• Stepping out of the Paris climate deal (joining only two other countries, Nicaragua and Syria!) leaves a void for China to fill
  
• Stepping out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China is filling the void
  
• His public assault on NATO partners has Putin rejoicing
  
• He is estranging Germany as a partner, Merkel argued (publicly, highly unusual) that the EU can't fully rely on the US anymore. Putin will rejoice.
  
• Destroying the soft power of the US by criticizing democratic allies and smooching to nasty strongman like Putin, Duterte, the Saudi's, Sisi of Egypt. It's amazing to see he gets so much better along with these rather than with Merkel or Macron.
  

Quote:President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement caused anger and anxiety across the world, with one major exception: China. With the US stepping away from its role as a leader of the global fight against climate change, Beijing is already moving to fill the void, giving it a chance to benefit both diplomatically and economically. It isn’t the first time Trump — who spent the campaign demonizing China — will have wound up giving Beijing a major chance to expand its standing on the world stage.

Quote:After Trump withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China inserted itself into trade talks among other nations disappointed by America’s reversal. As Canada and Mexico have felt spurned by Trump during the runup to renegotiating NAFTA, China has emerged as a more reliable trading prospect. This isn’t happening quietly behind the scenes: At China’s first appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Chinese President Xi Jinping chided the West for its flirtation with protectionism, and painted a picture of his country as a paragon of free trade and an inviting place for foreign investment.

Quote:The back-and-forth between the US and North Korea has devolved into a full blown tit-for-tat as Washington and Pyongyang issue escalating, and competing, warnings. Experts say Trump's rhetoric will likely prompt North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to double down further. One expert said the rhetoric might heighten North Korea's fears that it is in a 'use 'em or lose 'em" position with respect to its missiles.

Reid Pauly, a PhD candidate in political science at MIT and predoctoral fellow at Harvard who researches nuclear proliferation, nuclear strategy, deterrence and assurance theory, said the "credibility of American military threats was only one contributor to the peaceful conclusion" of the Cuban missile crisis. "The others were the Jupiter missile trade and, most importantly, an American pledge not to invade Cuba," Pauly explained.  

"Fast forward to today, American power in the Western Pacific is not in doubt in Pyongyang. What is in doubt is the credibility of American and allied pledges not to intervene in North Korea. Until that fundamental security assurance is made credible, expect Kim to hang on to his nuclear deterrent," he added.

Quote:Vocal supporters of President Donald Trump on the far right slammed his decision to deploy additional troops to Afghanistan and ramp up engagement in the US's longest war. Many of the president's longtime boosters criticized his about-face on Afghanistan, a war he repeatedly pilloried in the years leading up to the 2016 election. Breitbart News, the site led by recently ousted White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, had a front-page Monday evening full of stories lambasting Trump's decision, referring to it as "unlimited war," and comparing his strategy to that of former President Barack Obama. Its top story described the speech as a "disappointment to many who had supported his calls during the campaign to end expensive foreign intervention and nation-building."

Quote:H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser who still serves as a lieutenant general in the US Army, showed Trump a black-and-white image from 1972 of Afghan women walking through Kabul in miniskirts, according to The Post. McMaster ostensibly used the image to convince Trump that Western norms could exist in the country.

Quote:The Pentagon has more than 12,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday – about 3,500 more than the agency acknowledges publicly. The Pentagon publicly acknowledges some 8,500 troops as being deployed in Afghanistan. But according to the Wall Street Journal, another 3,500 are there on temporary assignment or some other status.

The Pentagon has typically only disclosed those troops on longer deployments, but omits those who move in and out of the country on a temporary basis. The revelation that the U.S. currently maintains more than 12,000 troops in Afghanistan comes a day after President Trump announced a new broad strategy for the country – the site of the United States' longest war.

Quote:A distinguished U.S. diplomat who was seen as a rising star at the State Department resigned after writing a searing letter to Secretary Of State Rex Tillerson, accusing him of gutting the department and damaging America’s standing across the world. Elizabeth Shackelford, who served as a political officer based in Nairobi for the U.S. mission to Somalia, lamented in a Nov. 7 letter obtained by Foreign Policy the “stinging disrespect” President Donald Trump’s administration had shown the diplomatic corps and how it was “driving” the department’s most experienced staff away in growing numbers.

“The cost of this is visible every day in Mission Somalia, my current post, where State’s diplomatic influence, on the country and within our own interagency, is waning,” Shackelford wrote. She said she was “shocked” when Tillerson, who stepped down as ExxonMobil CEO to serve as Trump’s secretary of state, told department employees that advancing human rights across the globe “creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests.“ If Tillerson is unable to “stem the bleeding” and preserve the department’s mission, she added, “I would humbly recommend you follow me out the door.”

Trump’s administration has been harshly criticized for downplaying human rights issues in countries like Russia, Turkey, and the Philippines. Democratic lawmakers and former ambassadors have also accused Tillerson of gutting the department’s budget and staff at a critical and dangerous time, as difficult foreign policy challenges persist in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula.

Quote:The fact that Trump’s State Department is in shambles is not, at this point, debatable. Recent data from the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the professional organization for America’s diplomatic corps, found that 60 percent of State’s highest-ranking career officers quit during Trump’s first year; the number of applications to join the foreign service dropped by half. Fewer than half of all top-level positions, political appointees nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, have been filled.

The question that remains is who’s to blame. A new article by journalist Ronan Farrow, published in the New Yorker on Thursday morning, sheds light on the question. The piece is deeply reported, featuring a wide-ranging interview with Tillerson conducted while he was in office. Farrow paints a damning picture of a dysfunctional State Department, brought to the brink of ruin by Trump and Tillerson in equal parts.

Quote:The US ambassador to Estonia has announced his resignation, citing Donald’s Trump’s disparagement of the European Union and Nato and adding to a steady trickle of career diplomats leaving in protest at the president’s policies. Jim Melville, a 33-year diplomat who has been posted in Tallinn since 2015, was approaching retirement but announced his decision to leave early to friends on a private Facebook posting that was obtained by Foreign Policy. The post refers to Trump’s remarks that have surfaced in the past week.

Melville wrote: “A Foreign Service Officer’s DNA is programmed to support policy and we’re schooled right from the start, that if there ever comes a point where one can no longer do so, particularly if one is in a position of leadership, the honorable course is to resign. Having served under six presidents and 11 secretaries of state, I never really thought it would reach that point for me. “For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘Nato is as bad as Nafta’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go.”

Quote:Saudi Arabia has placed a flurry of diplomatic sanctions against Canada. On Monday, the country recalled its ambassador to Canada for consultations and gave the Canadian ambassador 24 hours to leave the kingdom. The government also froze all new trade with Ottawa, ordered around 16,000 students in the North American country to either return home or complete their studies in another part of the world and canceled all direct flights to Toronto via its state airline. More recently, Saudi Arabia stopped all medical treatment programs in Canada and is coordinating for the transfer of all Saudi patients currently receiving care in Canadian hospitals to be moved outside of the country... 

And on Wednesday, the Saudi central bank and state pension funds ordered overseas asset managers to offload their Canadian equities, bonds and cash holdings "no matter the cost," the Financial Times reported, citing two unnamed sources.

Quote:Never Trump neocons’ essential paradox is that, for all Trump’s many sins, he (so far) hasn’t done anything even remotely as pernicious as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In its main phase from 2003 to 2011, this war led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, plus what appears to be around 400,000 Iraqis. And that was only the beginning. The regional destabilization the invasion touched off led directly to the rise of ISIS and a whole new round of fighting in Iraq in which many thousands of people have died. More broadly, the extremely deadly civil war in Syria likely also counts as a knock-on consequence of invading Iraq. This is to say nothing of the extent to which the war counterproductively undermined the global non-proliferation regime by convincing North Korea to go for broke in its quest for nukes.

At a certain point, trying to calculate the proliferating consequences of the decision to invade Iraq is impossible. But what we can say for sure is that the direct cost of war — $1 trillion in narrow fiscal terms — was high, and it brought about essentially none of the promised strategic or humanitarian benefits. It’s easy to snark about the conspiratorial thinking of the current president and the relentless dishonesty of his press operation, but the Bush-era conspiracy theories about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were about as ridiculous, and also got way more people killed. Strikingly, this was not incidental to the neoconservative project. It was, rather, an ideology fundamentally grounded in a politics of perpetual war.