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Official Hillary Clinton 2016 thread (2 Viewers)
- Thread starter timschochet
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Chicago Hooligan
Footballguy
A vote for Trump is inarguably a vote for a racist, which is probably worse.
Chicago Hooligan
Footballguy
And why is "President" in the title of that other thread? Gosh that'll look silly in a few hours.
squistion
Footballguy
People keep trotting out this Straw Man. Tim, myself and other Hillary supporters (for the most part) have gone to great lengths to say that voting for Trump does not make one a racist, even though we view him as a racist. And no, wanting to stop undocumented immigrants from entering this country or banning new Muslims arrivals does not make one a racist or a bigot, but there is a pretty strong correlation in many cases.David Dodds said:
Last edited by a moderator:
squistion
Footballguy
Joe Summer
Footballguy
Dodds, frankly:
Hillary's pro-Satan-worship platform was definitely a negative for me, but her pro-church-attendance platform was a positive. I figure those two positions can fight it out and in the very least we'll end up breaking even.
IC FBGCav
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
CNN producer to other CNN producer: "Hey Jerry, should we be concerned about putting longtime Clinton consultant, devoted friend and DNC chairwoman on as a paid political pundit?"flapgreen said:
Other CNN producer: "Naaaahhhh..."
Andy Dufresne
Footballguy
I successfully voted for no Presidential candidate. 
Boston
Footballguy
I think you are giving them too much credit...I don't think they even had a thought about it...
Gr00vus
Footballguy
BroncoFreak_2K3
sucker for Orange
beavers said:
in more ways than one.
cstu
Footballguy
pantagrapher
Footballguy
I voted for Hillary, btw.
beavers
Footballguy
IC FBGCav
Footballguy
beavers
Footballguy
squistion
Footballguy
And no, this has nothing to do with the fact Hillary and Trump are running. 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/barack-obama-is-now-viewed-more-positively-than-ronald-reagan-was-in-1988/
Barack Obama is now viewed more positively than Ronald Reagan was in 1988
Pollster.com's Charles Franklin was a little ahead of the curve Sunday morning when he pointed out that President Obama's approval rating right now is among the highest Election-Day approval ratings in recent history.
Franklin tracked recent survey results by party to evaluate Obama's approval, finding that, at 52.1 percent on average, he's viewed more positively now than Ronald Reagan was at the end of his second term, but not as positively as was Bill Clinton at the end of his.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/barack-obama-is-now-viewed-more-positively-than-ronald-reagan-was-in-1988/
Barack Obama is now viewed more positively than Ronald Reagan was in 1988
Pollster.com's Charles Franklin was a little ahead of the curve Sunday morning when he pointed out that President Obama's approval rating right now is among the highest Election-Day approval ratings in recent history.
Franklin tracked recent survey results by party to evaluate Obama's approval, finding that, at 52.1 percent on average, he's viewed more positively now than Ronald Reagan was at the end of his second term, but not as positively as was Bill Clinton at the end of his.
Card Trader
Footballguy
beavers said:
bueno
In a class by himself
So do you feel that you still have the right to complain?I successfully voted for no Presidential candidate.
Andy Dufresne
Footballguy
Jrodicus
Footballguy
FWIW, Reagan broke his big promises at the end of his tenure. Obama broke his early; that gives people more time to forget.And no, this has nothing to do with the fact Hillary and Trump are running.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/barack-obama-is-now-viewed-more-positively-than-ronald-reagan-was-in-1988/
Barack Obama is now viewed more positively than Ronald Reagan was in 1988
Pollster.com's Charles Franklin was a little ahead of the curve Sunday morning when he pointed out that President Obama's approval rating right now is among the highest Election-Day approval ratings in recent history.
Franklin tracked recent survey results by party to evaluate Obama's approval, finding that, at 52.1 percent on average, he's viewed more positively now than Ronald Reagan was at the end of his second term, but not as positively as was Bill Clinton at the end of his.
fruity pebbles
Footballguy
Standing next to these two clowns, i'm surprised his favorability rating isn't even higher.And no, this has nothing to do with the fact Hillary and Trump are running.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/barack-obama-is-now-viewed-more-positively-than-ronald-reagan-was-in-1988/
Barack Obama is now viewed more positively than Ronald Reagan was in 1988
Pollster.com's Charles Franklin was a little ahead of the curve Sunday morning when he pointed out that President Obama's approval rating right now is among the highest Election-Day approval ratings in recent history.
Franklin tracked recent survey results by party to evaluate Obama's approval, finding that, at 52.1 percent on average, he's viewed more positively now than Ronald Reagan was at the end of his second term, but not as positively as was Bill Clinton at the end of his.
higgins
Footballguy
Multiple editorials from Foreign Policy magazine following on Hillary, Trump, and international relations...
What Kind Of President Will Hillary Clinton Be?
What to expect on day one from the new Clinton administration.
This is my preferred metaphor for a figure who has tried on so many identities over the years that she has become a vector of colliding meanings. Robert Kagan has described her as a Democratic neocon, an interventionist who embraces the transformative potential of American power. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat views her as the living incarnation of the Washington consensus. In her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton often depicts herself as a skeptical realist who expected far less from Iran, from Russia, from Israel, or from the Arab Spring than did the starry-eyed youngsters around Obama.
Each of these views offers a plausible account of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state and thus of her likely role as president. She is more persuaded of the value of force than Obama, more shaped by political convention than Obama, more conscious of the zero-sum calculus of rival powers than Obama. But she is also, and above all, more pragmatic, more transactional, than either Obama or Bush.
In a long article about Clinton in Foreign Policy last fall, I wrote that while she did, indeed, have an old-fashioned faith in American power, Clinton was far more distrustful of other states and expected less from them than did Obama and his team. At the very least, I wrote, she is a “cautious figure who distrusts grandiose rhetorical formulations, is deeply grounded in the harsh realities of politics, and prefers small steps to large ones.”
A President Hillary Clinton might not achieve more than her predecessors, but since she would raise fewer expectations, she might provoke fewer disappointments. Bush promised in his second inaugural address to foster democracy with “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” He did not succeed, of course, and could not have. In his first year in office, Barack Obama promised to work toward a world without nuclear weapons and to forge a “new beginning” in the Middle East, without offering any notable change in American policy there beyond his own voice and story. What he achieved, in both cases, was far more modest than he had hoped.
What’s more, Obama was taken by surprise by the resurgence of great-power competition, which violated his intuitive faith that adversaries could be brought to recognize mutual interests. Hillary Clinton has little such faith. She accepts that states have intrinsically incompatible interests, which, as Dennis Ross, her former aide on Iran, put it to me last year, “means recognizing the reality of power relationships and the need to use power in defense of your interests.” She comes to the White House pre-chastened.
Of course, a president who takes over from an incumbent of the same party normally promises continuity rather than a decisive break. And unlike the last such example, George H. W. Bush in 1988, Hillary Clinton as the former secretary of state has substantial authorship of the policies she inherits. She is, to some extent, succeeding herself. Her major national security address, delivered in June, braided mockery of Donald Trump with reminders of her own efforts to strength alliances, her role in assembling sanctions against Iran, and her support for Obama’s plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Her pugilistic language was more notable than her prescription: She reminded listeners that she had “gone toe-to-toe with Russia and China” and had “twisted arms” on Iran sanctions. She offered coded evidence for those hoping she will conduct a more muscular foreign policy than Obama has. “We lead with purpose,” she declared, “and we prevail.”
How should we imagine Clinton as America’s stateswoman-in-chief? On her first day in office, she will call her great-power allies: Germany’s Angela Merkel, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Britain’s Theresa May, and India’s Narendra Modi … if it’s not too late at night. The very lame-duck François Hollande? Probably not. Maybe she will ask Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills whom she’s supposed to talk to in Brazil. When Mills reminds her that, on his first day, Barack Obama conducted an interview with Al Arabiya as a goodwill gesture to the Arab world, Clinton shoots back, “And a fat lot of good that did him.” Anyway, she says, no interviews. With anyone. For as long as possible.
Clinton does not, of course, call Vladimir Putin, who in any case is busy handing out prison terms to those so-called computer geniuses who promised to throw the election to Donald Trump by hacking her campaign’s emails. There is no view that enjoys broader bipartisan support in Washington than the need for a negative “reset” with Russia. But Clinton wants to be tougher than tough. She will tell Angela and Theresa (and you too, François!) that they don’t dare water down the sanctions imposed on Russia in the aftermath of Putin’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine. And she will tell Secretary of State Bill Burns not to bother negotiating 24-hour cease-fires in Syria with Moscow. No more leverage for Russia.
Clinton will seek to have it both ways on Iran. She will sound more skeptical of Tehran’s intentions than Obama did, but she will do nothing to jeopardize the nuclear deal he signed, which she surely recognizes is the best he could have gotten, not to mention a greater diplomatic achievement than anything she herself could claim. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that a President Clinton would ever have taken the political risks Obama accepted in order to reach an agreement with a hated adversary. That’s the blind spot of the tough-minded, who are so acutely conscious of the world as it is that they have trouble imagining a world that might be.
But wait — what about interventionist Hillary? Won’t she immediately order the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up plans to impose a no-fly zone over Syria? Well, no — she has said this won’t happen on “the first day” and would have to be preceded by “a lot of negotiation.” Among other things, she would have to feel confident that Putin wouldn’t test her by sending a Russian fighter jet into the middle of the no-fly zone. No American president is going to order the military to shoot down a Russian plane. Since Putin knows that, he probably won’t promise to keep out of the way. Seeing that, the Joint Chiefs might advise her against doing that no-fly zone. Clinton won’t take that risk.
Here we come to a fork in Clinton’s thinking. As a senator and later secretary of state, she rarely departed from the counsel of senior military officials. She was far more persuaded of the merits of Gen. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan for Afghanistan, which would have sent an additional 40,000 troops there, than Obama was and maybe even more than then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates was. She rarely departed from Gates on any significant issue. Of course, the one time she did so was on Libya, where she advocated intervention and he did not. On Syria, Clinton may have to choose between her own expressed commitments and a Pentagon that is far more cautious and more inclined to see mishap than are civilian interventionists. I wonder how Kagan-esque she will be in the White House. Less so, perhaps, than she was as secretary of state.
Clinton will not call Benjamin Netanyahu on day one, or day two, for that matter. But she will send discreet signals that she won’t push him as hard as she did as secretary of state, when she loyally carried the Obama administration’s message that settlement building must stop right away. Clinton will be happy to adopt the new view that Israel should be pushed to make daily life easier for the Palestinians rather than make any movement toward an increasingly unlikely two-state solution.
In 2009, a breakthrough on Middle East peace was seen as the key to reducing the hostility of the Arab world to the United States and even to weakening the potency of the terrorist message. No longer. President Clinton will have bigger fish to fry in the Middle East, including enlisting Arab allies in a more effective campaign against the Islamic State, stabilizing Libya, ending the civil war in Yemen, bolstering Tunisia’s fragile democracy, and reassuring the Saudis that we’re on their side in the epochal battle against Iran that Riyadh insists on waging. This last policy, which for Clinton will come under the heading of “alliance management,” would only deepen the violence and sectarian strife rending the region. She would be better advised to tell the Saudis that the United States will reduce its support of their war effort unless they make serious efforts toward a lasting cease-fire.
Finally, Clinton will send strong signals early on that she is every bit as passionate about the new global issues as Obama was. Climate change will move to the front of the agenda as the polar ice caps begin to melt like snow cones left out in the sun. Clinton may, on the other hand, give a rest to nuclear nonproliferation, Obama’s hobbyhorse, if only because he made so little progress on new international agreements like the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. The new issue confronting her administration will be refugees and migration, which has upended European politics and very nearly did so in the United States, as well. She will make this the centerpiece of her first meeting of the G-7 at the end of May. Maybe she will even accomplish something, though it’s hard to see what. If Europe can’t forge a collective solution on the subject — save to designate Turkey as the dumping ground for all future Syrian refugees — Clinton will be hard-pressed to forge a global entente.
The world that a President Clinton will face is very intransigent. Europe is weak, much of the Middle East is in flames, and the two great autocratic powers, Russia and China, are increasingly inclined to challenge the American-led world order. A president who likes problems could hardly ask for a more challenging set of them.
Hillary Clinton is a straight-A student. Maybe she’s even an A-plus student. She will not make dumb mistakes. She will reassure every ally who needs reassurance. She will try to mute China’s adventurism in the South China Sea without provoking a storm of nationalism. She’ll probably disappoint the neocons. She won’t go out on any limbs. She won’t shake the policymaking consensus. Perhaps she’ll be the Dwight Eisenhower of our time — a steady hand on the tiller. We could do a lot worse. We almost did.
What Kind Of President Will Hillary Clinton Be?
What to expect on day one from the new Clinton administration.
- By James Traub
- November 8, 2016
This is my preferred metaphor for a figure who has tried on so many identities over the years that she has become a vector of colliding meanings. Robert Kagan has described her as a Democratic neocon, an interventionist who embraces the transformative potential of American power. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat views her as the living incarnation of the Washington consensus. In her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton often depicts herself as a skeptical realist who expected far less from Iran, from Russia, from Israel, or from the Arab Spring than did the starry-eyed youngsters around Obama.
Each of these views offers a plausible account of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state and thus of her likely role as president. She is more persuaded of the value of force than Obama, more shaped by political convention than Obama, more conscious of the zero-sum calculus of rival powers than Obama. But she is also, and above all, more pragmatic, more transactional, than either Obama or Bush.
In a long article about Clinton in Foreign Policy last fall, I wrote that while she did, indeed, have an old-fashioned faith in American power, Clinton was far more distrustful of other states and expected less from them than did Obama and his team. At the very least, I wrote, she is a “cautious figure who distrusts grandiose rhetorical formulations, is deeply grounded in the harsh realities of politics, and prefers small steps to large ones.”
A President Hillary Clinton might not achieve more than her predecessors, but since she would raise fewer expectations, she might provoke fewer disappointments. Bush promised in his second inaugural address to foster democracy with “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” He did not succeed, of course, and could not have. In his first year in office, Barack Obama promised to work toward a world without nuclear weapons and to forge a “new beginning” in the Middle East, without offering any notable change in American policy there beyond his own voice and story. What he achieved, in both cases, was far more modest than he had hoped.
What’s more, Obama was taken by surprise by the resurgence of great-power competition, which violated his intuitive faith that adversaries could be brought to recognize mutual interests. Hillary Clinton has little such faith. She accepts that states have intrinsically incompatible interests, which, as Dennis Ross, her former aide on Iran, put it to me last year, “means recognizing the reality of power relationships and the need to use power in defense of your interests.” She comes to the White House pre-chastened.
Of course, a president who takes over from an incumbent of the same party normally promises continuity rather than a decisive break. And unlike the last such example, George H. W. Bush in 1988, Hillary Clinton as the former secretary of state has substantial authorship of the policies she inherits. She is, to some extent, succeeding herself. Her major national security address, delivered in June, braided mockery of Donald Trump with reminders of her own efforts to strength alliances, her role in assembling sanctions against Iran, and her support for Obama’s plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Her pugilistic language was more notable than her prescription: She reminded listeners that she had “gone toe-to-toe with Russia and China” and had “twisted arms” on Iran sanctions. She offered coded evidence for those hoping she will conduct a more muscular foreign policy than Obama has. “We lead with purpose,” she declared, “and we prevail.”
How should we imagine Clinton as America’s stateswoman-in-chief? On her first day in office, she will call her great-power allies: Germany’s Angela Merkel, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Britain’s Theresa May, and India’s Narendra Modi … if it’s not too late at night. The very lame-duck François Hollande? Probably not. Maybe she will ask Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills whom she’s supposed to talk to in Brazil. When Mills reminds her that, on his first day, Barack Obama conducted an interview with Al Arabiya as a goodwill gesture to the Arab world, Clinton shoots back, “And a fat lot of good that did him.” Anyway, she says, no interviews. With anyone. For as long as possible.
Clinton does not, of course, call Vladimir Putin, who in any case is busy handing out prison terms to those so-called computer geniuses who promised to throw the election to Donald Trump by hacking her campaign’s emails. There is no view that enjoys broader bipartisan support in Washington than the need for a negative “reset” with Russia. But Clinton wants to be tougher than tough. She will tell Angela and Theresa (and you too, François!) that they don’t dare water down the sanctions imposed on Russia in the aftermath of Putin’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine. And she will tell Secretary of State Bill Burns not to bother negotiating 24-hour cease-fires in Syria with Moscow. No more leverage for Russia.
Clinton will seek to have it both ways on Iran. She will sound more skeptical of Tehran’s intentions than Obama did, but she will do nothing to jeopardize the nuclear deal he signed, which she surely recognizes is the best he could have gotten, not to mention a greater diplomatic achievement than anything she herself could claim. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that a President Clinton would ever have taken the political risks Obama accepted in order to reach an agreement with a hated adversary. That’s the blind spot of the tough-minded, who are so acutely conscious of the world as it is that they have trouble imagining a world that might be.
But wait — what about interventionist Hillary? Won’t she immediately order the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up plans to impose a no-fly zone over Syria? Well, no — she has said this won’t happen on “the first day” and would have to be preceded by “a lot of negotiation.” Among other things, she would have to feel confident that Putin wouldn’t test her by sending a Russian fighter jet into the middle of the no-fly zone. No American president is going to order the military to shoot down a Russian plane. Since Putin knows that, he probably won’t promise to keep out of the way. Seeing that, the Joint Chiefs might advise her against doing that no-fly zone. Clinton won’t take that risk.
Here we come to a fork in Clinton’s thinking. As a senator and later secretary of state, she rarely departed from the counsel of senior military officials. She was far more persuaded of the merits of Gen. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan for Afghanistan, which would have sent an additional 40,000 troops there, than Obama was and maybe even more than then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates was. She rarely departed from Gates on any significant issue. Of course, the one time she did so was on Libya, where she advocated intervention and he did not. On Syria, Clinton may have to choose between her own expressed commitments and a Pentagon that is far more cautious and more inclined to see mishap than are civilian interventionists. I wonder how Kagan-esque she will be in the White House. Less so, perhaps, than she was as secretary of state.
Clinton will not call Benjamin Netanyahu on day one, or day two, for that matter. But she will send discreet signals that she won’t push him as hard as she did as secretary of state, when she loyally carried the Obama administration’s message that settlement building must stop right away. Clinton will be happy to adopt the new view that Israel should be pushed to make daily life easier for the Palestinians rather than make any movement toward an increasingly unlikely two-state solution.
In 2009, a breakthrough on Middle East peace was seen as the key to reducing the hostility of the Arab world to the United States and even to weakening the potency of the terrorist message. No longer. President Clinton will have bigger fish to fry in the Middle East, including enlisting Arab allies in a more effective campaign against the Islamic State, stabilizing Libya, ending the civil war in Yemen, bolstering Tunisia’s fragile democracy, and reassuring the Saudis that we’re on their side in the epochal battle against Iran that Riyadh insists on waging. This last policy, which for Clinton will come under the heading of “alliance management,” would only deepen the violence and sectarian strife rending the region. She would be better advised to tell the Saudis that the United States will reduce its support of their war effort unless they make serious efforts toward a lasting cease-fire.
Finally, Clinton will send strong signals early on that she is every bit as passionate about the new global issues as Obama was. Climate change will move to the front of the agenda as the polar ice caps begin to melt like snow cones left out in the sun. Clinton may, on the other hand, give a rest to nuclear nonproliferation, Obama’s hobbyhorse, if only because he made so little progress on new international agreements like the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. The new issue confronting her administration will be refugees and migration, which has upended European politics and very nearly did so in the United States, as well. She will make this the centerpiece of her first meeting of the G-7 at the end of May. Maybe she will even accomplish something, though it’s hard to see what. If Europe can’t forge a collective solution on the subject — save to designate Turkey as the dumping ground for all future Syrian refugees — Clinton will be hard-pressed to forge a global entente.
The world that a President Clinton will face is very intransigent. Europe is weak, much of the Middle East is in flames, and the two great autocratic powers, Russia and China, are increasingly inclined to challenge the American-led world order. A president who likes problems could hardly ask for a more challenging set of them.
Hillary Clinton is a straight-A student. Maybe she’s even an A-plus student. She will not make dumb mistakes. She will reassure every ally who needs reassurance. She will try to mute China’s adventurism in the South China Sea without provoking a storm of nationalism. She’ll probably disappoint the neocons. She won’t go out on any limbs. She won’t shake the policymaking consensus. Perhaps she’ll be the Dwight Eisenhower of our time — a steady hand on the tiller. We could do a lot worse. We almost did.
higgins
Footballguy
If Clinton Wins, Her Hawkish Wings Will Be Clipped
Hillary Clinton talked tough as a candidate, but harsh realities at home and abroad would limit her choices as commander in chief.
By Dan De Luce, Molly O’Toole
November 8, 2016
Hillary Clinton appeared poised to win the presidency on Tuesday after a bitterly divisive campaign in which she vowed to take a tougher stand against Russia and other U.S. adversaries, while her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, seemed to embrace Moscow and questioned the underpinnings of modern American foreign policy.
But despite her hawkish inclinations, the country’s first female commander in chief will find her room for maneuver severely constrained by the legacy of caution left by her predecessor, broader global trends undermining Washington’s position, and growing skepticism at home of the internationalist ethos that has girded U.S. foreign policy since World War II.
“I think Clinton will feel a lot of pressure to at least look more hawkish,” said Richard Gowan, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“But the reality is in a lot of cases — be it Syria, be it the South China Sea — there is no simple military gesture that will reassert American power overnight.”
National tracking polls and early-voting results suggested that Clinton held a slight lead ahead of Tuesday’s vote, though Donald Trump’s campaign pointed to recent gains in battleground states such as Florida and Ohio to insist it still has a path to victory, albeit a narrow one. Down ballot, Democrats are only slightly favored to wrest control of the Senate from the Republicans, with the outcome hinging on a few tight races.
As the top diplomat in President Barack Obama’s first term, Clinton often pushed for more forceful action but was sometimes overruled. In 2012, she and other members of the cabinet argued for providing weapons to moderate Syrian rebels, but Obama decided to hold off. In Libya, in 2011, Clinton urged prompt military intervention by the United States and its allies to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, persuading Obama to back a NATO-led coalition that eventually toppled Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime.
Now, with an expected victory on Nov. 8, Clinton will finally have a chance to put her recipe — diplomacy backed by hard power — to the test. In many areas, that will simply translate into a continuation of Obama-era policies. She has endorsed the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the targeting of the group’s leaders, and efforts to counter its online propaganda. And like Obama, she has ruled out the possibility of deploying a large ground force to defeat the Islamic State.
In other areas — like how to face down Russia in Syria or give new life to NATO — Clinton has shown signs of her talons, compared with Obama’s more detached approach. But in the four years since Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, America’s influence and leverage have deteriorated abroad, from the Middle East to Europe to the South China Sea, complicating her ability to shape the world more in Washington’s favor.
Years of aloof policies from the Obama administration — from the ill-fated “red line” in Syria to halfhearted support for the so-called “pivot to Asia” — will sap the credibility of the next administration even before it is sworn into office. Russia and China have asserted themselves militarily and diplomatically, harking back to Cold War-era competition for influence in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia. Both countries have also modernized their armies, navies, and air forces, narrowing the technological edge upon which the U.S. military relies. And a populist wave of anger in the United States and around the world — hostile to migrants, free trade, and globalization — threatens to derail international efforts to tackle an unprecedented refugee crisis, sluggish economic growth, and climate change.
Credibility gap
Washington has steadily lost leverage in the Syrian civil war since Obama’s about-face in August 2013. After declaring that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime against civilians would represent a “red line,” Obama then declined to take military action against President Bashar al-Assad after he gassed his own people in the suburbs of Damascus.
That moment, which left U.S. allies bewildered and outraged, has come to define Obama’s handling of the Syrian war. Critics on the left and right say U.S. credibility writ large has been seriously damaged by the episode.
“Rightly or wrongly, that decision not to act when a presidential ‘red line’ had been crossed is seen elsewhere as a sign of U.S. weakness and/or isolationism,” said Peter Westmacott, who served as British ambassador to the United States until last January.
“So the next president, whoever it is, will have to think about restoring perceptions of U.S. leadership, both to reassure nervous allies and to show tyrants they can’t do as they please,” he told Foreign Policy.
And the “red line,” experts and foreign diplomats say, has echoes in other foreign-policy setbacks, from Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine to unchecked Chinese expansion in the South China Sea.
Dwindling U.S. credibility extends to other issues that promise to complicate Clinton’s agenda. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a 12-nation trade deal between the United States and big Asian and Latin American economies — had for years been billed as the crown jewel of the U.S. “rebalance” to Asia. But bipartisan opposition to the agreement in Washington — including from Clinton herself, a onetime champion of the TPP — has doomed the deal.
The likely demise of the TPP, following years of painstaking negotiations, has dealt a blow to America’s reputation among allies in Asia — and opens the door for China to ink a regional trade pact of its own. Clinton helped lay the groundwork for the trade agreement but withdrew her support in the face of strong opposition within her own party, led by her opponent in the Democratic primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and later by her Republican rival.
Reality check
The erosion of U.S. credibility comes as the world has been radically transformed since Clinton left the State Department, let alone since her last stint in the White House. A more muscular Russia and China are carving out global roles for themselves, the Middle East is riven by a violent sectarian rivalry, Europe is weak and divided, and once steady U.S. allies, like the Philippines, are now courting Beijing.
In Syria, thanks to a largely hands-off approach to rebels fighting the Syrian regime, the United States now has little influence over opposition fighters battling Damascus and few viable options to strengthen them. And North Korea seems to have found the way to pair nuclear weapons with long-range missiles, potentially putting U.S. territories — and not just American allies — at risk.
Clinton has proffered hawkish prescriptions for years. In the Senate, she voted for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and as the top U.S. diplomat, she backed sending more troops to Afghanistan, keeping U.S. forces in Iraq, arming rebel forces in Syria, and bombing forces loyal to Qaddafi’s regime in Libya.
Some of her critics say her outlook is outdated and fails to take into account the limits of America’s influence and the rise of new powers.
“She’s stuck in the 1990s,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and professor of international relations and history at Boston University. “She appears to think that the United States is the ‘sole superpower’ and the ‘indispensable nation,’ tropes that no longer describe reality.”
That new reality means military options are often less palatable and, in some cases, almost unworkable.
In Syria, for instance, Clinton has often spoken of a “no-fly zone” that could shield civilians. At the final presidential debate last month, Clinton said it would offer a way to stem the flow of refugees and “frankly gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians so that perhaps we can have the kind of serious negotiation necessary to bring the conflict to an end and go forward on a political track.”
But she has never explained in detail precisely what she has in mind or what she is prepared to do to safeguard Syrian civilians from the regime’s barrel bombs and chemical weapons or the missiles of Russian fighter jets. Nor has she addressed the possibility that a no-fly zone could gradually morph into an all-out military assault on the Syrian regime, as NATO’s 2011 intervention did in Libya.
And with Russian warplanes based in Syria bombing rebels and civilians in Aleppo, and advanced Russian anti-aircraft missiles deployed across government-held territory, Clinton’s pledge to create such a zone could prove impossible — unless the next president is ready to risk a direct conflict with Russia.
She could arm Syrian rebel forces more aggressively than the Obama administration, which has been wary of indirectly equipping extremists. And some foreign-policy experts and former U.S. officials have called for launching limited missile strikes or airstrikes on the Syrian regime’s bases if Damascus violates cease-fire agreements.
But confronting the Syrian regime carries the risk of dangerous unintended consequences, by either triggering a shooting war with Russia or giving aid to al Qaeda-linked extremists.
And Syria is not the only place Russia is testing the United States. Moscow’s nuclear saber rattling, its armed intervention in Ukraine, its cyber-interference in the U.S. election, and its aggressive posture toward European neighbors have all sparked greater tensions with Washington.
Early in the next administration, the new president have to weigh the risks and rewards of retaliating against Russia for its efforts to disrupt the American election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and her campaign. Even before U.S. intelligence agencies announced in October that Russia was behind the hacks, Clinton told the American Legion that as president, she would treat such cyber-espionage “like any other attack.”
“We will be ready with serious political, economic, and military responses,” she said.
Clinton’s options for hard power in Asia aren’t much more appealing. As secretary of state, Clinton traveled frequently to Asia and rebuked China over its human rights record and its coercive tactics in the South China Sea. But translating that tougher posture into a more hawkish approach is fraught with peril, too.
Clinton could try to reassert U.S. power by backing more frequent and more aggressive “freedom of navigation” patrols by U.S. ships and aircraft in the South China Sea. That is something Obama’s White House was often reluctant to do to avoid upsetting Beijing and endangering other big-ticket bilateral diplomatic initiatives, from curbing North Korea’s nuclear program to battling climate change.
But the U.S. military position in Asia has been thrown for a loop by the election of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, an upstart populist nursing a longtime grudge against U.S. influence in his country. If Duterte succeeds in curtailing defense cooperation with Washington, limiting U.S. forces’ access to air and naval bases near the South China Sea, that will further complicate U.S. efforts to push back against Beijing.
Toxic politics
The vocal U.S. opposition to the TPP underscores the challenges Clinton will face in trying to advance a more interventionist and engaged foreign-policy agenda while being bogged down by a toxic domestic political climate. The next president will be faced with the daunting challenge of trying to reassure Americans their country’s political system is not dysfunctional — and foreign partners that U.S. democracy is not in decline. The election has called into question not just the health and legitimacy of U.S. democracy but a decades-old consensus about the broad outlines of America’s place in the world.
Apparently sick of an expansive — and expensive — role as the world’s police, most Americans now oppose military adventurism abroad and favor redirecting resources to domestic priorities.
A source close to the Clinton campaign acknowledged to FP late on Monday that she would face constraints on foreign policy, but argued the former secretary of state would be well-positioned to navigate those challenges.
“Part of her task going in will be addressing an American public that has also lived through this election campaign where the basic tenets of American foreign policy over the last several decades have been questioned,” he said, adding that the case for American leadership in the world “has not been celebrated or discussed in the ways that you want it to over the course of this campaign.”
It remains unclear to what degree Clinton will be able to even focus on foreign policy, given the divisive political atmosphere and the pressing need to address Americans’ economic anxieties. Philosophically more in tune with many Republican lawmakers on some questions of national security, Clinton will have an uphill battle trying to find common ground. Even those who opposed Trump have cause to fear a backlash in conservative districts if they are seen to be cooperating with a new president who is deeply disliked by most Republican voters.
Making matters worse, Clinton cannot bank on full-throated support from her own party, either. Some Democrats in Congress gave her calls for a no-fly zone in Syria a lukewarm response. And if Democrats manage to defeat some hawkish GOP incumbents — such as in Wisconsin or North Carolina — to retake a majority in the Senate, Clinton could actually find herself with fewer potential foreign-policy allies.
Ultimately, events could waylay the best-laid of plans, hawkish or otherwise. Syrian and Russian forces are gearing up to finish off rebel fighters in Aleppo and secure control over the city before the next president takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, delivering a troubling fait accompli that could hamstring the president-elect.
“You may have a situation,” Gowan said, “where the first test will be to essentially manage defeat.”
Hillary Clinton talked tough as a candidate, but harsh realities at home and abroad would limit her choices as commander in chief.
By Dan De Luce, Molly O’Toole
November 8, 2016
Hillary Clinton appeared poised to win the presidency on Tuesday after a bitterly divisive campaign in which she vowed to take a tougher stand against Russia and other U.S. adversaries, while her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, seemed to embrace Moscow and questioned the underpinnings of modern American foreign policy.
But despite her hawkish inclinations, the country’s first female commander in chief will find her room for maneuver severely constrained by the legacy of caution left by her predecessor, broader global trends undermining Washington’s position, and growing skepticism at home of the internationalist ethos that has girded U.S. foreign policy since World War II.
“I think Clinton will feel a lot of pressure to at least look more hawkish,” said Richard Gowan, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“But the reality is in a lot of cases — be it Syria, be it the South China Sea — there is no simple military gesture that will reassert American power overnight.”
National tracking polls and early-voting results suggested that Clinton held a slight lead ahead of Tuesday’s vote, though Donald Trump’s campaign pointed to recent gains in battleground states such as Florida and Ohio to insist it still has a path to victory, albeit a narrow one. Down ballot, Democrats are only slightly favored to wrest control of the Senate from the Republicans, with the outcome hinging on a few tight races.
As the top diplomat in President Barack Obama’s first term, Clinton often pushed for more forceful action but was sometimes overruled. In 2012, she and other members of the cabinet argued for providing weapons to moderate Syrian rebels, but Obama decided to hold off. In Libya, in 2011, Clinton urged prompt military intervention by the United States and its allies to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, persuading Obama to back a NATO-led coalition that eventually toppled Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime.
Now, with an expected victory on Nov. 8, Clinton will finally have a chance to put her recipe — diplomacy backed by hard power — to the test. In many areas, that will simply translate into a continuation of Obama-era policies. She has endorsed the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the targeting of the group’s leaders, and efforts to counter its online propaganda. And like Obama, she has ruled out the possibility of deploying a large ground force to defeat the Islamic State.
In other areas — like how to face down Russia in Syria or give new life to NATO — Clinton has shown signs of her talons, compared with Obama’s more detached approach. But in the four years since Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, America’s influence and leverage have deteriorated abroad, from the Middle East to Europe to the South China Sea, complicating her ability to shape the world more in Washington’s favor.
Years of aloof policies from the Obama administration — from the ill-fated “red line” in Syria to halfhearted support for the so-called “pivot to Asia” — will sap the credibility of the next administration even before it is sworn into office. Russia and China have asserted themselves militarily and diplomatically, harking back to Cold War-era competition for influence in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia. Both countries have also modernized their armies, navies, and air forces, narrowing the technological edge upon which the U.S. military relies. And a populist wave of anger in the United States and around the world — hostile to migrants, free trade, and globalization — threatens to derail international efforts to tackle an unprecedented refugee crisis, sluggish economic growth, and climate change.
Credibility gap
Washington has steadily lost leverage in the Syrian civil war since Obama’s about-face in August 2013. After declaring that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime against civilians would represent a “red line,” Obama then declined to take military action against President Bashar al-Assad after he gassed his own people in the suburbs of Damascus.
That moment, which left U.S. allies bewildered and outraged, has come to define Obama’s handling of the Syrian war. Critics on the left and right say U.S. credibility writ large has been seriously damaged by the episode.
“Rightly or wrongly, that decision not to act when a presidential ‘red line’ had been crossed is seen elsewhere as a sign of U.S. weakness and/or isolationism,” said Peter Westmacott, who served as British ambassador to the United States until last January.
“So the next president, whoever it is, will have to think about restoring perceptions of U.S. leadership, both to reassure nervous allies and to show tyrants they can’t do as they please,” he told Foreign Policy.
And the “red line,” experts and foreign diplomats say, has echoes in other foreign-policy setbacks, from Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine to unchecked Chinese expansion in the South China Sea.
Dwindling U.S. credibility extends to other issues that promise to complicate Clinton’s agenda. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a 12-nation trade deal between the United States and big Asian and Latin American economies — had for years been billed as the crown jewel of the U.S. “rebalance” to Asia. But bipartisan opposition to the agreement in Washington — including from Clinton herself, a onetime champion of the TPP — has doomed the deal.
The likely demise of the TPP, following years of painstaking negotiations, has dealt a blow to America’s reputation among allies in Asia — and opens the door for China to ink a regional trade pact of its own. Clinton helped lay the groundwork for the trade agreement but withdrew her support in the face of strong opposition within her own party, led by her opponent in the Democratic primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and later by her Republican rival.
Reality check
The erosion of U.S. credibility comes as the world has been radically transformed since Clinton left the State Department, let alone since her last stint in the White House. A more muscular Russia and China are carving out global roles for themselves, the Middle East is riven by a violent sectarian rivalry, Europe is weak and divided, and once steady U.S. allies, like the Philippines, are now courting Beijing.
In Syria, thanks to a largely hands-off approach to rebels fighting the Syrian regime, the United States now has little influence over opposition fighters battling Damascus and few viable options to strengthen them. And North Korea seems to have found the way to pair nuclear weapons with long-range missiles, potentially putting U.S. territories — and not just American allies — at risk.
Clinton has proffered hawkish prescriptions for years. In the Senate, she voted for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and as the top U.S. diplomat, she backed sending more troops to Afghanistan, keeping U.S. forces in Iraq, arming rebel forces in Syria, and bombing forces loyal to Qaddafi’s regime in Libya.
Some of her critics say her outlook is outdated and fails to take into account the limits of America’s influence and the rise of new powers.
“She’s stuck in the 1990s,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and professor of international relations and history at Boston University. “She appears to think that the United States is the ‘sole superpower’ and the ‘indispensable nation,’ tropes that no longer describe reality.”
That new reality means military options are often less palatable and, in some cases, almost unworkable.
In Syria, for instance, Clinton has often spoken of a “no-fly zone” that could shield civilians. At the final presidential debate last month, Clinton said it would offer a way to stem the flow of refugees and “frankly gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians so that perhaps we can have the kind of serious negotiation necessary to bring the conflict to an end and go forward on a political track.”
But she has never explained in detail precisely what she has in mind or what she is prepared to do to safeguard Syrian civilians from the regime’s barrel bombs and chemical weapons or the missiles of Russian fighter jets. Nor has she addressed the possibility that a no-fly zone could gradually morph into an all-out military assault on the Syrian regime, as NATO’s 2011 intervention did in Libya.
And with Russian warplanes based in Syria bombing rebels and civilians in Aleppo, and advanced Russian anti-aircraft missiles deployed across government-held territory, Clinton’s pledge to create such a zone could prove impossible — unless the next president is ready to risk a direct conflict with Russia.
She could arm Syrian rebel forces more aggressively than the Obama administration, which has been wary of indirectly equipping extremists. And some foreign-policy experts and former U.S. officials have called for launching limited missile strikes or airstrikes on the Syrian regime’s bases if Damascus violates cease-fire agreements.
But confronting the Syrian regime carries the risk of dangerous unintended consequences, by either triggering a shooting war with Russia or giving aid to al Qaeda-linked extremists.
And Syria is not the only place Russia is testing the United States. Moscow’s nuclear saber rattling, its armed intervention in Ukraine, its cyber-interference in the U.S. election, and its aggressive posture toward European neighbors have all sparked greater tensions with Washington.
Early in the next administration, the new president have to weigh the risks and rewards of retaliating against Russia for its efforts to disrupt the American election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and her campaign. Even before U.S. intelligence agencies announced in October that Russia was behind the hacks, Clinton told the American Legion that as president, she would treat such cyber-espionage “like any other attack.”
“We will be ready with serious political, economic, and military responses,” she said.
Clinton’s options for hard power in Asia aren’t much more appealing. As secretary of state, Clinton traveled frequently to Asia and rebuked China over its human rights record and its coercive tactics in the South China Sea. But translating that tougher posture into a more hawkish approach is fraught with peril, too.
Clinton could try to reassert U.S. power by backing more frequent and more aggressive “freedom of navigation” patrols by U.S. ships and aircraft in the South China Sea. That is something Obama’s White House was often reluctant to do to avoid upsetting Beijing and endangering other big-ticket bilateral diplomatic initiatives, from curbing North Korea’s nuclear program to battling climate change.
But the U.S. military position in Asia has been thrown for a loop by the election of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, an upstart populist nursing a longtime grudge against U.S. influence in his country. If Duterte succeeds in curtailing defense cooperation with Washington, limiting U.S. forces’ access to air and naval bases near the South China Sea, that will further complicate U.S. efforts to push back against Beijing.
Toxic politics
The vocal U.S. opposition to the TPP underscores the challenges Clinton will face in trying to advance a more interventionist and engaged foreign-policy agenda while being bogged down by a toxic domestic political climate. The next president will be faced with the daunting challenge of trying to reassure Americans their country’s political system is not dysfunctional — and foreign partners that U.S. democracy is not in decline. The election has called into question not just the health and legitimacy of U.S. democracy but a decades-old consensus about the broad outlines of America’s place in the world.
Apparently sick of an expansive — and expensive — role as the world’s police, most Americans now oppose military adventurism abroad and favor redirecting resources to domestic priorities.
A source close to the Clinton campaign acknowledged to FP late on Monday that she would face constraints on foreign policy, but argued the former secretary of state would be well-positioned to navigate those challenges.
“Part of her task going in will be addressing an American public that has also lived through this election campaign where the basic tenets of American foreign policy over the last several decades have been questioned,” he said, adding that the case for American leadership in the world “has not been celebrated or discussed in the ways that you want it to over the course of this campaign.”
It remains unclear to what degree Clinton will be able to even focus on foreign policy, given the divisive political atmosphere and the pressing need to address Americans’ economic anxieties. Philosophically more in tune with many Republican lawmakers on some questions of national security, Clinton will have an uphill battle trying to find common ground. Even those who opposed Trump have cause to fear a backlash in conservative districts if they are seen to be cooperating with a new president who is deeply disliked by most Republican voters.
Making matters worse, Clinton cannot bank on full-throated support from her own party, either. Some Democrats in Congress gave her calls for a no-fly zone in Syria a lukewarm response. And if Democrats manage to defeat some hawkish GOP incumbents — such as in Wisconsin or North Carolina — to retake a majority in the Senate, Clinton could actually find herself with fewer potential foreign-policy allies.
Ultimately, events could waylay the best-laid of plans, hawkish or otherwise. Syrian and Russian forces are gearing up to finish off rebel fighters in Aleppo and secure control over the city before the next president takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, delivering a troubling fait accompli that could hamstring the president-elect.
“You may have a situation,” Gowan said, “where the first test will be to essentially manage defeat.”
Dedfin
Footballguy
higgins
Footballguy
This Lifetime GOP Voter Is With Her; Why Republicans Should Vote For Hillary Clinton
Why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton, and why real Republicans should, too.
By Max Boot
November 6, 2016
Every four years since 1988, I have voted for the Republican presidential candidate. That streak will now be broken. For the first time in my life I will vote for the Democratic nominee. I have previously laid out the reasons why I am a #NeverTrumper. You can read my latest rundown here. But while it’s easy to say who I’m against — Trump is the least qualified and most dangerous presidential candidate in American history — it’s been more of a struggle to figure out who I’m for.
I can’t vote for Gary Johnson, a candidate who has never heard of Aleppo; I don’t want to reward cluelessness. I can’t vote for Jill Stein, who is as pro-Putin as Trump. I could easily vote for Evan McMullin, the only conservative in the race — and I would if I lived in Utah where he has a decent shot at winning. But he’s not on the ballot in New York state. In any case, if my primary goal is to stop Trump from getting his hands on the nuclear codes, the most effective way to do that is to support the only other candidate who has any chance of winning.
A lot of my Republican friends are incredulous to learn that #ImWithHer. In truth, I’m more than a little surprised myself. If a sane Republican like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, or Marco Rubio had been nominated I wouldn’t be voting for Clinton. But the GOP instead chose to nominate a malevolent carnival barker. So I will cast a ballot for the sane alternative.
“But … but … but …” sputter Trump voters, “how can you support a woman who belongs in jail and wants to impose a radical left-wing agenda?” If I thought these things were true, I wouldn’t vote for Clinton. But they’re simply not true.
I got to spend a little time with Clinton when she was a U.S. senator and we both served on an advisory board at the now-defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command. Given the harsh logic of the alphabet — C comes after B — I found myself seated next to her on several occasions. I found her to be a charming conversationalist with a lot of interest in learning about defense issues. I did not detect her peddling any ideological agenda; she simply wanted to figure out the best course of action.
The Hillary I met doesn’t match the ogre of Republican myth.
I am not alone in reaching that conclusion — many Republican senators were surprised to find how easily Clinton was to get along with and work with. She always does her homework so she is always prepared for any situation — whether it’s a Senate hearing or a presidential debate. And she usually tackles issues in a pragmatic rather, than ideological, fashion. There’s a good reason why partisans of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are so suspicious of her: They know that she’s not really one of them.
The WikiLeaks revelations showed that, in private, Clinton praises free trade (“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”) and the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan (“We have to restrain spending, we have to have adequate revenues and we have to incentivize growth”). These are the kinds of things that Republicans used to stand for before they sold their souls to Trump. As Tom Friedman notes, “WikiHillary” is “a smart, pragmatic, center-left politician who will be inclined to work with both the business community and Republicans to keep America tilted toward trade expansion, entrepreneurship and global integration.”
In fairness, there is good reason to doubt how hard Clinton would fight for any of these ideas in the face of a Congress controlled by Democrats who are to her left (which is most of them). During the campaign, she has tacked left on domestic policy to appease the Sanders-Warren wing. That’s why it’s important to keep at least one house in Republican hands to foster the kind of bipartisan cooperation that was a hallmark of the 1990s when President Bill Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich and a Republican Congress to reform welfare and eliminate the deficit. The very fact that Clinton is no ideologue means that she is someone that Republicans can work with.
From my vantage point as a foreign-policy wonk, Clinton’s biggest selling point is that she is tough-minded on national security policy — more so than President Obama or most Democrats, to say nothing of the troop-withdrawing, nuclear-proliferating, ally-bashing, Putin-loving Republican nominee. She supported sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan in 2009 (Obama sent 30,000), she supported leaving behind 10,000 to 20,000 American troops in Iraq (Obama pulled them all), and she pressed for an ambitious plan to train and arm the Syrian rebels in 2012 (Obama refused). Today, Clinton favors a tougher policy on Syria — she wants a no-fly zone — than either Obama or Trump. Yet she does not recklessly propose bombing “the s—” out of anyone, stealing another country’s oil, or killing terrorists’ relatives as Trump does.
Even though Clinton was associated with the Obama administration’s failed “reset” with Russia, she was always skeptical of Russian intentions. As Mark Landler of the New York Times writes: “In the administration’s first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, aides to Obama proposed that the United States make some symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of its good will in resetting the relationship. Clinton, the last to speak, brusquely rejected the idea, saying, ‘I’m not giving up anything for nothing.’ Her hardheadedness made an impression on Robert Gates, the defense secretary and George W. Bush holdover who was wary of a changed Russia. He decided there and then that she was someone he could do business with.
‘I thought, This is a tough lady,’ he told me.” Trump, by contrast, has been described by former acting CIA Director Michael Morell and former Director Michael Hayden as an “unwitting agent” or “useful idiot” of Vladimir Putin.
I don’t always agree with Clinton on foreign policy — especially when it comes to her support for the Iran nuclear deal or her current (and, one hopes, only temporary) opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But I respect her deep knowledge of international affairs. She would come into office knowing more on that subject than any new president since George H.W. Bush. Trump, by contrast, knows less than any previous nominee.
The strongest objection to Clinton is on ethical grounds. She was, at the very least, “extremely careless” in her handling of emails, as FBI Director James Comey said this summer. But now that Trumpkins revere Comey for investigating more emails which have come to light, will they accept his July finding, reaffirmed this Sunday, that she did nothing that is worthy of criminal prosecution? There have also been allegations of “pay to play” regarding the Clinton Foundation and a general air of suspicion around the Clintons that predates Bill’s impeachment.
Those would be huge problems if Clinton were running against a squeaky-clean Republican like Mitt Romney. But she’s running against an opponent who, after the election, will face civil trials for fraud and rape — and who has boasted of sexually assaulting women, not paying income taxes, and stiffing contractors. PolitiFact rates 50 percent of her statements “true” or “mostly true,” compared to only 15 percent for him. In contrast, 51 percent of Trump’s statements are either “false” or “pants on fire,” whereas just 12 percent of Clinton’s statements have been similarly dishonest. Clinton may be ethically challenged, but Trump is an ethics-free zone.
In the final analysis, the strongest case for Clinton is what she is not. She is not racist, sexist, or xenophobic. She is not cruel, erratic, or volatile. She is not a bully or an authoritarian personality. She is not ignorant or unhinged. Those may be insufficient recommendations against a more formidable opponent. But when she’s running against Donald Trump it’s more than enough.
Why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton, and why real Republicans should, too.
By Max Boot
November 6, 2016
Every four years since 1988, I have voted for the Republican presidential candidate. That streak will now be broken. For the first time in my life I will vote for the Democratic nominee. I have previously laid out the reasons why I am a #NeverTrumper. You can read my latest rundown here. But while it’s easy to say who I’m against — Trump is the least qualified and most dangerous presidential candidate in American history — it’s been more of a struggle to figure out who I’m for.
I can’t vote for Gary Johnson, a candidate who has never heard of Aleppo; I don’t want to reward cluelessness. I can’t vote for Jill Stein, who is as pro-Putin as Trump. I could easily vote for Evan McMullin, the only conservative in the race — and I would if I lived in Utah where he has a decent shot at winning. But he’s not on the ballot in New York state. In any case, if my primary goal is to stop Trump from getting his hands on the nuclear codes, the most effective way to do that is to support the only other candidate who has any chance of winning.
A lot of my Republican friends are incredulous to learn that #ImWithHer. In truth, I’m more than a little surprised myself. If a sane Republican like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, or Marco Rubio had been nominated I wouldn’t be voting for Clinton. But the GOP instead chose to nominate a malevolent carnival barker. So I will cast a ballot for the sane alternative.
“But … but … but …” sputter Trump voters, “how can you support a woman who belongs in jail and wants to impose a radical left-wing agenda?” If I thought these things were true, I wouldn’t vote for Clinton. But they’re simply not true.
I got to spend a little time with Clinton when she was a U.S. senator and we both served on an advisory board at the now-defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command. Given the harsh logic of the alphabet — C comes after B — I found myself seated next to her on several occasions. I found her to be a charming conversationalist with a lot of interest in learning about defense issues. I did not detect her peddling any ideological agenda; she simply wanted to figure out the best course of action.
The Hillary I met doesn’t match the ogre of Republican myth.
I am not alone in reaching that conclusion — many Republican senators were surprised to find how easily Clinton was to get along with and work with. She always does her homework so she is always prepared for any situation — whether it’s a Senate hearing or a presidential debate. And she usually tackles issues in a pragmatic rather, than ideological, fashion. There’s a good reason why partisans of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are so suspicious of her: They know that she’s not really one of them.
The WikiLeaks revelations showed that, in private, Clinton praises free trade (“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”) and the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan (“We have to restrain spending, we have to have adequate revenues and we have to incentivize growth”). These are the kinds of things that Republicans used to stand for before they sold their souls to Trump. As Tom Friedman notes, “WikiHillary” is “a smart, pragmatic, center-left politician who will be inclined to work with both the business community and Republicans to keep America tilted toward trade expansion, entrepreneurship and global integration.”
In fairness, there is good reason to doubt how hard Clinton would fight for any of these ideas in the face of a Congress controlled by Democrats who are to her left (which is most of them). During the campaign, she has tacked left on domestic policy to appease the Sanders-Warren wing. That’s why it’s important to keep at least one house in Republican hands to foster the kind of bipartisan cooperation that was a hallmark of the 1990s when President Bill Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich and a Republican Congress to reform welfare and eliminate the deficit. The very fact that Clinton is no ideologue means that she is someone that Republicans can work with.
From my vantage point as a foreign-policy wonk, Clinton’s biggest selling point is that she is tough-minded on national security policy — more so than President Obama or most Democrats, to say nothing of the troop-withdrawing, nuclear-proliferating, ally-bashing, Putin-loving Republican nominee. She supported sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan in 2009 (Obama sent 30,000), she supported leaving behind 10,000 to 20,000 American troops in Iraq (Obama pulled them all), and she pressed for an ambitious plan to train and arm the Syrian rebels in 2012 (Obama refused). Today, Clinton favors a tougher policy on Syria — she wants a no-fly zone — than either Obama or Trump. Yet she does not recklessly propose bombing “the s—” out of anyone, stealing another country’s oil, or killing terrorists’ relatives as Trump does.
Even though Clinton was associated with the Obama administration’s failed “reset” with Russia, she was always skeptical of Russian intentions. As Mark Landler of the New York Times writes: “In the administration’s first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, aides to Obama proposed that the United States make some symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of its good will in resetting the relationship. Clinton, the last to speak, brusquely rejected the idea, saying, ‘I’m not giving up anything for nothing.’ Her hardheadedness made an impression on Robert Gates, the defense secretary and George W. Bush holdover who was wary of a changed Russia. He decided there and then that she was someone he could do business with.
‘I thought, This is a tough lady,’ he told me.” Trump, by contrast, has been described by former acting CIA Director Michael Morell and former Director Michael Hayden as an “unwitting agent” or “useful idiot” of Vladimir Putin.
I don’t always agree with Clinton on foreign policy — especially when it comes to her support for the Iran nuclear deal or her current (and, one hopes, only temporary) opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But I respect her deep knowledge of international affairs. She would come into office knowing more on that subject than any new president since George H.W. Bush. Trump, by contrast, knows less than any previous nominee.
The strongest objection to Clinton is on ethical grounds. She was, at the very least, “extremely careless” in her handling of emails, as FBI Director James Comey said this summer. But now that Trumpkins revere Comey for investigating more emails which have come to light, will they accept his July finding, reaffirmed this Sunday, that she did nothing that is worthy of criminal prosecution? There have also been allegations of “pay to play” regarding the Clinton Foundation and a general air of suspicion around the Clintons that predates Bill’s impeachment.
Those would be huge problems if Clinton were running against a squeaky-clean Republican like Mitt Romney. But she’s running against an opponent who, after the election, will face civil trials for fraud and rape — and who has boasted of sexually assaulting women, not paying income taxes, and stiffing contractors. PolitiFact rates 50 percent of her statements “true” or “mostly true,” compared to only 15 percent for him. In contrast, 51 percent of Trump’s statements are either “false” or “pants on fire,” whereas just 12 percent of Clinton’s statements have been similarly dishonest. Clinton may be ethically challenged, but Trump is an ethics-free zone.
In the final analysis, the strongest case for Clinton is what she is not. She is not racist, sexist, or xenophobic. She is not cruel, erratic, or volatile. She is not a bully or an authoritarian personality. She is not ignorant or unhinged. Those may be insufficient recommendations against a more formidable opponent. But when she’s running against Donald Trump it’s more than enough.
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higgins
Footballguy
Dictators Everywhere Are Stumping For Trump
From Cambodia to Zimbabwe to North Korea, the Republican nominee has cornered the authoritarian autocrat demographic.
By Sebastian Strangio
November 7, 2016
With endorsements like these, one might ask, who needs enemies? Last week, as an enervating U.S. election race reached its final stretch, Republican nominee Donald Trump secured the support of another of the world’s leading authoritarians. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a pugnacious former soldier who has dominated his country’s politics for over three decades, threw his support behind the real estate mogul and former reality TV host. He did it, he said, for the sake of world peace. “To be frank, I do want to see Trump win,” Hun Sen told an audience of police cadets on Nov. 3. “If Trump wins, the world can change.… Trump does business, so Trump would not want to have war.”
It’s tempting to put Hun Sen’s endorsement down to shared authoritarian traits — an expression of strongman respect. For more than half his life, the 64-year-old Hun Sen has ruled his country through a blend of force, guile, and The Apprentice-style theatrics. Like Trump, he is thin-skinned; he is also partial to rambling speeches. Neither figure has any tolerance for opposition, which both see as a sign of treason or shadowy conspiracies (“the whole system is rigged”). While Trump has threatened to arrest his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, if he wins on Nov. 8, Hun Sen has effectively done it in advance. Since mid-2015, he has jailed more than 25 government critics, including two opposition lawmakers, while the main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, has been forced into exile in France. To top it off, Hun Sen has repeatedly warned that the country will descend into civil war if his Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, is not re-elected at the next national poll in 2018.
There’s also the magnetic attraction of Trump’s wealth. The Donald’s vulgar flaunting of the gilded and the marble not only reflects the rococo tastes of Cambodia’s own ruling elite. It also appeals to an aspect of Cambodia’s Buddhist-inflected political culture in which those with money are seen as persons of merit: rich because virtuous, virtuous because rich. Hun Sen might expect that an able and meritorious businessman like Trump would be liable to treat a wealthy counterpart with respect and “do deals” with Cambodia of the sort Washington now does with allies like Saudi Arabia or Vietnam — deals that would spare him lectures on civil rights or the treatment of workers.
Hun Sen’s endorsement of Trump, however, goes beyond superficial affinities of character or style. Indeed, an administration headed by Trump stands to produce something concrete for Hun Sen: a slackening of Washington’s position on the state of human rights and democracy in Cambodia. The Cambodian leader isn’t the only autocrat to see the upsides of a Trump presidency. In recent months, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe have all expressed support for the Republican nominee. (So has Ashin Wirathu, a rabidly nationalist monk in Myanmar who has fanned the flames of hate against his country’s Muslim minority.) For these leaders, Trump’s appeal goes beyond issues of style to touch on something more troubling: the possibility of a sudden and dramatic reshaping of U.S. power.
One of the few consistent themes to emerge from the bag of tricks of emotional appeals and knee-jerk nativism that comprises the Trump foreign-policy platform is the prospect of a broad American retreat from the world. Throughout the campaign, Trump has railed against free trade and slammed U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. Trump has made virtually no reference to democracy promotion, another sacred cow of U.S. foreign policy. His campaign has even adopted the slogan “America First,” annexed from the isolationist movement of the early 1940s whose spokesman, the noted aviator and racist Charles Lindbergh, praised the “organized vitality” of Nazi Germany and argued against U.S. involvement in World War II. “America first,” Trump said during his first major foreign-policy address in April, “will be the overriding theme of my administration.”
For a dictator like Hun Sen, this approach to foreign policy has obvious appeal. Since the early 1990s, as he has slowly bent Cambodia’s threadbare democratic system to his will, U.S. criticism has been a constant thorn in his side. When the Cambodian leader ousted his coalition partner Prince Norodom Ranariddh in an armed coup in July 1997, the United States immediately cut off aid, restoring it only after fresh elections the following year. (Hun Sen’s CCP won.) Even then, a vocal bipartisan congressional lobby, representing the large Cambodian diaspora in the United States, has kept up a steady drumbeat against a leader who some have referred to as “Saddam Hun Sen.” In 2013, facing another call from the U.S. Congress to cut off aid, Hun Sen said, “People can say what they want, but the right to decide the country’s destiny is in the hands of the people of Cambodia.”
International pressure has grown especially strong over the past year as the CPP, reacting to an unexpected loss of support at the last election in 2013, has tightened the vise on its opponents. In July, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution condemning this latest crackdown, which Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said laid bare the “thuggish nature of the Hun Sen regime.” Similar condemnations have been issued by the European Parliament and the U.N. Human Rights Council. Although the U.S. Congress would operate independently of a possible Trump White House, an executive who stays out of Cambodia’s domestic affairs, and maybe even offers a measure of legitimacy, would be something of a dream come true for Hun Sen.
In line with Trump’s “America First” philosophy, the former Apprentice host has also made repeated threats to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe and East Asia, depicting the United States as a colossus that is being leeched by a host of ungrateful allies and suggesting he would abandon long-standing obligations to protect NATO members and other allies. Threats to reconsider U.S. military deployments in South Korea until Seoul “pays its way” have led North Korean state media to offer their own endorsement of Trump, writing that he is “not the rough-talking, screwy, ignorant candidate they say he is, but is actually a wise politician and a prescient presidential candidate.”
For similar reasons, Trump also appears to have won some limited support within the political establishment in China. Although Trump’s very pronunciation of the country’s name drips with insinuation and disdain, and much of the country’s ruling elite appears to support Hillary, a weakened U.S. presence in East Asia would be a clear strategic win for Beijing. Trump “could in fact be the best president for China,” a commentator on Phoenix Television, a private station in Hong Kong that skews nationalist and pro-Beijing, said in April. Another commentator on Phoenix Television, recently declared, “It looks like Trump is God’s tool to end American imperialism.”
For the first time in living memory, a presidential candidate is offering a break from what has long been a firm bipartisan foreign-policy consensus: that the United States can, and should, do what it can to make the world safe for democracy. And although solid arguments can, and should, be made for the scaling back of American adventures abroad, Trump’s apparent willingness to toss out long-standing alliances in a vague bid to “start winning again” threatens a sudden realignment of the global security environment that carries serious and unpredictable risks. Hun Sen might be right: A President Trump is unlikely to go abroad in search of monsters to slay. But the Donald’s policies, such as they are, herald a world of dangerous uncertainty. Dictators of the world, rejoice.
From Cambodia to Zimbabwe to North Korea, the Republican nominee has cornered the authoritarian autocrat demographic.
By Sebastian Strangio
November 7, 2016
With endorsements like these, one might ask, who needs enemies? Last week, as an enervating U.S. election race reached its final stretch, Republican nominee Donald Trump secured the support of another of the world’s leading authoritarians. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a pugnacious former soldier who has dominated his country’s politics for over three decades, threw his support behind the real estate mogul and former reality TV host. He did it, he said, for the sake of world peace. “To be frank, I do want to see Trump win,” Hun Sen told an audience of police cadets on Nov. 3. “If Trump wins, the world can change.… Trump does business, so Trump would not want to have war.”
It’s tempting to put Hun Sen’s endorsement down to shared authoritarian traits — an expression of strongman respect. For more than half his life, the 64-year-old Hun Sen has ruled his country through a blend of force, guile, and The Apprentice-style theatrics. Like Trump, he is thin-skinned; he is also partial to rambling speeches. Neither figure has any tolerance for opposition, which both see as a sign of treason or shadowy conspiracies (“the whole system is rigged”). While Trump has threatened to arrest his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, if he wins on Nov. 8, Hun Sen has effectively done it in advance. Since mid-2015, he has jailed more than 25 government critics, including two opposition lawmakers, while the main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, has been forced into exile in France. To top it off, Hun Sen has repeatedly warned that the country will descend into civil war if his Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, is not re-elected at the next national poll in 2018.
There’s also the magnetic attraction of Trump’s wealth. The Donald’s vulgar flaunting of the gilded and the marble not only reflects the rococo tastes of Cambodia’s own ruling elite. It also appeals to an aspect of Cambodia’s Buddhist-inflected political culture in which those with money are seen as persons of merit: rich because virtuous, virtuous because rich. Hun Sen might expect that an able and meritorious businessman like Trump would be liable to treat a wealthy counterpart with respect and “do deals” with Cambodia of the sort Washington now does with allies like Saudi Arabia or Vietnam — deals that would spare him lectures on civil rights or the treatment of workers.
Hun Sen’s endorsement of Trump, however, goes beyond superficial affinities of character or style. Indeed, an administration headed by Trump stands to produce something concrete for Hun Sen: a slackening of Washington’s position on the state of human rights and democracy in Cambodia. The Cambodian leader isn’t the only autocrat to see the upsides of a Trump presidency. In recent months, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe have all expressed support for the Republican nominee. (So has Ashin Wirathu, a rabidly nationalist monk in Myanmar who has fanned the flames of hate against his country’s Muslim minority.) For these leaders, Trump’s appeal goes beyond issues of style to touch on something more troubling: the possibility of a sudden and dramatic reshaping of U.S. power.
One of the few consistent themes to emerge from the bag of tricks of emotional appeals and knee-jerk nativism that comprises the Trump foreign-policy platform is the prospect of a broad American retreat from the world. Throughout the campaign, Trump has railed against free trade and slammed U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. Trump has made virtually no reference to democracy promotion, another sacred cow of U.S. foreign policy. His campaign has even adopted the slogan “America First,” annexed from the isolationist movement of the early 1940s whose spokesman, the noted aviator and racist Charles Lindbergh, praised the “organized vitality” of Nazi Germany and argued against U.S. involvement in World War II. “America first,” Trump said during his first major foreign-policy address in April, “will be the overriding theme of my administration.”
For a dictator like Hun Sen, this approach to foreign policy has obvious appeal. Since the early 1990s, as he has slowly bent Cambodia’s threadbare democratic system to his will, U.S. criticism has been a constant thorn in his side. When the Cambodian leader ousted his coalition partner Prince Norodom Ranariddh in an armed coup in July 1997, the United States immediately cut off aid, restoring it only after fresh elections the following year. (Hun Sen’s CCP won.) Even then, a vocal bipartisan congressional lobby, representing the large Cambodian diaspora in the United States, has kept up a steady drumbeat against a leader who some have referred to as “Saddam Hun Sen.” In 2013, facing another call from the U.S. Congress to cut off aid, Hun Sen said, “People can say what they want, but the right to decide the country’s destiny is in the hands of the people of Cambodia.”
International pressure has grown especially strong over the past year as the CPP, reacting to an unexpected loss of support at the last election in 2013, has tightened the vise on its opponents. In July, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution condemning this latest crackdown, which Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said laid bare the “thuggish nature of the Hun Sen regime.” Similar condemnations have been issued by the European Parliament and the U.N. Human Rights Council. Although the U.S. Congress would operate independently of a possible Trump White House, an executive who stays out of Cambodia’s domestic affairs, and maybe even offers a measure of legitimacy, would be something of a dream come true for Hun Sen.
In line with Trump’s “America First” philosophy, the former Apprentice host has also made repeated threats to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe and East Asia, depicting the United States as a colossus that is being leeched by a host of ungrateful allies and suggesting he would abandon long-standing obligations to protect NATO members and other allies. Threats to reconsider U.S. military deployments in South Korea until Seoul “pays its way” have led North Korean state media to offer their own endorsement of Trump, writing that he is “not the rough-talking, screwy, ignorant candidate they say he is, but is actually a wise politician and a prescient presidential candidate.”
For similar reasons, Trump also appears to have won some limited support within the political establishment in China. Although Trump’s very pronunciation of the country’s name drips with insinuation and disdain, and much of the country’s ruling elite appears to support Hillary, a weakened U.S. presence in East Asia would be a clear strategic win for Beijing. Trump “could in fact be the best president for China,” a commentator on Phoenix Television, a private station in Hong Kong that skews nationalist and pro-Beijing, said in April. Another commentator on Phoenix Television, recently declared, “It looks like Trump is God’s tool to end American imperialism.”
For the first time in living memory, a presidential candidate is offering a break from what has long been a firm bipartisan foreign-policy consensus: that the United States can, and should, do what it can to make the world safe for democracy. And although solid arguments can, and should, be made for the scaling back of American adventures abroad, Trump’s apparent willingness to toss out long-standing alliances in a vague bid to “start winning again” threatens a sudden realignment of the global security environment that carries serious and unpredictable risks. Hun Sen might be right: A President Trump is unlikely to go abroad in search of monsters to slay. But the Donald’s policies, such as they are, herald a world of dangerous uncertainty. Dictators of the world, rejoice.
higgins
Footballguy
The United States Needs A Post-Election Peace Plan
I study fractured societies from post-war Côte d’Ivoire to post-Arab Spring Tunisia. Here’s how the next president can heal a divided electorate.
By Brian Klaas
November 7, 2016
For the first time in its modern history, the United States is going to need a post-election reconciliation plan — something typically reserved for countries emerging from deeply divisive conflicts.
On Nov. 9, between 55 million and 70 million Americans will wake up absolutely horrified at the results of the presidential election, whether it’s President Clinton or President Trump. But unlike past campaigns, millions are not going to be simply disappointed; they may well be unwilling to accept the results.
One sign that all is not well with the U.S. body politic: An October Public Policy Polling survey in Florida asked voters whether they believed that Hillary Clinton was actually a demon. Some 40 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters said yes, and 19 percent said they were unsure. Admittedly, many of those respondents were probably joking — or perhaps simply registering their unprecedented hatred for the Democratic nominee — but the existence of that question at all shows the degree to which 2016 has been an abysmal year for American democracy. Of more serious concern, a recent poll suggested that 41 percent of American voters believe the election could be “stolen.” The Republican nominee himself has not only suggested that the election has been rigged but has simultaneously painted Clinton as the “founder of ISIS,” someone who should be “locked up,” and repeatedly called her the “devil.” And last week, former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh implied that he would lead an armed revolt if Clinton wins the election.
Thankfully, most Americans still disavow political violence. Yet in surveys, a small but vocal minority consistently agrees with statements like: “Some of the problems citizens have with government could be fixed with a few well-aimed bullets.” The risk that we will see electoral violence in the United States has surged. This election cycle has not only seen instances of peaceful protests turning violent but also the normalization of violent rhetoric in American political discourse.
Making matters worse is the challenge presented by the Trump campaign’s mainstreaming of racism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance. The two threads combined horrifically on Nov. 1, when arsonists burned an African-American church in Mississippi and painted “Vote Trump” on the damaged walls.
Add it all together and few people would be shocked to see isolated incidents of post-election violence this year, something that would have been unthinkable during the 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Even if there is no violence, the fact that it is possible and predictable should be sufficient justification for taking the need for a reconciliation plan seriously.
If Hillary Clinton becomes President Clinton, she’s going to have a dual problem: quelling the risk of political violence from people who think she is potentially a demon (or at very least the winner of a “rigged” election) while trying to find a way to position herself as the president of all Americans, including tens of millions who have openly backed the most race-baiting, racially divisive politician in modern U.S. history. Conversely, if Donald Trump becomes President Trump, he’s going to need to find a way to win over groups that find him revolting either because he insulted or peddled racist tropes about them (Muslims, African-Americans, and Latinos in particular) or boasted about sexually assaulting them (women). What the new resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will need, in other words, is a peace plan.
I study rigged elections and political violence in the developing world, from Madagascar to Thailand, from Tunisia to Côte d’Ivoire. Never did I think that my expertise in some of the world’s most broken political systems would be relevant in understanding democracy in my own country. But this year is different. Suddenly, understanding why Côte d’Ivoire succumbed to bloody political violence in the wake of its deeply flawed 2010 presidential election is relevant to avoiding falling into that same trap in the United States. And learning from Tunisia’s reconciliation process after its remarkably peaceful post-Arab Spring transition to democracy could be vital to avoiding four years of further political dysfunction and division in Washington.
These two case studies, in particular, from very different parts of the world offer crucial lessons on how to approach post-election reconciliation in the United States.
First, Côte d’Ivoire offers a cautionary tale that the Trump campaign should take more seriously. In 2010, incumbent Ivoirian President Laurent Gbagbo lost his re-election bid. Rather than accept the results, he cast aspersions on the election’s integrity and called on his supporters to take up arms in his defense. Some loyal militias did exactly that. Fighting only ended after thousands of people had been killed. Gbagbo eventually was arrested and transported to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. His opponent took office in the end, but the country was deeply damaged as a result.
The United States is not headed toward another civil war, and Trump is not going to end up in The Hague. But when a major presidential candidate says the system is “rigged” and tells the public that he will keep them “in suspense” as to whether he will accept the election result, it sends a critically destabilizing signal that too many will take seriously.
So, the first step to reconciliation is a simple one. Should Trump lose, responsible Republicans must immediately congratulate Clinton and state unequivocally that they accept the results, even if Trump does not. Democrats, including Clinton, should of course do the same if Trump wins — as they have universally indicated they will. Republicans also need to work with a President Clinton, if she wins, to restore Americans’ faith in their electoral institutions. American democracy cannot thrive or survive when electoral integrity is incorrectly viewed through a partisan lens; the main type of election rigging in the United States is gerrymandering, and both parties are guilty of it. If these foundational steps do not occur, then Washington will look a lot more like Abidjan than it should.
If Clinton wins, she needs to find a way to reach out to what she called “the basket of deplorables” — without legitimizing their most deplorable ideas. Clinton will have to reconcile with an electoral base of mostly white, non-college-educated men, at least some of whom have reveled in the most toxic aspects of the Trump campaign. It may be a controversial statement, but many of Trump’s supporters are, in fact, racist. Surveys have shown that many, though not most, of Trump supporters believe that black people are less intelligent and more violent than white people. Forty-three percent of Republicans said Trump was “right” to complain that a judge with Mexican heritage was inherently biased because of his race.
And yet democracy works best when electoral victories do not result in vindictive and exclusionary governance. Citizens need to have a stake in the political system; they need to feel represented. That doesn’t mean accepting racism, or misogyny. But if Trump or Clinton voters feel completely abandoned or excluded in a system where “compromise” has become a dirty word, they may simply fight to undermine the system itself. To avoid that, establishment politicians — in the United States and around the world — need to incorporate people with unsavory views, whether it’s racist Trump supporters, ex-guerrillas in Colombia, or members of the authoritarian old guard in Tunisia.
In 2011, when Tunisians began to build a new political future after toppling a long-standing despot, they eschewed vengeance and embraced reconciliation. Their problem wasn’t racism, but it was no less toxic: Tunisia’s new leadership had to decide what to do with former members of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime, many of whom had even been complicit in torturing some of the members of the nascent post-dictatorship government.
Mature Tunisian statesmen decided to incorporate the old guard while dismantling what it stood for. The new political order put democracy center stage, condemned torture, and changed the rules of the political game without banning veteran politicos from playing. In that way, they realized that the key was to give those with unsavory views a reason to buy in to the new order while still keeping reactionary views out of Tunisia’s future. At one point, the new political coalition even went so far as to voluntarily give up power and allow a technocratic caretaker government to help with the transition. In doing so, they co-opted ex-authoritarians rather than alienating them by shutting them out. Over time, people with starkly different backgrounds and worldviews developed not only working relationships but, in some instances, friendships, too. And the Tunisian people were indispensible allies in weeding out authoritarianism with a soft touch: When one high-level member of the old regime ran for president in 2014, he received just 1.27 percent of the vote. Voters rejected his candidacy, but, crucially, he was given a stake in the process.
Beyond the elections, even those who did not vote for the new regime were invited to help shape it. The new regime also took criticisms of itself seriously and went to great pains to demonstrate that the overblown fears of its rivals — that it would turn Tunisia into a staunchly conservative and exclusionary Islamic republic — were misplaced. Those savvy moves saved democracy in Tunisia.
Tunisia is far afield from the United States geographically and even further afield politically. But its experience highlights a lesson that some divided societies have thankfully learned: Extending an olive branch to partisan rivals with even the most abhorrent views is crucial to not only peace but also the long-term vitality of democracy. Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment wasn’t factually inaccurate in many ways, but it was indicative of a candidate who has a long way to go in finding the finesse necessary to become the bridge-builder America sorely needs.
Tunisia’s old order committed human rights violations, but millions of people still backed it. All of them were still Tunisians; the Arab Spring didn’t change that. Likewise, voters who are deeply uncomfortable with the pace of demographic change — and the darker complexion of the U.S. electorate in particular — are still Americans. So are people who believe Clinton to be the devil incarnate. And while the government can pick and choose its policies, it cannot pick and choose its citizens.
In a functioning democracy, the winners take office, but they still must try to improve the lives of the electoral losers. Clinton is already signaling that she aims to do that, as her policies to make child care and college more affordable will inevitably benefit many Trump supporters if enacted. But that isn’t likely to be enough. Trump supporters are extremely anti-establishment, largely because they believe the government no longer works for them. A Clinton victory with a few baubles thrown in seems unlikely to create a buy-in for Trump voters. She’ll have to do more.
There is no time to waste. The aftermath of a hugely divisive ballot is often the most volatile period, as Election Day acts as a touchstone for anger and resentment. If Clinton wins, she must learn from Tunisia. First, take the darkest fears of your opponents seriously — but show how they are misplaced. In this case, that means appeasing those who want to lock her up by immediately laying out concrete steps to ensure that her administration is the most transparent in U.S. history by appointing a Republican lawyer to serve as a senior White House advisor on ethics and public disclosure compliance. To defuse the claim that she does not care about white working-class voters chewed up and spit out by the rough edges of globalization, Clinton should also spin off some of the functions of the Employment and Training Administration at the Department of Labor and create a new and better-funded Office of Inequality and Trade Dislocation.
Trump voters left behind by globalization won’t love Clinton, but they may grow to grudgingly accept her if they have more money in their pockets under her administration.
Second, she needs to reach out to Trump supporters by giving them, finally, the policy-based campaign they deserved. She should immediately hold a series of town hall meetings and listening sessions in the staunchest pro-Trump areas of the country — asking people for their ideas while still making clear that racially divisive policies are a non-starter. This may require some uncomfortable conversations: Giving the Trump voters who supported “the wall” a forum to express their concerns over immigration, for instance, may raise hackles in some quarters. But in post-conflict reconciliation, the simple act of listening can often be an effective pillar that can turn alienation into popular engagement. Transitional justice efforts from Uganda to the Philippines have hinged on listening to victims, who often fear being ignored and forgotten.
Whoever wins on Nov. 8 will soon preside over the most divided electorate in modern U.S. history. The same old politics that have gotten us here no longer suffice. Before America’s Civil War, Abraham Lincoln warned that a “house divided against itself cannot stand.” We are not yet on the brink of a civil war, but the house is clearly divided. The repairs need to come from the next White House and fast.
I study fractured societies from post-war Côte d’Ivoire to post-Arab Spring Tunisia. Here’s how the next president can heal a divided electorate.
By Brian Klaas
November 7, 2016
For the first time in its modern history, the United States is going to need a post-election reconciliation plan — something typically reserved for countries emerging from deeply divisive conflicts.
On Nov. 9, between 55 million and 70 million Americans will wake up absolutely horrified at the results of the presidential election, whether it’s President Clinton or President Trump. But unlike past campaigns, millions are not going to be simply disappointed; they may well be unwilling to accept the results.
One sign that all is not well with the U.S. body politic: An October Public Policy Polling survey in Florida asked voters whether they believed that Hillary Clinton was actually a demon. Some 40 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters said yes, and 19 percent said they were unsure. Admittedly, many of those respondents were probably joking — or perhaps simply registering their unprecedented hatred for the Democratic nominee — but the existence of that question at all shows the degree to which 2016 has been an abysmal year for American democracy. Of more serious concern, a recent poll suggested that 41 percent of American voters believe the election could be “stolen.” The Republican nominee himself has not only suggested that the election has been rigged but has simultaneously painted Clinton as the “founder of ISIS,” someone who should be “locked up,” and repeatedly called her the “devil.” And last week, former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh implied that he would lead an armed revolt if Clinton wins the election.
Thankfully, most Americans still disavow political violence. Yet in surveys, a small but vocal minority consistently agrees with statements like: “Some of the problems citizens have with government could be fixed with a few well-aimed bullets.” The risk that we will see electoral violence in the United States has surged. This election cycle has not only seen instances of peaceful protests turning violent but also the normalization of violent rhetoric in American political discourse.
Making matters worse is the challenge presented by the Trump campaign’s mainstreaming of racism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance. The two threads combined horrifically on Nov. 1, when arsonists burned an African-American church in Mississippi and painted “Vote Trump” on the damaged walls.
Add it all together and few people would be shocked to see isolated incidents of post-election violence this year, something that would have been unthinkable during the 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Even if there is no violence, the fact that it is possible and predictable should be sufficient justification for taking the need for a reconciliation plan seriously.
If Hillary Clinton becomes President Clinton, she’s going to have a dual problem: quelling the risk of political violence from people who think she is potentially a demon (or at very least the winner of a “rigged” election) while trying to find a way to position herself as the president of all Americans, including tens of millions who have openly backed the most race-baiting, racially divisive politician in modern U.S. history. Conversely, if Donald Trump becomes President Trump, he’s going to need to find a way to win over groups that find him revolting either because he insulted or peddled racist tropes about them (Muslims, African-Americans, and Latinos in particular) or boasted about sexually assaulting them (women). What the new resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will need, in other words, is a peace plan.
I study rigged elections and political violence in the developing world, from Madagascar to Thailand, from Tunisia to Côte d’Ivoire. Never did I think that my expertise in some of the world’s most broken political systems would be relevant in understanding democracy in my own country. But this year is different. Suddenly, understanding why Côte d’Ivoire succumbed to bloody political violence in the wake of its deeply flawed 2010 presidential election is relevant to avoiding falling into that same trap in the United States. And learning from Tunisia’s reconciliation process after its remarkably peaceful post-Arab Spring transition to democracy could be vital to avoiding four years of further political dysfunction and division in Washington.
These two case studies, in particular, from very different parts of the world offer crucial lessons on how to approach post-election reconciliation in the United States.
First, Côte d’Ivoire offers a cautionary tale that the Trump campaign should take more seriously. In 2010, incumbent Ivoirian President Laurent Gbagbo lost his re-election bid. Rather than accept the results, he cast aspersions on the election’s integrity and called on his supporters to take up arms in his defense. Some loyal militias did exactly that. Fighting only ended after thousands of people had been killed. Gbagbo eventually was arrested and transported to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. His opponent took office in the end, but the country was deeply damaged as a result.
The United States is not headed toward another civil war, and Trump is not going to end up in The Hague. But when a major presidential candidate says the system is “rigged” and tells the public that he will keep them “in suspense” as to whether he will accept the election result, it sends a critically destabilizing signal that too many will take seriously.
So, the first step to reconciliation is a simple one. Should Trump lose, responsible Republicans must immediately congratulate Clinton and state unequivocally that they accept the results, even if Trump does not. Democrats, including Clinton, should of course do the same if Trump wins — as they have universally indicated they will. Republicans also need to work with a President Clinton, if she wins, to restore Americans’ faith in their electoral institutions. American democracy cannot thrive or survive when electoral integrity is incorrectly viewed through a partisan lens; the main type of election rigging in the United States is gerrymandering, and both parties are guilty of it. If these foundational steps do not occur, then Washington will look a lot more like Abidjan than it should.
If Clinton wins, she needs to find a way to reach out to what she called “the basket of deplorables” — without legitimizing their most deplorable ideas. Clinton will have to reconcile with an electoral base of mostly white, non-college-educated men, at least some of whom have reveled in the most toxic aspects of the Trump campaign. It may be a controversial statement, but many of Trump’s supporters are, in fact, racist. Surveys have shown that many, though not most, of Trump supporters believe that black people are less intelligent and more violent than white people. Forty-three percent of Republicans said Trump was “right” to complain that a judge with Mexican heritage was inherently biased because of his race.
And yet democracy works best when electoral victories do not result in vindictive and exclusionary governance. Citizens need to have a stake in the political system; they need to feel represented. That doesn’t mean accepting racism, or misogyny. But if Trump or Clinton voters feel completely abandoned or excluded in a system where “compromise” has become a dirty word, they may simply fight to undermine the system itself. To avoid that, establishment politicians — in the United States and around the world — need to incorporate people with unsavory views, whether it’s racist Trump supporters, ex-guerrillas in Colombia, or members of the authoritarian old guard in Tunisia.
In 2011, when Tunisians began to build a new political future after toppling a long-standing despot, they eschewed vengeance and embraced reconciliation. Their problem wasn’t racism, but it was no less toxic: Tunisia’s new leadership had to decide what to do with former members of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime, many of whom had even been complicit in torturing some of the members of the nascent post-dictatorship government.
Mature Tunisian statesmen decided to incorporate the old guard while dismantling what it stood for. The new political order put democracy center stage, condemned torture, and changed the rules of the political game without banning veteran politicos from playing. In that way, they realized that the key was to give those with unsavory views a reason to buy in to the new order while still keeping reactionary views out of Tunisia’s future. At one point, the new political coalition even went so far as to voluntarily give up power and allow a technocratic caretaker government to help with the transition. In doing so, they co-opted ex-authoritarians rather than alienating them by shutting them out. Over time, people with starkly different backgrounds and worldviews developed not only working relationships but, in some instances, friendships, too. And the Tunisian people were indispensible allies in weeding out authoritarianism with a soft touch: When one high-level member of the old regime ran for president in 2014, he received just 1.27 percent of the vote. Voters rejected his candidacy, but, crucially, he was given a stake in the process.
Beyond the elections, even those who did not vote for the new regime were invited to help shape it. The new regime also took criticisms of itself seriously and went to great pains to demonstrate that the overblown fears of its rivals — that it would turn Tunisia into a staunchly conservative and exclusionary Islamic republic — were misplaced. Those savvy moves saved democracy in Tunisia.
Tunisia is far afield from the United States geographically and even further afield politically. But its experience highlights a lesson that some divided societies have thankfully learned: Extending an olive branch to partisan rivals with even the most abhorrent views is crucial to not only peace but also the long-term vitality of democracy. Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment wasn’t factually inaccurate in many ways, but it was indicative of a candidate who has a long way to go in finding the finesse necessary to become the bridge-builder America sorely needs.
Tunisia’s old order committed human rights violations, but millions of people still backed it. All of them were still Tunisians; the Arab Spring didn’t change that. Likewise, voters who are deeply uncomfortable with the pace of demographic change — and the darker complexion of the U.S. electorate in particular — are still Americans. So are people who believe Clinton to be the devil incarnate. And while the government can pick and choose its policies, it cannot pick and choose its citizens.
In a functioning democracy, the winners take office, but they still must try to improve the lives of the electoral losers. Clinton is already signaling that she aims to do that, as her policies to make child care and college more affordable will inevitably benefit many Trump supporters if enacted. But that isn’t likely to be enough. Trump supporters are extremely anti-establishment, largely because they believe the government no longer works for them. A Clinton victory with a few baubles thrown in seems unlikely to create a buy-in for Trump voters. She’ll have to do more.
There is no time to waste. The aftermath of a hugely divisive ballot is often the most volatile period, as Election Day acts as a touchstone for anger and resentment. If Clinton wins, she must learn from Tunisia. First, take the darkest fears of your opponents seriously — but show how they are misplaced. In this case, that means appeasing those who want to lock her up by immediately laying out concrete steps to ensure that her administration is the most transparent in U.S. history by appointing a Republican lawyer to serve as a senior White House advisor on ethics and public disclosure compliance. To defuse the claim that she does not care about white working-class voters chewed up and spit out by the rough edges of globalization, Clinton should also spin off some of the functions of the Employment and Training Administration at the Department of Labor and create a new and better-funded Office of Inequality and Trade Dislocation.
Trump voters left behind by globalization won’t love Clinton, but they may grow to grudgingly accept her if they have more money in their pockets under her administration.
Second, she needs to reach out to Trump supporters by giving them, finally, the policy-based campaign they deserved. She should immediately hold a series of town hall meetings and listening sessions in the staunchest pro-Trump areas of the country — asking people for their ideas while still making clear that racially divisive policies are a non-starter. This may require some uncomfortable conversations: Giving the Trump voters who supported “the wall” a forum to express their concerns over immigration, for instance, may raise hackles in some quarters. But in post-conflict reconciliation, the simple act of listening can often be an effective pillar that can turn alienation into popular engagement. Transitional justice efforts from Uganda to the Philippines have hinged on listening to victims, who often fear being ignored and forgotten.
Whoever wins on Nov. 8 will soon preside over the most divided electorate in modern U.S. history. The same old politics that have gotten us here no longer suffice. Before America’s Civil War, Abraham Lincoln warned that a “house divided against itself cannot stand.” We are not yet on the brink of a civil war, but the house is clearly divided. The repairs need to come from the next White House and fast.
higgins
Footballguy
Why Chinese Elites Endorse Hillary Clinton
Trump's policies would be softer on China, but the global instability he'd create as President would be bad for business in Beijing.
By Isaac Stone Fish
November 7, 2016
The United States, China’s largest trading partner but also its greatest geopolitical rival, faces an election that threatens domestic instability. A Donald Trump victory would confirm to many Chinese the inherent weakness of American democracy. A Hillary Clinton victory, on the other hand, would force Beijing to deal with a politician widely viewed as unfriendly, and sometimes even hostile, to Chinese interests.
One might think that China would therefore welcome a Trump presidency. Yet conversations over the past six months with roughly half-a-dozen mid-ranking and high-ranking Chinese officials, as well as with sources afforded insight into the thinking of top Chinese policymakers, show that many in the Chinese political class grudgingly support Clinton — precisely because they believe a Trump presidency would be a disaster for the United States. Although on their face, many of Trump’s economic, political, and military policies would be far more beneficial to China than Clinton’s, the Chinese elite seem to prefer Trump’s opponent because they feel she would be better for the United States, its place in the world, and thus global stability, which remains of great importance to Beijing.
“While China’s elites scrupulously avoid taking public positions on internal affairs of other countries — especially U.S. politics — their incessant concern for stability, international as well as domestic, moves many to believe that Clinton, not Trump, would be better for China,” said a source familiar with Chinese leaders’ thinking, who asked to speak anonymously. And a source close to China’s leaders, who also asked to speak anonymously, said that although Beijing reaps huge public relations gains from Trump’s meteoric rise and what it says about the state of American democracy, “the perfect outcome is for [Trump] to lose narrowly.”
This would seem to run counter to China’s interests. Despite Trump’s inveterate China-bashing, many of his proposed policies could actually benefit China. His desire to dismantle America’s alliance structure in Asia would greatly improve Beijing’s military position with regards to its rival Japan. Unlike Clinton, who has vociferously criticized China’s human rights violations, Trump appeared to applaud Beijing’s 1989 slaughtering of student protestors in Tiananmen Square during a 1990 interview with Playboy. (In a March 2016 GOP debate, he said he wasn’t endorsing Beijing’s behavior, but proceeded to call the protests “a riot,” echoing language used by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.) And while Trump touts himself as a masterful deal-maker, Chinese bureaucrats — themselves known internationally for tough negotiating — seem to regard Clinton more seriously. “Clinton will be very tough on China,” a senior official complained, earlier this year. Yet when asked about Trump, the official failed to stifle a grin. “We can handle Trump,” the official said.
But for many of Beijing’s political elite, the risks and uncertainties of a Trump presidency outweigh the benefits. Even though China would gain tremendously if Trump weakened U.S. commitments and alliances in Asia, they mostly believe Clinton is ultimately better for China, the source familiar with Chinese leader’s thinking said.
Trump’s isolationism and his disregard for multilateral institutions would leave an international power vacuum that Beijing is not ready to fill. One influential Chinese academic, who asked to speak anonymously so he could talk freely about the election, told Foreign Policy that a Trump victory “would be a heavy blow against global governance and globalization,” two international trends that have benefited China immensely. The economic pain from a Trump presidency’s repudiation of global trade, and its mishandling of the U.S. economy, could further decelerate China’s already slowing economic growth, and by doing so, weaken the party’s hold on power.
Moreover, the party’s grip on power is never as strong as it appears from the outside. Many see President Xi Jinping as a serenely confident leader who has consolidated power via an anti-corruption drive, the appointment of himself to various “leading groups,” and the recent conferral of “core” leader status at a Party plenum. Yet there’s an element of fragility to Xi’s hold on power. China’s economy is dealing with worrying high levels of debt and, in some cities, real estate markets that many fear are bubbles. Official corruption, and discontent over elements of Party rule, still simmer throughout the country. A Trump victory could inject unwanted uncertainty and instability into China’s most important bilateral relationship.
To be sure, speculating about what China’s political class feels about the U.S. election — especially what the 24 men and one woman who make up China’s secretive ruling Politburo feel — is fraught. What Xi personally feels is even more difficult to glean. What’s clear, however, is the massive propaganda victory Beijing gains from the effect Trump has on American democracy’s image abroad. “They see this as what popular democracy brings,” said the source close to China’s leaders. “Le Pen in France, the rise of the far right in Germany, Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, and Trump — a bunch of nutcases.”
But the futures of China and the United States are too interconnected for Schadenfreude to dominate. “If I were America’s enemy, I would hope Trump is elected .. he will leave the U.S.’s domestic and foreign policies in disarray,” Ren Xiao, a former diplomat and a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the journalist Vincent Ni. “But if I were America’s friend, I would think that Hillary would be a better president.” For Beijing’s political elite, friendship and cooperation — at least, the desire for predictability and stability — seems to outweigh whatever glee would greet the weakening of American interests.
Trump's policies would be softer on China, but the global instability he'd create as President would be bad for business in Beijing.
By Isaac Stone Fish
November 7, 2016
The United States, China’s largest trading partner but also its greatest geopolitical rival, faces an election that threatens domestic instability. A Donald Trump victory would confirm to many Chinese the inherent weakness of American democracy. A Hillary Clinton victory, on the other hand, would force Beijing to deal with a politician widely viewed as unfriendly, and sometimes even hostile, to Chinese interests.
One might think that China would therefore welcome a Trump presidency. Yet conversations over the past six months with roughly half-a-dozen mid-ranking and high-ranking Chinese officials, as well as with sources afforded insight into the thinking of top Chinese policymakers, show that many in the Chinese political class grudgingly support Clinton — precisely because they believe a Trump presidency would be a disaster for the United States. Although on their face, many of Trump’s economic, political, and military policies would be far more beneficial to China than Clinton’s, the Chinese elite seem to prefer Trump’s opponent because they feel she would be better for the United States, its place in the world, and thus global stability, which remains of great importance to Beijing.
“While China’s elites scrupulously avoid taking public positions on internal affairs of other countries — especially U.S. politics — their incessant concern for stability, international as well as domestic, moves many to believe that Clinton, not Trump, would be better for China,” said a source familiar with Chinese leaders’ thinking, who asked to speak anonymously. And a source close to China’s leaders, who also asked to speak anonymously, said that although Beijing reaps huge public relations gains from Trump’s meteoric rise and what it says about the state of American democracy, “the perfect outcome is for [Trump] to lose narrowly.”
This would seem to run counter to China’s interests. Despite Trump’s inveterate China-bashing, many of his proposed policies could actually benefit China. His desire to dismantle America’s alliance structure in Asia would greatly improve Beijing’s military position with regards to its rival Japan. Unlike Clinton, who has vociferously criticized China’s human rights violations, Trump appeared to applaud Beijing’s 1989 slaughtering of student protestors in Tiananmen Square during a 1990 interview with Playboy. (In a March 2016 GOP debate, he said he wasn’t endorsing Beijing’s behavior, but proceeded to call the protests “a riot,” echoing language used by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.) And while Trump touts himself as a masterful deal-maker, Chinese bureaucrats — themselves known internationally for tough negotiating — seem to regard Clinton more seriously. “Clinton will be very tough on China,” a senior official complained, earlier this year. Yet when asked about Trump, the official failed to stifle a grin. “We can handle Trump,” the official said.
But for many of Beijing’s political elite, the risks and uncertainties of a Trump presidency outweigh the benefits. Even though China would gain tremendously if Trump weakened U.S. commitments and alliances in Asia, they mostly believe Clinton is ultimately better for China, the source familiar with Chinese leader’s thinking said.
Trump’s isolationism and his disregard for multilateral institutions would leave an international power vacuum that Beijing is not ready to fill. One influential Chinese academic, who asked to speak anonymously so he could talk freely about the election, told Foreign Policy that a Trump victory “would be a heavy blow against global governance and globalization,” two international trends that have benefited China immensely. The economic pain from a Trump presidency’s repudiation of global trade, and its mishandling of the U.S. economy, could further decelerate China’s already slowing economic growth, and by doing so, weaken the party’s hold on power.
Moreover, the party’s grip on power is never as strong as it appears from the outside. Many see President Xi Jinping as a serenely confident leader who has consolidated power via an anti-corruption drive, the appointment of himself to various “leading groups,” and the recent conferral of “core” leader status at a Party plenum. Yet there’s an element of fragility to Xi’s hold on power. China’s economy is dealing with worrying high levels of debt and, in some cities, real estate markets that many fear are bubbles. Official corruption, and discontent over elements of Party rule, still simmer throughout the country. A Trump victory could inject unwanted uncertainty and instability into China’s most important bilateral relationship.
To be sure, speculating about what China’s political class feels about the U.S. election — especially what the 24 men and one woman who make up China’s secretive ruling Politburo feel — is fraught. What Xi personally feels is even more difficult to glean. What’s clear, however, is the massive propaganda victory Beijing gains from the effect Trump has on American democracy’s image abroad. “They see this as what popular democracy brings,” said the source close to China’s leaders. “Le Pen in France, the rise of the far right in Germany, Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, and Trump — a bunch of nutcases.”
But the futures of China and the United States are too interconnected for Schadenfreude to dominate. “If I were America’s enemy, I would hope Trump is elected .. he will leave the U.S.’s domestic and foreign policies in disarray,” Ren Xiao, a former diplomat and a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the journalist Vincent Ni. “But if I were America’s friend, I would think that Hillary would be a better president.” For Beijing’s political elite, friendship and cooperation — at least, the desire for predictability and stability — seems to outweigh whatever glee would greet the weakening of American interests.
James Daulton
Footballguy
Rohn Jambo
Footballguy
I made it to the polling place right before they close and voted not for Hillary.
BustedKnuckles
Footballguy
trump just took the lead in fla
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
BustedKnuckles
Footballguy
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