Shrike
22hr ago
Trump has said repeatedly that it's needed for Golden Dome. This makes me wonder if the US plans to put nuclear interceptors there - Danish territory is nuclear-free, although they let us bend the rules in Greenland during the Cold War and still might.
I suppose another possibility is that we think if we owned the land outright we would be able to better bar security threats from the territory in a way the Danes can't or won't.
Shrike
1d ago
I think Greenland is another case of the Donroe Doctrine being a twist on the traditional American doctrine. Obviously Greenland has been a long-term strategic objective (the USA invaded it during World War 2, and my understanding is that we just refused to leave afterwards and attempted to buy it; eventually NATO plus an operating agreement with Denmark secured our interests there). So why bang on the drum?
One possibility is that it's a weird Trump-y thing, and I definitely think he has handled the optics of it differently than most presidents. It's also probably true that it would be nice to base nuclear weapons there, if you're the US, and my understanding is that Denmark prohibits this. It's also worth keeping in mind that Denmark's stance on Greenland is "they can leave any time they want." If you're the US you would be wise to ensure that does not happen on terms unfavorable to you. I worry that the specific methodology might be counterproductive, though.
But if you go back to my post about the rise of coercive diplomacy going hand-in-glove with American status as a decaying superpower, it makes a lot of sense to me as an attempt to consolidate the hinterlands. If the US views its relationship with Europe as less secure going forward, while at the same time the threats from Russia and China have increased, attempting to shore up our defensive posture now before the situation deteriorates further makes a lot of sense.
Shrike
2d ago
A small but I think interesting speculative, tentative (both of these things because it's honestly too soon to tell how these things will ultimately play out) note on Recent Events, first with Venezuela and (perhaps?) secondly with Iran: the "Donroe Doctrine" in practice is avoiding a specific fail state of the neoconservative (or US-led international rules-based order or whatever you'd like to call it) modus operandi.
Specifically, the Donroe Doctrine has been to avoid creating a power vacuum that could be filled by forces unknown. Instead, coercive diplomacy is applied to weaken a regime, but rather than attempting to topple the regime's leadership, the coercive diplomacy is then treated as leverage in an ongoing series of negotiations.
You can see this most clearly in Venezuela - even though that operation involved seizing the leader of the country, Trump's strategy obviously was not to pursue the removal of the rump regime. Instead he preferred to negotiate with it. Now with Iran, with potentially regime-shattering protests apparently in play, it seems that the Donroe Doctrine might be to the hang the threat of removal over the head of the regime to induce preferred behavior rather than intervene directly. (Watch me jinx things and airstrikes happen as soon as I push the "comment" button.)
If you look back past the raid in Venezuela, you can see signs of this as well. Trump was comfortable drone-striking Qasem Soleimani, but not as part of a scheme to overthrow the government of Iran. Trump has always talked about working with Putin (or Xi, or Kim Jong Un, or what have you) even when he was taking direct adverse action against them (most notably against Putin).
I suppose there are a number of things one could say about this, but one observation I think I would make is that this is not new way of doing things, and in fact it's been practiced quite recently ("stop doing this or we will launch another 50 Tomahawks at you" is a pretty typical message for US presidents to send), so it's not an innovation per se. At the same time, in the recent past, there did seem to be a general vibe of "we want to remove the bad guys and let the good guys take over" even if we were only engaging in coercive diplomacy, and that vibe seems less present now.
The other one is that this way of doing things is actually well suited to a world where the US status as a superpower is challenged. Paradoxically, as the days of monopolarity slip into the rear view mirror, instances of US gunboat diplomacy may proliferate. This is for (at least) two reasons: firstly, as soft power slips away, the US will need to exercise more hard power to maintain credibility. Secondly, nation-building is an expensive and long-term commitment. Black-bagging dictators really isn't! By plentiful use of coercive diplomacy, the US might be able to achieve far-reaching effects at much less cost, letting it focus more budgetary effort on areas of major geopolitical focus.
Finally, I think there's a clear danger here: if you have a successful string of black-bagging, drone-striking, or otherwise exercising coercive diplomacy against people who annoy you, it can grow intoxicating and seductive. This is obviously a threat of nation-building as well, but a string of quick, cheap, successful operations can lead very quickly to an expensive failure if you keep rolling the dice. And, well, Donald knows better than anyone: nobody likes to lose.
But I'm curious if this sketch rings true to others. What am I missing?
Shrike
3d ago
Sorry I didn't get to reply to this in a more timely fashion.
I'm happy to accept for the sake of argument all of your criticism of Trump, but it's unclear to me how Trump not doing any of that is going to influence an ICE officer who was hired by the Obama administration when he's considering whether or not to shoot someone, any more than the whistleblower safeguards would.
You're laying out a lot of reasonable concerns about the Trump administration's actions, but the one that it seems to me could have prevented the shooting - the straw that broke the camel's back, here - was deciding to not send ICE into Minneapolis. Trump could fire Homan and Noem and go after Hatch Act offenders tomorrow and still send ICE agents into Minneapolis. And of course it's not clear to me that a different President wouldn't have sent ICE agents into Minneapolis.
Based on accounts from Central American women that ICE took into custody, the Southern Poverty Law Center concluded that the January raids “trampled legal rights, subjected mothers and children to terrifying and unnecessary police encounters, and [tore] families apart.” Their report alleges that ICE agents often failed to show warrants or ask for permission before entering the homes of the migrants they sought. At the time of the raids, many of the targets were complying with the rules and regulations set forth by immigration courts, such as wearing electronic ankle bracelets and keeping up with court appointments, according to SPLC’s report. Separate news accounts show that ICE agents picked up young people on their way to school. Against protocol, they even entered “sensitive locations” such as churches, Vice reports.
The effect of these raids on the immigrant community has been well-documented. Kids have been taken out of school. Their families have stopped going out—even to buy food—turning typically bustling immigrant locales into ghost towns, Esther Yu-Hsi Lee at ThinkProgress writes. Even in immigrant-friendly cities like New York, communities are paralyzed with fear.
This was written in 2016 about the Obama administration.
Furthermore, Congress recently voted to increase ICE's budget to accommodate a larger enforcement capability. So it seems to me that the system breakdown that led to this moment was not merely an arbitrary Presidential decision - it was due to our democratic system of government working as advertised. Trump was elected on a strong anti-illegal-immigration platform, Congress, in the course of its Constitutional duty, approved the funds to carry that out, ICE agents were deployed to enforce the laws, and that's what led to the shooting.
I think it's probably fair to criticize the techniques that ICE is using to enforce US immigration law. But ICE using smarter or softer-touch techniques doesn't, it seems to me, guarantee that a shooting won't happen, although it could reduce the odds.
Furthermore, your post claims that ICE agents are trained to avoid walking in front of cars. If that is true, it seems fair to me to criticize the officer for walking in front of the car. But it seems unfair to blame the series of events on "the system" given that the system in place would have prohibited his conduct (if your claims are true.)
I guess I am still trying to drill down on where you think the system failed exactly in this case. Is "the system" democracy? That would certainly make sense of your complaints about the allegedly corrupt conduct of the Trump administration.
Shrike
4d ago
I think this cuts both ways though. Cultural preferences will drive genetic personality traits.
Shrike
5d ago
so getting ahead of the curve and allying ourselves with the Iranians who have already endured and sacrificed so much is smart.
I am very seriously concerned that overtly intervening will cause the protest movement to lose face and legitimacy. Merely offering verbal support to a revolutionary movement and or even arming it generates less risk of creating an appearance that it is merely an American puppet regime than airstrikes or a ground intervention. Now admittedly this is a position I hold from ignorance, but we have reliable evidence such as outside polling showing that e.g. a majority of Iranians support US airstrikes against the regime, then I have not heard of it.
Shrike
5d ago
1915 is a bit out of the 70 year time-frame; I was referring to Operation Uphold Democracy.
Shrike
5d ago
Yeah, it's just a good design (at least for certain tasks), I think.
Supposedly it's based on the Israeli Harpy which in turn (it is theorized) was based on a German-American anti-radiation missile, but that might just be carcinization.
Shrike
5d ago
I think it's too soon to say in Venezuela.
"Played out in the US' favor" isn't the same as "played out in the other country's favor" but did our intervention in Haiti actually make the country worse?
Shrike
5d ago
The intervention (where we prepared an invasion, showed the ruler of the country a videotape of paratroopers en route, and then he decided to step down) seems to have played out in the US' favor in the sense of accomplishing our objectives at low cost.
I suppose it's fair to question whether or not the benefits from that were worth the cost, but OP didn't ask if regime-toppling exercises had solved all of the problems of the countries we toppled, just whether they had played out in the US' favor.
Probably some of those other ones should be on my list...
Shrike
5d ago
The steelman for bombing working is that if you take out the C&C or communication nodes of the enemy and perhaps hit a few troop concentrations they will scatter, loose coordination, and then fall to pieces before the troops that are already on the ground (the protestors). Coordination is extremely important and if you deny that to the enemy they might collapse quickly.
FWIW I tend to think the US should stay out.
Shrike
5d ago
Thank you for the substantive comment. A few thoughts:
Firstly, the excerpts that you listed (and the NYT article as a whole, if you're not reading it closely) gives the impression that the IGs are just disappearing into the void. But I don't think that's true – for instance, Trump fired Phyllis Fong and replaced her with John Walk; Michael Missal was replaced by Cheryl Mason, Thomas Bell was confirmed as the IG for HHS, and it looks like (although I didn't do an exhaustive search) the other IG slots are filled by acting IGs. So while the implication seems to be that Trump is slashing the nation's oversight, it seems that he is replacing personnel. Obviously whether that is good or bad is probably something people will fight over, but it's not the same as just deleting the IG apparatus.
Secondly, it's not clear to me how the whistleblower protection positions are supposed to safeguard from "bad shoots" by ICE, particularly since federal LEOs had quite a few controversial shoots under presidents following Nixon. (It's actually not clear to me they work very well if at all, but I might be overgeneralizing based on an incident I heard about in a personal context once where someone's attempts to reach out were brushed off.) Certainly the problem with the most recent ICE shooting wasn't that someone needed to blow the whistle on it.
Finally, I'm not sure I would characterize it as "naive" to follow the Constitution. It also seems like at least one appeals court (as per the Times) agrees with Trump that he has the legal ability to remove these IGs, at least in some cases, so it's likely not some weird of oddball theory. Instead it is (unless I am mistaken, but this is admittedly a somewhat-informed guess) being done under the theory that the chief executive can, as a matter of Constitutional law, appoint his own officers and Congress has limited ability to stop him from doing so.
I once made a comment about how Trump is taking in one hand the powers that have been slowly ceded to or accumulated by the President and with the other hand seizing the powers that had always been the President's but that had lain dormant for some time under the new arrangements. This seems like an example of that in action.
Shrike
5d ago
It's hard to tell what played out in the favor of the US compared to a counterfactual baseline that doesn't exist, but Grenada, Panama, Haiti and Brazil don't really seem to have backfired.
Shrike
5d ago
Seems like the US could provide e.g. airborne tanker support without really doing anything that would be considered "going to war with Iran" (although ofc material support is technically an act of war [ETA: or at least a cause for war] and all that)
Shrike
5d ago
Trump has dismantled the exact same Nixon-era protections all across the board.
Which ones did you specifically have in mind? Why didn't they stop FBI abuses since Nixon?
Shrike
5d ago
Long-range air defenses are not very effective against low-flying aircraft* (unless essentially colocated with the target, in which case they don't perform better and may perform worse than other cheaper systems) – you can see this in Ukraine, where Russian and Ukrainian aircraft have been able to operate despite the presence of air defenses much superior to those of Venezuela. Being able to get in, yoink a leader defended by small arms and MANPADS (as Maduro was) and fly off without (allegedly) loss of life or destruction of equipment is impressive. Frankly, just coordinating a joint-services time-on-target operation is difficult enough without any sort of resistance at all.
*you might be wondering "what's the point of long range missiles then?" and the answer is that is if all you are doing is forcing the enemy to do risky nap-of-the-earth operations where they will be susceptible to small-arms fire and have worse performance then your long-ranged missiles have paid for themselves already.
Shrike
5d ago
Everything is no longer fine; the system is breaking; its replacement would only be worse; beware of helping it along.
Agents of the federal government have killed moms, kids, dogs, dads, tampered with evidence, lied, entrapped, falsely accused and stolen for decades. Is this genuinely the last straw for you? Why this? Serious question.
But if you are somebody who feels like you have a fuckin 'don't tread on me' bumper sticker. I don't see how you've suddenly gone from this to supporting a mass militia of the government killing people.
I don't think it's hard to explain this, and since I did half of it above I may as well keep going. I can summarize by quoting David Hines: "This is what you ordered, eat it." [I don't mean you, the poster, to be clear!]
To elaborate a bit: uncharitably, righties and libertarians aren't quite so happy to stop the wheels of the state grinding now that it's finally gotten around to grinding their political foes. More charitably, righties and libertarians understand that "the wheels of the state grinding Group A is fine, but they must stop immediately if they touch Group B" is just a recipe for perpetually being abused if you are Group A.
Note that I am not saying this is the correct response. But I don't think it's hard to understand the game theory of it.
Shrike
5d ago
If Israel did well last time around (which on balance it seems to me they did) wouldn't the smartest thing for the US to do be "nothing" and let the Israelis sort it? They almost certainly have better intel and assets, their strike apparatus seems adequate, and they likely have better understanding of Iranian culture and society, and they have much more skin in the game.
The main argument I can see cutting against this is that US action might be more palatable to Iranians than Israeli action.
Shrike
6d ago
MN could have enforced the immigration law but decided it didn't want to
Not really, as I understand it, thanks to Arizona v. US (2012).
Conservatives were locked out of a state-by-state approach to immigration (which even then would have been derivative of federal law) and had to seize control of the federal government in order to enforce it.
Shrike
6d ago
Also, why do it in front of God and everybody (the shooter was both aware he was being filmed and apparently documenting it himself).
I think on balance if ICE agents wanted to assassinate people they would probably both preplan it (planning planning planning is a big thing in the US military and I think it's trickled down into law enforcement) and carefully control the media exposure around it, to say nothing of their own personal safety.
I would guess OP's position is likely that they are doing stochastic assassinations, or essentially taking any plausible opportunity to shoot people, under the guise of self-defense.
Shrike
7d ago
But without broad freedoms of speech and the freedom of running for office, their system was very far away from what anyone would consider a functioning liberal democracy.
To me one of the immediate risks of having a government overthrown is a lack of continuity of government. Most democracies are insufficiently respectful of human rights to my mind. The reason that Iran's democratic government seems like a positive to me in this specific circumstance is because there might be a system of government that could survive the fall of the Ayatollah and provide basic order and, ideally, legitimacy, not necessarily because they would be a liberal democracy. In other words, ideally there is a known factor, not an unknown power vacuum, if the current system of government is overthrown.
If you simply remove the Ayatollah from their parliament, it seems likely that during the next depression, people will vote for the fundamentalists and they will install him again.
I doubt the ayatollahs are actually this popular in Iran, but I could be wrong!
Shrike
8d ago
I didn't mean to suggest they weren't powerful, only that there was a clear successor government and electoral process.
But I haven't looked into it as much as I would like, either, it's possible that the Parliament would have trouble governing "on its own" at this point.
Shrike
8d ago
From what I understand, Iran has democracy, and has in fact had a very long-running democracy, it's just that it has a theocracy stapled on top of it – sort of like how the Constitution restrains US democracy, the Ayatollahs restrain Iranian democracy.
In my mind, this makes me more optimistic about regime change if it is genuinely a popular uprising, simply because (at least in theory) Iran would not need to reinvent the wheel from the ground up. They could (in theory, as I understand it) simply remove the Ayatollah and theocratic laws and keep the regular government in place. But real life is often messier than in theory.
Iran is aligned with Russia
I think this is correct, although I would suggest the tightness of their relationship is sometimes overblown. People sometimes suggest that Russia and Iran are joined at the hip, but Russia actually has pretty good relations with Israel and (from what I understand) has refrained from top-end weapons deliveries to Iran out of deference to Israel, and worked to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. (At this rate the Iranians are never going to be able to replace their F-14s...)
However, Russia and Iran definitely share an interest in containing US power. It's going to be tremendously interesting if Iran and Venezuela both switch to US-friendly or at least US-neutral within a month of each other. It is tempting to say that neutralizing Iran as a foe would wrap up US concerns in the Middle East, particularly if a lack of Iranian support crippled the Houthis. I think that's likely an overstatement, but if Iran and Yemen went down that would basically be the end of Middle Eastern governments that were really hostile to the United States.
I am not sure this is really very surprising, to be honest. I'm not sure I can put it better than Kipling:
but
One could go a bit further and speculate that the arrangement Kipling describes:
Has broken down and been washed away, particularly as the older Christian gender norms Kipling was familiar with have increasingly been forgotten, and commensurate with this breakdown we might expect to see ever stronger evidence that "the female of the species is more deadly than the male."
More options
Context Copy link