Newsweek 06/08/2018

“Iran’s loss…will be Russia’s gain.” A FEW MONTHS INTO THE TRUMP administration, former CIA Director Michael Hayden took a reconnaissance mission of sorts to Pittsburgh, where he grew up in a blue-collar, Roman Catholic family and worked summers in Steelers training camps. He’d asked his brother to gather a couple dozen people to talk politics in a sports bar “over some Iron City beer,” a local brew. “I knew many of the participants, indeed had grown up with several,” Hayden writes in his troubling and important new book, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies. “But we could have been from different planets.” Virtually everyone in the crowd, he recalls, were supporters of the erratic New York business mogul who had improbably won election and moved into…

WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD Trump declared in May that he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, he vowed to reimpose some of “the strongest sanctions that we’ve ever put on a country.” Among the biggest targets: Iran’s booming oil fields, an economic engine that fuels Europe and Asia with 4 million barrels of crude a day. But as Tehran and other world leaders recoiled, one country celebrated: Russia. The reason? Supply and demand. The new sanctions will likely remove a million barrels of Iranian oil a day from world markets once the restrictions fully kick in this fall, and few are in a better position to reap the benefits of the resulting price surge than the Kremlin. Russia is the world’s biggest energy exporter, but for the past four years, sagging…

THREE YEARS AGO, SELAHATTIN Demirtas was celebrating a political revolution in Turkey. Alarmed by the increasingly autocratic rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Kurdish former human rights lawyer had formed a new political party—the People’s Democratic Party, or HDP—and led it to victory in a historic election. For the first time, the country’s long-suppressed Kurdish minority was poised to take seats in Parliament, depriving the divisive president’s party of a majority and curbing his plans to expand his executive powers. “As of this hour, the debate about the presidency, the debate about dictatorship, is over,” Demirtas declared on election night in June 2015. “Turkey narrowly averted a disaster.” The victory was short-lived. Erdogan challenged the results, and five months later he regained his parliamentary majority in a snap election. Violence swept the…

THERE’S A LOW BUZZ AT HOUSE OF Memories, a popular restaurant in Yangon, where two 20-somethings in T-shirts are listening impatiently to a visitor’s questions about Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar. Some 600 miles away from the main city, the military allegedly has been ethnically cleansing Rohingya Muslims in the western state of Rakhine, and the visitor wants to know if they think Suu Kyi has condoned these actions. The two munch on seafood salad and batter-fried vegetables, point out the Japanese tourists dining at the next table and murmur asides to each other before one finally declares, “I love her,” his tone at once plaintive and defiant. “And anyway,” he says of the Rohingyas, “those are not Burmese.” That’s a common refrain among Myanmar’s Buddhist Burmans, the country’s…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY WAS killed 50 years ago June 6—the third in a trio of high-profile assassinations during that decade, the bloody coda to an era of political violence. Today, in our divided, uncivil time, it’s worth remembering that Americans survived the horrors of the 1960s and early ’70s, which began with the murder of Robert’s older brother, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. But 1968 was something of a watershed: “The year that shattered America,” as Smithsonian has called it, demolished the hippie fever dream of the ’60s with an explosive cocktail of escalating war, racially charged riots, police brutality and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and then RFK. There was no 24-hour news cycle back then. Social media was not spreading hate or forging divisive bubbles. The…

PETER GOLDMAN WAS AT HOME IN NEW York, watching the results roll in from the California presidential primary. It was early in the morning of June 5, 1968, and for a fleeting instant, Robert F. Kennedy seemed poised to capture the Democratic nomination and perhaps follow his slain brother’s footsteps into the White House. NBC went off the air, but Goldman, a 35-year-old national affairs writer for Newsweek, stayed awake, flipping through other news channels. Suddenly, he saw footage of a shaken Steve Smith, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and campaign manager, ascending to the podium at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel “and announcing that something horrible had happened.” As Goldman would observe in his subsequent Newsweek cover story, there was a sense of “sickening familiarity” in the night’s sequence of events, coming as it did…