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hussyknee · 2 years

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Hussy what's the situation in Sri Lanka right now? Hope you're safe love ❤

Oh I'm quite fine, love, thanks for asking. 😊❤️The chaos seems contained to the capital. The rest of us are encapsulated in this tweet:

(alt text included)

Reply translation: "For real. This is like when the war was in the North. Without fuel there's not even a dog to be seen around here, not even to get a ride to the shops."

As for what the fuck is going on. *Deep breath* This is a very long but simple explainer (I hope) that is as much for my fellow Lankans trying to make sense of everything.

What the fuck is happening in Sri Lanka (as of 4:40pm 14 July 22)

This motherfucker, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, was supposed to hand in his resignation yesterday, after protestors stormed his residence, his office, the prime minister's residence. Two and half million people flooded into the capital until even the cops fucking gave up, signalling to him that it was the end of the road. Except the 20th Amendment to the Constitution that Gota and his stooges had forced through gives him so much power that he can neither be impeached nor removed at all without a voluntary resignation.

So he asked for three days to resign (read: shove as much money as he could into a suitcase and flee), during which he and his family did their damndest to leave the country. Except our people absolutely refused to let them, even with the military at his beck and call. Workers of two different airports walked out rather than process his documentation to board a plane. People waiting at the airports obstructed him getting on a flight. Ports wouldn't let his ship leave the harbour. The US rejected his visa application. Man finally got so panicked that he refused to resign unless the Prime Minister secured a way for him to get the fuck out of here.

Now the Prime Minister, Ranil W, used to be the Opposition Leader and the Rajapaksas number one enemy until he bungled his last stint as Prime Minister so badly that nearly his whole party walked out on him and he couldn't even win his own seat at the last elections. He's been something of a joke in Parliament throughout Gota's term, so when Gota unexpectedly handpicked him to be PM to succeed his brother who we forced to resign, it was a huge political upset. But it was a rather brilliant move that splintered the protests and successfully protected him from having to step down.

But just like the entire rest of his 45 year career, Ranil spent the last 7 weeks making a complete pig's ear of things until he's now somehow even more reviled than he used to be. But Gota's resignation would have meant he got to become President of the caretaker government, and being President had been the ambition he's been clinging to his whole career, like a barnacle of calcified spite and greed. So he was more than happy to find Gota a way out.

Finally the Air Force itself had to take Gota to the Maldives (the President over there is also a wildly unpopular turd) even though the Maldivian people launched a massive protest of their own in response. Maldives was only supposed to be a stop gap to his "final destination" (according to his office, and yes memes ensued) and this fuckwit still did not send in his resignation letter.

Meanwhile, massive demonstrations were taking place all over Colombo, demanding that Ranil also resign to make way for the caretaker government. This assclown instead deployed cops and troops to beat back the crowds, firing tear gas from low-flying helicopters. He also declared a State of Emergency (martial law) and a curfew. Problem was, that only the Executive President has the power to do any of that shit, so everyone was like "Mx'cuse you?" And he was like "ah yeah no belay that". Then the Speaker and PM were like "akshully the President called and said Ranil can totes be President while he's um, overseas" and the whole circus of curfews, troops and martial law was back on track.

People responded to that by taking over Ranil's office as well.

(Also the legal fraternity was in a tizzy because Acting President doesn't have the vested powers of Executive President. But Ranil's dreams were finally almost within his grasp at age 73, what was a possible lawsuit to crossing this off his bucket list.)

Ranil continued throwing a wholeass army at the protestors, insisting that he was trying to protect our democracy from Antifa ( he really fucking said that). At any other time in our history, this has resulted in a horrific bloodbath. But this time, we were in the heart of the city's administrative district, the poshest of neighborhoods with embassies lining the streets. And it wasn't just one minority or marginalized group; it was the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, Sinhalese Christians, Tamils Hindus, Tamil Christians, Muslims, Burghers, foreign nationals, lawyers, the entire media establishment, clergy - the whole damn country on his doorstep, and none of them were even hurting the cops (in fact some of them were even helping the cops and STF wash their own tear gas out of their eyes and giving them tea and biscuits once they gave up trying to hold the line). Ranil then called an All-Party Conference (Friday casual version of Parliament, and no we don't know why we have this either) and asked them to select a new PM. The entire lot of them were instead like "actually we want to you to fuck off" leaving him all hurt and confused. He said "okay fine I will do it just as soon as Gota resigns" in much the same way we tell our Mums we will clean our rooms after we finish watching this one cartoon.

But the hours counted down, the stroke of midnight came and went, and no resignation appeared. By the end of the 13th, we were left with two presidents, one speaker, and an Opposition who wandered in like Donald Glover turning up with a pizza box as though none of them even lived here idk.

(An assorted bunch of wannabe revolutionaries, Rajapaksa plants and a splinter group from an ill-advised demonstration by the socialist party had tried to storm the Parliament in the evening for some godforsaken reason. It's not even in session. The road to which is effectively a killbox and also near Army HQ, and predictably resulted in a hundred people injured and one kid dying from tear gas).

We woke up this morning to Two Presidents, One Country: Part 2. Ranil and PM had come up with an extremely sus "gazette" from the President, who was still sending conflicting reports of his whereabouts. He was headed to Singapore. No he's still in Maldives. No he's now headed to Saudi Arabia. What he was not doing was sending in his fucking resignation, leaving his clown monkey to continue wreaking havoc, and leaving us to follow his flight plan like my cat watching his feather toy zoom around his head. As of this afternoon, the Speaker was debating declaring that the President had vacated his duties and moving this shitshow along, except that opens up in-fighting about legitimacy down the line. Even the Chamber of Commerce asked Ranil to step down, which is hilarious because that's the body of the country's richest old business bros and they'd never done anything like that before. The Commanders of the Tri-Forces also asked Ranil to step down, which is less hilarious and more terrifying because the military is not supposed to interfere in affairs of state at all. It's like if your gun had opinions on who should be shooting it. At best it sets a terrible precedent, at worst it might lead to a junta (military coup of the government). Overall, it's easier to get a five year old out of a bouncy castle that's on fire than getting this butt monkey to fuck off.

Meanwhile the middle class and neoliberals are bleating about the People's Struggle being hijacked by the communist party and trying to start a democracy-face-spitting fascist commie rebellion anarchy movement, there is no fuel even for ambulances, people not at the protests are stuck home, distribution of fuel and cooking gas are being held up, the poor are quite literally starving and watching enraged at all the military vehicles and helicopters zooming around, and the only thing that's doing a roaring trade are the conspiracy theories and breaking news alerts of the Lankan Aunties and Uncles over Facebook and Whatsapp. Ranil, who has taken to declaring curfews early and often even though the protestors have so far not given (1) good goddamn, suddenly declared one in the middle of the day, when people were still at office, leaving the streets of the capital and commercial districts absolutely gridlocked. Anyone who has a medical emergency right now is as good as dead.

Here is our last update from the President.

(alt text included)

Wow you guys, imagine being under a lot of pressure.

(updates cont'd in reblog)

#sri lanka economic crisis #sri lanka politics #sri lanka protests #sri lanka #world news #current events #gohomeranil2022 #gohomegota2022 #victory to the struggle!#අරගලයට ජය!#knee of huss

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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What Would Happen if Trump Refused to Leave Office?

A peaceful transfer of power is necessary for American democracy to survive.

By Barbara McQuade | Published February 22, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted Feb 22, 2020

If Donald Trump is defeated in November 2020, his presidency will end on January 20, 2021. If he is reelected, then, barring other circumstances such as removal from office, his administration will terminate on the same day in 2025. In either of these scenarios, Trump would cease to be president immediately upon the expiration of his term. But what if he won’t leave the White House?

The American Constitution spells out how the transfer of power is supposed to work. Article II provides that the president “shall hold his office for the term of four years.” The 20th Amendment says that the president’s and vice president’s terms “shall end at noon on the 20th day of January … and the terms of their successors shall then begin.” Of course, a president may be reelected to a second four-year term, but under the 22nd Amendment, “no person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice.”

[ READ BELOW Read: Trump’s second Term]

For nearly 250 years, presidents have respected the law. Even when electoral defeat has been unexpected and ignominious, presidents have passed the baton without acrimony. In a sense, perhaps this is the central achievement of the American system: to have transferred power peacefully from one leader to the next, without heredity to guide the way.

That a president would defy the results of an election has long been unthinkable; it is now, if not an actual possibility, at the very least something Trump’s supporters joke about. As the former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tweeted, President Trump “will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media , et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.” A good troll though it may have been, Huckabee is not the first person to suggest that Trump might not leave when his presidency ends.

In May, the faith leader Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeted an apparent reference to the completed investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian election interference. “I now support reparations,” he wrote. “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.” Trump retweeted Falwell’s post.

One of Trump’s former confidants, Michael Cohen, has suggested that Trump won’t leave. In his congressional testimony before heading to prison, Trump’s former attorney said, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Trump himself has joked about staying in office beyond his term, and even for life. In December, Trump told a crowd at a Pennsylvania rally that he will leave office in “five years, nine years, 13 years, 17 years, 21 years, 25 years, 29 years …” He added that he was joking to drive the media “totally crazy.” Just a few days earlier, Trump had alluded to his critics in a speech, “A lot of them say, ‘You know he’s not leaving’ … So now we have to start thinking about that because it’s not a bad idea.” This is how propaganda works. Say something outrageous often enough and soon it no longer sounds shocking.

Refusal to leave office is rare, but not unheard of. In the past decade, presidents in democracies such as Moldova, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gambia have refused to leave office, sometimes leading to bloodshed. In 2016, Joseph Kabila decided not to step down after three five-year terms as the president of Congo, announcing that he would delay the election for two years so that a census could be conducted. His decision was met with mass protests in which 50 people were killed by government security forces. Still, he followed through and an election took place in 2018. He left office thereafter.

Elected officials in the U.S. have also refused to step down, albeit from lower offices than the presidency. In 1874, a Texas governor locked himself in the basement of the state capitol building after losing his reelection bid. The saga began when Republican Governor Edmund J. Davis lost the 1873 election by a resounding 2-to-1 ratio to his Democratic challenger, Richard Coke, and claimed that the election had been tainted with fraud and intimidation. A court case made its way to the state’s supreme court. All three justices, each of whom had been appointed by the incumbent Davis, ruled that the election was unconstitutional and invalid. Democrats called upon the public to disregard the court’s decision, and proceeded with plans for Coke’s inauguration. On January 15, 1874, Coke arrived at the state capitol with a sheriff’s posse, and was sworn in to office while Davis barricaded himself downstairs with state troopers. The next day, Davis requested federal troops from President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant refused, and Davis finally stepped down three days later.

In 1946, Georgia endured the “Three Governors Crisis,” when the governor-elect died before taking office. Three men—the outgoing governor, the son of the governor-elect and the lieutenant governor-elect—each claimed a right to the office. The state assembly voted for the governor-elect’s son to take charge, but the outgoing governor refused to leave, so both men physically occupied the governor’s office. The outgoing governor yielded when the governor-elect’s son had the locks changed. The state supreme court finally decided in favor of the lieutenant governor-elect three months later.

The closest thing to a refusal to leave office that the U.S. presidency has experienced was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s break with tradition by seeking a third term. Roosevelt rejected the norm set by George Washington, and followed by successive presidents, to step down after two terms. FDR was elected to a third and even a fourth term, but concern about a permanent executive led to the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951, limiting presidents to two terms.

If Trump were inclined to overstay his term, the levers of power work in favor of removal. Because the president immediately and automatically loses his constitutional authority upon expiration of his term or after removal through impeachment, he would lack the power to direct the U.S. Secret Service or other federal agents to protect him. He would likewise lose his power, as the commander in chief of the armed forces, to order a military response to defend him. In fact, the newly minted president would possess those presidential powers. If necessary, the successor could direct federal agents to forcibly remove Trump from the White House. Now a private citizen, Trump would no longer be immune from criminal prosecution, and could be arrested and charged with trespassing in the White House. While even former presidents enjoy Secret Service protection, agents presumably would not follow an illegal order to protect one from removal from office.

Although Trump’s remaining in office seems unlikely, a more frightening—and plausible—scenario would be if his defeat inspired extremist supporters to engage in violence. One could imagine a world in which Trump is defeated in the 2020 election, and he immediately begins tweeting that the election was rigged. Or consider the possibility, albeit remote, that a second-term Trump is removed from office through impeachment, and rails about his ouster as a coup. His message would be amplified by right-wing media. If his grievances hit home with even a few people inclined toward violence, deadly acts of violence, or even terrorist attacks against the new administration, could result.

Ultimately, the key to the peaceful transfer of power is the conduct of the outgoing leader himself. America has thus far been lucky in that regard. After voluntarily relinquishing the presidency after his second term, Washington took measures to demonstrate the peaceful transfer of power. He attended the inauguration of his successor, John Adams, and insisted on walking behind Adams after the ceremony to display his subservience to the new president. Through this example, the citizenry was able to accept that the power of the presidency now resided in its new occupant.

More recently, upon leaving office after a heated campaign, George H. W. Bush left behind a letter to welcome Bill Clinton into the White House on January 20, 1993. It concluded, “You will be our president when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you. Good luck.” Imagining such a gracious note from the current occupant of the White House to his successor is difficult.

But if Trump should fail in his final duty as president to transfer power peacefully, the nation’s laws, norms, and institutions will be responsible for carrying out the will of the electorate. Should those fail too, then the American experiment’s greatest achievement will come to a grinding halt, and with it the hope that a republic can ever be kept.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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BARBARA MCQUADE is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and co-chair of the Attorney General’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and National Security in the Obama administration.

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NOW WE KNOW WHAT KIND OF AUTHORITARIAN TRUMP ASPIRES TO BE.... Over the past week, Trump has showed his commitment to creating Kyiv-on-the-Potomac.

By Franklin Foer | Published February 14, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

Donald Trump’s obsession with Ukrainian corruption turned out to be genuine: He wanted it thoroughly investigated—for the sake of its emulation. The diplomats who testified in front in Adam Schiff’s committee explained and exposed the Ukrainian justice system. Their descriptions may have been intended as an indictment of kleptocracy, but the president apparently regarded them as an instructional video on selective prosecution, the subversion of a neutral judiciary, and the punishment of whistle-blowers who expose corruption.

Over the course of Trump’s presidency, his critics have speculated about the model of illiberal democracy that he would adopt as his own. After the past week—which saw the firing of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the revocation of the Justice Department’s sentencing memo for Roger Stone, and Attorney General Bill Barr’s increasingly heavy-handed control of the investigations into his boss—there’s less doubt about the contours of the state Trump hopes to build. He’s creating Kyiv-on-the-Potomac.

The House Intelligence Committee narrative featured a villainous bureau in Kyiv called the Office of the Prosecutor General. On paper, this department is akin to America’s own Department of Justice, but in practice, it acted more like an auction house where top government lawyers would entertain bids from oligarchs. These prosecutors have been integral to the maintenance and perversion of the system. Oligarchs would abuse the office to bring cases against old enemies; they also used the office to punish critics of their corrupt practices. And, in the most extreme example, one Ukrainian president weaponized the office against his primary political opponent: He actually locked her up. (It was Paul Manafort’s job, as a consultant to that president, to justify the arrest to the rest of the world.)

The United States has tried to push Ukraine away from this corrupt system. When Joe Biden bragged about how he conditioned U.S. financial assistance on the firing of the prosecutor Viktor Shokin, he was boasting about a legitimate accomplishment. Thanks in part to his efforts, Ukraine’s judiciary moved toward a system more like our own—at least more like the system that existed before William Barr entered the Justice Department—where the state shows no favor to its friends and no punitive malice towards its enemies.

There’s an irony to this tale. Just as the United States was succeeding in pushing the Ukrainian judiciary in a more democratic direction, it began plundering Ukraine’s recent past, borrowing its worst practices. The corrupt prosecutors who were displaced in the course of reform have reemerged as the conspiratorial figures whispering in Rudy Giuliani’s ear, stoking unfounded theories about Burisma and Biden. They urged Trump to exact revenge against his enemies, with the same malevolent prosecutorial intent and flimsy evidence that they might themselves have deployed.

At the core of liberal democracy, especially as it evolved in the 20th century, is the notion that a swath of the state should be preserved as a neutral territory. One of the constraints on political power is a governmental structure that removes politics from important tasks. This commitment extended well beyond insulating the judicial system. The government installed a layer of experts and civil servants, who sat below political appointees. These are people like Alexander Vindman, who supply facts and dispassionate analysis. They are the technocrats, so maligned around the Western world these days. They tabulate the data about economic growth so that an administration can’t concoct self-serving statistics about employment and production. They process foreign intelligence so that sycophantic aides don’t simply manipulate briefings to confirm the policy biases of the commander in chief. And they exist as checks on the machinations of political appointees, sensitive to any attempts to corruptly distort the government for personal benefit.

Conservatives have long waged war on this neutral state. George W. Bush’s administration bulldozed the CIA when its bureaucracy objected to his Iraq policy; it trashed the EPA when officials there sought to provide assessments of the environmental impact of proposals. The problem with Trump is that he is even less sensitive to the idea of neutrality than were his predecessors. He’s incapable of self-control and incapable of distinguishing his self-interest from the common good. So with the ejection of Vindman and other events of this past week, it’s possible to see Trump finally making his move against the neutral state. By punishing whistle-blowers so ostentatiously, he’s disciplining the bureaucracy to accept his corruption. He’s instigating the Ukrainification of American government.

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Our Founders Didn’t Intend for Pardons to Work Like This

The Constitution allows the president to forgive any federal crime, but just because he can does not mean he should.

By Jeffrey Crouch, Assistant professor of American politics at American University | Published FEBRUARY 21, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor and Celebrity Apprentice contestant who was imprisoned for trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. The president also pardoned the former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo Jr., the “junk-bond king” Michael Milken, and former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik, among others. Each person had some connection to the president, a fact that the White House press announcement on the decisions made clear. Trump seems to view clemency as a way to reward celebrities and please his supporters.

The country’s Founders did not intend for the clemency power to be used as a prize. Article II of the Constitution allows the president to forgive any federal crime, but just because he can does not mean he should.

[ Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s unpardonable challenge to the Constitution]

The Founding Fathers had their own ideas about how the process should work; Alexander Hamilton provided the most famous rationales for the clemency power. In “Federalist No. 74,” he noted how the president must be able to make exceptions for “unfortunate guilt”; otherwise, the justice system would be “too sanguinary and cruel.” Additionally, Hamilton pointed out that presidents may need to use clemency to quell unrest or rebellion and thereby “restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”

President George Washington pardoned two men charged with treason after the Whiskey Rebellion. On December 8, 1795, in his annual address to Congress, he said he was motivated to both show mercy and serve the public good. Washington’s use of these dual rationales set the clemency standard for his successors. Going forward, one or both ideas have implicitly undergirded most of the roughly 30,000 individual clemency decisions that have been granted by presidents one through 44. Each rationale has also been featured in a Supreme Court case: United States v. Wilson described a pardon as an “act of grace,” and Biddle v. Perovich described the pardon power as “part of the Constitutional scheme” and characterized clemency as a decision to be guided by “public welfare.”

Using clemency to address a larger societal concern, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson offered forgiveness to entice the Confederates to rejoin the Union. Harry Truman named a panel to recommend amnesty for Selective Service Act offenders after World War II. Both Jimmy Carter and his predecessor, Gerald Ford, offered amnesty to Vietnam War–draft offenders.

Presidents have also granted pardons and commutations as “acts of mercy” to individuals—many anonymous—for a variety of federal offenses. Most recipients applied to the pardon attorney’s office within the Department of Justice and, months or years later, successfully received a pardon or sentence commutation. Recent examples include Olgen Williams, whom George W. Bush pardoned in 2002 for stealing money from the mail, and Charles Russell Cooper, a bootlegger pardoned by Bush in 2005. In 2017, Barack Obama pardoned Fred Elleston Hicks for illegal use of food stamps.

Not all presidents have followed these rationales, though. History also shows that presidents—particularly recent ones—have abused clemency for their own personal or political benefit. In 1992, George H. W. Bush pardoned several Iran-Contra figures, including former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, effectively relieving Weinberger of the need to stand trial, a boon to Bush, who may have been called to testify. Bill Clinton offered clemency to members of the violent Puerto Rican nationalist organization FALN, a controversial decision that some said he made to gain Latino support for the political races of his wife and Vice President Al Gore. Right before he left office, Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive from justice whose ex-wife was a large Clinton donor. George W. Bush commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, sparing Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff a prison term. (Trump later pardoned Libby.) The presidents issued each of these clemency decisions after they were free from electoral consequences.

President Trump began by pardoning former Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal contempt of court, after Arpaio refused to stop police practices that amounted to racial profiling. Trump mentioned his intentions at a political rally before granting the pardon three days later. Since then, Trump hasn’t looked back. Along the way, he has favored a host of well-connected, famous, wealthy, or partisan figures for presidential mercy. To his credit, Trump has not hidden from the press, Congress, or other institutions when exercising clemency. He makes a decision and then takes the heat, often noting that his clemency grants counteract an “unfair” criminal-justice system.

Almost a year after Arpaio, Trump teased on Twitter a pardon for the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who had violated campaign-finance laws. He pardoned D’Souza that same day, and then made comments that shifted clemency speculation to the TV personality Martha Stewart and to Blagojevich.

Trump has also been swayed by celebrities. He commuted Alice Marie Johnson’s prison sentence after Kim Kardashian West visited the White House to advocate for her. He also pardoned the late African American boxer Jack Johnson in a grant pushed by the Rocky actor Sylvester Stallone.

The usual procedure for petitioning for a pardon or sentence commutation is far less showy than Trump’s current process. Typically, after waiting a minimum of five years, applicants go to the website of the pardon attorney; download, complete, and submit the appropriate form; and wait. After a lengthy review—sometimes years—the result is usually the same for everyone: a denial. George W. Bush granted only about 2 percent of petitions for a pardon or sentence commutation; Barack Obama granted 5.3 percent; and—as of February 7, 2020—Trump had granted less than 0.5 percent of clemency requests.

The former pardon attorney Margaret Love explains in her article “The Twilight of the Pardon Power” that one crucial reason so few clemency cases receive a positive recommendation is that “all but a handful of the individuals officially responsible for approving Justice Department clemency recommendations since 1983 have been former federal prosecutors.” In other words, because prosecutors in the pardon attorney’s office are reluctant to undo the work of their fellow prosecutors, presidents are rarely given a thumbs-up to pardon.

[ Garrett Epps: The self-pardoning president]

The traditional role of the pardon attorney has been basically abandoned by the Trump administration, after the office assisted presidents for more than a century. As The Washington Post reported earlier this month, “Former White House officials describe a freewheeling atmosphere in which staff members have fielded suggestions from Trump friends while sometimes throwing in their own recommendations.” Moreover, “all but five of the 24 people who have received clemency from Trump had a line into the White House or currency with his political base.”

Whether Trump is reaping significant personal benefits from his clemency decisions is unclear, but he does seem to enjoy the public’s reaction, even inviting two military clemency recipients onstage at a fundraiser late last year. With so many clemency grants to controversial figures like Arpaio, D’Souza, and now Blagojevich, he may be launching trial balloons to test public reaction to more serious pardons for his former associates, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn.

Along similar lines, Trump has twice tweeted about his understanding of the scope of the clemency power. In July 2017, he noted that he held “the complete power to pardon.” Roughly a year later, Trump tweeted that he had “the absolute right to PARDON myself.” Robert Mueller’s investigation and the impeachment trial are now both behind him. Still, it’s become apparent at this point in his presidency that Trump has used clemency to both gauge public opinion and stake out ground for a self-pardon, should he ever need one.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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JEFFREY CROUCH is an assistant professor of American politics at American University. He is the author of The Presidential Pardon Power and the editor of the journal Congress & the Presidency.

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WHAT DEMOCRATS AREN’T ADMITTING ABOUT TRUMP’S RECORD

The episodes in which critics’ predictions weren't borne out offer valuable lessons for Trump’s challengers, even if they still vigorously disagree with the moves the president has made.

By Uri Friedman | Published February 22, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

It’s 2020, and America is embroiled in not one but two catastrophic wars: one with Iran that has sucked in the entire Middle East, and another halfway across the world in North Korea sparked by Kim Jong Un test-firing nuclear-capable missiles that could hit the United States. It’s all the worse since the U.S. is waging both wars without allies, all of which have abandoned Donald Trump because of his incessant bullying.

Fortunately, this isn’t where we find ourselves today, but it’s what the president’s critics have been warning could occur if he carries on with policies that have shattered decades of conventional U.S. policy making. It’s not as if their concerns have no factual basis. The Trump administration really did come to the brink of war with Iran and North Korea. In neither case are the underlying tensions that got them there anywhere near resolved. America’s alliances are indeed in flux. But the fact that this is not our reality in 2020 is just as instructive as the fact that it could have been.

This pattern has recurred on several occasions during the Trump era: The president’s detractors foretell doom caused by one of his decisions, only to be proved wrong, and then nobody acknowledges that they got it wrong or admits that Trump’s policies have had some advantages.

Of course, just because some of these doomsday scenarios haven’t yet materialized doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually. A number of Trump’s actions have already inflicted serious damage and could have corrosive consequences that will only become evident over time. In some cases, Trump seems to have simply been lucky. A number of warnings, moreover, have proved right.

Nevertheless, as American foreign policy comes under greater scrutiny as part of this year’s presidential campaign, the Democratic candidates risk losing credibility with voters and undermining their policy prescriptions if they don’t reckon with the moments when they said the sky was falling and it wasn’t. Why should a voter be convinced that returning to aspects of the pre-Trump status quo is necessarily a good thing when the people advocating for that inaccurately diagnosed the results of Trump’s defiance of convention? The episodes in which critics’ predictions weren't borne out offer valuable lessons for Trump’s challengers, even if they still vigorously disagree with the moves the president has made.

[ Read: The Sanders doctrine]

As Charles Dunlap Jr., the head of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security, wrote for Just Security early in the Trump administration, Americans “need balance in our national security and foreign policy discussions before we don sackcloth and ashes and hoist our ‘The End is Near’ signs. True, we are in an era of change, which is what happens in democracies when a candidate runs on a platform of change and wins, and change can be disquieting to those who prefer the status quo. But how good was the status quo?”

Consider three emblematic episodes:

The War With Iran That Wasn’t

In the wee hours of January 2, shortly after news broke that Trump had killed the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike, Twitter pulsed with anxiety about #WWIII.

Enter the Democratic candidates: Bernie Sanders warned that Trump had just placed the United States “on the path to another” endless war, one that could again “cost countless lives and trillions more dollars.” Joe Biden declared that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox,” potentially bringing America to “the brink of a major conflict across the Middle East.” The U.S. was perched precariously on that brink, Elizabeth Warren argued, “because a reckless president, his allies, and his administration have spent years pushing us here.”

The calamitous war they envisioned, however, has not come to pass. They were right, though, that there would be devastating consequences. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq, leaving at least 109 American troops with traumatic brain injuries. The Iranians mistakenly downed a civilian airliner, killing its 176 passengers, and hostilities between Iran and the U.S. remain dangerously high. Tehran has cast off restrictions under the 2015 deal brokered by the Obama administration to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, though it hasn’t yet raced to build a bomb, as many of Trump’s critics predicted would happen when the president withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Had Trump stuck with the accord in the first place, Iran and the U.S. might never have found themselves on the precipice of war over Soleimani’s demise.

Nevertheless, Iran’s missile barrage was a relatively restrained response when measured against the blow of losing its most powerful military leader and the predictions made by Sanders, Biden, and Warren. Iranian officials thought “that after a series of escalatory [Iranian] military operations—the tanker attacks, the shooting down of an American drone, the Saudi oil strikes, rocket attacks on bases in Iraq by Iranian-backed militias—Mr. Trump would refrain from responding consequentially,” only to be shocked by Trump taking out Soleimani, The New York Times reported last week in a postmortem of the crisis. Trump’s decision, the paper noted, “might ultimately deter future Iranian aggression.” A former British diplomat similarly told my London colleague Tom McTague that the Soleimani strike opened up “the space for de-escalation” by scrambling the Iranian government’s “understanding of how the Americans might react in [the] future.”

Setting aside the vital question of whether Trump’s killing of Soleimani was legally justified or strategically wise (for candidates such as Sanders and Warren, the answer is unequivocally no), it’s worthwhile to investigate why Iran didn’t react the way so many assumed it would and what insights that yields for how the United States deals with adversaries. Trump, “accidentally or otherwise, has identified real problems, including Iran’s ability to act with relative impunity,” McTague concluded. The Soleimani incident also suggests that viewing every U.S. military action in the Middle East through the trauma of the Iraq War can distort our understanding of those events.

The War With North Korea That Wasn’t

Trump’s critics argued that war would break out as a result of the president’s assorted threats (unleashing “fire and fury,” totally destroying “Rocket Man”) to attack North Korea during his first year in office. After Trump engaged in a nuclear-button measuring contest with North Korea’s leader on Twitter, Biden argued that the United States was closer to a nuclear war with North Korea than it had ever been. Sanders and Warren helped introduce legislation to restrain Trump from going to war with North Korea. These critiques weren’t confined to the left. Republican Senator Bob Corker cautioned that Trump doesn’t realize that “we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.”

North Korean officials probably didn’t interpret Trump’s remarks as a signal that war was imminent. But the bellicosity of the president and his advisers put the U.S. military on high alert, alarmed America’s ally South Korea, and increased the risk that the parties could stumble into conflict, just as the president’s critics had warned.

That bellicosity, though, was also productive in ways that Trump’s detractors rarely acknowledge. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, told me that she leveraged her boss’s rhetoric and volatility to persuade China and Russia to support UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea, which helped pressure Kim into (thus far mostly fruitless) nuclear negotiations with the United States. Vincent Brooks, who commanded U.S. forces in South Korea from 2016 to 2018, told me that the president’s unpredictability, paired with new military maneuvers on the Korean peninsula, helped Brooks reestablish deterrence against North Korean provocations and create space for diplomacy. "Trying to bait a dictator who has nuclear weapons is not a way to advance diplomacy," Warren argued in 2017. According to two former Trump administration officials who were at the forefront of its North Korea policy during this period, however, it was one way to do so.

The lesson here isn’t exactly that future American presidents should bait nuclear-armed dictators, but rather that, in certain situations, unconventional behavior can unlock opportunities to achieve breakthroughs with enemies. Thae Yong Ho, one of the highest-ranking officials ever to defect from North Korea, told me that he thought Trump’s sharp break with the “very gentle” posture of past American presidents helped dissuade North Korea from escalating the nuclear crisis with the United States in late 2017.

The Very Anxious Allies That Remain Allies

Trump’s critics have likewise divined doom each time the president has raised questions about his commitment to defending U.S. allies and demanded huge hikes in their financial contributions to collective security. Biden, for example, has warned that if Trump is reelected, “NATO will fall apart.” Similar predictions have been made as Trump pushes for new arrangements in which Japan and South Korea would cover most of the costs of stationing U.S. troops in each country.

These alliances are indeed being tested more than they have been in decades, and all these partners are now engaged in more contingency planning for a world in which they can no longer depend on U.S. protection. But the fact that the alliances haven’t yet shattered—and by some measures, certain alliances have actually grown stronger during the Trump era—reveals two realities of America’s network of alliances that the next commander in chief will confront.

First, Trump’s tenure has underscored that the United States never really figured out its role in the world and national-security interests once the Cold War ended and its clout began to decline relative to that of rising powers. That debate is now under way in earnest, and U.S. allies are gradually grasping this and processing what it means for them.

Second, for all the upheaval of the Trump years, these partners have come to recognize that they ultimately don’t have attractive alternatives—teaming up with authoritarian powers such as China and Russia? Staking their security on a weak European Union?—to their alliance with the United States. Some allied leaders may not be especially enthused about collaborating with the U.S. these days, and their publics may be with them, but their national interests still dictate that they do. That means there’s more room to tackle sensitive issues such as burden-sharing and more resilience in the relationships than previous American presidents suspected. Kersti Kaljulaid, the president of Estonia, a NATO member bordering Russia and thus on the front line of fears about America’s wavering fidelity to the bloc, told me and my colleague Yara Bayoumy that it took Trump’s crass transactionalism (rather than Barack Obama and his predecessors asking “nicely”) to impress upon NATO members that they had to get serious about ramping up their own defense spending.

As Robert Blackwill of the Council on Foreign Relations noted in a 2019 assessment of Trump’s foreign policy—in which he memorably likened the president’s policies to “a large bowl of spaghetti bolognese dumped and spread on a white canvas”—many criticisms of the president’s conduct in the world are related to the manner in which he makes, announces, and explains decisions and to the policy incoherence within his administration. Rarely, however, is it acknowledged that “the president has disrupted a whole series of conventions in the international system, some of them undoubtedly needed.”

“Not a single U.S. politician,” Blackwill observed, “has a coherent and convincing set of policies to cope with this eroding world order, but Trump receives nearly all the slings and arrows.”

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TRUMP’S SECOND TERM.... It’s more likely than most people think—and compared with his first term, its effects would be far more durable.

By Paul Starr | MAY 2019 ISSUE | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

Of all the questions that will be answered by the 2020 election, one matters above the others: Is Trumpism a temporary aberration or a long-term phenomenon? Put another way: Will the changes brought about by Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party fade away, or will they become entrenched?

Trump’s reelection seems implausible to many people, as implausible as his election did before November 2016. But despite the scandals and chaos of his presidency, and despite his party’s midterm losses, he approaches 2020 with two factors in his favor. One is incumbency: Since 1980, voters have only once denied an incumbent a second term. The other is a relatively strong economy (at least as of now). Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who weights both of those factors heavily in his election-forecasting model, gives Trump close to an even chance of reelection, based on a projected 2 percent GDP growth rate for the first half of 2020.

So far, much of the concern about the long-term effects of Trump’s presidency has centered on his antidemocratic tendencies. But even if we take those off the table—even if we assume that Trump continues to be hemmed in by other parts of the government and by outside institutions, and that he governs no more effectively than he has until now—the impact of a second term would be more lasting than that of the first.

In normal politics, the policies adopted by a president and Congress may zig one way, and those of the next president and Congress may zag the other. The contending parties take our system’s rules as a given, and fight over what they understand to be reversible policies and power arrangements. But some situations are not like that; a zig one way makes it hard to zag back.

This is one of those moments. After four years as president, Trump will have made at least two Supreme Court appointments, signed into law tax cuts, and rolled back federal regulation of the environment and the economy. Whatever you think of these actions, many of them can probably be offset or entirely undone in the future. The effects of a full eight years of Trump will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

Three areas—climate change, the risk of a renewed global arms race, and control of the Supreme Court—illustrate the historic significance of the 2020 election. The first two problems will become much harder to address as time goes on. The third one stands to remake our constitutional democracy and undermine the capacity for future change.

In short, the biggest difference between electing Trump in 2016 and reelecting Trump in 2020 would be irreversibility. Climate policy is now the most obvious example. For a long time, even many of the people who acknowledged the reality of climate change thought of it as a slow process that did not demand immediate action. But today, amid extreme weather events and worsening scientific forecasts, the costs of our delay are clearly mounting, as are the associated dangers. To have a chance at keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius—the objective of the Paris climate agreement—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2030, CO2 emissions must drop some 45 percent from 2010 levels. Instead of declining, however, they are rising.

In his first term, Trump has announced plans to cancel existing climate reforms, such as higher fuel-efficiency standards and limits on emissions from new coal-fired power plants, and he has pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. His reelection would put off a national commitment to decarbonization until at least the second half of the 2020s, while encouraging other countries to do nothing as well. And change that is delayed becomes more economically and politically difficult. According to the Global Carbon Project, if decarbonization had begun globally in 2000, an emissions reduction of about 2 percent a year would have been sufficient to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Now it will need to be approximately 5 percent a year. If we wait another decade, it will be about 9 percent. In the United States, the economic disruption and popular resistance sure to arise from such an abrupt transition may be more than our political system can bear. No one knows, moreover, when the world might hit irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would likely doom us to a catastrophic sea-level rise.

The 2020 election will also determine whether the U.S. continues on a course that all but guarantees another kind of runaway global change—a stepped-up arms race, and with it a heightened risk of nuclear accidents and nuclear war. Trump’s “America first” doctrine, attacks on America’s alliances, and unilateral withdrawal from arms-control treaties have made the world far more dangerous. After pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear agreement (in so doing, badly damaging America’s reputation as both an ally and a negotiating partner), Trump failed to secure from North Korea anything approaching the Iran deal’s terms, leaving Kim Jong Un not only unchecked but with increased international standing. Many world leaders are hoping that Trump’s presidency is a blip—that he will lose in 2020, and that his successor will renew America’s commitments to its allies and to the principles of multilateralism and nonproliferation. If he is reelected, however, several countries may opt to pursue nuclear weapons, especially those in regions that have relied on American security guarantees, such as the Middle East and Northeast Asia.

At stake is the global nonproliferation regime that the United States and other countries have maintained over the past several decades to persuade nonnuclear powers to stay that way. That this regime has largely succeeded is a tribute to a combination of tactics, including U.S. bilateral and alliance-based defense commitments to nonnuclear countries, punishments and incentives, and pledges by the U.S. and Russia—as the world’s leading nuclear powers—to make dramatic cuts to their own arsenals.

In his first term, Trump has begun to undermine the nonproliferation regime and dismantle the remaining arms-control treaties between Washington and Moscow. In October, he announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. While the Russian violations of the treaty that Trump cited are inexcusable, he has made no effort to hold Russia to its obligations—to the contrary, by destroying the treaty, he has let Russia off the hook. What’s more, he has displayed no interest in extending New START, which since 2011 has limited the strategic nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States. If the treaty is allowed to expire, 2021 will mark the first year since 1972 without a legally binding agreement in place to control and reduce the deadliest arsenals ever created.

The prospect of a new nuclear arms race is suddenly very real. With the end of verifiable limits on American and Russian nuclear weapons, both countries will lose the right to inspect each other’s arsenal, and will face greater uncertainty about each other’s capabilities and intentions. Already, rhetoric has taken an ominous turn: After Trump suspended U.S. participation in the INF Treaty on February 2, Vladimir Putin quickly followed suit and promised a “symmetrical response” to new American weapons. Trump replied a few days later in his State of the Union address, threatening to “outspend and out-innovate all others by far” in weapons development.

The treaties signed by the United States and Russia beginning in the 1980s have resulted in the elimination of nearly 90 percent of their nuclear weapons; the end of the Cold War seemed to confirm that those weapons had limited military utility. Now—as the U.S. and Russia abandon their commitment to arms control, and Trump’s “America first” approach causes countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia to question the durability of U.S. security guarantees—the stage is being set for more states to go nuclear and for the U.S. and Russia to ramp up weapons development. This breathtaking historical reversal would, like global warming, likely feed on itself, becoming more and more difficult to undo.

Finally, a second term for Trump would entrench changes at home, perhaps the most durable of which involves the Supreme Court. With a full eight years, he would probably have the opportunity to replace two more justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 87 at the beginning of the next presidential term, and Stephen Breyer will be 82. Whether you regard the prospect of four Trump-appointed justices as a good or a bad thing will depend on your politics and preferences—but there is no denying that the impact on the nation’s highest court would be momentous.

Not since Richard Nixon has a president named four new Supreme Court justices, and not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has one had the opportunity to alter the Court’s ideological balance so decisively. In Nixon’s time, conservatives did not approach court vacancies with a clear conception of their judicial objectives or with carefully vetted candidates; both Nixon and Gerald Ford appointed justices who ended up on the Court’s liberal wing. Since then, however, the conservative movement has built a formidable legal network designed to ensure that future judicial vacancies would not be squandered.

The justices nominated by recent Republican presidents reflect this shift. But because the Court’s conservative majorities have remained slim, a series of Republican appointees—Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and most recently John Roberts—have, by occasionally breaking ranks, held the Court back from a full-scale reversal of liberal principles and precedents. With a 7–2 rather than a 5–4 majority, however, the Court’s conservatives could no longer be checked by a lone swing vote.

Much of the public discussion about the Court’s future focuses on Roe v. Wade and other decisions expanding rights, protecting free speech, or mandating separation of Church and state. Much less public attention has been paid to conservative activists’ interest in reversing precedents that since the New Deal era have enabled the federal government to regulate labor and the economy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conservative justices regularly struck down laws and regulations such as limits on work hours. Only in 1937, after ruling major New Deal programs unconstitutional, did the Court uphold a state minimum-wage law. In the decades that followed, the Court invoked the Constitution’s commerce clause, which authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, as the basis for upholding laws regulating virtually any activity affecting the economy. A great deal of federal law, from labor standards to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to health and environmental regulation, rests on that foundation.

But the Court’s conservative majority has recently been chipping away at the expansive interpretation of the commerce clause, and some jurists on the right want to return to the pre-1937 era, thereby sharply limiting the government’s regulatory powers. In 2012, the Court’s five conservative justices held that the Affordable Care Act’s penalty for failing to obtain insurance—the so-called individual mandate—was not justified by the commerce clause. In a sweeping dissent from the majority’s opinion, four of those justices voted to strike down the entire ACA for that reason. The law survived only because the fifth conservative, Chief Justice Roberts, held that the mandate was a constitutional exercise of the government’s taxing power.

If the Court had included seven conservative justices in 2012, it would almost certainly have declared the ACA null and void. This is the fate awaiting much existing social and economic legislation and regulation if Trump is reelected. And that’s to say nothing of future legislation such as measures to limit climate change, which might well be struck down by a Court adhering to an originalist interpretation of our 18th-century Constitution.

Democracy is always a gamble, but ordinarily the stakes involve short-term wins and losses. Much more hangs in the balance next year.

With a second term, Trump’s presidency would go from an aberration to a turning point in American history. But it would not usher in an era marked by stability. The effects of climate change and the risks associated with another nuclear arms race are bound to be convulsive. And Trump’s reelection would leave the country contending with both dangers under the worst possible conditions, deeply alienated from friends abroad and deeply divided at home. The Supreme Court, furthermore, would be far out of line with public opinion and at the center of political conflict, much as the Court was in the 1930s before it relented on the key policies of the New Deal.

The choice Americans face in 2020 is one we will not get to make again. What remains to be seen is whether voters will grasp the stakes before them. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s emails absorbed more media and public attention than any other issue. In 2018, Trump tried to focus attention on a ragtag caravan of a few thousand Central Americans approaching the southern border. That effort failed, but the master of distraction will be back at it next year. If we cannot focus on what matters, we may sleepwalk into a truly perilous future.

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PAUL STARR is a professor of sociology & public affairs at Princeton & winner of Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He is the author of Entrenchment: Wealth, Power & the Constitution of Democratic

Societies.

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Shangri-La Dialogue 2019 begins in Singapore: With rising West-China divide, rising US-Iran tensions, give attention to Asia defence summit

http://tinyurl.com/yybuwl55 Singapore: It’s precisely one 12 months since Prime Minister Narendra Modi put India on the forefront of a brand new India-Pacific coverage to assist include China’s aggression in East and Southeast Asian waters. And what an eventful 12 months it has been. It has been a 12 months because the divide between the liberal West and China has widened to a chasm. Since April, a brand new potential faultline has opened with rising US-Iran tensions, making the annual Asian defence summit in Singapore, the Shangri-La Dialogue, the main target of world consideration this 12 months. Delivering the keynote speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last year, Modi introduced a startling departure from India’s equidistance between aggressive large powers. He drew upon civilisational historical past to incorporate Indian Ocean waters “from Africa to the Americas” inside India’s historic sphere of affect. The rollout of the brand new India-Pacific coverage was finely coordinated, with the US, Britain, France and even German defence officers committing to sustaining the present “rules-based world order” within the congested sea lanes of the area. When contacted, the Indian Excessive Fee didn’t remark. Excessive Commissioner Jawed Ashraf didn’t reply to questions on the one 12 months of the India-Pacific coverage. The Chinese have been militarising islands claimed by neighbours and, armed with an ultra-modern navy and long-range missiles, are aggressively pushing for extra strategic depth in what they contemplate their yard. India’s position in these sea lanes has gone again many years, particularly within the Malacca Straits and past to Africa, the place the Indian Navy has patrolled to clear pirates and make sure the safety of commerce routes. The US Navy has, since WWII, patrolled the Asia Pacific waters to keep up the ocean commerce framework put in place by the Allies. The keynote speech can be made by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Friday night. AFP It’s not misplaced on the Chinese language that Modi has come again to energy stronger than ever since his path-breaking speech final 12 months. Additionally, his extra muscular defence coverage, which was a dominant theme within the latest nationwide elections, has gained a ringing endorsement from the Indian voter. This 12 months, the three-day Dialogue, attended by the Indo-Pacific defence ministers, navy officers and safety professionals, kicks off on Friday (31 May). Attending for the primary time can be Chinese language defence minister Common Wei Fenghe. Common James Mattis, a star speaker eventually 12 months’s occasion, has been changed by Patrick Shanahan, the performing US Defence Secretary. Not like Mattis, he’s not identified to say “no” to President Donald Trump. The keynote speech can be made by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Friday night. Singapore, like the remainder of China’s neighbours from Australia to Myanmar, has been struggling to reply to rising Chinese language smooth and exhausting stress, particularly since President Xi Jinping got here to energy in 2012. Lee’s speech is being billed as a historic one in Singapore’s bicentennial 12 months. Precisely 200 years in the past, a British colonial officer, Sir Stamford Raffles, remodeled a small fishing village right into a regional buying and selling hub that has since gone on to turn into a singular, affluent nation. For Singapore, whose small measurement limits its choices on both aspect of an enormous energy tussle for dominance, the stakes are excessive. This small city-state primarily is determined by commerce. So peace and belief between the US and China is greater than a matter of nuanced coverage: It’s life and demise. Lee’s keynote speech, throughout which he’ll name for higher US-China relations, assumes added significance as a result of he can be handing over energy to a brand new technology of management after elections both late this 12 months or the subsequent. This new Prime Minister would be the first in Singapore to not have been chosen by the legendary Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of recent Singapore. The Singapore patriarch died in 2015. Whereas Singapore has had astounding success by hewing to studied Swiss-like neutrality between superpowers, it owed so much to the late Lee’s towering persona and the respect he commanded the world over. Within the years since his demise, his successor once-removed and son, Lee Hsien Loong, has had extra combined success. Relations with China hit a low level in 2016 when Singaporean armoured autos, being transported again after a navy train in Taiwan, had been detained at a Hong Kong port. The next 12 months (2017), Lee was not invited to the inaugural convention of the Belt and Street Initiative, Xi’s signature infrastructure undertaking that serves China’s geostrategic goals. The Chinese language had been upset that Singapore was taking part in a number one position in making an attempt to get President Barack Obama to ink a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact, which was conceptualised to be the world’s largest free commerce pact that will exclude China. In the long run, although, Obama did not get it carried out. This was a setback for Singapore. Nevertheless, Lee was invited to the second Belt and Street Initiative convention in Beijing this 12 months, and Singapore performs a key position within the financing of BRI initiatives. Nevertheless it was not simply the failure to get TPP carried out. Underneath President Obama, Singapore and all different international locations within the area suffered another near-catastrophe: the regular decline of US navy energy, simply when China was transferring in. Obama’s reassuring “Asia pivot” turned out to be a specious phrase meant extra for a point out in legacy paperwork. The US navy, affected by enormous finances cuts, had fewer ships and fewer “freedom of navigation” passages by contested waters. The low level for the US Navy got here in 2017, when USS McCain misplaced 10 sailors in a collision with an oil tanker in Singapore waters. Tools had malfunctioned by lack of upkeep. Obama pulled again from the area, leaving small nations within the Asia Pacific to fend for themselves. Nations like Japan, regardless of a navy pact with the US, have since 2014 reacted to the Chinese language menace by exploring methods to strengthen their defences. Underneath Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Japanese authorities has made amending its pacifist Structure a prime precedence to allow it to counter Chinese language aggression within the East China Sea. Bigger nations just like the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia have tried to amend commerce offers with China to higher shield their sovereignty. Sri Lanka and the Maldives, beneath new governments, have reversed their pro-China insurance policies. Australia and Singapore have handed legal guidelines aimed toward discouraging Chinese language smooth energy from altering home infrastructure and public networks. President Donald Trump, nonetheless, has introduced a completely new set of issues. The commerce warfare with China has a direct impact on sentiment, although there’s a risk that some small nations might acquire at China’s expense when issues quiet down. All of it is determined by the place the chips fall. Within the meantime, there’s a rising navy rigidity. The US is pushing exhausting on each entrance. Huawei has been banned from supplying its merchandise to federal companies within the US. Related voices in the UK and Germany to maintain the Chinese language firm out of the brand new 5G community have turn into strident. The continuing Iran disaster complicates an already tense scenario. If tensions proceed into subsequent 12 months, world development, already forecast to say no by the year-end by the WTO, might stall. Alongside, navy tensions might simply splinter the world into two competing camps, with China, Russia, Iran, maybe Turkey, on one aspect and the west on the opposite. A scenario not not like that in early-20th Europe — then the seat of world energy — earlier than the Nice Conflict. At Shangri-La Dialogue 2019, China will provide its deliberative response to the pushback by democratic nations in opposition to its unsavoury strategies. Xi’s defence minister, who himself arrived in Singapore on Wednesday, can be on the convention to take heed to the cacophony of complaints. He will even reply questions from the viewers. Lots can be using on him: China might have overplayed its hand beneath Xi however the Chinese language can not afford to “lose face” by conceding this. At residence, there may be some disquiet brought on by the continued commerce warfare and Xi’s overbearing, personality-led fashion of management. As the primary post-Deng Xiaoping chief not anointed by the patriarch, there may be significantly extra stress on him. In addition to, the depth of his dedication to his ideology is really astonishing. Xi has not solely inscribed his “Thought’ into the Celebration Structure however has additionally claimed a Mao-like standing by declaring the beginning of a “new period” beneath his management. In a rigorously formulated speech to the occasion Congress in 2017, Xi declared that China’s first stage of growth, began by Mao, was now full. And that China, now in an “intermediate” stage, ought to educate its strategies to the world. And play an even bigger position in world affairs. Since he took over, the world has seen the form of position Xi had in thoughts. A way more energetic navy in search of to manage strategic areas, massive infrastructure loans to poor international locations by offers with generally corrupt leaders and eventual takeover of belongings and networks. And utilizing state-owned corporations and Chinese language residents overseas to spy on free market economies. The Chinese language by no means begin a warfare with out overwhelming odds of their favour — besides to defend their core Communist ideology. However it’s unknown to what extent Xi’s fingers could also be compelled by the highly effective PLA generals desirous to play with their shiny new toys. And whether or not the boiling tensions spill over into navy battle or not, subversion is an extended recreation the Chinese language have all the time performed. To struggle with out combating is the Chinese language manner. !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function() {n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)} ; if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '259288058299626'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.9&appId=1117108234997285"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); window.fbAsyncInit = function () { FB.init({appId: '1117108234997285', version: 2.4, xfbml: true}); // *** here is my code *** if (typeof facebookInit == 'function') { facebookInit(); } }; (function () { var e = document.createElement('script'); e.src = document.location.protocol + '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js'; e.async = true; document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e); }()); function facebookInit() { console.log('Found FB: Loading comments.'); FB.XFBML.parse(); } Source link

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