Chris Hedges's Blog, page 651

The Generals Are Failing Their Soldiers—and America

September 2006. Iraq was falling apart. Nearly 100 American troops were being killed each month. The war seemed hopeless, unwinnable (because it ultimately was). So the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, convened a “council of colonels’ – purportedly some of the brightest minds in the military – to recommend new policies. Only three, reportedly, had any combat experience in Iraq, but still, these guys were sharp. The group debated endlessly and eventually reached an impasse. They had three separate proposals and the group generally divided along service lines. Some Air Force and Navy guys wanted a phased withdrawal – the “Go Home” option – but their ideas were promptly dismissed. Other (mostly Army and Marine officers) wanted to “engage in prolonged conflict – the “Go Long” option. Finally, the most prominent army officers – including America’s current National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster – wanted to “Go Big” and heavily reinforce the troops in Iraq with a “surge.” You can guess which side won out.

George W. Bush liked the can-do optimism of the “surge” team and doubled down. Violence briefly dropped, a couple thousand more American troops died, and the military promptly declared victory. We’re still dealing with the fallout.

That generation of colonels became today’s generals. The whole worldview of most senior officers is built on a fable, a myth: the surge worked. The reality is much messier. We’re still in Iraq (and Syria, and Afghanistan, and…everywhere). Still, our generals have a ready response. You see, the story goes, the problem is we didn’t go big enough or long enough and the damn liberals (like Obama!) pulled out the troops too soon. The “surge myth” provides our generals a comforting counterfactual, a road not taken, whereby the military could’ve-would’ve-should’ve won, but were denied victory.

So it stands, in 2018, that instead of a sensible “go home” option, America’s generals and civilian policymakers have handed us the worst of all worlds – a combo of “go big” and “go long.” Forever war.

Let’s be clear: most generals and admirals are “yes-men.” They’ve made a career of placating bosses and telling superiors exactly what they want to hear. After all, how do you think they got all those stars? Problem is: once they become senior flag officers, the “boss” is often a civilian Beltway insider in Washington, and those guys, well, what they want is more war, more bombs, and more endless interventions. And the generals? They’ve happily complied for coming up on 17 years now. Which would be all well and good if they were playing a board game (like Risk!) or a computer simulation, but these are real kids being shuttled from one indecisive theater to another like so many toy soldiers. No one wins, of course…except the military-industrial complex. There’s the tragedy.

Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and (ostensible) liberals alike, have stood at the helm of America’s post 9/11 forever wars. Neither mainstream party has the guts (or the compunction) to pump the breaks and pursue a less grandiose foreign policy. I, like so many others, bet big on Obama and, ultimately, lost a huge hand. The solutions aren’t in Washington, and, unfortunately, given the end of the draft and a castrated antiwar movement, the answers aren’t in the streets either.

Who, then, could put a stop to the madness? The generals, that’s who. This is a scary time for the republic, one that would have the Founders rolling in their graves, whereby Americans only trust the military among various public institutions. That ain’t healthy but it’s the reality we inhabit. So, basically, the American republic needs a whole bunch of generals to make known their dissent, slam their stars on someone’s desk, and threaten to resign if Washington doesn’t dial down these countless interventions and turn to Congress for a real declaration of war (or peace!). It’s a long shot, sure, but it just might be crazy enough to work.

Don’t count on it, though. Odds are the generals will carry on with their optimistic, can-do, delusional talk of “turning corners,” and “breaking stalemates” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and who knows where else. I’ve listened to one general after another speak to my soldiers since 2001, and they’ve all pretty much got one thing in common. There’s barely a hint of creativity or constructive critique in the whole bunch. Heck, this is a generation of generals who’ve known nothing but more war and more stalemate in perpetuity. They’ve been peddling the same tired old failed strategies to witless civilian policymakers for decades. It’s all they know!

Got a problem somewhere in the Greater Middle East? Well, the generals have a (distinctly military) recommendation for you: surge troops, advise and assist local forces, surge again, rinse and repeat! And when it doesn’t work out (it never does), have no fear – that general will have retired and grabbed a gig on the board of some defense contractor, and, guess what? Some slightly younger general, who just happened to previously work for the first guy, is now ready with the same advice: how ‘bout a surge?

The system of promotion and the very culture of America’s military is inherently flawed. Senior officers rarely ask questions because it hurts their careers to think critically. For all their protestations to the contrary (we want soldier-scholars), neither the military hierarchy nor civilian leadership want critical thinkers. Mark Perry, in his recent book, The Pentagon’s Wars, puts his finger on the core issue. “The inability [of generals] to act,” he claims, “flow[s] from a system where disagreement, or even reasoned dissent, [is] viewed as inappropriate, or worse.” Welcome to the U.S. Army!

Still, my fantasy isn’t completely unprecedented. Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s National Security Adviser, did his dissertation and even wrote a book – Dereliction of Duty – on the failure of senior officers to stand up to LBJ on the Vietnam War. McMaster, then just a middling major teaching (as I later would) in the West Point History Department, wrote of Vietnam that “the president was lying, and he expected the [Joint] Chiefs to lie as well or, at least, to withhold the whole truth.” McMaster concluded that the war was “lost in Washington;” which I find a dubious assertion since I’m quite sure the Vietnamese had something to do with it. Nevertheless, in pointing out the failings of the generals to speak truth to power, what he called their reinforcing failings of “arrogance, weakness, and lying in the pursuit of self-interest,” McMaster was dead on. He and I disagree about what the generals should have recommended – he thinks more troops might’ve done the trick, I’m certain the US should’ve never been in Vietnam – but we both feel the generals and admirals should’ve resigned in protest.

McMaster is a genuine scholar and one of the brightest officers the army has fielded in a generation. Still, a year into the Trump administration, the man, and his entire peer group of generals, utterly disappoint. The new National Security Strategy all but declares a new Cold War with Russia and China and ratchets up tensions with North Korea and Iran. The National Security Adviser, the Joint Chiefs, and senior theater commanders are now – at least according to every public statement we’ve seen – all in for expanded interventions, more mini-surges, and, frankly, indefinite war in countless locales. Therein lies the irony: a generation of flag officers read and, ostensibly, internalized the message of McMaster’s brave book. Yet now, 17 years into these failing, fruitless wars, not one has the courage to “call BS,” and turn in their stars.

Nor should we let these guys (and they’re mostly guys) off the hook. To a man, they know better. They’ve all attended the military’s various Command and General Staff and War Colleges. Some of the brighter bulbs even studied at the prestigious US Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). They’ve spent years reading about the strategy trinity. It even has a nifty formula for the knuckle draggers among them: Means + Ways = Ends. Simply put, in order to balance the proverbial three-legged stool, the Objective (Ends) must be achievable, and meeting that objective requires sufficient resources (means) combined with effective methods (ways). Makes sense, right?

Make no mistake, most of these generals know, I mean viscerally know, that the objectives set for the US military – “defeat terror,” “build democracy,” “stabilize Afghanistan,” and whatever else – are nowhere near achievable. They also know that the current all-volunteers force has neither the resources (like manpower) nor magical tactics (ways) to pull off the miraculous. And still they’re silent. So I ask again: where are the brave military voices ready to tell the one fundamental, if inconvenient, truth about today’s wars – the strategic trinity is bunk! The ends: unachievable and so much fantasy; the means: utterly insufficient; and, the ways: uncreative and lackluster at best.

So let me say it one last time: the generals and admirals – the sharper ones anyway – know this! They realize the “ends” don’t match the “means” and there aren’t any “ways” available to correct that stunning mismatch. Yet on they stagger, praising the (genuine) courage of their troops, maintaining a cordial, can-do cheerfulness, and shuttling more soldiers into unwinnable quagmires. Thus, they please their masters – Trump, Obama, Bush, it doesn’t matter who presides – and do what they do best: achieve the next promotion and feed personal ambition. Of course no one says that (even a shameless self-promoter like Petraeus wouldn’t be so blatant) out loud. We military men all share the same defect, the original sin of the soldier – self-righteousness. I’m guilty too. We’re told and tell ourselves we are special so often that we start to believe the mythos. We’re not ambitious, we’re selfless; we serve not ourselves, but our nation. Of course, the truth is far more complex and the motivations of human behavior rather gray.

Generals aren’t superheroes and, God knows, neither is this lowly, decidedly mediocre major. Still, we can and should expect better from our nation’s senior military advisors. My favorite general from this generation, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, demonstrated – in his own small way – what’s possible. Pressured by Republican hawks and even influential voices in the Obama administration, to do more and get involved in the Syrian Civil War, Dempsey ever so subtly served the nation’s best interests. He neither sad “no” outright, nor responded with a “yes, sir, can do,” but rather explained in writing the options available and the severe costs and acute risks of each escalation in Syria. His warning was persuasive, at least to some in Washington, and ultimately President Obama – at least briefly – avoid further interventions. Young men and women who would undoubtedly have died, didn’t! In part we can thank Martin Dempsey, the curious career soldier who once taught English Literature at West Point and regularly serenaded his troops with his tenor voice. He ain’t perfect – none of us are – but there’s a lesson in this man’s decisions.

Sadly, it’s unlikely any of Trump’s top generals will follow the Dempsey example or, more forcefully, publicly threaten resignation. There just aren’t very many courageous critical thinkers at the pinnacle of the military profession. The generals select their own, deciding which colonels join their exclusive club. This is a formula for nepotism and sycophancy, not creativity or intellectual diversity. Sure, some military dissenters and free thinkers populate the publishing world, but they almost exclusively wear the middling ranks of major or lieutenant colonel. More likely, they’ve already left the service. There’s a reason why such folks don’t wear general’s stars, and it comes down to a broken military culture.

Generals select their own; they also punish and promote internally. Captains, Lieutenants, and Sergeants take the fall for tactical or ethical errors in judgment. Generals, at worst, quietly retire or, sometimes, even get promoted. Back in the bad old days of 2007 Iraq, when Baghdad was on fire and no one, it seemed, had any solutions, one Lieutenant Colonel, Paul Yingling, had the gumption to publish a scathing article in the official Armed Forces Journal. “The intellectual and moral failures common to America’s general [officers]…constitute a crisis,” he wrote. As it stands, he concluded, “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” That remains, with America now having lost or losing several wars, a staggering, discomfiting truth. Yingling made it to the rank of full colonel – itself a near miracle – and now teaches high school social studies for about one-third of his previous pay. Courage isn’t always rewarded.

And so, in 2018, after 17 years’ worth of generals who saluted, obeyed orders, promised victory, and delivered nothing of the sort, this author doubts anything substantial will change. It seems all that’s now on offer from our senior officers are the “go big,” option, the “go long” option, or some perverse hybrid of the two.

So the generals will fail us, as they tend to do, and the U.S. military will go big, go long, and go forever.

To where, you ask? Nowhere fast.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

We Are Teachers, Not Warriors or Heroes

“It was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter.”

— Emma Gonzalez, Senior, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Over the past three weeks, the impassioned voices and steadfast demands of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have resounded across social media and through the halls of the large suburban high school where I teach visual arts. A group of senior girls, spurred to action by the horrors of the Parkland massacre and emboldened by watching videos of its protesting students, organized a walkout of their own.  Though it was an uncharacteristically cold, snowy day in our part of Oregon, hundreds of students marched out of school, engaging in what was certainly, for many of them, their first act of civil disobedience.  I positioned myself near the back of the crowd, listening as they shouted their demands for safer schools and an end to fear in the classroom.  Standing on that icy sidewalk, I was overcome by waves of conflicting emotions.  Though deeply proud of them for raising their voices and insisting on being heard, I was also forced to confront a stark and brutal reality: neither my students nor I feel safe in our school.

I still remember the cold December morning in 2012 when I first heard about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  A colleague walked up to my desk, tears streaming down her face.  She then recounted the grisly details of those shootings: a classroom of first graders and their teachers murdered on what should have been just another routine school day.

At the time, my daughter was a preschooler.  In those school pictures that began appearing in the media of gap-toothed Sandy Hook first graders I saw her face.  I began to think about her future in such a world and it looked bleak.  From that moment on, I couldn’t bear reading the stories of what had transpired within those school walls and so found myself avoiding the impassioned, anguished speeches of the brave parents and teachers of those senselessly slaughtered children.  It hit too close to home. It was horror on a level I had previously thought unimaginable and in a school not that different from mine. Naively, I assumed things would have to change, that nobody could look at those tiny little people and callously advocate for the status quo. How wrong I was. And as we all know, the shootings just kept happening.

So what was it about the Parkland killings that tipped the scale?  Why hadn’t this happened after Columbine or Newtown?  These are among the questions we teachers have been asking one another at my school recently.  Perhaps what’s driving this moment is fear of the seeming inevitability, the not-if-but-when of it all.  As teachers, we are forced to wonder: When will it be our turn?  When will we bar the doors, fight, run, or hide?  When will despair be given a physical form in the shape of a teenager with a gun and our school turned into a shooting gallery for the deranged?

At this point, we’ve been practicing lockdown drills for years. We lock and block the doors, then huddle on the floor in the darkest corners of our classroom, 36 teenagers and one adult trying to be as quiet as possible. No phones, no talking, no movement. We wait for the rattle of the door handle, at least one of us cries, and then it’s over. The all-clear.

We turn on the lights, stretch our cramped limbs, and return to our seats.  I tell a joke, try to lighten the mood a bit, and resume class.  One grim effect of these drills and procedures, though, is to normalize the threat of an act so heinous, so abnormal it’s hard to take in.  We’ve essentially desensitized our entire school community to the true horror of what we’re playing out — a fight for our lives.  We expect the routines of the classroom to resume once the lights come back on, hoping that the students will have grasped the seriousness of the drill but won’t have internalized the fear.  That none of us will.  When my students voice the fear that sits inside them in that darkened room, when they give the despair space to breathe in the light, we’re all forced to confront the twisted reality of what we’re doing.

At the beginning of the semester, I gave my new students a questionnaire about their lives. One of them answered the question “What is one thing that really stresses you out?” by writing: “What really stresses me out is the fact that I might die in this building.”

I had no idea how to respond because, honestly, I feel the same way.  How do I convey what it feels like to walk into your workplace every morning wondering if today is the day you’ll die there?  How do I explain the trepidation I feel when I have to confront that student — the one who’s been making the disturbing art, doesn’t smile or interact with his peers, and whose parents won’t return my emails or calls — to tell him that he needs to tone down the violence in his work?  How do I share my deepest fear that this is the kid who will come back for me later, armed and ready to exact his revenge?

How do I express the complexity of the emotions I feel when I’m huddling in the dark with my students, thinking about what it would take for all of us to make it out of the building alive in a real version of the same situation? And how do I begin to think about the worst possible scenario, that the sixteen-year-old kid crouched next to me in the dark is the next school shooter?  In the heightened paranoia of my classroom, my students are now suspects.

Teachers as Martyrs?

I imagine every new teacher arrives with some version of the story of the triumphant teacher who takes a ragtag group of students from disarray to academic excellence playing in the back of his or her mind. That cinematic dreamscape is often discarded as the years go by. If you’re actually going to survive in the system, tough it out for the long haul, certain illusions must be shed. Almost a third of all new teachers jump ship by year three when the challenges of the profession — the long hours, the constant planning, the never-ending grading, and the worries about meeting the intellectual and emotional needs of our students — begin to seem unsustainable.

In my first years on the job, the enormity of the psychological task of caring for the wellbeing of my students and a creeping awareness that I would never be able to fully support and know all of them could reduce me to tears.  My commute home in the afternoon often felt like a therapy session sans therapist.  I’d replay every missed opportunity, every interpersonal challenge, and then I’d cry.  I knew that, despite what I’d been led to believe, the stark reality of the situation was that I couldn’t support all of my students.  Part of teaching would always be about failure: failure to connect, failure to notice, failure to address the nuanced and specific needs of every one of those students. It was a numbers game that I would always lose and that was a truth I had to embrace in order to become a more effective educator.

Nevertheless, the archetype of the teacher-martyr who toils late into the night, sacrificing her personal life in order to focus solely on her students, is one we’ve bought into as a culture.  The story we tell is that teachers are superhuman, capable of reversing any tide, remedying any hurt, and counteracting the problems of our society by sheer focus, persistence, and care. If I just devote myself more, put in longer hours, and implement a better curriculum, I’ll ultimately save them all.  Being this martyr is a badge of honor in the school itself, a symbol of who is doing the best work.  I can’t help but wonder, though: Isn’t martyring oneself by taking a bullet for our students the ultimate expression of this archetype? Isn’t this what is, post-Parkland, now being demanded of us?

This uniquely American myth of the teacher who provides salvation for each student is the one we’ve now ascribed to the teachers at Parkland who threw their bodies in front of bullets to save their students’ lives. And while I’m awed by their bravery, I’m still willing to question the motivations behind those, including the president of the United States, holding them up as icons.

Perhaps valorizing teachers as heroes is simply another way of continually refusing to honor and respect the profession in the ways that actually matter. Heroes don’t need smaller class sizes, benefits or adequate retirement accounts. The truth is, those teachers should never have had to put their lives on the line for their students. It wasn’t their job. We are not warriors, we are teachers. We are not heroes, we are teachers.

When Dreams Fail

My last year of classroom teaching has been the most demanding. Not only because of the subjects I teach, my class sizes, or workload, but because of the mounting stress I feel from my students. Our children are the canaries in our American coal mine (an image that has new meaning in the Trump era). When I ask them about their mental health, I’m always overwhelmed by how many of them admit to depression and anxiety. They’re constantly exhausted and stressed out.  So many of them express a simmering despair about their future. And how can I argue with that?  When you’re huddled in the corner of a dark classroom, practicing for your own death, it’s difficult to feel as if there’s any hope for a decent future.

I’m no longer naïvely dreaming of changing the lives of each of my students. My goals have narrowed: to get the kids to invest in learning, to be an advocate for them, to listen to them, to create a relevant curriculum, to turn the classroom into a vital and thriving place.  In any given semester, I make it a priority to quickly learn the names of my more than two hundred students, to check in with them as frequently as I can and attempt to attend to each of their unique and complex individual needs.

I try to put whatever extra energy and attention I have into working with my more marginalized students, knowing that, as a white, middle-class woman, they likely will see me as an agent of a system that reinforces preexisting layers of alienation.  However, I no longer feel as if I can save any of them.  I don’t even feel that that’s my job.  My job is to provide a space for inquiry and expression.

If I do that job well, I’ll at least assist my students in finding their own voices. But believe me, it’s a Sisyphean task.  They’re teenagers after all.  Their emotional landscapes change minute by minute, day by day. They walk into my classroom with 15 to 18 years of lived experience, products of their family dynamics and their community. The hours I spend with them, no matter how impactful, cannot out-compete those actualities. Some of them will feel seen and heard in my classroom, and some of them, no matter what I do, will feel invisible, unseen, and lost.

Pulling the Trigger

School is the place where adolescents experiment with the lofty promises of the American Dream.  We teachers deliver the message that you can be anything, do anything.  Study hard enough and you’ll make something of yourself in your life, no matter the challenges along the way.  Make friends, get yourself a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and you’ll climb that social ladder.  Find your path and your talent and the world will be yours for the taking.

As educators we know that there’s no one more passionate and engaged than a teenager doing what she or he loves.  Tap into that intensity and myopic focus and you have the potential for genuine pedagogical alchemy.  But what if all the promises that we (and so many others) implicitly or explicitly make prove remarkably out of reach and those same students are increasingly aware of that?  What if you’re a student of color or an undocumented student and the American Dream was never promised to you in the first place?  What if you don’t make friends easily? What if the emotional stresses you carry with you are too heavy and all school represents is a relentless reminder of them?  What if, like the society it’s part of, school becomes a place for failure, not possibility?

If teenagers excel at one thing, it’s sniffing out hypocrisy. Kids can see through the veneers of so many promises. And the kids any teacher now sees are likely to be wondering:  What’s really there for them in this world we’ve built?  What hurts have gone unnoticed, unattended?

Is it any wonder that the most disgruntled among them, those who feel most betrayed by the broken promise of that Dream, return to the place they feel failed them the most, the institution society promised would provide them with salvation and so obviously didn’t?  They bring with them their failed social and familial relationships, their realization that the Dream was never for them in the first place, and — in a rising number of cases — AR-15s or other deadly weaponry. They cash that voided check by pulling the trigger, decimating that illusion, and possibly ending the lives of students and teachers while they’re at it.

Shooting that gun is the last act of personal agency these boys — and so far they are boys — have to offer.  That myopia and total focus, which leads to death in our schools, reflects the despair and nihilism seen in many of these shooters.  It’s something that, at least at a lesser level, should be familiar to any classroom teacher these days. Think of the nameless, faceless frustration and despair that drives a child to pick up weapons of war and wantonly kill as the failure of the American Dream played out in blood.

Dear America: You’ve given me an impossible task and condemned me for my failure to perform it. Now, you — or at least the president, the NRA, and various politicians — assure me that I can redeem myself by holding a gun, firing back, and so blasting away the despair.  No, thank you: I do not want to hold that gun and cannot be that shield.  Neither figuratively nor physically can I save my students.

What we are asking of our children, our teachers, and our schools is unlike anything we ask of any individuals or any institution.  We are martyring our children on the altar of society’s failed promises and then we wonder why they keep coming back with guns in their hands.

Belle Chesler is a visual arts teacher in Beaverton, Oregon.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

For the Love of Their Country or Money?

Much has been made of the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russian operatives or the Russian government to win the November 2016 election. While there is yet to emerge solid evidence that attempted Russian meddling actually impacted the election’s outcome, in recent days Mueller’s probe may have turned in a far more damning direction: how Trump’s family members may have used the president’s political power to obtain business advantages, and specifically how Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner may be deeply implicated.

Several recent reports offer strong suggestions of corruption. First, The Washington Post reported Feb. 27 that officials from four other countries—namely the United Arab Emirates, China, Mexico and Israel—apparently discussed ways to exploit Kushner’s business needs in order for their countries to obtain favorable U.S. policies. A day later The New York Times revealed that Kushner Companies last year received more than $500 million in loans from Apollo Global Management and Citigroup after Kushner met with those companies’ representatives at the White House. On March 1, Think Progress reported that Apollo “benefited from three rule changes [under Trump] relaxing pipeline safety regulations.” The next day, March 2, according to The Intercept, Kushner Companies reportedly approached the government of Qatar for loans and, after being rebuffed, President Trump backed a Saudi Arabian blockade of Qatar, bizarrely accusing the latter country of financing terrorism networks.

On the domestic front, Trump family members seem to be using government to fill their coffers by extracting loans for their businesses in exchange for favors. Even the appearance of impropriety and quid pro quo between the Trump family and the companies that lend it money ought to outright disqualify all those involved from policymaking and rule changes.

On the foreign policy front, the optics are even worse. If there is any link between Qatar’s refusal to grant Kushner Companies a loan and the Trump administration’s actions against that country, we can only conclude that American foreign policy is being wielded as a tool to punish those who might harm the Trump family’s business interests. Indeed, NBC reported four unnamed sources revealed that “Qatari government officials visiting the U.S. in late January and early February considered turning over to Mueller what they believe is evidence of efforts by their country’s Persian Gulf neighbors in coordination with Kushner to hurt their country,” but that ultimately, “The Qatari officials decided against cooperating with Mueller for now out of fear it would further strain the country’s relations with the White House.”

Upon accepting a position as the president’s adviser, Kushner ought to have completely divested himself from his extensive domestic and international business dealings, but he has chosen not to do so. Instead he retains more than $700 million worth of real estate holdings and related businesses. Within this context it should come as no surprise that Kushner’s security clearance was downgraded, given how easily he could be approached in efforts to trade American favors in exchange for loans or business deals.

Right from the start, Kushner and the Trump family’s businesses were considered problematic in terms of whether the Trumps would put their personal financial empires before the country’s interests. Just the appearance of the various situations Kushner has been caught in are deeply suspicious and can be traced back to the 2016 election, when he obtained a massive $285 million loan for his company’s property from Deutsche Bank. At that time the bank was engaged in a legal battle with the U.S. government over charges of mortgage fraud, which should have negated any dealings with the family member of a presidential candidate. Additionally, well into his tenure as the president’s adviser, Kushner’s sister, Nicole Kushner Meyer, was caught in China touting her brother’s new political role while trying to lure Chinese investors for her family company’s New Jersey housing development.

The politically inexperienced Kushner has also been put in charge of U.S. policy on a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet earlier this year The New York Times revealed that just before his first diplomatic mission to Israel last year, Kushner’s company received a $30 million infusion of cash from a major Israeli insurance company, Menora Mivtachim. How could Kushner possibly present himself as an impartial broker when he has investors in one of the two entities he is seeking to reconcile? If countries like Israel and China are attempting to exploit Kushner’s position, it is because Kushner has essentially given them every indication that he would like them to do so. The scope of the Trump family’s brazen financial dealings and the strong indications that they might be using the nation’s foreign policy to enrich themselves is unprecedented.

Much of what has been revealed about Kushner’s vulnerabilities are emerging through detailed, publicly available investigative news reports. Mueller’s team need only confirm the veracity of the reports to determine if Kushner’s presence in the White House gives the appearance of a serious conflict of interest. In any other time and with any other presidency, the mere whiff of personal financial gain through government positions would have been enough to generate demands for resignations and public apologies. But as we find out every day in this new reality under Trump, there seems to be no depth to which our national standards can fall in order to maintain this president’s power.

Last November, when Mueller indicted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, I wrote that the content of the indictments revealed a far more important aspect of the Trump presidency than possible collusion with Russia: how the people Trump has surrounded himself with are—like him—apparently interested in personal enrichment and greed more than anything else and appear willing to bend government rules toward that end.

As questions swirl about whether Mueller will now indict the president’s son-in-law, there are also reports that Trump is frustrated and “now views [Kushner] as a liability because of his legal entanglements, the investigations of the Kushner family’s real estate company and the publicity over having his security clearance downgraded.” But in what is the president’s habit of flip-flopping, he has alternatively expressed both support of and opposition to his son-in-law’s presence in the White House.

Meanwhile on the political front there is a deafening silence from lawmakers, especially Republicans, on the appearance of Kushner’s many conflicts of interest. If there had been even the tiniest fraction of such dealings during Barack Obama’s presidency, conservatives would have been howling louder than anyone else about impeachment or resignation. Even in the very unlikely event that it turns out Kushner’s business relations were kept scrupulously separate from his government-related work, the damage to his reputation as a U.S. government representative is done. Kushner and the entire Trump dynasty should be required to answer the question: What do they love more—their country or their money?

They cannot have it both ways.

Daniel Ellsberg’s Advice for How to Stop Current and Future Wars

Daniel Ellsberg has a message that managers of the warfare state don’t want people to hear.

“If you have information that bears on deception or illegality in pursuing wrongful policies or an aggressive war,” he said in a statement released last week, “don’t wait to put that out and think about it, consider acting in a timely way at whatever cost to yourself. … Do what Katharine Gun did.”

If you don’t know what Katharine Gun did, chalk that up to the media power of the war system.

Ellsberg’s video statement went public as this month began, just before the 15th anniversary of the revelation by a British newspaper, the Observer, of a secret NSA memo—thanks to Katharine Gun. At the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ, about 100 people received the same email memo from the National Security Agency on the last day of January 2003, seven weeks before the invasion of Iraq got underway. Only Katharine Gun, at great personal risk, decided to leak the document.

If more people had taken such risks in early 2003, the Iraq War might have been prevented. If more people were willing to take such risks in 2018, the current military slaughter in several nations, mainly funded by U.S. taxpayers, might be curtailed if not stopped. Blockage of information about past whistleblowing deprives the public of inspiring role models.

That’s the kind of reality George Orwell was referring to when he wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Fifteen years ago, “I find myself reading on my computer from the Observer the most extraordinary leak, or unauthorized disclosure, of classified information that I’d ever seen,” Ellsberg recalled, “and that definitely included and surpassed my own disclosure of top-secret information, a history of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam years earlier.” The Pentagon Papers whistleblower instantly recognized that, in the Observer article, “I was looking at something that was clearly classified much higher than top secret. … It was an operational cable having to do with how to conduct communications intelligence.”

What Ellsberg read in the newspaper story “was a cable from the NSA asking GCHQ to help in the intercepting of communications, and that implied both office and home communications, of every member of the Security Council of the UN. Now, why would NSA need GCHQ to do that? Because a condition of having the UN headquarters and the Security Council in the U.S. in New York was that the U.S. intelligence agencies promised or were required not to conduct intelligence on members of the UN. Well, of course, they want that. So they rely on their allies, the buddies, in the British to commit these criminal acts for them. And with this clearly I thought someone very high in access in Britain intelligence services must dissent from what was already clear the path to an illegal war.”

But actually, the leak didn’t come from “someone very high” in GCHQ. The whistleblower turned out to be a 28-year-old linguist and analyst at the agency, Katharine Gun, who had chosen to intervene against the march to war.

As Gun has recounted, she and other GCHQ employees “received an email from a senior official at the National Security Agency. It said the agency was ‘mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council members,’ and that it wanted ‘the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises.’ ”

In other words, the U.S. and British governments wanted to eavesdrop on key UN delegations and then manipulate or even blackmail them into voting for war.

Katharine Gun took action: “I was furious when I read that email and leaked it. Soon afterward, when the Observer ran a front-page story—‘U.S. dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war’—I confessed to the leak and was arrested on suspicion of the breach of section 1 of the Official Secrets Act.”

The whistleblowing occurred in real time. “This was not history,” as Ellsberg put it. “This was a current cable, I could see immediately from the date, and it was before the war had actually started against Iraq. And the clear purpose of it was to induce the support of the Security Council members to support a new UN resolution for the invasion of Iraq.”

The eavesdropping was aimed at gaining a second—and this time unequivocal—Security Council resolution in support of an invasion. “British involvement in this would be illegal without a second resolution,” Ellsberg said. “How are they going to get that? Obviously, essentially by blackmail and intimidation, by knowing the private wants and embarrassments, possible embarrassments, of people on the Security Council, or their aides, and so forth. The idea was, in effect, to coerce their vote.”

Katharine Gun foiled that plan. While scarcely reported in the U.S. media (despite cutting-edge news releases produced by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy beginning in early March of 2003), the revelations published by the Observer caused huge media coverage across much of the globe—and sparked outrage in several countries with seats on the Security Council.

“In the rest of the world, there was great interest in the fact that American intelligence agencies were interfering with their policies of their representatives in the Security Council,” Ellsberg noted. A result was that for some governments on the Security Council at the time, the leak “made it impossible for their representatives to support the U.S. wish to legitimize this clear case of aggression against Iraq. So the U.S. had to give up its plan to get a supporting vote in the UN.” The U.S. and British governments “went ahead anyway, but without the legitimating precedent of an aggressive war that would have had, I think, many consequences later.”

Ellsberg said: “What was most striking then and still to me about this disclosure was that the young woman who looked at this cable coming across her computer in GCHQ acted almost immediately on what she saw was the pursuit of an illegal war by illegal means. … I’ve often been asked, is there anything about the release of the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam that you regret. And my answer is yes, very much. I regret that I didn’t put out the top-secret documents available to me in the Pentagon in 1964, years before I actually gave them to the Senate and then to the newspapers. Years of war and years of bombing. It wasn’t that I was considering that all that time. I didn’t have a precedent to instruct me on that at that point. But in any case, I could have been much more effective in averting that war if I’d acted much sooner.”

Katharine Gun “was not dealing only with historical material,” Ellsberg emphasizes, she “was acting in a timely fashion very quickly on her right judgement that what she was being asked to participate in was wrong. I salute her. She’s my hero. I think she’s a model for other whistleblowers. And for a long time I’ve said to people in her position or my old position in the government: Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait till the bombs are falling or thousands more have died.”

By making her choice, Gun risked two years of imprisonment. In Ellsberg’s words, she seemed to be facing “a sure conviction—except that the government was not willing to have the legality of that war discussed in a courtroom, and in the end dropped the charges.”

As this month began, Katharine Gun spoke at a London news conference, co-sponsored by ExposeFacts and RootsAction.org (organizations I’m part of) and hosted by the National Union of Journalists. Speaking alongside her were three other whistleblowers—Thomas Drake, Matthew Hoh and Jesselyn Radack—who have emerged as eloquent American truth tellers from the NSA, State Department and Justice Department. The presentations by the four are stunning to watch.

Their initiatives, taken at great personal risk, underscore how we can seize the time to make use of opportunities for forthright actions of conscience. This truth is far from confined to what we call whistleblowing. It’s about possibilities in a world where silence is so often consent to what’s wrong, and disruption of injustice is imperative for creating a more humane future.

South Korea Leader Sees Obstacles to Denuclearizing the North

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s president said Thursday that many “critical moments” still lie ahead to end the nuclear crisis despite North Korea’s recent outreach to Seoul and Washington.

Moon Jae-in spoke before two senior Seoul officials left for the United States to brief officials about the outcome of their recent visit to North Korea.

The Seoul officials said North Korea offered talks with the United States over normalizing ties and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Seoul said the North also agreed to suspend nuclear and missile tests during such future talks.

Some experts question how sincere North Korea is about its reported offers, citing what they call its track record of using past disarmament talks to wrest aid and concessions while covertly continuing its bomb program.

According to the South Korean officials, North Korea said it has no reason to possess nuclear weapons if military threats against the country are removed and its security is guaranteed. That’s the same position North Korea has long maintained to justify its nuclear program or call for the withdrawal of 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea and a halt to annual U.S.-South Korean military drills as conditions for scrapping its nuclear program. The North sees the allies’ drills as an invasion rehearsal.

Choi Hyunsoo, spokeswoman for Seoul’s Defense Ministry, said the military will announce the schedule for the joint drills after the Pyeongchang Paralympics, which start Friday and run through March 18.

“We’ve overcome one critical moment. But there are many critical moments that we still have to go through before reaching the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and a permanent peace,” Moon said in a meeting with church leaders.

Moon still described the outcome of his envoys’ North Korea trip “a big step toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” that was possible with “a strong support” by the U.S. government.

It’s unclear whether the United States will accept the North’s reported offer for talks. President Donald Trump expressed both hope and skepticism, calling the North’s move “possible progress” that also “may be false hope.”

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking Thursday during a news conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said the United States has seen “potentially positive signals coming from North Korea” illustrated by its talks with South Korea.

“We’ve maintained very close communication with President Moon. They are keeping us well-informed of their meetings,” he said. “We’re providing them input as well.”

He said the U.S. and North Korea were still “a long ways from negotiations,” and the United States needed to remain “very clear-eyed and realistic.”

The first step is to have talks about whether to hold negotiations — “to have talks about talks,” Tillerson said.

South Korean and the U.S. plan to kick off their delayed springtime military drills next month, and how sensitively the North reacts will affect the mood of reconciliation that was revived by North Korea’s participation in last month’s Winter Olympics held in the South. The North has responded to past joint drills by the allies with fiery rhetoric and its own weapons tests.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan’s policy of pressuring North Korea does not change just because its leadership is now open to dialogue.

“We should not ease our stance, for instance relax sanctions, just because North Korea agreed to have a dialogue,” Abe told a parliamentary session on Thursday. “We should not give North Korea a reward in exchange for a dialogue.”

China, the North’s most important ally, encouraged follow-up measures while noting the progress was in part due to the suspension of both North Korean nuclear tests and U.S.-South Korean military exercises during the Olympics.

“This proves that China’s proposal of suspension for suspension was the right prescription for the problem and created basic conditions for the improvement of inter-Korean relations,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in Beijing. He said North Korea’s security concerns should be addressed in return for denuclearization.

Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are to meet at a border village in late April, when the South Korea-U.S. drills would likely be still under way. If realized, the Moon-Kim meeting would be the rivals’ third-ever summit since their 1945 division.

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Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Josh Lederman in Addis Ababa contributed to this report.

Amazon CEO’s Wealth Soars to New Heights While Trump’s Sinks

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has become the first $100 billion mogul to top Forbes’ annual rankings of the world’s richest people. But President Donald Trump’s fortune sank during his first year in office despite a surging stock market.

The Bezos milestone, revealed in Tuesday’s release of Forbes’ closely watched list, underscores the growing clout of both Bezos and the company that he founded in 1994 as an online bookstore. Forbes’ breakdown provided further evidence that serving as president isn’t the most lucrative job, even when most of the rich are getting richer.

All told, the world now holds more than 2,200 billionaires with a combined fortune of $9.1 trillion, up 18 percent from ago, according to Forbes’ calculations.

Although Trump is part of that elite group, he saw his fortune sink by about $400 million to $3.1 billion during his first year in office. The decline left him as the world’s 766th richest person, more than 200 places lower than his 544th spot on last year’s Forbes list.

Bezos seized the top ranking for the first time and has the added the distinction of becoming the first person to break the $100 billion barrier since Forbes began compiling its list in 1987. As of Feb. 9, Bezos’ wealth stood at $112 billion as of Feb. 9, up from about $73 billion last year, according to Forbes.

Most of Bezos’ fortune is tied up in Amazon stock, which soared 59 percent during the period tracked by Forbes.

Bezos has used a sliver of his wealth to buy The Washington Post — a target in Trump’s fusillades against the media — and to finance Blue Origin, a maker of rockets that aim to sell flights into space.

Meanwhile, Amazon has expanded beyond its bookselling origin to become a retailer of almost everything imaginable. It now even sells groceries in brick-and-mortar stores after its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Markets last year.

Amazon also has built a network of data centers that hosts the online services of other companies, and produces award-winning shows that compete against traditional TV networks. More recently, it branched into health care in a partnership involving Berkshire Hathaway and its CEO, Warren Buffett, whose $84 billion fortune ranks third on the Forbes list.

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and an occasional bridge partner of Buffett’s, ranks second on the Forbes list with wealth of $90 billion.

Both Gates, 62, and Buffett, 87, have committed to giving away most of their wealth while Bezos, 54, hasn’t said much about his philanthropic plans.

Second Major Storm in Days Pummels Northeast

NEW YORK—The second major storm in less than a week moved up the East Coast early Thursday, dumping heavy snow and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses from Pennsylvania to New England.

Some places saw more than 2 feet of snow by late Wednesday. Montville, New Jersey, got more than 26 inches from the nor’easter. North Adams, Massachusetts, registered 24 inches and Sloatsburg, New York, got 26 inches.

Major cities along the Interstate 95 corridor saw much less. Philadelphia International Airport recorded about 6 inches, while New York City’s Central Park saw less than 3 inches.

The storm made traveling treacherous. Thousands of flights across the region were canceled.

It was not much better on the ground. Members of the Northeastern University women’s basketball team pushed their bus back on course after it was stuck in the snow outside a practice facility in Philadelphia. The Huskies were in the city to compete in the 2018 CAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. The team posted a video of the feat on its Twitter account.

Amtrak suspended service between New York City and Boston until at least 10 a.m. Thursday. New York City’s Metro-North commuter railroad suspended service on lines connecting the city to its northern suburbs and Connecticut because of downed trees. It was not immediately known when service would be restored.

“It’s kind of awful,” said New York University student Alessa Raiford, who put two layers of clothing on a pug named Jengo before taking him for a walk in slushy, sloppy Manhattan, where rain gave way to wet snow in the afternoon. “I’d rather that it be full-on snowing than rain and slush. It just makes it difficult.”

The storm was not predicted to be as severe as the nor’easter that toppled trees, inundated coastal communities and caused more than 2 million power outages from Virginia to Maine last Friday.

It still proved to be a headache for the tens of thousands of customers still in the dark from the earlier storm — and for the crews trying to restore power to them.

In New Jersey, the state’s major utilities reported more than 300,000 customers without power by late Wednesday, with some left over from last week. Utilities across the Northeast also reported tens of thousands of homes and businesses without electricity.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning through Thursday for most of New England as the storm continued to make its way through.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, public works crews late Wednesday had a hard time keeping up with the snow.

“It’s heavy. Well, it was so warm earlier that it just melted when it hit the ground and now it’s heavy,” said Jesse Nadeau. “It’s the heaviest part of the storm right now for the next couple of hours. Heavy and wet.”

In North White Plains, New York, 10 people were taken to hospitals with symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning after running a generator inside a home, police said. All were expected to survive.

In Manchester Township, New Jersey, police said a teacher was struck by lightning while holding an umbrella on bus duty outside a school. The woman felt a tingling sensation but didn’t lose consciousness. She was taken to a hospital with minor injuries.

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Porter reported from Newark, New Jersey. Associated Press writers Michael Catalini in Morrisville, Pennsylvania; Michael Sisak and Rod Hicks in Philadelphia; Wayne Parry in Atlantic City, New Jersey; Bruce Shipkowski in Toms River, New Jersey, and Rodrique Ngowi in Worcester, Massachusetts, contributed.

Gun Legislation Passes Florida House, Goes to Governor

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—The Florida House passed a school safety bill Wednesday that includes new restrictions on rifle sales and a program to arm some teachers, sending the measure to the governor for his signature.

The vote of 67-50 reflected a mix of Republicans and Democrats in support and opposition. The measure, a response to the shootings at a Parkland high school that left 17 dead, is supported by the victims’ families.

Andrew Pollack, who lost his 18-year-old daughter Meadow in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and Ryan Petty, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Alaina, said there was enough good in the bill that it should pass.

Democratic Rep. Kristin Jacobs said she did not like the idea of arming teachers, but she voted yes. Republican Rep. Jay Fant said raising the minimum age to buy a rifle from 18 to 21 was unconstitutional, and he voted no.

“There is a cultural divide in this room, in this state and across the country. And there’s a bill before us that is not perfect,” said Democratic Rep. Kristin Jacobs, whose district includes Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

The bill would raise the minimum age to buy rifles from 18 to 21 and create a waiting period on sales of the weapons. It would also create a so-called guardian program that would let school employees and many teachers carry handguns if they go through law enforcement training and if the school district decides to participate in the program.

Other provisions would create new mental health programs for schools; establish an anonymous tip line where students and others could report threats to schools, ban bump stocks and improve communication between schools, law enforcement and state agencies.

Fant, who is running for attorney general, said the gun restrictions violate the Constitution.

“I just can’t imagine that Nikolas Cruz can commit such a heinous crime and then as a result we tell, potentially, a 20-year-old single mother living alone that she cannot purchase a firearm to defend herself,” Fant said.

The Florida Senate narrowly passed the bill Monday. Gov. Rick Scott declined to say Wednesday whether he would sign the legislation.

Scott has repeatedly said he doesn’t support arming teachers and pushed lawmakers to adopt his proposal, which called for at least one law enforcement officer in every school and one for every thousand students who attend a school.

“I’m going to take the time and I’m going to read the bill and I’m going to talk to families,” Scott told reporters.

Shooting suspect Cruz was formally charged with 17 counts of first-degree murder Wednesday, which could mean a death sentence if he is convicted.

The indictment returned by a grand jury in Fort Lauderdale also charges the 19-year-old with 17 counts of attempted murder for the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in which 17 people died and more than a dozen others were wounded.

Cruz’s public defender has said he will plead guilty if prosecutors take the death penalty off the table, which would mean a life prison sentence. Prosecutors have 45 days to decide whether they want to seek the death penalty.

James and Kimberly Snead, the couple who gave Cruz a home after his mother died late last year, testified before the grand jury. James Snead and the couple’s attorney, Jim Lewis, wore silver “17” pins to honor the victims of the shooting.

The couple is “trying to do the right thing” and is mourning along with the rest of the Parkland community, Lewis said.

“We’ll let justice take its course at this point,” Lewis said. “They still don’t know what happened, why this happened. They don’t have any answers. They feel very badly for everybody.”

Cruz told investigators he took an AR-15 rifle to his former school on Feb. 14 and started shooting into classrooms.

Jail records released by the Broward Sheriff’s Office show Cruz was being held in solitary confinement. Officers described Cruz as avoiding eye contact with deputies but also being cooperative and engaged with his visitors.

The report said Cruz “often sits with a blank stare,” asked for a Bible to read and appeared to be “smiling and giggling” during one visit with his attorneys. Investigators and psychiatrists also have visited Cruz in his single-person cell in the jail’s infirmary, where officers note his activities every 15 minutes.

His brother visited him twice, along with Roxanne Deschamps, who took in both teens after their mother died in November. Cruz lived with Deschamps only briefly before moving in with the Sneads.

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Farrington reported from Tallahassee, Florida, and Replogle reported from Parkland, Florida. Associated Press writers Gary Fineout in Tallahassee, Florida, and Freida Frisaro, David Fischer and Jennifer Kay in Miami contributed to this report.

Mexico, Canada, Others May Be Exempted From U.S. Tariffs

WASHINGTON—The White House said Wednesday that Mexico, Canada and other countries may be spared from President Donald Trump’s planned steel and aluminum tariffs under national security “carve-outs,” a move that could soften the blow amid threats of retaliation by trading partners and dire economic warnings from lawmakers and business groups.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters the exemptions would be made on a “case by case” and “country by country” basis, a reversal from the policy articulated by the White House just days ago that there would be no exemptions from Trump’s plan.

The announcement came as congressional Republicans and business groups braced for the impact of expected tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum, appearing resigned to additional protectionist trade actions as Trump signaled upcoming economic battles with China.

The looming departure of White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who has opposed the promised tariffs, set off anxiety among business leaders and investors worried about a potential trade war.

“We urge you to reconsider the idea of broad tariffs to avoid unintended negative consequences to the U.S. economy and its workers,” 107 House Republicans wrote in a letter to Trump.

The White House said Trump was expected to make a final announcement as early as Thursday and officials were working to include language in the tariffs that would give Trump the flexibility to approve exemptions for certain countries.

“He’s already indicated a degree of flexibility, I think a very sensible, very balanced degree of flexibility,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC. “We’re not trying to blow up the world.”

Trump signaled other trade actions could be in the works. In a tweet, he said the “U.S. is acting swiftly on Intellectual Property theft.” A White House official said Trump was referencing an ongoing investigation of China in which the U.S. trade representative is studying whether Chinese intellectual property rules are “unreasonable or discriminatory” to American business.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said an announcement on the findings of the report — and possible retaliatory actions — was expected within the next three weeks.

Business leaders, meanwhile, continued to sound the alarm about the potential economic fallout from tariffs, with the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raising the specter of a global trade war. That scenario, Tom Donohue said, would endanger the economic momentum from the GOP tax cuts and Trump’s rollback of regulations.

“We urge the administration to take this risk seriously,” Donohue said.

The president has said the tariffs are needed to reinforce lagging American steel and aluminum industries and protect national security. He has tried to use the tariffs as leverage in ongoing talks to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement, suggesting Canada and Mexico might be exempted from tariffs if they offer more favorable terms under NAFTA.

Lawmakers opposed to the tariffs, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have suggested more narrowly focused approaches to target Chinese imports. But members of Congress have few tools at their disposal to counter the president, who has vowed to fulfill his campaign pledge.

“I don’t think the president is going to be easily deterred,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has suggested hearings on the tariffs.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said Trump had listened to him and others who disagree with the direction of the trade policies. “I thank him for that and he’s been a good listener. The difficulty is so far I haven’t persuaded him,” Alexander said.

Republicans in Congress have lobbied administration officials to reconsider the plan and focus the trade actions on China, warning that allies such as Canada and members of the European Union would retaliate.

The EU said it was prepared to respond to any tariffs with countermeasures against U.S. products such as Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Levi’s jeans and bourbon. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem said the EU was circulating among member states a list of U.S. goods to target with tariffs so it could respond quickly.

The president plans to rally Republicans in western Pennsylvania on Saturday in support of Rick Saccone, who faces Democrat Conor Lamb in a March 13 special House election. Trump has told associates the tariffs could be helpful to the GOP cause in the election in the heart of steel country.

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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Matthew Daly and Alan Fram in Washington and Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.

Putin Praises Trump, Criticizes U.S. Political System

MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin lavished praise on President Donald Trump, but added that he was sorely disappointed with the U.S. political system, saying that it has been “eating itself up.”

Speaking in a series of interviews with Russian state television which were included in a documentary released Wednesday, Putin described Trump as a great communicator.

“I have no disappointment at all,” Putin said when asked about the U.S. president. “Moreover, on a personal level he made a very good impression on me.”

The two leaders met on the sidelines of international summits last year. Putin praised Trump as a “balanced” man, who easily gets into the gist of various issues and listens to his interlocutor.

“It’s possible to negotiate with him, to search for compromises,” Putin added.

He also noted that he spent some time talking to Melania Trump when he sat next to her during an official dinner at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in July. The Russian leader said he told her and the wife of the Italian premier “about Siberia and Kamchatka, about fishing … about bears on Kamchatka and tigers in the Far East.”

“I made some exaggerations,” the action-loving Russian leader said with a grin. “When you talk about fishing, you can’t help exaggerating.”

Asked jokingly by the interviewer if he was trying to recruit the women, the KGB veteran responded by saying: “No, I stopped dealing with that a long time ago.”

He added with a smile: “But I liked doing that, it was my job for many years.”

Venting his frustration with the U.S. political system, Putin said “it has demonstrated its inefficiency and has been eating itself up.”

“It’s quite difficult to interact with such a system, because it’s unpredictable,” Putin said.

Russia-U.S. ties long have been strained by the Ukrainian crisis, the war in Syria and other issues, and Moscow’s hopes for better ties with the U.S. under Trump haven’t materialized. Tensions have escalated further amid the ongoing congressional and FBI investigations into allegations of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Speaking about the Russia-West rift, Putin said it has been rooted in Western efforts to contain and weaken Russia.

“We are a great power, and no one likes competition,” he said.

He said he was particularly dismayed by what he described as the U.S. role in the ouster of Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president in February 2014 amid massive protests.

Putin charged that the U.S. had asked Russia to help persuade then-President Viktor Yanukovych not to use force against protesters and then “rudely and blatantly” cheated Russia, sponsoring what he called a “coup.”

Russia responded by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

“Few expected us to act so quickly and so resolutely, not to say daringly,” Putin said.

He described the Western sanctions over Crimea and the insurgency in eastern Ukraine as part of “illegitimate and unfair” efforts to contain Russia, adding that “we will win in the long run.”

“Those who serve us with poison will eventually swallow it and poison themselves,” he said.

Putin wasn’t speaking in the context of a former Russian spy who was left in critical condition, along with his daughter, after coming into contact with a mysterious substance in Britain. Some have suggested it was a poisoning in which Russia may have had a hand, even though British authorities haven’t revealed what the substance was and are still investigating. Moscow has denied any involvement.

Responding to a question about Russia’s growing global leverage, Putin responded: “If we play strongly with weak cards, it means the others are just poor players, they aren’t as strong as it seemed, they must be lacking something.”

Putin, who presented a sweeping array of new Russian nuclear weapons last week, voiced hope that nuclear weapons will never be used — but warned that Russia will retaliate in kind if it comes under a nuclear attack.

“The decision to use nuclear weapons can only be made if our early warning system not only detects a missile launch but clearly forecasts its flight path and the time when warheads reach the Russian territory,” he said. “If someone makes a decision to destroy Russia, then we have a legitimate right to respond.”

He added starkly: “Yes, it will mean a global catastrophe for mankind, for the entire world. But as a citizen of Russia and the head of Russian state I would ask: What is such a world for, if there were no Russia?”