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Begin forwarded message:
From: "Robert I. Rotberg from Robert's Conflict Mitigation Newsletter" <robertirotberg@substack.com>
Date: February 10, 2025 at 6:03:11 AM PST
To: mridmk@gmail.com
Subject: 330 - Subverting Our National Interest and Giving the Peoples of the World More War and Pestilence
Reply-To: "Robert I. Rotberg from Robert's Conflict Mitigation Newsletter" <reply+2ld5t1&1f26fm&&9626a83ea579abc20cd4cee0e05a70a4d3ed6519ba01b8265fdf8a6a6353da02@mg1.substack.com>
330 - Subverting Our National Interest and Giving the Peoples of the World More War and Pestilence 
What the world now desperately needs is some steadiness, some intelligent attention to reducing violence and to a stanching of the state-sponsored killing sprees that are riling much of the globe. The United States was once able to supply steadiness and at least urge many of the world's nations to attend to their people's real economic and humanitarian needs. Now, alas, our much celebrated leadership of global affairs is in tatters, losing more heft and integrity hourly. Trump is driving even our friends into China's arms. Is there a better example of the subversive Manchurian presidency (as I wrote last week)? For whom is Trump really working?
Instead of focusing his efforts, at a minimum, on restoring peace to Ukraine and avoiding the coming war over Taiwan, Trump has used a terrible chainsaw to downsize and shred the U.S.' compellingly important role in keeping America great. Our word is no longer our bond. He has reversed decades of American reliability. No one can or should trust us going forward. On that basis, Trump (assisted by Musk's unprincipled madness) has forfeited the good will and abundant soft power that rightly accrued to us from the uplifting actions of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, throughout the depths of the Cold War, and well into the presidencies of Obama and Biden. Even the benighted regime of President George W. Bush introduced PEPFAR, a brilliant and workable scheme to provide antiretroviral medicines and other assistance to (mostly) Africa's vulnerable HIV-AIDS afflicted population -- with strikingly positive results. Laura Bush, the first lady, measurably strengthened American efforts to reduce cervical cancer in Zambia, its global epicenter, and elsewhere in the developing world. But so much of those positive health measures are now undone. They will be exceedingly difficult to replace. Needless suffering, thousands of deaths, and the sacrifice of generations of young people will follow.
There are two major foreign policy concerns that American leadership must today arrest: Putin's invasion of and bombarding of Ukraine (together with his attempt to erase that nation's sovereignty) and President Xi Jinping's determination to intimidate the Philippines and Vietnam and harass Taiwan before forcibly annexing it to the mainland. The Trump administration should be focusing all of its considerable energies on those zones of violence, and on strengthening our Japanese and South Korean allies. We need a robust diplomacy that is now silenced, imaginative problem solving that is not pushed aside, and close attention to improving the readiness of our air, naval, and enlist personnel capabilities. Experts say we would lose a war against China. That should be Trump's main focus (instead of banishing the penny).
The Middle East demands an American steady and innovative hand that is more than the impulsive and madcap suggestion that all Gazans should leave and be replaced by Trump towers along the Mediterranean coast. (Trump envisages personal financial gain from such a caper.) No one is buying such foolishness, but its enunciator thinks his bright mindless meanderings can substitute for carefully constructed policy making and deep consultation with the relevant parties. Government by brainstorm never works well, and certainly not now when the motivational surges are so erratic, haphazard, and thoughtless. Stupidity is when one proposes an action that takes no account of (and may even be unaware of) the likely consequences and immensely negative fallout.
Trump and Musk are combining their blustering energies to eradicate wokeness, whatever that really is, and to fighting an all out internal American war against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Extirpating tiny governmental initiatives focused on DEI is easy, and satisfies legislators and voters who falsely view DEI and transgendered sports as threatening dangers. These shibboleths have replaced the Communism of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's era as our cultural obsession, but by pursuing them relentlessly and illegally (as Musk is doing on Trump's behalf) only takes our national mind off real national and problems that are so much more serious.
Wokeness can hardly be the all consuming danger to Americans that Trump and Musk proclaim. The real dangers include their attacks on constitutionalism and their flouting of legally imposed restraints on the executive. Trump (and Steven Miller) have brilliantly flooded the administrative realm with executive orders, taking advantage of Trump's capture of Congress. Mussolini and Hitler gave Trump's people ideas that are now being realized. When will the Mitch McConnells and Lindsay Grahams wakeup?
There is a massive effort underway to undermine what they call the "left." An excuse for denying the usual National Institutes of Health (NIH) overhead expenses for medical and standard scientific research is to destroy the "left" agenda (and upend the U.S. as the global investigative powerhouse). Trump is also taking over the hitherto nonpartisan Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and declaring himself chairman in order to thwart the "left" and its influence on the arts. Trump has also ended President Biden's ban on plastic straws in the White House! More of this nonsense is in the works. Wait for it.
Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine. That is the prize, for which he has no eyes. Instead, he has allowed Musk illegally to shut USAID, dismiss its dedicated and selfless global workforce and shut off grants to hundreds of large and small NGOs that are truly saving the world and keeping pestilence from our shores. Just as Trump did with bleach during the Covid-19 pandemic, he is prioritizing an attack upon supposed radical lunatics in USAID (none of whom exist as far as I know from long experience dealing with USAID) rather than the good work the agency has done for decades in coping with disasters overseas, enabling pregnant Africans to give birth safely, feeding a third of all Zimbabweans (and millions elsewhere in Africa and Asia), and helping Ukrainians, South Americans, and Africans appreciate the benefits of democracy.
USAID reinforces the American message of good governance, integrity, and resilience that Trump (and Musk) are now destroying. Assaulting wokeness is no substitute -- by any long stretches of imagination - to uplifting the world's poor or attacking the corruption and kleptocracy that so bedevils so many nations and deprives whole citizenries of health, happiness, and educational opportunity.
Who in the absence of USAID is going to help Uganda battle a new onset of Ebola and prevent babies from starving in Nepal? Nearly 2 million Congolese refugees must go without food, thanks to the USAID shutdown. Refugees everywhere are stranded. More than 40,000 Kenyan health workers will lose their jobs, absent USAID funding. Ethiopia fired 5,000 health workers for the same reason. The U.S. provides most of the financial backing for two of the largest refugee camps in the world, the 700,000+ person settlements in northern Kenya, on the Somali border. Who will feed those masses?
Possibly our out-maneuvered judicial system can put USAID to rights and keep Musk's youthful brigade out of the Treasury and other computer payment systems. Perhaps Trump's coup d'etat can be tempered by legal action despite the Republican-controlled Congress having been neutered and emasculated by Trump's bluster and onslaughts. If not, the Republic is doomed to slide endlessly into fascism and falsehood.
I wrote about the disastrous tariff bombardments last week. They are a guarantee, possibly a conscious one, that we will lose our closest allies. Canadians have already turned decisively against the U.S., cancelling vacation plans right and left and stopping as much cross-border buying as possible. Kentucky bourbon is being taken off the shelves. Mexicans will do what they can, too. And Europeans will shun products from the U.S. American farmers will suffer, too. Those who rely on energy imports from Quebec and Ontario will go dark. Detroit could be weakened if neighboring Windsor retaliates. And so on.
The point of all of this misplaced disturbance is vanity -- to show that Trump is boss. Unleashing Musk satisfies some of the same urges, and picks (as bullies do) on cheap and easy targets. USAID has never supplied condoms to Gazans, but that is precisely the kind of misinformation that Trump employs to justify the annihilation of USAID. Musk wants to put USAID through the "wood -chipper" because it is full of Marxists who are criminals. Those are two among many false charges and false accusations. But the most rabid of Trump's backers may believe, or at least take comfort, in such nonsense just as McCarthy's supporters believed in the 1950s that the State Department was full of disloyal Communists.
Trump has also mouthed the long-discredited canard that South Africa is oppressing whites. This is a charge that has been making the rounds for at least thirty years with little evidence. Musk is originally a white South African with known sympathies and a disregard for the facts. He may have boosted Trump's interest in South African white destinies, especially those of the Afrikaans speaking tiny minority. But this is more rubbish, and I will write about it at length next time. (This post is already long.)
May the republic somehow endure.
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