Atlantic Sentinel

Category: Top Story

  • Demographics Worked in Clinton’s Favor — But Not Enough

    Hillary Clinton
    American secretary of state Hillary Clinton speaks at a summit of Pacific nations in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, July 11, 2012 (State Department/William Ng)

    Donald Trump’s election has thrown into doubt the assumption that Democrats were emerging as America’s natural ruling party from a confluence of demographic and social changes.

    I argued here last month that Trump’s candidacy was accelerating trends that could reshape the two-party system: the consolidation of lower-educated white voters in the Republican Party and the flight of college-educated whites and minority voters to the Democrats.

    Many — myself included — predicted that these shifts would hand the election to Hillary Clinton.

    That obviously didn’t happen. Was the theory wrong? (more…)

  • After Trump’s Defeat, Republicans Must Purge His Insurgents

    Donald Trump
    Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, October 29 (Gage Skidmore)

    If, as expected, Hillary Clinton humiliates Donald Trump in America’s presidential election next week, Republicans must quickly stamp out his nativist insurgency — or risk a hostile takeover by his supporters.

    The immediate fight will be in Congress, where Republicans could face two big decisions:

    1. Relent and allow Judge Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s relatively centrist nominee, to take Antonin Scalia’s place on the Supreme Court or dig in and risk Hillary Clinton nominating a more left-wing justice in January.
    2. Approve the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a strategic and trade initiative with eleven other Pacific Rim nations that most Republicans support in principle — assuming Obama sends it to the Senate for ratification — or refuse to give the president a final “win” on his way out and risk the treaty being scuttled as a result of Clinton’s stated opposition to it.

    In both cases, Republican lawmakers are torn between doing the right thing and appeasing their hard-right base, which is now in thrall to Trump.

    Principled conservatives should be able to justify approving Garland (Clinton’s pick would be worse) and TPP (there was a time when Republicans supported free trade and containing China).

    But principled conservatism is not what Trump and his movement are about. (more…)

  • Trump Accelerates Trends That Could Realign Parties

    American voters Davidson North Carolina
    Voters listen to a speech by Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine in Davidson, North Carolina, October 12 (Hillary for America/Alyssa S.)

    Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in the United States is accelerating three trends that could reshape the country’s two-party system: the consolidation of lower-educated white voters in the Republican Party and the flight of college-educated whites and minority voters to the Democrats.

    New York magazine reports that Hillary Clinton’s party is trading white working-class supporters for suburban Republicans, a trend that is reshaping the electoral map: Whereas Trump weans white voters away from the Democrat in Northeastern Rust Belt states such as Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Clinton is making inroads in the suburbs of Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.

    This is deliberate, writes David Wasserman in The New York Times.

    The Clinton campaign calculates that its candidate is likelier to prevail by “disqualifying” Mr Trump — using ads to make the idea of voting for him socially unacceptable in professional suburbs — among additional well-educated voters (in states like North Carolina) than by holding on to working-class voters tempted by Mr Trump’s populism (in states like Ohio).

    Trump’s misogyny, his sexism and the many accusations of sexual misconduct against him have made him particularly vulnerable among educated women.

    FiveThirtyEight reports that polls show an average 15-point gender gap in Clinton’s favor. That is double Barack Obama’s lead among women over Mitt Romney four years ago. (more…)

  • Mussolini on Fifth Avenue: Donald Trump’s Fascist Tendencies

    Donald Trump
    Donald Trump gives a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, February 27, 2015 (Gage Skidmore)

    Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has reminded more than a few commentators of fascist movements from Europe’s past.

    Christopher Buckley casually called the New York property tycoon the “Mussolini of Fifth Avenue” in The Spectator, Britain’s leading right-wing opinion magazine.

    Robert Kagan, a neoconservative intellectual, has argued in The Washington Post that Trump is unleashing passions that could prove the undoing of liberal democracy:

    This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century and it has generally been called “fascism.”

    Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who teaches Italian history at New York University, has explained in The Atlantic how Trump borrows from Benito Mussolini: from his bombastic pronouncements to his humiliation of opponents and outsiders.

    Many of these analyses — and you can find many more from left-leaning columnists — focus on the most overt similarities between fascists and Trump: the glorification of violence at his rallies, his demonization of outsiders, his disrespect for democratic institutions and norms.

    Here, I will focus on three deeper, lesser known tenets of fascism that Trump exhibits: his valorization of victims, his obsession with fitness and his legitimization of violence as a form of political action. (more…)

  • Americans Love Elections. Why Not Have More?

    The number of things Americans can vote on is bewildering to a European. From county coroners to judges to the head of state, there’s scarcely an office that’s not elected in the United States. Their counterparts in Europe are more often appointed by whichever government happens to be in power.

    In contrast to their proliferation of elections, Americans don’t usually have much choice. In most places, most of the time, they can only pick between a Democrat and a Republican. That’s not something Europeans would put up with!

    This year’s presidential election is even less of a contest. With the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, so unfit for high office, sensible Americans really don’t have a choice at all.

    A switch to European-style proportional representation, which would open up the political sphere to more parties, is unlikely. But there is room for reform inside the current American system. The trick is adding another layer of elections: runoffs.

    Some cities, like Minneapolis and San Francisco, already use something like this, called preferential voting or instant runoffs. Their voters list candidates for city council in their order of preference. If one candidate is a majority of voters’ first choice, he or she wins outright. But if no candidate has a majority, the one with the fewest votes is eliminated and so forth until one gains an absolute majority. (Which could mean that everybody’s second choice wins in the end. Better than having the last choice of two-thirds of voters prevail, as happened in the Republican primaries this year.) (more…)

  • Rousseff Leaves But Brazil’s Problems Remain

    Dilma Rousseff Barack Obama
    Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff welcomes her American counterpart, Barack Obama, and his family in Brasília, March 19, 2011 (White House/Pete Souza)

    By the end of this month, not only will the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio have come and gone; it is also likely that the left-wing Dilma Rousseff will have finally been removed from the presidency.

    Neither will occur without incident. Nor will they solve Brazil’s increasingly confused, complex and confrontational state of affairs, from a messy entanglement of impeachment proceedings to the possibility of fresh elections to the worst economic recession in Brazilian history. (more…)

  • Why They Come: The Balkans’ Desperation

    Belgrade Serbia
    Skyline of Belgrade, Serbia, August 22, 2011 (Serzhile)

    Much of the world’s attention is fixed on the refugee crisis emanating from the warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It’s a simple enough narrative for journalists: fleeing the bombs and bullets of the Islamic State or the Taliban, refugees swarm peaceful Europe, hoping for humanitarian salvation.

    But that narrative overlooks a key failure of European migration policy. This wave of migration is hardly new. On the continent itself are states that have long propelled their citizens to jump the borders for greener pastures in Western Europe.

    Three of Germany’s top five asylum-seeking countries of origin are not in the wartorn Middle East but rather the overlooked Balkans: Albania, Kosovo and Serbia. Macedonia, another Balkan state, ranks seventh.

    What’s happening here? Why are fellow Europeans from peaceful states fleeing to Germany? (more…)

  • The West Must Not Lose Greece the Way It Lost Russia

    Alexis Tsipras Martin Schulz
    Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and European Parliament president Martin Schulz answer questions from reporters in Brussels, February 4 (European Parliament)

    Belying the official line of Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras that a “no” vote in Sunday’s referendum about the latest bailout offer from the nation’s creditors was not a vote on whether or not to stay in the euro, political and economic realities now point inexorably toward a “Grexit”.

    Although a conciliatory tone was struck by the eurozone’s laggards Italy and Spain, the main anchors of the currency bloc are losing patience.

    In Germany, the rhetoric of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat grassroots has hardened substantially. One leading member of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria openly stated that Athens “chose a path of isolation” by rejecting what Merkel effectively presented as the final offer on the table. Even her Social Democratic partners admit they cannot see a path forward from here and that Greece must show greater flexibility than it has up to this point.

    Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte echoed the language of Berlin’s hardliners after the referendum results were announced, saying if Tsipras arrived at an emergency summit with proposals not closely resembling those its creditors put forward a week ago, the eurozone would be at an impasse. “There is no other choice,” he maintained. Greece “must be ready to accept deep reforms.”

    Finally, French president François Hollande, terrified of strengthening Marine Le Pen’s Euroskeptic forces but simultaneously concerned about giving a resurgent Nicolas Sarkozy too much political ammunition, abandoned his media-constructed role as a sympathetic go-between and issued a joint statement with Merkel demanding that Greece put out its own proposals to stay in the euro within two days. (more…)

  • American-Israeli Relations Need Historical Context

    And where is the great artist who will paint Ben Gurion’s face as he gave the order, and the face of Yitzchak Sadeh and the face of Galili and the face of the man who fired the artillery and the faces of the Palmach men and women who danced and sang in the cars returning from the slaughter, as they drove down to Ben Yehuda and Allenby streets in Tel Aviv.

    These words, written by Dr Israel Eldad in The First Tithe (2008), reflect on a particularly dark episode in the history of the State of Israel — one about which many Jews are ignorant and others have tried hard to forget. It happened on June 22, 1948 off the coast of Tel Aviv. Fighters of the Irgun, the Jewish underground in Mandate Palestine then led by future premier Menachem Begin, had beached a cargo ship, the Altalena, on a sandbar. The Atlalena had left France with desperately needed weapons and equipment for use in Israel’s month-old War of Independence — some 5,000 rifles, 300 light machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition.

    As chronicled by Thomas G. Mitchell in Likud Leaders: the Lives and Careers of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon (2015), as Begin and his aides reached the beach and sought to help volunteers unload the cargo, he was ordered to surrender and turn all weapons over to the authority of the Palmach under the ultimate control of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. After a brief standoff and with its surrender demand rebuffed, a Palmach detachment under the command of future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin opened fire and killed sixteen Irgun members.

    Many decades later, and a few years before his assassination, Rabin called a fellow member of the Israeli parliament a fascist. That member, and others, would stoically respond that, names aside, at least they never killed Jews. Although not conclusively proven, circumstantial evidence exists to link Ben-Gurion’s cabinet decision to sink the Altalena with a desire to eliminate Begin himself were he on board.

    Far from the idyllic image of a united people fighting for survival that has come down through the generations, the history of modern Israel has more often than not been one of betrayal and division. (more…)

  • Between Switzerland and Salazar: Rethinking American Foreign Policy

    If American foreign policy lacks anything, it is imagination. When 2016 presidential contenders speak about the rest of the world, their rhetoric is often superficial and predictable. It seems the country’s strategic thinking is succumbing to a creeping “Russification” — an obsession with neo-imperial greatness and jingoistic patriotism.

    Irrespective of party label, America’s political elites and resident media experts have framed the country’s position in the world as a straightforward choice between strength and weakness: Unless America retains a permanent and dominating presence in every significant region of the world, a dystopian “war of all against all” will reign. Into this inevitable vacuum will leap “bad actors,” such as China, Iran and Russia. The delicate stability that supports the global economy will be upended and the American homeland will be under relentless threat. The assumption is that America’s role in the world is fateful and irreversible rather than a matter of choice or an accident of history — what America’s often globally unaware public thinks of this is beside the point.

    America’s political values, and founding principles have become intertwined by consensus with its supposed role as the guardian of international peace and security. Those who pose the counterfactual, question the assumption of America’s inevitable internationalism or propose an alternative path for the nation’s foreign policy have been diagnosed as malicious, anti-American retrogrades whose weakness would see the country prostrate before vacuous evil forces that must be fought “there” to avoid having to confront them “here at home.”

    In this way, American liberty has been exchanged for the authoritarian tribalism of, among others, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. (more…)

  • South Africa and the Perils of Forced Union in the Middle East

    On May 31, 1902, Lord Kitchener, second-in-command of British forces operating in South Africa, met with Boer delegates to negotiate terms for an end to the Second Boer War. The Boers were represented by some of their most talented field commanders, including Koos de la Rey, the “Lion of West Transvaal,” and Christiaan de Wet, who fought at Majuba Hill — the 1881 battle that forced London to recognize Boer independence for a further twenty years.

    De la Rey and De Wet passionately argued over the necessity of surrender. According to an interpretation by Joyce Kotze in her novel, The Runaway Horses, De Wet maintained that the religious honor and dignity of the Boers would be destroyed and Boer commandos should fight to the bitter end. De la Rey, emotional, retorted, “Fight to the bitter end? Is what you are saying? But has the bitter end not come?”

    Whereas Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in order to avoid sending his shattered army off to fight as guerrillas, that was exactly what De la Rey had done so successfully for the better part of a year. His admission of the futility of continued resistance resonated; the alternative to surrender was, perhaps, to subject the Boers to the fate of the Jews after the Second Revolt: complete destruction and forced exile.

    The Second Boer War completed Britain’s domination of Southern Africa. The Boers had tried to get away from British rule since the Great Trek of the early nineteenth century and staved off Her Majesty’s government for many a decade. In the end, having absorbed the defeat of 1881 and crushed the Zulu in Natal, the British deployed half a million men to finish off the heavily outnumbered and internationally ignored Boers. The Boer delegation, functionally led by Louis Botha, acceded to the end of their people’s independence and swore loyalty to the British crown in exchange for the preservation of Afrikaans, a promise of future self-government and the avoidance of punitive economic measures in connection with the War.

    Perversely, Kitchener excluded from the de facto amnesty provisions of the Treaty of Vereeniging those Boers who engaged in “certain acts contrary to the usage of war.” This was the same Kitchener who supervised the wholesale destruction of Boer farming communities and herded thousands of women and children into concentration camps to die of starvation. Now, the Boers smashed, Britain wanted a quick settlement and to consolidate control of the gold and diamond assets which served as primary drivers of the conflict.

    Viewing the terms of Vereeniging in context, one could almost believe Britain had an on-off switch to prosecuting its colonial wars. To achieve victory, it was prepared to do almost anything, no matter how mendacious. Once secured, priority was given to a rapid exit. (more…)

  • Structural Impediments to Closer Indo-American Relations

    Barack Obama Naredra Modi
    American president Barack Obama speaks with Prime Minister Modi of India during a state dinner at the presidential palace in New Delhi, January 25 (White House/Pete Souza)

    American president Barack Obama’s recent visit to India supposedly saw the conclusion of some far-reaching agreements, including on defense cooperation, specifically missile defense, technology transfer and the operationalization of the dormant nuclear agreement Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, negotiated with India in 2005.

    All of this cements the image of India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, of being both a strategic thinker and a doer.

    But this is at the political level. At the operational level, things are controlled by a bureaucracy that remains deeply anti-American and is ingrained in leftist nonaligned thought. It may well fail to implement or even block the implementation of the latest agreements.

    The clearest sign of the Indian bureaucracy’s ingrained anti-Americanism came from the visible euphoria of officials who were part of the negotiations. This in spite of the fact that no public announcements were made. (more…)

  • Why Ukraine, Thailand Are Not Venezuela

    After the “color revolutions,” the European “indignados,” “Occupy Wall Street” and the “Arab Spring,” pundits are again trying to make sense of a wave of public demonstrations around the world. Parallels have been drawn between the protests in Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela but only a superficial analysis could conclude that these are equivalent.

    The advent of new social media and the easier ability for unorganized demonstrators to mobilize themselves has facilitated the emergence of such phenomena. However, the lack of political coherence often implies an inherent anarchic and unsubstantial character to such demonstrations. If all these protests have something in common, it is that they largely failed to achieve any meaningful change. The Arab Spring did shake things up but it is difficult to see how overthrowing the old regimes has managed to improve living conditions in the Middle East and North Africa.

    That said, in 2014, Venezuela’s is probably the most consistent and rational of the protests and it differs starkly from realities in Bangkok and Kiev when it comes to legitimate grievances as well as methodology. (more…)

  • Kayani’s Succession Follows Familiar Pakistani Pattern

    Pakistani general Ashfaq Parvez Kayani achieved rather little during his six years as army chief while his replacement this week brings back painful memories of past mistakes and missteps.

    Kayani was General Pervez Musharraf’s successor as chief of Army Staff. When he took over in 2007, he was hailed, as is usual in the Pakistani press, as a reformer, a realist, apolitical and whatnot. By Pakistani standards he certainly was, given that the country had its first peaceful democratic transition of power under his watch. He is also credited with unverified reports of midnight diplomacy between politicians and judges to stave off a constitutional crisis.

    But militarily he was no reformer. Pakistan’s green book, believed to be the core doctrine of army thought, retains its focus on India. This showed in Kayani’s conduct of counterterrorist operations. Pakistani troops remained just as deliberately ineffective in fighting the Taliban and other radical groups. (more…)

  • Middle East Embroiled in Its Own Thirty Years’ War

    Istanbul Turkey
    Istanbul, Turkey at dawn, November 11, 2012 (Brendan Corey Benson)

    The Middle East is in turmoil as the third act of the post-Ottoman period — the colonial period and the nationalist regimes like Gamal Abdel Nasser’s that succeeded it being the first two — moves forward in an unstable and bloody fashion.

    The events should remind observers of an extremely devastating conflict that once embroiled Europe called the Thirty Years’ War. That massive, and complex, conflict began with the notorious “Defenestration of Prague” in 1618 and was largely a religious conflict between Protestant German princes jealous of their autonomy and faith arrayed against the power of the Catholic Hapsburg rulers of Austria.

    The conflict metastasized into a great power conflict between the ruling dynasties of Catholic France led by the famous practitioner of realpolitik, Cardinal Richelieu, and the Hapsburgs of both Austria and Spain. (more…)