President to unveil an 'America First' strategy organized around protecting Americans and promoting prosperity.
President Donald Trump will deliver remarks Monday afternoon on his new national security strategy, a comprehensive set of priorities, challenges, and proposed solutions required by law of every administration since that of Ronald Reagan. Appropriately, Trump will deliver his Monday speech at the federal building across the street from the White House named after the 40th president.
Trump’s “America First” national security strategy is organized around four pillars: protecting the American people and the homeland, promoting American prosperity, preserving peace through strength, and advancing American influence in the world. “Strengthening our sovereignty—the first duty of a government is to serve the interests of its own people—is a necessary condition for protecting those four national interests,” reads a draft version of the strategy paper obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “And as we strengthen our sovereignty, we will renew confidence in ourselves as a nation.”
This focus on American sovereignty pervades throughout the paper. Drafted chiefly by National Security Council staffer Nadia Schadlow, the NSS reflects Trump’s emphasis on what he has often called “principled realism.” The view champions American values as worth securing but downplays the utility of expressing those values as a tool in national security. Read more...
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| Mark It Down—“No, I’m not” - President Donald Trump, asked if he is planning on firing special counsel Robert Mueller, December 17, 2017. |
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| My colleague Andrew Egger has more on the push by Trump allies for the president to ditch Mueller: President Trump told reporters Sunday evening that he is not considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation into Russian election meddling has been a constant irritant to the White House. At the same time, however, Trump and his allies are stepping up their campaign to discredit Mueller, who has come under Republican fire following reports that several members of his team possessed anti-Trump animus.
Investigator Peter Strzok, whom Mueller removed from his team in August, reportedly sent texts to a colleague in 2016 disparaging Trump and saying that Hillary Clinton “just has to win.” Another prosecutor, Andrew Weissman, has drawn criticism as well for his support of the Clinton campaign and an email he sent acting Attorney General Sally Yates praising her for refusing to enforce Trump’s travel ban. |
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President Trump and congressional Republicans have nearly achieved their largest legislative victory of the year: a sweeping tax reform package that is all but guaranteed to pass through Congress early this week. But even in their moment of victory, Republicans have an irritating problem: their plan, which has been savaged in the press as a bailout for the wealthy, remains unpopular.
The bill’s backers are spending the closing days of the year trying to sell their vision of the package as a tax cut for the middle class. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called the bill’s likely passage an “historic moment” that would provide real tax savings to working people as early as next February.
“It’s a very complicated tax system, and this is about simplifying it,” Mnuchin said. “This is all about creating a tax system that’s good for workers, good for working families… Over 90 percent of Americans are going to fill out taxes on that postcard or a virtual electronic postcard.” Read more... |
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| Useful Tool—This simple tax calculator from Maxim Lott seems like a fair arbiter for figuring out how the Republican tax bill, in its final version, will affect you. |
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Must-Read of the Day—Read Andrew Ferguson in the new issue of the magazine on Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone, and how the counterculture became The Man. The key line: “The key to the boomer elite has been rhetorical egalitarianism and functional elitism.”
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| Senate Watch—John McCain, who is battling the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma, is heading back to his state of Arizona after spending several days at Walter Reed hospital recovering from chemotherapy. “McCain left Washington Sunday and is heading back to his home state to spend the holidays with his family,” CBS News reports. “He will not be on hand for the final vote on the GOP tax passage expected for early this week. It is unclear when McCain might return to Washington.” |
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| Column of the Day—One of President Trump’s big foreign policy victory that few have seemed to notice: the war against the Islamic State. Here’s more from Ross Douthat at the New York Times: There is nothing more characteristic of the Trump era, with its fire hose of misinformation, scandal and hyperbole, than that America and its allies recently managed to win a war that just two years ago consumed headlines and dominated political debate and helped Donald Trump himself get elected president — and somehow nobody seemed to notice.
I mean the war against the Islamic State, whose expansion was the defining foreign policy calamity of Barack Obama’s second term, whose executions of Americans made the U.S.A. look impotent and whose utopian experiment drew volunteers drunk on world-historical ambitions and metaphysical dreams. Its defeat was begun under Obama, and the hardest fighting has been done by Iraqis — but this was an American war too, and we succeeded without massive infusions of ground troops, without accidentally getting into a war with Russia, and without inspiring a huge wave of terrorism in the West.
Why haven’t we noticed this success? One reason is the nature of our victory: As Max Abrahms and John Glaser wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times, the defeat of the Islamic State didn’t happen the way many foreign policy hawks envisioned, because it didn’t require also going to war with Bashar al-Assad or creating a new Syrian opposition army. At the same time, it happened more easily than intervention skeptics feared — so there isn’t a pundit chorus, right or left, ready to claim vindication in the victory. |
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| Hezbollah Watch—This detailed investigation by Josh Meyer at Politico is a damning indictment of the Obama administration and its foreign policy. The suggested scandal involves Obama officials at the Justice Department putting roadblocks in the way of a Drug Enforcement Agency operation to connect the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization with drug trafficking. |
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