| | | | The Meaning of Pence's Remarkable Trip | | US Vice President Mike Pence's trip to Israel this week underscored just how tightly bound the two nations have become under the Trump administration. The Netanyahu government was likely delighted by what it heard. And Republican voters were probably happy, too, suggests Aaron David Miller for Politico Magazine.
"The vice president spent his less than 48 hours in Israel saying literally everything Israelis wanted to hear: He vowed to fix the Iran deal or cancel it; made it clear the U.S. Embassy would open in Jerusalem earlier than planned; validated Jerusalem as Israel's eternal capital; and vowed to make the US-Israeli relationship stronger still," Miller says.
"The tenor of Pence's pilgrimage to Israel doesn't just reflect the eschatology and end-times beliefs of many Evangelical Christians. It also reflects the more practical calculation that maintaining a decidedly pro-Israeli sensibility—on Jerusalem, the peace process, the Iran nuclear deal and having Israel's back at the U.N. no matter what—plays really well among mainstream Republican voters. What was once a thoroughly bipartisan issue has been increasingly harnessed in the service of partisan politics, as a recent Pew poll reflects: Currently, 79 percent of Republicans say they sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians, compared with just 27 percent of Democrats —a gap wider than at any point since 1978."
| | A US Ally Spits In America's Face | | Turkey's assault on Kurdish forces in Syria's Afrin province suggests that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks he can flout US interests without consequences. Just as bad, the Trump administration appears to be letting him get away with it – and is setting a risky precedent in the process, suggests Noah Feldman for Bloomberg View.
"Turkey is still a nice place to have a troop presence. But there must be some limit to what a supposed treaty ally can do to flout the US," Feldman writes.
"No one knows how many Kurds have died so far in and around Afrin, where the YPG is said to have between 8,000 and 10,000 fighters. No one knows how many Kurdish civilians will be killed, either.
"What's clear is that no one is doing anything to stop it.
"That's not in US interests, to put it mildly. Abandoning allies so publicly and so fast is a great way to make sure no one trusts you in the future. When the reckoning comes for the abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, as it eventually will, the Kurds will hold the US responsible for betraying them."
"All alliances have their natural end. Unless Erdogan stops spitting in Trump's face, the US-Turkey alliance is heading for its expiration date."
| | Sisi Is Looking Putinesque. That Should Worry America: Abrams | | | In stifling opposition ahead of an election in March, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has started to look a lot like Vladimir Putin, writes Elliott Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations. Washington needs to wise up, because Egyptians probably already have.
"That Sisi feels it necessary to do this is a cautionary tale for Washington. How popular can this man be if he is afraid to let any serious opponent take him on? Logically, someone who is popular will be happy to have that demonstrated by a smashing electoral victory. Sisi is acting like someone who knows he has lost the support of the Egyptian people," Abrams writes.
"And if he knows his popularity has disappeared, we in the United States should be equally aware--and that should inform American policy toward Sisi's regime. We have tended to treat him like the popular leader who saved Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood, because that's how many Egyptians saw him in 2013.
"But that's five years ago and it seems clear to Sisi that more and more Egyptians now regard him as just another general, intent on staying in power forever, repressing any criticism, presiding over vast corruption and destroying the possibility of democracy in Egypt." | | RIP the Art of the Real Deal | | The US government shutdown at the weekend may have been brief. But it was yet another reminder that something has been lost in Washington that we might not see again, suggests Susan Glasser in the New Yorker: Real deals.
"The Great 2018 Kick-the-Can-Down-the-Road-on-Immigration-for-Two-More-Weeks Accord is further proof of it. And no one, not even 'Art of the Deal' Donald Trump, can bring them back," Glasser writes.
"In recent years, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, now, Trump have all claimed to want to do big bipartisan deals, the kind that a President can pin a legacy on. Both Bush and Obama spent months in search of elusive 'grand bargains,' in Bush's case, one on entitlement reform; in Obama's, on the federal deficit. They didn't get them. Obamacare happened with Democratic votes alone. The Trump tax cut was purely a product of the Republican-controlled House and Senate."
"In those rare cases where Democrats and Republicans have come together on a big issue in the last fifteen years, it has almost always been in the midst of genuine crisis, or when a major deadline (usually self-inflicted) looms. There is no other kind of deal that even seems possible today—at least one of the consequential variety that unites a large majority of both parties' officeholders on an issue of national significance. By that standard, the last genuinely weighty bipartisan deals in Washington were arguably the bailout of the economy in the midst of the 2008 economic crisis and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"Can you imagine such a deal today? Of course not."
| | What Afghan Extremists Get: You Can Win Without Conquering | | Wednesday's attack in Jalalabad on the offices of Save the Children is just the latest example of how militants there have adopted the classic guerrilla playbook. There's no strategy for conquering Afghan cities, suggests Sami Yousafzai for the Daily Beast. As long as Westerners are among the victims of attacks, there doesn't necessarily need to be.
"By targeting foreigners they demonstrate the danger that faces the much less well protected general population even as they encourage the strangers, for so they are seen, to pack up and go home," Yousafzai writes.
"The attacks widen the gulf between those most in need, and this who could help. They spread terror, disappointment, anger—and questions. Why can't the government deliver security? Why can the Americans not win their longest war, one that has seen the birth of three generations here?
"The insurgent strategy is, in fact, a classic one used in many guerrilla wars, most notably in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968, which began 50 years ago this month. There, the guerrillas were defeated and decimated on the battlefield, but won in the minds of their enemies."
| | Venezuela Has Announced Elections Will Be Held Soon. That's Not Good | | News that an election has been called in a troubled country is usually something to be welcomed. That's not the case with Venezuela, argues Francisco Toro in the Washington Post.
"For the past three months, government and opposition representatives have been negotiating in the Dominican Republic, under international auspices, to try to agree on a set of minimal elections guarantees. Backed by diplomats from Mexico and Chile, opposition leaders had been pressing to appoint a credible new National Electoral Council that could hold an election free of the brazen abuses that have plagued recent Venezuelan elections," Toro writes.
"By announcing an election without an agreement, the regime signaled that this isn't going to happen. So Venezuelans should expect the upcoming vote to be another farce along the lines of the profoundly flawed municipal elections the government held last month.
"In those elections, the government barely bothered to conceal a strategy of buying votes with food. It was so blatant that, in the weeks after the election, the country was convulsed by protests from people angry they hadn't received the traditional Christmas ham many had been promised in exchange for their votes." | | | | | | |
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