Michael Boyle's weblog
I don’t read my RSS feeds as much as I used to, and there are a lot of blogs in there that I haven’t actively followed in years – mostly from the very early days of blogging. One such blog is that of Anil Dash – he doesn’t write like he used to either!
However, he published a very good piece at the beginning of October that I think bears some attention: We’re (still) not being alarmist enough about climate change.
Part of the reason I want to document this period is because in no time at all, we’ll know this is true, but won’t remember the moment when the depths of this man’s ignorance was first uncovered.
I grant that until the election he didn’t have to know about this kind of information. But you think that you could take it for granted that before any call was scheduled, the President of the US would ask for and receive a full, detailed briefing to catch him up on little details like… the foundation of one of the most important parts of the US/Russia relationship.
But no…
Asked by Putin about the possibility of extending the treaty capping U.S. and Russian deployment of nuclear warheads — known as New START — Trump reportedly paused to ask his aides what the treaty was, two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official briefed on the call told Reuters.
He then told Putin it was one of a number of bad deals negotiated by former President Barack Obama and that it favored Russia, before launching into a conversation about his own popularity, according to the sources.
Source: Trump denounced arms-reduction treaty in Putin call: report | TheHill
Posted with no further comment. Really, what is there to say?
“This was the worst call by far,” Trump told Australia’s Turnbull.
This article laying out the Trump outlook on the world and approach to foreign policy could prove to be an important explanation and contextualization of just what’s going on at the moment.
At the moment, Jacksonians are skeptical about the United States’ policy of global engagement and liberal order building—but more from a lack of trust in the people shaping foreign policy than from a desire for a specific alternative vision. They oppose recent trade agreements not because they understand the details and consequences of those extremely complex agreements’ terms but because they have come to believe that the negotiators of those agreements did not necessarily have the United States’ interests at heart. Most Jacksonians are not foreign policy experts and do not ever expect to become experts. For them, leadership is necessarily a matter of trust. If they believe in a leader or a political movement, they are prepared to accept policies that seem counter-intuitive and difficult.
Or, Why Trump’s Executive Order on Refugees Violates the Establishment Clause
This piece originally appeared at Just Security. According to the Supreme Court, “the clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” But that command is apparently not clear enough for President Donald Trump. On Friday he signed an executive order on refugees that imposes a selective ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries as well as establishes preferential treatment for refugees seeking asylum who are identified with “minority religions” in their country of origin. In case there was any doubt about the latter provision’s intent, Trump told Christian Broadcast News that it was intended to give priority to “Christians” seeking asylum over “Muslims.” In both respects, the executive order violates the “clearest command of the Establishment Clause.”
