Chaos at home, fear abroad: Trump unleashed puts western
world on edge
The Observer
Donald Trump
While a government shutdown and a key resignation grabbed
headlines, diplomats were stunned by US actions over Yemen
Julian Borger
Julian Borger in Washington
Sun 23 Dec 2018 06.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/23/donald-trump-government-shutdown-syria-mattis-mcgurk-yemen
The US stumbled into the holiday season with a sense of
unravelling, as a large chunk of the federal government ground to a halt, the
stock market crashed and the last independently minded, globally respected,
major figure left in the administration announced he could no longer work with
the president.
The defense secretary, James Mattis, handed in his
resignation on Thursday, over Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to pull US troops
out of Syria. On Saturday another senior official joined the White House
exodus. Brett McGurk, the special envoy for the global coalition to defeat Isis
and the US official closest to America’s Kurdish allies in the region, was
reported to have handed in his resignation on Friday.
That night, senators flew back to Washington from as far
away as Hawaii for emergency talks aimed at finding a compromise on Trump’s
demand for nearly $6bn for a wall on the southern border, a campaign promise
which has become an obsession. The president tweeted out an illustration of a
very pointy, very high metal fence which he called “our Steel Slat Barrier
which is totally effective while at the same time beautiful!”
Earlier in the week, it appeared a deal had been reached to
allow the funding of normal government functions into the New Year. But Trump
abruptly changed his mind, most likely after watching rightwing pundits
criticise the fudge on television.
The immediate consequences were that 380,000 federal workers
were placed on compulsory unpaid leave and another 420,000 would have to work
through the holidays unpaid. About a quarter of government functions ceased for
lack of funding. On Saturday the Senate adjourned without a solution, ensuring
the shutdown will continue until Thursday at the earliest.
The mood of uncertainty accelerated an already precipitous
stock market dive, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffering its worst
December fall since 1987.
Trump was left to brood alone in Washington. The first lady,
Melania, and their son, Barron, flew off on Friday to Mar-a-Lago, the
president’s private club in Florida.
“I am in the White House, working hard. News reports
concerning the Shutdown and Syria are mostly FAKE,” the president tweeted.
Trump has been spending an increasing amount of time in his
private quarters, appearing for work in the Oval Office later and later in the
morning. His aides call it “executive time” but it is clear from his Twitter
feed it is mostly spent watching TV and responding viscerally to what he sees
and hears.
With the departure of two retired generals, the chief of
staff John Kelly and the defense secretary James Mattis, the administration has
lost two war veterans not afraid of standing up to Trump. In 2019, that
insulation between Trump’s impulses and the rest of the world will no longer be
there.
James Mattis seen at
a news conference in June. Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The last straw for Mattis was a phone call on 14 December
between Trump and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in which the
president upended US policy.
Instead of warning Erdoğan off a threatened offensive into
Syria aimed at Kurdish forces, Washington’s closest allies against Isis, Trump
was persuaded in a matter of seconds to abandon Syria and leave the Kurds to
their fate. Unable to change Trump’s mind, Mattis handed in his resignation on
Thursday, with a letter he clearly spent some time composing, citing respect
for allies as the critical difference.
“Mattis clearly felt he had reached the end of the road,”
said Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence now at the
German Marshall Fund. “Trump has no real clear objective but has a destructive
America First perspective on the world, which will become more manifest now
there aren’t people around him willing and able to stand up to him.”
Furthermore, as the Mueller investigation into the Trump
campaign’s collusion with Russia heads towards a denouement, and the House of
Representatives begins its own investigations once Democrats take control in
January, Trump will have a growing incentive to look for new crises abroad to
change the subject on his Twitter feed.
“We know from people who have worked with this man that when
he feels out of control, he tends to create more chaos,” Farkas said. “That is
what we are seeing now.”
‘Added room for misjudgment’
Accounts from inside the White House, such as Bob Woodward’s
book Fear, confirm that Mattis had manage to steer the president from impulsive
moves that would have turned the world on its head, like pulling the US out of
Nato, or launching assassination strikes against Bashar al-Assad of Syria and
the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
“With adversaries, Trump’s underlying unpredictability and
lack of understanding of how to use the tools of American power will now be
exacerbated by the lack of much in the way of experienced and judicious foreign
policy advice and implementation,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former deputy
assistant secretary of state now at the Brookings Institution.
“So I think there’s added room for the kind of misjudgment
and misinterpretation (on both sides) that leads small incidents to escalate
into major international crisis.”
Trump’s top two remaining foreign policy aides, his national
security adviser, John Bolton, and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have shown
themselves ready to go along with his orders without much effort to change his
mind, even when those instructions directly contradict their own professed
views.
John Bolton and Mike
Pompeo confer in the rose garden at the White House in June. Photograph: Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images
Both men have increasingly focused their efforts on the one
area where their instincts are in line with Trump’s: putting maximum pressure
on Iran. Before taking his White House position, Bolton advocated air strikes
against Iranian nuclear facilities. European diplomats in Washington say Pompeo
is reluctant to engage with them on any other subject.
That focus has increased the importance administration puts
on relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Estimates, which
have egged Trump on against Iran, and downgraded alliances with European
capitals, which have insisted on sticking by the 2015 nuclear agreement with
Iran that Trump wants to destroy.
The new realities were brought home to British diplomats
over the past week, when they were trying to get a United Nations security
council resolution passed that would uphold a ceasefire in the Yemeni port of
Hodeidah, guarantee delivery of humanitarian supplies and threaten consequences
for war crimes.
Having been promised support from Washington, the UK mission
was stunned when the US began circulating a rival resolution, stripped of
language about humanitarian supplies and war crimes, the Americans apparently
acting on behalf of the Saudi-led coalition, which has fought any UN attempt to
constrain its military operations.
As the week went on, the UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, an
important independent voice on US foreign policy who is also leaving the
administration, declared herself unwell. Orders to the US mission came straight
from Pompeo. Early on Thursday, American diplomats threatened their British
counterparts with a veto, an almost unheard of step among allies.
“Utterly baffling behaviour from the US,” one diplomat said.
“No one in the US-UN [mission] or state [department] able to give sensible
advice to Pompeo who was obsessed with Iran and deleting all language which the
Saudis and Emiratis disliked.”
‘Trump and Putin could end the world today’
The ever-present possibility of an unintended or unforeseen
conflict flaring up increases fears among defence analysts over how Trump might
respond without experienced figures like Mattis at his side.
“President Trump has yet to be faced with a true
international crisis,” said Alexandra Bell, a senior policy director at the
Centre for Arms Control and Non-proliferation. “His behaviour and actions give
little hope that he’ll react to pressure with calm resolve.”
Bell pointed out that under the US command and control
system, there is no institutional brake on Trump ordering a nuclear launch.
“The world must also come to grips with the fact that we
have placed an inordinate amount of faith in the ability of individual leaders
to behave rationally. By choice or miscalculation, President Trump and
President Putin could end the world today and there’s little any of us could do
to stop them. What’s worse is that’s the way we designed it.”
The US is on the edge of the economic precipice – Trump may
push it over
Robert Reich
Government shutdowns hurt millions. Great depressions hurt
even more. History suggests real pain is round the corner
Sun 23 Dec 2018 06.00 GMT Last modified on Sun 23 Dec 2018
06.01 GMT
‘Ten years after the start of the Great Recession, we face
another economic precipice.’
On Friday, Donald Trump said: “We are totally prepared for a
very long shutdown.” It was one of his rare uses of the pronoun “we” instead of
his preferred – and in this case far more appropriate – “I”.
The shutdown is indubitably his. Congress offered him a way
to continue funding the government without the money to build his nonsensical
wall along the Mexican border, but Trump caved in to the rabid rightwing media
and refused.
I was in Bill Clinton’s cabinet when Newt Gingrich pulled
the plug on the federal government in 1996. It wasn’t a pretty picture. A long
shutdown hurts millions of people who rely on government for services and
paychecks.
Trump’s shutdown also adds to growing worries about the
economy. The stock market is on track for the worst December since the Great
Depression. World markets have lost nearly $7tn in 2018, making it the worst
year since the 2008 financial crisis.
The shutdown is stoking fears that Trump could do something
even more alarming. He might fail to authorize an increase in government borrowing
before the federal debt reaches the current limit, which Congress extended to 2
March. A default by the US on its obligations would be more calamitous than a
government shutdown.
All this brings us closer to the economic precipice. It
worsens America’s most fundamental economic problem.
The shutdown is
stoking fears that Trump could do something even more alarming
Economies depend first and foremost on spending. Otherwise,
there’s no reason to produce goods and services. In the US, consumer spending
constitutes about 70% of total demand. The rest comes from government and
exports.
Export markets are in trouble. Europe’s and China’s
economies were already slowing before Trump’s trade wars added to the stresses.
US government spending was hobbled even before the shutdown
by a large debt, which Trump’s tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy has
further enlarged.
Don’t count on American consumers to come to the rescue.
Most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession that
started in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009.
More Americans have jobs, to be sure, but their pay has
barely risen when adjusted for inflation. Many are worse off due to the
escalating costs of housing, healthcare and education.
Trump has added to their financial burdens by undermining
the Affordable Care Act, rolling back overtime pay, hobbling their ability to
join together in unions, allowing states to cut Medicaid, and imposing tariffs
that increase the prices of many goods.
America’s wealthy, meanwhile, have been taking home a
growing portion of the nation’s total income. But the rich spend a small
fraction of what they earn. The economy depends on the spending of middle-,
working-class and poor families.
The only way these Americans have continued to spend is by
going deeper into debt. By the third quarter of this year, household debt had
reached a record $13.5tn. Almost 80% of Americans are now living paycheck to
paycheck.
Holiday windows in
New York City. ‘The economy depends on the spending of middle-, working-class
and poor families.’
This isn’t sustainable. Even if the Fed weren’t raising
interest rates – an unwise move under these circumstances – consumers would still
be in trouble. Mortgage, auto and student-debt delinquencies are already
mounting.
The last time household debt was nearly this high was in
2007, just before the Great Recession. Similarly, between 1913 and 1928, the
ratio of personal debt to the total national economy nearly doubled. Then came
the Great Crash.
See a pattern?
The problem isn’t that Americans are living beyond their
means. It’s that their means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy.
Most gains have gone to the top. If the majority of households had taken home a
larger share of national income, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into
debt.
Without wage growth, American workers can’t continue to buy
without going into deeper debt. Unless they continue to buy, the economy can’t
continue to move forward.
It’s the same sort of trap that preceded the 2008 and 1929
crashes.
After the 1929 crash, the government invented new ways to
boost the wages of most Americans – social security, unemployment insurance,
overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers bargain with labor
unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called the second world war.
By contrast, after the 2007 crash the government bailed out
the banks and pumped enough money into the economy to stop the slide. But apart
from the Affordable Care Act, nothing was done to address the underlying problem
of stagnant wages.
Ten years after the start of the Great Recession, we face
another economic precipice.
It’s important to understand that the root cause of those
former collapses wasn’t a banking crisis. It was the growing imbalance between
consumer spending and total output – brought on by stagnant wages and widening
inequality.
That imbalance is back. Trump is making it worse.
O canal de televisão CNN divulgou que Trump sondou os seus
assessores sobre se teria base legal para demitir Jerome Powell, uma decisão
sem precedentes.
Trump terá discutido demissão do presidente da Fed
Negócios com Lusa
22 de dezembro de 2018 às 23:37
A imprensa norte-americana noticia hoje que o Presidente,
Donald Trump, discutiu em privado a demissão do presidente do banco central
pela sua decisão de aumentar as taxas de juro.
Contactado pela
agência France Presse, a Reserva Federal norte-americana ainda não comentou
essas notícias, que citavam fontes próximas de Donald Trump.
Wall Street registou
a maior queda semanal desde 2008, agravada pelo aumento das taxas de juro, a
ameaça de bloqueio do governo norte-americano, a guerra comercial e os receios
de uma desaceleração económica nos Estados Unidos
O canal de televisão
CNN divulgou que Trump sondou os seus assessores sobre se teria base legal para
demitir Jerome Powell, uma decisão sem precedentes.
Ao contrário dos seus
antecessores, Trump critica muitas vezes as decisões da Reserva Federal, afirmando
na semana passada que aumentar as taxas de juro seria um erro.
Ainda no dia anterior
ao anúncio da quarta subida de juros do ano, Trump pediu à Fed para não subir
as taxas de juro. "É incrível que com um dólar muito forte e praticamente
sem inflação, com o mundo a explodir à nossa volta, Paris a arder e a China em
queda, a Fed esteja sequer a considerar mais uma subida de juros",
escreveu Donald Trump no Twitter.
Há meses que o
presidente norte-americano critica a trajectória da política monetária adoptada
pelo líder do banco central, acusando Jerome Powell de penalizar o crescimento
da economia com a subida dos juros.
Em Outubro, Trump afirmou que a Fed estava a "cometer
um enorme erro" ao manter o ritmo de normalização da política monetária.
Disse ainda que os governadores do banco central estavam "doidos" e
que a política da instituição é "demasiado agressiva".
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