George Packer's Blog, page 237

Postscript: Johan Cruyff, Total Footballer

On April 9, 1975, Leeds United, then the best football team in England, hosted a match against Barcelona, the famous Spanish club, in the semifinal of the European Cup—the precursor to the Champions League, in which Europe’s top clubs compete. That drizzly evening, my father took me to Elland Road, Leeds’s home ground, where Johan Cruyff, the greatest player in the world, led Barca onto the pitch in their famous blue-and-purple-striped jerseys.

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The Calculated Populism of Rob Ford

In 2012, a year and a half after Rob Ford became the mayor of Toronto, the city, which had grown by nearly forty thousand people in the previous year alone, passed Chicago to become North America’s fourth-largest municipality. For more than a decade, Toronto’s transformation from a provincial capital of low-slung brick buildings and expansive parks—the small town that Ernest Hemingway knew as a young reporter for the Toronto Star Weekly in the early nineteen-twenties—had been accelerating, turning it into one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.

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A Walk in Rome in the Days of Trump
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, March 24th
How Mitt Romney and the Mormons Saved the “Never Trump” Movement

A Walk in Rome in the Days of Trump

The Roman Forum is—along with the Parthenon and the Egyptian pyramids—one of the mandatory sites for reflection on the passing of great powers, the impotence of architectural grandeur, and, these days, on the windfall profiteering of cold soda in places that attract mass tourism. Having come to spend a few days in Rome—for a book festival, the modern author’s equivalent of those pilgrimages that set ancient authors travelling from one marvel to the next—I found myself wandering through the nicely cleaned-up archeological site and brooding. It remains one of the most powerfully empathetic activities a New Yorker can engage in. It’s so exactly like walking through the future ruins of the corner of Fiftieth and Fifth: instead of the Basilica of Maxentius, the Temple of Saturn, and the three imposing columns that are all that remains of the Temple of Jupiter, there would be, facing what the guidebooks explain was once called “uptown,” the ruins of Rockefeller Center on your left, all office buildings and public plazas and sculptural reliefs as grand as can be; then, on your right, what remains of Saint Patrick’s, a religious-civic cathedral as big as imaginable; and then a few evocative fragments of Saks, once a department store as commodious as any. And not far away, a stadium in which tens of thousands of people would watch gladiators put their lives at risk in order to win the indulgence of a local oligarch. (Well, that could never happen now.) One member of my expedition, as our great-grandfathers would have written, does insist that Rome is best understood not as old New York but as an ancient Los Angeles—what with its relative proximity to the ocean, its ascent up into the hills, the long view down on its spread-out evening glitter. Either way, it’s weirdly familiar.

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The Calculated Populism of Rob Ford
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, March 24th
How Mitt Romney and the Mormons Saved the “Never Trump” Movement

Terrorists in the Family

In October, 2014, Mohammed Hamzah Khan, a nineteen-year-old engineering student from suburban Chicago, was arrested at O’Hare Airport, where he planned to board a plane to Vienna and then continue to Istanbul, on the way to join ISIS fighters in Syria. Khan’s story remained in the local news for months, and eventually became the opening of the terrorism analyst Peter Bergen’s book “United States of Jihad,” in part because he seemed an unlikely radical: high-achieving, assimilated, a good kid. But there was another interesting feature to the Khan case: his seventeen-year-old sister and sixteen-year-old brother had attempted to travel with him. Khan had carefully saved more than twenty-eight hundred dollars from his part-time job so that he could buy three tickets, not one. The letters that the Khan children had left for their parents, describing their motives, echoed one another’s language. Their parents, immigrants from India, said afterward that they were shocked, and that they had not noticed anything unusual about their son’s behavior, with the exception of an inordinate amount of time spent on his phone, which the parents did not monitor as closely as their one computer. Perhaps one reason that the Khan parents missed the evidence of their children’s radicalization was that it must have taken place partly in the most mundane of settings, in their rooms and cars, with one another.

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Brussels: An Attack on All of Europe
American Presidential Campaigns in the Age of Terror
Terror in Brussels

Obama’s Bittersweet Visit to Argentina

Earlier this year, when President Barack Obama’s first visit to Buenos Aires was announced, human-rights organizations in Argentina threatened to fill the streets in protest when he arrived. The visit was scheduled for March 24th, coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of the country’s last coup d’état and the beginning of a brutal dictatorship. During the junta’s seven-year reign, military hit squads disappeared tens of thousands of people, torturing and killing most of them and abducting hundreds of their children. As with other military interventions throughout South and Central America in the Cold War era, the Argentine coup and its consequent crimes were made partly possible by the support of the United States. For the relatives of the disappeared and sympathizers with their cause, American imperialism is as much to blame for their loss as the military itself.

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Obama and Raúl Castro’s Awkward Embrace in Cuba
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Donald Trump and the Super Tuesday II View from Mar-a-Lago

How Mitt Romney and the Mormons Saved the “Never Trump” Movement

On Tuesday night, Josh Romney, the son of the 2012 Republican Presidential nominee, attended a caucus just outside Salt Lake City, Utah, a state where the Romney family has deep historical roots and remains popular. “If we have any hope to stop Trump, any hope at all,” Josh told his fellow-Republicans, “you have to vote for Ted Cruz.”

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Jeb Bush Endorses Ted Cruz, but Donald Trump Marches On
American Presidential Campaigns in the Age of Terror
At the AIPAC Conference, Trump and Clinton Try for a Do-Over

Jeb Bush Endorses Ted Cruz, but Donald Trump Marches On

After spending much of Tuesday on television—where he bemoaned the state of Europe (Brussels, in particular), called for the legalization of torture, and pledged to eliminate the visa-waiver program that allows residents of certain foreign countries to visit the United States without going through a lengthy application process—come evening, Donald Trump switched media platforms.

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How Mitt Romney and the Mormons Saved the “Never Trump” Movement
American Presidential Campaigns in the Age of Terror
At the AIPAC Conference, Trump and Clinton Try for a Do-Over

Brussels: An Attack on All of Europe

Paris is the tourist capital of Europe, but Brussels is its real capital. A famously unglamorous city, it is home to many of the key institutions of the European Union—the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, and the European Parliament (which also meets in Strasbourg, France). It is known mostly for its high concentration of Eurocrats and postwar Brutalist architecture (outside the Old Town), and, lately, for the Islamic extremists who inhabit its drab suburb of Molenbeek, which lies to the west of the city center.

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American Presidential Campaigns in the Age of Terror
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Ukraine’s Biggest Rock Star Doesn’t Want to Go Back Into Politics—Yet

American Presidential Campaigns in the Age of Terror

In Presidential campaigns, foreign-policy questions can sound like the Regents Exam. What is the nuclear triad? Who can pronounce Srebrenica? Speaking to the Washington Post’s editorial board yesterday, Donald Trump ticked off not only the names of a few foreign-policy advisers but also their terminal degrees: “Walid Phares, who you probably know, Ph.D., adviser to the House of Representatives caucus.” He continued, “Carter Page, Ph.D.; George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy.” Those names did less to clarify Trump’s foreign-affairs positions than his speech yesterday at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual policy conference, where he insisted he would be a pro-Israeli partisan in the White House (having said just that morning that he would be neutral when it came to Israel and the Palestinians), and denounced a “culture of hatred” in Palestinian “textbooks and mosques” that has been “fomenting there for years.” The speech fit with Trump’s pattern during the past few weeks, as he has fleshed out the dynamics of a general-election campaign in which he says very different things to different audiences and hopes that no one will notice. At his rallies, he has sometimes argued that Israel should not be receiving aid from the U.S. He did not mention this to the AIPAC conferees.

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Related:
Brussels: An Attack on All of Europe
At the AIPAC Conference, Trump and Clinton Try for a Do-Over
Terror in Brussels

At the AIPAC Conference, Trump and Clinton Try for a Do-Over

“I didn’t come here tonight to pander to you about Israel,” Donald Trump said on Monday, at a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, before moving on to do precisely that. “I love the people in this room,” he said. “My daughter Ivanka is about to have a beautiful Jewish baby.” In the course of his speech, Trump tried, for the first time since announcing his Presidential candidacy, to roll out his policy on one of the thorniest issues facing American leaders. On whether he would act to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table, as President Obama has tried—and failed—to do, Trump fell on the side of a stagnant status quo. “The United States can be useful as a facilitator of negotiations, but no one should be telling Israel it must abide by some agreement made by others, thousands of miles away, that don’t even really know what’s happening,” he said. He added that Palestinian leaders who choose to resume negotiations should keep in mind “that the bond between the United States and Israel is absolutely and totally unbreakable.” Trump also excoriated the Iran nuclear deal, criticized the “weakness and incompetence” of the United Nations, and spoke of the “culture of hatred” festering among Palestinians.

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American Presidential Campaigns in the Age of Terror
Sample Questions from the Trump University Final Exam
Why the Turnout in November Should Help Hillary Clinton