“Donald Trump went on national TV last week and proposed bombing Mexico.
Asked by Fox News’s Jesse Watters if he’d consider strikes against drug cartels operating in the country, Trump said yes — and framed his answer as a threat against the Mexican government. “Mexico’s gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely,” the former president said.
This is not a one-off answer to a stray question. Trump suggested firing missiles at Mexico during his presidency, asked advisers for a “battle plan” against the cartels last year, and recently proposed sending special operators to assassinate drug kingpins. The idea of war in Mexico is popular among the Republican elite; a Trump-aligned think tank even drew up a broad-strokes plan for how such a war might work.
There is every reason to take Trump’s proposal seriously. Presidents tend to at least try to deliver on campaign promises, and they have nearly unlimited war-making power nowadays. As unthinkable as it may sound, there is a reasonable chance the United States will be at war on its southern border in the coming years if Donald Trump returns to office.”
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“This is part of a bigger pattern. If you actually look at Trump’s policy agenda, he’s called for some wild stuff: policies so extreme that, had they been proposed prior to 2016, would have defined the entire course of the campaign. Today, a few get some coverage, but mostly feel like sideshows — with policy as a category taking a backseat to personality and polling.
Recently, the lack of policy focus is partly due to a remarkably chaotic stretch of American political life. One candidate, the incumbent president, bungled his debate performance so badly that his party replaced him with his vice president. The other almost got killed on national television by a would-be assassin.
But even in more normal times this is a general problem with the media: Policy is technical and boring, while horse-race reporting is exciting and easier for audiences to grasp.
Elements of Trump’s persona also make policy reporting a lot tougher. The combination of habitual lying, flip-flopping, and personal disinterest in detail can make it tough to know what’s an actual proposal and what’s something he said just for the hell of it.”
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“Before I started writing this story, I asked my colleagues at Vox what stood out as Trump’s signature policy proposals in this election — the equivalent of “Build the Wall” in 2016. We came up with two big answers: Trump’s proposal for a general 10 percent tariff and his plan for “the largest deportation in American history.”
Each of these policies is genuinely extreme.
A 10 percent blanket tariff isn’t just putting a tax on specific imports to protect a particular industry, or to retaliate against a country like China engaging in unfair trade practices. It’s a blanket attempt to make all imports from every country, including from neighbors like Canada and allies like the European Union, 10 percent more expensive.
This is a radical shift from the way that trade policy typically works in the United States — one with huge and predictably negative implications for US consumers and the economy.
The tariffs mean that people will either buy American-made goods that cost more than their current foreign competitors, or they will keep buying foreign-made goods at a 10 percent markup. That’s inflation basically by definition: an odd proposal for a candidate running against inflation as his central issue.
The center-right Tax Foundation estimates that the tariffs would shave nearly 1 percent off of US GDP growth annually, costing roughly 684,000 jobs. This estimate did not take into account retaliation from other countries, who almost certainly would impose their own tariffs on American goods in response. A second estimate, from the centrist Peterson Institute, finds that every group of Americans — from the poorest to the wealthiest — would see drops in their annual income.
Neither of these estimates takes into account the all-but-certain retaliation from the affected countries, especially China (who Trump wants to hit with a special 60 percent across-the-board tariff).”
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“No one is exactly sure how many people are going to be targeted for deportations: Trump never sets a specific target, but often implies he’s going to deport every undocumented immigrant in the United States (there are currently around 11 million). A group of four NBC reporters tried to figure out how deporting so many people was supposed to work, and ended up concluding that it was such a break with the way immigration enforcement typically works that it was near-impossible to grasp the scope of the effort.
Typically, police don’t go out looking for undocumented migrants currently residing in the United States. They find them by accident, during a traffic stop or criminal arrest, and then discover that they are undocumented and notify ICE to begin deportation. Targeted enforcement raids happen, but they’re comparatively rare and make up only a fraction of annual deportations.
For Trump’s “mass deportation” policy to work, he would need to devote extraordinary resources — state, federal, and local — to finding and apprehending undocumented immigrants. Once found, they still pose a massive logistical challenge: current law does not allow ICE to deport longstanding US residents without a hearing (or the migrant’s consent), posing a huge burden on the legal system. The government would also need to figure out the travel logistics for deportation, including negotiating with home countries that might not be very happy to receive large numbers of functional refugees.
During all of this, the US government would need to house millions of people — which ICE currently lacks the capacity to do. Hence the now-infamous Trump proposals for keeping detained immigrants in camps: there’s literally nowhere else to put them while they await deportation.
All of this is not only a human rights disaster, but an economic and law enforcement one. The cost of devoting police and judicial resources to this task, in terms of trade-offs with addressing actual crime, would be significant. So too would be the financial cost of building immigrant camps and providing them with food and medical care.
Removing so many people from the workforce would also be inflationary, far outweighing any (questionable) increase in wages for native-born workers. One estimate suggests that, all told, mass deportations would cost the American economy $4.7 trillion over a 10-year period.
The point, in short, is that Trump is proposing sweeping changes to the way the US economy and legal system operates — ones with consequences for every American — and we’re barely even talking about what they would mean.”
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“there’s a difference between Trump’s random utterances, or what he might do about some obscure policy issue, and his consistent instincts on the issues central to his political identity — like trade and the southern border. And there, he could not be clearer: across-the-board tariff, mass deportation, and waging war on the drug cartels.
Even if we set aside everything else we know (or think we know) about what Trump would do, these three items alone would have the potential to transform life in America as we know it. It’s time to start covering Trump like he means what he says.”
“The partnership does not make NATO a direct player in the Indo-Pacific but allows it to coordinate with the four partners on issues of mutual concern, said Mirna Galic, senior policy analyst on China and East Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace. For example, she wrote in an analysis, they can share information and align on actions such as sanctions and aid delivery but do not intervene in military crises outside of their own regions.
The NATO summit will allow the United States and its European and Indo-Pacific allies to push back against China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, according to Luis Simon, director of the Centre for Security Diplomacy and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.”
“”I don’t think we’re going to see a deal like we saw in the first term,” Robert O’Brien, Trump’s fourth and final national security advisor, told Chalfant. “I think people were generally happy with [the previous deal], but as it turned out, the Chinese didn’t honor it.””
“Former President Donald Trump helped negotiate the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending America’s longest foreign war. But now he believes that the United States should have kept its largest base in Afghanistan to help in a future conflict against China.
During this week’s Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker has tried to transform “America First” from a slogan against overseas entanglements into a cry for more aggressive military force. And the gambit seems to have succeeded. A day after Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), condemned the war in Afghanistan as a failure, Trump himself called for using Afghanistan as a springboard to future conflicts.”
“As part of a larger restructuring, the US Army also announced it is cutting thousands of posts in roles most heavily involved in counterterrorism. “The mission or the function of counterterrorism has continued, but it just doesn’t have the same limelight and focus that it did,” Javed Ali, a counterterrorism specialist formerly at the FBI, Pentagon, and National Security Council, told Vox.”
“Israel’s commitment to complete victory over Hamas has been one major obstacle to peace. To this point, Hamas has proven resilient enough to withstand Israel’s onslaught and tolerant enough of Gazans’ suffering to insist on retaining power, no matter the human cost. Hamas has evinced some interest in trading hostages for Palestinian prisoners, but it has shown none in total surrender. If Israel no longer demanded the latter, then peace might be at hand.”
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“World War II analogies figure prominently in this line of argument. Last week, in a column titled, “Do we still understand how wars are won?” the New York Times’s Bret Stephens accused Israel’s critics of historical amnesia.
After all, he notes,the last time the United States fought a war in which its very existence was conceivably at stake, Allied bombers “killed an estimated 10,000 civilians in the Netherlands, 60,000 in France, 60,000 in Italy and hundreds of thousands of Germans,” while the firebombings of Japanese cities and atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed nearly 1 million Japanese civilians.
Stephens notes that we do not remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a genocidal leader. Rather, we fondly remember leaders “who, faced with the awful choice of evils that every war presents, nonetheless chose morally compromised victories over morally pure defeats.”
Today, Stephens writes, Israel finds itself waging such an existential war: Hamas has called for wiping the country off the map, and the Jewish state cannot know security until it destroys its enemy’s “capability and will to wage war,” a task that entails tragedies like the one that claimed 45 civilian lives in Rafah in late May. Rather than threatening to withhold arms transfers to force Israel into appeasing Hamas, Stephens argues, the United States must “understand that [Israel has] no choice to fight except in the way we once did — back when we knew what it takes to win.”
But this line of reasoning is morally and intellectually bankrupt. That we are more horrified by the mass killing of civilians today than we were in 1945 is a mark of progress, not amnesia. And in any case, Israel’s war with Hamas is not remotely analogous to the Allied cause.
By the time the United States and Great Britain began bombing Dresden and Tokyo, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were already in the process of mass murdering tens of millions of people. Hamas may have genocidal intentions, but it does not have genocidal capacities. Waging total war on Gaza is not necessary for averting the imminent slaughter of Israeli civilians; to the contrary, doing so risks the lives of the few Israelis whom Hamas is currently in a position to destroy.
Further, the Axis powers genuinely threatened the existence of neighboring states. Hamas is incapable of defending its airspace, let alone conquering Israel. The Israeli government is right to insist that Hamas must not be allowed to launch another October 7, but that attack was only possible due to easily avoidable failures of intelligence and border defense.
More fundamentally, Israel’s ends cannot justify its means in Gaza when those ends are themselves unjust. The Netanyahu government is not fighting to liberate Gazans from despotism and establish the foundations for a two-state solution. To the contrary, it is committed to Palestinian statelessness and dispossession.
The people of Gaza deserve better than Hamas, but the Israeli government has neither the capacity nor the will to give Gazans what they deserve. The best it can do for the moment is stop killing them.”
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“It is quite understandable that Israelis do not like the idea of Hamas persisting in Gaza after October 7. No one should. But it does not follow that the very existence of Israel depends on Hamas’s elimination, let alone that these existential stakes give Netanyahu’s government the right to “fight in the way we once did,” even if that involves incinerating Palestinian refugees in their tents.
This is all the more true when one considers that Israel does not actually have a remotely feasible plan for eliminating Hamas, facilitating the formation of a stable successor government in Gaza, or pursuing a lasting peace with the Palestinians.
When the United States bombed Japan and Germany, it was not simultaneously engaged in the settlement of Japanese and German land. The Israeli government, by contrast, has been forcing Palestinian communities in the West Bank off their land, while subjecting the broader territory to a form of apartheid rule.
Establishing a postwar governing authority in Gaza that simultaneously boasts legitimacy in the eyes of its people and cooperates with Israel on security issues would be difficult today under any circumstances. In a context where the Netanyahu government remains committed to expanding settlements — and, in so doing, humiliating Fatah in the West Bank, Palestine’s only alternative power center to Hamas — it is wholly impossible. Until that changes, an uneasy truce with a Hamas-governed Gaza may be the best of Israel’s bad options.
But Netanyahu’s problem isn’t merely that he cannot install a replacement for Hamas without abandoning his coalition partners’ commitment to the West Bank’s annexation. It is also that his military has proven incapable of eliminating Hamas to begin with. As soon as Israeli troops began leaving northern Gaza, the militant group started reestablishing itself, forcing the IDF to return and reengage in fighting. By all appearances, Israel has no viable alternative to Hamas to offer Gaza’s 2 million people beyond unending war and occupation.
Stephens is not wrong that we remember the justice of the Allies’ cause more than the horrors of their war crimes. But the suffering of Dresden and Hiroshima would be harder to rationalize or overlook in a world where neither gave way to peace and prosperity, but rather, to an endless cycle of counterinsurgency wars and the illegal settlement of German and Japanese lands by American religious fanatics.
In Gaza, Israel is not choosing a “morally compromised victory” over a “morally pure defeat.” It’s choosing a morally abominable quagmire. The bereaved parents of Rafah will take no comfort in the thought that hundreds of thousands German and Japanese civilians knew a similar pain in the 1940s. We shouldn’t either.”
“Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine more than two years ago, US and Western military assistance to the country has followed a pattern.
First, Kyiv asks for a particular weapons system or capability. Washington declines due to concerns about raising the risk of escalation with Russia. Vladimir Putin then makes vague threats involving his nuclear arsenal. Ukraine’s advocates respond by spending months making their case in the media. One or several European allies come around to giving the Ukrainians what they want, and then eventually the US does as well.
This is more or less what happened with the debate over providing Ukraine with battle tanks, Patriot air defense systems, F-16 fighter jets, and long-range ATACMS, among other systems.”