#also this is a very good interview on climate policies so if you speak german please watch it

[dumbestthingiveeverheard]

Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 7/18/2023

Third Place: J.D. Vance

While talking on Fox News about the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Vance said the following:

The United States has the largest military budget in the world and is so overblown that at one point in 2016 CIA backed groups in Syria were fighting with Pentagon backed groups in the same country, but suddenly--as soon as it becomes time to defend a small democratic country against a large imperial force--we run out of money.

The same interview saw him saying this:

I don't even feel like I need to add commentary, Aaron Rupar did it for me.

Second place: Jesse Watters of Fox News

Speaking on The Five last night, Jesse said the following about the recent heatwaves all across the country:

The left rushing to blame global warming for that dangerous heatwave gripping the nation and the world right now.

Next you'll tell me they blame bullets when somebody dies of a bullet wound. In case any of you are curious, Jesse did not explain how this was unrelated to climate change--instead he and his buddies decided to just spend the next five minutes mocking some activists in Germany who glued their hands to airports to protest climate change. Maybe if the protesters stormed the German Parliament The Five would have had more respect for them.

Winner: Marjorie Taylor Greene

I'm just going to quote from  Kiel James Patrick's recent Press Conference:

Over the weekend, the Congresswoman, Majority Leader Taylor Greene, criticized Bidenomics as being in line with FDR's creation of Social Security, and Lyndon Johnson's creation of Medicare. She also bizarrely attacked Bidenomics because it's reducing poverty in rural areas. We agree with her all around, all around on this. We are opposed to rural poverty, and the President is committed to protect Medicare and committed to protect Social Security, as you heard from him over and over again over the past several months. Now, to be fair, we are aware of her misgivings about Medicare and Social Security because she's a member of the Republican Study Committee, which recently, again, proposed cutting those very benefits. But this is the first time that we are aware of being attacked for trying to reduce rural poverty, although we probably should have seen that coming since Majority Leader Taylor Greene or Marjorie Taylor Greene is also trying to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, policies that are responsible for high-paying manufacturing jobs coming back to her own district. Now, President Biden looks forward to visiting her district, as you've heard him say many times before, to highlight those good-paying jobs and the differences that they are making in the lives of real people on the ground.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, you've said the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

#jd vance #jesse watters #marjorie taylor greene

[notanotherinfjblog]

How to spot an INTP

A few years ago, I made a post about how the cognitive functions manifest in our behaviour and now I’m going to expand on that and give a more detailed, visually accompanied overview for each type, now for the INTP.

For the purpose of this guide, I took a look at this interview with Harald Lesch, a German astrophysicist, natural philosopher and science journalist. You can find the links to other type spotting guides below which I will update over time when new guides are being added.

The dominant and the auxiliary cognitive functions that people use are those that are the ones that are really noticeable in the quality of their gaze, in their speech style, in their facial expressions, and their whole general demeanour, and so these are the ones that I will be focussing on here. In case of an INTP, these are Ti and Ne. Due to this combination, INTPs spend a lot of time inside their own mind and that’s visible in their faces. If you compare the gaze of an INTP to that of an ISTP that shares their dominant Ti, the difference between them is blatantly staring you in the face because the INTP’s gaze completely lacks any intensity whatsoever that the ISTP (and any other person with Ni/Se) does possess. INTPs can look at something directly and yet it never seems like they are really taking in all the visual information. It’s like their mind is screaming so loudly that it’s drowning out any external information that might enter their brain.

When they laugh, they laugh for themselves, not to accommodate other people. Many times, INTPs laugh about what they are about to say, but when they are saying the funny thing afterwards, they usually do so calmly without laughter in their voice. INTPs are in general not designed to accommodate other people, they are not designed to go out of their way to be polite and friendly. They can absolutely be so, but that’s a conscious choice, not something that happens naturally as it does for the other types with higher Fe. If you watch the interview, you will find that Harald Lesch spends the entire almost 20 minutes just sitting there on his chair with his arms crossed for the entire time, with occasional disruptions of gesticulations with no regard to how that might come across. INTPs are not socially inept though and they usually do know what is appropriate in a situation and what isn’t, but first and foremost, they are existing for themselves, unrelated to those around them. They are their own entity. 

When it comes to talking, INTPs have two modes: 1) their gaze is directed at some point in the air, but their eyes are slightly shifting from left to right, from right to left, like the external gearwheels of their mind, and you can bet there will be a perpendicular line on their forehead between their eyes as they are frowning at their own thoughts, or 2) they are looking at their conversation partner directly, often with big eyes under raised eyebrows as to highlight the point they are making. And they will switch between these two modes constantly, though the first one appears to be the default. INTPs may lack the grand and open body language of other types and like to keep it minimalistic, so they mainly use their head for this purpose, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible: their head moves around a lot, may it be for emphasis, for (un)certainty on a matter, anything.

Regarding their speech style, INTPs share the same tendency that all intuitives are prone to, which is really long sentences. They squeeze in a lot of subordinate clauses all over the place, and when they finally finish a sentence while monologuing, the next sentence is following so quickly after with not a single millisecond wasted for irrelevant things like breathing, it seems like they are actually producing one single sentence that is going on and on and on forever. But I would like to highlight that what they are saying is (with a few exceptions of aborted subordinate clauses they first wanted to squeeze in) all grammatically correct. This becomes noteworthy when you compare them to the NJs who are many times incapable of that. A little excerpt from the interview on climate change and policies with Harald Lesch (translated from German) demonstrating these everlasting sentences:

“It must be done. It’s a bit like, you are told, the tooth back there, we actually should do something about it, and then you don’t go to the dentist and you still don’t go to the dentist and at some point it starts to hurt and then you may try some highly spiritual drinks such as a cognac, fiddle there, rinse it a bit back there and at some point in the end you need to go and then it needs to be pulled and currently I have the feeling, we’ve had the diagnosis for a long time concerning the wisdom tooth, but wisdom’s last resort, eventually, is climate protection and gradually, uh, the number of people who understand that keeps growing, but it could be that nature won’t play along, which means that our conception of time, how we deal with decisions - we are poring over and over and so on - these conceptions are wrong because we cannot bargain with nature and nature has its own time scales according to which it reacts and the more strongly we change nature, the more strongly and the faster these changes will fall back on us. [...] And at this point you just really need to say this, you need to, uh, that children go on the streets here on Fridays [Friday’s for future], uh, that is actually a scandal, namely that one that we are not joining them, that not all of us are on the streets.”

Occasionally, INTPs can fall into a speech style that the Ne-doms ENFP and ENTP are notorious for, which is almost stutter-like as they repeat either the same word or the beginning of a word several times over and over very quickly before moving on with the sentence. Something that INTPs also like to do is start talking about something, omit the main part and jump right to the conclusion, so that they get confused when nobody can follow because they know the middle part, they just forgot to say it out loud. 

Other How to spot type XY guides so far: INFJ, ENFJ, ESFJ, ISFP

#not gonna lie the main reason i chose this guy over all the other intp candidates is that he reminds me one hell of a lot of my dad #also this is a very good interview on climate policies so if you speak german please watch it #mbti #mbti typing #intp #how to spot #how to spot an intp #cognitive functions #ti #ne #high ti #high ne #introverted thinking #extroverted intuition #intp appearance #while writing down the speech paragraph i realised that that one mandatory book we had to read in german class must've been by an ntp #because that guy wrote a novel - a classic! - that consisted of like 10 sentences #i'm exaggerating but his sentences could span almost two pages and there were exactly three people in that class that didn't hate it #and that was me that entp girl and our infj teacher while the rest of the class was full of rage because of this writing style #man that was almost a decade ago i'm getting old and i'm sorry for the ramble that's what happens when you write a post at 4am #typing post #visual typing

[robotsforcake]

Yanked this off fark, it's not mine:

Author is on twitter as @suitedjustice

I’ve been working on a project to summarize Trump’s first 100 days, but there’s just so much of it that I’ll have to post it in 10-day blocks. I tried to be as crisp as possible here, as again, there’s a lot to work with. If I missed anything substantial, let me know. Also, if you like this, let me know and I’ll post days 11-20 when the time comes.

Day 1: Reads 16-minute inauguration speech he falsely claims to have written himself. In that speech, inadvertently quotes movie villain Bane from Batman. Announces the Alt-Right’s theme of America First as policy and philosophy. Cites American ‘carnage’, without going into detail as to what that might entail. Falsely claims it stopped raining when he began to speak. Passes over long-time inauguration parade announcer Charlie Brotman, replacing him with no one. Six journalists are arrested while covering the inauguration and charged with felony rioting. Trump signs emergency order increasing mortgage costs for first time home buyers.

Day 2: Climate change data on White House website scrubbed. Trump calls National Park Service Director Michael T. Reynolds and orders him to produce photos showing a more crowded inauguration. He lies to the press about the size of the crowds at his inauguration, then complains when the press calls him on that lie. Gives speech at CIA headquarters. Brings along a claque of staffers unrelated to the CIA to cheer and clap at his words. Later claims he received the “greatest standing ovation since Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl.” Protocol calls for government employees to remain standing until the president asks them to sit Outgoing CIA director, John Brennan, calls the CIA speech “a despicable display of self-aggrandizement.” Claims to hold the all-time record of Time magazine covers at “14 or 15.” He has been on 11 covers. Richard Nixon holds the actual record with 55 Time covers. Hillary Clinton has 22 covers.

Day 3: Spokesperson Conway announces Trump won’t be releasing his tax returns regardless of the state of his IRS Audit. She claims that the people don’t care about Trump’s taxes. Conway also introduces the concept of lies as “alternative facts.”

Day 4: Spanish language option on White House website scrubbed. Conway reverses herself and says that Trump will release his taxes once his IRS audit is complete. After lying about inauguration crowd sizes on Day 1, Press Secretary Spicer says “…our intention is never to lie to you.” Spicer claims hiring freeze will halt “dramatic increase” in government employment. Number of federal employees at the beginning of Obama’s terms, 2.77 million; towards the end, 2.66 million. Spicer declines to give the current unemployment rate when asked by a reporter. Trump bans aid to international health organizations, including the World Heath Organization, if they mention abortion. Claims he will cut all regulations on businesses by 75%, that the remaining 25% will be just as strong about protecting the people as before the cut. Claims to have “received many awards on the environment.” The only award that can be verified is a Trump golf course that received one in 2007. In 2011 the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection cited the same golf course for several environmental violations. At a meeting with lawmakers, Trump repeats the false claim that between 3 and 5 million illegal voters made him lose the popular vote. The initial evidence he cites is the anecdote of a 59-year-old golf pro and German citizen, Bernhard Langer, who Trump claims saw a lot of Latin faces in a polling line in Florida. Reporters reached the golf pro’s daughter on Langer’s cell phone. She said “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.” An attempt to sue Trump under the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause begins.

Day 5: Retroactively declares his inauguration day, January 20, 2017, the National Day of Patriotic Devotion. Revives the Keystone XL and Dakota Access crude oil pipelines. The Badlands National Park Twitter account goes rogue and begins to tweet global warming stats and other scientific facts. It is shut down. A few other National Park accounts begin to follow suit out of solidarity. White house imposes a freeze on grants and contracts from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, prohibits employees from speaking to the press or on social media. Slaps a similar gag order on US Department of Agriculture scientists. Press Secretary Spicer says Trump’s 306 electoral votes were the most won by a GOP president since Reagan. But after Reagan, George HW Bush won with 426 electoral votes. Spicer calls prospective Attorney General Sessions record on voting and civil rights “exemplary.” Says Sessions “has fought very hard for voting rights, civil rights and on areas of minority rights.” Sessions was considered to be too racist for a federal judgeship in the 1980’s. As a US Attorney, Sessions prosecuted 3 black activists for hand delivering, rather than mailing a small number of absentee ballots. Sessions also called a fellow US Attorney “Boy.” Spicer repeats Trump’s lie regarding 3-5 million illegal votes during the election, citing non-existent “studies and evidence.” A member of the House and a Senator introduce a bill that would prevent the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a congressional declaration of war. A short time after a Bill O'Reilly episode touching on Chicago gun violence airs on Fox, Trump threatens to send federal troops into Chicago. Chicago’s murder rate in 2016 failed to put it in the top 10 US cities.

Day 6: Expands media and social media gag orders to include US Departments of Commerce, the Interior, Transportation and Health and Human services. Trump issues Draft Order designed to reopen CIA.-run “black site” prisons. These secret overseas prisons detained and tortured terrorism suspects for years, before being shut down by President Obama. Trump claims that intelligence officials have told him that torture “absolutely” works. George Orwell’s classic book 1984 hits #6 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Trump tweets that he will be asking for a “major investigation into VOTER FRAUD.” When confronted on ABC with the fact that the Pew reporter he was citing regarding voter fraud said there was in fact no voter fraud, Trump claimed the Pew reporter was “groveling.” Claims that two people were shot in Chicago during Obama’s farewell speech. Police reported no shootings in Chicago on that day. In the same interview, says “We ended up winning by a massive amount, 306.” In terms of electoral votes, Trump’s win ranks 46th out of 58 elections. Says “They say I had the biggest crowd in the history of inaugural speeches.” Estimates for crowds at Trump’s speech are 80% below those of Barack Obama’s in 2009. Says “We have spent as of one month ago 6 trillion dollars in the Middle East.” From 2001 to 2014 the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan–the latter country is in South Asia–cost an estimated $1.6 trillion. Says “You had millions of people that now aren’t insured anymore.” Some 20 million people have gained health care coverage because of the Affordable Care Act. He signs directive to build border wall with Mexico, reiterates that Mexico will pay for it. The deepest channel of the Rio Grande river serves as the US-Mexico border for 1255 miles, longer than the distance from New York City to Orlando, FL. The river is known to change its course rather frequently. Signs another directive increasing detention centers and Border Patrol staff. Signs another directive that threatens to cut off federal funds to cities that don’t actively and vigorously pursue illegal aliens. Another order cuts U.S. funding to the International Criminal Court by 40 percent. The U.S. currently gives zero funding to the International Criminal Court. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club doubles membership fees. His hotel business reveals plans for a major US expansion.

Day 7 14 minutes after Fox News calls Chelsea Manning an ungrateful traitor who called Obama a weak leader, Trump tweets that Chelsea Manning is an ungrateful traitor who called Obama a weak leader. Entire US State Department senior management team resigns. All were career foreign service officers who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Infowars, who reported that the murdered Sandy Hook 1st graders were paid actors hired by the anti-gun lobby, and that the Air Force is purposefully creating deadly tornadoes in the Midwest, is granted White House Press credentials. Trump tweets that Mexico should cancel the upcoming summit with the US if they don’t want to pay for the wall. Enrique Pena Nieto, president of Mexico, our close ally, cancels his planned trip to Washington. Trump proposes a 20% tax on goods coming from Mexico. Sellers will increase their prices by 20%, which will be paid for by the US consumer. In Philadelphia Trump says that “the murder rate has been steadily – I mean, just terribly increasing.” Data provided by the Philadelphia Police Department shows a record downturn in violent crimes, with fewer occurring in 2016 than in every other year since 1979. Trump orders his new administration to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants. The idea is not new. The German newspaper Der Stürmer had a feature known as the “Letter Box”, which encouraged the reporting of Jewish illegal acts in the 1930’s and 40’s. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” -Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s closest adviser. In an interview with Sean Hannity, Trump says that he doesn’t consider waterboarding to be torture. In April of 2009, Hannity agreed to be waterboarded for charity, but has yet to follow through on the offer. Trump draft proposal will ban immigration and to the US from Muslim majority countries Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia. Muslim majority countries Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan and the U.A.E. will not be on the banned list. These five countries are where Trump has business interests.

Day 8 Trump signs ban on Muslims from the 7 countries from traveling into the US. Announces that persecuted Christians will be given priority over Muslim refugees. A screenshot is revived of Mike Pence’s deleted December 2015 tweet stating “Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.” Dick Cheney says Muslim ban “goes against everything we stand for and believe in.” By a margin of 42% to 39%, Trump voters believe that it would be okay for him to use his private email server for official business. George Orwell’s 1984 hits #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Trump tweets that he has another source for his oft-debunked claim of millions of illegal votes - Gregg Phillips, who has made claims that the Department of Homeland Security hacked the 2016 US election at Obama’s request, and that Israel was the culprit for the DNC hacks. Three paragraph White House statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day makes no mention of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. White Supremacist publication the Daily Stormer praises Trump on this statement for daring to reject “Jewish science fiction” about the Holocaust.

Day 9 Donald Trump calls Vladimir Putin from the White House. Steve Bannon, former publisher of radical right wing website Breitbart, is granted a regular seat at National Security Council meetings. Sample Breitbart headlines include Data: Young Muslims in the West Are a Ticking Time Bomb, and Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy. In 2013, Bannon told a writer for the Daily Beast, “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down.” The Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will no longer have regular seats on the NSC. Some legal permanent US residents are being stopped from reentering as they return from visits or studies abroad. The Muslim ban will also keep Oscar-nominated director Asghar Farhadi from attending the Oscars. Referencing an article on how the ban will include green card residents, former KKK Grand Wizard and current racist icon David Duke tweets, “Greatest. Year. Ever.” Protesters flood JFK International Terminal in New York, demanding that detainees there be allowed to go free. More protesters assemble at airports in Denver, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle, LA, and Washington DC. Dozens of lawyers show up at various airports to work pro bono to free detainees there. New York judge issues a temporary injunction halting deportations nationwide from Trump’s ban. Similar rulings follow in Virginia, Massachusetts and Washington State.

Day 10 The US Department of Homeland Security says it will comply with judicial orders not to deport detained travelers affected by Trump’s ban. The DHS reverses itself and announces it will defy the court orders, potentially provoking a constitutional crisis. According to White House sources, Top Trump policy director Stephen Miller tells government employees that the public is behind Trump’s ban, and to ignore the hysterical voices on TV. While at Duke, Stephen Miller worked closely with White Nationalist Richard Spencer–the man who was recently punched in the face on air while explaining the Alt-Right, provoking debate amongst the Left as to whether or not it’s okay to punch a Nazi. As chaos and protests continue at airports in the US and around the world, Trump tells reporters “It’s not a Muslim ban. We were totally prepared. It’s working out very nicely. You see it at the airports, you see it all over. It’s working out very nicely.” Trump issues a statement saying, “To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting,” Earlier in the day, Rudy Giuliani, adviser to Trump, told a reporter, “I’ll tell you the whole history of it. When he first announced it, he said 'Muslim ban.’ He called me up, he said 'put a commission together, show me the right way to do it, legally.’ ” A petition calling for Trump to be prevented from making a state visit to the United Kingdom picks up over 600,000 signatures, Once a petition passes the 500,000 threshold, the matter must then be debated in the UK Parliament.

[hellofastestnewsfan]

Two-plus years into the Trump presidency, NATO is learning to live with the United States president, and vice versa. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has been praised for his deft touch with President Donald Trump—for making him feel that his concerns are heard while still defending NATO’s value. For his part, Trump has long been skeptical of military alliances, contending that well-heeled nations shouldn’t rely on the U.S. defense umbrella without picking up more of the cost.

“In an ideal world, we would not need to spend any more on defense,” Stoltenberg told a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, displaying his dexterousness. “But we do not live in an ideal world. Freedom has enemies, and they need to be deterred.”

The Norwegian had come at the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to address a legislative body that has expressed overwhelming support for NATO —even as President Trump has criticized its members over defense spending and shaken long-held assumptions about America’s commitment to the alliance. Stoltenberg, having praised the alliance for safeguarding peace in Europe, and having thanked America in particular for its contributions to the cause, echoed the president’s message: “NATO allies must spend more on defense. This has been the clear message from President Trump, and this message is having a real impact.”

[Read: The West takes NATO for granted. One country still wants in.]

Meanwhile, the alliance faces an expansionist Russia determined to divide it. The more points of tension develop, the more opportunities Russia could have to exploit them.

Stoltenberg, twice Norway’s prime minister and the head of NATO since 2014, ticked off a list of those disagreements in his speech: over trade, energy, the Iran deal, and climate change. He could have added Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw most U.S. troops from Syria; European energy purchases from Russia; creeping authoritarianism in NATO members such as Hungary and Turkey; or Turkish weapons purchases from Russia. Still, Stoltenberg noted that disputes have erupted among NATO members in the past—the French withdrawal from military cooperation in 1966, the divisive Iraq War debates in 2003. And still the alliance is poised to celebrate its 70th year on Thursday. “Open discussions and different views is not a sign of weakness,” he said. “It is a sign of strength.”

Previous presidents have raised the spending issue, though Trump has stood out for the harshness of his rhetoric, including a reported threat at a NATO conference in Brussels last summer to “go it alone” if the allies didn’t pay up. But there’s been a difference between his rhetoric and his administration’s policy. In practice, Trump’s administration has been hard on Russia and supportive of Europe, notwithstanding his stated desire to get along with Russia and his belittling of some European leaders.

[Richard Fontaine: Trump gets NATO backwards]

“There’s this argument within the policy community about policies versus words,” says Rachel Rizzo, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security who works in its transatlantic-security program. “Trump uses harsh words all the time. It’s something that we’ve gotten used to.” At the same time, she noted that the administration has increased spending on the European Deterrence Initiative, which is aimed at preventing regional aggression. Under Trump, the U.S. has put more troops into the Baltics and eastern Europe. “Our commitment to NATO is strong,” Rizzo says.

The disconnect between words and actions does, however, fuel anxiety over the U.S. commitment to NATO, especially after Trump sparked deep concern in Washington, D.C., and Brussels by initially declining to publicly endorse NATO’s Article 5 commitment to collective defense (he did so halfway through his first year in office). At times Trump has seemed at odds with the pro-alliance wing of his own government. In the summer of 2017, Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Montenegro, a NATO ally, where he reassured Balkan leaders that the U.S. would be a bulwark against Russian aggression. A year later, Trump said in an interview with Fox News that Montenegro is home to “very aggressive people” whose actions could touch off “World War III.”

Another source of tension has been Trump’s decision to withdraw most U.S. troops from Syria, which took European officials by surprise. This was followed up with a Trump-administration demand that the Europeans stay to deal with the aftermath. One European official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the issue, told The Atlantic that when Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan made this expectation clear at a conference in Munich in February, the Europeans pushed back, saying: We’re in together, and we’re out together. Trump ultimately opted to leave some 400 U.S. troops in the theater.

Trump has been particularly focused on the idea that the U.S. bears an unfair share of the burden to protect Europe—an argument that resonated with his core voters in the 2016 presidential campaign and is part of his broader complaint that the U.S. had been exploited in trade pacts and in a host of dealings with other nations. Europeans have actually been stepping up defense spending since the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2015, although Trump has taken credit for some of the increases, with Stoltenberg’s encouragement. Still, Trump has continued to insist that the allies meet a defense-spending target they all said they’d aim for back in 2014—when each country committed to move toward spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, without specifying a timeline.

Germany has recently been a flash point in this debate, and its struggle shows why defense-spending increases are difficult even for a wealthy country. Vice President Pence met privately with German officials in Munich in February and pressed them to boost their country’s financial contribution to NATO. Trump-administration officials believe that Germany is wealthy enough to comply with the 2 percent goal.

When Pence made his case, his German counterparts balked, citing their own domestic politics, according to a White House official familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. And they made clear that it could be years before they were able to raise military-spending levels.

The German position was very much, “Thank you for what you’re doing. We need you to do more because our own domestic politics makes it impossible for us to get there,” the White House official said.

In an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday with Stoltenberg, the president returned to the same sore point: Germany. The country, he told reporters, is “not paying what they should be paying.”

Appearing at a NATO summit meeting in Brussels last year, Trump upbraided Germany for its natural-gas-pipeline deal with Russia. He tweeted: “What good is NATO if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy. Why are there only 5 out of 29 countries that have met their commitment? The U.S. is paying for Europe’s protection, then loses billions on Trade.”

One Western diplomat, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, told The Atlantic that Trump should avoid the appearance of bullying Germany on military spending. Such aggressive messages can boomerang. The diplomat said that “it can actually be harder for Germany to spend more if it looks as though they are bowing to U.S. pressure.”

Apart from that, Trump’s tight focus on the 2 percent goal minimizes other contributions that aren’t measured in financial terms.

“As an example,” the diplomat said, “Greece has met the 2 percent threshold; Denmark has not. However, Denmark has sacrificed a significant amount and has been an invaluable member of the alliance.”

Strains were evident during Vice President Pence’s afternoon speech at an international conference marking the 70-year anniversary. Echoing the president, Pence again took aim at Germany and cautioned that NATO is not a “unilateral security guarantee.”

He received polite applause throughout the 25-minute address from the European and NATO diplomats in attendance. But when Pence sought to celebrate Trump—crediting the president with “resolute leadership” that had strengthened NATO—no one clapped.

Yara Bayoumy contributed reporting.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2VfXl6B

#Blogger

[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: The Trump-Macron Friendship Is Falling Apart at the G-7. That Spells Trouble for the French President

The world’s most powerful friendship might finally be on the rocks.

Enraged by President Donald Trump’s decision not to exempt America’s close allies in the E.U., Canada and Japan from his steel and aluminum tariffs, French President Emmanuel Macron has broken his year-long warm embrace of his U.S. counterpart—and threatened to isolate the world’s biggest economy by forming a united bloc against Trump with other allies.

In a Trump-like tweet-storm overnight on Thursday, Macron lashed out at Trump from Quebec, where the world’s seven more powerful leaders are meeting at the G-7 summit. “Maybe the U.S. President doesn’t mind being isolated, but we also don’t mind signing a six-country agreement if need be,” Macron tweeted in a rare and sharp warning to Trump.

Read more: U.S. Allies are ready to turn their backs on Trump at the G-7 summit

Those words could spell the downfall of one of the most curious political odd couples in recent times—a friendship in which Trump has called Macron “fantastic,” and Macron has addressed Trump as “dear Donald.”

In many ways, Macron and Trump were polar opposites in style and policy, pitting a young global-minded intellectual against an aging nationalist.

Even so, ever since Macron shot to power in May last year as France’s youthful, come-from-nowhere president, he made it clear that he intended to be Donald Trump’s friend—a decision he said was based on a centuries-old alliance between the U.S. and France. The two exchanged mobile numbers shortly after Macron’s election, and have spoken frequently since.

Macron’s warmth has been a marked contrast to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has barely concealed her distaste for Trump’s views, and to British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose relationship with Trump has been strained.

That quickly made Macron—a first-time elected politician—the preeminent global figure among the E.U.’s 28 leaders. “I’m not here to judge or say I’m the opponent to anybody,” Macron told TIME in an interview last November at the Elysée Palace. “I do believe we have a very good personal relationship.”

Read more: French President Emmanuel Macron won a shocking victory. But he’s just getting started

In turn, Trump was receptive to Macron’s advances. In July last year, he gushed in Paris after Macron hosted him at the Bastille Day military parade and at a fine dinner with their wives atop the Eiffel Tower. In late April Trump hosted Macron at the first White House state dinner of his presidency.

“There was a kind of reciprocal fascination between the two men because they had both won in the most unexpected manner,” Dominique Moisi, senior advisor to the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, or IFRI, tells TIME. “Macron was very sure of himself, and his charm, believing that if he could seduce his teacher at 16 [Brigitte Macron, now the French president’s wife] and seduce France at less than 40, he could do the same with Trump.”

But as the relationship takes a bumpy turn, Macron potentially has much to lose. Some see his assuredness that he could persuade Trump to reverse course as a miscalculation—leaving Macron open to criticism that he has been far too acquiescent until now to Trump, who is deeply disliked in Europe.

“You wonder why Macron went to all that effort, dining with the Trumps at the Eiffel Tower, the whole masquerade in Washington, all that hugging and holding hands,” says Laurence Nardon, head of IFRI’s program on U.S. relations. “It looks ridiculous.”

One moment during Macron’s Washington visit in late April hinted at the trouble to come. In what seemed to be a power play, Trump, in full view of cameras, appeared to flick dandruff off the French leader’s jacket, telling him he was trying to “make him perfect.” “It was a cringing moment,” Nardon says.

In fact, Macron’s anger over Trump’s tariffs marks just the latest rift between the two leaders.

The relationship officially turned sour in early May, when Trump announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal, which was signed in 2015 with the E.U., U.N. and Iran. Trump gave no forewarning of his decision to Macron, despite their Oval Office meeting in late April, during which the French leader pleaded with Trump to stick to the Iran deal.

The schisms began well before then, however, dating to Trump’s decision in June 2017 to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, which was signed in 2015 in the French capital; the U.S. is now the only country in the world not to commit itself to the deal, which aims to drastically reduce carbon emissions in order to rein in global warming. Macron slammed the decision, telling Trump in a speech that “there is no Plan B.”

And on Tuesday, Macron told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem increased violence. “If this leads to people dying it is not a celebration,” he said.

“There has been an accumulation of differences,” one senior aide at the French Foreign Ministry, speaking anonyously, told TIME last month after Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.

Moisi calls the current chill between Washington and Europe “the worst trans-Atlantic crisis ever,” leaving Europeans wondering who they can turn to if a far deeper crisis—say, a war—occurs. “If American is no longer the life insurance of Europe, well, where are we going to turn?” he says. “I have no idea.”

For that very reason, Macron has thought it essential to maintain a warm relationship with Trump. Now, that seems too difficult to pull off.

Where this will leave Macron—Europe’s most globally ambitious leader—is not yet clear. A canny, highly calculating politician, Macron may have chosen his tough words for Trump with careful deliberation, attempting a new strategy to win him over.

Nardon says that having read Trump’s book The Art of the Deal, she believes Trump might be persuaded to make concessions if the rest of the G-7 leaders stick together and refuse to compromise. That could be in Macron’s mind too, she says.

“Macron tried to be friends, and it didn’t work,” she says. “Both positions are tactics. Now, Macron thinks, ‘I’m going to try the tough guy method, and see if it works better.'”

It just might, she says. “If you read Trump’s book you see if someone won’t give concessions, he will run after them.”

June 08, 2018 at 11:07PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

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