October 22nd, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
IN the aftermath of the release of the “Access Hollywood” videotape, in which Donald J Trump was heard making crude remarks about women, and the ensuing charges by several women that Mr Trump had sexually assaulted them in the past, advisers to the embattled Republican presidential nominee came up with what sounded like reasonable advice.
It was clear that Hillary Clinton, the first woman running on the presidential ticket of a major political party, would do well among female voters. And for years, there has been a gender gap between the two major parties: More women tended to vote for the Democrats who were perceived to be the “caring” political party. And vice versa, more men voted for the Republicans who were branded as more “manly”.
But now, opinion polls are pointing to a YUGE gender gap, of close to 20 per cent, between the Donald and his Democratic opponent. And you don’t have to be a veteran pollster to attribute that to the widespread perception that Mr Trump himself helped to inspire, that he talks about and treats women, at best, like one of those chauvinist guys from Mad Men; and at worst, as a revolting misogynist.
So the Republican political strategists made it clear to their presidential nominee that he needed to invest his time and resources in the last days of the campaign wooing women voters. If, as the polls indicated, he would lose the support of white educated and suburban women who in the past leaned in the Republican direction during presidential races, Mr Trump wouldn’t be able to carry battleground states such as Nevada, Colorado, Florida and Ohio.
Moreover, as the two presidential nominees were preparing for their third and last presidential debate on Wednesday in Las Vegas, politicos and pundits were almost all in agreement that Mr Trump had to chill out, look presidential, stop insulting people ranging from former Miss Universe contestants to his Republican critics, and instead focus on the issues, such as the economy, national security, and immigration.
But Mr Trump seemed to have rejected that advice. If anything, he doubled down on insults, not only rejecting the allegations of sexual assaults made against him, as he continued to do during the televised debate on Wednesday, but also describing the accusers as “sick”, “horrible”, and “phony”. And calling on his adoring crowds to “look at them” – was it even possible that God’s gift to women would be attracted to these women?
Then, there were all the personal attacks on leading Republican figures, such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan and Arizona Senator John McCain who had dropped their support for their party’s presidential nominee.
At times, it seemed as though Mr Trump was spending more time bashing them and other Republicans than criticising his Democratic opponent and at a time when there was a lot to criticise her about. In particular, the revelations in the leaked WikiLeaks documents about her questionable ethical standards and those of members of her campaign.
And finally, it seemed that the Donald was going nuclear, making it clear that if he couldn’t win, he was going to bring the entire house down. He charged, with no evidence to support his allegations, that if Mrs Clinton wins the race, that would be a clear indication that the entire presidential election process was “rigged” and that the election was stolen from him.
And, indeed, Mr Trump went on to raise more doubts about the integrity of the US election process by describing it as “rigged” several times during the televised debate in Las Vegas. And in response to a question by the Fox News moderator Chris Wallace, he refused to make a clear commitment to accept the outcome of the election. “I will look at it at the time,” Mr Trump said. And he added: “I will keep you in suspense.”
Mr Trump’s response could raise concerns among both Democrats and Republicans that if he would go on to lose the election, he could challenge the results of the election, departing from a fundamental principle of American democracy – the peaceful transfer of power after an election. Such a move could lead to a major political crisis and a legal battle and could even ignite protests by Mr Trump’s supporters.
Earlier, before the debate on Wednesday, Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence told CNN that “we’ll certainly accept the outcome of this election”, while Mr Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said after the debate that her candidate would “accept the results of the election because he’s going to win the election”.
Overall, Mr Trump seemed to have performed better in the Las Vegas showdown than in the last two televised debates, showing some restraint as he and his Democratic opponent discussed issues, including the Supreme Court and gun rights
But Mr Trump seemed to begin to lose his cool when Mrs Clinton blasted him as a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin and called on him to condemn what she described as Russian efforts to influence the presidential contest through cyber-attacks on the election in her rival’s favour.
“That’s because he would rather have a puppet as president of the United States,” Mrs Clinton insisted. “No puppet. You are the puppet,” Mr Trump responded, adding that Mr Putin had no respect for her.
The debate then slid into a series of bitter exchanges between the two presidential nominees, with Mr Trump at one point calling Mrs Clinton “such a nasty woman”.
But it was Mr Trump’s comments on the election outcome, described by Mrs Clinton as “horrifying”, that would end up dominating the newspaper headlines on Thursday and could hurt any chance that the Republican presidential nominee might have had to win the support of undecided voters for his candidacy.
Almost all the opinion polls conducted on the eve of Wednesday’s televised debate showed a decisive electoral advantage for the Democratic presidential nominee, suggesting that she could bag more than the 270 Electoral College votes she needs to win the election on Nov 8.
Mrs Clinton’s national average margin in the polls was around seven points, and with 244 electoral voters secure in her pocket, she seemed to be widening her lead in battleground or “swing” states such as Michigan, New Mexico, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and beating Mr Trump by wide leads in Virginia and New Hampshire. There were even some signs that she could carry also Georgia and Arizona, two traditionally Republican states.
The Republican presidential nominee, who has only 126 electoral votes secure in his column, has maintained a 2-5-point lead in critical battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Nevada and Iowa.
The bottom line is that while Mrs Clinton needs only to carry two or three more states to win the election, Mr Trump is facing an uphill battle. In order to win, he would need to carry more swing states than her.
It’s not clear if and how the Wednesday debate would affect this electoral balance of power. But based on results of the first opinion polls, there were no signs that Mr Trump succeeded in delivering a political knockout to Mrs Clinton.
While a large majority of polling organisations are predicting a Democratic win, Trumpists continue to hope that many voters, too embarrassed to admit that they would be voting for the much-reviled Mr Trump, have lied to pollsters, and that we are headed for a big surprise on Nov 8.
The expectation in Washington is that notwithstanding his rhetoric, Mr Trump, if he loses the race, would eventually accept the results of the election. And in any case, it’s doubtful that his supporters – who include many seniors with back problems, who spend much of their time waiting to fill their prescriptions in their local pharmacy – are going to take part in violent demonstrations in support of their candidate.
And meanwhile, we now learn that a possible election defeat would probably not turn the Donald into a political loser. It seems that Mr Trump’s son-in-law has been talking with investors about launching a new cable news network that would probably be named the Trump News Network to cover the first term of President Clinton.
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October 14th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
Moves to target Russia as global threat may prove to be self-fulfilling prophecy
Mr Putin is first and foremost committed to advancing Russia’s traditional national interests in Europe and the Middle East. His country is neither an enemy nor a friend of the US, but a “frenemy”. That suggests that the two countries could cooperate on many issues, such as fighting the ISIS and radical Islam in the Middle East.
SINCE the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, members of the American Foreign Policy Establishment (FPE) have been suffering from what former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman has described as the Enemy Depravation Syndrome (EDS).
After all, for close to five decades, the spectre of a powerful global political and military superpower threatening core US national interests and challenging its central ideological principles served as raison d’etre for expanding American military presence and promoting an ideological crusade worldwide.
It wasn’t only the generals at the Pentagon and the spies at the Central Intelligence Agency who had benefited from the continuing rivalry between the two superpowers in terms of defence spending and military intervention.
The struggle against international communism made it possible for the elites in Washington – ranging from the president to low-ranking congressional staff – with the help of the pundits in the Mainstream Media (MSM) to mobilise the American people behind their leaders.
So it wasn’t surprising that when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet bloc was no more, a sense of anxiety dawned on many in Washington. A search then began for a new global bogeyman to replace the militarily routed and economically bankrupted former Soviet Union that was transformed from a superpower into a second-rate global power aka the Russian Federation.
And, indeed, since the early 1990s when the communists (or Red Menace) ceased to exist, efforts to deal with Washington’s EDS has led members of the FPE to take advantage of the never-ending international crises.
They constructed new threats, ranging from the occasional “mini me” such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic to the spectre of a mighty military and ideological challenge such as radical Islam (the Green Menace) or rising China (the Yellow Menace), that were supposed to be substitutes for the old Soviet Union, the Red Menace.
Now in an intriguing twist of history, the new Russia seems to be gradually returning to assume the role that the old Soviet Union had played in the past. Or at least that is the way things are seen by many in Washington.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin, unlike his Soviet predecessors in the Kremlin, was elected in a mostly free and open election and is not commanding a global superpower.
He is a Russian nationalist leader who is first and foremost committed to advancing his country’s traditional national interests in Europe and the Middle East that are seen by many of his countrymen to be challenged by the United States and its allies.
In fact, contrary to earlier commitments by US administrations, Nato had invited former Soviet bloc members, in eastern Europe and the Baltics, to join the Western military organisation. And the Americans have been exploiting groups that are partly funded by the US government to promote its democratic values in Russia as well as in former member states of the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, in the form of so-called “Colour Revolutions”.
Indeed, one of the reasons Mr Putin remains so popular among Russians is that he has taken steps to reassert Russian power, by thwarting an attempt by its neighbour Ukraine to join the European Union (EU) and by maintaining Russian presence in the Middle East.
Washington and its allies condemned the Moscow-backed secession by the Russian population of Crimea from Ukraine as “aggression”. But then you cannot blame the Russians of accusing the West of hypocrisy since it celebrated a similar move by the Muslim Kosovars when they seceded from Serbia in 1994.
The politicians and the pundits have depicted Russian support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and its deployment of troops to that country, as part of an anti-American strategy.
But the fact is that not only has Syria been a long-time client state of Moscow but the Russians have maintained presence in the Middle East going back to the 19th century. They also have legitimate concerns over the spread of radical Islam in what is considered to be their strategic backyard.
Mr Putin does make a good point when he recalls that the ouster of Saddam by the Americans has destabilised the country, strengthened the power of radical Islamists and created the conditions for the rise of the murderous Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). His alliance with President Assad is aimed at defeating the ISIS and he has called for Russian-American cooperation in achieving that goal.
But foreign policy professionals in Washington, including the neoconservative intellectuals who were the driving force behind the Iraq war, have rejected any kind of policy that would leave the authoritarian and unsavoury Mr Assad in power in Damascus. However, they don’t seem to have any problem with helping protect the medieval monarchs of Saudi Arabia.
The Obama administration has actually taken steps to work with the Russians in resolving the crisis in Syria, but ended the cooperation with Russia after its forces bombed and killed civilians in Aleppo, not unlike the conduct by American forces fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Moreover, officials in Washington have intensified their anti-Russia campaign by accusing the Kremlin of intervening in the US presidential elections – by hacking into the Internet servers operated by the Democratic Party and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. But the Americans have yet to provide evidence that would support these allegations.
That hasn’t prevented Democrats and the MSM from accusing Mr Putin of being behind the recent WikiLeaks reports that helped tarnish Mrs Clinton’s image and of supposedly trying to assist Donald Trump getting elected as president in November.
But again while there is a lot of evidence to support allegations of an American role in influencing elections in the former Soviet Union, the notion of a collusion between Mr Putin and Mr Trump (the two have never met) sounds like nothing more than the outline of an entertaining political thriller.
That Mr Putin isn’t leading an anti-American campaign or that Russia shouldn’t be regarded as Washington’s new bogeyman, doesn’t mean that the interests of Russia and the US are compatible and that Americans shouldn’t be concerned about, and in some cases take action against, Russian strategic moves.
In a way, like in the case of China, Russia is neither an enemy nor a friend of the US, but a “frenemy”. That suggests that the two countries could cooperate on many issues, such as fighting the ISIS and radical Islam in the Middle East.
At the same time, Washington needs to respond aggressively if and when the Russians try to expand their influence beyond their legitimate spheres of influence – for example, using its military power to threaten Poland and the Baltic states.
But nationalist Russia isn’t the former Soviet Union. It isn’t trying to establish a dominant position on a global scale or to assert its hegemony in regions such as in the Middle East. And it certainly isn’t exporting its values to the rest of the world.
If anything, the current Washington-driven campaign to target Russia as a new global threat that would require taking decisive action against it, including by employing military power, could prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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October 11th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
It remains to be seen whether the Donald has succeeded in putting his crude remarks about women behind him, and whether he could regain political momentum
There was very little doubt that Sunday’s showdown was the nastiest television debate in history, with the tension between Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump on full display from the opening moment.
IN the midst of the Watergate scandal in 1974, when then Republican president Richard Nixon was facing the threat of impeachment, the respected senator Barry Goldwater came to visit the embattled White House occupant.
The Arizona senator made it clear to Nixon that he had lost the support of almost all the Republicans on Capitol Hill and urged him to resign. Immediately!
Nixon listened to the advice of the GOP elder. He recognised that his fate was sealed, and left office before Congress was to take action to force him out.
But Donald J Trump made it clear to the dozens of Republican leaders – who over the weekend had urged him to withdraw from the presidential race, after the release on Friday of a video showing him speaking of women in vulgar sexual terms – that he was no Richard Nixon.
He would “never drop out of this race in a million years”, Mr Trump told reporters on Saturday. “That’s not the kind of person I am,” he added. “I am in this until the end.” He was certainly planning to attend the televised presidential debate on Sunday.
Unlike in the case of Nixon and Goldwater, none of the Republican stars has actually approached the Donald and pleaded with him to drop out from the race.
Instead, the GOP leaders – including a respected figure like Arizona senator and former presidential nominee John McCain – have released statements in which they explained that their candidate’s comments from 11 years ago that were caught on a tape, including bragging about sexually assaulting women, made it impossible for them to vote for him in November.
The consensus in Washington on the eve of the debate was that it was finally over the Donald. This time for real. Bashed by the Mainstream Media, mocked by the pundits, and now abandoned by his former Republican allies, there was even some speculation that Mr Trump would be forced by his party leaders to withdraw from the race after the debate. Perhaps the vice-presidential nominee, Governor Mike Pence from Indiana, would head the ticket?
It was a great moment of high political drama which helped transform the second televised debate in St Louis between Mr Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, into one of the greatest political reality shows of all times. A power play between two global celebrities and a mishmash of politics and sex, millions of viewers at home and around the world were watching it and waiting to see whether the Donald would finally implode right before their eyes or whether he would once again emerge as the ultimate survivor.
The level of suspense was high: Will the event, a 90-minute lone televised town-hall meeting hosted by CNN, turn out to be an ugly shouting match between the two presidential candidates dominated by the allegations of sexual degradation of women by Mr Trump and of the sexual misconduct of Mrs Clinton’s husband?
Will Mr Trump be able to effectively manage the crisis, convince viewers that his comments on the video were nothing more than moronic locker room swagger, and succeed in maintaining the support of Republican voters?
Or will the debate prove to be another stage in the electoral downfall of the Republican nominee who was already continuing to lose support among independent voters, women, and educated professionals before the damaging tape was released on Friday? The expectation was that in the aftermath of the debate, pundits would not be speculating whether Mr Trump was going to win the race, but by how much he was going to lose it.
It would take a few days before pollsters would be able to figure out who had “won” the debate and whether the performances of the two candidates had a major effect on their chances of winning the election. But it did become clear at the end of the televised encounter that while Mr Trump may have failed to hit a home run, he was able to demonstrate his skills as an escape artist. He forced his opponent – who had won the first debate – to play defence and may have persuaded Republican sceptics that he was here to stay.
There was very little doubt that Sunday’s showdown was the nastiest television debate in history, with the tension between the two candidates on full display from the opening moment when they took the stage and didn’t shake each other’s hands. Mr Trump at one point said that his rival had “hate in her heart” when she said that half of his supporters were in the “basket of deplorables” and referred to her as “the devil”, while Mrs Clinton accused her adversary of peddling the “racist lie” that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
The worst-case scenario from the Republican presidential nominee’s perspective would have been for the debate to end up being dominated by the vulgar language he used about women more than a decade ago.
In that case, the public and media outcry ignited by the release of a decade-old video tape would have exploded on the television screen in full view of the entire world – and would have made it close to impossible for the Donald to recover.
But after close to 20 minutes into the debate, it seemed that Mr Trump was able to contain the fallout of the release of the video, dismissing it as just “locker room talk” and stressing that “certainly I’m not proud of it”, before turning the focus on accusations about Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. He noted that some of the women who accused the former president of sexual abuse were in the audience, and tried to re-direct the conversation to his plans to “Make America Great Again”.
Mrs Clinton did her best to refocus attention on the video. “Yes, this is who Donald Trump is,” she said. “This is who Donald Trump is but the question our country must answer is this is not who we are.” She said that she had differed before with Republicans over policy. But “I never questioned their fitness to serve”, she said. “Donald Trump is different.”
Those were powerful words, but they also marked the end of the discussion about the video, with Mr Trump going on offence, blasting Mrs Clinton for her use of a private email server to handle government business, and vowing that as president he would ask the Justice Department to re-investigate her conduct.
The Republican presidential nominee also forced Mrs Clinton to defend her policies as secretary of state and her achievements as a senator representing New York, as well as the economic record of the Obama administration. According to his narrative, Hillary represented the political and economic status-quo which he pledged to overturn.
But Mrs Clinton’s main argument that her rival was unfit to become the next president continues to resonate among voters. It also remains to be seen whether Mr Trump has succeeded in putting his crude remarks about women behind him, especially if, as some expect, more videos in which the Donald made offensive comments about women and minorities will be released in the coming days.
Contrary to earlier expectations, the outcome of the debate didn’t force Mr Trump out of the race. He survived. But it’s doubtful that he would be able to regain political momentum and succeed in expanding his electoral support beyond his core base of mostly white blue-collar workers. His performance in the debate may have done nothing to change that reality.
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October 7th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
The Donald excels in “hot” media formats like his rally addresses, but loses it in the “cool” medium of TV debates where he looks and sounds angry and unsteady.
THE late communications scholar Marshall McLuhan was famous for his original theorising about the way the media, especially television, revolutionised society and politics.
The ideas advanced by the witty Canadian philosopher remain popular today; in particular, the distinction he made between “hot” and “cool” media.
According to McLuhan, a hot medium is one which extends the senses in high definition. A sharp photograph is highly defined since it’s densely filled with information and doesn’t require much effort by the viewer to deconstruct it. By contrast, a blurry photograph is a cool medium. It extends the senses in relatively low definition, demanding more interaction by the viewer who needs to figure out what he or she is seeing.
Applying his categories to the media of his time, McLuhan proposed that radio and film were hot. They engage one sense without forcing the viewer to try to fill the gaps in the content.
Television and speeches were cool. They not only engage several senses but they also demand more interaction on the part of the consumers who need to make sense of what they see and hear.
McLuhan was developing his ideas when television and politics were starting to interact. The first televised presidential debates took place in 1960, and he had some advice for the debaters.
Since television was by definition a cool medium, hot politicians were almost bound to fail selling themselves on it. A hot politician appearing on television is like a hot signal that stands out very noticeably from its background.
Imagine someone raising his voice in a gentlemen’s club. He draws your attention but irritates you. You feel more comfortable with the elderly man who is quietly smoking his pipe.
Analysing the 1960 presidential debates, McLuhan concluded that the Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon lost the debate in the new cool medium, because he had a hot personality and television made him look unsteady and untrustworthy. The Democratic candidate, John F Kennedy, won the debates because he was cool, and exuded calmness and confidence. He almost became an integral part of the television screen, while Nixon stood out and made the viewers uneasy. Kennedy became the first television president.
Other cool presidential candidates and presidents included Ronald Reagan and most recently, Barack Obama, who has been nicknamed “No-Drama Obama”.
Watching the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night, it didn’t take too long for viewers to figure out who was playing the role of the cool candidate.
The Republican vice-presidential nominee, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, projected strength and confidence without looking arrogant and disrespectful. Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, the Democratic candidate, looked nervous and sounded shrill, interrupting his opponent numerous times.
Ironically, if you’d listened to the debate on the radio or read the transcript, you would probably conclude that Mr Kaine made some good points, especially when directing his criticism against the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, repeatedly challenging Mr Kaine to defend Mr Trump, in particular over his refusal to release his tax returns.
That Mr Pence refrained from responding to these attacks may not have changed the way many viewers saw him on television. They were less concerned with his message and may have paid more attention to his cool performance and contrasted it with the hot signals that the edgy Mr Kaine was sending.
Employing McLuhan’s typologies to examine the performances of Mr Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in their first presidential debate, as the two prepare for their second televised encounter on Sunday night, we could probably imagine the reaction of the late media critic.
There is little doubt that the Donald is the hottest candidate in the race, excelling in hot media formats like the addresses he delivers in his political rallies, but losing it in the ultimate cool medium of television debates, where he looks and sounds angry, incoherent, unsteady and disrespectful. Contrast that with the performance of Hillary, a veteran politician, who has participated in many televised debates, and mastered the use of that cool medium, by appearing calm, coherent, steady and respectful.
But wait a minute; wasn’t Mr Trump the star of a television reality show? And didn’t he win the Republican presidential nomination following quite a few televised debates?
Indeed, it’s possible that McLuhan, who died in 1980, didn’t take into consideration that at one point, viewers would come to treat the televised debates as mostly entertainment, and not as a serious forum to debate policy issues.
In fact, there is nothing cool about television reality shows, where participants are expected to defy the conventions of the medium, to be hot by drawing your attention and irritating you, like Mr Trump did in The Apprentice and the Republican presidential debates.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz and former Florida governor Jeb Bush sounded more coherent and looked more cool than Mr Trump during debates, and may have “won” if we apply conventional standards.
But the former television reality show ended up winning the nomination by doing something that McLuhan would not have expected, transforming the television debate into a hot medium, like other forms of entertainment that don’t require the viewer to make a lot of sense of what he or she is watching. Just to have fun.
This sounds like bad news for those of us who are looking forward to a serious televised debate over policy issues on Sunday. Many US viewers will be watching it hoping to be entertained, and not necessarily to be educated about the two presidential candidates so as to make an informed choice. Most of them have already made up their minds, and those who haven’t will probably switch to another channel.
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September 29th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
SO let’s say that you are a young, single woman, a lawyer working in a law firm in Manhattan, and let’s assume that you and your partner, who works in a financial company in the city, were watching on Monday evening the first televised presidential debate of 2016, together with 100 million other viewers.
As you were both watching the televised encounter, the two of you were applauding as Hillary Clinton was taking some jabs at her Republican opponent and articulating her proposed policies to create jobs in the United States and fight the so-called Islamic State (IS) abroad.
Yes. Mrs Clinton does sound wonky, boring sometimes and even a bit smug. But, hey, you have no doubt that when it comes to the economy or foreign policy, the former Secretary of State and senator knows what she is talking about. She did her homework and came prepared for the debate – and she is prepared to enter the White House next year.
And then you were laughing out loud as Donald Trump seems to be travelling nowhere in one of his stream-of-consciousness trips, explaining that he talks about how rich he was “not in a braggadocious way” but because “it’s time that this country has somebody running the country who has an idea about money”, and then lashing out at the Chinese, Mexicans and, yes, Rosie O’Donnell. He is complaining that jobs are “fleeing the country” at a time when, as you know, the unemployment rate is falling, while fabricating conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve that is supposedly (or so the Donald contends) scheming with President Barack Obama in lowering interest rates.
“Is this guy for real?” you ask your partner. “What a joke,” he responds. You cannot believe the Republicans have nominated this television celebrity, who practically doesn’t know what he is talking about, who seems to blow up every time someone tweets something against him, and who is so, so unqualified to be president, to run against an experienced and well-informed politician like Mrs Clinton.
And on Tuesday, when you go back to work you aren’t surprised to find out that all the lawyers in the firm share your impressions about the presidential debate.
“Hillary was the winner last night!” seems to be the general consensus among your highly educated and well-paid professional colleagues and of almost everyone you know in Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, DC, who text to remind you that the Donald is also a bigot and a misogynist.
In short, in your social-cultural universe there seems to be no doubt. There is no way in the world that this ignorant and boorish man would be elected as the next president of the United States. As Mrs Clinton has pointed out, she should be beating him in the opinion polls by at least 50 per cent.
So you find it difficult to believe that so many Americans support Mr Trump. In fact, according to the results of some opinion polls online, the majority of television viewers thought Mr Trump had won the debate. Say what?
And then as you take your lunch break on Tuesday, and after checking your emails, you skim through New York Post, the local tabloid, and your eyes catch the following headline: “How Trump Won Over a Bar Full of Undecideds and Democrats”.
The dateline of the story is Pennsylvania, and it includes interviews with young men and women your age, most of whom are undecided and Democrats, including Kady Letoksy, who works as paralegal by day and as a waitress and bartender at night. New York Post wanted to report their reactions as they were watching the presidential debate on Monday at Tin Lizzy, a 270-year-old tavern in Youngstown, a small Westmoreland County town.
And guess what? After watching the 90-minute television exchange, most of the patrons of the bar declared Mr Trump the unchallenged winner. “Trump had the upper hand this evening,” said Ms Letoksy.
“By the end of the debate, Clinton never said a thing to persuade me that she had anything to offer me or my family or my community,” said Ken Reed, 35, a registered Democrat and small businessman. “Have to say Trump had the edge this evening, he came out swinging but also talked about specifics on jobs and the economy,” Mr Reed told New York Post.
Quite amazing, you say to yourself. You and Ms Letoksy are around the same age and you live in two neighbouring states. The drive from Manhattan to Youngstown takes only a few hours. Yet it seems that the two of you see the world in totally different ways, as though you reside in two different planets. In the aftermath of the presidential debate, we can probably refer to them as Planet Hillary and Planet Donald.
Over-educated, working in a high-skilled and well-paying job, and living in one of the world’s financial and commercial centres, you have benefited from the economic changes brought about by globalisation since Mrs Clinton’s husband served as president in the 1990s.
Indeed, the numerous trade deals that were signed through the years, the economic opening to China, the explosion in the financial industry and the rise of the high-tech information industries, have all helped grow your law firm and expand its operations abroad. Your friends who work in other knowledge industries, ranging from finance to entertainment, feel the same.
Moreover, you and your friends are also feeling very comfortable living in the multi-cultural setting of the big urban centres, and welcome the arrival of new immigrants whether they are high-skilled engineers from India or are legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico who clean the offices of your law firm late at night.
So it’s not surprising that you would prefer to have a prominent resident of your social-economic universe and who shares your values and perspectives, and one who wishes to preserve the status quo that rewarded you and your friends, be elected as the next US president.
And you find it hard to believe that there are other Americans who want to elect someone who questions whether globalism does benefit the American people and wants to tear up global trade deals and to place restrictions on immigration.
In Youngstown and the rural towns in the struggling areas of America’s Rust Belt, the sentiments shared by Ms Letoksy and others are quite different. Globalisation is being blamed for the collapse of the manufacturing industry and the loss of well-paying jobs. The values, traditions, skills, jobs and lives of those who live there are seen as under attack and what is replacing them is igniting a sense of insecurity. And Mr Trump is seen by many as the saviour.
When you listen to the Republican presidential nominee pledging to bring jobs “back home” or threatening a trade war with China or calling for the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants back to Mexico, you recognise that these and other plans are at best unworkable; and at worst, that they would actually end up making things worse for the people of Youngstown.
But then there is very little communication these days between Manhattan and Youngstown, or between the residents of Hillary Planet and those who live on Donald Planet. They may share the same United States but they dream different dreams.
The 2016 presidential campaign has helped highlight this ongoing civil war between these two political tribes. And it’s doubtful that any election outcome would help to end it. At best, expect a ceasefire.
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September 23rd, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
I RECENTLY visited the north-eastern- most state of Maine, known for its breathtaking natural scenery, like the granite and spruce islands of the Acadia National Park.
But with its small population of 1.8 million residents, 90 per cent of whom are white (you don’t meet many African Americans and Hispanics here), Maine has been assigned three electoral votes in presidential elections since 1964. So it isn’t a state that pollsters have visited to gauge the national electoral trends during this year’s race to the White House.
Voting for Republican presidents for most of its history, Maine has voted Democratic in the last six elections, with Barack Obama winning by 15 percentage points over Mitt Romney in 2012, helping to turn it into a “purple” battleground state.
Indeed, with voters here embracing a mix of liberal social cultural values and conservative economic principles, it has become difficult to pigeon-hole Maine’s voters as either Republicans or Democrats. Hence it is represented in the Senate by a liberal Republican and an Independent, and is led by a conservative Republican governor.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that of all the states that were once seen as clearly in the column of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, a new survey identifies Maine as perhaps most likely to tip to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. A recent Colby College-Boston Globe poll indicated that the presidential race in Maine was within the margin of error, with Mrs Clinton leading Mr Trump 42 per cent to 39 per cent.
Being a political junkie, I decided to conduct my own very unscientific poll among the seven cab and Uber drivers who took me around Maine during my visit. Not remarkably all of them were men (because not many women drive cabs even in large states like New York and California); and considering the racial make-up of the state, it was also not surprising that they were all white.
Moreover, since according to most national opinion polls, a majority of white men were planning to vote for Mr Trump, it made a lot of sense that five of the drivers were ardent Trumpists, one was going to cast his ballot for the Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, and another described himself as “undecided”.
A bit intriguing, however, was the comment made by my undecided driver. He was leaning towards the Republican nominee but, as he put it, “I am looking for an excuse to vote for Trump. Maybe the (televised presidential) debate will help me find one”.
Consider for a moment when you have heard people telling you that they were “looking for an excuse”. None of your friends has told you that, for example, they were looking for an excuse to marry someone. But many have revealed to you that they were looking for an excuse to break up with a boyfriend or a girlfriend.
Indeed, we usually look for an excuse when we want to get rid of something, to do an unexpected thing, and to rationalise it. For example – “jittery investors have been looking for an excuse to take money off the table following a protracted period of low volatility” – and not “bullish investors have been looking for an excuse to buy high-performing tech stocks”. After all, no one is looking for an excuse to do something that makes so much sense and is in line with the person’s modus operandi and set of values, like in “Mom, I decided to marry Jack and I am sure I don’t have to give you a reason”.
But that was clearly not the case when it came to my undecided cab driver. He could have said something like, “I respect and admire Donald Trump and his business record and his leadership qualities and hope that his performance in the debate would only help boost my confidence that he is qualified to be the next president”.
Obviously, that was not the way he had felt. He actually admitted that he found many of Mr Trump’s comments and his behaviour quite offensive, and was not sure whether he wanted to see someone who seemed to be driven into a frenzy when someone else posts an unfriendly tweet, to handle US ties with China.
But then my driver just couldn’t stand Mrs Clinton and would not vote for her under any circumstances. So now he was hoping that the Republican nominee would do so well in the coming debate that despite all his many misgivings, he would help convince him to vote for him on Nov 8.
Looking for an excuse to vote for someone you really don’t like, may be the way many more American voters would be approaching the debate between the two presidential candidates that will be hosted by Anderson Cooper from CNN, in Fordham University in Long Island, New York, next Monday evening.
According to a recent Morning Consult Poll, the upcoming presidential debate on Sept 26 is expected to be watched by nearly three-quarters of voters, including 44 per cent who say they were “very likely” to watch, and with a slight majority who believe that Mrs Clinton would have an edge over Mr Trump during the debate.
With most opinion polls indicating that the two presidential candidates were running even nationally and in the major battleground states, the conventional wisdom has been that the debate next week, as well as the other two that will take place in November, could have a major impact on voters’ attitudes and could help tip the balance in the race either way.
The nightmare scenario among Mrs Clinton’s campaign aides is that the debate could accentuate some of the Democratic candidate’s weaknesses: That she is too much of a boring policy wonk who cannot connect with voters; that she projects a certain aloofness, if not a sense of elitism and superiority over the “regular folks”; that she cannot be trusted to tell the truth; that she doesn’t have a core of values and adjusts her positions based on political necessity.
More troubling to Mrs Clinton’s campaign has been the focus on her medical condition, including her recent brush with pneumonia, highlighted by a video of her buckling and stumbling as she got into her van.
Mr Trump’s political and media advisers are worried that Mrs Clinton would try to bait their candidate into losing control during the debate and lead him to lash out in less-than-presidential ways, by using offensive language, by mocking the Democratic presidential candidate, and by acting like a buffoon.
Or to put it differently, Mrs Clinton would try to use the debate to ensure that undecided Republican voters would not find any excuse to vote for Mr Trump after the Republican presidential candidate performs in a way that convinces my driver that he is just not qualified to become the next president. Do you want this man to have his finger on the nuclear button?
But Mr Trump would have an opportunity to act “presidential” and to project steadiness and strength while trying to draw Mrs Clinton into an exchange that would make her look unreliable and weak. That may help lead undecided Democratic voters to conclude that they have no excuse to vote for their candidate. Would you really trust this woman to stand up to the Islamic terrorists?
What is so unique about this election season is that so many voters aren’t undecided in the sense that they aren’t sure which candidate is better. Instead, as the polls suggest, a large majority of Americans dislike both candidates, one of them more than the other.
Many Democrats believe that Mrs Clinton isn’t telling the truth while a similar percentage of Republicans think that Mr Trump is a bigot. They aren’t ready to vote for their opponent and are sceptical about the idea of voting for a third-party candidate. But despite everything, they are just looking for an excuse to vote for their political party’s candidate.
Mrs Clinton’s main electoral weakness lies with Millennials, who don’t like her, and with African American voters, who aren’t crazy about her.
Members of these two electoral groups had been enthusiastic supporters of Mr Obama in 2008 and in 2012. But many young voters who had backed Senator Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, have been drawn to Mr Johnson and the other third party candidate, Jill Stein, while Mrs Clinton cannot count on large masses of black voters in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania to go out and vote for her. At the same time, Mr Trump needs to regain the support of two Republican voting groups – college-educated whites and women who have been alienated by his boorish behaviour and offensive language.
It is not clear whether the debate would provide them with the opportunity to give excuses for these and other voters to support them. But I do expect those drivers I met in Maine would be the target of heavy campaigning by both camps.
Indeed, with the presidential race tightening, raising the possibility of an electoral deadlock in the competition for the large battle- ground states, Maine with its three electoral votes could end up determining the outcome of the race.
Adding to the suspense is the fact that Maine – like another state, Nebraska – doesn’t use the “all-or-nothing” approach to awarding electoral votes. Instead, the winner of the popular vote in Maine gets two electoral votes, while the third one is assigned to the winner of each of Maine’s two congressional districts. That means that Mr Trump, for example, could win two electoral votes there, while Mrs Clinton could be awarded with one electoral vote. And vice versa. Which explains why the two will be spending a lot of time campaigning there before Nov 8.
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September 21st, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
IT has become one of the classic political television commercials of all time, known for its opening line, “Morning Again in America”.
The commercial was part of the 1984 re-election campaign of Republican President Ronald Reagan and was aimed at marketing to American voters the message that following years of economic downturn the American economy was back and kicking, thanks to the policies pursued by the incumbent president, and that America was – as the ad put it – “Prouder, Stronger, Better”.
Featuring a montage of cheerful Americans going to work on a sunny morning, the narrator compared the sense of optimism about America and its expanding economy to the depressing mood of the American people on the eve of the 1980 presidential election that led to the defeat of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and the electoral triumph of the ex-Hollywood actor and former Republican Governor of California.
The main point of the commercial was clear: Why would you want to elect the then Democratic challenger Walter Mondale and return to the disastrous policies of President Carter that ended up producing a deadly combination of high unemployment and rising inflation?
Despite the steep recession in 1982, that was a consequence of tight monetary policies aimed at squeezing out the historic inflation level of the late 1970s, the Reagan policies of reducing taxes, spending, regulation and inflation were in place in 1983. They created the conditions for unprecedented and sustained economic growth, the longest during peace times, with economic growth averaging 3.5 per cent.
So it was not surprising that President Reagan ended up getting re-elected in an electoral landslide, winning 49 states, with his opponent carrying only his state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The outcome of the 1984 presidential election helped to support once again a familiar political axiom: Electoral victories tend to be correlated with economic growth. A White House occupant who presides over a period of economic expansion, including falling unemployment and inflation rates , will be by definition a political winner. And vice versa: A president running for re-election in bad times will be in for a tough – and probably losing – fight.
In fact, a long period of economic growth under one president could have a positive impact on his successor. Which explains why President Reagan’s Vice-President George HW Bush – who ran for president in 1988 pledging to continue his predecessor’s economic policies – won the presidential race that year.
So, perhaps you could imagine how President Barack Obama and the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton who wants to succeed him in office, felt last week. According to the media, Americans have been telling pollsters that they are depressed and angry, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has clearly been exploiting those sentiments.
But then last Tuesday, the Federal government’s Census Bureau issued a report on the American economy that basically told the nation that, very much contrary to what the Republican presidential contender has been saying, it was, well, morning again in America.
Or at least that was what the unexpected economic numbers were saying. After seven years of stagnant and declining earnings, the economic recovery pursued by the Democratic White House occupant and which resulted in a fall in the unemployment rate, were finally delivering concrete results that almost every American could put in the bank. Hence, in what was the largest annual gain recorded since the government started taking surveys of yearly incomes in 1967, the income of median American households rose 5.2 per cent – or US$2,798 to US$56,516 – from a year earlier. These eye-popping numbers seemed to push against what has been the conventional wisdom during the last seven years and which goes something like this:
Yes, the Obama Administration, working together with the US Federal Reserve, succeeded in ensuring that the Great Downturn didn’t turn into another Great Recession. It pursued policies that brought about slow but steady economic growth a reduced unemployment rate.
But, the main beneficiaries of this economic recovery were the big corporations and investors in Wall Street. The wages of members of the middle class remained stagnant while blue-collar workers continued to see their wages falling and many of them lost their jobs.
The bottom line was that as long as they won’t see their incomes starting to rise, most Americans will be experiencing a gainless economic recovery of sorts. It may be morning for America for those in the top one per cent of the wealthiest America, but for most Americans, it still seems dark and dreary .
These sentiments fed into the angry mood in the country with a large majority of Americans telling pollsters that they believed that America was moving in the wrong direction. During the recent Democratic nomination convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, both President Obama and Mrs Clinton pointed to statistics that showed that things were improving in the job and housing markets and insisting that despite all the problems, the American economy has been growing faster than the economies of the European Union (EU). It may not be morning in America but here were the first rays of sun. But this somewhat bullish narrative apparently failed to make an impression on half of American voters who have been attracted to the less uplifting and more populist messages of former Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, and the Republican presidential nominee. In fact, if you’ve listened to their campaign rhetoric, you would conclude that America was on the road to economic bankruptcy and national decline. It was a minute or two before midnight in America, according to Mr Trump.
In Mr Trump’s political narrative, the collapsing American economy was only one part of an American nightmare – that included a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico; rising street violence; and the growing threat of Islamic terrorism. Forget morning in America. According to the former television reality show host, America now resembled a “divided crime scene”.
“Surge in US incomes defies dark rhetoric of presidential contest”, screamed the headline in the Financial Times on Sept 14. Hey, Mr and Mrs American Voter. Why don’t you take a look at the Census Bureau figures! The strong numbers indicate that the economic policies pursued by President Obama – and which a future President Clinton has promised to continue – were finally starting to pay dividends to everyone.
Indeed, according to the Census Bureau, the number of people in poverty dropped 3.5 million in 2015 and the growth in income was strong among all social demographic groups – whites, African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans, men and women, those who work full-time and those who hold part-time jobs. Wake up! The country was moving in the right direction. But if anything, in the same week that the Census Bureau issued its upbeat reports, public opinion polls were indicating that Mrs Clinton’s lead over Mr Trump was shrinking, and that the Republican presidential nominee was gaining momentum in all the major battleground states, including Ohio, Florida, and Michigan, where he was leading, according to some polls, and was even acquiring strength in states that until now have been considered to be in the Democratic column: Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and the really Big One – Pennsylvania. Census Bureau report or no Census Bureau report.
There is no doubt that presidents running for re-election during a period of economic boom – like President Reagan in 1984 and President Bill Clinton in 1996 – are bound to win. Voters – especially those who cast their ballot to elect the American president – see him (or her) as the Leader of the Nation, a cross between a father (or mother) figure, a tribal chief and what could be described as one’s political heartthrob in the coming four years. President Reagan’s electoral victory in 1984 and the notion that ‘It was Morning Again in America’ had, in part, to do with the improving economy, but also with the confidence that voters felt in the charismatic leadership of the President Reagan, whom they perceived could stand up to the threats posed by the then Soviet Union and its international satellites.
It’s true that President Obama has helped America avert a devastating economic recession and that unemployment is down, the inflation rate is close to zero, and incomes may be a bit higher. But that doesn’t seem to be changing the mood in the country that reflects insecurity about the future and rising fears about domestic and global threats.
In a way, if Mr Trump ends up winning in November, the 2016 presidential election would probably remind political observers of the 1980 race to the White House. Many Americans blamed President Carter for their economic problems and for the weakness that the United States was projecting then around the world.
But then President Carter was already taking major steps to end inflation and grow the economy and to build up the depleted US military forces. Yet, those policies were only starting to bear fruit at the end of his term and ended up benefiting President Reagan when he took office in 1981. In the same way, President Bill Clinton presided over a period of economic growth that had actually started at the end of is Republican predecessor’s term.
So it’s quite possible that President Obama and Mrs Clinton were considering the possibility that Americans would be celebrating next year a period of economic boom that began under the current Democratic President. And that the main beneficiary would be President Trump, running for re-election in 2020 under the slogan ‘It’s Morning Again in America’.
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September 15th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
THERE was a time when most Americans didn’t know, and in most cases, couldn’t care, about the medical problems of their presidents or for that matter, of the leading presidential candidates.
Franklin D Roosevelt – who won four presidential elections and led the United States out of the Great Depression into a military victory in World War II – was diagnosed with polio at the age of 39, leaving him with permanent paralysis from the waist down. He was unable to stand or walk without support and was confined to a wheelchair during his 16 years in office.
While FDR’s bout with polio was known before and during his presidency, the extent of his paralysis, and in particular, his inability to stand or walk, was kept from public view. The journalists at the time collaborated with the White House in covering up the president’s medical problems, including his diagnosis with congestive heart failure during his last term in office. In fact, there were only two or three pictures of FDR in a wheelchair.
Another popular American president, John F Kennedy – who always seemed to be vibrant and flamboyant – was secretly afflicted with many medical problems, including Addison’s disease, that his aides, with the assistance of the press, were able to conceal from the public.
Throughout his political career and his presidency, JFK was taking steroids and other drugs to ward off the symptoms of Addison’s disease, which led him to collapse twice during public appearances. Most historians agree that a public disclosure of his health problems would have kept him from running for president.
And the list of US presidents and presidential candidates with health problems is quite long: It includes President Woodrow Wilson who was incapacitated by a stroke; President Grover Cleveland who went through cancer surgery; and more recently, President Ronald Reagan who apparently suffered from Alzheimer’s disease during his last months in office. Again, like in the cases of FDR and JFK, most Americans weren’t informed about their president’s deteriorating medical conditions.
And then there was the first American president to die in office. But very few Americans remember the name of the ninth president of the United States (1841), William Henry Harrison, who died on his 32nd day in office of complications from pneumonia, serving the shortest tenure in United States presidential history.
President Harrison was 68 years old when he was elected, the oldest person to run for the White House until Ronald Reagan (68) and this year’s two presidential nominees, Donald Trump (70) and Hillary Clinton (68).
As the cliche goes, 68 may be the new 58, and unlike in the day of President Harrison, most forms of pneumonia aren’t life threatening anymore. So when Mrs Clinton, following several days of recurring cough, went to her doctor’s clinic, near her home in Chappaqua, New York, and was diagnosed by Lisa Bardack, her personal physician, with pneumonia, she probably should have done what any other person, especially one in the late 60s would do: Take a break from her hectic presidential campaign and rest for a few days, take antibiotics, drink a lot of tea and chicken soup, until recovering. Which is exactly what Dr Bardack advised her to do.
In fact, the notion that one of the most powerful women in the world was no different than you and me, and that she sometimes gets sick and goes to the doctor, could have helped Hillary deal with one of her main challenges of the campaign: That she was perceived by many voters as being too aloof, unable to connect with your Average Joe, and exuding a sense of entitlement, that she was somewhat better than most of us.
But instead, the Democratic presidential nominee and her close aides decided to respond to her health problem in the same way they seem to deal with other problems: By covering it up. But unlike in the cases of FDR and JFK, Hillary didn’t have a friendly press corps on her side who would be willing to collaborate in the cover-up.
Reverting to that modus operandi may have made some political sense. The presidential election was two months away, and the latest public opinion polls were indicating that the lead she had over her Republican opponent since the end of the Democratic Nomination Convention was evaporating.
If anything, Mr Trump and his political surrogates were pointing to pictures that appeared online that showed Security Service agents helping Mrs Clinton walk during a stop in the campaign as well as to her recurring cough, and hinting that Hillary may have some mysterious illness, insisting that she doesn’t have the mental and physical “stamina” required for anyone who wanted to become the leader of the free world.
So worried that staying at home to recover from her pneumonia would play into the hands of her political rival, Mrs Clinton didn’t heed her doctor’s advice and decided to continue with her gruelling campaign schedule that would have left a 20-year-old kid exhausted. That included a televised discussion on national security on NBC News; a major fundraiser event and a news conference in New York; and attending the 9/11 commemoration ceremony on Sunday.
But something had to give. After feeling dizzy and overheated during the 9/11 memorial ceremony Mrs Clinton left abruptly. Later on, an iPhone video showed her stumbling and then collapsing, as Security Service agents were helping her into a black van.
The Democratic presidential nominee then went to recuperate at her daughter Chelsea’s apartment in Manhattan. And later she and her aides admitted that she was ill and informed the press that she would be cancelling her planned campaign events and would spend the next few days recovering from her ailment.
But the damage to her campaign was already done. The video showing her trembling and her knees buckling went viral and was broadcast 24/7 on cable news networks. The Donald did wish Hillary a speedy recovery, but his campaign aides couldn’t believe their political luck: Consistent media coverage that showed his Democratic opponent literally collapsing and accusing her once again of trying to cover up her problems. Her aides apologised for not being “transparent” enough, but pundits were employing another term: Lying.
While very few political observers in Washington are taking seriously the rumours that Mrs Clinton’s media problems may force her to drop out from the race, there is no doubt that the latest incident helped accentuate the main elements in the Republican narrative: That she was not telling the truth and that she projected weakness.
All of this was taking place against the backdrop of other problems that have been inflicting Mrs Clinton’s election campaign, including the continuing focus of the media on the scandal involving the use of a private Internet server when she was Secretary of State, and her political and financial ties to the Clinton Foundation.
Indeed, every day there seems to be a new media report about the e-mails she sent and received. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange has hinted that his organisation was planning to publish soon more material exposing Mrs Clinton’s misconduct.
And Mrs Clinton has been the object of criticism by Republicans as well as some Democrats after suggesting during a fundraiser in New York that “half” of Mr Trump’s supporters were in a “basket of deplorables – racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobia, you name it”.
While the Democratic presidential nominee expressed regrets for her comments, they clearly helped the Trump campaign in its efforts to depict Mrs Clinton as an elitist who lacked any empathy for the concerns of working-class Americans.
The comments would clearly antagonise many of the white blue-collar workers in key states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania who have been attracted to Mr Trump’s populist message. But depicting her Republican opponent and his supporters as bigots may help her gain more support among white educated men and women in the same states who had tended in the past to vote for Republican presidential tickets. That is at least what the Democrats were hoping.
But many of the same Democrats were also wondering how one of the most famous politicians in the world, who has been running for president for close to a decade, and whose campaign was being run by veteran political professionals, continues to run even with a disastrous presidential candidate like Mr Trump, and could end up losing to him in November.
Many of the opinion polls continue to show Mrs Clinton with a slim lead over her Republican rival nationally and in several battleground states, including those that were considered in the past a Republican territory, like Virginia, Colorado and Nevada, and even closing on Mr Trump in Arizona and Georgia.
But the race remains very close and there are growing concerns in the Clinton camp that the opinion polls may be underestimating the electoral support for Mr Trump. In any case, Mr Trump has been acting “presidential” in recent days and seems to gradually increase his support even among African Americans and Latinos. The message for Mrs Clinton is clear: After recuperating from the bout of pneumonia, she needs to take care of her political health.
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September 10th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
A former Turkish diplomat told me that during a visit to the Pentagon after 9/11, a top official explained that the Bush Administration hoped Ankara would take steps towards strengthening political and military ties with New Delhi, as part of a process that could lead eventually to the establishment of an alliance between the three pro-Western democracies of India, Turkey and Israel.
The Turkish official was dumbfounded. Where was his counterpart getting his political intelligence from? After all, it wasn’t a secret that when it came to the conflict between India and Pakistan, Turkey tended to identify and cooperate with the South Asian Muslim country.
No to mention the fact that notwithstanding the partnership between Ankara and Jerusalem, the Turks never considered Israel to be an “ally,” as they attempted balancing their relationship with the Jewish State and the Arab countries. In fact, Israel and Turkey didn’t establish full diplomatic until 1992 following the Oslo Process that led to the rapprochement between the Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
And in any case, the idea of Turkey siding with India and challenging the balance of power in South Asia didn’t make a lot of sense, particularly at a moment when the United States as part of its campaign against terrorism was strengthening its ties with Islamabad and elevating them to the status of a strategic alliance.
But then it seemed that Pentagon official was engaged in one of the intellectual exercises favored by both neoconservatives on the political right and liberal internationalists on the political left: Drawing up foreign policy narratives that reflect the dualistic cosmology of Manichaeism in which international relations is seen as a never-ending struggle between light and darkness, between the forces of good led by the United States that are confronting the bad guys, ranging from “rogue states” to “authoritarian regimes” that threaten to destroy the liberal international order.
But in the real world, as opposed to the imaginary universe that neoconservatives and Wilsonians dream about, there are very few really good protagonists or really bad antagonists.
So you need to make sure that while constructing a narrative one takes into account the “anomalies” and resolve the cognitive dissonance between the plot of the fairy tale and the many shades of gray that typify the relations between nations.
Hence, when the Bush Administration responded to the attacks on New York and Washington by Al Qaeda, the radical Muslim fundamentalist group, by launching the war against terrorism it identified Iraq and Iran as two of the leading members of the Axis of Evil it was planning to confront.
But that proposed narrative was full with inconsistencies. The secular Ba’ath regime in Baghdad and the Shiite clerics in Tehran regarded Osama Bin Ladin’s terrorist group as well as its ally, the Taliban, the Sunni Muslim fundamentalist movement ruling Afghanistan as ideological adversaries (in the case of the secular and semi-fascist Saddam Hussein) or as sectarian foes (in the case of Iran’s Ayatollahs).
On the other hand, two of Washington’s allies in the war on terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, were the two main allies of the Taliban while Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden were proponents of the extremist Wahhabi Muslim dogma promoted by the Saudis and embraced by the Pakistanis.
The neocons that championed the Bush Administration’s move to oust Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq were never able to resolve this dissonance. They tried to protect it by turning “Islamo-Fascism” into the an all encompassing bogeyman that seemed to cover all the bad guys – Saddam and the Ayatollahs; Al Qaeda and Hizbolah; the Taliban and Hamas– while not dwelling on the role of that the Saudis and the Pakistan had played in the story.
They even provided the narrative with a Happy End – the ushering of the age of liberal democracy in the Middle East though the use of American military power. That the story ended with a stronger Iran, the rise of Islamic State (IS), and the return of the Taliban: well that would have to wait for another narrative.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that the same cast of narrative writers in Washington who were responsible for that foreign policy flop, are now trying to employ their creative talents to come-up with new story lines that would help convince us that once again the international system was dominated by a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And guess which side we are on?
For a while it seemed as though the reality of international relations was anything but Manichean, with the Middle East degenerating into a struggle over power between a few allies (Turkey; the Kurds; Israel); not very-nice players who happen to be our friends (Saudi Arabia; Egypt); the bad ones (Iran; Syria; Hizbolah; Hamas), and the devil incarnate (IS) that happened to be a killing machine that owes its radical Islamist ideology to the Wahhabi teachers in Saudi Arabia. Not to mention Al Qaeda and its many political satellites that were located now somewhere between the bad ones and the devil incarnate.
That was kind of a bummer, if you plan to write a script for a western in which the noble protagonists fight the evil antagonists, as opposed to a post-modern David Lynch movie with its tormenting moral ambiguity, which unfortunately is how the international system looks quite frequently.
Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine in 2014 and West was encouraging in a sense that it helped to cast Vladimir Putin as the new global villain. That Putin strengthened Russia’s ties with its old client state Syria and maintained friendly ties with Iran, allowed the creative juices of the narrative writers to start flowing again and to identify the new forces of darkness: The authoritarian Putin; the murderous Bashar Assad; and the Ayatollahs in Tehran.
Never mind that the secular Assad and for that matter, Iran, were fighting the IS and other radical Sunni Islamist groups. Or that Russia had to protect legitimate strategic interests in the Middle East and was strengthening its ties with a U.S. ally, Israel. Or that Turkey was at one point allied with Assad, that it was an adversary of the Kurds and in the midst of a major diplomatic confrontation with Israel, and that together with the Saudis, Ankara helped support radical Sunni Islamist groups.
Indeed, it was becoming more and more difficult to cast Turkey’s Recap Tayyip Erdogan, who like Putin was accused of projecting authoritarian tendencies, as the good guy in the evolving narrative, especially after the Turks shot-down a Russian warplane on its border with Syria in November 2015, raising the specter of a war between the Russians and the Turks.
But not to worry: Amid the tensions between Ankara and the West in the aftermath of the attempted military coup in Turkey, and as the two countries struggled with their flagging economies, Moscow and Ankara decided to patch their relations, leading to a meeting between Erdogan and Putin in Moscow.
Judging by the reaction of the foreign policy crowd in Washington, the meeting was nothing short of an historic summit, a turning point in the Middle East politics that could reshape the global balance of balance: The supposedly two anti-Eastern authoritarian leaders, are cooperating with the other force of darkness, Iran, in shoring up Assad brutal regime and check mating the United States.
It almost goes without saying that this storyline is farfetched when one takes into consideration that Turkey is an important member of NATO and is seeking membership in the European Union (EU). Just count how many times President Barack Obama has met with Erdogan. And Turkey (like in the case of Russia), continues to hold free and democratic elections (certainly more open than those held in “liberated” Iraq or in Egypt).
There is no question that there are serious disagreements between the U.S. and Turkey – as there are between Russia and Turkey or between the Russia and the United States — over the strategy of bringing an end to the civil war in Syria as well as over Kurdish issue. But those disagreements would not necessarily disappear if a more secular and liberal government had led Turkey.
On one level, scripting Manichean foreign policy narratives is at best an intriguing intellectual exercise. But at worst, it can impact the foreign policy discourse in Washington; in the way the neoconservative narrative helped shape public perception of policy after 9/11, creating the conditions for the decision to invade Iraq.
Similarly, a narrative that places Turkey at the center of a new anti-Western alliance could have the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy that would actually help create more incentives for Ankara and Moscow to cooperate against the U.S.
The reality is quite different. Indeed, in the embryonic multipolar system under which the U.S. is now operating, the notion that Washington could find itself in disagreement with Turkey (or other power) on one issue on Monday, and then find itself cooperating with it on another issue on Friday, could become a part of the new foreign policy routine. It doesn’t sound very exciting. But that’s the way the world works.
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August 22nd, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
We have come to associate the term “technocrats” with the kind of unelected and non-political experts that serve in European governments, particularly those responding to the recent financial crisis that has devastated several economies there. For example, economists like Mario Monti who served as Italy’s prime minister from 2011 to 2013, leading a government of technocrats in the wake of the Italian debt crisis. Their task wasn’t to transform the economic status quo in Italy, but to use their knowledge and expertise to fix that country’s economy.
In fact, “technocrats” was considered to be a term of abuse in the 1960s and the 1970s. It was used then by American intellectuals, especially on the political left, to describe the economists, engineers, and scientists that came to play a critical role in making decisions about domestic and foreign policy. As the critics saw it, asked to build structures that would carry human blood from New York to Chicago, your average technocrat would tell you how much such a project would cost and how long it would take to complete it, but would refrain from asking a very basic question: Why the hell do you need to carry human blood from New York to Chicago?
Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford, and later secretary of defense during the escalation of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, was considered the archetype of the detested technocrat, who like the rest of the Best and the Brightest in Washington never came to challenge the intellectual foundations of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia, or for that matter, of the entire American Cold War strategy.
Instead, McNamara was searching for ways to make that policy work, to make it more cost-effective. But what he and other technocrats failed to take into account was that foreign policy, like other social affairs, involves human beings and not machines that can be calibrated in response to our needs. In a way, it’s the job of political leaders to make decisions based on the needs of their respective societies or, in the case of foreign policy, their national communities (in the form of the “national interest”). Only then does one hire the most talented technocrats to implement their decisions.
From that perspective, General David Petraeus, the leading architect of the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, was another technocrat who succeeded in devising and implementing a policy of providing security to Baghdad and Al Anbar Province. He never questioned whether the decision to oust Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq made sense in terms of U.S. national interests. Petraeus therefore failed to consider the possibility that while the “surge” may have helped fix the American vehicle, it didn’t change the fact that we were driving towards a dead-end in Mesopotamia.
If we make this distinction between political leaders and technocrats, it may lead to the conclusion that when it comes to Donald Trump, we may have gotten the entire “thing” wrong. Trump is not ready to become a political leader. He is the ultimate technocrat, a man who loves to fix things in the same way he helped bring back to life the business he inherited from his father. Unlike our great presidents, he really doesn’t have a personal sense of what America is all about, a perspective which is usually grounded in reading history, in a set of values (religious and otherwise), and a feeling for the current Zeitgeist.
We need to take Trump at his word. He is a great deal maker and he thinks that all the problems facing the United States, especially in the international arena—immigration, trade, national security—are consequences of bad deals made by incompetent figures.
Hence Trump doesn’t challenge the notion that the United States needed to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran or that it has the responsibility to facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He never let us know what he really thinks about the Iranian theocracy and whether or not it is in the American interest to engage with the Ayatollahs. Nor does he explain to us why the U.S. president needs to spend time and resources in resolving a tribal war in the Holy Land. He just asserts that if he was in charge, he would succeed in negotiating the best deal (and indeed as a deal maker he would need to be “neutral” when it comes to the Israelis and the Palestinians).
Even on the issue of trade, Trump insists that he supports free trade and by extension, an open international trade system, but again, that the problem lies in the bad trade deals Americans negotiate. He claims he would be more successful in reaching trade deals with China, Japan, and Korea. Even when it comes to punishing China with tariffs, he winks at us and explains that it’s only the opening position in negotiations with Beijing.
Notice that many of his “views” on such issues as U.S. policy toward Europe and Asia are construed as financial problems and evaluated in terms of costs and benefits. He doesn’t consider why exactly we are continuing to protect South Korea and Germany. As far as he is concerned, we can continue doing that if the South Koreans and the Germans pay us what we deserve for carrying out our services.
Even when he starts sounding as though he is raising broad political and strategic issues, he does so in the form of another cost-effective analysis. For example, during his recent meeting with the editorial page of the Washington Post, he questioned the need to continue participating in NATO, which he said was just too expensive when we need the money to spend on other things.
But NATO isn’t a business. It’s a military-political entity that was formed to promote the interests of the United States and its allies. We should reassess the American role in NATO and the rationale for continuing to maintain it. But Trump needs to explain to us why we need to do that, not like a technocrat going through the books but as a political leader with coherent vision of the role the U.S. should play in the world. We do foreign policy not to make a profit but in order to protect the country and advance its interests.
That much of what Trump describes as foreign policy or national security doesn’t reflect such a vision, and is usually a product of his stream of consciousness babble, also explains why it doesn’t make a lot of sense. He may have been a critic of the Iraq War, but he proposes now that the U.S. deploy thousands of ground troops into Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS, without clarifying why that kind of military intervention wouldn’t lead to another American quagmire.
No one expects Trump or any presidential candidate to be an expert on world affairs, or for that matter, to provide detailed proposals on how to transform the international trade system or remake Western alliances. But one assumes that the person who wants to lead this country would have some intellectual curiosity about these issues, like Ronald Reagan did, and that he would try to learn them and recruit the best minds in the field to help him make the correct decisions and serve in his administration as technocrats and negotiators.
Yet the same man who apparently has enough money in the bank to purchase high-quality steaks and show them off during his press conference, responded to the pressure on him to unveil the members of his foreign policy team by showcasing in Washington Monday a group of men who are part of the “foreign policy establishment” that Trump’s supporters love to bash.
The problem is these advisers occupy the lowest echelons of that foreign policy establishment, and include two Beltway Bandits (Joseph Schmitz and Keith Kellogg), two self-proclaimed “energy analysts” (Carter Page and George Papadopoulos), and a professional propagandist (Walid Phares). In short, they are Kissingers for very poor people.
What the five do have in common is that they have never said or written anything that had a limited impact on the war of ideas in Washington—or was even noticed by the rest of the community of foreign policy practitioners and thinkers. And what they had to say or write has been either the kind of policy papers and columns that appear in marginal magazines and websites that nobody usually reads.
Moreover, the views they expressed certainly don’t echo the non-interventionist positions that Trump supposedly advocates, at least according to the Washington Post. In fact, Phares was a cheerleader for the Iraq War and for President George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda. Certainly these are not the kind “big” thinkers and “beautiful” ideas that the Donald has promised us. Instead, they are his mini-mes.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, since in Trump’s world foreign policy—and policy in general—has very little to do with ideas that would allow us to change reality. What counts is the technical knowledge and skills of the policy maker, the technocrat. And since the Donald has those in large amounts, all he has to do is look in the mirror and talk with himself.
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May 11th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
LIKE Barack Obama, the first African- American US president, Thomas Bradley, the 38th mayor of Los Angeles, made history when he was elected the first African-American mayor of the city in 1973 – a position in which he served for 20 years.
But when Mr Bradley decided to run for governor of California in 1982 and later in 1986, he was defeated each time by the Republican George Deukmejian – and that despite opinion polls conducted on the eve of the election that showed him being ahead (and by a large margin in 1982), giving rise to a term that only political junkies may be familiar with: the Bradley Effect.
Trying to explain the discrepancies between the pre-election poll results and the election outcome, pollsters proposed that when a non- white candidate runs against a white candidate, some white (or even black) voters would say that they are undecided or plan to vote for the non-white candidate although they intend to vote for the white contender.
The theory assumes that in a politically correct (PC) environment, voting for a white candidate against a non-white one may be regarded as socially unacceptable behaviour. So voters who don’t want to be tagged as non-PC would lie about their preference for the white candidate.
Now that, for the first time in history, a woman is running as a US presidential candidate of a major party and seems to have a better-than- 50-per-cent chance of winning the race this year, while her main rival is a white man who also happens to be a misogynist, is it possible that the results of recent opinion polls that show Hillary Clinton having a big lead over the Republican contender, Donald Trump, reflect what could be described as a Hillary Effect?
Is it likely that many voters – and, in particular, female voters – will be reluctant to admit to pollsters that they are planning to cast their ballot for the much maligned Mr Trump, who has been tagged by the Mainstream Media (MSM) as someone who insults women (and others) on a regular basis?
Whether there is or isn’t a Hillary Effect, journalists and pundits – including celebrated pollsters like Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight , whose forecast of Mr Obama’s presidential win in 2012 was on target, but who failed miserably to predict Mr Trump’s electoral surge among Republican primary voters – are now being forced to treat with many, many grains of salt the results of most current opinion polls that suggest that the former secretary of state would beat the former TV reality show star by a wide margin in November, and perhaps even win by a landslide.
According to the conventional wisdom (that sometimes is correct), she has a better-than-50- per-cent chance of winning the 270 electoral votes she needs to take the White House. At the same time, under most electoral scenarios that have been drawn, Mr Trump is seen as being dead on arrival.
You don’t have to be a political expert to decide whether Hillary or the Donald would be occupying the White House. Just extrapolate from the numbers that point to Mr Trump’s crushing negatives, and that show that 6-in-10 Americans have an unfavourable view of the New York real estate magnate (while only 36 per cent view him favourably); and that he is entering the general election with very poor approval ratings among almost all demographic groups – and especially among women, Hispanics and African Americans.
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, lost 73 per cent of the Hispanic vote and received only 44 per cent of the women vote, which could explain in part why he lost that race. But Mr Trump is now viewed unfavourably by 82 per cent of Hispanics and is trailing Mrs Clinton among women by almost 20 percentage points (34 per cent to 54 per cent). This means that even if he improves his electoral position among these crucial demographic groups, it’s unlikely that he could end up doing better than Mr Romney with Hispanics and women or, for that matter, with Millennials and African Americans.
In many respects, Mrs Clinton and the Democrats seem to be positioned on the winning side of American history. The electoral groups that constituted the winning coalition that elected and re-elected Mr Obama (including Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, educated urbanites, single women, Millennials, and gays) are growing in number, while the electoral base of the Republican Party (dominated by white men, rural voters, and Evangelical Christians) is shrinking. Also, American society is becoming more accepting of ethnic and racial diversity, and more liberal on social-cultural issues.
One example of the way this demographic transformation has been changing the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans has been the electoral shifts in California – which once upon a time was regarded as “blue” (Democratic) or “purple” (swinging), and is now fully in Democratic hands. These changes reflect the transformation of California from a white-dominated state into one in which whites have become a minority while the Hispanic population has been growing. Hence you have Latinos surpassing the number of whites in 2014 (39 per cent to 38 per cent).
In that context, Hispanic voters have turned against the GOP after the then Republican governor of California (Pete Wilson) pressed in the 1990s for legislation that would have limited the access of the mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants in the state – those whom Mr Trump has referred to as “rapists” – to government services.
Indeed, Hispanics have emerged as an important electoral group that could help tilt presidential elections not only in California, but also in purple states like Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia – that President Obama won in 2008 and could also, according to some analysts, turn a red state like Arizona into a blue one this year (and at some point in the future, even a super-red state like Texas with its growing Hispanic population could turn blue).
While the Donald and his supporters are not denying that these demographic changes are taking place, they note that whites maintain a clear majority among American voters, in general, and in important purple states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, in particular, and even in traditionally blue states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The bottom line is that the majority of American voters are white men and women, and the majority of them voted for the Republican Romney in 2012, and many more of them are going to vote for Republican Trump in 2016, according to calculations by the Trump camp.
Mr Trump is counting, in particular, on the support of angry white blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, who have driven his primary victories and who are blaming free trade and illegal immigrants for their economic woes – they are attracted to the billionaire’s populist anti-trade and anti-immigration policies.
Many of these white blue-collar workers are Democrats or independents who would now be switching their support to the Republican candidate and could, in theory, make it possible for Mr Trump to win states where crumbling manufacturing industries have left behind many unemployed workers who count on the brash New Yorker to bring back good jobs to their states.
But the Democrats believe that the Trumpists are daydreaming and counter by suggesting that for every angry white blue-collar worker who would supposedly vote for the Republican presidential candidate, there are a larger number of white suburban women, educated professionals and young voters who would cast their ballot for Hillary and help her beat the Donald in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and perhaps even in southern states that are traditionally carried by the Republicans. Hence a recent poll suggested that the Democratic candidate now has an electoral edge over the Republican in Georgia.
But those white blue-collar workers seem to be mad as hell this year and they really don’t like Mrs Clinton, who found herself being bashed by angry miners in West Virginia before the Democratic primary in the state this week – they accused her of scheming to destroy their industry in the name of her environmental agenda. If these kinds of voters show up in large numbers in the voting booths on Election Day in November, they could deliver some key states to the Donald and deny Hillary a victory that many still see as certain.
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April 29th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
Mr Trump supporters.
Mr Trump is confident that Americans, tired of military interventions that go nowhere and of trade deals that rob them of jobs, would be drawn to his nationalist diatribe.
SINCE the end of the 1960s, when American military intervention in Southeast Asia triggered a long and bitter public debate, students of American politics and US foreign policy seemed to be operating based on the following axiom:
The Democratic Party and the liberal politicians and intellectuals who embodied its values were representative of a school of thought that advocated foreign-policy restraint and placed emphasis on resolving international crises through the use of diplomatic means, as opposed to military force.
Republicans and conservatives, on the other hand, embraced a foreign-policy agenda that accentuated the need to maintain a strong US defence posture and apply it, if necessary, in response to national-security threats, recognising that diplomacy worked only if it was backed by military force.
In the Washington political lingo, the Democrats have been known to be “doves” and the Republicans, “hawks”. GOP lawmakers who tended to call for higher defence budgets faced opposition from Democrats, who demanded that more US dollars be spent on domestic social programmes.
And when the Soviets during the Cold War or the many global Bad Guys that challenged the United States in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall were threatening America, Republicans would instinctively demand that Washington act tough against them, including by using its military power.
The Democrats, on the other hand, contended that military power should be applied as a last resort, only after all the diplomatic means have been exhausted.
So it wasn’t surprising that many Democrats and liberals opposed the decisions by Republican presidents George HW Bush and George W Bush to go to war in Iraq and that Republicans used every opportunity to bash Democrats and liberals, including President Barack Obama, as “weak” on national security and accused them of “appeasing” America’s enemies.
The political bottom line was that when Americans were worried about threats to the national security, they were more inclined to vote for Republican presidential candidates, and that when they were concerned that presidents was dragging the country into costly military quagmires, they would give their support to the Democrats.
But now it seems that the old political axiom would have to be reassessed.
If anything, the major foreign-policy address that Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump delivered on Wednesday in Washington suggests that when it comes to the use of American military force, Republicans and Democrats may be about to switch places, with the Donald more restrained about the use of military force than the hawkish Hillary Clinton.
While it would probably be a mistake to describe Mr Trump’s speech, delivered under the auspices of TheNational Interest magazine, as the Trump Doctrine, it nevertheless amounted to a powerful rebuke of the GOP foreign-policy orthodoxy. In fact, it could be seen as a major challenge to the entire global strategy, including national security and trade policies, adopted by the Washington establishment after the end of the Cold War and that sometimes is referred to as “globalism”.
Insisting that as US president, he would “no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism” and stressing that “the nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony”, the Republican frontrunner delivered what could be described as a cry of defiance vis-à-vis the entire way of thinking espoused by the foreign-policy elites, including leading editorial pages and think tanks. This thinking has been driving the policies of Republican and Democratic presidents in the form of military over-extension around the world and, in particular, in the Middle East, and the numerous free-trade deals that result in “the theft of American jobs”, as Mr Trump put it.
Recalling his earlier opposition to the decision to invade Iraq and to oust Saddam Hussein from power and establish a democracy in Iraq, Mr Trump ridiculed the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy” and blasted the US military intervention in the Middle East that “helped to throw the region into chaos, and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper”.
“We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of American lives and many trillions of dollars were lost as a result,” he said. “The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill the void, much to their unjust enrichment.”
The Donald pledged in his address that he would not only reverse US policies in the Middle East that resulted in the over-extension of US military power and financial resources, but would also put pressure on US allies in Europe and Asia who seem to expect the United States to pay the costs of protecting them. They need to “contribute toward the financial, political and human costs of our tremendous security burden” or else his administration would have no choice but to reassess its security commitments to them, Mr Trump asserted.
Unlike “other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct”, he declared, adding that one cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy and that a superpower “understands that caution and restraint are signs of strength”. Under a Trump administration, “the world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies”.
It would be wrong to label President Trump’s foreign policy as “dovish”. In fact, in his address, he vowed to “spend what we need to rebuild our military” and to use all the necessary US military power to destroy ISIS. What he was suggesting was that he would make decisions on war and peace as well as on other global policy issues like trade, based solely on US national interest – or, to put it in simpler terms, President Trump would be more of a nationalist than an internationalist. He wouldn’t go to war in the name of promoting liberal democracy or do nation building or sign trade deals as part of an effort to liberalise global trade; he would do all this only in order to advance US strategic and economic interests. This also explains his willingness to make deals with Russia and China that work for the United States instead of pressing those global powers to improve their human-rights policies.
“America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration,” the Republican presidential frontrunner said, stressing that his foreign policy would “always put the interests of the American people and American security first”.
And that nationalist posture sets his foreign-policy agenda apart from the one that would be embraced by Mrs Clinton, who will remain committed to American traditional internationalist policy, including in its most recent incarnation, globalism.
In a way, Democratic presidential frontrunner Mrs Clinton has emerged as the most “hawkish” among the rest of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. As a senator from New York, she voted in favour of giving President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq, a decision that she now apparently regrets.
But then as Secretary of State, she pushed for using US military power to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi from power and help transform the country into a liberal democracy, a project that – like in the case of Iraq – had failed miserably. She also sided with the hawks in the Obama administration who urged the president to provide more military support to the anti-government insurgents in Syria and would probably adopt such policies if elected as president.
It is true that under pressure from the progressive wing of her party, she did distance herself from the pro-free-trade policies pursued by her husband in the 1990s. But the expectation in Washington is that as president, she would revert to those policies.
The foreign-policy elites in Washington are hoping that their globalist agenda would remain alive and well if she is elected president and takes new steps aimed at remaking the Middle East, even if that includes the use of military power while promoting nation building, democracy and free trade.
The Donald, on the other hand, is confident that Americans, exhausted of military interventions and opposed to trade agreement, would be drawn to his nationalist messages.
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April 20th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
You want to capture the mood of the American people on the eve of the 2016 presidential election? Well, imagine that the Washington Monument – the 555-foot (169m) marble obelisk towering over Washington, DC, built as a tribute to commemorate George Washington, the nation’s first president – is actually the long and stiff middle finger of the American voter pointing up and meant to insult, and sending a message to the rest of the world, in particular to US military allies and trade partners. It would go something like this:
“Hey, guys, we are sick and tired of carrying the burden of protecting your security with our lives and dollars, and allowing your exports and your immigrants to flood our country all these years while you strengthen your economies to compete with ours and embrace unfair trade practices that end up destroying our manufacturing sector and stealing our jobs.
“So the time has come for us to take a break and to come back home, America! No more crusades for democracy, experiments in nation building, and disastrous and costly military interventions in the Middle East and the rest of the world. You (Japan; South Korea; Germany) are wealthy nations and you need to spend more on defence. Protect your interests in your strategic backyards and stop free-riding on our military might which from now on will be used to defend our own interests.
“And while for a long time, we had an interest in liberalising global free trade, helping us to expand markets for our products, we are discovering that you (China; India; Mexico) are exploiting the system and beating us in the global economic competition. That forced us to protect our national economy.
“Bottom line: Time for us to finally do nation building at home, reform our ailing educational system, impose restrictions on immigration, fix our shattered roads and the rest of our infrastructure. And hopefully sooner than later, our airports would look as shiny as yours, we’ll build the same kind of speed trains you have, and enjoy those long annual vacations, free college education, and healthcare for all. Just like you guys!”
Foreign observers of the 2016 American presidential election, joined by many local mainstream media (MSM) types, would probably counter that all this sounds like a mishmash of what the two leading populist presidential candidates – the nationalist Donald Trump (“America First!”) and the socialist Bernie Sanders (“A Political Revolution is Coming!”) – have been trying to market to the American people, that they are empty slogans and demagoguery that would be forgotten a day following the presidential election in the same way that presidential candidates promoting isolationist and protectionist agendas in previous elections had vanished eventually into political thin air. Recall the failed campaigns of nationalist Republican candidate Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, and isolationist Democratic candidate George McGovern in 1972.
But it would be a mistake to assume that the election rhetoric – infused with protectionist and isolationist sentiments, and in some cases, with nativist and xenophobic attitudes – is just, well, election rhetoric. And that the Donald wouldn’t win the Republican presidential nomination and that if he does, then he would probably lose the general election. And that Mr Sanders, the Vermont senator, would be beaten by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential race.
“I am willing to bet a lot of money that Hillary would be the next US president and I expect her to continue pursuing traditional internationalist US strategy” is what you hear these days from your average MSM pundit in Washington. So don’t worry. We’ll end up passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade accord at some point. Nato would still be with us and the US would continue protecting its Asian allies and reassert its leadership role in the Middle East. Let’s all go partying in Davos!
These kinds of forecasts may cheer up the Davos Man, but the main problems with them is that they are being made by the same people (also known as the political and economic elites) who not long ago were dismissing the former reality television host from New York as a “joke” who would withdraw from the race after the third or fourth Republican primary. And that there was no way in the world that an ageing socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union in the previous century would be considered as a serious Democratic presidential candidate.
Moreover, the members of the foreign policy establishment who had treated with disdain the Donald’s suggestion that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was obsolete and that he wouldn’t have problems with Japan going nuclear, are the same people who were cheerleading the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. Most Americans now regard that decision – which both Mr Trump and Mr Sanders have opposed – as a historic blunder. And according to opinion polls, the majority of Americans reject the proposals by members of the same establishment to use US military power to oust Syrian leader Bashar Assad or force Russia out of Crimea.
In fact, President Barack Obama has embraced some of the foreign policy positions that the Republican presidential frontrunner and the Democrat who is running in a close second place have advocated and that have been decried by Washington insiders as “isolationist”. An early opponent of the Iraq War, Mr Obama rejected the advice by those insiders to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war and to assert US power vis-a-vis Russia and China, even if that could lead to military escalation.
Indeed, during his lengthy interview with Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic magazine, Mr Obama sounded at times like Mr Trump, when he criticised the German and Saudi “free riders” and urged them to protect their regional interests instead of relying on America to do that. And like Mr Trump and Mr Sanders, Mr Obama continues to insist that Americans should start doing serious nation building at home while cutting on those efforts abroad, reflecting the sentiment of the American electorate that has become more sceptical about the cost-effectiveness of US military interventions.
An argument can be made that both Mr Trump and Mr Sanders succeeded in emerging as serious presidential candidates not despite their challenges to Washington’s foreign and trade policy axioms, but because of them. Neither should the protectionist agendas that the two have been promoting during the campaign, including rejection of the TPP trade deal, be regarded as positions that are backed by marginal minorities in the two parties.
On the contrary, a large majority of Democratic lawmakers and primary voters, backed by the labour unions and environmentalist groups, reject the centrist pro-free trade policies pursued by former president Bill Clinton in the 1990s. That explains why his wife – who as secretary of state was a driving force behind the TPP accord – is now opposing the TPP.
Similarly, there are clear indications that Mr Trump’s nationalist economic views are gaining support among members of the GOP, which has traditionally been a powerful pro-free trade voice on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. That has raised concerns that the Republican lawmakers would be reluctant now to approve the TPP agreement.
Supporters of free trade insist that the decline of American manufacturing and loss of jobs is mostly a result of structural problems of the American economy and automation, as well as competition from China, and that globalisation and trade are only partly responsible for what is happening. But most Americans aren’t familiar with the intricacies of the theory of competitive advantage and politicians such as Mr Trump and Mr Sanders are successful in marketing their protectionist ideas, especially since the other presidential candidates haven’t been pushing in the other direction.
It’s not clear yet whether these trends mark the beginning of the end of an era in which a strong internationalist consensus on foreign and trade policies brought together lawmakers from both parties and all the Republicans and Democrats who have occupied the White House.
It’s possible that “President Clinton the Second” – backed by internationalist Republicans and Democrats – would be able to reverse these trends, especially if the American economic engine starts roaring. But even she would find it difficult to win the support of an American public that feels that it is being played for a sucker by the rest of the world.
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March 22nd, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
There’s a parallel between Trump and Reagan but it ends soon enough
Reagan was also dismissed as a US presidential candidate but he wasn’t seen as a dangerous man.
WITH your permission, let me take a stroll down memory lane. It was 1980 and I was enrolled in the prestigious Columbia University’s School of Journalism in New York City, and together with my classmates I was taking part in my first Big Time political journalism undertaking: Covering the Republican presidential primary race in New Hampshire.
Two leading candidates were dominating the then GOP presidential fight. First, there was George HW Bush, the former congressman, CIA director and US ambassador to China, who was the favourite of the Republican establishment and who – according to the major media outlets – was going to win his party’s nomination. He had the Big Mo(mentum), they argued.
Challenging him was Ronald Reagan, an ageing former B-grade movie star who had served as the governor of California and who held extremist right-wing views on domestic and foreign policy issues – calling for a return to the Gold Standard and for ending the diplomatic détente with Red China – and who was, not surprisingly, supported by the ultra-conservative wing of the GOP.
To make a long story short, at some point during the primary campaign, I joined my fellow students for a roundtable with several of the famous journalists, including the legendary Theodore “Teddy” White, the author of a series of bestsellers on the earlier US presidential races (The Making of the President) that – like other young political junkies – I devoured and regarded as the bible of political reportage. For me, the idea of meeting Teddy White was akin to a young kid shooting hoops when Michael Jordan suddenly shows up in his backyard.
So you can understand when Teddy asked us what we were thinking – Will Mr Reagan or Mr Bush win the primary? – I hesitated to raise my hand. But then I did and little me told the great Teddy that, well, I had a feeling that Mr Reagan would beat Mr Bush.
Mr White was a gentleman so he did not respond to my words of wisdom by laughing out loud. I remember him giving me the sweetest, most grandfatherly smile, and saying, “Well, young man, I don’t believe that an elderly and mediocre Hollywood actor would win the Republican presidential nomination, and in the unlikely case that he does, I can predict now that he wouldn’t be able to win in the general election.”
My ego was depleted as Teddy and the rest of the political experts and journalists on the panel went on to explain that candidate Reagan was not very smart and lacked any basic knowledge of world affairs. He was a “lightweight” and a “radical” whose candidacy would be rejected by the majority of Americans (as most opinion polls indicated at the time) and who would eventually be recalled as a historical footnote, if not as a “joke”.
As we all know, Mr Reagan did beat Mr Bush and went on to win the presidential race and then to be re-elected by a landslide for a second term. He ended up introducing major reforms of the American economy and presided over the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He is regarded today as one of the great American presidents of the 20th century.
I recalled my encounter with Teddy White in 1980 as I was following the emergence of New York real estate magnate Donald Trump as the leading Republican presidential candidate this year. The majority of contemporary political pundits and the members of what we now refer to as the mainstream media (MSM) had initially dismissed that scenario as a political fantasy. They predicted with quite a lot of confidence that the favourite of the Republican Establishment Jeb Bush, the son of Mr Reagan’s challenger in New Hampshire, would win the race this year.
In a way, the response by the pundits and the MSM to the political rise of The Donald this year echoes the sentiments expressed by The New York Times and other elite newspapers in reaction to the primary victories of The Gipper in 1980 (Mr Reagan’s first big role as an actor was playing ill-fated football star George Gipp in the 1940 film classic, Knute Rockne: All-American): Disbelief. Denial. Anger. Disparagement. Vilification.
Today’s tough talk by the New Yorker, who has pledged to abolish radical Islam from the face of the earth and launch trade wars against China, raises concerns that he would devastate the global economy. Similarly, the former California governor who was a long-time anti-communist crusader, and had vowed to toughen US policy towards the Soviet Union and China and the other “commies”, ignited fears that his policies would lead to World War III. Would you allow these dangerous warmongers to have their fingers on the nuclear button?
Mr Reagan, like Mr Trump, was not an intellectual or policy wonk, but an entertainer. And as in the case of the Republican frontrunner this year, much of what he said during the presidential primaries sounded like a mixture of stream-of-consciousness babble and sound bites. So it is not surprising that the press depicted the two as lacking in substance and turned them into targets for insults and jokes.
The secret of the electoral successes of both The Gipper and The Donald can be traced to their ability to communicate with their followers through simple messages. While exploiting fears of foreign enemies, the two combine a sense of national pride and strength, which appeals in particular to lower middle class white Americans, including economically squeezed blue-collar workers who had voted for the Democrats in the past.
Hence, the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s are coming back in the form of the Trump Democrats of today who are helping the brash GOP candidate score major victories in the primaries. And in the same way that the Republican bosses had tried to place obstacles on candidate Reagan’s road to winning the nomination in 1980, the current Republican establishment – led by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney – is seeking to stop candidate Trump’s rise as the GOP presidential frontrunner this year.
But Mr Trump is not a political clone of Mr Reagan by any stretch of the imagination. Candidate Reagan did not go out of his way to insult and humiliate his rivals, and he certainly did not enlighten voters about the size of his genitalia. Candidate Reagan surrounded himself with the best and brightest advisers on domestic and foreign policy and hired talented speech writers, allowing him to deliver addresses that outlined his plans to reform the American economy and to strengthen US national security.
Many of Mr Trump’s public addresses, on the other hand, seem to focus on, well, Mr Trump himself and are devoid of substance when it comes to policy issues. He continues to bombard voters with incoherent and inconsistent ideas about building a “beautiful wall”, barring Muslims from entering the United States, punishing China for its trade policies, and “making America great again”. That rhetoric plays directly into the hands of Mr Trump’s opponents who portray him as a xenophobic and racist candidate, a dangerous man who should not occupy the White House.
Surprising his critics, Mr Reagan turned out to be not a fantastic ideologue but a pragmatic leader who recognised the limits operating on American power. Contrary to the earlier fears of his bashers who had worried that he would launch a nuclear attack on Russia, he ended his presidency making peace with it.
Unfortunately, at this stage of the presidential campaign, much of what candidate Trump says or does tends to reinforce anxieties about his leadership style and his policies at home and abroad. Like in the case of Mr Reagan, a president Trump could end up proving wrong his critics, the Teddy Whites of today. But he has a long way to cover before he reaches that point.
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January 11th, 2016
By Leon Hadar.
A spoof of a BBC promo has been circulating on the Internet: “Greece is Collapsing, Iranians are getting aggressive & Rome is disarray. Welcome back to 430 BC!”
But you don’t have to go back to antiquity for news: “The Levant and the Balkans are boiling, the Turks are angry, the Russians are aggressive & the West is nervous. Welcome back to 1853!”
The bloodshed in Syria, the economic collapse of Greece, an assertive Russia and a nervous West are not going to produce a rerun of the Crimean War, when czarist Russia fought against a military alliance of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire.
But at a time when neo-Ottomanism is rising in Ankara, it may not be surprising that Moscow is experiencing a resurgence of neo-Byzantinism.
Back in the early nineteenth century, international diplomacy was preoccupied by the Eastern question, posed by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and its loss of dominance over the greater Middle East.
Today, that same region remains a concern for the United States and its European allies as the collapse of the old order in the Middle East shatters the balance of power and erodes the West’s regional influence.
In early 1800s, Britain and France worried that Russia would exploit the weakness of the Ottomans and hence strengthen its position in the region. That’s why they allied themselves with the Turks.
Today, the United States views a more assertive Turkey as a bulwark against a Moscow that has been resisting pressure from Washington, London, Paris and Ankara to help oust Syrian president Bashar Assad.
As the Cold War ended, many Americans expected Moscow to end its interventionist policies in the Middle East, given that these policies were seen as being driven by the Soviet Union’s geostrategic interests and ideological pretensions.
And it has been Washington that has pursued a supercharged military interventionism and ideological crusade in the Middle East, while Russia’s role has been marginalized.
But, now that America’s unilateral moment in the Middle East is ending, Russia is back. And this time, it’s not grand Soviet strategy or communist ideology that is stirring Russian interest.
Just as in the nineteenth century, Moscow’s policy is partly reactive, reflecting fears over anti-Russian Islamist movements in the Caucasus, wariness over American ambitions in the Middle East and a protective attitude toward Russian interests in the Balkans.
Also, as in the years preceding the Crimean War, Russian interests in the Middle East are driven by Russian nationalism—a mix of pan-Slavism and the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
As British historian Orlando Figes recounts in The Crimean War, central to Russian nationalism is the notion that Moscow was the last remaining capital of Orthodoxy (the “Third Rome”) following the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The idea of “Holy Russia” assumed the creation of an empire of the Orthodox in all the lands of Eastern Orthodoxy, with liberated Constantinople as its capital.
An effort to advance this nationalist project, including by sponsorship of Greek and Serbian nationalism in the Turkish-controlled Balkans, placed Moscow on a collision course with the Ottoman Empire and its Western backers.
Even the most ardent Russian nationalist is not fantasizing today of establishing an empire stretching from the Balkans to Hindu-Kush and liberating Constantinople. And of course no one in Ankara is daydreaming about a caliphate ruled from Istanbul. But some elements of Russian policy in the Middle East echo those of czarist Russia.
Russian opposition to Western and Arab efforts to depose Syria’s Assad is a continuation of the Soviet policy of supporting the Baath regime in Damascus. But the current Russian position also is influenced by pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church, which fears the Christians in the former Byzantine province, including a large Orthodox community, would be persecuted if Muslim fundamentalists came to power.
This Russian support for Assad has produced tensions between Moscow and the Turks, who have joined the Saudis and the Western powers in calling for regime change in Damascus.
The growing Russian concern with the political repercussions of the Arab Spring, including the perceived threat of radical Islam’s rising power in the Middle East, is shared by Israel. This creates a sense of common interests between the Jewish State and Moscow, regarded for most of the Cold War as an ally of the Arabs.
Further, both Moscow and Jerusalem are troubled by a more assertive Turkey sponsoring political Islamist movements. This perception of a common Turkish threat may explain the evolution that Michael Lee of the German Marshall Fund sees as “an alliance in the making, bringing together Israel, Cyprus and Greece.” Israel is helping the Republic of Cyprus develop offshore natural-gas deposits with the idea that the resulting energy products could be shipped through Greece to markets in Europe.
Ankara opposes Cyprus’s plans and has announced its own gas exploration in the area. Moscow criticized the announcement and stressed its backing for the Israel-Cyprus-Greece energy triangle.
But Israel’s recent rapprochement with Nicosia and Athens “is only a partial substitute for its previous close relations with Turkey,” according to the Marshall Fund’s Lee, who insists that Ankara and Israel continue to share a common interest in establishing stability in Syria.
Moreover, Israel is not going to exchange its alliance with the United States for one with Russia. And an alliance with Cyprus, Greece and Serbia would do little to enhance Israel’s strategic interests.
Yet, with more than a million immigrants from Russia living in Israel at a time when the Israelis are trying to reduce their dependency on Washington, Russia is in a position to strengthen its ties with Israel as part of its strategy to enhance its influence in the Middle East.
Published originally in the National Interest
Understanding Moscow’s Mideast Policy
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