Yesterday’s big news was that Tucker Carlson had left or been removed from Fox News while Don Lemon was removed from CNN. I don’t watch cable news or pay any attention to it so neither move means a great deal to me.

Various explanations have been proffered for Carlson’s departure but what seems the most likely to me is that following the settlement of the Dominion suit Fox is looking to change its highly partisan stance and Carlson was seen as an impediment to that. Similarly with CNN and Lemon.

The two situations aren’t completely parallel. Mr. Carlson was by far the most popular figure on Fox News. Clearly, he was giving his audience what they wanted. There are a number of onscreen personalities as or more popular than Don Lemon on CNN.

In my view there needs to be a sharp line of demarcation, what used to be called a “Chinese wall”, between the news and opinion segments in news media. That pertains to cable news, broadcast news, print news, and online. Such lines have eroded over the last couple of decades and the decline in confidence in journalists more generally can be related to that erosion. It will not be easy to restore the credibility that has been lost.

An alternative solution would be explicitly partisan news outlets as they have in the UK. I believe those can only work with libel laws like those in the UK which are not nearly as rigorous as ours have been. I suspect with the increasing visual orientation of the media we will see an attendant increasingly agonistic tone. That’s completely consistent with the “point of view” approach to journalism that has replaced the “5Ws” style.

I disagree with Richard Haass’s remarks at Project Syndicate concerning Northern Ireland. Here’s the meat of it:

Some of what explains the accord’s success is specific to Northern Ireland. But other factors have broader relevance, providing guidance for approaching conflicts elsewhere, even the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The most fundamental lesson is that diplomacy can succeed only where and when other tools cannot. Successive British prime ministers – Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair – created a context that by the late 1990s gave diplomacy a chance. This required two things: First, the UK introduced sufficient security forces so that those in Northern Ireland who sought to shoot their way to power could not succeed. Violence could not be prevented from disrupting lives, but it was not allowed to create political facts.

Everything he says in the balance of the piece might well be true but he leaves out an important development. In the late 1990s the IRA was largely being financed by private contributions from the Irish diaspora, particularly Irish Americans. You couldn’t go into an Irish pub here in Chicago without somebody passing the can for contributions at some point. Everybody knew where the contributions went.

But then disaster struck on September 11, 2001. The U. S. experienced a major terrorist attack of its own and nearly overnight the contributions dried up. Terrorist attacks just weren’t that romantic any more.

When the contributions dried up the bargaining table looked a lot more attractive.

This piece by Alexey Gusev at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is hard to excerpt meaningfully but easy to summarize: there is no practical way to divide Russia into statelets. If it happens at all it is unlikely to happen peacefully.

The feature above was shown yesterday on ABC’s This Week. I found it interesting but unsatisfying. For example, there was no mention of an earlier wargame with a similar scenario I reported on a few weeks ago. As you may recall the outcome of that session was that Japanese preparedness was an absolute essential.

There’s an old joke. Two diplomats are attending the funeral of a third diplomat. After standing there, solemnly, for a while, one turns to the other and asks “I wonder what he means by this?” The editors of the Wall Street Journal take note of something interesting:

China’s Ambassador Lu Shaye was asked on Friday on French TV whether he considered Crimea to be part of Ukraine under international law. In 2014 Russia occupied and annexed Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

Mr. Lu didn’t stop at Crimea. “Even these ex-Soviet Union countries do not have effective status, as we say, under international law because there’s no international accord to concretize their status as a sovereign country,” Mr. Lu said. The “as we say” is a nice diplomatic touch since the only international law that Beijing recognizes is what serves its increasingly imperial interests.

The diplomat is saying that the many countries that declared their independence when the Soviet Union dissolved aren’t independent at all. That would include Ukraine, but also the three Baltic states, Moldova, and the countries of central Asia like Georgia and Kazakhstan. The clear implication is that Russia is justified in its attempt to conquer Ukraine, and perhaps the other countries too.

At one level that’s a bit of sophistry. If taken at face value he is saying that in China’s opinion Article 2 of the United Nations charter is meaningless. Even the United States which has many treaties with Canada and Mexico respecting our shared borders, does not have an “international accord” securing that border other than bilateral ones. Very few countries have actual international accords on their boundaries. In more specific terms he is asserting China’s right to attack or invade Taiwan at any time and that such an act of aggression would not be a violation of China’s obligations under the UN Charter.

That leaves we me to wonder what he meant by that?

Joseph Addison once observed that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. As if to instantiate that claim, outgoing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has made a very good observation to the members of the African American Mayors Association, report on here at Crain’s Chicago Business by Judith Crown:

Noting that the city of Chicago procures $4 billion in goods and services every year, she said, “Surely some of those contracts can go to Black- and Brown- and women- and veteran-owned businesses. It’s different tools and levers that we can pull, but it’s all centered around equity and righting historic wrongs.”

The mayor may not be aware of it but 11% of city contracts are let to black-owned businesses, 14% to businesses owned by Hispanics, and 7% to businesses owned by “Asians”. I put that in quotation marks because I despise that classification, lumping as it does people from very different backgrounds into one single classification. Chicago’s population is 29.2% black, 28.7% Hispanics, and 6.8% “Asian” (no further breakdown to distinguish between Middle Eastern, Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.). I don’t much like the term “Hispanic” either but that’s a topic for another post.

In other words the city contracts let to black-owned businesses and Hispanic-owned businesses are substantially below their percentage of the population. Why?

There are actually several good reasons and none of them is directly related to racism: clout, business strategy, and fiduciary responsibility.

“Clout’, defined by Mike Royko 50 years ago as “political influence, as exercised through patronage, fixing, money, favors, and other traditional City Hall methods” is what accomplishes practically everything in Chicago and I have little doubt that it is essential in allocating city contracts. Clout depends less on what what your political influence is now than upon what it has been and will be. Chicago’s black population is declining and in all likelihood will continue to do so.

Racial “set sides” place minority-owned businesses in a peculiar situation. As these businesses grow they need to make a decision. They can depend on racial set sides until they reach a certain size and profitability. They can either stop growing or start competing with some very large businesses which potentially means they’ll get even less in the way of city contracts.

And, of course, believe it or not small elements of fiduciary responsibility actually leak into this tidy system. Even black-owned businesses must be qualified, i.e. they must have the skills and wherewithal to execute the contracts they’re receiving. Furthermore limiting the size a company can reach to remain qualified for racial set asides is a form of basing the decision on need.

So there you have it. it’s darned hard to let more contracts to black-owned and Hispanic-owned businesses.

An interview of Robert D. Kaplan by John Waters at RealClearDefense caught my eye. This snippet follows introductions, questions about classical thought, remarks about chaos, etc:

What is your critique of the Biden Administration?

I disagree with how the administration has framed the Ukraine War. For example, when James Baker III put together a coalition of three dozen countries to help eject Iraq from Kuwait, most of those countries were autocracies but James Baker didn’t care. There was enough of a common interest to work together but not a demand that everyone align totally on ideology. Now, we’ve framed the struggle in Ukraine as “democracy versus autocracy” and that is wrong. It should be framed as an invasion of a sovereign nation and a violation of the rules-based order.

Your book is instructive to political leaders and policymakers. Both have committed many errors since the end of World War Two. I’ll spare you the list of failed foreign interventions. But do you believe we are led by foolish people?

No. We’re led by brilliant people who are part of a technocratic elite. They are specialists. They know all about specific regimes and histories, and they know a lot about dictators. It’s all you read about in the newspapers. Elites live in the realm of ideas and dictators repress ideas and so they think these people are in fact the worst thing possible. Elites take their order and well-to-do lives for granted. But the problem in most of the world is how to erect an orderly system in the first place.

I’m curious how Mr. Kaplan thinks the Biden Administration can defend our participation in the war in Ukraine on the basis of a rules-based order while we bomb Serbia, invade Iraq, participate in the overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi, support the rebels in Syria, and aid the Saudis in making war on Yemen. How any of those actions that fit in with defending national sovereignty and a rules-based order is unclear to me and is not explored in the interview. I will only add that we have forfeited any moral high ground in pursuit of I’m not precisely sure what.

On the subject of the brilliance and wide-reaching expertise of our political leadership I’m going to restrain myself. I would certainly like to see examples of the brilliance of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy. Other than getting elected in what does their expertise reside? Quite to the contrary I think that our political leadership are canny navigators of the political waters that has complacent experts, some of whom may actually be brilliant, on whom they can rely to support their less-than-brilliant decisions.

But none of those is the point I actually wanted to make. I think there’s something that Mr. Kaplan fails to understand. There are multiple ways of maintaining order, e. g. by force, by virtue, or by consensus. Any rules-based order must be based on one of more of those. On what is there an an international consensus? I have no idea.

Indeed, I don’t there’s is a consensus within the U. S. any more. Once upon a time there was a consensus, loosely based on the popular understanding of our founding documents, e.g. the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, some of Lincoln’s addresses, etc. What’s the American consensus now? I don’t believe there is one.

The White House and the House of Representatives appear to be digging in their heels. Will we raise the debt ceiling and does it matter?

I wish that Mark Leonard had developed the thoughts he expresses in his piece at Japan Times about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s strategy more thoroughly. He does a pretty good job in outlining the weaknesses in the U. S. approach but doesn’t do as well in the part I actually read the piece for. Here’s the kernel:

By contrast, China — whose only treaty ally is North Korea — realizes that it cannot win a contest between competing alliances. Xi’s strategy therefore is to appeal to the non-Western world’s general preference for optionality and nonalignment. Presenting himself as the champion of these principles, he has developed a different notion of “democracy” based on the ability of all countries to emancipate themselves from Western dominance. This concept featured heavily in his rhetoric when he met with Putin in Moscow.

The contest between these two visions is deliberately asymmetrical. While the United States is betting on a polarized world, China is doing everything it can to advance a more fragmented one. Rather than trying to replace the U.S., it wants to be seen as a friend and ally to developing countries that want to have a greater say.

One of the problems is that I don’t think that any of that is true. I think that President Xi is trying to promote what he sees as China’s rightful place in the world—as the leading nation to which all other countries give deference.