Category Archives: Politics – international

Why you should read The Art of the Impossible

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The Sydney book launch for my blog history on the election of Donald Trump – The Art of the Impossible – is tonight. Not sure how many would show up to hear me talk about my book, but as very good luck would have it, my presentation will be preceded by Ross Cameron and Mark Latham discussing Donald Trump and my book. But then it will be me, and what a pair of tough acts to follow. However, I also have some things to say. So for those of you who cannot make it, this is a brief rundown of what I will say on the night if there is enough time.

1) I am endlessly grateful to both Ross and Mark for agreeing to help put this book on the map. I’m not sure I would have come along myself if they had not agreed to come. But there they will be and then it will be myself.

2) My aim is to explain why I wrote the book as a means to explain why others might find value and entertainment in reading it.

3) Reasons to read the book:

a) It will explain how essential for our future welfare and well being it was that DJT became president. It is not just that we don’t have Hillary, but that we don’t have any of the other Republicans who were running. The way in which Trump’s agenda is held up not just by the courts but also by the Republican Congress should be all the reminder you need that if the log jams in solving our problems is ever to be broken, Trump is the only one who might possibly do it.

b) It reminds you of how much opposition there was and is to everything DJT is trying to do, which for most of us on this side of the fence are the things we ourselves want done. Dealing with the disastrous residue of eight of the most destructive years in American politics under Obama’s terms as president have left major problems that need urgent attention.

c) The book is utterly unique in being made up entirely of blog posts that were written at the time and in the moment. There is no looking back at what happened in the knowledge that Trump became president. The posts all reflect the personal concern that some other Republican might get the nomination – which was not necessarily a catastrophe although I think no one else could have won – but more crucially once DJT became the nominee why it was essential that he won and Hillary lost. The book brings back to life some of the tension that never disappeared throughout the campaign and which reached a crescendo in that last week before the election itself.

d) It reminds you of the issues at stake. The fantastic fog and misdirection laid down by the media obscures almost everything that is essential. You are reminded of the kinds of things Trump represented, but also how if he did nothing else other than not be Hillary Clinton that he would have achieved an enormous amount. That he is carefully working to put his policy agenda in place will only come back to you if you are first reminded of that that agenda was. The book makes that agenda clear.

e) It is a primer in conservative political thought. I think of myself as conservative in the most traditional Burkean sense. I therefore think about every political issue from a conservative perspective. We in the West have a long historical tradition of doing things in particular ways with a set of values in place that have been built on our Judeo-Christian heritage. It has brought us prosperity and a measure of civic peace and tolerance unknown anywhere else across the globe. It is this world I wish to see preserved even though I know change in so many directions is inevitable. And while hardly anyone else sees Trump as a conservative, I most certainly do. It may take one to know one, but I absolutely and without question see DJT as a fellow conservative.

f) The posts are made up of three different elements each of which is interesting in their own right:

i) A description of the most important events during the campaign, discussed as they occurred
ii) My commentary on these events
iii) The various articles and posts put up by others that I thought were relevant

g) The book can therefore be read in a number of ways:

i) Starting from page 1 and finishing on page 389 (or page 2 if that’s how it strikes you)
ii) Opening the book and starting anywhere you like and then continuing anywhere else you like, either going forward or backwards into the past either sequentially or at random
iii) Reading my commentary and leaving out the rest or
iv) Reading the articles written by others and leaving out my commentary.

h) This is oddly a different kind of history. There have been personal memoirs of individuals who have been in the midst of events. But what blogging has done has been to introduce a kind of memoir by someone who was no more than a spectator but one who was nevertheless as able to remain involved with events even though living literally at the other end of the world.

i) But as far away as I might have been, I did see Donald Trump speak on the very day that finally ignited the campaign that would send him to the White House. And although having lived in Australia since 1975, I grew up in North America and have a North American understanding of the American political system, with my first political memory going back to “I like Ike” which makes it no later than 1956! Beyond just that, I have been part of the political world in Australia and tangentially internationally, having worked for the Chamber of Commerce in Canberra. And it’s by no means my first book but my ninth (with a tenth that has now come after this one). And to that we may add my interest in political and economic theory and history, all of which is the background for my blogging which is the art of the instantaneous reaction to events.

4) And if I have time after I have said all of this, I intend to read three sections from the book: (i) the first post discussing Obama’s America which was written on arriving in New York in July 2015; (ii) my reaction to hearing Trump speak ten days later; and then (iii) my post on “Sunshine Conservatives” which I wrote a month before the election in which I described and discussed the #NeverTrump crowd who are pretend conservatives at best, with no common sense and none of the grit needed to get anything done worth doing.

The book turned out to be better than I had any right to hope it would be. You can buy it here if you can’t make it on the night. I will let you know what Ross and Mark said after it is all over.

Art of the Impossible Sydney book launch this Thursday

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For those who can’t make it to Sydney you can buy your copy online from Connor Court at this link. But for those who can:

Mark Lathan & Ross Cameron introducing Dr Steven Kates “The Art of the Impossible” –  Sydney 27 April

Join Mark Latham and Ross Cameron as they discuss candidly the Trump election win before introducing Dr Steven Kates to speak about his new book “The Art of the Impossible: A Blog History of the Election of Donald J Trump as President“.

“The book is a complete compilation of my blogs on the 2016 American presidential election beginning in July 2015 as the election cycle began and ending with the tallying of the votes which was completed on November 9, 2016. It is a blog history, and may be the very first of its kind.”

Dr Steve Kates was the Chief Economist for the Australian Chamber of Commerce for 24 years and a Commissioner on the Productivity Commission. He is now associate professor of economics in the College of Business at RMIT University in Melbourne.

 

This LibertyWorks event is proudly co-sponsored by Connor Court and Australian Taxpayers Alliance.

When: Thur 27 April from 6:15 pm
Where: Metropolitan Hotel, Sydney
Early bird tickets can be purchased HERE for $15 inc complimentary drink. (Note: LibertyWorks financial members attend for free but you must reserve tickets)

International election scorecards

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And now in France.

 

And in other election-related news:

WASH POST SHOCK POLL: Trump still beats Clinton, 43%-40%...

While at the other end of the spectrum:

Merkel’s populist foes in disarray as Germany defies Trump surge…

That must be why having stability like in North Korea is so important.

FRENCH ELECTION UPDATE: This could explain quite a bit: The crisis sends in its calling card. The concluding para with all the ones before it worth your time:

An entire generation of Europeans is facing economic stagnation and internal cultural exile in their own countries. That is surely explosive and would normally lead obviously to what Spengler calls an extraordinarily dangerous French moment. What is truly scandalous is how long it has taken to recognize the smash. The crises of globalization is only belatedly being acknowledged after years of denial by the mainstream press. A Narrative that stubbornly characterized Brexit as an irrational aberration and Trump as joint product of Russian hacking and bigotry may now reluctantly face the fact that a genuine challenge to the world order now exists.

Cleaning up after Obama

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Donald Trump has followed the worst president in American history. Here is Daniel Greenfield discussing the foreign policy mess that must now be dealt with, but also how it arose in the first place. As he writes, it was hard for Obama to follow any kind of consistency since his number one aim was to support America’s enemies, but sometimes the really bad guys were on opposite sides in different theatres of war which made it hard for him to choose. Here is a sample from the article but read the lot about the guy the left incredibly wishes were still president.

Obama’s foreign policy was a wildly inconsistent mess. The Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn’t quite decide if he was a humanitarian interventionist or a pacifist non-interventionist. He couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to take the side of the Sunnis or the Shiites in their Islamic unholy war. He didn’t know if he wanted to appease Russia or sanction it, to pivot to Asia or run the other way, to play another round of golf or replace his defense secretary for the fifth time. . . .

The Islamist democracy proponents got Obama to kick off the Arab Spring. When Gaddafi shot the Islamists in the streets, the interventionists got him to sign on to regime change in Libya. But then Syria boiled down to Sunni and Shiite Islamists shooting each other and interventionism hit a roadblock.

Obama stopped at his own Red Line and couldn’t figure out what to do next. His foreign policy had somehow boiled down to helping Shiites kill Sunnis in Iraq and helping Sunnis kill Shiites in Syria.

The left has no foreign policy since they side with every form of anti-American group across the world. Cuba, Iran, Islamists, or whoever is around at the time. It is now Trump’s role to straighten out the crooked road left behind, but must do it without the support of 90% of those who make a living by writing or reading from scripts (such as actors, journalist, newsreaders, public “servants” and academics).

Guess who was “a supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War”

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Can this possibly be true and not common knowledge? From: This is the open scandal that Congress should investigate:

John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”

This is just a throw-away para and is entirely by-the-way in discussing the role of international agencies in trying to subvert Trump’s run for president which is in and of itself an extraordinary scandal. From Wikipedia:

In 1976, he voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall in the presidential election; he later said that he viewed it as a way “of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.”

And this was the man who headed the CIA from 2013 until January! How does one keep up with all of the skulduggery and deceit? You can read the entire episode here told by Brennan himself from his own perspective. How did this man get top security clearance never mind the job running the CIA?

FWIW I picked this up at Instapundit where none of the comments even so much as glanced at Brennan’s personal history. Does none of this any longer even matter?

Ross Cameron and Mark Latham to launch The Art of the Impossible: Sydney April 27 @ 6:15pm

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Ross Cameron and Mark Latham [!!!!!] will be launching The Art of the Impossible in Sydney on April 27 @ 6:15 pm. The best (and probably the only) book on an American presidential election ever written in Australia and the first book ever written entirely as a series of blog posts. It is a reminder just how necessary Donald Trump was and a reminder of how fortunate we are that he was elected.

This is where it will be held:

Metropolitan Hotel Sydney
1 Bridge Street
Sydney, NSW 2000

And this is where you will need to book your ticket.

But if you have already bought a copy of the book and would like to have it signed, just bring it along on the night and entry will be free – but you will have to buy your own drinks.

Trump’s cautious and necessary start to rebuilding American credibility

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Whose judgement can you trust in such a snake pit as foreign relations? But with Trump, at least I am never in any doubt that he is on the same side as I am in every conflict. Two stellar authorities among the many who comment have recently written on where he has taken the US since becoming president. Let me start with The Diplomad: Climbing out of the Obama Foreign Policy Hole. There he writes:

The Russians and the Chinese certainly have taken note of the change in Washington, and I suspect that the regimes in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, and the fetid leaders of ISIS and the other radical Islamist death cults have, as well. We can see positive change all around; we see it in the willingness of the Chinese to work much more energetically to control Krazy Kim and deal with the unbalanced nature of our bilateral trade, we see it in the Russian acquiescence to our blasting their Syrian ally, we even see it on our border where illegal crossings have plummeted as the coyotes fear the new sheriff.

I am optimistic that we have begun the long climb out of the Obama foreign policy hole.

The same note is struck by Claudia Rosett: Trump juggles the foreign policy balls Obama dropped.

The Trump administration is taking heat for striking a Syrian air base with Tomahawk missiles and hitting ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan with a MOAB, a conventional bomb so big that it has been dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs.” No doubt there are useful debates to be had about the pros and cons, both tactical and juridical. But one sure upside of these strikes is that they are a step toward restoring abroad the credibility of America as a power to be reckoned with.

That’s big, in ways that go way beyond the immediate battlefields. In a world grown dramatically more dangerous during President Obama’s eight years of appeasement and retreat, America badly and urgently needs to restore its lost credibility. . . .

Obama’s policies invited the world’s most dangerous actors to conclude that America would no longer act in defense of the Free World, or of the rules and understandings that promote a modicum of peace. This is a path to conflict and carnage on a scale not seen since World War II. It is imperative that Trump find ways to change this calculus.

One need not love the use of ordnance to appreciate that with the unprecedented moves of hitting a Syrian air base with cruise missiles and dropping a MOAB to obliterate an ISIS nest in Afghanistan, he has sent an important message, in terms that predatory tyrants, from Moscow to Beijing to Tehran to Pyongyang, will understand.

Both should be read in full. It is an always dangerous world, and even more dangerous after eight years of Obama. But these seem to be calculated risks and nothing done so far seems to have been anything other than temperate. The risks remain enormous, but to me anyway, they seem the right steps to have taken.

Which American president does this remind you of?

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Other than his being an introvert, that is. From introverts tend to be better CEOs — and other surprising traits of top-performing executives:

So what did make CEOs successful? After analyzing all of their data, the researchers found that roughly half of the candidates earning an overall ‘A’ rating in their database, when evaluated for a CEO job, had distinguished themselves in more than one of four management traits. (Only five percent of the weakest performers, meanwhile, had done the same.) The four were: reaching out to stakeholders; being highly adaptable to change; being reliable and predictable rather than showing exceptional, and perhaps not repeatable, performance; and making fast decisions with conviction, if not necessarily perfect ones.

Indeed, that last trait — a willingness to make a call quickly, even without all the needed information — was one of the four “essentials” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, detailed in his own letter to shareholders last week. Calling it “high-velocity decision-making,” Bezos wrote that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” Being wrong isn’t always so bad, he wrote. “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

Botelho agreed that first trait was the most surprising. “We frankly expected to find that strong CEOs stood out for the quality of their decisions — that they turn out to be right more frequently,” she said. “But what very clearly stood out was the speed. Quality was likely something they developed earlier, but then they’re willing to step up and make the decision faster, even with more uncertainty.”

Finding yourself right most of the time gives the confidence to keep making those decisions, and allows others to to defer to your decision-making when everything is so entirely opaque. It’s like the question Napoleon used to ask his generals: do you think of yourself as lucky. For those where things turned out as they had hoped, it would often have looked as if it had been little more than luck. But the better judgement you have, as they say, the luckier you become.

Advising the president on North Korea

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On every issue both international and domestic I find myself on the same side as Donald Trump. He is, moreover, not a lone wolf, he is not the head of some “think tank” that pours out advice without responsibility, but the head of an administration of people who have had to deal with international relations for decades past, but in which every moment is something new. What to do about North Korea, led by a madman with ambitions to build nuclear weapons and a delivery system that will reach the United States (and therefore also Australia)? I have no idea what the right answer is, but of all people across the globe I am content to see it is Trump attempting to deal with a situation that has been allowed to fester and rot. So where among our local papers can one turn to for guidance?

This is from The Australian today, We should make the best of being region’s odd man in. From which:

Donald Trump’s inexperience, recklessness and incoherence in foreign policy adds another element to this already volatile mix of superpower politics, mad dictatorships and menacing brinkmanship. The Trump administration is not a reliable ally for Australia given its contradictory and confused approach to foreign policy.

The only thing confused here is the donkey who wrote this article. Meanwhile at The Age we have another piece of advice: Donald Trump is right to try something new on North Korea. There we find:

Donald Trump is therefore quite right when he asserts that US policy has failed. So it’s time to hold our breath while he tries out a new tactic: play the vicious little dictator at his own game. The Kims have always used belligerence to extract concessions, like loosened sanctions, because no one is ever sure just how far Pyongyang will go. . . .

China might not be able to stop North Korea’s weapons program. Perhaps nothing can except a war. It would be a terrible, brutal, bloody war and it would be unforgivable for Mr Trump to trigger it lightly or by accident. But US policy on North Korea has so far been a failure. The White House is right to try something new.

The Australian’s continuous and ignorant attacks on Donald Trump is making the paper almost unreadable. But here is how it is. The world now depends on the American president as its best chance of solving the problem of North Korean and its nuclear ambitions. These media leftists with their automatic opposition to anything Trump does are worse than tiresome, they are making it more difficult to find solutions to major problems that will take us all down if we do not do something about them.