Author: sauer@technologists.com

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Foreign Affairs: Asia After America

How U.S. Strategy Failed—and Ceded the Advantage to China

The pivot to Asia has failed. A decade and a half ago, in 2011, President Barack Obama committed to rebalancing U.S. strategy and resources to focus on the Asia-Pacific. “Let there be no doubt,” he pledged on a visit to Australia, “The United States of America is all in.” Although the phrasing changed and policymakers and politicians argued about the tactical details, Obama’s successors affirmed the logic behind the pivot, which soon became the core bipartisan assumption of American strategy. In speech after speech, U.S. officials emphasized that the only way to prevent China from dominating Asia was for the United States and its allies and partners to make a major investment in the region’s political, economic, and military stability.

Yet nearly 15 years later, U.S. leaders have still not matched their words with action. American promises to foster greater prosperity and better governance now elicit eye rolls throughout Asia. A perpetually distracted United States neglects much of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Few today are asking when the pivot will come. Instead, the question in regional capitals is how far the United States will pull back.

With the United States facing divisions at home and distractions abroad, it has become clear that deep engagement across all of Asia is no longer realistic. Yet the assumptions behind the pivot have persisted, as have the calls to finally give the effort priority. …
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CNN: Trump’s tariff troubles might not be over

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To the extent the Trump team can justify the global tariffs under this [“balance of payments” deficit] authority, they’ll need to offer a completely different justification than they’ve been using to this point.

Or they’ll have to convince judges of a rather novel reading of Section 122 in which trade deficits are balance-of-payments deficits.

But on both counts, their past arguments could come back to haunt them.

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Joyce Vance: If DOJ Is Trump’s Law Firm, Aileen Cannon Is His Judge

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The procedural history is convoluted. And I almost hesitate to inflict it on you. But it’s important because we cannot afford to forget that, no matter his reelection, Donald Trump was charged in two federal criminal cases, and those charges were never heard by a jury. In the Mar-a-Lago case, the Trump-appointed judge who handled the matter essentially refused to let it go to trial, with a series of highly questionable rulings and a healthy dose of delay. In other words, if there was a way for Judge Cannon to rule for Trump and against public disclosure, she took it at every turn, up to and including today.

Many people believe Volume II is unlikely to contain information beyond what was revealed in the detailed speaking indictment brought by the government. But Trump has fought long and hard to keep it out of public view, which has led to speculation about whether it might include new information, for instance, about his motives for keeping classified material after he left the White House and what, if anything, was done with it. For now, we don’t know the answer. But it’s hard to miss the glaring similarity to the Epstein Files, where it increasingly appears attempts to avoid disclosure were meant to protect wealthy, powerful people. Why not just release Volume II if Trump, as he says, is innocent? You’d think that might help him prove his “case” and set the matter aside for once and for all. But that is not the path he has taken.

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Atlantic: Hitler’s Greenland Obsession

After creating an economic mess with ill-advised tariffs, Hitler looked north in pursuit of resources and national security.

Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s. According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone “interested him more in his youth” than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the first team to cross Greenland’s interior. …

By April 1934, Hitler’s government had inventoried Greenland: 13,500 Eskimos, 3,500 Danes, and 8,000 sheep, as well as the world’s largest deposit of a strategic natural resource—cryolite, a mineral essential to American aluminum production. In 1938, Hermann Göring dispatched an expedition to Greenland, ostensibly to explore the island’s flora and fauna. However, Hitler’s true intent may have been not scientific, but economic—the expedition was headed by a mining engineer, Kurt Herdemerten, who had been a member of the ill-fated Wegener expedition. Hitler had inflicted countless economic wounds on his country over his five years as chancellor, and this foray into the Arctic was part of a broader effort to remedy one of them.

In a drive to move Germany toward economic self-sufficiency, Hitler had imposed draconian tariffs, refused to honor foreign-debt obligations, and sought to wean the nation off Norwegian whale-oil consumption. The problem was that Germany used whale oil not only for margarine, a staple of the German diet, but also in the production of nitroglycerin, a key component for the munitions industry. …
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Bloomberg: Hillary Clinton Urges India to Step Up on Climate

Also: the biggest US gas plant could also be a huge source of emissions

India has been urged to push forward global action on climate change even as President Donald Trump rolls back emissions reduction policies in the US.

“It is not possible for us to wait any longer,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Mumbai, addressing India’s first major national climate conference. “We cannot wait for the political change that I know will come to the United States, because that’s a few years off — we have to do the innovation and build the models here.”
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – February 20, 2026

Today, in a 6–3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found that President Donald J. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were unconstitutional.

Shortly after he took office, Trump declared that two things—the influx of illegal drugs from Canada, Mexico, and China, and the country’s “large and persistent” trade deficits—constituted national emergencies. Under these emergency declarations, he claimed the authority to raise tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
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Trump promised his supporters that foreign countries would pay the tariffs, but in fact, studies have reinforced what economists always maintained: the cost of tariffs falls on businesses and consumers in the U.S. Similarly, Trump promised his tariffs would make the economy boom and bring back manufacturing jobs, but the latest report on U.S. economic growth in the fourth quarter of last year, released just this morning, shows that tariffs and the government shutdown slowed growth to 1.4%, bringing overall growth down from 2.8% in 2024 to 2.2% in 2025.

While the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, it added only 181,000 in 2025. Manufacturing lost about 108,000 jobs in 2025.
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… Trump’s reliance on tariffs was mostly about seizing power. Trump’s advisors appear to be using the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate.
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Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that “today’s decision is…an indictment of the Court.” In August 2025, almost six months ago, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision striking down the tariffs as illegal. …
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Heather Delaney Reese: Trump sealed his own fate today

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And then, just like that, it slipped. Whatever composure he had left cracked in real time. The fury broke through. And what followed was one of the strangest, most unhinged tirades of his presidency. He called the justices “a disgrace to our nation.” He called them “fools and lapdogs.” He said they were “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” He accused the Court of being “swayed by foreign interests.” He said Gorsuch and Barrett’s decision was “an embarrassment to their families.” At one point, while defending his so-called loyalty to the Constitution, he blurted out: “I want to be a good boy.” He mused that maybe Democrats should pack the Court. And he told a bizarre story about fighting off the advances of a male business owner who “wanted to kiss him” the day before.
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Intercept: Prison-Style Free Speech Censorship Is Coming for the Rest of Us

The government wants to make it illegal to possess literature it deems dangerous — a familiar tactic to this incarcerated writer.

American prisons have never been much for the First Amendment, and now, the Trump administration is exporting prison-style censorship to the general population. In tactics that are easily recognizable to incarcerated people like me, they’re doing it in the name of “security.”

This includes claiming antiestablishment ideologies and literature must be punished because they pose nebulous risks to those with government-approved political views. It also includes the logical next step: criminalizing efforts to keep authorities from finding out that one holds those ideologies or reads that literature.

Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada is set to be tried starting Tuesday on charges of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents. He’s been in custody since July …

In plain language, Sanchez Estrada is facing up to 20 years behind bars for allegedly moving a box of anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence in his hometown of Dallas. His indictment came on the heels of Trump’s signing an executive order to classify “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” and issuing National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.
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Heather Delaney Reese: The continued disappearances of Donald J. Trump

The President of the United States went missing again. …

This is a man who lives for the camera, who has never willingly stepped away from attention, who builds his days around being seen and praised. And yet, on a day with three scheduled events, there was silence. And then, this evening, almost as if someone realized people would start asking questions, a cryptic video appeared on Truth Social. …

Which leads to the next question: when was this video actually filmed? It could have been recorded earlier today. It could have been recorded days ago. But the timing of its release tells us what matters. Three scheduled events where cameras would normally document his presence, followed by a single controlled recording distributed on his own platform, offered just enough visibility to quiet concern without actually answering the questions those concerns raise.

What we are witnessing follows a pattern that should not be dismissed. …

This is eerily familiar to what happened in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Leonid Brezhnev, followed by Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, were all visibly declining while the state continued to function as if nothing was wrong. …

In Francisco Franco’s final years, Spain followed a similar pattern. Franco was kept alive through extraordinary medical intervention while loyalists governed in his name, preserving the illusion of continuity because the regime depended on it. …
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Paul Krugman: How the Kakistocracy Became a Quackistocracy

Corruption is a germ’s best friend

Childhood vaccination is one of public policy’s greatest success stories. People who view the 1950s through rose-colored glasses, seeing them as an era of American greatness, miss many ways in which life was much worse then than now, ranging from gross racism and sexism to high poverty rates among the elderly. One often-overlooked feature of the “good old days” was that many children contracted, and some died from, infectious diseases that have now been almost eliminated — or had been almost eliminated, until today’s right-wing anti-vaccine agitators set the stage for their comeback.

In many ways the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy, which I wrote about yesterday. Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution. Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade. …

Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing. …
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Last but by no means least, in both cases it’s crucial to follow the money.
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Bill McKibben: An El Niño is brewing

And with it the next, pivotal, chapter of the climate fight.

America’s abandonment of the “endangerment finding” undergirding national climate policy is not the most important thing that happened last week. That decision was an act of gross stupidity, but it was also perfectly predictable given the people making it, and since America’s not doing anything good on climate anyway it won’t have deep immediate effect. (As is often the case, humorist Alexandra Petri had the best response). What will matter more, I think, for America and for policy going forward, is the news that we’re likely to see another El Niño soon; take this as your first warning that not only the temperature but the politics of the planet are likely to change dramatically, and soon.

We’re still in a La Niña phase in the Pacific right now—the cooler part of the cycle that meant that 2025’s global temperature was “only” the second or third highest ever, trailing 2023, the last big El Niño year. But that hot phase seems to be returning, and somewhat faster than expected. …
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