| | | | Fareed: What Trump Speech Got Right | | As President Trump prepares to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, Fareed says the President deserves credit for his much-anticipated speech in Davos on Friday. The question, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, is whether this represents a genuinely new, more conventional approach, or if Trump will "veer off in an entirely different direction."
"The Trump presidency has been composed of three parts. Trump I is the circus — the tweets, the outlandish claims, the reality-TV-like show. Trump II is the dark populism and the demagogic assaults on minorities, the press and the judiciary. Trump III is the conventional Republican president, following a fairly standard GOP agenda — tax cuts, deregulation and a hawkish foreign policy, guided by mainstream advisers such as National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis," Fareed writes.
"We could be entertained by the circus, and we should be appalled by the demagogue, but we have to be encouraged by Trump the Republican. That's not because I agree with all the ideas he has put forth in his agenda. I continue to think the tax cut is fiscally irresponsible, blowing a huge hole in the deficit that will starve public investment and effectively transfer government resources from the poor to the rich. On the other hand, his deregulatory push could be an important reform of an administrative state that has grown burdensome and overly complex."
"I don't seek to normalize Trump. But I do believe that, given the stakes, the United States and the world are better off for these moments when he behaves more like a normal president."
| | Why America Can't "Win" in Afghanistan | | An uptick in high-profile attacks in Kabul over the past week, including an attacker killing more than 100 people on Saturday by detonating an ambulance filled with explosives, underscores America's failure to quell the unrest in the country. One reason the United States hasn't been able to "win" in Afghanistan? Because it doesn't know why it's there, suggests Steve Coll in The New York Times.
"Why is this problem so hard? Why, since the Sept. 11 attacks, has the United States been unable to prevent Pakistan, a notional ally that has received billions of dollars in aid, from succoring the Taliban at such a high cost in American lives and Afghan misery?" Coll writes.
"One major reason is American war aims in Afghanistan have been, and remain, riddled with contradictions and illusions that Inter-Services Intelligence can exploit. President Bush, President Barack Obama and President Trump have all offered convoluted, incomplete or unconvincing answers to essential questions: Why are we in Afghanistan? What interests justify our sacrifices? How will the war end?"
"For years, almost every American general dispatched to command the Afghan war has conceded that the conflict must ultimately end with a political settlement, supported by regional powers, and that there is no purely military solution possible against the Taliban. Nonetheless, the United States continues to prioritize military action over diplomacy. Stalemated civil wars like Afghanistan's can last a very long time. They end only through negotiations with the enemy." - US casualties jump in 2017. "The increase in US military action in Afghanistan over the past year has been accompanied by a higher number of casualties, with 141 American service members killed or wounded in the 12-month period through November," the Wall Street Journal reports.
"The figures amount to a 35% increase in US military casualties over the previous 12 months, according to US military data provided to Congress. The military said 14 were killed in action and 127 wounded through November."
| | How Putin's Biggest Rival Hurts Him More by NOT Running | | | Alexei Navalny may have been barred from running in Russia's presidential election in March. "Ironically, that means Mr Navalny could yet do more damage to the Kremlin as a non-candidate than as a candidate," the Financial Times editorializes.
"Were he allowed to contest the election, he almost certainly would not win. Mr Putin enjoys an overwhelming advantage in name recognition and 'administrative resources,' such as fawning state media and obedient civil servants and election officials. Yet if Mr Navalny's boycott campaign can lower turnout by even a few percentage points, that could make the difference between an acceptable level and one that falls short," the Financial Times writes.
"True, some pro-democratic Russians may be reluctant to give up a vote that is one of the few means of actively registering their opinion. The entry of the socialite and TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak as a self-proclaimed protest candidate — whether on her own or the Kremlin's initiative — provides an alternative outlet for disgruntled voters. Still, Mr Navalny may be able to tap into broader disenchantment among voters; some Russians who would not vote for him might also stay away." | | What Basketball Tells Us About the Terror Threat | | President Trump's recent claim that "nearly 3 in 4 individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges are foreign born" is misleading, write Leaf Van Boven and Paul Slovic in Politico Magazine. They suggest that not only does this figure not include domestic terrorism, but using it also exploits a slippery psychological trick. To understand how, they point to the basketball court.
"The 75 percent statistic ignores the rarity of terrorist-related activities despite the very large number of foreign-born individuals in the United States. Treating 75 percent as a meaningful measure of risk is deceitful—it's lying with statistics," they write.
"To see why, consider a less politically charged domain. Of the approximately 450 NBA players, about 330 are African American—a fraction close to three in four. But among more than 20 million African-American men in the United States, a vanishingly small portion play in the NBA—less than 0.01 percent. In other words, we can be about 75 percent confident that a man is African American if we know he is an NBA player. But if we know only that a man is African American, we can be even more confident that he is not an NBA player.
"Similarly, we can be confident that an individual convicted of terrorism-related charges in a US federal court is foreign-born (a probability of about 75 percent). But if an individual is foreign-born, the likelihood that the person has engaged in terrorism-related activities is nearly zero. There are approximately 41 million foreign-born people living in the United States; 402 out of 41 million is a minuscule proportion—less than 0.001 percent.
"Even though the numbers are vastly different, people often treat these two types of statements about probability as though they were equally valid. Psychologists call this an inverse fallacy. It arises from natural human tendencies in responding to risk."
| | President Trump delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Aaron Kall writes for USA Today that Trump should take a leaf out of Bill Clinton's playbook -- and move to the center. "Clinton's ability to ignore the surrounding political noise and march toward the center yielded the largest bump in presidential job approval ratings since Gallup began tracking in 1978. His approval rating rose 6 percentage points following his 1996 speech and 10 points after the one in 1998," Kall notes.
Syrian peace talks were scheduled to begin early this week in Sochi. But don't expect a major breakthrough anytime soon, a Reuters report suggests. "Western powers and some Arab states believe the Sochi talks are an attempt by Russia to create a separate peace process that undermines the U.N. peace effort while laying the groundwork for a solution favorable to President Bashar al-Assad and allies Russia and Iran."
British Prime Minister Theresa May travels to China on Tuesday. But William James and Andrew MacAskill write for Reuters that while Britain is trying to "reinvent itself as a global trading nation after deciding to leave the European Union in 2016…Brexit has unnerved Beijing and May is perceived to be less keen on courting China than her predecessor, David Cameron." | | | | | | |
