The people she’s chosen to advise her on national security
One of them is Philip Gordon, who also served in the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Another is Rebecca Lissner, a diplomat and scholar.
While at the Council on Foreign Relations between the Obama and Biden terms, he wrote a book with the telling title Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.
His narrative charts the failures, follies and unintended consequences of US interventions in the region.
Those include the ouster of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 (which, via many twists and turns, gave us today’s anti-American theocracy in Tehran),
Bush II’s misguided invasion of Iraq (which spawned, among other ills, the Islamic State and left Iran as the paradoxical winner), as well as misadventures in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere.
The book that Lissner co-authored, which was published at about the same time as Gordon’s, hews to similar themes. Her conclusion is that the US nowadays lacks the means to police the world as “hegemon,” or to defend the so-called “rules-based international order.”
There’s absolutely nothing humble about Trump. The man is pure narcissistic megalomania; he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
Andreas Kluth Bloomberg 31 augusti 2024
Daniel Hannan: The fall of Vladimir Putin is now only a matter of time
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/08/daniel-hannan-fall-of-vladimir-putin-is.html
Russia has made sweeping advances in recent days that threaten to outweigh the gains made by Ukraine in its cross-border attack into the Kursk region.
Russian forces are just a few kilometres from the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a crucial logistics hub used by the Ukrainian military.
Home to a key railway station and major roads, Pokrovsk is an essential supply and reinforcement point for Ukraine’s troops on the eastern front line.
Critics in Kyiv fear that the country's military has made a serious miscalculation.
BBC 31 August 2024
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c984g10e22lo
At the start of the war, we immobilized approximately $280 billion of Russia’s sovereign assets held in our financial institutions so that they cannot be used to fuel Putin’s war of choice.
We agreed that these assets would remain immobilized until Russia pays for the damage it has caused.
Janet L. Yellen New York Times 13 June 2024
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/06/frozen-russian-assets.html
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