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Recent Posts
- Election Night Preview — Part Six (Post-Midnight Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Five — The Local News and the West Coast (11:00 To 11:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Four — Prime Time Hour Three (10:00 to 10:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Three — Prime Time Hour Two (9:00 To 9:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Two — Prime Time Hour One (8:00 to 8:59 p.m. Eastern)
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Tag Archives: Vladimir Putin
Foreign Elections — Spring/Summer 2019
The next two months will see several elections in our allies/major democracies.
This weekend is the election in Spain for both houses of their parliament. In Spain, the lower house is elected by proportional representation on a provincial basis. While there is a nominal 3% threshold in each province, the (fifty) provinces range from one seat (in which whomever finishes first gets the seat) to thirty-six seats (in which case the threshold makes a real difference as it would take slightly over 2.7% to win a seat). In the Senate, most of the provinces get four seats. While voters directly elect most of the members of the Senate, the catch is that voters have one vote less than the number of seats (i.e. three votes in a province with four seats) which translates into the largest party getting three seats and the second-place party getting one seat. The regional parliaments also get to appoint the remaining fifty-eight members of the Senate. For this election, there are five national parties (ranging from two Democratic Socialist parties to a Trumpian nationalist party) and several regional parties.
There are three things to look at in the results from Spain. First, is there a natural majority for either of the two main blocs (the two Democratic Socialist parties vs. the two center-right party)? Second, how does the Trumpian (Vox) party perform? Third, how do the regional parties (which want increased local autonomy/independence) perform? From the traditional American foreign policy, we would prefer a result that creates a strong functional government capable of being a partner with us. Russia (and our current administration) would prefer a divided election result with strong performances by Vox and the regional parties pulling Spain further away from NATO and the European Union and potentially splitting Spain (one of the larger European countries) into several separate countries focused on their grievances with each other rather than building a strong Europe.
Posted in Elections
Also tagged Australia, Brexit, Donald Trump, European Union, India, Russia, Spain
Comments Off on Foreign Elections — Spring/Summer 2019
Strength in Leadership
Earlier this week, Donald Trump — again — expressed his admiration for the strong leadership of Vladimir Putin as compared to the current leadership of the United States. It is understandable why somebody who is the head of a closely-held family business would sympathize with the leadership style of Vladimir Putin. There is a lot of similarity in the ability of such individuals to make decisions for their company or country between such a business and a police state. The leader of a democracy, however, does not have the same ability.
Posted in Donald Trump, Elections, Politics
Also tagged Donald Trump, Russia
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Putin-Trump 2016
No, I don’t think that Trump is actually running on a ticket with Vladimir Putin. It’s just that sometimes, you just can’t tell for sure. Throughout 2015, the conventional wisdom was that, at some point, as the primaries approached, Republican voters would wake up from their flirtation with Donald Trump and realize that Trump is not a Republican, that he supports almost none of the traditional positions that the Republican Party has taken for the past fifty years.
Nowhere is Trump’s lack of respect for issues and principles clearer than when he stumbles into foreign policy. The only discernable principle that Trump has demonstrated so far when it comes to foreign policy is some variation on mercantilism — that the only foreign policy interest that the U.S. has is what’s good for U.S. business, primarily what’s good for the Trump Organization.
The past week has seen several examples of this approach. On NATO, forget the fact that the security guarantees that the U.S. has given eliminates any need for Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, etc., to develop their own nuclear weapons (and all could within months). What matters is how much everyone is paying, as if the U.S. Army was 21st century mercenaries fighting on behalf of the highest bidder.
Today, after evidence that Russia was behind the hack on the DNC and is actively interfering in U.S. politics, Trump makes a statement that is (at best) ambivalent, and (at worst) encouragement for Russia to keep going. While it’s a dirty secret of international diplomacy and espionage that everybody tries to influence what is going on in other countries (even our allies), the normal response when your country is being targeted is to demand that it stop.
At the same time, when asked about the Crimea, Trump’s response was that he had to think about his position on Russia’s annexation of the Ukraine. Later, Trump indicated that he thought that, under a Trump Administration, there was no reason why the U.S. and Russia couldn’t be on friendlier terms. Now, I don’t think any U.S. Administration is going to be in a position to force Russia to give back the Ukraine. However, part of our agreement with the Ukraine when they agreed to give up the nuclear weapons that fell into their hands when the Soviet Union collapsed was that we would help guarantee the security of the Ukraine. Saying that those arrangements are something that a Trump Administration needs to think about is astonishing.
While saying that he did not know why we couldn’t be on friendlier terms with Russia, Trump also (contrary to earlier claims that he knew Putin and could get along with him) denied really knowing much about Putin. Which ultimately is the problem. It is one thing for a U.S. presidential candidate to have no clue about who is running Angola or East Timor. It is another thing to be clueless about the big players like Russia and China. There are good reasons why we have problems with Russia. On almost every major international problem, Russia is opposing our position (and vice versa).
The fact that Trump is blissfully ignorant of these issues means that nobody has any idea what a Trump foreign policy would look like. (The same can be said of a lot of Trump’s flip-flopping domestic agenda.) At least a lot of the Republican foreign policy leadership has stood up and said that Trump is too risky for them to take and that they will be voting for Hillary. Among the rank and file, the question for the next three months is whether Republican voters actually support the traditional Republican foreign policy or whether the only philosophy that the Republican Party stands for is to stop the Democrats, no matter the cost.
Posted in Donald Trump, Rant
Also tagged Crimea, Donald Trump, NATO, Ukraine
Comments Off on Putin-Trump 2016