Trump, by taking a hard line on Iran, drew some needed attention to Iran’s bad behavior and created an opportunity to improve the nuclear deal. But to do so would have required Trump to admit that there was merit in the deal Obama had forged and to be content with limited, but valuable, fixes that our European allies likely would have embraced.
.. Instead, Trump pushed for the max, torched the whole bridge, separating us from Germany, France and Britain, undermining the forces of moderation in Iran.
.. Color me dubious that a president who has not been able to manage his confrontation with a stripper, or prevent leaks in his White House, can manage a multifront strategy for confronting Iran and North Korea and trade wars with China, Europe and Mexico.
.. Obama’s view of the Middle East was that it was an outlier region, where a toxic brew of religious extremism, tribalism, oil, corruption, climate change and mis-governance made positive change from outside impossible; it had to come from within. By the end of his eight years, Obama was skeptical of all the leaders in the Middle East — Iranian, Arab and Israeli — and of their intentions.
.. It made Obama a policy minimalist on the Middle East: keep it simple and focus on the biggest threat.
.. By lifting sanctions on Iran as part of the deal, Obama hoped Iran would become integrated into the world and moderate the regime.
.. By contrast, Trump’s team is made up of maximalists. They want to limit Iran’s ballistic missile program, reverse its imperialistic reach into the Sunni Arab world, require Iran to accept terms that would ensure it could never ever enrich enough uranium for a nuclear bomb, and, if possible, induce regime change in Tehran.
.. in almost every country the alternative to autocracy turned out not to be democracy, but disorder or military dictatorship. If Iran, a country of 80 million people, was to go the way of Syria, it would destabilize the entire Middle East, and refugees would pour into Europe.
.. Iran has projected its power deep into the Arab world. But that was not because of money it got from the nuclear deal and sanctions relief, as argued by Trump & friends. It was because of the weakness of the Sunni Arab states and their internecine fighting, which created power vacuums that Iran has filled
.. Israel gets censured for implanting settlements deep into the West Bank. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates get censured for contributing to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. But the Iranians have gotten away with murder, mass murder, at home and abroad — with virtually no censure.
.. In Syria, Iran’s special forces and its mercenary recruits — Hezbollah militiamen from Lebanon and Shiite hired guns from Central Asia — have helped President Bashar al-Assad perpetrate a ruthless genocide against Syrian Sunnis, including the use of poison gas, in order to maintain a pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian dictatorship in Damascus.
.. “The aim … is changing the demography” of Syria by settling Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen “from Afghanistan, Lebanon and other countries in the region … to fill the demographic vacuum” left by the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have fled their civil war.
.. Rather than scrapping the deal, he should have told the Europeans that all he wanted to stay in the deal were three fixes:
1. Extend the ban on Iran’s enriching of uranium to weapons grade from the original 15 years Obama negotiated to 25 years.
2. Europe and the U.S. agree to impose sanctions if Iran ever attempts to build a missile with a range that could hit Europe or America.
3. The U.S. and Europe use diplomacy to spotlight and censure Iran’s “occupations” of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
The Fall of the German Empire
But if the test of Europe’s unity feels like a test for liberal democracy, it’s a mistake to see it only in those terms. It is also a struggle of nations against empire, of the Continent’s smaller countries against German mastery and Northern European interests, in which populist parties are being elected to resist policies the center sought to impose upon the periphery without a vote. And the liberal aspect of the European system wouldn’t be under such strain if the imperial aspect hadn’t been exploited unwisely by leaders in the empire’s German core.
This disastrous imperial dynamic was first manifest in the fiscal policy imposed on Southern Europe in the wake of the Great Recession — a policy that manifestly made more sense for Germany’s economy than for Italy’s or Spain’s or Greece’s, even as it was confidently presented by German bankers as a hardheaded necessity that no merely national government could be permitted to reject.
Then the same dynamic repeated itself on immigration, when Angela Merkel took it upon herself to make migration policy for the Continent, in atonement for Germany’s racist past and in the hopes of revitalizing its aging society. The resistance from other Europeans to her open door to refugees and migrants, the refusal to let the German chancellor and her admirers determine immigration policy, is one reason among many that populists won the Brexit referendum and find themselves on the cusp of power in Italy — and it’s the major reason that populist parties rule today in Budapest and Warsaw.
Publishers Haven’t Realized Just How Big a Deal GDPR is
On May 25, 2018, the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (better known as GDPR) comes into effect, and I’m quite worried about how this will impact publishers because most don’t seem to be even close to compliant.
.. What I’m not seeing, however, is any real change to the way publishers use data, the business models they have that rely on data, or any consideration as to what impact this will have on their editorial strategies.
.. What people are reacting to is not just what Facebook is doing, but how every publisher is using a very large number of 3rd party trackers, where neither the publisher or the reader has any control over what is actually happening with this data.
.. . Think about how people are using services like Snapchat, Instagram Stories, or Twitch live streaming … all services that, by default, delete what you have posted so that it can’t be turned into a privacy violation later.
.. If you then, as a publisher, just implement GDPR by taking advantage of all the exceptions or loopholes, so that you continue to load 38 trackers into your site and do it like it’s all ‘business as usual’, you will be fighting against this trend.
In other words, you become the bad guy.
.. Companies like Google and Facebook are perhaps those who have benefited the most from being able to collect data from multiple sources, so you would think that they would do everything they can to try to use every loophole GDPR has.
What we are seeing, however, is a very different outcome.
Let me just remind you of the basic principles of GDPR in a simplified way:
- Everything must be consent based.
- You can only collect what is adequate, necessary, and not excessive in relation to the specific service you offer.
- People have the right to transparency.
- People have the right to be forgotten.
- IP addresses are also considered to be personal information.
.. But think about this in relation to a new visitor. Someone that you have no prior relationship with (a first time visitor). What data can you actually collect and use for that person?
The answer is … nothing!
.. The reason is that a first time visitor hasn’t done anything that could be considered consent, so you have nothing to work with.
I don’t think publishers realize just what this means.
Essentially, it means that you can’t load any 3rd party service into your site. You can’t load advertising from your ad partners (via their scripts), you can’t add social widgets, you can’t add a quiz to your articles that is using some 3rd party service.
.. when Google looked at GDPR they basically came to the conclusion that there was no way around it without resulting in lengthy and likely very expensive legal fights. Fights that they would be attacked with in the press, that would also cause a drop in trust from their users.
So, Google has come to the same conclusion that I have, which is that they can’t do anything until you have given them consent. And, as a result, Google has now implemented a system so that when you visit them, you are presented with a box that looks like this:
.. So, Google is trying to get ahead of this by just getting rid of the problem altogether.
It’s the same with Facebook. They too are moving to a consent based baseline for how they do everything. And, they are also stopping their practice of buying personal data from data brokers.
Trump Alienates Allies Needed for a Trade Fight With China
China’s predatory trade behavior is threatening sectors much more vital than steel and aluminum
“Beijing has doubled down on its state capitalist model even as it has gotten richer,” Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, who both served in foreign-policy roles under former President Barack Obama, write in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. “Cooperative and voluntary mechanisms to pry open China’s economy have by and large failed.”
.. But Mr. Trump has consistently rejected collective action in favor of going it alone. His officials downgraded multilateral efforts to reduce steel overcapacity. In January 2017, Mr. Obama’s administration launched a case at the WTO against China for subsidizing aluminum, but Mr. Trump has failed to follow up.
.. since 2003 China has four times promised to address overcapacity in steel production, as its actual capacity quadrupled to roughly half the world total.
.. Yet China exports little steel to the U.S. because of existing duties and accounts for just 11% of its aluminum imports, far behind Canada. The Commerce Department argued for a global remedy because Chinese production depresses global prices and drives foreign producers out of third markets, and they then ship to the U.S.
This means the pain of Mr. Trump’s tariffs will fall not on China but on actors that play by the rules, including Canada, Japan and the European Union. When the EU threatened to retaliate, Mr. Trump said he would escalate by raising duties on European cars.
Chinese misbehavior has thus brought the U.S. to the brink of trade war with its own economic and strategic allies, echoing how Russian meddling has served to fuel internal strife in Europe and the U.S.
.. Chinese forced technology transfer, commercial espionage and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at creating Chinese champions in key industries by 2025.
These pose a far greater threat to U.S. technological leadership and the enormous value it adds to U.S. exports than do growing imports of steel and aluminum which, while vital to some communities, are commodities.
.. The U.S. is preparing a sweeping penalty against China, but it would be more effective if done jointly; otherwise, Beijing may simply persuade others to hand over their technology in exchange for Chinese sales or capital.
.. Most of all, though, it requires Mr. Trump to understand where leverage comes from.
“Chinese misbehavior with respect to intellectual property and economic espionage is a real problem that requires a response,” Patrick Toomey, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said in an interview. “We are much more likely to get our allies to work with us if we aren’t punishing them for selling us steel that our consumers want to buy.”