Satire, commentary, analysis—throw it all out the window. What’s happening in Washington is beyond parody, beyond fiction. What will happen tomorrow, what will happen in the next hour? No one knows.
.. Trump doesn’t want stability, he wants motion. He isn’t interested in details or arguments, he’s energized by accomplishments, achievements, placards on the wall. He doesn’t have a cabinet, he has employees. And the primary job of those employees is to protect their boss.
.. Which is what Anthony Scaramucci understands. Like Trump, he’s a showman. Larger than life. He’s familiar with grand gestures. He’s not a D.C. guy.
.. So the man whom the voters brought in to disrupt Washington brought in Scaramucci to disrupt his own White House. Well, mission accomplished.
.. I have been reading past issues of National Review, including bound volumes from 1977-1981. I do not know whether Donald Trump fits the historian’s model of a “disjunctive” president like Jimmy Carter, but the two chief executives do share this in common: Both campaigned as outsiders, both brought fellow outsiders with them to Washington, and these coteries of trusted advisers did not mesh with the institutions and personalities and manners they found in the city. In both cases there was a culture clash, apparent from the beginning. It soon became apparent that Carter’s presidency was not only dysfunctional, but a failure.
Trump’s Defense Secretary Cites Climate Change as National Security Challenge
James Mattis’ unpublished testimony before a Senate panel recognizes a threat others in the administration reject or minimize
“Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today,”
.. Mattis’ statements on climate change, for instance, recognize the same body of science that Scott Pruitt, the new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, seems dead-set on rejecting. In a CNBC interview last Thursday, Pruitt rejected established science pointing to carbon dioxide as the main driver of recent global warming.
.. European officials pushed back on demands that they spend more on defense, saying their investments in boosting resilience to climate hazards in poor regions of the world are as valuable to maintaining security as strong military forces.
.. “[Y]ou need the European Union, because when you invest in development, when you invest in the fight against climate change, you also invest in our own security,” Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said in a panel discussion.
Trump May Doubt Climate Change, Pentagon Sees It as Threat Multiplier
At his confirmation hearing, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called climate change a “driver of instability” that “requires a broader, whole-of-government response.”
For more than a decade, military leaders have said that extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels are aggravating social tensions, destabilizing regions and feeding the rise of extremist groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
.. Another Pentagon report in 2015 called climate change a “threat multiplier.”
.. Climate change is already impacting the military itself, how it operates, and the countries in which we have an interest where it can result in instability, which leads to violence, which leads to conflict and where we end up moving our young men and women overseas
.. He warned the U.S. that “if one country decides to leave a void, I can guarantee someone else will occupy it.” The only other countries not in the accord are Syria and Nicaragua.
.. “Around the world, military strategists view climate change as a threat to global peace and security,” he said in a speech at New York University. “We are all aware of the political turmoil and societal tensions that have been generated by the mass movement of refugees.”
.. a three-foot sea level rise would threaten at least 128 U.S. military bases, which are valued at $100 billion. Nine of those are major hubs for the U.S. Navy.
The Deconstruction of the West
The greatest threat to the liberal international order comes not from Russia, China, or jihadist terror but from the self-induced deconstruction of Western culture.
.. the fracturing of the collective West. And yet the unraveling of the idea of the West has degraded our ability to respond with a clear strategy to protect our regional and global interests.
.. The problem confronting the West today stems not from a shortage of power, but rather from the inability to build consensus on the shared goals and interests in whose name that power ought to be applied.
.. The growing instability in the international system is not, as some argue, due to the rise of China as an aspiring global power, the resurgence of Russia as a systemic spoiler, the aspirations of Iran for regional hegemony, or the rogue despotism of a nuclear-armed North Korea
.. The West’s problem today is also not mainly the result of the economic decline of the United States or the European Union
.. Nor is the increasing global instability due to a surge in Islamic jihadism across the globe
.. At the core of the deepening dysfunction in the West is the self-induced deconstruction of Western culture and, with it, the glue that for two centuries kept Europe and the United States at the center of the international system.
.. The West prevailed then because it was confident that on balance it offered the best set of ideas, values, and principles for others to emulate.
.. It has been replaced by elite narratives substituting shame for pride and indifference to one’s own heritage for patriotism.