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Javier E

Amoral and venal: Britain's governing class has lost all sense of duty | Aditya Chakrabortty | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-referendum-conservative-party

elite morality UK entitlement opportunism

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Far from resembling the sometimes dim but dutiful set depicted by Orwell, today’s political elite are strangers to collective interest or public responsibility
  • Their conduct serves to undermine both the establishment of which they are part and the country they run.
  • The failure of our governing elite is technical and political, for sure. But it is also moral. They have short-changed the public for so long that they don’t know any different.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In his essential recent book Reckless Opportunists, Aeron Davis charts the breadth and the depth of this betrayal. The sociologist has spent two decades interviewing more than 350 people at the top of Westminster and Whitehall, big business, the media and the City.
  • Across these interlocking elites, he finds common trends: they reach the top far sooner, stay in post for far less time, before rushing through the revolving doors to the next gig.
  • The result, Davis writes, is a generation of leaders who are “precarious, rootless and increasingly self-serving”. They grab whatever they can – be that cheap headlines or fast money – and then crash out, even while loosening the very foundations of the institutions entrusted to them
  • one of the strongest lessons of this period is that we need a wholesale reimagining of our institutions so that they better serve the rest of us, rather than just those who run them
  • ohn Redwood. The arch-Brexiter and Thatcherite MP has a side-gig in the finance industry (or perhaps it is the other way round) and observed here what a tonic populism had proved for markets
  • Redwood wrote: “A bit of populism might be no bad thing when I look at the state of the euro area economy.” By “a bit of populism” the MP for Wokingham presumably means the Mussolini-worship and xenophobia of Italy’s Matteo Salvini. And Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, silencing the media and driving judges into retirement, behaviour that has earned him unprecedented sanctions from the European parliament. Chaos and authoritarianism are fine, it appears, as long as they prove good for asset prices
fischerry

Putin on North Korea Crisis: Don't Back Kim Jong Un Into a Corner - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...don-t-back-kim-jong-un-n812176

northkorea crisis Trump policy putin

shared by fischerry on 21 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Don't back North Korea into a corner, Putin warns
  • Putin did not mention the U.S. specifically on Thursday, but warned of the growing possibility of conflict and pointed out that North Korea is a "sovereign country."
  • A series of missile and nuclear tests has rattled North Korea's neighbors. The U.S. has responded with sanctions. North Korea's foreign minister last month stated that Trump had "declared war" on his country and that Kim's regime would consider shooting down American bombers. The White House later described the notion that the U.S. had declared war "absurd."
knudsenlu

US withdraws assistance from Myanmar military amid Rohingya crisis | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-military-amid-rohingya-crisis

myanmar military Rohingya Muslims US

shared by knudsenlu on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The US has announced it is withdrawing military assistance from Myanmar units and officers involved in violence against Rohingya Muslims that has triggered a mass exodus and humanitarian crisis
  • We express our gravest concern with recent events in Rakhine state and the violent, traumatic abuses Rohingya and other communities have endured,” said a state department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, announcing the punitive measures.
  • Militant attacks on Myanmar security forces in Rakhine sparked an army crackdown that has already been likened to ethnic cleansing by the UN. More than 600,000 members of the minority Muslim group have fled across the border into Bangladesh since late August.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The government of Burma, including its armed forces, must take immediate action to ensure peace and security; implement commitments to ensure humanitarian access to communities in desperate need; facilitate the safe and voluntary return of those who have fled or been displaced in Rakhine state; and address the root causes of systematic discrimination against the Rohingya,” Nauert said.
  • The measures announced by the state department are the strongest US response so far to the months-long Rohingya crisis but fall short of the most drastic tools at Washington’s disposal, such as reimposing broader economic sanctions suspended under the Obama administration
krystalxu

Japan - VALUES AND BELIEFS - 0 views

countrystudies.us/58.htm

janpanese culture value history society

shared by krystalxu on 07 Oct 17 - Cached
  • Confucianism
    • krystalxu
      krystalxu on 07 Oct 17
       
      Interesting fact : nowadays Chinese, according my previous reading, don't think this is important or needed within the society or culutre
  • This view implies that hierarchy is natural.
  • Japanese find it awkward, even unbecoming, when a person does not behave in accordance with status expectations.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • As is appropriate in a culture that stresses the value of empathy, one person cannot speak without considering the other.
  • Men and women employ somewhat different speech patterns, with women making greater use of polite forms.
  • But the kind of hierarchical sense that pervades the whole society is of a different sort, which anthropologist Robert J. Smith calls "diffuse order."
  • they may have had no direct involvement in the situation.
  • apan, like all other societies, has conflicts between individual and group.
  • most Japanese place greater emphasis on cultivating "a self that can feel human in the company of others," according to David W. Plath.
  • secular society
  • Religious practice, too, emphasizes the maintenance of harmonious relations with others
  • Harmony, order, and self-development are three of the most important values that underlie Japanese social interaction.
  • the gods display human emotions,
  • Empathy and Human Relations
  • Japan is among the societies that most strongly rely on social rather than supernatural sanctions and emphasize the benefits of harmony.
  • Children learn early to recognize that they are part of an interdependent society,
  • most Japanese tend to avoid open competition and confrontation.
  • If each individual in the group understands personal obligations and empathizes with the situations of others, then the group as a whole benefits.
  • Success can come only if all put forth their best individual efforts. Decisions are often made only after consulting with everyone in the group. Consensus does not imply that there has been universal agreement, but this style of consultative decision making involves each member of the group in an information exchange, reinforces feelings of group identity, and makes implementation of the decision smoother.
  • Symbols such as uniforms, names, banners, and songs identify the group as distinct from others both to outsiders and to those within the group.
  • It is often the individual, however, who bears the burden of these interpersonal tensions.
  • Many Japanese cope with these stresses by retreating into the private self or by enjoying the escapism offered by much of the popular culture.
  • Order and Status
Javier E

Review of Hugh Kennedy's "Caliphate: The History of an Idea" | History News Network - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...166297

history islam caliphate

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Hugh Kennedy’s political history of Islam from Muhammad to the Ottomans.
  • it’s not a history of an idea for the simple reason that it has little to say about what was new about the caliphate or why it was different from all other empires.
  • questions soon arose. If a caliph was just a deputy, then whom was he a deputy of – Muhammad or God himself?  How was a caliph to be chosen – by election, descent, or some different way altogether? What should his qualifications be, and what was he supposed to do once he took office?  Amass treasure and territory or concentrate on spreading the word of God?
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Charlemagne regarded himself as a lawgiver in the style of Moses or the ancient Jewish king Josiah. 
  • the caliphs relinquished legislative authority beginning in the 830s when a hard-nosed mullah named Ibn Hanbal argued that such powers belonged exclusively to the religious scholars.  Unable to make law in their own right, caliphs found themselves reduced to the role of enforcers of law that others formulated, interpreted, and adjudicated.  Muhammad’s successors were marginalized by their own society. 
  • while Kennedy, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the author of more than a dozen books about Muslim history, tells us what happened, he has much less to say about why.
  • this hardly describes the outrage of Muslim troops at irreligious upstarts whom they said had hijacked a divinely-sanctioned movement for their own purposes.
Javier E

Opinion | America the Cowardly Bully - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-trade-war.html

trade war economics politics trump

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Even if most of the tariffs go away, Trump’s trade belligerence has done lasting damage to America’s reputation, and hence to a global economy that depends on American leadership.
  • The whole world now knows two things about us. First, we’re not reliable — an agreement with the U.S. is really just a suggestion, because you never know when the president will invent some excuse for breaking it.
  • Second, we’re easily rolled: The president may talk tough on trade, but in classic bully fashion, he runs away if confronted.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Why bother making deals with a country that’s willing to slap sanctions on the best of allies, and clearly lie about the reasons, whenever it feels like it?
  • backing down so easily, after all the posturing, tells the world that the way to deal with America is not to bargain in good faith, but simply to threaten the president’s political base, and maybe offer some payoffs, political and otherwise.
malonema1

Trump: N Korea talks could bring world's 'greatest deal' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-43362505

trump US politics NK

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • US President Donald Trump has said his planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un could either fail or lead to the "greatest deal for the world".At a political rally in Pennsylvania, Mr Trump told supporters he believed North Korea wanted to make peace. But he said he might leave the talks quickly if it didn't look like progress for nuclear disarmament could be made.In his speech, the US leader warned of tariffs on European cars, and launched his slogan for re-election in 2020.
  • He also said he believed the North Koreans would honour their commitment not to test any more missiles. Mr Trump told the crowd: "I think they want to make peace, I think it's time."
  • The US has made "zero concessions" with its sanctions, said Vice-President Mike Pence, following news of the upcoming meeting being agreed. He said he believed North Korea's willingness to talk proved the US strategy of isolating the country was working.
malonema1

Donald Trump is 'being played' by Kim Jong Un on North Korea meeting - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...un-on-north-korea-meeting.html

US trump diplomacy NK

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Trump's team has repeatedly criticized previous administrations for giving North Korea concessions in exchange for negotiations that never halted the state's nuclear weapons program. The Republican may now be making that same mistake, analysts warned.
  • The rogue state has extended a number of olive branches in recent weeks, including peace talks with Seoul and participation at the Winter Olympics. Kim also pledged to refrain from further nuclear or missile tests and understands that joint military exercises between Seoul and Washington — one of the North's major points of contention — must continue, South Korea's National Security Office head Chung Eui-yon said on Thursday.
  • Trump is being "played by Pyongyang" and is "unwittingly preempting himself of the one effective non-lethal policy he has, sanctions enforcement," according to Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korean studies professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • While the idea of a May summit is seen by many as an encouraging step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula — no sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader — others are puzzled by Washington's marked change in tone.
  • "It is striking how fast this has moved forward ... This is encouraging news, but it's very important to manage expectations," said Park. "We don't have all the details yet to make an assessment on how viable this process will be."
knudsenlu

Bill Perry: America 'Blew the Opportunity' Stop Kim's Nukes - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555239

america opportunity nukes history

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • As South Korea’s national-security adviser told it on Thursday, Donald Trump will meet with Kim Jong Un this spring for one purpose only: to achieve the “permanent denuclearization” of North Korea. But according to one of the U.S. officials who came closest to striking that kind of deal, the president better lower his expectations. By a lot.
  • “I don’t think [the North Koreans are] going to want to negotiate giving up all their nuclear weapons,” he added. “But even if they did … I have no idea how we could verify it.”
  • The years since have brought a series of nuclear agreements that at times froze the North Korean nuclear program, but over the long term failed to prevent the North from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The achilles heel of many of these accords was the Kim government’s refusal to disclose all its nuclear activities and permit outside monitors to verify that those activities had ceased.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Establishing safeguards against North Korea transferring nuclear components and technology to other states or non-state actors like terrorist groups would be difficult to verify but still worth pursuing in negotiations, Perry said. (North Korea has a history of proliferating missiles and other materials related to weapons of mass destruction.)
  • hile recognizing North Korea diplomatically and finally concluding the Korean War might seem like grand gestures, Perry argued that they are actually “easy and cheap” for the United States to implement—and, maybe most importantly, “reversible” in the event that North Korea reneges on its end of the bargain. The outcome Perry envisions is, as he put it, possible, desirable, and verifiable. It's also a far cry from the denuclearization of North Korea.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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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.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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.”
Javier E

The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...le-amazon-and-apple-1516121561

antitrust tech fb amazon apple microsoft network monopoly

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A growing number of critics think these tech giants need to be broken up or regulated as Standard Oil and AT&T once were.
  • antitrust regulators have a narrow test: Does their size leave consumers worse off?
  • By that standard, there isn’t a clear case for going after big tech—at least for now. They are driving down prices and rolling out new and often improved products and services every week.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • That may not be true in the future: If market dominance means fewer competitors and less innovation, consumers will be worse off than if those companies had been restrained. “The impact on innovation can be the most important competitive effect” in an antitrust case
  • Yet Google’s monopoly means some features and prices that competitors offered never made it in front of customers. Yelp Inc., which in 2004 began aggregating detailed information and user reviews of local services, such as restaurants and stores, claims Google altered its search results to hurt Yelp and help its own competing service. While Yelp survived, it has retreated from Europe, and several similar local search services have faded.
  • When the federal government sued to break up Standard Oil, the Supreme Court acknowledged business acumen was important to the company’s early success, but concluded that was eventually supplanted by a single-minded determination to drive others out of the market.
  • Standard Oil and AT&T used trusts, regulations and patents to keep out or co-opt competitors. They were respected but unloved.
  • By contrast, Google and Facebook give away their main product, while Amazon undercuts traditional retailers so aggressively it may be holding down inflation. None enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly; all invest prodigiously in new products.
  • All are among the public’s most loved brands, according to polls by Morning Consult.
  • Yet there are also important parallels. The monopolies of old and of today were built on proprietary technology and physical networks that drove down costs while locking in customers, erecting formidable barriers to entry.
  • . If they’re imposing a cost, it may not be what customers pay but the products they never see.
  • In a 2005 paper, Mr. Scherer found that Standard Oil was indeed a prolific generator of patents in its early years, but that slowed once it achieved dominance.
  • Amazon hasn’t yet reached the same market share as Google or Facebook but its position is arguably even more impregnable because it enjoys both physical and technological barriers to entry. Its roughly 75 fulfillment centers and state-of-the art logistics (including robots) put it closer, in time and space, to customers than any other online retailer.
  • “Just like people joined Facebook because everyone else was on Facebook, the biggest competitive advantage AT&T had was that it was interconnected,”
  • Early in the 20th century, AT&T began buying up local competitors and refusing to connect independent exchanges to its long-distance lines, arousing antitrust complaints. By the 1920s, it was allowed to become a monopoly in exchange for universal service in the communities it served. By 1939, the company carried more than 90% of calls.
  • After AT&T was broken up into separate local and long-distance companies in 1982, telecommunication innovation blossomed, spreading to digital switching, fiber optics, cellphones—and the internet.
  • when Google launched its own comparison business, Google Shopping, those sites found themselves dropping deeper into Google’s search results. They accused Google of changing its algorithm to favor its own results. The company responded that its algorithm was designed to give customers the results they want.
  • At that same hearing Jeffrey Katz, then the chief executive of Nextag, responded, “That is like saying move to Panama if you don’t like the tax rate in America. It’s a fake choice because no one has Google’s scope or capabilities and consumers won’t, don’t, and in fact can’t jump.”
  • In 2013 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluded that even if Google had hurt competitors, it was to serve consumers better, and declined to bring a case. Since then, comparison sites such as Nextag have largely faded.
  • The different outcomes hinge in part on different approaches. European regulators are more likely to see a shrinking pool of competitors as inherently bad for both competition and consumers. American regulators are more open to the possibility that it could be natural and benign.
  • Internet platforms have high fixed and minimal operating costs, which favors consolidation into a few deep-pocketed competitors. And the more customers a platform has, the more useful it is to each individual customer—the “network effect.”
  • But a platform that confers monopoly in one market can be leveraged to dominate another. Facebook’s existing user base enabled it to become the world’s largest photo-sharing site through its purchase of Instagram in 2012 and the largest instant-messaging provider through its purchase of WhatsApp in 2014. It is also muscling into virtual reality through its acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014 and anonymous polling with its purchase of TBH last year.
  • Once a company like Google or Facebook has critical mass, “the venture capital looks elsewhere,” says Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, a technology-focused private-equity firm. “There’s no point taking on someone with a three or four years head start.”
  • “There should be hundreds of Yelps. There’s not. No one is pitching investors to build a service that relies on discovery through Facebook or Google to grow, because venture capitalists think it’s a poor bet.”
  • As the dominant platform for third-party online sales, Amazon also has access to data it can use to decide what products to sell itself. In 2016 Capitol Forum, a news service that investigates anticompetitive behavior, reported that when a shopper views an Amazon private-label clothing brand, the accompanying list of items labeled “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” is also dominated by Amazon’s private-label brands. This, it says, restricts competing sellers’ access to a prime marketing space
  • In the face of such accusations, the probability of regulatory action—for now—looks low, largely because U.S. regulators have a relatively high bar to clear: Do consumers suffer?
  • “We think consumer welfare is the right standard,” Bruce Hoffman, the FTC’s acting director of the bureau of competition, recently told a panel on antitrust law and innovation. “We have tried other standards. They were dismal failures.”
  • What would remedies look like? Since Big Tech owes its network effects to data, one often-proposed fix is to give users ownership of their own data: the “social graph” of connections on Facebook, or their search history on Google and Amazon. They could then take it to a competitor.
  • A more drastic remedy would be to block acquisitions of companies that might one day be a competing platform. British regulators let Facebook buy Instagram in part because Instagram didn’t sell ads, which they argued made them different businesses. In fact, Facebook used Instagram to engage users longer and thus sell more ads
  • Ben Thompson, wrote in his technology newsletter Stratechery. Building a network is “extremely difficult, but, once built, nearly impregnable. The only possible antidote is another network that draws away the one scarce resource: attention.” Thus, maintaining competition on the internet requires keeping “social networks in separate competitive companies.”
  • How sound are these premises? Google’s and Facebook’s access to that data and network effects might seem like an impregnable barrier, but the same appeared to be true of America Online’s membership, Yahoo ’s search engine and Apple’s iTunes store, note two economists, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, in a recent paper. All saw their dominance recede in the face of disruptive competition.
  • It’s possible Microsoft might have become the dominant company in search and mobile without the scrutiny the federal antitrust case brought. Throughout history, entrepreneurs have often needed the government’s help to dislodge a monopolist—and may one day need it again.
maxwellokolo

Iran deal deadlines loom as Trump weighs sanctions - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by maxwellokolo on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 15 Jan 18
     
    Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has used Iranian anti-government protests as an opportunity to slam the Iran nuclear deal ahead of key legal deadlines looming this month, actions that may foreshadow how he plans to proceed. In mid-January, Trump will once again have to decide whether to certify Iran's compliance with the deal -- a process that must occur every 90 days according to the terms of the agreement.
  • maxwellokolo on 15 Jan 18
     
    Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has used Iranian anti-government protests as an opportunity to slam the Iran nuclear deal ahead of key legal deadlines looming this month, actions that may foreshadow how he plans to proceed. In mid-January, Trump will once again have to decide whether to certify Iran's compliance with the deal -- a process that must occur every 90 days according to the terms of the agreement.
oliviaodon

Can Europe Enforce Its Founding Ideals? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549137

europe turmoil

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • PARIS—When history books are written on Europe in the early 21st century, this week may stand out. Pro-independence parties gained a majority in Catalonia’s regional elections, exacerbating a constitutional crisis in Spain. This occurred just days after Poland’s defiant right-wing government pushed back against the unprecedented threat of European Union sanctions by moving ahead with changes to the judiciary that European officials say threaten the rule of law.
  • All politics are local—until they’re not. The developments in Poland and Catalonia stem from unique circumstances, but each case tests the European Union from opposite sides, right in one case, and somewhat left in the other.
  • In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s six-month-old government is coming under pressure from right-wing critics who say the government hasn’t cracked down enough on illegal migrants, and from left-wing critics who say his handling of the crisis has been scandalously inhumane, with authorities busting up migrant encampments. More than 13,000 asylum-seekers are stuck on Greek islands, living in tents, Human Rights Watch reported. In Italy, younger voters who’ve come of age knowing only economic crisis are not convinced the European Union is doing them any favors.
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  • Other tectonic plates are shifting. Germany, once the most politically predictable country in Europe, has not yet formed a government, and Chancellor Angela Merkel is weaker than ever before. This week, an editorialist in Der Spiegel called for an end to the Merkel era—a position unthinkable months ago—saying her emphasis on stability was in fact causing more instability.
  • “I think Europe is going to be stronger now because it has no other choice,” Kasia told me. “It has to be stronger or fall apart. There’s no third way for the EU.”
oliviaodon

How the U.S. and China Differ on North Korea - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...546746

china us north korea

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Last week, President Trump named North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism, tagging the communist country with the label almost a decade after the Bush administration removed it.
  • For Washington, the road to a diplomatic solution with North Korea goes through Beijing. But despite public statements to the contrary, the United States and China are quite divided on some key questions, including why North Korea pursues nuclear weapons in the first place, and on the reasons why previous agreements to halt its illicit activities failed. Unless they can bridge these gaps, any lasting resolution of the North Korean crisis is unlikely.
  • The Trump administration has said that its goal is to isolate North Korea, in the hope that pressure through sanctions will compel it to renounce its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs and seek dialogue with the United States.
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  • North Korea has a long history of provocation in the face of what it regards as threats from the United States and South Korea. It has warned of a “merciless strike” in retaliation against their joint military exercises, and said it would accelerate its nuclear-weapons program in response to the deployment in South Korea of the Terminal High Altitude Thermal Defense System, a U.S. anti-missile defense network.
  • The U.S. position can be better understood through the lens of a pair of earlier failed agreements with North Korea—failures caused, in Washington’s view, by Pyongyang
  • The view from Washington is quite different. Government officials and experts alike believe North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has aggressive and offensive objectives
  • Chinese experts believe North Korea’s leaders pursue nuclear weapons because they feel genuinely threatened by the United States and South Korea.
  • Unless China adopts America’s approach, at least in part (or vice versa), the crisis is unlikely to diminish. “Even though at the surface level they appear cooperative, deep down their approaches of dealing with North Korea are fundamentally different,” Zhao said. Ultimately, Zhao said, the nature of the disagreements between Washington and Beijing ensures that the crisis of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs will remain unresolved for some time to come.
oliviaodon

The National Security Strategy Papers Over a Crisis - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...548756

trump

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In off-the-record conversations with outsiders, the Trump administration’s senior national-security officials all stay in the mainstream of U.S. foreign policy. They recognize the threat from Russia, often with great passion. They reject the notion they are protectionist, instead championing bilateral deals as an alternative to mega trade pacts such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They steadfastly back U.S. allies, especially those in NATO. They even make favorable reference to the much-derided liberal international order.
  • Trump’s silence followed a remarkable story last week in The Washington Post that said the president cannot stand to be briefed on the Russian political threat to the United States and has refused to do anything to counter it. He was furious at the new sanctions imposed on Russia, blamed Congress for the downturn in relations with Moscow, and has done everything in his power not to implement them. We also know that Russia wasn’t even on the agenda at the NATO summit earlier this year, so nervous were U.S. allies of antagonizing the president.So, we’re left to ponder the question once more: Who to believe? Is the United States serious about countering Russian power? Or is it asleep at the switch? The answers are yes and yes—parts of the administration are actively working to counter Russia, even as one important part is not and prefers to embrace Putin.
  • The notion that Trump is weak and ineffective is the unstated assumption behind the school of thought—particularly prevalent among conservatives sympathetic to him and some foreign governments—that this is all going to work out okay. Of course, they never say that outright, but it’s what they mean. They always point to the bureaucrats and the “actions” (as if Trump’s actions do not count), and never the president himself.
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  • The story of year one is that of a president who remains as radical, erratic, and thin-skinned as ever. He entered office with no Senate-confirmable foreign-policy loyalists. He turned to the military and titans of industry and they constrained him and took control of the bureaucracy. He has had to tolerate being handled, but he is not happy about it. He breaks out whenever he can—defying them on Iran or on Jerusalem or with a phone call or in a speech.
  • The main lesson of the launch of the National Security Strategy is that U.S. foreign policy is still in crisis and will remain so for the duration of the Trump presidency. Some brave men and women on the inside are trying to chart a course toward safety, but there are no guarantees they will succeed in containing Trump or that they will remain at their posts. The most testing days of this crisis still lie ahead.
manhefnawi

War of the Polish Succession | European history | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...War-of-the-Polish-Succession

Augustus II Charles III Poland Leszczyński

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • War of the Polish Succession, (1733–38), general European conflict waged ostensibly to determine the successor of the king of Poland, Augustus II the Strong
  • The war resulted mainly in a redistribution of Italian territory and an increase in Russian influence over Polish affairs
  • After Augustus died (Feb. 1, 1733), Austria and Russia supported the election of his son Frederick Augustus II of Saxony as king of Poland
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  • who had been their king (1704–09) when the Swedes had temporarily forced Augustus II to be deposed and who also had become connected to France via the marriage of his daughter Marie to King Louis XV
  • Lombardy, which remained a Habsburg possession
  • Don Carlos, the Spanish infante, led a Spanish army of 40,000 across Tuscany and the Papal States to Naples, defeated the Austrians at Bitonto (May 25, 1734), conquered Sicily, and was crowned king of Naples and Sicily as Charles III.
  • It provided for Augustus to remain king of Poland. In addition, Don Carlos was to retain Naples-Sicily but had to give Austria both Parma and Piacenza, which he had inherited in 1731,
  • But when a Russian army of 30,000 approached Warsaw, Leszczyński fled to Gdańsk, and another sejm of 3,000 delegates named Frederick Augustus as Poland’s new king, Augustus III (Oct. 5, 1733). France consequently formed anti-Habsburg alliances with Sardinia-Savoy (September 26) and Spain (November 7) and declared war on Austria (October 10)
  • Leszczyński renounced the crown
  • On Nov. 18, 1738, France and Austria signed the final Treaty of Vienna, in which the provisions of the preliminary agreement were confirmed and in which France also conditionally guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, by which Holy Roman emperor Charles VI named his daughter, the Austrian archduchess Maria Theresa, as the heiress to his Habsburg lands
Javier E

The Holocaust Museum's Lesson for America Today - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560495

isolationism nativism America First

shared by Javier E on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • visitors from anywhere in the United States can discover what their hometown newspapers were saying during the rise of Hitler. The answer is: a lot. Discrimination against, and then persecution of, Germany’s Jews was widely covered. Kristallnacht, the officially sanctioned pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, received particular attention, and was roundly condemned across the country. The sympathy with the Jews of Germany and later Europe was impressive, and is documented by contemporary Gallup polls.
  • But were Americans willing to take in refugees, even children? The answer is no: By a three-to-one margin, including on the eve of the war and indeed after it, Americans did not want such immigrants.
  • Grimmer yet: Did America admit at least those refugees provided for in the skimpy quotas allowed under law in the years leading up to 1941 and American entry? The answer again is no: not by a large margin. In 1936, for example, barely a quarter of the visas that could have been issued to refugees from Germany—most of them Jews—were in fact issued.
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  • Roosevelt was a master calculator who was leading a country that wanted nothing to do with immigrants, nothing to do with European squabbles, and not a whole lot to do with Jews.
  • The isolationist organization America First gets its share of attention here, and deservedly so. Launched in September 1940, it soon built up a membership of over 800,000. Led by the retired general and business executive Robert Wood, its most charismatic spokesman was the heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh, a strange but inflammatory hero for the isolationists, who was not beyond the occasional Jew-baiting himself.
  • America First opposed the Atlantic Charter issued by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941 after their meeting off Newfoundland, presumably including clauses like the pledge to respect the right to self-government. It captured the imaginations of some privileged young men, to include a couple of future presidents and assorted intellectual luminaries. It vanished into thin air after Pearl Harbor
  • the America of the 1930s was not all that great. There were—as we have been reminded by the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—the pitiless murders of African Americans by lynch mobs. There were scores of such killings in the 1930s. There was casual and open bigotry and discrimination against Jews and other religious and ethnic groups.
  • There were, thank goodness, other voices and other movements.
  • There was Freedom House, established by Wendell Willkie—FDR’s failed opponent in 1940—and Eleanor Roosevelt, to counteract America First. It remains today one of the great voices of conscience in chronicling the abuses of freedom wherever they occur, true to the legacy of those who founded it almost eight decades ago. It, not America First, is the true voice of a generation that at last made a difficult choice and the right choice.
  • The mood is more that of the early 1930s, when the horrors of Auschwitz lay in the unimagined and unimaginable future. Then, Americans, angry that the war of 1914–18, the war to end all wars, had not in fact done so, were suspicious of foreigners and susceptible to the demagoguery of politicians like Huey Long or Gerald Nye. They tried to close themselves off from the world. If building a wall would have done it, many would have favored it.
  • Roosevelt turned all of his extraordinary political skills to averting the disaster that would have meant—and even so, it was only through a series of extraordinary miscalculations by America’s enemies that the United States fully stepped up to the challenges awaiting it
manhefnawi

U.S. Exits Paris Climate Agreement | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...-exits-paris-climate-agreement

Carbon Emissions UN Greenhouse Gases Global Warming Trump

shared by manhefnawi on 17 May 18 - No Cached
  • At a rose garden ceremony on June 1, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump declared his intention to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement. 
  • would have negative effects on job growth, hinder manufacturing, and bring about dramatic declines in the coal mining, natural gas, steel, and cement industries
  • The Paris Agreement, which was designed to control and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, was the centerpiece of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
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  • Although many of the world’s other leaders have expressed their disappointment with Trump’s decision, they have also underscored their commitment to solving the problem of global warming, with or without American participation
  • To date there are only two other countries that have not yet signed on to the Paris Agreement: Syria and Nicaragua. Syria, which remains in the throes of a destructive civil war, noted that it was not in a position to sign such agreements because of ongoing sanctions from Western countries. The government of Nicaragua, however, refused to sign on for different reasons. Nicaragua believes that the Paris Agreement does not go far enough to reduce emissions, arguing that wealthy countries such as the United States should have been forced to make deeper commitments.
krystalxu

Which Has The Bigger Economy: Texas Or Russia? - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...bigger-economy-texas-or-russia

economy russia

shared by krystalxu on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • The U.S. just levied fresh sanctions against the Eastern European country for its alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and early last week President Donald Trump warned Russia that the U.S. military could soon strike its ally Syria in response to its use of chemical weapons—a promise he kept Friday evening.
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