A Bipolar World
September 23, 2019
The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. – Hans Morgenthau
Who Has The Higher Ground?
Late on September 18, the Washington Post reported a bombshell story about a whistleblower complaint filed August 12 by an intelligence officer concerning a promise President Trump made during his communications with a foreign leader. Federal law controls how an intelligence complaint shall be handled. The story came to light after the intelligence officer followed the law, and Trump appointees chose to break it.
Additional details learned over subsequent days are fleshing out the story. The complaint involves a July 25 phone call Trump made from the Oval Office to the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump is said to have pressed Zelensky multiple times to investigate leading Democratic rival Joe Biden’s actions toward Ukraine as vice president in 2016, and Biden’s younger son, Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company at the time.
Over the summer Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani actively pushed the Ukrainian government to ramp up investigations of Biden and his son. Trump also withheld $250 million in military aid to Ukraine that Congress had appropriated. Facing congressional pressure, Trump finally released the aid less than two weeks ago.
The whistleblower’s identity has not been revealed, but Trump’s interactions were troubling enough that both complainant and IG felt Congress should know. Both complainant and IG followed explicit statutory procedure, but once the complaint got to the acting director of national intelligence, the Trump appointee ignored the statute and involved both the justice department and the White House. Despite an urgent national security concern, transmission of the complaint to Congress remains blocked.
- Democrats Intensify Calls For Potential Impeachment Over Whistleblower Complaint (NPR)
- Ukranian Leaders Feel Trapped Between Warring Washington Factions (WaPo $)
- On Ukraine Call, Biden Says Trump Is ‘Violating Every Basic Norm Of A President’ (NPR)
- If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is The president reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against Joe Biden. (Atlantic, $)
- Trump Walks a Crooked Mile: Has he finally gone too far? (NYT $)
- Trump and Election Interference, Whistle-Blower Edition: Many elements are murky, but something clearly stinks. (NYT $)
- Trump’s Ukraine Call Reveals a President Convinced of His Own Invincibility (WaPo $)
- President Trump and the Warning of Democratic Governance (WaPo $)
- The Corey Lewandowski Trap: Democrats keep underestimating the audacity of Trump and his tribe. (NYT $)
- Behind the Whistle-Blower Case, a Long-Held Trump Grudge Toward Ukraine (NYT $)
- The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned From Roy Cohn: The unrepentant political hitman who taught a younger Trump how to flout the rules didn’t get away with it forever. (Politico)
A Bipolar World Fights Over El Salvador
- For years the US did little to confront China’s increasing influence in Latin America, which Beijing was accomplishing through a growing network of trade and loans. Then last year China attempted to take over Isla Perico, a speck of an island in a destitute corner of El Salvador, by offering the few families living there $7,000 each to pack up and move to the mainland.
- China told islanders it wanted to turn the downtrodden area into a global trade hub and manufacturing powerhouse. US officials began saying China can’t be trusted — it doesn’t have the interest of a poor country at heart — what it really wants is a valuable perch to expand its military and intelligence capabilities in Washington’s vicinity.
- However, critics of the Trump administration point out that while the Chinese were offering to build manufacturing plants, invest in renewable energy and make El Salvador a tourist destination, Trump was calling migrants “animals,” separating children from parents at the border, and cutting off aid. (NYT)
Chechen Death Squads
- Thousands of Chechens who fled after the insurgency a decade ago are living in legal limbo, denied asylum by European countries and risking deportation back to Russia.
- Meanwhile, insurgency figures and enemies of Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrovhas are being hunted down by death squads and killed in Europe and the Middle East. (Guardian)
Way Too Little, Way Too Late
- The decomposed bodies of a 42-year-old North Korean mother and her 6-year-old son were found last July in their $74-a-month Seoul apartment, two months after they died.
- Han Sung-ok had fled North Korea in the late 1990s to escape famine, going first to China where she became one of thousands of North Korean women sold by human traffickers to rural Chinese men looking for wives.
- She eventually made her way to South Korea where the government provides refugees with low-income apartments, welfare payments, health care and job training.
- South Korean news outlets reported that the two died of starvation. The story became national news after it was learned how the two died despite help being available just a few hundred yards away at a district government office. (NYT)
From Pulpit To Politics
- An ultra-conservative priest is the most politically powerful, and divisive, unelected man in Poland. From the pulpit and his vast media empire, the Reverend Tadeusz Rydzyk delivers a daily diet of horror stories about a world without faith, where gay people control the political agenda, universities are corrupted by “neo-Marxists,” and the Roman Catholic Church is under mortal attack.
- National elections are on October 13, and Rydzyk is expected, as he has in the past, to deliver millions of votes for the governing Law and Justice party. In turn, the government has showered the business empire of “Father Director” with tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks and grants. (NYT)
Additional World News
- ‘Howdy Modi’: thousands of Indian Americans attend Trump rally (Guardian)
- Hong Kong police fire tear gas after storming shopping mall (Reuters) and Clashes Erupt in Hong Kong After Dueling Demonstrations (NYT $)
- Israeli Arab parties back Gantz for PM in bid to oust Netanyahu (Guardian)
- Syrian Children Saved a German Village. And a Village Saved Itself. Four years after Germany took in over one million migrants, integration is quietly working, one village at a time. (NYT $) and (we highly recommend this read) Immigrant kids fill this town’s schools. Their bus driver is leading the backlash. (WaPo, $)
Iran So Far Away
- Last June President Trump threatened to retaliate against Iran for shooting down an American surveillance drone, but with warships readying missiles and airplanes already in the skies, he called off the attack with just minutes to go, and without informing his vice president or any cabinet members.
- Some allies feared the failure to follow through was taken by the Iranians as a sign of weakness. Now Trump is again threatening retaliation against Iran, this time for their even bolder attacks on Saudi oil facilities, and again he is wrestling with the consequences of using force, and the consequences of avoiding it. (NYT)
- Iran warns foreign forces to stay out of Gulf, amid new US deployment (BBC)
- Trump Sending Troops To Middle East After Attack On Saudi Oil Facilities (NPR)
Want To Stop Being Distrac
- Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, studies fun for a living.
- Bogost claims we must challenge the way we think about fun and play, in order to redirect how we think about tedious tasks we don’t want to do. By relinquishing our notions about what fun should feel like, we open ourselves up to seeing our daily activities in a new way.
- “Fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way,” Bogost says. He shows us how to engage our attention and maintain focus when tempted by distraction, and insists learning to transform the hard focused work we have to do into something that feels like play can make us feel very powerful indeed. (TED)
Additional Reads
- Poll: Two-thirds of Americans want to break up companies like Amazon and Google: Turns out breaking up Big Tech is super popular. (Vox)
- This is why you need to take microbreaks (and how to do it properly): We can’t be productive without breaks. But far too many of us can’t seem to get away from our desks, even for just a few minutes. (Fast Company)
- Reed Hastings on the Streamer Wars: ‘It’s a Whole New World Starting in November’ (Variety)
- WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion: Why the consumer-tech revolution can’t seem to survive public scrutiny (Atlantic, $)
LAST MORSELS
“If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.” – Kazuo Ishiguro