As Americans, we are not one in any way, shape or form.

We are diverse, inclusive, at times exclusionary, conflicted, self-righteous and, more often than not these days, divisive. In our fast-evaporating sense of who we are, or once were, we have left our beacon of hope for the world at large adrift in a sea of uncertainty.

It was once easy to tout the United States as the symbol of desirable values, a sort of Rhodes port of entry for democracy. Oh, how we have stumbled as a nation, and precipitously, in recent years.

We continue to be warm, insensitive, confused, confusing, at times at one with ourselves, at times just a human bunch of some 331.9 (as of a 2021 count) million souls trying to make sense of what we have been given, the United States of America, and our place in the world beyond.

We are, and have always been, far from being one, and way far from being perfect. Yet our Constitution and our daily lives once allowed us to be just that, imperfect, with guaranteed freedoms … at least until the next crazed teenager or over-armed adult decided to pick us off with an automatic shotgun one by one in some unsuspecting mall, school or Home Depot.

As Americans, we are easy to hate, difficult to love, and as often as not misunderstood. Where some of us attempt to break down barriers, those of us across the street, or across our national divide, have been happy to build borders, walls and barriers. At times, it would seem that we are completely unknowable, political pundits aside.

There are still many of us alive today who remember the torn country that we were during the Vietnam War. We remember how it felt to be American then. It was confused and confusing all at once, day after day. The rest of the world did not like us at all, to put it kindly.

So, give a thought for Russians now.

Just for a minute, put yourself in the skin of a Russian today.

Russia is right now the Big Bad Wolf in headlines worldwide, and justifiably so. Russians, after all, elected Putin president once again by a vast majority as recently as 2018. Yet, remember that the Vietnam War, our Vietnam War, was prolonged under 5 Presidents until it eventually folded in April 1975.

This is hardly good news for the people of Ukraine. For a World Power to recognize its mistakes can take decades.

Are Russians as conflicted as we were during the Vietnam War? I imagine they are. Are their opinions of their country fraught? They must be. Can Russians protest within Russia? Not at all. Thousands upon thousands have been removed from the streets and silenced in a way that is unthinkable here in the United States.

I was, in more ways than one, reminded of our United States – yes, those same conflicted United States above – on a recent arrival in Madrid.

The EU is still a much newer concept in co-living than our American Union. Within the European Union, things are even now falling into place. The EU as we know it today had its beginnings with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. The European Union is a work in progress. The United Kingdom was a reluctante partner for awhile, until they decided in 2019 to Brexit. However, their example is far from being the norm. Other countries are lining up to join the Union.

According to Wikipedia:

There are seven recognised candidates for membership of the European Union: Turkey (applied in 1987), North Macedonia (2004), Montenegro (2008), Albania (2009), Serbia (2009), Ukraine (2022), and Moldova (2022). Additionally, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Kosovo (whose independence is not recognised by five EU member states) are considered potential candidates for membership by the EU.^[1][2] Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Georgia have formally submitted applications for membership, while Kosovo has a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU, which generally precedes the lodging of a membership application.

 Ukraine sees things differently than the UK. Ukraine doesn’t have the UK’s options of history and geography. Putin didn’t decide to invade the United Kingdom, after all.

Putin choose a defenseless neighbor, still not a member of a nascent European Union, to try to exert his late-blooming and misbegotten manhood by invading a benign neighbor to prove somehow his macho worldview. As is now evident to anybody paying attention worldwide, Putin misjudged, and exiled his eternal reputation to the gutter.

Back to landing in Madrid. At Barajas, there were Russians dragging and pushing way-overweight bags along their way, any which way, far from Russia. That was understandable. Until it wasn’t.

For Russians with money, Madrid is just one of many escapes from the horror of the motherland to a neighbor that still extends a welcoming embrace.

The sight of Russians at Atocha, Madrid’s train station, toting Louis Vuitton bags filled with recent purchases, was unsettling. Louis Vuitton in times of war? Drinking beer, happy with their day of shopping, joking around, the Russians at Atocha disquieted me.

The disquiet continued.

On the Metro in Rome, I sat next to a bunch of loud Russians wisecracking among themselves, laughing and seemingly happy on their way to view the ruins of the Coliseum. They were oblivious to any discomfort they might have been communicating to their fellow passengers concerned about their country’s invasion of a helpless neighbor, Ukraine.

These Russians didn’t seem to care about the nuances of co-existence. Nuances be damned was what I, unfortunately, understood.

These joyous Russians were, for me, somehow complicit in Putin’s imperious view of the world.

We can do what we want, they seemed to be saying as they joshed around, just as their elected leader, Putin did, toasting a glass of champagne high in celebration of his invasion of Ukraine not even a month later.

I was disturbed by the attitude of the Russians that I saw in Italy and Spain.

Could it be that Russians, at large, really support Putin? I found myself wondering.

Could it be that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine might represent the true mindset of the majority in Russia?

I know, I know, that Russians are as diverse as we are. See above.

I know that many have been swept off the streets, disappeared forever.

Yet, could it be that Putin really represents Russia? I found myself thinking in Rome.

Could it be that Russians in general could care less about Ukraine?

Just maybe, I found myself thinking.

Is Putin the true champion of a Russia anathema to our Western view of civilization? That’s what I really wondered.

Could that be true?

Just maybe, I found myself thinking again.

The post Is Putin Russia, and Russia Putin? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 1959, Chuck Berry had a hit with a song called Back in the USA, a rock ‘n roll propelled love anthem to America. The lyrics went:

Oh well, oh well, I feel so good today
We touched ground on an international runway

… New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearned for you
Detroit, Chicago, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge
Let alone just to be at my home back in ol’ St. Lou

.… Well, I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A.
Yes, I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A.
Anything you want, we got right here in the U.S.A.

Just about a decade later, in November 1968, the Beatles led off their White Album with a tongue-in-cheek riff on the East-West divide going on at the time, a track called Back in the USSR, a shout-out to Chuck Berry.

The Beatles lyrics went:

… back in the USSR
You don’t know how lucky you are, boy

Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR

Then the Beatles segued into a spoof of the Beach Boys – California Girls:

… Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout

And then back to:

… I’m back in the USSR
You don’t know how lucky you are, boys
Back in the USSR

The Beatles brought many new Russian fans on board with Back in the USSR, among them a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the very same thug now directing genocide against the people of Ukraine. But the Beatles were just messing around. Back in the USSR was not a love anthem to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had just invaded Czechoslovakia in August of that same year, 1968, and the Beatles were well aware of that. The song had its base in irony.

In a changed world, Paul McCartney later sang the song at a concert in Moscow’s Red Square in 2003, and Putin was in attendance. At that Red Square concert, everywhere you looked Moscovites were rockin’ and rollin,’ happy as hell that they were being acknowledged by McCartney. Putin was deadpan, perhaps already fixated on how he might recreate the empire that the Beatles had satirized and that McCartney was now flaunting right in front of him in Moscow. Putin was not amused by the irony.

All water under the bridge now that Comrade Vlad has directed his military might to invade and attempt to choke off life in Ukraine.

Despite the passage of time, inter-connected world economies, the acceptance of Russia as a partner, glasnost, the internet, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and Twitter, here we are looking at an East-West divide, the likes of which we never imagined possible at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century.

And what the fu .. why (expletive removed)?

Well, just maybe because Putin, going about his daily life as a dictator par excellence in Russia in 2022, has an ego even greater than Trump’s. Putin is mega-egotistical, eager for a mention in history equal to that of his heroine Catherine the Great, paranoiac in the extreme and, unfortunately for the rest of us, someone with a uniquely manhood-threatened view of civilization. He has his finger on a nuclear trigger, something that Stalin and Hitler never had. His mention in history, if the there ever is a history after this, is sure to be in the column of the latter.

Once, we might have imagined, in our innocence, that Paul McCartney knew what he was doing, penning a guitar-driven rock song that the world – Russia included – could twist-and-shout to.

Oh, how silly we were.

All the while, our real future was being decided in Comrade Putin’s mind.

Here in the USA, we were dutifully electing a new President every four years. Back in the USSR of his dreams, the de facto ruler of Russia since December 1999, according to Wikipedia, Putin was upending the last 22 years of history, consolidating power, readying his new Russia for the moment when he might recreate some semblance of his lost Soviet empire.

Soviet, you might just reasonably ask, What is that exactly?

Basically, Soviet is a synonym for Communist, an elected community council that makes decisions for a society, a country, no dissension allowed.

It’s a world vision that went out of favor in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved, an empire that consisted of none other than Russia, but also Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

In the world at large, we may have thought Soviet was forever gone from our reality, a thing of the past.

In 1991, the Soviet Union was replaced by something called the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Bush Administration at the time quickly recognized the independence of Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. And some of those newly independent states immediately understood their opportunity. Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, fast aligned themselves with Europe and the West, and over a relatively short period of time became NATO members.

And so Soviet was gone from the world stage, or so we wished ourselves into thinking.

Except, Soviet was not gone. Soviet had one major shareholder remaining.

That major USSR shareholder was not at all discouraged, put off or disheartened by past Soviet setbacks or failures, but in a cockeyed view of world politics, found himself not only the President of Russia, but capable of invading a previous ally to inflict unprecedented death, pain and destruction on Ukraine.

That shareholder’s name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

His goal?

To drag us all back to a pre-McCartney, pre-Beatles era, to a psuedo-utopia, a ghost empire that he has convinced himself he can regroup called the USSR?

What a blockhead, what a fu..-up (expletive again removed.)

Pardon my French.

The post Back in the USSR appeared first on Occasional Planet.

History is something that binds us all together, and that includes an unlikely pairing of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the affirmative action movement in the United States. To understand the motives of why Putin feels so possessively towards Ukraine and why affirmative action is central to the advancement of minorities, we must draw upon the history of both.

To comprehend why Putin is so interested in protecting his interests in Ukraine, it’s necessary to consider how since the time of Napoleon, more than two hundred years ago, Russia has repeatedly been attacked from its west. There have been three major incursions into Russia from other European countries. First was Napoleon from France in 1812. Second was Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914 and third was Germany again, this time under Adolf Hitler in 1941.

When the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, there was Russia and sixteen other states nearby republics. One of those sixteen was Ukraine, which was one of the founding republics in the U.S.S.R. Other republics that came to form a barrier of protection around Russia were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Estonia, Georgia, Kirghizstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (there were four others that came later).

What early leaders of the Soviet Union, including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, did was to form a protective shell around Russia. In some ways, it is similar to the United States asserting that it has control of the Americas (North, Central and South) through the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The U.S. has engaged European countries twice to “protect the independence of Cuba.” First was in 1898 with the Spanish-American War and then in 1962 in staring down Russia in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The key point is that both Russia and the United States have acted in ways to protect themselves from invasion. Each has formed geographic barriers around its borders. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, it left Russia in many ways unprotected.

For many years post-1989, the Ukraine had a government friendly to Russia. However, in recent years, Ukraine has become more independent and interested in developing closer relations with western Europe. Economic trade between western Europe and Ukraine has increased and Ukraine has also asked to become part of the western defense alliance, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

For Vladimir Putin and many others in Russia, this is scary. This is also not the way it should be according to the Russian playbook. Russia’s field of reference is the Soviet Union of old, in which Ukraine and other republics on its western flank protected it from western incursion, or western even influence.

In this light, it makes sense that Putin would want to take control of the Ukrainian government. In his mind, doing so would include the possibility of using military force to do so.

I am not asserting that NATO countries, including the United States, should just stand by and let Russia invade Ukraine without consequences. But it is important to understand that Russia has valid reasons to want to control Ukraine. That is something that is very different from when they placed offensive missiles in Cuba in 1962, a country thousands of miles outside of their “sphere of interest.”

So, drawing upon history, it is important to understand from where Russia comes and why it is important for NATO countries to negotiate with Putin. One component of an agreement might be to include a declaration agreeing not to include Ukraine in NATO now, but to have a sunset provision whereby the issue could be reconsidered in twenty years.

In many ways, looking at Russia’s current desires is not that different from the ways in which many white people in the United States look at minorities. In 2019, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the history of African-Americans, beginning with the estimated first day that slaves from Africa arrived on the American shore of the colony of Virginia.

Lead author of the 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah-Jones, does a remarkable job of connecting the elements of slavery to current problems that African-Americans face. She is joined by a number of other outstanding writers who provide more detail on subjects such as how urban interstate highways have been intentionally designed to divide black neighborhoods, how the work of slaves on southern plantations provided need for investment and eventually the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange. The work of the Times is greatly supplemented by lessons from the Pulitzer Center.

Many white people are now getting upset about Critical Race Theory, which is simply a recognition of how contemporary conditions (good and bad) for African-Americans is a result of the history of blacks in America.

It is because of the discrimination that black people have endured in America, now for more than 400 years, that programs such as Affirmative Action have been needed, and still are. Affirmative Action is a policy or a program that seeks to redress past discrimination through active measures to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment.

Affirmative Action is not something that is limited to race. It is used for those who are economically disadvantaged, or for people with disabilities, or for women. It is necessary to balance the playing field.

White people need to understand the history of minorities, just as NATO countries need to understand the history of Russia. To be fair, the reverse is true in each case. On a global level, if we are going to live peacefully and with justice, it is important to understand one another’s history.

The post What Putin and Affirmative Action have in common appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Ukraine, for many Americans is way out there – somewhere in the nowhere land of Uzbekistan or North Korea. Ukraine is very far away from our daily lives.

And yet, it may be worth our while paying a little attention to what’s going on in Ukraine right now. It might just have consequences for all of us down the line.

A friend went home to spend Christmas with family in Venezuela – a much closer geography. He tells me that the dollarization of the Venezuelan economy is to all extents and purposes done. Motorcycle delivery guys can now make change for a $20 US bill with 20 US $1 bills. The bolivar is history. The surprise was that, in addition to paying for goods and services in dollars, in Venezuela my friend could now also pay with Russian rubles.

It’s a small, but pertinent, detail.

Venezuela, along with the rest of Caribbean, Central and South America, were once unequivocally considered to be under the umbrella of US purview. Let’s not forget the Cuban Missile Crisis as an earlier attempt to disrupt that way of the world. And yet, quietly, and somewhat menacingly to a distracted US, Russia has in recent years again begun to spread its tentacles into the economic heart of one of our neighbors immediately to our south.

How many rubles go about their daily lives in Venezuela? Nobody knows.

Food is once again abundant in Caracas, at least and perhaps not only, in its better neighborhoods. There are whispers of hope in the air. The dollar is now king. If you have dollars, you can not only just get by, but also even live well. The caveat, of course, is that you have dollars. Those millions of Venezuelans who had, out of necessity, to flee Venezuela in recent years are not in that column. After you force the poor, the needy and the undesirable out, you can aspire to a thriving society, apparently. Regrettably, we’ve seen attempts at that scenario before in our history. When you muscle any segment of your population out, you are veering far away from accepted norms of decency.

Almost suddenly, after years of waste, destruction and damage to the lives of its citizens and the infrastructure of the country, Venezuela is now signaling an economic shift. By the end of December 2021, the country had doubled its petroleum output from just a year before – not back to when Venezuela was a major force in petroleum production worldwide, but a long way toward a surprising and flag-waving celebratory candle cake for the Maduro regime.

Money is once again flowing, if not into Venezuela – at least not from the known Western world, then definitively round and about within its borders. What kind of money, again we don’t entirely know. So many Venezuelans have been sanctioned by the United States that now those very same Venezuelan citizens may just have decided to keep their enormous wealth home and plow it back into their country’s economy. Sanctions are flawed, and in this case, perhaps, counter-productive to US interests. Money needs a sanctuary. And just maybe, Venezuela is now a sanctuary for its own and odd money in general.

And in this repositioning of Venezuela, the ground has shifted.

Russia and China are now firmly ensconced, along with Iran, as Venezuela’s allies, protectors and supporters.

Why is that important?

Because this is happening in the Americas, just a little less than 2,000 miles south of Key West. This is not some distant Ukraine, Belarus or Uzbekistan.

For better or worse, for decades after WW2, it was taken as a given that the Americas were within the United States general sphere of interest and influence. We had sometimes benign and at times harmful relationships with nations within that domain.

Russia, on the other hand, had all of Eastern Europe, and not coincidentally, Ukraine and the Stan countries at its southern borders, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan et al to do with whatever it wished.

East was East, and West was West.

Except that many of the countries under Russian overview weren’t happy with that division. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, those nations grabbed at the chance of change. Ukraine wanted autonomy from its overseer, Russia. Ukraine wanted to shift its essential values westward. As did Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia and many of the former Russian affiliates.

And Europe opened its bosom.

Europe said, Come on in!

Ukraine was a big fan of the EU, and Ukraine said, Let’s do it.

And all was good, for a while.

Then came Putin, a Russian ultranationalist, a man obsessed with Russian power and superiority, a man with an exaggerated ego rarely seen in history – Thump not withstanding, a man focused on a Soviet-style view of the world as a greater Russia reinvigorated, a man who feels Ukraine’s aspirations as somehow a threat to his nationalistic manhood.

Cuba means nothing to Putin. He has done nothing to alleviate Cuba’s pain. Venezuela, on the other hand, sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves -greater even than Saudi Arabia’s, means a lot.

And if Ukraine can be European, maybe Venezuela can be Russian, if you will.

Welcome to Putin’s worldview.

In Venezuela, Putin gets to mess with America like never before.

Almost overnight in the Ukraine crisis now upon us, all bets are off.

On Jan 14th, the BBC reported that …

“… a senior diplomat in the Kremlin described two recent rounds of talks with the US and NATO as “unsuccessful.” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who led negotiations with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, said he didn’t want “to confirm anything, won’t exclude anything here either”. When asked whether Russia might consider establishing a military presence in Washington’s backyard, Mr Ryabkov said it depended “on the actions of American colleagues”

Russia is not excluding a presence in Cuba or Venezuela; quite the opposite, in fact. Russia is positioning itself for a major confrontation that may just include the Americas.

Putin’s focus is far beyond Ukraine.

So we might just think about projecting ourselves a little bit (or a lot) into our near future.

Russia invades Ukraine.

The US imposes unprecedented sanctions on Russia’s banks and ways of doing business with the rest of the world.

Russia reacts. Russia sends military equipment and/or troops to Venezuela and Cuba.

Then what?

The US sends troops to Colombia?

A young Colombian friend of mine was already thinking about that possibility in a conversation with his friends at lunchtime here in Bogotá today.

Those with upcoming military service are worried, he told me.

And so, Ukraine has come home to roost.

Ukraine is not so far away at all, as it turns out. In fact, perhaps Ukraine is already here.

So now what?

The post Venezuela: Ukraine comes home to roost appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It was another of the many “last straws” in the Trump era. Kyle Murphy, a senior analyst in the US Defense Intelligence Agency, went public with his resignation, appearing on tv news shows and

publishing an op-ed on the highly regarded Just Security site. Murphy said that what he saw in the Trump administration had “grave similarities between events in our country and the processes by which autocratic leaders have brought their countries to the brink of civil conflict and beyond. Each day, Trump’s approach looks more like the autocrats I warned about as an analyst.”

Here is the full text of his powerful op-ed:

I recently resigned as a senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency after experiencing firsthand the actions of U.S. government leaders to suppress nonviolent dissent during the recent nationwide protests for racial justice.

I have seen up close the president’s disdain for democratic values, and recent events should be put in the context of a continuous slide toward authoritarianism. In 2015, I was detailed to the White House as an apolitical civil servant on the National Security Council (NSC) staff. My term was set to conclude in January 2017, but I agreed to extend for two months at the request of NSC leaders to support an orderly transition between administrations. I briefed President Donald Trump before several introductory calls to foreign heads of state, and as is customary, I listened in and prepared the official transcripts. I was appalled by the ways he actively undermined the democratic principles we have long aspired to model and to advance globally.

In my years analyzing foreign political and military decision-making for senior policymakers, part of my job was to observe whether foreign governments protected their national security services from politicization and whether they committed abuses against their own populations. These are critical measures of the health of a democracy, and failures not only disqualify countries from U.S. partnership but also can be a warning sign that a country may play a destabilizing role in the world. Our laws enshrine a fundamental belief that a nation’s security forces should defend, not undermine, the core principles of democracy, and that they are not a leader’s personal tool to silence critics and retain power. Respect for this principle is one of the starkest lines dividing democratic and authoritarian leaders, and I see grave similarities between events in our country and the processes by which autocratic leaders have brought their countries to the brink of civil conflict and beyond.

Each day, Trump’s approach looks more like the autocrats I warned about as an analyst. I am alarmed by the decision to send federal forces to Portland and additional cities, over local objections, as well as the abusive approach of those forces to protesters in operations well beyond their normal jurisdiction. The use of intelligence elements to monitor citizens engaging in constitutionally-protected activity is deeply disturbing and strikingly similar to illegal domestic spying that prompted the Church Committee in 1975 and resulted in our modern intelligence oversight structure. Set against the backdrop of the dereliction and callous disregard for the more than 160,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19, I fear the president and his allies may choose further escalation in an attempt to avoid the personal consequences of defeat in November.

I saw several patterns repeated in the behavior of foreign leaders who lacked majority support and refused to respect their constitutions and constituents. They ignored or manipulated facts, rejected legitimate criticism, sought to disenfranchise opposition voters, invited foreign interference, and planted seeds of doubt about their own institutions and electoral processes. They also identified security elements willing to spy on their own citizens and to use force to put down protests calling for the leader to step down. Sadly, the similarities to current events in the United States are striking.

I have seen up close the president’s disdain for democratic values, and recent events should be put in the context of a continuous slide toward authoritarianism.

But some of the same situations I watched overseas give me reasons to be hopeful. I have seen several authoritarian leaders attempt but ultimately fail to subdue populations deeply committed to advancing democratic values – including Yahya Jammeh in The Gambia and Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso. In these cases, massive turnout for elections and non-violent protest as part of disciplined and enduring social movements were vital to resetting the course of countries on our current trajectory.

These basic acts of civic participation, undertaken by millions, help rebuild the foundations of democracy and bolster governing institutions against efforts to tear them apart. It is up to all of us to ensure historic and safe participation in this election, and to be prepared to peacefully reject any efforts to subvert the will of the people.

The post Senior analyst quits Defense Intelligence Agency, citing U.S. “slide into authoritarianism” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Sometime in early 2019 Heather Nauert, Donald Trump’s appointee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, will go before the Senate for confirmation hearings. If confirmed, Nauert, a former Fox News correspondent with no foreign-service or direct diplomatic experience, will join a long lineup of questionable and unqualified high-profile appointments by the president.

For observers following the trajectory of the erratic governance style of the Trump administration, Nauert will inevitably be seen as the latest in a long line of unqualified individuals to have been blessed (or cursed, depending on your perspective) by Trump’s toxic spotlight. If confirmed, Nauert will join the coterie of unqualified Trumpists in high-profile positions in and out of the cabinet, including Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and everyone’s all-time favorite, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Why does Trump appoint these people?

Some media attention (but perhaps not enough) has focused on speculation about the reasons why Trump surrounds himself with the glaringly unqualified and why, from an outsider’s point of view, his staffing decision making appears to be so fundamentally flawed. As the numbers of the unqualified and their destruction of the agencies they head continues to expand, the question of “why” should continue to be at the forefront of news coverage and discussion by our elected representatives.  After all, Trump’s appointees work for us, the American taxpayer, not for the president.

Is this deeply troubling pattern the result of Trump’s need to ensure the loyalty of the Republican Party by furthering the party’s decades-long dream to “starve the beast” and limit through incompetence, mismanagement, and budget and program cuts the effectiveness of government agencies—like the EPA, the Energy Department, the Consumer Protection Agency, or the Department of Education?

Or are Trump’s hiring decisions the result of a personal psychology that combines a need for self-aggrandizement and unquestioning loyalty, a terrifying dependence on the gut rather than the brain, the need to appear to be the smartest, most domineering, or most powerful person in the room, or, too often, a banal focus on whether an individual looks the part. Let us never forget (or forgive) that Vice President Mike Pence, who could succeed Trump if he were impeached or resigned, was plucked out of the Republican universe of potential running mates simply because he looked like a poster boy for the second in command.

Or is the explanation all of the above and more?  Perhaps the decades-long dream of the Republican Party to destroy or limit the effective operation of the federal government is nothing more than a conspiracy theory (although all evidence points to the contrary), and there is no back-door plan to limit the effectiveness of the federal government. Perhaps Trump’s staffing picks simply reflect a fundamental ignorance and refusal by Trump to school himself on the actual functioning of government, or a deficit of interest and lack of seriousness and respect for the responsibilities of the presidency, or the president’s inexplicable dependence on the advice of the talking heads of Fox News rather than the advice of his more schooled advisers. All such explanations should be setting off alarm bells with voters across America, no matter their party affiliation.

Qualifications: Nauert vs everybody else

But enough of speculation. Let’s return for a moment to the upcoming Senate hearing for the next unqualified appointee. I’m hoping that level-headed senators and their staffs on both sides of the aisle are doing their homework on Nauert’s lack of qualifications. I’m hoping they’ll be armed with the resumes and history of prior U.N. ambassadors. Those resumes will certainly illuminate the gulf between Nauert’s  lack of foreign-policy chops and the foreign-policy experience of most of her most recent predecessors.

My conclusion is this. The United Nations is not an organization to be taken lightly nor disrespected. America deserves a serious, experienced, and qualified ambassador to represent our interests and negotiate the most difficult of the world’s interconnected challenges. Being a quick study is not good enough. Putting on a good show after marathon coaching sessions and being a clever talking head is not good enough. In a dangerous and unsettled world, America needs an ambassador who has experience and years of grounding in the world of foreign affairs and diplomacy. America deserves more than just window dressing at the United Nations.

If you’re not yet convinced of why Nauert should not be confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., I encourage you to review the list below of her qualifications and those of some of her distinguished predecessors. Then draw your own conclusions.

Heather Nauert – Nominated by Trump

• Health-insurance consultant, Washington, D.C.
• Fox TV news anchor and presenter Fox & Friends
• ABC network correspondent
• Trump-appointed Acting Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, March – October 2018
• Trump-appointed State Department spokeswoman,  April 2017 to present

Nikki Haley – Appointed by Trump

• Representative, South Carolina House of Representatives
• Governor, South Carolina

Samantha Power – Appointed by Obama

• War correspondent
• Harvard professor
• Adviser to Obama’s National Security Council
• Senior director for Multinational Affairs and Human Rights
• Pulitzer-prize–winning author

Susan Rice – Appointed by Obama

• Member, National Security Council
• Member, State Department
• Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs
• Brookings Institute Fellow
• Author of policy papers on international terrorism, peacekeeping, global effects of failed states
• Senior foreign-policy adviser for presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Barack Obama

Zalmay Khalizad – Appointed by George W. Bush

• Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at Dept. of State
• Counselor at Center for Strategic and International Studies
• Consultant at U.S. State Department and Pentagon since 1980s
• U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan
• U.S. Ambassador to Iraq

John Negroponte – Appointed by George W. Bush

• Research fellow and lecturer – International Affairs at George Washington University, Elliot School of International Affairs, and Yale University
• Deputy Secretary of State
• First Director of National Intelligence
• U.S. Foreign Service
• U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, and Philippines
• U.S. permanent representative to U.N.
• Ambassador to Iraq

Richard Holbrooke – Appointed by Bill Clinton

• Special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Assistant Secretary of State for Asia
• Assistant Secretary of State for Europe
• Ambassador to Germany
• Brokered peace agreement in Bosnia

Bill Richardson – Appointed by Bill Clinton

• Governor of New Mexico
• Secretary of Energy

Madeleine Albright – Appointed by Bill Clinton

• Secretary of State
• Member, National Security Council
• Professor, Georgetown University

Daniel Patrick Moynihan – Appointed by Gerald Ford

• Advisor to President Nixon
• Assistant Secretary of Labor
• U.S. Ambassador to India

 

 

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Instead of grieving for the past, or focusing on whether world leaders laughed at or with President Trump at the United Nations, grassroots progressives should be searching for a new deal with the world.

During his visit to the UN in September 2108, the President’s stated vision and priorities for multilateral action got little discussion. While the majority of world leaders used their time at the UN dais to speak of “common threats” and “universal values,” President Trump, for a second year in a row, expounded on the urgency of patriotism, rejecting the multilateral process, the vaulted “ideology of globalism.” This approach is hardly surprising from a leader who campaigned on the promise of “America First.”

Two years into the Trump presidency, we are quick to dismiss the President’s rhetoric as mere theatrics. Yet, his vision of the world, greatly influenced by veteran war-hawks around him such as the current National Security Advisor John Bolton, currently set the tone of U.S. foreign policy. They shape America’s relations with its neighbors and overseas nations alike, and in turn the safety, well-being and prosperity of Americans at home.

Few question the current state of affairs on the foreign policy front. Many have accepted it as a part of the ongoing reality show that the American political process has become. Others grieve for the past administration which, in its dealings with foreign nations and multilateral institutions, typically called on America’s better angels. We would be better off searching for new ideas about alternative means of American engagement with the world — a sort of New Deal with the world.

Historians are quick to point out that the popular consensus on U.S. foreign policy has undergone little change following the fall of the Berlin Wall, regardless of the party in power. Rather, leaders have mainly prioritized policies with a singularly pro- war, surveillance, and exploitative business focus.

The progressive wing, the mainstream-kind, has rarely dared to challenge the status-quo. Often, they are busy with advocacy on domestic issues. There are also no ongoing robust discussions in the D.C. think-tank circles about alternative U.S. foreign policy practices. The funders for such projects are scarce. According to some reports, there are not even enough policy experts to staff administrations that deviate from the mainstream foreign policy consensus. The American foreign policy elite follows a cookie-cutter approach, namely because most of them came of age in the same institutions of higher-learning.

However, the blueprints for an alternative foreign policy are slowly emerging. They include proposals that would both honor and  advance the ideals of justice upon which the U.S. was founded, and would guarantee the well-being of others and the planet.

These policy proposals are being sketched out by scholars and foreign policy experts. They are also championed by a small group of politicians unafraid to take on the establishment. One of these people is long-term Vermont Senator and former Democratic-party nominee candidate Bernie Sanders.

Earlier this month, Sanders took the spotlight at D.C.’s premier international relations university to outline what some have dubbed, “Bernie’s New Internationalist Vision” for U.S. engagement with the world.

The ideas outlined were less of a battle cry to resist, and instead, a call for a new international movement “to create a decent life for all people.” Standing up to authoritarians of all stripes, controlling unchecked greed and eliminating corrosive corruption is a first step in this endeavor.

Sanders’ political vision has yet to be translated into specific policy proposals. Right now, it would only play well at political rallies. Other progressive elected or aspiring officials have yet to fully come around to this way of thinking and offer their take on how America should conduct its foreign affairs. Though, with a presidential campaign just around the corner, this too might change. The electorate and social movements, preoccupied with domestic resistance struggles, likewise have yet to show genuine concern for or interest in transnational debates. Though, their struggles have often been framed in transnational ideals and with the suffering of marginalized people across the world in mind.

Therefore, this is an opportune time for progressives to get more seriously involved and begin imagining new ways of U.S. engagement in the world. Similar to domestic battles for social justice, American dealings with the world should reflect the aspirations of grassroots progressives: blue-collar workers concerned about climate change; college students calling for justice in Syria; and religious leaders crusading for a reduction of nuclear armaments.

Ultimately, it is these people who will experience the most direct consequences of the country’s foreign policy, whether it’s when their loved ones are sent to war, or when profits drop due to ongoing trade wars, or when crops fail from the lack of sustained global action on climate change.

The post A New Deal for US foreign policy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Something monumental, and not in a good way, is going on in Venezuela. You might need to get out a map of South America for this one. Suffice it to say that we have never had a refugee crisis of this magnitude in the Americas before.

Just imagine for a minute that you are living in Venezuela right now, a country where the International Monetary Fund Is estimating a 1,000,000% inflation rate by  December. Is that even possible to imagine? A loaf of bread that today might cost 50 cents, if you’re lucky enough to find bread, will by the end of this year cost $5,000.

Cash has disappeared, doctors have fled, medicines are scant, children are dying, poverty and malnutrition are skyrocketing, crime is spiraling, electricity is intermittent (just last week residents of some neighborhoods in Caracas went 36 to 40 hours without power) and the ability of citizens to obtain a Venezuelan passport – the most essential document increasingly required to enter a neighboring country – has evaporated. By the end of the year, how on earth will you come up with $5,000 to buy a loaf of bread?

You can’t. And you won’t.

And now just for another minute, imagine that you also have aging parents who need medicines that are more and more difficult to find. You decide to cross the border with the meager pay that you have scraped together working two or three makeshift jobs, driving a taxi, working a lunch shift at a restaurant where basic ingredients are hard to come by, or standing in endless lines just to be able to buy something as basic as rice as proxy for someone who is somehow better off than you, someone who can pay you something minimal, and we are talking about cents not dollars – money most likely wired home from family abroad.

You cross the border to Cúcuta in Colombia only to find that your money has no value. Zero.

30 pills of the generic version of a common hypertension drug, Losartan, are available in Colombia for $15,500 Colombian Pesos, approximately $5 US, or for about a $1 if you have the most basic Colombian health care coverage. Arriving in Colombia last month and attempting to buy this drug for your Venezuelan parents and paying with the Colombian exchange rate for your hard-earned Venezuelan Bolivars, you would have found that 30 Losartan pills would cost you the equivalent of 15,500,000 Bolivars, or 1,085 times the average monthly salary in Venezuela, an untenable amount of money that you just don’t have.

The situation is unconscionable.

Unable to buy 30 pills of Losartan, only one among various other medications that you were hoping to purchase in Colombia, you give up. You head home to Venezuela to the expectant hopes and needs of your mother and father with not one pill to offer.

You are beginning to think that President Maduro, the former bus driver leader-in-chief now in charge of your country, might just be in charge of the genocide of his own people. And after a pause to let that sink in, you might just begin to believe that you are right.

Wikipedia defines genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.

Venezuelans as a national group fall within this definition, and Venezuelans are being systematically decimated by the policies of Maduro and his cohorts. There is a deliberate and systematic destruction of the Venezuelan people afoot at the behest of Maduro. And remember that Venezuela is a country just over 1,600 miles south of Key West, well within the historic umbrella of US interest and responsibility.

Venezuela is our neighbor just as Canada is.

In this unfathomable fall from grace for Venezuela, a fall from what was once the richest country in Latin America and a country still sitting on the largest petroleum reserves on the planet to 1,000,000% inflation by December, what makes sense? Damn little.

Despite US sanctions on Maduro’s honchos, and despite reports that Trump was gung-ho to invade Venezuela last August, the United States continues to import oil from Venezuela and thus still provides the money that keeps Maduro’s regime afloat.

Even now when the UN is estimating that more than 2.5 million Venezuelans will decide to, have to or need to leave their country by the end of this year. Colombia is already home to well more than 1 million fleeing Venezuelans. Right now, on pretty much every Bogotá articulated bus of its extensive Transmilenio system of transport, you are going to hear Venezuelans singing, begging, soliciting and asking for humanitarian help. Every day. On every bus.

Up to now, just this year, Ecuador has admitted more than 500,000 Venezuelans. And the situation just got more complex, with both Peru and Ecuador now admitting only those Venezuelans entering their countries holding the Holy Grail, a Venezuelan passport. A passport is a luxury item in Venezuela. Because of corruption and a so-called paper shortage within SAIME, the Venezuelan entity in charge of issuing passports, your passport may cost you, through pay-offs of up to $2,000 – money that you absolutely don’t have – and may take up to 2 or 3 years to process, and ultimately may never arrive. This is money and years to survive that you as a Venezuelan don’t have at your disposal.

And just as a matter of interest, how many Venezuelan refugees has the US admitted this year? Zero.

No passport. No money. No medicine. No food. No pretty much nada. Imagining yourself as a Venezuela citizen right now, how are you feeling about yourself, your prospects and your future? Pretty much screwed, I think.

As a Venezuelan, you are perfectly within your rights to think of doing whatever you can to leave this corrupt, disgraced, inhumane dictatorship that you live under. But what about your incapacitated parents? What’s to happen to them? Can you leave them and just go? Of course not.

What to do? Keep that map out. Many Venezuelans are now walking the length of Colombia and Ecuador to reach Peru, where they feel their prospects might be better. The journey can take months on foot. Venezuelans are camped out in parks and football fields in towns and cities along the way causing increasing xenophobic tensions in all of the countries affected by the Venezuelan exodus. Just last week, in Pacaraima, a Brazilian border town, makeshift Venezuelan encampments were attacked and destroyed. Venezuelans were chased back across the border. Days later, the numbers of Venezuelans arriving had increased three-fold.

Hunger will make you do terrible things. Hunger will make you take your chances – even where you are not wanted. But with aging dependents in Venezuela, you can’t even attempt the arduous journey to Peru, and then possibly on to Chile, where you might be able to sell Chiclets on street corners to send money home to your family. Chiclet money is real money in Venezuela.

The post Imagine yourself in the nightmare that is Venezuela today appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I was not looking forward to The United Nations Association Leadership Summit. What concerned me was not the seminars or panels with veteran US diplomats in DC. Rather, I was concerned with the events of the conference’s last day, when UNA members would head to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressional staffers. I confess that I am rather uncomfortable among politicos and upwardly-mobile, lanyard-wearing types; but it was actually the seminars, not the lobbying, that ended up being the most concerning for me.

The Congressional staffers we met with were attentive, or were at least able to imitate attentiveness. I even feel that I made some headway with the staff of the more reactionary and nationalist Congresspeople. Unfortunately, I am less certain that I made any headway in discussions with the UNA members themselves. During the conference, I asked several questions intended to challenge what I considered to be weaknesses of the organization, to mixed results:

On the Permanent Veto

Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering led a panel titled “The State of Multilateralism”. Ambassador Pickering served as the US Ambassador to the UN from 1989-1992. The topic of this panel was largely centered on the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the world community at large: The proposed cuts to the foreign aid budget (which represents around 1% of US GDP annually), Nicki Haley’s threat to cut aid to states that don’t vote with the US, and Trump’s general inability to speak coherently to other world leaders.

A frequent complaint from Ambassador Pickering was the use of the permanent veto. The veto is a function of the UN Charter itself: Any of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, Britain, France, Russia, China) can immediately halt any UNSC action by casting a vote in the negative. The ambassador cited the frequent use of the veto by Russia and China to protect its allies that commit human rights abuses.

I told the ambassador that in the course of writing my thesis, I found that the veto was in part the creation of Joseph Stalin, who wanted to continue his purges and ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe without UN interference. Given that the very inception of the veto was to allow for mass murder, why have it at all? Why privilege state sovereignty over human rights? The ambassador’s response was surprisingly satisfying: While he, as a veteran US diplomat, could not argue for abolishing the veto, he did articulate a powerful reform: Only allowing the veto in cases directly pertaining to the existence of the state. While this would not be enough to curb state-sponsored atrocities, it was still quite heartening to see a veteran US diplomat acknowledge that the current paradigm was insufficient.

On Climate Change

I was interested to attend the “Action on Climate Change” panel, as the problem of the environment is exactly what the UN was created for: a transnational issue that individual member states are incapable of solving on their own. Unfortunately, the ideas presented were rather small-bore and sometimes flat-out unhelpful.

I was especially annoyed by Elan Strait’s comments.  Strait is the Director of the US Climate Campaign of the World Wildlife Fund. He laid out a vision of climate change policy in which governmental agencies work with corporations like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s to “green” businesses and public institutions. Against this effort, he said, stands the administration of Donald Trump. He also claimed that he had no idea why climate change denial existed. I objected strenuously to this: It is corporations like Wal-Mart who fund far-right candidates, fueling climate change denial. Why, I asked, would concerned citizens team up with the wealthy, who fundamentally are the malefactors in this case? I articulated the belief that capitalism itself is the problem. He replied that while he understood my concern that corporations “greenwash” their policies while doing nothing, it was easier to work with such people than against them.

I found this profoundly unsatisfying. I was less concerned with “greenwashing” than I was with the coming collapse of global ecosystems and the mass death that could easily result from the same. Later, moderator Julie Cerqueira, Executive Director of the US Climate Alliance of the UN Foundation, mentioned something similar, quipping about “market forces.” To me, this kind of business-friendly gradualism in the face of absolute catastrophe seemed like fiddling while Rome burns.

On US-Backed Human Rights Abuses

One of the nights of the Leadership Summit culminated in a dinner at the United States Institute of Peace, an “independent institution devoted to the nonviolent prevention and mitigation of deadly conflict abroad.” I asked the Director of Public Education, Ann-Louise Colgan, if the USIP ever studied conflicts and human rights abuses committed by US-backed regimes. “We’re Congressionally funded, so probably not,” she said. I have to admit, her honesty was refreshing.

I really shouldn’t have been as frustrated with the above as I was. The UNA-USA is, after all, an American organization dedicated to advancing the goals of the UN and promoting a strong US presence within the UN system. Its governing ideology could best be described as liberal internationalism. UNA-USA President Chris Whatley described himself as a “liberal Republican”, for instance. There seemed to be underlying assumptions among many of the speakers, namely that the world-system established by the United States and the other allies in 1945 was fundamentally good. This includes the dominance of the great powers and economic inequality.

This means that the UNA-USA, and the UN itself, is rooted in the world-system, and not in any substantive effort to overthrow said system. My politics have moved significantly to the left since I began to serve in the UNA. Therefore, the redeeming qualities of the liberal, post-1945 world-system seem less appealing to me than they once did.

At least the Leadership Summit was better than UN Member’s Day, which I attended in 2017. This was even more nonpartisan and milquetoast than USA-USA 2018. Personnel at Member’s Day asked us to mass-text Nicki Haley to thank her for her service. I refrained.

But I maintain that my disappointment with the UNA-USA Leadership Summit was not simply my own petulance. Together, the attendees grappled with some of the world’s greatest challenges, and only yielded unambitious solutions. It’s difficult to fault me for not getting excited about carbon tax credits for mega-corporations.

The reader can take some solace that on the last day of the Summit, UNA-USA members split into several teams and spoke with congressional staffers about the importance of the US’s role within the UN. The Trump administration has frequently threatened to stop paying UN dues, and as of my writing this, has pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council. But despite the above critiques, I genuinely believe the US should strive for a seat at the table at the United Nations. It brings me a little comfort than UNA-USA personnel had an effect, however small, towards that goal.

Note: Adam Michael Levin is the Vice-President of the United Nations Association of St. Louis, MO.

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Four and a half years ago, on Sunday, February 23, the 2014 Winter Olympics ended in Sochi, Russia. Four days later, masked Russian troops without insignia took over the Supreme Council (parliament) of Crimea, and captured strategic sites across Crimea, which led to the installation of the pro-Russian Aksyonov government in Crimea.

Could Vladimir Putin do the same thing right after the World Cup ends in Russia this Sunday, July 15? He may not take immediate action, because over the next several days he will have meetings with none other than Donald Trump. Why should Putin take precipitous action without first playing with Trump’s brain a little more to ensure that the acting U.S. President knows what to say and do to affirm his unqualified support?

Trump likes to blame Barack Obama for allowing Russia to take over Crimea and to further encroach upon the Ukraine. However, Obama recognized the age-old theory of “sphere of influence.” Crimea and the Ukraine are in Russia’s orbit, and there is very little that the U.S. or even NATO could or can do about it militarily. What the West did under the leadership of Obama was to initiate a series of economic sanctions on Russia that were particularly painful, because they were specifically aimed at the oligarchs. In other words, the action that the West took hurt the Russians who are personally closest to Trump.

What, if anything, might Putin have up his sleeve after the spotlight of Russia hosting the World Cup dims? Putin is cagey, so it’s difficult to tell. But one possibility is that he will work to convince Trump that the U.S. no longer needs to be in Syria, a move that will strengthen the Russian connection with Bashar al-Assad and ultimately with the leadership of Iran. Putin needs to expand his sphere of influence, and Trump seems to have little interest in parts of the world that he does not see as challenging “America’s greatness.”

Putin also has his eye on the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They had been under Soviet control from the end of World War II until the shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. If Putin could neutralize their independence, he would once again put Russia on the doorstep of Poland. All of this illustrates how important NATO is to the West, and how risky and unpredictable an impetuous U.S. president is to the world.

It is possible that Putin will not take a dramatic political or military move soon. After all, since 2014, he has had remarkable success causing confusion in the West through cyber-warfare. He has infiltrated social media and mainstream media alike. With the three branches of the U.S. government under strict Republican control, very little is being done to blunt Russia’s cyber aggression.

But before the summer of 2018 passes, let’s not forget what we can learn from the recent history of 2014. Once the praise of Russia’s hosting a great international sporting event has passed, it is quite possible that Putin will ramp up his international aggression. Perish the thought with Donald Trump acting more and more like his puppet.

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