As they prepared to present themselves at the San Ysidro Port of Entry today, a group of asylum seekers from Central America gathered at the border fence in Playas de Tijuana early Sunday cheered on by supporters on both sides of the border.
The boisterous gathering grew to hundreds, with some...
When Sunday began, the Angels and New York Yankees were the top two teams in the American League wild-card race.
With only 135 games and five months to go.
Given this big-picture context, the Angels decided Shohei Ohtani will not make his next scheduled start, Tuesday against Baltimore, because...
The closer is no longer inevitable. The ace walked the park in his last start. The lineup lacks continuity and consistency. The bullpen behaves like butane.
And on Sunday, in a 4-2 loss to the San Francisco Giants, the reigning National League rookie of the year was benched for what his manager...
A couple of new classes of country music performer emerged at the 2018 edition of the Stagecoach Country Music Festival over the weekend — one obvious, one less so.
After making strides for the last three years with female headliners Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert, it was back...
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un promised at a meeting with his South Korean counterpart last week to give up his nuclear arms in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to attack his country, a spokesman for the South Korean president said Sunday.
Top aides to President Trump signaled skepticism, but insisted...
Barcelona is celebrating yet another Spanish league title to cap a nearly perfect season.
Unbeaten Barcelona added to its domestic dominance by winning La Liga for the third time in the last four seasons on Sunday, remaining unbeaten after 34 rounds. Lionel Messi scored a hat trick and Philippe...
T-Mobile and Sprint, the nation's third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers, announced a roughly $26.8-billion merger Sunday that could dramatically reshape the U.S. telecom industry and test consumers’ and regulators’ appetites for further corporate consolidation.
The deal is the latest attempt...
In the tense moments before a jury convicted Bill Cosby of sexual assault, the prosecutor who had branded him a "con man" and called him out for laughing during closing arguments started to worry about the global implications if the #MeToo era's first big trial went the other way.
Andrea Constand's...
A caravan of asylum seekers from Central America made it to the California border Sunday. Here’s a look at what’s ahead for them:
What do we know about this caravan?At its largest, the caravan reportedly numbered about 1,200 people, mostly from Central American countries such as Honduras, where...
Nate Schmidt wondered what he was getting thrown into when the Vegas Golden Knights selected him off the Washington Capitals’ roster in the NHL expansion draft last June. He knew one other player, forward Erik Haula, a former teammate at the University of Minnesota, and knew goaltender Marc-Andre...
LeBron James scored 45 points and got some needed help in Game 7 to stay unbeaten in the opening round of the NBA playoffs, leading the Cleveland Cavaliers to a 105-101 win over the Indiana Pacers, who pushed the game's best player to the limit.
James improved to 13-0 in the first round and kept...
Joey Logano has ended a nearly yearlong losing streak with a victory at Talladega Superspeedway.
Logano's last victory was April 30 of last year at Richmond but his car failed inspection, the benefits from the victory were stripped and it cost him a shot in the playoffs.
On Sunday, he made sure...
The blow-up mattress takes up nearly half the guestroom in Blair Overstreet’s 1940s-era apartment in University Heights. The 36-year-old San Diego resident and her husband, Matt Dunn, still needed to empty out a chest of drawers. A wooden desk crammed against the wall would likely need to go.
Still,...
Police are asking for the public's help in identifying and locating the gunman who fatally shot a 15-year-old girl as she waited with her mother outside a hamburger stand in South Los Angeles.
The girl was identified Sunday as Hannah Bell, said Officer Mike Lopez of the LAPD's Media Relations Section.
...
Israeli troops fatally shot two Palestinians who infiltrated the country from Gaza and in a separate incident killed another Palestinian who tried to breach the border Sunday night, the military said.
Another Palestinian was detained in the latter incident, and two more were caught trying to cross...
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“Is this ridiculous, what I’m trying to do?” says South Korean violinist Hyungjoon Won in the short documentary 9at38. Catherine Lee’s film, premiering on The Atlantic today, follows Won as he attempts to stage a peace concert at the 38th Parallel Demilitarized Zone to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Korea’s independence. “I’ve made an official pitch to the South and North Korean governments for a choir from the North and orchestra from the South to play Beethoven’s 9th,” explains Won in the film. “The lyrics mention a mysterious force that unites what’s divided, making us brothers.”
Won, a Julliard-trained musician, makes many personal sacrifices in pursuit of the concert. So, too, did Lee. Frequently during the two-year process of filming, the humanitarian aid worker-turned-documentarian questioned the potential impact of the musical performance. “When I would run out of funds or when I would be pulling consecutive all-nighters, I would ask myself, why am I making this movie at such cost?” Lee told The Atlantic. “After all, people have been telling [Won] for years that one song isn’t going to change anything.”
Ultimately, Lee concluded that music could indeed become an instrument of peace. “If a single young North Korean musician and a South Korean counterpart can look into each other’s eyes as they adjust pitch or dynamic, then a domino effect begins,” she said. “Interactions need not be grand to start a butterfly effect to shake the prejudices taught by school and society. Music is an especially meaningful interaction because it requires listening to each other, adjusting, and achieving that moment of perfect harmony.”
On the morning of Friday, April 27th, the day before 9at38’s final screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, Lee awoke to footage of Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae taking turns crossing the border at Panmunjom. The declaration that the two leaders signed agrees to eliminate military provocations, including the removal of all nuclear weapons from their peninsula. “But whether a permanent peace agreement will be signed, ending seven decades of temporary armistice and the final unresolved violent conflict of the Cold War, remains to be seen,” said Lee.
During her career as an aid worker across 18 countries, Lee came to see that positive human-to-human interaction could bridge chasms between groups of people in conflict. “Empathy—relatability, something only bred through familiarity—is the only effective counter to the ‘us versus them’ mentality,” she said. “It makes all the difference between war and peace. 9at38 is a symbol of possibilities, not just for Korea but all hostile parts of the globe.”
As anyone who reads the news knows, Donald Trump will decide by May 12 whether to “withdraw from” or “pull out of” or “abandon” or “scrap” or “jettison” (the synonyms keep coming) the nuclear deal with Iran. Why May 12? Because last October, Trump declared that Iran isn’t complying with the agreement. Under a law passed by Congress, that “decertification” means Trump can reimpose the sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear activities that were waived as part of the deal. Trump hasn’t reimposed those sanctions yet. But he’s demanded that Iran make vast new concessions. And he’s threatened that if Iran does not do so by May 12, “American nuclear sanctions would automatically resume.”
There’s an irony here. For all of the drama surrounding Trump’s decision to decertify Iranian compliance with the deal, there’s little doubt that Iran is complying. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said so nine times. America’s European allies have said so. So has Trump’s own Defense Secretary, James Mattis. This very month, Trump’s State Department issued a report declaring that, “Iran continued to fulfill its nuclear-related commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” the technical name for the nuclear deal. (The deal’s opponents often cite the two times Iran narrowly exceeded the agreement’s 130 metric ton cap on heavy water, which is used in nuclear reactors: In both cases Iran shipped the excess out of the country, and it remains in compliance with the deal.)
The more interesting question isn’t whether Iran has been complying with the nuclear deal. It’s whether America has. American journalists often describe the agreement as a trade. In the words of one CNN report, it “obliges Iran to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the suspension of economic sanctions.” But there’s more to it than that. The deal doesn’t only require the United States to lift nuclear sanctions. It requires the United States not to inhibit Iran’s reintegration into the global economy. Section 26 commits the U.S. (and its allies) “to prevent interference with the realisation of the full benefit by Iran of the sanctions lifting specified” in the deal. Section 29 commits the U.S. and Europe to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran.” Section 33 commits them to “agree on steps to ensure Iran’s access in areas of trade, technology, finance and energy.”
The Trump administration has likely been violating these clauses. The Washington Post reported that at a NATO summit last May, “Trump tried to persuade European partners to stop making trade and business deals with Iran.” Then, in July, Trump’s director of legislative affairs boasted that at a G20 summit in Germany, Trump had “underscored the need for nations … to stop doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran.” Both of these lobbying efforts appear to violate America’s pledge to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran.”
The Trump administration may have committed other violations as well. Section 22 of the deal specifically obliges the United States, subject to some restrictions, to “allow for the sale of commercial passenger aircraft and related parts and services to Iran.” To do business with Iran, any U.S. company—or even any foreign company that gets more than 10 percent of its components from U.S. companies—must get a permit from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). OFAC must certify, for instance, that the transaction isn’t with an Iranian company designated under other U.S. sanctions programs such as those targeting terrorism. And under the Obama administration, OFAC began issuing these permits, albeit slowly. In November 2016, for instance, OFAC allowed the sale of 106 planes by Airbus to Iran Air.
But since Trump took over, notes Al-Monitor, “requests concerning permits to export planes to Iran have been piling up … OFAC has not responded to aircraft sales licensing requests since the first of such licenses were issued during the Barack Obama administration.” Erich Ferrari, a lawyer in Washington who works on sanctions issues, told me there’s “definitely been a shift. Certain transactions that we’ve seen licensed in the past under the Obama administration, are now being denied.”
The Trump administration still issues licenses for routine personal divestment transactions: for instance, people who want to sell off their property or close their bank accounts in Iran. But as far as Ferrari can tell, the Trump administration has issued few, if any, licenses for commercial transactions. That’s hard to verify: There is no public database of OFAC licenses, and the Treasury Department didn’t respond to my request for comment. But in recent months, two close observers of the Iran deal have echoed Ferrari’s observation. As the pro-nuclear deal National Iranian American Council’s Reza Marashi reported earlier this year, “To hear senior Western diplomats tell it, the Trump administration has not approved a single Iran-related OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) license since taking office.” If true, this too likely violates the Iran deal.
We’ve seen a version of this movie before. In 1994, the Clinton administration signed a nuclear deal with North Korea. Pyongyang promised to freeze its nuclear program. In return, the U.S. promised to provide “heavy fuel oil” to compensate for the electricity North Korea would lose by shutting down its plutonium reactor; to help build an entirely new, “light water” reactor; and to move toward normalizing relations. But that November, Republicans—many of whom were skeptical of the deal—took control of the House and Senate. And in the following years Congress hindered both America’s promised delivery of fuel oil and its promised help in building a light-water reactor. The North Koreans warned that if the U.S. didn’t abide by the deal, they wouldn’t either.
And they didn’t. While North Korea mostly met its promises not to build a bomb using plutonium, it secretly operated an alternative nuclear program based on enriched uranium.
Whether North Korea cheated in response to U.S. cheating, or intended to cheat all along, is a subject of debate. Either way, the Bush administration in 2002 confronted Pyongyang about its uranium-enrichment program. North Korean officials conceded its existence, while falsely claiming the deal covered only the plutonium route to a bomb. And they proposed a new, more comprehensive agreement, which would also cover uranium enrichment and require the U.S. to recognize North Korea, stop threatening it militarily, and lift sanctions. But the hawks in the Bush administration, who had opposed the 1994 deal from the beginning, refused to negotiate seriously. As John Bolton explained, the uranium-enrichment program “was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.”
Now Bolton is back, and looking for another hammer. If Trump stops him from wielding it, and the U.S. doesn’t reimpose nuclear sanctions on Iran, many in the media will celebrate America’s decision to continue complying with the nuclear deal. But that will be wrong. The Trump administration has never fully complied with the nuclear deal, and likely never will. The real question isn’t whether Trump violates it, but how.
The truth is that, at least in the post-Cold War era, the United States hasn’t always been very good about keeping the promises it makes in nuclear deals. It’s important Americans know that. It might be nice to think that the U.S., as a democracy, is more trustworthy than its authoritarian adversaries. But America’s government won’t hold itself to a higher standard unless its people do.
President Donald Trump evidently doesn’t need the State Department to conduct foreign policy. When Mike Pompeo went to North Korea over Easter, no one from the State Department accompanied him. Pompeo, still the CIA director at the time, hadn’t been confirmed by the Senate as secretary of state, and his trip had to be quietly declared “not diplomacy.” Meanwhile, Trump has no ambassador in South Korea, no permanent assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and nothing resembling the unit of diplomats that shepherded negotiations with North Korea under past presidents. And yet the possibility making of some kind of deal with North Korea is real, even without the close involvement of America’s professional diplomatic corps.
This, according to the journalist Ronan Farrow, is diplomacy by moonshot. “Whether we get played or this is used to leverage our way into lasting gains in the North Korea crisis is highly dependent on whether we assemble a corps of experts and diplomats to guide this kind of intervention,” Farrow told me in an interview prior to Friday’s high-profile North Korea summit. He’s in a position to know. Better known for his Pulitzer-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds, Farrow spent the early part of his career as one of those professional diplomats the Trump administration has sidelined. For a new book, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, Farrow spoke to every living former secretary of state and a host of other civil servants, policy experts, and at least one prominent U.S.-backed warlord. The resulting picture of American foreign policy is both grimmer and in some ways more hopeful than any other recent portrait of the State Department: grimmer because the decline in American diplomacy long predates the Trump administration, and hopeful because it reveals how past presidents have acted to arrest that decline.
At the heart of the problem with diplomacy is an unbalanced relationship among the key agents of American power: the military, the intelligence agencies, and the civilian diplomats of the State Department. “There's a reason we structure our government in terms of checks and balances and different agencies with different interests and areas of expertise,” Farrow told me. “When those agencies work in concert it creates an effective policy process. Right now, when you have everything run through the military and intelligence communities, you really do lose something.” Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang is Exhibit A for this problem. Time and again, foreign policy led by military and intelligence officials has led the U.S. into tactical deals with unsavory foreign governments or other local actors that have later undermined American interests. “When you don't have a counterbalancing force, civilians voices saying, here's how this fits into a 10 or 20 year development strategy, you really do lose something,” said Farrow.
The war in Afghanistan is the clearest example of foreign policy without sufficient diplomacy. In the initial invasion, the U.S. chose to rely on local partners—many of them warlords—to carry out the bulk of the fighting. One was Abdul Rashid Dostum, the current vice president of Afghanistan, who admitted to Farrow that his forces were responsible for massacring prisoners in the aftermath of the U.S. intervention. Dostum committed war crimes even as his military contribution was invaluable to achieving U.S. objectives the early phase of the war. But nearly two decades later, Dostum is still sowing chaos—he has even hinted he might turn his militia fighters against his own government. (He now prefers the term “peacelord,” he told Farrow.) In that saga, Farrow saw a failure to involve civilians in setting the broad course of American strategy. “The problem is that when you don't have diplomats introducing some kind of strategy into the way that unfolds in the long-term, not just in those weeks [after the invasion], but in the months and years to follow, you end up with the downside of the Dostum relationships, which is a lack of accountability, and violent and erratic characters woven into the structure of the new government that we create in these places, and no way to rein in people we've empowered.”
The U.S. relationship with Pakistan is similarly problematic. Military and intelligence officials can strike deals with Pakistani leaders behind closed doors, but each side knows the other will say something else in public. That has allowed the U.S. to pursue tactical deals that come at the expense of American interests in a rights-respecting, stable Pakistani government. Former CIA director Michael Hayden was bracing in his conversations with Farrow about the tradeoffs he was willing to make with the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence service. “We already know that the ISI were apparently killing journalists. Alright? That may affect my overall view of ISI, but it doesn’t affect my working with ISI to try and capture an al-Qaeda operative in Wana or Mir Ali,” Hayden is quoted as telling Farrow. “Look, I mean, the director of the CIA is not going to cause the government of Pakistan to change course based upon a conversation he has in either Washington or Islamabad,” Hayden said in another exchange. That requires the balancing power of civilian authority, but in recent administrations, civilian foreign policy experts have rarely had the same access to the president as military and intelligence officials.
For a brief moment under President Barack Obama, a strong civilian voice came from Richard Holbrooke, a veteran American diplomat who had led the negotiations to end the war in Bosnia under President Bill Clinton. Under Obama, Holbrooke assembled a team of diplomats to address Afghanistan and Pakistan—a unit that Farrow joined. But that effort failed to find purchase before Holbrooke’s death in 2010. Farrow recounts that, despite Holbrooke’s efforts, Obama’s Afghanistan strategy was “pure mil-think,” according to Holbrooke’s audio diaries. Holbrooke and David Petraeus, the general Obama appointed to lead the war, were meant to be equals, but that was never true in practice. “And while I had great respect for the military, uh, and Petraeus was brilliant, I liked them as individuals and they were great Americans, they should not dictate political strategy, which is what’s happening now,” said Holbrooke in the diaries. He made his frustration with Petraeus plain to Farrow and the team: “His job should be to drop the bombs when I tell him to.”
Obama’s Iran strategy shows the other side of foreign policy. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told Farrow that in the latter half of the presidency, the administration moved away from its reliance on generals. “I think there was a slow, admittedly, but steady reprioritization of diplomacy,” Rhodes said. The Iran deal, according to Farrow, shows how diplomacy is meant to work. “If you have leadership that says, OK, diplomats, we've got your back, the White House will support you, we're not going to micromanage you, go to town, this is one of our top priorities, you can pretty rapidly mobilize results,” said Farrow. And those results have (so far) proved relatively difficult for the deals opponents to undo, particularly because U.S. allies like France signed onto Obama’s plan. (A key difference, however, is that, unlike Afghanistan, the U.S. is not in direct military conflict in Iran, potentially giving civilians a larger opportunity to control policy.)
Governments do poorly when they are run purely by the whim of their leaders. The diplomatic whiplash over the Iran deal is one example; the confusion created by the U.S. entrance into and exit from the Paris Climate Accords is another. Institutions staffed by apolitical professionals are meant to dampen these kinds of vibrations. Farrow raises the question of what happens if the State Department can no longer be a stabilizing institution for the United States. “There’s no way around the fact that all these secretaries of state described a generational problem,” he said. The ranks of experienced diplomats are being depleted, Farrow argues, as foreign service officers serve for shorter and shorter periods than their predecessors. More-junior officers are serving in positions previously reserved for those with more experience. And that was true before the Trump presidency, which has yet to make nominations for dozens of ambassador positions, according to the American Foreign Service Association. Trump has found the edifice of America diplomacy crumbling, and, instead of rebuilding it, has kicked away the scaffolding.
Mike Pompeo is now formally in the role of chief diplomat, but his title alone doesn’t automatically convey the depth of civilian experience that a fully staffed, in-the-loop State Department was able to provide in decades past. Nor does it ensure him any more access to the president than his predecessors in that role had—though his personal relationship with Trump might. That means any deal the United States strikes with North Korea is in danger of suffering all the faults of previous diplomacy-light deals: it may be overly tactical, focused on short-term wins, and constructed without regard to the interests of American allies. Moonshots succeed every now and then. But they’re no way to run a government.
RedState was a rare thing these days in the conservative media: a platform for an array of different opinions about President Trump.
That now seems to be a thing of the past, as media on the right has split into two camps: the full-on Trump boosterism of Breitbart or Fox News’s opinion programs, or anti-Trump critique as exemplified by National Review. On Friday, several contract writers were let go from the conservative website RedState and its editor, Caleb Howe, was fired. One thing many of them had in common was their vocal criticism of Trump.
Howe got the news while driving from his home in North Carolina to Washington to meet with Townhall Media, the arm of Salem Media which owns RedState, about Facebook strategy. Jonathan Garthwaite, the vice president and general manager of Townhall Media, called him before he got to the meeting and fired him over the phone, Howe told me. Garthwaite did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
I spoke to Howe while he was still in his car in D.C. He said that around 10 writers had been let go, and their contracts (which pay writers based on the number of times their articles are viewed) terminated.
“The site has been doing well. I don’t think there’s any reason to panic or that they would need a sudden and instantaneous change to how things are done,” Howe said. The site had drawn roughly 7 or 8 million pageviews each month, according to Howe, down from 10 or 12 million a month during the election. Dips in audience after elections are common throughout the digital media. Howe said that even the impact of Facebook’s algorithm change, which conservative publishers have blamed for a decline in traffic, was relatively moderate: “We took a relatively small traffic hit from the new Facebook guidelines,” he said.
His brother, the conservative writer Ben Howe, passed along the email he had received from Garthwaite cutting him loose. The email suggests that the cuts were made for financial reasons. “Unfortunately, we have reached the conclusion that we can no longer support the entire current roster of writers,” Garthwaite wrote. “Therefore, effective today, we are terminating our independent contractor agreement with you with your writing responsibilities ending immediately. This is a 30-day notice of the end of our compensation payments to you. You will be paid for April 2018 in the normal manner. At the end of May, we will tabulate the total page views that accumulated during May for content written prior to April 28th and you will be paid for May 2018 page views based upon those reports.” (Garthwaite did not respond to a request for comment.)
But sources I spoke with were skeptical of that explanation. “I think the ones who were shitcanned—and this is just my opinion—could probably be easily defined as the loudest and most vocal Trump critics,” Ben Howe said.
“There’s a clear pattern that the people who were let go were all critics of Donald Trump,” said Patrick Frey, a lawyer who blogs as Patterico and whose contract was also terminated on Friday.
“It was a complete surprise,” Frey said. “There’d been rumors of contract changes but being fired was a complete surprise.”
Jay Caruso, a former RedState editor, now works for The Dallas Morning News but maintained a contract with the site until Friday morning. “When you look at he names across the board, the people that were let go had a clear bias against President Trump,” he said.
Caleb Howe pointed out that RedState is keeping some Trump-critical writers. But he emphasized that one of those fired was Susan Wright, an anti-Trump writer who, he said, had consistently been one of the highest-trafficked writers on the site.
“The most Trump-critical people, the most vocally critical were on the list, especially Susan Wright,” he said. “Susan also happens to be the number one traffic draw at RedState, so it’s sort of weird if it’s a monetary decision.”
“Over the last two years I’ve been working for them, I’ve consistently been one of their top three writers,” Wright told me. “More often than not their top writer … They can’t say it’s a money issue.” She tried to file a piece on Friday morning, and found herself locked out of the system. She then received an email from Garthwaite nearly identical to the one Ben Howe received.
In the modern conservative media, is there an audience for RedState’s mix of views? Or is it bad for business to not choose a side?
“If nothing else, this shows you how deep, how solid that wall is down through the Republican Party, the conservative movement, what happened when Trump got introduced into the bloodstream,” Wright said. “Partisans on one side, conservatives on the other side.”
The Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year showed the extent to which Trump has overwhelmed the conservative movement. His ascendancy has either marginalized movement conservatives or co-opted them, remaking their worldview in his image. RedState, which was founded in 2004, now seems a relic from a time when Tea Party activism propelled a new set of writers into the conservative media, blessed with a certain freedom in being in the opposition to the party in power. It’s not that there weren’t intra-party and intra-movement fights; there were. But the fighting over Mitt Romney pales in comparison to the savage infighting caused by the rise of Trump.
Before Howe, the site was led by Erick Erickson and then Leon Wolf, both now vocal critics of Trump. Erickson wrote on his website on Friday that he had felt even before the firings that RedState was in decline. “They've really stopped driving a conversation among conservatives in the past few years as they turned to clickbait and now will really just be a clickbait site it seems,” he wrote.
“One of the things I was always really proud of at the website was that it’s representative of the current schism in the Republican movement,” Caleb Howe said.
“RedState gained and retained traffic in a way that many conservative blogs were not able to, and we survived the slaughter of the Trump years and the slaughter of being anti-Trump,” Howe said. “We kept never-Trumpers on the front page, like Susan Wright, all the way up until this week, successfully.”
Frey says he’s grateful for his time at RedState and emphasized that the company has the right to fire people. But he worried that the remaining writers were being sent a clear message about what kind of views were now permissible. “It seems like the message of the firings is very clear,” he said. “We won’t tolerate strong criticism of this president.”
“What this says is ‘Toe this line,’ and it’s not behind a movement, it’s behind a man,” Wright said.
Though it’s not yet clear what will become of RedState, Caleb Howe said his impression is that management will not install a new editor to replace him, instead turning the site into a Twitchy-style network. “RedState as an independent editorial point of view will no longer exist. It will now be subject to the editorial control of Townhall,” he said.
“Breitbart-lite or something,” predicted Caruso.
Come the 2020 Democratic National Convention, it is entirely possible that the party’s presidential nominee will be committed to “Medicare for all,” at least two tuition-free years at a public college or university, a $15 minimum wage, a sharp increase in Social Security benefits, a dramatic expansion of wage subsidies, and a federal jobs guarantee. Bernie Sanders, who came very close to securing the Democratic nomination in 2016, has endorsed all of the above, and though most of the party’s younger presidential aspirants eschew the socialist label, all have been galloping in the same leftward direction. Most striking has been the evolution of Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom came of age at a time when Democrats felt obligated to present themselves as scrupulously moderate, and who earlier on flirted with various centrist and even conservative commitments, yet who have now reinvented themselves as stalwart progressives.
Whereas Sanders is notably comfortable with taking contrarian stands, having endured marginalization and ridicule for decades, Booker and Gillibrand are best understood as weathervanes: They see which way the wind is blowing among enthusiastic Democratic primary voters and small-dollar donors, and they have no intention of beating up against it. At times, the two junior senators seem to be duking it out to see which of them can one-up the other: Booker proposes a new jobs program, Gillibrand calls for a public option for banking, and so on. Though I doubt either of the two will ever call for, say, raising taxes on their upper-middle-income constituents—that would be dangerously radical—it is a safe bet that we will hear many more inventive ideas from them between now and the New Hampshire primary.
What I want to know, though, is how Republican doctrine might evolve in response to this ideological phase shift among Democrats. The most straightforward interpretation of what might be called the Democratic Party’s social-democratic turn is that the shock of Donald Trump’s victory has prompted a larger rethinking of its agenda. In light of Democratic defeats in the Rust Belt, the party could have responded by adjusting its cultural stance, to win back voters alienated by its social liberalism and its commitment to high immigration levels. Yet doing so risked alienating many of its core constituencies. And so mainstream Democrats are instead pursuing a more populist course on economic and fiscal issues, with an eye towards increasing their salience. Their hope, as I understand it, is that blue-collar voters who dissent from the party’s social liberalism will nevertheless embrace its economic populism, which would compare favorably with the faux populism of Trump. It is a strategy that makes sense. It’s worth remembering, however, that Republicans can make adjustments of their own.
In his 2012 book The Lost Majority, political analyst Sean Trende observed that predictions of durable partisan dominance are almost never realized in practice. Every emerging Republican majority soon gives way to an emerging Democratic majority, and vice versa. As the Democratic (or Republican) coalition expands, Republican (or Democratic) politicians have a powerful incentive to exploit its internal fissures, and to prize off some of its disgruntled supporters. We have seen this dynamic play out over the course of the Obama years: As the Democratic Party has grown more appealing to college-educated white voters, including some erstwhile Republicans, and to younger voters of color, the GOP has successfully wooed a large number of non-college-educated white voters, many of whom were once loyal Democrats. And as non-college-educated white voters have come to represent a shrinking share of the Democratic primary electorate, its politicians have adapted to the new dispensation, growing less solicitous of older whites with traditionalist cultural beliefs and more inclined to champion ambitious social programs, to be designed and administered by credentialed professionals. If Booker and Gillibrand were wooing the same primary voters Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sought to win over in 2008, they wouldn’t be talking up job guarantees and free college; they might tout their fondness for charter schools and private equity, in the case of Booker, or gun rights and immigration enforcement, in the case of Gillibrand.
Which leads me to the GOP. Republican politicians increasingly depend on disaffected Democrats and independents who are more favorably disposed toward government than many stalwart conservatives, yet who find themselves alienated from the new Democratic consensus. It stands to reason that this influx of blue-collar voters will influence Republican sensibilities, if only out of the desire of politicians for their own political survival. So far, we have seen the GOP consensus on trade shift from reflexive support for lower trade barriers to an increased openness to protectionist measures, ranging from currency intervention to tariffs. When it comes to the welfare state, however, Republicans find themselves at a crossroads.
As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum has observed, there is considerable evidence that Donald Trump’s white working-class supporters maintain a distinction between universal social-insurance programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, and means-tested social-welfare programs, such as SNAP and TANF. Whereas the former are seen as benefiting deserving workers, who have paid into the system over the years, the latter are often resented as programs that chiefly benefit the idle poor. Republican policymakers can thus go in one of two directions: either make means-tested social-welfare programs more punitive, to make life more difficult for supposed shirkers, or transform them into more universal programs, so they are of greater benefit to the (putatively) more deserving majority. Thus far, Republicans have been emphasizing the former over the latter. But in a few years’ time, I suspect that will change.
Consider, for example, the new GOP farm bill. Michael Conaway, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, has crafted legislation that would, among other things, impose stringent new work requirements on SNAP beneficiaries. Though these would only apply to able-bodied adults under the age of 59 who do not have children under the age of 6, there is no question that they are demanding. To meet the new requirements, applicants would have to spend at least 20 hours a week in work or in work-related activities, such as taking part in a supervised job search. And if you fail to meet the requirement in a given month, you’d be barred from receiving benefits for an entire year for your first infraction and three years for your second. Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation, who for decades has championed more stringent SNAP work requirements, has criticized these sanctions as too harsh. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a center-left think tank, was even more stinging in its indictment of the bill, warning that the new work requirements would compel state governments to “create a massive reporting and paperwork system that will be expensive and hard to navigate for participants, states, and possibly those who employ SNAP participants.”
On the other side of the ledger, the bill goes beyond imposing a work requirement. To help ensure that its work requirements are met, it greatly increases funds for employment and training programs, and it stipulates that access to these programs is guaranteed to all eligible applicants. If you show up to fulfill your work requirement, a state agency will either place you in a job or help you find one. When compared to Booker’s job-guarantee pilot program, which would guarantee all comers a $15-an-hour job with health insurance and a suite of other fringe benefits, the farm bill seems punitive and stingy. Yet it is in many respects more generous than previous Republican-only proposals to overhaul SNAP, and it will become more so if it is to have any hope of making it through the Senate. Robert VerBruggen, writing in National Review, argues that a softer version of the work requirements—e.g., expecting childless, able-bodied beneficiaries to devote six hours a week to community service—is the right way to go, and there is no question that it would be an improvement.
Regardless, softening SNAP reform won’t address the larger political challenge, which is the Trump coalition’s apparent appetite for programs that are more universal, not less. Even if SNAP is overhauled in such a way that it makes life a bit more difficult for those who can’t or won’t work, it still won’t do much for lower-middle-class families trying to keep their heads above water. This is where a more universal approach could come in.
In recent years, a number of conservative reformers have touted the benefits of a refundable child credit. During the debate over the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Marco Rubio and Mike Lee endeavored to make the child credit more refundable, with mixed success. Champions of the idea, such as the sociologist Josh McCabe, emphasize that a more generous child benefit would greatly improve family stability: Whereas families lose SNAP benefits and the earned-income tax credit as they climb out of poverty, a child credit could be designed so that families only lose it at very high levels of income. Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown, Democratic senators from Colorado and Ohio, respectively, have proposed a child credit that fits the bill, yet which has been met with less enthusiasm on the left than single-payer and the jobs guarantee. Part of the reason could simply be that Democratic policymakers have an awful lot of competing priorities to spend money on. Younger liberals badly want their student-loan debt forgiven. Public-sector unions long for a dramatic expansion of the public-sector workforce. A growing majority of Democrats want the federal government to cover everyone’s medical bills. It is easy to see how a universal child benefit might get lost in the shuffle.
Whatever the reason, Republican reformers would be wise to embrace Bennet-Brown, or something very much like it. For one, it is a proposal that has the potential to benefit large numbers of working-class Republican voters. And unlike many existing means-tested programs, it is unambiguously pro-marriage, pro-family, and pro-work—a formula that could have great appeal for a more populist GOP.
A cliffside convenience store in China, a Peruvian sunset, a nesting stork in Belarus, Fashion Week in Brazil, flower fields in California, three lost bear cubs in Bulgaria, fire dancing in the Philippines, Lego art in Paris, a historic handshake in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and much more.
All politics, even geopolitics, is domestic. (Sorry, Tip.) Friday’s historic meeting between North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-In represents an important milestone on the Korean Peninsula, but it is also an important moment for President Trump, for whom North Korean proliferation has been a major foreign-policy challenge.
Discerning what the latest news means for Trump, however, is no easy feat. Using nearly the identical set of publicly available facts, one can make a plausible argument that either Trump has succeeded where others have failed for decades, or that Trump is falling into the same trap his predecessors did. In fact, that is just what I have tried to do here.
The Korean Rapprochement Is Trump’s Vindication
On North Korea, Trump Is the Only One Falling for His Rhetoric
When he was running for president, Donald Trump promised to bring unorthodox, fresh thinking to global problems, shaking up the stale consensus from the right and left. Most people can agree that that the results have been tumultuous, but a landmark meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea is a major win for his strategy. For years, American leaders vacillated within a narrow mainstream range, but Trump, with a series of brash threats, has produced real progress—including a historic moment as the leaders of the two nations stepped into each other’s countries.
“South and North Korea confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula,” North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in said in a joint statement.
The president took a deserved victory lap on Twitter:
KOREAN WAR TO END! The United States, and all of its GREAT people, should be very proud of what is now taking place in Korea!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2018
Trump’s strategy was a modern reinvention of Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory for dealing with the Soviet Union. And it was flamboyantly batty: Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man” at the United Nations, threatened “fire and fury” against the North, and boasted about the comparative sizes of their nuclear buttons, as the North’s weapons capacity increased.
But unlike Nixon’s feint, Trump’s worked. The North agreed to talks ahead of the Olympics, welcomed then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo for secret talks, and is negotiating a summit meeting between Trump and Kim. Then came Friday’s meeting. The speed with which the shift has happened, after decades of stalemate, is a testament to the efficacy of Trump’s stratagem. Not only is there progress toward ending the war, but North Korea consented to language about a “nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”
While Trump has tended to pick fights with allies, his work with China to pressure North Korea deserves particular notice. He cultivated Xi Jinping and persuaded China to use its muscle to further isolate North Korea and force it to the negotiating table. In what could be a sign of personal growth, Trump even managed to share the credit, without boasting, in another Friday tweet: “Please do not forget the great help that my good friend, President Xi of China, has given to the United States, particularly at the Border of North Korea. Without him it would have been a much longer, tougher, process!”
As Trump said on Fox and Friends on Thursday, a date and time for the Kim-Trump summit isn’t set yet, but negotiations are ongoing. That meeting can and should serve as the crowning moment of the process. The statement from the leaders on Friday leaves many details unresolved, but it is a huge step forward. Just a few months ago, many of foreign policy’s wise men and women were wringing their hands, afraid Trump would start a nuclear war. Instead, he has done what they couldn’t, and nearly achieved peace between the Koreas.
As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to bring a fresh approach to intractable foreign-policy problems. Rhetorically, that has been true, with the president offering threats and bluster. What is clear now, and was clear to many people then, was that Trump really had very little understanding of what he was talking about. On Friday, after a historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, Trump tried to take a victory lap. In reality, he’s walking into an old North Korean trap, showing how little he knows.
The president tweeted:
KOREAN WAR TO END! The United States, and all of its GREAT people, should be very proud of what is now taking place in Korea!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2018
Trump’s madman act, including bringing the U.S. and North Korea closer to nuclear war than at any time in recent memory, may indeed have convinced Kim Jong-Un to make some overtures to both Washington and Seoul. But as Trump would know if he studied his history, his predecessors, and South Korean President Moon Jae-In’s, have had some success getting North Korean leaders to talk. Getting them to act is another thing entirely. What emerged from Friday’s meeting was a concise statement. Ending a war requires a treaty, and that’s something entirely different.
As Nicholas Eberstadt wrote this week in The New York Times, North and South Korea have embraced and offered warm, fuzzy statements several times before: 1992, 2000, 2007. “All of these deals were then trash-canned,” Eberstadt wrote. “The North Korean promises in them were worthless, indeed deceitful. These agreements only seemed to hold force until, well, they no longer did, when Pyongyang unilaterally decided to ignore, violate or repudiate them.” Trump is quick (and correct) to point to his predecessors’ failures to contain North Korea’s nuclear program, but he hasn’t studied the reasons well enough to avoid falling into the same traps.
The speed with which matters have progressed from fear of a shooting war to hand-holding in the DMZ should be reason for uneasiness, not optimism. Few major diplomatic breakthroughs happen overnight. Besides, if Trump was able to convince Kim that he was just crazy enough to act, that impression will not quickly dissolve: North Korea would reasonably conclude that it should take any American promises with a full cellar’s worth of salt.
Consider also the statement that Moon and Kim released: “South and North Korea confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.” Optimists promptly focused on the use of the word “denuclearization,” which is notable, but worth no more than the paper it is printed on. North Korea did not explicitly commit to ending its own nuclear program, and as Jeffrey Lewis has noted, “denuclearization” has a different meaning in Korean negotiations than it does in plain English. Nor did Kim mention denuclearization in his own remarks.
It’s easy to deride this as diplomatic jargon, but ignore its import at your own peril. Of course, Trump has happily disregarded such fragile but essential diplomatic fictions in the past, too. The president had no one to warn him about this, though, because not only did former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ignore career diplomats, but Trump froze Tillerson out of Korean negotiations in favor of Mike Pompeo, who was then CIA director but was confirmed as secretary of state Thursday.
Trump deserves credit for persuading China to put fresh pressure on North Korea. “Please do not forget the great help that my good friend, President Xi of China, has given to the United States, particularly at the Border of North Korea. Without him it would have been a much longer, tougher, process!” he tweeted Friday. But here again, Trump’s inconstancy is a danger. Even as the president relies on Beijing to help seal a deal on the Korean Peninsula, he’s pushing the U.S. toward a trade war with China.
The developments on Friday increase the risks of Trump’s as-yet unscheduled meeting with Kim. U.S. aides have expressed skepticism that the meeting would ever occur, but the positive encounter in the DMZ probably makes it more likely, and on Thursday, Trump said Washington and Pyongyang have narrowed down a series of dates and locations. That summit offers many chances for disaster. If Trump and Kim can’t reach a deal, it’s unclear what the next step is. But Trump, despite his boasts about his negotiating prowess, has proven to be a pushover in face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders. The fact that he is taking North Korea’s overtures Friday at face value does not impart confidence that he can outfox Kim.
This doesn’t mean that Friday’s meeting in the DMZ is a bad thing. It would be churlish to argue otherwise. But the president’s haste to congratulate himself is not so much a sign that his hard line against North Korea solved the problem as a sign that he has bought into his own rhetoric.
To report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to invite criticism and controversy. In what is arguably the most well-covered story in the world (perhaps before the rise of Trump), any mistake is amplified, with both sides often accusing media outlets and journalists of bias. Yet The New York Times recently took this journalistic truth to another level with a severely unforced error. In a wholly unrelated profile on Facebook’s Campbell Brown, the Grey Lady was forced to issue a long correction due to a throwaway line touting “Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families” as an example of “far-right conspiracy programming” peddled on the social network.
In fact, as the Times subsequently clarified, “Palestinian officials have acknowledged providing payments to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis or convicted of terrorist acts and imprisoned in Israel; that is not a conspiracy theory.”
Such payments, in truth, have risen to the top of the policy agenda in Washington over the past year. The omnibus spending package passed in March by Congress included a bill called the Taylor Force Act, which cuts U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) until the practice of paying imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists is ended. (Taylor Force was a U.S. army veteran who was killed in a Palestinian attack in Israel in 2016.) The Israeli government, as well, has long called for such a measure and has debated passing a comparable bill in the Knesset. As President Donald Trump said on his visit to the West Bank last May, “Peace can never take root in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded, and even rewarded.”
And yet, while certainly not a “conspiracy theory,” the headline wafting on Facebook doesn’t quite do justice to the complexity of this Palestinian practice or the real-world implications of ending it.
First, it isn’t solely terrorists and their families who receive official Palestinian financial support. Rather, many other Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails for lesser offenses—including what some in the world might consider civil disobedience or political activism—are entitled to the stipend. Second, the families of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces also receive assistance: some of these, to be sure, were terrorists “neutralized” (in Israeli security parlance) either before or after an attack, but also those injured or killed in error. Finally, the dollar amount cited in most press accounts and by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—around $350 million per year, 10 percent of the annual PA budget—is likely inflated, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler recently explained in painstaking detail.
Definitional arguments regarding “terrorists” (for Israelis) and “martyrs” (for Palestinians) aside, the bigger challenge when discussing this Palestinian practice is that there’s truth to both sides’ claims about its wider impact. Israelis maintain that for some Palestinian attackers, these payments act as an incentive: They enable embarking on a terror attack with the safe knowledge that the attackers’ families will be taken care of after the fact, in Palestinian terms quite well (“pay to slay,” as it’s called by some).
Palestinians, not surprisingly, tend to emphasize the social and familial perspective, and less the fact that unabashed terrorists sit in jail drawing official salaries. “One out of every three Palestinian males has spent time in Israeli prison. Is any rational human being going to claim that … one-third of Palestinians are terrorists?,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked last year through a proxy at the Herzliya Conference, an annual policy gathering in Israel. “Payments to support families are a social responsibility to look after innocent people impacted by the incarceration or killing of loved ones as a result of the military occupation.”
Perhaps most important, this Palestinian practice has to be understood as a longtime policy dating back to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s guerrilla battles with Israel in the 1960s. The PA has simply continued the practice, the termination of which would be, as one Palestinian official put it, “nothing short of political suicide” for Abbas.
In private conversations, Palestinian officials are adamant they won’t stop the payments—recent congressional legislation and Trump administration demands notwithstanding. The irony, too, is that these stipends come out of the very same coffers that pay for the PA’s security forces, who work in tandem with their Israeli counterparts to stop such attacks from happening in the first place.
In a more positive Israeli-Palestinian political context, one could envision a Palestinian move to differentiate between payments to “heavy” security prisoners with blood on their hands, as Israel calls them, and the genuine political prisoners, orphans, and the like that Abbas speaks of. Yet this is far from a positive moment in this longest-running, and most controversial, of conflicts.
Year after year, the admissions process at selective colleges seems to make high-schoolers and their parents only more anxious. The numbers are wild: Harvard admitted just 4.6 percent of its nearly 43,000 applicants for the class that begins this fall. Stanford accepted only 4.29 percent, and Princeton 5.5 percent. Although selective schools—those that accept fewer than half of applicants—enroll only about one-fifth of U.S. undergraduates, they account for more than one-third of applications each year.
Plenty of ideas to fix the system—to make it more bearable for students, parents, and even colleges themselves—have been floated in recent years, including restructuring the whole process to be a somewhat randomized lottery, or implementing a matching system akin to how medical-school graduates are placed in residencies. They are promising, but they have something problematic in common: In all likelihood, they’d be illegal.
That’s because, like nearly every other American company and organization, colleges and universities are subject to antitrust law, meaning they are bound to compete with one another in a way the government deems fair. Such antitrust provisions are vital—they are what stop, say, automakers from raising the price of cars in unison—but in the case of higher education, it might turn out that antitrust law stands in the way of making college admissions, as well as the linked and similarly fraught process for divvying out financial aid, fairer and less harrowing for all involved.
Take, for example, the idea of a national clearinghouse or a matching system, similar to the one for medical-residency programs. With a national clearinghouse, students could upload their academic records and accomplishments during their high-school career and then in their senior year simply press a button to apply to colleges. The database would be open to admissions officers at all colleges, so they could see where else students are applying, bringing a level of openness to the process. Under a matching system, students and colleges would each submit rank-order lists of each other and be paired as closely as possible.
Those who follow admissions closely tend to think that such a system would ease the pressures on students, parents, and schools. But, alas, antitrust law prohibits it—it would produce a level of cooperation that the federal government would likely find unacceptable. (The medical-residency match program is legal because Congress granted it an antitrust exemption about 15 years ago.)
Other promising college-admissions fixes that have been proposed run up against some of the same problems. One feature of the shared application designed by an advocacy group called the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success is a virtual “locker,” which is already being tested by more than 130 prestigious schools. It allows students as early as ninth grade to upload their written work, videos, photos, and other materials that show off their potential beyond a transcript. At first, only students can access the locker, but over time they can open it to their parents, counselors, and to colleges through the admissions process. While the virtual locker doesn’t have the transparency of a clearinghouse, it too might raise antitrust concerns one day, depending on how colleges want to share access with each other.
Another idea that has been floated is to have admissions to selective colleges determined by a lottery. The names of qualified students would be picked at random until a class is filled. “A strict lottery system for academically qualified applicants would be the most equitable, least costly, and most publicly explainable method of dealing with the ever-growing demand for scarce seats at our most selective institutions,” said Barmak Nassirian, the director of federal relations for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. A lottery system would also, in all likelihood, not pass muster with the Department of Justice, which enforces antitrust law, because depending on how it was administered, it likely would require colleges to share information about applicants with each other.
Another option: Put a limit on the number of colleges to which students can apply. The proportion of college freshmen who applied to seven or more colleges reached 35 percent in 2016, up from 18 percent a decade ago, and from just 9 percent in 1990. Some eight in 10 freshmen in 2016 applied to at least three colleges. “If you limited it to, say, five, everyone would get fewer applicants,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the former president of Vassar College who now heads the nonprofit research group Ithaka S+R. This is a solution that might not be banned by antitrust provisions, as it might be able to be implemented through, say, the Common Application, rather than through the direct cooperation of colleges.
Even changes that work within the current admissions and financial-aid systems—rather than remaking them entirely—would likely run afoul of federal laws. College leaders, for instance, find themselves in a tricky position when it comes to “merit aid” scholarships that some schools give out. For instance, Grinnell College, a selective liberal-arts school in Iowa, uses merit aid as a tool for recruiting students who might otherwise turn them down—in practice, the scholarships are small discounts for wealthier students who end up paying less than full tuition.
But these scholarships serve another purpose, too: Grinnell, like other selective colleges, is trying to increase the number of low-income students on campus. This year, the college estimates 26 percent of its incoming class will be eligible for Pell Grants, which mostly go to students from families making less than $40,000 annually. But Pell Grants don’t come close to covering the cost of tuition, so to make up some of the difference, Grinnell sets aside 10 percent of its financial-aid budget for merit aid to lure students who can afford to pay a lot more.
Many of Grinnell’s higher-ranked competitors have sworn off such merit aid—on the grounds that it helps families who can already afford college—but schools right below Grinnell in the rankings offer such discounts. So Grinnell officials maintain that if they abandoned merit aid, they would also likely give up the tuition dollars of those students who would follow the money and attend lower-ranked colleges that offer discounts.
“The way to end this arms race is for institutions to spend less on merit-based aid and amenities and use that money on need-based aid,” said Hill, the former Vassar president. If such an approach were widely embraced, Hill believes it could result in greater economic diversity on campuses: There’d be more money to devote to low-income students. And affluent students wouldn’t be as tempted by money in making their college choice.
But Grinnell and other institutions that use merit aid as bait for affluent students would only stop if they knew their competitors would too. And that would require them to cooperate in ways prohibited by antitrust laws. “One effect of antitrust laws is that colleges in a weaker market position pursue strategies to generate revenue but that ultimately drive up prices across the board,” said Joseph Bagnoli Jr., the vice president for enrollment and dean of admission and financial aid at Grinnell College in Iowa. Those “strategies” he’s referring to are things like merit aid, or spending on amenities that competitors have on their campus, such as new dormitories and recreation centers. These amenities tend to siphon away money that could theoretically be put toward financial aid instead.
There is, as well, a subtler, more philosophical argument for exempting colleges from antitrust law. “If universities are getting federal funds, they shouldn’t be allowed to shroud in secrecy the process for determining who gets admitted,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, the associate vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University, in Chicago.
Antitrust law exists to protect consumers—in the case of higher education, it’s what prevents colleges from colluding on setting tuition costs. But, beyond Major League Baseball, few entities in the United States operate with the kind of freedoms from antitrust laws that higher education would need to truly reform the admissions and financial-aid process.
Recently, the association in Washington, D.C., that represents private colleges requested a five-year exemption from antitrust laws for its member schools. Its reasoning goes that if schools were allowed to cooperate, they could build new tuition pricing models together. They could also share information on applicants they have in common and the financial-aid packages they’re offering them, which might end, or at least slow, the arms race of trying to provide more money than a competitor to every student regardless of need. A sense of reasonableness might return to the admissions process and at the same time slow the rapid rise of college tuition.
The Justice Department does not appear interested in granting this request. Instead, the department has for years been bringing more scrutiny to colleges’ practices, rather than becoming more permissive. Inside Higher Ed reported earlier this month on a federal investigation of colleges—this one related to the practices of early-decision admissions—and it was the latest of several. The Justice Department in 2017 launched an inquiry into alleged discrimination against high-achieving Asian American college applicants, as well as an antitrust probe of the ethics code of the trade association that represents high-school counselors and college-admissions deans.
An earlier incident, in 2013, presaged this. In January of that year, presidents of several hundred small, private colleges gathered for the Council of Independent Colleges annual winter meeting in Palm Harbor, Florida. Among the sessions was one on how schools should end bidding wars for students and curtail the use of generous merit-aid packages.
The discussion caught the attention of the U.S. Justice Department. Five months later, lawyers for the department wrote a letter to a handful of college presidents who were at the meeting, warning them that agreements to “restrict tuition discounting” might violate antitrust laws and instructed them to preserve information related to the session. (That investigation is now closed.)
The inquiry that was first reported on this month pertains to early decision, an arrangement under which applicants commit to attending a school if accepted and agree not to apply via regular decision elsewhere. The percentage of the incoming class accepted through early decision at selective colleges has risen rapidly in the last decade now accounts for about half the class on some campuses.
Colleges are leaning more on early decision for two reasons. One, as more students apply, colleges have a difficult time predicting how many of them will actually show up. Early decision reduces that uncertainty. Second, students who apply early decision clearly want to enroll, and they often come from higher-income families. As a result, they demand less financial assistance, and that gives colleges the financial security to spend a bit more freely on the much larger pool of applicants in the regular-admissions round.
Some schools share information like this because they want to make certain their early admits are not in admissions pools elsewhere. The Justice Department, as part of its latest inquiry, wants to know if schools make admissions decisions based on what other schools have done with an applicant.
Colleges and universities have been at this crisis point before. Until the 1990s, the Ivy League colleges and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set financial-aid awards jointly, so students could choose colleges based on factors other than cost. The practice, however, ended after the Justice Department accused the participating schools of price-fixing. College admissions have changed drastically in the intervening years, but the department’s thinking on the subject has—probably for the worse—remained the same.
On Friday, after becoming the first North Korean leader to step into South Korea, Kim Jong Un joined with South Korean President Moon Jae In in making an extraordinary announcement: The two leaders vowed to pursue the shared objective of a “nuclear-free Korean peninsula” and, by the end of this year, to finally proclaim an end to the Korean War.
The declaration established ambitious, if notably vague, parameters for Kim’s upcoming nuclear talks with Donald Trump, who had previously given his “blessing” to North and South Korea to discuss an official conclusion to the war, which was stopped but not formally ended by an armistice in 1953. But it also highlighted just how fast diplomatic efforts to address North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program are moving and just how much work those involved are setting out to accomplish in the coming months: no less than a peace treaty that has eluded North and South Korea for 65 years, and a definitive nuclear deal with North Korea that has escaped international negotiators for 25 years.
In the abstract, a peace deal to replace the armistice that halted the Korean War makes eminent sense. Why not draw to a close a conflict that has unnaturally divided Korea and perpetuated one of the most militarized and volatile stalemates on earth? When leaders of North Korean, Chinese, and U.S.-led United Nations forces signed the 1953 truce (South Korea abided by the armistice but refused to sign it), they agreed to hold another conference in three months to ensure “the peaceful settlement of the Korean question.” A resolution is a long time coming.
But while North Korean, South Korean, Chinese, and American officials have occasionally proposed and explored a peace treaty over the decades, actually executing an agreement has proved prohibitively problematic. Given the signatories to the ceasefire, a treaty “would need to be formalized by the UN—if not the Security Council, at least the UN General Assembly” and ratified by North Korea, China, the United States, and most likely South Korea, said Bruce Klingner, a Korea expert at the Heritage Foundation. (In their joint declaration on Friday, the North and South Koreans committed, with a number of caveats, to “actively pursue trilateral meetings involving the two Koreas and the United States, or quadrilateral meetings involving the two Koreas, the United States and China with a view to declaring an end to the war and establishing a permanent and solid peace regime.”)
Before reaching such a pact, the parties may first need to devise something similar to the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty concluded at the end of the Cold War, in which “we first capped and then thinned out the Warsaw Pact and NATO forces that were facing each other in Europe in order to reduce the potential for a standing-start invasion,” according to Klingner. North and South Korea might, for instance, restrict the number of tanks, artillery pieces, and light-armored vehicles that are stationed within 50 miles of the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
“It would be a huge mistake to sign a peace treaty without first addressing the nuclear, missile, conventional, chemical, and biological [military] threat that North Korea poses to the South,” Klingner told me earlier this month.
That’s why, since North Korea began developing its nuclear program in earnest in the 1990s, the United States has traditionally considered a peace treaty between the Koreas, and a corresponding normalization of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and North Korea, as the capstone to a grand bargain in which the North agrees to completely dismantle its nuclear arsenal—the end state after a series of smaller-scale concessions give the parties confidence that overhauling relations between the various players on the peninsula would be durable. As Andrea Berger of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies recently observed, “you can’t unsign a peace treaty,” even if you might be able to withdraw some of the benefits that North Korea would derive from it.
A peace treaty would likely end the United Nations mission in South Korea that has been there since the end of the war and that the U.S. has led. The U.S.–South Korea alliance exists independently, but the end of the UN mission “could lead to a sense of ‘well the war’s over, bring the boys home,’ both in South Korea and the U.S. Then the danger is, like in June 1950 [when Kim Jong Un’s grandfather invaded South Korea], if North Korea doesn’t feel there’s a sufficient defense or deterrence, then they may feel emboldened” to act aggressively against South Korea, “especially if they have nuclear weapons.”
North Korea aspires to “divide the [U.S.–South Korea] alliance, reduce the U.S. military presence and involvement in the defense of the Republic of Korea,” Klingner told me. North Korea desires a peace treaty “to set those dominoes in motion.”
In the lead-up to this week’s summit between North and South Korea, however, reports indicated that Kim Jong Un, in line with a position his father at times took, might be willing to accept some form of continued American troop presence in South Korea. The condition would be that a peace treaty, and the establishment of normal relations with the United States, shifted the U.S. military’s mission from one of countering North Korea to one of stabilizing and keeping the peace on the peninsula.
The signals spoke to what would be one of the most significant consequences of a possible peace treaty. Since the summer, when Kim Jong Un conducted his first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could potentially carry a nuclear warhead to the United States, North Korea shot up to the top of the list of concerns for U.S. officials because it uniquely satisfied both definitions of a security threat: North Korea suddenly had the intent and the capability to cause devastating harm to the United States—in contrast, for example, to terrorist groups that mainly had intent without capabilities, or countries such as Russia and China that mainly had capabilities but not necessarily intent. North Korean leaders, meanwhile, have long argued that they are building nuclear weapons because America has the intent and capability to harm them.
The drive to “denuclearize” the Korean peninsula, which could involve not just North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons but also the U.S. removing its nuclear-capable forces from South Korea, is about blunting capabilities. The push for a peace treaty is about altering intent. (As the German political scientist Alexander Wendt once observed, “500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5 North Korean nuclear weapons, because the British are friends of the United States and the North Koreans are not.”) The most pressing question coming out of the meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea is which problem will be resolved first, if either is resolved at all, and how those decisions could transform the Korean peninsula. “KOREAN WAR TO END!” Donald Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday. “Good things are happening, but only time will tell!” Based on the timeline that Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae In outlined, time will tell very soon.
