treating law as if its explanatory power were almost unlimited, as for example when the huge growth in the number of civil wars since 1945 is attributed to the fact that ‘these conflicts are not prohibited by the pact.’
Everything that has been achieved can be rescinded, forgotten, tossed away. That is the message Hathaway and Shapiro want to convey.
That was far from the truth. Obama himself had been so upset by excesses in the new incursion he ordered into Yemen that he stopped the drone attacks there for a year between 2010 and 2011
第一:不精確,第二,不確定,第三,法官儈子手
In just the first few months of 2009, after Obama took the oath of office, the initial metamorphosis of American war into humane form was achieved. As the worst sins of the prior administration were disowned, Obama’s lawyers claimed authority to continue war indefinitely across space and time, devising formal legal frameworks for targeted killings
But that lawyerliness often served as an elaborate rationalisation process. The president’s men and women, Savage has written, “were trying to fight al-Qaida while adhering to what they saw as the rule of law”. Though what they saw as the rule of law meant little more than self-regulation, their commitment to humane standards of fighting war
He was a politician whose career depended on protecting the American people. But not only did Obama design a far bigger and more encompassing form of war than necessary, and not only did he undermine the US’s earlier commitments to a legal order consecrating peace to do so
Then Trump went on to repeat the very same pirouette from anti-war candidate to endless war president that Obama had performed. And now Joe Biden risks doing the same.
*************
At its heart lies a convincing line of argument: recent efforts to humanize war by reducing its lethality have come at the expense of normalizing violence
Whereas the ambition of the nineteenth century peace movements and their successors was to outlaw war—or at the very least to establish forms of legal arbitration or international institutions to radically limit its occurrence—recent decades have been dominated by efforts to regulate the conduct of war.
“We had made a moral choice to prioritize humane war, not a peaceful globe”
remarkable change principally to the closing years of the Vietnam War
朝鮮戰爭是最不受約束,最殘忍的戰爭,美國(雙方)使用了一切可以使用的手段,造成的傷亡密度之大,比二戰有過之無不及,但越戰是促成國際法轉變的契機,一是美國對自己在越戰中形象的羞愧,Potentially endless violence has been ushered in under the guise of legal regulation. “In our time, swords have not been beaten into ploughshares. They have been melted down for drones”
美國以各種人道名義出兵幹預他國,到了20世紀末,成了人道主義幹預原則的所謂“保護責任”(Responsibility to Protect),就是說一旦發生人道主義災難,如種族滅絕,那麽世界在聯合國倡導下有“責任”武力幹預,當然這種幹預主要是西方的武裝幹預,成了美國、北約和西方出兵的道德依據
Moyn contends that the “self-humanization of the [American] military under law” was arguably the most important post-Vietnam factor in the emergence of humane war.
But basically, what I’m getting at is the longer the war on terror goes on, the longer these mechanisms, these tools exist, it’s a matter of time until there are people in these relevant positions who simply say, you know, particularly if I’m a senior lawyer at one of these agencies, I’ll come up with whatever pretext I need to come up with to say my operations are lawful.
This is exactly what happened during the Bush administration when an attorney named John Yoo and another named David Addington decided to essentially retcon the laws about torture and about surveillance to allow these things to happen. This happened in the Obama administration when attorneys named Marty Lederman and David Barron decided to manipulate and retcon the laws to permit the assassination of an American citizen. We see with Trump not discontinuity, but a whole lot of continuity in an uncomfortable way that I write this book to reckon with
A deeply tragic missed opportunity that put millions of people in peril that entrenched lawlessness in American national security, and then from their American government, that told itself that it was lawful.
Barack Obama really makes the forever war forever,
under Barack Obama, the opposite occurs
The N.S.A. grows more powerful, often by inertia, by allowing its tools not only to develop in sophistication, but now after a 2008 surveillance law that Barack Obama votes for knowing that he will very likely soon be president
It kills potential combatants. In particular, it kills what it calls military age males, people between, essentially, the ages of 16 and 50-odd something. And the point I’m trying to drive at is that throughout all of this, not only does Obama expand the aperture and the operations of the war on terror while viewing himself as winding all of this down, but he does so through a particularly perilous way, which is to say that he empowers a lot of lawyers to set up belts of process that the previous administration, as well as the subsequent administration, don’t bother with
In spite of its brevity, the review captures two cornerstones of my account I cared most about: one is the centrality of racialization to the history of the laws of war; the other is the complex lawyerly morality of Barack Obama's role in that history
But, she (Michèle A. Flournoy) added, “It’s important to draw a distinction between his appetite for nation-building, which is essentially nil, versus his appetite for using force if it’s necessary to defend U.S. national security, which I believe remains quite strong.”
Biden seems to recognize that humanitarianism, far more than politics, justified, legitimized, and, indeed, required violence
The international media tended to every report of violence across the country after largely ignoring the torture, rape, massacres, and other war crimes committed by Western armies and their allies as well as by the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS over the past twenty years
Even as Biden promises to forsake humanitarian interventions for political interests, he is still drawn back to the scene of cruelty that defines the former
Unaccountable, unrepresentative, and anti-political, humanitarian interventions are evaluated by internal and economic criteria that include best practice as determined by competitors, value for money as defined by the market, and efficient delivery as measured by budgets and timelines decided without the participation of beneficiaries
smoothed the unjust exercise of power and paved the way to a dystopian future in which domination by force may evade the checking function of a legal order focused narrowly on collateral damage.
Moyn’s searing book is about nothing less than the mechanisms by which the powerful of the planet control the weak
presents a confounding mix of brilliant moral vision with maddening historical omissions and one-sidedness
The best the law can do is reflect our best selves, though surely it often mirrors our worst
state military power routinely included law-abiding force of jaw-droppingly brutal proportions
Did making war more humane make war worse and longer?
That's what Moyn said. Haven't read the book, but had read 3 excerts. Pretty convinced he has a strong argument. But his inadvertant use of Mayer sparked some retort. Mayer strongly objected to both "anti war and anti atrocities are counterproductive" and
Then Dexter responded specific to Moyn. He said Moyn was wrong.
No he didn't say Moyn was wrong.
He said Moyn was wrong b/c he attribited it to the wrong reason. By Basically, by quoting Atkin, Dexter laid out the true reason is the industrial military complex has grown so big it's got a life of its own. Hardly anything new. But apparently Atkin's knwoldge of details and its inner working is so vivid that his story
Did Moyn say the human rights moement is wrong, as in
? "Human rights movement" is not wrong per se, but has a detrimental and pervers effect of making war forever. I think that's Moyn's point. "What it reveals is that, for some, the only imaginable alternative to more humane war is more brutal war--not less war." Ah, he is attacking
Maybe he expressed the resignation "you may as well not do it".
But is Moyn wrong? Dexter said "it was only after the revelations of Abu Ghraib that a majority of Americans came to think the war was a mistake", very true. But the interesting question is, if so, why did the war not end for another 16 years? Here is why Moyn is right. We all agree the industrial military complex doesn't want the war to end. It takes the politicians to end it. But politicians are always bought, "persuaded" with "reason of national security" for "change their mind" even if they campaign public
As an exclamation point, Biden authorized two strikes targeting ISIS in Afghanistan, one of which reportedly killed Afghani civilians and children.
The administration is continuing the strategy that emerged under Obama, as, in the words of Hal Brands and Michael O’Hanlon, armchair strategists based at Johns Hopkins and Brookings, the United States “failed its way to counterterrorism success.” In what they dub the ”medium footprint strategy,”
The president even reviewed assassination targets each week. Obama ended dropping 10 times the drone bombs that Bush did. “Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” he quipped, “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
One NPR correspondent said privately to me that America needed to do everything we could to stop the next terrorist attack, arguing that the ACLU’s hard-line defense of civil liberties was wrongheaded
Asked by @karentravers about timeline to evacuate individuals from Afghanistan, Psaki says: "The possibility of a deterioration of coordination with the Taliban is real. Putting our service members at risk is real and those are certainly part of the president's decision making." pic.twitter.com/wFP9IAOrgz
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab just said the moral esponsibility for civilian casulties(including 6 children) caused by US drone strikes "lies with the terrorists"(責任全在他人)
But the history of great power interventions into insurgencies suggests that efforts to stabilize Afghanistan through democratization would have been futile. My research explains why the success of great power interventions to stabilize countries relies heavily on coercion and corruption, rather than democratizing overhauls.
Joe Biden is displeased. After our recent editorial criticized the Vice President for privately telling Chinese leader Xi Jinping to ignore U.S. rhetoric on human rights, White House spokesman Stephen Spector wrote to object: “As he has said publicly many times, the Vice President sees human rights in China as fundamental to advancing U.S.-China relations.”
It turns out Mr. Biden has a long record of playing down human rights in private diplomatic meetings while mouthing support in public. His message to China’s Mr. Xi—that U.S. human-rights talk is meant to satisfy a “political imperative” from voters at home—is almost identical to what he told Soviet leaders as a Senator visiting Moscow in 1979.
The US failure makes it much harder for Biden to push his core message that “America is back”. By contrast, it fits perfectly with two key messages pushed by the Chinese (and Russian) governments. First, that US power is in decline. Second, that American security guarantees cannot be relied upon
government officials seemed openly disoriented, expressing shock and fury at their own government, and a deep sense of shame. Another military officer urged me to publicly attack U.S. immigration officials for failing to process Special Immigrant Visa applications for roughly twenty thousand Afghan interpreters who had worked with U.S. forces. “These are extraordinary times,” the officer said. “It called for extraordinary measures. They failed. Hope you consider this.”
美國人以為“大戰略”不在乎這些
“There is no system. The system has collapsed,” s
American-backed leaders in Afghanistan engaged in corruption and empowered warlords, even as some three hundred thousand Afghans joined the Army and the police to fight the Taliban. Sixty-six thousand of them perished. The Taliban suffered enormous casualties of their own, losing fifty-one thousand in battle.
“It’s hard to believe that we’ve abandoned the Afghans so overwhelmingly,” he said. “We created this society, like it or not.
As someone who never supported Trump or Biden I think I can be impartial when I say Biden has done more to diminish America’s standing in the world in 7 months than Trump in 4 years. I am slightly surprised by this, by the way
It’s a failure of the Western world and it’s a game changer for international relations,” the European Union’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell
The United States looked blundering and inept, and it dragged its allies down with it
That has led to recriminations in London and Berlin and Brussels, directed at leaders there, and at the United States
“Was our intelligence really so poor?” former British Prime Minister Theresa May asked in Parliament earlier this month. “Was our understanding of the Afghan government so weak? Was our knowledge on the ground so inadequate? Or did we just think we had to follow the United States and on a wing and a prayer it would be all right on the night?”
Are the United Kingdom and Europe too dependent on the US for their security?
Joe Biden’s reassurances that “America is back” is not enough
the US communicated, but didn’t consult
歐洲,通過北約,完全是美國的從屬,沒有獨立的能力,歐洲那種為自由民主奮鬥的雄心,隻是在美國逃跑,自己狼狽不堪後才發現一直是狐假虎威,這一切,把歐洲三大國德英法不久前非要高唱自己是全球勢力(Global Briton, Global Germany, Global France, Global EU),是亞太大國,每個國家都來個亞太戰略,還派幾艘軍艦跑到南海威風一把,顯得極其可笑
A sense of impotence, Martin said, has laid bare the extent of allies’ dependence on the United States
The dependency on the United States fuels insecurity about what happens if the country’s domestic interests diverge more profoundly from Europe’s
Biden has said the right things, and has promised allies he will work to rebuild the relationship. But the Afghanistan exit adds to “this realization that maybe some of the things that were attributed to Trump were actually part of something deeper that’s going on in the US on both sides of the political spectrum,”
難民
德國:part of selling that mission to the public was selling its humanitarian mission,現在被打臉,怎麽跟國人交代?
US allies are wondering where they fit in the US’s priorities
withdrawal added to a growing skepticism of the United States, and its larger commitment to collaboration with allies
反駁:NATO allies were briefed on the plans at a joint meeting of foreign and defense ministers on April 14 of this year by none other than Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin themselves. Here’s how NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg described the meeting at the time:
All Allies agreed. And all Allies agreed actually a statement, which we agreed at the ministerial meeting today, where we clearly state that we now have decided to start the withdrawal of all our NATO troops from Afghanistan, starting first of May. And the plan is to finalize that drawdown, or withdrawal, within a few months
none of the diplomats and government officials believe that the pictures of the Taliban overrunning Kabul and the United States on the run will be without geopolitical consequences for Washington—and that includes the Biden administration’s campaign to build a coalition to counter China.
the space for Europe to get cozy with Washington has narrowed
For the time being at least, making the case for a robust partnership with Washington is not good politics.
聯合國人權理事會,中國一直大聲叫,要調查美國澳大利亞在阿富汗犯下的戰爭罪
“Those in Europe arguing for more autonomy and independence will be strengthened,” b/c “In the end, U.S. policy is still ‘America First.’
but the retreat heightens the sense that America’s backing is no longer unbounded
grumblings about American credibility, compounding the wounds of the Trump years and reinforcing the idea that America’s backing for its allies is not unlimited.
How on Earth did we get to a point in which "unlimited support for allies" became the expected norm??? Trita Parsi
“When Biden says ‘America is back,’ many people will say, ‘Yes, America is back home,’” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst.
That hesitation will now be felt all the more strongly among countries in play in the world, like Taiwan, Ukraine, the Philippines and Indonesia, which can only please China and Russia, analysts suggest.
The country expressing the most concern has been China, which shares a short, remote border with Afghanistan, which under the Taliban served as a haven for Uyghur extremists from Xinjiang, the far western Chinese province
Those who recommended staying indefinitely did so in the full knowledge that 20 years of massive expense and effort could not produce a stable central government or a secure Afghanistan. There is zero evidence any outside force ever could do that. None ever has.
But in the end, the timing and nature of the withdrawal were set in Washington
To become a more capable ally, Europe must invest more in its security capabilities and develop the ability to think and act in strategic terms
European Strategic Compass, a document that will precisely define our ambitions for security and defense for the next five to 10 years.
consisting of about 5,000 troops, that could undertake rapid and robust action. Helping to secure an airport in challenging circumstances, as in Kabul, c
But we must go further and faster. The European Defence Fund, established to boost the bloc’s defense capabilities, will receive close to 8 billion euros, or $9.4 billion, over the next six years
A more strategically autonomous and militarily capable E.U. would be better able to a
The stunning meltdown of the U.S.’s Afghan client state
The dramatic scenes of despair in Kabul have frustrated and angered many American allies, particularly in Europe, inflicting considerable reputational damage
非常赤裸裸把利益攤在桌上
“中國俄國懇求美國繼續參與”,哈
the American withdrawal was a deliberate policy move, even if it caused unintended consequences黨媒
美國不理解戰場不再軍隊較量
Even the closest of America’s allies, such as the U.K., have openly criticized the U.S. withdrawal. Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the foreign-affairs committee in the U.K. House of Commons and an Afghanistan war veteran, compared the debacle in Kabul to the 1956 Suez crisis, which bared the limits of British power and precipitated his nation’s strategic retreat
Since President Obama, the action has been of U.S. withdrawal, but my God, has this made it clear,” Mr. Tugendhat said in an interview.
The U.S. denouement in Afghanistan has raised particular concerns in Taiwan, the democratic island Beijing seeks to unite with the mainland—by force if necessary
The prevailing view among U.S. allies and partners in Asia is that Washington can now deliver, finally, on the “pivot to Asia” t
While the chaos in Afghanistan has at least temporarily undermined America’s credibility with partners and allies, these relationships, from Taiwan to Israel to Ukraine
government officials seemed openly disoriented, expressing shock and fury at their own government, and a deep sense of shame. Another military officer urged me to publicly attack U.S. immigration officials for failing to process Special Immigrant Visa applications for roughly twenty thousand Afghan interpreters who had worked with U.S. forces. “These are extraordinary times,” the officer said. “It called for extraordinary measures. They failed. Hope you consider this.”
美國人以為“大戰略”不在乎這些
“There is no system. The system has collapsed,” s
American-backed leaders in Afghanistan engaged in corruption and empowered warlords, even as some three hundred thousand Afghans joined the Army and the police to fight the Taliban. Sixty-six thousand of them perished. The Taliban suffered enormous casualties of their own, losing fifty-one thousand in battle.
“It’s hard to believe that we’ve abandoned the Afghans so overwhelmingly,” he said. “We created this society, like it or not.
Even as he asserted that “the buck stops with me,” Biden pointed fingers at everyone but himself: DONALD TRUMP tied his hands with his deal with the Taliban, the Afghan army wasn’t willing to fight, and some civilians didn’t initially want to leave
reduced role for America as the world’s policeman worries allies in the Middle East and Europe
“It sounds like the end of an era,” said Bruno Macaes
reassure allies that “America is back” after four years of Trump’s
Britain, France and Germany, are unhappy with America’s end to the Afghanistan war, which came with little co-ordination
“Mr Biden wants to appeal to a strong notion of the American national interest. That has a cost: partners can no longer expect their own interests to be taken into account in major US foreign policy decisions,” Mr Macaes
“We are hearing from EU officials that a new caution is necessary on forging a common EU-US policy on China. That’s an immediate and heavy cost of the Biden decision,” said Mr Macaes,
Finally, what is taking place should only encourage Europe to strengthen its strategic autonomy to make sure it can continue working with allies whenever it can—as well as autonomously any time it needs to. Nathalie Loiseau
the way this war ended presents a crisis of legitimacy for the transatlantic alliance, and for NATO in particular. Dave Keating
The credibility of US foreign policy, as well as its intelligence services and military, is so damaged that it harms the political and moral credibility of the West as a whole. Daniela Schwarzer
Many of the ideas coming from Washington have visibly stopped working. Bruno Maçães
But government officials and defence experts from across the region have told the Financial Times that the comparison between Afghanistan and Washington’s relationship with the rest of Asia is misplaced.
The Strategic Logic of a Forever War:The United States should have ignored sunk costs in Afghanistan and maintained a light military footprint
This may be the most dishonest of the "sustainable status quo" arguments I have seen so far, and there has been a lot of competition for that distinction
Household debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) stood at 62.0 per cent at the end of the second quarter, down 0.1 percentage points from its historic peak of 62.2 per cent at the end of last year, and 0.1 percentage points below the first quarter of this year.
這一政策基本堵死出租房,是不是妥當呢?大家又到那裏投資呢?如果隻有股市,是不是另一個泡沫呢?
help the family sell their three-bedroom flat to raise 8-9 million yuan.
瘋了,這才是內卷,賭“Everyone’s loans and leverage are piling up. If you don’t increase yours, you will lag behind in wealth. Of course the risks are growing like crazy, but no one dares to lower leverage, neither the rich nor the government.”
Over the past five years from 2015 to 2019, China’s households have added $4.6 trillion in borrowing, compared to a $5.1 trillion expansion in US household debt from Q3 2003 to Q3 2008.2008
China’s push for “common prosperity” is not just about taxing the rich but also directing resources into rural areas and the lower-income group, according to one of the country’s most prominent experts studying income inequality.
China’s richest 20% earn more than 10 times the poorest 20%, a gap that hasn’t budged since 2015. The country counts 400 million people -- about one-third of its population -- in its middle class, defined as those with annual household income between 100,000 yuan ($15,392) and 500,000 yuan. More than 600 million people in China still live on a monthly income of 1,000 yuan
Xi wants to reverse economic inequality would be if the government pushed through measures such as introducing property and inheritance taxes aimed at the rich. Such moves could be challenging because many of the elite have links to the party, and anger could flare among many Chinese people who have bought up housing as their main investment.
They only have to look to the last 15 years: It’ll be more of the same.
raising the bar on industrial policy
The reality is, as analysts at independent research firm Gavekal Dragonomics recently wrote, China “does not view consumer internet companies as the nation’s leaders of technological innovation: that role belongs instead to the manufacturing sector.”
Viewed through this lens, the next decade will be more of the same: An attempt to make higher quality and more accessible industrial goods and, ultimately, create a more level playing field across companies and industries.
working without the state’s helping hand and paying more taxes will be the bigger challenge.
專欄,有點猜,但至少不瞎扯
A significant portion of Chinese adults are in the middle-income bracket, making them better off than the average adult in the rest of the world
Now, Xi Jinping has put China’s tycoons on notice that it is time for them to share more wealth with the rest of the country.
“A powerful China should also be a fair and just China,” Yao Yang, a professor of economics at Peking University who endorses the shift in priorities, said by email. “China is one of the worst countries in terms of redistribution, despite being a socialist country. Public spending is overly concentrated in cities, elite schools and so on.”
Some of the actions have been reactive, others deeply studied: Beijing surveyed 17,000 firms and 700,000 parents before its education ban
In my view, the biggest source of uncertainty today is the Cyberspace Administration (CAC), which has asserted power to regulate IPOs, algorithms, and financial media. Unlike most other regulators, it is a party organization, its chief a vice-director at the Propaganda Department
is signaling plans to more assertively promote social equality, as he tries to solidify popular support for continued Communist Party rule
The government needs to “encourage high-income people and enterprises to give back to society more” and to “create opportunities for more people to become rich,” state-run Xinhua News Agency cited an official report of the meeting as saying
He wants this to demonstrate that socialism is better than Western capitalism in caring for all the population
the country’s Gini-coefficient, a measure of inequality, widened to 70.4 in 2020 from 59.9 in 2000, making China one of the world’s most unequal major economies, according to data from Credit Suisse
四億人月入不過一千
now include diverting more financial support to poorer regions and taming property prices.
But in his efforts to assert ever-greater personal control over both the party and civil society, he is flirting with propaganda tools and intimidation tactics that many observers see as a throwback to the Mao era,引導大眾意誌打擊個別個人、群體、階層和行業。非常有針對性
Xi has made it clear that the party must not abandon its revolutionary ideals — that it is duty-bound to deliver “common prosperity” and stand up to the west, especially the US.
人民對美好生活的向往就是我們的奮鬥目標
declared that it was necessary to “regulate excessively high incomes” in order to ensure “common prosperity for all”
creating a grand experiment for 21st century authoritarian governance.
Beijing aims to have it both ways. It believes that technologies will shore up social control and suppress political dissent without damping the entrepreneurial vigour or the innovation that animate the world’s fastest-growing large economy.
Productivity growth adjusted for the expanding stock of buildings, machinery and other capital was 2.6% a year from 2000 to 2010. It has been negative since 2015, a sign of how inefficient much of that investment has been
property contributes 30% of value added in China, and sales of land contribute 27.5% of local government revenue比我查到的要高