America

No post-Iowa polls have appeared at this writing, but everyone wants to know whether Donald Trump’s New Hampshire lead will survive his supposedly surprising defeat in Iowa. Of course, finishing second in Iowa wasn’t really astonishing: the New York Times pointed out two weeks ago that his ground organization in the state was more or less pathetic. NBC’s Chuck Todd observed, correctly I think, that Trump might have finished third or fourth if he hadn’t made a desperate push there in the last two weeks—like cramming for a final after not going to classes all semester.

On Monday I gave some reasons why foreign policy realists might not be interested in supporting Donald Trump. Leon Hadar delves deeper into the question today and concludes that Trump isn’t a realist:

While the biggest news of the night had nothing to do with either oil or China, all that mattered to US equity futures trading also was oil and China, and since WTI managed to rebound modestly from their biggest 2-day drop in years, continuing the trend of unprecedented, HFT-driven volatility which has far surpassed that of equities and is shown in the chart below...

If Donald Trump has distanced himself from some of the positions held by two of the powerful wings of the conservative movement—free marketeers and evangelical Christians—he has provoked a fury among members of the third GOP wing, the neoconservatives, who for all practical purposes dominate the party’s foreign policy thinking.

The US military faces five “big challenges,” Ash Carter told the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday.

Those challenges are: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and ISIS.

So essentially, the exact same “challenges” Washington has been trotting out for years to justify hundreds upon hundreds of billions in defense spending, only with one CIA pet project gone horribly awry added to the list.