It’s really not that complicated.

President Trump’s Syria strikes have reopened the debate over what defines his foreign policy. Is he an interventionist or an isolationist? Foreign policy experts claim that he’s making it up as he goes along.

They’re not paying attention.

President Trump’s foreign policy has two consistent elements. From threatening Kim Jong-Un on Twitter to moving the embassy to Jerusalem to bombing Syria, he applies pressure and then he disengages.

Here’s how that works.  Hint:  Regarding North Korea, Trump accomplished more with a few tweets than previous administrations had with billions of dollars.

Read more...

What a delicious hors d’oeuvre Michael Horowitz gave the world on Friday!

The inspector general for Department of Justice finally issued his eagerly awaited (eagerly awaited by some of us, anyway) report on Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former deputy director of the FBI.

Note that this is only an appetizer. In the coming weeks, Horowitz will follow up with entrees on the FBI’s partisan activities in the 2016 presidential election and, later, another report on (if I may employ the term) collusion with the State Department.

As of today (4/17), it is unclear exactly what the scope of the inspector general’s inquiries will be.

Speaking for myself, I hope the desert course includes a close look at the January 5, 2017 meeting at the Obama White House.

Read more...

The economic outlook in Germany is deteriorating with alarming speed and any mistake by policy-makers could push the country into a full-blown slump, a leading economic institute has warned.

“The danger of recession has increased markedly. It is a notably more critical picture than a month ago,” says the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) in Düsseldorf.

The IMK’s early warning indicator says the recession risk over the next three months has jumped suddenly to 32.4% as trade tensions mount and liquidity ebbs away in the international financial system.

Germany is heavily reliant on world trade and is therefore a bellwether for the broader health of the global economy. Its industrial sector lurched abruptly from boom to bust early in the last downturn and proved to be a leading indicator for the Great Recession.

Read more...

Whoever was surprised by the hate-fest against the National Rifle Association and conservative Americans in general that followed the Parkland, FL school shooting must not have been paying attention.

Over the past half century, a ruling class formed by our uniformly leftist educational system and occupying the commanding heights of corporate life, governmental bureaucracies, the media, etc. accuses its targets of everything from murder and terrorism to culpable psycho-social disorders (racism, sexism, and so forth).

When one side rejects persuasion in favor of war, what are the other’s options? To convince our opponents to accept us as equals? To reform them? Fat chance! Decency for ourselves is our objective. Hence, the words and deeds by which we deal with those who make war on us must aim at affirming ourselves, despite them.

Hence, the practical question: what is to be our war?

Read more...

Lee Smith's seminal The Strong Horse: Politics, Power and the Clash of Arab Civilizations  (2010) explains how the Arab world typically follows the leader with the most strength and power, i. e. the strong horse.

This proclivity for the powerful does not restrict itself to the Middle East, however.  Xi Jinping these days is a pretty strong horse.  Nor does it even restrict itself to dictators.  Winston Churchill may have been the strongest horse of the last hundred years, having led the allies from the brink of defeat to victory in World War II, sometimes through sheer force of will.

Now it's Donald Trump's turn.

Russia, China, Syria, Iran, North Korea, among other countries and non-state actors, not to mention a whole host of domestic foes, have all aligned themselves against him (and consequently America) in various degrees.

At the same time, an investigation into his inner circle threatens to sweep up virtually everyone from his personal lawyer to his son while his adversaries chortle.

But these adversaries, ambitious and vengeful as they are, have little idea of the chaos that will ensue in this country should Trump fall, the ruptures that will occur.

Read more...

What helped elect Trump was a collective weariness with demands put on a country $20 trillion in debt. America is currently running a $57 billion a month trade deficit.

The poverty of inner-city Detroit, or rural Central California, or West Virginia does not suggest an endlessly opulent nation, at least as a visitor might conclude from visiting Manhattan, Chevy Chase, or Presidio Heights.

Universities and colleges have taken for granted that they can count on massive federal student loan subsidies to increase vastly the number of administrators, pay for an expanding apparat of politicized and nonteaching staff, increase tuition beyond the rate of inflation and not dare to be held accountable for dismal graduation rates, poorly educated graduates, or ossified systems of tenure.

For all this and so very much more, what cannot go on won’t.  We have reached the limits of our patience.

Read more...

Obama owns the disaster in Syria in a way that no one else does. Three of his policies intersected to cause the bloodshed, devastation and horrors there.

1. The Iraq Withdrawal
2. The Arab Spring
3. The Iran Deal

Obama’s Iraq withdrawal turned the country over to Iran and ISIS. The tensions between the Shiite puppet regime in Baghdad (which Obama insisted on backing) and the Sunni population created a cycle of violence that reduced the country to a bloody civil war between Shiite militias and Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The collapse of the multicultural Iraqi army allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq to seize huge swathes of territory. And ISIS and Iran began carving up Iraq into their own ethnically cleansed dominions.

Iraq’s civil war spread to Syria. Initially Obama backed the Sunni Brotherhood militias. These groups represented themselves as free, secular and democratic. They were actually nothing of the kind.

Read more...

Russia’s economy was smaller than that of Texas even before the latest and most lethal sanctions imposed by Washington.

It has diminished further to Benelux proportions after the ruble’s 10% crash this week, the steepest fall since the late Nineties.

Upon this slender economic base, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is posing as a world-class superpower, the new master of the Middle East, insisting on its ‘droit de regard’ over the old Tsarist realms as if by natural right.

What is extraordinary is than anybody should believe in such geostrategic posturing.

The harsher truth is that Mr. Putin squandered the windfall wealth of the commodity supercycle and hollowed out what remained of the Soviet industrial and engineering base, leaving Russia’s Potemkin economy in a futureless cul de sac.

Read more...