Category: Situational Awareness

Posts about the situation we are in–the good facts, the bad facts, and the terrible facts. Facts that, if taken on board, will let us “know ourselves, know the other side” and go on to win those hundred battles.

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From Tom Friedman’s Lips to God’s Ears

Thomas L. Friedman (N.Y. Times), The Israeli Government Is a Danger to Jews Everywhere:

Israelis, diaspora Jewry and friends of Israel everywhere need to understand that the way Israel is fighting the war in Gaza today is laying the groundwork for a fundamental recasting of how Israel and Jews will be seen the world over.

It won’t be good. Police cars and private security at synagogues and Jewish institutions will increasingly become the norm; Israel, instead of being seen by Jews as a safe haven from antisemitism, will be seen as a new engine generating it; sane Israelis will line up to immigrate to Australia and America rather than beckon their fellow Jews to come Israel’s way. That dystopian future is not here yet, but if you don’t see its outlines gathering, you are deluding yourself.

Fortunately, more and more retired and reserve duty Israeli Air Force pilots, as well as retired Army and security officers, are seeing this gathering storm and declaring they will not be silent or complicit in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ugly, nihilistic policy in Gaza. They have begun to urge Jews in America and elsewhere to speak up — SOS: Save Our Ship — before the widening moral stain of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza becomes irreversible.

First, the back story: Israel months ago destroyed Hamas as an existential military threat. Given that, the Netanyahu government should be telling the Trump administration and Arab mediators that it’s ready to withdraw from Gaza in a phased manner and be replaced by an international/Arab/Palestinian Authority peacekeeping force — provided that the Hamas leadership agrees to return all remaining living and dead hostages and leave the strip.

If instead, though, Israel goes ahead with Netanyahu’s vow to perpetuate this war indefinitely — to try to achieve “total victory” over every last Hamasnik, along with the far right’s fantasy of ridding Gaza of Palestinians and resettling it with Israelis — Jews worldwide better prepare themselves, their children and their grandchildren for a reality they’ve never known: to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state — a source of shame, not of pride.

Because one day, foreign photographers and reporters will be allowed to go into Gaza unescorted by the Israeli Army. And when they do, and the full horror of the destruction there becomes clear to all, the backlash against Israel and Jews everywhere could be profound.

Do not confuse my warning to Israel for a shred of understanding for what Hamas did on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas invited the Israeli response with its own mass killings of Israeli parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents, by kidnapping grandmothers and murdering kidnapped children. What society in the world would not see its heart grow cold by such brutality? Hamas deserves to be eliminated; Hamas is and always has been a cancer on the Palestinian people, let alone Israelis.

But as a Jew who believes in the right of the Jewish people to live in a secure state in their biblical homeland — alongside a secure Palestinian state — I am focused right now on my own tribe. And if my own tribe does not resist this Israeli government’s utter indifference to the number of civilians being killed in Gaza today — as well its attempt to tilt Israel into authoritarianism at home by moving to sack its independent attorney general — Jews everywhere will pay dearly.

Don’t just take that warning from me. Last week two respected former Israeli Air Force pilots, Brig. Gen. Asaf Agmon and Col. Uri Arad (who was a P.O.W. in Egypt during the October 1973 war), published an open letter in Hebrew in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, addressed to their colleagues still serving in the Air Force. …

I have three reactions to these open letters:

First, Amen.

Second, this is what being pro-Israel really sounds like.

Third, it is time for a similar movement calling out Hamas’s vile excesses, led by those who support Palestinian statehood and a peaceful resolution in Gaza. No one should accept Hamas prolonging this war to keep itself in power. Nothing would do more to pressure Hamas to accept a cease-fire than to be denounced across the world, on college campuses and in high-profile demonstrations from those who have been giving this hate-driven organization a free pass. This is what being pro-Palestinian really sounds like.

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Trump, China Policy, and Christopher Columbus’s Three Mistakes

N.Y. Times, DealBook Newsletter, Trump Bemoans How ‘HARD’ It Is to Strike a China Deal: Even the president appears to be doubting his strategy to win over Beijing, as relations fray between the trading partners.

Well, yeah. But the headline writer mistakenly assumes there’s a discernible goal toward which Trump has an actual strategy.

It is said that Christopher Columbus made three mistakes.

When he started out, he didn’t know where he was going.

When he got there, he didn’t know where he was.

When he came back, he didn’t know where he had been.

If you have no idea where you are going, it’s not meaningful to talk about your strategy for getting there. The ever insightful Ed Luce—who writes behind a pricey paywall—analyses the situation beautifully. 

Financial Times, Edward Luce, The great Trump riddle on China: No one knows what the US president’s desired endgame with Beijing really is:

Smart money says that Donald Trump’s upside is that you know where he stands. That may be true on his love of grift and loathing of immigrants and trade deficits. When it comes to Trump and China, however, economists should drop their caveat about “all things being equal”. 

Nothing to do with Trump’s China policy is predictable, let alone equal. Does he care about Taiwan? Let’s toss a coin. Does he want the US to decouple from China? Spin the roulette wheel. Trump’s supposed coming phone call with China’s President Xi Jinping is unlikely to lift our confusion. China is the ultimate Trump riddle. 

You can hardly blame the Chinese for being wary of talking to him. In late April, Trump told Time that Xi had called him — “and I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf”. No call had taken place. 

Any reading by Trump of Xi’s psychology should thus be put down to an AI-style hallucination. China’s foreign ministry accused Trump of “misleading the public”, which by today’s standards was polite. But we should not mistake Xi’s avoidance of “wolf warrior” invective for submission to Trump in the tariffs war. China is not the UK. The Chinese are as confused about Trump’s endgame as everyone else. 

If Xi does finally agree to a call with Trump — the first since he was inaugurated — the duelling Washington-Beijing readouts would make for interesting reading. It is almost impossible to imagine Xi agreeing to sit down for one of Trump’s reality TV Oval Office specials. That crapshoot has had big downside impacts on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and proved helpful to Canada’s Mark Carney and arguably to Britain’s Keir Starmer. Xi will never agree to run that gauntlet. Nor should he. 

The China-US component of Trump’s on-again off-again trade war is in a category of its own. The rest are based on exaggerated or imaginary complaints. The EU is no likelier to concede that its value added tax is a trade barrier than Canada will admit to exporting fentanyl to the US. Both are fictions. By contrast, China’s dual-use technological ambitions pose a big geopolitical conundrum to America. How Trump addresses those — whether he scraps Joe Biden’s “small yard, high fence” restrictions on semiconductor trade with China — matters to everyone. 

Yet we have little clue how much they concern Trump. The leverage goes both ways. The US could continue to restrict China’s access to AI technology and chips. But Trump has already relaxed some of this. Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang is an influential advocate with Trump of further relaxation. On the other side, China has a stranglehold on the world’s rare earth supply that is critical to a wide range of US production. Trump claims China has reneged on last month’s deal to resume its exports of rare earths to the US. In that pause, Trump reduced his 145 per cent tariff on China to 30 per cent. 

Will he ratchet tariffs up again if China does not lift its embargo? There is no way of knowing. Once upon a time Trump thought that the China-owned TikTok was a threat to US national security. Now he is keeping the social media app alive — with a possible view of a forced sale to a Trump business partner — against the wishes of Congress and the Supreme Court. As goes TikTok, so might go Trump’s China policy. 

The same confusion reigns over Taiwan. Many voices in Trump’s administration urge a hardline defence of Taiwan. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, said last week: “The threat China poses [to Taiwan] is real. And it could be imminent.” But few in the US or around the world take Hegseth seriously. Trump hired him to play Pentagon chief on TV. China is widely believed to be getting ready to launch an invasion of Taiwan by 2027. Hegseth could well have been speaking the truth. But you cannot assume he is credible. Trump has thus created a real national security risk by having a secretary of defence cry wolf. 

Trump’s China uncertainty is also a tax on the global economy. France’s Emmanuel Macron spoke for many last week when he said: “We don’t want to be instructed on a daily basis what is allowed, what is not allowed, and how our life will change because of the decision of a single person.” 

That was one way of putting it. Here is another from JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon: “China is a potential adversary . . . But what I really worry about is us.” Dimon was tactful not to name the US president. On the conundrum posed by Trump’s erraticism, China and the rest of the world are as one. 

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The Con Man Twice Conned

Washington Post, Trump blames conservative legal world and one of its leaders for tariffs ruling: The President called the prominent judicial activist Leonard Leo a “real ‘sleazebag’” and said the Federalist Society had led him astray in his first term.

N.Y. Times, Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks: The president has grown increasingly angry at court rulings blocking parts of his agenda, including by judges he appointed.

Executive Order, Addressing Risks from Susman Godfrey

The First Con

During Trump 1.0, because he thinks like a mob boss, Trump thought he was filling the federal judiciary with sycophants who would always rule his way, no matter about the facts, no matter about the law.

Federalist Society lawyers did a splendid job of conning Trump into thinking they were doing his bidding in their judicial selections.

Now, it has become apparent even to those of the meanest intelligence that most of the Federalist Society judges will not bend the knee to Trump, regardless of the facts, and regardless of the law. 

Because Trump is a person of the meanest intelligence, he has now figured this out, and is busy this week throwing a hissy fit. 

Specifically: where the law affords discretion to the President, it appears the Supreme Court will probably allow him to exercise that lawful discretion, even if he’s acting stupidly, in bad faith, with bad judgment, in ways that harm vast numbers of people. 

BUT … BUT … BUT there is good reason to anticipate that the Supreme Court, along with the majority of the lower courts, will not endorse Trump’s actions when he or his agents

  • unconstitutionally refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress,
  • unconstitutionally dismantle federal agencies, without congressional authorization,
  • unconstitutionally deprive persons present in the United States of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or
  • unconstitutionally use the powers they have—or claim powers they do not in fact possess—to punish people for the exercise of their civil rights, including free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom to petition for redress of grievances (and note that the latter freedom encompasses the freedom to file lawsuits).[1]

The Second Con

Throughout the four dreadful months of Trump 2.0, Team Trump has repeatedly—relying only on ipse dixit—asserted that it has legal powers that it does not actually have. It’s metaphysically possible that Trump has just acted without any legal advice at all. And it’s metaphysically possible that Trump has received legal advice, but decided to ignore it. That sort of thing does happen. 

But I don’t think he actually acted without legal advice, or that he decided just to ignore the advice he received. It seems much more likely that he got legal advice, but that that advice was deeply flawed. If so, why? Are Trump’s legal counselors merely incompetent—or, on the other hand, are they intentionally maneuvering him into a place where the Supreme Court tells him to back down?

Take the Susman Godfrey executive order cited above. Who the hell drafted that thing? Who the hell told him it was a good idea? Who the hell told him that the courts would go along with him.

Read it. It might as well say, in all caps boldface type, at the top of the page, “THIS EXECUTIVE ORDER IS AN ATTEMPT TO PUNISH CITIZENS FOR EXERCISING THEIR CIVIL RIGHTS, AND TO DETER THEM FROM DOING SO, IN VIOLATION OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.”

The current White House Counsel, David Warrington, is a Trump loyalist but has good credentials and has apparently never been subject to legal discipline.

Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, received her law degree from the number 98 ranked school in the country. Her lengthy Wikipedia biography reveals an astonishing number of regrettable circumstances in her legal career—notably, her exuberant embrace of the 2020 stolen election claim.

My thoughts: I don’t care that she’s the Attorney General. If you have the bad sense to ask Pam Bondi for legal advice, then you deserve what you get.

And then, of course, there is Vice President J.D. Vance—a Yale Law graduate who has come to believe Trump should just ignore Marbury v. Madison (decided in 1803, holding that “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is”). 

I don’t know whether anyone is duping Trump about the legal underpinnings of his various attempted usurpations—and, if anyone is doing so, who it is. As I implied above, maybe it’s just Trump gaslighting himself. 

I do know that if any lawyer told Trump he was likely to prevail on, for example, the Susman Godfrey executive order, then that lawyer needs to be disbarred, and that right soon.

And I suspect that when the dust settles and we learn the truth, the chief culprits are going to be Bondi and Vance.  And I think the evidence will show they conned Trump, intentionally misleading him about his chances with the Supreme Court–all with the goal of provoking a constitutional crisis.

[1] And then there are the tariffs. Trump purports to rely on a squinty-eyed interpretation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. As a matter of statutory interpretation and application, Team Trump has the legally weaker position, and his adversaries have the stronger position. But his legal case is not so ridiculous that his attorneys should be disbarred for asserting it. 

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Jerome Powell, Princeton ’75, Speaks to the Graduating Class

“Our great universities are the envy of the world and a crucial national asset. Look around you, and I urge you to take none of this for granted. When you look back in 50 years, you will want to know that you have done whatever it takes to preserve and strengthen our democracy.”