Political scientist Peter Feaver, a specialist in civil-military issues and a national security aide to President George W. Bush, talks about the potential impact of a book written by new national security adviser, Gen. H.R McMaster, that highlighted the consequences of the military not giving candid advice to a president during the Vietnam War.
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“The Senate has confirmed Scott Pruitt to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt filed 14 lawsuits challenging EPA regulations, including limits on carbon emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants,” writes Tim Profeta, founding director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, in a summary of the week’s top environmental news.
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“It’s not novel to point out that with the election of President Trump, tribalism has reached new and dizzying heights — the “basket of deplorables” vs. “liberal elites.” Many of us feel sickened. And we’re right to worry. Tribal thinking is not just inherently undemocratic — it’s perilous,” writes Dirk Philipsen, associate research professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy.
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“This case goes a little farther than some in that it holds assault weapons fall outside the Second Amendment. Most other courts have assumed that they fall inside and are still subject to ban,” law professor Joseph Blocher says about a federal appeals court in Maryland upholding a law banning military-style weapons.
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How can the U.S. increase security along the southern border without building a wall? Stephen Kelly, a visiting professor of the practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy, says more cooperation between law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border is key.
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Political scientist Peter Feaver, a scholar on civil-military ties, says he expects Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster to take a skeptical view of Russia, seeing Moscow as a dubious partner and major potential threat to U.S. security. And Feaver says he expects a similar skepticism toward Iran, whose support for proxy groups across the Middle East many senior military officials say has gone unchecked.
Read More in The Washington Post
If there’s an enduring upside to U.S. EPA’s doomed Clean Power Plan, it’s that it spurred some much-needed discussions about energy on the state level, says Brian Murray, director for economic analysis at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. “There really was not much going on in terms of coordination and dialogue between energy and environmental regulators at the state level before all this.”
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Historian Gunther Peck says mass deportations would hurt numerous businesses. “Many businesses profit from undocumented workers and would be very hard pressed to replace them. They do work that actual citizens don’t want to do, and they do it for low wages. So, if you were to deport and round up a lot of those hardworking men and women, you would be hurting a lot of American businesses.”
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When he rolled back a regulation to protect streams from mining pollution last week, President Donald Trump made good on his promise to ease up on coal mining. “This repeal is ignoring a lot of the recent science that clearly documents a lot of these downstream impacts,” says biology professor Emily Bernhardt, who has studied the ecological effects of coal mining.
Read More at Inside Climate News
“Most Americans don’t remember that we invaded Mexico at least three times, and forced it to give up nearly half of the territory they won in their independence from Spain,” says public policy professor Stephen Kelly, who served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico from 2004 to 2006. “Nowhere is that feeling of invasion, that Mexico has been robbed and violated, more strongly felt than in the Mexican army.”
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“A national security adviser has to successfully manage three key constituencies: First and foremost his relationships with the president, but also his relations with other senior officials in the West Wing, and with Cabinet officials in various agencies,” says Peter Feaver, who served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.
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“The problem is that with each successive episode, it raises the stakes for the next one,” says political scientist Peter Feaver, who was a strategic planning adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s going to be hard for the next outsider to accept the national security job and not request the ability to make personnel changes.”
Read More in The New York Times
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