Foreign Policy Decisions

BACKGROUND

1) Timothy W. Ryback, “THE OLIGARCHS WHO CAME TO REGRET SUPPORTING HITLER; They helped him in pursuit of profit;Many ended up in concentration camps,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2025 (7 a.m. ET);

BACKGROUND

1) Camilla Tominey, “Let’s celebrate: Donald Trump is vaccinating the West against the woke mind virus
Whether it’s gender ideology or border control; The president has torn through years of bizarre, divisive groupthink in a matter of weeks,”:The Telegraph, February 7, 2025 (6:10 pm GMT);

How do we judge actions by Donald Trump which are aimed at goals we share, at least in part?

How dowe judge the actions of a dictator ang goals accomplished by dictatorial means, even if we share the goals of the actions in whole or in part?

Unless we’ve lost our moral compass, unless we’ve lost our bearings, we don’t celebrate the dictatorial actions of a tyrant, or goals achieved by dictatorial means.

Camilla Townley, in tue article cited above, falls into the unpardonable trap of praising the acts of a dictator, or would-be dictator.

That weakens the case against the dictator, opening the door to justifications for supporting a tyrannical regime. E.g.,”But…he has done good things…”

Like Adolf Hitler, who built the Autobahn in Germany.

One must always judge the achievement of goals by the means employed to secure them.

With Tominey, and many others, we need to go back to democratic basics, and remind tgem and everyone else of the core tenets of democracy and the rule of law.

Summarily dismissing DEI employees without due process of law is no way to proceed, however much we may disagree with DEI policies.

BACKGROUND

1) Timothyy Snyder, “Of course ut’s a coup,” Thinking about…, February 5, 2025 (6:31 a.m.);

2) Olga Lautman, “Trump’s Diversion Tactics; Stay Focused on the Hostile Takeover of the U.S. Government,” UnmaskingvRussia, February 5, 2025 (8:37 a.m);

Timothy Snyder: “of course it’s a coup.”

It’d hard to know whether journalists at leading newspapers are just stupid, orvwhether their compromised editors are keeping them from reporting what is really going om. Olga Lautman and Timothy Snyder help tell the real news stories of the day.

On February 4, Donald Trump again revealed his manipulating the press. His latest shiny object was his preposterous proposal that the U.S. take over Gaza and rebuild it, after all of the i habitants had left.

Almost all of the journalists fell for the bait.
a week earlier Elon Musk demobstrated his iwn brilliance at such legerdemain, with his Nazi salute at a gathering of right-wing supporters. The press corp all ran off to cover the Nazi salute, failing to report much less investigate Musk’s power grab and progressive takeover of the government’s computers and the information stored in the.

A careful reading of Trump’s Executive Order on Dope would have revealed what was going on, as we reported here.

Are journalists just stupid, or are their editors keeping them from reporting and investigating the really important news?

Or is tge fact that articles are now wrutten bybteams if four or five reporters? The other day the New York times reported that Musks team members had passed background checks and been vetted for security clearsnces. They failed to note that for a security clearance all you needed was for Trump or the White House Counsel to add your name to a list, and that Musk’s team was hired bypassing all regular hiring procedures.

Reporters at major newspapers, with a few exceptions, are failing utterly at reporting not only the immediate details but also what is really going on.

BACKGROUND

1) Stéphanie Maupas (La Haye, correspondance), “La Cour pénale internationale, menacée de sanctions par les Etats-Unis de Trump, s’inquiète pour son avenir; La CPI tente de se préparer aux sanctions promises par l’administration en réponse au mandat d’arrêt émis contre Benyamin Nétanyahou. Le premier ministre israélien doit être reçu à la Maison Blanche, mardi 4 février,” Le Monde, le 3 février 2025 (14h51);

2) Stéphanie Maupas (The Hague, correspondent), “The International Criminal Court, threatened with sanctions by Trump’s United States, worries about his future; The ICC is trying to prepare for the sanctions promised by the administration in response to the arrest warrant issued against Benyamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister is to be received at the White House on Tuesday, February 4,” Le Monde, February 3, 2025 (updated at 2:51 p.m.);

BACKGROUND

1)Le Monde avec AFP,”La fin annoncée de l’USAID, l’Agence pour le développement international, liquidée par Elon Musk et l’administration Trump; Le premier pourvoyeur d’aide humanitaire dans le monde va « fermer », a déclaré le multimilliardaire Elon Musk. La Maison Blanche a rappelé que ce dernier ne prenait pas de décision sans son accord. Des experts ont mis en cause la legality de cette décision,” Le Monde,le 3 férier 2025 (modifié à 21h01);

2)

3) Julien Bouissou, “CHRONIQUE: Aux Etats-Unis comme en France, c’est toute la philosophie de l’aide au développement qui est menacée; La baisse des fonds destinés à l’aide au développement montre un changement des objectifs politiques poursuivis autour de ces dépenses, observe Julien Bouissou, dans une chronique au ‘Monde’,” Le Monde, le 4 février 2025 (8;30 h);

5) Jukien Bouissou, “”In the United States as in France, it is the whole philosophy of development aid that is threatened; The decrease in funds for development aid shows a change in the political objectives pursued around these expenses, observes Julien Bouissou, in a column in the Le Monde,”, Le Monde, le 4 février 2025 (08:30 am);

1) WTO agreements
2) U.S. law
–any escape cla uses in U.S. law?
–Invocation of National Security exception
3) WTO dispute resolution body

We are not the first to experience a world turned upside dowm.

We are not the first to see our most cherished vales, the lodestars we have followed our entire lives, trampled upon, dismissed, and violated in the most horrendous manner imaginable.

Think back to what many people must have been thinking and feeling in Germany in the 1930’s as the Nazi Party gained in strength and its Leader become Chancellor of Germany (on January 30, 1933) and an absolute dictator following the Reichstag fire (on February 27) and passage by the Reichstag of theEnabling Act(on March 23, 1933).

There were undoubtedly millions of rational people who did not succumb to the Nazi virus which infected growing numbers of tge population as tge Nazi Party became the Nazi state.

Imagine what other thinking Europeans thought as reason was swept aside by the mass emotions manipulated and directed by Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, his propaganda minister.

Undoubtedly many reacted in horror, much as many are reacting to the latest outrages by Amrrica’s 47th president since his inauguration on January 20, 2025.

Undoubtedly many Europeans reacted with outrage over the Nazis’ actions and assumption of dictatorial oowers.

But they reacted too late, a# did the French and the British at and after Munich (September 1938).

Everyone assumed they had more time, much more time.

But then time ran out, much more quickly than anyone had thought possible.

It seems that the majority of people including business leaders and elected representatives have reacted to the fascist challenge of Trump and his Republican supporters with what Timothy Snyder in his primer On Tyranny terms “anticipatory obedience”.
It feels like tge fascists are in power, and tgat for the moment at least they have triumphed.

Acquiescence is the norm.

Aside from a few intellectuals, no one seems to take the warnings of experts on fascism and authoritarian rule seriously.

Instead we face the brilliance of the fascist propagandists who have reduced public discourse to a kind of vaudeville act and what Neil Postman described in Amusing Ourselves to Death

BACKGROUND

1) Jim Tankersley and Christopher F. Schuetze, “Musk Says Germany Has ‘Too Much of a Focus on Past Guilt’;
His comments to the hard-right Alternative for Germany party escalated efforts by the billionaire to influence the country’s election for chancellor next month,” New York Times, January 27, 2025 (Updated 1:26 p.m. ET);

BACKGROUND

1) David French, “How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality,” New York Times, January 26, 2025;