Misfortune and Misfits
Misfortune and Misfits
A scandal in Japan, Europe is leaderless, Trump VP is JD Vance, Vance: "I certainly think we should be much more aggressive in applying tariffs on a whole host of industries."
A scandal in Japan
More than 200 defence officials punished for mishandling classified data
By ABC Australia and International Affairs Russia
Japan’s defence ministry and forces are under scrutiny over allegations members of the navy violated the sensitive information protection law, falsely claimed allowances for special assignments, and wrongfully claimed free meals at base cafeterias.
Of the 218 people disciplined, 11 senior officials were dismissed, two were demoted, dozens suspended and 14 received pay cuts
Japan’s defence ministry has announced disciplinary action against more than 200 senior officials and service members over the mishandling of classified materials and other misconduct.
The announcement on July 12 could undermine Tokyo’s efforts to work more closely with the United States and other partners in the face of China’s growing threat.
Among senior commanders and defence ministry officials to face discipline, head of Maritime Self Defence Force, Admiral Ryo Sakai, was to resign to take responsibility over some of the misconducts, to be replaced by Akira Saito, currently Self Defence Fleet commander in chief, the minister announced.
Defence Minister Minoru Kihara apologised, saying the problems were “significantly damaging to the public trust” for the ministry and Japan’s defence forces.
Mr Kihara said the ministry’s investigation found that classified information was mishandled on 38 destroyers and submarines.
However, he said no sensitive information leaked outside the military or caused any harm.
With Japan accelerating military cooperation with the US, Australia, the UK and other western partners, the issue could undermine its reputation as a trusted defence partner.
"Ensuring intelligence protection is extremely important for our cooperation with the ally and other like-minded countries, and we should never let this kind of problem happen again," Mr Kihara said.
He pledged to quickly carry out preventive measures "so that we will not breach trust with other countries".
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Europe is… leaderless
Is there any head-of-state in Europe who can actually claim a leadership role on the continent? – ‘Newsweek’ puts a question.
By Daniel R. DePetris (Newsweek)
France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, commonly viewed as Europe's three biggest powers, are all in the midst of various degrees of political dysfunction, economic malaise, and broader disenchantment with their respective electorates. The three countries certainly aren't going to fall apart. But there's no doubt that the men leading them — Emmanuel Macron in France, Olaf Scholz in Germany, and Keir Starmer in the U.K. — are confronting a host of domestic problems that will inevitably detract from their attempts to make a name for themselves on the international stage.
Increasingly it seems like the centre of European power is drifting toward the East, where Poland and the small but vocal Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are carrying the torch against the Russian menace next-door.
Macron could reasonably be considered Europe's indisputable heavyweight. First elected in 2017 after beating France's two major political parties in the first round and walloping the nationalist Marine Le Pen in the second by a whopping 33 percentage points, the young Macron entered the Élysée Palace with a spring in his step and a long to-do list in his pocket. A big chunk of the list concerned international affairs.
Yet today, the stamina and intellectual weight Macron carried throughout his seven years as president have depreciated to the lowest point in his political career. While Macron still has the respect of his international colleagues, his lectures and soapbox preaching undermined his ability to persuade. Macron's political position is irrevocably damaged after the most recent French legislative elections, which he called based on the assumption that his party's dismal performance during this summer's European Parliament elections was an anomaly. It turned out to be a terrible gamble, with his crop of centrists losing plurality in the National Assembly to a far-left coalition. Le Pen's right-wing nationalists aren't too far behind. The assembly is now deadlocked between three competing blocs with deep philosophical differences, which means Macron is likely to spend the remainder of his second term in a state of limbo.
Germany's Scholz is hardly in a better position. Ever since his party grabbed the largest share of seats in the Bundestag in September 2021, and cobbled together a three-way coalition with the Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), he has been harangued by low approval ratings, internal squabbling over Ukraine aid, and a general feeling among the German public that everything is a bit sluggish. Although Germany under Scholz's stewardship has increased its defense budget—days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the chancellor proposed a one-time 100 billion euro defense fund for the decrepit Bundeswehr—and is now Europe's biggest provider of aid to Ukraine, Scholz has been dogged by constant disagreement within his coalition.
Meanwhile, the U.K.'s Keir Starmer is still getting his feet wet and assembling his government after beating the Conservative Party like a drum. Relegated to the opposition benches for a long 14 years, Labour is now in full control of the House of Commons with 411 seats, more than three times what the Tories mustered from their historically calamitous defeat last week. Starmer, however, is untested in the international arena and has never had to run the U.K.'s foreign policy machinery. International relations will be the least of his concerns; the U.K. economy has been downright schizophrenic over the last decade and the country itself hobbled by Brexit, high inflation, a gargantuan cost-of-living crisis, and an overall disgust among ordinary Brits about the political class.
Europe at this point in time looks leaderless. We are long past the days of big European personalities and consequential heads of state like Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair, and Angela Merkel, men and women who will be remembered in the history books (both for their successes and failures) for a long time to come. Now, Europe is looking at a combination of populists, inexperienced politicians, fragile cross-political coalitions, and underachievers who talk a big game but are unable to get out of their own way.
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Trump VP is JD Vance
Trump VP choice unified Democrats, divided Republicans and scared Europe
By Jonathan Martin (Politico)
The attempted assassination of the former president prompted his Republican critics to relent, perhaps permanently, notes POLITICO.
For nearly a decade, Donald Trump has been the biggest force for unity among Democrats and the biggest source of division in his own party. Now, as Republicans convene to nominate Trump for a third consecutive election, that has been reversed.
His GOP critics have retired, lost, died, capitulated or fallen silent as the former president has all but made the Party of Lincoln a wholly owned subsidiary of his MAGA movement.
And that was before Saturday’s harrowing assassination attempt.
The complete and total, to borrow a phrase, realignment of the GOP into the Party of Trump was nearly complete after he avoided being seriously challenged, let alone defeated, through the primaries. But it was cemented in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump escaped death and seconds later rallied his stunned audience to forge a bond few American presidents have enjoyed with their supporters.
With that instant moment of political iconography, Trump is well-positioned to stifle what little intra-party dissent remains in the GOP.
More worrisome for his opponents, and perhaps the country, the shooting and his defiant response will strengthen his case for a brand of strongman politics to which our democracy had mostly been immune. Trump’s clenched fist will strengthen his hand — not only in the campaign but also, should he win, with a party that will prove far less likely to resist his second-term impulses.
Put it this way: To millions of Republican voters, Trump in life was already more beloved than Ronald Reagan is in memory. Consider the power Trump will have over other Republican lawmakers now that he’s survived an assassin’s bullet.
Yet the former president hasn’t just staged a takeover of the Republican Party — he’s also been a singular force in the Democratic Party.
Since 2017, Democrats have owed almost most of their electoral success to a backlash against Trump and Trumpism. The former president birthed and bred a seersucker-to-socialist opposition that endured because enough Bush Republicans, card-carrying DSA members and Americans in between found consensus on a single issue.
However, in the wake of Biden’s catastrophic, and catatonic, debate showing the forces of Stop Trump are now badly splintered.
After all these years of Trump-propelled unity, the coalition is at odds because, while the threat he poses is now even more sobering, the understanding they had to mute internal dissent has come undone.
Instead of spending Biden’s first term determining who could block Trump’s return, they slept-walked into Armageddon. Democrats are now attempting to compress what should have been a three-year-long conversation into three weeks, the summer of the election. And they’re speaking in existential terms about the stakes.
Of course, that was all before the historic events of the weekend. Shortly before the shooting, Biden had sat through a contentious call with a group of moderate House Democrats, a dispute that led one lawmaker afterward and suggest more calls from the caucus demanding Biden stand down would be forthcoming.
Those haven’t come. The presidential campaign and the Democrats’ campaign against their own nominee have been put on hold while the country absorbs what happened and could have happened in Western Pennsylvania.
Biden, flying back to the White House Saturday night from his Delaware beach home, has sought to project the sort of sober leadership the nation desperately needs. His task, however, is not only to reassure unnerved voters — it’s also to put down, for good, the multiweek rebellion he’s facing in his ranks.
Addressing the nation in a rare Oval Office speech Sunday night, Biden said it’s “time to cool it down” and that “politics must never be a literal battlefield.”
J.D. Vance’s elevation to the number two spot on the Republican ticket marks the culmination of two remarkable transformations — one personal to Vance, and one that has swept over the American right as a whole, writes POLITICO.
The transformation signaled by Vance’s ascension — the takeover of the Republican Party by a once-marginal faction of conservative elites — is no less remarkable.
Vance entered the national political scene in 2022 as the leading avatar of the “New Right,” a rag-tag band of conservative intellectuals and activists that coalesced during the end of the Trump presidency. The New Right is largely aligned with Trump on questions of policy, including his embrace of economic nationalism, his hardline opposition to immigration, his skepticism of U.S. military involvement abroad and his escalation of the culture war at home. But its support for this agenda — grouped for simplicity’s sake under the heading of “national conservatism” — is grounded in more obscure intellectual sources: Catholic-inflected “post-liberalism,” conservative populism and localism, and various strands of neo-reactionary thought that flourish online.
Vance has risen to prominence as the standard-bearer of this movement in Washington. He embodies many of the attributes that distinguish the New Right: He is young, Catholic, cerebral, contemptuous of elites (while maintaining a solid foothold in their rarified world) and comfortable with the language of conservative counter-revolution. At just shy of 40 years old, he would also be the first millennial at the top of the line of succession.
Alongside key figures on the New Right — including its primary benefactor, Peter Thiel, and its leading spokesperson, Tucker Carlson — Vance has gone out of his way to inject their worldview into the conservative mainstream. In the Senate, he has championed a distinctive New Right legislative agenda, rejecting the GOP’s traditional fusion of free-market fundamentalism, small-government libertarianism and foreign policy interventionism in favor of a program that combines some elements of economic populism with ultra-traditionalist social conservatism and a more restrained foreign policy.
Most importantly, he has embraced the New Right’s unifying philosophical creed: that the developments liberals point to as signs of “progress” — an expanding global economy, accelerating technological innovation and the relaxation of traditional social and sexual mores — are in fact engines of civilizational collapse.
Vance’s closeness with this world was on full display in early July at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, a big-tent annual gathering for the New Right. In his keynote address, Vance praised the event as “the place of intellectual leadership and the American conservative movement,” and the audience rewarded him with two standing ovations. In the conference hall outside, young conservatives handed out t-shirts emblazoned with Vance’s face on Mount Rushmore, right next to Trump and Richard Nixon.
As recently as two years ago, it was possible to write off the New Right’s vision as just another minor intellectual fad, confined to panels at obscure conferences and the pages of niche conservative journals. But now, with the movement’s political wunderkind headlining the Republican ticket in November, it’s clear that the New Right is central to the future of the Republican Party. Like Trumpism in 2016, the New Right started at the GOP’s outer fringe, only to quickly make its way to the party’s core.
Vance’s close ties to the New Right entail some clear political benefits for Trump.
First, Vance’s spot on the ticket sures up Trump’s support with the small but influential network of New Right-adjacent activists and intellectuals
Then Vance is also likely to fire up the young conservative elites who serve as the foot soldiers of the MAGA movement in Washington. Among this cohort, Vance has attained a hagiographic status that few elected Republicans beyond Trump enjoy.
Finally, Vance is well connected to deep-pocketed conservatives through the Rockbridge Network, a coalition of wealthy, Trump-aligned donors that he helped create before entering the Senate and that has reportedly poured tens of millions of dollars into conservative causes. Although most are already supporting Trump, Vance’s addition to the ticket could convince them to open their wallets even wider.
Much of Europe was already panicked about a second Donald Trump presidency, worrying the U.S. would cut off aid to Ukraine if he wins in November. Then Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate, informs POLITICO from Europe.
The 39-year-old Ohio senator is one of the most isolationist members of the Republican Party. He is vehemently opposed to using more funds to help Ukraine and has blasted what he sees as Europe’s over-dependence on the United States when it comes to military investment.
One senior EU official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly on the issue, said in an interview Monday that the appointment of Vance was a “disaster” for Ukraine — and by extension for the European Union, which has backed Kyiv as it defends itself against Russian aggression.
Vance played a central role in the effort to kill off a Ukraine aid bill earlier this year in the Senate, and while that effort failed, Vance told reporters at the time: “We were able to make it pretty clear to Europe and the rest of the world that America can’t write blank checks indefinitely.”
Also weighing on European minds is Vance’s protectionist impulses which could hamper Europe’s trading relationship with the United States. The Ohio senator is an ardent defender of American manufacturing and advocates tariffs on imports.
In an interview with POLITICO at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance set out his stall on why America should not help Ukraine.
“We simply do not have manufacturing capacity to support a ground war in Eastern Europe indefinitely. And I think it’s incumbent upon leaders to articulate this for their populations,” Vance said. “How long is this expected to go on? How much is it expected to cost? And importantly, how are we actually supposed to produce the weapons necessary to support the Ukrainians?”
In the hallowed halls of the Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich, such talk was sacrilege — the annual Munich Security Conference has long been the champion of transatlantic defense and security cooperation, frequented by such U.S. foreign policy luminaries as the late John McCain and President Joe Biden, who strongly believed in the “rules-based international order” that governed transatlantic relationships in the decades after World War II.
But in his first appearance at the high-level international conference in February, Vance skipped a meeting between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and a bipartisan group of senators on the fringes of the gathering. “I didn’t think I would learn anything new,” he told POLITICO.
Ukraine’s advocates in the U.S. have sought to rebuff the argument that Washington is cutting a blank check to Kyiv. Most of the money allocated for Ukraine assistance doesn’t leave the United States. Much of it instead goes to American defense contractors who supply those weapons or finance U.S. military operations.
Vance’s Trump-style, America-first foreign policy extends to more general critiques of Europe and NATO as well. In a speech on the Senate floor in April, he blasted Europe for not spending enough on defense.
“For three years, the Europeans have told us that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe. And for three years, they have failed to respond as if that were actually true,” he said, calling out Germany in particular for failing to spend two percent of its GDP on defense — the amount NATO members have agreed to as a joint target.
Vance has long championed the cause of the American worker and the importance of the U.S. manufacturing sector. Expect him to advocate a turning inwards economically and push against China if he is elected as vice president on the Republican ticket in November — another headache for Brussels as the E.U. seeks to repair a battered trade relationship between Brussels and Washington.
“You’re going to see a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers” if Trump wins a second term, Vance told POLITICO this spring.
“I certainly think we should be much more aggressive in applying tariffs on a whole host of industries.”
Such warnings are troublesome for the European Union.
US presidential candidate Donald Trump will be ready to enter into dialogue with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to resolve the conflict in Ukraine without any mediators. This was reported to a TASS correspondent by a high-ranking Republican Party functionary taking part in the party’s national convention in Milwaukee, where Trump’s official nomination as a presidential candidate was recently announced.
“Undoubtedly, he will begin a dialogue with Putin. And he will do this without intermediaries,” the agency’s interlocutor emphasized, answering a question about Trump’s readiness to enter into a dialogue with Putin on Ukraine.
“Now the democrats are not conducting any negotiations [with Russia]. Of course, there must be someone who will start negotiations so that you [Russia and Ukraine] can come to some kind of agreement,” the agency’s interlocutor emphasized and answered the question affirmatively, whether that person will be Trump.
The functionary expressed confidence that the North Atlantic Alliance should not be present in Ukraine, the conflict should be resolved through negotiations. “NATO does not need to be in Ukraine. We need dialogue, and if it starts, we can all come to an agreement on how to overcome it [the conflict in Ukraine],” the agency’s interlocutor noted.
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