1. Bloomberg asks if Drumpf has sidelined his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. I am currently reading Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices, her memoirs about her time as U.S. Secretary of State under Barak Obama. The Bloomberg article's 2nd paragraph relays the words of Secretary Tillerson upon his arrival to the State Department, and the remarks quoted sound like they could've been uttered by Clinton herself: “You have accumulated knowledge and experience that cannot be replicated anywhere else... Your wisdom, your work ethic and patriotism, is as important as ever.” So there was perhaps reason to believe Tillerson would have a "moderating" effect on Drumpf's foreign policy.
It hasn’t happened. Far from curbing [Drumpf]’s excesses, Tillerson has been blindsided by them: a travel ban that alienated much of the Muslim world and originally barred the entry of Iraqis who’d fought alongside U.S. troops; a crackdown on immigrants that’s poisoned relations with America’s third-largest trading partner, Mexico; [Drumpf]’s suggestion that the U.S. could live with a permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank, so long as everyone else is cool with it. Tillerson was absent from White House meetings with the leaders of Canada, Japan, and Israel. His pick for deputy secretary, Elliott Abrams, was rejected after [Drumpf] learned Abrams had criticized him during the 2016 campaign.
...
Senior State Department officials are livid at the White House’s proposal to cut by a third the $50 billion base budget for the department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham declared the Trump plan “a disaster” and “dead on arrival” in Congress. So far, Tillerson has remained characteristically impassive, but protecting the State Department’s resources will require him to step outside his comfort zone and send clear, vigorous, and public messages about the value of diplomacy as a tool of U.S. power.2. Embattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he intends to have the Dept. of Justice "pull back" on Obama-era federal scrutiny of police department civil rights violations, examples of which include its investigations of the Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD police departments after the high profile killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, respectively.
Sessions has also reversed an Obama order to phase out government contracting with private prisons.
The federal Bureau of Prisons currently holds 12 private prison contracts, housing nearly 21,000 inmates across the country.
The Justice Department began issuing contracts with private prisons when the prison population boosted up to 800 percent between 1980 and 2013.
Now, with President Trump’s strict immigration policies on the horizon, private prisons could make major profits in the coming years.3. The Intercept claims that Defense Secretary James Mattis nearly brought us to war with Iran.
Defense Secretary James Mattis... had wanted the U.S. Navy to “intercept and board an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen. … But the ship was in international waters in the Arabian Sea, according to two officials. Mr. Mattis ultimately decided to set the operation aside, at least for now. White House officials said that was because news of the impending operation leaked.”
Get that? It was only thanks to what Mattis’s commander in chief has called “illegal leaks” that the operation was (at least temporarily) set aside and military action between the United States and Iran was averted.
Am I exaggerating? Ask the Iranians. “Boarding an Iranian ship is a shortcut” to confrontation, says Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, former member of Iran’s National Security Council and a close ally of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Even if a firefight in international waters were avoided, the Islamic Republic, Mousavian tells me, “would retaliate” and has “many other options for retaliation.”
Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council and author of the forthcoming book “Losing an Enemy — Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy,” agrees. Such acts of “escalation” by the Trump administration, he tells me, “significantly increases the risk of war.”
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