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      Ukraine’s MPs hopeful Donald Trump’s victory ‘not a catastrophe’ for war effort

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      Ukrainian politicians are expressing tentative hopes that the return of Donald Trump to the White House will not necessarily lead to a rapid and humiliating forced peace.An initial 25-minute post-election call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, during which the president-elect handed the phone to Elon Musk, is said to have been positive in tone and no specifics of any peace proposals were discussed.Zelenskyy also thanked Musk for making the Starlink satellite internet service available for use by his country’s military, for whom it is a vital communications tool on the front line.Though Trump promised to “stop wars” in his first speech after his victory over Kamala Harris became apparent last week, there are no settled outlines of a peace plan yet, giving Kyiv breathing space to press its own case.Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian opposition MP, said: “I don’t think that Trump’s victory is a catastrophe. Ukraine is now his business and if negotiations lead to a disaster it will be his, like Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This is a person who loves to win.”Trump spoke to Vladimir Putin on the phone on Thursday and discussed the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post has reported. The US president-elect advised Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”, according to the Post.Ukrainians emphasise the complexity of negotiating with the Russian president, who they hope may overplay his hand with maximalist demands or irritate the notoriously prickly American leader.“At some point, Trump has to present a plan to Putin and we will see if Putin wants to stick to it. From that moment there is a new reality,” Goncharenko said. “In the meantime, we have to work with the US and with US public opinion.”Putin has already praised Trump’s courage for his defiant behaviour after surviving an assassination attempt in July, describing him as “a real man”, though Moscow has said its goals in invading Ukraine – once described as “demilitarisation and denazification” – remain unchanged.The Russian president congratulated Trump on his victory and said: “He turned out to be a courageous person. People show who they are in extraordinary circumstances. This is where a person reveals himself. And he showed himself, in my opinion, in a very correct manner, courageously. Like a man.”He said he was ready for dialogue with Trump. “What was said about the desire to restore relations with Russia, to bring about the end of the Ukrainian crisis, in my opinion this deserves attention at least.”On Sunday, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, was upbeat but non-specific. “Trump during his election talked about how he perceives everything through deals, that he can make a deal that can lead to peace,” he said, though he added campaign trail statements were not always borne out.A day after his phone call with Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, acknowledged that the president-elect thought he could move fast. “I believe that President Trump really wants a quick decision,” he said at a meeting of the European Political Community in Budapest. “He wants that. It doesn’t mean that it will happen this way.”Specific proposals for a peace deal in Ukraine from senior Republicans are competing and to some extent contradictory. A critical factor will be Trump’s appointments to the state department and Pentagon as well as his choice of national security adviser.In June, the retired Lt Gen Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who previously both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s national security council, presented a proposal to Trump that would force Ukraine to negotiate by threatening to cut off military aid, freezing the conflict along the current frontlines.In September, JD Vance, now the vice-president-elect, proposed something similar, a plan that would allow Russia to take control of the 20% of Ukraine it currently occupies, and stipulating that Ukraine would never be allowed to join Nato.Another plan partly proposed by Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state under Trump now considered to be a candidate for defence secretary, involves a de facto partition based on the current frontlines while lifting “all restrictions on the type of weapons Ukraine can obtain and use” – including British Storm Shadow missiles. This would be paid for with money obtained from Russian foreign exchange reserves; $50bn in loans from G7 members was announced last month.Over the weekend, the Trump campaign distanced themselves from a comment made by another campaign adviser, Bryan Lanza, who said “Crimea is gone,” arguing the occupied territories were lost for good. Lanza “does not speak for” Trump, a spokesperson for the Republican said.All such proposals are diametrically opposed to Zelenskyy’s own “victory plan” presented publicly last month, which called for Nato membership plus unrestricted use of western weapons to force a restoration of its internationally recognised territory.Across Ukraine there is a certain fatalism. Maria Avdeeva, a Kyiv-based fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute thinktank, said: “I think Ukrainians have already learned the lesson that we have to count on ourselves” – a refrain that crops up repeatedly in conversation.Ukraine is already struggling on the battlefield to a degree not seen since the spring of 2022, particularly on the southern part of the eastern from, where Ukraine has lost 9km in a week in some areas as Russia presses forward aggressively, incurring, according to UK estimates, numbers of troops killed and wounded of as high as 1,354 a day.The numbers of cases of Ukrainian desertion (18,196) and soldiers going absent without leave (35,307) between January and September are double those of the whole of 2023, according to leaked figures from the prosecutor general’s office, suggesting a growing weariness in parts of the armed forces.Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s most senior military commander, said on Saturday: “The situation remains challenging and shows signs of escalation. The enemy, leveraging its numerical advantage, is continuing offensive actions and is focusing its main efforts on the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions.” More

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      The US has lost faith in the American dream. Is this the end of the country as we know it?

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      A dozen years ago – an eternity in American politics – the Republican party was reeling from its fourth presidential election loss in six tries and decided that it needed to be a lot kinder to the people whose votes it was courting.No more demonising of migrants, the party resolved – it was time for comprehensive immigration reform. No more demeaning language that turned off women and minorities – it needed more of them to run for office.“We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them too,” the party asserted in a famously self-flagellating autopsy after Barack Obama’s re-election as president in 2012.Even Dick Armey, a veteran Texas conservative, told the authors of the report: “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you.”Just one voice on the right begged to differ: Donald Trump. “Does the @RNC [Republican National Committee] have a death wish?” he asked in a tweet.View image in fullscreenHis objection received little attention at the time, but it wasn’t long before he was offering himself as flesh-and-blood proof of how wrong the autopsy was. In announcing his first campaign for president in 2015, Trump called Mexicans rapists and criminals.He demeaned a female TV moderator, Megyn Kelly, at his first Republican candidates’ debate, saying she had “blood coming out of her wherever” and later implied she was a “bimbo”. He also called for migrants to be deported en masse and for Muslims to be banned from entering the US.No serious presidential candidate had ever talked this way, and for several months, mainstream Republicans regarded his approach as electoral suicide. Even once it became apparent Trump might win the party nomination, they still feared his candidacy would go down in flames because swing voters in the presidential election would “flock away from him in droves”, as party stalwart Henry Barbour put it.Then Trump won – and American politics has not been the same since.The country has not been the same since. It’s true, the US has never been quite the shining beacon of its own imagination.On the international stage, it has frequently been belligerent, bullying, chaotic, dysfunctional and indifferent to the suffering of people in faraway nations – traits that bear some passing similarity to Trump’s leadership style.But it has also, for more than a century, been the standard-bearer of a certain lofty vision, a driver of strategic alliances between similarly advanced democratic nations intent on extending their economic, military and cultural footprint across continents.After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion.Military alliances and foreign policy no longer command the cross-party consensus of the cold war era, when politics could be relied upon to “stop at the water’s edge”, in the famous formulation of the Truman-era senator Arthur Vandenberg.Now the politics don’t stop at all, for any reason. And alliances are for chumps.View image in fullscreenLast week’s election was a contest between a unifying, consensus vision laid out by Kamala Harris – and by that Republican autopsy document of the pre-Trump era – and Trump’s altogether darker, us-versus-them, zero-sum vision of a world where nobody can win without someone else becoming a loser and payback is a dish best served piping hot. The contest could have gone either way – there has been much talk of a different outcome with a different Democratic candidate, or with a different process for selecting her.Still, the fact that the zero-sum vision proved so seductive says something powerful about the collapse of American ideals, and the pessimism and anger that has overtaken large swaths of the country.In 2016 and 2020, that anger was largely confined to the white working-class staring down a bleak future without the manufacturing jobs that once sustained them.Now it has spread to groups once disgusted by Trump, or whom Trump has openly disparaged – Latinos, young voters, Black men. Kelly, the TV personality memorably insulted by Trump during his first campaign, stumped for him in Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign. Even undocumented migrants, ostensibly facing mass deportation once the new administration takes office, have been voicing cautious support for Trump because they believe his economic policies will improve their prospects, risks and all.At first glance, this is a baffling state of affairs. How could so many Americans vote against their own self-interest, when it is plain – both from past experience and from the stated intentions of Trump and his allies – that the chief beneficiaries of the incoming administration are likely to be the billionaire class? When the depressed, disaffected communities of the rust belt can expect little if any of the relief Trump has been promising but failing to deliver for years?View image in fullscreenThe answer has a lot to do with the zero-sum mentality that Trump has sold so successfully.People across the country have lost all faith in the American dream: the notion that hard work and a desire for self-improvement are all it takes to climb up the social ladder, to own a home, to lay the foundations for the success of your children and grandchildren.They have lost their faith because the dream simply does not correspond to their lived experience.As in Britain and other post-industrial societies, too many lives are a constant struggle to get by month to month, with no end in sight to the bills and day-to-day living expenses and crippling levels of personal debt.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe majority of jobs in the US now require some qualification beyond high school, but college is dizzyingly expensive and dropout rates are high enough to deter many people from even starting. Medical debt in a country without a national health service is rampant. Home ownership is simply out of reach.When people think of prosperity and success, what many of them see is an exclusive club of Americans, recipients of generations of wealth who live in increasingly expensive big cities, who have the financial flexibility to get through college, find a high-paying job and come up with a down payment on a house.The fix is in, as Trump likes to say. The game is rigged, and if you’re not a member of the club at birth, your chances of being admitted are slim to none.Under such circumstances, the Democrats’ promise of consensus leadership rings largely hollow. The consensus arguably broke a long time ago, when the bursting of the housing bubble of the early 00s left many would-be homeowners crippled by debt and led to the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression.It broke all over again during the Covid pandemic, when the economy ground to halt, unemployment rocketed and prices of everyday goods spun alarmingly out of control. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the past 16 years, yet their idea of consensus has failed to reach much beyond the big-city limits.More appealing by far to those on the outside looking in are Trump’s promises of retribution, of tearing down the entire system and starting again.Those promises may also prove to be hollow over time, but to people only intermittently focused on politics as they struggle to put food on the table for their families, they feel at least fleetingly empowering. In a zero-sum world, blaming migrants for the country’s woes feels like its own kind of victory. It means some other group is at the bottom of the social heap for a change.Overlaid on this grim picture is the slow implosion of the two main political parties. The coalitions held together by Republicans and Democrats were always complicated affairs: an awkward marriage of big business and Christian fundamentalism on the right; a patchwork of union workers, racial minorities, intellectuals and, for a long time, old-guard southern segregationists on the left.Now, though, what is most apparent is not their intricacy but their weakness. The Republican party was as powerless to stop Trump’s hostile takeover in 2016 as the Democrats were to hold on to their bedrock of support in the “blue wall” states in the upper midwest – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.What drives American politics now is, rather, the unfettered power of money, much of it managed by groups outside party control who do not have to declare their funding sources and can make or break candidates depending on their willingness to follow a preordained set of policy prescriptions.View image in fullscreenThe sway of special interest groups is a longstanding problem in American politics; think of the pharmaceutical industry lobbying to keep drug prices higher than in any other western country, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spending tens of millions to keep critics of the Israeli government out of Congress.But it has grown exponentially worse since the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which has fuelled an unprecedented growth in “dark money” – untraceable lobbying funds that far outstrip anything candidates are able to raise on their own behalf and tilt the political playing field accordingly.This, too, has given an edge to a demagogue such as Trump, whose vulgarity and bluster serve as useful distractions from a corporate-friendly policy agenda driven largely by tax cuts, deregulation and the dismantling of what Trump’s former political consigliere Steve Bannon calls the “administrative state”.The Democrats, meanwhile, can talk all they want about serving the interests of all Americans, but they too rely on dark money representing the interests of Wall Street, big tech companies and more, and are all but doomed to come off as hypocritical and insincere as a result.Two generations ago, the avatars of the civil rights movement were under no illusions about the brutal nature of the forces driving US society – “the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak”, as Langston Hughes wrote in his famous poem Let America Be America Again.The hope then was this was at least a correctable problem, that the oppressed could push back against their oppressors and create a fairer, more just world.What nobody then envisaged was that the oppressed themselves – the working class, disaffected young Black and Latino men, even undocumented manual labourers – would one day support the rise of an autocratic government willing to overthrow every sacred tenet of American public life, and even the constitution itself, with its promise of creating “a more perfect union”.Yet here we are. In January 2021, at Joe Biden’s inauguration, the young poet Amanda Gorman invoked the spirit of the civil rights era in describing “a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished”.It now appears that her faith was misplaced. The US we thought we knew is broken indeed, and may well be finished. More

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      ‘This victory is a mandate’: rightwing groups ready with policy proposals for new Trump administration

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      As Donald Trump prepares to move back into the White House, he’ll have a host of rightwing groups trying to influence his staffing choices and policy proposals, including the group behind Project 2025, despite Trump’s insistence they won’t be involved.Democrats repeatedly ran attacks on Trump over Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that its writers want to guide a second Trump administration. Trump tried to distance himself from it and from the group behind it, the Heritage Foundation, one of DC’s biggest thinktanks.The Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, congratulated Trump on his “hard-fought victory” that came despite the “sham” indictments and against a “relentless leftwing machine”.“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state,” Roberts said.Other groups, namely the America First Policy Institute, have avoided the limelight that backfired on Project 2025 and instead worked behind the scenes to ally themselves with Trump and seek to influence his administration. Trump named Linda McMahon, the chair of the institute’s board, as a co-chair of his transition team, giving the America First Policy Institute a critical role.The institute, started in 2021 and stacked with Trump allies, said in a tweet that it “stands ready to support bold governance that puts Americans first”. It also shared a video clip with the former acting United States attorney general Matt Whitaker talking about deportations and sanctuary cities, key alignments with Trump’s policy goals.“This victory is a mandate to restore our nation to a place of safety, opportunity, and prosperity rooted in freedom,” the America First Policy Institute said. “Together, we’ll secure borders, strengthen the economy, & uphold the freedoms that define us – for a stronger future.”The institute has held trainings for people that could serve in the Trump White House and has a lengthy agenda published online, complete with plans for immigration, education, energy and elections. The New York Times recently reported that the group has “installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again”.The heads of both the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation have roots in the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a state-based conservative thinktank. Brooke Rollins, CEO of the America First Policy Institute, ran the Texas foundation for 15 years, and Roberts was the foundation’s CEO before he was tapped by Heritage.Another organization, America First Legal, is headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. It has been filing lawsuits that boost Trump and other conservatives on issues like election fraud, diversity programs, public records disputes and government overreach. Miller could return to the Trump administration, but it’s likely the group will remain an outside rightwing legal monitor to help the incoming president.What could Trump’s policies be?Project 2025’s sprawling “mandate for leadership” details in 900-plus pages how each government agency could be altered under a conservative president. The project includes a database of potential hires and a training program for those who could staff a Trump administration, though Trump’s team has said none of the people associated with Heritage’s staffing suggestions would be hired. That would be a feat, given the extensive reach the project had – it was signed on to by more than 100 conservative groups, and many of those who wrote chapters or otherwise contributed had played some kind of role in the previous Trump administration.The project’s biggest suggestion is to designate exponentially more federal government employees as political appointees rather than non-partisan civil servants. It also wants to downsize the government. Trump’s plan also involves downsizing the federal government, something he tried to start implementing near the end of his first term.The project suggests many ways to restrict immigration, both through beefed-up border security and through limiting legal immigration programs for groups like students and low-skilled workers. That’s another pillar for Trump, who made mass deportations a central theme of his campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn education, the project wants to get rid of the Department of Education and increase the use of vouchers that use public money for private schools – both of which Trump has suggested as well. Conservatives have sought the dismantling of the department for decades, so far without success.Most chapters of Project 2025 mention discarding any programs that promote LGBTQ+ rights and diversity. Trump has railed against these ideals on the campaign trail, promising to root out trans women from sports and in schools.Abortion access is one area where Trump and the project could differ, though Trump’s plans for abortion have been muddled. The project wants to end federal approval of abortion pills, track abortion data and root out anything that is seen as promoting abortion as healthcare. It doesn’t call for a direct ban on the procedure, and Trump has said he wouldn’t approve of one either, but many of these policies would make access significantly more difficult.The America First Policy Institute suggests many of the same policies, though it wants to go further than Project 2025 with federal employees, the New York Times notes, by making most federal workers at-will employees who would not receive civil service protections.Other ideas the institute has pushed include, according to the Times, “halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.”A policy agenda pamphlet from the institute starts by discussing the Christian foundations of the US and imploring Christians to get involved in the government “before it’s too late”. The policy agenda for the pamphlet was written “through the lens of their biblical foundations and applications to provide Christians more information on the issues and solutions needed for the restoration of the nation”. More

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      Tariffs, tech and Taiwan: how China hopes to Trump-proof its economy

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      China is bracing itself for four years of volatile relations with its biggest trading partner and geopolitical rival, as the dust settles on the news that Donald Trump will once again be in the White House.On Thursday China’s president, Xi Jinping, congratulated Trump on his victory and said that the two countries must “get along with each other in the new era”, according to a Chinese government readout.“A stable, healthy and sustainable China-US relationship is in the common interest of both countries and is in line with the expectations of the international community,” Xi said.But the reality is that Trump’s second presidency, which will begin as China grapples with a difficult economic situation and an entrenched, bipartisan hawkishness in Washington, will be a challenge for Beijing.“Trump 2.0 is likely to be more destructive than the 2017 version,” said Wang Dong, a professor of international relations at Peking University, in a pre-election interview with Chinese media.“Compared with his first term in office in 2017, Trump’s views in his second campaign in 2024 have not changed much, but the domestic situation and international environment have changed dramatically … during the Trump 2.0 period, China and the United States are likely to have constant friction and conflict”.The trade war ‘will be worse’Analysts have said Trump’s approach to China will be hard to predict. During his last presidency he swung from praising Xi as a great leader and friend, to presiding over a raft of hawkish policies and waging a trade war that pitted the world’s two biggest economies against each other.Xi, now presiding over a far worse domestic economy, is likely hoping to avoid a repeat of the trade war, but may be out of luck. During the campaign, Trump promised to impose tariffs of 60% on all Chinese imports, which could affect $500bn worth of goods, asset managers PineBridge Investments suggested to Reuters.View image in fullscreenYu Jie, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, said that policymakers in Beijing have been preparing for a Trump victory for months. The trade war “will be worse than the first term of Trump,” Yu said. So the Chinese government is trying to lessen its exposure to the US ahead of time.One approach has been to increase China’s trade volumes with global south countries. In September, at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit in Beijing, Xi announced that China would introduce a regime of zero tariffs for developing countries that have diplomatic relations with Beijing, including 33 in Africa. Such policies stand in stark contrast to the economic barriers between China and the US.And amid restrictions from the US and its allies on China’s ability to purchase the most advanced technology for making semiconductors, Chinese firms have become focused on building their own alternatives.The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently revealed that it had built a lithography scanner capable of producing chips as small as 65 nanometers. That is still well behind the most cutting-edge technology made by ASML, the Dutch company that has been blocked from selling certain equipment to China because of a Dutch government agreement with the US, but it is still an improvement on where China’s capabilities were even two years ago.‘A poisoned chalice’When it comes to geopolitics, Trump’s unorthodox approach may be an opportunity for Beijing, some analysts noted. With Trump in the White House, “there will be no violence in Taiwan,” said Shen Dingli, a senior international relations scholar in Shanghai. “He will make a deal”.Whether or not any such deal would be acceptable to either Beijing or Taipei is another matter. Trump’s position on Taiwan, which China regards as part of its territory, has been very unclear. During his first presidential term the US increased arms sales to Taiwan and lifted restrictions on contacts between US and Taiwanese officials.However earlier this year Trump called into question the US’s continued support of Taiwan, accusing it of stealing American semiconductor industry, and suggesting Taiwan should pay for US protection.But in an interview last month, Trump said that that he wouldn’t have to use military force to prevent a blockade on Taiwan – one mooted option for a possible Chinese attempt at annexing it – because Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy”, he was quoted as saying.View image in fullscreenHe promised tariffs of 150-200% if China tried a blockade. But that too raises complications. There are reportedly hundreds of Taiwanese businesses in China, who would all be vulnerable to China-targeted tariffs. On Thursday, Taipei said it would help Taiwanese businesses to relocate production from China, ahead of Trump tariffs. Economy minister JW Kuo said the impact on the businesses otherwise would be “quite large”.Drew Thompson, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam school of international studies says Trump would be unlikely to use Taiwan as a bargaining chip in any “deal” with Xi. If only because Xi is unlikely to accept it as one.“The trade itself is a poisoned chalice for Xi because he is conceding [Taiwan] is not already part of China and he needs to trade for it.”Alexander Huang, an associate professor at Tamkang University, told a panel in Taipei on Thursday that while Trump’s behaviour may be unpredictable, his logic was not. “He does not want the US to be taken advantage of,” Huang said, suggesting that if Trump were to commit US forces to defend Taiwan against China, it would be purely to protect US interests.One of the major sticking points in China’s relationship with the west in recent years has been its continued economic and political support for Russia during the invasion of Ukraine. Xi presents himself as a global statesman who can help to broker peace, but western analysts say that China’s deepening economic and political ties have prolonged rather than resolved the crisis.Trump has claimed that he could end the war “in 24 hours”. But many US allies fear the more likely outcome is that Trump reduces the flow of military aid to Ukraine, or pressures Kyiv to accept a deal in which it loses control of some territory to Russia.“If Trump’s support to Ukraine reduces, that gives China a chance to jump to the negotiating table,” Yu said. Along with the ongoing war in Gaza, “Beijing will exploit the line that the US is the single most destructive force in the world, while Beijing brings stability”. More

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      US diplomats brace as Trump plans foreign policy shake-up in wider purge of government

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      The US foreign policy establishment is set for one of the biggest shake-ups in years as Donald Trump has vowed to both revamp US policy abroad and to root out the so-called “deep state” by firing thousands of government workers – including those among the ranks of America’s diplomatic corps.Trump’s electoral victory is also likely to push the Biden administration to speed up efforts to support Ukraine before Trump can cut off military aid, hamper the already-modest efforts to restrain Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza and Lebanon and lead to a fresh effort to slash and burn through major parts of US bureaucracy including the state department.Trump backers have said he will be more organised during his second term, often dubbed “Trump 2.0”, and on the day after election day US media reported that Trump had already chosen Brian Hook, a hawkish State Department official during the first Trump administration, to lead the transition for America’s diplomats.And yet analysts, serving and former US diplomats and foreign officials said that it remained difficult to separate Trump’s bluster from his actual plans when he takes power in January. What is clear is that his priority is to bin many of the policies put in place by his predecessor.“I’m skeptical that the transition process will be super-impactful since the natural instinct of the new team will be to toss all of Biden’s foreign policy in the dumpster,” one former senior diplomat said.“If you go back to 2016, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall. And, you know, it doesn’t look like there was a secret plan to defeat Isis,” said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security thinktank. “Some of these things didn’t turn out the way that they were talked about on that campaign trail and we go into this without really knowing what the president’s proposal will be for all of this – and what he will do.”One clear priority, however, is to target many of those involved in crafting US foreign policy as part of a broader purge of the US government.Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F, a designation that would strip tens of thousands of federal employees of their protections as civil servants and define them instead as political appointees, giving Trump immense powers to fire “rogue bureaucrats”, as he called them in a campaign statement.Within the State Department, there are concerns that Trump could target the bureaus that focus specifically on issues that he has attacked during his reelection campaign such as immigration. In particular, he could slash entire bureaus of the State Department, including the bureau of population, refugees and migration (PRM, which resettled 125,000 refugees to the US in 2022 alone), as well as the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, which has focused on the violation of the rights of Palestinians by Israel.Project 2025, a policy memo released by the conservative Heritage Foundation, suggested that Trump would merely reassign PRM to shift resources to “challenges stemming from the current immigration situation until the crisis can be contained” and said it would demand “indefinite curtailment of the number of USRAP [United States refugee admissions program] refugee admissions”.But the blueprint, authored by Kiron Skinner, a former director of policy planning at the State Department during the first Trump administration, went further, suggesting that Trump could simply freeze the agency’s work for a complete reevaluation of its earlier policy.“Before inauguration, the president-elect’s department transition team should assess every aspect of State Department negotiations and funding commitments,” a section of the memo said. After inauguration, Skinner wrote, the secretary of state should “order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc” pending a review by a political appointee.“Everyone is bracing [themselves],” said one diplomat stationed abroad. “Some [diplomats] may choose to leave before he even arrives.”Trump has also vowed to “overhaul federal departments and agencies, firing all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus”.As Joe Biden enters his lame duck period, the administration will focus on trying to push through $6bn in aid that has already been approved for Ukraine, as well as exerting whatever leverage remains in his administration to find an unlikely ceasefire in Gaza.At the same time, they will have to calm a nervous world waiting to see what Trump has planned for his second term.“I think they’re going to do everything they can to make the case that the United States needs to continue to aid Ukraine, and they’ll have to spend a lot of time, I’m sure, dealing with nervous Ukrainians and nervous Europeans,” said Fontaine. At an upcoming G20 summit in Rio, the current administration was “going to try to reassure the rest of the world that a lot of the things that they have done over the past four years are going to stick into the future rather than just be kind of undone”.“And,” he added, “we’ll see what the reaction to that is.” More

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      Five days out, Arab Americans are split on Harris v Trump: vote ‘strategically’ or ‘morally’?

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      It’s a Saturday afternoon at Al Madina Halal market and restaurant in Norcross, Georgia, and the line is four people deep for shawarma sandwiches or leg of lamb with saffron rice and two sides.A television on the wall by a group of tables has Al Jazeera correspondents reporting from several countries on a split screen about Israel’s attack on Iranian military targets the day before.Mohammad Hejja is drinking yogurt, surveying the bustle in the store he bought in 2012. There are shoppers and employees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco and other countries – a clear sign of what makes surrounding Gwinnett county, with nearly a million residents, the most diverse in the south-east.Hejja has Jordanian and US citizenship, but his family is Palestinian. Soldiers of the nascent nation of Israel drove his grandparents out of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba – the Palestinian catastrophe caused by Israel’s creation.Asked about how he expects his community to vote when Americans head to the polls next week, he says: “Everybody is confused about this election.” His No 1 concern is to “stop the war”, referring to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and recent attacks on Lebanon.The issue is top of mind for Arab American voters nationwide. Some polls suggest Arab Americans could abandon the Democrats in droves over the Biden administration’s support for Israel; elsewhere, advocates and community leaders are urgently organizing to prevent a Donald Trump victory, warning about impacts in the Middle East and on domestic issues such as immigration if the GOP candidate is re-elected.Less than a week from 5 November, one thing is certain: “You cannot assess Arabs as a coherent voting bloc,” says Kareem Rifai, a Syrian-American graduate student at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Rifai, who co-founded the University of Michigan Students for Biden chapter in 2020, calls himself a “foreign policy voter”, and is sticking with the Democratic candidate this cycle due to the party’s “strong stance on Russia”.Rifai weighed in on the Arab American vote on X recently, saying he was “pulling out my Arab Muslim from Metro-Detroit card” to let non-Arabs know that people hailing from across the Arab world have differing takes on the upcoming election.“Pro-Hezbollah socially conservative Arab community leaders … are not representative of Arab Americans in the same way that secular liberal Arabs or Christian anti-Hezbollah Arabs, etc, etc, are not representative of all Arab Americans,” Rifai wrote.At the same time, before this year, Arab Americans were clearer in their preference for Democrats – at this time in 2020, Joe Biden led Trump by 24 points, and exit polls showed that more than 85% of Arab American voters backed Democrats in 2004 and 2008.Today, Arab American voters seem more willing to look past Trump’s ban on travel from certain Muslim-majority countries – and his vow to reimpose a ban if re-elected – as well as his staunch support for Israel.Michigan, Rifai’s home state, is home to an estimated 392,000-plus Arab Americans – one of 12 states in which 75% of the nation’s estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans live.But as if to underscore its swing state status, dueling endorsements of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have come from Michigan in the last week alone. Over the weekend, a Yemeni-American organization upheld Trump as capable of “restoring stability in the Middle East”. The following day, a group assembled at the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn, Michigan, to back Harris, calling her “the first to call for a ceasefire and also to call for Palestinian self-determination”. (The statement also noted that “Arab Americans are not a single-issue people, we care about the environment, an existential issue for families and children, workers, rights and a fair wage, civil rights, women’s rights and so much more.”)Also in the last week, dozens of “Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Progressive” leaders in Arizona issued a statement backing Harris, underlining that support for an arms embargo on Israel and a ceasefire in Gaza has mainly come from Democrats. “In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement,” the statement says.Arizona is home to an estimated 77,000 Arab Americans, according to the Arab American Institute.Meanwhile, back in swing state Georgia – with its estimated 58,000 Arab Americans – the staterepresentative Ruwa Romman spoke about her choice to vote for Kamala Harris.Romman is the first Muslim woman elected to the Georgia statehouse and the first Palestinian to hold public office in the state’s history. Speaking with fellow Muslims and Arabs about this election “feels like talking about politics at a funeral”, she wrote in a recent article for Rolling Stone.She believes that organizing for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo would be easier under a Harris administration. “I don’t know how advocating for Palestine would survive under Trump,” she said, adding that many of her constituents – including immigrants – would suffer if he were re-elected.Over at Al Madina, owner Hejja was arriving at a different conclusion. His wife has aunts in Gaza; she had not been able to reach them in three weeks. “The minimum thing we can do is pray five times a day,” he said.As for the election, he said: “If the president of the United States wants to stop the war, he can – with one phone call to Israel. He has the power.” Hejja believes “if Trump wins, Netanyahu will stop the war … [Trump] said he wants peace, and I believe him.”About 12 miles south-west, at Emory University – site of some of the harshest police responses to pro-Palestinian protests early this year – the Syrian-American senior Ibrahim had already sent an absentee ballot to his home state of Kentucky, marked for the Green party’s Jill Stein. “I see it as an ethical decision,” he said of his first time voting for president.“Voting for an administration that is supporting genocide crosses an ethical red line,” he added, referring to Harris.Fellow student Michael Krayyem, whose father is Palestinian, said he would “probably be voting down-ballot” on 5 November, but not for president. “I can’t support Kamala Harris because of what her administration has done to my people,” he said.Romman says she feels this dilemma facing fellow Arab Americans deeply. At the same time, she says: “Ultimately, in this election, I view voting as a strategic choice, and no longer a moral one.” More

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      ‘Zombie-like’: the US trade agreement that still haunts Democrats

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      More than 30 years have passed since President Bill Clinton persuaded Congress to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and yet the trade agreement still infuriates many voters and hangs over Kamala Harris’s – and the Democrats’ – chances in this year’s elections.Zombie-like, Nafta just keeps coming back, decades after many Democrats believe it should have died. At the Republican convention, Donald Trump attacked Nafta, calling it “the worst trade agreement ever”. In speech after speech, Nafta is a topic Trump turns to as he seeks to woo the voters in the pivotal blue-collar communities of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – many of whom remain angry about the job losses it caused.There were early warning signs. “A lot of people were saying Nafta was going to be a disaster economically,” said David Bonior, a former Democratic congressman from Michigan who led the congressional fight to defeat Clinton’s push for Nafta. “I could see it was going to be a disaster politically, too.”Nafta acted like a slow-motion poison for Democrats. After Congress ratified it in 1993, year by year more factories closed and more jobs disappeared as manufacturers moved operations to Mexico to take advantage of that country’s lower wages. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, estimates that the US lost 682,000 jobs due to Nafta, which largely eliminated tariffs between the US, Mexico and Canada.“It’s a lingering issue in Michigan,” said Ron Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, the US’s largest federation of unions. “Everyone knows someone here in Michigan who lost their job due to Nafta. The door was cracked open to outsourcing before Nafta, but Nafta threw the door open after it was passed.”JJ Jewell, who works at a Ford axle plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, was born two years before Nafta was ratified. The trade pact has been part of the background of his life, he says. Jewell said he often discussed trade problems with other auto workers, even when they didn’t directly discuss Nafta. “It’s an issue,” he said. “Nafta helped expedite the loss of jobs from our country to a country where wages are cheaper. I have friends, family members, neighbors who lost their jobs as a direct result of Nafta. It still affects things decades later.”While Trump talks tough on trade and protecting factory jobs, Jewell said that Trump, while president, fell badly short in his vows to bring back manufacturing jobs. “It’s empty promises,” he said.Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s main labor federation, agreed, saying that Trump’s tough words on trade have done little for workers. “This is an example of Trump’s rhetoric not matching reality,” Shuler said. “He talks a good game, but there’s no action to back it up. When he had the ability to make a difference, when he was president, he went to different places and pretended to be a savior, and you followed up and you saw that those plants closed and jobs were moved to Mexico. He did nothing to fix it.”Seeing all the lingering discontent about Nafta, many Democrats say it’s unfair for Trump and others to blame their party for the agreement. The idea for Nafta arose under Ronald Reagan, they say, and George HW Bush negotiated the deal, both Republicans. More Republicans in Congress voted to ratify Nafta than Democrats. The vast majority of Senate Republicans also voted for it, while most Democratic senators voted against ratification.Still, Bonior said that Clinton and his administration “get the blame because their top guy was for it”, he said. “Clinton was instrumental in making it happen.”Many workers who lost jobs due to Nafta were able to find other jobs, said Bonior, but their pay was 20% less on average. “Lifestyles were enormously downgraded in my district,” said Bonior, who served as House majority whip. “Clinton bought into Nafta, but a lot of working-class people saw that as a betrayal.”On Nafta, Clinton won strong backing from economists and corporate America. Brushing aside labor’s warnings that Nafta would speed the loss of jobs to Mexico, nearly 300 economists on the right and the left, including several Nobel Prize winners, signed a pro-Nafta letter, saying: “The assertions that Nafta will spur an exodus of US jobs to Mexico are without basis.”Many economists argued that Nafta would increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the US because the nation had a higher-skilled, more productive workforce than Mexico and would thus, in theory, gain factory jobs in an expanded free-trade zone. Pro-Nafta forces also argued that the closer economic integration of the US, Mexico and Canada would create a North American powerhouse to counter China’s fast-growing economic power.Jeff Faux, a former president of the Economic Policy Institute, said many economists failed to realize something important that was happening when Nafta was negotiated: “The US was losing its manufacturing base. It was deindustrializing.”Faux, one of the most outspoken economists against Nafta, said Clinton embraced Nafta because he was eager to present himself as a different type of Democrat and “was trying to ingratiate himself with the business community”. “Clinton saw Nafta as an opportunity to present himself as not just another liberal Democrat,” Faux said. “It was the beginning of the notion that came to dominate the Democratic party that its future is not in working people, that it’s in professionals, in women, in minorities and various ethnic groups. They wanted to put together a new coalition, and labor would be a thing of the past.”Michael Podhorzer, a former AFL-CIO political director, said many blue-collar workers remain angry about Nafta because it was such a departure from President Franklin Roosevelt’s emphatically pro-worker Democratic party. Podhorzer said: “Nafta is the catchall for a series of things that Democrats did that showed they had a greater concern for business interests and a kind of insensitivity to the consequences that accelerating deindustrialization would have on people’s lives.”Trump was shrewd to seize on Nafta, he said: “It’s a way for him to sort of wave a flag, but it doesn’t actually mean he’s on the workers’ side. It channels pretty effectively the frustration that many Americans feel in seeing their jobs go offshore or to Mexico or seeing their communities hollowed out or seeing fewer economics prospects for their kids.”In the view of many labor leaders and workers, the Democrats doubled down on misguided trade policy when Clinton successfully pushed Congress in 2000 to approve normal trade relations with China. That move encouraged many US corporations to outsource operations to lower-wage China, with one study finding that the country lost 2m jobs, including 985,000 factory jobs, because of the normalized trade relations with China. The number of factories in the US also declined by 45,000 from 1997 to 2008, with many workers blaming Nafta and the China trade deal.What’s more, many unions faulted Barack Obama for pushing for another free trade agreement: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a pact with 12 Pacific Rim countries. TPP’s supporters said the deal would increase US exports and build a powerful economic bloc to counter China. TPP was signed in 2016 under Obama’s presidency, but soon after Trump became president, he withdrew the US from TPP, preventing it from taking force.“Obama wasn’t great shakes on trade either,” Bonior said. “A lot of working people said they had enough. They decided we’re not going to be with the Democrats any more, and Trump came along and filled the void. That was very smart for Trump to do.”In a 2016 campaign appearance in Pittsburgh, Trump made a major speech on trade that denounced Nafta and cited several Economic Policy Institute studies that criticized the trade pact. Lawrence Mishel, who was the institute’s president at the time, said: “Trump never really explained what he would do about Nafta or trade. He ended his speech with a call for deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, which was far more pro-Chamber of Commerce than pro-worker.”While Joe Biden voted to ratify Nafta when he was a senator, labor leaders say the president’s current pro-worker stance on trade shows that he recognizes his Nafta vote was a mistake. For Bonior, it might be too little too late.“Biden has been very good on working-class issues. Biden is trying to make up for his vote on Nafta,” Bonior said. “But a lot of working-class people are turned off so much to the Democrats that they’re not hearing of the things Biden and Harris have done for them. They’re not listening. They’re gone. I don’t know if we’ll ever get them back.“They’re to some degree mesmerized by Trump even though Trump has never been for working people,” Bonior continued. “Those plants he said he would restore – he never did any of that.”Many union leaders slam Trump for a speech he gave in Youngstown in which he told thousands of workers that he would bring back all the factory jobs that Ohio had lost. “They’re all coming back,” he said. They didn’t. And when General Motors closed its huge assembly plant in nearby Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, Trump did little to stop the plant closing or bring back the lost jobs.“He said all those jobs would be coming back, and then he did nothing,” said Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW). “The auto industry abandoned Lordstown, and Trump did nothing.”When Trump was running for president in 2016, he vowed to renegotiate Nafta, and he followed through, reaching a new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2018. Labor leaders had attacked Nafta not only for encouraging companies to move factory jobs to Mexico and but also for failing to effectively protect Mexican workers whose employers had violated their right to unionize or other rights.Union leaders agree that USMCA created a stronger mechanism to crack down on labor violations by Mexican companies, although the Trump administration negotiated that improved enforcement mechanism only after the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and House Democrats demanded that Trump go further in the negotiations. But under USMCA, often called “Nafta 2.0”, US companies have continued moving manufacturing operations to Mexico.Even though USMCA made only minor changes to Nafta, Trump called it, “the best trade deal ever made”. For her part, Harris was one of 10 senators to vote against USMCA, saying it didn’t improve Nafta sufficiently.Faux said many workers applaud Trump on trade because “he did something” about it by renegotiating Nafta, while “the Democrats did nothing”.Labor leaders have differing views of USMCA. David McCall, president of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers, said: “I think Nafta 2.0 was helpful. It’s gotten some better labor protections.”But the UAW’s Fain was merciless in attacking USMCA. “I like to call it Trump’s Nafta,” Fain said. “Trump’s Nafta only made problems worse. Trump’s Nafta only gave the billionaires more profits. Trump’s Nafta only killed more American jobs. Trump’s Nafta only shipped more work to Mexico.”Both Harris and Trump say they will renegotiate USMCA if elected. Trump also says he will protect factory jobs by imposing a 20% tariff on all imports, but the Steelworkers’ McCall says that’s a terrible idea. “I don’t think the solution to the problem is to have tariffs for the sake of having tariffs,” McCall said. “That’s protection. I think trade is a good thing. It’s an economic stimulator.” He said the US should use tariffs not in a blunderbuss way, but to “punish cheaters or countries that dump their various products”.McCall said the Biden-Harris administration had had a far better strategy for protecting factory jobs. “It’s the first time in generations that we’ve had an industrial policy in this country,” he said, praising three important laws passed under Biden: the infrastructure law, the green energy law and the Chips Act to encourage semiconductor production. McCall said those laws, along with Biden’s targeted tariffs “against countries that cheat”, give the US “an opportunity to be the most productive producers of many products”.While many blue-collar workers like Trump’s views on trade, McCall said: “He’s not a friend of unions or labor. For Trump it’s all about him, not about the person that’s working on the job: the steelworker, the electrical worker, the teamster or the UAW member.” More

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      Progressives must walk a fine line: end the war in Gaza and elect Harris | Judith Levine

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      The war in Gaza is not high among most voters’ concerns. But for many Arab Americans and protesters of the war, it is. As election day nears and the margins tighten – and with the critical swing state of Michigan, home to the largest Arab American community in the nation, up for grabs – these people are among the small, scattered constituencies that could determine the results. This makes their political strategies crucial to the US’s – and, by extension, Palestine’s – future.Some activists working to end the genocide are putting that urgent cause ahead of the other urgent cause: electing a Democrat, if only to prevent a Trump presidency. “If I’m going to be a one-issue voter and that issue is genocide, I’m okay with that,” a Dearborn, Michigan, woman told NPR’s Code Switch.For these people, Harris’s repeated assertions that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” – spoken in the passive voice and always accompanied by even louder assertions of commitment to Israel’s “self-defense” – no longer cut it. A progressive activist who is stumping for Trump in Michigan said there’s nothing the Democrat can do to change her mind. The administration’s collaboration in genocide is unforgivable; she wants the party punished. Her eyes are on the 2028 election, she said – apparently sanguine that there will be an election after the ascension of King Donald the First.In Mondoweiss this month, journalist and activist Saleema Gul interviewed a dozen members of the Uncommitted movement in a post-mortem of its campaign and failure to secure a speaking slot at the DNC this summer. The movement persuaded three-quarters of a million Democratic primary voters to write in “uncommitted” or leave their ballots blank to signal that their support for Biden, now Harris, depends on a pledge to end unconditional military support to Israel.Some of the people interviewed in the piece felt that the movement should have tried to influence the party platform in the primary process and quit there. Others believed that pushing for a speaker at the DNC distracted from organizing anti-war delegates inside the convention. After much debate, the leadership decided to endorse no one. Instead, it is urging supporters to “register anti-Trump votes” and not vote for a third-party presidential candidate. That move, wrote Gul, “has led many to believe the Uncommitted movement has prioritized shielding the Democratic Party over forcefully pushing for an end to the Gaza genocide”.The debate within the uncommitted movement encapsulates the perennial tensions in all political organizing: radical change v incremental reform; grassroots activism v establishment engagement; insider work v outsider disruption; movement-building v election-cycle campaigns. But to put “versus” between any of the above is to misunderstand political strategy: that is, to presume that organizing is either/or.In fact, you can do more than one thing at a time: organize for an arms embargo; get Harris elected; move the Democrats leftward; and build a radical pro-liberation movement.That these tactics don’t always overlap does not mean they contradict each other. Grassroots movements move politicians, not the other way around. But grassroots movements labor for decades far from the centers of influence before policy makers code their ideas and demands – watered down, of course – into bills and statutes. The more local the politician, the more open their ears are to those demands.For instance, in New York City’s safely Democratic congressional districts nine and 10, antiwar groups are asking voters to write in the name of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli tank, instead of voting for the pro-Israel Democrats or any of the other parties’ candidates. The activists want to remind the Dems that their antiwar constituents are watching, without jeopardizing the party’s chances of winning back the House of Representatives. But presidential candidates are as far from the ground as candidates get – and this year a no vote for the Democrat holds potentially catastrophic consequences.You could argue that electing a woman of color as president would be a radical step forward for the US. But Harris is no radical. In fact, presidential elections rarely lead to radical change. The big difference this time is that Trump’s election would.The anti-war movement should not cease to pressure the Harris campaign to win their votes. Her supporters should not cease persuading anti-war voters to vote for her. Right now, a door is opening for both to happen.Harris herself pushed the door ajar. In her interview with Fox News last week, she suggested for the first time that she might break with the Biden administration. “Let me be very clear,” she said. “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.” She pledged to bring “fresh new ideas” to the Oval Office.One idea – not so fresh, but good anyway – would be to call for the US simply to abide by its own law: the Leahy Law, enacted in 1997, requires the state department to vet military forces receiving US aid for violations of international human rights law. If there’s credible evidence of such violations, the aid must be withheld.Since 2000, former US senator Patrick Leahy has been pressing the state department to apply such scrutiny to Israel, which has remained practically exempt. In May, in the Washington Post, he reasserted the necessity of doing so now, citing violations in Gaza and the West Bank. A former associate general counsel at the Department of Defense told Al Jazeera that the president has no discretion in the matter. “It’s not up for negotiation. It is a binding domestic law on the executive branch,” she said.The confirmed killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah this week opens the door even wider. The US can declare that Israel has decapitated its enemy. Although the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never specified what would constitute victory, candidate Harris can credibly assert that Israel has achieved it. The US has fulfilled its responsibility to its ally. If Bibi wants to keep bombing Gaza, he’s on his own.Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the Uncommitted movement, has stressed many times that its goal is to end the genocide. He has also stressed the significance of this election, not just for the US but also for Palestine. Trump’s stated intention is to let Netanyahu obliterate Gaza, Alawieh has said. The candidate is already musing about potential luxury seaside resorts in Gaza – “better than Monaco”, he said – if, as his son-in-law has put it, Israel would “move the people out and then clean it up”.The movement to end the war must continue. It must succeed. And Trump must be defeated. Both can happen – must happen – at once.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More