| | | | The Limits of Those "Nice and New" Missiles | | President Trump may have tweeted Wednesday that "nice and new" and "smart" US missiles will soon be heading Syria's way. But even if they are, the data suggests an inconvenient truth: a one-off strike will do little to deter Bashar al-Assad, writes Chris Meserole for the Brookings Institution.
The "Trump administration now faces a bind. Its argument that a one-off military strike is enough to deter Assad from using chemical weapons again is clearly untrue. Indeed, the Assad regime would not have carried out the attack in Douma if it didn't think it could handle another barrage of cruise missiles. Yet the Trump administration is also unlikely to significantly escalate its response either—just last week President Trump demanded that the Pentagon withdraw all forces from Syria within six months, which suggests he has little appetite for the kind of robust and sustained response that might actually deter Assad," Meserole writes.
"How Trump tries to square the circle remains to be seen. But given Trump's pledge to withdraw from Syria, it's unlikely that Assad's latest use of chemical weapons will be his last." - The questions Trump should be asking. President Trump's tweet warning of a US attack with "new" and "smart" missiles "suggests a lack of discipline, even on something as serious as war and peace," Fareed says. But that discussion risks overshadowing something else: "This is a reflex in search of a strategy."
"The reality is that we still don't have a coherent Syria policy. We still don't know what we are doing in that country. President Trump needs to ask himself: What is the goal? What is the strategy here? What would firing off even 50 missiles do? How would that change the balance of power?
"The kind of show of force that the President has warned is coming will only be effective if it's part of a larger strategy. Russia has a strategy in Syria – to ensure Assad isn't toppled, to widen his area of control. But under the Obama administration, and now the Trump administration, a US strategy has been absent. No one – including our allies – understands what we are doing."
| | Informed Consent? Nonsense | | The "beating heart" of Facebook's business model emerged largely unscathed from CEO Mark Zuckerberg's five hours in the Congressional hot seat on Tuesday, writes Shira Ovide for Bloomberg View. That's bad news for the rest of us.
"Facebook will keep failing users' trust as long as its business is based on unrestrained hoovering of as much user data as possible, and crafting ever-more innovative ways for advertisers to harness that information for commercial goals," Ovide writes.
"Zuckerberg said everyone who uses Facebook consents to what they agree to share, and has complete control of it. The trick is few people really understand what they're giving, or are capable of truly controlling it. Zuckerberg seemed to concede as much after a lawmaker brandished a stack of papers said to be Facebook's data collection and ad policy disclosures to its users.
"Technically, Facebook's users can turn off targeted advertisements or disable sensitive features such as image recognition in photos. (I couldn't figure out how to do the latter, and I write about technology for a living.) Zuckerberg believes he's giving users control, but he's giving them the illusion of control. And that means the consent of Facebook users is not informed." - It's not Facebook's fault, it's yours. Pointing the finger at Mark Zuckerberg might be easy, but it would be more honest to point it at a mirror, argues Scott Gilmore in Maclean's. After all, we're the ones that have lost sight of what we should and shouldn't be sharing with strangers. In fact, we've lost sight of what a stranger is.
"Our social networks expanded exponentially, but our brains didn't. So, we kept interacting with these networks the same way we did when we lived in a tribe or a clan or a village. We treated these new weak links like our old strong ones. We shared our most private thoughts, our intimate photos, our political views and our barbecue recipes.
"People have been warning us, from the very beginning, that just because Facebook calls these people your 'friends,' they aren't really your friends. Collectively, we responded by just changing the definition of friend. It now includes the most vague acquaintances, even strangers."
| | Memo on the Latest Trump Panic Cycle: Chill! | | | The raid on the office of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has inevitably brought with it fevered speculation that the President might be on the verge of firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller – and triggering a constitutional crisis in the process. But we've been here before – several times, writes Jack Goldsmith for Lawfare. It's time to take a deep breath.
"If the past is any guide – and the question here is whether it is – perhaps we should calm down. At least five major times in the last 10 or so months (and many more times on a smaller scale), we have seen a version of the following cycle: (1) Trump says something menacing (or is reported to have done so) about firing a senior Justice Department official or clamping down on the Mueller investigation, (2) Commentators and politicians of both parties (but mainly Democrats) announce that the United States is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, (3) Republican leaders warn the president to stand down, (4) Trump, one of his lawyers or a White House spokesperson says, in effect: Don't worry, the president has no plans to do the horrible thing you fear, and then (5) everyone eventually calms down, for a bit, and the threat seems to recede, until we start at step 1 in a new cycle," Goldsmith writes.
"I could be proven wrong if Trump fires [Deputy Attorney General] Rosenstein or Mueller or [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions, but I continue to think that the main aim of Trump's discombobulating tactics is to delegitimize Mueller for the same reasons that Bill Clinton's proxies tried to discredit Ken Starr: to shape the politics of impeachment or, possibly in Trump's case, of massive pardons. This would also explain why the discombobulating tactics are always accompanied by discrediting tactics (Mueller's alleged conflicts of interest, the Justice Department's going easy on Hillary, etc.)." | | Trump's Peru Summit Decision: Sad! | | | President Trump's decision to skip the Summit of the Americas in Peru this week can't be seen in isolation, writes Andrés Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald. The White House says it's about Syria, but a track record of neglect suggests otherwise.
"Trump will be the first US president not to attend the Summit of the Americas, which is held every three or four years since 1994," Oppenheimer says.
"Trump is the first US president in recent times not to have set foot on Latin America during his first year in office. Former presidents Obama and George W. Bush made their first foreign trips while in the White House to Mexico or Canada, and attended all the Summits of the Americas during their terms.
"While Trump has not visited Latin America despite being geographically close to the region, Chinese President Xi Jinping has already made four visits to Latin America in four years." | | The Essential Metals You Haven't Heard Of (And Why They Matter) | | Japanese researchers believe they have found reserves of rare earth metals so massive they could meet global demand on a "semi-infinite basis," the Japan Times reports. That could be a very big deal for close ally the United States.
Victoria Bruce explains in The Hill:
"The chemical elements on the periodic table with atomic numbers 57 through 71 make up the critical elements called rare earths. Two more, Scandium and Yttrium, reside elsewhere on the periodic table and complete the group."
"The US is 100 percent import-dependent on all of these critical defense materials and 100 percent import-dependent exclusively on China for these materials after they are processed into metallic form (the state required for most technology and defense applications).
"Rare earth metals are so critical and in so many defense components for guided missiles, smart bombs, targeting lasers, sonar, radar, night vision and high temperature resistant metals for military jet engines, that if China cut us off, the US could not replace or build most of our advanced weapon systems." | | | | | | |
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