Tuesday Open Thread [12.29.2015]

According to a new Gallup poll, President Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have been named 2015’s “Most Admired” people. Not only did they win, but they won by a very wide margin to those who came in behind them. Gallup states:

“Americans again name Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama the woman and man living anywhere in the world they admire most. Both win by wide margins over the next-closest finishers, Malala Yousafzai for women and Pope Francis and Donald Trump for men.”

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone writes—This Christmas, Tune It All Out:

This has been a bad year for America, largely because politically, we’ve lost the ability to tune out. We no longer know how to calm down and appreciate what we have.

Though our economy may not be what it was, we’re actually safer and less susceptible to crime or war than at any time in our history. But in the same way retailers want us buying on Christmas, others want us scared to death and addicted to news of threats at home and from abroad.

Media companies and politicians alike want us buying stories about terrorists, Ebola, immigrants, crime, hurricanes and whatever else gets the blood rushing to the fear center. And just as retailers sell us things we don’t need, news writers and presidential candidates alike will sell us scare stories, whether we need them or not. They will never not need us to buy.

And we’re obliging. We’ve become fear addicts. Not that this world is without threats, but what there is to worry about – even the threat of being killed in a terrorist attack – exists on a level nowhere near in proportion to our anxiety.

The American Conservative on the grand foreign policy strategy of President Barack H. Obama:

[L]et’s give credit where it’s due. Without proclaiming a presumptuously labeled policy such as “triangulation,” “the Nixon Doctrine,” or even a “freedom agenda,” Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s fading global influence.

Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that can be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American state power, he has slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of unilateral military action toward the more cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security—all in search of a new version of American supremacy. […]

In his determined pursuit of this grand strategy, Obama has revealed himself as one of the few U.S. leaders since America’s rise to world power in 1898 who can play this particular great game of imperial domination with the requisite balance of vision and ruthlessness. Forget everyone’s nominee for master diplomat, Henry Kissinger, who was as inept as he was ruthless, extending the Vietnam War by seven bloody years to mask his diplomatic failure, turning East Timor over to Indonesia for decades of slaughter until its inevitable independence, cratering U.S. credibility in Latin America by installing a murderous military dictatorship in Chile, and mismanaging Moscow in ways that extended the Cold War by another 15 years. Kissinger’s career, as international law specialist Richard Falk wrote recently, has been marked by “his extraordinary capacity to be repeatedly wrong about almost every major foreign policy decision made by the U.S. government over the course of the last half-century.”

Once we subject other American leaders to a similar calculus of costs and benefits, we are, surprisingly enough, left with just three grandmasters of geopolitics: Elihu Root, the original architect of America’s rise to global power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, who shattered the Soviet Empire, making the U.S. the world’s sole superpower; and Barack Obama, who is defending that status and offering a striking imperial blueprint for how to check China’s rise. In each case, their maneuvers have been supple and subtle enough that they have eluded both contemporary observers and later historians.

Many American presidents—think Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—have been capable diplomats, skilled at negotiating treaties or persuading allies to do their bidding. But surprisingly few world leaders, American or otherwise, have a capacity for mastering both the temporal and spatial dimensions of global power—that is, the connections between present actions and often distant results as well as an intuitive ability to grasp the cultural, economic, and military forces whose sum is geopolitics. Mastering both of these skills involves seeing beneath the confusion of current events and understanding the deeper currents of historical change. Root and Brzezinski both had an ability to manipulate the present moment to advance long-term American interests while altering, often fundamentally, the future balance of global power. Though little noticed in the avalanche of criticism that has all but buried his accomplishments in the Oval Office, Obama seems to be following in their footsteps.

Former KKK Leader Says Donald Trump’s Rhetoric Might Be A Little Too Radical for him:

Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke spoke candidly about Donald Trump recently, saying the Republican presidential candidate speaks “a lot more radically” than he does. Duke, who is also a former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, made the comments in an interview on December 17. […]

“As far as what I see, according to the candidates that are out there now, Republicans and Democrats, I think he’s head and shoulders right now above the rest,” Duke said of Trump in the interview. “I don’t agree with everything he says, he speaks a little more, actually he speaks […] a lot more radically than I talk. And I think that’s a positive and negative.”

MSNBC: “While the Democratic race largely fell into line with early expectations – Hillary Clinton fending off a challenge from the left – the Republican primary has been chaos from its first moments. It feels like every time polls, fundraising, and news coverage start to point one direction, things swerve in another: Front-runners turn into underdogs and then disappear entirely; candidates branded as novelties turn into political powerhouses; and broad theories of how modern American politics work are tested to their limits.”

“We compiled a sampling of once-popular assumptions about the GOP race that have been overtaken by events in 2015. As you might expect, one candidate in particular tends to dominate the list.”

Eugene Robinson and his take on Donald Trump’s lasting impression on the Republican Party:

History will remember 2015 as the year when The Republican Party As We Knew It was destroyed by Donald Trump. An entity called the GOP will survive — but can never be the same.

Am I overstating Trump’s impact, given that not a single vote has been cast? Hardly. I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate how the Trump phenomenon has torn the party apart, revealing a chasm between establishment and base that is far too wide to bridge with stale Reagan-era rhetoric. Can you picture the Trump legions meekly falling in line behind Jeb Bush or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.)? I can’t either. […] Trump has given voice to the ugliness and anger that the party spent years encouraging and exploiting. He let the cat out of the bag, and it’s hungry.

Joshua Spivak, senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in New York, explains why a third party run by Trump is highly unlikely:

Third-party runs meet disappointment so consistently, in part, because there aren’t as many truly “independent” voters as we like to think. Yes, 42% of voters aren’t registered with any party — but just 10% say they don’t lean toward one party or the other.

Furthermore, campaigns quash any potential spoiler: They co-opt popular proposals and hammer away at the new party’s inconsistent positions or the candidate’s inexperience. Soon voters retreat to the comfortable embrace of the traditional parties. Outsider candidates inevitably lose steam or collapse in the face of donor disinterest. In many states, there are also serious difficulties just getting on the ballot.

Trump’s political positions may be extreme, but his approach is pragmatic. If he wants to expand his real estate holdings to include 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., he’ll get there only via the GOP primary.