Bad-boy foreign leaders shouldn’t underestimate Trump’s appetite for election-year drama

Turkey, Russia and China are just three countries taking advantage of the moment to act aggressively around the world and test American resolve. All three are betting that the United States is too mired in crisis to react powerfully to strategic challenges overseas. All three might be making a miscalculation.

Turkey is threatening its neighbors and claiming new maritime borders; Russia is poisoning its opposition and posturing around Belarus; and China continues to build up its defense forces while cracking down on dissent at home and abroad. It’s all a potently toxic brew of hyper-national ambitions heartily guzzled by Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

They are drunk with the idea that right now is their time to act aggressively because America can’t or won’t seriously engage to stop them. If they’re right and can achieve their goals because America continues to stand on the sidelines, they win their bet without paying a hefty price. READ MORE

Putin, Assad, Erdoğan and Khamenei — the four horsemen of the apocalypse 2.0

Texas tornadoes are potentially caused by the “flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil” according to the Butterfly Effect theory. Determining the ultimate cause and effects in weather is a tough call, however, given how many random physical factors ultimately come into play. But it’s fascinating to think that a distant and peacefully fluttering butterfly has so much potential power.

Easier to determine is how one man’s wanton tongue wagging and temper tweeting can not only cause a political storm but has now unleashed the four horsemen of a modern regional apocalypse: Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, Syrian President Bashir al Assad, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the ever-present Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Donald J. Trump, in his “great and unmatched wisdom,” has shown that not only can he distract a domestic electorate but that the power of his presidency can create limitless distant chaos, death and destruction with the tap of a thumb and the flip of a finger. Now that’s power.

Trump’s causal tweet-to-terror relationship reanimated the biblical fearsome four horsemen who, in their initial iteration, represented Conquest, War, Famine and Death. This is no small feat. In one feckless action, the president of the United States has whipped up the apocalyptic forces that one hoped the world’s most powerful man would instead be able to tamp down. READ MORE

Economics + politics + a dash of presidential ego = potential disaster

Twenty-first century voodoo economic theories pushed worldwide by populist politicians are speeding the world to the edge of a global downturn. One by one, democratically elected leaders are taking down their smart economists and promoting their own questionable — and politically motivated — ideas about interest rates and banking practices.

Turkey and the United States are the latest nations whose presidents are pressuring or pushing out their reliable economic advisers, replacing them with ideological loyalists. These presidents’ makeshift monetary mumbo-jumbo is aimed at achieving short-term economic and political gain. As a result, corrections and recessions may be temporarily delayed, but continually loom right around the corner.

From Ankara to Washington, heads of state are demanding that their previously apolitical national bankers cut interest rates to grow their economies, spur investment and combat unemployment. The message to central bankers is clear: Drop the cost of money or lose your job. It’s not an idle threat. READ MORE

In a world of populist tyrants, this still was a good week for democracy

Democracy goes through ups and downs, even experiencing recessions like the stock market. This is a particularly tough time for democracies around the world, with some places once judged to have turned the corner on their authoritarian past coming back as bigger, badder, anti-democratic governments. Hungary, Poland, Italy, Russia, the Philippines and several other countries are riding on the edge of populist electoral sentiment.

This week, however, was a particularly good one for people yearning to be free. It was an especially good week for those wanting to keep or to take back their government. Three nations showed us the way: Turkey, Ethiopia and the Czech Republic.

Let’s face it, democracies around the world are getting challenged by dictators and demagogues. My Hoover Institution colleague Larry Diamond’s new book, “Ill Winds,” assesses this abysmal global state of democracy, finding that these ill winds are whipping up “Russian rage, Chinese ambition, and American complacency.” READ MORE

The death penalty? Kill it off, around the world

Newspaper columnist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing is the latest high-profile example of a sovereign meting out extreme justice and capital punishment. CIA analysts concluded that Khashoggi was brutally killed last October inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey.

And, shockingly, it was legal.

One reason the Saudis have not faced international retribution in the courts or official diplomatic blowback for the killing is simple: Death is a legal form of punishment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Like it or not, the sentence was handed down, perhaps by Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself, and the cruel execution was conducted within the consulate and on what is arguably Saudi Arabia’s diplomatically sovereign territory. READ MORE

NBA player goes one-on-one with the petulant President Erdoğan

Shoot a 3-pointer, go to jail.

If Turkey’s spoiled-sport president gets his way, he will soon be locking up Enes Kanter, a Turkish-American star center for the New York Knicks.

The reason for a just-requested Interpol “Red Notice” arrest warrant is not Kanter’s aggressive defensive style, it is his offensive speech calling President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, among other things, the “Hitler of our century.” Erdogan returned the favor and labeled Kanter “a terrorist.

Unlike in the United States, where public figures can’t be libeled, criticism of the Turkish president is illegal. I can write that President Trump is a boob and feel pretty secure that the black helicopters won’t descend on my home. Well, maybe not totally secure as the U.S. Attorney General nominee William Barr recently told the Senate that he “can conceive” of instances where journalists might be arrested. READ MORE

The truth of Khashoggi‘s death is buried under a mountain of Saudi lies

Osama bin Laden was killed by American special forces on foreign soil. His body was secreted off to a U.S. Navy ship and received ablutions, prayers. It was wrapped in a white sheet out of respect for the dead and flollowing Islamic custom. He was then given a sea burial and returned to his maker.

Jamal Khashoggi‘s body remains desecrated and his spirit despoiled.

This is the sad tale of the death of two Saudis, one a targeted terrorist, the other an innocent journalist. 

No matter how you feel about giving mass murderer bin Laden a proper and respectful burial, you have to credit the United States for giving a sworn enemy his last rites. It’s only a small part of what makes America great. It’s also what makes America big. READ MORE

Kanye West can help Trump recognize the Armenian genocide

Armenia is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Kanye West and the Kardashians. Truth is, however, Kanye has always cared and sang about justice and his wife's Armenian-American family has always felt strongly about the need to recognize one of the world's greatest crimes and injustices — the Armenian genocide.

Kanye should leverage his newfound kinship with President Trump to prod him towards doing what no other sitting American president has done: Use an executive order to declare that the murderous events of 1915 were the world’s first modern genocide.

Genocide means a single group is targeted for systematic and premeditated death and extinction. Armenian families who survived the genocide await the world’s recognition of this reprehensible event. America officially regards it as regrettable, unfortunate, and tragic, but does not recognize it as the event that spurred the word “genocide.” It is time.  READ MORE

Hostile Turkey warns U.S.-backed Kurds, aims to sideline Washington

Simmering for years, the full outbreak of hostilities between American-backed forces and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey is now finally at a boil. Turkey, an unreliable NATO ally at best, has again made clear that the U.S. is not welcome in the neighborhood.

President Erdogan just threatened to crush the “terror army” — what he calls the American-armed and supported Kurdish troops assembling on Turkey's Syrian border — by putting the developing 30,000 Kurd anti-ISIS force directly in Ankara’s crosshairs. Erdogan promised to “strangle” this U.S.-backed force “before it’s even born.”

Turkey’s aggressive threats and active troop movements dissolve U.S. hopes for a more stabilized region and further diminish America's already waning influence in the broader Middle East. An increasingly present and embraced Russia and more regionally assertive Iran also further sideline America. The newly developing anti-American power dynamic certainly dashes any plans to “take the oil” from Iraq and Kurdistan, as candidate Donald Trump suggested in 2016.  READ MORE