Saturday, June 08, 2024
America Cannot Repeat the Mistakes of the 1930s
On this day in 1944, the liberation of Western Europe began with immense sacrifice. In a tribute delivered 40 years later from a Normandy cliff, President Ronald Reagan reminded us that “the boys of Pointe du Hoc” were “heroes who helped end a war.” That last detail is worth some reflection because we are in danger of forgetting why it matters.
American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines joined allies and took the fight to the Axis powers not as a first instinct, but as a last resort. They ended a war that the free world’s inaction had left them no choice but to fight.
Generations have taken pride in the triumph of the West’s wartime bravery and ingenuity, from the assembly lines to the front lines. We reflect less often on the fact that the world was plunged into war, and millions of innocents died, because European powers and the United States met the rise of a militant authoritarian with appeasement or naïve neglect in the first place.
We forget how influential isolationists persuaded millions of Americans that the fate of allies and partners mattered little to our own security and prosperity. We gloss over the powerful political forces that downplayed growing danger, resisted providing assistance to allies and partners, and tried to limit America’s ability to defend its national interests.
Of course, Americans heard much less from our disgraced isolationists after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Today, America and our allies face some of the gravest threats to our security since Axis forces marched across Europe and the Pacific. And as these threats grow, some of the same forces that hampered our response in the 1930s have re-emerged.
Germany is now a close ally and trading partner. But it was caught flat-footed by the rise of a new axis of authoritarians made up of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. So, too, were the advanced European powers who once united to defeat the Nazis.
Like the United States, they responded to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine in 2014 with wishful thinking. The disrepair of their militaries and defense industrial bases, and their overreliance on foreign energy and technology, were further exposed by Russia’s dramatic escalation in 2022.
By contrast, Japan needed fewer reminders about threats from aggressive neighbors or about the growing links between Russia and China. Increasingly, America’s allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific are taking seriously the urgent requirements of self-defense. Fortunately, in the past two years, some of our European allies have taken overdue steps in the same direction.
Here at home, we face problems of our own. Some vocal corners of the American right are trying to resurrect the discredited brand of prewar isolationism and deny the basic value of the alliance system that has kept the postwar peace. This dangerous proposition rivals the American left’s longstanding allergy to military spending in its potential to make America less safe.
It should not take another catastrophic attack like Pearl Harbor to wake today’s isolationists from the delusion that regional conflicts have no consequences for the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation. With global power comes global interests and global responsibilities.
In 1941, President Roosevelt justified a belated increase in military spending to 5.5 percent of gross domestic product. On the road to victory, that figure would reach 37 percent. Deterring conflict today costs less than fighting it tomorrow.
I hope my colleague’s work prompts overdue action to address shortcomings in shipbuilding and the production of long-range munitions and missile defenses. Rebuilding the arsenal of democracy would demonstrate to America’s allies and adversaries alike that our commitment to the stable order of international peace and prosperity is rock-solid.
Nothing else will suffice. Not a desperate pursuit of nuclear diplomacy with Iran, the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism. Not cabinet junkets to Beijing in pursuit of common ground on climate policy. The way to prove that America means what it says is to show what we’re willing to fight for.
Eighty years ago, America and our allies fought because we had to. The forces assembled on the English Channel on June 6, 1944, represented the fruits of many months of feverish planning. And once victory was secure, the United States led the formation of the alliances that have underpinned Western peace and security ever since.
Today, the better part of valor is to build credible defenses before they are necessary and demonstrate American leadership before it is doubted any further.
Biden Rallies the Free World as Trump Rages About Hatred and Grievances
The 80th anniversary of D-Day on Thursday provided the contrast that should define the election.
President Biden went to Normandy and spoke about American greatness. Donald Trump went to Phoenix and called the United States a “failed nation” and a “very sick country.”
In France, Biden rhapsodized about “the story of America” told by the rows of graves at the Normandy America Cemetery: “Nearly 10,000 heroes buried side-by-side, officers and enlisted, immigrants and native-born, different races, different faiths, but all Americans.”
In Phoenix, Trump, invoked the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, saying Biden had orchestrated an “invasion” at the border as part of “a deliberate demolition of our sovereignty” because “they probably think these people are going to be voting.”
Biden hailed NATO, the “greatest military alliance in the history of the world,” and vowed to defend Ukraine: “To bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable. Were we to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here in these hallowed beaches.”
Trump hailed a modern-day tyrant, Hungary’s Viktor Orban (“strong man, very powerful man”), complained about “endless wars” and “delinquent” Europeans, and vowed to “spend our money in our country” — including by “moving thousands of troops, if necessary, currently stationed overseas to our own borders.”
Biden honored the heroes of Operation Overlord, who launched an invasion to liberate a continent knowing “the probability of dying was real.” Trump promised the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history.
Biden spoke powerfully about the threat to democracy then, and now: “In their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty. Now, the question for us is, in our hour of trial, will we do ours? We’re living in a time when democracy is more at risk across the world than at any point since the end of World War II, since these beaches were stormed in 1944. Now, we have to ask ourselves: Will we stand against tyranny? ... Will we defend democracy? Will we stand together? My answer is yes, and only can be yes.”
And Trump? Though he posted on social media about the “immortal heroes who landed at Normandy,” his message in Phoenix was full of self-absorbed thoughts on his “rigged trial in New York” and nihilistic commentary: “It’s all fake. Impeachment is a fake. The court cases are a disgrace to our country. Everything is fake.”
Biden’s speech was an important attempt to rally Europeans, and Americans, against the far-right nationalists who threaten the free world. “Isolationism was not the answer 80 years ago, and it’s not the answer today,” he warned. “The autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine, to see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked. We cannot let that happen. To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable.”
Such lofty ideals are foreign to Trump, who serves no cause greater than himself. He skipped a visit to an American military cemetery in France in 2018 because it was filled with “suckers and losers,” according to John Kelly, who was his chief of staff at the time. . . . . His message has only become more vulgar since then.
In Phoenix, he was participating in an event hosted by right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, who has said, among other things, that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and that “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act.” Trump called onto the stage former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom he had pardoned for criminal contempt of court related to his racial profiling and abusive treatment of migrants in Arizona.
Will Americans recognize their country in the dark and desperate portrait Trump painted? “Our country is falling to pieces,” he said, and if he isn’t returned to power, “the country is finished . . . You won’t have a country anymore.” Trump described a nation full of “crooked people” and serving as “a dumping ground for the dungeons of the Third World.”
Or will Americans instead choose to see a nation still striving to fulfill the higher purpose that Biden described? “In memory of those who fought here, died here, literally saved the world here, let us be worthy of their sacrifice,” he said.
Trump, though a convicted felon, is not in prison, nor is he likely to be when he’s sentenced next month. In reality, he undertook all of the suffering mentioned above of his own free will. But he sees great value in proclaiming himself a “political prisoner,” as his campaign did in a fundraising pitch almost immediately after he was convicted last week.
Trump’s brand has always been about driving people to desperation and paranoia. He was doing it at Trump Tower the morning after his New York conviction, saying the judge in the hush money case was a “crazed” “devil” who “literally crucified” defense witnesses. And he again told his supporters that they were targets: “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone. These are bad people. These are in many cases, I believe, sick people.”
On Tuesday, he threatened that, in response to the imaginary “weaponization” of the Justice Department that he and his MAGA followers have conjured, he would actually weaponize the Justice Department against his opponents if he regains power.
On Thursday, he expanded his call for vengeance, saying that he wants to see indictments of the members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Never mind that the Justice Department had no role in the cases where courts have so far ruled against Trump: the state hush-money case (in which Trump was convicted on 34 counts for falsifying business records), the New York business fraud case (in which a judge ordered him to pay $355 million because he lied about his assets) or in the sexual abuse and defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll (in which he was ordered to pay $88 million). And never mind that at the pinnacle of this supposedly weaponized justice system is a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Laura Loomer, a far-right activist cultivated by Trump, said Democrats should be punished with “not just jail. They should get the death penalty.”
Trump’s sycophants in Congress echo the cries for vengeance. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), auditioning to be Trump’s running mate, referred to Biden as a “demented man propped up by wicked & deranged people.” Using flame emojis, he added: “It’s time to fight fire with fire.”
[I]f violence comes, as it did on Jan. 6, Trump will again say it’s not his fault. In his Newsmax interview this week, he claimed he never uttered the best-known phrase of his 2016 campaign, about Hillary Clinton. “I didn’t say, ‘Lock Her Up.’”
But there is ample evidence that he did. Just as there is ample evidence of the sinister rhetoric he’s employing this time around.
Friday, June 07, 2024
Thursday, June 06, 2024
How to Honor the Heroes of D-Day
President Joe Biden arrived in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, where he will likely try to remind European allies of his role as a world leader, while distancing himself from his “America First” predecessor, ahead of the November election.
Biden touched down on Wednesday in Paris to pay respect to World War II veterans. But the trip serves as a crucial opportunity for the president, as he stands to gain the support of allies in Europe ahead of the upcoming presidential election – and give them a chance to contrast his leadership with that of former president Donald Trump, who could soon be re-elected.
Perhaps in a preview of what’s to come, in a fundraiser on Monday, the president reminded donors of Trump’s comments that he made in France in 2018, when he canceled a trip to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and infamously referred to soldiers buried there as “losers” and “suckers.”
“‘Losers and suckers!’ Who in the hell does he think he is?” Biden said. “This guy does not deserve to be president, whether or not I’m running.”
On Tuesday, when asked whether Biden would visit the cemetery, John Kirby, the White House national security communications adviser, confirmed he would be visiting the cemetery. Kirby added: “Our commitment to honor that sacrifice should never waver. And our obligations to those they leave behind, even though it may be generations ago, can never be lessened.”
To further this contrast to his predecessor, according to the White House, Biden is expected to deliver a speech later this week focusing on democracy and freedom, both of which, he said during his State of the Union address in March, were “under attack” both at home and overseas.
As president, Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, threatened to “quit” Nato, and touted an “America First” agenda, leaving a wake of frayed relationships the world over. . . . Biden “has made revitalizing our relationships a key priority, recognizing of course that we are stronger when we act together and that today’s challenges require global solutions and global responses”, Kirby said.
Sadly, Trump supporters who feign being patriots are instead motivated by hatred and prejudice against others - something Trump has fanned - and would have America embrace isolationism akin to America's disastrous approach prior to both WWI and WWII. If one truly honors America's war dead and veterans, voting for Trump should be anathema.
Wednesday, June 05, 2024
American Complacency: Trump’s Secret Weapon
Americans are conditioned by popular culture to believe from an early age that good inevitably triumphs over evil. For more than a hundred years — from the days of Tom Mix to Tom Cruise — Hollywood has been churning out plotlines in which the villains get their comeuppance before the closing credits.
If only real life worked the same way as the movies. Freedom House reports that global freedom has been in decline for 18 years, and recent events only bolster that sinister trend: Russian troops’ advance in Ukraine, Iran’s crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations and Georgia’s passage of a Russian-style law allowing the prosecution of civil society organizations as “foreign agents.”
The strength of Donald Trump’s demagogic presidential campaign has been another sign of how easily illiberalism can flourish. If his popularity endures despite his conviction last week on 34 felony counts in his New York hush money trial, that will be another indicator.
“I believe that Americans are going to choose good over evil,” first lady Jill Biden said last week, referring to the presidential election. I hope she’s right, but the possibility that she’s wrong must be taken seriously. Naively pretending otherwise may produce a crippling passivity and counterproductive inertia that makes the triumph of evil all the more likely.
The U.S. sense of invulnerability has been shaken in the past, notably by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but on the whole, that sanguine sense of security remains intact. . . . . in January, only 19 percent of Americans expressed more concern about foreign than domestic security threats.
The subtext of much U.S. national discourse is a bedrock conviction that America is on the right side of history and that “our” side will eventually triumph over the forces of tyranny, no matter what policies we pursue. It’s simply a question of time. . . . although long discredited by historians, it still has popular currency.
In the real world, unfortunately, the bad guys are perfectly capable of winning — and even victories for the good guys are usually less complete than they appear in retrospect. Look at World War II, the paradigm of the “good war.” Americans tend to focus on the defeat of Nazism and overlook the triumph of Soviet despotism in Eastern Europe. The end of World War II contained the seeds of the Cold War, which led to costly conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.
The end of the Cold War gave fresh impetus to dreams that liberal democracy would reign unchallenged, as suggested in Francis Fukuyama’s influential essay and book prophesying “the end of history.” But recent years have seen democratic backsliding in countries such as Hungary and Georgia that were once held up as model post-communist republics. Russia itself has ended its brief experiment with democracy to return to a level of despotism not seen since the days of Stalin.
The war pitting brutal Russian invaders against the innocent people of Ukraine is about as pure an expression of good vs. evil as it’s possible to imagine. If this were a movie, the Russian villains would long ago have been sent slinking back to Moscow. But in real life, the war criminals are showing disturbing staying power.
While Putin presses ahead with his invasion, Western leaders dither and delay in providing Ukraine the support it needs. In the past, the West was slow in deciding to send tanks, long-range missiles and F-16s (which still haven’t arrived). Now there has been endless hand-wringing over whether to give Ukraine access to nearly $300 billion in frozen Russian assets . . .
The war is poised on a knife’s edge, and if the West does not do more for Ukraine, it could still lose. Of course, Ukraine also needs to do more for itself by mobilizing more soldiers and building more fortifications.
Tyrants elsewhere in the world are ascendant — at least for now. There is Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Xi Jinping in China. Kim Jong Un in North Korea. Ali Khamenei in Iran. The list goes on. Most of these countries have seen protest movements brutally crushed in recent years. The dictators are even banding together, with China, North Korea and Iran all helping Russia wage its barbaric war in Ukraine.
[N]ow, even in the United States, liberal democracy is under threat. Trump, who instigated an insurrection and vows vengeance on his foes, is leading Biden in most swing states. Like many Americans, I would never have imagined that a disgraced president who has been impeached twice and is now a felon could possibly return to office. But there is a good chance that he will.
Trump is hardly on a par with the dictators who so often stir his admiration, but this aspiring authoritarian promises to inflict great harm on the most vulnerable among us — including the millions of undocumented immigrants whom he vows to detain and deport. Some of his followers are even scarier than he is. The fascistic tenor of the Trump campaign is inescapable.
Yet many Americans seem too politically apathetic to acknowledge the profound differences between Biden and Trump. In 2020, 80 million Americans — about one-third of the potential electorate — did not vote in the presidential election. Turnout this year appears likely to be about the same. Perhaps that’s because, according to a YouGov poll, only 18 percent of Americans fear that their country could become a dictatorship in their lifetimes. That may be a fatal failure of imagination.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that the triumph of evil is inevitable, in the United States or around the world. But nor is the triumph of good. History has no predetermined destination, good or bad. The outcome is very much in our own hands. Unlike in the movies, superheroes aren’t coming to the rescue. We have to save ourselves.
Tuesday, June 04, 2024
Trump’s Plan to Supercharge Inflation
Among prominent economists, no one was more explicit than former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in warning that President Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve Board risked igniting inflation by overstimulating the economy in 2021. Soaring prices over the next few years proved Summers correct.
Now Summers sees the risk of another price shock in the economic plans of former President Donald Trump. “There has never been a presidential platform so self-evidently inflationary as the one put forward by President Trump,” Summers told me in an interview this week. “I have little doubt that with the Trump program, we will see a substantial acceleration in inflation, unless somehow we get a major recession first.”
Trump’s greatest asset in the 2024 campaign may be the widespread belief among voters that the cost of living was more affordable when he was president and would be so again if he’s reelected to a second term. But a growing number of economists and policy analysts are warning that Trump’s second-term agenda of sweeping tariffs, mass deportation of undocumented migrants, and enormous tax cuts would accelerate, rather than alleviate, inflation.
Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, forecasts that compared with current policies, Trump’s economic plans would increase the inflation rate and force the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates higher than they would be otherwise. “If he got what he wanted,” Zandi told me, “you add it all up and it feels highly inflationary to me.”
In a study released last month, the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated that the tariffs Trump says he will impose on imports would dramatically raise costs for consumers. “Trump is promising a no-holds-barred, all-out protectionist spree that will affect every single thing that people buy that is either an import or in competition with imports,” Kimberly Clausing, a co-author of the study and a professor of tax policy at the UCLA Law School, told me. . . . Trump’s economic plan “doesn’t bode well” for “the cost of living,” as he told me.
Summers told me he remains unsure that the policies Biden and the Fed are pursuing will push inflation all the way down to the Fed’s 2 percent target. But he said he is confident that Trump’s blueprint would make inflation worse.
Summers identified multiple pillars of Trump’s economic agenda that could accelerate inflation. These included compromising the independence of the Federal Reserve Board, enlarging the federal budget deficit by extending his 2017 tax cuts, raising tariffs, rescinding Biden policies designed to promote competition and reduce “junk fees,” and squeezing the labor supply by restricting new immigration and deporting undocumented migrants already here. Others note that top Trump advisers have also hinted that in a second term, he would seek to devalue the dollar, which would boost exports but further raise the cost of imported goods.
For many economists, Trump’s plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on imported products from all countries and 60 percent tariffs on imports from China are the most concerning entries on that list.
These new levies go far beyond any of the tariffs Trump raised while in office, . . . . Trump proposes to raise tariffs on $3.1 trillion in imported goods, more than 150 times as much. Trump “has been quite clear that he is envisioning something quite a bit larger than he did last time,” Clausing told me.
Trump’s tariffs would raise prices for consumers on the goods they purchase by at least $500 billion a year, or about $1,700 annually for a middle-income family. The cost for consumers, she told me, could be about twice as high if domestic manufacturers increase their own prices on the goods that compete with imports.
“When you make foreign wine more expensive, domestic manufacturers can sell their wine at a higher price,” Clausing told me. “The same with washing machines and solar panels and chairs. Anything that is in competition with an import will also get more expensive.”
While Trump’s proposed tariffs would increase the cost of goods, his pledge to undertake a mass deportation of undocumented migrants would put pressure on the cost of both goods and services.
Undocumented migrants are central to the workforce in an array of service industries, such as hospitality, child care, and elder care. But they also fill many jobs in construction, agricultural harvesting, and food production. Removing millions of undocumented workers from the economy at once “would create massive labor shortages in lots of different industries,” . . . . “If you are talking about kicking 50 percent of the farm labor force out, that is not going to do wonders for agricultural food prices,” David Bier, director of immigration-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told me.
[I]mmigrants and their children already account for almost all the growth in the population of working-age adults ages 18 to 64. If Trump in fact extracts millions of undocumented migrants from the workforce, “there is no replacement [available] even at a theoretical level,” Bier said.
More difficult to quantify but potentially equally significant are the frequent indications from Trump that, as with all other federal agencies, he wants to tighten his personal control over the Federal Reserve Board. . . . . for instance, by seeking to fire or demote the board’s chair, Jay Powell—would be aimed at pressuring the board into prematurely cutting interest rates
Inflation, Zandi projects, would be nearly a full percentage point higher (0.8 percent, to be exact) under the scenario of Trump and Republicans in control than in the alternative of Biden presiding over a divided government. Inflation would be about that much higher under Trump even compared with the less likely scenario of Democrats winning the White House and both congressional chambers, Zandi projects.
Zandi said the only reason he does not anticipate prices rising even faster under Trump is that the Federal Reserve Board would inevitably raise interest rates to offset the inflationary impact of Trump’s proposals.
But those higher interest rates would come with their own cost: Zandi projects they would depress the growth in total economic output and personal income below current policy, and raise the unemployment rate over the next few years by as much as a full percentage point—even as inflation rises. Raising the specter of the slow-growth, high-inflation pattern that hobbled the American economy through much of the 1970s, Zandi told me, “It is really a stagflation scenario.”
People need to wake up to what Trump proposes and the economic costs. And this warning does not factor in any of the social chaos Trump 2.0 would bring as the right wing extremists go after contraception, gays, and non-whites and non-Christians.
Monday, June 03, 2024
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