OK!!! OK, already !!!! With Donald Trump leading comfortably in all of the polls (except the latest outlier WSJ/NBC poll) and three quarters of Republicans anticipating that he will be the nominee, it is time to think about him going head to head with Hillary. It is way too hard to envision him as President Trump, but it is worth getting one's head around Nominee Trump.
Let's start in the easiest place - foreign policy. The New York real estate mogul who has some gambling and resort connections in the Caribbean and knows folks in Monaco and Macao versus the former Secretary of State who has met with every important foreign leader in the past 30 years. By winning this discussion Trump can obliterate Hillary's perceived "experience" advantage which has lurked in the background unchallenged in a Democratic debate season which has focused on ways to expand the federal government and take down the evil rich. As strange as it seems, foreign policy should be Hillary's greatest vulnerability.
Carly Fiorina started down this road a few months ago, but nobody was listening to her beyond her clever tag line that frequent flyer miles do not equate to accomplishments. Trump has a different skill - he understands the use of pithy statements to strike at central unspoken truths which most people understand, and he yells them. Get ready for the breakout puncturing of the competence balloon.
Let's take a short tour of the world before and after Hillary:
- Trump can start with the Middle East and an unlikely and uncomfortable turn for most Republicans - Hillary voted for the Iraq War while Trump claims that he opposed it. Obama and Clinton snatched defeat from the jaws of a hard won victory by removing all US forces, watching a Shia government align with Iran to marginalize the Sunnis, and opening the door for ISIS. Trump will sound like Bernie Sanders about the decision to go in and Lindsey Graham about the decision to get out. Trump can have it both ways.
- Hillary will own Libya. Her State Department advocated for the removal of Gaddafi without a plan for his replacement. She and the President fumbled Benghazi - leaving diplomats unprotected, refusing to come to their aid, "leading from behind", and lying to the public about the cause of the attack.
- Syria - the greatest humanitarian disaster in a half century - over 250,000 killed; millions of refugees; foundations of the European Union challenged. The blame rests mainly with President Obama - "Assad must go" with no plan; the "red line" with no consequences; inability to mobilize the Sunni Arabs, the Turks, the Kurds, and NATO. If Hillary makes a break with the administration, this will be it, otherwise she owns ISIS. But then she has to explain where she was when the decisions were made.
- Egypt - She supported the overthrow and prosecution of a long time US ally and stood by while the Army reasserted control.
- The much-hyped "re-set" with Russia. After a few tests of the Obama/Clinton weakness, Putin acted in the Ukraine, then in Syria. Eastern Europe remains exposed. This is one area where Trump is probably right - Putin would treat him very differently.
- The diplomatic initiative with Mexico and Central America to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. What initiative?
- The abandonment of the Keystone XL Pipeline - with its required State Department approval - and the vision of North American energy independence. And the good will of the Canadians.
- The "pivot to Asia" with the only tangible result being the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement which she once championed and now opposes. And the increasingly fortified Chinese presence in the South China Sea.
- Let's have somebody come forward who claims a better relation with the United States from Hillary's time at State - the Saudis?; the Brits? the Germans?; the Japanese? the Indians? the Pakisanis? OK, maybe the Cubans.
While Trump isn't really a process guy, there are easy pickings there too.
- The e-mails are the obvious place to start. Lawyers view it as a question of whether her violation of the laws on protecting secrets (and perhaps maintaining public records) rises to the level justifying prosecution, but that is not the question. The FBI may recommend indictment, but the Democratic Attorney General and the president will not initiate a war with their candidate. What the public understands is that she used her own server to avoid scrutiny and that doing so exposed deliberations and sources of information to our adversaries. The Russians knew our thinking on the Ukraine; they knew what we would accept in Syria. The Chinese listened in on administration discussions of Snowden's exposure of NSA practices. More important to the intelligence community, sources of information were exposed in Hillary's e-mails. People probably died and the CIA's ability to recruit informants was greatly compromised.
- And the Clinton Foundation - with Bill taking large fees from foreigners with business before the State Department - Uranium One for one easy example. Expect a blunt conversation about what donors expect in return for their largess. Bernie Sanders is making a big point of Wall Street donors; foreign donors are more universally offensive - and illegal. Trump is a believable expert on why people donate to politicians.
- Maybe there is even a barb about things as simple as the "Reset" button - mistakenly translated "overcharged" - which Hillary gave to Soviet Foreign Minister Lavrov. One can hear Trump mocking rank incompetence.
Others have more experience in foreign policy - Marco Rubio who is on the Senate Armed Services Committee or John Kasich who served on the House Armed Services Committee. Rubio has called her unqualified because she lied to the relatives of the men killed at Benghazi, but that has pretty much been ignored in the swirl of competing stories. Trump cannot be ignored.
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In answer to the current assault on capitalism by the Bernie Sanders Left, this week's bonus, is a welcome takedown of a young Phil Donahue whose rant about income inequality runs into the wisdom of Milton Friedman.
bill bowen - 2/18/16
APPLE AND YOUR FBI-- Interesting game of arguments. Apple claims that encryption is necessary for consumer confidence in the security of their devices. That it is crucial to the American security. You have to go no further than the recent award winning movie "Imitation Game" to realize that machines can and will aid people/nations to break encryption systems for both the good and the bad uses. Good in the case of WWII and the years it shortened the war and millions of lives it saved. Bad in the case of Chinese cyber crime.
When I worked on the nation's top secrets looking into the communications behavior of the cold war enemies my company had a safe room that in the 70's cost 100's of thousand dollars to build and maintain outside the Pentagon. As far as I know the words we said and the viewgraphs we displayed remained secure at least from the 70's until the 90's when DOD released them. Some have yet to be revealed. We were able to tell much of what our enemies were doing from observing their electronic signals. It was useful and probably helped secure the world through the cold war. The other side of course as depicted in the movie "Bridge of Spies" were doing the same thing to keep up with us in that case using Human spies to build a nuclear weapon. So governments are going to do what governments do: provide for the security of their country. In some ways this cas is the same argument for and against Water Boarding.
Now comes the entry of Apple. And, the advancement of terrorist groups so diverse, so large (probably 300 Million people support Muslim terrorists) and so disposed to the destruction of the western civilization that it occupies much of the security pursuits of the world. Apple could, as a part of their responsibility to society, build a secure group that opens, under very stringent court orders, a specific set of their products one at a time and provides to the government the information from that device but not the backdoor solution. On the other hand is that the way it should be done? Will that require Apple to have a similar group in every country to respond to their courts? Or is the government's responsibility to build their own secure group to open devices one at a time? Can they compel Apple to help? I guess we could look back to WWII when Ford went from a car company to a tank builder for the US Army. What if Ford had said "No"?
I could go on but no need. This will be drawn out but it will be solved in the Supreme court or in Congress in the US. Perhaps both.I'm sure China is now thinking about this problem. And, if Apple is as smart as I think they are they already use different encryption systems for China than they do in the US. In the meantime be sure that there are no secure devices especially once you connect them through the internet, Wi Fi or your blue tooth in your car. Your phone is your phone and someone is listening to it all.
Posted by: Bill McCormick | February 25, 2016 at 12:27 PM