation of North and South Korea and -- the Korean War in 1950.
  • World War II was the biggest story of the 20th Century, and its aftermath continues to affect the world profoundly more than 65 years later.
Javier E

'Chernobyl' Should Make Humanity Count Its Blessings - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...590956

chernobyl soviet USSR crisis

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • During a beautifully rendered scene, an elderly Communist Party apparatchik sits silently at a meeting of plant managers and local officials, all of whom are giving in to panic. He then rises and exhorts his comrades to gaze upon the portrait of the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin on the wall, and to remember that Lenin would be proud of them—even though one of the reactors had already exploded and was, at that moment, on the verge of melting through the earth around them.
  • “Chernobyl,” Mazin tweeted to Bongino, “was a failure of humans whose loyalty to (or fear of) a broken governing party overruled their sense of decency and rationality. You’re the old man with the cane. You just worship a different man’s portrait.”
  • From its inception, the Soviet Union was governed by a fundamentally psychotic regime that over successive generations was unable to comprehend reality, process information, or see beyond its own fevered and paranoid outlook
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  • Lenin and his comrades were European intellectuals who stumbled into power after “years of sitting in isolation and making up schemes for Communist revolution.”
  • Once they captured a state, however, they were determined to keep it, and a regime founded by chance and based on a lie soon began to believe in its own infallibility. Socialism and communism were just words; the power and survival of the Soviet Communist Party were paramount. No one life was of any particular importance.
  • this scene captures something about the Soviet regime both at its most mundane and at its most dangerous. Everyone was accountable to everyone else. Any show of public defiance, or even a misplaced comment, could carry severe consequences
  • at a moment of great peril to millions of Soviet citizens and millions more people around the world, no one was accountable. Every bureaucrat and manager simply repeated the mantra of the gray, authoritarian system that produced them: I had my job. I did my job. I fulfilled my tasks. I did nothing wrong.
  • This state, run by delusional old men chasing, imprisoning, and shooting millions of their fellow citizens in a “circle of accountability,” controlled thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the United States and its allies. We all lived under the constant threat that the commitment of a group of paranoids to ideas first bruited about in the coffeehouses of Victorian Europe would lead to global extermination.
  • We should also be grateful for our narrow escape not only from the burning reactors in the marshes of Pripyat, but from a state led by a cabal of dangerous men who, for the better part of a century, hijacked the fate of billions of human beings.
Javier E

Asteroid 2019 OK just missed Earth, surprising scientists - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ts-almost-didnt-detect-it-time

asteroid risk geology astronomy

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • The last-minute detection is yet another sign of how much remains unknown about space and a sobering reminder of the very real threat asteroids can pose
  • It should worry us all, quite frankly,” he said. “It’s not a Hollywood movie. It is a clear and present danger.”
  • astronomers have a nickname for the kind of space rock that just came so close to Earth: “City-killer asteroids.” If the asteroid had struck Earth, most of it would have probably reached the ground, resulting in devastating damage
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  • “It would have gone off like a very large nuclear weapon” with enough force to destroy a city, he said. “Many megatons, perhaps in the ballpark of 10 megatons of TNT, so something not to be messed with.”
  • The last space rock to strike Earth similar in size to Asteroid 2019 OK was more than a century ago, Brown said. That asteroid, known as the Tunguska event, caused an explosion that leveled 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) of forest land in Siberia.
  • it is still worthwhile to devote resources toward detection and prevention. Brown said Asteroid 2019 OK proves there are “still dangerous asteroids out there that we don’t know of” that “can arrive on our doorstep unannounced.”
  • Duffy stressed the importance of investing in a “global dedicated approach” to detecting asteroids because “sooner or later there will be one with our name on it. It’s just a matter of when, not if.”
Javier E

George Conway: Trump Is Unfit for Office - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...599128

trump sociopath narcissism impeachment

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Behavior like this is unusual, a point that journalists across the political spectrum have made. “This is not normal,” Megan McArdle wrote in late August. “And I don’t mean that as in, ‘Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.’ I mean that as in, ‘This is not normal for a functioning adult.’” James Fallows observed, also in August, that Trump is having “episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting,” and that if he “were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.”
  • Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires. To see why first requires a look at what the Constitution demands of a president, and then an examination of how Trump’s behavioral characteristics preclude his ability to fulfill those demands.
  • Though the Constitution’s drafters could hardly have foreseen how the system would evolve, they certainly knew the kind of person they wanted it to produce. “The process of election affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
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  • “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” might suffice for someone to be elected to the governorship of a state, but not the presidency. Election would “require other talents, and a different kind of merit,” to gain “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” or enough of it to win the presidency. As a result, there would be “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” This was the Framers’ goal in designing the system that would make “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”
  • In a nutshell, while carrying out his official duties, a president has to put the country, not himself, first; he must faithfully follow and enforce the law; and he must act with the utmost care in doing all that.
  • can Trump do all that? Does his personality allow him to? Answering those questions doesn’t require mental-health expertise, nor does it really require a diagnosis. You can make the argument for Trump’s unfitness without assessing his mental health: Like James Fallows, for example, you could just ask whether Trump would have been allowed to retain any other job in light of his bizarre conduct
  • More than a diagnosis, what truly matters, as Lincoln’s case shows, is the president’s behavioral characteristics and personality traits. And understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others.
  • its criteria for personality disorders—they don’t require a person to lie on a couch and confess his or her innermost thoughts. They turn on how a person behaves in the wild, so to speak.
  • Donald Trump, as president of the United States, is probably the most observable and observed person in the world. I’ve personally met and spoken with him only a few times, but anyone who knows him will tell you that Trump, in a way, has no facade: What you see of him publicly is what you get all the time, although you may get more of it in private
  • accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorde
  • These two disorders just happen to be the ones that have most commonly been ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals over the past four years. Of these two disorders, the more commonly discussed when it comes to Trump is narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD—pathological narcissism
  • it touches directly upon whether Trump has the capacity to put anyone’s interests—including the country’s and the Constitution’s—above his own.
  • A certain amount of narcissism is healthy, and helpful—it brings with it confidence, optimism, and boldness. Someone with more than an average amount of narcissism may be called a narcissist. Many politicians, and many celebrities, could be considered narcissists
  • “Pathological narcissism begins when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray, and even hurt those closest to them,”
  • The “fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see,
  • To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism: One clinical psychologist told Vanity Fair that he considers Trump such a “classic” pathological narcissist that he is actually “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example”
  • The goal of a diagnosis is to help a clinician guide treatment. The question facing the public is very different: Does the president of the United States exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior that suggests he is incapable of properly discharging the duties of his office?
  • Even Trump’s own allies recognize the degree of his narcissism. When he launched racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “That’s just the way he is. It’s more narcissism than anything else.” So, too, do skeptics of assigning a clinical diagnosis. “No one is denying,” Frances told Rolling Stone, “that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter.” The president’s exceptional narcissism is his defining characteristic—and understanding that is crucial to evaluating his fitness for office
  • The DSM-5 describes its conception of pathological narcissism this way: “The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.”
  • The diagnostic criteria offer a useful framework for understanding the most remarkable features of Donald Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. (1) Exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements?
  • (2) Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance
  • (3) Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with other special or high-status people?
  • Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians.
  • (4) Requires excessive admiration? Last Thanksgiving, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for. His answer: himself, of course. A number of years ago, he made a video for Forbes in which he interviewed two of his children. The interview topic: how great they thought Donald Trump wa
  • (5) A sense of entitlement? (9) Arrogant, haughty behaviors? Trump is the man who, on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything you want”—including grabbing women by their genitals. He’s the man who also once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
  • (8) Envious of others? Here’s a man so unable to stand the praise received by a respected war hero and statesman, Senator John McCain, that he has continued to attack McCain months after McCain’s death;
  • (6) Interpersonally exploitative? Just watch the Access Hollywood tape, or ask any of the hundreds of contractors and employees Trump the businessman allegedly stiffed, or speak with any of the two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape.
  • Finally, (7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others? One of the most striking aspects of Trump’s personality is his utter and complete lack of empathy
  • The notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who once counseled Trump, said that “Donald pisses ice water,” and indeed, examples of Trump’s utter lack of normal human empathy abound.
  • “It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood … ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.’
  • What kind of human being, let alone politician, would engage in such unempathetic, self-centered behavior while memorializing such horrible tragedies? Only the most narcissistic person imaginable—or a person whose narcissism would be difficult to imagine if we hadn’t seen it ourselves. The evidence of Trump’s narcissism is overwhelming—indeed, it would be a gargantuan task to try to marshal all of it, especially as it mounts each and every day.
  • A second disorder also frequently ascribed to Trump by professionals is sociopathy—what the DSM-5 calls antisocial personality disorder
  • Central to sociopathy is a complete lack of empathy—along with “an absence of guilt.” Sociopaths engage in “intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings … They are lacking an essential part of being human.” For its part, the DSM-5 states that the “essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”
  • Trump’s sociopathic characteristics sufficiently intertwine with his narcissistic ones that they deserve mention here. These include, to quote the DSM-5, “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others.” Trump’s deceitfulness—his lying—has become the stuff of legend; journalists track his “false and misleading claims” as president by the thousands upon thousands.
  • Other criteria for antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”; “impulsivity or failure to plan ahead”; and “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
  • As for impulsivity, that essentially describes what gets him into trouble most: It was his “impulsiveness—actually, total recklessness”—that came close to destroying him in the 1980s
  • And lack of remorse? That’s a hallmark of sociopathy, and goes hand in hand with a lack of human conscience. In a narcissistic sociopath, it’s intertwined with a lack of empathy. Trump hardly ever shows remorse, or apologizes, for anything. The one exception: With his presidential candidacy on the line in early October
  • In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism
  • articular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.
  • The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality
  • Experts haven’t suggested that Trump is psychotic, but many have contended that his narcissism and sociopathy are so inordinate that he fits the bill for “malignant narcissism.” Malignant narcissism isn’t recognized as an official diagnosis; it’s a descriptive term coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and expanded upon by another psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, to refer to an extreme mix of narcissism and sociopathy, with a degree of paranoia and sadism mixed in
  • In the view of some in the mental-health community, such as John Gartner, Trump “exhibits all four” components of malignant narcissism: “narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism.”
  • Mental-health professionals have raised a variety of other concerns about Trump’s mental state; the last worth specifically mentioning here is the possibility that, apart from any personality disorder, he may be suffering cognitive decline.
  • His “mental state,” according to Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry and physician who wrote a book about Trump’s psychology, “include[s] so many psychic afflictions” that a “working knowledge of psychiatric disorders is essential to understanding Trump.” Indeed, as Gartner puts it: “There are a lot of things wrong with him—and, together, they are a scary witch’s brew.”
  • when you line up what the Framers expected of a president with all that we know about Donald Trump, his unfitness becomes obvious. The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust. To borrow from the Harvard Law Review article, can he follow the “proscriptions against profit, bad faith, and self-dealing,” manifest “a strong concern about avoiding ultra vires action” (that is, action exceeding the president’s legal authority), and maintain “a duty of diligence and carefulness”? Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.
  • To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard
  • Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect
  • Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security.
  • All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation
  • hat constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account?
  • it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism
  • In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into pla
  • One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’
  • Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.
  • why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament
  • Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
  • What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury
  • As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.”
  • As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.
  • It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.
  • there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer.
bluekoenig

Coronavirus is Idling North Korea's Ships; Achieving What Sanctions Did Not - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-north-korea.html

politics history crisis culture northkorea health trade medicine covid19 coronavirus

shared by bluekoenig on 26 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 26 Mar 20
     
    One of the most interesting things to come out of this pandemic is that illegal and illicit trade between North Korea and China has likely been halted due to North Korea's fear of the coronavirus. Satellite images show an unusual amount of ships sitting idle outside of Nampo, North Korea, where North Korea takes in sanctioned shipments of coal and oil forbidden by the United Nations. These ships could either be Chinese ships waiting for ports to open or Korean ships sitting idle after being pulled back from sea trading with China. North Korea was sanctioned by the UN in the first place because they were putting much of its revenue into nuclear weapons development. This could also have an impact on North Korea's agricultural industry as they depend on illicit oil to power their machines. To North Korea, the coronavirus has become more threatening than United Nations sanctions.
anonymous

'A simple war maniac': North Koreans sound off after Trump - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US trump policy

shared by anonymous on 09 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Pyongyang, North Korea (CNN)US President Donald Trump had already flown to China by the time ordinary North Koreans heard he'd addressed South Korea's National Assembly.
  • North Korean state media reported that Trump had spoken on Thursday, but did not include concrete details of his speech, in which the President slammed Pyongyang's human rights abuses.
  • The North Korean state newspaper Rodong Sinmun characterized Trump's words as "garbage spewing like gunpowder out of Trump's snout like garbage that reeks of gun powder to ignite war."
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  • Most people in Pyongyang are effectively sealed off from the outside world. They're only able to access government-approved propaganda, as the North Korean leadership blocks foreign media and levies harsh punishments to those who smuggle or view content they deem inappropriate.
  • Trump is currently in Beijing as part of a nearly two-week long tour of Asia, and North Korea's nuclear and weapons program have been a top priority he's discussed with his Japanese, South Korean and Chinese counterparts.
Javier E

Steven Pinker: This Is History's Most Peaceful Time--New Study: "Not So Fast" - Scienti... - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...ful-time-new-study-not-so-fast

mortality war violence history

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard University psychologist and famed intellect Steven Pinker argues humans are now living in the most peaceful era in the history of our species.
  • there is plenty of evidence supporting Pinker’s claim. Most scholars agree the percentage of people who die violent war-related deaths has plummeted through history; and that proportionally violent deaths decline as populations become increasingly large and organized, or move from “nonstate” status—such as hunter–gatherer societies—to fully fledged “states.”
  • the percentage of a population suffering violent war-related deaths—fatalities due to intentional conflict between differing communities—does decrease as a population grows. At the same time, though, the absolute numbers increase more than would be expected from just population growth.
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  • In fact, it appears, the data suggest, the overall battle-death toll in modern organized societies is exponentially higher than in hunter–gatherer societies surveyed during the past 200 years.
  • compared annual war deaths for 11 chimpanzee communities, 24 hunter–gatherer or other nonstate groups and 19 and 22 countries that fought in World Wars I and II, respectively
  • People, their data show, have evolved to be more violent than chimps. And, despite high rates of violent death in comparison with population size, nonstate groups are on average no more or less violent than those living in organized societies.
  • The outsize rise in total war-related deaths associated with larger groups of people may be due, in part, to the advances in weaponry and military strategy that come with increased communication and collaboration: A similar degree of violent behavior enacted by a similar number of people just does more damage on a nuclear scale than it ever could with axes and spears
  • Pinker points out many anthropologists are committed to some version of the noble savage theory—the idea that in the wild humans are innately good, only to be corrupted by society and civilization. Falk acknowledges this, in part, motivated her to undertake the study. “As anthropologists we were primarily concerned about the negative portrayal of small-scale societies as more violent than “civilized” state dwellers.”
  • Pinker cites a number of trends through history he feels support the idea that despite the seemingly continual carnage in the world, we have actually inched toward a more civil society. Our transition from hunter–gatherers to farmers is thought to have reduced violent death fivefold; between the Middle Ages and the 20th century, Europe saw a 10- to 50-fold drop in murder; and in the 70-plus years since World War II warring among the leading powers has for the most part stopped, a first in the history of civilization.
  • None of this gives Falk much comfort when it comes to mass-scale war and mortality, given that modern weaponry can inflict sky-high total death counts. Astronomical death tolls can be tallied in a matter of days, even minutes, not decades. “All it would take is for one homicidal leader—who we know exists—to unleash a weapon of mass destruction,” she warns. “The 70-odd years that have transpired since World War II is a proverbial drop in the bucket compared with the five [million] to seven million years humans and our ancestors have been around. The probability of World War III is not negligible.”
anonymous

Trump sarcastically responds to Kim Jong Un insults - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US trump

shared by anonymous on 12 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump sarcastically responded to North Korea's insults that described him as a "destroyer" who "begged for nuclear war" during his tour of Asia.
  • In a statement lashing out at Trump on Saturday, North Korea also referred to him as a "dotard," a word meaning a very old person, and one the reclusive nation has used on him in the past. Trump fired back hours later. "Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me 'old,' when I would NEVER call him 'short and fat?' Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen!" Trump tweeted.
  • "The weapons you are acquiring are not making you safer, they are putting your regime in grave danger," Trump said about North Korea during an address at South Korea's National Assembly in Seoul. "Every step you take down this dark path increases the peril you face."
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  • The US on Saturday began a three-carrier strike force exercise in the Western Pacific. It involves the USS Ronald Reagan, the USS Nimitz and the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The exercise, set to continue through Tuesday, will involve operations showing the Navy's ability to operate multiple carrier strike groups as a coordinated effort, it said in a release.The strike force plans to conduct air defense drills, sea surveillance, defensive air combat training as well as other maneuvers.
draneka

U.S. Highlights Sanctions, Diplomacy as North Korea Threat Grows - 0 views

www.msn.com/...ar-BBAoZGu

shared by draneka on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • “North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is an urgent national security threat and top foreign policy priority,”
  • “The words and actions of North Korea threaten the U.S. homeland and that of our allies in South Korea and Japan,” Harris said in his prepared testimony. The U.S. “must be prepared to fight” on short notice, he said.
  • "There’re so many options that we need to be taking that are a long ways away from a strike,”
Javier E

We're at cyberwar. And the enemy is us. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-aa96-54417592cf72_story.html

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The United States and its allies are under attack. The cyberwar we’ve feared for a generation is well underway, and we are losing. This is the forest, and the stuff about Russian election meddling, contacts with the Trump campaign, phony Twitter accounts, fake news on Facebook — those things are trees.
  • we failed to prepare for an attack of great subtlety and strategic nuance. Enemies of the West have hacked our cultural advantages, turning the very things that have made us strong — technological leadership, free speech, the market economy and multi-party government — against us. The attack is ongoing.
  • With each passing week, we learn more. Russia and its sympathizers have cranked up the volume on existing political and cultural divisions in the West, like some psychic version of the Stuxnet hack that caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to spin so fast they tore themselves to pieces.
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  • They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to believe and spread it.
  • They have targeted online ads designed to intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.
  • The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work. Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll farms
  • Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers.
  • The West has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.
  • What was first perceived as a targeted attack — Russia attempting to hack the U.S. election — is proving to be a broader and bolder war.
  • Seeking to weaken and discredit the Western alliance that has constrained Russia’s global ambitions for 70 years, Putin pushed the Brexit vote that rattled the European Union.
  • His cyber-sappers have also aided nationalist movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary
  • Russia did not need to collude with Trump. He was already an ideal host for the virus they are spreading. Putin’s goal, in May’s words, is to “sow discord in the West,” and Trump eats, sleeps and breathes discord. He understands that our siloed, targeted, algorithmic media feeds on conflict and outrage, and he is happy to dish it up.
  • We can’t defend ourselves until we see clearly what is happening, and understand that fact-checking, truth-telling and goodwill are more than virtues now. They are patriotic duties. Pogo’s words were never so true: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.
krystalxu

Ted Cruz: A Pressure Point for North Korea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ure-point-for-north-korea.html

North Korea US politics history War Crisis

shared by krystalxu on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Americans could be forgiven for wondering why North Korea is not already designated as a sponsor of terrorism.
  • why the United States needs to reverse its approach and relist Pyongyang immediately.
  • the United States government does our citizens — and the world — a disservice if it continually discounts the centrality of nuclear weapons to the Kim regime.
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  • Is continuing diplomatic and economic relations with a state that uses diplomacy and finance to export and foment terrorism in their interest?
  • We must tell the truth about the dangerous ambitions of North Korea and once again list it as a state sponsor of terrorism,
krystalxu

The Coming Confrontation Between Israel and Iran - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...542541

Israel history Crisis policy

shared by krystalxu on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Fishman also wrote that Iran and the Assad regime are negotiating over giving Iran its own naval pier in the port of Tartus, and that Iran may actually deploy a division of soldiers in Syria.
  • Whether this happens remains to be seen. Whatever the debate over the JCPOA, there may well be a broader consensus in the administration that Iran’s growing military role in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the region must be countered.
  • Israel could be a decade away from a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and bases in Syria
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  • Whatever the American conclusion, if Iran does indeed plan to establish a large and permanent military footprint in Syria
ethanshilling

Israel's Shadow War With Iran Moves Out to Sea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-iran-shadow-war.html

israel war

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The sun was rising on the Mediterranean one recent morning when the crew of an Iranian cargo ship heard an explosion. The ship, the Shahr e Kord, was about 50 miles off the coast of Israel, and from the bridge they saw a plume of smoke rising from one of the hundreds of containers stacked on deck.
  • But the attack on the Shahr e Kord this month was just one of the latest salvos in a long-running covert conflict between Israel and Iran. An Israeli official said the attack was retaliation for an Iranian assault on an Israeli cargo ship last month.
  • The Israeli campaign, confirmed by American, Israeli and Iranian officials, has become a linchpin of Israel’s effort to curb Iran’s military influence in the Middle East and stymie Iranian efforts to circumvent American sanctions on its oil industry.
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  • “This is a full-fledged cold war that risks turning hot with a single mistake,” said Ali Vaez, Iran program director at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization. “We’re still in an escalatory spiral that risks getting out of control.”
  • Since 2019, Israeli commandos have attacked at least 10 ships carrying Iranian cargo, according to an American official and a former senior Israeli official. The real number of targeted ships may be higher than 20, according to an Iranian Oil Ministry official, an adviser to the ministry and an oil trader.
  • The extent of Iran’s retaliation is unclear. Most of the attacks are carried out clandestinely and with no public claims of responsibility.
  • The Israeli ship attacked last month was a car freighter, the Helios Ray, carrying several thousand German-made cars to China.
  • Several tankers were similarly attacked in the Red Sea last fall and winter, actions some officials attributed to the Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel movement in Yemen.
  • Iran has denied involvement in all of these attacks which, like the Israeli ones, appeared intended not to sink the ships but to send a message.
  • Israel has tried to counter Iran’s power play by launching regular airstrikes on Iranian shipments by land and air of arms and other cargo to Syria and Lebanon. Those attacks have made those routes riskier and shifted at least some of the weapons transit, and the conflict, to the sea, analysts said.
  • “Neither Israel nor Iran want to publicly take responsibility for the attacks because doing so would be an act of war with military consequences,” Hossein Dalirian, a military analyst affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, told The New York Times in a Clubhouse discussion on Thursday.
  • Analysts say that Iran wants to continue to needle Israel and to arm and support its Middle Eastern allies, both to surround Israel with well-armed proxies and to give Iran a stronger hand in any future nuclear negotiations.
  • The Israeli offensive against Iranian shipping has two goals, analysts and officials said. The first is to prevent Tehran from sending equipment to Lebanon to help Hezbollah build a precision missile program, which Israel considers a strategic threat.
  • The tankers targeted by Israel were carrying Iranian oil to Syria, contravening American sanctions and most likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
  • President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, also under sanctions, is in dire need of oil. Iran, its economy decimated by American sanctions, needs cash. Hezbollah has also been hit hard by the severe economic and political crisis in Lebanon and a cyberattack on its financial system.
  • The effectiveness of the Israeli campaign is unclear. Some of the targeted ships were forced to return to Iran without delivering their cargo, the American official said.
  • While the Israeli Navy can make its presence felt in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, it is less effective in waters closer to Iran. And that could make Israeli-owned ships more vulnerable to Iranian attacks as they pass Iran’s western shores on their way to ports in the Gulf, said Shaul Chorev, a retired Israeli admiral who now heads the Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center at the University of Haifa.
Javier E

Why global warming needs national solutions | Prospect Magazine - 0 views

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...ng-nation-state-climate-change

global warming national solutions realist nationalism climate change international activism history crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 04 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • it is in relation to the collective defence of the interests of our descendants that the power of the nation applies with special force. Modern history has shown that the bond of nation engenders a uniquely effective willingness to make shared sacrifices for shared survival—stronger than class, faith, or appeals to humanitarianism. At a time when sacrifices are urgently required, however alien it may be to some political tastes, the role of nationalism is not one we can afford to eschew.
  • Central to security thinking is, or should be, the calculation of risk. The risks posed by climate change come in two broad categories. The first concerns the effects we can already observe, and which we can expect with near certainty to worsen in the decades to come
  • As things stand, even after having been caught off guard by a pandemic, many nation states are again grotesquely miscalculating the relative risks they face.
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  • The second category of risk concerns the future potential for runaway climate change, which will take hold at that hard-to-call moment when the world falls prey to ruinous feedback mechanisms
  • A general recognition of climate change as a threat to national security in the short term and national existence in the long term would allow the mobilisation of the only modern ideological force that retains wide enough popularity to inspire collective sacrifice: nationalism (or patriotism,
  • If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that the combination of material disappointment with national insecurity and decline is a potent one. Climate change threatens both things, and so could translate into a politics of rage that though it rises through the ballot box, goes on to destroy democracy.
  • Clear-eyed national establishments will need to make a radical shift in focus and resources away from traditional great power threats (which, though real, are minor by comparison), and towards a new understanding of national security in a much wider sense, requiring new forms of national mobilisation in response.
  • In Europe, the most dramatic direct effects will be seen in the Mediterranean states, where the summer is predicted to last for an additional month, heatwaves (with temperatures over 35 degrees) to be extended by more than a month, and rainfall to decrease by up to 20 per cent.
  • The when and even the if of truly runaway climate change taking hold are uncertain, but should we slide down this slipway it would be so catastrophic—involving the destruction of the nations which militaries are sworn to defend—that even a remote possibility should be enough to mobilise militaries in response
  • In the decades to come, the most important single branch of the US armed forces will become not the Marines or the special forces but the Army Corps of Engineers.
  • But the need for western security establishments to prioritise climate change is not just about such practical reallocation of resources; an even more important impact could be about political persuasion.
  • The Greens’ blindness to the political importance of stable and rooted national communities risks driving voters into the arms of the chauvinists, while their contempt for the nation state leads to an overwhelming focus on international agreements demanded and driven by global movements.
  • Nationalism therefore helps address one of the greatest obstacles to action against climate change: namely, that considerable sacrifices will have to be made by present generations, but the most terrible results of refusal to make these sacrifices will only affect generations yet unborn.
  • It was only when I began to read how mainstream economists thought about climate change that I came fully to understand our moral decadence as a culture.
  • They look at things from a standpoint that deems that the interests of future generations matter little, or even not at all. One “discount rate” which has been used by economists when it comes to valuing future benefits is 6 per cent.
  • While the existential threat to humanity as a whole from runaway climate change would probably only appear in the next century, the threat to many individual states—and to western democracy—will appear in the next decades.
  • “To assume such a rate comes close to saying ‘forget about issues concerning 100 years or more from now.’” Such an attitude is antithetical not just to nationalism, but to the very idea of a nation (or of a family, for that matter).
  • The idea of a nation thinking of itself as living for only one generation is a contradiction in terms
  • Above all, with communism gone and religion in abeyance in the west, a sense of nationalism is essential to motivate sacrifice
  • We should not be surprised that individualistic and materialist cultures struggle with the most collective of all collective action problems. Even where these cultures are liberal and rational, they can do nothing to challenge the mindset of the individual who looks at the potentially big sacrifice being asked of them, and rationally judges that it will on its own make no difference to the big picture. Real change will need a new political dispensation.
  • Appealing to nationalism in the fight against climate change is abhorrent to most environmentalists, coming as they do from liberal and socialist internationalist traditions. Indeed, in many cases this hostility extends to the nation state itself,
  •  this is no innocuous technicality. It implies that a “unit of benefit” in 50 years is being valued 18 times lower than it would be today, and in 100 years, 339 times lower:
  • The language of “empowerment” that permeates much left-wing environmentalist discourse misses an absolutely central point. If you really want to act for the climate, then you need powerful allies, not powerless ones whom you have to expend energy empowering. This means state elites, state institutions, and, in the democracies, sweeping electoral majorities who can push through the painful changes required.
  • The centrality of states and nationalism also applies to very important proposals in the US and elsewhere for “Green New Deals” combining different goals: to support a new industrial revolution based on alternative energy and thereby convince dubious voters that climate change action is not an enemy of economic progress and prosperity; to build social solidarity by providing jobs and social welfare to the population, and especially workers in fossil fuel industries; and to legitimise the necessary sacrifices by ensuring that they will be shared through progressive taxation.
  • Any Green New Deal and the new bonds of social solidarity that it can engender will inevitably be national, not internationa
  • The alternative idea of massive transfers of resources from wealthy countries through systems of international solidarity has long been proved a complete fantasy, and will remain so
  • The fundamental issue at stake has been well expressed by the development economist Paul Collier: “The brute fact is that the domain of public policy is inevitably spatial… elections generate representatives with authority over a territory… The non-spatial political unit is a fantasy
  • So nationalism is indispensable, even though we also know it can often be dangerous. Thankfully, it does not have to be nationalism of an ethnic chauvinist variety.
  • Looking back at us from the perspective of a hundred years hence what may strike historians most (assuming for the moment that civilisation remains vigorous enough for historians still to exist) is the extent to which our institutions and political classes have become trapped by their own traditions
  • Military establishments amass huge arsenals at huge cost, though the existence of nuclear weapons has long banished any serious risk of direct war between the great powers; conservatives adhere blindly to a free-market ideology that has long been proved to be inadequate to the management of great modern states; and progressives remain fixated on dreams of an internationalist utopia that stand no chance whatsoever of being realised
saberal

South Korea Will Pay More for U.S. Troop Presence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...US-troops-korea-payments.html

Global Politics Policy

shared by saberal on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • South Korea said on Wednesday that it had agreed to increase its share in covering the cost of the American military presence by 13.9 percent this year, removing a prolonged dispute in the alliance ahead of a joint visit by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III.
  • Differences over how to share the cost of keeping 28,500 American troops in South Korea have kept the allies at odds for years. The issue became particularly contentious under former President Donald J. Trump, who demanded that South Korea drastically increase its payments —
  • Over the weekend, the United States and South Korea agreed to a five-year deal to increase the military payments, subject to legislative approval in both capitals. Under the agreement, South Korea will pay $1 billion this year, 13.9 percent more than its annual payments in 2019 and 2020, officials said on Wednesday. From next year through 2025, South Korea will increase its portion annually at the same rate it boosts its defense budget — at an average of 6.1 percent per year until 2025.
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  • “By smoothly addressing the key pending alliance issue early on after the launch of the Biden administration, South Korea and the United States demonstrated the robustness of the firm alliance,”
  • North Korea has long campaigned for the American troops’ withdrawal, arguing that the threat they posed, including their joint war games with the South Korean military, had forced it to develop nuclear weapons.
  • How to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table will be a key topic when Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin visit South Korea next Wednesday and Thursday, meeting President Moon Jae-in and other senior South Korean officials. North Korea has yet to react to their planned visit or the joint military drill by Washington and Seoul.
  • Mr. Moon’s government hopes that the Biden administration will follow up on the diplomacy started by Mr. Trump rather than going back to former President Obama’s policy of “strategic patience,” which focused on squeezing North Korea with sanctions.
saberal

Opinion | Biden's First 100 Days Would Make Trump Jealous - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-100-days-trump.html

Biden Trump Politics

shared by saberal on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden’s inauguration, with its camp authoritarian light displays and general atmosphere of praetorian menace, was exactly the sort of swearing-in that his predecessor might have relished
  • A sort of blithe tactlessness persists. “Did you ever five years ago think every second or third ad out of five or six would be biracial couples?” is not a question one can readily imagine being asked by any American politician of standing other than Mr. Trump — or his successor, who in fact posed it to CNN’s viewers in February.
  • This month he briefly committed his administration to maintaining Mr. Trump’s parsimonious annual cap on the number of refugees the United States will accept (though in response to criticism the White House now claims that it will reconsider the issue next month).
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  • Mr. Biden’s suggestion, made during his primary campaign, that entering the United States illegally should no longer be treated as a criminal offense, his promise to end construction of the border wall and his pledge that not a single deportation would take place during his first hundred days in office — ’tis gone, and all is gray.
  • Between announcing that the remaining 2,500 American troops would return from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, he has carried out airstrikes in Syria, spoken equivocally about our shameful adventures in Yemen and largely ignored the genocide being carried out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.
  • The United States may be on the verge of returning to the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons accord with Iran, but when it comes to North Korea, the nation is also, in the words of Lloyd Austin, Mr. Biden’s secretary of defense, “ready to fight tonight,” presumably with fire and fury.
  • Even in the area of economics, where it might have been supposed by both supporters and critics during the presidential campaign that Mr. Biden would adopt a more progressive agenda, he has differed from the bipartisan center-right economic consensus along curiously familiar lines. In addition to keeping Mr. Trump’s moratorium on evictions in place, for example, he has continued with the suspension of interest on student loan debt and the collection of monthly payments.
  • Despite occasional rhetorical sops to organized labor that have become a mainstay of populist conservative rhetoric, Mr. Trump was arguably the least union-friendly president since Ronald Reagan, whereas Mr. Biden has restored some collective bargaining rights by executive order.
  • Why is Mr. Biden having more success carrying out some of his predecessor’s policies? Certainly Mr. Trump’s fabled étourderie and his inability to staff a cabinet with qualified officials sympathetic to what was ostensibly his agenda are a part of the story. A more interesting question, though, is where the indignation from would-be opponents of moderate protectionism and realism in foreign policy has gone. Would Mr. Biden’s broken promises regarding deportations be less excusable if he, too, were in the habit of calling immigrants revolting names?
edencottone

U.S. 'on watch' for new North Korean missile tests - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...orth-korea-missile-test-476533

us Politics

shared by edencottone on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • U.S. officials are concerned about North Korea resuming missile testing after a three-year hiatus in response to ongoing U.S.-South Korea military drills, according to two people familiar with the intelligence.
  • The annual combined exercises are “specifically abhorred” by North Korean leadership, and there have been provocations from Pyongyang in the past associated with the training, said one senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
  • It wasn’t immediately clear which conditions might make Kim stand down, but the Biden administration has sought to de-escalate with North Korea overall.
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  • The warnings from U.S. officials echo comments by the head of U.S. Northern Command, who warned members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that North Korea could be testing an improved intercontinental ballistic missile soon.
  • "The North Korean regime has also indicated that it is no longer bound by the unilateral nuclear and ICBM testing moratorium announced in 2018, suggesting that Kim Jong Un may begin flight testing an improved ICBM design in the near future."
  • Although Pyongyang halted testing of long-range missiles after former President Donald Trump’s 2018 Singapore summit with Kim, they continued to develop and parade sophisticated new capabilities, including a new class of intercontinental ballistic missiles, two new submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and diversified their inventory of short-range ballistic missile launchers, said a second senior defense official.
  • “North Korea’s continued development of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction represent a threat to U.S. interests and the security of our allies and partners,” said Lt. Col. Martin Meiners. “In the near term, DoD, in close coordination with allies and partners, will seek to deter negative behavior from North Korea.”
  • Rhetoric from North Korea is heating up as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are in Asia for their first overseas visit. The two wrapped up meetings with their Japanese counterparts and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga in Tokyo on Tuesday, before heading to South Korea on Wednesday.
  • he Biden administration has reached out to Pyongyang through various channels, but has yet to receive a response, Blinken said Tuesday in Tokyo.
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