Практика Shadowing: Trump's Iran, China & US actions have set 3 new stages | Fareed's Take roundup - Изучайте разговорный английский с YouTube
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Here's my take.
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Here's my take.
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Why is the most powerful country on the planet unable to get its way with a much smaller,
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weaker country that has been ravaged by economic sanctions and military strikes?
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At one level, the simplest way to understand America's problem in the Iran war is to use game theory.
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Donald Trump decided to play a game of chicken with Iran.
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Think of two drivers racing straight at each other.
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In these situations, if the stakes for one side are existential and for the other much lower,
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the side with those bigger stakes usually prevails.
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For the Iranian regime, if they lose,
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there's a good chance they end up toppled and slaughtered.
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For Trump, it would be a bad weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
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It's easy to see why the Iranians would be more willing to lock their steering wheel in that game of chicken.
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But there's a broader reason why America has found it so difficult to handle Iran,
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one that is not just about Trump and this latest ill-conceived war.
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Ever since the Islamic regime took power in Iran,
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America has been of two minds about it.
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On the one hand, the U.S has had certain issues it wanted resolved,
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from the return of the hostages to nuclear limits.
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On the other hand, it wants to topple the regime,
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not just negotiate with it.
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There is a tension in these two attitudes that has run through American foreign policy for almost half a century.
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Does Washington want to change certain policies of Iran,
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or does it want to change Iran?
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If Washington negotiates with Tehran,
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inevitably there is give and take.
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There are concessions on both sides.
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There is some relaxation of hostilities.
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Above all, in engaging with it,
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the United States government conferring a certain degree of legitimacy on the Islamic Republic,
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treating it as a serious negotiating partner,
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accepting that it represents Iran on the world stage.
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But that acceptance sits uneasily with some American elites who feel that the Islamic Republic is illegitimate,
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should not exist, and Washington's only policy toward it should be to overthrow it.
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And yet there are things Washington wants that only Iran can deliver.
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That is why even Ronald Reagan found himself secretly negotiating with the Iranian mullahs while publicly denouncing them.
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We can see the tension almost daily in Donald Trump's policy toward Iran.
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One social media post threatens to destroy Iranian civilization and bring an end to 47 years of evil.
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Another one that same day speaks of the progress being made in negotiations with Iran.
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Trump enters negotiations and seems optimistic about a deal with Iran,
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and in between rounds starts a war with Tehran and urges Iranians to overthrow their government.
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Less than a week later,
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he's back to promising that if they agree to his demands,
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Iran will have a very bright future.
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America had a similarly contradictory attitude toward the Soviet Union.
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After the communists took control of Russia in 1917,
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Washington broke relations with it and even tried in some small ways to overthrow it.
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It took Franklin Delano Roosevelt about 15 years later to recognize its existence and exchange ambassadors with Moscow.
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The tension reemerged after World War II.
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In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger's policy of negotiation with the Soviet Union was pilloried on the right
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because it was seen as bolstering the standing of an evil empire.
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Kissinger's response was always that America stood in ideological opposition to the Soviet Union,
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but that it also had certain national interests,
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like the control of nuclear weapons,
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which could not be handled without agreements with Moscow.
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Kissinger's equivalent in the Iran debate was Barack Obama.
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Obama's was the one administration to make a choice.
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It determined that while America might prefer another regime in Iran,
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it had to deal with this one to tackle the greatest danger to America's national interest,
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which as with the Soviet case, involved nuclear weapons.
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The Iran nuclear deal was an effort to take the one most dangerous element of Iran's foreign policy and neutralize it.
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And it succeeded at that.
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But for many on the right,
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the price was that it,
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in some sense, legitimized the regime.
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So Trump pulled the U.S out of the deal,
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which then led to the discrediting of then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the return of the hardliners in Tehran,
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who ramped up Iran's enrichment program,
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which has brought Donald Trump right back to the same dilemma.
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Does he make a deal or take a stand?
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At this point, it's clear that Trump wants a deal.
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But in making it, he might end up giving the Islamic Republic what it has been seeking for 47 years,
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unqualified acceptance even from the most hardline elements of the United States.
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For Tehran, that is a prize worth many concessions.
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Regular viewers know that I have not been a fan of Donald Trump's foreign policy in his second term.
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From threatening to seize Greenland and annex Canada,
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unilaterally raising tariffs sky-high to the fiasco of the Iran war,
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Trump has been reckless, chaotic and deeply destabilizing.
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But he might well turn out to have the right instincts and perhaps even the right policy in one crucial arena,
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the US-China relationship.
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In Trump's recent interactions with Xi Jinping,
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we saw a version of him rarely on display.
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She was respectful, almost deferential,
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eager to emphasize their personal rapport.
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She by contrast remained formal,
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disciplined, and never especially warm.
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The asymmetry was revealing.
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Donald Trump is obsessed with power.
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More than ideology or values,
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of course, he thinks in terms of leverage and dominance.
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He insults European allies because he understands how dependent they remain on American military protection and access to U.S markets.
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Trump senses weakness and exploits it.
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But with China, he has come to understand something that much of Washington still struggles to accept emotionally.
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Beijing has enormous strength of its own,
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economic, technological, industrial, even military,
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and can wield it effectively.
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So Trump has evolved from belligerence toward a more complicated mix of rivalry and cooperation.
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That may be what this relationship requires.
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Contrast Trump's visit with the first meeting of Biden officials with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage in 2021.
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The Americans launched into a televised public scolding of China over human rights,
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cyber attacks, and the international order.
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China's diplomats responded angrily, in kind.
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It was less a serious diplomatic exchange than a cable news shouting match.
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Many centrist Democrats live in fear of being portrayed as soft on China.
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So they often overcompensate rhetorically,
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adopting maximalist language and escalating symbolic confrontations.
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After showing skepticism toward Trump's China tariffs during the campaign,
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Joe Biden kept nearly all of them in place.
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Biden never visited China as president,
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nor did he invite Xi Jinping to Washington.
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The Biden team endorsed the claim,
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leveled by the first Trump administration,
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that China's actions in Xinjiang constituted genocide,
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a term that evokes industrial-scale extermination campaigns like the Holocaust or Rwanda.
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China's prison and re-education camps in Xinjiang are brutal and horrific,
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and dozens of scholars have called its actions against the Uyghurs a genocide.
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But as the economist noted,
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it is not what most people think of when conjuring up the word genocide.
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Trump's superpower is that he cannot be attacked from the right.
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He came to power after the 2016 election,
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railing against Beijing, blaming it for lost manufacturing jobs,
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trade imbalances, and America's industrial decline.
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In a sense, the analogy is not Nixon going to China,
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but rather Ronald Reagan, the uber-hawk to the right of Nixon,
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going to the Soviet Union.
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Trump may be capable of a similar pivot precisely because his base will follow wherever he leads.
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One need only look at how quickly many MAGA figures reverse themselves on intervention in Iran
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once Trump signals support for military action.
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Why would a more cooperative approach toward China make sense?
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Because the truth is that China is not the Soviet Union.
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The Soviet economy was smaller than Italy's by the end of the Cold War,
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by one UN measure.
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China, by contrast, is the world's second largest economy,
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the leading trading partner for more than 120 countries,
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countries and a technological powerhouse in fields ranging from electric vehicles and batteries to drones,
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advanced manufacturing, and even artificial intelligence.
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It produces more manufacturing output than the United States,
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Japan, and Germany put together.
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Trying to launch a full-scale Cold War against such a country would not resemble the struggle against Moscow
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when the world was already divided.
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It would mean tearing apart the global economy itself.
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American consumers would face higher prices and supply shocks.
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U.S companies would lose access to one of the world's largest markets.
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Universities would lose many top students.
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The danger would not simply be economic pain.
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It would be the creation of two hostile technological and geopolitical blocks spiraling toward increasing confrontation.
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Of course, the U.S and China are rivals.
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That is unavoidable in a bipolar world.
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They will compete economically, militarily,
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and strategically for decades to come.
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But rivalry need not mean total rupture.
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In the weeks before he died,
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Henry Kissinger noted to me that leaders of both countries should keep in mind how,
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in 1914, nationalist competition, pursued with no concerns about its consequences,
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led to a world war that upended the entire global order.
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In an age of AI,
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cyber warfare, and nuclear weapons,
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maintaining channels of dialogue and cooperation is more important than ever.
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The two countries should compete fiercely while still trading,
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talking, and collaborating where possible on nuclear stability,
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AI safety, pandemics, and financial crises.
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During the Cold War, Washington
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and Moscow maintained arms control talks even at moments of intense hostility
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because both sides understood that unmanaged rivalry could end in catastrophe.
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That remains true today.
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And if Donald Trump, for reasons rooted less in philosophy than instinct,
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has come to recognize this basic reality,
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then on this issue at least, his pragmatism makes sense.
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I think he is a more mature,
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more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.
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That's what Jeff Bezos said about President Trump this week.
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I'm puzzled by this statement from an obviously intelligent and accomplished businessman.
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I look at Trump's second term and I see the ham-handed efforts to annex Greenland and Canada,
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massive tariff hikes on most of the world,
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a cruel immigration crackdown that was both lawless and ineffective,
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and the sudden launching of a war without UN sanction,
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congressional consultation, or any clear strategy.
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If this is maturity, I would shudder to think what Trump's immature phase would look like.
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The opposite is actually closer to the truth.
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Trump's first term was disciplined,
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more disciplined not because he was disciplined,
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but because he was constrained.
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He often deferred, however grudgingly,
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to the Republican establishment and national security elites.
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His early legislative agenda was shaped by Speaker Paul Ryan and executed by Chief of Staff Rence Priebus.
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Top economic advisor Gary Cohn repeatedly talked him out of the global tariff hikes he had long wanted.
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The generals whom he surrounded himself with urged caution on Iran,
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support for NATO, and arms for Ukraine.
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The lesson Trump drew from that first term,
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however, was not that expertise mattered.
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It was that experts were not loyal enough.
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After the January 6th attack,
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you see, many of his senior officials distanced themselves from him.
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Some denounced him.
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So this time, he has surrounded himself with people whose chief qualification is fealty.
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The less distinguished the resume, the better.
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Such people owe everything to him.
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Process has given way to impulse,
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procedure to instinct, government to gut.
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But the starkest difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is not policy.
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It is enrichment.
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It's scale.
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It's brazenness.
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It's open contempt for restraint.
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The day before Bezos made his remarks,
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the acting attorney general of the United States announced that the Justice Department would grant Trump,
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his family, and his businesses immunity from all audits and investigations for any past tax-related misconduct,
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And the announcement claimed it would last forever.
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The week before, Trump disclosed that his stock portfolio had executed around 3,700 trades in the first quarter alone,
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a staggering number.
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Many following a suspiciously convenient pattern.
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A stock bought shortly before a government action or statement that benefited it.
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On January 6th of this year,
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for example, the Trump portfolio bought half a million dollars of NVIDIA stock.
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A week later, NVIDIA received U.S clearance to sell its H200 chips to China.
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That was not all.
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The Commerce Department this week announced an investment in a quantum computing company in
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which a member of the Trump family holds interests.
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And don't forget the $500 million UAE investment in a Trump family crypto venture,
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the $2 billion UAE investment using that company's stable coin,
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the flurry of new Trump organization real estate deals,
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or the drone company in which the Trump family invested and that later miraculously received a Pentagon contract.
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One number says it all.
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Reuters calculates that from the first half of 2024 to the first half of 2025,
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the Trump Organization's income rose from $51 million to $864 million.
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This does suggest discipline, a relentless discipline devoted to monetizing the presidency.
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But somehow I doubt But that is what Jeff Bezos had in mind.
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The Trump Organization has maintained that Trump himself,
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his family and the organization don't have any role in directing or influencing specific investments.
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The deeper question is why is this possible?
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And why has it produced so little resistance?
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Scholars of corruption have long assumed that in advanced democracies,
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graft becomes subtle and institutional campaign donations, lobbying networks, consulting contracts.
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Trump has taken the elaborate machinery of an advanced industrial state and used it to accelerate something far cruder,
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old-fashioned personal grift.
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The public may be troubled,
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but his MAGA base doesn't seem to be,
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and that is the only constituency that could restrain him.
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In a hyper-polarized country, corruption is no longer judged as an objective moral failing.
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It is filtered through tribe.
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If our side does it,
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it's either fake news, clever politics, or totally justified revenge.
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This reveals a deeper weakness in the American system.
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The founding fathers built a magnificent constitutional framework,
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but it rested on an assumption that they did not spell out,
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that public officials would retain some shared commitment to unwritten civic norms.
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Madison's design, ambition must be made to counteract ambition,
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assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive.
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He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.
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The legal guardrails are weaker than most Americans realize.
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The president is largely exempt from standard federal conflict of interest laws.
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Many of the actions I've described would expose even the senior-most cabinet secretary to grave legal peril.
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For a president, the Supreme Court has decided
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that the only remedy for official acts is impeachment and two-thirds of the Senate voting for conviction,
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which in our partisan age requires a civic miracle.
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The mature response to these travesties is not revenge,
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but a restoration of the rule of law.
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After Trump, the urgent task for the American Republic will be to turn norms into statutes,
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curtail the ethical immunities of the presidency,
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and find legal ways to ensure
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that the highest public office in the world can never again become a platform for family business.
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Ключевая лексика и фразы
- game theory – теория игр
- existential stakes – экзистенциальные ставки
- negotiation – переговоры
- legitimacy – легитимность
- foreign policy – внешняя политика
- concessions – уступки
- hostilities – враждебность
- regime – режим
Советы по практике
При изучении этого видео используйте технику shadowspeak, чтобы улучшить произношение английского. Начните с того, чтобы внимательно прослушать каждую фразу, а затем повторять ее в унисон с оратором. Обратите внимание на скорость речи, и старайтесь имитировать интонацию и паузы. Если темп слишком быстр, используйте возможности shadowing site для замедления воспроизведения, чтобы вам было легче следить за произношением. Фокусируйтесь на трудных словах и фразах, повторяя их несколько раз, прежде чем переходить к следующим. Постоянная практика в режиме shadowing поможет вам уверенно строить диалоги на такие сложные темы, как международные отношения, что существенно расширит ваши навыки разговорного английского.
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