| | | | What the West's Busiest Train Station Says About Government Power | | New York's Penn Station is the Western Hemisphere's busiest transit hub, but it's also proof that too many people and groups can veto public projects, Marc J. Dunkelman writes in a Politico Magazine essay. As a result, nothing gets built.
Chronicling 30 years of failed efforts to rebuild or relocate the station, Dunkelman writes that developers, federal agencies, and city politicians have been able to "gum up the works." It reflects government's diminished power: In the era of Teddy Roosevelt, progressivism began as a movement to vest more power in technocrats to act in the public interest—but the left soured on executive authority in the 1960s, putting checks in place.
Now, Dunkelman writes, "the pendulum has swung too far," and public projects stall from New York to California, where an L.A.-to-San Francisco rail proposal collapsed. "The Trump era may not be the moment to extol the virtues of unchecked executive power," Dunkelman writes. "But Penn Station's story suggests that, for those hoping to achieve traditionally progressive aims, America's cultural aversion to power has gone too far." | | Fareed: It's Hard to Be an Optimist About America Right Now | | "I am an optimist who tends to see the story of this country as one of addressing its shortcomings and making progress," Fareed writes in his most recent Washington Post column. "Lately, it has been tough to maintain that sunny outlook."
As rhetoric grows extreme, and as executive power expands, Fareed writes, "America's greatest assets—its constitutional republic and its democratic character—seem to be in danger of breakdown."
US presidents can now order the executions of American citizens deemed to be terrorists, and the Trump administration has simply ignored congressional subpoenas. "People often ask themselves what the founders would think of America today," Fareed writes. "It seems to me that the greatest shock to them would be the incredible growth of presidential power. Congress and the courts are recognizable from their times; the White House is not." | | Will Iran's Protests Threaten the Regime? | | Iran has been rocked by protests that began after a hike in gas prices on Nov. 15; with government forces opening fire on demonstrators, the unrest has left at least 180 dead, by The New York Times' count. Today's protesters are of lower income than 2009's mostly middle-class "Green Revolution" protesters, Iran-based freelancer Amir Delshad writes for LobeLog: "This is very dangerous for the Iranian establishment," he advises, as they "have nothing to lose and no prospects of improving their lives."
Can the protests threaten Iran's revolutionary regime? Demonstrators have called for its end, but Delshad is skeptical, concluding that a "lack of leadership among the protesters, the absence of a potential alternative to the current Iranian system," fear of civil war, and the government's violent crackdown will keep the movement in check. On that final point, Amnesty International's Raha Bahreini shares with The New York Times some of the footage suppressed by Iran's Internet blackout meant to counter the protest movement, and some of it is violent and unsettling. | | Why A Cold War With China Is a Bad Idea | | China isn't the Soviet Union, Melvyn P. Leffler writes for The Atlantic—something the US should keep in mind. For one, the US and Chinese economies are integrated; for another, the "Soviets seemed to be absorbing whole countries, such as Poland." Not so, with China.
Leffler argues for cutting China some slack. After all, the US demanded similar respect when it emerged as a rising power. "To understand that China is acting like a normal state, we need only to look at our own history from the 1890s to the 1920s," Leffler writes. "In those years, the United States pushed relentlessly to force the British to make maritime and fishing concessions in North America. The U.S. insisted that London arbitrate disputed territory with Venezuela and renegotiated treaties that excluded Great Britain from a canal zone in Central America. The U.S. then intervened in places like the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua and took over their customs houses in order to prevent the British and other Europeans from intervening in nearby waters. Washington subsequently manipulated a civil war in Colombia, helped orchestrate the creation of Panama, and secured unilateral rights to build and fortify an interoceanic canal."
China's expansionism might make Washington nervous, but in Leffler's view, a new Cold War isn't the answer. | | Will Europe's Migration Crisis Return? | | Migration into Europe is nowhere near its peak levels in 2015 (111,000-plus arrivals to Mediterranean countries in 2019 were dwarfed by over 1 million four years ago), but James Blake writes for Foreign Policy that Europe should prepare for an uptick. Europe sought to close off arrivals from Libya, funding Libyan border efforts to keep would-be migrants on the other side of the Mediterranean, but sea arrivals into Greece (across the Aegean, from Turkey) have risen this year: 52,719 have crossed by boat so far in 2019, compared with 32,494 in all of last year, according to UN statistics. Migrants and asylum-seekers have surged into overcrowded Greek camps, leading to a dire situation, according to a Council of Europe human-rights watchdog.
"Along with the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, there is a growing realization that climate migration will result in a large influx of people from newly uninhabitable places all seeking to rebuild their lives," Blake writes. In the near term, Europe's governments "need to take small steps to prepare for the future." | | | | | | |
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