#U.S. Strategy

[fandfnews]

Azerbaijan Poised to Expand the Abraham Accords

In a significant move that could reshape regional alliances, discussions have intensified over the possibility of Azerbaijan joining the Abraham Accords framework. This development marks a potential expansion of Israel’s established diplomatic partnerships with Muslim-majority nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, and could further bolster Israel’s image as a normalized…

[firstoccupier]

Senator Marco Rubio Calls for Reevaluation of U.S. Strategy Towards China

By, WPS News Staff ReporterBaybay City | January 22, 2022 In a series of recent statements, Senator Marco Rubio has ardently expressed his concerns regarding China’s rise as a global power, labeling it not just as a challenge but as a formidable threat to the United States and its allies. Rubio’s perspective is informed by a growing anxiety about the geopolitical landscape shaped by China’s…

[vaguely-problematic]

the maga infighting on display is not a sign of the collapse of the gop or something.

it's just how maga works.

maga chews through their own people on an impressive basis, and yet it keeps on going. same feces new faces.

i wish the media wouldn't act like there's no other news

[bubonickitten]

I truly, desperately need the Democratic party to focus at LEAST as much on the undecided progressive as on the undecided right-leaning moderate.

If you really want to earn the votes of undecided people, or--perhaps more importantly--inspire a young generation of first-time voters to vote for you, you HAVE to fucking talk to them and meet them where they are, and then prove to them that you've got their backs.

Like, yes, I'm voting for the Democratic candidate either way because the electoral college two-party system precludes viable alternatives. But forget the discourse about voting, not voting, voting third party, etc. for a minute and just acknowledge the fact that there are going to be people who are not going to change their minds if all you can give them is "not as bad as the other guy." Just, speaking purely in terms of pragmatism and sustainability, "not as bad as the other guy" is a dead end for a large percentage of voters, like it or not. Democrats have got to do better than that if they want to genuinely improve their chances of beating the other guy -- in this election and every other.

(ETA: I should probably clarify that I also don't like or trust the Democratic party, for the record, and this isn't me white knighting on their behalf. I'm just saying if they actually want to court progressive voters, they have to stop being... you know. Like this.)

[hisradiantfire]

Disbelief, Reactions to MLK Jr.

In this thought-provoking episode, we confront the uncomfortable truths surrounding Martin Luther King Jr. and the broader implications of deception in both the Church and society. Join Christopher as he delve into the journey of discovering hidden narratives and the impact of misinformation on our understanding of historical figures. Through personal reflections and insightful thoughts, we explore the importance of truth, the consequences of ignorance, and the necessity for deeper biblical knowledge in navigating today's complex spiritual landscape.

Here is the latest from Radiant Fire Radio...

[tmarshconnors]

Franklin D. Roosevelt was warned.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour became one of the most infamous events in American history, leading the United States into World War II. However, a lesser-known aspect of this tragic day is the series of warnings that were issued to American military installations in the days leading up to the attack. Ten days before the Japanese planes descended upon Pearl Harbor, both the Army and Navy sent explicit messages warning of imminent war to key locations, including Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, and the Canal Zone. These warnings, unfortunately, were largely ignored by the facilities in Oahu, resulting in catastrophic consequences.

In late November 1941, the increasing tension in the Pacific was palpable. Intelligence gathered by American cryptanalysts indicated that Japan was planning a significant military operation. On November 27, 1941, a "war warning" was sent out by both the War Department and the Navy Department. This warning indicated that a Japanese attack was likely and urged all Pacific commands to take appropriate defensive measures.

"Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes with only the barest possibilities that the Japanese Government might come back and offer to continue. Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot, be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act. This policy should not, repeat not, be construed as restricting you to a course of action that might jeopardise your defence."

Similarly, the Navy's communication emphasized the imminence of war and the need for vigilance:

"This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. The negotiations with Japan in an effort to stabilize conditions in the Pacific have ceased, and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days."

Despite the urgency conveyed in these messages, the response from military facilities in Oahu, where Pearl Harbor is located, was shockingly lax. Several factors contributed to this alarming oversight, including a misinterpretation of the threat's location and a general underestimation of Japan's capabilities and intentions.

Another controversial aspect of the lead-up to Pearl Harbor is the role of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Critics argue that Roosevelt was aware of the impending danger but failed to take adequate steps to prevent the attack. While it is true that Roosevelt had access to intelligence reports indicating a potential threat, the extent to which he understood or acted on this information remains a topic of debate among historians.

Some theorists suggest that Roosevelt might have allowed the attack to happen to galvanize American public opinion in favor of entering World War II. However, most historians dismiss this notion as a conspiracy theory, citing the immense risk and unpredictable consequences of such an action. What is clear, though, is that the warnings from both the Army and Navy were not given the level of attention and urgency they warranted, either by Roosevelt's administration or the military commanders in Hawaii.

The attack on Pearl Harbor had devastating effects, resulting in the deaths of over 2,400 Americans and the loss of numerous ships and aircraft. In the aftermath, numerous investigations sought to understand how such a significant surprise attack could have occurred. These inquiries highlighted the failures in communication, preparedness, and the underestimation of the Japanese threat.

One of the crucial lessons from Pearl Harbor is the importance of heeding intelligence warnings and ensuring that all levels of command understand and act upon them appropriately. The tragedy underscored the need for improved communication and coordination among military and government agencies to prevent such lapses in the future.

The events leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack serve as a poignant reminder of the consequences of ignoring clear warnings. The messages sent ten days prior to the attack were explicit and direct, yet the failure to act on them resulted in one of the darkest days in American history.

As we remember Pearl Harbour, it is essential to acknowledge the lessons it taught us about vigilance, preparedness, and the critical importance of acting on intelligence to safeguard national security.

[inc-immigrationnewscanada]

Brian Schatz's Shocking Move as Senator

In a dramatic turn of events that could significantly impact the landscape of American foreign policy, Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) has taken a stand that could delay or derail Donald Trump’s plans for the U.S. Department of State. With a firm declaration of a “blanket hold” on all of Trump’s nominees for diplomatic positions, Schatz has ignited a firestorm of discussion, debate, and…

[yesornopolls]

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[sparkmantis]

Trump’s India Tariffs Contradict His Own “Peace Through Trade Threats” Doctrine

Published: July 31, 2025Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes 📉 A Strategy in Conflict President Donald Trump’s latest move to impose 25% tariffs on Indian exports, along with additional penalties for India’s ongoing trade with Russia, is making headlines for more than just its economic impact. It’s also exposing cracks in his own foreign policy doctrine, the so-called “peace through trade threats”…

[luffymonkey1227]

What’s Going on with Israel and Iran? Is There Going to Be a War? A Progressive Perspective

The relationship between Israel and Iran has been fraught with tension and conflict for decades. From nuclear ambitions to regional power struggles, the two nations have been on opposing sides of a wider geopolitical contest, not just for regional dominance but for ideological and religious influence in the Middle East. As of 2025, this longstanding conflict has shown few signs of de-escalation.…

[go-21newstv]

A review of the stock market headwinds into 2025 and what could potentially end the bull

For stock investors the handoff for 2025 is about as good as it gets, but there are significant potential headwinds. Let’s review the state of play going into the new year. Here’s the good news first. Market tailwinds into 2025 First and foremost, there is a still-strong economy, with 3% GDP. Second, record profits are expected for a second year in 2025, and not just from the tech sector.…

[finovohub]

market strategy: No sharp rallies ahead, expect incremental valuation re-rating: Chakri Lokapriya

https://img.etimg.com/thumb/msid-122852540,width-1200,height-630,imgsize-22066,overlay-etmarkets/articleshow.jpg “We’ve seen earnings from TCS and HCL Tech that reflect the uncertainty in the U.S., largely due to tariffs. Discretionary demand remains weak. The order books, however, continue to be fairly decent, though conversion remains sluggish. This pattern is likely to continue across the IT…

[syedtahirabbas]

Israel’s military intervention in Syria after deadly clashes in Sweida raises regional stakes. This analysis explores the causes, implications, and the fragile future of Syria’s political transition.

[toymakerinchina]

Will U.S. Sanctions and Tariff Threats Disrupt the Global Playground Equipment Supply Chain?

As U.S.-China trade tensions intensify, particularly with the recent threat of up to 500% tariffs on countries trading with Russia, global industries are bracing for impact — including an unlikely but significant sector: indoor playground equipment manufacturing. On July 14th, U.S. officials escalated their rhetoric, suggesting “secondary tariffs” targeting countries — like China — that continue…