There’s something that I think is at risk of being lost in all of the huggamuggah about the impeachment inquiry. We need to think very clearly about the U.S. interest in cultivating a relationship with Ukraine. To the best of my ability to determine, all of those encouraging a close relationship between Ukraine and the U.S. are either a) Ukrainians by birth or b) unreconstructed Cold Warriors. I’m not challenging anyone’s patriotism, just pointing out that just as Ireland looms larger in the thinking of Irish-Americans than would reflect the U.S.’s actual interest in Ireland, it shouldn’t be entirely surprising if Ukraine looms larger in the thinking of Ukrainian-Americans than actually reflects a more general American interest.

I’m a skeptic about cultivating a close relationship with Ukraine. It didn’t become a distinct Soviet republic until the 1950s; it had been an actual part of Russia for hundreds of years. And Russia is quite sensitive about the foreign policies of former Soviet republics. Is it really in the U.S. interest to aggravate the already tense relationship between the U.S. and Russia? Our two countries are, after all, the only places on earth equipped to render the earth uninhabitable.

I’m not sure what the point of Fareed Zakaria’s latest Washington Post column is other than that he doesn’t like Trump. Let’s start here:

This week, talks between Washington and Seoul broke down after the Trump administration demanded a 400 percent increase in what South Korea pays for the stationing of U.S. troops in that country. The annual operating cost of the U.S. military presence there is approximately $2 billion. Seoul pays a little less than half that. Trump is asking for $4.7 billion.

I think that Trump’s asking South Korea to pay more than the cost of our maintaining troops in South Korea was dumb. Presumably, he thought he was at the beginning of a negotiation rather than in the middle of one in which the price had already been established (less than half the cost) and he didn’t know what the insult price was. Blowing up the talks with the increase was outrageous but thinking that South Korea should be paying more isn’t. We should have a plan for increasing South Korea’s tithe until it’s at least the full cost. South Korea isn’t a poor, broken down country. It’s one of the most prosperous countries in Asia and, indeed, a competitor. Signalling to them that under the circumstances they should be carrying more of the freight isn’t that bad an idea.

Or this:

Trump’s impulse everywhere is to quit the field. He has done so in the Middle East, ceding U.S. foreign policy to his favorite strongmen, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The American withdrawal from northern Syria has handed over a large swath of the country to Turkey and bolstered Russia, Iran and the Bashar al-Assad regime. When Republican senators complained about the abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, who lost 10,000 troops supporting the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State, Trump’s response was to let Erdogan show them a propaganda video claiming that our allies were actually terrorists.

I don’t honestly know what “Trump’s impulse” is. I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t understand the man. IMO Mr. Zakaria is misstating what actually happened. Were the Kurds “supporting the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State” or were they defending their homeland? What’s the U. S. interest in Syria? I don’t think that establishing Kurdish homeland there is and, presumably, neither do the Turks. I also think that Erdogan’s Turkey is a major problem but, again, what’s the U.S. interest?

The Trump administration has also given up on support for broad-based norms and values. It withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council, ceding the field to countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. The American Civil Liberties Union has charged that the Trump administration has ended all cooperation with international human rights monitors in the United States. Trump’s tariffs have rocked the free-trade system, perhaps irretrievably. This week, the administration reversed the long-standing U.S. position that Israeli settlements violate international law.

IMO Mr. Zakaria should look at the membership of the UNHCR, present and past. It has included and presently includes members who are not signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m not sure how much value there is in being a member of a committee that can’t even agree on what human rights are. That’s a persistent misconception of internationalists. There is no global consensus on human rights. In the absence of such a consensus anything else is just wishful thinking.

There’s a lot in the column about what Mr. Zakaria is against but next to nothing about what he’s for. I have some questions for him.

1. Why was replacing the Assad regime either with Al Qaeda or DAESH in the U.S. interest? Those were the only alternatives. There were no liberal democrats waiting in the wings to take over.
2. The concept behind the system of “forward deployments” put in place in the decade following World War II was that we would provide security from the surplus we realized as being the only major industrial economy left intact by the war. China is now capturing that surplus. The circumstances have changed. Why doesn’t it make sense for the arrangement to change?
3. Kemalist Turkey was the country that joined NATO. Why is Islamist Turkey still a NATO member?
4. Finally, why is invading one country after another internationalist while avoiding such invasions is isolationist?

I’m still waiting for the overnight polls to come out before making any more observations about the impeachment inquiry. I doubt that anyone’s listening any more.

The New York Times panel rates the winners and losers of last night’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate (in descending sequence): Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Steyer. Notice anything about that list? It’s not until you get to the fifth candidate on the list that we encounter someone who actually has a chance of winning and overall the candidates in the bottom five are more likely to win than those in the top five.

What does that tell us?

1. Debate performance is irrelevant.
2. The NYT panel is completely out of touch.
3. The candidates are completely out of touch.
4. The members of the NYT panel really don’t like Tulsi Gabbard (the only candidate actually running on a foreign policy platform).
5. Each of Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Joe Biden have more Washington political experience than all of the other candidates put together
6. Nothing
7. Other

Offhand I’d say we all lost that debate.

A regular commenter brought the clip above to my attention. In it the Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell distinguishes among four categories of crime fiction. It’s short and I encourage you to watch it but here’s an even briefer summary.

In “Westerns” there is no law and the protagonist imposes law on a lawless territory. In “Northerns” there is a flawless legal system in place which is effective in enforcing the law. In “Easterns” the legal system is corrupt; it must be fixed from the inside. In “Southerns” not just the legal system but everything is thoroughly corrupt—it must be fixed from outside.

I would point out that this taxonomy doesn’t just apply to crime fiction but to sci-fi in the movies and television and even medical dramas. Star Trek is a Northern. Star Wars is an Eastern. Serenity is a Western. There are even a few isolated Southerns (Riddick).

It occurred to me that it is productive to look at the way that different groups view the political drama that has been unfolding since 2016 using Gladwell’s prism. Democrats tend to look at the last nearly three years as a Northern. The system is working well to rid itself of a criminal. The Republicans, not terribly surprisingly, see it as a Southern—a man comes from outside to fix a thoroughly corrupted system.

I view it as an Eastern with the needed reform yet to appear.

Imagine that what you like and what you can’t stand are different from the preferences of other people. That shouldn’t be too hard. To some degree that’s true of all of us. Now imagine that you can make broad generalizations about those preferences based on what part of the country people live in. There’s actually some evidence to support that, as this article from Atlantic points out:

Rentfrow had a breakthrough in 2013, when he and others published a study that suggested the U.S. has three “psychological regions.” The first, in the Midwest and parts of the Southeast, is “friendly and conventional.” It has high levels of extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—three more of the big-five personality traits. “The characteristics of this psychological region suggest a place where traditional values, family, and the status quo are important,” the authors wrote. (The southern United States also tends to be more courageous, according to his research.)

In a second region, which consists of the West Coast, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southwest, meanwhile, Americans tend to be “relaxed and creative,” the authors wrote. People in these areas are very open—another big personality measure, marked by a tendency toward curiosity, variety, and imagination—but rank comparatively low on most all other traits. “In general, the qualities of this region depict a place where open-mindedness, tolerance, individualism, and happiness are valued,” the authors noted.

Finally, there’s the “temperamental and uninhibited” region, which consists of the Northeast and, to some extent, Texas. These states have higher neuroticism than the others and are moderately high on openness. “This particular configuration of traits depicts the type of person who is reserved, aloof, impulsive, irritable, and inquisitive,” he wrote. To which we on the East Coast say, You talkin’ to me?

Get that? Your ideas of what’s good, what’s bad, how you want to live may differ from those of people in other parts of the country. That you’re right and they’re wrong is far too simplistic a way of looking at it. Their history, culture, experiences, and relative preferences are just different from yours. Your idea of heaven and that of your neighbors may be different from that of mine and my neighbors. It might even be my hell.

Sounds like a darned good case for federalism to me.

The Hill reports a significant change in the attitudes of independents towards the impeachment inquiry:

Opposition by independents to the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry jumped 10 percentage points in the last week, according to a Politico–Morning Consult poll released Tuesday.

The poll showed 47 percent of independents opposed the inquiry, compared to 37 percent last week. Meanwhile support for the inquiry by independents fell 7 points to 40 percent.

Support for the inquiry among all respondents fell 2 points to 48 percent, while opposition to it rose 3 points to 45 percent.

That is going in the wrong direction for House Democrats.

That is not a statement about the president’s guilt or innocence or whether what the president did was right or wrong. I am simply pointing out that if the House Democrats expected their impeachment inquiry to foster support for impeachment, they must surely be disappointed. So far it isn’t happening.

The editors of the New York Times are lambasting the Chinese authorities, too:

“Ying shou jin shou” — “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

The echo of “1984,” “Brave New World” or “Fahrenheit 451” is unmistakable. But this is not dystopian fiction. It’s a real bureaucratic directive prepared by the Chinese leadership, drawing on a series of secret speeches by Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader, on dealing ruthlessly with Muslims who show “symptoms” of religious radicalism.

There’s nothing theoretical about it: Based on these diktats, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in the western Xinjiang region have been rounded up in internment camps to undergo months or years of indoctrination intended to mold them into secular and loyal followers of the Communist Party.

This modern-day totalitarian brainwashing is revealed in a remarkable trove of documents leaked to The New York Times by an anonymous Chinese official. The existence of these re-education camps has been known for some time, but nothing before had offered so lucid a glimpse into the thinking of China’s bosses under the fist of Mr. Xi, from the obsessive determination to stamp out the “virus” of unauthorized thought to cynical preparations for the pushback to come, including how to deal with questions from students returning to empty homes and untended farms.

That the world should put up with such outrageous behavior to preserve the flow of cheap manufactured goods beggars credulity. Every assumption that underpinned the U. S.’s opening up of discourse and trade with China has failed. It is primarily helping the Chinese authorities and a handful of ultra-rich people in the developed world.

There is a rather chilling account of the Chinese authorities’ treatment of China’s Uighur people in the Sydney Morning Herald which deserves your attention:

Gulmire Zunun had been living in Australia for nine years and was looking forward to her father visiting from China. He was in his late 70s so he didn’t want to delay.

Australia gave her dad a visa and he headed for the airport. But China’s immigration authorities blocked him. After turning him back, China’s authorities questioned the former school teacher.

They kept him under close scrutiny in his home city of Urumchi, capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in far northwestern China. Yes, his crime was to be a member of the Uighur ethnic minority.

Two years later, Beijing launched its mass round-up of Uighurs to send them into its vast complex of detention centres, part of a system The Economist magazine calls “Apartheid with Chinese characteristics”. The authorities picked up the old man, then aged 81.

He was told that he was being sent to live in an aged care facility, according to Gulmire, who lives in Sydney with her husband and two children.

But her dad was healthy and wanted to stay in his home. He explained that he had relatives who were happy to visit to give him any care he might need in future. To no avail. He disappeared into a so-called aged care facility where no visitors were allowed.

He was released after two years, near death. Zunun Niyazi died 20 days later, on August 26. “People are released before they die so they don’t become statistics in the camps,” Gulmire explains.

Read the whole thing.

The Chinese authorities consider Han Chinese peasants as barely human and the Uighurs as not even that. The Chinese authorities are fascists engaging in a genocide of the Uighurs in a search for ethnic and cultural purity. Characterizing it as “apartheid” is giving those authorities too much credit. It’s worse.