Month: May 2018

The comedian known as Michelle.

Her jokes didn’t go down too well.

Her performance onstage

Led to howls of outrage.

If the dinner dies, it’s just as well.

Barack Obama believed in the Pax Americana, but, after the experience of the Iraq War, he wanted to do it on the cheap.  Like the lawyer that he is, he preferred to solve problems in the fastest, least risky, and least expensive way possible.  And so, he developed a style of building and assisting coalitions that came to be called (not completely accurately) “leading from behind.”

The results were mixed.  He succeeded in negotiating the TPP and the Iran nuclear deal, but Trump is in the process of destroying both of them.  The “pivot to Asia” may have moderated, but did not stop, Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.  In Syria, one can reasonably doubt, based on precedent, that an approach similar to Iraq (direct military intervention) or Libya (extensive support for local surrogates) would have led to a better result, but we do know for sure that what actually occurred had seriously negative impacts on the US, Europe, and the Syrians themselves.

In contrast to Obama’s cool rationality, we are now in an era in which brute force and bluster are valued over alliances, diplomacy, and rules-based systems.  The Pax Americana itself is under threat, both at home and abroad.  How long will this phase continue?  More on that later.

We now have data for the first quarter of 2018, and guess what?  There is no sign of the corporate investment boom that was promised as a result of the Trump tax cut.  The money is being used predominantly for share buybacks.

Who could have predicted it?  Well, everyone except Kevin Hassett.

The rationale for the tax cut is now mutating into an argument that, even if corporations don’t invest, their wealthy owners will.  Sure–they will drive up the cost of assets and buy government bonds.

And so, the final outcome of the tax cut is. . . the government gives money to rich people, who then invest in the securities the government sells to finance the deficit created by the tax cut.

Who says Republicans hate recycling?

Reasonable people can disagree about this, but I would maintain that there are two strains of neoconservative thought.  The first is that American security ultimately depends on the continuing existence of like-minded democratic regimes throughout the world, so we should be prepared to impose liberal democracy on other countries by force, if necessary.  That approach, unsurprisingly, failed miserably in Iraq, and thus is rarely heard today.

The second requires us to be the world’s policeman–not its savior.  Its proponents argue that, in a world that has become effectively much smaller as the result of technological change, small brush fires can become infernos endangering our security almost overnight.  Minor civil wars in faraway lands of which we know little, for example, can result in waves of refugees and terrorism affecting the entire world.  It’s ultimately cheaper and less risky to deal with these problems at their source than at home.  The US is the only power strong enough to do that.  If the rest of the world benefits from that level of American engagement, so be it.

#2 makes sense, but is it sustainable if we are going into a period of relative decline?  More on that later in the week.

Senator Marco Rubio threw his support to Adolf Hitler today.  While he acknowledged his differences with Hitler, he indicated that he “agreed with Hitler on some things, but he disagreed with Hillary Clinton on everything.”

Rubio conceded that he had concerns about some of Hitler’s unconventional  rhetoric, particularly about Jews, but said that Hitler’s statements should be taken “seriously, but not literally.”  He further suggested that he would have more influence with Hitler from the inside than the outside, and expressed confidence that the country’s institutions were strong enough to keep Hitler from making good on his more extreme promises.

Just to make this crystal clear, I am not saying that Trump is Hitler, or that Rubio is any worse than any of Trump’s other enablers.  I am merely pointing out that the arguments made by members of the right in favor of enabling sound a lot like the positions taken by members of the moderate German right in 1933, and that didn’t turn out too well.  The only appropriate response to Trump’s outrages is resistance–period.