| | | | Can the President Be a National Security Threat? | | News that the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation in 2017 into whether President Trump was working to advance Russia's interests sparked an angry denial from the president. And Trump has reason to be indignant, suggests Jack Goldsmith in Lawfare. The FBI may have a mission of "identifying and neutralizing ongoing national security threats," but "[t]he president defines what a national security threat is, and thus any action by him cannot be such a threat."
"[T]he FBI can fully investigate Russia's interference with the 2016 election, including matters involving the president, as it has been doing for a while now," Goldsmith writes. "But it cannot cross the line of taking investigative steps premised on the president's threat to national security. The Constitution leaves crossing that line up to Congress and the American people."
We have watched presidents from Nixon to Obama "engage in controversial contacts with foreign leaders" and "sharply change the direction of U.S. foreign policy," and if the FBI can launch a secret investigation like this, "it would chill controversial presidential foreign policy actions that the Constitution says are solely the president's decisions to make, for better and worse."
"[T]he FBI was not merely justified, but actually compelled, to investigate the president," counters David Kris, also in Lawfare. Given the FBI's pre-existing counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and given Trump's behavior toward Russia and his firing of FBI Director James Comey, "the FBI effectively could not avoid investigating the president."
| | The Autoimmune Disorder in the American Government | | | Meanwhile, as new revelations surface about Trump's efforts to maintain secrecy in his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, House Democrats are mulling a subpoena of Trump's interpreter.
David Frum, who served in the George W. Bush administration, argues in The Atlantic that Democrats should indeed take that extraordinary step, despite the risk that "such a subpoena would create a new precedent that would shadow all future confidential presidential conversations with non-English-speaking heads of government, allied as well as adversarial."
The swirling questions about Trump's relationship with Russia are too grave to ignore, he believes, and "Trump's own determination to defy normal presidential operating procedures to keep secret his private conversations with Putin only lends credibility to the worst suspicions."
Trump has a habit of creating quandaries like this, Frum writes – "autoimmune disorders" wherein "Trump's breaches of norms force other agencies of government to breach norms in reply, in order to protect supreme public interests threatened by Trump." Frum's solution: "Subpoena the interpreter now; write a new law formalizing the confidentiality of interpretation later." | | | President Trump tweeted that he spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today about "economic development between the U.S. & Turkey - great potential to substantially expand!" That came after a tweet yesterday in which Trump wrote ominously, "Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds. Create 20 mile safe zone. Likewise, do not want the Kurds to provoke Turkey."
Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group, called that earlier tweet the "Most extraordinary direct threat I've ever seen from a President against a NATO ally," while Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, opined on Twitter that "historians are going to point to this Trump tweet as when US lost #Turkey." Nasr added that the "US is losing credibility" in the Middle East due to statements like this, and the "only assurance [the US] is giving the region is that it is now a force for instability."
Soner Cagaptay, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was more sanguine. In an email to Global Briefing, he wrote that "Trump's tweet is actually full of good news" because it suggests there is a shared goal of preventing conflict between Turkey and US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria. He noted that Turkey's "sober response" to the tweet signaled "Ankara's desire to reach a deal with the US in eastern Syria, including a safe zone to be patrolled by Turkey." | | Chinese Capital Finds New Homes | | Chinese foreign direct investment in the US has taken a nosedive, according to a new analysis by Baker McKenzie and the Rhodium Group. Investment, which had already fallen from $46 billion in 2016 to $29 billion in 2017, fell again in 2018, this time to $5 billion, a drop of 83%. Meanwhile, Chinese investment last year increased by 80% in Canada, 86% in France, 162% in Spain and 186% in Sweden.
According to the analysis, the drop-off in Chinese investment into the US was "the result of continued restrictions on outbound transactions in China, tighter US foreign investment reviews, and a tense bilateral relationship between the two countries."
The trade hawks in the Trump administration may be glad that Trump's tough-on-China approach is helping to decouple the two economies. However, the administration's goal of shrinking the US-China trade deficit appears to be going nowhere, as China announced a record trade surplus with the US in 2018, up 17% from 2017.
| | Beijing, We Have A Problem | | China's recent feat of landing a rover on the far side of the moon is indicative of its ambitions to be a scientific superpower, suggests The Economist. Indeed, the country has been ramping up R&D spending and churning out science graduates, with results to show for it – "China published more high-impact research papers than America did in 23 out of 30 hot research fields with clear technological applications" over the last five years.
But China has a problem. "Chinese science takes place under the beady eye of a Communist Party and government which want the fruits of science but are not always comfortable about the untrammelled flow of information and the spirit of doubt and critical scepticism from which they normally grow," The Economist observes. That encourages dishonest behavior like fabricating data and makes it difficult to retain domestic talent or attract foreign talent.
"The idea that you can get either truly reliable science or truly great science in a political system that depends on a culture of unappealable authority is, as yet, unproven." | | | | | | |
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