Mr. Trump appears to be unifying America — unifying Americans in their denial. The more racist Mr. Trump sounds, the more Trump country denies his racism, and the more his opponents look away from their own racism to brand Trump country as racist. Through it all, America remains a unified country of denial.
The reckoning of Mr. Trump’s racism must become the reckoning of American racism. Because the American creed of denial — “I’m not a racist” — knows no political parties, no ideologies, no colors, no regions.
Posted at 03:47 PM in American Politics, Books, Current Affairs, Foreign Policy and National Security, Political Commentary and Analysis, Public Diplomacy, Public Policy Issues, Religion, Science, Think Tanks | Permalink | Comments (1)
Tags: denial, Ibram X. Kendi, Martin Luther King, racism, racism in America, slavery, Stamped from the Beginning
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Tags: annus horribilis, Bret Stephens, CIA, court jester, Donald Trump, FBI, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Jon Meacham, Kim Jong Un, malignant narcissist, Mar-a-Lago, Politico, POTUS 45, Robert Dallek, Roy Moore, tax reform
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Tags: Benjamin Franklin, DOJ, Donald Trump, DSM-5, Erich Fromm, Evan Osnos, FBI, Goldwater Rule, Grand Rounds, Heinz Kohut, James Comey, Jeff Sessions, narcissistic personality disorder, narcissistic rage, New Yorker, Otto Kernberg, Rod Rosenstein, Sir William Osler, T. S. Eliot, White House
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Tags: 2016 election, adverbs, Department of Justice, FBI, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, President Bill Clinton, Senate Judiciary Committee, syntax
“There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”
Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize Physicist,
Dear Friends,
Over the course of the next sixty days, Senate hearings on the Iran-and-P5+1 agreement (permanent members of the U. N. Security Council -- China, France, Russia, U. K., U. S, + Germany) on Iran’s nuclear program – JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – will examine the strengths and flaws of the agreement in what we can assume will be a strenuously heated debate, but one that will have generated significantly more light than heat when the clock has run out (or even if it keeps running, as it did in Vienna.)
To some, it’s an occasion for recalling Woody Allen’s favorite commencement speech admonition -- “Mankind is facing a crossroad - one road leads to despair and utter hopelessness and the other to total extinction . . .” but for many others it offers the opportunity for a healthy ‘national conversation’ about a set of issues that are of paramount importance to the country, to the selection of the 45th president of the United States, and to the prospects for relative stability in the Middle East region.
It would be understatement to say that the eyes of the world will be on this exercise in democracy, American-style, just as it’s important to understand that any decision taken by Congress and the President will be viewed in some parts of the globe as a goring of oxen.
Narrowly considered, the Senate debate will lead to an up-or-down vote on the agreement, subject to approval or veto by the President (and similar action by the other countries to the agreement, lest we forget.)
Broadly considered, because of the Middle East’s labyrinthine politics and the ways in which these shape global geopolitical decisions and policies, it is about much more than centrifuges, stockpiles, inspections, and verification protocols.
Despite having sixty days to make this decision, it’s likely that most members of the Senate and the concerned public have decided how they’ll vote. The value of the legislative interregnum is to provide some time-and-space allowing for a reasoned examination of the facts as well as the admitted imponderables and unintended consequences.
Much of the value of this process will rest with the leadership shown by Senate Foreign Relations Chair, Tennessee’s Bob Corker, and Ranking Member, Maryland’s Ben Cardin, both highly respected on both sides of the aisle. In addition, New York Senator Charles Schumer, the Democrat’s presumptive new Senate Leader, will be a key influencer owing to vehement opposition from New York’s Jewish constituency versus towering pressure from a President of his own party for whom this is magnum opus.
In consideration of the Iran question, we’ll offer these four observations:
Ignore hyperbole and pomposity. No matter from which politician, pundit, or seat of government it comes. It is neither “one of the darkest days in world history” nor “The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history.’ And while it isn’t a ‘reckless bet,’ neither is it ‘a triumph.”
It is a bargain, but not a ‘grand bargain.’ By design, it was agreed at the outset that these negotiations would be about the Iran’s nuclear program only and not concerned with other highly sensitive matters – e. g., support for terrorist organizations, human rights abuses, IRGC interference in various Middle East theaters of military operation. Had the policy palate been broader, neither China nor Russia would have participated; had they not, no deal with Iran would have been possible.
Simply put, the prospect of a “nuclear Iran” was the magnet and the glue of these negotiations – it’s what drew each of the six countries to the table and kept them there for such prolonged duration. Had there been an insistence on a ratcheting up or lengthening out of the sanctions, this would have emptied the P5 + 1 table.
This is a transactional, not a transformational deal. Borrowing political scientist James McGregor Burns’ terminology, transactional leadership is where "one person takes the initiative in making contact with others for the purpose of an exchange of valued things."
In this case, the P5 + 1 sought to create ‘an exchange of valued things’ with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nothing more, nothing less – they ‘gave’ on nukes, the P5 + 1 ‘gave’ on sanctions. And despite select stentorian pronouncements to the contrary, ‘gave” is not the same thing as ‘cave.’ This was never about changing attitudes or debating the moral high ground, arguably a colloquy best avoided with a Grand Ayatollah.
Disregard errant historical analogies. Obama is not Neville Chamberlain, nor is this agreement tantamount to appeasement. The Iran agreement is not history repeating itself with the North Korean ‘Agreed Framework.’ The President isn’t ‘dangerously naïve,’ and despite the exuberance of one candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination who said, “This is a victory for diplomacy over saber-rattling and could keep the United States from being drawn into another never-ending war in the Middle East,” there are no ‘victories’ in this deal, and it’s a little early to declare an end to armed conflict in the Levant and surrounding territory.
We’ll close this discussion with three perspectives from well-respected analysts and observers who see things differently, allowing you to consider the range of policy options.
First, a thoughtful, hopeful op-ed by Roger Cohen in the July 16th New York Times – “The Door to Iran Opens” – who favors the agreement while cautiously noting that Iran is ‘a repressive but pragmatic power’ that is ‘finely poised between a tough old guard forged in revolution and its aspirational Westward-looking youth.”
Of the agreement, he writes:
“If implemented, the agreement constitutes the most remarkable American diplomatic achievement since the Dayton Accords put an end to the Bosnian war two decades ago. It increases the distance between Iran and a bomb as it reduces the distance between Iran and the world. It makes the Middle East less dangerous by forestalling proliferation. In a cacophonous age of short-termism, it offers a lesson of stubborn leadership in pursuit of a long-term goal.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/roger-cohen-the-door-to-iran-opens.html?_r=0
Second, a candid, considered, and admirably labored analysis by Shadi Hamid, a fellow at Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and contributing writer at the Atlantic — “Why I’m Torn About the Iran Deal: Was it Worth It?”
“I’ve long wanted to support a deal with Iran. Now that an agreement has been struck, I do. But I do so with major reservations. I can’t help feeling that the United States has paid a tremendous cost for what can only be described as a narrow—if understandable—focus on the minutia of Iran’s nuclear program, including extremely technical questions about, for example, centrifuges. I’ve found it hard to relate to this sort of discussion, because I’ve never quite seen Iran’s nuclear capability as the issue. Iran’s nuclear program mattered of course, but it mattered more because of the kind of regional actor Iran happened to be . . . America’s Gulf allies, for all their faults, recognized this. What worried them most was Iran’s destabilizing role in the region. And while they exaggerated Iran’s meddling, while conveniently eliding their own, they were right to view Iran as a fundamentally negative force in places like Syria and Lebanon."
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2015/07/15-middle-east-iran-deal-obama-hamid
And finally, from Eric Edelman, a former Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration and experienced diplomat, and Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Senior Advisor at the State Department on Iran, a concise case against the JCPOA with an expression of hope that it can be properly amended:
“After two years of painstaking diplomacy, the Obama administration has finally concluded a nuclear agreement with Iran. A careful examination of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reveals that it concedes an enrichment capacity that is too large; sunset clauses that are too short; a verification regime that is too leaky; and enforcement mechanisms that are too suspect. No agreement is perfect, but at times the scale of imperfection is so great that the judicious course is to reject the deal and renegotiate a more stringent one. The way for this to happen is for Congress to disapprove the JCPOA.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-iran-congress-should-just-say-no/2015/07/17/56e366ae-2b30-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html
When we next meet, we’ll offer TMR’s take on the agreement, the status of the Senate hearings, and some soundings from the global community on the deal. In the meantime, let’s see what you conclude, and if you find reaching a satisfactory choice difficult, remember Bohr’s dictum, which suggests that in almost any great issues debate it is a faceoff of ‘great truths’ from which those who govern must choose.
Posted at 07:00 PM in American Politics, Books, Current Affairs, Foreign Policy and National Security, Political Commentary and Analysis, Public Diplomacy, Public Policy Issues, Religion, Science, Think Tanks, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Iran, Javad Zarif, JCPOA, John Kerry, Middle East politics, NPT, nuclear agreement, P5+1, President Obama, President Rouhani, Supreme Leader Khamanei
July 13, 2012
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
Voltaire
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
C. J. Jung
Dear Friends,
During a colloquium hosted last month by the Carnegie Endowment on an insightful new book entitled, “The Dictator’s Learning Curve” (William Dobson, Doubleday) I began thinking about TMR’s buckling bookshelves, which are weighted down with works assessing America’s role in the changing global order of the 21st century.
The connection was triggered by an exchange between Carnegie’s host scholar, Karim Sadjadpour (who knows a thing or two about dictators and dictatorships,) and the author, Will Dobson, in which the term “Dictatorship 2.0” emerged as a way of distinguishing between “the good old days” when the likes of Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, or the Samozas of Nicaragua held sway with the usual tools of force and torture, and today’s crop that must navigate in a universe where Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and you-name-it have made the profession far more demanding.
“It’s hard to be a dictator these days,” Dobson observed, and that led to some thoughts about how difficult it is to be a democrat these days, as well.
Political leadership, whether of the Dictatorship 1.0 or Democracy 1.0 doctrine, has fallen on hard times. Strong leaders need strong followers, and both brands have lost an ‘iron grip’ on their followers, which may be the most salient political fact of these times – accounting for the sense of possibility and potential in states where dictatorships have ruled for so long, and for the sense of angst and agita in those where democracy has been in place for decades or centuries.
And while the reasons for these changing circumstances vary from country to country, it is the same array of digital communications tools, software, and apps that are fueling the transformations.
It has become difficult to hide, to keep secrets, and to keep the ‘outside world’ out – a fact that North Korea’s newest Kim may learn a thing or two about in the years ahead.
Back to that bookshelf, to questions about America’s posture in the emerging global order, and to a fresh look at American Exceptionalism.
First, an anecdotal observation.
There’s less talk these days about America being “the only global superpower,“ and even the voices trumpeting “American Exceptionalism” have been muted.
Why might that be?
Well, let’s consider some data on education, health care, and economic mobility, and some other factors, as well.
According to an OECD study, the U. S. spending per K-12 student is higher than all other countries, except Switzerland; and yet American students rank 14th in reading literacy, 25th in mathematics, and 17th in science.
High school graduation rates are lower than the rates of the UK, Switzerland, Norway, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Finland and Denmark. And the number of who earn college degrees places America 16th, while the number who earn graduate degrees puts us in 12th place.
Add to this that while the U.S. has roughly 36% of the world's college graduates in the 55-to-64 age bracket, it has just 20% percent in the 25-to-34 age range.
Something’s going on here.
According to a World Health Organization report, the U. S. ranks 37th in terms of “overall effectiveness” of its health care system, 38th in life expectancy, 29th in infant mortality, 20th out of 92 countries in childhood obesity, and 1st among 28 OECD countries for adult obesity.
In a 2010 study conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, America ranked last when compared to the six other nations, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand; as the report found, “Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system.”
Another of the “wither factors” is the ‘hollowing out’ of America’s middle class, which the Financial Times’ Ed Luce writes about in his new book, “Time To Start Thinking:”
“For the first time in modern history the majority of American households were poorer at the end of a business cycle than at the beginning (2002 to 2007). Since then things have gotten worse.
“In the last full American business cycle, between 2002 and 2007, the top one in one hundred Americans captured almost two-thirds of the all growth while the top one in one thousand Americans (0.1 percent) captured more than a third of the economy’s growth.”
And yet in the most recent OECD study of household income, we are solidly in first place – more than $32,000, leading Canada, Switzerland, UK, Norway, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden.
So, we’re the richest,
We rank first on defense spending in real dollars ($711 billion) and as a percentage of GDP (4.3 %; only Saudi Arabia exceeds that). All told, we account for 41% of military-related spending.
We rank first in per capita incarceration rates (730 per 100,000) versus the UK (90th), China (121st), Canada (130th), Germany (132nd), and France (161st.)
And we rank first in ‘billionaires,’ 425 out of the universe of 1200, followed by Russia (96) and China (95,) data points your grandfather would find inconceivable.
So, where does this leave us in our consideration of whether American exceptionalism is withering, treading water, or just having a “bad hair” decade or two?
As the distinguished historian Robert Kagan writes in his magisterial volume, “Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century:”
“The first American exceptionalism was really an English exceptionalism, the first American mission an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, imperial mission.”
And in what would undoubtedly shock today’s most bombastic “American exceptionalists,” Kagan offered this thought:
“What has been said of Russia, that it found its security only in the insecurity of others, could be said of the colonial Anglo-Americans, too. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they purchased their security at the price of the insecurity, and often the ruin, of Pequot, Iroquois, and Narragansett, of French and Spaniards, and by the time of the Revolution, of the British, too.”
Thus, it began with the Creator’s gift of geography, was animated by the arrival of religious utopians, followed by a generation or two of their native born sons and daughters, students of the Enlightenment, political pioneers who gave us the founding contours, principles, and even an operating system for the American republic.
Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century, and back to Kagan in his newest book, “The World America Made:”
“Perhaps democracy has spread to over a hundred nations since 1950 not simply because people yearn for democracy but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy. Perhaps the stunning global economic growth of the past six decades reflects an economic order shaped by the world’s leading free-market economy. Perhaps the era of peace we have known has something to do with the enormous power wielded by one nation.”
Virtually all serious scholars who have examined the ‘whither’ or ‘wither’ question in this century have reached two conclusions: first, that the preservation and expansion of the liberal democratic order in the post-great war period of the 20th century owes most to American leadership; and second, that while it is unclear whether America will be primus inter pares, a “frugal superpower,” as Michael Mandelbaum has predicted, or the “largest minority shareholder in the global order LLC," as Brookings’ Bruce Jones has described, no other nation or group of nations is preparing to assume the lead position.
And thus, we are left with uncertainty, which Voltaire reminds us is vastly preferable to certitude.
Jung’s observation suggests that in order to successfully navigate the transition from Democracy 1.0 to Democracy 2.0, we must disenthrall ourselves from the dream and deal with the reality – as individual citizens, who bear much of the responsibility for the condition of the republic; and as a polity, where our political institutions must find ways of delivering results instead of dividing us further.
But how? Indeed, how?
Not easily or evenly. And probably not without a “transforming transaction,” the prospect of which seems more elusive than finding the Higgs Boson particle, aka, “The God Particle.”
And on that point, it turns out that the term “God particle,” derives not from theological inspiration, but from a 1993 book on Higgs' particle by physicist, Leon Lederman, whose title was “The Goddamn Particle,” until a politically correct publisher intervened and shortened it to a term whose meaning is lost today.
American Exceptionalism needs its ‘goddamn particle,’ and the sooner the better.
“To govern is to choose.”
Pierre Mendes France
“There is a short passage near the very end of the Mahler in which the almost vanishing violins, all engaged in a sustained backward glance, are edged aside for a few bars by the cellos. Those lower notes pick up fragments from the first movement, as though prepared to begin everything all over again, and then the cellos subside and disappear, like an exhalation. I used to hear this as a wonderful few seconds of encouragement: we'll be back, we're still here, keep going, keep going.”
“Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”
Lewis Thomas
Continue reading "Early Morning Thoughts on Rereading Lewis Thomas" »
Houston, we've had a problem.”
Astronaut James Lovell
Apollo 13
April 13, 1971
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