‘If He Makes a Successful Return in 2024, Democracy’s Done’

Fiona Hill was introduced to most Americans through her testimony in President Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in late 2019. A former National Security Council official, that day she delivered a personal story of growing up in a working-class mining town in northeastern England and emigrating to the United States, all delivered in an accent that many Americans couldn’t quite place but would have marked her for class discrimination in her native country.

Her new book, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21^st Century, only briefly touches on her White House experience and mostly focuses on the personal story that so many found compelling in her testimony. (Representative Jackie Speier asked Hill to confirm a story from her childhood during the question-and-answer portion: that a classmate had set her pigtails on fire when she was 11 during school, and Hill had extinguished the blaze and completed a test. It was true.) Still, there is enough space for a few revealing West Wing anecdotes, such as when the former president mistook her for a secretary and then-chief of staff Reince Priebus referred to her as “the Russia bitch.” In response to the book, Trump emailed an angry statement to supporters this week calling her “a Deep State stiff with a nice accent.”

Ultimately, the book goes beyond a memoir. Hill uses the story of her hometown and her journey to the White House to show not just that success was difficult for her, but that it should have been impossible. The more she describes her native mining town, the more it looks like deindustrialized centers in the American Midwest and coal towns in Appalachia. That’s the point: Hill is particularly interested in how a lack of opportunity, not just in the UK but also in the U.S. and Russia, creates the ideal circumstances for a dangerous brand of populist politics to thrive.

While some parts of the book sound like a policy paper, there are also parts that sound like snippets from a frank conversation between two very close friends, such as when she writes about her struggles with wage discrimination in Washington or stuffing her bra with tissue and pantyhose at one of her first jobs at a medieval-themed banquet hall. I called to ask her what she’s most worried about when it comes to Trump’s next act, and if even now, even after everyone in Washington knows her name, she thinks she could play salary hardball like some of her male colleagues.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Katelyn Fossett: What do you make of Trump’s recent comments about the Jan. 6 rioters? He said in a statement in September they were being unfairly persecuted by the Biden administration.

Fiona Hill: Well, this is also part of this myth-making, as we’re well aware: the perpetration of the Big Lie, and the turning of the people of Jan. 6 into martyrs and also trying to rewrite the historical record in real time. He is mulling again a return to what he sees more as a crown than the presidency in 2024.

I feel like we’re at a really critical and very dangerous inflection point in our society, and if Trump — this is not on an ideological basis, this is just purely on an observational basis based on the larger international historical context — if he makes a successful return to the presidency in 2024, democracy’s done. Because it will be on the back of a lie. A fiction. And I think we have to bear that in mind. And I was hoping that with the book, I might be able to reach out, because I’m not a partisan person, to people who care very much about the United States and about its democracy to really think about this long and hard.

I find it deeply disturbing that the number one identity that people put forward in polls now is whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican rather than an American or someone from a particular region. Even religious or ethnic/racial identifiers seem to be subsumed in this in some of the polling. And so, you know, those of us who are independent in mind and practice but politically engaged, where do we fit into all of this? We used to fit into America. I have a lot of friends who are immigrants like myself who have been here for a long time, who come from many, many different places — not all from Europe. And they say, “This is not the America I came to. This is not the America we chose to come to.” And they were deeply disturbed by this. But many people fled these kinds of authoritarian or autocratic regimes, which are highly personalized, deny social mobility and where you have kleptocratic cliques of cronies who are really trying to take charge of policy, and that’s what this [deep polarization] is about. This is not about ideology. It is a manipulation of particular social issues — abortion, immigration, all kinds of issues.

This America is looking dangerously like Russia — based on the divisions of Russia in the 1990s and then the Putin system that came out of that. China, Hungary, Venezuela — many of the countries that are expelling immigrants from the region. This is what we’re dealing with. In all of these places, all of these issues are being manipulated and people’s grievances are being whipped up.

Fossett: Given your past concerns about the Trump administration’s friendly posture toward Russia, do you think that the Biden administration has been an improvement in that respect?

Hill: Well, you know, there’s a similar kind of problem. With both Trump and Biden, the first thing is that they both wanted to get rid of Russia as a problem. Trump obviously wanted to win over Putin. He had this kind of strongman envy; he thought Putin was the ultimate badass. But really, Trump himself wanted to focus on other things. China, Iran and other issues were much more pertinent to his goals, and he was trying to sort of win Russia over through Putin to just get them on our side, as he saw it. Biden similarly wants to focus on China — not Iran, obviously — but he wants to park Russia somewhere, as a colleague has described it. But the Russians really don’t like this. And so the more that you try to marginalize them, or deprioritize them, the more likely they are to fight back, or drive out of that parking lot.

Russia is confounding for most people. Why are we still in a Cold War situation with Russia? When the National Security Strategy came out under Trump — obviously Trump didn’t really like it — when Russia was given more prominence along with China, there was a lot of head-scratching. But it’s of course because of the election subversion and the actions Russia has taken to influence our elections, all of these operations to hack into all of our systems, ransomware … I mean, Russia is a massive problem. But we’re not in the kind of confrontation that we were with Russia in the Cold War. This is really kind of more Russia’s confrontation of choice than it is ours.

We have a really hard time getting the Russians off our back. So just like Trump thought that he could woo Putin, Biden would just like to say, “Yeah, please go away,” so he can move on with everything else.

But we need to always keep coming to Russia in our sights. And we’ve got to be a bit more sophisticated and nuanced in managing that relationship.

Fossett: What do you think more sophistication and nuance would look like?

Hill: Well, first of all, we know that they’ve been interfering in our political systems and they continue to do so. They’ve been doing it across the board with our European allies as well. We do need to work with [those allies] on this and get back to a concerted action. Domestic renewal is a critical part of this as well because the Russians are exploiting all of our internal divisions. Russian operatives masquerade on the internet, pressing issues on abortion, race, religion and partisan divisions. The more that we can do to overcome those and have a sensible national conversation about them, give more empathy and remember we’re Americans, the better off we will be.

We also have to keep on with education efforts to make sure that people are more aware of posting personal and political information online. They might also be dealing with someone in their social media circles who might be working for the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, as opposed to St. Petersburg, Florida.

And we also have to recognize that some of our politicians behave in the same way. I probably shouldn’t say this, but some of our members of Congress look more like some of the crazy members of the Russian Duma [parliament], like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who were influence operations for Russian domestic purposes. They’re out there being agent-provocateurs and stirring things up for domestic purposes, but they’re exactly the kinds of people that can be pointed to and manipulated by Russians on the outside. So when people say, for example, that Trump was a Russian asset, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he was on the books, or that we’ll find some file. Is just means that his actions, and his embrace of the Big Lie, and all of his vulnerabilities could be unbelievably easily exploited. Some of our members of Congress and senators are exactly the same.

But the problem for us is that we’re doing that domestically. Our political system has changed since Citizens United, with the creation of Super PACs and political action committees. I would hope that the Supreme Court would start thinking about reversing that. It’s a bit pie in the sky, but we need to ask how we can take all of this money out of our politics. Because that’s how the Russians can create shells, and they can influence other people with lots of money who can play in our system.

Fossett: I thought your book was similar to J.D. Vance’s book. Both are personal stories about people who made it out of socioeconomic disadvantage against all odds, and what those stories explain about people who feel resentful or dispossessed. Have you read that book?

Hill: I did, and, actually in a way, my book’s a little bit of a reaction to his. I thought his book was so grim, and he seems to sort of blame, in some respects, his family and people from his background for their predicament. And I thought, “Well, that’s not fair,” because in my experience, all of it has to do with circumstances. And I didn’t grow up in a family with substance abuse problems and other issues but certainly in the community there was plenty of that.

Fossett: Now he’s running for Senate in the mold of a Trump populist. And I want to ask about that transformation, because it seems so relevant to your arguments about how these populist-nationalist ideas take root in areas that are dealing with the kinds of problems both you and he discuss.

Hill: He should be running as his own person, not trying to emulate someone else. He’s the real deal. I mean, Trump was never the real deal. There are sections in Hillbilly Elegy about how celebrities like Trump can talk the talk and they never walk the walk.

There ought to be more empathy for the people and place where he came from, not trying to use them as a kind of slogan or a kind of a banner. Because the big problem of populism is people can’t see themselves reflected in the people at the top, and so they become prey to the celebrity-politicians and others who say, “I will be your champion; just give me your vote.” And those politicians don’t care that much about them.

Vance’s book along with many of the other, more conventional sociological books of the period — like The Unwinding, Strangers in Their Own Land, We’re Still Here, Janesville — these are the books that should be helping us to understand how we got to all of this. And these books should be coming up with some concrete solutions, not just serving as a kind of platform and springboard for exploitation, for a certain small number of people to get into political office.

I’m not saying that every politician seeks office for personal gain or professional advancement, but certainly a lot of people do. I mean, Trump thinks of himself as a king and wants to create a new dynasty. I saw that firsthand.

Fossett: I really thought the gender component was interesting to include in the book, because it’s essentially about lack of opportunity, and there are specific hurdles for women.

Hill: At one point my editor was a bit leery about me weaving the gender issue into it because I started off writing the book thematically. I wasn’t really going to do the whole biography in the way that it is in there now. Once we started to do it, when I started to write and draft it, it was a little overwhelming for the uninitiated reader. So we decided to do the biographical through-line.

And that’s when the women’s issues component seemed to become a question mark for the editor. But I did a little bit of focus grouping with my colleagues, and they said I should really insist on trying to keep this in. Some of them said, “Well, maybe this isn’t completely related to the theme of opportunity or some of the national security themes that you’re mentioning,” and I said, “But it is!” I mean, as any woman will tell you, this is very important. It does feed into social grievance and helps to explain why many women are also attracted to populism.

Fossett: It’s so important because we rarely discuss gender in the context of economic mobility. A lot of the gender issues we talk about are either issues for women at the top of the income distribution or the bottom. But women face unique issues moving from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Hill: Yes, because you get Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book about not having it all, which is very much for an elite audience. And then you got the less well-off women at the very bottom, for instance the single mothers who are looking for jobs and opportunities. You don’t see it the whole way through.

Fossett: So often when you hear about the narrative of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or the self-made person, that narrative often sounds designed around a man.

Hill: Even the word bootstraps, right?

Fossett: What do you think our conversation about economic mobility misses when it comes to women in particular?

Hill: Well, I do think gender is an obstacle to getting ahead at different phases of one’s career.

But many of the barriers are subtle. I mean, the #MeToo movement brought those out in a very unsubtle way — the barriers that are posed by sexual harassment and rape. But it’s also that kind of constant feeling that you are not the same as everyone else. I was told throughout my career that I was a risk because of being a woman. I’ve had all of these questions asked — when I was planning on having children — all of these things that are completely inappropriate.

But women are also often divided against each other. People never really know about salaries, because people don’t want to talk about it. I wanted to use a few more stories that people told me for the book and they didn’t want to let me use them because they were embarrassed. Older women in particular didn’t want people to know that they were underpaid vis-a-vis their male colleagues in these senior positions, because it was them somehow saying, “Well, I’m second class. I’m not worthy of this.” Because money is the marker.

Then there are physical security issues that are tied to opportunity. If you’re a girl considering job opportunities, you do have to think about going home on a bus or metro late at night. Some of the stories that got taken out were about attacks on the metro and getting stalked in the streets. My teenage years were when the Yorkshire Ripper was at large in the UK. It was a huge constraint on my teens and late teens because girls from all kinds of backgrounds were being killed. They weren’t all prostitutes, and a lot of the people who were had been driven into prostitution because of the extreme economic circumstances. And in the whole of the north of England, we were having all kinds of Take-Back-the-Night demonstrations because women couldn’t go to work and come back for fear of being brutally murdered. I was flashed at probably 100,000 bloody times from being a small child all the way through to an adult woman. And it would make me think twice about walking on my own or going anywhere on my own. So opportunities were constrained. These are not fully understood, but they do become constraints on economic mobility because women don’t have the same choices as men or boys do in terms of being able to take advantage of job offers or internships or other things as well.

And then the big issue is of single women with children, and their constraints on earning power get passed on to their children.

Fossett: The other thing I noticed in your book was how frankly you talked about what might be called wage discrimination. You describe two instances, at the Brookings Institution and in the White House, where the person who was in your position before you made a lot more money. In both cases, your predecessor was a man. They got more money because they had threatened to leave if they didn’t. And I have to ask, even in your position, as someone who is very well respected in her field and who has worked directly with the president, do you think that if you had tried to play hardball in the same way, it would have worked?

Hill: I almost think that it wouldn’t. It would be a backfire. And there was one incident where my husband had actually coached me beforehand. He said, “Men do this all the time, and you need to ask for this. And here, this is how to do it.” The hiring manager pretty much laughed at me when I tried it. And this is the kind of thing that a guy does all the time. And then I just thought, “Wow.” I remember hearing about successful women who had taken a lawyer to their salary negotiation, and I was like, “What?” And then I thought, “Well, yeah, I see why.” Because they’re going to get ripped off just as a matter of course.

But there is always this pervasive sense that I’ve experienced myself all the time that if you push too much, they’ll say, “Well, we won’t hire you. Because you are a risk and we’re taking a risk on you.” And then your salary history from these early jobs … The places I’ve worked, like Brookings and Harvard, have really worked on this, particularly in the last 10 years since the Lilly Ledbetter Act, and more women have moved up and started to push for wage equality.

But you can’t reverse 20-odd years of wage inequality. I tallied up at one point $500,000 of pay that I will never have. And I’m not going to complain from my vantage point, because I’m married to somebody who works in the private sector. But, yeah, it just annoys me that I’m paid and have been successively paid a hell of a lot less than men. So it’s like … so what am I? I’ve worked incredibly hard. I’ve been working since I was 11. And I’ll never make the same as a man from my kind of cohort.

And so what about the single mother? The younger person who is looking across at the guy next to her and thinks, “They’re making more than me here.” And then the hiring managers, will literally say, “Well, what’s your husband making?” or “Well good for you that you made that in your last job but you’re not going to get that here because we’re taking a risk on you in this promotion.” I spoke to a lot of women — around my age and in the media — who had exactly these discussions, and I want them to come out and talk about them. Because I want to make sure that young women don’t have to do that. People think you are the B-word when you start to push. Or they think you’re greedy and grasping. Women aren’t allowed to be angry, and women aren’t allowed to ask for the same things that men are allowed to ask for.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/08/fiona-hill-book-donald-trump-515660
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Katelyn Fossett

! #Headlines, #Newsfeed, #Political, #Politico, #Politics, #Trending, #TrumpLiesMatter, biden trump, iran trump, putin trump, #News, #Science, #Trump, #UK, #WorldNews

Texas hold ’em: Biden aides push Cruz to lift ‘death grip’ on nominees

The secretary of State is lighting up Capitol Hill phone lines. His underlings are using committee hearings and private exchanges to raise alarms. An outside letter-writing campaign is not out of the question. And if things get really bad, President Joe Biden himself may have to say something.

But will any of this growing pressure move Sen. Ted Cruz to stop blocking the confirmations of State Department nominees? An increasingly frustrated Biden administration is simply not sure.

Nearly seven months since he took office, only 10 of Biden’s State Department nominees have been confirmed. Dozens more, including some 60 would-be ambassadors, face what one person familiar with the situation called Cruz’s “death grip.” Other senators have put holds on nominees, but none has enforced such a blanket block without an easy path through it as Cruz.

The Texas Republican is blocking State Department nominees en masse because he is upset that Biden waived some sanctions related to Nord Stream 2, a Russian-German energy pipeline project that the United States has long opposed.

Cruz has used a mix of procedural moves in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and on the full chamber’s floor to delay the confirmation process and needle the administration. His actions have two effects: They either delay nominees’ votes, like when Cruz held over a batch of Biden picks from a SFRC business meeting on July 28 to another on Aug. 4. Or they outright block the full Senate from finally confirming a nominee.

Cruz also has been vocal about his intentions, leading to intense negotiations between him, his staff and administration officials.

In some cases, he has avoided escalating the fight. For example, Cruz used procedural plays to delay decisions on two key positions, consular affairs and diplomatic security — including in a spat with SFRC Chair Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). But he did not try to block those two nominees from being confirmed by the full Senate on Monday night.

Cruz isn’t backing down from the broader battle, though. “Americans and people across the world understand the importance of halting the Biden-Putin pipeline,” a senior Cruz staffer told POLITICO. The aide wouldn’t say if there’s anything the administration can offer the lawmaker to lift the holds short of imposing all of the sanctions on Nord Stream 2.

Administration officials have been in “constant, near-daily” contact with Cruz and his staffers, in hopes of getting more nominees through before the Senate break for its August recess, a senior State Department official said. But Cruz has resisted the administration’s main argument: that his recalcitrance is damaging to U.S. national interests and national security.

“The Senate is built on this idea of mutuality and shame,” the senior State Department official said. “If someone doesn’t have that sense of shame about essentially kneecapping an important national security agency, there’s no magic button that you can push.”

Administration officials describe the Cruz holds as highly unusual given that they target an entire department and revolve around a policy dispute, not the senator’s reservations about a particular nominee.

Overall, Biden has nominated 405 people for Senate-confirmable positions across the government, including the State Department. Of those, 288 are still awaiting confirmation, far more than his modern predecessors. Before Biden, and dating back to Bill Clinton, no president had more than 178 nominees awaiting confirmation at this stage. (That was Donald Trump.)

Historically, many State Department nominees — especially career U.S. diplomats tapped for ambassadorships — have been confirmed as part of packages that sail through the Senate ahead of August recess. The date for the recess this year remains a close but still moving target.

Getting around Cruz, however, will require Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to spend precious floor hours pushing through State nominees, time he’d rather spend getting other parts of the president’s domestic agenda through Congress. It was Schumer who blew past Cruz’s hold to confirm Bonnie Jenkins as the undersecretary of State for arms control by forcing a vote on the nomination.

A senior Senate GOP aide wished Schumer would spend more time on this issue. “So many State nominees need floor time, and only the leader can make that happen,” the aide said. But a Senate Democratic staffer pointed a finger at the Texas lawmaker. “I think the sentiment [in the Senate] is Ted Cruz is responsible for Ted Cruz,” the staffer told POLITICO.

Administration officials warn the situation is unsustainable.

“This is unprecedented that we would have to negotiate every single one on an individual basis, and it’s going to take years if that’s the case,” the senior State Department official said.

Several Republicans have expressed sympathy with the administration, the official said, naming Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and James Risch (R-Idaho) in particular. The administration also is in touch with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, about easing the nominees’ path.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to Cruz.

The Texas Republican has relented at times. Recently, after a personal appeal from Menendez, Cruz lifted his hold on Jose Fernandez, who was confirmed as the undersecretary of State for economic growth, energy and the environment, the State Department official and the person familiar with the situation said.

But Cruz is adamant that Biden’s decision to end sanctions on the pipeline is a historically bad one, arguing that it gives Russia more influence in Central Europe and hurts Ukraine financially. Nord Stream 2 is over 90 percent complete, and he’s worked closely with both parties in Congress to ensure it doesn’t reach 100 percent. That’s why Cruz continually says publicly and privately that he’ll maintain the holds until Biden imposes all of the congressionally mandated sanctions on the pipeline.

Biden explained his pipeline decision during a July press conference alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “[B]y the time I became president, it was 90 percent completed,” he said, “and imposing sanctions did not seem to make any sense. It made more sense to work with the chancellor on finding out how she’d proceed based on whether or not Russia tried to, essentially, blackmail Ukraine in some way.”

That doesn’t satisfy Cruz, and he’s pushing the president to change his mind. The administration “has repeatedly said their waiver of sanctions can be rescinded. Well, good. [They’ve] laid out the path forward: Rescind the waiver and actually follow the law,” Cruz told POLITICO in his Senate office last month. “And when they rescind the waiver, I will happily lift my holds. State has it within their power to lift the holds any time they want.”

Some critics, though, believe Cruz is positioning himself as the chief Biden antagonist on foreign policy, a moniker he can use during a possible 2024 presidential run.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been calling lawmakers to encourage them to help the nominees get through; Blinken also used a press conference last week to urge that the confirmation process be sped up.

During a Senate hearing last week, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said the State Department was “hamstrung” without all of its people in place. Other State Department officials also are using their contacts with senators to press the issue.

Administration officials wouldn’t rule out the possibility of asking for outside help — such as letter-writing campaigns from NGOs that often help galvanize public opinion around such issues. They also didn’t discount the possibility of Biden making a comment at some point. It was not clear if the president has been weighing in behind the scenes at the Senate, his longtime professional home.

Biden administration officials stressed that several of the nominees that have been confirmed have had little to no opposition in the final vote. They also insisted that the Biden administration’s nominees are, for the most part, not partisan warriors the way many of Trump’s were. (That being said, the Trump administration expressed fury at what it viewed as slow-rolling of nominees by Menendez and other Democrats.)

The hope is that, if nominees continue to pile up and critical national security positions remain unfilled, Cruz will feel more public pressure to release the holds.

“To some extent it’s sort of been under the radar,” the senior State Department official said. “Sen. Cruz has been holding all State Department nominees for many months, but it hasn’t been sort of in the public consciousness that he’s doing that.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/10/biden-cruz-death-grip-nominees-503272
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Nahal Toosi and Alexander Ward

! #Headlines, #Biden, #Congress, #Newsfeed, #Political, #Politico, #Politics, #Trending, biden trump, putin trump, #News, #Trump, #WorldNews

The queen meets her 13th U.S. president: Joe from Scranton

ST. IVES, England — President Joe Biden built his political brand on being part of a working class family from a former coal town in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania.

On Sunday, Joe from Scranton meets with the queen.

Biden — alongside his wife, first lady Jill Biden, a community college teacher — will have tea at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth II, the British monarch who has reigned for more than 60 years, before he departs the United Kingdom.

It’s a presidential rite of passage. Queen Elizabeth, 95, has met every American president since World War II, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson. Biden is the first in two decades, though, to come from what he’s described as hardscrabble roots.

“It’s a mighty long ride from being Scranton Joe the Amtrak commuter to dining… with Queen Elizabeth but they’ll get along fabulously,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. “The wonderful thing about Biden is that he is comfortable with himself in any setting.”

Brinkley said Biden will go out of his way to follow the correct protocols and manners. “Protocol is our current president’s modus operandi,” he said.

Biden and the queen have met at least once before, back in 1982, when he was serving as a Democratic senator from Delaware, the state his family moved to when he was 10.

The visit on Sunday — which is expected to include an arrival ceremony with a review of troops and the playing of the two countries’ national anthems — comes three days after what would have been the queen’s late husband’s 100th birthday. Prince Philip, the duke of Edinburgh, died two months ago at the age of 99. It will mark the queen’s first in-person meeting with a head of state since his death.

But in the U.K., the media has focused more on Biden’s Irish Roman Catholic heritage than on the queen’s lingering grief or the president’s more modest beginnings. There has been speculation that Biden’s faith might impact relations with the queen given that Brexit, which Biden opposed, could jeopardize the peace process in Northern Ireland.

“This is more a foreign policy moment than a class moment; as with so much else in the Biden presidency, it might have been different even 20 years ago, but the Irishness has been muted by the burdens of being president in 2021,” a Biden adviser said. “He will doubtless console her on the loss of Philip, but the real question for Elizabeth’s nation is how to deal with the same kind of forces we are facing — Brexit in their case, Trumpism in ours.”

Biden has experienced grief in his own life, suffering two losses decades apart. His first wife and baby daughter died in a car crash in 1972 and one of his adult sons, Beau, died in 2015, of brain cancer. He often seeks out those who have suffered loss to console them.

“There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son, or daughter, or your wife or your husband, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye,” he says repeatedly when he speaks to those who have lost someone. “It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner than later.”

On Thursday, on what would have been the prince’s birthday, Biden recognized the occasion before giving a speech on the Covid vaccination campaign.

“I want to express our condolences on behalf of Jill and I to her majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, the entire royal family, and the people of the United Kingdom,” he said “Today would have been Prince Philip’s 100th birthday, and I know there are a lot of people feeling his absence today.”

Two days later, the United Kingdom celebrated the queen’s birthday, a date Secretary of State Antony Blinken marked in a statement. “Queen Elizabeth’s lifetime of leadership and dedication to service is an example for all nations. Under her stewardship, the United Kingdom has withstood great challenges and enjoyed long standing stability.”

Biden traveled to Europe to attend several meetings — the G-7, NATO and summits with European Union and European Council leaders — in England and Belgium. His final stop will be in Geneva, where he will speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The visit with the queen — a rite of passage for U.S. presidents — will be the most ceremonial of his stops.

“A meeting with the queen is highly sought after by U.S. presidents and Joe Biden is no exception,” said Nile Gardiner, a former adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who now serves as director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

For Biden, sticking to protocols will be one of the main objectives. In 2018, then-President Donald Trump, who bragged about how much fun the queen had with him, was criticized for both walking in front of her and turning his back to her as they reviewed an honor guard.

In 2009, then-first lady Michelle Obama briefly put her arm around the queen’s back as the two shared complaints about their aching feet at a reception for the G-20 group of world leaders in London.

In 2007, then-President George W. Bush misspoke, saying the queen helped the U.S. “celebrate its bicentennial in 17… ” before catching himself, and quickly correcting the date to 1976.

“She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child,” he said at the time.

No such incident occurred when the Bidens saw the queen Friday. She made Biden and other world leaders laugh when posing for a group photo, asking: “Are you supposed to be looking as if you’re enjoying yourself?”

“Yes,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson replied. “We have been enjoying ourselves in spite of appearances.”

Later, the queen spoke to the Bidens at a reception at Eden Project, an eco-park that proclaims it houses the largest rainforest in captivity. She was joined by her son, Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and grandson, Prince William and his wife, Kate Middleton, the duchess of Cambridge.

Earlier that day, the first lady and the duchess of Cambridge visited a school to highlight early childhood development programs. It was the first time they had met.

“Joe and I are both looking forward to meeting the queen,” Jill Biden told reporters. “That’s an exciting part of the visit for us. We’ve looked forward to this for weeks and now it’s finally here. It’s a beautiful beginning.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/13/the-queen-president-joe-biden-493865
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Anita Kumar

! #Headlines, #Biden, #Newsfeed, #People, #Political, #Politico, #Politics, #Trending, biden trump, putin trump, #Health, #News, #Trump, #UK, #WorldNews

‘Stop the bleeding’: Biden reaches out to Europe, but Trump’s damage has been done

President Joe Biden and his team are fanning out across the West’s leading institutions and forums to announce that “America is back.”

They’re set to be greeted with welcome relief by allies, who — in the face of a global recession and pandemic, not to mention PTSD from the Trump years — appear happy for now to table complicated negotiations over shared challenges and thorny points of divergence.

“These next four days will set the tone” for the following four years, said Alexander Stubb, who spent nearly a decade dealing with then-Vice President Biden, including a stint as Finland’s prime minister.

Biden is guaranteed to get hearty applause while addressing G-7 leaders and the Munich Security Conference on Friday, but his administration should expect a rockier road ahead.

After conversations with his British, French and German counterparts, aimed at reviving the Iran nuclear deal, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is meeting Quad counterparts (India, Japan and Australia) on Friday and the EU’s foreign affairs council Monday. His audience is expecting him to play transatlantic bad cop, compared to the ever-optimistic Biden.

On other fronts in the charm offensive, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has wrapped up two days of meetings with NATO colleagues, where he successfully argued to delay NATO troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, while climate envoy John Kerry today joins U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to sweep the U.S. back into the Paris Climate Agreement.

POLITICO spoke to a dozen European and Japanese leaders and senior officials who often lived in fear of former President Donald Trump’s tweets. While they’re positively relaxed about the speeches Biden will deliver Friday, they know Biden’s powers are limited.

European leaders in particular worry that Trumpism remains alive, are skeptical about the results the White House can squeeze from a deeply divided U.S. Congress and aren’t yet sold on meeting the Biden administration’s expectations on China, Russia and trade.

To maximize the chances of a functioning G-7 and rekindled transatlantic relationship, allies are setting the bar low for Friday’s gatherings.

As president and host of Friday’s G-7 gathering, the U.K. is giving Biden a passing grade before he opens his mouth. “Biden doesn’t need to come to this meeting with a suite of creative policy announcements for it to be important or successful,” said a senior British diplomat, adding “it’s enough to stop America’s image bleeding. I doubt anyone will be disappointed.”

A Japanese government spokesperson stressed the need for G-7 countries “to lead the post-COVID international order,” and anticipated full-throated agreement with the shared democratic values Biden is expected to advocate.

Even the Hungarian government — which had an antagonistic relationship with the Obama administration — couldn’t bring itself to sound any alarm bells about the Biden era: Zoltán Kovács, a cabinet member and government spokesperson, said he had no concerns or expectations to convey to Biden.

While boilerplate commitments to multilateralism and democracy are already flowing, they disguise bubbling transatlantic tensions on issues from trade to energy policy to China.

European officials know the tough conversations can’t be avoided for long. Biden “said all the right things” to reassure Europe after “the unpredictable cacophony of Trump,” said Stubb.

“But the realistic picture is that the world is radically different from 2016 when Trump entered the scene,” he added. “This is the message Blinken should deliver” when he meets with the EU’s 27 foreign ministers and the bloc’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell.

Europe isn’t afraid to go its own way

Shocked by Britain’s vote to leave, and wedged between an aggressive Russia, a rising China and a disinterested America under Trump, the EU set a course for “strategic autonomy” in recent years. In that time, China also overtook the U.S. as the EU’s biggest trading partner.

The EU’s repositioning is only now bearing fruit, but that’s not to say it’s superficial either: There’s a determined independent approach to China and Russia relations, a beefed-up industrial policy, tough digital regulations and taxes, and only a tentative commitment to EU joint defense and increased national defense spending.

While the Biden administration sees the EU as an essential pillar of stability in global affairs, it recoils at many of these decisions.

Europeans also worry that in four years, a new Republican administration may junk Biden’s defense and climate commitments, leaving them stranded with long-term investments and no American backup. “Who’s to say we won’t end up right where we were four years from now?” one senior German defense official asked.

National leaders and climate officials welcome U.S. re-entry into the Paris Climate Agreement — Sebastian Kurz, the Austrian chancellor, called it “an encouraging step” — but said they will celebrate only when Congress passes a strict and well-funded 2030 emissions reduction target.

Trade tensions are simmering

On trade, there is goodwill but that isn’t stopping points of contention spilling out into the open.

Kurz, Austria’s 34-year-old chancellor, told POLITICO that once progress is made against Covid-19 and toward economic recovery, “we should give our trade relations a fresh start by settling ongoing trade disputes and ending punitive measures as soon as possible.”

Kurz is referring to Trump-era tariffs the new administration is yet to unwind, and Biden’s new “Made in America” government procurement policy, which is provoking grumbling in Brussels. Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU’s trade chief, told reporters Thursday: “We will be assessing to which extent the U.S. complies with its [World Trade Organization] commitments under the global procurement agreement.”

As part of a broader review of trade policy, Dombrovskis promised the EU will be “tougher and more assertive.” That includes a European Commission effort to deliver an “anti-coercion” trade instrument, which would allow it to retaliate against any future U.S. efforts to block EU trade. EU officials are frustrated that European companies such as Airbus and Renault have lost out because of American sanctions against Iran. Brussels is also worried that Washington may outlaw EU companies from shipping goods (like cars) made with U.S. microchips to China, on national security grounds.

“In the years to come, we will witness a certain amount of tension in the field of semiconductors,” said Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner. “We, in Europe, intend to play our full part in this new geostrategic game of chess.”

Back in Washington, administration officials are mostly biting their tongues, avoiding wading into controversial geopolitics like the Nordstream II gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, though House Republicans are urging the imposition of sanctions.

On Trump’s favorite topic of defense funding commitments, Austin, the defense secretary, wrote Wednesday that the U.S. is “ready to consult together, decide together and act together,” with NATO allies, a markedly softer tone than Trump.

European leaders know this harmony won’t last without extra effort from Europe. “Both President Biden and Secretary Blinken know Europe very well. But this also means they know Europe could be a better partner and ally,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told POLITICO.

“We need to put our European house in order by being united on foreign policy and defense,” de Croo added.

Washington’s frustrations are almost certain to burst out into the open around the EU’s push for “strategic autonomy” from the U.S., China and Russia.

While American officials roll their eyes at the EU’s bungling of Russia relations, and see the bloc’s “tech sovereignty” push as blatant protectionism, top of their complaint list is a recent EU-China investment deal that Angela Merkel and EU officials deliberately pushed through in the last weeks of the Trump administration.

The China problem

“China will be the elephant in the room,” said Stubb, but others including Austria’s Kurz are happy to bring the discussion into the spotlight. “Austria is also ready to engage in an open dialogue with the United States on China,” Kurz said.

The problem for the U.S. may be a lack of EU unity on the topic. “If Mr. Biden is stretching out his hand towards Europe, he expects a firm shake, not 27 opinions from as many member states,” said De Croo.

Many smaller European countries feel stuck on China: They distrust how Beijing wields power, but find it both too big to ignore and too big to handle alone. Germany and France — the biggest EU powers — have been vocal about their preference to engage with China rather than forming a Cold War-style bloc against it.

While the EU shifted closer toward U.S. positions on China in 2020, the lack of unity leaves many European countries still allowing Huawei in at least parts of their mobile networks, and prevents the EU from imposing sanctions on China over human rights abuses against the Uighur Muslim minority.

Last week, as China attempted to use a special summit to strengthen relations with Central and Eastern European countries, half of the 12 invited EU national leaders failed to show up to pay homage to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who hosted the event.

When Blinken meets with 27 European foreign ministers Monday via videoconference, he will begin testing the waters on whether the EU can be a strong U.S. ally on China policy.

Aware that pressure from D.C. is on the way, Brussels is considering blocking products made with slave labor before they enter the EU market as part of its new trade strategy, Dombrovskis, the EU’s trade chief, said. Countries including the U.S., Canada and the U.K. have taken steps to avoid importing such products, following increasingly detailed reports on forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region.

Meanwhile, NATO — which includes 21 EU countries as members — has quietly expanded its remit to China: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said the alliance’s strategy must be based on defending democracy against China’s and Russia’s “authoritarian pushback against rules-based international order.”

NATO’s traditional foe is another source of EU division and potential conflict with a Biden administration. To the annoyance of Baltic countries, Emmanuel Macron has spent his French presidency attempting to succeed where Merkel, Barack Obama and others have failed — by turning Vladimir Putin into a security partner for Europe. There’s no evidence it’s working.

Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Draghi, seems determined to follow in Macron’s footsteps: using his debut speech Wednesday to say Italy would try to increase dialogue with Russia, while expressing concerns over violations of fundamental rights in the country.

Draghi’s remarks come as the EU is considering whether to hit Russia with further sanctions. The topic will be on the table of the bloc’s foreign affairs ministers’ meeting Monday, right after Blinken finishes his discussion with ministers.

We’ll always have Munich

President Biden is returning to familiar ground at the Munich Security Conference, with a familiar message for familiar faces: “Without a stable Atlantic alliance everything, in my view, falls apart.” But what worked in 2009 and 2019 may not be enough in 2021 as democracy finds itself under attack from all quarters, including at home in the United States.

Biden has had to adjust his domestic message and policies to fit with the times, and deliver a flurry of concrete actions to repair the damage he discovered when assuming office. Sooner or later, he’ll need to do the same abroad.

Matthew Karnitschnig and Mark Scott contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/19/biden-europe-meeting-g7-leaders-470104
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Ryan Heath

! #Headlines, #Biden, #Europe, #Newsfeed, #Political, #Politico, #Politics, #Trending, #Trump, biden trump, iran trump, putin trump, #Coronavirus, #Health, #News, #Science, #ThePlanet, #UK, #WorldNews

Trump hid his calls with Putin. Now, Biden has access to them.

Few Trump-era mysteries are as intriguing as what the 45th president said to Vladimir Putin in at least a dozen rambling, off-the-cuff calls and meetings over four years. Understanding what was said between the two could help illuminate whether Trump ever revealed sensitive information or struck any deals with the Kremlin leader that could take the new administration by surprise.

Now that President Joe Biden is in the White House, he can see for himself.

“They don’t need our approval to see those [records],” a former Trump White House official said, referring to the new Biden national security team. “Biden owns all the call materials. There is only one president at a time.”

The Biden White House did not comment on whether it had seen the content of the calls. But so far, at least, the National Security Council has not registered any complaints with their ability to access relevant call records from the previous administration.

“It is a national security priority to find out what Trump said to Putin” over his four years in office, said one former national security official who is close to the new president. “Some things, like what happened in some face-to-face meetings where no American translator or note-taker was present, may never be fully known. But I would be very surprised if the new national security team were not trying to access” the call records.

Trump closely guarded his private conversations with foreign leaders while in office, going as far as to have some hidden in the NSC’s top-secret codeword system to limit staffers’ and even cabinet members’ access and prevent leaks. Readouts of Trump’s calls with Putin would often come from the Kremlin first, or through Trump’s Twitter feed. But while the calls were not recorded, aides were typically still on the line and taking notes of what was said. The resulting loose transcripts are known as “memcons,” or memorandums of conversation.

Trump went to particularly great lengths to keep his in-person conversations with the Russian leader private, from confiscating his interpreter’s notes to forgoing American translators and notetakers altogether in their meetings. That desire for secrecy has extended even past his time in office. One former Trump official argued last week that records of Trump’s conversations with Putin, which often lasted an hour or more, should not be made available to his successor.

“There are certain things a president and his immediate staff should be able to hold privileged to do the work of government, without being subject to constant partisan gamesmanship,” said a second former Trump White House official.

Memcons, including Trump’s calls with Putin, are considered presidential records, and were not expunged before the 45th president left office, one former Trump White House official said. They were transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of Trump’s term, as is customary.

“Of course we didn’t delete anything and they would be in NARA and accessible,” the official said.

Kel McClanahan, executive director of the law firm National Security Counselors, agreed as a legal matter: “The only person who can claim executive privilege anywhere is the sitting president,” he said. “So there is literally no situation, nor could there be, where a former president could keep a sitting president from seeing something.”

Trump’s interactions with Putin and other Russian officials were certainly far from the normally carefully choreographed talks between world leaders — Trump early on in his tenure went as far as to disclose classified information to Russian diplomats in the Oval Office.

But former senior Trump advisers said it was rare that Trump would say anything to the Russian leader that he had not already said publicly (or would simply blurt out later while complaining about “the Russia hoax”). Marina Gross, who interpreted many of Trump’s calls and meetings with Putin, told associates that listening to their conversations often felt like eavesdropping on two friends chatting in a bar, according to one former official.

Still, the shadow diplomatic campaigns that flourished during the Trump administration are also top of mind for the Biden team as it works to understand the often disjointed policies of the last four years. Trump’s ill-fated call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which led to his impeachment, was also hidden in the NSC codeword system, as were Trump’s calls with the Saudi royal family.

“This is much bigger than just Russia and Putin,” said another former Trump administration official. “It’s a problem across the board for the new team — basically, trying to find out, what did [Trump] promise people left right and center?”

John Eisenberg, the former top lawyer on Trump’s NSC who was involved in placing the president’s calls in the top-secret server, will now be one of Trump’s representatives handling some records requests from the Biden White House, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Biden NSC’s Russia review is being led in part by the council’s acting senior director for Russia and Central Asia, Eric Green, a veteran foreign service officer who for years specialized in Russia at the State Department. Green recently replaced Andrea Kendall-Taylor who left for personal reasons.

The Biden and Trump NSC staff consulted on a range of issues, including Russia, during the transition. And officials said it was generally thorough. In the days and weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s outgoing NSC staff turned over binders full of material — including intelligence reports, strategy documents and information about ongoing operations — to facilitate a smooth transition.

The incoming national security team likewise grilled their predecessors on the obligations and commitments the Trump administration had made to both allies and adversaries, including to Russia. Some Trump staffers — primarily detailees from other federal agencies — remained on the NSC after Jan. 20 for the sake of continuity of government and have been helpful in answering the new NSC’s questions.

“We really tried hard to do it well,” said the second former Trump official, who participated in the process.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/09/biden-can-access-trump-putin-calls-468100
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman

! #Headlines, #Biden, #Newsfeed, #Political, #Politico, #Politics, #Putin, #Russia, #Trending, #Trump, #TrumpLiesMatter, #Truth, biden trump, putin trump, #News, #WorldNews

On first call with Putin, Biden raises election interference, bounties, Navalny poisoning

President Joe Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin Tuesday afternoon, expressing U.S. objections to a variety of Kremlin actions, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.

Psaki told reporters at Tuesday’s press briefing that the call was scheduled to take place as she was behind the podium fielding press questions. She said the White House would issue a readout of the call later Tuesday afternoon.

Biden called intending to raise concern about a suspected Russian SolarWinds hacking campaign that breached Justice Department email accounts, reports of Russian bounties reportedly placed on American troops and interference in the 2020 election, Psaki said. The president also intended to raise his concerns about the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the Kremlin’s recent treatment of peaceful protesters demonstrating in support of him, the press secretary said.

Biden also intended to support Ukrainian sovereignty and his goal of extending a nuclear arms treaty for five years with Russia, Psaki said.

The two leaders agreed to “work urgently” to extend the nuclear treaty by Feb. 5, when the deal is slated to expire, according to the Biden administration’s readout of the call. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty limits the two nation’s deployed nuclear weapons to 1,550 each.

“They also agreed to explore strategic stability discussions on a range of arms control and emerging security issues,” the readout said.

Biden and Putin agreed to be transparent and communicate consistently, according to the readout.

“His intention was also to make clear that the United States will act firmly in defense of our national interests in response to malign actions by Russia,” Psaki told reporters.

Biden’s agenda for his call with Putin struck a decidedly different tone than former President Donald Trump, who was the subject of significant criticism for his relatively soft rhetoric toward Russia, especially relative to his broader America-first approach to foreign policy. Trump routinely attempted to undermine widely accepted evidence about the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference, at one point telling reporters that he would take the Russian president’s word over that of the U.S. intelligence community on the issue.

Biden has vowed to turn the page from the Trump administration on U.S.-Russia relations and take a stronger stance against the Kremlin.

In April 2018, Trump blamed poor relations between the U.S. and Russia on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential collusion between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign. The investigation found no Trump-Russia conspiracy but established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in “sweeping and systematic fashion.” Mueller’s report also found repeated communication between Trump associates and people who indicated they had potentially harmful information about Hillary Clinton.

On the large-scale hack into federal agencies uncovered in December — which intelligence agencies said was likely Russia’s doing — Trump baselessly suggested it may have been China. Biden has promised a forceful response to the campaign.

“My administration will make cybersecurity a top priority at every level of government,” Biden said in a statement, “and we will make dealing with this breach a top priority from the moment we take office.”

After less than a week in office, Biden has now been on calls with several prominent foreign leaders, including U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico.

Biden has pledged to “restore dignified leadership at home and respected leadership on the world stage” in wake of Trump’s foreign policy.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/26/biden-putin-call-elections-bounties-navalny-462700
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Ben Leonard

! #Headlines, #Biden, #Newsfeed, #Political, #Politico, #Politics, #Putin, #Russia, #Trending, biden trump, putin trump, #News, #Trump, #WorldNews

‘Sputnik V arrived!’ Maduro thanks Russia as Venezuela receives first batch of Russian Covid-19 vaccine

Russia has delivered the first batch of its Covid-19 vaccine to Venezuela, making it the first Latin American nation to participate in Sputnik V’s clinical trial.

“We are the first country from the Western Hemisphere which will start the Phase III trial of this vaccine against Covid-19,” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro tweeted, expressing his gratitude to Russia.

Red crates containing doses of the Sputnik V vaccine to immunize 2,000 people arrived at the Simon Bolivar International Airport in Caracas on Friday. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez accepted the cargo during a short welcome ceremony, after which it was moved to a lab.

“On behalf of President Nicolas Maduro and the Venezuelan people, we thank our sister Russia and President Vladimir Putin,” she tweeted.

The vaccine, nicknamed after the USSR’s first space satellite, was registered in Russia in August, before a large-scale Phase III trial of the drug was conducted. The decision was criticized by some Western nations, who called it reckless.

Moscow said the medicine was based on a time-tested platform successfully used for other vaccines, assuring its safety.

Also on rt.com

Creator of Russia’s Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine offers to help White House staff after US President Trump contracts virus

The batch delivered to Venezuela is part of a post-approval trial, which involves some 40,000 volunteers and is conducted with the help of some of Russia’s foreign allies. The results of the study are expected to be reported within two months.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!

Source: https://www.rt.com/russia/502438-russian-covid-vaccine-venezuela/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: RT

! #Headlines, #CoronaVirus, #Health, #Medicine, #Newsfeed, #RT, #Russia, #SouthAmerica, #Trending, #WorldNews, pandemic, putin trump, #Coronavirus, #News, #Politics, #Science, #Trump

Armenia commits to work with French, Russian & US-led OSCE mediators, says it will stick to peaceful solution for Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia said on Friday it’s ready to negotiate an end to hostilities with Azerbaijan, but also prepared to continue fighting. Yerevan welcomed the condemnation of the violence in Nagorno-Karabakh by Russia, France, and the US.

The OSCE Minsk group – set up in 1992 and co-chaired by Paris, Moscow and Washington – which has long mediated in the three decade conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, condemned on Thursday the latest flare up over the disputed region. Armenia reacted the next day, saying it remains committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict, in line with the group’s call.

Also on rt.com

‘An immediate cessation of hostilities’: Putin, Macron & Trump issue joint statement demanding end to Nagorno-Karabakh violence

“We will continue to resolutely confront the aggression [against the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic], but at the same time we are prepared to work with chair nations of the OSCE Minsk group to restore the ceasefire based on the agreements of 1994-1995,” the Foreign Ministry in Yerevan said.

While the mediation group is headed by Russia, France, and the US, it lists several other nations as members, including Azerbaijan and Armenia, the principal parties of the conflict. It was formed to coordinate the OSCE effort to stop the bloodshed in Nagorno-Karabakh which was ongoing at the time.

The fighting was over a predominantly ethnic Armenian part of Azerbaijan which broke away and proclaimed itself a sovereign state with the backing of the Armenian military. Azerbaijan considers Nagorno-Karabakh a territory occupied by Armenia. Border clashes in the area resumed last Sunday, with Azerbaijan and Armenia accusing each other of escalating the violence.

Also on rt.com

Syrian JIHADIST fighters are operating in disputed Nagorno-Karabakh, French President Macron says, citing ‘credible information’

Azerbaijan is backed by its long-time ally Turkey, which has called Armenia a threat to peace in the region. Yerevan accused Ankara of providing military advisers, Syrian mercenaries, and air support during the offensive. The claim about foreign fighters was backed by France, which said on Tuesday it had credible evidence confirming it.

Baku leveled accusations of its own, claiming Armenia brought in ethnic Armenians from Syria to fight for its side.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan believes that Turkey’s involvement in the conflict disqualifies it from remaining part of the Minsk group and its membership should be stripped, he told French newspaper Le Figaro earlier this week.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

Source: https://www.rt.com/russia/502330-armenia-osce-mediation-ceasefire/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: RT

! #Headlines, #Armenia, #Newsfeed, #Politics, #RT, #Trending, #Warfare, France, putin trump, #News, #Trump, #WorldNews

Trump hit with devastating barrage as Michael Cohen and Bob Woodward books near publish dates

Never before has a sitting president been hit by so many blistering books, so many times, in a one-month period. 

Why it matters: President Trump’s niece and his former fixer paint a devastating portrait of a corrupt, racist, dishonest commander in chief, just two months before the election. Michael Schmidt, a top N.Y. Times investigative reporter, begins with a quote from King Lear in his new book reporting that Trump’s Russia ties have never been fully investigated.

---

What’s next: Bob Woodward, armed with a reported 17 interviews with Trump himself, will be out Sept. 15 with “Rage,” which Trump is already attacking.

The latest … Michael Cohen — the longtime fixer who used to instantly put reporters on the phone with Trump — writes in “Disloyal,” out Tuesday, that Trump admired Vladimir Putin because he “had the balls to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company.”

• “I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Cohen quotes Trump as saying, per AP, which obtained an early copy. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.”

The White House calls the book “fan fiction,” saying in a statement that Cohen “readily admits to lying routinely but expects people to believe him now so that he can make money from book sales.”

• “It’s unfortunate that the media is exploiting this sad and desperate man to attack President Trump.”

Source: https://www.axios.com/trump-books-michael-cohen-woodward-890db680-eddb-49ba-9ede-8fa4cad49fc6.html
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Axios

! #Headlines, #Axios, #Books, #Election2020, #Newsfeed, #Politics, #Trump, #TrumpLiesMatter, putin trump, #News, #WorldNews

Trump had public meltdown over missed phone call from Putin, former No 10 aide says

‘If Putin wants a call with me you just put him through,’ US president yelled according to Theresa May’s former chief of staff

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-meltdown-missed-phone-call-putin-mike-flynn-theresa-may-meeting-a9691001.html
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Adam Forrest

! #Headlines, #Newsfeed, #Putin, #Russia, #Trending, #Trump, #TrumperTantrum, putin trump, #News, #Politics, #WorldNews

The Least Important Election of Our Lives

With four more years of Donald Trump on the ballot, and the nation spinning into a recession, and an unprecedented global pandemic, it’s a more or less consensus judgment that the coming election will be a very big deal.

“The presidential contest alone will represent perhaps the starkest choice between two competing visions for the nation’s future since the elections of 1860 that set the Union on course for a civil war” writes Reid Wilson in The Hill, with a breathlessness that’s become familiar this year.

Then again, it’s also familiar from four years ago. “This is by far the most important vote you’ve ever cast for anyone at any time,” said Trump, in what was surely one of his few points of agreement with Democrats. It’s what conservative commentator Dennis Prager said of 2012: “The usual description of presidential elections—‘the most important in our lifetime’—is true this time.” It’s what liberal columnist Michael Tomasky said about 2008: “In 2004, many Americans, particularly liberals fearful about a second Bush term, took to calling that election ‘the most important of my lifetime.’ And it was, for a while. Now this one is.”

Rewind the tape and you’ll hear Nancy Reagan in 1980 (“This is the most important election of my life … The outcome will affect the nation and the world”), Harry Truman in 1952 (“This is, my friends, the most important election in your lifetime,”), and even the Atlantic Monthly describing the 1868 Grant-Seymour race (“It would, indeed, be no exaggeration to say that it will be the most important election that Americans ever have known”). That was just 12 years after the New York Times called an 1856 election for the Pennsylvania Legislature “by all parties conceded the most important election that has been held since the organization of our Government.”

So if you’re feeling nostalgic for a time when it seemed like less was at stake, you may be mostly out of luck.

Except for one year. While there may be a platoon of contenders for the Most Important Election of Our Lives, there can be no doubt whatsoever about the prevailing contender for the Least Important. By every reasonable measure, the election of 1996 stands alone as the least suspenseful, least intriguing, least consequential election of my lifetime, your lifetime, anybody’s lifetime. It is the campaign equivalent of Andy Warhol’s “Empire,” the eight-hour-long film of the unmoving Empire State Building, or the Christmas Yule Log video, or the line at the New York City Department of Motor Vehicles. Search for memorable moments, a dramatic shift from one candidate to another, a history-changing result of the outcome, and you find yourself in a haystack where there is no needle.

What was it about 1996? Start with the terrain. In 1996, America was a hotbed of … rest. The economy was in the best shape in decades: a jobless rate of just 5 percent, inflation under 3 percent, real growth at a more or less steady 2.5 percent and a budget that was approaching balanced—and on a clear path to future surpluses of several hundred billion dollars. A debate among economists was seriously focused on whether to eliminate the national debt entirely or keep it alive just for credit purposes. Abroad, Boris Yeltsin was winning reelection as president of Russia; Vladimir Putin was a relative unknown who had just moved to Moscow to assume the lofty position of deputy chief of the Presidential Property Management Department. Even terrorism wasn’t a front-burner issue: Al QaIda’s attempt to bring down the World Trade Center Towers with a truck bomb in 1993 had ended in failure, and Osama Bin Laden was a name known to a relative handful of government officials.

As for intense political combat? The government shutdown of 1995-96 had ended with the more militant Republicans in Congress conceding defeat; indeed, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the White House were in negotiations for a series of bipartisan efforts, starting with welfare reform. In his State of the Union address, which marked the unofficial kickoff of the political season, President Bill Clinton, still chastened by the 1994 midterms that had delivered both houses of Congress to the GOP, proclaimed: “the era of big government is over.” As fierce as Gingrich’s early fights had been, both parties had tacked to the center, and by modern standards it was the Era of Good Feelings in Washington.

But every race still requires an challenger, and the primary season began with a clear Republican favorite: Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, a veteran of 35 years in Congress, one of World War II’s great heroes, with the soul of a great legislator who lived for bargains, compromise and the middle ground. The instincts that had made him a distinguished figure in the Capitol did not make him a compelling presidential candidate. Legend has it that when a child asked him what he would do to make schools better, Dole’s answer was: “That bill’s in markup.” (In this case, the legend is true.)

His chief competitors were arrayed along a moderate-to-conservative axis. Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, whose campaign signature was, with unconscious irony, a plaid shirt; Steve Forbes, the novelty flat-tax advocate whose principal asset was his family’s wealth; and Texas Senator Phil Gramm, who began his campaign with the inspiring observation that “I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that is ready money.”

The only frisson of the entire campaign was provided by Pat Buchanan, the speechwriter-political strategist-columnist-commentator who had embarrassed President George H.W. Bush four years earlier with an impressive 38 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, running a campaign that presaged the nationalist message of Donald Trump. He ran with the nothing-to-lose approach of Senator John McCain—he was so transparent that when I interviewed him in his hotel room, he paused for a few moments to write a campaign ad. He managed to win the primary again, with 28 percent, finishing one point ahead of Dole while garnering the smallest plurality in the history of the state’s GOP primaries.

In the wake of Buchanan’s victory, a New York Times report declared the race was “wide-open.” Well, not exactly. Spooked by the prospect of a Buchanan nomination, the party did what people might have expected it to do in 2016 against Trump: It quickly closed ranks, and Dole won 41 of the next 42 contests, losing only the Missouri caucuses. This made things easy for the GOP, but did not make for compelling Tuesday nights in front of the TV.

That Buchanan victory, it turned out, was the dramatic high point of not just the primary, but the whole election. The nomination fight had left Dole bereft of money—he could spend no general election funds until he was formally picked by the GOP—while President Clinton and his allies shelled Dole with a series of ads linking him to the unpopular Gingrich.

Long before the conventions, the election cake was essentially baked. In mid-March, a Gallup Poll had Clinton with a 10-percentage-point lead, and, except for a brief post-convention bounce that brought Dole within 9 points, Clinton kept that double-digit margin until the very end of the campaign.

And it wasn’t just the peace-and-prosperity mood of the country that made it so sleepy. Dole himself was not the kind of figure to wage a Manichean “battle for the soul” campaign. True, he’d had a reputation as a hatchet man in earlier times—as the GOP’s 1976 vice presidential nominee, he’d talked about “four Democrat wars in my lifetime.” But his truer nature was on display when in June he resigned from the Senate to pursue the campaign full time. It was a 50-minute farewell, with Dole strolling through the Senate, recalling the great work he’d done with Democrats like George McGovern, Mike Mansfield and Tom Daschle.

An equally revealing moment came during Dole’s acceptance speech at the convention, when he contrasted himself with Clinton’s “bridge to the future” theme by literally offering a bridge to the past. “Let me be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth,” he said. “Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith and confidence in action.”

In drawing distinctions between himself and Clinton, Dole said: “That is not the outlook of my opponent—and he is my opponent, not my enemy.” It is a generous sentiment, one almost unimaginable in today’s politics. But is not a sentiment designed to get the blood rushing as a call to political arms.

As for the Democratic convention … Well, the highlight was the news out of Washington that Clinton adviser-Svengali Dick Morris had been caught out with a prostitute, whom he’d allowed to eavesdrop on his telephone calls with the president. (Morris ultimately resigned and went on to a lucrative career spreading rumors about Hillary Clinton’s various alleged felonies and searching for black helicopters). The other thrilling moment was at the end of one night’s proceedings, when a rostrum full of high-ranking women led the delegates in the “Macarena.”

And then came the debates.

I have watched every presidential and vice presidential debate since the very first JFK-Nixon encounter. Thanks to a memory that stores gigabytes of useless information, I can recall moments from just about all of them. But when it comes to 1996, if you put a gun to my head and demanded a recollection of any moment from any one of that campaign’s debates, you’d have a corpse on your hands. (During one debate, which I was covering from the balcony of the debate hall, I persuaded my camera operator to turn our monitor to a Yankees-Orioles playoff game.)

Those debates were a microcosm of the entire year. The polls simply never changed. Bill Schneider, CNN’s pollster, struggled to find anything to report about daily poll numbers that resembled the EEG line of a flatlined patient. One of Clinton’s key White House advisers told a group of journalists (off the record) that he was afflicted with a serious case of boredom—not the usual emotional state of a high-placed operative. On the GOP side, the grasping at straws was of Olympian reach. (I remember being in the “Nightline” green room when Gingrich predicted that Dole would win California on the strength of the backlash to affirmative action. Spoiler alert: Dole lost California by 1.3 million votes).

In fact, the election was a bit closer than the polls were predicting, the product of a late fall fundraising scandal that implied funds from foreign sources were flowing into the Clinton campaign. But it still ended with an easy 49-41 victory. (Reform Party candidate Ross Perot won 8.4 percent.) Clinton became the first two-term president since Woodrow Wilson to never win a majority of votes, but his 379 electoral votes were decisive, and more than any president since. The Congress was essentially unchanged, as befits a Seinfeld “about nothing” contest; Democrats picked up two seats in the House and lost two in the Senate.

If there was neither suspense nor drama, what about the consequences? Most Presidential elections, even the less compelling ones, matter if for no other reason than the Supreme Court. (The Dukakis-Bush race in 1988 was a “meh” election, but the presence of Clarence Thomas on the court has mattered a lot.) But as it happened, a Dole victory would have made no difference at all here, because there were no vacancies on the Supreme Court until 2005. Even a two-term Dole presidency would have had no impact on the court. As for lower courts, it was a very different time back then; there was no list from the Federalist Society giving a GOP president a roster of young, zealous conservatives out to undo the past several years of Court decisions. There was far more bipartisanship, and far more comity, in how judges were picked.

And when it comes to domestic policy, it’s arguable that a President Dole might even have had a rockier time with the GOP Congress than Clinton did. For one thing, Dole held Gingrich in “minimum high regard,” which is Washington’s way of saying he couldn’t stand his guts. When Gingrich ran for president in 2012, Dole said: “Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall.” An effort by Gingrich to bring his “revolution” to fruition would have met with implacable opposition from a Dole White House.

There is, of course, one way in which a Dole presidency would have led to a very different time. With Clinton out of the White House, the ongoing effort of independent counsel Ken Starr to probe the Clintons’ Whitewater investments, and his alleged sexual harassment of Paula Jones, would have been far less newsworthy. It is highly possible that, without his presidency to defend, Clinton simply would have settled with Jones, ending the case and thus any probe into the interactions between the president and an intern. At best, the story would have been a footnote, and not the dominant political story of 1998.

That quirky possibility aside, I think the case is overwhelming. When 2021 rolls around, it will mark the silver anniversary of a campaign that has already descended deep into oblivion. I suggest we mark the anniversary in the most appropriate manner possible: by launching a fleet of lead balloons.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/23/the-least-important-election-of-our-lives-400075
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Jeff Greenfield

! #Headlines, #Elections, #History, #Newsfeed, #Political, #Politico, #Politics, #Trending, new york nyc NY nypd nyfd, putin trump, #Coronavirus, #News, #Trump, #WorldNews

Trump unloads in morning interviews as U.S. struggles to tame virus

President Donald Trump let loose in a pair of lengthy radio interviews Tuesday morning, weighing in on foreign affairs and cultural flashpoints while continuing to speak dismissively of the rampant coronavirus threat.

Much of the president’s remarks centered on the return of sports amid the pandemic, as he railed against athletes who refuse to stand during the national anthem and rallied for college football to resume in the fall.

“These football players are very young, strong people and — physically. I mean, they’re physically in extraordinary shape,” Trump told Fox Sports Radio’s Clay Travis in a more-than-20-minute conversation.

“So they’re not going to have a problem,” he said. “You’re not going to see people — you know, could there be? Could it happen? But I doubt it. You’re not going to see people dying.”

The president and several congressional Republicans have advocated this week for games to carry on as scheduled, even as The Detroit Free Press reported Monday that the Big Ten Conference was expected to cancel its fall college football season.

Although athletes and schools have expressed escalating coronavirus-related health concerns, Trump told conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt later Tuesday morning that “they should play football.” But in that half-hour interview, he stressed players should also “stand for our flag and respect our flag.”

“Basketball didn’t do that, and they’re down [the] tubes,” Trump said. “Their ratings are terrible. Like, terrible. People are angry about it.”

The popular American pastime of college football is just the latest facet of daily life now upended by the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak within the United States — a public health crisis that Trump said Tuesday had damaged his rapport with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“I had a great relationship with President Xi. I like him,” Trump said. “But I don’t feel the same way now.”

Trump did not allude to a similar deterioration in his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who announced earlier Tuesday that his government had become the first to officially register a coronavirus vaccine and declare it ready for use, despite international skepticism.

The president only argued that he had been significantly tougher on Moscow than his predecessor, Barack Obama, whose administration he accused of spying on him in a vast bureaucratic conspiracy that allegedly involved former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump made several comments Tuesday critical of Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, referencing a recent U.S. intelligence assessment that concluded Russia is targeting Biden ahead of November’s election while China is hoping Trump will lose.

“They’ll own the United States if he wins,” Trump said of Beijing. “And with me, they were having the worst year in 67 years because I tariffed the hell out of them.”

The president also opined on the most anticipated political announcement of the week — Biden’s reveal of his running mate, who is expected to be named in the coming days.

“I think that I would be inclined to go a different route than what he’s done. You know, doing it the way he — first of all, he roped himself into, you know, a certain group of people, which is fine,” Trump said, referring to Biden’s pledge to select a female vice presidential nominee.

“He said that and, you know, some people would say that men are insulted by that, and some people would say it’s fine. I don’t know.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/11/trump-morning-interviews-coronavirus-393488
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Quint Forgey

! #Headlines, #CoronaVirus, #Newsfeed, #Political, #Politico, #Politics, #Trending, #Trump, #TrumperTantrum, biden trump, putin trump, #Coronavirus, #Health, #News, #WorldNews

Nuclear free-for-all: The arms control era may be ending

The mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki have remained unreplicated for 75 years in part because the U.S. and Soviet Union — after peering over the ledge into nuclear armageddon — began to negotiate.

Why it matters: The arms control era that began after the Cuban Missile Crisis may now be coming to a close. The next phase could be a nuclear free-for-all.

---

Driving the news: New START, the last major pact constraining the U.S. and Russia — which together hold 91% of the world’s nuclear warheads — is due to expire two weeks into the next presidential term, on Feb. 5.

• President Trump has insisted on a new, larger deal that also constrains China — which has a far smaller program, but one that U.S. intelligence expects to grow quickly.
• Beijing balked at American pressure to join recent U.S.-Russia nuclear talks in Vienna.
• Trump has recently held a flurry of phone calls with Vladimir Putin, and he suggested last week that he might support a deal involving only the U.S. and Russia.
• His top aides continue to insist on Chinese participation and to resist Putin’s proposal for an unconditional extension.

Where things stand: Joe Biden on Thursday reiterated his commitment to extending New START if elected (he’d have 15 days to exchange diplomatic notes with Russia). Its fate would be far more uncertain in a second Trump term.

What they’re saying: Rose Gottemoeller, the chief U.S. negotiator for New START under Barack Obama, says China won’t rush to the negotiating table before February.

• “It’s not rational, it’s not logical and they have absolutely no incentive to do so,” she told Axios.
• Meanwhile, “the Russians have just finished the modernization of their nuclear arsenal,” and have “hot production lines.”
• “We could soon be facing a Russia who is far superior to us in nuclear numbers,” she says, if the deal lapses.

Tim Morrison, who held both the arms control and Russia portfolios on Trump’s National Security Council, says those demanding a clean extension of New START might as well enter a car dealership and declare: “I am not leaving here until you sell me a car, no matter the price.”

• China and Russia fear Washington’s deep pockets and the prospect of an unconstrained American arsenal, he says. That offers leverage.
• America, meanwhile, has reason to fear Russia’s fast-advancing capabilities (not covered by New START) and China’s burgeoning nuclear buildup.
• That explains the administration’s emphasis on a new deal and its willingness to take the old one to the brink. “I am simply not in the panic that some people are to extend the treaty now,” Morrison says.

The big picture: The expiration of New START — paired with Trump’s withdrawal from the Open Skies and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties (the latter due to Russian violations) — would signal the end of arms control as we know it.

• If the arms control infrastructure built up during the Cold War collapses, it may be impossible to reassemble.
• Morrison, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, acknowledges that. But he points the finger at Moscow: “If arms control is dying, it’s because Russia killed it.”

Even if New START survives, we are heading into a new, more uncertain era.

• As communications channels break down and new technologies are built up, “the possibilities of a miscalculation are unfortunately higher than they have been in a long, long time,” Ernest Moniz, the nuclear physicist and former energy secretary, tells Axios.

What to watch: Emerging technologies like cyber warfare and AI portend an uncertain future.

• Meanwhile, arsenals of smaller-yield nukes are growing, including among newer nuclear powers like India and Pakistan. “They were built for battlefield use and so seem to lower the threshold for nuclear use,” Gottemoeller says.
• North Korea has entered the nuclear club, and others could follow. Those include Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is working with China to increase its capacity to generate nuclear fuel, the NYT reports.
• With Russia boasting of “unstoppable” weapons and China working to narrow the nuclear gap, America is undertaking a modernization process which could cost $1.7 trillion over 25 years, Jessica Mathews writes in the New York Review of Books.

The bottom line: “Yet the public isn’t scared,” Mathews notes. “Decades of fearing a nuclear war that didn’t happen may have induced an unwarranted complacency that this threat belongs to the past.”

Go deeper: How new tech raises the risk of nuclear war

Source: https://www.axios.com/nuclear-arms-control-75-years-hiroshima-50d3fe4b-16ce-4d9d-aef0-53a496446271.html
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Dave Lawler

! #Headlines, #Axios, #Military, #Newsfeed, #Nukes, #Politics, #WorldNews, biden trump, extinction, iran trump, new york nyc NY nypd nyfd, putin trump, #News, #Trump