| | | | We Need to Stop the President Stumbling into Nuclear War | | The war of words between President Trump and North Korea is a reminder of the very real danger that two leaders could "stumble into a nuclear holocaust," write Jeffrey Bader and Jonathan Pollack in the New York Times. It's time for Congress to step up and limit American presidents' ability to make this danger a reality.
Congress should "amend the War Powers Act to cover the possibility of preventive or preemptive nuclear strikes. This would ensure that the president could not simply provide the codes to his military aide carrying the nuclear 'football' and launch such an attack on his own authority," they write.
"Legislation should provide for a small group of officials, possibly including the vice president, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the four leaders of the House and Senate, to give unanimous consent to any such nuclear strike. It would ensure that multiple sets of eyes, equipped with stable emotions and sound brains, would be able to prevent such a nuclear strike [being] undertaken without appropriate deliberation."
| | Two Cheers for the Senate | | The limitations of the Trump administration's "hard power budget" – which proposed steep cuts to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, among others – have become increasingly clear. Two cheers, then, for the Senate Appropriations Committee's unanimous vote to give the administration more than it asked for, Bloomberg editorializes.
"From North Korea and Afghanistan to Venezuela and Central America, the administration has been forced to recognize that U.S. military might is necessary but not sufficient. To maintain alliances, contain complex threats, win hearts and minds, and keep small problems from becoming big ones, soft power -- as well as seasoned diplomats to wield it -- is essential," Bloomberg argues.
The Appropriations Committee's bill "fights threats like drug trafficking and illegal migration by restoring funding to strengthen law enforcement and governance in Central America and Colombia. It helps create new markets by supporting economic development overseas. It bolsters global stability by boosting spending to address famines, epidemics and disease. Even with the bill's failure to restore U.S. funding for the Green Climate Fund, its $10 million increase over Trump's budget still represents money well spent."
| | How Trump's Mexico Rhetoric Could Come Back to Bite Him | | | President Trump's continued rhetorical attacks on Mexico are painting the country's politicians into a corner ahead of an election next year. That's bad news for U.S.-Mexico cooperation, and ultimately for both nations, argues Jorge Guajardo in Politico Magazine.
"How bad could it get? The first item off the table would likely be cooperation on issues of migration. In the past decade, Mexico has worked to stem the flow of Central American immigrants into the United States by stopping them at our southern border. This has pitted us against our Latin American neighbors, who resent us for doing the U.S.'s dirty work. With an adversarial northern neighbor; we would have to halt this cooperation immediately.
"Next up would be cooperation on the drug war. Mexicans harbor long-standing suspicions of armed Americans in our territory, be they invading forces or U.S. law-enforcement agents. In a post-NAFTA cold war with the United States, the Mexican government would be pressured to expel all U.S. agents currently stationed in Mexico to help in the fight against drug trafficking."
"The list goes on: health, environment, transportation, water, disease control. No two countries in the world cooperate in as many areas as Mexico and the United States. Like a clean room, this extensive day-to-day cooperation is not noticed; it is taken for granted until something breaks down and the mess starts to show." | | Enough is Enough in Yemen: FT | | Yemen's civil war – and Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign against Houthi rebels -- is fast-destroying what is left of the region's poorest nation. With a quarter of the country's 28 million people on the brink of famine, it's time for the United States to intervene, the Financial Times editorializes.
"Under Donald Trump, the U.S. has encouraged a Saudi-led Sunni jihad in hopes of isolating Shia Iran. This overlooks the futility of the Saudi campaign in Yemen and the likely blowback if the country collapses. The U.S. Congress, though equally hostile to Tehran, is becoming less tolerant of Riyadh's exporting of Wahhabi extremism. The U.S., with its 2003 invasion of Iraq, helped reignite the age-old schism between Sunni and Shia. It could douse some of the flames from this fratricidal struggle by pushing for immediate relief and longer-term help for Yemen," the FT writes.
"The U.S., UK and France, the major suppliers of arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, need jointly to insist on a ceasefire and huge influx of humanitarian aid. Russia should intercede with its ally Iran, which has already called for a ceasefire. International peacekeepers may eventually be required; a global development package to refloat Yemen will certainly be needed."
| | Trump's Muddled Thinking on Immigration: Chavez | | | A new bill backed by the Trump administration that would dramatically slash legal immigration into the United States harks back to early efforts to impose broad restrictions on the number of immigrants entering the United States. It also suggests a complete misunderstanding of the economics of the issue, writes Linda Chavez in Foreign Policy. "Although supporters of the RAISE Act claim it will improve the quality of immigrants admitted to the country by taking only those who are highly skilled, the loss of lower-skilled immigrants under the proposed bill is a major problem," Chavez writes. "The assumption of the bill's authors and the Trump administration is that unemployed Americans, or those who have dropped out of the labor force altogether, will step in to take jobs currently held by lower-skilled immigrants living in the country legally or illegally. But there is little evidence that this would happen. Will Americans who can now draw unemployment, welfare, or disability benefits suddenly rush to take jobs picking crops, milking cows, scrubbing toilets, processing poultry, or replacing roofs, even if the pay is somewhat higher than what immigrant workers in those jobs currently receive? One of the reasons immigrants, here legally or illegally, fill so many of these jobs is that their skill sets match them." | | The Danger of China's "Sputnik Moments" | | A series of recent "Sputnik Moments," from quantum satellite communication to gene editing, underscores the dramatic technological advances China is making. Unless the United States gets better at protecting its intellectual property, it will get left behind, argue Daniel Kliman and Harry Krejsa for Politico.
"The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimates that piracy, theft, and counterfeiting by China costs the U.S. economy between $225 billion and $600 billion a year, or up to 3 percent of the entire U.S. GDP. In the long term, the costs only grow more daunting. If scientific advances in quantum communications, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, energy, and battery technology increasingly move to China, so will the future industries – and jobs – that will accompany them." | | | | | | |
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