Abby,
Given the inability of Progressive candidates to underwrite successful
campaigns, I agree that we do need to vote for the lesser of two
Evils. This is a change of course for me, due mainly to the desperate
conditions being forced upon us by the Trump administration. But it
is often difficult to tell the "lesser", since politicians have a
language of their own, deliberately misleading.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/21/18, abby <aevincent@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm having flashbacks to the "Failsafe" and "On the Beach" days. We can
ride it out if we're successful at electing the lesser of two (orr more)
evils.
Abby
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2018 7:46 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Bolton Administration Has Already Begun
My my my. What a depressing way to start the new week.
I've begun skimming many articles...as a means to keeping my sanity.
For my way of thinking, the question is, can we ride out the storm?
Or will we all be lost at sea.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/20/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Bolton Administration Has Already Begun By John Feffer, Informed
Comment
20 May 18
The hard-right national security adviser successfully tanked the Iran
deal.
His next target? The North Korea talks.
For a man with a reputation for venting spleen and flying off the
handle, John Bolton bided his time before finally rising to the
position of power he now occupies.
The former U.S. ambassador to the UN spent much of the last decade
consolidating his political base through stints at right-wing
institutes like the American Enterprise Institute, media appearances
on Fox, and the occasional reckless op-ed. He considered running for
president in 2012 and
2016 but chose not to take the risk. Instead, he raised large amounts
of money for extreme right-wing Republican candidates like Senator Tom
Cotton (R-AR).
When Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, Bolton eagerly
endorsed the candidate in the presidential race and offered himself up
as a potential secretary of state. Trump won, but Bolton didn't get
the call. A similarity in temperament and a difference in ideology
seemed to doom his appointment.
The White House, after all, couldn't possibly accommodate two
filterless hotheads.
Moreover, Bolton's continued support for the Iraq War and a more
interventionist U.S. foreign policy seemed to put him forever at odds
with the new president. "Bolton's lambasting of global aristocrats
aside, there isn't much in the man's worldview that rings consonant
with President Trump's 'America First' foreign policy," wrote Daniel
DePetris in The American Conservative.
That was then. Now John Bolton is Trump's national security advisor.
After a steady diet of levelheaded corporate execs and restrained
military men, Trump clearly wanted a little more hot sauce in the Oval
Office. As for the differences in ideology, those were largely
fictitious. Trump has no ideology, and Bolton is smart enough to
tailor his message to his audience.
Trump is a very powerful boat with no rudder. Unfortunately, Bolton is
now his rudder. Which effectively means, when it comes to foreign
policy, that it's Bolton's administration now.
Bolton's Impact
National security advisor is the perfect position for Bolton. He
didn't have to go through any messy confirmation hearings. He doesn't
have to perform any of the ceremonial tasks of a secretary of state.
He can instead focus on what he does best: steering government policy
far to the right. Only a few weeks into his job, he can already put
one notch in his gun for helping to steer the United States out of the
Iran nuclear deal.
This should have been an easy task, since Trump had already made clear
his distaste for the agreement. But there was still significant
disagreement within the administration. Bolton, it appears, tilted the
balance away from those, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who
preferred to remain within the agreement. Writes Mark Langler in The
New York Times:
"Even if Mr. Mattis had wanted to fight for the deal, it is not clear
how much he would have been heard. Mr. Bolton, officials said, never
convened a high-level meeting of the National Security Council to air
the debate. He advised Mr. Trump in smaller sessions, otherwise
keeping the door to his West Wing office closed. Mr. Bolton has forged
a comfortable relationship with the president, several people said,
channeling his "America First"
vocabulary.
Now that he has this comfortable relationship, Bolton will move on to
more challenging assignments. "By working in the West Wing, the
national security adviser spends more time with the president than the
secretaries of State or Defense, and so can always get the last word,"
writes Jonathan Swan in Axios. "But Bolton is signaling restraint
until Trump makes a decision."
So, for instance, with the Iran deal decision made, Bolton has been
coy about whether he's still pushing a regime-change strategy toward
Iran. In public, of course, he must defer to the president. In
private, Bolton would never keep his ideas to himself. As one of the
biggest boosters of the militant, cult-like People's Mujahedin of Iran
(or MEK), Bolton is no doubt whispering into Trump's ear at every
possible opportunity that Iran is on the verge of regime collapse and
a cadre of Ahmed Chalabis are ready to take over. All it needs is a
tightening economic noose and a military nudge from Israel.
Meanwhile, as the president's enforcer, it's Bolton's job to play the
bad cop. He's already done so with Europe, raising the possibility of
sanctioning European businesses that continue to work with Iran.
Bolton must love the opportunity to kill two multilateral birds with
one unilateral stone.
However, the test of Bolton's impact shouldn't be Iran, where his
views intersect with Trump's. The real challenge will be on issues
where Bolton's stated preferences are diametrically opposed to current
policy.
From Regime Change to Rapprochement?
John Bolton has never concealed his desire to see the collapse of the
current government in North Korea. In February, even after the two
Koreas had cooperated in the Winter Olympics, Bolton continued to
argue in the Wall Street Journal that the United States should launch
a preemptive military attack on Pyongyang and its nuclear facilities.
The Journal piece featured a bizarre, legalistic argument based on his
interpretation of a British attack on a Canadian steamboat in U.S.
territory
in 1837. (No, I'm not making this up). Bolton didn't bother to devote
any space to the likely consequences of a preemptive attack on North
Korea that, unlike the British example, could escalate to an exchange
of nuclear weapons and involve the deaths of more than a million
people.
It was pure Bolton: a legal intellect plus an instinct for bombast -
and minus any acknowledgement of real-world consequences.
Now, as national security advisor, Bolton must wrap his mind around
the reality of the potential summit between his boss and Kim Jong Un,
scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. This might seem to put Bolton in a
bind, forcing him to make arguments that run counter to his long-held
preferences.
But remember: Bolton knows how to bide his time. He knows that the
track record of U.S.-North Korean negotiations isn't very good. He
knows that a failed summit could easily push Donald Trump to the other
side of the spectrum - or perhaps, given North Korea's reaction to the
recent U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the summit might not
happen at all. A Trump scorned will likely find regime-change
arguments more compelling.
In the meantime, Bolton is doing what he can to subtly undermine the
upcoming summit. He's ratcheted down expectations by saying that the
Trump administration isn't "starry-eyed" about the meeting. He's
loaded the summit agenda by adding "their ballistic missile programs,
their biological and chemical weapons programs, their keeping of
American hostages, the abduction of innocent Japanese and South Korean
citizens over the years." It would be hard enough to negotiate a
nuclear agreement even without adding these other elements (though
North Korea has already released the "American hostages").
But perhaps the most sinister tactic Bolton has deployed involves his
references to Libya. In interviews, he has said that Libya's
denuclearization in the 2000s can serve as a model for the North Korea
talks.
Libya? The country that gave up its nuclear weapons program and then,
within a few years, experienced civil war, foreign intervention, and
regime collapse? Is that really the kind of model you want to
highlight with a country like North Korea, which is worried about
precisely such a scenario?
An anonymous source in the Trump administration told Abigail Tracy of
Vanity Fair that Bolton is sending his own message to the North
Koreans: "I mean, there is only one reason you would ever bring up
Libya to the North Koreans, and that is to tell them, 'Warning: don't
go any further because we are going to screw you'. So yeah, I
completely agree that that is a dog whistle to the North Koreans,
telling them, 'don't trust us.'"
Of course, Bolton's mere presence in the administration, even if he
just stands quietly in the corner and scowls, sends the message that
this government is not to be trusted. Perhaps that's the real reason
for North Korea's sudden summit skepticism.
War at the Top?
John Bolton isn't stupid enough to contradict his boss, at least not
directly. He's a sycophant to his superiors and a sunvabitch to his
subordinates. The interesting part comes with his relations to his
equals.
The most interesting part will be his relationship with Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo.
Thomas Wright, in Politico, argues that Bolton and Pompeo are cruising
for a mutual bruising. He argues that it's not hawks versus doves in
the Trump administration, but "litigators versus planners."
"The litigators, led by Trump and deputized to Bolton, see national
security policy as a way of settling scores with enemies, foreign and
domestic, and closing the file. They will torpedo multilateral deals,
pull out of international commitments and demonstrate American power
before moving on to the next target.
Planners, on the other hand, are worried about the day after - for
instance, how the United States addresses Chinese economic power in
the wake of a pullout from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.
It's not yet clear whether Pompeo is a litigator or a planner, and
thus whether he'll team up with Bolton or side with the quintessential
planner, Jim Mattis, to challenge the national security advisor's
blow-'em-all-up philosophy. Wright expects a showdown.
I'm not sure. I expect tactical alliances between Bolton and Pompeo
(on
Iran) and tactical disagreements (on China). Where they disagree,
Bolton probably will gain the upper hand, if not immediately then
eventually, because he knows better how to manipulate the levers of
power.
But on the general direction of Trump's foreign policy, Bolton and
Pompeo are in agreement. The faux-isolationism of Trump during his
presidential campaign fooled a number of neoconservatives into voicing
their opposition.
But it didn't fool either Bolton or Pompeo.
Let's be clear: There is no American "retreat" from the world. Under
the rubric of "America First," the Trump administration has created a
new kind of multilateral engagement - aligned with the hard right in
Israel and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, allied with
authoritarian and far-right leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in
Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Viktor Orban in Hungary, and in
support of a range of plutocratic interests over and above the
wellbeing of the majority and the planet as a whole. (I long for
Angela Merkel to just come out and say it: "Gott im Himmel, we must
oppose this new Axis of Autocracy!)
So, not a retreat from the world but a retort to the world: Move this
way, not that. As the Washington Examiner recently editorialized,
"Trump's foreign policy record is one of America continuing its role
as global leader
- even if we're leading in a direction that displeases John Kerry."
But please, let's not talk about Trump's "foreign policy record." This
is not the world of Donald Trump. The world of Trump is Mar-a-Lago,
Fox News, and his Twitter account. His worldview is limited by his
over-inflated ego and bank account.
No, this is the world of John Bolton. And, for a limited time before
he blows it up, we're just living in it.
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