International Relations
- “Making Tariffs Great Again: Does President Trump Have Legal Authority to Implement New Tariffs on U.S. Trading Partners and China?” by Warren Maruyama, Lyric Galvin, and William Alan Reinsch, Center for Strategic & International Studies, October 10, 2024.
- “Trump could impose tariffs on day one, with few checks on that power” by Adam Looney and Elena Patel, Brookings Institute, January 15, 2025.
The U.S.–Russia talks in Saudi Arabia have proven once again that Ukraine is ground zero for the war against democracy. Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn’t give a rat’s ass about democracy—or ethnic cleansing or genocide. We’ve done evil before, but never so openly, stridently, or proudly.
Anders Puck Nielsen looks at the current U.S. administration’s (non)understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War and offers reasons for why we needn’t panic. Ukraine has more agency than the U.S. administration assumes. https://youtu.be… 🇺🇦
Make America a reviled laughingstock! MAARL isn’t as catchy as MAGA, but it’s more accurate. And it captures something of the vomiting sound so many of us are making.
Despite Russia’s unrelenting propaganda, Ukraine is not a U.S. client state, and NATO is not a U.S. client organization, not even when the current U.S. administration talks as if they were.
Diplomacy 101: Orange Oaf’s threats are going to lose their value as fast as Putin’s nuclear saber rattling has. It sure would be nice if Orangina deigned to surround himself with people in possession of expertise and experience.
I don’t get it. With the Abraham Accords from last time and now the changed situation in Lebanon and Syria, His Royal Orangliness might have been uniquely poised to obtain a grand bargain for Israel and the region. Instead everything he says and does worsens the situation. Have they no imagination?
Xi Jinping must be feeling really good. Putin’s worn down his army in a bid to end Ukrainian state- and nationhood. Felonious Husk is gutting the U.S. federal government from within, snuffing out crucial expertise. And Hegseth is leading the Pentagon—enough said.
Ethnic cleansing as daring do—if Orange Donald’s own country doesn’t move to try him and his collaborators in the end, other countries will.
King Donald as nation builder in the Middle East. It’ll be a snap with the U.S. armed forces at his command. He just needs a few more weeks to undermine everything that once made America a great power.
Democratic U.S. allies are going to need to find ways to stand up to the United States, whose government is being captured by Rocket Man, before this person starts leveraging U.S. foreign policy for his own ends. Orange Oaf’s capricious nature might just be the least of their problems.
Unsexy Tariffs Matter
I know tariffs aren’t a sexy topic, but they matter, now more than ever—for commerce, for our household budgets, for the stability of international relations, and for our constitutional order.
Over the years, Congress largely delegated its authority to the executive branch. The following two pieces offer insight on this authority. The second also underlines the destabilizing effect this power can have on the international system. Americans need to increase their awareness of what tariffs do. Those who care little about checks on the president’s power or about international relations should should still care about their household budgets, which are going to be paying the bill.
The problem of unchecked presidential power is particularly accute at this moment, as the president attacks critical government institutions and capabilities while flouting Congressional oversight and its power of the purse. Given moves against the treasury last week, the president’s latest tariff announcements require strong pushback. The president loves tariffs. We need to make the topic of tariffs sexy again in order to fight back.
Great remarks by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last night on the unconscionable tariffs announced by President Man Baby: https://youtu.be…. 🇲🇽🇺🇸🇨🇦
Quoth Darth Putin: “Chomsky: Greenland is clearly in US sphere of influence. Denmark should trade land for peace. Mearsheimer: Great powers always ruthlessly pursue their own interests. Denmark should be pragmatic. Varoufakis: Denmark’s aggressive joining of EU provoked Trump. It’s their own fault.” /sarcasm
Finished reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020). Highly recommended. Good antidote to feelings of confusion and helplessness in these troubled times.📚
The principle that a commander has an obligation to punish war crimes by his subordinates is not a progressive development of the law promoted by the advocacy community. Instead, the duty to punish stands out as an ancient legal norm interwoven into the domestic law of the United States and which the United States has incorporated into international legal instruments.
Does Putin understand the United States? I'm inclined to think not, even if he's got Trump as a person pretty well sized up.
I can’t help but think that the Kremlin once again misunderstands the situation, as they did in February 2022. Sure, the next U.S. president likes rubbing elbows with “tough guy” dictators, and the guardrails of expertise and institutions mean nothing to him; nevertheless, he won’t be completely free to do as he pleases. Think of the old guard Republicans who know what’s at stake in Europe. Enough of them were able to convince the guy in Mar-a-Lago to tell Mike Johnson to finally approve funds for Ukraine earlier this year. More importantly, even if his supporters are gung-ho America Firsters, they feel threatened by China, Putin’s close ally. If they haven’t put two and two together about the global ramifications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, their obsession with tariffs has everything to do with China, Russia’s closest supporter.
In fact, will the jumping, hooting, squealing Mr. Cybertruck’s interests in China throw a spanner in his current machinations to treat our government like an extension of his personal business interests? Mr. Orange-in-a-Suit’s supporters are expecting action on China, and their guy with the tie needs their adulation—not to mention their votes in the 2026 midterms. Besides, how open will his oil guys be to welcoming Russia back to legitimate global oil and natural gas markets while prices are low? I can’t claim to know all the variables, and I know the occupant of the White House matters a great deal. Still, as unpredictable, unscrupulous, inhumane, and disloyal as Mr. Bad Hairpiece is, he will not be operating in a vacuum free from the influence of powerful players calling in their chits.
Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the Russian terrorist-in-chief and his security apparatus have already proven how blinkered they were about Ukraine, not to mention the unity NATO has projected. It is equally nonsensical for the Kremlin to think of NATO as a collection of American-led satellite states, pace Russia’s rabid propagandists Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Soloviev. Why should the Kremlin understand the United States any better, if it can’t even acknowledge Ukrainian agency? And just how well would the next U.S. president respond to threats, when Putin realizes that flattery won’t get him what he wants in Ukraine.
Juan Cole on Israel’s Wars
Juan Cole offers some interesting historical perspective on Israel’s wars in a piece called “Gaza 2008: Micro-Wars and Macro-Wars.” Here is one of his more provocative assessments:
Israel’s political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power with its enemies. If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless from its avowed foes. If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace.
If only I knew what “total war” means here. In modern European history it was when the distinction between soldiers and civilians was increasingly erased during the First and Second World Wars. If Israel sometimes erases such distinctions in urban situations, I am not aware of a policy that accepts this erasure, especially not for its own civilians. Presumably Cole has something else in mind or is using hyperbole, either way demonstrating how slippery the term “total war” can be.
And “cold peace”? Well, the Cold War was a rhetorical war in the metropoles and a shooting war in other countries by proxy; however, it was otherwise a peace, albeit one punctuated by extreme levels of militarization that the push of a button could have transformed into the first real total war. Perhaps then “cold war” in a generic sense means a war with no shooting. Does “cold peace” mean a peace marked by periodic violence? If so, I have not noticed any particular willingness by Israel to accept this violence. Or is this about an icy peace punctuated by the permanent threat of violence? Wouldn’t that be a cold war then?
Putting aside the overly generous use of unexplained labels, Cole’s article is worth reading, whether or not you agree with his take on “Israel’s old expansionist tendencies.” The historical context is useful, and the term “micro-wars” is at least consistent with the metaphor upon which “asymmetric war” depends, though it encompasses more dimensions than merely partisan warfare. Cole points to four specific factors in the twenty-first century: (1) the integration of the religious political parties Hamas and Hizbullah with the population around them via the parties' social services; (2) suicide bombs, tank-piercing capabilities, and small rocket fire; (3) the support of a regional power (a common feature of other guerilla wars); and (4) “Israel’s Achilles heel, its demographic vulnerability”—a violent environment encourages emigration. Cole uses these factors as the backdrop for his narrative of Israel’s conflicts in Southern Lebanon and Gaza.
In the end, though, he wonders if global opinion might prove a bigger problem for Israel, albeit only in the long term. Public opinion is the one thing I’ve been wondering about as well.
And “macro-war”? Does Cole mean the old conventional wars that Israel used to fight with its neighbors? Or is he talking about global public opinion, which is the focus of Israel’s and its enemies' propaganda wars and public diplomacy?
What Russia should have learned from Iraq
At the beginning of the week I suggested that Russia might have learned a lesson from the American invasion of Iraq.[^1] One lesson that Russia clearly did not learn was the importance of world opinion. The Bush administration paid a high price for thumbing its nose at allies and friends who opposed the invasion. It did not believe in soft power, but its significant diminution was real nonetheless. Russia’s actions will cost it dearly if it continues to allow its armored vehicles to rumble around Georgia, far away from South Ossetia. Remember that breakaway province? Wasn’t defending it Russia’s casus belli? Sometimes states have to ignore international opinion, but it is important to balance whatever one hopes thereby to gain against what one is going to lose. Russia has more to lose because of its pugnacious behavior than it thinks. It might believe that its interests lie in observing a “jail house yard” code of behavior, and following this model might net it some short-term gains; however, in the long run it will lose more than it can gain. Naked force is a poor substitute for hearts and minds. It is an even worse substitute if those hearts and minds stand behind an opposing force. Hubris is a dangerous thing, Mr. Putin. That’s the real lesson of Iraq.
[^1:] The post I reference here has gone missing. – MRS, 11/3/2024
In Brief: Georgia and Russia Again
This post is better viewed on [the Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/20080922205825/http://markstoneman.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/in-brief-georgia-and-russia-again/) because of all the links and some discussion.