The centerboard of this administration’s foreign policy team will remain Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, still steady in balancing competing views. But there will be a lot more sail aloft, adding speed and also danger. The changes will likely be seen as a signal of greater U.S. willingness to use force, which will increase anxieties at home and abroad about possible conflict with North Korea and Iran.
.. Mike Pompeo, the feisty and politically ambitious CIA director who is likely headed to State, is the un-Tillerson. He’s flamboyant where Tillerson is guarded, sharp and sometimes snarky where Tillerson is reticent. He’s a far better communicator than Tillerson, and he’ll probably do better conveying to Congress, the public and U.S. allies his version of diplomacy than does Tillerson, whose dislike for his job is palpable.
.. The atmospherics will be a more activist, hawkish, extroverted U.S. foreign policy. Pompeo is good at the things Tillerson isn’t... Mattis and Tillerson have been joined at the hip on most policy issues, especially North Korea. They presented a formidable united front in the Situation Room; the power axis may now shift a bit, because of the chemistry between Trump and Pompeo.
.. Pompeo has been aggressively developing covert options for North Korea, but he probably agrees with Tillerson that there is no “silver bullet” for solving this problem.
.. Tillerson’s plan to convene in Canada a meeting of the “sending states,” the 15 U.S. allies that sent troops to fight North Korea in 1950 under a U.N. Security Council resolution. Mattis was the first to endorse this idea publicly, and he still backs it strongly.
.. The wild card in the new team is Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), reputed to be the president’s choice to replace Pompeo as CIA director. Cotton has played an outsize policy role in recent months, especially in shaping Iran strategy. He cultivates the image of a hard man, lanky, laconic and Arkansas-tough. Like Pompeo, he combines book smarts with a high tolerance for risk. Pyongyang and Tehran should be worried. This team has not been selected to manage compromise.
.. U.S. allies will probably be worried, too. Tillerson was liked and trusted by key allies and seen as a check on Trump’s impulsiveness.
.. Most successful CIA directors quickly learn how much they don’t know; humility is part of the job description, along with boldness.
.. In the early months of the Trump administration, the Mattis-Tillerson alliance led many analysts to say that the “adults” were in charge of foreign policy, and that their influence checked the tweet-happy president. Trump hated that formulation. Now he’ll have a new team, one that is tuned more closely to his pitch.
Stokely Carmichael
He was also frustrated to be drawn again into nonviolent confrontations with police, which he no longer found empowering. After seeing protesters brutally beaten again, he collapsed from stress, and his colleagues urged him to leave the city.[28]
.. Carmichael helped to increase the number of registered black voters from 70 to 2,600—300 more than the number of registered white voters.[2] Black voters had essentially been disfranchised by Alabama’s constitution passed by white Democrats in 1901.
.. Black residents and voters organized and widely supported the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), a party that had the black panther as its mascot, over the white-dominated local Democratic Party, whose mascot was a white rooster. Since federal protection from violent voter suppression by the Ku Klux Klan and other white opponents was sporadic, most Lowndes County activists openly carried arms.
.. Although black residents and voters outnumbered whites in Lowndes, their candidate lost the county-wide election of 1965. In 1966, several LCFO candidates ran for office in the general election but failed to win.[31] In 1970, the LCFO merged with the statewide Democratic Party, and former LCFO candidates won their first offices in the county.[32][33]
.. Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in 1966, taking over from John Lewis, who later was elected to the US Congress. A few weeks after Carmichael took office, James Meredith was shot and wounded by a sniper during the solitary March Against Fear. Carmichael joined Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick, Cleveland Sellers and others to continue Meredith’s march. He was arrested during the march and, upon his release, he gave his first “Black Power” speech, using the phrase to urge black pride and socio-economic independence:
“ It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations. .. According to Carmichael: “Black Power meant black people coming together to form a political force and either electing representatives or forcing their representatives to speak their needs [rather than relying on established parties]”.[36]
.. Carmichael led SNCC to become more radical. The group focused on Black Power as its core goal and ideology.
.. Carmichael ultimately sided with those calling for the expulsion of whites. He said that whites should organize poor white southern communities, of which there were plenty, while SNCC focused on promoting African-American self-reliance through Black Power.[38]
.. Carmichael considered nonviolence to be a tactic as opposed to an underlying principle
.. that we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy. Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom. No man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after they’re born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.[39]
.. For a time in 1967, Carmichael considered an alliance with Saul Alinsky‘s Industrial Areas Foundation
.. Carmichael popularized the oft-repeated anti-draft slogan, “Hell no-We won’t go!” during this time.[44]
.. Carmichael was targeted by a section of J. Edgar Hoover‘s COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) which focused on black activists; the program promoted slander and violence against targets that Hoover considered to be enemies of the US government.[52
.. A March 4, 1968 memo from Hoover states his fear of the rise of a black nationalist “messiah” and notes that Carmichael alone had the “necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.”[56
.. Hoover stepped up his efforts to divide the black power movement. Declassifed documents show a plan was launched to undermine the SNCC-Panther merger, as well as to “bad-jacket” Carmichael as a CIA agent. Both efforts were largely successful: Carmichael was expelled from SNCC that year, and the rival Panthers began to denounce him.[57][58]
.. Carmichael was present in Washington, D.C. the night after King’s assassination in April 1968. He led a group through the streets, demanding that businesses close out of respect. Although he tried to prevent violence, the situation escalated beyond his control. Due to his reputation as a provocateur, the news media blamed Carmichael for the ensuing violence as mobs rioted along U Street and other areas of black commercial development.[62]
.. Carmichael soon began to distance himself from the Panthers. He disagreed with them about whether white activists should be allowed to participate in the movement. The Panthers believed that white activists could help the movement, while Carmichael had come to agree with Malcolm X, and said that the white activists should organize their own communities first.
.. in July 1969, Carmichael published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning them for not being separatist enough and for their “dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals”.[2]
.. Carmichael’s suspicions about the CIA were affirmed in 2007, when previously secret CIA documents were declassified, revealing that the agency had tracked Carmichael from 1968 as part of their surveillance of black activists abroad. The surveillance continued for years.[67]
.. Kwame Ture, along with Charles V. Hamilton,[79] is credited with coining the phrase “institutional racism“—defined as racism that occurs through institutions such as public bodies and corporations, including universities. In the late 1960s Ture defined “institutional racism” as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnic origin.”[80]
.. Garrow described the period in 1966 where Ture and other members of the SNCC managed to successfully register 2,600 African American voters in Lowndes County, Alabama, as the most consequential period in Ture’s life “in terms of real, positive, tangible influence on people’s lives.”[4]
Evaluations from Ture’s associates are also mixed, with most praising his efforts and others criticizing him for failing to find constructive ways to achieve his objectives.[81]
.. “Even though we kidded and called him ‘Starmichael,’ he could sublimate his ego to get done what was needed to be done….He would say what he thought, and you could disagree with it but you wouldn’t cease being a human being and someone with whom he wanted to be in relationship.”
Adolph Hitler—I’m not putting a judgment on what he did—if you asked me for my judgment morally, I would say it was bad, what he did was wrong, was evil, etc. But I would say he was a genius, nevertheless . . . . You say he’s not a genius because he committed bad acts. That’s not the question. The question is, he does have genius. Now when we condemn him morally or ethically, we will say, well, he was absolutely wrong, he should be killed, he should be murdered, etc., etc. . . . But if we’re judging his genius objectively, we have to admit that the man was a genius. He forced the entire world to fight him. He was fighting America, France, Britain, Russia, Italy once— then she switched sides—all of them at the same time, and whupping them. That’s a genius, you cannot deny that.[85]
.. “Our paper on the position of women came up, and Stokely in his hipster rap comedic way joked that ‘the proper position of women in SNCC is prone’. I laughed, he laughed, we all laughed.
.. This viciously anti-women outlook is another reason why all of these nationalist movements went nowhere
Former U.S. intelligence officials: Trump being ‘played’ by Putin
“By not confronting the issue directly and not acknowledging to Putin that we know you’re responsible for this, I think he’s giving Putin a pass,” former CIA director John Brennan said
.. I think it demonstrates to Mr. Putin that Donald Trump can be played by foreign leaders who are going to appeal to his ego and try to play upon his insecurities, which is very, very worrisome from a national security standpoint.”
.. “He seems very susceptible to rolling out the red carpet and honor guards and all the trappings and pomp and circumstance that come with the office, and I think that appeals to him, and I think it plays to his insecurities,” Clapper said.
.. “I don’t know why the ambiguity about this,” Brennan said. “Putin is committed to undermining our system, our democracy and our whole process. And to try paint it in any other way is, I think, astounding, and, in fact, poses a peril to this country.”
.. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin came to Trump’s defense, brushing aside the comments of Brennan and Clapper.
“Those were the most ridiculous statements,” Mnuchin said. “President Trump is not getting played by anybody.”
.. Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs, said Sunday that the president does concur with a January 2017 assessment by the intelligence community about Russian meddling... “He believes that after a year of investigations of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, there is zero evidence of any ballot being impacted by Russian interference,”
Is Tom Cotton the Future of Trumpism?
The junior senator from Arkansas is a hybrid of insurgent and old guard.
At forty years old, Cotton is the youngest member of the Senate
.. when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way we look, and the way we talk, and the way we think.”
.. It was, on one level, a breathtaking leap—to equate mockery of a louche New York billionaire with attacks on the citizens of this small, conservative city, which lies across the Arkansas River from Oklahoma.
.. “Next to Trump, he’s the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism.
.. Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, whose term is not up until 2020, said that, by threatening journalists, Trump was violating his oath to defend the Constitution.
.. “The President puts things sometimes in a way that I would not,” he said in early October. “But he was still nominated by our voters and elected by the American people to be our President, and if we want him to accomplish our agenda we need to set him up for success.”
.. From the beginning, Tom could play to both the establishment and the Tea Party. Everyone recognizes he’s got a firm set of conservative principles, but that makes him a polarizing figure. There are a lot of people here, too, who hate him and think he’s the Antichrist. The only thing everyone agrees on is that he wants to be President someday.”
.. To make that next leap, Cotton expresses the militarism, bellicosity, intolerance, and xenophobia of Donald Trump, but without the childish tweets.
.. He and his supporters see Trump and Trumpism as the future of the Republican Party.
.. He was the one who told us about John Kelly,” the former Marine Corps general who is now Trump’s chief of staff
.. after Cotton spoke out against a quick deal to protect the Dreamers, Trump made a formal proposal to Congress that attached many strings Cotton had demanded.
.. Trump gave Cotton a victory on the touchstone issue of his Senate career by decertifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear-arms deal
.. “Putting aside the issue of technical compliance or noncompliance, it’s clear that the agreement is not in our national interest.”
.. “One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees you drive him to the ground and choke him out.” In response, a questioner pointed out that killing a prisoner of war is not “American practice.” (It is, in fact, a war crime.)
.. in North Korea, Cotton supports Trump’s brinkmanship with Kim Jong Un
.. one recent report suggested that the President would name him director of the C.I.A. if Mike Pompeo, the current director, were to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.
.. Cotton would ratify the President’s instincts. He offers Trump a certainty that matches his own
.. “The Democratic Party has drifted away from them,” Tom told me, as his parents sat nearby. “Bill Clinton would be repudiated by his own party today.
.. I wrote against sacred cows, such as the cult of diversity, affirmative action, conspicuous compassion and radical participatory democracy. I wrote in favor of taboo notions, such as Promise Keepers, student apathy, honor and (most unforgivably) conservativism.”
.. The letter combined outrage, overstatement, and savvy politics in a manner that Trump would perfect a decade later.
.. “ ‘God, guns, and gays’—social issues—were driving white conservatives to the Republicans all along
.. It is impossible not to see race as a central element in the fall of the Democratic Party here
.. “It took a black President to bring out the threat.”
.. “I would always say to my liberal white friends, ‘Oh, come on, surely it’s gotten better.’ And they’d say to me, ‘Oh, no, it hasn’t. You can’t believe what white people say about Obama in private—he’s Kenyan, he’s Muslim, they’d call him unprintable racial epithets.’ ”
.. I think a lot of people in Arkansas thought he was ‘uppity,’ to use the old smear.”
.. Cotton also benefitted from enormous outside spending by conservative groups, including some affiliated with the Koch brothers
.. outside groups spent twenty-three million dollars for Cotton, compared with fourteen million for Pryor.
.. Democrats in Arkansas had a special reason to disdain Obama: “It wasn’t because Barack Obama was black, it was because Barack Obama stopped the Clinton restoration.”
.. About three hundred thousand people, which amounts to more than ten per cent of the state’s population, have taken advantage of the law to obtain health insurance.
.. The program is not called Obamacare but, rather, Arkansas Works.
.. “If you live in a big city and you work in an office building, immigration is almost an unalloyed good for you. . . . It makes the price of services that you pay for a little bit more affordable—whether it’s your nanny to take care of your kids for you, or landscaping your yard, or pedicures, manicures, that sort of thing. And you get a lot of exciting new fusion restaurants as well.
“But if you live and work in a community where they have a large illegal-immigrant population
- that’s straining the public school,
- that’s clogging up the emergency room when you’re trying to get care,
- that makes it more dangerous to drive in the roads because people don’t have driver’s licenses or they don’t have insurance,
- or if they are bidding down the wages or even taking jobs away from you, then it doesn’t look nearly so good,”
.. Most economists believe that immigrants, legal and otherwise, add more to the economy than they take from it, and that their presence in the labor force does not lead to lower wages over all.
.. “He probably knows more about geopolitics than most senators.”
.. In March of his first year in the Senate, Cotton wrote an open letter to the “Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which was co-signed by forty-six other Republican senators, warning the mullahs that Congress might undo any agreement they reached with Obama. The letter was denounced by Executive Branch officials as an attempt to interfere in a diplomatic initiative, but Cotton regards it as a triumph.
.. he boasted about the letter
.. You simply cannot neglect security, and without security there cannot be political compromise and reconciliation, there cannot be good governance, there cannot be economic development, there can’t be anything.”
.. If Rand Paul is the leading Republican isolationist in the Senate, Cotton, in short order, has become heir to the opposing wing of the Party, the one associated with Senator John McCain, whose efforts to increase the defense budget Cotton has championed.
.. But Cotton has gone well past McCain in his swaggering belligerence.
.. “In my opinion, the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now,” Cotton said. “We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far as I’m concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell, but as long as they don’t do that they can rot in Guantánamo Bay.”
.. skirted the edge of demagoguery. “I don’t think any Republicans want legislation that is going to let out violent felons, which this bill would do,”
.. Cotton made his name in the Senate in a more personally poisonous way. In his first year, Cotton placed a hold on Obama’s nominations for the Ambassadors to Sweden, Norway, and the Bahamas, because of an unrelated dispute regarding the Secret Service.
.. “There is a point where winning a political battle isn’t worth it.”
.. “How many guys in town can give a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations and also get kudos in the pages of Breitbart? The answer is, one guy.”
.. Cotton has carved out a clear Trumpism-without-Trump agenda:
- limits on immigration through legislation,
- deportations, and a wall;
- longer prison sentences for American convicts and suspected terrorists abroad;
- a bigger budget for the Department of Defense.
.. The question is whether he has the charisma to sell that agenda to a broader public.