Replies to post #268278 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

Donald Trump’s big problem is he doesn’t know what he’s talking about
At least it’s one of his problems.

Updated by Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail] Apr 17, 2017, 8:30am EDT

Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This became clear when he said he realized dealing with North Korea was “not so easy” after 10 minutes with the Chinese president.
http://www.vox.com/2017/4/12/15279654/trump-north-korea-xi-10-minutes

(omitted imbedded links)

Dealing with complicated problems is an occupational hazard faced by outsiders in all fields — and there’s never been a president who is more of an outsider to the realm of public policy. Consequently, a lot of his assertions about critical matters of public concern are based on ... nothing at all. As president, he is fitfully coming into contact with concrete policy choices, actual information, and well-informed people. And it’s making a difference.

That’s the dynamic behind many of this spring’s jarring policy reversals on backing out of NATO, Chinese currency manipulation, and relations with Russia.

And to the extent that Trump is replacing ignorance with information and bad policy with good policy, it deserves to be celebrated rather than mocked. But the wild swings themselves are disturbing and have consequences. And Trump’s actual habits around issuing ignorant pronouncements and failing to obtain sound information don’t appear to have changed. Most fundamentally of all, Trump’s laziness and ignorance leave him easily manipulated.

Some of the things he’s “learned” since taking office aren’t true, like when Paul Ryan convinced him Republicans had to do health care reform before tax reform. And as his equal-opportunity openness to both new information and new “information” become clearer to all interested parties, the race will be on to manipulate the president and incite further chaos in American public policy.

Trump didn’t realize being president is complicated

Trump’s basic worldview, as articulated on the campaign trail, was that all the major dilemmas of American public policy had easy solutions. The reason the problems had not been solved already was that America’s political leaders were too stupid, too corrupt, or too “politically correct” to solve them.

This is a reasonably widespread view of things among the mass public, but as Trump has been discovering since taking office, it’s not true.

* Trump pronounced in February that “nobody knew health care could be this complicated” until he sat down to look at legislative options.
* Earlier this week, he explained that he’d changed his mind about North Korea after speaking to Chinese President Xi Jinping because “after listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.”
* Having talked it over with his economic and foreign policy advisers, Trump has realized that China stopped manipulating its currency some time ago, and that slapping the country with an official currency manipulator designation would impair cooperation on other issues, like the aforementioned North Korea.

Trump’s reversal on Russia and Syria doesn’t yet have a pithy quote attached, but it’s a fundamentally similar issue. During the campaign, Trump again and again called for the United States to take a tougher line on Iran and a softer line on Russia. From a broad, hazy, distant view of the world heavily colored by ethnic nationalism and Islamophobia, this combination of ideas makes sense.

But the real world is, well, complicated. Trump’s desire to cozy up to the Gulf states and confront Iran led very quickly to conflict with Moscow — which anyone could have explained to candidate Trump had he cared to ask.

Trump decided the Export-Import Bank is good after talking it over with the CEO of Boeing, and a handful of high-level meetings have convinced him that NATO is worthwhile after all.

Trump still hasn’t learned how to learn

A lot of this is change for the better, but the fact that it keeps happening suggests Trump has not really internalized the key lesson.

Peter Baker of the New York Times reports that “only after he publicly accused Mr. Obama of having wiretapped his telephones last year did [Trump] ask aides how the system of obtaining eavesdropping warrants from a special foreign intelligence court worked.”

One particularly chilling example of Trump’s casualness about information gathering is that Michael Crowley and Josh Dawsey report he was asking aides for information about why Assad would use banned chemical weapons only after American Tomahawk missiles had destroyed Syrian military targets. The shocking truth is that it’s probably Trump’s own rhetoric about Syria in particular and chemical weapons in general that led Assad to think there would be no consequences for violating his 2013 agreement.

A clearer and better-organized policy process could potentially have avoided the gas attack, the subsequent perceived need for a US military response, and the inevitable worsening of relations with Russia that resulted from it.

The other turnabouts are also a little alarming. Like Trump, I am not deeply versed in East Asian security issues and long had a fuzzy impression that China could make North Korea do basically whatever it wanted. Then I went on a journalists’ tour of China, organized by the Chinese government, during which Chinese officials argued fairly persuasively that this is wrong. But I didn’t just take their word for it. Having had my thinking challenged, I went and checked to see if credible Western experts agreed — and indeed they do.

After all, one problem with simply changing your mind after talking to a well-informed person is that lots of well-informed people are nonetheless wrong or pushing a partial agenda. In my experience, business lobbyists on both sides of the Export-Import Bank issue are deeply informed — better informed than I am, for sure — and make somewhat persuasive arguments. Trump tends to resolve this kind of situation by simply agreeing with the last person he talked to.

Trump is “learning” things that aren’t true

The fundamental problem here is that what Trump “learns” is sometimes actually bad information.

Baker also reported that before becoming president, Trump “had never heard of the congressional procedures that forced him to push for health care changes before overhauling the tax code.”

One reason Trump had never heard of these procedures is that he was not familiar with congressional procedure. But another reason Trump didn’t realize that procedural rules in Congress forced him to push for health care changed before overhauling the tax code is that this isn’t true.

Since becoming president, Trump has several times referred vaguely to complicated statutory requirements that forced him to prioritize Obamacare repeal. His explanations of this are invariably fuzzy because in fact there is no statutory requirement for him to do health care reform before he works on tax reform.

Instead, this “health care before tax reform” idea was simply Paul Ryan’s legislative strategy. Ryan wants to pass a tax reform plan with a party-line vote, which means he needs to use the budget reconciliation process to avoid a Senate filibuster.

You can’t write a reconciliation bill that increases the deficit over the long term. So Ryan’s plan is to repeal the Affordable Care Act — which, among other things, would sharply reduce taxes on the rich, but would avoid increasing the deficit since the cuts will be offset by spending less on insurance for the poor and middle class. Then, having locked that tax cut into place, Republicans could move on to a revenue-neutral tax reform using the lower revenue number as the baseline.

Ryan has his reasons for wanting to do it this way, and those reasons to involve procedural arcana. But nothing is being forced on anyone here. It’s simply a choice he made and then apparently tricked the president into endorsing.

Things are going to keep getting harder

Trump is currently dealing with extremely difficult issues for the simple reason that he is the president of the United States and the issues the president deals with are generally complicated and difficult. But in all honesty, he hasn’t yet handled any truly hard cases.

Even something as tough as a North Korean nuclear test or a Syrian chemical weapon strike is, fundamentally, a ripe issue that the professionals in government have had a long time to chew over. What inevitably happens over the course of an administration is that some genuinely unpredictable crises emerge. There could be an infectious disease outbreak, or revolution in the capital of a friendly autocracy, or a recession, or a bank failure, or a terrorist attack.

Unforeseen crises truly put a leader and his team to the test, drastically altering the policy space and creating opportunities to push new agendas.

Sometimes, as with the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak of 2014, a crisis can be successfully resolved by persevering with an approach that is met with initial criticism on Capitol Hill and cable news. Other times, a crisis can be an opportunity for people with strong opinions and poor judgment to push the country into a reckless misadventure, as with the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

Based on what we know of Trump’s decision-making, it’s difficult to imagine him doing the former and very easy to imagine him doing the latter.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/17/15304212/trump-ignorant

[fuagf]

Aircraft Carrier Wasn’t Sailing to Deter North Korea, as U.S. Suggested

Mr. President, when will your administration start communicating better? Or was it just fine as it gave you a King Kong moment.

By MARK LANDLER and ERIC SCHMITTAPRIL 18, 2017


The Navy posted a photo of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson sailing Saturday in the Sunda Strait off the coast
of Indonesia, thousands of miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
Credit MC2 Sean M. Castellano/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Just over a week ago, the White House declared that ordering an American aircraft carrier into the Sea of Japan would send a powerful deterrent signal to North Korea .. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/northkorea/index.html?inline=nyt-geo .. and give President Trump more options in responding to the North’s provocative behavior. “We’re sending an armada,” Mr. Trump said to Fox News last Tuesday afternoon.

The problem was that the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the three other warships in its strike force were that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.

White House officials said Tuesday that they had been relying on guidance from the Defense Department. Officials there described a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from an ill-timed announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to a partially erroneous explanation by the defense secretary, Jim Mattis — all of which perpetuated the false narrative that a flotilla was racing toward the waters off North Korea.

By the time the White House was asked about the Carl Vinson, its imminent arrival had been emblazoned on front pages across East Asia, fanning fears that Mr. Trump was considering a pre-emptive military strike. It was portrayed as further evidence of the president’s muscular style days after he ordered a missile strike on Syria .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/us/politics/syria-strike-trump-timeline.html .. that came while he and President Xi Jinping of China chatted over dessert during a meeting in Florida.

With Mr. Trump himself playing up the show of force, Pentagon officials said, rolling back the story became difficult.

The story of the wayward carrier might never have come to light had the Navy not posted a photo online .. http://www.navy.mil/view_image.asp?id=235255 .. Monday of the Carl Vinson sailing south through the Sunda Strait, which separates the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. It was taken on Saturday, four days after the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, described its mission in the Sea of Japan.

Now, the Carl Vinson is finally on a course for the Korean Peninsula, expected to arrive in the region next week, according to Defense Department officials. White House officials declined to comment on the confusion, referring questions to the Pentagon. “Sean discussed it once when asked, and it was all about process,” a spokesman, Michael Short, said of Mr. Spicer.

Privately, however, other officials expressed bewilderment that the Pentagon did not correct its timeline, particularly given the tensions in the region and the fact that Mr. Spicer, as well as the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, were publicly answering questions about it.

“The ship is now moving north to the Western Pacific,” the Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman, Dana White, said Tuesday. “This should have been communicated more clearly at the time.”

IMAGE inside

The miscues began on April 9 when the public affairs office of the Navy’s Third Fleet issued a news release .. http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=99815 .. saying that Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the Pacific commander, had ordered the Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered carrier, and its strike force — two destroyers and one cruiser — to leave Singapore and sail to the Western Pacific. As is customary, the Navy did not say exactly where the carrier force was headed or its precise mission.

Given the timing, it hardly needed to: Mr. Trump had just wrapped up a two-day summit meeting with Mr. Xi at his Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, with a message that the United States had run out of patience with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, and its nuclear and missile programs.

That Sunday, General McMaster told Fox News that the deployment was a “prudent” move, designed to give the president “a full range of options to remove” the threat posed by Mr. Kim.

What the Navy did not say was that the Carl Vinson had to carry out another mission before it set sail north: a long-scheduled joint exercise with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean.

South Korean and Japanese news media, as well as The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/world/asia/korean-peninsula-us-aircraft-carrier-north-korea.html , reported Admiral Harris’s order as evidence that the crisis was intensifying. While an aircraft carrier is not the weapon of choice for a strike on North Korea — such an operation would more likely involve long-range bombers and cruise missiles — it sends a vivid message of military might.

In July 2010, President Barack Obama ordered the aircraft carrier George Washington .. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/world/asia/20military.html .. to the Sea of Japan to intimidate the North after it had torpedoed a South Korean Navy corvette, killing 46 sailors. When his defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, asked him to reroute the carrier to the Yellow Sea, to send an additional message to Beijing, Mr. Obama resisted.

“I don’t call audibles with aircraft carriers,” he said, using a football metaphor to reject the midcourse correction.

By all accounts, Mr. Trump is less worried than Mr. Obama about making such calls on the fly. His aides have praised this unpredictability as a virtue in dealing with rogue leaders in North Korea and Syria.

In South Korea, though, fears of a full-blown war erupted. The government rushed to reassure the public that the Carl Vinson was coming only to deter North Korean provocations. April 15 is the birthday of Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founder and the grandfather of Kim Jong-un — an occasion the North typically uses to conduct celebratory weapons tests.

On April 11, Mr. Trump stoked the fears of military action [KKish, beat the chest] with an early-morning Twitter post ..

North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2017

: “North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.” Later that day, Mr. Spicer was asked by a reporter, who assumed the Carl Vinson was on its way north, why the United States had decided to dispatch the carrier group to the Sea of Japan.

“A carrier group is several things,” Mr. Spicer replied. “The forward deployment is deterrence, presence.” He added, “I think when you see a carrier group steaming into an area like that, the forward presence of that is clearly, through almost every instance, a huge deterrence.”

Mr. Spicer did not point out that the Carl Vinson was not, in fact, steaming into the area and would not be for 14 more days. A senior administration official said the press secretary was using talking points supplied by the Pentagon. He was discussing the rationale for sending a carrier, this official said, not confirming the ship’s schedule.

An hour after Mr. Spicer left the podium, Mr. Mattis, the defense secretary, reinforced the perception of ships racing to the scene. Speaking at the Pentagon, he said the Navy disclosed the Carl Vinson’s itinerary in advance because the exercise with the Australians had been canceled. “We had to explain why she wasn’t in that exercise,” he said.

Mr. Mattis, however, had conflated two things: Admiral Harris had canceled only a port call for the Carl Vinson in Fremantle, Australia, according to Pentagon officials, because he feared that images of sailors on shore leave would be unseemly at a time when North Korea was firing missiles.

Navy officials said Admiral Harris never meant to suggest he was canceling the naval exercise. Organizing such exercises is a complicated effort that takes months. One official described it as a high-end exercise, raising the possibility that the two navies practiced scenarios to counter China, or tested new missile defenses or cyberoperations.

Some officials expressed irritation with Admiral Harris, saying he did not think through the consequences of announcing the deployment of an aircraft carrier during a period of high tension.

Mr. Mattis sent mixed signals about the mission. He stressed the need for the Navy to operate freely in the Pacific but added, “There’s not a specific demand signal or specific reason why we’re sending her up there.”

After a week of war drums, fueled by the reports of the oncoming armada, tensions subsided when the weekend passed with only a military parade in Pyongyang and a failed missile test.

Then, on Monday, the Navy posted the photo of the Carl Vinson, bristling with fighter jets as it passed Indonesia. It was spotted by Defense News .. http://www.defensenews.com/articles/united-technologies-faces-narrow-chances-of-ousting-incumbent-f-35-ejection-seat-maker , a trade publication, which broke the news that the ship was thousands of miles from where most of the world thought it was.

---------------

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/world/asia/aircraft-carrier-north-korea-carl-vinson.html