Security analyst: Next NSA Plans a Housecleaning

At Foreign Policy, Thomas Ricks reports that Vice Adm. (ret.) Robert Harward has been offered the national-security-adviser job — and if he takes it, he’ll bring in “his own team, from deputy on down, with a focus on national security types with some experience under their belts,” particularly people he worked with at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. Unlike the departed Michael Flynn, “he is not an ideologue,” instead thinking of himself as “a national security professional.” Ricks also notes that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, under whom Harward once served, “would emerge from the Flynn mess in a uniquely powerful position.” Indeed, his presence at the Pentagon “is the sole reason some are considering climbing aboard” Trump’s ship.

Iconoclast: Path to Flynn’s Ouster Deeply Troubling

Even if you agree that the United States “is much better” for Michael Flynn’s ouster, “no one should be cheering the way he was brought down,” asserts Damon Linker at The Week. Because it was “a soft coup . . . engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats.” In short, it’s “evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America’s democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency.” But “far too many Trump critics appear not to care that these intelligence agents leaked highly sensitive information to the press” — because they’re “pleased with the result.” And “those cheering the deep state torpedoing of Flynn are saying, in effect, that a police state is perfectly fine so long as it helps to bring down Trump.”

From the right: Left Needs a Moynihan Moment

Steven Malanga at City Journal is nostalgic for the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “a liberal who wasn’t above challenging orthodoxy, for which he occasionally found himself in trouble.” He “popularized the notion that residents of richer states,” like New York, “contributed disproportionately to the federal budget because they paid more in federal income and business taxes than they got back” in aid. But “flummoxed” by the complexity of congressional funding formulas, in his final Senate years he “argued that what the country needed was to shrink the federal government back to the essentials” and reduce taxes. This, he said, “would free each state to create the kind of government its citizens wanted.” It was a “warning” that Washington “had taken on more than it could handle” and against “the Left’s dream of a powerful, all-encompassing federal government.”

Foreign desk: An Overdue Punishment for Venezuela

With all the focus on Russia, there’s been little attention paid to the Treasury Department’s move “to impose sanctions on and to freeze the assets of a series of high-profile Venezuelan actors — including the country’s new vice president,” notes Noah Rothman at Commentary. This “welcome development” was “a long time coming,” after years of investigations into the regime’s drug-trafficking activities. The swiftness of this action “contrasts mightily with the Obama administration’s lethargy when it came to Venezuela.” And it shows “the Trump White House appears to have fewer reservations about using the tools at their disposal to constrain the world’s bad actors.”

Conservative take: GOP Carbon Tax a Bad Deal

President Barack Obama backed away from cap-and-trade after the Democrats’ disastrous 2010 election losses, but Rupert Darwall at National Review warns, “Now the grandees of the Old Republican Establishment, led by former secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker, are calling for President Trump to put the new Republican majority at risk by enacting an escalating $40-per-ton carbon tax.” Yes, a carbon tax is “economically superior” to other efforts to cut carbon emissions, but “the best that can be said” for it “is that it is the least bad way.” Discouraging “the use of efficient hydrocarbon energy shrinks the economy’s productivity frontier” and “subverts consumer choice, so that for the same income families are forced to consume less than they would otherwise.” And Trump vowed to end Obama’s war on coal, while implementing a carbon tax “would be the death warrant for the US coal industry.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann

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