| | | | Will Trump's Pardons Politicize the Military? | | When President Trump pardoned two accused war criminals last week and restored the rank of a third, he did so over the dismay of senior Pentagon leaders. The move was met by a "terse yessir" from the top ranks, as The New York Times put it, but at The Atlantic, Kori Schake wonders if Trump's decision was intended to gin up military support.
Trump enjoys backing among the military's rank and file, Schake writes (and a July Pew poll showed veterans mostly supported his sending troops to the US-Mexico border and his Iran-deal withdrawal), and he has "previously challenged the advice of DOD leaders by asserting that he understands better than they what the military wants."
But if gaining support did motivate the pardons, Schake writes that courting it in this way is dangerous: It's worrisome that a president could seek to "undermine the military chain of command to instill in soldiers a more personal loyalty," she warns, "especially when the basis for that loyalty is free rein to behave unethically and in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice." The US military benefits from its apolitical identity, Schake writes: It makes countries more willing to host US bases, and it makes service members' reentries into civilian society easier. Politicizing the military puts those advantages at risk. | | China's Expanding Surveillance Frontier | | | China has earned infamy for its high-tech repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, but Bradley Jardine writes for Foreign Policy that China is exporting surveillance technology to the Central Asian states of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan—potentially expanding its surveillance reach westward. Central Asian countries have "deep historic links to Xinjiang," Jardine writes, and Chinese-run "smart city" programs in the region "give China access to a huge pool of data on Central Asia's people, which both aids in developing new technology and allows greater monitoring of the cross-border movement that Beijing sees as a key threat to security in Xinjiang." | | Did Pompeo Hang US Diplomats Out to Dry? | | Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's "behavior is one of the most shameful things I have seen in 40 years of covering U.S. diplomacy," Tom Friedman writes in a scathing New York Times column. Pompeo has declined to defend US diplomats from the attacks of President Trump, including the alleged campaign to oust former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. As Friedman writes, that's despite Pompeo's own deputy secretary of state, John Sullivan, having "baldly declared" in an Oct. 30 hearing (on his nomination as ambassador to Russia) that Yovanovitch had served "admirably" and that Rudy Giuliani had been "seeking to smear Ambassador Yovanovitch, or have her removed."
As Friedman notes, former US diplomats Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky argued in a CNN op-ed that "Pompeo enabled the smear campaign to go unchallenged, acquiesced in the Giuliani back channel effort with Ukraine and failed to say a word in defense of Bill Taylor, George Kent or Marie Yovanovitch." Friedman goes a step further, writing that Pompeo "is trying to hide as much as possible from public view, counting on the next Trump outrage to wash away his own outrageous behavior." | | As the global wave of protests continues to grow (most recently, demonstrations have broken out in Iran over an increase in fuel prices), at least one country sees a way out: Patricio Navia writes for Americas Quarterly that in Chile, where a proposed transit-fare hike sparked chaos last month, right-leaning President Sebastián Piñera and his opponents have agreed to hold a 2020 referendum on whether to draft a new constitution—a move that has brought relief.
Amended more than 45 times since 1990, Chile's constitution was drafted by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and was "originally designed to prevent democracy from flourishing," Navia writes; critics note "excessive" super-majority requirements to pass laws. Public dissatisfaction is being channeled through institutions, Navia writes, predicting Chile is on track for consensus-building and reform. | | How to Fix Political Microtargeting | | As Fareed recently wrote, it could be dangerous to ask social-media platforms to fact-check political ads—and one alternative might be to reconsider microtargeting. In a New York Times op-ed, Daniel Kreiss and Matt Perault recommend some specific policies: Platforms like Twitter and Facebook should ban advertisers from using their own datasets to target voters and should place "limits on the categories political advertisers can target (such as geographic region, interests, ideology, race and ethnicity, or gender)."
That would remove secrecy and protect voters from nefarious purposes like suppression of minority votes, while allowing legitimate tactics like targeting all voters in a single voting district. Another recommendation: Allow "verified rival campaigns to publish ads to the exact same audience." Those policies would be better than "blunt solutions" like banning ads altogether, Kreiss and Perault argue. | | | | | | |
