Attention to the Unseen

Will Rahn writes: It’s easy to get the basic gist of the Deep State conspiracy theory, which posits that the FBI and CIA ginned up a devious plot to help Hillary Clinton and hurt Donald Trump. But there’s an arch, coy, almost feline quality to the way these arguments are presented. The allegations are always cloaked for a later reveal. And this is probably because the allegations are bonkers, and would sound that way to anyone not already primed to…

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Eric Levitz writes: American democracy is unwell; on this much, President Trump’s detractors can agree. But when they turn to the tasks of identifying our republic’s symptoms, naming its illness, and writing a prescription, different factions of “the resistance” produce divergent diagnoses. One group — comprised of comparative politics scholars, liberal pundits, and NeverTrump conservatives — have their eyes fixed on Donald Trump. They see the moral cowardice of a Republican elite that declined to deny an illiberal demagogue their…

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The Washington Post reports: Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has cast himself as a reformer, advocating equality for women and granting them the right to drive. But in the past few days, Saudi activists who called for exactly those things were arrested, accused by the authorities of undermining national security and branded “traitors” in pro-government newspapers. The unusually vicious state-led crackdown has targeted Saudi Arabia’s most prominent women’s rights advocates, including activists who led the first protests against…

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Jeffrey Lewis writes: For the past few weeks, new national security adviser John Bolton has been publicly emphasizing that the United States would seek a “Libya-style” agreement with North Korea. A lot of experts, including me, warned that this was a deliberate effort to sabotage the prospect of a summit with North Korea. After all, bringing up instances of leaders who disarmed only to be brutally murdered is not likely to be an effective testament to the security of a…

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The New York Times reports: From the moment President Trump accepted an audacious invitation to meet Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, he raised expectations that he would finally do what none of his predecessors had: get North Korea to abandon its nuclear arsenal. Yet, as a warning last week from the North made clear — and as most experts on the country have long declared — Mr. Kim may have no intention of giving up his nuclear weapons any time…

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Philip Róin and Mikkel Danielsen write: On Saturday 13 August 2016, six bodyguards from the protection detail of the Gambia’s president, Yahya Jammeh, squeezed into a rental car and drove to the sprawling coastal town of Serekunda. They stopped in Senegambia, the capital’s famous party street, where music blares from bars and white tourists walk around in flip-flops hand-in-hand with young lovers. The men drank some juice and nibbled at some food as they awaited nightfall. At 1am, when they…

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