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Friday, November 30, 2018
"Odin iz nashikh? ... [one of ours]? ... (II)
Shmykov image from below-cited article, with caption: Mr. Sater tapped Evgeny Shmykov, a former general in Russian military intelligence, to help with the Moscow project.
Excerpt from Mike McIntire, Megan Twohey and Mark Mazzetti, "How a Lawyer, a Felon and a Russian General Chased a Moscow Trump Tower Deal," The New York Times (Nov. 29, 2018); see also
When Donald J. Trump took a run at building a tower in Moscow in the middle of his 2016 presidential campaign, it was the high point of a decades-long effort to plant the “Trump” flag there.
The role his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen played in the endeavor entered the spotlight again on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to misleading Congress. But the effort was led in large part by Felix Sater, a convicted felon and longtime business associate with deep ties to Russia.
Image from article, with caption: Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of President Trump’s, drew on deep Russian contacts to pursue a real estate deal during the 2016 campaign. One of those contacts was a former intelligence official in Russia.
To get the project off the ground, Mr. Sater dug into his address book and its more than 100 Russian contacts — including entries for President Vladimir V. Putin and a former general in Russian military intelligence. Mr. Sater tapped the general, Evgeny Shmykov, to help arrange visas for Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump to visit Russia, according to emails and interviews with several people knowledgeable about the events. ...
Mr. Sater drew on connections he had made in Russia in the late 1990s when he began secretly working for American intelligence agencies [JB emphasis], which in turn helped reduce his penalty after a guilty plea in a $40 million securities fraud case. (He was previously convicted after slashing a man’s face in a Manhattan bar fight in 1991.) ...
A European Goes to Trump’s Washington
And what he finds is disturbing.
on Krastev, see
VIENNA — For a European, visiting the United States these days is a bit like going to the dentist: Your mouth is agape, you smell trouble, and you leave with a lingering bad taste.
I recently spent three months in Washington as the Henry A. Kissinger chair at the Library of the Congress. My job, ostensibly, was to make sense of a world that has gone wild. But I think in my time there the only thing I really achieved was high-level confusion.
This wasn’t my first visit to America, but it was my most disturbing one. What I found so disconcerting was the pervasive political polarization afflicting the country. It was also clear that America has become inward-looking and conspiracy-minded. And in Washington now, people are incapable of discussing anything but President Trump. They talk about Mr. Trump even when they pretend to be speaking about something else. It’s all Trump, all the time.
The only people who refrain from Trump talk are those who work for him. It used to be when I visited Washington, people in the government were eager to talk to me, an analyst, about everything from the war in Ukraine to trade with the European Union. They wanted their talking points heard on the Continent, and they wanted outsiders’ perspectives on world events. But officials in the Trump administration shy away from many — especially foreigners like myself. Perhaps they fear that we might figure out that even senior White House officials have little clue about what the president plans to do next.
Those who do like to speak on behalf of Mr. Trump, though, present unorthodox foreign policy as similar to Richard Nixon’s. But what I could never figure out in these conversations is who plays Henry Kissinger to Mr. Trump’s Nixon. (Mr. Kissinger was, naturally, on my mind.)
Unlike government officials, the president’s critics in the think-tank world and the media seem eager to cavort with Europeans. It is a sort of never-ending psychoanalysis, in which it is not easy to figure out who is the patient and who is the analyst. As I met with dozens of such people around Washington, I heard the same things: Mr. Trump is at best an accidental president; he is a minority president; he was elected by the Russians; at some point soon (though not soon enough) he will be cast out of the White House. Behind this talk is a combination of anxiety and hope — anxiety about what Mr. Trump has broken and hope that as soon as he’s gone everything will return to normal.
That part is familiar. I’ve heard a similar hope in Europe, too. In most European capitals, policymakers and the chattering classes want to believe that before too long, Mr. Trump will be gone and the world order — including the close alliances between Europe and the United States — will return.
But here’s the dirty secret that I learned in my three months in Washington: That’s not true. The world will not boomerang back to where it was even if Democrats take back the White House in 2020, and not simply because even if Mr. Trump will be gone, many of the Trumpian leaders in power around the world will remain. Many of the changes Mr. Trump has ushered into America’s foreign policy will remain long after he’s gone. When it comes to America’s role in the world, he could end up being more consequential than George W. Bush or Barack Obama. The Trump moment in the end may resemble the Truman moment, when over a short period America dramatically changed its views of the world.
This may be hard for Europeans to swallow, but it’s the message I am bringing back with me from Washington. The post-Trump world will not be the pre-Trump world. [JB emphasis]
Mr. Trump’s presidency has ushered in two significant changes that are likely to have staying power. First, with his administration, Americans have lost confidence in their exceptionalism. It’s not just the president but also the millennials (who predominantly oppose him) who no longer share the belief that America is an “indispensable nation” with a moral obligation to make the world safe for democracy. The difference is that the millennials believe that America is hardly better than other countries, while Mr. Trump believes that if America wants to defend its global leadership, it has to be nastier than others.
Second, under the Trump presidency, rivalry with China has become the organizing principle of American foreign policy. Republicans and Democrats disagree on almost everything today, but one area where there seems to be effective bipartisanship is that America must change its policy toward China. Only a few lost souls in Washington continue to believe that China’s economic development will lead to a political opening. There is now a consensus that allowing China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 was a mistake and that if America fails to contain China’s geopolitical reach now, tomorrow it will be impossible to do so. America’s anxiety about China is in my view a realization of the fact that China’s market-friendly, big-data authoritarianism is a much more dangerous adversary for liberal democracies than Soviet Communism ever was.
It’s common to hear Europeans today wax nostalgic about the Cold War, a time when the United States and Western Europe were united in an alliance against the Soviet Union. But Americans don’t share that nostalgia. They are looking for allies aligned against China. And confrontation with Beijing is not something most Europeans are interested in.
It would be a tragedy and, worse, a mistake if Europeans failed to realize that their relationship with the United States will be defined by China, not just now but even after Mr. Trump is out of office. And for Europe to take a clear stand in the coming confrontation between Washington and Beijing will be a lot more painful than going to the dentist.
Ivan Krastev is a contributing opinion writer, the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the author, most recently, of “After Europe.”
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
The endangered dusky gopher frog
The endangered dusky gopher frog, a darkly colored, moderately sized frog with warts covering its back and dusky spots on its belly. PHOTO: U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE/REUTERS
A Black Eye, a Controversial Leak and Possible Armageddon—the Madness of the World Chess Championship
After three dramatic weeks and 12 indecisive games, Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana will play a series of fast-paced tiebreaker games
Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson, The Wall Street Journal
This year’s World Chess Championships has produced a crazy level of drama for an event that has so far produced a dozen draws and no winner.
A leaked video gave away the preparations of the No. 2 player in the world. The world’s No. 1 player arrived for one match sporting a gnarly black eye. The draw in match 12 was so shocking that it befuddled grandmasters around the globe.
So after three weeks and 12 indecisive games, reigning champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway and challenger Fabiano Caruana of the U.S. are heading to overtime. It’s the first time ever that regulation play hasn’t produced a single victory for either player. Carlsen and Caruana will return to the board one more time on Wednesday for a series of fast-paced tiebreaker games.
“We both had our moments,” Caruana said. “I actually wouldn’t mind more rounds. Sixteen or 18 rounds would be fine.”
Inside a fishbowl of soundproof glass in London, the past three weeks have delivered nonstop mental and physical theater. Caruana is trying to become the first American champion since Bobby Fischer in 1972, while Carlsen is hoping to burnish his legacy as one of the game’s all-time greats.
The match reached overtime after a series of bizarre events not normally associated with the word “chess.”
Before Game 4, a snippet of footage showing Caruana’s preparation leaked online, and the chess universe caught fire: Would it provide an undue advantage for Carlsen? Was it a gambit of misdirection from Caruana’s team?
But before those questions were resolved, Carlsen arrived for Game 9 with an unexpected problem of his own: a bandage above his right eye. The injury was not chess related—no bishops were hurled in his direction. Instead, the player who achieved the highest Elo rating in chess history had spent his day off playing soccer and collided with a Norwegian journalist.
Carlsen did not suffer a concussion as initially feared and was cleared by his medical team. But his mental acuity was thrust into question after the game when a poor move allowed Caruana to draw against him. Carlsen, afterward, conceded he “blew it.”
Magnus Carlsen arrived for Game 9 with a bandage above his right eye. PHOTO: FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Then in Game 11, an opening that Caruana was shown in the video preparing for—known as “Petrov’s Defense”—emerged on the chessboard. Everyone knew Caruana had prepared for this. Which made it seem only more likely that Carlsen had seen something he could exploit in the video and was now baiting Caruana into it. Nonetheless, the game finished in a draw.
That set the stage for the potentially climactic Game 12. Carlsen was playing the black pieces, which move second in each match and theoretically begin on the defensive. Yet after 21 moves, top experts and sophisticated chess computers agreed that Carlsen held a significant advantage. As the match proceeded, chess computers showed that Carlsen could have turned the screws even further with a single move and put himself in position to snatch the game and the title.
Despite his decided edge, however, Carlsen abruptly proposed a draw. The pleasantly surprised Caruana leapt to accept it. On the other side of the glass, the chess world fumed.
“I’m very shocked by Magnus’s decision,” American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura said on the chess.com broadcast.
World Chess Championship, Game 12
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Source: Chess.com
Caruana didn’t conceal his relief. “I was down a lot of time and had a position I didn’t really feel comfortable with,” he said. Asked afterward what he thought of a move that pushed his edge, the champion of the most logical game on earth didn’t have a logical answer. “I don’t care,” he scoffed.
Now the two grandmasters are headed to tiebreakers, all of which would take place Wednesday. First, they will play four “rapid” games, in which the two players begin with 25 minutes on the clock and get a 10-second increment after each move. If that does not produce a winner, they will play blitz games, in which the players get five minutes and a three-second increment.
If those games fail to produce a winner, the championship has only one solution: Armageddon.
That’s the name chess gives to its most extreme tiebreaker. It has never been used to decide the world championship. It has rules so arcane that the chess world might actually descend into anarchy if it becomes necessary. But it has a necessary function. It is guaranteed to produce a winner, if not the end of the world.
Players draw lots to pick sides. Then, white has five aggregate minutes to complete its moves and black has only four. Here’s where it gets even wilder: If the game ends in a draw, black wins.
From the Archives
When an Amateur Challenges a Chess Grandmaster
Self-described “obsessive learner” Max Deutsch challenged grandmaster Magnus Carlsen to a game of chess. What could possibly go wrong? Video: George Downs/WSJ. Photo: Gordon Welters for The Wall Street Journal (Originally published Nov. 17, 2017)
“Let’s hope there won’t be Armageddon, because it’s a little bit too much,” grandmaster Sergey Karjakin said before losing to Carlsen in tiebreakers at the 2016 world championships.
Turbo-charged tiebreakers can be a gruesome way to settle three weeks of carefully considered competition and many experts argue that they aren’t in the spirit of elite-level chess. But the alternative is a scenario like the 1984 World Chess Championships between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, which dragged on for 48 games over five months without a winner. The president of chess’s world governing body ultimately ordered the match to be abandoned due to concerns over the players’ health. Karpov had reportedly lost upwards of 20 pounds.
Wednesday’s proceedings will be significantly shorter.
Historically, Carlsen is the stronger rapid and blitz player—he is No. 1 in the world in both formats with a sizable rating advantage over Caruana. And experts believe that his intuitive style could throw the more calculating Caruana, who has faced time crunches already in this championship, off-balance. That said, shorter formats introduce an element of randomness—there is no time to correct for mistakes. Even the worst team in the NBA would like its chances in a five-minute overtime against the Warriors better than its chances of winning in regulation.
“I think I have a very good chance, obviously. But I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Carlsen said. “Before today, I thought getting a tiebreak would be getting a good result.”
Magnus Carlsen shakes hands with Fabiano Caruana (R) before their Round 12 match. PHOTO:FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Before Monday, it also seemed like the tiebreaks could be a formality. But Carlsen’s shocking decision to offer a draw in Game 12 has the chess world wondering about his mental state.
“Tiebreaks require tremendous nerves,” Kasparov tweeted. “And he seems to be losing his.”
Appeared in the November 28, 2018, print edition as 'A Black Eye, a Leak and Possible Armageddon.'
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