Newsweek 02/01/2019

1973 “It was a war that produced no famous victories, no national heroes and no patriotic songs,” wrote Newsweek of the January 27 ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Vietnam. It also produced no winner. Once America withdrew, the war between North and South Vietnam raged on until April 30, 1975, when Saigon fell to the Communists, forcing South Vietnam to surrender and ending close to 20 years of conflict. Over 58,000 U.S. soldiers and more than 3 million Vietnamese, on both sides, perished. 1982 “America’s painful dilemma” is whether “humane treatment of refugees is compatible with effective immigration control.” Thousands of Haitians were seeking asylum in the U.S. to “work hard and be free.” Instead, they were jailed—a reversal in national policy that paved the way for family separation. 1995 The rates of teen…

IN TWEET MODE AND AT HIS “MAKE AMERICA great again” rallies, the president has spent the better part of the past 18 months attacking the “WITCH HUNT” against him. Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, has run a tight-lipped operation. Other than the 33 people and three companies he has charged so far, almost no one, least of all the American public, knows what to expect as his investigation churns toward its presumed final target, an increasingly rattled President Donald Trump. University of Arizona constitutional law professor and author Andrew Coan’s new book, Prosecuting the President (Oxford University Press), provides historical context for Mueller’s operation. Because government policy states that no sitting president can be indicted before he is impeached, Coan explains that the special prosecutor’s relationship to…

IT’S FREQUENTLY STATED THAT the Republican Party has a lot of ideas but only one common priority: lowering taxes. The GOP’s record tends to back this depressing assessment—after two years of complete control of Congress and the White House, its main legislative win was yet another tax cut. As a fan of tax cuts, I admire that achievement. But the same GOP that promised to defund Planned Parenthood, radically increase border security and reform the welfare state hasn’t done much of that. If the GOP’s point of commonality is its willingness to cut taxes, the Democratic Party presents the mirror image: a group of disparate interests that coincide only on the topic of raising taxes. Thus, newly empowered congressional Democrats have begun competing with one another to promise higher and higher…

HAVING LED THE INTERNATIONAL Renewable Energy Agency over the past eight years with a privileged-insider view of the energy transition, I have become convinced that a new geopolitical reality is taking shape. The result will be a map of energy geopolitics that will look fundamentally different from the one that has dominated the past 100 years. Whereas coal powered industrialization in the 19th century and oil drove nations’ making of alliances in the 20th, a quiet revolution of renew-ables will transform the politics of the 21st century. The untold story of renewables is that they’re transforming the global energy system at a speed no one predicted. In recent years, technological advances and falling costs have made renewables genuinely competitive commercially. Price trends suggest that by 2020, the average cost of electricity generated…

ON A GRAY, RAIN-SOAKED DAY IN DECEMBER, British Prime Minister Theresa May pulled up to the entrance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office in Berlin. The embattled May was on a tour of European capitals in a desperate bid to win further concessions for her Brexit deal after putting off a parliamentary vote on the proposal to avoid a certain defeat. As Merkel stood outside on a red carpet waiting to greet the British leader, an official tried to open the door to May’s black Mercedes, only to find she was locked inside. After several unsuccessful tries, the official finally got it open. Some pundits saw symbolism in May’s awkward arrival, interpreting it as yet another sign of her political and personal struggle to implement Britain’s 2016 decision to leave the European…

A second Brexit vote may be the ONLY WAY to get the Brexit we truly want. Theresa May’s government didn’t just lose a crucial vote on January 15. It also suffered the biggest defeat by a sitting administration in British history. Her Brexit deal, which set out the terms under which Britain was supposed to leave the European Union on March 29, was rejected by a majority of 230 MPs. That’s more than a third of the membership of the House of Commons. The word catastrophe barely covers it. This number was far higher than many commentators predicted. And yet despite Brexiteers like me being happy that May’s appalling deal was overturned, I am left with a sense of enormous frustration. It is obvious that May is the reason Britain is in…