Tim Talks Politics - The Weekly Brief, March 23, 2018
The Weekly Brief - March 23, 2018
Stay this Madness!
If you’re still feeling angsty (like me) about your bracket being blown apart last week, it might help to direct that angst at the corruption that still plagues NCAA basketball. Maybe it’s poetic justice that a lot of big schools are losing.
Fear the “Rhetoric of Certainty”
March 24 is the March for Our Lives demonstration in Washington DC, the student-led effort to call for greater gun control measures in the wake of the Parkland, Florida shooting last month. I've been thinking an awful lot about the gun control debate and have finally composed some initial thoughts on TimTalksPolitics.com regarding the “rhetoric of certainty” that surrounds our political discourse.
Because the pro-gun control message has more or less dominated the news cycles I want to pull in the other side of the debate from conservative sites to suggest that there's greater plurality in this discussion even among students than we generally hear about.
The Federalist, for example, discusses potential additional causes to the Parkland shooting like well-intentioned but poorly developed education policies. Intellectual Takeout provides what it dubs as “eight stubborn facts about gun violence” in America, suggesting that we're not discussing policy with a complete picture.
Pew Research, not conservative, contributes to this picture by noting that Google searches indicate a greater interest in guns in the states with higher gun control laws. This could be interpreted many different ways, but it does suggest that guns don't fade quietly to the background just because you have a lot of laws on the books.
Facebook: Didn’t die a hero, so….
Facebook is once again on the hot seat as news leaked over its data-sharing deals with Cambridge Analytica that may or may not have helped fuel the spread of fake news and elect Donald Trump.
It's an unnerving moment to realize that the social media giant that we all thought was our best friend has been indiscriminately using our private data for its financial gain, but the emperor has had no clothes for a while.
Cal Newport, one of my favorite bloggers, offers some thoughts on getting off of social media or at least recognizing its proper place in life while Politico seems to have been taking the whole thing quite personally.
More constructively, maybe, the American Enterprise Institute talks about the good social media sites like Facebook can do for consumers and the Council on Foreign Relations discusses the more philosophical question of intentionally building a digital society.
Beyond Facebook’s legal and PR woes, discussions on net privacy swirl around the CLOUD Act, while War on the Rocks considers the implications of the “network generation” on military force structure.
Federal Budget 101
With all the ups and downs of Washington politics, the ongoing effort to pass a massive omnibus spending bill has been something of background news for much of the last week. In order to inform the reader on what goes into a spending bill, I'd like to share a series of infographics produced by the Congressional Budget Office based on last year's budget and revenue numbers.
It's quite an insightful bit of data analysis as we realize where the 2,000+ pages of the omnibus bill fit into these numbers. Federal budget 101: There’s mandatory spending and discretionary spending. Most of the debate happens over the latter (smaller) amount.
MBS and BFFs
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is visiting the United States this week and Brookings Institute discusses his relationship with the US having come of political age during the Iraq War.
The Council on Foreign Relations produces some interesting research that suggests that American arms sales to the region have a correlative relationship to unstable oil prices. Though this is unlikely to stem the flow of weapons to Middle Eastern allies like Saudi Arabia it could be laying the foundation for the future tenor of Saudi-US relations.
Will Turkey lay an egg?
In the Middle East, Turkey continues its ongoing efforts to relive its Ottoman glory days. Al-Monitor reports that Turkey is considering opening up another front in its Afrin campaign, this time extending into northern Iraq. If there was any doubt that Turkey is involved in Syria and possibly Iraq as a way to confront the Kurds this should be considered proof positive.
But Turkey seems to be picking more fights than it probably can handle as confrontation builds with Greece and in the waters around Cyprus. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Turkey has officially gone from a democracy to an autocracy and continues its regressive slide towards a strongman dictatorship.
This will probably make diplomatic relations with Turkey more difficult for the United States and Turkey’s other NATO allies. The Hudson Institute looks ahead to what those diplomatic relations may entail.
Russia Reruns
Also in the club of “once a democracy now an autocracy” Russia held its own presidential election this last week that saw an upset win for Vladimir Putin, making him the longest-serving Russian head of state since Brezhnev. Putin's reelection comes after a Russian assassination attempt on a Russian dissident in London.
The continuing impunity of Russia leads Lawfare to believe that the Bear’s increasing aggression towards Western nations will only escalate in the cyber warfare field. Columnist Bret Stephens worries that Putin is reshaping European politics in his image.
The Age of the Strongman
Between Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, and Xi in China it would seem that we are living in a new era of strongman government. Even the world's largest democracy, India, has a leader who has somewhat autocratic tendencies.
AEI reminds us that presidents for life do not produce political stability. That instability may already be present in North Africa, a region dominated by strongman governments. The North Africa Post provides a case study in looking at Algeria's inability to protect its borders.
Japan Rearms
Never too far over the horizon is East Asia. Paralleling American efforts to meet with North Korea by May, Japan, China and South Korea are planning their own trilateral summit even as North and South Korean and American representatives meet in Finland to lay out the parameters of the upcoming Kim-Trump talks.
In that context, it is notable that Japan is taking one of the largest steps away from its post World War II pacifism with the preparation of a marine combat brigade. This is the first dedicated combat unit designed for island defense to be developed since World War II. It reflects the continuing Japanese unease over the East Asian security environment and the future stability of the American-Japan alliance. The question is not will Japan rearm, but to what extent?