Story 1: Senator Mitch McConnell on Unfair Behind Closed Doors Single Party Impeachment Inquiry and Syria — Videos —
Senator Mitch McConnell: Democrats Are ‘Throwing Fairness And Precedent To The Wind’ | NBC News
Senate Needs to Make a Strong, Strategic Statement on Syria
Trump was ‘absolutely right’ to take troops out of Syria: Rand Paul
Democrats, Republicans unite on Trump’s decision on Syria
Senate Needs to Make a Strong, Strategic Statement on Syria
McConnell splits with Trump on Syria pullout
Mitch McConnell rebukes Donald Trump over Turkish invasion of Kurdish-held Syria, saying troop pullout gives Iran a chance to reach Israel’s doorstep and contending worthwhile intervention does NOT make the U.S. world’s policeman
McConnell once again expressed his ‘grave concern’ about the situation in Syria
Said the door is ‘wide open’ for resurgence of ISIS
Said policy could put Iran on Israel’s ‘door-step’
Said standing up for U.S. interests does not make nation the ‘evil empire’
Trump has repeatedly complained the nation should not be world’s policeman
At the same time, he blasted House Democrats on impeachment
PUBLISHED: 17:14 EDT, 15 October 2019 | UPDATED: 17:14 EDT, 15 October 2019
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell directly confronted President Trump‘s complaint that U.S. troop deployment’s make it the ‘world’s policeman’ and expressed his ‘grave concern’ about Trump’s policy moves in Syria.
McConnell issued the rebuke without directly blaming President Trump for the latest calamity in the region – although he said Trump’s policy threatens to put Iran on Israel’s door-step and fuel a ‘humanitarian catastrophe.’
Following Turkey’s incursion into Syria in territory that had been controlled by U.S.-allied members of the Kurdish minority, McConnell warned that the ‘door is wide open for resurgence of the Islamic State.’
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took on President Trump’s contention that having forces remain in Syria was akin to being the ‘world’s policeman’
In a Senate floor speech, McConnell said the situation created a power vacuum that could fuel the meddling influence of Russia, and ‘leaving northeastern Syria wide open Iran to extend reach unimpeded all the way from tehran to the door step of our friends in Israel.
He also confronted the view, espoused directly by President Trump, that the U.S. should pull out of the region rather serving as the ‘world’s policeman.’
‘I want to make something clear, the United States has taken the fight to Syria and Afghanistan because that is where our enemies are, that’s why we’re there. Fighting terrorists, exercising leadership and troubled regions and advancing U.S. interests around the world does not make us an evil empire or the world’s policeman,’ McConnell said.
This picture taken on October 15, 2019 shows a missile fired by Turkish forces towards the Syrian town of Ras al-Ain, from the Turkish side of the border at Ceylanpinar district in Sanliurfa on the first week of Turkey’s military operation against Kurdish forces
McConnell shared his ‘grave concern’ about the situation in Syria
‘When it looked like President Trump would withdraw from Syria at beginning of the year, 70 senators joined in warning of the risk of precipitously withdrawing from Syria or Afghanistan,’ McConnell noted in his floor speech
McConnell had also warned of his ‘grave concern’ in a written statement Monday that did not mention Trump by name. But in his floor speech Tuesday, he included such a reference.
‘When it looked like President Trump would withdraw from Syria at beginning of the year, 70 senators joined in warning of the risk of precipitously withdrawing from Syria or Afghanistan,’ McConnell noted.
But even as he challenged the president on a policy that has resulted in the release of ISIS prisoners, led to attacks against key regional allies, and even led to shelling by Turkish forces toward a U.S. troop-held position, he defended the president on impeachment by attacking Democrats.
‘House Democrats are finally indulging in their impeachment obsession. Full steam ahead,’ McConnell warned. ‘I don’t think many of us were expecting to witness a clinic in terms of fairness or due process. But even by their own partisan standards, House Democrats have already found new ways to lower the bar,’ he complained.
McConnell has said he was required by Senate rules to hold a trial should the House impeach Trump.
He resorts to sanctions as the harm from withdrawal builds.
By The Editorial Board
Syrians fleeing Turskih advance arrive to the town of Tal Tamr in north Syria, Oct. 14.PHOTO: BADERKHAN AHMAD/ASSOCIATED PRESS
What a fiasco. Foreign-policy blunders often take months or years to reveal their damaging consequences, but the harm from President Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. forces from northern Syria is playing out almost in real time.
Critics said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would invade northern Syria despite Mr. Trump’s public warnings, and the Turkish strongman did. Critics said our Kurdish allies would strike a deal with Syria’s Bashar Assad to defend themselves, and the Kurds have. Critics said Islamic State prisoners held by the Kurds would be released and scatter to wage jihad again, and they are.
The mess compounded Monday when Mr. Trump authorized sanctions against several Turkish officials and agencies who are “contributing to Turkey’s destabilizing actions in northeast Syria.” The sanctions include financial measures and barring entry to the U.S. Mr. Trump also said he’s ending trade talks with Turkey and raising steel tariffs to 50%.
Mr. Trump now finds himself back in an economic and diplomatic brawl with Turkey that he said he wanted to avoid. Wouldn’t it have been easier simply to tell Mr. Erdogan, on that famous phone call two Sundays ago, that the U.S. wouldn’t tolerate a Turkish invasion against the Kurds and would use air power to stop it? Mr. Erdogan would have had to back down and continue negotiating a Syrian safe zone with the Kurds and the U.S.
Mr. Trump is also making matters worse with his unserious justifications. “After defeating 100% of the ISIS Caliphate, I largely moved our troops out of Syria. Let Syria and Assad protect the Kurds and fight Turkey for their own land,” he tweeted Monday. “Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte. I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away!”
We suppose the Napoleon line was a joke, but the world is laughing at an American President. Mr. Trump was able to project an image of strength in his early days as he prosecuted the war against ISIS and used force to impose a cost on Mr. Assad for using chemical weapons. But that image has faded as he has indulged his inner Rand Paul and claims at every opportunity that the main goal of his foreign policy is to put an end to “endless wars.”
This is simple-minded isolationism, and it’s a message to the world’s rogues that a U.S. President has little interest in engaging on behalf of American allies or interests. Friends like Israel and Saudi Arabia are quietly dismayed, while Iran, Russia and Hezbollah can’t believe Mr. Trump has so glibly abandoned U.S. commitments and military partners.
By now it’s not unreasonable to conclude that Mr. Trump’s foreign policy can be distilled into two tactics—sanctions and tariffs. Mr. Trump wields them willy-nilly against friend and foe alike as substitutes for diplomacy and the credible threat of military force.
Mr. Trump won’t like to hear it, but the Syrian mess is hurting him at home too. Republicans who have stood by him through the Russia fight and more are questioning his judgment as Commander in Chief in an increasingly dangerous world. With impeachment looming, he can’t afford to alienate more friends.
Opinion: Trump’s Foreign Policy Needs to Change Course
As Turkey advances into Syria, foreign powers will increasingly act on the belief that the American executive is both politically weak and intellectually unfocused. Image: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Imageshttps://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-syria-mess-11571095091
TRUMP’S CHAOTIC SYRIA EXIT PUTS ANTI-WAR 2020 DEMOCRATS IN A DELICATE SPOT
THE PENTAGONannounced on Monday that the U.S. was pulling all of its troops out of northeastern Syria at President Donald Trump’s direction, completing a withdrawal he had started by Twitter declaration a week earlier. The move further clears the way for a full-on invasion by Turkey, whose soldiers have already been accused of executing noncombatants. In the chaos, hundreds of Islamic State detainees have reportedly escaped.
Trump defended his decision in a series of early-morning tweets on Monday. “The same people who got us into the Middle East mess are the people who most want to stay there!” he wrote. “Never ending wars will end!”
Trump’s abandonment of eastern Syria and the U.S. military’s Kurdish allies has put progressive Democrats — many of whom also favor withdrawing from overseas military operations — in a delicate spot. Over the past week, they have been trying to thread the needle between condemning Trump for recklessly abandoning an ally and emphasizing that withdrawing U.S. troops should be an eventual policy goal.
Trump’s decision has showcased what a worst-case scenario for expedited military withdrawal could look like, making it harder for progressive Democratic presidential candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to press their cases against “endless wars” on the campaign trail. The question of how progressives can go about drawing down U.S. military commitments without repeating Trump’s calamitous actions would be an obvious pick for Tuesday night’s Democratic debate.
So far, the Democratic candidates have been critical of Trump but light on specifics about what they would do differently. Last week, Sanders condemned Trump’s withdrawal from Syria, telling reporters that “as somebody who does not want to see American troops bogged down in countries all over the world — you don’t turn your back on allies who have fought and died alongside American troops. You just don’t do that.” But when George Stephanopoulos asked Sunday morning on ABC for Sanders to explain the difference between his and Trump’s approaches, Sanders responded simply that Trump “lies. I don’t.”
Warren’s response was similarly vague. She tweeted that “Trump recklessly betrayed our Kurdish partners” and that “we should bring our troops home, but we need to do so in a way that respects our security.”
Trump Turned His Back on Syrian Kurds. Here’s How They View Their New Precarious Position.
Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California and co-chair of Sanders’s 2020 campaign, told The Intercept that progressives urgently need to make the case for a “doctrine of responsible withdrawal.”
“I don’t believe that withdrawal from a progressive perspective means a moral indifference to the lives of the places that we leave,” Khanna said in a phone interview. “It’s not an ‘America First’ approach that says our interests and our American lives are the only things that have moral worth. Rather, our withdrawal is based on an understanding of the limitations of American power to shape and restructure societies. It emphasizes the need for effective diplomacy and understands our moral obligations in these places.”
The U.S. should not have withdrawn troops without negotiating a deal that would have kept Turkey from invading Syria, backed by a threat to withhold future arms sales and economic assistance, Khanna told The Intercept. “We could have used all those points of leverage to get their commitment that they wouldn’t slaughter the Kurds.”
Another key difference between Trump’s approach and that of progressives is their level of trust for civil service expertise, Khanna said. “What this shows is that it’s not enough to have a president with certain instincts. Foreign policy requires great expertise. You need a progressive president who understands the importance of military restraint, but who also has the ability to put together an extraordinary foreign policy team to implement the goals that they may have.”
Far from admiring Trump’s approach to Syria, many anti-interventionists and foreign policy experts in D.C. view it as a blueprint for how not to withdraw from a conflict, according to Adam Wunische, a researcher with the Quincy Institute, a new pro-diplomacy, noninterventionist, and nonpartisan think tank.
“What we should have been doing from the very beginning is once we achieved the limited objective of destroying ISIS territory, they should have immediately begun contemplating what kind of peace or settlement could come afterwards,” Wunische told The Intercept. “To my knowledge, the U.S. is one of the only actors that can effectively talk to both the Turks and the Kurds. So they should have been trying to find an acceptable political arrangement for all the parties involved that doesn’t involve an endless, ill-defined military presence for the U.S.”
The Quincy Institute is working on a report outlining a possible plan for U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan that would avoid the type of disorder on display in northeastern Syria, Wunische said, though the timing of the report remains unclear.
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Throughout the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, a number of candidates have railed against “endless wars.” But in a conversation that has been defined by intricate domestic policy proposals and detailed outlines of how to structure a wealth tax, candidates have said little about the rest of the world and even less about how they would wind down overseas conflicts.
Sanders, for example, has called for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan “as expeditiously as possible.” Warren has said “it’s long past time to bring our troops home, and I would begin to do so immediately.” Joe Biden has said he would bring “American combat troops in Afghanistan home during my first term,” but left the door open for a “residual U.S. military presence” that would be “focused on counterterrorism operations.” When asked during a July debate whether he would withdraw from Afghanistan during the first year of his presidency, Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend mayor and Navy Reserve veteran who spent seven months in Afghanistan, answered emphatically in the affirmative.
But aside from seeking a diplomatic solution, candidates have said very little about their policies for ending the war. And as in Syria, stakes for U.S. allies in Afghanistan are high.
A January study by the Rand Corporation found that a “precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan” would have far-reaching consequences. The legitimacy for the U.S.-backed Kabul government would plummet, the report argued, and the Taliban would extend its control and influence. People all across the country would turn to regional militias and rival warlords for basic security.
“I don’t think that anyone, whether they promise it or not, is going to get out of Afghanistan in a week,” said Wuinsche. “What we need to focus on is, what is the political solution that we think is possible, and how do we get there? That requires marshaling all of these different tools of foreign policy, not just the military.”
Kate Kizer, policy director for the D.C.-based advocacy group Win Without War, stressed that one of the most revealing differences between progressives and Trump is how they would treat a conflict’s refugees. Under Trump, the U.S. has accepted historically low numbers of refugees and closed the door on future Syrian immigrants applying for Temporary Protected Status.
“One of the cruelest parts of Trump’s policy is the fact that, in addition to fueling more bloodshed with this decision, he’s also banning any types of civilians who would be fleeing from the conflict,” Kizer said. “In a situation like Syria and even Afghanistan, there’s a way to responsibly withdraw and then there’s a way to cut and run, which is what Trump has shown he has a predilection for. But I’m not sitting here saying that any type of military withdraw will necessarily be bloodless.”
Story 2: The Search of Leakers in Trump Administration — Videos
RUST NO ONE
Trump Suspects a Spiteful John Bolton Is Behind Some of the Ukraine Leaks
Trump fears the leaks are now coming from the people he chose to serve him—and that only increases the paranoia currently infecting the West Wing.
Asawin Suebsaeng
White House Reporter
Sam Stein
Politics Editor
Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast/Getty
At a critical juncture in his presidency, facing a rapidly unfolding impeachment inquiry by House Democrats, Donald Trump is feeling besieged by snitches.
In recent weeks, numerous leaks have appeared in the pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other major papers and news outlets detailing the president’s attempts to enlist foreign leaders to help dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and also aid Trump’s quest to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s concluded investigation. And as is his MO, the media-obsessed president has been fixated on not just the identity of the whistleblower behind the internal complaint that brought this scandal to the fore, but also on who, exactly, has been namelessly feeding intel to the press.
In the course of casual conversations with advisers and friends, President Trump has privately raised suspicions that a spiteful John Bolton, his notoriously hawkish former national security adviser, could be one of the sources behind the flood of leaks against him, three people familiar with the comments said. At one point, one of those sources recalled, Trump guessed that Bolton was behind one of the anonymous accounts that listed the former national security adviser as one of the top officials most disturbed by the Ukraine-related efforts of Trump and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney who remains at the center of activities that spurred the impeachment inquiry.
“[Trump] was clearly implying [it, saying] something to the effect of, ‘Oh, gee, I wonder who the source on that could be,’” this source said, referring to the president’s speculation. Bolton, for his part, told The Daily Beast last month that allegations that he was a leaker in Trump’s midst are “flatly incorrect.”
The former national security adviser—who departed the administration last month on awful, mutually bitter terms—is working on a book about his time serving Trump, and has “a lot to dish,” one knowledgeable source noted.
Neither Bolton nor White House spokespeople provided comment for this story. Matt Schlapp, an influential conservative activist with close ties to the White House, said his assumption was that the leaks were coming from “career folks inside who hate Trump” and that the president and his campaign had “14 months of this” to come. As for Bolton, Schlapp said, “He’s smarter than that, although he does aggressively defend himself.”
Indeed, Bolton’s name surfaced Monday before House impeachment inquiry committees, when Hill reportedly testified that he told her to alert the chief lawyer for the National Security Council that Giuliani was working with Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, on an operation with legal implications, the Times reported late Monday. “I am not part of whatever drug deal Rudy and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Bolton told Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to sources familiar with the testimony.
“I have not spoken to John about [his comments, as conveyed by Hill],” Giuliani told The Daily Beast on Tuesday morning. “John is a longtime friend. I have no idea why John is doing this. My best guess is that he’s confused and bought into a false media narrative without bothering to call me about it.”
Regarding Bolton’s reported comment about Mulvaney being involved in this figurative Ukraine “drug deal,” the former New York City mayor insisted that “Mick wasn’t involved in this. I don’t recall having any lengthy conversation with him about this subject… I don’t recall ever having a lengthy conversation [about Ukraine] with John, either.”
Trump has felt under siege from within before, including at various flashpoints of his presidency. For instance, near the end of the Mueller probe, the president became so distrustful and resentful toward Don McGahn, his own White House counsel at the time, he started asking those close to him, “Is [Don] wearing a wire?”
But the current sense that he has been undermined by people whom he brought into his orbit has come at a critical juncture and colored some of the decisions he has made since the whistleblower complaint became public. The president has openly declared that the whistleblower committed an act of treason. He has attempted to stop prominent advisers—including Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, a man who donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration—from testifying to Congress, only to apparently fail. On Monday, Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top adviser on Russia and Europe, was on Capitol Hill, where she reportedly told lawmakers that Sondland and Giuliani circumventedthe standard national-security process on high-profile Ukraine matters. The president has struggled to add to his current legal team, and appeared to begin putting some distance between himself and Giuliani last week.
And when outside allies began to talk about constructing a war room to help with impeachment, Trump shot down the concept, in part out of a sense that he couldn’t rely on them to get the message out right. One top White House aide subsequently labeled the idea an exercise by “outside peeps trying to self-aggrandize.”
The impression left on Republicans is one of a president increasingly driven by paranoia and a desire for insularity—and not, necessarily, to his own benefit.
“There is a certain level of frustration that all the sudden the president says something, then Rudy does, and it is not always consistent. There is a frustration that not everybody knows what they should be doing. It is not that they can’t defend the president it is a frustration that they don’t know exactly how they are supposed to defend the president,” said John Brabender, a longtime GOP consultant. “From the president’s perspective, this whole thing is a witch hunt and is outrageous and, therefore, it shouldn’t even need explanation…But with that said, you can’t just be angry. You need a unified communications team.”
According to those who’ve known the president, the sense that a good chunk of the government has never fully accepted his presidency and has actively worked to undermine it has animated much of his activity over the past few weeks. And though they believe he has a point, they also wonder if it is making him functionally incapable of taking the advice of some advisers: to simply ignore impeachment and apply his attention to other facets of governance.
Trump, they add, is preternaturally incapable of ignoring press about him and lingers particularly on leaks that depict atmospherics of his inner sanctum, the West Wing, and his internal well-being.
“In my experience, what he despises is somebody writing that Donald Trump feels under siege and his emotions are this and his thinking is this,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide. “He hates people saying what he is thinking… And one of his most frequent tricks in terms of talking about himself on background [as an anonymous source] is him having the reporter say [he is] someone ‘familiar with the president’s thinking.’”
Nunberg said he had yet to see a blind quote in any recent report that would lead him to believe that Trump is cold-calling reporters. But the president is certainly working the fourth estate. Democratic aides were left shaking their heads last week when they received an email from the White House with the subject line, “Article from President Trump” and a PDF attachment of a Kimberly Strassel Wall Street Journal column.
“He’s apparently so anxious about GOP support in the Senate, he’s taken to sending WSJ columns against the House inquiry,” said a Senate source.
Still, for all of Trump’s grousing and preoccupation with who is and isn’t stabbing him in the back, loyalty has always been a one-way street for this president. Last week, after the news broke that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Soviet-born businessmen tied to Giuliani, were arrested on charges of violating campaign-finance law, a reporter at the White House asked Trump if the former New York mayor was still his personal attorney. The president responded that he didn’t know.
Though the president would later tweet out his support for Giuliani over the weekend, Trump has a long track record for being loyal to and supportive of a longtime associate, friend, or staffer—up until the moment he’s not. Perhaps the quintessential example of this is that of one of the president’s former attorneys, Michael Cohen, who famously turned on Trump after becoming convinced that the president had abandoned him while he was in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors.
Asked by The Daily Beast last week if the president told him that he still had his lawyer’s back—an attorney who further earned the president’s trust by defending Trump during the Mueller investigation—Giuliani let out a big belly-laugh and responded, “There’s nothing, [no knife], in my back.”
“My back feels very comfortable right now,” he added.
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‘Germany is a captive of Russia’: Trump dresses down NATO’s secretary general and threatens Berlin over its lagging defense spending and energy partnership with Putin’s government
Donald Trump unleashed his fury on NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday morning after the leader asked him about Vladimir Putin
‘Germany is totally controlled by Russia,’ Trump charged. ‘I think its a very bad thing for NATO’
Merkel told press that her country is ‘independent’ after Trump’s tongue-lashing
President Trump has berated America’s European allies for failing to meet their defense spending obligations to NATO
The complaints come full circle this week at the NATO leaders’ summit
On Tuesday, European Council President Donald Tusk hit back at Trump, telling him, ‘America does not have and will not have a better ally than Europe’
Tusk said: ‘America appreciate your allies. After all you don’t have that many’
President Trump tweeted minutes later: NATO countries must pay MORE, the United States must pay LESS. Very Unfair!’
He told reporters as he prepared to board Marine One that America has plenty of allies and put new pressure on NATO nations to increase their defense spending
PUBLISHED: 04:06 EDT, 11 July 2018 | UPDATED: 17:14 EDT, 11 July 2018
Donald Trump unleashed his fury on NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday for defending Germany‘s energy partnership with Russia and threatened Berlin with U.S. action over the deal that he said is wholly inappropriate.
Trump fumed that ‘Germany is a captive of Russia’ and said the U.S. would ‘have to do something’ in light of the pipeline deal that’s funneling billions of dollars to Moscow.
‘Germany is totally controlled by Russia,’ he charged. ‘I think its a very bad thing for NATO, and I don’t think it should have happened.’
Stoltenberg reminded him that the U.S. and Europe are ‘stronger together than apart’ and that has been proven by two World Wars and the alliance’s dealings with Russia.
Trump told him in response, ‘No, you’re just making Russia richer. You’re not dealing with Russia, you’re making Russia richer.’
The confrontation stunned the leaders’ senior advisers, including Trump’s secretaries of defense and state. A press aide demanded the media leave the room as Trump pushed Stoltenberg to explain how the U.S. is supposed to protect Germany when it’s opening its front door to Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump unleashed his fury on NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday for defending Germany’s energy partnership with Russia after Stoltenberg reminded him that the U.S. and Europe are ‘stronger together than apart
Stoltenberg inadvertently whipped the U.S. president into a frenzy at an internationally-broadcast breakfast by asking Trump about his upcoming meeting with Putin. Trump responded with a tirade on Germany and its weaknesses and griped, again, about lagging contributions from members of the NATO alliance.
Trump gave Stoltenberg an earful with media present, telling the visibly startled NATO chief, ‘We’re protecting Germany. We’re protecting France. We’re protecting everybody, and yet, we’re paying a lot of money to protect.’
Trump said that past presidents did not confront America’s allies because they did not want to meddle in their affairs or they were blind to the problem.
‘I think that these countries have to step it up — not over a 10-year-period — they have to step it up immediately,’ Trump demanded. ‘Germany is a rich country. They talk about they’re gonna increase it a tiny bit by 2030. Well, they could increase it immediately tomorrow and have no problem.’
The United States’ more than 4 percent GDP contribution to the security group compared to its European allies is ‘very unfair’ to the American taxpayer, he said in a familiar complaint.
‘I don’t think it’s fair to the United States, so we’re going to have to do something, because we’re not gonna put up with it. We can’t put up with it, and it’s inappropriate,’ Trump on Wednesday proclaimed. ‘So we have to talk about the billions and billions of dollars that’s being paid to the country that we’re supposed to be protecting you against.’
A new NATO report actually puts the U.S. contribution at 3.5 percent of the nation’s GDP in 2018. Still, it’s significantly more than the next closest country. Germany’s spending on defense as a percentage of GDP was on par with a handful of other NATO nations at 1.24 percent, putting it at the mid-to-lower end of the pack.
A new NATO report actually puts the U.S. contribution at 3.5 percent of the nation’s GDP in 2018. Still, it’s significantly more than the next closest country – and nearly three times as much as Germany
TERSE TALKS: Trump fumed that ‘Germany is a captive of Russia’ and said the U.S. would ‘have to do something’ about a gas deal that’s funneling billions into Moscow’s economy
U.S. President Donald Trump, U.S. Secretary of Defence James Mattis, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the breakfast with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
Trump began his Wednesday morning rant by telling Stoltenberg that it’s ‘very sad’ when Germany, France and ‘numerous of the countries go out and then make a pipeline deal with Russia’ and then expect the U.S. to foot the bill for their security.
‘So we’re supposed to protect you against Russia but they’re paying billions of dollars to Russia, and I think that’s very inappropriate,’ Trump said. ‘And the former chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that’s supplying the gas.’
Trump informed Stoltenberg that ‘Germany will have almost 70 percent of their country controlled by Russia with natural gas’ when the deal is fully realized.
‘So you tell me is that appropriate?’ he said. ‘I mean I’ve been complaining about this from the time I got in. It should never have never been allowed to have happened.’
Now, he said, ‘Germany is totally controlled by Russia…And you tell me if that’s appropriate, because I think it’s not. And I think it’s a very bad thing for NATO, and I don’t think it should have happened, and I think we have to talk to Germany about it.’
Merkel told press in German as she arrived at NATO that her country makes ‘independent decisions,’ according to a translation of her remarks on NATO’s blue arrival carpet by AFP.
‘I myself have also experienced a part of Germany being occupied by the Soviet Union,’ said Merkel, who was born and raised in East Germany, in her native tougue.
She touched on her nation’s communist history, saying. ‘I am very glad that we are united today in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany and that we can therefore also make our own independent policies and make our own independent decisions.’
The White House said after the president’s remarks went wide that he would hold private talks in the afternoon on the sidelines of the summit with Merkel and then meet separately with France’s president.
Trump told Stoltenberg that the alliance must confront Germany over its gas deal with Russia. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is seen her on Wednesday during her Cabinet meeting in Berlin. She’ll see Trump later today at NATO
Trump said last week at a rally that he told Merkel in an undated conversation that he couldn’t commit to protecting Germany from Putin’s army
In bringing up the gas deal on Wednesday, Trump returned to an issue he had raised before his trip in an attempt to put Germany on the defensive while simultaneously pushing back on the narrative that it is the U.S. that is cozying up to Moscow.
For much of the past year, it has been Trump who has been under attack for resisting sanctions imposed on Russia for its election interference. His frequent praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his repeated attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe have also been the subject of national and international scrutiny.
But in Brussels, it was Trump who hammered Merkel for taking part in a deal that would give Germany direct access to Russian energy supplies and cut out Eastern European nations fearful of Moscow’s leverage.
In March, Germany reached a deal to allow Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom to run its Nord Stream 2 pipeline through its waters. The $11 billion deal immediately outraged Eastern European allies.
Russia has used its oil and gas to pressure and punish its neighbors. In a shock move, the parties announced the deal a day after Germany joined UK in protesting the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Great Britain.
Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Alliance’s headquarters ahead of the NATO summit in Brussels
She will continue talking to Trump after everyone else has gone home as she is hosting the U.S. President in Britain for a two-day visit
The pipeline will send Russian oil and gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Poland and other Eastern European countries fear the pipeline could leave them vulnerable to Russian pressure.
In May, a State Department official weighed in against the project. Deputy Assistant Secretary Sandra Oudkirk said the pipeline could allow Russia to exert ‘malign influence’ in Europe. But the pipeline company said the project wouldn’t be used to blackmail other countries.
Stoltenberg unequivocally said at a news conference that followed his meeting with Trump that the pipeline deal is ‘a national decision’ and ‘it’s not for NATO to decide.’
‘It’s not for NATO to solve this issue,’ he asserted.
Trump bashed Germany over the pipeline issue at a campaign rally last Thursday in Montana, where he also raised the ally’s defense spending.
‘They go out and make a gas deal, oil and gas, from Russia, where they pay billions and billions of dollars to Russia. They want to protect against Russia, and yet they pay billions of dollars to Russia,’ Trump said then.
He said at the rally that he told German Chancellor Angela Merkel that he could not ensure her nation’s security as a result.
U.S. President Donald Trump is greeted by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg before a bilateral breakfast ahead of the NATO Summit in Brussels on Wednesday
Trump informed Stoltenberg that ‘Germany will have almost 70 percent of their country controlled by Russia with natural gas’ when the deal is fully realized
Former Secretary of State John Kerry blasted Trump for his display.
‘I’ve never seen a president say anything as strange or counterproductive as President Trump’s harangue against NATO and Germany,’ Kerry said in a statement. ‘It was disgraceful, destructive, and flies in the face of the actual interests of the United States of America,’ the former top diplomat said.
Then Kerry, a 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, said of Trump: ‘He is steadily destroying our reputation in the world. He is undermining our interests. He diminishes alliances we built to safeguard an economic and strategic force that has allowed millions of people to live in freedom.
House Speaker Paul Ryan invoked a bygone rule usually cited when members of one party refrain from attacking a president of the other.
‘I subscribe to the view that we should not be criticizing our president while he’s overseas,’ Ryan said.
‘NATO is indispensable. It is as important today as it ever has been,’ Ryan said in defense of the organization Trump went after.
Germany’s defense minister told CNBC after Trump’s assault on her country on Wednesday that two weeks ago she had occasion to visit the United States and was reassured by her conversations with American lawmakers of the strength of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
‘The president is as the president is. We know him and we can cope with that,’ Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen told CNBC from outside of NATO’s headquarters. ‘This rhetoric also leads us to remember that a lot is at stake.’
Von der Leyen said that generations that came of age after WWII have taken peace for granted. ‘Now, we have to fight for democracy. We have to secure our international order, our peace architecture,’ she said.
It was Trump who had arrived in Brussels on the defense on Tuesday after the EU Council’s head berated him at an off-site event that was attached to the NATO summit.
Trump had signaled in early morning tweets on Tuesday that foreign leaders could expect a reckoning when he sees them this week over the ‘unfair’ burden on the U.S. taxpayer to carry the cost of Europe’s protection.
He was met with an immediate brush-back from European Council chief Donald Tusk, who said at a signing of a joint declaration between the Brussels-based security alliance and the body of EU nations that Trump should be more careful with his taunts.
‘America does not have and will not have a better ally than Europe. Today Europeans spend on defense many times more than Russia and as much as China,’ he said in remarks that were addressed to Trump. ‘And I think you can have no doubt, Mr. President, that this is an investment in common American and European defense and security.’
Then, in the toughest challenge yet to the U.S. president, Tusk said: ‘America: appreciate your allies. After all you don’t have that many.’
U.S. President Donald Trump signaled Tuesday that European leaders can expect a reckoning when he sees them this week in Brussels at the NATO summit and faced an immediate brush-back from European Council President Donald Tusk
Trump signaled in early morning tweets that foreign leaders can expect a reckoning when he sees them this week in Brussels at the NATO summit over the ‘unfair’ burden on the U.S. taxpayer to pay for Europe’s protection. He’s seen here in May of 2017 at a working dinner at last year’s NATO gathering
Trump fired back minutes later as he left the White House en route to NATO.
‘We do have a lot of allies. But we cannot be taken advantage of. We’re being taken advantage of by the European Union,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘We lost $151 billion last year on trade, and on top of that we spend at least 70 per cent for NATO, and frankly it helps them a lot more than it helps us. So we’ll see what happens.‘
Trump had invited the challenge in the lead-up to the alliance’s summertime summit by pillorying NATO member nations in almost-day tirades.
Just prior to Tusk’s comments on Tuesday, Trump complained that the United States is bearing the brunt of the 29-nation security alliance’s costs and said that it’s not fair to Americans, especially when the U.S. is getting hosed in economic markets.
‘The U.S. is spending many times more than any other country in order to protect them. Not fair to the U.S. taxpayer,’ he griped. ‘On top of that we lose $151 Billion on Trade with the European Union. Charge us big Tariffs (& Barriers)!’
After Tusk’s slap at him — which the EU Council leader also tweeted at Trump — the president doubled down on his position, saying, ‘NATO countries must pay MORE, the United States must pay LESS. Very Unfair!’
Trump woke up early on Tuesday chagrined about the United States’ trade relationship with allies that are part of the Brussels-based security and their lacking contributions to NATO’s defense fund
Tusk fired back at Trump from NATO’s new headquarter city of Brussels: ‘America: appreciate your allies. After all you don’t have that many’
Tusk had acknowledged in his remarks that European countries need to step up their contributions.
‘Everyone expects an ally that is well-prepared and equipped,’ he said.
The EU Council chief assessed that ‘money is important’ yet said that ‘genuine solidarity is even more important.’
‘Speaking about solidarity, I want to dispel the American president’s argument which says that the U.S. alone protects Europe against our enemies, and threat the U.S. is almost alone in this struggle,’ he said in a repudiation of Trump’s statements.
Tusk argued that Europe ‘was first to respond on a large scale’ when terrorists attacked the U.S. on 9/11. He further noted that European soldiers have been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with American soldiers in Afghanistan.
But Trump refused to climb down from his position as he spoke to reporters on Tuesday morning local time from the White House’s South Lawn.
‘NATO has not treated us fairly, but I think we’ll work something out. We pay far too much and they pay far too little,’ he said. ‘But we will work it out and all countries will be happy.’
He acknowledged that the relationship between the U.S. and many of its traditional allies had soured in the nearly 18 months since he took office. He said a meeting next week with the Russian president may be the ‘easiest’ leg of his four-nation visit to Europe.
Trump refused to climb down from his position as he spoke to reporters on Tuesday morning local time from the White House’s South Lawn. ‘NATO has not treated us fairly…We pay far too much and they pay far too little’
Trump had invited the challenge in the lead-up to the alliance’s summertime summit by pillorying NATO member nations in almost-day tirades
With Trump in the air, it was his NATO Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchison who was left to do the talking for him at a news conference where Trump’s flattery of Putin and his disagreements with Merkel and Tusk came up.
Hutchison told reporters that Trump backs Article 5 of NATO’s charter, which specifies that an attack on one is an attack on all.
‘He is committed to Article 5 protection just as it is in he NATO charter,’ she told press who arrived at the NATO summit in advance of the U.S. president.
She also stressed that ‘the importance of unity in NATO is what makes us different’ from other alliances that the U.S. and Europe are a part of.
‘I will say that in all of the disagreements that have happened between President Trump and the United States’ position and the EU,’ Hutchsion said, ‘our allies in NATO have remained steadfastly focused on the NATO issues, and we are in agreement, we are in unity on our security issues, and we are an alliance that has performed better, increasing our capabilities.’
Hutchison said that while Trump is hard on Germany, he believes he is ‘pulling them toward us, not away from us.’
Croatia’s President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic (second from left) arrives for a NATO summit in Brussels with her entourage
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu arrive at the Alliance’s headquarters ahead of the NATO summit
At a news conference just before Hutchison’s, Stoltenberg had thanked Trump for the push as he informally kicking off the 2018 summit.
‘It is clearly having an impact,’ he said. ‘We estimate that European allies and Canada will add an extra $266 billion USD to defense between now and 2024. This is significant.’
Stoltenberg said that eight countries are on track to hit their contribution targets this year compared to three in 2014.
At the presser he said he was confident that leaders would be able to put their differences over trade aside as they have done in the past, because NATO has a good story to tell.
When it comes to defense spending, he said, it is true that the burden sharing has not been fairly distributed. That is why Canada and European nations that are part of the alliance are stepping up their donations.
‘I would not be surprised if we had robust discussions at the summit, including on defense spending,’ he said. ‘Different views are common between friends and allies.’
Just how robust they would get, even he did not seem to have imagined. The NATO secretary general was pummeled in his Wednesday morning breakfast by a fired-up Trump.
Trump indicated Tuesday that he was chagrined about the United States’ trade relationship with allies that are part of the Brussels-based security organization NATO and intended to make their contributions to its defense fund the focal point of his conversations in Belgium.
The president directly linked the the trade discrepancies that inspired his heavy metal tariffs in tweets that contradicted his NATO ambassador’s assessment a day prior that the policies should be evaluated separately from one another. He’s pictured here talking to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in June at the G7 summit
Just 16 countries are on track to meet the agreed upon spending obligation of 2 percent GDP, the United States has said, in accordance with a 2014 pact. That’s roughly half of NATO’s 29 members.
In tweets on Monday, President Trump berated the rest for relying on America for protection while at the same time running massive trade deficits with the U.S.
The president directly linked the trade discrepancies that inspired his heavy tariffs on metal imports to Western security in tweets that contradicted his NATO ambassador’s assessment a day prior that the policies should be evaluated separately from one another.
‘NATO benefits Europe far more than it does the U.S. By some accounts, the U.S. is paying for 90% of NATO, with many countries nowhere close to their 2% commitments,’ Trump said. ‘On top of this the European Union has a Trade Surplus of $151 Million with the U.S., with big Trade Barriers on U.S. goods. NO!’
The president put trade on the table in talks that begin Wednesday in Brussels with the tweets that he continued to send even after he had departed the U.S. for Belgium.
His trip to Brussels was proving to be a repeat of the testy confrontation he had with leaders from allied nations in June at the G7 summit in Charlevoix.
He butted heads with them on trade in Canada, also, complaining in conversations that NATO is ‘much too costly for the U.S’ and almost as bad as the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In Belgium, he was due to come face-to-face with Canada’s Justin Trudeau for the first time since senior aides to Trump accused the prime minister of trying to sabotage the American president’s Singapore summit.
He was also assured to have an uncomfortable encounter with Germany’s long-running chancellor, Merkel.
He put on the table in talks that begin Wednesday in Brussels with the tweets that kicked off a day that was supposed to be focused on his Supreme Court appointment on Monday
Trump was on course to face opposition in Brussels from almost all of NATO’s 29 member nations over his worldwide steel and aluminum tariffs, on top of his security demands. The EU and Canada have retaliated with stiff penalties of their own on American-made products.
TRUMP’S AGENDA IN BRUSSELS
President Trump arrives in Brussels on Tuesday evening local time July 10.
He begins his Wednesday with a bilateral meeting with NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg. His secretaries of defense and state and his national security adviser will also participate in the conversation.
Trump will next meet with the United States’ Brussels missions’ staff and families, as is customary for a U.S. president when visiting foreign countries.
Later on Wednesday he will attend an opening ceremony at the NATO headquarters. There, he will meet privately with unknown heads of government.
He will attend a working dinner that evening with fellow leaders.
Wednesday morning leaders will participate in meeting with the presidents of Georgia and Ukraine.
An Afghan strategy session follows.
Trump departs Belgium on Wednesday afternoon for London, where he has a working visit with Prime Minister Theresa May and an audience with the queen before a weekend in Scotland.
He caps his trip to Europe with a stop in Helsinki, Finland, for a summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
He will also likely to be pressed on a decision to conclude his trip to Europe with a tacked-on stop in Finland to negotiate with NATO nemesis and Russian head of state Putin.
The president who has groused since he was a candidate about NATO burden sharing was expected to put pressure of his own on member nations in Brussels to meet the soft goal of 2 percent GDP for defense spending. The guideline was agreed to by the group years before he took office.
‘The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other Country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable. While these countries have been increasing their contributions since I took office, they must do much more. Germany is at 1%, the U.S. is at 4%,’ Trump harped in a message on Monday.
He has singled out Germany as a violator incessantly. His defense secretary recently put a microscope on spending by the contribution-abiding U.K. in a new twist of the knife, as well.
Trump hammered Germany at a Thursday evening rally, in Montana, where he claimed that he told Merkel that he believes Europe is benefited more by the security alliance because of its proximity to Russia than the U.S.
He repeated the charge in tweets on Monday in which he again brought up the EU’s trade deficit with the United States.
A day prior, Hutchison, had insisted on Fox News that trade and security were not related and should not be a subject of NATO talks.
‘One thing I will say is that in all of the disagreements that we have seen at the G7 and with allies with whom we are now having trade talks and negotiations and tariffs, that has not come up in the NATO context,’ she stated. ‘Our diplomats are professional and they are staying on our NATO issues, where we are 100 percent allied.’
An outside view of the NATO building is seen at the NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. The security organization has its annual summit in Belgium this week
She said prior to the summit that Russia’s ‘malign activities’ and a ‘rising China’ would be the foremost topics.
The president on Friday slapped $34 billion in tariffs on China that were aimed at reducing a trade deficit with the country that the U.S. has also accused of rampant and intentional intellectual property violations. He said Tuesday that he intends to hit Beijing with $200 billion more in penalties.
He is also said to have told France’s Macron that the EU is worse than China on trade in some ways when they met in Canada last month.
The rift over trade and the president’s planned talks with Putin set the stage for more tension in Belgium.
Hucthison pointed out on Sunday that Trump’s way of doing business had been effective, though, pointing to increased contributions to NATO since he took office.
‘NATO really is making progress and they are doing it really at President Trump’s insistence, and I think that it’s very clear, and he’s been very direct about the Europeans needing to do more for their own security,’ she said. ‘Every ally is now increasing defense spending.’
Trump’s liaison to NATO said, ‘We’ve had the largest increase in defense spending since the Cold War. And in the year and a half since President Trump has been in office, it has doubled since 2014.
‘So, I think he is making an impact and I think that the Europeans, including Chancellor Merkel just recently who has said we are going to do more,’ she said. ‘We need to do more, it’s the right thing to do and she is encouraging her Bundestag, her parliament, to increase the defense budget so that we will be more fit for purpose in NATO for the fights that we want to deter.’
A day prior, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hucthison, had insisted on Fox News that trade and security were not related and should not be a subject of NATO talks
Merkel said last month in a speech to parliament that she anticipates ‘very difficult’ talks in Brussels in a reference to the increasingly complicated relationship between Germany and the United States in the era of Donald Trump.
‘It is no secret that the transatlantic alliance is under strain at the moment but we are convinced that the alliance remains central to our common security,’ the European leader stated.
Trump hit back at her on Thursday evening, saying in remarks at a campaign event for a U.S. Senate candidate that Europe is killing America on trade and paying Russia billions for oil and gas all while complaining that it needs protection from Putin and his military.
‘We’re paying anywhere from 70- to 90-percent to protect Europe. And that’s fine. Of course, they kill us on trade. They kill us on other things,’ he proclaimed. ‘So they want to protect against Russia, yet they pay billions of dollars to Russia and we’re the schmucks paying for the whole thing.’
The president said he told Merkel in an undated conversation that he couldn’t commit to protecting Germany from Putin’s army.
‘Putin is fine. He’s fine. We’re all people,’ he said. ‘Will I be prepared? I’ve been preparing for this stuff all my life.’
Hutchison said Sunday that she does not agree with the president’s assessment of Putin. She said Trump is right, however, to engage with the former KGB spy who has personally been accused by the U.S. of directing a scheme to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.
‘We should be talking to Vladimir Putin and many of our allied nations do as well,’ she said. ‘But it is to try to bring them in the tent instead of just constantly seeing them do these things that are attempting to disrupt us, but will not.’
She claimed on Tuesday at a news conference that Trump was saying at his rally that he was ‘not certain’ that Germany could pay out more money to NATO, not that he was unclear about the United States’ continued ability to protect the ally from Russia. Trump promptly contradicted her Wednesday when he indicated that’s exactly what he meant during his breakfast with Stoltenberg.
Germany’s defense minister, von der Leyen, said Wednesday on CNBC that Trump is right that Germany needs to increase its defense contribution — and said that it has.
The German official said her country also backs Trump’s summit next week with Putin.
‘It is good that he talking to President Putin,’ she said. ‘We have a lot of issues with Russia without question, but it’s good to be in a dialogue.’
LNG, which stands for Liquefied Natural Gas, is natural gas that has been converted to a liquid state by cooling to below -163°C. In this form, it occupies 600 times less space than before cooling, while retaining the same calorific value. This makes transport much easier.
Setting up a LNG chain requires investment in several types of facility:
– Exploration, to detect deposits of natural gas (which are generally discovered during oil exploration operations) and extraction/production
– Storage then liquefaction, to convert the natural gas from “gaseous” to “liquid” form in which it can be transported by tanker
– Transportation by special vessels called LNG tankers
– Storage then regasification, to restore the natural gas to its gaseous form, in which it can be transmitted through pipelines for consumption by end customers.
The differents steps of a LNG supply chain
The history of LNG
Natural gas liquefaction was developed in the 19th century by the British chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, who experimented with liquefying several gases, including natural gas. The first liquefaction plant was built in the United States in 1917. The first commercial operation began in 1941, again in the US. In January 1959, a former World War II cargo ship was converted into a tanker, the Methane Pioneer, to carry LNG between Lake Charles (Louisiana, USA) and Canvey Island (UK). Long-distance LNG transportation had become a reality. The 7 deliveries made in the following 14 months suffered only minor technical problems. Following this success, the British Gas Council decided to set up a commercial route between Venezuela and Canvey Island. In 1964, the UK became the first LNG importer, and Algeria the first exporter. Subsequently, several countries became interested in this new supply technique, including France, which built its first LNG terminal at Le Havre in 1965 (dismantled in 1989). The terminals of Fos-Tonkin (1972), Montoir-de-Bretagne (1980), Fos-Cavaou (2010) and Dunkerque (2016) are all part of the strategy to diversify national and European natural gas supplies.
Share of LNG among the total of natural gas imports in France in 2014
Worldwide, there are currently 26 liquefaction terminals in 16 countries, and 95 regasification terminals in 33 countries. Furthermore, there are plans for several both liquefaction and regasification terminals: if some of these projects will never be built, other are under construction.
The LNG supply chain
A LNG supply chain is made up of 4 interdependent segments: exploration/production, liquefaction, transportation and regasification. Each of these segments has its own specific industrial processes and involves specific rules and participants.
1. Exploration – production
At the heart of this essential activity, specialists analyse geological structure to identify areas that may contain hydrocarbons. They carry out special tests, such as seismic analysis, to confirm their initial assessments. Drilling is undertaken when there is a high probability of discovering gas (or oil). If the well is viable (after a series of tests, measurements and additional drilling), it can go into production.
2. Liquefaction
The natural gas extracted from the deposit is filtered and purified, so as not to damage equipment during the conversion from gas to liquid, and in order to meet the specifications of the importing regions. This means that the liquefaction process produces a natural gas with a methane content close to 100%. Liquefaction plants often consist of several installations arranged in parallel, called “liquefaction trains”. The liquefaction process reduces the volume of gas by a factor of around 600, in other words 1 cubic metre of LNG at -163°C has the same energy content as 600 cubic metres of “gaseous” gas at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure. The density of LNG is around 45% that of water.
3. LNG transportation
LNG tankers are double-hulled ships specially designed to prevent hull leaks and ruptures in the event of accident. The LNG is stored in tanks (generally 4 to 5 per tanker) at a temperature of -163°C and at atmospheric pressure. There are currently 3 types of LNG carrier, each corresponding to a different tank design: membrane tanks, spherical tanks and IHI Prismatic tanks. In 2009, carriers with membrane tanks accounted for more than 60% of world LNG transportation capacity, and more than 85% of orders. This is so far the only technology which allows the construction of large capacity carriers such as the Q-flex (210,000 cu. m.) and Q-max (260,000 cu. m.) vessels.
Interior of a membrane type tank in an LNG carrier (Source: GTT)
4. Storage and regasification
Once received and offloaded, the liquefied natural gas is returned to cryogenic storage tanks – usually varying in capacity from 100,000 to 160,000 cubic meters, depending on the site – where it is kept at a temperature of -163°C prior to regasification. Regasification consists of gradually warming the gas back up to a temperature of over 0°C. It is done under high pressures of 60 to 100 bar, usually in a series of seawater percolation heat exchangers, the most energy efficient technique when water of the right quality is available. An alternative method is to burn some of the gas to provide heat. On its way out of the terminal, the gas undergoes any treatment processes needed to bring its characteristics in line with regulatory and end-user requirements. Its heating value, for example, may be tweaked by altering nitrogen, butane or propane content or blending it with other gases.
Exporting and importing countries
The LNG importing countries can be divided into 2 markets: the Atlantic Basin and the Pacific Basin. The Pacific Basin comprises countries along the Pacific and in South Asia (including India). The Atlantic Basin covers Europe, North and West Africa and the Atlantic coast of the American continent.
The Pacific Basin market emerged in the 1990s, at a time when demand in some Asian countries increased significantly (mainly Japan and South Korea). LNG represented an alternative to oil, and the goal was to maintain security of supply even at relatively high cost. The Atlantic Basin market emerged later in the 1990s, for reasons of security of supply and also in anticipation of a fall in some countries’ domestic reserves.
We can note that there are less and less exporting countries. Thus, in 2015 there were 17 exporting countries whereas there were 19 in 2014.
LNG exports (Source: IGU “2016 World LNG Report”)
In contrast to the declining number of exporters, the number of importers is growing. In 2015, there were 34 LNG importing countries. Although it tends to import lower LNG quatities, Japan remains the world’s biggest LNG importer, followed by South Korea. The reason is that those countries – just like a great part of Asia-Pacific region – are extremely dependent on LNG for their gas consumption.
US President Donald Trump traded barbs with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a tense NATO summit Wednesday after he accused Berlin of being “captive” to Russia and demanded it immediately step up defence spending.
The two-day meet in Brussels is shaping up as the alliance’s most difficult in years, with Europe and the US engaged in a bitter trade spat and Trump demanding that NATO allies “reimburse” Washington for defending the continent.
Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, shot back that she knew what it meant to be under Kremlin domination and Germany had the right to make its own policy choices.
European alliance members were braced for criticism from Trump on defence spending, but his blistering attack on Germany at a breakfast meeting with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg took the summit by surprise.
“Germany is a captive of Russia because it is getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump said, taking particular aim at the proposed Nord Stream II gas pipeline, which he has previously criticised.
“Everybody’s talking about it all over the world, they’re saying we’re paying you billions of dollars to protect you but you’re paying billions of dollars to Russia.”
Video: Trump Attends NATO Summit Amid Tense Relations With Allies
Merkel ramped up the febrile atmosphere of the summit with a sharp reply on arriving at NATO HQ.
“I myself have also experienced a part of Germany being controlled by the Soviet Union,” she said.
“I am very glad that we are united today in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany and that we can therefore also make our own independent policies and make our own independent decisions.”
The pair later met for a one-on-one meeting and while Trump insisted they had a “very very good relationship”, their frosty body language suggested otherwise.
Merkel said she welcomed the chance to have an “exchange of views” with Trump.
– ‘Step it up’ –
Trump has long complained that European NATO members do not pay enough for their own defence, singling out Germany for particular criticism.
NATO allies agreed at a summit in Wales in 2014 to move towards spending two percent of GDP on defence by 2024. But Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, spends just 1.24 percent, compared with 3.5 percent for the US.
“These countries have to step it up — not over a 10 year period, they have to step it up immediately,” Trump said.
“We’re protecting Germany, France and everybody… this has been going on for decades,” Trump said. “We can’t put up with it and it’s inappropriate.”
Stoltenberg acknowledged that Trump had expressed himself in “very direct language” but insisted that away from the fiery rhetoric the allies all agree on fundamental issues: the need to boost NATO’s resilience, fight terror and share the cost of defence more equally.
NATO officials and diplomats will try to promote an image of unity at the summit in the face of growing unease about the threat from Russia, but with the row between Merkel and Trump it may prove difficult to paper over the cracks.
The mercurial tycoon said before leaving Washington that his meeting in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday “may be the easiest” part of his European tour, which also includes a trip to Britain, where the government is in crisis over Brexit.
– ‘Appreciate your allies’ –
Trump ramped up his rhetoric ahead of the talks, explicitly linking NATO with the transatlantic trade row by saying the EU shut out US business while expecting America to defend it.
EU President Donald Tusk stepped up to the fight with his own salvo against Trump on Tuesday, telling him to “appreciate your allies” and reminding him Washington that Europe had come to its aid following the 9/11 attacks.
European diplomats fear a repeat of last month’s divisive G7 in Canada, when Trump clashed with his Western allies before meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at a summit and praising him as “very talented”.
There have been fears that Trump, keen to be seen to make a breakthrough with the Kremlin strongman, might make concessions in his meeting with Putin that would weaken Western unity over issues such as Ukraine and Syria.
US ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison urged allies to look beyond Trump’s rhetoric and focus on the summit declaration for the alliance’s future work — which the US is expected to back.
And she said she expected Trump to recommit to one of the founding articles of NATO — Article 5 — which holds that an attack on one member is an attack on them all.
NATO Funding and Burdensharing
May 19, 2017 (IN10704)
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Related Author
Paul Belkin
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Paul Belkin, Analyst in European Affairs (pbelkin@crs.loc.gov, 7-0220)
President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with NATO heads of state and government in Brussels on May 25, 2017.
This will be the President’s first collective meeting with his counterparts from NATO’s other 27 member states.
President Trump is expected to continue to strongly urge NATO members to increase defense spending and enhance
military capabilities.
For numerous reasons—not least the United States’ status as the world’s preeminent military power—U.S. defense
spending levels long have been significantly higher than those of any other NATO ally. Since NATO’s founding,
successive U.S. Administrations have characterized a steadfast U.S. commitment to NATO as essential to advancing a
key U.S. security interest: peace and stability in Europe. Nevertheless, the relative imbalance in defense spending and
military capabilities within NATO has long fueled concerns about burdensharing and European allies’ reliance on U.S.
defense guarantees.
NATO members contribute to the alliance financially in various ways. The most fundamental way is by funding, in
members’ individual national defense budgets, the deployment of their respective armed forces to support NATO
missions.
NATO member states also fund NATO’s annual budget of about $2.5 billion. National contributions fund the day-to-day
operations of NATO headquarters, as well as some collective NATO military assets and infrastructure. The U.S. share
of these so-called common-funded budgets is currently about 22%, followed by Germany (15%), France (11%), and the
United Kingdom (UK; 10%).
Defense Spending Targets
As signatories of NATO’s founding North Atlantic Treaty, member states commit to “maintain and develop their
individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack” (Article 3) and, in the case of an armed attack against one or
more allies, to take “such action as [they] deem necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the
security of the North Atlantic area” (Article 5). However, decisions about individual national contributions to specific
NATO missions are essentially voluntary.
In 2006, NATO members agreed informally to aim to allocate at least 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) to their
national defense budgets annually and to devote at least 20% of national defense expenditure to research and
development and procurement. These targets were formalized at NATO’s 2014 Wales Summit, when the allies pledged
to “halt any decline in defence expenditure” and to “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.” The 2%
and 20% spending targets are intended to guide national defense spending by individual NATO members; they do not
refer to contributions made directly to NATO.
Most analysts agree that the 2% spending figure “does not represent any type of critical threshold or ‘tipping point’ in
terms of defence capabilities.” The target is considered politically and symbolically important, however. NATO does
not impose sanctions on countries that fail to meet the target.
In 2016, 5 allies met or exceeded the 2% target (Estonia, Greece, Poland, the UK, and the United States); 10 allies met
or exceeded the 20% target (France, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Turkey, the UK, and the
United States); and 3 allies met both targets (Poland, the UK, and the United States).
NATO figures for 2015 indicate that if every ally were to have met the 2% benchmark, the aggregate sum of NATO
members’ national defense budgets would have increased by about $100 billion (from $891 billion to $989 billion).
Although most analysts agree that such an increase could benefit the alliance significantly, many stress that how
additional resources are invested is equally, if not more, important. Critics note, for example, that an ally spending less
than 2% of GDP on defense could have more modern, effective military capabilities than an ally that meets the 2%
target but allocates most of that funding to personnel costs and relatively little to procurement and modernization.
Defense Spending Trends and Future Prospects
NATO and U.S. officials say they are encouraged that many allies have bolstered their defense budgets in recent years,
largely in response to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. According to NATO, in 2016, 23 allies increased defense
spending compared to 2015, in real terms. NATO officials expect at least three more allies (Latvia, Lithuania, and
Romania) to meet the 2% guideline in 2017 or 2018. Other allied governments, including France and Germany, have
reiterated their commitment to meeting the 2% target by 2024.
Nevertheless, ongoing fiscal challenges facing many European governments and broad public skepticism of military
action could impede some allies’ plans to increase defense spending. To help stretch existing defense resources, NATO
and U.S. leaders have called for more progress on allied defense cooperation initiatives, including the joint acquisition
of shared capabilities.
U.S. Policy and Considerations for Congress
U.S. calls for increased allied defense spending are not new, but the Trump Administration has approached the issue
more stridently than its predecessors. Defense Secretary James Mattis’s suggestion in February 2017 that the United
States could moderate its commitment to NATO if spending increases are not forthcoming caused particular concern
within the alliance, given that past U.S. Administrations had never linked spending levels to the U.S. commitment to
NATO to this degree.
Trump Administration officials have acknowledged the upward trend in allied defense spending but also have indicated
that they will continue to seek more specific commitments to achieve NATO targets.
U.S. concerns about defense spending and burdensharing raise several broader policy questions related to the nature and
scope of U.S. commitments to NATO and the appropriate U.S. military presence in Europe that could be of interest to
Congress, including the following:
How does NATO membership advance U.S. national security interests? Some analysts argue that a robust U.S.
commitment to NATO and force presence in Europe continues to advance key U.S. national security interests,
especially given recent Russian aggression in Europe. Others contend that the U.S. commitment to European security
could be scaled back to ensure greater European contributions.
Is the 2% defense spending target the best means to enhance allied military capabilities? Some analysts argue that
NATO should focus more on ensuring more effective defense spending than on increasing aggregate defense spending,
including through pooling and sharing of defense resources. Others counter that effective defense cooperation requires
minimum defense spending levels.
NATO was little more than a political association until the Korean War galvanized the organization’s member states, and an integrated military structure was built up under the direction of two US Supreme Commanders. The course of the Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact which formed in 1955. Doubts over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the NATO defense against a prospective Soviet invasion—doubts that led to the development of the independent French nuclear deterrent and the withdrawal of France from NATO’s military structure in 1966 for 30 years. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany in 1989, the organization conducted its first military interventions in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 and later Yugoslavia in 1999 during the breakup of Yugoslavia.[5] Politically, the organization sought better relations with former Warsaw Pact countries, several of which joined the alliance in 1999 and 2004.
Since its founding, the admission of new member states has increased the alliance from the original 12 countries to 29. The most recent member state to be added to NATO is Montenegro on 5 June 2017. NATO currently recognizes Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Macedonia and Ukraine as aspiring members.[8] An additional 21 countries participate in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, with 15 other countries involved in institutionalized dialogue programs. The combined military spending of all NATO members constitutes over 70% of the global total.[9] Members’ defense spending is supposed to amount to at least 2% of GDP by 2024.[10]
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed by US President Harry S. Truman in Washington, on 4 April 1949 and was ratified by the United States in August 1949.
The Treaty of Brussels was a mutual defence treaty against the Soviet threat at the start of the Cold War. It was signed on 17 March 1948 by Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, and the United Kingdom. It was the precursor to NATO. The Soviet threat became immediate with the Berlin Blockade in 1948, leading to the creation of a multinational defence organization, the Western Union Defence Organisation, in September 1948.[11] However, the parties were too weak militarily to counter the Soviet Armed Forces. In addition, the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d’état by the Communists had overthrown a democratic government and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevinreiterated that the best way to prevent another Czechoslovakia was to evolve a joint Western military strategy. He got a receptive hearing in the United States, especially considering American anxiety over Italy (and the Italian Communist Party).[12]
In 1948, European leaders met with US defence, military and diplomatic officials at the Pentagon, under US Secretary of State George C. Marshall‘s orders, exploring a framework for a new and unprecedented association.[13] Talks for a new military alliance resulted in the North Atlantic Treaty, which was signed by US President Harry S. Truman in Washington on 4 April 1949. It included the five Treaty of Brussels states plus the United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.[14] The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, stated in 1949 that the organization’s goal was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.[15] Popular support for the Treaty was not unanimous, and some Icelanders participated in a pro-neutrality, anti-membership riot in March 1949. The creation of NATO can be seen as the primary institutional consequence of a school of thought called Atlanticism which stressed the importance of trans-Atlantic cooperation.[16]
The members agreed that an armed attack against any one of them in Europe or North America would be considered an attack against them all. Consequently, they agreed that, if an armed attack occurred, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence, would assist the member being attacked, taking such action as it deemed necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. The treaty does not require members to respond with military action against an aggressor. Although obliged to respond, they maintain the freedom to choose the method by which they do so. This differs from Article IV of the Treaty of Brussels, which clearly states that the response will be military in nature. It is nonetheless assumed that NATO members will aid the attacked member militarily. The treaty was later clarified to include both the member’s territory and their “vessels, forces or aircraft” above the Tropic of Cancer, including some overseas departments of France.[17]
The creation of NATO brought about some standardization of allied military terminology, procedures, and technology, which in many cases meant European countries adopting US practices. The roughly 1300 Standardization Agreements (STANAG) codified many of the common practices that NATO has achieved. Hence, the 7.62×51mm NATO rifle cartridge was introduced in the 1950s as a standard firearm cartridge among many NATO countries.[18]Fabrique Nationale de Herstal‘s FAL, which used the 7.62mm NATO cartridge, was adopted by 75 countries, including many outside of NATO.[19] Also, aircraft marshalling signals were standardized, so that any NATO aircraft could land at any NATO base. Other standards such as the NATO phonetic alphabet have made their way beyond NATO into civilian use.[20]
The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 was crucial for NATO as it raised the apparent threat of all Communist countries working together and forced the alliance to develop concrete military plans.[21]Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) was formed to direct forces in Europe, and began work under Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower in January 1951.[22] In September 1950, the NATO Military Committee called for an ambitious buildup of conventional forces to meet the Soviets, subsequently reaffirming this position at the February 1952 meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Lisbon. The Lisbon conference, seeking to provide the forces necessary for NATO’s Long-Term Defence Plan, called for an expansion to ninety-six divisions. However this requirement was dropped the following year to roughly thirty-five divisions with heavier use to be made of nuclear weapons. At this time, NATO could call on about fifteen ready divisions in Central Europe, and another ten in Italy and Scandinavia.[23][24] Also at Lisbon, the post of Secretary General of NATO as the organization’s chief civilian was created, and Lord Ismay was eventually appointed to the post.[25]
The German Bundeswehr provided the largest element of the allied land forces guarding the frontier in Central Europe.
In September 1952, the first major NATO maritime exercises began; Exercise Mainbrace brought together 200 ships and over 50,000 personnel to practice the defence of Denmark and Norway.[26] Other major exercises that followed included Exercise Grand Slam and Exercise Longstep, naval and amphibious exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, Italic Weld, a combined air-naval-ground exercise in northern Italy, Grand Repulse, involving the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR), the Netherlands Corps and Allied Air Forces Central Europe (AAFCE), Monte Carlo, a simulated atomic air-ground exercise involving the Central Army Group, and Weldfast, a combined amphibious landing exercise in the Mediterranean Sea involving American, British, Greek, Italian and Turkish naval forces.[27]
Greece and Turkey also joined the alliance in 1952, forcing a series of controversial negotiations, in which the United States and Britain were the primary disputants, over how to bring the two countries into the military command structure.[22] While this overt military preparation was going on, covert stay-behind arrangements initially made by the Western European Union to continue resistance after a successful Soviet invasion, including Operation Gladio, were transferred to NATO control. Ultimately unofficial bonds began to grow between NATO’s armed forces, such as the NATO Tiger Association and competitions such as the Canadian Army Trophy for tank gunnery.[28][29]
A 1952 US postage stampcommemorating the third anniversary of NATO. Stamps honoring the organization were issued by many member countries.
In 1954, the Soviet Union suggested that it should join NATO to preserve peace in Europe.[30] The NATO countries, fearing that the Soviet Union’s motive was to weaken the alliance, ultimately rejected this proposal.
On 17 December 1954, the North Atlantic Council approved MC 48, a key document in the evolution of NATO nuclear thought. MC 48 emphasized that NATO would have to use atomic weapons from the outset of a war with the Soviet Union whether or not the Soviets chose to use them first. This gave SACEUR the same prerogatives for automatic use of nuclear weapons as existed for the commander-in-chief of the US Strategic Air Command.
The incorporation of West Germany into the organization on 9 May 1955 was described as “a decisive turning point in the history of our continent” by Halvard Lange, Foreign Affairs Minister of Norway at the time.[31] A major reason for Germany’s entry into the alliance was that without German manpower, it would have been impossible to field enough conventional forces to resist a Soviet invasion.[32] One of its immediate results was the creation of the Warsaw Pact, which was signed on 14 May 1955 by the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and East Germany, as a formal response to this event, thereby delineating the two opposing sides of the Cold War.
Three major exercises were held concurrently in the northern autumn of 1957. Operation Counter Punch, Operation Strikeback, and Operation Deep Water were the most ambitious military undertaking for the alliance to date, involving more than 250,000 men, 300 ships, and 1,500 aircraft operating from Norway to Turkey.[33]
French withdrawal
Map of the NATO air bases in France before Charles de Gaulle‘s 1966 withdrawal from NATO military integrated command
NATO’s unity was breached early in its history with a crisis occurring during Charles de Gaulle‘s presidency of France.[34] De Gaulle protested against the United States’ strong role in the organization and what he perceived as a special relationship between it and the United Kingdom. In a memorandum sent to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on 17 September 1958, he argued for the creation of a tripartite directorate that would put France on an equal footing with the US and the UK.[35]
Considering the response to be unsatisfactory, de Gaulle began constructing an independent defence force for his country. He wanted to give France, in the event of an East German incursion into West Germany, the option of coming to a separate peace with the Eastern bloc instead of being drawn into a larger NATO–Warsaw Pact war.[36] In February 1959, France withdrew its Mediterranean Fleet from NATO command,[37] and later banned the stationing of foreign nuclear weapons on French soil. This caused the United States to transfer two hundred military aircraft out of France and return control of the air force bases that it had operated in France since 1950 to the French by 1967.
Though France showed solidarity with the rest of NATO during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, de Gaulle continued his pursuit of an independent defence by removing France’s Atlantic and Channel fleets from NATO command.[38] In 1966, all French armed forces were removed from NATO’s integrated military command, and all non-French NATO troops were asked to leave France. US Secretary of State Dean Rusk was later quoted as asking de Gaulle whether his order included “the bodies of American soldiers in France’s cemeteries?”[39] This withdrawal forced the relocation of SHAPE from Rocquencourt, near Paris, to Casteau, north of Mons, Belgium, by 16 October 1967.[40] France remained a member of the alliance, and committed to the defence of Europe from possible Warsaw Pact attack with its own forces stationed in the Federal Republic of Germany throughout the Cold War. A series of secret accords between US and French officials, the Lemnitzer–Ailleret Agreements, detailed how French forces would dovetail back into NATO’s command structure should East-West hostilities break out.[41]
When de Gaulle announced his decision to withdraw from the integrated NATO command, President Lyndon Johnson suggested that when de Gaulle “comes rushing down like a locomotive on the track, why the Germans and ourselves, we just stand aside and let him go on by, then we are back together again.”[42] The vision came true. France announced their return to full participation at the 2009 Strasbourg–Kehl summit.[43]
Détente led to many high level meetings between leaders from both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
Wim van Eekelen, Minister of Defence of the Netherlands, greeting US soldiers arriving as they are deployed to NATO bases (1987).
During most of the Cold War, NATO’s watch against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact did not actually lead to direct military action. On 1 July 1968, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons opened for signature: NATO argued that its nuclear sharing arrangements did not breach the treaty as US forces controlled the weapons until a decision was made to go to war, at which point the treaty would no longer be controlling. Few states knew of the NATO nuclear sharing arrangements at that time, and they were not challenged. In May 1978, NATO countries officially defined two complementary aims of the Alliance, to maintain security and pursue détente. This was supposed to mean matching defences at the level rendered necessary by the Warsaw Pact’s offensive capabilities without spurring a further arms race.[44]
During the Cold War, most of Europe was divided between two alliances. Members of NATO are shown in blue, with members of the Warsaw Pact in red, unaffiliated countries are in grey. Yugoslavia, although communist, had left the Soviet sphere in 1948, while Albania was only a Warsaw Pact member until 1968.
On 12 December 1979, in light of a build-up of Warsaw Pact nuclear capabilities in Europe, ministers approved the deployment of US GLCMcruise missiles and Pershing II theatre nuclear weapons in Europe. The new warheads were also meant to strengthen the western negotiating position regarding nuclear disarmament. This policy was called the Dual Track policy.[45] Similarly, in 1983–84, responding to the stationing of Warsaw PactSS-20 medium-range missiles in Europe, NATO deployed modern Pershing II missiles tasked to hit military targets such as tank formations in the event of war.[46] This action led to peace movement protests throughout Western Europe, and support for the deployment wavered as many doubted whether the push for deployment could be sustained.
The membership of the organization at this time remained largely static. In 1974, as a consequence of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Greece withdrew its forces from NATO’s military command structure but, with Turkish cooperation, were readmitted in 1980[citation needed]. The Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina did not result in NATO involvement because article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that collective self-defence is only applicable to attacks on member state territories north of the Tropic of Cancer.[47] On 30 May 1982, NATO gained a new member when the newly democratic Spain joined the alliance; Spain’s membership was confirmed by referendum in 1986. At the peak of the Cold War, 16 member nations maintained an approximate strength of 5,252,800 active military, including as many as 435,000 forward deployed US forces, under a command structure that reached a peak of 78 headquarters, organized into four echelons.[48]
The Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 removed the de facto main adversary of NATO and caused a strategic re-evaluation of NATO’s purpose, nature, tasks, and their focus on the continent of Europe. This shift started with the 1990 signing in Paris of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe between NATO and the Soviet Union, which mandated specific military reductions across the continent that continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.[49] At that time, European countries accounted for 34 percent of NATO’s military spending; by 2012, this had fallen to 21 percent.[50] NATO also began a gradual expansion to include newly autonomous Central and Eastern European nations, and extended its activities into political and humanitarian situations that had not formerly been NATO concerns.
The first post-Cold War expansion of NATO came with German reunification on 3 October 1990, when the former East Germany became part of the Federal Republic of Germany and the alliance. This had been agreed in the Two Plus Four Treaty earlier in the year. To secure Soviet approval of a united Germany remaining in NATO, it was agreed that foreign troops and nuclear weapons would not be stationed in the east, and there are diverging views on whether negotiators gave commitments regarding further NATO expansion east.[51]Jack Matlock, American ambassador to the Soviet Union during its final years, said that the West gave a “clear commitment” not to expand, and declassified documents indicate that Soviet negotiators were given the impression that NATO membership was off the table for countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland.[52]Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister at that time, said in a conversation with Eduard Shevardnadze that “[f]or us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.”[52] In 1996, Gorbachev wrote in his Memoirs, that “during the negotiations on the unification of Germany they gave assurances that NATO would not extend its zone of operation to the east,”[53] and repeated this view in an interview in 2008.[54] According to Robert Zoellick, a State Department official involved in the Two Plus Four negotiating process, this appears to be a misperception, and no formal commitment regarding enlargement was made.[55]
As part of post-Cold War restructuring, NATO’s military structure was cut back and reorganized, with new forces such as the Headquarters Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps established. The changes brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union on the military balance in Europe were recognized in the Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, which was signed in 1999. The policies of French President Nicolas Sarkozy resulted in a major reform of France’s military position, culminating with the return to full membership on 4 April 2009, which also included France rejoining the NATO Military Command Structure, while maintaining an independent nuclear deterrent.[41][56]
The NATO flag being raised in a ceremony marking Croatia‘s joining of the alliance in 2009.
Between 1994 and 1997, wider forums for regional cooperation between NATO and its neighbors were set up, like the Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue initiative and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. In 1998, the NATO–Russia Permanent Joint Council was established. On 8 July 1997, three former communist countries, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, were invited to join NATO, which each did in 1999. Membership went on expanding with the accession of seven more Central and Eastern European countries to NATO: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. They were first invited to start talks of membership during the 2002 Prague summit, and joined NATO on 29 March 2004, shortly before the 2004 Istanbul summit. At that time, the decision was criticised in the US by many military, political and academic leaders as a “a policy error of historic proportions.”[57] According to George F. Kennan, an American diplomat and an advocate of the containment policy, this decision “may be expected to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”[58]
New NATO structures were also formed while old ones were abolished. In 1997, NATO reached agreement on a significant downsizing of its command structure from 65 headquarters to just 20.[59] The NATO Response Force (NRF) was launched at the 2002 Prague summit on 21 November, the first summit in a former Comecon country. On 19 June 2003, a further restructuring of the NATO military commands began as the Headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic were abolished and a new command, Allied Command Transformation (ACT), was established in Norfolk, United States, and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) became the Headquarters of Allied Command Operations (ACO). ACT is responsible for driving transformation (future capabilities) in NATO, whilst ACO is responsible for current operations.[60] In March 2004, NATO’s Baltic Air Policing began, which supported the sovereignty of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia by providing jet fighters to react to any unwanted aerial intrusions. Eight multinational jet fighters are based in Lithuania, the number of which was increased from four in 2014.[61] Also at the 2004 Istanbul summit, NATO launched the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative with four Persian Gulf nations.[62]
Meetings between the government of Viktor Yushchenko and NATO leaders led to the Intensified Dialogue programme.
The 2006 Riga summit was held in Riga, Latvia, and highlighted the issue of energy security. It was the first NATO summit to be held in a country that had been part of the Soviet Union. At the April 2008 summit in Bucharest, Romania, NATO agreed to the accession of Croatia and Albania and both countries joined NATO in April 2009. Ukraine and Georgia were also told that they could eventually become members.[63] The issue of Georgian and Ukrainian membership in NATO prompted harsh criticism from Russia, as did NATO plans for a missile defence system. Studies for this system began in 2002, with negotiations centered on anti-ballistic missiles being stationed in Poland and the Czech Republic. Though NATO leaders gave assurances that the system was not targeting Russia, both presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev criticized it as a threat.[64]
In 2009, US President Barack Obama proposed using the ship-based Aegis Combat System, though this plan still includes stations being built in Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Romania, and Poland.[65] NATO will also maintain the “status quo” in its nuclear deterrent in Europe by upgrading the targeting capabilities of the “tactical” B61 nuclear bombs stationed there and deploying them on the stealthier Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II.[66][67] Following the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, NATO committed to forming a new “spearhead” force of 5,000 troops at bases in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.[68][69]
The Russian intervention in Crimea in 2014 lead to strong condemnation by NATO nations, and Poland invoked Article 4 meetings.[70] At the subsequent 2014 Wales summit, the leaders of NATO’s member states reaffirmed their pledge to spend the equivalent of at least 2% of their gross domestic products on defence by 2024.[71] In 2015, five of its 28 members met that goal.[72][73][74] On 15 June 2016, NATO officially recognized cyberwarfare as an operational domain of war, just like land, sea and aerial warfare. This means that any cyber attack on NATO members can trigger Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.[75]Montenegro became the 29th and newest member of NATO on 5 June 2017, amid strong objections from Russia.[76][77]
No military operations were conducted by NATO during the Cold War. Following the end of the Cold War, the first operations, Anchor Guard in 1990 and Ace Guard in 1991, were prompted by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Airborne early warning aircraft were sent to provide coverage of southeastern Turkey, and later a quick-reaction force was deployed to the area.[78]
NATO air strikes that year helped bring the Yugoslav wars to an end, resulting in the Dayton Agreement in November 1995.[84] As part of this agreement, NATO deployed a UN-mandated peacekeeping force, under Operation Joint Endeavor, named IFOR. Almost 60,000 NATO troops were joined by forces from non-NATO nations in this peacekeeping mission. This transitioned into the smaller SFOR, which started with 32,000 troops initially and ran from December 1996 until December 2004, when operations were then passed onto European Union Force Althea.[85] Following the lead of its member nations, NATO began to award a service medal, the NATO Medal, for these operations.[86]
German KFOR soldiers patrol southern Kosovo in 1999
In an effort to stop Slobodan Milošević‘s Serbian-led crackdown on KLA separatists and Albanian civilians in Kosovo, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1199 on 23 September 1998 to demand a ceasefire. Negotiations under US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke broke down on 23 March 1999, and he handed the matter to NATO,[87] which started a 78-day bombing campaign on 24 March 1999.[88] Operation Allied Force targeted the military capabilities of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During the crisis, NATO also deployed one of its international reaction forces, the ACE Mobile Force (Land), to Albania as the Albania Force (AFOR), to deliver humanitarian aid to refugees from Kosovo.[89]
Though the campaign was criticized for high civilian casualties, including bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Milošević finally accepted the terms of an international peace plan on 3 June 1999, ending the Kosovo War. On 11 June, Milošević further accepted UN resolution 1244, under the mandate of which NATO then helped establish the KFOR peacekeeping force. Nearly one million refugees had fled Kosovo, and part of KFOR’s mandate was to protect the humanitarian missions, in addition to deterring violence.[89][90] In August–September 2001, the alliance also mounted Operation Essential Harvest, a mission disarming ethnic Albanian militias in the Republic of Macedonia.[91] As of 1 December 2013, 4,882 KFOR soldiers, representing 31 countries, continue to operate in the area.[92]
The US, the UK, and most other NATO countries opposed efforts to require the UN Security Council to approve NATO military strikes, such as the action against Serbia in 1999, while France and some others claimed that the alliance needed UN approval.[93] The US/UK side claimed that this would undermine the authority of the alliance, and they noted that Russia and China would have exercised their Security Council vetoes to block the strike on Yugoslavia, and could do the same in future conflicts where NATO intervention was required, thus nullifying the entire potency and purpose of the organization. Recognizing the post-Cold War military environment, NATO adopted the Alliance Strategic Concept during its Washington summit in April 1999 that emphasized conflict prevention and crisis management.[94]
The September 11 attacks in the United States caused NATO to invoke its collective defence article for the first time.
The September 11 attacks in the United States caused NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter for the first time in the organization’s history. The Article says that an attack on any member shall be considered to be an attack on all. The invocation was confirmed on 4 October 2001 when NATO determined that the attacks were indeed eligible under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty.[95] The eight official actions taken by NATO in response to the attacks included Operation Eagle Assist and Operation Active Endeavour, a naval operation in the Mediterranean Sea which is designed to prevent the movement of terrorists or weapons of mass destruction, as well as enhancing the security of shipping in general which began on 4 October 2001.[96]
The alliance showed unity: On 16 April 2003, NATO agreed to take command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which includes troops from 42 countries. The decision came at the request of Germany and the Netherlands, the two nations leading ISAF at the time of the agreement, and all nineteen NATO ambassadors approved it unanimously. The handover of control to NATO took place on 11 August, and marked the first time in NATO’s history that it took charge of a mission outside the north Atlantic area.[97]
ISAF was initially charged with securing Kabul and surrounding areas from the Taliban, al Qaeda and factional warlords, so as to allow for the establishment of the Afghan Transitional Administration headed by Hamid Karzai. In October 2003, the UN Security Council authorized the expansion of the ISAF mission throughout Afghanistan,[98] and ISAF subsequently expanded the mission in four main stages over the whole of the country.[99]
On 31 July 2006, the ISAF additionally took over military operations in the south of Afghanistan from a US-led anti-terrorism coalition.[100] Due to the intensity of the fighting in the south, in 2011 France allowed a squadron of Mirage 2000 fighter/attack aircraft to be moved into the area, to Kandahar, in order to reinforce the alliance’s efforts.[101] During its 2012 Chicago Summit, NATO endorsed a plan to end the Afghanistan war and to remove the NATO-led ISAF Forces by the end of December 2014.[102] ISAF was disestablished in December 2014 and replaced by the follow-on training Resolute Support Mission
In August 2004, during the Iraq War, NATO formed the NATO Training Mission – Iraq, a training mission to assist the Iraqi security forces in conjunction with the US led MNF-I.[103] The NATO Training Mission-Iraq (NTM-I) was established at the request of the Iraqi Interim Government under the provisions of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1546. The aim of NTM-I was to assist in the development of Iraqi security forces training structures and institutions so that Iraq can build an effective and sustainable capability that addresses the needs of the nation. NTM-I was not a combat mission but is a distinct mission, under the political control of NATO’s North Atlantic Council. Its operational emphasis was on training and mentoring. The activities of the mission were coordinated with Iraqi authorities and the US-led Deputy Commanding General Advising and Training, who was also dual-hatted as the Commander of NTM-I. The mission officially concluded on 17 December 2011.[104]
USS Farragut destroying a Somali pirate skiff in March 2010
Beginning on 17 August 2009, NATO deployed warships in an operation to protect maritime traffic in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean from Somali pirates, and help strengthen the navies and coast guards of regional states. The operation was approved by the North Atlantic Council and involves warships primarily from the United States though vessels from many other nations are also included. Operation Ocean Shield focuses on protecting the ships of Operation Allied Provider which are distributing aid as part of the World Food Programme mission in Somalia. Russia, China and South Korea have sent warships to participate in the activities as well.[107][108] The operation seeks to dissuade and interrupt pirate attacks, protect vessels, and abetting to increase the general level of security in the region.[109]
During the Libyan Civil War, violence between protestors and the Libyan government under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi escalated, and on 17 March 2011 led to the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which called for a ceasefire, and authorized military action to protect civilians. A coalition that included several NATO members began enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya shortly afterwards, beginning with Opération Harmattan by the French Air Force on March 19.
On 24 March, NATO agreed to take control of the no-fly zone from the initial coalition, while command of targeting ground units remained with the coalition’s forces.[112][113] NATO began officially enforcing the UN resolution on 27 March 2011 with assistance from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.[114] By June, reports of divisions within the alliance surfaced as only eight of the 28 member nations were participating in combat operations,[115] resulting in a confrontation between US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and countries such as Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Germany to contribute more, the latter believing the organization has overstepped its mandate in the conflict.[116][117][118] In his final policy speech in Brussels on 10 June, Gates further criticized allied countries in suggesting their actions could cause the demise of NATO.[119] The German foreign ministry pointed to “a considerable [German] contribution to NATO and NATO-led operations” and to the fact that this engagement was highly valued by President Obama.[120]
While the mission was extended into September, Norway that day announced it would begin scaling down contributions and complete withdrawal by 1 August.[121] Earlier that week it was reported Danish air fighters were running out of bombs.[122][123] The following week, the head of the Royal Navy said the country’s operations in the conflict were not sustainable.[124] By the end of the mission in October 2011, after the death of Colonel Gaddafi, NATO planes had flown about 9,500 strike sorties against pro-Gaddafi targets.[125][126] A report from the organization Human Rights Watch in May 2012 identified at least 72 civilians killed in the campaign.[127] Following a coup d’état attempt in October 2013, Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan requested technical advice and trainers from NATO to assist with ongoing security issues.[128]
NATO organizes regular summits for leaders of their members states and partnerships.
NATO has twenty-nine members, mainly in Europe and North America. Some of these countries also have territory on multiple continents, which can be covered only as far south as the Tropic of Cancer in the Atlantic Ocean, which defines NATO’s “area of responsibility” under Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty. During the original treaty negotiations, the United States insisted that colonies such as the Belgian Congo be excluded from the treaty.[129][130]French Algeria was however covered until their independence on 3 July 1962.[131] Twelve of these twenty-nine are original members who joined in 1949, while the other seventeen joined in one of seven enlargement rounds.
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, France pursued a military strategy of independence from NATO under a policy dubbed “Gaullo-Mitterrandism”.[citation needed]Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated the return of France to the integrated military command and the Defence Planning Committee in 2009, the latter being disbanded the following year. France remains the only NATO member outside the Nuclear Planning Group and unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, will not commit its nuclear-armed submarines to the alliance.[41][56] Few members spend more than two percent of their gross domestic product on defence,[132] with the United States accounting for three quarters of NATO defense spending.[133]
New membership in the alliance has been largely from Central and Eastern Europe, including former members of the Warsaw Pact. Accession to the alliance is governed with individual Membership Action Plans, and requires approval by each current member. NATO currently has two candidate countries that are in the process of joining the alliance: Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Macedonia. In NATO official statements, the Republic of Macedonia is always referred to as the “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, with a footnote stating that “Turkey recognizes the Republic of Macedonia under its constitutional name”. Though Macedonia completed its requirements for membership at the same time as Croatia and Albania, who joined NATO in 2009, its accession was blocked by Greece pending a resolution of the Macedonia naming dispute.[134] In order to support each other in the process, new and potential members in the region formed the Adriatic Charter in 2003.[135]Georgia was also named as an aspiring member, and was promised “future membership” during the 2008 summit in Bucharest,[136]though in 2014, US President Barack Obama said the country was not “currently on a path” to membership.[137]
Russia continues to oppose further expansion, seeing it as inconsistent with understandings between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and European and American negotiators that allowed for a peaceful German reunification.[52]NATO’s expansion efforts are often seen by Moscow leaders as a continuation of a Cold War attempt to surround and isolate Russia,[138] though they have also been criticised in the West.[139] A June 2016 Levada poll found that 68% of Russians think that deploying NATO troops in the Baltic states and Poland – former Eastern bloc countries bordering Russia – is a threat to Russia.[140]Ukraine‘s relationship with NATO and Europe has been politically divisive, and contributed to “Euromaidan” protests that saw the ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. In March 2014, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk reiterated the government’s stance that Ukraine is not seeking NATO membership.[141] Ukraine’s president subsequently signed a bill dropping his nation’s nonaligned status in order to pursue NATO membership, but signaled that it would hold a referendum before seeking to join.[142]Ukraine is one of eight countries in Eastern Europe with an Individual Partnership Action Plan. IPAPs began in 2002, and are open to countries that have the political will and ability to deepen their relationship with NATO.[143]
A 2006 study in the journal Security Studies argued that NATO enlargement contributed to democratic consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe.[144]
Partnership for Peace conducts multinational military exercises like Cooperative Archer, which took place in Tblisi in July 2007 with 500 servicemen from four NATO members, eight PfP members, and Jordan, a Mediterranean Dialogue participant.[145]
The Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme was established in 1994 and is based on individual bilateral relations between each partner country and NATO: each country may choose the extent of its participation.[146] Members include all current and former members of the Commonwealth of Independent States.[147] The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) was first established on 29 May 1997, and is a forum for regular coordination, consultation and dialogue between all fifty participants.[148] The PfP programme is considered the operational wing of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership.[146] Other third countries also have been contacted for participation in some activities of the PfP framework such as Afghanistan.[149]
The European Union (EU) signed a comprehensive package of arrangements with NATO under the Berlin Plus agreement on 16 December 2002. With this agreement, the EU was given the possibility to use NATO assets in case it wanted to act independently in an international crisis, on the condition that NATO itself did not want to act—the so-called “right of first refusal“.[150] For example, Article 42(7) of the 1982 Treaty of Lisbon specifies that “If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power”. The treaty applies globally to specified territories whereas NATO is restricted under its Article 6 to operations north of the Tropic of Cancer. It provides a “double framework” for the EU countries that are also linked with the PfP programme.
Additionally, NATO cooperates and discusses its activities with numerous other non-NATO members. The Mediterranean Dialogue was established in 1994 to coordinate in a similar way with Israel and countries in North Africa. The Istanbul Cooperation Initiative was announced in 2004 as a dialog forum for the Middle East along the same lines as the Mediterranean Dialogue. The four participants are also linked through the Gulf Cooperation Council.[151]
Political dialogue with Japan began in 1990, and since then, the Alliance has gradually increased its contact with countries that do not form part of any of these cooperation initiatives.[152] In 1998, NATO established a set of general guidelines that do not allow for a formal institutionalisation of relations, but reflect the Allies’ desire to increase cooperation. Following extensive debate, the term “Contact Countries” was agreed by the Allies in 2000. By 2012, the Alliance had broadened this group, which meets to discuss issues such as counter-piracy and technology exchange, under the names “partners across the globe” or “global partners”.[153][154]Australia and New Zealand, both contact countries, are also members of the AUSCANNZUKUS strategic alliance, and similar regional or bilateral agreements between contact countries and NATO members also aid cooperation. Colombia is the NATO’s latest partner and Colombia has access to the full range of cooperative activities NATO offers to partners; Colombia became the first and only Latin American country to cooperate with NATO.[155]
The main headquarters of NATO is located on Boulevard Léopold III/Leopold III-laan, B-1110 Brussels, which is in Haren, part of the City of Brussels municipality.[156] A new €750 million headquarters building began construction in 2010, was completed in summer 2016,[157] and was dedicated on 25 May 2017. The 250,000 square metres (2,700,000 sq ft) complex was designed by Jo Palma and home to a staff of 3800.[158] Problems in the original building stemmed from its hurried construction in 1967, when NATO was forced to move its headquarters from Porte Dauphine in Paris, France following the French withdrawal.[159][40]
The staff at the Headquarters is composed of national delegations of member countries and includes civilian and military liaison offices and officers or diplomatic missions and diplomats of partner countries, as well as the International Staff and International Military Staff filled from serving members of the armed forces of member states.[160] Non-governmental citizens’ groups have also grown up in support of NATO, broadly under the banner of the Atlantic Council/Atlantic Treaty Association movement.
The cost of the new headquarters building escalated to about €1.1 billion[161] or $1.23 billion.[162]
NATO Council
Like any alliance, NATO is ultimately governed by its 29 member states. However, the North Atlantic Treaty and other agreements outline how decisions are to be made within NATO. Each of the 29 members sends a delegation or mission to NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.[163] The senior permanent member of each delegation is known as the Permanent Representative and is generally a senior civil servant or an experienced ambassador (and holding that diplomatic rank). Several countries have diplomatic missions to NATO through embassies in Belgium.
Together, the Permanent Members form the North Atlantic Council (NAC), a body which meets together at least once a week and has effective governance authority and powers of decision in NATO. From time to time the Council also meets at higher level meetings involving foreign ministers, defence ministers or heads of state or government (HOSG) and it is at these meetings that major decisions regarding NATO’s policies are generally taken. However, it is worth noting that the Council has the same authority and powers of decision-making, and its decisions have the same status and validity, at whatever level it meets. France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States are together referred to as the Quint, which is an informal discussion group within NATO. NATO summits also form a further venue for decisions on complex issues, such as enlargement.[164]
The meetings of the North Atlantic Council are chaired by the Secretary General of NATO and, when decisions have to be made, action is agreed upon on the basis of unanimity and common accord. There is no voting or decision by majority. Each nation represented at the Council table or on any of its subordinate committees retains complete sovereignty and responsibility for its own decisions.
The NATO Parliamentary Assembly, an intergovernmental organization of NATO and associate countries’ elected representatives, meets in London prior to the start of the 2014 Newport summit.
The body that sets broad strategic goals for NATO is the NATO Parliamentary Assembly (NATO-PA) which meets at the Annual Session, and one other time during the year, and is the organ that directly interacts with the parliamentary structures of the national governments of the member states which appoint Permanent Members, or ambassadors to NATO. The NATO Parliamentary Assembly is made up of legislators from the member countries of the North Atlantic Alliance as well as thirteen associate members. Karl A. Lamers, German Deputy Chairman of the Defence Committee of the Bundestag and a member of the Christian Democratic Union, became president of the assembly in 2010.[167] It is however officially a different structure from NATO, and has as aim to join together deputies of NATO countries in order to discuss security policies on the NATO Council.
The Assembly is the political integration body of NATO that generates political policy agenda setting for the NATO Council via reports of its five committees:
Committee on the Civil Dimension of Security
Defence and Security Committee
Economics and Security Committee
Political Committee
Science and Technology Committee
These reports provide impetus and direction as agreed upon by the national governments of the member states through their own national political processes and influencers to the NATO administrative and executive organizational entities.
NATO’s military operations are directed by the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee with the Deputy Chairman, and split into two Strategic Commands commanded by a senior US officer and (currently) a senior French officer[168] assisted by a staff drawn from across NATO. The Strategic Commanders are responsible to the Military Committee for the overall direction and conduct of all Alliance military matters within their areas of command.[60]
Each country’s delegation includes a Military Representative, a senior officer from each country’s armed forces, supported by the International Military Staff. Together the Military Representatives form the Military Committee, a body responsible for recommending to NATO’s political authorities those measures considered necessary for the common defence of the NATO area. Its principal role is to provide direction and advice on military policy and strategy. It provides guidance on military matters to the NATO Strategic Commanders, whose representatives attend its meetings, and is responsible for the overall conduct of the military affairs of the Alliance under the authority of the Council.[169] The Chairman of the NATO Military Committee is Air Chief MarshalStuart Peach of the United States, since 2018, and the Deputy Chairman is Steven Shepro of the United States, since 2016.[170]
Like the Council, from time to time the Military Committee also meets at a higher level, namely at the level of Chiefs of Defence, the most senior military officer in each nation’s armed forces. Until 2008 the Military Committee excluded France, due to that country’s 1966 decision to remove itself from the NATO Military Command Structure, which it rejoined in 1995. Until France rejoined NATO, it was not represented on the Defence Planning Committee, and this led to conflicts between it and NATO members.[171] Such was the case in the lead up to Operation Iraqi Freedom.[172] The operational work of the Committee is supported by the International Military Staff.
The structure of NATO evolved throughout the Cold War and its aftermath. An integrated military structure for NATO was first established in 1950 as it became clear that NATO would need to enhance its defences for the longer term against a potential Soviet attack. In April 1951, Allied Command Europeand its headquarters (SHAPE) were established; later, four subordinate headquarters were added in Northern and Central Europe, the Southern Region, and the Mediterranean.[173]
In early 2015, in the wake of the War in Donbass, meetings of NATO ministers decided that Multinational Corps Northeast would be augmented so as to develop greater capabilities, to, if thought necessary, prepare to defend the Baltic States, and that a new Multinational Division Southeast would be established in Romania. Six NATO Force Integration Units would also be established to coordinate preparations for defence of new Eastern members of NATO.[176]
Multinational Division Southeast was activated on 1 December 2015.[177] Headquarters Multinational Division South – East (HQ MND-SE) is a North Atlantic Council (NAC) activated NATO military body under operational command (OPCOM) of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) which may be employed and deployed in peacetime, crisis and operations by NATO on the authority of the appropriate NATO Military Authorities by means of an exercise or operational tasking issued in accordance with the Command and Control Technical Arrangement (C2 TA) and standard NATO procedures.
During August 2016, it was announced that 650 soldiers of the British Army would be deployed on an enduring basis in Eastern Europe, mainly in Estonia with some also being deployed to Poland. This British deployment forms part of a four-battle group (four-battalion) deployment by various allies, NATO Enhanced Forward Presence, one each spread from Poland (the Poland-deployed battle group mostly led by the US) to Estonia.
Story 2: President Trump Increases The Pressure on China To Eliminate Trade Deficits and Unfair Trade Practices or Face Higher Tariffs On Many Chinese Exports To United States — Videos
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(6 Jul 2018) The United States hiked tariffs on Chinese imports Friday and Beijing said it would be forced to counterattack in a dispute between the world’s two biggest economies that President Donald Trump says he is prepared to escalate. Washington increased tariffs at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time (0401 GMT) on 34 billion US dollars worth of Chinese imports, a first step in what could become an accelerating series of tariffs. China’s Commerce Ministry said it would be “forced to make a necessary counterattack.” It gave no immediate details but Beijing earlier released a target list of American goods for retaliation including soybeans, electric cars, whiskey, pork and pork products. Ohio pig farmer Brian Watkins expressed the worry that the tariffs would rob him of the majority of his profits. Watkins said he’s worried that a prolonged trade dispute could take the US out of the pork equation as the global market becomes reliant on other countries’ production. He said he thought trade would be a big issue on farmers’ minds as they take to the polls in auturmn.
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U.S. Threatens Tariffs on $200 Billion of Chinese Goods, From Tilapia to Handbags
The trade war with China intensified as the Trump administration outlined tariffs on another $200 billion worth of products. China has already retaliated against the first round of tariffs with its own levies on American goods, including soybeans.CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Ana Swanson and Jim Tankersley
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration escalated its trade dispute with China on Tuesday, saying it would impose tariffs on roughly $200 billion worth of Chinese fish, petroleum, chemicals, handbags, textiles and other products if Beijing does not change its trade practices.
The threat comes just days after President Trump imposed levies on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods, including robotics, airplane parts and ball bearings. Mr. Trump has said he is prepared to tax as much as $450 billion worth of Chinese products.
On Tuesday, his administration detailed the next list of products that would face Mr. Trump’s wrath unless Beijing folds to Washington’s demands. The White House is pushing China to reduce its trade surplus with the United States, halt intellectual property theft and open its markets to American companies.
Neither side appears eager to blink first. China has responded to Mr. Trump’s initial tariffs with its own equal amount of levies on American goods like pork, steel, cars and fiber optic cable and has said that it is prepared to continue retaliating.
The Chinese government said it would take unspecified countermeasures against new tariffs and renewed its threat to take its complaints to the World Trade Organization, which handles trade disputes.
“The American side’s behavior harms China, harms the world and also harms itself,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement.
With no official discussions scheduled to settle the trade dispute, it is unclear how or when the differences get resolved. A senior White House official said on Tuesday evening that the administration welcomed China’s engagement and had been “extremely clear” with China about its concerns over its trade practices, but that China had been “nonresponsive.” The official said that the process of imposing tariffs on the new list of goods would take roughly two months, with a public hearing on the tariffs scheduled for Aug. 20 through Aug 23.
The trade war has already started to raise costs for businesses that depend on international supply chains, from manufacturers to retailers, and consumers that purchase their products. The Trump administration said it intended its first wave of tariffs to target industrial products that the Chinese government subsidizes and to minimize the impact to American households.
But as the list of taxed products grows, the number of consumers and businesses that will feel the pinch also increases.
“It gets harder for them to keep it from the shelves of Walmart and Target and Best Buy,” said Mary E. Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It also gets harder for them to continue to hide behind this rationale of hitting China for forced technology transfer.”
The administration’s approach has prompted criticism from lawmakers, particularly those from farm states, who say Mr. Trump is approaching a serious issue in an undisciplined way that could backfire.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said that he supported the administration’s effort to crack down on Chinese practices, but the decision to use tariffs was not the proper response.
“Tonight’s announcement appears reckless and is not a targeted approach,” Mr. Hatch said. “We cannot turn a blind eye to China’s mercantilist trade practices, but this action falls short of a strategy that will give the administration negotiating leverage with China while maintaining the long-term health and prosperity of the American economy.”
The White House administration disagrees. Robert E. Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, said in a statement that the announcement was “an appropriate response.”
“Rather than address our legitimate concerns, China has begun to retaliate against U.S. products,” he said. “There is no justification for such action.”
For now, the limited tariffs combined with a booming economy seem to be having little impact beyond targeted industries.
Goldman Sachs economists estimated this week that the initial tariffs on Chinese goods would reduce the size of the United States economy by a minimal amount, and said they did not expect the White House to follow through on Mr. Trump’s latest threatened tariffs.
But Federal Reserve officials and others are worried about potential damage from a prolonged trade war. Minutes from the Fed’s June meetingshow business contacts “indicated that plans for capital spending had been scaled back or postponed as a result of uncertainty over trade policy.”
Goldman economists said in a report earlier this month that, if the broader range of tariffs were actually enacted, it would be more damaging because they would hit Americans more quickly in the wallet than the initial round of tariffs.
Economists have also cautioned that the potential damage to the economy could grow if the trade conflict grows. Eswar Prasad, a professor of international trade at Cornell University, said that it was difficult to see a path to cooling off tensions, especially with the highly charged midterm elections approaching in the United States.
“With China in attack mode as well, additional tariffs risk escalating the trade war to a level from which it is becoming increasingly difficult to envision an exit path,” he said.
U.S. LNG, ethanol sellers buoyed by China trade talks
Scott DiSavino
(Reuters) – China’s interest in reducing its trade surplus with the United States through increased energy imports could advance plans for U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants and ethanol sales, analysts and energy executives involved in developing new LNG facilities said.
Washington and Beijing stepped back from the brink of a full-blown trade war after talks last week, with the United States appearing to set aside for now its demands that China revamp key planks of its industrial policy.
“China represents an enormous economic opportunity for U.S. LNG and ethanol exports as both products will likely see dramatic demand growth in the coming years, during which time the United States is also expected to dominate global export markets,” Katie Bays, energy analyst at Height Securities in Washington, D.C., said in a note on Tuesday.
Bays estimated that substantial LNG sales commitments could bring in between $20 billion and $30 billion annually and ethanol sales could reach $5 billion to $7 billion annually. She noted, however, that the LNG and ethanol markets are not big enough by themselves to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of reducing the Chinese trade deficit by $200 billion per year.
On Tuesday, Cheniere Energy Inc said its board approved financing for an LNG unit, the first new approval in the United States since 2015. The decision adds a third unit capable of producing 0.7-billion cubic feet per day of liquefied natural gas to its Corpus Christi, Texas, plant.
There are more than two dozen proposed U.S. LNG plants waiting for customer commitments to reach a final investment decision, many of them looking to China for deals.
China overtook South Korea in 2017 as the world’s second biggest buyer of LNG behind Japan. The country, which imported 5.6 billion cubic feet per day last year, is looking to buy more low-cost sources of energy, like gas, to reduce its use of coal and cut pollution.
Charlie Cone, LNG proprietary analyst for energy data provider Genscape, said at least 13 percent of total U.S. LNG cargoes currently go to China. “We expect this number to grow as more U.S. firms sign long-term agreements with Chinese buyers as their nation continues to develop its gas infrastructure,” Cone said.
Bays said a hold on the trade war could drive Chinese customers to sign new LNG contracts with Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass or Corpus Christi facilities, Sempra Energy’s Cameron, Freeport LNG, NextDecade Corp’s Rio Grande, or Pembina Pipeline Corp’s Jordan Cove.
“We see it as a positive development,” said William Daughdrill, director of health, safety and environmental matters at Delfin Midstream. The company’s chief executive was in Asia last week pursuing customers, Daughdrill said.
Delfin is proposing a floating LNG facility in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and aiming for a final investment decision as early as this year to go ahead and produce up to 13 million metric tons per annum (mtpa) of LNG for export.
“For us, it’s strictly been about marketing to China,” said Greg Vesey, chief executive of LNG Ltd, which is developing an LNG plant in Louisiana and another in Nova Scotia in Canada. It hopes to reach a final investment decision on the U.S. project by year-end and begin exports in 2022, he said.
“If you look at some forecasts for 2035, there are really only two places that have significant increases in LNG imports. Europe goes up about 100 mtpa and China goes up about 200 mtpa,” Vesey said.
Texas LNG, which is proposing a 4-mtpa export facility in Brownsville, Texas, and has five early-stage agreements with Chinese customers, hopes to make a final decision next year, about six months behind its original goal.
“Sentiment in the LNG markets is heating up again,” said Langtry Meyer, co-founder of the company. He added, however, that Texas LNG was not considering developing an import terminal in China, which would likely be needed to expand U.S. exports.
As for ethanol, Bays at Height Securities said ethanol producers like Archer Daniels Midland Co and Green Plains Inc could benefit from negotiations with China given the political importance of corn producers to Trump, coupled with China’s need to increase ethanol imports dramatically to meet its 2020 renewable fuel objectives.
Reporting by Scott DiSavino in New York; Writing by Gary McWilliams; Editing by Tom Brown and Leslie Adler
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Alternate Unemployment Charts
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
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Civilian Labor Force Level
161,527,000
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
Series Id: LNS11000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Civilian Labor Force Level
Labor force status: Civilian labor force
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
1998
137095
137112
137236
137150
137372
137455
137588
137570
138286
138279
138381
138634
1999
139003
138967
138730
138959
139107
139329
139439
139430
139622
139771
140025
140177
2000
142267(1)
142456
142434
142751
142388
142591
142278
142514
142518
142622
142962
143248
2001
143800
143701
143924
143569
143318
143357
143654
143284
143989
144086
144240
144305
2002
143883
144653
144481
144725
144938
144808
144803
145009
145552
145314
145041
145066
2003
145937(1)
146100
146022
146474
146500
147056
146485
146445
146530
146716
147000
146729
2004
146842(1)
146709
146944
146850
147065
147460
147692
147564
147415
147793
148162
148059
2005
148029(1)
148364
148391
148926
149261
149238
149432
149779
149954
150001
150065
150030
2006
150214(1)
150641
150813
150881
151069
151354
151377
151716
151662
152041
152406
152732
2007
153144(1)
152983
153051
152435
152670
153041
153054
152749
153414
153183
153835
153918
2008
154063(1)
153653
153908
153769
154303
154313
154469
154641
154570
154876
154639
154655
2009
154210(1)
154538
154133
154509
154747
154716
154502
154307
153827
153784
153878
153111
2010
153484(1)
153694
153954
154622
154091
153616
153691
154086
153975
153635
154125
153650
2011
153263(1)
153214
153376
153543
153479
153346
153288
153760
154131
153961
154128
153995
2012
154381(1)
154671
154749
154545
154866
155083
154948
154763
155160
155554
155338
155628
2013
155763(1)
155312
155005
155394
155536
155749
155599
155605
155687
154673
155265
155182
2014
155357(1)
155526
156108
155404
155564
155742
156011
156124
156019
156383
156455
156301
2015
157063(1)
156734
156754
157051
157449
157071
157035
157132
156700
157138
157435
158043
2016
158387(1)
158811
159253
158919
158512
158976
159207
159514
159734
159700
159544
159736
2017
159718(1)
159997
160235
160181
159729
160214
160467
160598
161082
160371
160533
160597
2018
161115(1)
161921
161763
161527
1 : Data affected by changes in population controls.
Labor Force Participation Rate
62.8%
Series Id: LNS11300000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor force status: Civilian labor force participation rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
1998
67.1
67.1
67.1
67.0
67.0
67.0
67.0
67.0
67.2
67.2
67.1
67.2
1999
67.2
67.2
67.0
67.1
67.1
67.1
67.1
67.0
67.0
67.0
67.1
67.1
2000
67.3
67.3
67.3
67.3
67.1
67.1
66.9
66.9
66.9
66.8
66.9
67.0
2001
67.2
67.1
67.2
66.9
66.7
66.7
66.8
66.5
66.8
66.7
66.7
66.7
2002
66.5
66.8
66.6
66.7
66.7
66.6
66.5
66.6
66.7
66.6
66.4
66.3
2003
66.4
66.4
66.3
66.4
66.4
66.5
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
65.9
2004
66.1
66.0
66.0
65.9
66.0
66.1
66.1
66.0
65.8
65.9
66.0
65.9
2005
65.8
65.9
65.9
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.0
66.0
2006
66.0
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.2
66.1
66.2
66.3
66.4
2007
66.4
66.3
66.2
65.9
66.0
66.0
66.0
65.8
66.0
65.8
66.0
66.0
2008
66.2
66.0
66.1
65.9
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.1
66.0
66.0
65.9
65.8
2009
65.7
65.8
65.6
65.7
65.7
65.7
65.5
65.4
65.1
65.0
65.0
64.6
2010
64.8
64.9
64.9
65.2
64.9
64.6
64.6
64.7
64.6
64.4
64.6
64.3
2011
64.2
64.1
64.2
64.2
64.1
64.0
64.0
64.1
64.2
64.1
64.1
64.0
2012
63.7
63.8
63.8
63.7
63.7
63.8
63.7
63.5
63.6
63.8
63.6
63.7
2013
63.7
63.4
63.3
63.4
63.4
63.4
63.3
63.3
63.2
62.8
63.0
62.9
2014
62.9
62.9
63.1
62.8
62.8
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.8
62.9
62.9
62.8
2015
62.9
62.7
62.7
62.8
62.9
62.7
62.6
62.6
62.3
62.5
62.5
62.7
2016
62.8
62.9
63.0
62.8
62.6
62.7
62.8
62.8
62.9
62.8
62.7
62.7
2017
62.9
62.9
63.0
62.9
62.7
62.8
62.9
62.9
63.0
62.7
62.7
62.7
2018
62.7
63.0
62.9
62.8
Unemployment Level
6,346,000
Series Id: LNS13000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Level
Labor force status: Unemployed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Download:
Year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
1998
6368
6306
6422
5941
6047
6212
6259
6179
6300
6280
6100
6032
1999
5976
6111
5783
6004
5796
5951
6025
5838
5915
5778
5716
5653
2000
5708
5858
5733
5481
5758
5651
5747
5853
5625
5534
5639
5634
2001
6023
6089
6141
6271
6226
6484
6583
7042
7142
7694
8003
8258
2002
8182
8215
8304
8599
8399
8393
8390
8304
8251
8307
8520
8640
2003
8520
8618
8588
8842
8957
9266
9011
8896
8921
8732
8576
8317
2004
8370
8167
8491
8170
8212
8286
8136
7990
7927
8061
7932
7934
2005
7784
7980
7737
7672
7651
7524
7406
7345
7553
7453
7566
7279
2006
7064
7184
7072
7120
6980
7001
7175
7091
6847
6727
6872
6762
2007
7116
6927
6731
6850
6766
6979
7149
7067
7170
7237
7240
7645
2008
7685
7497
7822
7637
8395
8575
8937
9438
9494
10074
10538
11286
2009
12058
12898
13426
13853
14499
14707
14601
14814
15009
15352
15219
15098
2010
15046
15113
15202
15325
14849
14474
14512
14648
14579
14516
15081
14348
2011
14013
13820
13737
13957
13855
13962
13763
13818
13948
13594
13302
13093
2012
12797
12813
12713
12646
12660
12692
12656
12471
12115
12124
12005
12298
2013
12471
11950
11689
11760
11654
11751
11335
11279
11270
11136
10787
10404
2014
10235
10365
10435
9724
9740
9474
9610
9602
9266
8972
9064
8704
2015
8951
8634
8578
8546
8662
8265
8206
7996
7891
7884
7948
7907
2016
7811
7806
8024
7942
7465
7812
7723
7827
7919
7761
7419
7502
2017
7642
7486
7171
7021
6837
6964
6956
7127
6759
6524
6616
6576
2018
6684
6706
6585
6346
95,745,000: Record Number Not in Labor Force as Boomers Retire
A growing number of retirees is pushing up the number of Americans counted as “not in the labor force.”
(CNSNews.com) – The number of employed Americans has broken eight records since President Trump took office, but on the not-so-sunny side, the number of Americans not in the labor force also keeps increasing, breaking six records since Trump took office in January 2017.
Last month, a record 95,745,000 Americans were counted as “not in the labor force,” meaning they are not employed and are not seeking a job, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statics. “This category includes retired persons, students, those taking care of children or other family members, and others who are neither working nor seeking work,” BLS said.
With record numbers of people not in the labor force, the labor force participation rate has remained stubbornly low in recent years.
In April, only 62.8 percent of the non-institutionalized, civilian population over the age of 16 was either working or actively looking for work. This compares with an all-time high of 67.3 percent in the first four months of 2000.
In a March 2018 report, the Congressional Budget Office noted that a lower labor force participation rate is associated with lower gross domestic product and lower tax revenues. It is also associated with larger federal outlays, because people who are not in the labor force are more likely to enroll in federal benefit programs, including Social Security.
This past January, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the labor force participation rate will continue to decline over the next 30 years from the current 62.8 percent to 61.0 percent in 2027 and to 59.2 percent in 2047.
According to that report, “The continued retirement of the baby-boom generation is the most important factor driving down the overall participation rate.” The first Baby Boomers — people born between 1946 and 1964 — turned 65 in 2011.
CBO has identified three factors pushing down the participation rate, and three factors pushing it up in future years, as follows:
On the downside:
— First, younger workers who are replacing Baby Boomers in the labor force tend to participate in the labor force at lower rates.
— Second, the share of people receiving disability insurance benefits is generally projected to continue increasing, and people who receive such benefits are less likely to participate in the labor force.
— Third, the marriage rate is projected to continue declining, especially among men, and unmarried men tend to participate in the labor force at lower rates than married men.
On the upside:
— First, the population is becoming more educated, and workers with more education tend to participate in the labor force at higher rates than do people with less education.
— Second, the racial and ethnic composition of the population is changing in ways that increase participation in the labor force. CBO expects Hispanics to make up an increasing share of the population, which would increase the overall labor force participation rate, and it expects non-Hispanic whites to make up a diminishing share, which would decrease the participation rate — resulting, on net, in an increase.
— Third, increasing longevity is expected to lead people to work longer.
The US labor market forged ahead in 2017. Job growth was strong and steady after accounting for hurricanes and extreme weather. Unemployment kept falling and wage growth picked up a bit. Best of all—the labor market recovery reached many of the least well-off, including those who were hurt most in the recession.
Still, the good news hasn’t touched everyone. The biggest short-term challenge is not growth, but distribution—some sectors of the economy and a few regions of the country lagged. Furthermore, the welcome narrowing of some labor market gaps in 2017 might turn out to be temporary. The labor market also faces longer-term challenges from technological disruption and polarization. In short, behind the successes of 2017, we found plenty to watch, wonder and even worry about in the year ahead.
A look back at 2017: leaps and momentum, with room to grow
The labor market made impressive gains this past year. October 2017 was the 85th consecutive month of job growth. So far in 2017, monthly job growth has averaged 169,000—down modestly from previous years, but more than we’d expect after so many years of recovery and expansion. Job growth is also still far ahead of what’s needed to keep up with low working-age population growth.
The result is more people are working. Two key measures improved notably: The U-6 rate, a broad measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers and those involuntarily working part time, fell from 9.2% in December 2016 to 7.9% in October 2017. And, over the same period, the share of 25–54 year-olds at work rose to 78.8% from 78.2%. Not only are these measures improving, but they’re improving at the same rate or better than they were a year ago. Even after years of gains, the labor market recovery still has momentum.
What’s more, the labor market probably still has room to grow. Granted, the market looks very tight by some measures. The headline unemployment rate (U-3) is 4.1%, its lowest point since the end of 2000. There are nearly as many job openings as unemployed workers. Employers are laying off fewer workers today than in the early 2000s.
But other measures suggest there’s still slack. Several key measures of the labor market haven’t returned to their 2000 levels, including the broad U-6 unemployment rate, the share of people unemployed for more than six months, and the employment-to-population ratio among people of prime working age. These indicators stand in contrast to the measure that gets the most attention—the narrower headline unemployment rate, which doesn’t count people who are willing and able to work but aren’t looking. Thus, the headline rate probably overstates labor market tightness.
Wage trends also point to some remaining slack. Wage growth has averaged 2.6% year-over-year throughout 2017, similar to 2016 and ahead of the pace from 2010 to 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly jobs report.
Why haven’t wages risen even faster in 2017 as the unemployment rate has dropped? It’s partly a measurement issue. The measure of wage growth in the jobs report probably understates 2017 wage gains. The BLS releases an alternative measure of wages and benefits that accounts for changes in the job mix—and that indicator has accelerated in 2017. Furthermore, this alternative measure has historically tracked the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age workers closely. Today, this measure of wage growth is what we’d expect for the improving, but not gangbusters, prime-age employment-to-population ratio.
Thus, the headline unemployment rate probably overstates labor market tightness, while wage growth in the jobs report probably understates 2017 wage gains. That means, first, there may be more room for employment to expand. And, second, wage growth is neither quite as slow nor as puzzling as it initially appears.
Even better news: labor market gaps narrowed in 2017
By themselves, solid job expansion, falling unemployment and strengthening wage growth would be reason enough to cheer 2017. But there’s more—the greatest gains have gone to the people who needed them most. The least well-off and those hurt most by the recession typically saw larger employment and wage increases than others. Thus, labor market inequalities narrowed in 2017.
Let’s look first at industries. Over the past year, employment increased most in middle-wage industries, such as couriers and messengers, non-store retailers and homebuilding contractors. Middle-wage industries fared worst during the recession, losing more jobs than both higher- and lower-wage industries. Their newfound strength is a welcome rebound.
Strikingly, after losing jobs in 2016, manufacturing grew 1.3% in the past year, nearly the same pace as employment overall. In addition, wages rose most in lower-wage industries, as they have for several years. Wages in lower-wage industries were up 3.6% in September 2017 year-over-year versus 2.6% in middle-wage and 2.5% in higher-wage industries.
These trends translate to better conditions for people with fewer advantages in the labor market—including those with less education. Whatever the measure—unemployment, earnings or risk from automation—people with more education typically fare better in the labor market. But, over the past year, people with a high school degree or less have notched the biggest employment gains, whether measured by the unemployment rate or the employment-to-population ratio. This group has also had proportionally bigger wage gains than people with a bachelor’s or graduate degree.
Inevitably though, not every corner of the labor market is thriving. Job growth has been slower in the Northeast and Midwest than in the South and West. In fact, ten of the 103 largest metros lost jobs in the past year, including several in the Great Lakes region.
We find laggards not only by geography, but also by sector. Three sectors lost jobs in the past year. Employment in the information sector was dragged down by losses in motion pictures, broadcast outlets and telecoms. The retail sector overall lost jobs, particularly brick-and-mortar stores that directly face online competitors. At the same time, non-store retailers and related industries like couriers and warehouses gained.
The places and industries left behind are not our only labor market concerns. We’ve also got our eye on several big questions for next year.
What to watch, wonder and worry about in 2018
Let’s start with the too-much-of-a-good-thing worry. If the labor market tightens further—or if, as some argue, the market is already so tight that it has little room to grow—what challenges will we contend with? That leads to our first big question:
ONE: How willemployers respond to a tightening labor market? Falling unemployment and rising wages for people with less education are drawing in job seekers and raising their expectations. On the Indeed site, searches for full-time work have increased, but not for part-time work. But good news for workers brings challenges for employers. Companies may have to raise wages, relax hiring requirements or invest more in on-the-job training, and they might struggle to fill part-time jobs. Tellingly, more job-seekers are searching using terms like “no background check” and “felony-friendly” jobs. And employers looking for technical workers might also face the additional challenge of future restrictions on immigration to the US and the rising interest of US tech workers in Canadian jobs.
Then there are longer-term concerns. We have big questions about why people remain out of work, whether labor market polarization will increase again and how people whose jobs disappear will manage.
TWO: Will fewer workers be sidelined by illness and disability? The share of prime-age adults who aren’t working because of illness or disability has risen from 2% in 1970 to over 5% today, and the percentages are much higher for adults with a high school degree or less. This long-term trend has worsened with the opioid crisis. Some in this category may never work again. But there is a glimmer of good news: Illness and disability is keeping fewer people out of work today than in 2015. The tightening labor market—especially for less-educated adults—may be lifting wages enough to lure some of these adults back to work.
THREE: Will labor market gaps start widening again? The narrowing of employment and wage gaps in 2017 might not last. Although middle-wage jobs grew fastest in the past year, polarization of the labor force could return. The latest BLS projections point to faster job growth in high-wage and low-wage jobs, with slower growth of middle-wage jobs and for people with a high school degree or less.
Plus, geographic gaps are likely to worsen. Job growth today is faster in larger metros than in smaller metros or rural areas. Future job growth will probably continue to lag in rural areas, where slower-growing occupations are concentrated. In contrast, the fastest-growing occupations are clustered in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Washington DC, and other expensive coastal markets. In particular, higher-paying, cutting-edge tech jobs increasingly are concentrated in top tech hubs.
FOUR: How will workers manage painful disruptions? Hard as it may be to believe, there is less disruption and churn in the labor market today than in the early 2000s and much less than in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, economists worry that there’s too little job-switching, business turnover and mobility, not too much. Still, for people whose jobs are being disrupted by automation or globalization, the pain is real. And it’s not just factory workers and farmers. Most of the jobs in shrinking occupations are now in service positions like secretaries and data-entry work. People in threatened occupations are looking at opportunities in new fields. On Indeed’s site, we see truckers checking out mining and heavy-equipment-operation jobs, while retail workers are clicking on customer service and sales-rep roles.
Those are some of the questions we’ll be looking at next year. Both the best news from 2017 and some of our top concerns for 2018 are about the distribution of labor market gains, not the overall growth rate. The labor market is entering 2018 with strength and momentum, and these longer-term challenges are moving—as they should be—into the foreground.
Transmission of material in this news release is embargoed until USDL-18-0683
8:30 a.m. (EDT) Friday, May 4, 2018.
Technical information:
Household data: (202) 691-6378 * cpsinfo@bls.gov * www.bls.gov/cps
Establishment data: (202) 691-6555 * cesinfo@bls.gov * www.bls.gov/ces
Media contact: (202) 691-5902 * PressOffice@bls.gov
THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION -- APRIL 2018
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 164,000 in April, and the unemployment
rate edged down to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
Job gains occurred in professional and business services, manufacturing, health care,
and mining.
Household Survey Data
In April, the unemployment rate edged down to 3.9 percent, following 6 months at 4.1
percent. The number of unemployed persons, at 6.3 million, also edged down over the
month. (See table A-1.)Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for adult women decreased to
3.5 percent in April. The jobless rates for adult men (3.7 percent), teenagers
(12.9 percent), Whites (3.6 percent), Blacks (6.6 percent), Asians (2.8 percent),
and Hispanics (4.8 percent) showed little or no change over the month. (See
tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)
Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary
jobs declined by 188,000 in April to 3.0 million. (See table A-11.)
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little
changed at 1.3 million in April and accounted for 20.0 percent of the unemployed.
Over the year, the number of long-term unemployed was down by 340,000. (See
table A-12.)Both the labor force participation rate, at 62.8 percent, and the employment-
population ratio, at 60.3 percent, changed little in April. (See table A-1.)
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred
to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged at 5.0 million in
April. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were
working part time because their hours had been reduced or because they were unable
to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)
In April, 1.4 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, down
by 172,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These
individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and
had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as
unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the
survey. (See table A-16.)
Among the marginally attached, there were 408,000 discouraged workers in April,
little changed from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.)
Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they
believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.0 million persons
marginally attached to the labor force in April had not searched for work for
reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. (See table A-16.)
Establishment Survey Data
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 164,000 in April, compared with an
average monthly gain of 191,000 over the prior 12 months. In April, job gains
occurred in professional and business services, manufacturing, health care, and
mining. (See table B-1.)
In April, employment in professional and business services increased by 54,000. Over
the past 12 months, the industry has added 518,000 jobs.
Employment in manufacturing increased by 24,000 in April. Most of the gain was in
the durable goods component, with machinery adding 8,000 jobs and employment in
fabricated metal products continuing to trend up (+4,000). Manufacturing employment
has risen by 245,000 over the year, with about three-fourths of the growth in durable
goods industries.
Health care added 24,000 jobs in April and 305,000 jobs over the year. In April,
employment rose in ambulatory health care services (+17,000) and hospitals (+8,000).
In April, employment in mining increased by 8,000, with most of the gain occurring
in support activities for mining (+7,000). Since a recent low in October 2016,
employment in mining has risen by 86,000.
Employment changed little over the month in other major industries, including
construction, wholesale trade, retail trade, transportation and warehousing,
information, financial activities, leisure and hospitality, and government.
The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at
34.5 hours in April. In manufacturing, the workweek increased by 0.2 hour to 41.1
hours, while overtime edged up by 0.1 hour to 3.7 hours. The average workweek for
production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls increased by
0.1 hour to 33.8 hours. (See tables B-2 and B-7.)
In April, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls
rose by 4 cents to $26.84. Over the year, average hourly earnings have increased by
67 cents, or 2.6 percent. Average hourly earnings of private-sector production and
nonsupervisory employees increased by 5 cents to $22.51 in April. (See tables B-3
and B-8.)
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for February was revised down from
+326,000 to +324,000, and the change for March was revised up from +103,000 to
+135,000. With these revisions, employment gains in February and March combined were
30,000 more than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional
reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published
estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.) After revisions, job
gains have averaged 208,000 over the last 3 months.
_____________
The Employment Situation for May is scheduled to be released on Friday, June 1, 2018,
at 8:30 a.m. (EDT).
Employment Situation Summary Table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted
HOUSEHOLD DATA
Summary table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted[Numbers in thousands]
Category
Apr.
2017
Feb.
2018
Mar.
2018
Apr.
2018
Change from:
Mar.
2018-
Apr.
2018
Employment status
Civilian noninstitutional population
254,588
256,934
257,097
257,272
175
Civilian labor force
160,181
161,921
161,763
161,527
-236
Participation rate
62.9
63.0
62.9
62.8
-0.1
Employed
153,161
155,215
155,178
155,181
3
Employment-population ratio
60.2
60.4
60.4
60.3
-0.1
Unemployed
7,021
6,706
6,585
6,346
-239
Unemployment rate
4.4
4.1
4.1
3.9
-0.2
Not in labor force
94,407
95,012
95,335
95,745
410
Unemployment rates
Total, 16 years and over
4.4
4.1
4.1
3.9
-0.2
Adult men (20 years and over)
3.9
3.7
3.7
3.7
0.0
Adult women (20 years and over)
4.1
3.8
3.7
3.5
-0.2
Teenagers (16 to 19 years)
14.7
14.4
13.5
12.9
-0.6
White
3.9
3.7
3.6
3.6
0.0
Black or African American
7.9
6.9
6.9
6.6
-0.3
Asian
3.2
2.9
3.1
2.8
-0.3
Hispanic or Latino ethnicity
5.2
4.9
5.1
4.8
-0.3
Total, 25 years and over
3.6
3.4
3.4
3.3
-0.1
Less than a high school diploma
6.5
5.7
5.5
5.9
0.4
High school graduates, no college
4.6
4.4
4.3
4.3
0.0
Some college or associate degree
3.7
3.5
3.6
3.5
-0.1
Bachelor’s degree and higher
2.4
2.3
2.2
2.1
-0.1
Reason for unemployment
Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs
3,538
3,279
3,146
2,958
-188
Job leavers
785
780
864
815
-49
Reentrants
2,044
1,948
1,967
2,009
42
New entrants
707
704
625
623
-2
Duration of unemployment
Less than 5 weeks
2,300
2,508
2,287
2,115
-172
5 to 14 weeks
2,140
1,906
2,009
2,017
8
15 to 26 weeks
1,087
934
880
1,036
156
27 weeks and over
1,633
1,397
1,322
1,293
-29
Employed persons at work part time
Part time for economic reasons
5,309
5,160
5,019
4,985
-34
Slack work or business conditions
3,183
3,302
3,005
2,994
-11
Could only find part-time work
1,787
1,541
1,625
1,586
-39
Part time for noneconomic reasons
20,406
21,061
21,399
21,258
-141
Persons not in the labor force (not seasonally adjusted)
Marginally attached to the labor force
1,534
1,602
1,454
1,362
–
Discouraged workers
455
373
450
408
–
– Over-the-month changes are not displayed for not seasonally adjusted data.
NOTE: Persons whose ethnicity is identified as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race. Detail for the seasonally adjusted data shown in this table will not necessarily add to totals because of the independent seasonal adjustment of the various series. Updated population controls are introduced annually with the release of January data.
Employment Situation Summary Table B. Establishment data, seasonally adjusted
ESTABLISHMENT DATA
Summary table B. Establishment data, seasonally adjusted
Footnotes (1) Includes other industries, not shown separately.
(2) Data relate to production employees in mining and logging and manufacturing, construction employees in construction, and nonsupervisory employees in the service-providing industries.
(3) The indexes of aggregate weekly hours are calculated by dividing the current month’s estimates of aggregate hours by the corresponding annual average aggregate hours.
(4) The indexes of aggregate weekly payrolls are calculated by dividing the current month’s estimates of aggregate weekly payrolls by the corresponding annual average aggregate weekly payrolls.
(5) Figures are the percent of industries with employment increasing plus one-half of the industries with unchanged employment, where 50 percent indicates an equal balance between industries with increasing and decreasing employment.
(P) Preliminary
NOTE: Data have been revised to reflect March 2017 benchmark levels and updated seasonal adjustment factors.
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Story 1: Commander in Chief Trump Orders National Guard To Secure The Mexican/United States Border in 2018 As Bush Did In 2006 and Obama in 2010 — Election Year Politics? — Enforce Immigration Law By Deporting All 30-60 Million Illegal Aliens in U.S. — Videos —
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President Donald Trump To Send National Guard To U.S.-Mexico Border | NBC Nightly News
Analysis: Trump’s plan to send National Guard troops to secure the southern border
President Trump signed a proclamation Wednesday night to send the National Guard to the southern border immediately, a senior White House official told Fox News, in response to what the administration described as an “unacceptable” flow of drugs, criminal activity and illegal immigrants.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at the White House press briefing that the signing would be done in conjunction with governors and that the administration hoped the deployment would begin “immediately.”
“Despite a number of steps this administration has taken…we continue to see unacceptable levels of illegal drugs, dangerous gang activity transnational criminal organizations and illegal immigration flow across our border,” she said.
“The president has directed that the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security work together with our governors to deploy our National Guard to our southwest border to assist the border patrol,” she said. “The president will be signing a proclamation to that effect today.”
Details about what the National Guard would do and how many would be deployed and for how long were not immediately disclosed.
Under the George W. Bush administration, deploying the National Guard to the border cost $415 million dollars.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Our Border Laws are very weak while those of Mexico & Canada are very strong. Congress must change these Obama era, and other, laws NOW! The Democrats stand in our way – they want people to pour into our country unchecked….CRIME! We will be taking strong action today.
Nielsen pointed to what she described as increasing fraud and exploited loopholes among arrivals on the southern border, saying traffickers have been advertising that if migrants have children with them, then they are more likely to be released into the U.S. She also said that almost 50 percent of arriving aliens are from Central America.
“Traffickers and smugglers know that these individuals cannot under U.S. law be easily removed in an expeditious way back to their country of origin and so they exploit the loophole,” she said, adding that the ability to game the system acts as a magnet for more migrants.
She said that the administration has drafted legislation and will ask Congress to provide legal authority and resources to address the problem.
“We will not allow illegal immigration levels to become the norm,” she said. “More than 1,000 people a day, 300,000 a year violating our sovereignty as a nation will never be acceptable to this president.”
Trump had tweeted earlier Wednesday that he would “be taking strong action today” on the Mexico border, a day after he said that he wants to send the military to secure it until a wall is built.
Arguing that the U.S. border laws “are very weak” compared to Mexico and Canada, he accused Democrats of wanting immigrants “to pour into our country unchecked.”
Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had deployed the National Guard to the border in response to security issues.
The Associated Press reported that the White House was considering a model similar to a Bush-era operation, where in 2006 6,000 National Guard troops were sent to assist the border patrol with non-law enforcement duties while additional border agents were hired and trained.
Trump’s recent focus on illegal immigration appeared to have been partly motivated by a caravan of more than 1,000 Central American migrants heading toward the U.S. border.
Trump had threatened to end the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and to cut foreign aid to countries such as Honduras, from where many of the migrants originate, if the caravan was not stopped.
Trump said Tuesday that he believes the caravan is being broken up after he had a conversation with Mexican officials.
Nielsen said on Tuesday that she had been advised by Mexican officials that “the caravan is dissipating” and that several hundred migrants had been repatriated.
“We will not accept the lawlessness of these types of efforts and those who choose to violate our laws, and those who conspire to assist others to violate our laws, will face criminal prosecution,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. “The Department of Justice fully supports the efforts of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security announced today to secure our border. I will soon be announcing additional Department of Justice initiatives to restore legality to the southern border.”
Fox News’ Brooke Singman, Serafin Gomez, Jennifer Griffin, Jake Gibson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Congress should make sure our border patrol has the manpower, equipment, funds, and authority to do what is needed.
(AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
About 1,100 Central Americans are marching toward the U.S.-Mexico border. Word from this “caravan,” organized by a group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which translates as “peoples without borders,”* is that these migrants plan to turn themselves over to U.S. immigration officers and apply for asylum.
(Note, Pueblos sin Fronteras is not connected to a U.S. nonprofit named “People without Borders.”)
It’s worth noting some interesting math, among other things. If the caravan tried to evade the U.S. Border Patrol but was caught, it would be about equal to the number of illegal entrants caught every day at the southern border.
The border patrol caught 310,531 in fiscal 2017. In the first five months of fiscal 2018, apprehensions are up a bit, to about 900 a day. These are people caught trying to sneak into the U.S. between checkpoints.
It’s a huge problem.
At least 10 million people are in here illegally. Many snuck in. Many others overstayed visas. Nearly 1,000 more are caught every day trying to cross. And another 2,000 a day overstay their visas.
We aren’t a “people without borders,” and we never should be. President Trump has ramped up border enforcement, but there is more work to do, and Congress should make sure our border patrol has the manpower, equipment, funds, and authority to do what is needed.
Border enforcement isn’t any old aspect of law enforcement. Democratic self-determination and the rule of law hinge on it.
A country without borders, Trump says repeatedly, is no country at all. This is true, and it’s important. National democracy is the biggest form that democracy takes in today’s world. In a democratic nation, self-determination includes determining who is part of the nation.
If we really believe in the ideas of the Enlightenment, then we have to believe in self-determining, democratic nations. That means we have to believe in immigration control.
How much immigration to have, and of what sort, is a live debate. We support something more open than Trump’s rhetoric would prescribe. We don’t favor cuts in the level of legal immigration, but we agree with the president’s tilt toward high-skilled newcomers.
If we have laws and don’t enforce them, while so many of our business and political elites cheer the lax enforcement, we are trading democracy for oligarchy.
Illegal immigration corrodes the rule of law more than most lawbreaking. It creates subcultures and neighborhoods where families and communities live in the shadows. This means they’re less likely to call the police or operate above board, leaving their families vulnerable to the worst among them.
Trump’s critics blame this on aggressive deportation efforts. That can be debated, but we should all agree that the best place to enforce immigration law is at the border.
The Pueblo Sin Fronteras people want asylum status. This country has always welcomed genuine refugees, which is to say, people who have a well-founded fear of persecution in their own country. But migrants are not the same thing as asylum seekers. And anyway, why is the U.S. responsible for people from Guatemala tramping across a huge country such as Mexico, simply because this is where they would prefer to live? Asylum seekers, properly defined, are fleeing for their lives. They have the right to safety, not to residence in the land of milk of honey.
Imagine there’s no countries. It may sound nice in a John Lennon song, but it is facile and ill-considered. In reality, a land without a border is inhabited by a people without the rule of law or democracy.
—-
* UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: The original version of this editorial apparently left many readers believing that the caravan group, Pueblos Sin Fronteras was the same as a U.S.-based nonprofit with the name “People Without Borders.” They are not connected in any way.
Can President Trump breathe easy? The Washington Post reported Tuesday night that Trump is a subject of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, but not a target of the investigation.
There’s something there for both sides—Trump supporters can argue that the president isn’t a target, and his critics can point out that the president remains under investigation. Trump is not in the clear, but neither are criminal charges necessarily imminent. Trump might never become a target of the investigation, or he could change from subject to target at any time.
“It’s not comforting to be a ‘subject’ of an investigation. Most white-collar criminal defendants started out as subjects of a grand jury investigation,” said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Fordham. “Calling President Trump a ‘subject’ rather than a mere ‘witness’ generally means that his conduct is still being investigated, he is still suspected of having acted criminally, but no conclusion has yet been reached that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The media’s Mueller speculation has reached a new level of lunacy
MatthewWalther
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
April 5, 2018
Did you hear the news? On Wednesday an obscure Dutch lawyer who is “tied” — one of my favorite journalistic weasel words, along with “linked” and “blasted” — to the deputy chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has been sentenced to 30 days in jail for initially failing to forward all of his emails to Bob Mueller. I have heard of stiffer sentences for jaywalking in Manhattan and failing to register a cocker spaniel, but I’m sure it’s a very big deal.
It has to be because the sentencing of Alex van der Zwaan immediately inspired another round of lunatic speculation about the state of the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The sentence was announced the day after TheWashington Postreported that Trump is currently not a “target” of the investigation.
Cue the takes! “Mueller told Trump he’s not a criminal target in the Russia probe. That may not mean what you think,” one of the approximately 1,700 persons employed full-time by the Post to produce algorithmically generated electronic high-pitched noise sounding not unlike the president’s last name insisted. “Mueller’s assurances that Trump is not a ‘target’ don’t mean much,” Politicoyodeled. “The report that Trump is not a target of the Mueller probe is actually terrible news for the president,” saidSlate, which still maintains its idiotic Trump Impeach-o-Meter, something I wish I had thought of when I was working at a right-wing magazine during Obama’s second term. I spent Wednesday morning reading dozens, possibly as many as a hundred, of these pieces without learning anything.
Here is what it all really means: nothing.
Nothing at all except that among a certain segment of our supposedly educated upper-middle-class there is apparently an endless appetite for therapy-tainment. The Mueller investigation has seemingly nothing to do with collusion between Trump and Moscow, of which there is still as much evidence as there was in January 2017, i.e., none. It’s Bircherism for people who know what “green juice” is, a way to explain how the wealthiest political campaign in history lost to a quasi-literate lowbrow TV star and cope with this ongoing reality. This is why some recent takes don’t even make a pretense of mentioning Russia. Long ago the whole thing morphed from being an investigation of treasonous election meddling to one of supposed obstruction of an investigation into the aforementioned non-event. People are still clicking.
Trump is not safe from Mueller. Not by a long shot.
It is easy to understand why journalists cater to their readers’ appetite for this stuff. When there is news, even news that makes the whole thing seem stupid and pointless, it’s bad news for Trump; when there isn’t news, the absence of news is also bad news for Trump. If a rando volunteer on the campaign admits that he lied about once emailing another rando overseas, it’s the second gunman on the grassy knoll. If Mueller shows no sign of being even remotely interested in a conspiracy theory about Trump, Russia, and the release of emails that showed irrefutable evidence of actual collusion between the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it’s actually proof that this is probably what is going to bring down the administration sooner or later. For people who have convinced themselves that all of this is hugely significant anything can be evidence of everything — even nothing.Let’s summarize the things we actually know. Paul Manafort worked for the Ukrainian government from before the release of Star Wars on DVD until roughly the day that Beyoncé won a Grammy for “Single Ladies.” He also lied about it and about some or perhaps nearly all of his earnings. Several other people, including the president’s former national security advisor, have told lies about, among other things, an utterly unremarkable post-election conversation with a Russian ambassador. Thirteen technically real Russian people also LARPed as Tea Party types on Facebook. I mean, really. What bank did Putin use to cash the golf-style novelty oversized check from Trump and how many digital copies of the pee tape are on Mueller’s MacBook Pro?
In the spirit of paschal charity I would like to offer up my very first contribution to the vast literature of Mueller “what’s next” takes. In two or six or eight months, President Trump, as tired as the rest of us of hearing about this non-story, will finally agree to sit down with our very special prosecutor to clear his name. Because Trump is a hyperbolic charlatan, he will proffer some ridiculous falsehoods — “I have never met a Russian, okay? I don’t — does anybody, does anybody even know where Russia is?” — under oath. Bingo, Mueller will say, you lied. You’re done.
And maybe he will be. No one whose habit or job it is to read the news on a daily basis would disagree at this point that it would be worth having President Michael Pence in exchange for the drawing of a curtain over these tedious revels. I would go a great deal further than that: I would rather see Hillary Clinton cackling from the Oval Office than read another spodomantic opinion column about the former star of The Apprentice and the largest sovereign republic in Eurasia.
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‘THE BOMB” NEW PBS Documentary about the history of nuclear weapons!!
Published on Jul 23, 2017
The Bomb is a 2015 American documentary film about the history of nuclear weapons, from theoretical scientific considerations at the very beginning, to their first use on August 6, 1945,to their global political implications in the present-day.The two-hour PBS film was written and directed by Rushmore DeNooyer, who noted the project took a year and a half to complete, since much of the film footage and images was only recently declassified by the United States Department of Defense. According to DeNooyer, “It wouldn’t take very many bombs to really change life on Earth, … The idea that there are thousands of them sitting around is pretty scary. I don’t think people today realize that. They don’t think about it. I don’t think they are scared. But in a way, they should be. Mark Dawidziak, of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, summarized the film as follows: “The Bomb moves swiftly to cover Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War, the arms race, the Red Scare, the witch hunt, the Cuban Missile Crisis, test-ban treaties, the “Star Wars” initiative, the anti-nuke movement, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of new nuclear threats. According to historian Richard Rhodes, “The invention [of ‘The Bomb’] was a millennial change in human history: for the first time, we were now capable of our own destruction, as a species…
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TED – China’s Political System
Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems
It’s a standard assumption in the West: As a society progresses, it eventually becomes a capitalist, multi-party democracy. Right? Eric X. Li, a Chinese investor and political scientist, begs to differ. In this provocative, boundary-pushing talk, he asks his audience to consider that there’s more than one way to run a succesful modern nation. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more. Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at
Xi Jinping: Why are we called Communist Party of China?
China congress: Xi Jinping declares ‘new era’ for China – BBC News
China’s Communist party enshrines Xi Jinping ideology in constitution
Published on Oct 24, 2017
China’s ruling Communist Party has voted to enshrine Xi Jinping’s name and ideology in its constitution, elevating him to the level of founder Mao Zedong. The unanimous vote to incorporate “Xi Jinping Thought” happened at the end of the Communist Party congress, China’s most important political meeting. Mr Xi has steadily increased his grip on power since becoming leader in 2012. This move means that any challenge to Mr Xi will now be seen as a threat to Communist Party rule. More than 2,000 delegates gathered in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People for the final approval process to enshrine “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era” into the Communist Party constitution of China. At the end of the process, delegates were asked if they had any objections, to which they responded with loud cries of “none”, reported journalists at the scene.
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China Just Sent a Chilling Warning to North Korea About The United States
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China Just Sent a Chilling Warning to North Korea About The United States
The threat of a North Korean nuclear attack is Trump’s biggest test of leadership yet – but another country might actually end up calling the shots. And Trump, to be fair, has been warning us about China for years. But I’m willing to bet that even he didn’t see this coming.
Fact is, aside from being deadly, brutal, and destructive, war is also expensive. And if you can’t afford to do it, you probably shouldn’t start it.
Or join it, for that matter. It’s why China has unofficially leaked a government policy for the world to see – that if North Korea attacks the US, China will remain neutral.
But if the US attacks first, China will join the war. Which means, put bluntly, that the only way World War III doesn’t start is for North Korea to hit us first. Which is unacceptable. About as unacceptable as World War III.China really put Trump in a bind.
Breitbart reports:
The Communist Party organization Global Times [published] an editorial declaring that China would remain neutral if North Korea starts a war but intervene on North Korea’s behalf if the U.S. and South Korea attempt a preemptive strike.
The Chinese government may eventually seek some diplomatic wiggle room by insisting the Global Times is but a newspaper printing an editorial, and the piece is written in the style of newspaper editors lecturing officials about what they “should” do, but China’s state-run media is a mouthpiece for its authoritarian government.If it sounds complicated, it’s really not. The Chinese government is run by the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party owns and runs the Global Times. Therefore, whatever the Global Times prints is what the Communist Party wants it to print.
But it’s still a newspaper, of course, which means that, if the world – or, sometimes, the Chinese themselves – really don’t like a policy, the government can pretend that the newspaper just got the story wrong.
It’s an easy way to test a policy before you pass it. Or, in this case, an easy way to tell the world what you’re going to do, without all the trouble of officially telling the world what you’re going to do.
Fact is, China can’t really afford this war – Breitbart lists off several reasons, including tensions with India, Japan, and all the work securing the South China Sea. The Korea thing is just one more brick on an already heavy pile. But their way out of it forces Donald Trump to let the US get hit first.
‘Welcome to China! I love you!’: Beijing schoolchildren thrill Trump with Peking opera performance after private tour of the Forbidden City and tea with China’s Xi and Madame Peng
Trump landed Wednesday in China for meetings with President Xi Jinping
School children waving American flags greeted him at the airport in Beijing
President and first lady took in an extra special performance of Peking opera during a grand tour of the Forbidden City put on for him by Xi
President has touted his close relationship with Xi, calling it ‘outstanding’
But he says that won’t stop him from getting tough with China over trade
North Korea is expected to dominate the agenda as it did when pair met in April
Last year when he visited China, Obama was prevented from using his stairs to deplane Air Force One in a major snub
Trump didn’t have that problem: Chinese authorities had a rolling staircase tall enough to reach the front door of the plane
By Francesca Chambers, White House Correspondent In Beijing, China and David Martosko, Us Political Editor For Dailymail.com In Seoul, South Korea
PUBLISHED: 21:20 EST, 7 November 2017 | UPDATED: 12:59 EST, 8 November 2017
President Donald Trump took in an extra special performance of Peking opera on Wednesday evening in Beijing during a grand tour of the Forbidden City put on for him by China‘s Xi Jinping.
Xi had the production staged in the former imperial palace that is now a museum just for Trump’s visit.
‘Welcome to China! I love you!’ a group of children who were part of the performance told the U.S. president when it was finished.
The president and first lady Melania Trump ended their evening with a dinner in another section of the Forbidden City with the Chinese leader and his wife, Madame Peng Liyuan.
‘Welcome to China! I love you!’ a group of children who were part of a Peking opera performance told the U.S. president this evening in Beijing
Trump took in an extra special performance of Peking opera on Wednesday during a grand tour of the Forbidden City put on by Chinese President Xi Jinping. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump are seen here in the Forbidden City with Xi and his wife Madame Peng Liyuan
The Trumps are at a private dinner now with Xi and his wife, Madame Peng Liyuan
SPECIAL MOMENT: The president and first lady share a fond moment after their arrival in the Forbidden City
President Trump tours the Conservation Scientific Laboratory of the Forbidden City with his wife, Xi and Peng
Trump viewed a clock on a “musical clock with country scene,” a “gourd-shaped clock with rotating flowers,” and a “clock with lifting tower,” according to a placard bearing an English and Chinese-language descriptions of the items
After the tour, the presidents and the first ladies of the US and China watched a special performance of Peking opera that was staged for Trump’s visit
A military honor guard and flag-waving schoolchildren greeted Trump when he arrived Wednesday afternoon in China, the third country in his 12-day Asia tour.
U.S. ambassador to China Terry Branstad met Trump and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, after Air Force One stopped on the tarmac in Beijing.
Trump deplaned from Air Force One without incident, avoiding the embarrassment Barack Obama suffered a year ago as he landed in China during the annual Group of 20 summit.
Obama was humiliated when he had to exit from the belly of the aircraft because authorities didn’t approve a staircase tall enough for him to walk out of the front exit of the plane.
Chinese officials rolled a large set of stairs to the aircraft’s door on Wednesday.
WARM REUNION: Trump and Xi greeted each other like old friends on Wednesday in the Forbidden City
Trump was especially interested in a clock with lifting tour during his tour of an artifacts restoration center in the Forbidden City. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said
Trump and Xi watch the Peking opera from the Hall of Character Cultivation in the Forbidden City
The U.S. president was delighted as children in yellow and red costumes danced on stage with peacock feathers
As Trump left the performance, the told inquiring reporters, ‘We’re having a great time, thank you’
Trump hopped in his motorcade and sped through Beijing to the Forbidden City, where he had tea with his Chinese counterpart, whom he had entertained at his Florida Mar-a-Lago club in April, and the first lady of sprawling Asian country that is home to 1.4 billion people.
After a warm reunion over tea, Chinese president Xi Jinping led the Trumps to the Conservation Scientific Laboratory of the Forbidden City to participate in an artifact restoration.
Trump was intrigued by a ‘musical clock with country scene’ and a ‘gourd-shaped clock with rotating flowers,’ according to English-language placards.
Viewing a ‘clock with lifting tower, Trump said it was ‘unbelievable.’
Once Trump had moved on to another room, Tillerson entered with the rest of the U.S. delegation, including Branstad. The diplomat was eager to know more about the artifacts, asking many questions as White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, senior adviser Jared Kushner and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster milled about the room.
The two first couples next watched a performance of Peking opera, a distinctively Chinese art form that combines music, mime, dance and acrobatics.
Posing for pictures with the cast when the opera had concluded, Trump told them the extravagant show was ‘beautiful!’
Children waving American flags greet the Trumps as they arrive at the Beijing airport
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrived on Air Force One in Beijing, China on Wednesday
Trump left Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea on his way to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk about global trade and the North Korean nuclear menace
A U.S and Chinese honor guard met the Trumps, along with a cadre of schoolchildren waving the flags of both nations
Chinese officials rolled a large set of stairs to the aircraft’s door on Wednesday, avoiding any appearance of the kind of insult that greeted former president Barack Obama in 2016
Obama was denied use of an airport staircase when he deplaned Air Force One last September as he arrived in China for the annual Group of 20 summit – a move that was seen globally as a major snub
The Forbidden City, now a major tourist attraction, has its roots in the 15th Century and was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming dynasty through 1912.
On the agenda for Trump during his Beijing visit are requests for a hardline approach to economically paralyzing North Korea, and talks aimed at shrinking America’s massive trade deficit with China.
Last year the Chinese sold $347 billion more in goods to the U.S. than America sold into the world’s largest communist nation.
Trump is on a five-country trip through Asia traveling to Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines
Trump roared with approval as he waded through a sea of children on the tarmac Wednesday in China
Trump said Monday in Japan that he’s fond of Xi Jinping, the newly-elevated communist party chair of China, and the foreign leader likes him too
Trump left South Korea on Wednesday after delivering a speech to the country’s National Assembly. He said in a tweet Wednesday morning that he was looking forward to again seeing Xi, ‘who is just off his great political victory.’
He said Monday inJapan that he’s fond of Xi, the newly-elevated communist party chair of China, and the foreign leader likes him.
But he won’t allow their mutual affection to cloud his judgement, Trump asserted, as he pledgedto take ‘very, very strong action’ against China and other countries that have been treating the United States ‘unfairly’ in the trade arena.
‘He represents China. I represent the United States,’ Trump said at a news conference in Tokyo.
On the way to Beijing, a senior White House official told reporters that the president plans to keep up his habit of tweeting while he’s in China, even though Chinese citizens can’t do it.
‘The president will tweet whatever he wants,’ the official said. ‘That’s his way of communicating directly with the American people. Why not?’
‘So long as he can access his Twitter account – because Twitter is banned in China along with Facebook and most of the other social media. I’m sure we’ve got the gear aboard this airplane to make it happen. But it is noteworthy that none of the major western platforms for social media are even allowed to operate in China.’
On Tuesday in Seoul, Trump pressured Xi’s government to totally isolate Kim Jong-un, the 33-year-old despot across the border, during remarks in Seoul.
Trump tweeted Wednesday that he was looking forward to renewing his bond with Xi, whom he welcomed to his Florida Mar-a-Lago private resort in April
Trump has touted his relationship with Xi Jinping calling it ‘outstanding’, but says he still intends to get tough with the Chinese leader over trade in Beijing
In this photo taken on October 31, 2017, Chinese paramilitary guards walk in The Forbidden City in Beijing
All responsible nations must cut off North Korea’s cash flow by imposing and enforcing international sanctions on Kim and his government, Trump declared, singling out China and Russia, two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
‘It’s time to act with urgency and with great determination,’ the U.S. president said in a joint press conference with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in.
Beijing is the third destination on a five-nation hustle across eastern Asia.
As with every other stop on this trip, North Korea is expected to dominate Xi and Trump’s discussions.
But in Beijing, more than anywhere else during the visit, Trump – a former titan of real estate – is also under pressure to address the regional trade practices that he said as a candidate he would fix.
Trump pounded China for alleged currency manipulation in the presidential election last year that unexpectedly put him in power. He’s said as recently as February that the Chinese were ‘grand champions’ at the economic trick.
By artificially devaluing its currency, the yuan, Beijing has been able to been able to lower the price of its exports, ‘stealing’ American jobs, Trump has said.
Trump will tour a famous imperial palace and take in the opera today today with first lady Melania Trump as he brings his high-wire circuit of Asia to Beijing
His assessment was rejected by the International Monetary Fund last year, and Trump’s own administration has shied away from shackling China with the designation.
Since his April summit with Xi, the U.S. president has also backed off his verbal assault.
‘The relationship developed by President Xi and myself I think is outstanding,’ Trump said after less than a day of talks with the Chinese president and his representatives.
‘We look forward to being together many times in the future. And I believe lots of very potentially bad problems will be going away.’
Days later Trump was still gushing about his weekend in Florida with Xi in what amounted to a total about-face of his previous criticisms.
‘Now what am I going to do? Start a trade war with China while in the middle of him working on a bigger problem, frankly, with North Korea?’ he asked rhetorically in an interview with Fox & Friends.
Trump said later that month that it wouldn’t make sense to label Xi’s country a currency manipulator after the Chinese leader offered to assist the U.S. in its efforts to constrain North Korea.
‘Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem? We will see what happens!’ Trump tweeted.
China’s stepped up efforts to choke off Kim Jong-un’s finances has not kept Trump from complaining about the gross trade deficit between the two countries, nor has it had an immediate effect on the United States’ enforcement of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo late last month that the U.S. loses ‘hundreds of billions a year’ a year to China.
Trump singled out China on Tuesday in South Korea as a country that needs to do more to cripple North Korea’s nuclear aggression
Trump is due in Beijing on Wednesday where he will meet Chinese leader Xi Jingping on his home soil for the first time (the two are pictured at the G20 summit in Germany in July)
‘We lose with almost every country, we have massive deficits,’ the billionaire president insisted. ‘We can’t allow the world to look at us as a whipping post. Not gonna happen, anymore.’
Monday, at a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo, Trump told a reporter who asked how his administration plans to enforce its mandate of a ‘free and open’ Indo-Asia Pacific without riling up China, a major power on the continent, that he would not allow the communist country to take advantage of the U.S.
‘You will be seeing things of countries that have been treating the United States and the United States worker and companies…our country, and our workers very unfairly, you will be seeing that the United States will take very, very strong action,’ Trump said.
The legal work is mostly finished, he revealed. ‘And you’re going to see a very big difference, and it’s going to happen very soon. Because the United States, by many countries, has been treated very, very unfairly when it comes to trade.’
Trump has not shied away from attacking China on Twitter, both before and after his first meeting with Xi at Mar-A-Lago back in April
The administration believes that China is behind as much as $600 million in IP theft through forced technology transfers.
China’s Commerce Ministry has called the probe ‘irresponsible’ and ‘not objective.’ Beijing would almost certainly bring additional U.S. action before the World Trade Organization.
But Trump could unilaterally impose tariffs on Beijing through Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 if USTR determines that China is engaging in ‘unfair trade practices’ – a powerful weapon if he decides to use it.
Trump has been hesitant to act against Beijing so long as Xi goes along with his plans to suffocate North Korea’s nuclear ambition.
The resident left Seoul on Wednesday after meeting with Moon Jae-in, the newly elected leader of South Korea
Trump visited Japan earlier this week and after stopping in Beijing he is due to visit Vietnam and the Philippines before heading back to the US
At a briefing with reporters on Sunday evening in Tokyo, a senior White House official insisted that the economic and security concerns of the Trump administration are wholly separate issues when it comes to North Korea and trade with countries in the Indo-Pacific.
This article is about the main ideology of the People’s Republic of China and its ruling party, the Communist Party. For the socialist ideology of the Republican era of China under Kuomintang rule, see Socialist ideology of the Kuomintang.
The concept of a primary stage of socialism was conceived before China introduced economic reforms.[1] When discussing the necessity of commodity relations at the First Zhengzhou Conference (2–10 November 1958) Mao Zedong—the Chairman of the CPC’s Central Committee—said that China was in the “initial stage of socialism” [1] Mao never elaborated on the idea; his successors were left to do this.[1]
After Mao’s death
On 5 May 1978, the article “Putting into Effect the Socialist Principle of Distribution According to Work”, elaborated on the idea that China was still at the first stage of reaching pure communism[2] and that it had not become a truly socialist society.[2] It is said[by whom?] that the article was written on the orders of Deng Xiaoping, so as to “criticize and repudiate” the beliefs of the communist left.[3] The term reappeared at the 6th plenum of the 11th Central Committee on 27 June 1981 in the document, “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party since the Founding of the PRC”.[4]Hu Yaobang, the CPC’s general secretary, used the term in his report to the 12th CPC National Congress on 1 September 1982.[4] It was not until the “Resolution Concerning the Guiding Principle in Building Socialist Spiritual Civilization” at the 6th plenum of the 12th Central Committee that the term was used in the defense of the economic reforms which were being introduced.[4]
At the 13th CPC National Congress, acting CPC General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, on behalf of the 12th Central Committee, delivered the report “Advance Along the Road of Socialism with Chinese characteristics”.[5] He wrote that China was a socialist society, but that socialism in China was in its primary stage;[5] a Chinese peculiarity which was due to the undeveloped state of the country’s productive forces.[5] During this phase of development, Zhao recommended introducing a planned commodity economy on the basis of public ownership.[5] The main failure of the communist right, according to Zhao, was that they failed to acknowledge that China could reach socialism by bypassing capitalism. The main failure of the communist left was that they held the “utopian position” that China could bypass the primary stage of socialism, in which the productive forces are to be modernized.[6]On 25 October 1987, Zhao further expounded on the concept of the primary stage of socialism, and said that the Party line was to follow “One Center, Two Basic Points”; the central focus of the Chinese state was economic development, but that this should occur simultaneously through centralized political control (i.e., the Four Cardinal Principles) and upholding the policy of reform and opening up.[4]
CPC General Secretary Jiang Zemin further elaborated on the concept ten years later; first during a speech to the Central Party School on 29 May 1997 and again in his report to the 15th CPC National Congress on 12 September 1997.[4] According to Jiang, the 3rd plenum of the 11th Central Committee correctly analyzed and formulated a scientifically correct program for the problems facing China and socialism.[4] In Jiang’s words, the primary stage of socialism was an “undeveloped stage”.[4] The fundamental task of socialism is to develop the productive forces, therefore the main aim during the primary stage should be the further development of the national productive forces.[4] The primary contradiction in Chinese society during the primary stage of socialism is “the growing material and cultural needs of the people and the backwardness of production”.[4] This contradiction will remain until China has completed the process of primary stage of socialism, and because of it, economic development should remain the CPC’s main focus during this stage.[4]
Jiang elaborated on three points to develop the primary stage of socialism.[7] The first—to develop a socialist economy with Chinese characteristics—meant developing the economy by emancipating and modernizing the forces of production while developing a market economy.[7] The second—building socialist politics with Chinese characteristics—meant “managing state affairs according to the law”, developing socialist democracy under the CPC and making the “people the masters of the country”.[7] The third point—building socialist culture with Chinese characteristics—meant turning Marxism into the guide to train the people so as to give them “high ideals, moral integrity, a good education, and a strong sense of discipline, and developing a national scientific, and popular socialist culture geared to the needs of modernization, of the world, and of the future.”[7]
When asked how long the primary stage of socialism would last, Zhao replied, “[i]t will be at least 100 years … [before] socialist modernization will have been in the main accomplished.”[8] The state constitution states that “China will be in the primary stage of socialism for a long time to come”.[9] As with Zhao, Jiang believed that it would take at least 100 years to reach a more advanced stage.[4]
“What is socialism and what is Marxism? We were not quite clear about this in the past. Marxism attaches utmost importance to developing the productive forces. We have said that socialism is the primary stage of communism and that at the advanced stage the principle of from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs will be applied. This calls for highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth. Therefore, the fundamental task for the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces. The superiority of the socialist system is demonstrated, in the final analysis, by faster and greater development of those forces than under the capitalist system. As they develop, the people’s material and cultural life will constantly improve. One of our shortcomings after the founding of the People’s Republic was that we didn’t pay enough attention to developing the productive forces. Socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism.”
”
— Deng Xiaoping, on 30 June 1984 at a Central Committee plenum, in a speech discussing Marxist theory[10]
Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the Chinese economic reforms, did not believe that the market economy was synonymous with capitalism or that planning was synonymous with socialism.[11] During his southern tour, he said, “planning and market forces are not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism. A planned economy is not the definition of socialism, because there is planning under capitalism; the market economy happens under socialism, too. Planning and market forces are both ways of controlling economic activity”.[11]
Ideological justification
In the 1980s it became evident to Chinese economists that the Marxist theory of the law of value—understood as the expression of the labor theory of value—could not serve as the basis of China’s pricing system.[12] They concluded that Marx never intended his theory of law of value to work “as an expression of ‘concretized labor time’ “.[12] Marx’s notion of “prices of production” was meaningless to the Soviet-styled planned economies since price formations were according to Marx established by markets.[13] Soviet planners had used the law of value as a basis to rationalize prices in the planned economy.[14] According to Soviet sources, prices were “planned with an eye to the … basic requirements of the law of value.”[14] However, the primary fault with the Soviet interpretation was that they tried to calibrate prices without a competitive market since, according to Marx, competitive markets allowed for an equilibrium of profit rates which led to an increase in the prices of production.[15] The rejection of the Soviet interpretation of the law of value led to the acceptance of the idea that China was still in the “primary stage of socialism”.[14] The basic argument was that conditions envisaged by Marx for reaching the socialist stage of development did not yet exist in China.[14]
Mao said that the imposition of “progressive relations of production” would revolutionize production.[16] His successor’s rejection of this view has, according to A. James Gregor, thwarted the ideological continuity of Maoism—officially “Mao Zedong Thought“.[16] Classical Marxism had argued that a socialist revolution would only take place in advanced capitalist societies, and its success would signal the transition from a capitalist commodity-based economy to a “product economy” in which goods would be distributed for people’s need and not for profit.[16] If because of a lack of a coherent explanation in the chance of failure this revolution did not occur, the revolutionaries would be forced to take over the responsibilities of the bourgeoisie.[16] Thus Chinese communists are looking for a new Marxist theory of development.[16] Party theorist Luo Rongqu recognized that the founders of Marxism had never “formulated any systematic theory on the development of the non-Western world”, and said that the Communist Party should “establish their own synthesized theoretical framework to study the problem of modern development.”[17] According to A. James Gregor, the implication of this stance “is that Chinese Marxism is currently in a state of profound theoretical discontinuity.”[18]
Private ownership
The concept of private ownership is rooted in classical Marxism.[19] Because China adopted socialism when it was a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country, it is in the primary stage of socialism.[19] Because of this, certain policies and system characteristics—such as commodity production for the market, the existence of a private sector and the reliance of the profit motive in enterprise management—were changed.[19] These changes were allowed as long as they improve productivity and modernize the means of production, and thus further develop socialism.[19] According to this perspective, Mao’s leftist belief that China could advance to full socialism immediately by bypassing capitalism is considered false.[19]
The CPC still considers private ownership to be non-socialist.[20] However, according to party theorists, the existence and growth of private ownership does not necessarily undermine socialism and promote capitalism in China.[20] It is argued that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—the founders of communism—never proposed the immediate abolishment of private ownership.[20] According to Engel’s book Principles of Communism, the proletariat can only abolish private ownership when the necessary conditions have been met.[20] In the phase before the abolishment of private ownership, Engels proposed progressive taxation, high inheritance taxes and compulsory bond purchases to restrict private property while using the competitive powers of state-owned enterprises to expand the public sector.[20]Marx and Engels proposed similar measures in the Communist Manifesto in regards to advanced countries, but since China was economically undeveloped, party theorists called for flexibility regarding the CPC’s handling of private property.[20] According to party theorist Liu Shuiyuan, the New Economic Policy program initiated by Soviet authorities in the aftermath of the war communism program is a good example of flexibility by socialist authorities.[20]
Party theorist Li Xuai said that private ownership inevitably involves capitalist exploitation.[20] However, Li regards private property and exploitation as necessary in the primary stage of socialism, claiming that capitalism in its primary stage uses remnants of the old society to build itself.[20] Sun Liancheng and Lin Huiyong said that Marx and Engels, in their interpretation of the Communist Manifesto, criticized private ownership when it was owned solely by the bourgeoisie but not individual ownership in which everyone owns the means of production and hence cannot be exploited by others.[21] Individual ownership is consistent with socialism since Marx wrote that post-capitalist society would entail the rebuilding of “associated social individual ownership”.[22]
According to writer and researcher Huang Yasheng and many others, the economic theory in China is not socialism with Chinese characteristics but the opposite—capitalism with Chinese characteristics.[23]
Story 2: President Trump Meets With Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe and President Moon Jai-in As U.S. Navy Flexes Air Power — All Options Are On The Table — Let’s Make A Deal North Korea — Video —
Trump’s South Korea speech, in 3 minutes
Trump’s speech to South Korea’s parliament (full)
Is Trump softening his stance on North Korea?
Trump urges N Korea to ‘come to the table’
Trump Calls On North Korea To “Make A Deal” – Full News Conference In Seoul
President Trump Receives a Military Briefing on North Korea from Top Generals 11/7/17
President Trump Has Lunch with U.S. Troops in South Korea (Camp Humphreys) 11/6/17
Donald Trump in South Korea, Gives hint of Handling North Korea in Some different way.
President Trump meeting with President Moon Jae In of the Republic of Korea. Nov 7, 2017
President Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Moon Jae In of the Republic of Korea
Trump arrives in South Korea amid tensions with North
President Trump and first lady Melania Trump is officially welcomed to Seoul, Republic of Korea.
President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrives in South Korea. November 7, 2017.
Is Melania Trump’s coat for South Korea fashion hit or miss?
Warning: China Russia Saudi Arabia & Iran To Use Yuan For Trading Oil Next Step Is WW3
High Alert: For The First Time In 13 Years, U.S. Deploys 7 Aircraft Carriers Simultaneously
For The First Time In 13 Years, U.S. Deploys 7 Aircraft Carriers Simultaneously
The US has simultaneously deployed 7 of the 11 U.S. nuclear aircraft carriers for the first time in over a decade according to the US Naval Institute. The three aircraft carriers with full air wings and strike groups positioned in the Western Pacific are the following: USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76); USS Nimitz (CVN-68); USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71). Another four are conducting “short training missions as part of training operations or workups ahead of deployment”. Two out of four are operating in Eastern Pacific – USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) and USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) – and the remaining two are operating in the Atlantic, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78).
What 3 US Supercarriers in the Asia-Pacific Means for N. Korea
High Alert: 3 US Carrier Strike Groups Enter Asia-Pacific Ahead of Trump Visit
President Trump Joint Press Conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Japan. Tokyo. Nov 6, 2017.
President Trump attends state banquet hosted by Japanese PM. President Trump in Japan.
President Trump Participates in a Working Lunch with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan
Trump and Abe meet at a golf course in Japan
President Trump Plays Golf with Prime Minister Abe in Japan 11/5/17
Trump abruptly talking negotiations, not threats in Korea
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Softening his aggressive rhetoric, at least for the moment, President Donald Trump stood on South Korean soil Tuesday and urged North Korea to come to the negotiating table. It’s time, he said, for the North to “make a deal” to rein in its nuclear weapons program.
It was a striking shift in tone for the president, who for months has issued increasingly dire threats to answer any hostile North Korean action with “fire and fury.” On Tuesday, his first day on the Korean Peninsula as president, Trump said he’d seen “a lot of progress” in dealing with Pyongyang, though he stopped short of saying whether he wanted direct diplomatic talks.
“It makes sense for North Korea to come to the table and make a deal that is good for the people of North Korea and for the world,” Trump said at a news conference with South Korean president Moon Jae-in. “I do see certain movement.”
Trump was winding down his visit to Seoul on Wednesday with an address to South Korea’s National Assembly, where he was expected to outline his view of dangers posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The next stop on his five-nation Asian tour: Beijing, where he will press China to constrict the North’s economic lifeblood.
President Donald Trump says he believes he sees a lot of progress on the North Korean issue. Trump also urged North Korea to ‘come to the table and make a deal.’ He spoke during a news conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. (Nov. 7)
Ever the showman, Trump teased that he had a surprise in store for Wednesday, saying at a Tuesday evening banquet that he had an “exciting day” planned — “for many reasons that people will find out.” He did not elaborate.
Overall, the president sounded an optimistic note on disagreements with the North, saying confidently, if vaguely: “Ultimately, it’ll all work out.” Whether the shift in rhetoric signaled a change in policy or diplomatic strategy remained uncertain.
Mark Fitzpatrick, executive director in Washington for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said it could simply be Trump projecting “what he most recently heard” from Moon and Japan’s Shinzo Abe.
“I expect he heard from both Prime Minister Abe and President Moon the need to give diplomacy a chance,” Fitzpatrick said. “Of course, it’s not the first time he has talked about engaging with North Korea. The issue has been one of timing. Now is a good time, during a pause in missile testing.”
North Korea has fired off more than a dozen missiles this year but none in nearly two months. But analysts caution against reading too much into the pause.
There’s no public sign of any diplomatic progress between Washington and Pyongyang. U.S. officials say the back channel between the State Department and the North Korean mission at the United Nations in New York remains intact, but contacts have not been substantive other than achieving the release of American college student Otto Warmbier in June. He died days after his repatriation to the U.S.
Still, Trump’s conciliatory comments would be welcome in South Korea, where both the government and the wider population have been unnerved by the president’s threats against the North.
Trump did note the United States’ military options, mentioning that three aircraft carrier groups and a nuclear submarine had been deployed to the region. But he said “we hope to God we never have to use” the arsenal. And he accused North Korea’s Kim Jong Un of “threatening millions and millions of lives, so needlessly.”
Moon, who has been eager to solidify a friendship with Trump, said he hoped the president’s visit would be a turning point in the standoff with North Korea.
The president began his day with a visit to Camp Humphreys, a joint US-Korean military base where he shook hands with American and Korean service members and ate lunch with troops in a large mess hall. The visit was intended to underscore the countries’ ties and South Korea’s commitment to contributing to its own defense.
When he leaves South Korea, Trump flies to Beijing for what the White House sees as the centerpiece of his five-nation Asia trip.
China is North Korea’s largest trade partner, and Trump is expected to press its leaders to curtail their dealings with Pyongyang and to expel North Korean workers from its borders. Trump has praised China for adopting tough United Nations sanctions against North Korea but has urged it to do more.
“I want to just say that President Xi — where we will be tomorrow, China — has been very helpful. We’ll find out how helpful soon,” Trump said. “But he really has been very, very helpful. So China is out trying very hard to solve the problem with North Korea.”
Trump and first lady Melania Trump on Wednesday will meet and have dinner with Xi Jinping and his wife and receive a private tour of The Forbidden City, Beijing’s ancient imperial palace. White House officials point to the leaders’ successful summit in Florida this spring, an event in part defined by Trump telling his Chinese counterpart about the missile strike he had ordered on Syria while the two men enjoyed chocolate cake. But experts in the region suggest that Xi will have the advantage over Trump.
“Trump keeps portraying his relationship with XI as great pals but that’s wildly naive,” said Mike Chinoy, a non-resident senior fellow at the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California. “The Chinese have figured out how to play Trump: flatter him. And there’s nothing the Chinese do better than wow foreign diplomats.”
___
Associated Press writers Matthew Pennington, Ken Thomas and Catherine Lucey contributed from Washington.
EXCLUSIVE: We are ready for anything – don’t mess with our Hornets. Admiral in charge of supercarrier which will sail for North Korea’s doorstep sends message to Kim Jong-Un as Trump touches down in Seoul
DailyMailTV joined the Rear Admiral and crew of the USS Carl Vinson as the huge warship left its port in San Diego for a series of exercises ahead of its deployment
The Vinson will sail for the Western Pacific to relieve the USS Ronald Reagan and be one of two carrier strike groups in the region amid ongoing tensions with North Korea
Rear Admiral John Fuller, Commander of Carrier Strike Group 1, will lead the vessel and its ferocious armament of planes and escort of Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers and a guided missile cruiser
Aboard the 95,000 ton vessel are fighter aircraft such as the $70million F/A-18 Super Hornet – capable of reaching Mach 1.8 (1,190mph) with a massive armament of bombs and missiles
In a message to Kim Jong-Un Rear Admiral Fuller said: ‘He needs to think very carefully on how he works with us, he needs to understand that we have capabilities that no other country has.’
The supercarrier has more than 3,500 crew which swells to 5,300 when the air wing is on board – the warship was used to transport Osama bin Laden’s body for its burial at sea in 2011
President Trump embarked on his 12-day trip to Asia, arriving on Sunday in Tokyo, where he met with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe amid heightened tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile tests
By Ryan Parry West Coast Correspondent For Dailymail.com On Board Uss Carl Vinson In The Pacific Ocean
PUBLISHED: 14:05 EST, 6 November 2017 | UPDATED: 18:50 EST, 6 November 2017
The twin engines of the F/A-18 Super Hornet build into a roar and the $70million supersonic jet is catapulted from the deck of the USS Carl Vinson with an ear-splitting blast.
The aircraft disappears off the bow of the enormous nuclear-powered super carrier in a haze of steam, the bright glow of its engines disappearing into the distance.
This is one of the planes the man in charge of the supercarrier wants Kim Jong-Un to fear – because the Vinson is due to set sail for waters close to North Korea.
President Trump arrives in South Korea Monday night putting him on Kim’s doorstep as tensions mount over the ‘little Rocket Man’s’ escalating nuclear threat.
Now one of the president’s most important commanders tells DailyMailTV that his sailors are ready for anything – and that Kim needs to ‘think carefully’ when Carrier Strike Group One is in his waters.
Rear Admiral John Fuller, Commander of Carrier Strike Group 1, will lead the Vinson, its ferocious armament of planes, and its escort of Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers and a guided missile cruiser.
Don’t mess with our Hornets: DailyMailTV witnessed the incredible sight of hundreds of sailors and airmen on board the 1,092ft long, 117,000 sq ft USS Carl Vinson as they put its four aircraft catapults through their paces. Its aircraft include the Hornet and Super Hornets and the EA-18 Growler (pictured) electronic attack aircraft, which jams enemy radar systems
Aboard the 95,000 ton vessel, the twin engines of the F/A-18C Hornet were heard roaring off as the $70 million aircraft was catapulted off the deck. The strike fighter aircraft, which can reach Mach 1.8 (1,190mph), disappeared off the bow of the super carrier in a haze of steam
Preparation: Before liftoff, Navy crew work diligently to ensure the aircraft is ready and the flight deck clean and clear of foreign objects. Mini tractors tow the F/A18s into place and the Top Gun pilots ready the jets for take off
Commander Brian ‘Convict’ Felloney gets ready for take-off. The decorated pilot has more than 620 carrier landings on his record, and was a Top Gun instructor on a previous deployment
This is how the Vinson deploys: In May the supercarrier was photographed from the air as it and the whole strike group got an escort from two South Korean destroyers, the Sejong the Great and the Yang Manchun. The Carl Vinson’s U.S. Navy escorts were the USS Lake Champlain, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, and the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers the USS Michael Murphy and the USS Stethem
In an exclusive interview with DailyMailTV Rear Admiral Fuller says his strike group is ‘ready and in a direct message to Kim says: ‘He knows the capabilities we have.
‘Right now there are three aircraft carriers there, when we go through there – if we go off the coast [of North Korea] depending on our operations – he needs to think very carefully on how he works with us, he needs to understand that we have capabilities that no other country has.’
Standing on the deck of the Vinson, those capabilities are in no doubt.
DailyMailTV joined the Rear Admiral and crew of the Vinson as the huge warship left its port in San Diego for a series of exercises ahead of its deployment.
The ship raised its two 60,000lb anchors and set sail from Naval Air Station North Island, in Coronado.
Capable of reaching more than 30 knots (35mph) the Nimitz-class supercarrier – one of ten nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the US Fleet – headed out into the Pacific Ocean.
DailyMailTV witnessed the awesome sight of hundreds of sailors and airmen on board the 1,092ft long, 117,000 sq ft warship put its four aircraft catapults through their paces.
Four giant elevators brought aircraft up from the hangar deep below the 4.5 acre flight deck as Super Hornets lined up on deck to be catapulted into the air – just like in a real war.
The USS Ronald Reagan and the USS Theodore Roosevelt are both in the region amid ongoing tensions with North Korea. The Vinson will relieve the USS Ronald Reagan, keeping two carrier strike groups in the Western Pacific.
The ship is the same vessel that was used to transport Osama bin Laden’s body for its burial at sea in 2011.
Last week it was reported that the USS Nimitz had left the Middle East and is also heading to the Pacific to join the US Navy’s 7th Fleet area of operations.
Rear Admiral John Fuller (pictured above in the flag bridge aboard the ship) Commander of Carrier Strike Group 1, will lead the Vinson. He said his strike group is ‘ready’ and in a direct message to Kim said: ‘He knows the capabilities we have’
All hands on deck: One of the most important men on the flight deck is Lieutenant Commander Erick Stroud (left) who serves as the Aircraft Handling Officer (ACHO) – also called the handler or mangler and manages the movement and positioning of aircraft. Jet blast deflector (JBD) operator ABE3 Jasper Evans’s (right) job is to raise the JBD to protect his shipmates from getting ‘burnt or blown away off the flight deck’
President Trump will visit Asia for the first time when he leaves Washington D.C. on Friday for a 12-day trip which will include China, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam.
The might of the Vinson is part of his message to the region’s leaders – that America has its allies’ backs, and its enemies should be afraid.
The Rear Admiral said: ‘There happens to be three carriers there that are gonna be working together for a while. This is good timing for us.
‘We’re going to go out to provide presence, stability, we’re going to go work with our partners and allies, we’re going to try to foment rules, laws and norms of theater.’
North Korea has not test-launched a missile in over a month, but has continued its threats on Guam and last week even threatened to detonate a nuclear weapon above ground.
Fuller, 52, the son of a retired Army colonel, said the ‘scheduled short cycle’ deployment is the Vinson’s ‘opportunity’.
‘I just know the Carl Vinson strike group is going to do the training to be ready to do what we’re called to do,’ he said.
Petty Officer 3rd class Joseph Newman, a 42-year-old nine-year veteran of the US Navy from Evansville, Indiana, is in charge of communications on the flight deck
‘We’re gonna go prepare our forces and our team to make sure that whatever missions they call us to do, so this provides perspective, Korea is one possible contingency plan that the aircraft carrier strike group is supposed to support.’
The Rear Admiral said the ‘beauty’ of what a carrier strike group brings is to project ‘awesome’ power at sea.
‘We don’t have to ask permission to go to some other land to operate our forces, we have the opportunity to use the seas to maneuver freely and we have the capability to project power from the sea as required.
‘But it is also a very stabilizing thing for our friends and allies that this capability is there as needed, we have the will power to use it and we have the proficiency to use it well.’
The Rear Admiral insists, however that the Navy’s first line of defense is to ‘promote peace’, adding: ‘My job is to make sure if they decide to use the capabilities an aircraft carrier and a strike group has, that we’re prepared to deliver those.
‘The civilian policy maker will do what they feel is in the best interests.
‘But I owe it to the parents of my sailors to make sure we’re ready.’
On deck getting ready is a complex task. Mini tractors tow the F/A18s into place and the Top Gun pilots ready the jets for take off.
Commanding Officer of the Vinson, Captain Doug ‘V8’ Verissimo gives the order and the jets roar into action.
Jet blast deflector (JBD) operator ABE3 Jasper Evans, who is known as a ‘Green Jersey’ describes the ‘intense’ moment a F/A-18 takes off.
His job is to raise the JBD to protect his shipmates from the searing heat of a jet engine.
‘Whenever the aircraft is getting ready to launch they throttle up and I raise the JBD so that no one behind can get burnt or blown away off the flight deck,’ he explained.
‘It gets really hot up here, really intense. But we’re fully protected, we wear float coats, flight deck pants and jersey, and a helmet and goggles.’
Evans, 27, is in his fourth year with the US Navy. Originally from Lawrenceville, Georgia, he has just one year left to complete his service.
Donald Trump kicked off his 12-day Asian trip in Japan on Sunday. The President met with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe amid heightened tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile tests
He has been on two long deployments overseas and is used to the strict routine of life at sea.
‘Everything is routine on a ship, you wake up at a certain time, go eat breakfast and get ready for when they call flight operations and we come upstairs on the flight deck, we suit up and get ready to launch the aircraft.
‘A work day ends at 10 or 11 o’clock and it repeats – very long days.’
The flight deck is awash with dedicated crewmen like Evans wearing different colored jerseys.
Green jerseys operate the JBDs, aircraft handlers wear yellow jerseys, blue jerseys work in the hangar bay and purple jerseys refuel the aircraft, while red jerseys handle aviation ordinance and crash and salvage.
The whole manic scene is watched over by white jerseys.
Interior Communications Electrician Petty Officer 3rd Class Joseph Newman from Evansville, Indiana is in charge of communications on the flight deck.
Everyday is routine on the ship as Navy crew are expected to wake up early in the morning, eat breakfast, get ready, arrive on the flight deck, suit up, and prepare to launch the aircraft. A typical work day ends at 10pm or 11pm
The flight deck is awash with dedicated crewmen wearing different colored jerseys. Green jerseys (center) operate the jet blast deflectors, and aircraft handlers wear yellow jerseys (right)
‘I take care of all the maintenance of the cameras, the comms systems and the deck lighting as well as the lights up on the island,’ he explains.
Blue jerseys work in the hangar bay and purple jerseys refuel the aircraft, while red jerseys handle aviation ordinance and crash and salvage. The Hornets, Super Hornets and Growlers are moved up to the flight desk on huge aircraft elevators
Four giant elevators brought aircraft up from the hangar deep below the 4.5 acre flight deck as Super Hornets lined up on deck to be catapulted into the air – just like in a real war
‘I also take care of the ‘meat ball’, [a gray boom that displays lights that pilots use to help during the final seconds of landing].
‘You’ll hear the pilots say they’re on the ball as they come in to land. We also take care of all the sound power headsets that the crew use to communicate, we keep things running.
‘It’s a big job, up here in V2 and air department and we also have ICs downstairs in combat systems.’
Newman is a 42-year-old nine-year veteran of the US Navy and has served on the Vinson for six years.
‘I joined late, I did apartment maintenance before this.’
But perhaps the most important man on the flight deck is Lieutenant Commander Erick Stroud.
Stroud is the Aircraft Handling Officer (ACHO) – also called the handler or mangler and manages the movement and positioning of aircraft.
Stroud, 42, a married father of four from Griffin, Georgia, said the most important part of the preparations is keeping his flight deck clean and free of foreign objects.
‘I don’t want to be associated with damaging a $70million aircraft so we go to the extreme to make sure we’re prepared,’ he said.
The ship operates four squadrons of F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornets, one squadron of EA-18G Growlers, and Seahawk helicopters for transportation and maritime patrols
Also on board is a squadron of E-2C Hawkeye early warning aircraft – designed to detect jets, ships and other vehicles from long distances
There are more than 3,500 crew on the Vinson which swells to 5,300 when the full air wing is on embarked, as it was in this 2011 photograph. The warship – call sign ‘Gold Eagle’ – can operate for up to 20 years without refueling since it is nuclear-powered
Speaking from his control room – a buzz of phone calls and radio chatter – just off the flight deck, he added: ‘This is the nucleus of aviation and flight operations, I control the entire flight deck as well as movement in the hangar bay and all the people involved, we have about 600 people working in those two areas and we integrate with the squadrons, that’s about 500 people.
‘That’s 1,100 people working together seamlessly to make this all happen.’
DON’T MESS WITH OUR SUPER HORNETS
The twin-engine strike fighter aircraft were first introduced to the US Navy in 1999 to replace the F-14 Tomcat, made famous in the hit movie Top Gun.
The F/A-18 Super Hornet can reach Mach 1.8, which is equivalent to 1,190mph at 40,000 ft.
On the Vinson they operate alongside the older Hornet and the related Growler.
The Super Hornets’ armament includes:
One M61A1/A2 Vulcan 20mm cannon
The strike fighter has 11 hard points on its wings and under the main fuselage which can carry a mixture of:
Missiles: Four AIM 9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles
Two AIM 7 Sparrow/ (2) AIM-120 AMRAAM
One Standoff Land Attack Missile
One AGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missile
One HARM (Anti-Radiation Missile) – designed to destroy enemy radar systems
Maverick air to ground missiles: Joint Stand-Off Weapon (JSOW); Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM).
Stroud keeps an eye on two large digital status boards showing the movements of aircraft on the flight deck but he also uses an old school ‘Ouija Board’ – a scaled replica of the flight deck on which templates of aircraft are moved around based on messages radioed in from spotters.
The lieutenant commander, a 25-year veteran, has four catapults to launch aircraft at his disposal as well as four arresting cables to recover the aircraft.
He moves the aircraft up from the hangar bay in the guts of the ship on four giant elevators.
When planes make an arrested landing, pilots aim to hit the No 3 cable of four arrested cables numbered 1-4 from aft to forward.
Their performance goes up on a board so it gets competitive.
But crew safety is of utmost importance.
Stroud explains: ‘There’s a red and white foul line, which is said to be drawn in blood, because you have to judge where the aircraft is coming in and everybody has to stand on the opposite side of the line.
‘If an aircraft is coming in and you get one of the tall guys level with the wing on the wrong side of the line, it’ll take his head off and we’ll have a body to clean up.
‘When we get into that level of complacency, where we get into the same routine every day, launching planes and recovering planes, that one second of being inattentive is dangerous.
‘You have to keep your head on a swivel no matter what.’
Everyone on the Vinson seems on point inside the 3,000 room hull underneath the flight deck.
There are several cafeterias, nine gyms, a Starbucks-style coffee shop and ‘luxury’ state rooms for ‘Distinguished Visitors’.
Since it is nuclear-powered, the Vinson – call sign ‘Gold Eagle’ – can operate for up to 20 years without refueling. It also has anti-submarine capabilities.
The seal of the ship is an eagle with extended wings, carrying a banner in its beak.
The Latin phrase ‘Vis Per Mare’ -‘Strength through the Sea’ – is inscribed on the banner.
The ship operates four squadrons of F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornets, one squadron of EA-18G Growlers – which disrupt enemy radar – one squadron of E-2C Hawkeye early warning aircraft, as well as a compliment of C2-A Greyhound transport planes and Seahawk helicopters.
There are more than 3,500 crew on the Vinson, which swells to 5,300 when the air wing is on board, which means working seven days a week with shifts often lasting 12 hours or more. But few complain about living on the floating city.
The massive warship has a 3,000-room hull below the flight deck which includes several cafeterias, nine gyms, a Starbucks-style coffee shop and ‘luxury’ state rooms for ‘Distinguished Visitors’
On a daily average, the Navy spends around $60,000 feeding sailors and on Sunday, they serve a special brunch meal which includes Belgian waffles or some shrimp
‘On a daily average we spend around $60,000 to feed the crew, which is roughly about 15-20 pallets worth of food.
‘A special day for us is Sunday, we do a brunch we serve things like Belgian waffles, some shrimp, a special chance to give the sailors a chance to refresh for the next week.’
After filling up a lot of the sailors like to keep fit. Dan Larrell is in charge of putting them through their paces in the ship’s nine gyms.
‘I am a fitness director, if you imagine this warship as a large 24 hour fitness, we have 4,500 sailors and we treat them all as our clients,’ he explains.
Larrell says as well as running and maintaining the gyms he puts together the fitness schedule and offers Zumba and spin classes, weight-lifting and functional fitness classes and even rowing club.
‘Any sailor on any watch on any schedule can come to our classes,’ he added.
‘What’s really incredible is that we not only get the younger sailors at our classes but we get the captain of the ship, the XO [executive officer] of the ship and the admiral of the ship, when I train them… it’s the first time in a very long time someone is telling them what to do. It’s my time to make them work a little bit harder.’
Running the Vinson, let alone a whole Carrier Strike Group, is a huge undertaking and one that Fuller doesn’t take lightly.
He says he’s incredibly ‘honored and humbled’ to be in the position he’s in.
‘I never expected that I would have the opportunity to lead such an awesome fighting force and such an awesome group of sailors. It hasn’t even really sunk in, I’m just amazed I get this chance here. I am exceptionally proud of that.’
And the commander says America should be equally proud of the US Navy’s achievements.
He said: ‘The most awesome thing we have is some of the best people in America who volunteered to help protect and promote prosperity for our American citizens and then with those great people we have fantastic equipment and systems that allow us to project power from the sea for sustained periods of time in ways no other country can.’
Soon the Vinson will be in Kim’s waters – and those people and equipment could be tested as never before.
Story 3: Saudi Arab On The Brink of Proxy War With Lebanon Paritally Controlled By Iran-backed Lebanese Shi‘ite group Hezbollah — Saudi Arab Blames Iran For Yemen Missile Attack — Purge and Roundup of Royal Prince Continues — Videos —
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Published on Nov 7, 2017
A senior Saudi minister has accused Lebanon of declaring war against the kingdom. The minister for Persian Gulf Affairs, Thamer al-Sabhan also accused the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah of committing acts of aggression and attacking the Saudi kingdom without further elaborations. He then urged the Lebanese government to realize the risks of Hezbollah actions. Al-Sabhan made the comments in reaction to criticism Riyadh has been facing over the resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri. Hariri made the announcement in a statement broadcast on Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV. On Sunday, Hezbollah chief Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah and other Lebanese officials accused Riyadh of forcing Hariri to quit in a bid to create tensions in Lebanon.
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Published on Nov 5, 2017
Hariri’s resignation came as a surprise. The fact that he did it from Riyadh, accusing Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah of sowing strife in the Arab world, sent shockwaves through the region. His resignation shatters a delicate deal that put him in a coalition government after a two-year political vacuum. It is not the first time a Lebanese government has collapsed- it happened in 2005, 2011 and 2013. The country’s political structure requires that the President must be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament a Shia Muslim. Last year Lebanon’s parliament swore in a new cabinet dominated by Hezbollah and its allies – in a major victory for the Shia, Iran-backed group. Add to that, Hezbolllah’s military wing has been racking up victories in Syria, building up its arsenal, and steadily increasing its influence at home, and that’s upset some, including Saudi Arabia So, what’s next? And will Lebanon again become the battleground for other peoples’ wars?
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Foreign Policy Association
Published on Feb 29, 2016
From the conflicts in Iraq and Syria to the tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the struggle between Sunni and Shi‘a groups for hegemony is tearing apart the region and shows no signs of abating. But for all the religious discourse permeating the conflict, much of its roots are political, not religious. How does sectarianism fit into a larger narrative of the Middle East? How have governments manipulated sectarian differences? And finally, what is the U.S. doing about it? Full episode from the Great Decisions PBS series: http://www.greatdecisionsonpbs.com/ Visit our website for more information: http://www.fpa.org/ Narrated by Academy Award nominated actor David Strathairn and produced by the Foreign Policy Association, each half-hour episode of the Great Decisions documentary series tackles a different challenge facing America today. This episode first aired in January 2015.
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Saudi Arabia Arrests 11 Princes Including A Billionaire
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PBS NewsHour
Published on Nov 6, 2017
In the name of fighting corruption in Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman announced over the weekend the government would hold trials for 11 princes, stamping out opposition and cementing his rule. Special correspondent Nick Schifrin is joined by Bilal Saab of the Middle East Institute and Aaron David Miller of the Wilson Center to discuss the potential fallout of the crackdown.
Saudi Arabia arrests 4 ministers and 11 princes
PBS NewsHour
Published on Nov 5, 2017
Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the arrest of four government ministers and 11 royal princes hours after he was named the head of a new anti-corruption committee. Billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who has stakes in major U.S. companies like Apple and Twitter, was among those arrested. Gary Sick, a senior research scholar at Columbia University, joins Hari Sreenivasan.
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Saudi prince killed in helicopter crash near Yemen border – BBC News
Published on Nov 6, 2017
A senior Saudi prince and seven other officials have been killed in a helicopter crash near the country’s border with Yemen, state media report. Prince Mansour bin Muqrin, the deputy governor of Asir province, was returning from an inspection tour when his aircraft came down near Abha late on Sunday, the interior ministry said. It did not give a cause for the crash. But it came hours after a major purge of the kingdom’s political and business leadership. An anti-corruption body led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 32, ordered the detentions of dozens of people, including 11 princes, four ministers and dozens of ex-ministers. Analysts see the unprecedented move as an attempt to cement the power of the heir to the throne.
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Saudi Arabia says Lebanon declares war, deepening crisis
Tom Perry, Lisa Barrington
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia accused Lebanon on Monday of declaring war against it because of aggression by the Iran-backed Lebanese Shi‘ite group Hezbollah, a dramatic escalation of a crisis threatening to destabilize the tiny Arab country.
People walk next to a poster depicting Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who has resigned from his post, along a street in the mainly Sunni Beirut neighbourhood of Tariq al-Jadideh in Beirut, Lebanon November 6, 2017. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
Lebanon has been thrust to the center of regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran since the Saudi-allied Lebanese politician Saad al-Hariri quit as prime minister on Saturday, blaming Iran and Hezbollah in his resignation speech.
Saudi Gulf affairs minister Thamer al-Sabhan said the Lebanese government would “be dealt with as a government declaring war on Saudi Arabia” because of what he described as aggression by Hezbollah.
Faulting the Hariri-led administration for failing to take action against Hezbollah during a year in office, Sabhan said “there are those who will stop (Hezbollah) and make it return to the caves of South Lebanon”, the heartland of the Shi‘ite community.
In an interview with Al-Arabiya TV, he added: “Lebanese must all know these risks and work to fix matters before they reach the point of no return.”
He did not spell out what action Saudi Arabia might take against Lebanon, a country with a weak and heavily indebted state that is still rebuilding from its 1975-90 civil war and where one-in-four people is a Syrian refugee.
There was no immediate comment from the Lebanese government.
Hezbollah is both a military and a political organization that is represented in the Lebanese parliament and in the Hariri-led coalition government formed last year.
Its powerful guerrilla army is widely seen as stronger than the Lebanese army, and has played a major role in the war in neighboring Syria, another theater of Saudi-Iranian rivalry where Hezbollah has fought in support of the government.
Lebanese authorities said on Monday the country’s financial institutions could cope with Hariri’s resignation and the stability of the Lebanese pound was not at risk.
But the cash price of Lebanon’s U.S. dollar-denominated bonds fell, with longer-dated maturities suffering hefty losses as investors took a dim view of the medium- to longer-term outlook for Lebanon.
A poster depicting Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who has resigned from his post, hangs along a street in the mainly Sunni Beirut neighbourhood of Tariq al-Jadideh in Beirut, Lebanon November 6, 2017. The Arabic on the poster reads, “With you forever”. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
HARIRI FREE TO TRAVEL, SAUDI FM SAYS
Hariri cited a plot to assassinate him during his unexpected resignation speech broadcast from Saudi Arabia which caught even his aides off guard. He also slammed Hezbollah and Iran, accusing them of sowing strife in the Arab world.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has said he will not comment on Hariri’s speech, calling it a “Saudi statement” and saying Riyadh had forced Hariri to resign.
The sudden nature of Hariri’s resignation generated speculation in Lebanon that his family’s Saudi construction business had been caught up in an anti-corruption purge and he had been coerced into resigning.
Slideshow (3 Images)
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Jubeir said it was “nonsense” to suggest Hariri had been coerced into quitting in a CNN interview on Monday. Hariri had quit because Hezbollah had been “calling the shots” in the government, he said. Hariri, a Saudi citizen, was free to leave the country at any time, he said.
Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk, a senior member of Hariri’s political party, said he was under the impression Hariri would return to Beirut within days.
A meeting between Saudi King Salman and Hariri in Riyadh on Monday proved “rumors” wrong, he said – an apparent reference to speculation that Hariri was detained or forced to quit.
Earlier on Monday, President Michel Aoun, a political ally of Hezbollah, appealed for national unity.
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Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, another political ally of Hezbollah, said in a televised statement after meeting Aoun it was too early to talk about forming a new government.
The crisis could re-aggravate tensions between Sunni and Shi‘ite Muslims and afflict Lebanese government with paralysis once again. All of the sides have called for calm and there has been no sign of unrest since Hariri’s resignation.
The Hariri-led government took office last year in a political deal that made Aoun president. The deal ended years of deadlock, and last month it produced Lebanon’s first budget since 2005.
Hariri flew to Saudi Arabia on Friday after meeting in Beirut the top adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader, who described the coalition as “a victory” and “great success” afterwards.
Yemeni rebels’ missile attack on the Saudi capital on Saturday could be considered an Iranian act of war, Saudi Arabia said, in a statement likely to intensify tensions between the archrivals.
Saudi Arabia intercepted the ballistic missile east of Riyadh’s main airport after it flew more than 500 miles from Yemen. It was fired by Houthi rebels, who are seen by Saudi Arabia as proxies of Iran.
The Saudi-led military coalition that has been at war with the Houthis in Yemen for more than 2½ years “considers this a blatant act of military aggression by the Iranian regime and could rise to be considered as an act of war against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” according to a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
Debris from the missile showed it was made in Iran, the statement said, adding that the coalition “reserves its right to respond to Iran in the appropriate time and manner, in accordance with international law and based on the right of self-defense.”
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, dismissed the claim.
“We are not basically capable of transferring missiles to Yemen,” he said Sunday, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. Houthi missiles, he said, are homegrown.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Bahram Ghasemi, on Monday called Saudi accusations against Iran “unfair, irresponsible, destructive and provocative,” according to a state television news website. He advised the kingdom to stop its assault on Yemen to pave the way for peace talks.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted that Saudi Arabia was bombing Yemen and killing thousands of innocent people and spreading famine.
The kingdom “is engaged in wars of aggression, regional bullying, destabilizing behavior and risky provocations,” he said. “It blames Iran for the consequences.”
Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir tweeted that Iranian intervention in the region was undermining security and repeated that Saudi Arabia had the right to respond.
The range of some, like the “Volcano H2” the group fired Saturday, has increased markedly in 2017, putting significant Saudi population centers and energy infrastructure within range.
Saudi Arabia, which controls Yemeni airspace and oversees shipping traffic through its ports, said all land, sea and air borders with the country would be closed temporarily to address the missile threat, although humanitarian supplies would still be allowed in.
Tensions between Saudi Arabia, the leading Sunni Muslim power in the region, and Iran, its main Shiite rival, have risen in recent days. Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a close Saudi ally, resigned Saturday, blaming Iran for destabilizing the region and saying his life was under threat.
Saudi Arabia has more aggressively confronted Iran under 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who orchestrated Saudi involvement in Yemen.
Saudi Crackdown Targets Up to $800 Billion in Assets
Authorities detain more prominent businessmen, freeze bank accounts
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left, has said tackling corruption is necessary to overhaul Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy.PHOTO: SAUDI PRESS AGENCY/REUTERS
By Margherita Stancati in Beirut and
Updated Nov. 7, 2017 5:38 p.m. ET
The Saudi government is aiming to confiscate cash and other assets worth as much as $800 billion in its broadening crackdown on alleged corruption among the kingdom’s elite, according to people familiar with the matter.
The country’s central bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, said late Tuesday that it has frozen the bank accounts of “persons of interest” and said the move is “in response to the Attorney General’s request pending the legal cases against them.”
The purge is the most extensive of the kingdom’s elite in recent history. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman, was named heir to the throne in Juneand has moved to consolidate power. He has said that tackling corruption at the highest level is necessary to overhaul what has long been an oil-dependent economy.
The crackdown could also help replenish state coffers. The government has said that assets accumulated through corruption will become state property, and people familiar with the matter say the government estimates the value of assets it can reclaim at up to 3 trillion Saudi riyal, or $800 billion.
“They reckon that they could get around 2 to 3 trillion riyals from these people. That’s the number they are talking about,” said a person close to the government.
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Much of that money is abroad, which will complicate efforts to reclaim it, people familiar with the matter said. But even a portion of that amount could help Saudi Arabia’s finances. A prolonged period of low oil prices forced the government to borrow money on the international bond market and to draw extensively from the country’s foreign reserves, which dropped from $730 billion at their peak in 2014 to $487.6 billion in August, the latest available government data.
Who Has Been Promoted, Who Has Been Detained in Saudi Arabia
Under King Salman, many senior princes have been sidelined from power or detained, according to people familiar with the matter. Here are a few of the important moves.
King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud
The founder of modern Saudi Arabia, who ruled from 1932
to 1953
Detained
Promoted
Other direct descendant
LINE OF SUCCESSION
King Salman bin
Abdulaziz
King 2015-present
He is the sixth brother in a row to assume the throne. He became king in 2015 and in June appointed his own son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as his heir.
Prince Miteb bin Abdullah
Prince al-Waleed
bin Talal
Prince Mohammed bin Nayef
Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman
He is one of the world’s richest men. Through his firm Kingdom Holding Co., he has invested in Apple, Twitter, and Citigroup. He was detained on Nov. 4.
Previous head of the elite Saudi Arabian National Guard
Previous crown prince
The 32-year-old prince has ascended to a position of unrivaled power since his father became king, and oversees most key policy areas in the country, from the economy to defense. He is the architect of the ambitious plan to end the kingdom’s dependence on oil. As minister of defense, he launched Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. He became crown prince in June.
Prince Mohammed, a former powerful minister of interior, was removed from the position of crown prince in June and replaced by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a younger cousin. His ouster faced some resistance within the royal family
He is the politically influential son of the previous monarch, King Abdullah. He was fired and detained on Nov. 4.
Prince Abdulaziz bin
Saud bin Nayef
New minister of interior
He was appointed as minister of interior in June. He belongs to the same branch of the royal family as Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the ousted crown prince.
Note: not all descendants represented
Sources: Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia; staff reports.
The arrests were ordered by a newly established anticorruption agency headed by Prince Mohammed.
The crown prince “needs cash to fund the government’s investment plans,” political risk advisory firm Eurasia Group said in a note on Monday. “It was becoming increasingly clear that additional revenue is needed to improve the economy’s performance. The government will also strike deals with businessmen and royals to avoid arrest, but only as part of a greater commitment to the local economy.”
Spokespeople for the Saudi government didn’t respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
Saudi Arabia’s minister of commerce, Majid al Qasabi, on Tuesday sought to reassure the private sector that the corruption investigation wouldn’t interfere with normal business operations.
The procedures and investigations undertaken by the anticorruption agency won’t affect ongoing business or projects, he said.
Running LowSaudi Arabia is heavily dependent on oilexports, and government revenues havetaken a hit as crude prices have tumbled inrecent years.THE WALL STREET JOURNALSource: Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority
In its statement on Tuesday, the Saudi central bank said that individual accounts had been frozen, not corporate accounts. “It is business as usual for both banks and corporates,” the central bank said.
The central bank sent a list of hundreds of names to lenders, asking them to freeze any accounts linked to them, according to people familiar with the matter.
“These are just the initial stages of either asset freezes or arrests. More people are expected to be impacted as the investigation unfolds,” said a Saudi official.
The government earlier this week vowed that it would arrest more people as part of the corruption investigation, which began around three years ago.
As a precautionary measure, authorities have banned a large number of people from traveling outside the country, among them hundreds of royals and people connected to those arrested, according to people familiar with the matter.
Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a Saudi billionaire and founder of Kingdom Holding Co., spoke at a conference in Chicago in 2013. PHOTO: DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS
The government hasn’t officially named the people who were detained.
They include billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the most widely known members of the Saudi royal family and a major investor in companies including Apple Inc., Twitter Inc. and Citigroup Inc. He faces allegations of money laundering, bribery and extortion, according to a senior Saudi official. A representative of Prince al-Waleed didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to people familiar with the investigation, those detained over the weekend also include Bakr bin Ladin, the chairman of the construction giant Saudi Binladin Group. A spokesman for Saudi Binladin didn’t respond to request for comment.
Saudi Binladin, the biggest construction firm in the Gulf region, flourished as one of the government’s preferred builders during the boom years in the oil-rich country, winning a high-profile contract to expand the grounds of the Great Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. The people familiar with the investigation said Mr. bin Ladin faces allegations of bribery in connection with that project.
A resignation, detentions and missiles: 24 hours that shook the Middle East
By Tamara Qiblawi, CNN
Updated 12:44 PM ET, Mon November 6, 2017
When 32-year-old Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman rose to power two years ago, many predicted that change was afoot. The events of November 4 have shown that change would not just be swift, but also seismic, extending unremittingly beyond the kingdom’s boundaries.
A 24-hour sequence of political bombshells began on Saturday afternoon, when Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation from the Saudi capital of Riyadh, blindsiding his country’s political establishment. Hours later, Saudi Arabia’s official news agency reported that the country’s military had intercepted a Yemen-borne ballistic missile over Riyadh. Even as images of the blast were flashing on TV sets around the region, similarly dramatic news began to trickle in: Some of Saudi Arabia’s most high-profile princes and businessmen were being sacked and detained in an anti-corruption drive led by bin Salman.
The events serve as an opening salvo for a new period in the region’s crisis-ridden history, analysts say. They represent an escalation in a yearslong proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, threatening to activate new fronts in the region, with the Saudi show of force beginning with a sweeping consolidation of power from within.
On Friday, ISIS’ last strongholds in Iraq and Syria fell. It marked a major milestone in a fight that saw archrivals converge on the extremist group until its so-called caliphate was on its last legs. On Saturday, regional powerhouses appear to have trained their sights on one another.
“I think the end of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State, does not really mean the end of geostrategic struggles,” London School of Economics Professor Fawaz Gerges told CNN’s George Howell.
“On the contrary, the dismantling of the so-called caliphate will basically intensify the geostrategic struggles between the pro-Iranian camp led by Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and its allies in the region, including the United States.”
On Friday evening, Lebanon’s Saad Hariri was summoned to the Saudi capital. It was his second visit to the country in a week. Hariri is a dual Saudi-Lebanese citizen and the regional powerhouse is widely seen as his political patron.
Just a week before, it appeared the Prime Minister had averted a major crisis between Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. He had met with the Crown Prince and outspoken Saudi Minister Thamer al-Sabhan, appeasing their fears about the Iran-backed Hezbollah, which has members in his Cabinet.
“A long and fruitful meeting with my brother Prime Minister Saad Hariri. We’ve agreed on many issues that concern the good people of Lebanon. God willing, the best is yet to come,” Sabhan wrote in a tweet.
The meeting came on the heels of a series of tweets in which Sabhan chastised the Lebanese government for its inclusion of Hezbollah. Hariri appeared to have defused tensions with his visit.
Independent Lebanese MP Yassin Jaber, a member of a pro-Hezbollah parliamentary bloc, told CNN that he met with Hariri just as he returned from Saudi Arabia, and described the premier as cheery and in a “joking” mood.
But when Hariri returned to Saudi Arabia the second time, it was an altogether different matter.
It would be the first time a Lebanese premier submitted his resignation from outside the country. Multiple local media reported that nearly all Hariri’s closest aides were caught unawares.
“Over the past decades, Hezbollah has unfortunately managed to impose a fait accompli in Lebanon by the force of its weapons, which it alleges is a resistance weapon,” Hariri said in his resignation speech.
“I want to tell Iran and its followers that they are losing their interferences in the Arab nation affairs. Our nation will rise just as it did before and the hands that want to harm it will be cut,” he said in remarks apparently aimed at Hezbollah, which he shared a coalition government with.
Hariri’s resignation spells the collapse of a 30-member government of national unity that saw Saudi-backed Hariri fill the post of prime minister, and Hezbollah-backed Michel Aoun occupy the presidency. That government, analysts say, was one of the byproducts of the Obama administration’s landmark Iran nuclear deal.
“With this arrangement, we saw some sort of appeasement where we saw mutual steps from the US and Iran in improving relations and lowering tensions in various areas,” said Riad Kahwaji, director of Institute for Near East and Gulf Military.
The period marked a brief time of stability, in which Lebanon seemed to have steered clear of regional fault-lines.
“With (Hariri’s) resignation yesterday, this arrangement has come to an end and we are back to an escalation between Iran and Saudi Arabia on the Lebanese front. Lebanon is back in the arena of the showdown between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
“Everyone in Lebanon is holding tight and worried … we’re seeing now that we may again be engulfed in conflict,” said Jaber.
Hariri’s resignation triggered a crescendo of war drums. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the remarks were a “wake-up call” to “take action” against Iran. Saudi Minister Sabhan promptly tweeted: “The hands of treachery and aggression must be cut off,” echoing Hariri’s threats against Hezbollah.
Just hours later, Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched a ballistic missile targeting King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital. Saudi forces intercepted the missile over northeast Riyadh, the Saudi Ministry of Defense said, but the Houthis hailed it as a “success” that “shook the Saudi capital.”
The attack was conducted using a Yemeni-made, long-range missile called the Burqan 2H, the rebels said. The missile launch was the first time the heart of the Saudi capital has been attacked.
The Saudi-led coalition accused a regional state of providing material support to the Houthi rebels, saying the firing of a ballistic missile at Riyadh “threatens the security of the Kingdom and regional and international security,” according to a statement carried by Saudi state-TV al-Ekbariya.
The coalition didn’t name the country. Saudi Arabia has been fighting a proxy war in Yemen against Iran, which it accuses of arming the Houthi rebels.
Analysts dubbed this a “major escalation” in the Yemeni war.
“This is a major escalation and will have tremendous implications on the situation in Yemen itself, because Saudi Arabia now feels extremely the urge to retaliate against the Houthi movement that controls the government in Sanaa,” said Gerges.
Gerges added that combined with the political rupture in Lebanon, the ballistic missile attack spells an outbreak of tensions “throughout the region.”
Saudi Arabia was still putting out the fires caused by the missile attack when state TV announced the onset of an anti-corruption crackdown led by the crown prince. Over 17 princes and top officials were arrested on graft charges, according to a list obtained by CNN and cited by a senior royal court official.
The list includes billionaire business magnate Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns 95% of Kingdom Holding, which holds stakes in global companies such as Citigroup, Twitter, Apple and News Corp.
The list also includes formal head of the royal court Khaled Al-Tuwaijri, Saudi media mogul Waleed Al-Ibrahim and Prince Turki Bin Nasser.
“Some of the wealthiest figures in the Arab world are in apprehension today,” said military analyst Riad Kahwaji.
“This is unprecedented. We’re seeing it for the first time and it’s definitely causing shockwaves across the region.”
A picture taken on November 5 of the closed Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh.
Reportedly, the detainees are being held at the lavish Ritz-Carlton hotel. “I think there’s a lovely irony in that many of these corrupt deals happened at the Ritz-Carlton and now these guys are locked up there,” said historian Robert Lacey, who wrote two books about the kingdom.
“In historic terms, what we’ve seen in the last few months is nothing short of revolutionary,” said Lacey. “I’ve been waiting for 40 years for these things to happen, and they happened in four months.”
Mohammed bin Salman’s campaign of “two fronts,” as analysts have dubbed it, is being met by cheers and apprehension. But there is near consensus that these are uncharted waters, and the results will be dramatic.
CNN’s Becky Anderson, Chandrika Narayan and Sarah El Sirgany in Riyadh contributed to this report.
Trump voices ‘great confidence’ in Saudi Arabia amid royal purge
BY JORDAN FABIAN – 11/06/17 06:18 PM EST 363
President Trump on Monday gave a vote of confidence to the leadership of Saudi Arabia amid a royal family purge that has rocked the Middle East.
“I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing,” Trump tweeted while traveling in Asia. “Some of those they are harshly treating have been ‘milking’ their country for years!”
The president appeared to lend his endorsement to this weekend’s arrests of 11 members of the Saudi royal family, which authorities there described as a crackdown against corruption.
The mass arrests amounted to the most sweeping purge of the Saudi ruling elite in the country’s modern history. Advisers, ministers and businessmen were also taken into custody on orders from a newly formed anti-corruption committee.
Regional observers see the round-up as one of the most dramatic moves yet by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman to consolidate power.
The crown prince, 32, has taken over several key government posts over the past two years while pushing aside rivals as he seeks to position himself as the next leader of the oil-rich kingdom.
He also heads the anti-corruption panel.
Among those arrested were Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, a son of the late King Abdullah and head of the National Guard, and the kingdom’s wealthiest investor, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Mohammad bin Salman has pushed the hidebound kingdom to implement reforms while cozying up to the U.S., a top Saudi ally.
The crown prince, who is a son of King Salman, has also formed a relationship with President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Kushner made an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia last month, where U.S. officials said he intended to discuss Middle East peace.
Saudi Arabia was the site of Trump’s first trip abroad as president, a visit Mohammad bin Salman was said to have helped arrange.
Trump also has ties to bin Talal, who helped bail him out of financial trouble in the 1990s. The investor was part of a group that purchased New York’s Plaza Hotel from Trump as well as the real-estate mogul’s yacht.
No one should ever have to negotiate between getting lifesaving care or accessing their prescriptions.
Their relationship took a turn for the worse in 2015, when bin Talal bashedTrump’s campaign rhetoric and called on him to drop out of the presidential race.
“Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our U.S. politicians with daddy’s money,” Trump responded on Twitter. “Can’t do it when I get elected. #Trump2016”
Story 1: Update of Radical Islamic Terrorist Jihadist Attack in New York City — President Trump “Send Him To Gitmo” and Get Rid of Chain Migration and Diversity Lottery Immigration and Replace With Merit Base System — Videos —
Passport to terrorism – Jason Chaffetz on the NY terrorist attack – 11/1/17 – Fox & Friends
New York truck attack: Trump calls for end of green card lottery – BBC News
President Donald Trump: Starting The Process Of Terminating The Diversity Lottery Program | CNBC
Schumer to Trump: Stop dividing, politicizing
What we know about the suspect in deadly NYC attack
Suspect In NYC Terror Attack That Killed 8 Victims Shot, In Custody
President Trump’s EXPLOSIVE Response to NY Truck Attack: “Send Him to Gitmo!” 11/1/17
The Diversity VISA Program Should Be GUTTED!!” Hannity and Mark Levin Speak TRUTH on Immigration
“The Diversity Lottery is COMPLETELY INSANE!” Ann Coulter REACTS to NYC
Robert Mueller’s Witch Hunt – Mark Levin – Hannity
“Allahu Akbar!” #NYC #Terror and #Uzbek Sayfullo Saipov — Lionel on “Real News With David Knight”
We Should Televise Sayfullo Saipov Explaining Why He Killed 8 to Show America What Evil Looks Like
Uzbek terrorist appears shackled in court in a wheelchair after it emerges he had thousands of ISIS videos on his phone, asked to fly terror flag in his hospital room and chose Halloween because he thought more people would be on the streets
Sayfullo Saipov, 29, was charged Wednesday with providing material support to a terrorist group and committing violence and destruction of motor vehicles
He did not enter a plea and judge ordered him to be held in federal jail
Uzbek national will appear again in federal court on November 15
Saipov killed eight and injured 12 by mowing down people with a rented pick-up truck on the Hudson River bike path in lower Manhattan Tuesday afternoon
According to a criminal complaint, Saipov admitted that he was inspired by ISIS
Saipov asked federal agents to hang an ISIS flag in his hospital room and said he ‘felt good about what he had done’
Investigators found thousands of ISIS-related materials on Saipov’s computer
About 90 ISIS-related videos were also found on Saipov’s cell phone
He was interviewed by federal agents in 2015 as a possible associate of two suspected terrorists, but a case file was never opened on him
By Ashley Collman For Dailymail.com and Ben Ashford In Tampa, Florida For Dailymail.com and Will Stewart In Moscow For Dailymail.com and Regina F. Graham For Dailymail.com
PUBLISHED: 08:51 EDT, 1 November 2017 | UPDATED: 01:25 EDT, 2 November 2017
New details are emerging about Sayfullo Saipov (left and right) who mowed down more than a dozen innocent people on a New York City bike path on Tuesday
The Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan accused of carrying out Tuesday’s terror attack in Manhattan entered court Wednesday evening in a wheelchair, handcuffed and with his feet shackled, to face terrorism charges filed against him by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Sayfullo Saipov, 29, wore a gray shirt and was surrounded by five guards while in his wheelchair inside a New York federal courthouse after he was charged with providing material support to a terrorist group and committing violence and destruction of motor vehicles.
His lawyers said Wednesday they were not seeking bail and a judge ordered him to be held in federal jail.
Saipov did not enter a plea to terrorism charges and a judge set his next court date for November 15.
Authorities say the Uzbek national watched ISIS videos on his cellphone and picked Halloween for the attack on a bike lane in lower Manhattan because he knew more people would be out on the streets.
Prosecutors said in court papers that Saipov asked to display the ISIS flag in his hospital room where he was recovering from being shot in the stomach by police ending the attack.
Saipov ‘stated that he felt good about what he had done,’ according to court papers.
The 29-year-old left behind knives and a note, handwritten in Arabic, that included Islamic religious references and said ‘it will endure’ — a phrase that commonly refers to ISIS, FBI agent Amber Tyree said in court papers.
The Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan (above in court sketches) accused of carrying on Tuesday’s terror attack in Manhattan entered court Wednesday evening in a wheelchair, handcuffed and with his feet shackled, to face terrorism charges filed against him by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York
Saipov, 29, wore a gray shirt and was surrounded by five guards while in his wheelchair inside a New York federal courthouse after he was charged with providing material support to a terrorist group and committing violence and destruction of motor vehicles
His lawyers said Wednesday they were not seeking bail and a judge ordered him to be held in federal jail. Saipov did not enter a plea to terrorism charges and a judge set his next court date for November 15
Questioned in his hospital bed, Saipov said he had been inspired by ISIS videos and began plotting an attack about a year ago, deciding to use a truck about two months ago, Tyree said. Saipov even rented a truck on October 22 to practice making turns, Tyree said.
John Miller, deputy New York police commissioner for intelligence, said Saipov ‘appears to have followed, almost exactly to a T, the instructions that ISIS has put out.’
In the past few years, the Islamic State has exhorted followers online to use vehicles, knives or other close-at-hand means of killing people in their home countries. England, France and Germany have all seen deadly vehicle attacks since mid-2016.
A November 2016 issue of the group’s online magazine detailed features that an attack truck or van should have, suggested renting such a vehicle and recommended targeting crowded streets and outdoor gatherings, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, a militant-monitoring agency.
Saipov told authorities, according to the compliant, he chose Halloween for the attack because he thought there would be more civilians nearby.
Carlos Batista, a neighbor of Saipov’s in Paterson, New Jersey, said he had seen the suspect and two friends using the same model of rented truck several times in the past three weeks.
Overnight, FBI investigators raided Saipov’s Paterson, New Jersey apartment, where he lives with his wife and three kids, the youngest of whom is three months old
It’s unclear how long Saipov has lived at the address in New Jersey, he seemed to float between Ohio, Florida and New Jersey
A member of the media knocks on the door next to Saipov’s apartment on Wednesday
An FBI investigator carries a bag of evidence away from Saipov’s home on Wednesday
Trump tweeted Wednesday night that he spoke with the president of Argentina about the five victims who died in the attack on Tuesday
He also tweeted that the US ‘will be immediately implementing much tougher Extreme Vetting Procedures’
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told CNN on Wednesday that Saipov ‘radicalized domestically’ after moving to America seven years ago, where he had worked as a commercial truck driver and Uber driver.
Reports say that Saipov attended a ‘suspicious’ New Jersey mosque.
Saipov married in 2013 and has since fathered three children – the youngest of whom is three months old. Overnight, FBI agents raided the couple’s Paterson, New Jersey home.
On October 28, Saipov was spotted on the George Washington Bridge, the crossing at the far northern tip of the island between New Jersey and New York.
That same day, his EZ-pass recorded him driving through the Holland Tunnel (which also links New Jersey and New York) twice. The Holland Tunnel is located in lower Manhattan, near where Saipov started his rampage on Tuesday.
Prosecutors released the criminal complaint (above) against Saipov on Wednesday afternoon which describes the charges he’s been hit with for Tuesday’s deadly attack
Saipov was charged with providing material support to a terrorist group and committing violence and destruction of motor vehicles
The documents also provide details into the background on ISIS as a foreign terrorist organization
The documents say ISIS has ‘disseminated a wide variety of recruiting materials and propaganda through social media’
The suspect seemingly lived a quiet life prior to moving to the U.S.
He had spent most of his life living in a single apartment with his parents and three younger sisters in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Radio Free Europe (RFE) reports.
Two neighbors back in Tashkent told RFE that the Saipov family were ‘very secular’ and ‘ordinary Uzbeks who don’t stand out in any particular respect’.
‘His parents are far from religion,’ one of them said, ‘They don’t even pray.’
Saipov’s father, 52-year-old Habibullo, and mother, 50-year-old Muqaddas, run a small clothing stand in their local bazaar, and are relatively well off in their country, owning their own car and home.
The complaint details the deadly attack on Tuesday afternoon in lower Manhattan and also what was found inside the rented Home Depot truck. One of those items was a document that contained Arabic and English text
The complaint also shows a photo showing Saipov at the Home Depot in Passaic, New Jersey renting the truck used in the horrific attack
Saipov was read his Miranda Rights while in the hospital after being shot by an NYPD officer. He waived those rights and began speaking to investigators about what he admitted to doing, according to the complaint
The Uzbek national also said that he was inspired to carry out the attack by ISIS videos he had watched on his cell phone, according to the complaint
Authorities say one of the cellphones found in Saipov’s possession contained 90 videos of ISIS-related propaganda
At the age of 22, Saipov moved alone to the U.S. after winning a greencard through the Diversity Visa Lottery.
But a police source in Tashkent told RFE that Saipov lived for a time in Osh, Kyrgyzstan – a city that saw violent ethnic clashes in 1990 and 2010 – before immigrating to the U.S. (DailyMail.com learned that Saipov has close links to Osh, according to Ruslan Leviev, head of the Conflict Intelligence Team, an anti-Kremlin social media monitoring group. He has social media links to friends in the city, also the home of Akbarjon Djalilov, who bombed the St Petersburg metro last year.)
When he first moved to the U.S., acquaintances said that he did not appear to be a ‘religious person’. Several years later though, they say he became ‘aggressive’ and started expressing ‘very radical views,’ according to sources who spoke to RFE.
Since immigrating, Saipov has lived in multiple states – with addresses in Ohio, Florida and New Jersey. There’s some confusion about where Saipov lived when, and for how long, since it appears he moved around frequently.
It’s possible that Saipov, working as a trucker, split his time between the three states.
Saipov’s mosque in Paterson, New Jersey has been under NYPD surveillance since 2005 (pictured above on Wednesday)
While NBC News reported that Saipov got his commercial driver’s license in New Jersey in 2010, and later had it transferred to Florida, sources in Ohio say he lived there right after immigrating.
Dilnoza Abdusamatova, 24, told the Washington Post that Saipov stayed with her family in Cincinnati for his first two weeks in the country because their fathers were friends.
‘He always used to work,’ Dilnoza said told the Cincinnati Enquirer. ‘He wouldn’t go to parties or anything. He only used to come home and rest and leave and go back to work.’
She said that he cut off contact with them about a year later, when he got married and moved to Florida to work as a truck driver.
Records show that Saipov married fellow-Uzbek Nozima Odilova in Ohio in 2013. She was 19 years old at the time.
Pictured above is Saipov’s former apartment building in Tampa, Florida. He also had an address in Fort Myers
TIMELINE OF THE MASSACRE
2:06pm
Saipov rents a truck from the Home Depot in Passaic, New Jersey.
2:43pm
Cameras on the George Washington Bridge show Saipov crossing into New York City.
3:04pm
Cameras outside the Holland Tunnel show Saipov entering the bike lane at West Street and Houston Street at a high rate of speed.
Saipov targets bicyclists and pedestrians in the south-bound lane. Eventually, crashing into a school bus at Chambers Street, where gets out and continues to terrorize bystanders.
3:08pm
Police receive more than a dozen 911 calls of a truck driver targeting bystanders in the bike lane, crashing into a school bus and getting out waiving a gun.
Two officers who were nearby at Stuyvesant High school for an unrelated call respond to the scene and notice Saipov walking around waiving a gun.
Officer Bryan Nash, a 28-year-old who has been on the force for five years, shoots Saipov in the abdomen, bringing the rampage to an end.
While Dilnoza says that Saipov started his trucking business in Florida, recrods show he actually started both of them in Ohio – going so far as to use her family’s home address for registration.
In 2011, he started Sayf Motors in Hamilton County, Ohio.
Two years later, he started another company in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio – Bright Auto LLC.
Bright Auto LLC is an active carrier registered with the U.S. Department of Transportation. Records show that the trucking company has one truck and one driver. The company said it could not confirm if the suspect had rented the vehicle, but they are cooperating with police.
One fellow Uzbek driver said that Saipov ran into issues working as a truck driver and was a mean-spirited person.
Mirrakhmat Muminov, 38, of Stow, Ohio, portrayed Saipov as an argumentative young man whose work was falling apart and who ‘was not happy with his life.’
Muminov said Saipov lost his insurance on his truck after his rates shot up because of a few traffic tickets, and companies stopped hiring him. Muminov said he heard from Saipov’s friends that Saipov’s truck engine blew up a few months ago in New Jersey.
He also said Saipov would get into arguments with his friends and family, tangling over even small things, such as going to a picnic with the Uzbek community.
‘He had the habit of disagreeing with everybody,’ Muminov said.
Saipov drove nearly a mile down the Hudson River bike path before his rampage came to an end when he smashed into a school bus
The above graphic shows how Saipov drove off the West Side Highway and onto the Hudson River bike path on Tuesday
But others who knew Saipov had nothing but nice things to say about him – painting a picture of a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure.
Kobiljon Matkarov, 37, said that he met Saipov in Florida about five years ago and they bonded over their shared Uzbek heritage.
‘He is very good guy, he is very friendly… he is like little brother… he look at me like big brother,’ he told The New York Post.
Matkarov says Saipov even invited him to his wedding in Ohio, but he couldn’t attend.
Matkarov visited New York City recently and said that Saipov drove his family to JFK airport as they were leaving.
Saipov was very friendly, he said, and good with children: ‘My kids like him too, he is always playing with them. He is playing all the time,’ he said – but added that when one of the children asked to take a photo with him, Saipov refused. ‘He no like that. He said no,’ Matkarov said.
Matkarov said he was shocked by the claim that his friend had murdered and injured more than a dozen people, and that he didn’t know of any terrorist connections he may have had.
Matkarov said he knew his friend had been working for Uber in New Jersey, a fact that the ride-sharing company has confirmed.
Uber said in a statement on Tuesday night: ‘We are horrified by this senseless of violence. Our hearts are with the victims and their families. We have reached out to law enforcement to provide our full assistance.’
The company said that he had passed a background check by the company and that they are now ‘aggressively’ reviewing his history with them, although they had not yet found any ‘concerning safety reports.’
The company added that he has been banned from the app.
Saipov (seen being taken into custody on Tuesday) immigrated to the U.S. from his native Uzbekistan in March 2010
People who know Saipov’s parents back in Uzbekistan say the family is not religious. Saipov seen above moments after mowing down more than a dozen people on a bike path
Saipov is reportedly seen here holding his two fake guns after climbing out of the Home Depot truck. He ran about a block south of the crash before being shot. Records indicate he worked as an Uber driver and a commercial truck driver
Saipov appears to have lived in both Fort Myers and Tampa, Florida. And though he had been living in New Jersey when he was arrested on Tuesday, he had a Florida driver’s license on him.
Neighbors at Saipov’s Tampa apartment complex told the Daily Beast that Saipov lived in a modest apartment with his wife, kids and an older woman who appeared to be his mother or mother in law.
They said he was often on the road for two weeks at a time because of his job. They said the family also left every summer. The last time they left, the family told neighbors that they were moving to New Jersey because Saipov’s job had been transferred.
Neighbor Melissa Matthews says the women of the household wore head scarves and were cold to her.
‘Most people you say hello to and they say hello back, but they didn’t,’ Matthews said.
But neighbor Kyong Eagan had fonder memories of Saipov.
She says that the terror suspect treated her like royalty, bringing her food, large cases of water and orange juice and household appliances his family no longer needed.
‘He always treated me like I was his mother,’ Eagan said. ‘He was kind of a nice neighbor. A real nice neighbor to have.’
Eagan said Saipov, who she described as soft-spoken, brought her home-cooked meals because he wanted her to learn about his culture.
‘I just can’t believe it at all. He was just so genuine. I’m just so shocked,’ she said.
Other Tampa neighbors said he should ‘fry’ for his killing spree.
Gloria Bailey, 71, learnt she was living in the alleged mass killer’s former apartment when the FBI knocked on her door Tuesday and a helicopter circled overhead.
‘If he did what they say he did, they need to fry him. If he took innocent lives they need to burn him. Locking him up isn’t good enough,’ she told DailyMail.com.
The grandmother of seven moved into the rented $48,000 condo 11 months ago and found the two-bedroom property clean and tidy when she arrived.
‘I’ve never seen the guy, I don’t know what was going on. I just know that he was living in my apartment previously because the management told me,’ she added.
‘All I do is go to work and go to church. But now I feel nervous, I feel scared. I know America is the land of opportunity but they need to do more screening than they do.
‘People are killing each other all over the world and they can all come here.’
Residents living at the Heritage At Tampa housing complex said they barely remembered Saipov who is believed to have lived there in 2015 when his driver’s license was registered to the address.
A statement issued by the property’s management company confirmed he was a former tenant but directed all questions to law enforcement.
Tatiana Colarte, 19, who used to walk her dog past Saipov’s former ground apartment every morning, said: ‘It’s so scary.
‘As soon as I saw a picture I recognized it was him. I can’t believe the man who carried out that act lived so close to me.’
Police probed an apartment complex address in Fort Myers, Florida on Tuesday night where terror suspect Saipov lived from 2010 to 2011.
Uniformed officers from the Fort Myers Police Department as well as unidentified plain clothed agents were seen entering a second floor condo and speaking to the current occupants, a couple with young children.
A police car was stationed outside the rented two-bed, $50,000 property on the Gulfstream Isles housing complex but law enforcement had left by Wednesday morning.
Neighbors told DailyMail.com they had no idea who Saipov was before they saw his face on the news and couldn’t remember him living there.
This is the rented Home Depot truck that plowed through cyclists and runners on the bicycle path. It only stopped when Saipov allegedly deliberately struck a schoolbus at an intersection
The side of the bus crumpled in, collapsing onto the chairs – and children – inside. Two children and two adults were hospitalized after the crash. One of the children was in critical condition
Shattered bicycles are seen here on the West Side Highway bike path where eight people were killed and at least 12 more injured. At least five of those who were killed had rented Citibikes before they were hit
A vehicle is surrounded by a police perimeter in the parking lot of a Home Depot store in Passaic, New Jersey where authorities believe Saipov rented the truck used in the attack
It’s unclear how long Saipov has been living in Paterson, New Jersey. Some outlets say he moved in June, but records indicate he was living there at least off-and-on since 2012.
TERRORIST’S ACTIVITIES SINCE MOVING TO THE U.S.
March 2010: Immigrates to the U.S. from Uzbekistan. Stays with the Abdusamatov family in a Cincinnati suburb for his first two weeks.
April 2011: Gets a traffic violation in Hartford County, Maryland and lists an address in Fort Myers, Florida
May 2011: Starts Sayf Motors Inc., registering the business to the Abdumastov’s home address
April 12, 2013: Marries Nozima Odilova in Ohio
August 2012: Gets a ticket in Pennsylvania and lists a Paterson, New Jersey address
Sometime in 2012: Meets friend Kobiljon Matkarov in Florida, is allegedly living there at the time. Matkarov says Saipov lived in Fort Myers until 2014
August 2013: Starts Bright Auto LLC in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
March 2015: Gets ticket in Pennsylvania and gives officers a Paterson, New Jersey address
April 2016: Gets a traffic violation in Missouri and gives cops an address for Tampa, Florida
Late 2016 – Early 2017: Saipov’s mother visits him for about two months
Around April 2017: Starts working for Uber in NJ
September 2017: Saipov tells a friend that he’s thinking of moving back to Uzbekistan
In August 2012, he was pulled over in Palmyra, Pennsylvania and gave cops a Paterson, New Jersey address. He gave cops a Paterson address again in March 2015, when he was pulled over in Mount Holly Springs Borough, Pennsylvania.
The manager of Saipov’s local grocery store in Paterson, Farm Boy Super Fresh Supermarket on Getty Avenue, had a poor opinion of the man.
She claims that Saipov was an ‘erratic’ customer who berated the cashiers, the New York Post reported.
‘Every time he came here he was always erratic or arguing with the cashiers,’ the manager, who did not want to provide her name, said.
‘He would get angry very fast…. he would break the cans, dumb things,’ she said, adding that he was known for his rude behavior.
‘I feel like he was prejudiced to the cashiers – whether they were covered or not in a hijab – he would belittle them,’ she told The Post.
‘He was talking good English, proper, but he would call the cashiers dumb, uneducated – how they didn’t know how to scan the items.’
She also said that Saipov argued often about the price of Canada Dry Ginger Ale.
‘Soda was the problem. He would come here and buy soda,’ she said. ‘He would give us a hard time on the 12-pack Canada Dry – if it was one price he would want his own price. It was always the soda, always a problem with the 12-pack of cans. Always a problem.’
One neighbor, 64-year-old Slavo Petrov, says he often sees Saipov going to mosque with his wife and kids, but he ‘never says good morning and never says good afternoon’.
Investigators work around the wreckage of the Home Depot pickup truck a day after the massacre
Crime scene covered the scene, located in a usually bustling area of Manhattan
A large portion of the West Side Highway remained shut down on Wednesday so that officials could continue to investigate
It has since been revealed that Saipov’s mosque was also under surveillance by the NYPD.
According to NorthJersey.com, the NYPD has been studying the Omar Mosque in Paterson, near Saipov’s home, as a possible location for ‘budding terrorist conspiracies’.
It doesn’t appear that criminal activity has been linked to the mosque but the report says it ‘is believed to have been the subject of federal investigations’.
ABC News also reports that Saipov was interviewed by federal agents two years ago about his alleged ties to two suspected terrorists.
Law enforcement sources told ABC that Saipov was interviewed as a potential ‘point of contact’ for two different men who were entered into the Counter-terrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit’s list when they came to the U.S. from ‘threat countries’.
One of those men has since vanished and federal authorities are actively searching for him. The other is described as a ‘suspected terrorist’.
Saipov was never the center of any investigation, and his interviews with federal authorities did not raise suspicions enough for the FBI to start a case file on him.
Saipov also has a minor criminal record for traffic offenses in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
He was pulled over in Maryland in 2011 and gave cops an address in Fort Myers, Florida.
In 2012 and 2015, he was pulled over twice in Pennsylvania and each time gave an address in Paterson, New Jersey
His most recent traffic violation appears to have happened in April 2016, when he got a traffic violation in Missouri and said he was living in Tampa.
Each time he was cited for a traffic violation, Saipov pleaded guilty and paid a fine.
New York City Police Commissioner James O’Neill (center) stands with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and (left) and Mayor Bill de Blasio during a news conference about the attack on Wednesday
VICTIMS OF THE BIKE PATH TERROR ATTACK
Darren Drake, 32
Drake from New Milford, New Jersey, was taking a 15-minute afternoon break from his job at Moody’s Analytics nearby when he was struck.
His father said he had recently undergone weight loss surgery and cycled his bike to stay fit.
Drake’s grieving parents told The New York Post he that he had recently purchased a Citibike membership in a bid to lose weight.
They said he was ‘so smart’ and suggested that he may have been listening to an audio book when he was hit which they said they hoped meant he did not see the truck coming.
Nicholas Cleves, 23
Cleves is a resident of New York. He was identified along with Drake by the NYPD on Wednesday afternoon.
Cleves, 23, is a high school graduate and recently completed a degree in computer science from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.
He lived in Greenwich Street, near to where the truck began its rampage on the West Side Highway at Houston Street.
Shopkeepers in the area said Cleves was ‘warm’ and a ‘good person’. It is not clear if he was cycling or walking when he was hit.
Belgian tourist Ann-Laure Decadt, 31,
Mother-of-two Decadt was in New York with her two sisters and mother and was hit from behind as she traveled south on the bike path.
She died in New York Presbyterian Hospital after being rushed from the scene.
Her husband said she was a ‘wonderful’ mother to two young boys aged two and three-months.
He was notified that she had died in a phone call from hospital staff on Tuesday evening.
The woman’s mother and two sisters were not injured.
Five Argentinian friends visiting New York
Five men from a group of nine Argentinians who were in New York celebrating their 30th school reunion were killed.
The men were all on Citibikes and were struck cycling south along the path.
They are Hernan Diego Mendoza-Espino, 47, Alegandro Damian Mendoza-Espino, 47, Herman Ferruchi, 47, Diego Enrique, 47 and Ariel Erlis, 48.
Five members of this group of Argentinian friends were also killed. They are Hernán Diego Mendoza (far left), Alejandro Damián Pagnucco (second from left), Ariel Erlij (third from left), Diego Enrique Angelini (second from right) and Hernán Ferruchi (third from right). A sixth friend, Martin Ludovico Marro (not pictured), was injured
About an hour before the attack on Tuesday, Saipov rented a pick-up truck from a Home Depot in Passaic, New Jersey. He then drove the truck into the city over the George Washington Bridge, at the very northern tip of Manhattan, and made his way all the way down to lower Manhattan.
He crossed onto the Hudson River bike path at Houston Street, and then sped down the path nearly a mile – killing eight and injuring 12 while allegedly shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’.
He then waved a paintball gun in one hand and a pellet gun in the other, and was shot in the abdomen by a police officer.
Overnight FBI investigators searched through Saipov’s apartment in Paterson, and the white minivan he left behind at the Home Depot parking lot.
Investigators are also collecting video and pictures from the scene of the attack.
In addition to interviewing Saipov, investigators are also talking to his wife and are planning to track down his other contacts. A source told RFE that authorities in Uzbekistan interviewed Saipov’s mother, father and 17-year-old sister on Wednesday.
A makeshift memorial stands on a bike path in lower Manhattan on Wednesday where the terror attack was carrier out a day before
Five of the dead were part of a group from Argentina who were celebrating the 30-year anniversary of their high school graduation. Another victim was from Belgium and the other two were American. Two of the injured were staff members on a bus transporting children that Saipov slammed into at the end of his rampage.
Six people died at the scene and two more died at the hospital. Of the 12 others that were hospitalized, three have since been released. Four of the nine still hospitalized were in critical condition but are now stable. The rest are in serious condition. The injuries ranged from a bilateral amputation to serious head and neck injuries, back trauma and trauma to the arms and legs.
Both New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke at the Wednesday press conference.
‘This was an attack on the United States of America, an attack on New York City, an attack on our people,’ de Blasio said.
‘It was the definition of terror – an effort to take away people’s hopes and spirit and make them change.
‘And what New York has showed already is that we will not be changed. We will now be cowed, we will not be thrown off by anything,’ he added.
During the question and answer portion of the press conference, Cuomo criticized President Trump’s ‘politicization’ of the tragedy.
The aftermath took a political turn Wednesday when Trump said Saipov came to the U.S. under a visa lottery program — ‘a Chuck Schumer beauty,’ Trump called it in a reference to the Senate’s top Democrat.
Cuomo said it was not the time for such remarks – which he called ‘not helpful’ and ‘not factual’.
WHAT IS THE DIVERSITY VISA LOTTERY PROGRAM?
President Donald Trump pitted part of the blame for the latest New York City terror attack on one of the state’s senators, Chuck Schumer.
The terror suspect, 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov, came to the U.S. in March 2010 from Uzbekistan, after winning a greencard through the Diversity Visa Lottery Program.
The program was enacted into law under the first President Bush in 1990, as part of a bi-partisan effort on immigration reform. The original bill was authored by Sen. Ted Kennedy, and Schumer was a co-sponsor of the bill.
The lottery is meant to benefit immigrants from under-represented ethnic groups, and was originally designed with the Irish in mind. As the years have gone by, the winners of the lottery have gotten more diverse, just like the name of the program. In 2015, nearly half the winners were African.
President Donald Trump complained Wednesday morning on Twitter that the terrorist who killed eight people Tuesday in New York entered the U.S. through a program that uses a lottery to award immigration visas
The program, which awards visas mainly to people from countries that are under-represented in the U.S., was originally introduced by Sen. Chuck Schumer when he was a member of the House of Representatives
Trump has argued for a ‘merit-based’ immigration system since at least March
Applicants who enter must have the equivalent of a high school degree and two years of work experience.
As many as 15 million prospective immigrants enter the lottery every year, but only 55,000 visas are awarded – 5.5 per cent of the about 1million who move to the U.S. every year.
The program is different from more traditional means of immigration.
Many people secure visas to move to the U.S. because they have desireable degrees, are going to study at a school or work for a specific employer. And of course there are those who secure visas through marriage.
In his comments on Wednesday, Trump blamed Schumer for the policy and said he wants all U.S. immigration to be merit-based (i.e. prospective immigrants must prove that they have something to offer).
‘The terrorist came into our country through what is called the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based [immigration].
‘We are fighting hard for Merit Based immigration, no more Democrat Lottery Systems. We must get MUCH tougher (and smarter),’ the president tweeted.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer originally introduced the diversity visa program to an immigration bill in 1990 when he served in the House of Representatives
Chuck Schumer fired back on Twitter, accusing President Trump of being eager to ‘politicize a tragedy’
Later in the day, he held a press conference and promised to eradicate the program.
‘I am today starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program,’ Trump told reporters before a midday Cabinet meeting. ‘It sounds nice. It’s not nice. It’s not good.’
While Schumer did indeed co-sponsor the bill nearly 30 years ago, he actually tried to end it in 2013 as part of the bi-partisan Gang of Eight immigration reform bill.
Schumer was part of the group of four Republicans and four Democrats that tried to pass the new immigration bill.
It never passed, but it if did it would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the country, increased border security by adding up to 40,000 border patrol agents, instituted talent-based immigration program, increased visas and greencards for STEM students and placed restrictions on the oft-abused H-1B visa.
The other senators who authored the bill included the Democrats Michael Bennett, Dick Durbin and Robert Menendez and the Republicans Jeff Flake, Lindsay Graham, John McCain and Marco Rubio.
Schumer said Wednesday in a statement that he has ‘always believed and continue to believe that immigration is good for America.’
‘President Trump, instead of politicizing and dividing America, which he always seems to do at times of national tragedy, should be focusing on the real solution – anti-terrorism funding – which he proposed cutting in his most recent budget,’ Schumer said.
‘I’m calling on the President to immediately rescind his proposed cuts to this vital anti-terrorism funding.’
Below are the countries that saw the largest amount of Diversity Lottery winners in 2015. Saipov’s homeland of Uzbekistan makes it into the top 10.
PUBLISHED: 12:40 EDT, 1 November 2017 | UPDATED: 18:44 EDT, 1 November 2017
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would consider sending Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbek national who plowed a rented truck through a bike lane full of cyclists and pedestrians on Tuesday, to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
‘I would certainly consider that, yes. I would certainly consider that. Send him to Gitmo,’ Trump said.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters hours later during a briefing that ‘the point he was making is that he supports – or would support that, but he wasn’t necessarily advocating for it.’
Trump ‘certainly would support it if he felt like that was the best move,’ she added cryptically.
Separately, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain, a Republican who has tangled with the president on taxes and Obamacare, said Saipov should be considered an ‘enemy combatant’ and denied Miranda rights by police.
President Donald Trump said as he began a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that he would consider sending suspected terrorist Sayfullo Saipov to the Guantanamo Bay military prison
Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbek national who plowed a rented truck through a bike lane full of cyclists and pedestrians on Tuesday, was admitted to the U.S. in 2010 under the State Department’s Diversity Immigrant Visa Program
The president also declared that he is already moving to terminate the State Department’s diversity-oriented visa lottery program, which granted Saipov entry into the United States in 2010.
‘I am today starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program. I’m going to ask Congress to immediately initiate or get rid of this program,’ he said.
Trump called Saipov ‘an animal’ during remarks before a cabinet meeting at the White House.
‘He came in through the diversity program as you know, and we’re going to stop it,’ the president vowed.
On Capitol Hill, McCain said in a statement that Americans should recognize terror attacks as ‘acts of war.’
‘As such, the New York terror suspect should be held and interrogated – thoroughly, responsibly, and humanely– as an enemy combatant consistent with the Law of Armed Conflict,’ McCain added.
‘He should not be read Miranda Rights, as enemy combatants are not entitled to them. As soon as possible, the administration should notify Congress how it plans to proceed with the interrogation and trial of this suspect.’
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain said terror attacks are ‘acts of war’ and perpetrators should be considered ‘enemy combatants’
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham advocates for holding suspected terrorists without giving them Miranda rights, including the right to have an attorney
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham also suggested grilling terror attackers without giving them the right to remain silent or an attorney.
Graham recommended on the Fox News Channel that authorities ‘Hold them for a long period of time, get to know them, interrogate them about what they know, where they got trained – if any training.’
‘And we’ll find out pretty soon more about this guy if you don’t read him his Miranda rights,’ he continued, ‘because that stops the interrogation.’
The president does not have the authority to unilaterally end the lottery program that was implemented by Congress in 1990.
He has endorsed Senate legislation that would replace it with a merit-based program, but it is not guaranteed to pass even if it comes to the floor for a vote.
The White House could order the State Department to reduce the maximum number of lottery visas awarded annually from 50,000 to as few as zero.
‘The “diversity lottery” – sounds nice. It’s not nice. It’s not good,’ Trump told reporters.
‘We want a merit-based program’ for immigration, Trump said, ‘where people come into our country based on merit.’
‘And we do not want chain migration, where ultimately someone like him will be allowed to bring in many, many members of his family,’ Trump said.
America’s heavily fortified Guantanamo Bay prison camp, situated on leased land in Cuba, has been the home of suspected jihadi terrorists for decades
There are only 41 prisoners left at ‘Gitmo,’ down from 242 when Barack Obama took office in 2009
Trump suggested that Americans were ‘suckers’ for supporting a system that allowed lax oversight of people allowed to fast-track their visa applications on the basis of a randomly drawn number.
‘We want people that are going to keep our country safe. We don’t want lotteries, where the wrong people are in the lotteries,’ he said.
‘And guess what? Who are the suckers that get those people.’
The president also complained about ‘being stopped by Democrats’ as he attempts to ‘get rid of this lottery program.’
‘We’re going to stop that,’ the president insisted.
Saipov was seen on video running through a lower Manhattan street as he yelled ‘Allahu akbar,’ just after mowing down eight people with a rented pickup truck.
Trump suggested on Wednesday that Americans were ‘suckers’ for supporting a system that allowed lax oversight of people allowed to fast-track their visa applications on the basis of a randomly drawn number
NYPD: Uzbek man ‘planned attack for number of weeks’
Trump has vowed to reverse the previous administration’s course on closing Guantanamo, which was one of former president Barack Obama’s earliest campaign promises – and one he never fulfilled.
Obama largely emptied out ‘Gitmo,’ as the terror-detention hellhole is known, reducing its population from 242 to just 41.
The prison camp has been the site of infamous torture techniques including waterboarding – which the president supported during his White House campaign.
‘Terrorists are constantly seeking to strike our nation and it will require the unflinching devotion to our law enforcement, homeland security and intelligence professionals to keep America safe,’ Trump said Wednesday
‘We have to get much tougher and we have to get much smarter,’ he added. ‘And we have to get much less politically correct. We’re so politically correct that we’re afraid to do anything.’
THE ‘DIVERSITY VISA’ LOTTERY
In the government fiscal year ending September 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the State Department received about 9.4 million applications for Diversity Immigrant Visas.
The applications included petitions for another 5 million spouses and children who would be admitted to the U.S. with lottery winners, for a total of 14.4 million potential visa recipients.
About 125,000 of them were lottery-selected, giving them the right to apply for immigrant visas – a number that the State Department cut off at 50,000 on a first-come, first-served basis.
Uzbekistan was the 8th-highest represented nation among the lottery winners that year.
White House says Saipov should be considered ‘enemy combatant’
By Dave Boyer and Andrea Noble – The Washington Times – Wednesday, November 1, 2017
The White House said Wednesday that it considers the New York terrorist attacker to be an enemy combatant, a status which would make him subject to military justice.
“I believe we would consider this person to be an enemy combatant, yes,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “I think the actions that he took certainly justify that.”
Terrorist suspect Sayfullo Saipov, a native of Uzbekistan, is accused of killing eight people and injuring 11 others by mowing them down with a rented truck on a bike path in lower Manhattan Tuesday.
President Trump said he would consider sending Mr. Saipov to the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center. Mrs. Sanders said the president “wasn’t necessarily advocating for it.”
Asked about the president’s call for quicker and tougher justice in terrorism prosecutions, Mrs. Sanders said Mr. Trump “was simply expressing his frustration” with the lengthy legal process that often comes with such cases.
President Trump said he would consider sending Mr. Saipov to the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center. Mrs. Sanders said the president “wasn’t necessarily advocating for it.”
Asked about the president’s call for quicker and tougher justice in terrorism prosecutions, Mrs. Sanders said Mr. Trump “was simply expressing his frustration” with the lengthy legal process that often comes with such cases.
Justice Department spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle declined to comment Wednesday on whether there have been any discussions with the White House on sending Mr. Saipov to Guantanamo rather than filing criminal charges in a civilian court.
The question about whether Mr. Saipov could be subject to military justice or tried in the civilian courts comes amid developments in several high-profile terrorism trials in the federal courts.
A federal jury last month convicted Ahmad Khan Rahimi, a 29-year-old New Jersey man, of planting two pressure-cooker bombs in New York City in 2016, one of which exploded and injured 30 people.
The federal trial of Ahmed Abu Khattala, the alleged mastermind behind the deadly 2012 attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya, got underway last month. Federal prosecutors are still presenting evidence in that case at the federal courthouse in D.C.
According to Justice Department documents from 2015, federal civilian criminal courts had convicted 620 people on terrorism-related charges since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The number of convictions has continued to climb. A Fordham University School of Law analysis found that from March 2014 through August 2017, 135 people had been charged with and 77 people had been convicted of crimes linked to the Islamic State.
Since 2001, military commissions have resulted in eight convictions, with four overturned. The five people accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks have yet to go to trial after more than a decade in custody at Guantanamo.
Anthony D. Romero, executor director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said sending Mr. Saipov to Guantanamo or treating him as an enemy combatant would “violate due process and the rule of law.”
“The FBI and our federal court system are more than capable of dealing with terrorism cases, and Guantánamo was shown long ago to be an epic failure,” Mr. Romero said.
Trump orders Homeland Security to step up ‘extreme vetting’ in wake of NYC terror attack
POSTED 9:43 PM, OCTOBER 31, 2017, BY PIX11 NEWS AND ASSOCIATED PRESS, UPDATED AT 08:28AM, NOVEMBER 1, 2017
President Trump announced that he has ordered Homeland Security to step up “extreme vetting” in the wake of the New York City attack that left eight people dead and 11 injured.
“I have just ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program. Being politically correct is fine, but not for this!” he wrote.
Trump’s statement comes after a man described as a “lone wolf” deliberately drove a rented truck into a West Side bike path in lower Manhattan, in the first terror attack in New York City since 9/11, and just blocks from the World Trade Center.
Trump’s extreme-vetting policy on immigrants entails more stringent investigative measures intended to identify those who may sympathize with extremists or pose a national security risk to the United States.
On Wednesday, Trump called for “Merit Based immigration,” saying on Twitter that the driver in Tuesday’s attack “came into our country through what is called the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty.”
Officials said the attacker is an immigrant from Uzbekistan who came to the U.S. legally in 2010. They haven’t said whether he came in through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, which covers immigrants from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.
Trump tweeted, “We are fighting hard for Merit Based immigration, no more Democrat Lottery Systems. We must get MUCH tougher (and smarter).”
On Tuesday, the driver brandished two fake guns when he exited the truck after the multi-block rampage which left a trail of mangled bodies and twisted bikes. He yelled “Allahu Akbar,” which is the Arabic phrase for “God is great.”
A high-ranking police source told PIX11 News the suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov. He’s a resident of Tampa, Fla., who arrived in the United States in 2010 from Uzbekistan, sources told PIX11 News.
Under an executive order Trump signed earlier this year, the United States had temporarily halted admissions for refugees from all countries, with some exceptions. The end-date written into the order came and went last week with no new order from Trump to extend it, according to a State Department official, who wasn’t authorized to comment by name and requested anonymity.
Refugees seeking entry to the U.S. will face what officials described as more stringent and thorough examination of their backgrounds, in line with Trump’s “extreme vetting” policy for immigrants. The Homeland Security Department, the State Department and other U.S. agencies have been reviewing the screening process during the temporary ban.
The five-year (2006–2010) legal immigration rate per country’s total 2005 population, defined as all those who received legal permanent residence in all categories, including regular immigrants, refugees and asylees, diversity lottery winners, NACARA/HRIFA beneficiaries, and others.
The lottery is administered by the Department of State and conducted under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as amended by the Immigration Act of 1990. The lottery makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually and aims to diversify the immigrant population in the United States, by selecting applicants from countries with low rates of immigration in the five years prior.
Attempts have been made to end the program since 2005. In 2017 it received widespread attention after eight people were killed in a terrorist attack by a recipient of a Diversity Immigrant Visa.
To enter the lottery, applicants must have been born in an eligible country. If selected, to qualify for the immigrant visa, they must have completed at least a high school education or at least two years of work experience in an occupation which requires at least two other years of training or experience.[1] They must also satisfy general immigration requirements, such as means of support, no criminal background, and good health.
Eligibility is determined by the applicant’s country of birth. In some cases the applicant may use a parent’s or spouse’s country of birth instead. The country of residence or nationality is irrelevant.[1]
Distribution and lottery process
Regions and eligible countries for the Diversity Visa lottery
Dependent territories are treated as part of their respective sovereign countries, and disputed territories are allocated as recognized by the United States. For example, Bermuda is treated as part of the United Kingdom under Europe, the Gaza Strip is considered part of Egypt under Africa, and the West Bank is considered part of Jordan under Asia. However, there are some exceptions: Northern Ireland, Hong Kong and Taiwan are treated as separate countries, and Macau is considered part of Portugal under Europe (even after its sovereignty returned to China in 1999).[1]
Each region that sent more than one sixth of the total number of immigrants to the United States in the previous five years is considered a “high-admission region” (currently Latin America and Asia), and each region that sent less than one sixth is a “low-admission region” (currently North America, Europe, Africa and Oceania). The proportion of Diversity Visas given to the low-admission group is set as the proportion of recent immigrants from the high-admission group (currently about 80%),[3] and vice versa. Among regions of the same group, the Diversity Visas are allocated proportionally to their population, excluding ineligible countries (those that sent more than 50,000 immigrants in the previous five years).[2]
There is a limitation that no single country may receive more than 7% of the total Diversity Visas (3,500).[1] Although only 50,000 Diversity Visas are available each year, the lottery selects about 100,000 applicants. The reason for the larger selection is to ensure that all 50,000 Diversity Visas are eventually given each year, since some applicants may not satisfy general immigration requirements or may decide not to continue the process. As a result, some lottery winners might not obtain a visa.[4] It is also possible that some visas remain available even after all initially selected applicants are reviewed. In this case, additional applicants are selected later. For this reason, applicants who were not initially selected in the lottery should keep checking their status online periodically, until the end of the respective fiscal year.[5]
History
Legislative and Administrative
Starting in 1986, the United States established several temporary immigrant visa programs outside of the usual immigration preferences (family members or by employment). The first program was NP-5, run from 1987 to 1989, where a limited number of visas was issued on a first-come, first-served basis. The second program was OP-1, run through a lottery from 1989 to 1991 and available for natives of countries with low levels of recent immigration to the United States. The third program, AA-1, ran from 1992 to 1994 and was available for natives from a select group of countries that had been “adversely affected” by earlier immigration laws. Intentionally and in practice, people from Ireland and Northern Ireland benefited disproportionally from these programs. They were also known as the Donnelly, Berman and Morrison visas, respectively, after the congressmen who sponsored each one.[6][7][8][9]
The Immigration Act of 1990 established the current and permanent Diversity Visa (DV) program, where 55,000 immigrant visas (later reduced to 50,000) are available in an annual lottery. The lottery aims to diversify the immigrant population in the United States, by selecting applicants mostly from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States in the previous five years.[9] Starting in fiscal year 1999, 5,000 of the visas from the DV program are reserved for use by the NACARA program, so the number of immigrant visas available in the lottery is reduced to 50,000.[10]
The first DV lottery, for fiscal year 1995, was named DV-1.[11] For fiscal years 1996 to 1999, the name was in the format DV-YY, where YY was the last two digits of the year.[12][13][14][15] The lotteries since fiscal year 2000 have been named in the format DV-YYYY, with the full year number.[16] The year in the name refers to the fiscal year when the immigrant visas will be given, which starts in October of the previous calendar year, and the entry period for the lottery occurs almost a year earlier. Therefore, there is a two-year difference between the lottery name and its entry period. For example, for DV-2017 (fiscal year starting in October 2016), the entry period was in 2015.[1]
Initially, the DV lottery was administered entirely by mail, and only winners were notified. The entry form moved to an online system starting in DV-2005, but still only winners were notified, by mail.[6] Starting in DV-2010, all applicants are able to verify online whether they were selected.[17] Notification of winners also by mail continued until DV-2011, but since DV-2012 it is done exclusively online.[18]
Efforts to Repeal
In December 2005, the United States House of Representatives voted 273–148 to add an amendment to the border enforcement bill H.R. 4437 abolishing the DV. Opponents of the lottery said it was susceptible to fraud and was a way for terrorists to enter the country. The Senate never passed the bill.
In March 2007, Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) introduced H.R. 1430, which would eliminate the Diversity Visa program. In June 2007, the U.S. House passed H.R. 2764 to eliminate funding for the program, and the Senate did likewise in September.[19] However, the final version of this bill with amendments, signed into law on December 26, 2007, did not include the removal of funds for the program. Several attempts have been made over the last several years to eliminate the lottery. Although H.R. 2764 was an appropriation bill and could only cut funds for the lottery during one fiscal year, this was the first time that both the House and the Senate passed a bill to halt the Diversity Visa program. H.R. 2764
Rep. Goodlatte reintroduced his Security and Fairness Enhancement for America Act (formerly H.R. 1430, now H.R. 2305) on May 7, 2009. The bill would have amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to eliminate the diversity immigrant program completely, but did not pass. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) introduced the Save America Comprehensive Immigration Act of 2009 (H.R. 264) on January 7, 2009. The bill would have doubled the number of Diversity Visas available to 110,000 yearly. The bill did not pass.[20] If it had passed, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 would have abolished the program in fiscal year 2015. A comprehensive analysis of DV lottery issues was prepared in 2011 by Congressional Research Service.[21]
The term 50,000 “immigrants” refers only to people who immigrated via the family-sponsored, employment, or immediate relatives of U.S. citizen categories, and does not include other categories such as refugees, asylum seekers, NACARA beneficiaries, or previous diversity immigrants. It is for this reason that Cuba, Iraq, Myanmar, Iran, Ethiopia, Nepal, Guatemala, Ecuador and Egypt are not on the ineligible list as of 2016 despite sending over 50,000 immigrants in the previous five years.[29]Northern Ireland has a special exemption, with natives able to enter the lottery despite the rest of the United Kingdom being ineligible.
Changes
The first program was in fiscal year 1995, and the following 13 countries were ineligible from the start: Canada, China (mainland), Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam. Since then, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Peru have been added to the ineligible list and are currently on it, Taiwan has been removed from it, and Ecuador, Guatemala, Poland and Russia have been on it at times, reflecting the changing levels of immigration from these countries.
Critics have called for ending the program citing fraud and the random nature of the lottery.[33][34] Others have noted the risk of terrorism, citing a 2002 terror attack by an Egyptian immigrant who maintained residency in United States through his wife’s Diversity Visa.[22][35][36] Following a 2017 terrorist attack by another Diversity Visa recipient, President Donald Trump, who had earlier called for a return to a “merit-based” immigration system,[37][38] called for an end to the program.[39][40]
Fraud
There is no charge to enter the Diversity Visa lottery, and the only way to do so is by completing and sending the electronic form available at the U.S. Department of State’s website during the registration period. However, there are numerous companies and websites that charge a fee in order to complete the form for the applicant. The Department of State and the Federal Trade Commission have warned that some of these businesses falsely claim to increase someone’s chances of winning the lottery, or that they are affiliated with the U.S. government.[41]
There have also been numerous cases of fraudulent emails and letters which falsely claim to have been sent by the Department of State and that the recipient has been granted a Permanent Resident Card. These messages prompt the recipients to transfer a “visa processing fee” as a prerequisite for obtaining a “guaranteed” green card. The messages are sometimes sent to people who never participated in the lottery and can look trustworthy as they contain the recipient’s exact name and contact details and what appears to be a legal notice.
The Department of State has issued a warning against the scammers. It notes that any email claiming the recipient to be a winner of the lottery is fake because the Department has never notified and will not notify winners by email. The Department has urged recipients of such messages to notify the Internet Crime Complaint Center about the scam.[42] The office of inspector general identified multiple problems with DV lottery in several countries, including Ukraine, Ghana, Albania in embassy inspection reports.[43][44][45] According to testimony from Stephen A. Edson before the House Judiciary Committee, “in Bangladesh, for example, one agent is reported to have enrolled an entire phone book so that he could then either extort money from winning applicants who had never entered the program to begin with or sell their winning slots to others.”[46]
Story 2: Trump Expected To Name Jerome Powell As Next Federal Reserve Chairman Replacing Chair Janet Yellen — A Dove or Continuation of Interventionist Easy Monetary Policy — Better Choice Was John Taylor — Taylor For Fed Chair and Powell for Vice Chair — Videos
Bill Gross on Fed Chair Candidates, Bonds, U.S. Deficit
Bill Gross on the Future of Asset Management and the Fed
Who is Jerome Powell?
Trump leaning toward Jerome Powell for Fed Chair: sources
The Economic Club of New York Event – Jerome Powell
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Powell Is a Force at the Federal Reserve, Says Wallace
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President Donald Trump on tech regulations, the Federal Reserve, NAFTA, the outlook for U.S. economic growth and defense spending.
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Published on Aug 1, 2016
July 28 — Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman and founder of Greenspan Associates, discusses nervousness over bond prices and moving into currencies to counter negative interest rates, as well as dealing with uncertainties in the global economy. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Alix Steel on “Bloomberg ‹GO›.”
Greenspan: You Can’t Fix U.S. Economy Until You Fix Entitlements
Published on Dec 14, 2016
Dec.13 — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan discusses his outlook for productivity and U.S. economic growth. He speaks with Bloomberg’s David Westin.
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Published on Oct 17, 2017
Oct.17 — David Riley, head of credit strategy at Bluebay Asset Management, and Ed Perks, chief investment officer at Franklin Templeton Multi-Asset Solutions, examine what John Taylor would offer as Federal Reserve Chairman. They speak on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas.”
Interview with Professor John Taylor
The Fed Should Raise Rates to Help the Economy – John Taylor
Published on Nov 13, 2015
The Federal Reserve should return to conventional monetary policy as soon as possible as higher interest rates would be beneficial to the U.S. economy, said noted economist John Taylor of Stanford University. Taylor spoke with TheStreet during a conference called ‘Rethinking Monetary Policy,’ which was held at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. Thursday. ‘To me the rethinking in some sense is going back and seeing why things worked well when they did in the ‘80s and ’90s until this period,’ said Taylor. ‘Rethinking means adapting some of the things that we forgot.’ Taylor argues that unconventional Fed policy, which was enacted in response to the financial crisis, has in some ways been detrimental. ‘The world has suffered in a way from being off track, from these very unusual policies. And so fixing that, getting back to where I think the Fed wants to go, would be an improvement,’ explained Taylor. ‘Just globally speaking, it’s not been a very successful decade,’ he added. Taylor argues for a rules-based policy system for Central Banks, saying it would lead to less volatility in policy making. TheStreet’s Rhonda Schaffler reports.
John B. Taylor’s Keynote Address: Monetary Rules for a Post-Crisis World
Monetary Policy Based on the Taylor Rule
Debate on the “Neutral” Interest Rate: Opening Presentations
Debate on the “Neutral” Interest Rate: John Taylor’s Take
Debate on the “Neutral” Interest Rate: Audience Q&A
A Powell, Taylor Fed Hawkish to Markets, Says Zentner
5 Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity: John B. Taylor
In his new book, First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity, Stanford University professor of economics John B. Taylor, details the not-so-secret ingredients to rebuilding American’s economic future: predictable policy, rule of law, strong incentives, reliance on markets, and a clearly limited role for government. “America can be great again, economically speaking,” Taylor explains, “it’s just more recently where we’ve gone off track.” Taylor sat down with Reason Magazine Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward to discuss his book, the principles that underlie America’s economic supremacy and what’s gone wrong over the past decade. Taylor is the Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Shultz Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He was Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs from 2001 to 2005. His previous books include Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis.
John B. Taylor “How Government Interventions Caused the Financial Crisis.”
Author John B. Taylor discusses his book “Getting Off Track — How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis,” with Reason.tv’s Michael C. Moynihan.
Is the Fed Making the Crisis Worse? – John B. Taylor
Uncommon Knowledge with John B. Taylor
Economist Lee Says Taylor Can Be One of Best Fed Chairs
The Fed Should Raise Rates to Help the Economy – John Taylor
Trump to Tap Jerome Powell as Next Fed Chairman
The president is expected to announce his decision Thursday
Federal Reserve governor Jerome Powell spoke in Washington on Oct. 3. He has been on the board of governors since 2012.PHOTO:JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS
By Kate Davidson, Peter Nicholas and David Harrison
WASHINGTON—The White House has notified Federal Reserve governor Jerome Powell that President Donald Trump intends to nominate him as the next chairman of the central bank, according to a person familiar with the matter, a move likely to combine continuity on interest-rate policy with perhaps a lighter touch on financial regulation.
If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Powell would succeed Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, the central bank’s first female leader, whose four-year term as Fed chief expires in early February.
In his five years at the Fed, Mr. Powell has been a reliable ally of Ms. Yellen and would likely continue the Fed’s current cautious approach to reversing the central bank’s crisis-era stimulus policies as the economy expands.
That would mean gradually raising short-term interest rates in quarter-percentage-point steps through 2020 while slowly shrinking the Fed’s $4.2 trillion portfolio of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities it purchased to lower long-term rates.
Mr. Powell’s nomination would mark the first time in nearly four decades that a new president hasn’t asked the serving Fed leader to stay on for another term, even though that person was nominated by a president of a different party. The last time a first-term president didn’t do that was in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter chose G. William Miller to succeed Arthur Burns.
The president spoke with Mr. Powell on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter who couldn’t describe what they discussed.
Mr. Trump had settled on Mr. Powell by Saturday, but people familiar with the process had cautioned that he could change his mind. The president plans to formally announce the decision Thursday before he leaves for a trip to Asia on Friday.
Reached by phone Wednesday, both Mr. Powell and Ms. Yellen declined to comment. A Fed spokeswoman also declined to comment.
Ms. Yellen was one of five finalists for the position, along with Stanford University economics professor John Taylor, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn.
Mr. Taylor and Mr. Warsh didn’t respond to requests seeking comment Wednesday. Mr. Cohn’s spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump said in a video last week that he had “somebody very specific in mind” for the job. “It will be a person who hopefully will do a fantastic job,” Mr. Trump said in a video posted to Instagram, adding, “I think everybody will be very impressed.”
Fed officials began raising their benchmark federal-funds rate in December 2015 after holding it near zero for seven years following the financial crisis. They voted in June to lift rates to a range between 1% and 1.25% and in October started the process of slowly shrinking the Fed’s bond portfolio.
“The economy is as close to our assigned goals as it has been for many years,” Mr. Powell said in June. If it continues growing as expected, “I would view it as appropriate to continue to gradually raise rates.”
Officials have penciled in one more rate increase this year. But they indicated in September such increases are likely to end at a lower point than they had previously projected—at a longer-run level of around 2.75%—considerably lower than where officials have stopped raising rates in the past.
The Fed on Wednesday left short-term interest rates unchanged, but signaled it would consider lifting them before year’s end amid signs the economy is gaining momentum.
Mr. Powell has never dissented on a Fed monetary or regulatory policy vote and in speeches hasn’t deviated far from the board’s consensus.
Where he could lead a shift is on regulatory policy. He has advocated loosening some of the financial rules adopted by the Fed and other agencies since the crisis, a position that meshes with Mr. Trump’s deregulatory agenda. Mr. Powell has suggested softening the Volcker rule barring banks from using their own money to make risky bets and easing some bank stress tests.
He also has endorsed reviewing some of the supervisory duties imposed on banks’ boards of directors to prevent them from being burdened with “an ever-increasing checklist.”
A look at various Fed regimes, and how they used interest rates to manage inflation, growth and the economy
*Seasonally adjusted †Change from a year earlier in the price index for personal-consumption expenditures
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
“To some extent he offers Trump the best of both worlds. You get broadly speaking continuity of Yellen’s careful and relatively dovish approach to monetary policy but with somebody who is a card-carrying Republican and who is significantly more inclined to revisit some of the postcrisis regulations,” said Krishna Guha, vice chairman at Evercore ISI and a former New York Fed official.
Karen Petrou, managing partner of the financial-services consulting firm Federal Financial Analytics, said Mr. Powell’s recent remarks on regulation “were certainly much more flexible than [Ms. Yellen] has been.”
Mr. Powell, a lawyer, would be the first Fed leader in three decades without a Ph.D. in economics. Before joining the Fed board, Mr. Powell worked as an investment banker in New York City, as Treasury undersecretary for financial institutions in the George H.W. Bush administration, as a partner at the Carlyle Group and as a scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
That background could serve him well, said Aaron Klein, an economic studies fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of the Center on Regulation and Markets.
“The Federal Reserve’s mandate has grown significantly since the financial crisis,” he said. “With a broader mandate, one should expect broader and more diverse backgrounds of potential good fits for a chair.”
“He would represent continuity of the Fed system and culture but a break from the predominance of monetary policy as the core background of the chair,” Mr. Klein said.
The decision marks the culmination of an unusually public and drawn-out search for one of the top economic policy-making jobs in the world.
Mr. Trump upended the usually staid selection process by openly weighing the pros and cons of various candidates and asking lawmakers, businesspeople and media personalities for their input.
Mr. Trump polled GOP senators last month on their preferred choice at a lunch on Capitol Hill, and said he was still considering “two, and maybe three” people for the job.
Mr. Trump has other opportunities to reshape the central bank. Randal Quarles, his first nominee to the Fed’s powerful seven-member board of governors, took office in October. Three other seats remain open.
Ms. Yellen’s term as a Fed governor doesn’t expire until 2024, and she hasn’t ruled out staying on in that position after her term as chairwoman ends. The decision would be unusual, but not unprecedented. Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles remained a governor for three years after not being reappointed to the top job by President Harry Truman.
Nominations for all board positions, including chairman and vice chairman, are subject to Senate confirmation.
Mr. Powell should have little trouble winning Senate approval, but his views could clash with those of some Republican senators who have criticized him for supporting the Fed’s easy-money and postcrisis regulatory policies.
He won confirmation to the Fed with bipartisan support in the Senate twice before: to fill an unfinished governor’s term in 2012 and for a full term in 2014. Some Republicans have suggested he could face difficult questions from his own side of the aisle. “I think we should move in a different direction,” from current Fed policies, Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) said last month about the possibility of a Powell nomination.
In economics, a Taylor rule is a reduced form approximation of the responsiveness of the nominal interest rate, as set by the central bank, to changes in inflation, output, or other economic conditions. In particular, the rule describes how, for each one-percent increase in inflation, the central bank tends to raise the nominal interest rate by more than one percentage point. This aspect of the rule is often called the Taylor principle. Although such rules may serve as concise, descriptive proxies for central bank policy, and are not explicitly proscriptively considered by central banks when setting nominal rates.
The rule was first proposed by John B. Taylor,[1] and simultaneously by Dale W. Henderson and Warwick McKibbin in 1993.[2] It is intended to foster price stability by systematically reducing uncertainty and increasing the credibility of future actions by the central bank. It may also avoid the inefficiencies of time inconsistency from the exercise of discretionary policy.[3] The Taylor rule synthesized, and provided a compromise between, competing schools of economics thought in a language devoid of rhetorical passion.[4] Although many issues remain unresolved and views still differ about how the Taylor rule can best be applied in practice, research shows that the rule has advanced the practice of central banking.[5]
As an equation
According to Taylor’s original version of the rule, the nominal interest rate should respond to divergences of actual inflation rates from target inflation rates and of actual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from potential GDP:
In this equation, {\displaystyle \,i_{t}\,} is the target short-term nominal interest rate (e.g. the federal funds rate in the US, the Bank of England base rate in the UK), {\displaystyle \,\pi _{t}\,} is the rate of inflation as measured by the GDP deflator, {\displaystyle \pi _{t}^{*}} is the desired rate of inflation, {\displaystyle r_{t}^{*}} is the assumed equilibrium real interest rate, {\displaystyle \,y_{t}\,} is the logarithm of real GDP, and {\displaystyle {\bar {y}}_{t}} is the logarithm of potential output, as determined by a linear trend.
In this equation, both {\displaystyle a_{\pi }} and {\displaystyle a_{y}} should be positive (as a rough rule of thumb, Taylor’s 1993 paper proposed setting {\displaystyle a_{\pi }=a_{y}=0.5}).[6] That is, the rule “recommends” a relatively high interest rate (a “tight” monetary policy) when inflation is above its target or when output is above its full-employment level, in order to reduce inflationary pressure. It recommends a relatively low interest rate (“easy” monetary policy) in the opposite situation, to stimulate output. Sometimes monetary policy goals may conflict, as in the case of stagflation, when inflation is above its target while output is below full employment. In such a situation, a Taylor rule specifies the relative weights given to reducing inflation versus increasing output.
The Taylor principle
By specifying {\displaystyle a_{\pi }>0}, the Taylor rule says that an increase in inflation by one percentage point should prompt the central bank to raise the nominal interest rate by more than one percentage point (specifically, by {\displaystyle 1+a_{\pi }}, the sum of the two coefficients on {\displaystyle \pi _{t}} in the equation above). Since the real interest rate is (approximately) the nominal interest rate minus inflation, stipulating {\displaystyle a_{\pi }>0} implies that when inflation rises, the real interest rate should be increased. The idea that the real interest rate should be raised to cool the economy when inflation increases (requiring the nominal interest rate to increase more than inflation does) has sometimes been called the Taylor principle.[7]
Alternative versions of the rule
Effective federal funds rate and prescriptions from alternate versions of the Taylor Rule
While the Taylor principle has proved very influential, there is more debate about the other terms that should enter into the rule. According to some simple New Keynesian macroeconomic models, insofar as the central bank keeps inflation stable, the degree of fluctuation in output will be optimized (Blanchard and Gali call this property the ‘divine coincidence‘). In this case, the central bank does not need to take fluctuations in the output gap into account when setting interest rates (that is, it may optimally set {\displaystyle a_{y}=0}.) On the other hand, other economists have proposed including additional terms in the Taylor rule to take into account financial conditions: for example, the interest rate might be raised when stock prices, housing prices, or interest rate spreads increase.
• Taylor Rule 1993 – the original definition by John Taylor with {\displaystyle a_{\pi }=a_{y}=0.5}
• Taylor Rule 1999 – adapted and updated by John Taylor in a new research paper: {\displaystyle a_{\pi }=0.5,a_{y}\geq 0}
Empirical relevance
Although the Federal Reserve does not explicitly follow the Taylor rule, many analysts have argued that the rule provides a fairly accurate summary of US monetary policy under Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan.[8][9] Similar observations have been made about central banks in other developed economies, both in countries like Canada and New Zealand that have officially adopted inflation targeting rules, and in others like Germany where the Bundesbank‘s policy did not officially target the inflation rate.[10][11] This observation has been cited by Clarida, Galí, and Gertler as a reason why inflation had remained under control and the economy had been relatively stable (the so-called ‘Great Moderation‘) in most developed countries from the 1980s through the 2000s.[8] However, according to Taylor, the rule was not followed in part of the 2000s, possibly leading to the housing bubble.[12][13] Certain research has determined that some households form their expectations about the future path of interest rates, inflation, and unemployment in a way that is consistent with Taylor-type rules.[14]
Criticisms
Athanasios Orphanides (2003) claims that the Taylor rule can misguide policy makers since they face real-time data. He shows that the Taylor rule matches the US funds rate less perfectly when accounting for these informational limitations and that an activist policy following the Taylor rule would have resulted in an inferior macroeconomic performance during the Great Inflation of the seventies.[15]
In 2015, financial manager Bill Gross said the Taylor rule “must now be discarded into the trash bin of history”, in light of tepid GDP growth in the years after 2009.[16] Gross believed low interest rates were not the cure for decreased growth, but the source of the problem.
Jump up^Henderson, D. W.; McKibbin, W. (1993). “A Comparison of Some Basic Monetary Policy Regimes for Open Economies: Implications of Different Degrees of Instrument Adjustment and Wage Persistence”. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy. 39: 221–318. doi:10.1016/0167-2231(93)90011-K.
Jump up^Taylor, John (2012). First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Economic Prosperity. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. p. 126
Jump up^Kahn, George A.; Asso, Pier Francesco; Leeson, Robert (2007). “The Taylor Rule and the Transformation of Monetary Policy”. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Working Paper 07-11. SSRN1088466.
Jump up^Asso, Pier Francesco; Kahn, George A.; Leeson, Robert (2010). “The Taylor Rule and the Practice of Central Banking”. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Working Paper 10-05. SSRN1553978.
Jump up^Taylor, John B. (2009). Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis. Hoover Institution Press. ISBN0-8179-4971-2.
Jump up^Carvalho, Carlos; Nechio, Fernanda (2013). “Do People Understand Monetary Policy?”. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2012-01. SSRN1984321.
Yields on inflation-indexed government bonds of selected countries and maturities.
The real interest rate is the rate of interest an investor, saver or lender receives (or expects to receive) after allowing for inflation. It can be described more formally by the Fisher equation, which states that the real interest rate is approximately the nominal interest rate minus the inflation rate.
If, for example, an investor were able to lock in a 5% interest rate for the coming year and anticipated a 2% rise in prices, they would expect to earn a real interest rate of 3%.[1] The expected real interest rate is not a single number, as different investors have different expectations of future inflation. Since the inflation rate over the course of a loan is not known initially, volatility in inflation represents a risk to both the lender and the borrower.
In the case of contracts stated in terms of the nominal interest rate, the real interest rate is known only at the end of the period of the loan, based on the realized inflation rate; this is called the ex-post real interest rate. Since the introduction of inflation-indexed bonds, ex-ante real interest rates have become observable.[2]
Risks
In economics and finance, an individual who lends money for repayment at a later point in time expects to be compensated for the time value of money, or not having the use of that money while it is lent. In addition, they will want to be compensated for the risks of having less purchasing power when the loan is repaid. These risks are systematic risks, regulatory risks and inflation risks. The first includes the possibility that the borrower will default or be unable to pay on the originally agreed upon terms, or that collateral backing the loan will prove to be less valuable than estimated. The second includes taxation and changes in the law which would prevent the lender from collecting on a loan or having to pay more in taxes on the amount repaid than originally estimated. The third takes into account that the money repaid may not have as much buying power from the perspective of the lender as the money originally lent, that is inflation, and may include fluctuations in the value of the currencies involved.
Nominal interest rates include all three risk factors, plus the time value of the money itself.
Real interest rates include only the systematic and regulatory risks and are meant to measure the time value of money.
The “real interest rate” in an economy is often considered to be the rate of return on a risk free investment, such as US Treasury notes, minus an index of inflation, such as the rate of change of the CPI or GDP deflator.
Fisher equation
The relation between real and nominal interest rates and the expected inflation rate is given by the Fisher equation
For example, if somebody lends $1000 for a year at 10%, and receives $1100 back at the end of the year, this represents a 10% increase in her purchasing power if prices for the average goods and services that she buys are unchanged from what they were at the beginning of the year. However, if the prices of the food, clothing, housing, and other things that she wishes to purchase have increased 25% over this period, she has in fact suffered a real loss of about 15% in her purchasing power. (Notice that the approximation here is a bit rough; since 1.1/1.25 = 0.88 = 1 – 0.12, the actual loss of purchasing power is exactly 12%.
Variations in inflation
The inflation rate will not be known in advance. People often base their expectation of future inflation on an average of inflation rates in the past, but this gives rise to errors. The real interest rate ex-post may turn out to be quite different from the real interest rate (ex-ante real interest rate) that was expected in advance. Borrowers hope to repay in cheaper money in the future, while lenders hope to collect on more expensive money. When inflation and currency risks are underestimated by lenders, then they will suffer a net reduction in buying power.
The complexity increases for bonds issued for a long term, where the average inflation rate over the term of the loan may be subject to a great deal of uncertainty. In response to this, many governments have issued real return bonds, also known as inflation-indexed bonds, in which the principal value and coupon rises each year with the rate of inflation, with the result that the interest rate on the bond approximates a real interest rate. (E.g., the three-month indexation lag of TIPS can result in a divergence of as much as 0.042% from the real interest rate, according to research by Grishchenko and Huang.[3]) In the US, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) are issued by the US Treasury.
The expected real interest rate can vary considerably from year to year. The real interest rate on short term loans is strongly influenced by the monetary policy of central banks. The real interest rate on longer term bonds tends to be more market driven, and in recent decades, with globalized financial markets, the real interest rates in the industrialized countries have become increasingly correlated. Real interest rates have been low by historical standards since 2000, due to a combination of factors, including relatively weak demand for loans by corporations, plus strong savings in newly industrializing countries in Asia. The latter has offset the large borrowing demands by the US Federal Government, which might otherwise have put more upward pressure on real interest rates.
Related is the concept of “risk return”, which is the rate of return minus the risks as measured against the safest (least-risky) investment available. Thus if a loan is made at 15% with an inflation rate of 5% and 10% in risks associated with default or problems repaying, then the “risk adjusted” rate of return on the investment is 0%.
Importance in economic theory
Effective federal funds rate and prescriptions from alternate versions of the Taylor Rule
The amount of physical investment—in particular the purchasing of new machines and other productive capacity—that firms engage in depends on the level of real interest rates, because such purchases typically must be financed by issuing new bonds. If real interest rates are high, the cost of borrowing may exceed the real physical return of some potentially purchased machines (in the form of output produced); in that case those machines will not be purchased. Lower real interest rates would make it profitable to borrow to finance the purchasing of a greater number of machines.
The real interest rate is used in various economic theories to explain such phenomena as the capital flight, business cycle and economic bubbles. When the real rate of interest is high, that is, demand for credit is high, then money will, all other things being equal, move from consumption to savings. Conversely, when the real rate of interest is low, demand will move from savings to investment and consumption. Different economic theories, beginning with the work of Knut Wicksell have had different explanations of the effect of rising and falling real interest rates. Thus, international capital moves to markets that offer higher real rates of interest from markets that offer low or negative real rates of interest triggering speculation in equities, estates and exchange rates.
Real federal funds rate
In setting monetary policy, the U.S. Federal Reserve (and other central banks) establish an interest rate at which they lend to banks. This is the federal funds rate. By setting this rate low, they can encourage borrowing and thus economic activity; or the reverse by raising the rate. Like any interest rate, there are a nominal and a real value defined as described above. Further, there is a concept called the “equilibrium real federal funds rate” (r*), alternatively called the “natural rate of interest” or the “neutral real rate”, which is the “level of the real federal funds rate, if allowed to prevail for several years, [that] would place economic activity at its potential and keep inflation low and stable.” There are various methods used to estimate this amount, using tools such as the Taylor Rule. It is possible for this rate to be negative.[4]
If there is a negative real interest rate, it means that the inflation rate is greater than the nominal interest rate. If the Federal funds rate is 2% and the inflation rate is 10%, then the borrower would gain 7.27% of every dollar borrowed per year.
{\displaystyle {\frac {1+0.02}{1+0.1}}-1=-0.0727}
Negative real interest rates are an important factor in government fiscal policy. Since 2010, the U.S. Treasury has been obtaining negative real interest rates on government debt, meaning the inflation rate is greater than the interest rate paid on the debt.[5] Such low rates, outpaced by the inflation rate, occur when the market believes that there are no alternatives with sufficiently low risk, or when popular institutional investments such as insurance companies, pensions, or bond, money market, and balanced mutual funds are required or choose to invest sufficiently large sums in Treasury securities to hedge against risk.[6][7]Lawrence Summers stated that at such low rates, government debt borrowing saves taxpayer money, and improves creditworthiness.[8][9] In the late 1940s through the early 1970s, the US and UK both reduced their debt burden by about 30% to 40% of GDP per decade by taking advantage of negative real interest rates, but there is no guarantee that government debt rates will continue to stay so low.[6][10] Between 1946 and 1974, the US debt-to-GDP ratio fell from 121% to 32% even though there were surpluses in only eight of those years which were much smaller than the deficits.[11]
Jump up^Grishchenko, Olesya V.; Jing-zhi Huang (June 2012). “Inflation Risk Premium: Evidence from the TIPS Market” (PDF). Finance and Economics Discussion Series. Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C. Retrieved 26 May 2013.
Born in Yonkers, New York, he graduated from Shady Side Academy[3] and earned his A.B. from Princeton University in 1968 and Ph.D. from Stanford in 1973, both in economics. He taught at Columbia University from 1973–1980 and the Woodrow Wilson School and Economics Department of Princeton University from 1980–1984 before returning to Stanford. He has received several teaching prizes and teaches Stanford’s introductory economics course as well as Ph.D. courses in monetary economics.[4]
In research published in 1979 and 1980 he developed a model of price and wage setting—called the staggered contract model—which served as an underpinning of a new class of empirical models with rational expectations and sticky prices—sometimes called new Keynesian models.[5][6] In a 1993 paper he proposed the Taylor rule,[7] intended as a recommendation about how nominal interest rates should be determined, which then became a rough summary of how central banks actually do set them. He has been active in public policy, serving as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs during the first term of the George W. Bush Administration. His book Global Financial Warriors chronicles this period.[8] He was a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors during the George H. W. Bush Administration and Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisors during the Ford and Carter Administrations.
Taylor’s research—including the staggered contract model, the Taylor rule, and the construction of a policy tradeoff (Taylor) curve[10] employing empirical rational expectations models[11]—has had a major impact on economic theory and policy.[12] Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said that Taylor’s “influence on monetary theory and policy has been profound,”[13] and Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has noted that Taylor’s work “has affected the way policymakers and economists analyze the economy and approach monetary policy.”[14]
Taylor contributed to the development of mathematical methods for solving macroeconomic models under the assumption of rational expectations, including in a 1975 Journal of Political Economy paper, in which he showed how gradual learning could be incorporated in models with rational expectations;[15] a 1979 Econometrica paper in which he presented one of the first econometric models with overlapping price setting and rational expectations,[16] which he later expanded into a large multicountry model in a 1993 book Macroeconomic Policy in a World Economy,[11] and a 1983 Econometrica paper,[17] in which he developed with Ray Fair the first algorithm to solve large-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models which became part of popular solution programs such as Dynare and EViews.[18]
In 1977, Taylor and Edmund Phelps, simultaneously with Stanley Fischer, showed that monetary policy is useful for stabilizing the economy if prices or wages are sticky, even when all workers and firms have rational expectations.[19] This demonstrated that some of the earlier insights of Keynesian economics remained true under rational expectations. This was important because Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace had argued that rational expectations would make macroeconomic policy useless for stabilization;[20] the results of Taylor, Phelps, and Fischer showed that Sargent and Wallace’s crucial assumption was not rational expectations, but perfectly flexible prices.[21] These research projects together could considerably deepen our understanding of the limits of the policy-ineffectiveness proposition.[22]
Taylor’s research on monetary policy rules traces back to his undergraduate studies at Princeton.[25][26] He went on in the 1970s and 1980s to explore what types of monetary policy rules would most effectively reduce the social costs of inflation and business cycle fluctuations: should central banks try to control the money supply, the price level, or the interest rate; and should these instruments react to changes in output, unemployment, asset prices, or inflation rates? He showed[27] that there was a tradeoff—later called the Taylor curve[28]—between the volatility of inflation and that of output. Taylor’s 1993 paper in the Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy proposed that a simple and effective central bank policy would manipulate short-term interest rates, raising rates to cool the economy whenever inflation or output growth becomes excessive, and lowering rates when either one falls too low.[7] Taylor’s interest rate equation has come to be known as the Taylor rule, and it is now widely accepted as an effective formula for monetary decision making.[29]
A key stipulation of the Taylor rule, sometimes called the Taylor principle,[30] is that the nominal interest rate should increase by more than one percentage point for each one-percent rise in inflation. Some empirical estimates indicate that many central banks today act approximately as the Taylor rule prescribes, but violated the Taylor principle during the inflationary spiral of the 1970s.[31]
Recent research
Taylor’s recent research has been on the financial crisis that began in 2007 and the world economic recession. He finds that the crisis was primarily caused by flawed macroeconomic policies from the U.S. government and other governments. Particularly, he focuses on the Federal Reserve which, under Alan Greenspan, a personal friend of Taylor, created “monetary excesses” in which interest rates were kept too low for too long, which then directly led to the housing boom in his opinion.[32] He also believes that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae spurred on the boom and that the crisis was misdiagnosed as a liquidity rather than a credit risk problem.[33] He wrote that, “government actions and interventions, not any inherent failure or instability of the private economy, caused, prolonged, and worsen the crisis.”[34]
Taylor’s research has also examined the impact of fiscal policy in the recent recession. In November 2008, writing for The Wall Street Journal opinion section, he recommended four measures to fight the economic downturn: (a) permanently keeping all income tax ratesthe same, (b) permanently creating a worker’s tax credit equal to 6.2 percent of wages up to $8,000, (c) incorporating “automatic stabilizers” as part of overall fiscal plans, and (d) enacting a short-term stimulus plan that also meets long term objectives against waste and inefficiency. He stated that merely temporary tax cuts would not serve as a good policy tool.[35] His research[36] with John Cogan, Tobias Cwik, and Volcker Wieland showed that the multiplier is much smaller in new Keynesian than in old Keynesian models, a result that was confirmed by researchers at central banks.[37] He evaluated the 2008 and 2009 stimulus packages and argued that they were not effective in stimulating the economy.[38]
In a June 2011 interview on Bloomberg Television, Taylor stressed the importance of long term fiscal reform that sets the U.S. federal budget on a path towards being balanced. He cautioned that the Fed should move away from quantitative easing measures and keep to a more static, stable monetary policy. He also criticized fellow economist Paul Krugman‘s advocacy of additional stimulus programs from Congress, which Taylor said will not help in the long run.[39] In his 2012 book First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity, he endeavors to explain why these reforms are part of a broader set of principles of economic freedom.
Reprinted in Taylor, John B. (1991), “Staggered wage setting in a macro model”, in Mankiw, N. Gregory; Romer, David, New Keynesian economics, volume 1, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 233–42, ISBN9780262631334.
Taylor, John B. (1986), ‘New econometric approaches to stabilization policy in stochastic models of macroeconomic fluctuations’. Ch. 34 of Handbook of Econometrics, vol. 3, Z. Griliches and M.D. Intriligator, eds. Elsevier Science Publishers.
Taylor, John B. (1999), “An historical analysis of monetary policy rules”, in Taylor, John B., Monetary policy rules, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN9780226791265.
Taylor, John B. (2007). Global financial warriors: the untold story of international finance in the post-9/11 world. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN9780393064483.
Taylor, John B. (2008), “Housing and monetary policy”, in Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Housing, housing finance, and monetary policy: a symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 30-September 1, 2007, Kansas City, Missouri: Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pp. 463–76, OCLC170267547
Taylor, John B. (2009), “The financial crisis and the policy response: an empirical analysis of what went wrong”, in Bank of Canada Staff, Festschrift in honour of David Dodge’s contributions to Canadian public policy: proceedings of a conference held by the Bank of Canada, November, 2008, Ottawa: Bank of Canada, pp. 1–18, ISBN9780660199276.
Taylor, John B. (2009). Getting off track: how government actions and interventions caused, prolonged, and worsened the financial crisis. Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press. ISBN9780817949716.
Taylor, John B.; Shultz, George P.; Scott, Kenneth, eds. (2009). Ending government bailouts as we know them. Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press. ISBN9780817911287.
Reprinted in Taylor, John B. (1991), “Staggered wage setting in a macro model”, in Mankiw, N. Gregory; Romer, David, New Keynesian economics, volume 1, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 233–242, ISBN9780262631334.
Jump up^Taylor, John B. (2007). Global financial warriors: the untold story of international finance in the post-9/11 world. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN9780393064483.
Reprinted in Taylor, John B. (1981), “Estimation and control of a macroeconomic model with rational expectations”, in Lucas, Jr., Robert E.; Sargent, Thomas J., Rational expectations and econometric practice, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ISBN9780816610983.
^ Jump up to:abTaylor, John B. (1993). Macroeconomic policy in a world economy: from econometric design to practical operation. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN9780393963168.
Jump up^Ben Bernanke refers to the “three concepts named after John that are central to understanding our macroeconomic experience of the past three decades—the Taylor curve, the Taylor rule, and the Taylor principle.” in “Opening Remarks,” Conference on John Taylor’s Contributions to Monetary Theory and Policy
Jump up^Judd, Kenneth; Kubler, Felix; Schmedders, Karl (2003), “Computational methods for dynamic equilibria with heterogeneous agents”, in Dewatripont, Mathias; Hansen, Lars Peter; Turnovsky, Stephen J., Advances in economics and econometrics theory and applications (volume 3), Cambridge, U.K. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 247, ISBN9781280163388 and “Eviews Users Guide II.”
Jump up^Blanchard, Olivier (2000), “Epliogue”, in Blanchard, Olivier, Macroeconomics (2nd ed.), Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, p. 543, ISBN9780130557872.
Jump up^King, Robert G.; Wolman, Alexander (1999), “What should the monetary authority do when prices are sticky?”, in Taylor, John B., Monetary policy rules, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN9780226791265.
Jump up^Taylor, John B. (1999), “Staggered price and wage setting in macroeconomics”, in Taylor, John B.; Woodford, Michael, Handbook of macroeconomics, Amsterdam New York: North-Holland Elsevier, pp. 1009–50, ISBN9780444501585.
Jump up^Taylor, John B. (April 1968). Fiscal and monetary stabilization policies in a model of endogenous cyclical growth (BA thesis). Princeton University.
Jump up^Taylor, John B. (2008), “Housing and monetary policy”, in Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Housing, housing finance, and monetary policy: a symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 30-September 1, 2007, Kansas City, Missouri: Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pp. 463–76, OCLC170267547
Jump up^Taylor, John B. (2009), “The financial crisis and the policy response: an empirical analysis of what went wrong (housing and monetary policy)”, in Bank of Canada Staff, Festschrift in honour of David Dodge’s contributions to Canadian public policy: proceedings of a conference held by the Bank of Canada, November, 2008, Ottawa: Bank of Canada, pp. 1–18, ISBN9780660199276.
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Story 1: Senator Mitch McConnell on Unfair Behind Closed Doors Single Party Impeachment Inquiry and Syria — Videos —
Senator Mitch McConnell: Democrats Are ‘Throwing Fairness And Precedent To The Wind’ | NBC News
Senate Needs to Make a Strong, Strategic Statement on Syria
Trump was ‘absolutely right’ to take troops out of Syria: Rand Paul
Democrats, Republicans unite on Trump’s decision on Syria
Senate Needs to Make a Strong, Strategic Statement on Syria
McConnell splits with Trump on Syria pullout
Mitch McConnell rebukes Donald Trump over Turkish invasion of Kurdish-held Syria, saying troop pullout gives Iran a chance to reach Israel’s doorstep and contending worthwhile intervention does NOT make the U.S. world’s policeman
By GEOFF EARLE, DEPUTY U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 17:14 EDT, 15 October 2019 | UPDATED: 17:14 EDT, 15 October 2019
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell directly confronted President Trump‘s complaint that U.S. troop deployment’s make it the ‘world’s policeman’ and expressed his ‘grave concern’ about Trump’s policy moves in Syria.
McConnell issued the rebuke without directly blaming President Trump for the latest calamity in the region – although he said Trump’s policy threatens to put Iran on Israel’s door-step and fuel a ‘humanitarian catastrophe.’
Following Turkey’s incursion into Syria in territory that had been controlled by U.S.-allied members of the Kurdish minority, McConnell warned that the ‘door is wide open for resurgence of the Islamic State.’
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took on President Trump’s contention that having forces remain in Syria was akin to being the ‘world’s policeman’
In a Senate floor speech, McConnell said the situation created a power vacuum that could fuel the meddling influence of Russia, and ‘leaving northeastern Syria wide open Iran to extend reach unimpeded all the way from tehran to the door step of our friends in Israel.
‘I want to make something clear, the United States has taken the fight to Syria and Afghanistan because that is where our enemies are, that’s why we’re there. Fighting terrorists, exercising leadership and troubled regions and advancing U.S. interests around the world does not make us an evil empire or the world’s policeman,’ McConnell said.
This picture taken on October 15, 2019 shows a missile fired by Turkish forces towards the Syrian town of Ras al-Ain, from the Turkish side of the border at Ceylanpinar district in Sanliurfa on the first week of Turkey’s military operation against Kurdish forces
McConnell shared his ‘grave concern’ about the situation in Syria
‘When it looked like President Trump would withdraw from Syria at beginning of the year, 70 senators joined in warning of the risk of precipitously withdrawing from Syria or Afghanistan,’ McConnell noted in his floor speech
McConnell had also warned of his ‘grave concern’ in a written statement Monday that did not mention Trump by name. But in his floor speech Tuesday, he included such a reference.
‘When it looked like President Trump would withdraw from Syria at beginning of the year, 70 senators joined in warning of the risk of precipitously withdrawing from Syria or Afghanistan,’ McConnell noted.
But even as he challenged the president on a policy that has resulted in the release of ISIS prisoners, led to attacks against key regional allies, and even led to shelling by Turkish forces toward a U.S. troop-held position, he defended the president on impeachment by attacking Democrats.
‘House Democrats are finally indulging in their impeachment obsession. Full steam ahead,’ McConnell warned. ‘I don’t think many of us were expecting to witness a clinic in terms of fairness or due process. But even by their own partisan standards, House Democrats have already found new ways to lower the bar,’ he complained.
McConnell has said he was required by Senate rules to hold a trial should the House impeach Trump.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7577029/Mitch-McConnell-rebukes-Donald-Trump-Turkish-invasion-Kurdish-held-Syria.html
Trump’s Syria Mess
He resorts to sanctions as the harm from withdrawal builds.
What a fiasco. Foreign-policy blunders often take months or years to reveal their damaging consequences, but the harm from President Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. forces from northern Syria is playing out almost in real time.
Critics said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would invade northern Syria despite Mr. Trump’s public warnings, and the Turkish strongman did. Critics said our Kurdish allies would strike a deal with Syria’s Bashar Assad to defend themselves, and the Kurds have. Critics said Islamic State prisoners held by the Kurds would be released and scatter to wage jihad again, and they are.
Mr. Trump now finds himself back in an economic and diplomatic brawl with Turkey that he said he wanted to avoid. Wouldn’t it have been easier simply to tell Mr. Erdogan, on that famous phone call two Sundays ago, that the U.S. wouldn’t tolerate a Turkish invasion against the Kurds and would use air power to stop it? Mr. Erdogan would have had to back down and continue negotiating a Syrian safe zone with the Kurds and the U.S.
Mr. Trump is also making matters worse with his unserious justifications. “After defeating 100% of the ISIS Caliphate, I largely moved our troops out of Syria. Let Syria and Assad protect the Kurds and fight Turkey for their own land,” he tweeted Monday. “Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte. I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away!”
We suppose the Napoleon line was a joke, but the world is laughing at an American President. Mr. Trump was able to project an image of strength in his early days as he prosecuted the war against ISIS and used force to impose a cost on Mr. Assad for using chemical weapons. But that image has faded as he has indulged his inner Rand Paul and claims at every opportunity that the main goal of his foreign policy is to put an end to “endless wars.”
This is simple-minded isolationism, and it’s a message to the world’s rogues that a U.S. President has little interest in engaging on behalf of American allies or interests. Friends like Israel and Saudi Arabia are quietly dismayed, while Iran, Russia and Hezbollah can’t believe Mr. Trump has so glibly abandoned U.S. commitments and military partners.
By now it’s not unreasonable to conclude that Mr. Trump’s foreign policy can be distilled into two tactics—sanctions and tariffs. Mr. Trump wields them willy-nilly against friend and foe alike as substitutes for diplomacy and the credible threat of military force.
Mr. Trump won’t like to hear it, but the Syrian mess is hurting him at home too. Republicans who have stood by him through the Russia fight and more are questioning his judgment as Commander in Chief in an increasingly dangerous world. With impeachment looming, he can’t afford to alienate more friends.
TRUMP’S CHAOTIC SYRIA EXIT PUTS ANTI-WAR 2020 DEMOCRATS IN A DELICATE SPOT
October 15 2019, 2:31 p.m.
THE PENTAGON announced on Monday that the U.S. was pulling all of its troops out of northeastern Syria at President Donald Trump’s direction, completing a withdrawal he had started by Twitter declaration a week earlier. The move further clears the way for a full-on invasion by Turkey, whose soldiers have already been accused of executing noncombatants. In the chaos, hundreds of Islamic State detainees have reportedly escaped.
Trump defended his decision in a series of early-morning tweets on Monday. “The same people who got us into the Middle East mess are the people who most want to stay there!” he wrote. “Never ending wars will end!”
Trump’s abandonment of eastern Syria and the U.S. military’s Kurdish allies has put progressive Democrats — many of whom also favor withdrawing from overseas military operations — in a delicate spot. Over the past week, they have been trying to thread the needle between condemning Trump for recklessly abandoning an ally and emphasizing that withdrawing U.S. troops should be an eventual policy goal.
Trump’s decision has showcased what a worst-case scenario for expedited military withdrawal could look like, making it harder for progressive Democratic presidential candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to press their cases against “endless wars” on the campaign trail. The question of how progressives can go about drawing down U.S. military commitments without repeating Trump’s calamitous actions would be an obvious pick for Tuesday night’s Democratic debate.
So far, the Democratic candidates have been critical of Trump but light on specifics about what they would do differently. Last week, Sanders condemned Trump’s withdrawal from Syria, telling reporters that “as somebody who does not want to see American troops bogged down in countries all over the world — you don’t turn your back on allies who have fought and died alongside American troops. You just don’t do that.” But when George Stephanopoulos asked Sunday morning on ABC for Sanders to explain the difference between his and Trump’s approaches, Sanders responded simply that Trump “lies. I don’t.”
Warren’s response was similarly vague. She tweeted that “Trump recklessly betrayed our Kurdish partners” and that “we should bring our troops home, but we need to do so in a way that respects our security.”
Trump Turned His Back on Syrian Kurds. Here’s How They View Their New Precarious Position.
Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California and co-chair of Sanders’s 2020 campaign, told The Intercept that progressives urgently need to make the case for a “doctrine of responsible withdrawal.”
“I don’t believe that withdrawal from a progressive perspective means a moral indifference to the lives of the places that we leave,” Khanna said in a phone interview. “It’s not an ‘America First’ approach that says our interests and our American lives are the only things that have moral worth. Rather, our withdrawal is based on an understanding of the limitations of American power to shape and restructure societies. It emphasizes the need for effective diplomacy and understands our moral obligations in these places.”
The U.S. should not have withdrawn troops without negotiating a deal that would have kept Turkey from invading Syria, backed by a threat to withhold future arms sales and economic assistance, Khanna told The Intercept. “We could have used all those points of leverage to get their commitment that they wouldn’t slaughter the Kurds.”
Another key difference between Trump’s approach and that of progressives is their level of trust for civil service expertise, Khanna said. “What this shows is that it’s not enough to have a president with certain instincts. Foreign policy requires great expertise. You need a progressive president who understands the importance of military restraint, but who also has the ability to put together an extraordinary foreign policy team to implement the goals that they may have.”
Far from admiring Trump’s approach to Syria, many anti-interventionists and foreign policy experts in D.C. view it as a blueprint for how not to withdraw from a conflict, according to Adam Wunische, a researcher with the Quincy Institute, a new pro-diplomacy, noninterventionist, and nonpartisan think tank.
“What we should have been doing from the very beginning is once we achieved the limited objective of destroying ISIS territory, they should have immediately begun contemplating what kind of peace or settlement could come afterwards,” Wunische told The Intercept. “To my knowledge, the U.S. is one of the only actors that can effectively talk to both the Turks and the Kurds. So they should have been trying to find an acceptable political arrangement for all the parties involved that doesn’t involve an endless, ill-defined military presence for the U.S.”
The Quincy Institute is working on a report outlining a possible plan for U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan that would avoid the type of disorder on display in northeastern Syria, Wunische said, though the timing of the report remains unclear.
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Throughout the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, a number of candidates have railed against “endless wars.” But in a conversation that has been defined by intricate domestic policy proposals and detailed outlines of how to structure a wealth tax, candidates have said little about the rest of the world and even less about how they would wind down overseas conflicts.
Sanders, for example, has called for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan “as expeditiously as possible.” Warren has said “it’s long past time to bring our troops home, and I would begin to do so immediately.” Joe Biden has said he would bring “American combat troops in Afghanistan home during my first term,” but left the door open for a “residual U.S. military presence” that would be “focused on counterterrorism operations.” When asked during a July debate whether he would withdraw from Afghanistan during the first year of his presidency, Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend mayor and Navy Reserve veteran who spent seven months in Afghanistan, answered emphatically in the affirmative.
But aside from seeking a diplomatic solution, candidates have said very little about their policies for ending the war. And as in Syria, stakes for U.S. allies in Afghanistan are high.
A January study by the Rand Corporation found that a “precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan” would have far-reaching consequences. The legitimacy for the U.S.-backed Kabul government would plummet, the report argued, and the Taliban would extend its control and influence. People all across the country would turn to regional militias and rival warlords for basic security.
“I don’t think that anyone, whether they promise it or not, is going to get out of Afghanistan in a week,” said Wuinsche. “What we need to focus on is, what is the political solution that we think is possible, and how do we get there? That requires marshaling all of these different tools of foreign policy, not just the military.”
Kate Kizer, policy director for the D.C.-based advocacy group Win Without War, stressed that one of the most revealing differences between progressives and Trump is how they would treat a conflict’s refugees. Under Trump, the U.S. has accepted historically low numbers of refugees and closed the door on future Syrian immigrants applying for Temporary Protected Status.
“One of the cruelest parts of Trump’s policy is the fact that, in addition to fueling more bloodshed with this decision, he’s also banning any types of civilians who would be fleeing from the conflict,” Kizer said. “In a situation like Syria and even Afghanistan, there’s a way to responsibly withdraw and then there’s a way to cut and run, which is what Trump has shown he has a predilection for. But I’m not sitting here saying that any type of military withdraw will necessarily be bloodless.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/15/syria-troop-withdrawal-trump-democrats/
Story 2: The Search of Leakers in Trump Administration — Videos
RUST NO ONE
Trump Suspects a Spiteful John Bolton Is Behind Some of the Ukraine Leaks
Trump fears the leaks are now coming from the people he chose to serve him—and that only increases the paranoia currently infecting the West Wing.
Asawin Suebsaeng
White House Reporter
Sam Stein
Politics Editor
Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast/Getty
At a critical juncture in his presidency, facing a rapidly unfolding impeachment inquiry by House Democrats, Donald Trump is feeling besieged by snitches.
In recent weeks, numerous leaks have appeared in the pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other major papers and news outlets detailing the president’s attempts to enlist foreign leaders to help dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and also aid Trump’s quest to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s concluded investigation. And as is his MO, the media-obsessed president has been fixated on not just the identity of the whistleblower behind the internal complaint that brought this scandal to the fore, but also on who, exactly, has been namelessly feeding intel to the press.
In the course of casual conversations with advisers and friends, President Trump has privately raised suspicions that a spiteful John Bolton, his notoriously hawkish former national security adviser, could be one of the sources behind the flood of leaks against him, three people familiar with the comments said. At one point, one of those sources recalled, Trump guessed that Bolton was behind one of the anonymous accounts that listed the former national security adviser as one of the top officials most disturbed by the Ukraine-related efforts of Trump and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney who remains at the center of activities that spurred the impeachment inquiry.
“[Trump] was clearly implying [it, saying] something to the effect of, ‘Oh, gee, I wonder who the source on that could be,’” this source said, referring to the president’s speculation. Bolton, for his part, told The Daily Beast last month that allegations that he was a leaker in Trump’s midst are “flatly incorrect.”
The former national security adviser—who departed the administration last month on awful, mutually bitter terms—is working on a book about his time serving Trump, and has “a lot to dish,” one knowledgeable source noted.
Neither Bolton nor White House spokespeople provided comment for this story. Matt Schlapp, an influential conservative activist with close ties to the White House, said his assumption was that the leaks were coming from “career folks inside who hate Trump” and that the president and his campaign had “14 months of this” to come. As for Bolton, Schlapp said, “He’s smarter than that, although he does aggressively defend himself.”
Indeed, Bolton’s name surfaced Monday before House impeachment inquiry committees, when Hill reportedly testified that he told her to alert the chief lawyer for the National Security Council that Giuliani was working with Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, on an operation with legal implications, the Times reported late Monday. “I am not part of whatever drug deal Rudy and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Bolton told Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to sources familiar with the testimony.
“I have not spoken to John about [his comments, as conveyed by Hill],” Giuliani told The Daily Beast on Tuesday morning. “John is a longtime friend. I have no idea why John is doing this. My best guess is that he’s confused and bought into a false media narrative without bothering to call me about it.”
Trump has felt under siege from within before, including at various flashpoints of his presidency. For instance, near the end of the Mueller probe, the president became so distrustful and resentful toward Don McGahn, his own White House counsel at the time, he started asking those close to him, “Is [Don] wearing a wire?”
But the current sense that he has been undermined by people whom he brought into his orbit has come at a critical juncture and colored some of the decisions he has made since the whistleblower complaint became public. The president has openly declared that the whistleblower committed an act of treason. He has attempted to stop prominent advisers—including Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, a man who donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration—from testifying to Congress, only to apparently fail. On Monday, Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top adviser on Russia and Europe, was on Capitol Hill, where she reportedly told lawmakers that Sondland and Giuliani circumventedthe standard national-security process on high-profile Ukraine matters. The president has struggled to add to his current legal team, and appeared to begin putting some distance between himself and Giuliani last week.
And when outside allies began to talk about constructing a war room to help with impeachment, Trump shot down the concept, in part out of a sense that he couldn’t rely on them to get the message out right. One top White House aide subsequently labeled the idea an exercise by “outside peeps trying to self-aggrandize.”
The impression left on Republicans is one of a president increasingly driven by paranoia and a desire for insularity—and not, necessarily, to his own benefit.
“There is a certain level of frustration that all the sudden the president says something, then Rudy does, and it is not always consistent. There is a frustration that not everybody knows what they should be doing. It is not that they can’t defend the president it is a frustration that they don’t know exactly how they are supposed to defend the president,” said John Brabender, a longtime GOP consultant. “From the president’s perspective, this whole thing is a witch hunt and is outrageous and, therefore, it shouldn’t even need explanation…But with that said, you can’t just be angry. You need a unified communications team.”
According to those who’ve known the president, the sense that a good chunk of the government has never fully accepted his presidency and has actively worked to undermine it has animated much of his activity over the past few weeks. And though they believe he has a point, they also wonder if it is making him functionally incapable of taking the advice of some advisers: to simply ignore impeachment and apply his attention to other facets of governance.
Trump, they add, is preternaturally incapable of ignoring press about him and lingers particularly on leaks that depict atmospherics of his inner sanctum, the West Wing, and his internal well-being.
“In my experience, what he despises is somebody writing that Donald Trump feels under siege and his emotions are this and his thinking is this,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide. “He hates people saying what he is thinking… And one of his most frequent tricks in terms of talking about himself on background [as an anonymous source] is him having the reporter say [he is] someone ‘familiar with the president’s thinking.’”
Nunberg said he had yet to see a blind quote in any recent report that would lead him to believe that Trump is cold-calling reporters. But the president is certainly working the fourth estate. Democratic aides were left shaking their heads last week when they received an email from the White House with the subject line, “Article from President Trump” and a PDF attachment of a Kimberly Strassel Wall Street Journal column.
“He’s apparently so anxious about GOP support in the Senate, he’s taken to sending WSJ columns against the House inquiry,” said a Senate source.
Still, for all of Trump’s grousing and preoccupation with who is and isn’t stabbing him in the back, loyalty has always been a one-way street for this president. Last week, after the news broke that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Soviet-born businessmen tied to Giuliani, were arrested on charges of violating campaign-finance law, a reporter at the White House asked Trump if the former New York mayor was still his personal attorney. The president responded that he didn’t know.
Though the president would later tweet out his support for Giuliani over the weekend, Trump has a long track record for being loyal to and supportive of a longtime associate, friend, or staffer—up until the moment he’s not. Perhaps the quintessential example of this is that of one of the president’s former attorneys, Michael Cohen, who famously turned on Trump after becoming convinced that the president had abandoned him while he was in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors.
Asked by The Daily Beast last week if the president told him that he still had his lawyer’s back—an attorney who further earned the president’s trust by defending Trump during the Mueller investigation—Giuliani let out a big belly-laugh and responded, “There’s nothing, [no knife], in my back.”
“My back feels very comfortable right now,” he added.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-suspects-a-spiteful-john-bolton-is-behind-ukraine-leaks
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