Biggest Threats To National Security Are Coming Straight Out Of The Oval Office

Paul Krugman believes the biggest threat to our national security comes from Donald Trump and his henchmen. I think he has a valid point. Here's what he has written: 

To update Samuel Johnson, these days national security is the last refuge of a scoundrel. According to Donald Trump, anything he doesn’t like is a threat to national security. Question his clearly illegal tariffs? You’re a dark and sinister force trying to undermine America. When the New York Times reported on signs that age may be taking a toll on Trump’s stamina, he denounced the reporting as “seditious, maybe even treasonous.”

But some of America’s allies — and many of us here at home — are becoming increasingly open about saying that the real danger is coming from inside the White House: Trump himself has become the biggest security threat facing the U.S. and, indeed, all the world’s democracies.

On Wednesday a new report from Denmark’s military intelligence service contained the most explicit statement of the growing alarm. It pointed out that, under Donald Trump, America is no longer acting like a friendly partner:

The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.

Without a doubt, Denmark’s concerns have been heightened by Trump’s repeated assertions that he wants to “get” Greenland, which is a Danish territory. In August the Danish government summoned the head of the U.S. embassy to protest about “covert influence operations” in Greenland undertaken by Americans with ties to Trump.

However, Denmark is certainly not alone in raising concerns and acting on them. Several of America’s closest traditional allies, including Canada and the UK, have reportedly acted to limit intelligence-sharing with the U.S. One cited concern is the risk of being complicit in unlawful acts or war crimes arising from the deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

Sotto voce, it’s also clear that the Canadians and the Europeans are alarmed by the presence of Putin sympathizers and conspiracy theorists like Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, in sensitive positions within the Trump administration. After hearing the leaked tape of Steve Witkoff’s fawning and borderline treasonous conversation with Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser – in which Witkoff coached him on how to manipulate Trump -- who would want to share sensitive information with this American president?

More broadly, in a world of growing geopolitical conflict, it has become increasingly clear whose side the Trump administration is on — the side of Trump’s personal interests, grudges and biases. Trump’s new National Security Strategy, released last week, made this dynamic clear. There was no condemnation of Russian aggression against Ukraine and hardly any mention of the US rivalry with China. Yet it lambasted Europe and openly supported right-wing extremist parties that are trying to undermine European democracy.

Trump’s proposed “peace plan” for Ukraine not only reads like a Russian wish list, but it also uses some odd phrasing and syntax suggesting that it was translated from a Russian original. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal reports that the plan includes a number of undisclosed appendices that would unlock frozen Russian assets and bring Russia’s economy “in from the cold,” effectively ending the sanctions Putin has faced since he invaded Ukraine.

As odious as Witkoff’s actions were, they revealed the truth of the matter: Trump’s foreign policy is not about securing the safety and well-being of the United States. It’s about playing to Trump’s ego, about appealing to his incessant psychodrama of domination and sycophancy. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in La-La-Land.

This betrayal of America’s security interests extends to Trump’s international economic policy and his clear misuse of tariff laws. Under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a president is given considerable discretion to impose tariffs to protect industries deemed crucial to national security. And national security tariffs are legal under international law.

The Trump administration has, however, made a mockery of Section 232, using it to justify tariffs on many goods that have no conceivable relationship to national security. In October, for example, Trump imposed Section 232 tariffs on upholstered furnitureand kitchen cabinets. In Trump’s mind America would be put at great risk if it were dependent on foreign suppliers of new sofas in the midst of an international conflict.

Even as he imposes 50 percent tariffs to limit the menace of Chinese kitchen cabinets, Trump has decided to allow China to buy the advanced Nvidia semiconductor chips that power many AI models. Bear in mind that the U.S. lead in cutting-edge technology is one of our few advantages in geopolitical competition with China, and this gift to the Chinese has been strongly criticized by every genuine national security expert that I know. (Our other big advantage used to be that we had so many strong allies, but Trump has ended that.)

Yet Trump is now, for a modest fee, letting the Chinese have access to our most advanced semiconductors. As the Wall Street Journal — not exactly a left-wing rag — put it,

The Indians struck a better deal when they sold Manhattan to the Dutch. Why would the President give away one of America’s chief technological advantages to an adversary and its chief economic competitor?

But the answer is simple: Trump doesn’t care at all about national security, or for that matter America’s national interests. Instead, it’s all about him: reportedly Trump took the decision to allow the Chinese to have the advanced Nvidia chips after personal lobbying by Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. Clearly Chinese exporters of furniture and kitchen cabinetry need to get coached by Steve Witkoff.

Just to be clear, I am not a free trade purist. I am not saying national security should be ignored or underplayed when setting economic policy. On the contrary, in a world in which China is arguably the world’s leading superpower, in which Putin feels free to launch a war of conquest on Europe’s doorstep, national security considerations are critically important. In fact, it’s arguable that the twin threats from China and Russia have rendered the US far more vulnerable than at any other period in our lifetimes.

Yet the biggest threats to U.S. national security aren’t coming from Beijing or Moscow. They’re coming straight out of the Oval Office.

Protecting Abortion Care Is A Matter Of National Security

The following post is by Louis Caldera, Ray Mabus, and Deborah James in The Washington Post. 

Louis Caldera is a former Army secretary and former director of the White House Military Office. Ray Mabus is a former Navy secretary. Deborah James is a former Air Force secretary and former assistant defense secretary for reserve affairs.

The tragic attack on our troops at Tower 22 in Jordan is a stark reminder of how those in uniform might give their lives at any moment in service to our country. Two of the three soldiers killed were women. They lost their lives for a country that is moving to restrict the rights of all women — including those in uniform.

While it might not seem to be a military issue, the Supreme Court will soon decide a case that will affect the armed forces and hundreds of thousands of women who serve in uniform — as well as those civilians we need to recruit. The question before the court is whether to severely limit access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used for medication abortions up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Medication abortions make up over half of the cases in the United States.

Threatening vital reproductive health care will only make it harder to recruit and retain women across the military and meet the security challenges of a dangerous world. That is precisely why we, as former secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, felt compelled to join with retired general officers in filing a landmark amicus brief to the Supreme Court with the nonpartisan Vet Voice Foundation.

Our filing marked the first time that former defense professionals and retired military officers have weighed in on a Supreme Court abortion case on national security grounds.

Although there are a number of barriers to receiving reproductive care, service members for now can still obtain safe and effective medication abortions without visiting a doctor’s office. Mifepristone offers a less expensive, more private and convenient method of abortion care, including for those women stationed in remote locations and to whom the military cannot provide care directly.

This case could not come at a worse time. We are deeply concerned about our country’s defense readiness. The Army, Navy and Air Force all failed to meet recruiting goals last fiscal year. Men in particular have lost interest in joining the military, and the number of people who meet its rigorous enlistment standards has gone down.

Women are critical to our military. But for many, the demands and challenges can be career-ending. Female service members are 28 percent more likely to leave military service, driven in part by difficulties with family planning and child care. Reducing that attrition rate — combined with bringing in new female recruits — is essential to maintaining America’s military readiness and protecting our national security.

Mifepristone has provided military women and veterans safe and effective care they need, regardless of where they are stationed or deployed. When women are forced to take extended leave and travel out of state to access health care, their units are deprived of full staffing, and the women’s morale and careers suffer. Moreover, delays in accessing care increase the health risk associated with abortion.

Military service requires many sacrifices, including being stationed in locations where access to reproductive care is already hard to find. Undermining our female service members’ physical and mental well-being could have disastrous consequences.

Those who take an oath and wear the uniform will always do their duty and put their lives on the line for us. But those who defend America should not — while on the front lines or training to defeat our nation’s enemies — also have to fight for reproductive care and bodily autonomy. That is more than a matter of principle. It’s a matter of national security.

House GOP: No Help For Israel Unless Tax Cheats Protected

Paul Krugman (in The New York Times) exposes the "Big Grift" House Republicans are trying to pull off:

Historians of propaganda are familiar with the concept of the Big Lie, a claim so extreme that many people end up accepting it because they can’t believe that authority figures would make up something so at odds with reality.

It often seems to me that we need a term to describe a somewhat similar phenomenon in policy debates, which we might call the Big Grift. What I mean are policy proposals so corrupt, so obviously designed to benefit an undeserving few at everyone else’s expense, that many voters balk at the notion that seemingly respectable politicians actually advocate such things.

A case in point is the current demand by House Republicans that funding for Israel in this moment of crisis be tied to budget cutsthat would undermine the ability of the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on wealthy tax cheats. This should be a major scandal, but my suspicion is that many voters just won’t accept the idea that G.O.P. leaders would do something so cartoonishly villainous. . . .

I mean, holding national security hostage unless we make it easier for wealthy tax cheats to break the law? Who would do that?

Yet I fear that the proposal’s very awfulness may protect it from scrutiny, because voters will be incredulous about claims that this idea is even on the table.

Still, I guess we do need to discuss the substance of the proposal, on the off chance that somebody might be paying attention.

First, the idea that cutting the I.R.S. budget would somehow help pay for aid to Israel is utterly wrong. America has a huge “tax gap” — taxes legally owed but not paid. The bulk of that tax gapprobably comes from wealthy Americans underreporting their incomes, which they can get away with because the I.R.S. lacks the resources to fully enforce the law.

As a result, cutting I.R.S. funding would actually increase the deficit by enabling more tax evasion, a conclusion confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday in its score of the House proposal.

Republicans, however, often claim that tax cuts do great things for the economy, and maybe even pay for themselves. There’s not a shred of evidence for that belief. Still, starving the I.R.S. of funds is in a way a kind of tax cut. So can’t they make a similar argument here?

No, for several reasons.

For one thing, even if you believe (wrongly) that low taxes on the rich strongly encourage entrepreneurship or something, making it easier for a businessman to cheat on his taxes probably doesn’t have the same incentive effects as reducing his legal tax rate.

Furthermore, enabling tax evasion doesn’t help all businesses equally; it biases the economy toward activities, often unproductive, where tax fraud is relatively easy, such as real estate speculation. Did I mention that the Trump Organization has been convicted of tax fraud?

And making it easier to cheat on taxes by defunding the tax police probably has spillover effects that go beyond the direct adverse effect on enforcement. The more we become a society that rewards people who evade their fiscal obligations, the more likely it is that people who don’t cheat on their taxes will feel like chumps and losers. If Americans start to believe, as Leona Helmsley put it, that “only the little people pay taxes,” the damage to our society will surely be moral as well as fiscal.

Yet starving the I.R.S. has long been a Republican priority; what’s new is the party’s willingness to serve that priority by endangering national security.

Where does this priority come from? I don’t pretend to have a full answer. I will note, however, that, as the historian Rick Perlstein has pointed out, there has long been a close association between right-wing conspiracy theorizing and financial grifting. Alex Jones, the proprietor of the conspiracy site Infowars, best known for claiming that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook was a left-wing hoax, made his money by selling bogus dietary supplements — what my colleague Farhad Manjoo calls the “wellness-conspiracy industrial complex.”

And now that conspiracy theorists have effectively taken over the G.O.P., it kind of makes sense that one of their overriding policy priorities is to deprive the government of the resources it needs to crack down on grifters and financial fraud.

In any case, don’t be skeptical about news reports that Republicans are willing to sacrifice crucial national interests unless we make life easier for tax cheats. That is, in fact, exactly what is happening. 

A Statement By Former GOP National Security Officials

The following statement has been signed by more than seventy former national security officials. All of them are Republicans -- and all of them believe it would be a huge mistake to re-elect Donald Trump. They have come out in support of Joe Biden.

You can go here to see who has signed the statement.

Here is their statement:

We are former national security officials who served during the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and/or Donald Trump, or as Republican Members of Congress. We are profoundly concerned about the course of our nation under the leadership of Donald Trump. Through his actions and his rhetoric, Trump has demonstrated that he lacks the character and competence to lead this nation and has engaged in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as President.

For the following reasons, we have concluded that Donald Trump has failed our country and that Vice President Joe Biden should be elected the next President of the United States.

1. ​Donald Trump has gravely damaged America’s role as a world leader. Trump has disgraced America’s global reputation and undermined our nation’s moral and diplomatic influence. He has called NATO “obsolete,” branded Europe a “foe,” mocked the leaders of America’s closest friends, and threatened to terminate longstanding US alliances. Other global leaders, friends and foes alike, view him as unreliable, unstable, and unworthy of respect.
2. ​Donald Trump has shown that he is unfit to lead during a national crisis. Instead of rallying the American people and the world to confront the coronavirus, Trump has spent the past half year spreading misinformation, undermining public health experts, attacking state and local officials, and wallowing in self-pity. He has demonstrated far greater concern about the fate of his reelection than the health of the American people.
3. Donald Trump has solicited foreign influence and undermined confidence in our presidential elections. Trump publicly asked Russian president Vladimir Putin to assist his 2016 campaign, called on Chinese president Xi Jinping to “start an investigation” into his current political opponent, and pressured the president of Ukraine to act against his opponent. Citing exaggerated claims of voter fraud, he has challenged the integrity of this year’s election, even suggesting that it be postponed.
4. Donald Trump has aligned himself with dictators and failed to stand up for American values. Trump has regularly praised the actions of dictators and human rights abusers. He proclaimed his “love” and “great respect” for North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un, endorsed “brilliant leader” Xi Jinping’s move to serve as China’s president for life, repeatedly sided with Vladimir Putin against our own intelligence community, and pronounced himself a “big fan” of Turkish president Recep Erdogan despite his crackdown on democracy.
5. Donald Trump has disparaged our armed forces, intelligence agencies, and diplomats. Trump has attacked Gold Star families, scoffed at American prisoners of war, interfered in the military justice system, and embroiled our military in domestic politics. He has ridiculed US intelligence agencies and falsely branded our nation’s diplomats as the “deep state.”
6. Donald Trump has undermined the rule of law. Trump has compromised the independence of the Department of Justice, repeatedly attacked federal judges, and punished government officials who have sought to uphold the law. To protect himself from accountability, he has fired officials who launched investigations or testified against him, threatened whistleblowers, dangled pardons as incentives to stay silent, and blocked prison time for a political crony convicted of lying on his behalf. He has impugned journalists investigating his misconduct and has repeatedly denounced the press as the “enemy of the people.”
7. Donald Trump has dishonored the office of the presidency. Trump engages in childish name-calling, mocks the disabled, belittles women, persistently lies, peddles baseless conspiracy theories, and continually embarrasses Americans in the eyes of the world.
8. Donald Trump has divided our nation and preached a dark and pessimistic view of America. Trump consistently seeks to incite political, racial, and ethnic divisions, weakening our nation and delighting our adversaries. In contrast to Reagan’s vision of America as a “shining city on a hill,” Trump speaks of “American carnage,” pits Americans against each other, and stokes fears that “angry mobs” and “anarchists” are destroying our country.
9. Donald Trump has attacked and vilified immigrants to our country. Trump routinely denigrates immigrants and inflames prejudices as he seeks support for his reelection. Despite America’s legacy as a nation of immigrants, he has demonized Americans who come from other countries, even telling members of Congress whose families immigrated to the United States to “go back” to the “crime-infested places” from which they came.
10. Donald Trump has imperiled America’s security by mismanaging his national security team. Trump has dismissed or replaced — often by tweet — the secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the Directors of National Intelligence and the FBI, three National Security Advisors, and other senior officials in critical national security positions, many because they refused to cover for his misdeeds or demonstrate sufficient personal loyalty.

While we – like all Americans – had hoped that Donald Trump would govern wisely, he has disappointed millions of voters who put their faith in him and has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.

In contrast, we believe Joe Biden has the character, experience, and temperament to lead this nation. We believe he will restore the dignity of the presidency, bring Americans together, reassert America’s role as a global leader, and inspire our nation to live up to its ideals.

While some of us hold policy positions that differ from those of Joe Biden and his party, the time to debate those policy differences will come later. For now, it is imperative that we stop Trump’s assault on our nation’s values and institutions and reinstate the moral foundations of our democracy.

To that end, we are firmly convinced that it is in the best interest of our nation that Vice President Joe Biden be elected as the next President of the United States, and we will vote for him.

Over 80 Former National Security Officials Endorse Biden

Over 80 former national security officials have signed an open letter endorsing Joe Biden to be our next president. You can go here to see who these officials are -- but they are officials who have served under the administrations of both Republicans and Democrats.

Here is part of how The Washington Post reports it:

More than 80 career national security professionals have signed an open letter of support for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, saying that President Trump “has created an existential danger to the United States.”

Most of the signatories, who include career diplomats, intelligence officers and defense policymakers, have served both Republican and Democratic administrations. They noted that their policy views cover a spectrum and as officials they “have often been in opposition, sometimes bitterly, with each other.”

But in a letter published online Wednesday, they expressed a shared belief that Trump’s approach to leadership has undermined the country’s role in the world.

“His reelection would continue this downward spiral and will likely have catastrophic results,” say the signatories, most of whom have never publicly endorsed a candidate for president.

Fox News Poses A Threat To U.S. National Security

Much of what is broadcast on Fox News is not news at all. It is propaganda, lies, and conspiracy theories made to look like news.

Unfortunately, a fairly large chunk of our society depends on Fox to know what is happening in the United States and the world. They are not getting the truth. And that poses a danger to our democracy, and our security.

It poses a danger to democracy because only a well-informed public can sustain a democracy. It poses a threat to our security because many of the conspiracy theories they spread come from our enemy -- Russia.

Here's some of how Garrett M. Graff describes this Fox News failure at wired.com:

The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia’s Internet Research Agency or China’s Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own—and I, a paid contributor to its competitor CNN, may appear a biased voice anyway—but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America’s democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer.

The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it’s clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America’s foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.

In the impeachment hearings, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill and other witnesses made clear how those who, like Fox News hosts and the president, advance the false narrative that Ukraine meddled in the US election are serving the Kremlin’s interests. Russia is playing a weak hand geopolitically—its economy is sputtering along and its population shrinking—and so its greatest hope is to stoke internal discord in the West. Robert Mueller warned of this; James Clapper has warned of it; and now Fiona Hill has done the same. “Our nation is being torn apart,” she said. “Truth is questioned.” Yet Fox, and the GOP more broadly, has warmly embraced almost every twist of Kremlin propaganda, up to and including the idea that Russia never meddled in the 2016 election to begin with.

Fox’s clear willingness to parry the wingnuttiest ideas in service of the president, long-term implications to the United States be damned, should worry all concerned about the state of the United States. The Ukraine myth is hardly the only example; for years, it has repeated false conspiracies about the murder of Democratic staffer Seth Rich, a conspiracy literally cooked up by Russian intelligence and fed into the US media. (To say nothing of Fox’s long-term commitment to undermining and questioning climate science, leaving the US both behind in mitigating the worst effects of climate change and also ill-equipped to face the myriad security consequences of a warming planet.). . .

 Fox’s evening talk shows and its presidentially endorsed morning show have proven to be a particularly egregious and odious swamp of fetid, metastasizing lies and bad faith feedback loops that leave its viewers—and, notably, its Presidential Audience of One—foaming at the mouth with outrage and bile. . . .

The network’s pantheon of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, and the rotating couch-cast of Fox & Friends’ morning show dunces-by-choice together represent a level of ill-informed demagoguery that would make Father Coughlin and Huey Long wince.

More than simply embarrassing themselves by spouting obvious falsehoods, though, Fox News’ incendiary, fanatical rants serve to delegitimize to its viewers the very idea of a political opposition. Every Democrat is evil. Every person who disagrees with President Trump is an enemy of the state. Every career federal employee is a member of a deep state opposition. . . .

These pronouncements—uttered around the clock on weekdays and doubled down on weekends by hosts like the president’s favorite, Jeanine Pirro—are an attack on the very ideals and foundations of the American experiment. . . .

Fox News has upended Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous proclamation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Its daily programming seems driven by the idea that everyone might be entitled to their own facts, but that there is only one correct opinion: President Trump’s.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote his imagined dystopian regime “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” but Fox News has actually figured out a tactic even more pernicious: Fox News’ own masters of Orwellian doublespeak, its Hannitys, Carlsons, and Doocys, the ones who smugly declare down up and up down, aren’t even bothering to tell their viewers to ignore their eyes and ears, because the truth never even approaches their airtime.

Let’s hope that Fox News today, unlike in Orwell’s world, doesn’t manage to succeed in transforming our country from a functional democracy into an authoritarian cult.