11 SEPTEMBER

Bolton blasted out

President Trump has fired his national security adviser, John Bolton, in a pair of tweets, saying he had “disagreed strongly” with his top aide. The firing of the president's third national security adviser appears to have caught the White House by surprise, with the tweets posted barely an hour after it was announced Bolton would appear at a press conference alongside the secretaries of state and treasury.

Trump and Bolton are reported to have clashed over the president's approach to Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan. Bolton's departure comes just a week after Trump said he called off secret peace negotiations with the Taliban at his Camp David retreat, planned for shortly before the anniversary of the September 11 attacks today. 

NEWS WRAP

Laws and opinion are polls apart

• NSW abortion laws appear to be out of step with public opinion according to new polling by the United States Studies Centre and YouGov, which compared attitudes to women's reproductive rights in Australia and the United States. Lecturer in political science Shaun Ratcliff spoke to Buzzfeed Australia about the poll's findings. READ MORE HERE.
   

• The top polling candidates for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 will face each other for the first time on the same debate stage on Thursday. Hosted by ABC News and Univision, the third primary debate will take place in Texas and feature Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, Julián Castro and Andrew Yang. Catch up on the last debate with 2020Vision's recap episode, featuring Research Associate Elliott Brennan. LISTEN HERE.
   

• US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross threatened to fire employees at the scientific agency responsible for US weather forecasts after it contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, reports The New York Times. Trump has spent more than a week defending his initial claims that Alabama was in the path of the hurricane, despite the National Weather Service’s position that Alabama was not at risk. READ MORE HERE.
   

• President Trump has defended his decision to not let survivors of Hurricane Dorian enter the United States, claiming the storm-ravaged Bahamas is full of “very bad gang members”. On Sunday, several hundred Bahamians were ejected from a ferry bound for Florida because they didn’t have US visas. READ MORE HERE.
   

• The US Air Force has ordered a review of how it chooses overnight accommodations on long flights following revelations that air crews had stayed at President Trump's Scotland resort while refuelling at a small commercial airport nearby. The House Government Oversight and Reform Committee launched a probe of the Scotland operations in April out of concern that use by the military of the Trump property could pose a conflict of interest for the president. READ MORE HERE.

 The Trumps will be a dynasty that lasts for decades.

Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale
California Republican Convention
7 September 2019

ANALYSIS

Democracy is fighting for its life

Charles Edel
Senior Fellow

It is common today to speak of a crisis of democracy, but such language underrates the challenge at hand. American democracy faces not one, but three distinct and connected crises. There is an ongoing assault on democratic norms and values, which has led to the coarsening of the US social fabric and the erosion of unspoken, but vitally important, norms that provide the guardrails of self-government. There is a sense of displacement, dislocation, and despair among large numbers of Americans who feel that the democratic system has grown increasingly unresponsive to their needs and that government is less willing to advocate for their interests. Finally, there is an onslaught by authoritarian powers in Beijing and Moscow, which are using new forms of technology to reach into democratic societies, exacerbate internal tensions, and carve out illiberal spheres of influences.

Failing to see that these crises are connected diminishes Americans’ ability to understand the full scope of the challenge. Alternatively, concentrating on only the part of the challenge most affecting their own interests gives them at best a partial understanding of what is occurring and hampers our ability to address these connected challenges. To begin to tackle these challenges requires first a sufficiently broad, and accurate, diagnosis of what exactly is afflicting, and what is attacking, democracy.

Larry Diamond’s new book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, attempts to do just that. Diamond, perhaps the world’s leading authority on democracy, is ideally suited for such a task. Equally adept—and prominent—in academia, the think tank world, and policy circles, Diamond is a professor at Stanford University, the author or editor of dozens of books on democracy, and the founder of the Journal of Democracy. He has written about democracy in the developing world, the impact of social media on democracy, and, most recently, co-chaired an authoritative study on the role of Beijing’s expanding influence operations inside the United States. Diamond’s entire career has been centred on studying, advocating for, and improving democracy. In the field of democracy studies, Diamond has long been a leading authority, and what he has to say matters.

“Late in a lifetime spent studying and promoting democracy,” Diamond writes, “I would like to be able to say that things are heading in the right direction. They are not.” This blunt appraisal is partially a result of his concern over the increasingly autocratic impulses emanating from the Trump White House. But as harmful as he thinks President Donald Trump has been to America’s democracy, it is a broader set of concerns driving this work.

The rising danger to democracy as a global phenomenon takes centre stage in Diamond’s new book. “In every region of the world,” he writes, “autocrats are seizing the initiative, democrats are on the defensive, and the space for competitive politics and free expression is shrinking.” Mature democracies are becoming increasingly polarised, intolerant, and dysfunctional. Emerging democratic states are drowning in corruption, struggling for legitimacy, and fighting against growing external threats. Authoritarian leaders are simultaneously becoming more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad, and more convinced that they are sailing with the wind at their back.

Read Charles Edel's full review for Foreign Policy here.

DIARY

The week ahead

• Wednesday, 11 September: President Trump is scheduled to take part in a moment of silence in remembrance of the September 11 attacks and the Pentagon Observance Ceremony.
   

• Wednesday, 11 September: US Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold hearings examining innovation in America and how Congress can make the patent system stronger.
   

• Thursday, 12 September: Third Democratic presidential debate in Houston, Texas.
   

• 16-19 September: Australian Parliament sitting in Canberra.

EVENT

Iran Deal 2.0?

VIDEO

 Former CIA operative Valerie Plame announces her run for Congress

THE WEEK IN TWEETS

#TrumpHotels

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Institute Building H03
University of Sydney NSW 2006

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