Author: hamilton1788

American efforts to induce our erstwhile allies to spend more on defense have had some positive impacts in Europe, but less in Asia. This is because the logical response is, or else what?

If you’re the leader of a European state that was previously dominated by the USSR, you already know what life in a Russian satellite state is like, so you have plenty of incentive to beef up the defense budget. If you live in Taiwan, you have a pretty good idea of what happens to you if the Chinese invade, so the American demand should resonate there, too. But if you live in Japan, India, Australia, or South Korea, the situation is different. Life in a Chinese vassal state probably wouldn’t be that bad on a day-to-day basis as long as you weren’t publicly critical of the Chinese regime. That means you have a plausible alternative if Trump’s demands start getting too obnoxious.

Has the Trump defense team figured this out, particularly with regard to India? Based on Trump’s actions on tariffs, I would say not.

Where to start on this one! Here is a list of Trump’s “accomplishments:”

1. Eliminating protections from refugees from countries with regimes that are clearly either despotic or incapable of governing;
2. Deporting people to third party countries that are clearly unsafe;
3. Equivocating on mass deportations for essential workers in fields in which the owners are Republicans;
4. Unleashing masked thugs on law-abiding undocumented immigrants in blue state cities;
5. Attempting to deport students who clearly represent no threat to American foreign policy for the exercise of their First Amendment rights;
6. Supporting the construction of Alligator Alcatraz;
7. Sending troops to blue cities to assist with immigration roundups; and
8. Denying any reasonable form of due process to deportees.

An article in the NYT tells us that Israeli officials have discussed the possibility of moving the Palestinians in Gaza to South Sudan. That’s not genocide; it’s merely ethnic cleansing.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see how Bret Stephens justifies this. Will he say removing the civilian population of Gaza is necessary to protect Israel from a handful of Hamas fighters? Will he say the Israeli officials involved in the discussions don’t really speak for the government? Or will he argue that the duly elected government doesn’t really reflect the views of the population?

Whatever he comes up with, I’m not buying it.

As I noted many times last year, Trump voters could be divided into two groups: those who believed his campaign promises; and those who thought he was lying. One of those groups was bound to be disappointed. As it turned out, Trump was telling the truth, and the lying group has already jumped ship.

If we do ultimately wind up with a Ukraine peace deal, it will be based on a similar misunderstanding; the Ukrainians will believe Trump’s security promises, and Putin will not. Who will turn out to be right on that occasion? TBD.

The outlines of a deal are starting to become clear, and they closely resemble what I predicted years ago. Ukraine will give up the land it has already lost, because it doesn’t have the ability to take it back. It will also be excluded from NATO. It will, however, receive security guarantees that resemble those in Article 5.

If this deal ultimately happens–and it will require the consent of the Ukrainian people in one way or another–it will not be another Munich as long as Ukraine’s new borders remain defensible and the security guarantees are ironclad. It is the latter requirement that would concern me if I were a Ukrainian. Can Ukraine trust Trump–a man who rewrites his own deals on a daily basis–to meet the obligations in such an agreement, even if they are put in writing and ratified by Congress, which seems unlikely to me? I would have grave concerns about that, to say the least.

It is worth noting that Hitler received the Sudetenland without having to fight for it, and that Czechoslovakia’s revised frontier was left indefensible. In the case of Ukraine, the first statement is not true; the second is TBD, and depends on further negotiation.

Here’s a list of Trump’s “accomplishments” to date in this field:

1. He pulled the security from foreign policy critics who have been threatened by the Iranians;
2. He also pulled the clearances from law firms connected in some way with his past legal problems, and managed to force some of them to enter into highly unfavorable legal settlements;
3. He fired everyone in the DOJ or the FBI who had any involvement in previous investigations of him; and
4. He has publicly directed that several of his critics be subjected to criminal investigation. We know that at least one of these critics–Letitia James–is actually being investigated. As to the others, we just don’t know.

Since we have passed the six month mark, it is time to provide a comprehensive list of Trump’s “accomplishments,” starting with the culture wars:

1. He attacked the Smithsonian and demanded changes to exhibits to make white men feel better about themselves;
2. He took over the Kennedy Center, cut the budget, changed the character of the entertainment, and chose the annual honorees himself;
3. He used antisemitism as a pretext to withhold large sums of money for valuable research at left-leaning Ivy League universities;
4. He put the names of loser Confederate generals back on our military bases;
5. He directed the NPS to change any park exhibits that could make straight white people feel guilty;
6. He threatened several left-wing musicians with prosecution;
7. He threw trans people out of the military; and
8. He eliminated billions of dollars in grant programs on the basis that they promoted woke ideology.

The interesting thing here is that there is nothing to report on the abortion front. Trump genuinely fears angering female voters.

Having opted for idealism over materialism as the source of ultimate reality, the next question in the sequence revolves around God. What do logic and experience tell me about the nature of the divine?

God is the creator of the universe. He (language fails me here–God transcends sexuality) is the source of matter, life, and love. He is immortal, universal, and unchanging.

This definition owes something to Greek philosophy and something to Deism. It doesn’t play well with the three major Western religions. More on that in my next post on metaphysics.

Trump contemplates that there will be massive new exports of “American energy” as part of his trade deals. This suggests that the price to domestic users will increase. But Trump insists that domestic prices will remain low, which would deter investment into new sources of energy. How is this possible? Hope for the best.

The deportation of millions of essential workers will logically result in failed businesses, wage increases, and price increases. How can those be avoided? Through rapid mechanization, presumably involving robots and AI. How can we be sure that will happen? Hope for the best.

Trump demands that foreigners invest more in America. He wants an end to trade deficits. He wants the dollar to remain the world’s currency of choice, but to be weakened. Oh, and he wants low inflation and interest rates, too. How are these incompatible objectives to be achieved? Hope for the best.

There were only two possible outcomes of the ill-advised Alaska summit: a bad deal or no deal. For the moment, the Ukrainians, our NATO allies, and our diplomatic bureaucracy hold enough sway with Trump to keep him, not just from giving the store away, but forcing Zelensky to surrender.

The optics of the meeting were awful, however. There is every reason to believe that Trump really wants to make the bad deal and move on–just not right at this moment.

Evidence of the new administration’s cultural affinity with the Confederacy increases every day. The irony, of course, is that opposition to tariffs was the second most compelling issue for the Confederate states–right behind slavery. Trump wouldn’t approve of that.

Oh, and William McKinley, his role model, actually fought for the Union in the Civil War, if memory serves me correctly.

As I noted in my last post, the bulk of the Vance Claremont speech revolved around Mamdani and his supposed “communism.” For his part, Mamdani has made vocal opposition to Trump a key part of his brand, so it is highly likely the two will being going back and forth at each other with great gusto if Mamdani wins the election. Then what?

It is only too easy to imagine Trump, using his LA and DC experiences as a template, declaring some sort of public safety emergency and sending troops to New York.

I can see it now–Pete Hegseth’s neo-Confederate army of Christian soldiers parading up Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. It would be the ultimate triumph of reactionary values over progressives. It would be Little Rock in reverse.

Most of the public attention paid to Vance’s speech at Claremont revolved around the legacy American issue. I will probably have more to say about that in the future. The biggest single segment of the speech, however, was an attack on Mamdani, who, according to Vance, is a communist.

Vance was speaking to a group of relatively sophisticated right-wingers, so they probably understand that mildly increasing taxes on the wealthy, running a few grocery stores, and making buses free does not exactly amount to taking control of the means of production. Let’s take this critique a step further, however. Donald Trump is governing as the CEO of corporate America. He is demanding personal control over large segments of our economy through golden shares, new investment funds supposedly to be run at his discretion, tariff policy, and social media attacks on disfavored companies. Does this not make him more of a “communist” than Mamdani?

The ancient Greeks thought that the Muses were the source of ideas. Many contemporary artists believe they reveal, rather than generate, ideas through “channeling.” My personal view is that ideas are typically produced when people divorce themselves from their senses, as in dreams. It’s clearly a debatable point, and one that may never be resolved.

AI is hyperrational. It doesn’t have a subconscious. It isn’t capable of divorcing itself from reality and receiving revelations. As a result, it cannot replace natural intelligence; in fact, the classical definition of man as “rational animal” may have to be replaced by referencing emotions and the subconscious.

Large factories with machines operated by workers represented the cutting edge of technology when Marx was writing in the middle of the 19th century. To Marx, they were the end of history. Europe, led by the UK, would see more and more of them; the advent of the factory created a new class division between the owners of the means of production and the people who ran the machines; the owners would exploit the workers; the numerically superior workers would ultimately rise and throw off their chains; and the classless society would be the end game.

Marx, like most of us, was a lousy prophet. He didn’t foresee the extension of the franchise to workers, progressive taxation, the creation of the welfare state, or the shift towards services in advanced economies. As I’ve noted before, the means of production for the wealthiest men in the world is now a laptop computer. Factories filled with masses of burly workers are a relic of the last century, and nobody really believes in communism today–not even the Chinese or the North Koreans.

But AI puts a new twist on an old question. Marx argued that an economy dominated by factories and mass production inevitably led to the exploitation of the working class by a handful of capitalists. AI, on the other hand, could cause inequality to soar by making tens of millions of workers irrelevant. What happens then? Do we see a revolution led by the newly unemployed workers, a vast expansion of the welfare state, or something else? What would Marx say today?