| | | | Why Trump's Russia Dream Will Be Dashed: Friedman | | | President Trump has a point when he suggests that the United States and Russia should try to get along. After all, on issues ranging from North Korea, to Syria to terrorism, the prospect of better coordination seems tantalizing, writes Uri Friedman for The Atlantic. But he isn't the first president to believe this – for decades, U.S. presidents have been trying, and failing, to realize the dream of two great powers working to solve the world's problems. "These dreams have repeatedly been dashed for the same reason: The divergent ways that the U.S. and Russia view the world and their own interests have proven more powerful than the incentives to join forces," Friedman says. "Under Clinton, the breaking point was NATO's expansion into Central and Eastern Europe and military intervention against Yugoslavia. Under Bush, it was Russia's invasion of Georgia. Under Obama, it was Russia's apparent campaign to undermine American democracy. Trump claims he has "what it takes" to call up Putin, make a deal, and get Russia to "pull back" from North Korea, Syria, and Ukraine. This plan, however, doesn't account for the stubborn realities that the United States is committed to denuclearizing North Korea while Russia is ready to settle for a less provocative North Korea with nuclear weapons; that Russia prioritizes the Assad government's survival in Syria while the United States prioritizes ISIS's destruction; that the United States wants a united and independent Ukraine while Russia desires a divided and dependent satellite state." | | America's Military Position Could Be Weaker than it Looks | | | Don't be fooled by the U.S. show of force in the Asia-Pacific as three U.S. aircraft carriers sail the seas there. On a global scale, America's military might dwarfs that of other nations, writes Peter Apps for Reuters. "But it now faces a very real danger that its foes may be able to bleed it to death without ever confronting it in battle." "Tensions with China and North Korea have kept those units on high alert. In Europe too, heightened tensions with Russia have resulted in a scale of U.S. military activity unseen since the Cold War. U.S. troops, planes, ships and submarines are now on almost continuous exercises to reassure allies and track Russia's increasingly active forces as Moscow probes NATO air and sea borders," Apps writes. "The Pentagon budget – $825 billion this fiscal year – is rising, and continues to dwarf that of any other nation. But it is also spread much more widely. China and Russia – spending $146 billion and 70 billion respectively – lack America's global reach, but are more aggressively focused on their own immediate neighborhoods. Both have aggressively plowed resources into techniques and tactics such as cyber warfare and missiles that U.S. tacticians worry might give them the edge in any local war." | | Forget Snowden, Fear the Shadow Brokers | | | More than a year into a U.S. investigation into a security breach that revealed many of the agency's hacking tools and it is still unclear whether the National Security Agency "is the victim of a brilliantly executed hack, with Russia as the most likely perpetrator, an insider's leak, or both," the New York Times reports. Regardless, "there is broad agreement that the damage from the Shadow Brokers already far exceeds the harm to American intelligence done by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who fled with four laptops of classified material in 2013," write Scott Shane, Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger. "Mr. Snowden's cascade of disclosures to journalists and his defiant public stance drew far more media coverage than this new breach. But Mr. Snowden released code words, while the Shadow Brokers have released the actual code; if he shared what might be described as battle plans, they have loosed the weapons themselves. Created at huge expense to American taxpayers, those cyberweapons have now been picked up by hackers from North Korea to Russia and shot back at the United States and its allies." | | The Shocking Entitlement of the Far-Right | | The 60,000 marchers that showed up in Warsaw on Saturday for Poland's Independence Day weren't all neo-fascists. But their shocking boldness underscores the changing nature of the far-right across the continent, writes Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post.
"Nowadays, neo-fascism and open racism are no longer the province of national parties. In part as a consequence of the borderless Europe they claim to hate, these are now international movements," she writes. "Large contingents of Hungarian, Slovak and Italian neo-fascist groups came to Warsaw to join the march; for the first time, international alt-right trolls were also actively supporting the march on Twitter and elsewhere, 'alt-right' being the modern-sounding term for neo-fascist. There is a Russian angle, too, although few in this Polish government want to admit it. Just like everywhere else, there is Russian support for the most discordant far-right elements of Polish politics, especially online. Poland's divisive defense minister, a particularly loud 'patriot,' has strange Russian links as well."
"The groups that displayed themselves so aggressively in Warsaw on Saturday are not the majority in Poland. They are not even a significant minority. They are a radical group who suddenly feel enabled and encouraged by the new conditions in their country, in Europe and in the world. But even if they don't set the tone for public life, in Warsaw — a city that was destroyed by fascists, where old buildings are still pockmarked by bullet holes from fascist rifles; a city that also now hosts the most ambitious and beautiful Jewish museum in Europe — their new sense of entitlement is indeed shocking." | | Germany's Climate Hypocrisy | | | Germany has long cultivated an image as a leader in addressing climate change. That might once have been true, writes Paul Hockenos in Foreign Policy. Now it's a "transparent fiction." "Germany has fallen badly behind on its pledges to sink its own greenhouse gas pollutants. In fact, Germany's carbon emissions haven't declined for nearly a decade and the German Environment Agency calculated that Germany emitted 906 million tons of CO2 in 2016 -- the highest in Europe -- compared to 902 million in 2015. And 2017's interim numbers suggest emissions are going to tick up again this year," Hockenos writes. "Germany is now in serious danger of hitting neither its 2020 nor its 2030 emissions targets, the very benchmarks that it browbeat other nations into adopting at previous climate conferences." The problem? "Germany's prodigious coal production for coal-fired power plants, on the one hand, and its sheltered automobile industry on the other. "Germany is Europe's largest producer and burner of coal, which accounted for 49 percent of gross power production in 2016: 28 percent from hard coal and 21 percent from lignite, also known as brown coal, among the dirtiest of fossil fuels, which Germany mines more of than any other country in the world." | | | President Trump is wrapping up his 5-nation visit to Asia. Gillian Turner writes for The Hill: "In Vietnam, President Trump told his audience, 'I am always going to put America first, the same way that I expect all of you in this room to put your countries first.' The leader of the free world could not have been more succinct. We'll do America first, and you should do you. We're going to go it alone, and we suggest you do the same." Britain's parliament will hold the first of eight public debates on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill on Tuesday, Reuters reports. Gideon Rachman writes for the Financial Times that Britain is heading toward disaster. "The EU will not offer anything like the deal that Britain's Brexiters still dream of. But Theresa May's Conservative colleagues are still unprepared to accept this unpleasant reality," Rachman writes. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is scheduled to travel to Myanmar on Wednesday to discuss the Rohingya refugee crisis. Amnesty International says a new report from Myanmar's military on its response to the issue amounts to the whitewashing of the crisis. "After recording countless stories of horror and using satellite analysis to track the growing devastation we can only reach one conclusion: these attacks amount to crimes against humanity," says James Gomez, Amnesty International's regional director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The latest round of NAFTA talks begin in Mexico. A new Pew Research poll finds that a majority of Americans (56%) believe the trade pact is good for the United States, compared with 33% who say it is bad. | | | | | | |
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