RUTHFULLY YOURS

While the clown car that is the Donald Trump campaign continues to careen around the stage, drawing outsize media attention, the serious candidates for the Republican nomination are putting forward serious proposals that deserve more serious consideration than they are getting. Just in the last few days, Jeb Bush has given a substantive speech on how he would handle Syria and Iraq, and Foreign Affairs published a substantive article by Marco Rubio articulating his broad foreign policy vision. (Full disclosure: I have advised both candidates on foreign policy.)

The attention devoted to Bush’s speech yesterday at the Reagan library has focused mainly on his criticisms of Hillary Clinton’s record on Iraq. I addressed that issue in a separate blog post. But what’s worth stressing is that this was only a short passage in a much meatier speech that laid out concrete proposals for addressing the problems of Iraq and Syria in a way that Clinton has not yet done.

On Iraq, Bush called for doing more to support not only the Iraqi Security Forces but also the Sunni tribes and Kurdish Peshmerga. He also called for sending tactical air controllers to call in air strikes and allowing our advisers to embed with Iraqi military personnel on operations in the way that Canadian Special Forces already do. He did not spell out exactly how much of a troop commitment he would make to Iraq, but he did say “more may well be needed” (beyond the 3,500 already there), even if he also said, “We do not need, and our friends do not ask for, a major commitment of American combat forces.”

On Syria, he called for expanded efforts to train and equip moderate rebels, creating “multiple safe zones,” and a no-fly zone. The last point is especially important. Bush spelled out the importance of a no-fly zone: “Enforce that no-fly zone, and we’ll stop the regime’s bombing raids that kill helpless civilians. It could also keep Iranian flights from resupplying the regime, Hizballah, and other bad actors. A no-fly zone is a critical strategic step to cut off Assad, counter Iranian influence, keep the pressure on for a settlement, and prevent more needless death in a country that has seen so much of it.” Those arguments are strong ones, but even though a no-fly zone has been on the drawing board of years, Obama has never pulled the trigger. Bush said he would. That’s an important commitment.

Jeb Bush caused some consternation among Democrats by suggesting that Hillary Clinton bears some of the blame for the dire situation that Iraq finds itself in today. In a larger foreign policy speech at the Reagan Library, Bush said:

“So why was the success of the surge followed by a withdrawal from Iraq, leaving not even the residual force that commanders and the joint chiefs knew was necessary? That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill – and that Iran has exploited to the full as well. ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat. And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this? Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge, then joined in claiming credit for its success, then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away. In all her record-setting travels, she stopped by Iraq exactly one time.”

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) renewed his call for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would “make it easier for workers to join unions.”

“There are millions of workers in this country, not everyone, but millions of workers who want to join a union but are unable to do so because suddenly and mysteriously a worker active in the organizing effort suddenly gets fired because she was late three years ago and we understand that employers take people into propaganda sessions,” Sanders said at a Oakland, Calif., rally held by National Nurses United, a union that endorsed Sanders.

“We understand that employers threaten workers. ‘You want a union? Good. You form a union, we’re shutting down here and we’re going to China.’ We understand that it is not uncommon that when workers in fact go through all of these hoops and form a union and negotiate a first contract, employers refuse to sit down and honestly negotiate that contract,” he added.

Sanders said the Employee Free Choice Act, originally introduced in 2009, is a simple bill.

Two people were killed at an IKEA in Sweden by an assailant. Due to Sweden’s abysmally weak knife control laws, the killer was able to murder both of them with an unregistered blade.

A man and a woman were killed and a third injured in a knife attack at an IKEA store in the Swedish city of Vasteras on Monday and two suspects were arrested, police said.

While Sweden has strict gun control laws, it has no knife control legislation.

The candidate has taken to maligning opponents’ motives—but 57% of voters don’t trust her.

President Obama came into office promising to unify America, but he has made political discourse meaner and more cynical. Whenever Mr. Obama is playing a weak hand, he questions the motivations of those who disagree with him and mangles the truth to undermine any criticism.

Take the president’s recent statement that Republican opponents of his nuclear deal with Iran are making “common cause” with hard-liners in Tehran who chant “Death to America.” Or consider his warnings that those opposed to the deal are “big check writers to political campaigns” and “the same array of forces that got us into the Iraq war”—a charge that borders on thinly veiled anti-Semitism.

The EPA’s new anticarbon rule is full of redistribution to offset its harm to the poor.

President Obama says that critics of his plan to decarbonize the economy are “the special interests and their allies in Congress” repeating “the same stale arguments” about “killing jobs and businesses and freedom.” He adds that “even more cynical, we’ve got critics of this plan who are actually claiming that this will harm minority and low-income communities.”

Is he thinking of critics who work at the Environmental Protection Agency? Perhaps so, because multiple new antipoverty transfer programs are built into the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan. The fine print is there, for anyone who cares to look, 1,317 pages into the rule’s 1,560-page preamble.

The ordinary business of economic life goes on quite separately from forensic examinations of its innards. And it can be made reasonable sense of by anyone of inquiring mind provided theory does not obfuscate reality. Unfortunately, Keynesian obfuscation is pervasive
… that there may be a supply of commodities in the aggregate surpassing demand … appears to me to involve so much inconsistency in its very conception, that I feel considerable difficulty in giving any statement of it which shall be at once clear, and satisfactory to its supporters.

— John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy

If numbers of patients were to sicken progressively and dreadfully after prolonged medical treatment we might ask whether the treatment was any good. We might even ask whether the treatment was doing more harm than good. That’s medicine. Apparently, the same scrutiny is not applied to the practice of economics. If it were, we might ask how it was possible that many developed economies are suffering from high levels of unemployment; measured, for example, at over 11 per cent across the eighteen-country Eurozone (Lithuania has recently become the nineteenth). And this, so long after the cure for unemployment—injections of government stimulus expenditure to boost demand—was given theoretical imprimatur by the followers of John Maynard Keynes and prescribed by armies of economists employed by governments. It is surely time that old-fashioned common sense kicked in and we declared, after seventy-five years and more of assiduous application, that the economic medicine has turned out to be snake oil at best and hemlock at worst.

Friend —

You might hear some news over the next few days about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Because you are an important part of this team, we wanted to take a few minutes to talk through the facts — we need your help to make sure they get out there.

There’s a lot of misinformation, so bear with us; the truth matters on this.

Here are the basics: Like other Secretaries of State who served before her, Hillary used a personal email address, and the rules of the State Department permitted it. She’s already acknowledged that, in hindsight, it would have been better just to use separate work and personal email accounts. No one disputes that.

The State Department’s request: Last year, as part of a review of its records, the State Department asked the last four former Secretaries of State to provide any work-related emails they had. Hillary was the only former Secretary of State to provide any materials — more than 30,000 emails. In fact, she handed over too many — the Department said it will be returning over 1,200 messages to her because, in their and the National Archives’ judgment, these messages were completely personal in nature.

Conservative social media is a very depressing place these days. It’s not just all the people on the same side hurling hate at each other. It’s the fragmenting of a once united movement into candidate partisan groups that circulate talking points and fight culture wars against ‘outsiders’.

This isn’t the Tea Party. It’s little cults of personality around candidates. It’s cultural groups forming around people, signaling insiders and outsiders, the righteous and the infidels.

This isn’t about Trump. It’s about all the candidates who have attracted passionate followings. Conservative social media these days often consists of these partisans having it out.

I don’t know who the winner of all this is, but it isn’t going to be the things we believe in.

Like it or not, China will play an important role in Western Asia, because the imperative of energy security and the rollout of the “One Belt/One Road” require it to do so. As China engages with this unruly region, the seeming irrationality and self-defeating behavior of its minor powers are a source of endless frustration to China, which looks at Western Asia through the rational eyes of commercial interest, and offers investments on the grand scale that stand to benefit all of its states.

When we last spoke some months ago in Beijing, Turkey’s President Erdogan infuriated you. Turkey meddled where it had no competence—in nuclear negotiations with Iran, with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, with Hamas in Gaza, with ISIS in Syria, and with Uyghur rebels in China’s Xinjiang province. Not long from now, I predict, you will be furious at Iran’s meddling in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and perhaps Azerbaijan. Why, China asks, do the petty pretenders to empire in Western Asia risk their own well-being with adventures of this sort?