| | | | Fareed: Trump's Big Missed Opportunity | | Donald Trump had a chance to address genuine problems and deep frustration with the U.S. political system when he took office, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. Instead, his presidency has been marked by incompetence – and one lost opportunity after another.
"Trump could have quickly begun reshaping American politics. He discerned voices that others didn't, understood what those people wanted to hear and articulated much of it," Fareed says.
"But when it came time to deliver, it turned out that he had no serious idea or policies, nor even the desire to search for them. He just wanted to be president, meeting world leaders, having Oval Office photo ops and flying on Air Force One, while delegating the actual public policy to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) or Vice President Pence. So far, Trump has turned out to be something far less revolutionary than expected -- a standard-issue, big-business Republican, albeit an incompetent one, wrapped in populist clothing."
| | Why Russia Won't be Able to Hack Germany's Election | | There's a good chance Russian hackers will try to meddle in Germany's upcoming election. But it's unlikely to have much impact, writes Anna Sauerbrey in the New York Times. Germany's sound – even boring – political culture means there's little for the Kremlin to gain.
"In France, a right-wing candidate with strong anti-European Union positions made it to the final round. And in the United States -- well, you know that story. In Germany's system of proportional representation, however, coalition governments are the rule. If hackers released information that pushed the vote by a few percentage points more or less, not much would happen. Designed after World War II to immunize the country against totalitarianism, Germany's political system now also serves as a firewall against information warfare," Sauerbrey says.
| | The State Department's Cyber Folly: Dreyfuss | | | The U.S. State Department is reportedly poised to close its Cyber Security branch. If true, the move won't just hurt America's cyber defenses, but would also reflect a disturbing blindness to the modern day global threat posed by hackers, suggests Emily Dreyfuss in Wired.
"In 2017, cyberhacking serves not only as a pointed tool for nations and nation-state-backed hackers to take down power grids, but an easily accessible tool available to whoever wants to wreak world havoc by targeting information. Disinformation campaigns like the one that rocked Qatar go one step further, threatening to undermine base reality. The dangers that cyberattacks present require exactly the kind of coordinated, international response that the State Department should invest in, not bury in a bureaucratic backwater," Dreyfuss says.
"State's cybersecurity office doesn't directly administer cyberattacks or defenses, but serves a vital diplomatic function. While the CIA and NSA work in secret to keep America safe from cyber and other threats, it's the State Department that serves as the public face of U.S. values. It communicates U.S. interests with allies and adversaries, and negotiates policies about defensive and offensive measures, retaliations, and treaties." | | No, Trump Couldn't Pardon Himself: Feldman | | It's time to dispense with the silly talk about Donald Trump potentially pardoning himself, suggests Noah Feldman for Bloomberg View. He can't, and he shouldn't listen to any lawyer that tells him otherwise.
"The basic problem with self-pardon is that it would make a mockery of the very idea that the U.S. operates under the rule of law. A president who could self-pardon could violate literally any federal law with impunity, knowing that the only risk was removal from office by impeachment," Feldman writes.
"We have a name for an elected leader who is outside the law: dictator. And dictatorship is fundamentally inconsistent with the republic established by the Constitution. In fact, it's a little difficult to think of any single idea that would more grossly violate the rule of law than a president free to break any and every law and then wave a get-out-of-jail-free card." - About those Clinton comparisons. Julian Zelizer writes for CNN Opinion that comparisons between Trump and the way Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan treated special prosecutors miss something fundamental: the independent counsel law passed in the wake of Watergate to protect such investigations has since lapsed.
"The law protected [Kenneth Starr and Lawrence Walsh] from an aggressive president and both could count on the fact that their team would not be stifled by an administration that was intent on obstructing justice. Presidents Clinton and Reagan could criticize and castigate the prosecutors all they wanted, but it would be nearly impossible to have them fired. Their work could go on unimpeded.
| | Why Trump Is Right About NATO | | President Trump had a point about NATO, writes Mark Galeotti for Foreign Policy. The alliance does need to spend more – but not on traditional hardware like tanks and fighter jets.
"[A]ll tools can get rusty or outdated, and the existing 2 percent benchmark is a perfect example. Now that 'war' is as much about hacking, subversion, espionage, and fake news as it is about tanks, the West needs a minimal baseline requirement for spending on 'hybrid defense': police services, counterintelligence services, and the like," Galeotti argues.
"Much of this may sound as if it shouldn't be NATO's business; this is a military alliance, after all, and it should be no more responsible for parachuting forensic accountants in to check whether British banks are laundering dirty Russian cash than it should be hunting spies in the Balkans. But…[g]iven that NATO now recognizes cyberattacks as possible grounds for invoking Article 5, the alliance's mutual defense clause, weak national cyberdefenses are a potential invitation to a wider conflict."
| | Britain Needs to Get its Head Out of the Sand: The Economist | | Britain needs to get its head out of the sand on Brexit, The Economist editorializes. There are painful trade-offs to be made, but a power vacuum in government means the country risks stumbling unprepared into a potentially larger crisis.
"There are many ways to leave the EU, and none is free of problems. The more Britain aims to preserve its economic relationship with the continent, the more it will have to follow rules set by foreign politicians and enforced by foreign judges (including on the sensitive issue of freedom of movement). The more control it demands over its borders and laws, the harder it will find it to do business with its biggest market. It is not unpatriotic to be frank about these trade-offs. Indeed, it is more unpatriotic to kid voters into thinking that Brexit has no drawbacks at all." | | Report: Scales Have Tipped in AIDS Fight | | The scales have tipped in the battle against HIV/AIDS, with AIDS-related deaths having halved since 2005 as access to treatment improves, according to a new report from UNAIDS.
Leading the way are eastern and southern Africa, which account for more than half of all people living with HIV. "Since 2010, AIDS-related deaths have declined by 42%. New HIV infections have declined by 29%, including a 56% drop in new HIV infections among children over the same period, a remarkable achievement resulting from HIV treatment and prevention efforts that is putting eastern and southern Africa on track towards ending its AIDS epidemic," the report says. | | | | | | |
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