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• Trump’s Warsaw speech is still yielding rounds of insightful commentary. The latest entry comes from Stephen Wertheim, a historian on the emergence of U.S. global leadership, in an op-ed in the New York Times. Trump’s embrace of a kind of civilizational war against “barbarism” was the blunt edge of a clear foreign policy that is emerging: “To be precise, Mr. Trump appears to be evolving into a kind of neoconservative. Before becoming associated with George W. Bush’s ‘freedom agenda,’ many neoconservatives reviled Soviet Communism but were less than enamored with the goal of exporting democracy and human rights. Scorning the flabby norms of the liberal international order, they placed their trust in the muscular assertion of American power, deeming it the real guarantor of their country’s interests and the world’s civilized values alike. “Like earlier neocons, Mr. Trump looks at the world and sees unceasing threats that experts understate. In the 1970s, prominent neoconservatives formed a ‘Team B’ to challenge the C.I.A.’s estimate of Soviet capabilities and reinvigorate the Cold War. Later, George W. Bush’s administration created an intelligence unit that hyped the Iraqi threat. Mr. Trump, too, mistrusts professionals in the State Department, whose funding he seeks to slash, and in the intelligence agencies, whose honesty and competence he has impugned. Like neoconservatives, he glorifies martial values and seeks to build up the military. Unsurprisingly, this foreign policy has received recent praise from neoconservatives like Elliott Abrams, an erstwhile critic and former Bush and Reagan foreign policy staffer. The commentator Charles Krauthammer, a frequent Trump critic, conferred the gold standard on the Warsaw speech: ‘Reaganesque.'” • On Friday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer resigned, ending a tumultuous half-year as Trump’s main spokesman. The proverbial writing had been on the wall for some time. Spicer, whose close ally, White House chief of staff Reince Preibus, is also on thin ice, was never part of Trump’s inner circle and endured a torrid time in his post, struggling to clean up after Trump’s incessant tweets and persistent falsehoods. He was even frozen out of the president’s meeting at the Vatican, despite Trump knowing Spicer was a devout Catholic eager to meet the pope. The move that finally prompted Spicer’s departure was Trump’s appointment of Anthony Scaramucci as the White House’s new communications director. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had already assumed a number of Spicer’s duties, was installed as the new press secretary. On Sunday, Sanders and Scaramucci seemed to offer contradictory statements on the White House’s approach to new sanctions legislation on Russia. Scaramucci, a Wall Street veteran who swam in the same circles of Manhattan high finance as Trump, cuts a very different figure than Spicer, a veteran GOP operative. He was a permanent fixture at the World Economic Forum’s annual confab in Davos — that bastion of “globalism” so reviled by Trump on the campaign trail — and espoused liberal positions on a range of issues, from immigration to gun control. (Scaramucci deleted a series of his old tweets articulating these positions hours after assuming a formal role in the Trump administration.) Suave and charismatic, it’s easy to see why he is liked by Trump. Watching his first briefing, CNN’s Dana Bash observed that Scaramucci is “the guy that the President thinks that he sees in the mirror.” • There’s an escalating crisis over access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam. Israeli authorities installed metal detectors there in the wake of a shooting rampage earlier this month. That has triggered further upheaval, protests and clashes. The metal detectors are controversial because they are an assertion of Israeli sovereignty at a spot whose status remains at the heart of broader Palestinian-Israeli disputes. Here’s a bit of explanation from the Guardian: “Captured by Israel in 1967, the site — regarded by most of the international community as ‘occupied’ although claimed by Israel — is seen as a centre of Palestinian national identity that exists above both factional politics and disagreements over strategy. “A unifying idea, its significance as a national symbol is embraced by secular and religious, making it one of the conflict’s most dangerous flashpoints. The location — as commentators on both sides have been quick to point out — triggered the Second Intifada in 2000 after a similar Israeli political misjudgment when then opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the site.” |
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An Iraqi man walks outside the ruins of the University of Mosul on Jan. 22, 2017, a week after Iraqi forces retook it from the Islamic State. (Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images) The closest of calls On the day the Islamic State overran the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014, it laid claim to one of the greatest weapons bonanzas ever to fall to a terrorist group: a metropolis dotted with military bases and stocked with guns, bombs, rockets and even tanks. But the most fearsome weapon in Mosul on that day was never used by the terrorists. Only now is it becoming clear what happened to it. Locked away in a storage room on a college campus were two caches of cobalt-60, a metallic substance with lethally high levels of radiation. When encased in a radiotherapy machine, cobalt-60 is used to kill cancer cells. In terrorists’ hands, it is the core ingredient of a “dirty bomb,” a weapon that could be used to spread radiation and panic. Western intelligence agencies were aware of the cobalt and watched anxiously for three years for signs that the militants might try to use it. Those concerns intensified in late 2014 when Islamic State officials boasted of obtaining radioactive material, and again early last year when the terrorists took over laboratories at the same Mosul campus. In Washington, independent nuclear experts drafted papers and ran calculations about the potency of the cobalt and the extent of the damage it could do. The details were kept under wraps on the chance that Mosul’s occupiers might not be fully aware of what they had. Iraqi military commanders were apprised of the potential threat as they battled Islamic State fighters in the sprawling complex where the cobalt was last seen. Finally, earlier this year, government officials entered the bullet-pocked building and peered into the room where the cobalt machines were kept. They were still there, exactly as they were when the Islamic State seized the campus in 2014. The cobalt apparently had never been touched. “They are not that smart”” a relieved health ministry official said. U.S. officials and nuclear experts speculate that the terrorists may have been stymied by a practical concern: how to dismantle the machines’ thick cladding without killing themselves. A person standing three feet from the unshielded core would receive a fatal dose of radiation in less than three minutes. More certain is the fact that the danger has not entirely passed: With dozens of Islamic State stragglers still loose in the city, U.S. officials requested that details about the cobalt’s current whereabouts not be revealed. — Joby Warrick and Loveday Morris
White House senior advisor Jared Kushner at the Royal Court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 20. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters) The big question The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner comes to Capitol Hill this week for a doubleheader of closed-door testimonybefore the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It’s another big moment in the ever-expanding investigations into Russian election interference and President Trump’s possible ties to the country. Last week saw a slew of new revelations about the Trump team’s interactions with Russians, and fissures in the president’s political team are starting to show. So we asked Post national security reporter Karoun Demirjian: What’s so important about Kushner’s upcoming — and private — testimony? “Kushner’s appearances are the first chance committee investigators will have to grill someone who participated in a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have information damaging to Hillary Clinton — and who they believed had Kremlin ties. “Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Donald Trump, Jr., were supposed to appear for a public hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, but they got a pass after agreeing to testify behind closed doors at a still-undetermined date. “But it isn’t all about that June 2016 meeting. These interviews are happening with the permission of special counsel Robert B. Mueller III, who is running a much wider probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government; they are also happening as new details are emerging of previously undisclosed interactions Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others had with Russian officials during the campaign. The information lawmakers get from Kushner could provide additional grist for Mueller’s now-sprawling inquiries. “Kushner has updated his security-clearance questionnaire to include more than 100 calls and meetings he previously neglected to list. The Washington Post also reported that U.S. intelligence intercepts showed Sessions did talk about campaign-related matters with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, something he had publicly denied before. “It’s the second strike in only a week for Sessions, whose job security appeared shaky last week after the president told the New York Times he thought it was ‘very unfair‘ to him that Sessions had recused himself from the Russia probe. And with campaign surrogates and current administration members only coming under closer scrutiny, it’s hard to say how the White House will handle things as new revelations keep mounting.“ |
If Poland’s new law stands, what comes next? Foreign Policy has some ways the E.U. could respond. And what comes next if President Trump in fact tries to pardon himself in the Russia investigation? Nothing good, says Politico, while national-security blog Just Security has ideas what should happen after that investigation, no matter the results. And The Post runs down the reasons why the White House shouldn’t give up on removing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
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The U.S has a problem: too much cheese. More than a billion pounds too much. Bloomberg tells the story of the government-sponsored “cheese Illuminati” tasked with solving this problem. Meanwhile, Frontline breaks down the surprising child marriage numbers across America, while High Country News details one teenaged Alaskan’s rite of passage that took a dark turn thanks to social media.
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The Islamic State may not have gotten their hands on dirty bomb material, but they did find plenty of supplies to fashion
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