January 9, 2020--Trump the Nation Builder

Virtually all presidents shy away from talking positively about nation building. They know from experience and history (a few presidents actually know something about American history) that more frequently than not it doesn't work and that the nation attempting to carry out the nation building usually winds up paying a huge political price.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon come to mind. Both presidencies collapsed as the result of sinking into the quagmire that was the Vietnam War. 

And then we have George W. Bush who, during the October 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore, when asked by Jim Lehrer about nation building, said--

I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation building core from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win wars. That's what it's meant to do. And when it gets overextended, morale drops . . . I strongly believe we need to keep a presence in NATO, but I'm going to be judicious as to how to use the military. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the strategy obvious.

Then, ignoring his own advice, Bush authorized nation building after invading Afghanistan and Iraq. In both instances this turned out to be an expensive, bloody disaster that to this day many years later continues to fester.

And now we have Trump who as a candidate and later as president spoke contemptuously about his predecessors' nation building efforts.

Trump though now finds himself in an ironic situation. Like it or not, after mocking Obama and Bush he too finds himself supporting nation building in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran where neo-con advisors such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been pressing him to abrogate the de-nuclearization deal struck by Obama and a number of allies and to act more confrontationally.

I refer to current pressures that Trump is placing on Iran as ironic because the demands he is making and the aggressive military actions he has authorized are having unanticipated consequences.

Until Trump turned up the volume of threatening talk, bragging that we have the capacity to bring down the current regime and devastate the country, there were dissident political factions in Iran that might very well, with the right kind of support, have had enough power to challenge the ruling ayatollahs.

But the decision to assassinate general Soleimani so inflamed Iranian national pride that the contesting factions are now fully united in their hatred of Trump and America. Now everyone in Iran is chanting "Death to America."

For this example of nation building they and we have Donald Trump to thank.

January 20, 2016--What's Playing in Somalia and On Reunion Island?

I love my Netflix.

I know there is current controversy about their ratings--the company is coy about them, which suggests they are not as high as advertised. The concern about the truth is not academic or about the truth itself but about Netflix's valuation--how much it is worth and how justifiable is its current lofty stock price.

I don't care about that except that I do have an investor's interest in the so-called FANG stocks. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. I do not at this point in my life believe in owning that many shares of individual companies, preferring broad-based securities funds, but I do own a decent amount of Amazon stock, am thinking about buying more, and am considering making an equivalent investment in Netflix.

After all, boldly last week, the CEO of Netflix announced that they are making their streaming service available in 190 large and small countries from China to Somalia.

And just yesterday Netflix announced that they are signing up surprising numbers of subscribers in many out-of-the-way places.

Now people from Madagascar to Reunion Island can catch Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards.

"They must have pretty good Internet connections," CEO Reed Hastings joked the other day when he learned that the Reunion Island folks were among the first to subscribe.

Now Netflix is scrambling to dub their shows in dozens of languages to keep up with the already burgeoning demand.

I remember back in the day, when nation-buidling still seemed to some like a good idea, that the thought was that if we could help bring versions of Western democracy to underdeveloped places such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya young people especially would clamor for MTV and once they could tune in all would be well in the world.

We see now what that culturally imperialist and naive strategy has yielded. Among other things--ISIS.

Now here comes Netflix.

To some in Yemen, seeing the evil Kevin Spacey character, fictional U.S. president Francis Underwood ensconced in the White House, will feel that what they believe to be true about our actual president is in fact true.