David Thomson on Trump

We are beyond the mercy of critical lucidity and valuable scholarship. The nature of bingeing is to commit to the frenzy without any hope of rational control or order. That is why Donald Trump is the exact leader for our time: he is so blind to order and meaning because he is inextricably caught up in the binge of himself, of being Trump every moment, and of knowing every moment is both new and exactly like very earlier moment. He is not so much a leader as a primordial suck, the ego pit int which we are all tumbling. Since his only need is watching television, so his life is being on television, or quite simply being TV - being on. 

De Gaulle on treaties

"Treaties are like young girls and roses. They last as long as they last."

Aaron Sorkin on Network

Even before the rise of Donald Trump, Aaron Sorkin claimed that “no predictor of the future - not even Orwell - has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote Network.” The film deals with the rise of infotainment, the decline of hard news, the birth of a culture in which we are assailed by an  unending storm of images, the collapse of objective reality, and the emergence of a global market. 

Ian Johnson on China's imperial ambitions in the NYRB

Between 2013 and 2015 it built more than 3000 acres of new land in the South China Sea by occupying and expanding shoals and refs just off the coast of the Philippines int islands big enough to support radar stations, runways and docks for its growing navy... Along with the building campaign has been Beijing's novel, contemptuous might be the better word, interpretation of the international law of the sea.  First, the Chinese government violated any accepted understanding of maritime law by declaring the reefs and shoals to be sovereign territory.  Then it claimed the waters around them as its exclusive economic zone.  Finally it declared that economic zones of control are virtually the same as territorial waters, go ing it the right to chase off any ship that passes through.  The fact has been to make the South China Sea into China's South Sea. This means more than Beijing being the dominant power in the region; it wants to control these waters as if they were an inland lake. 

Munchau in the FT on why Hard Brexit would also be bad for the EU

“Just consider the following three effects of a sudden Brexit. First, the eurozone remains dependent on the City of London for financial services and especially on settlement and clearing, the plumbing of the financial system. Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, who is not a Brexit cheerleader, said recently there was a bigger risk of a financial crisis in the EU than in the UK. The eurozone is unfortunate in that it allowed its main financial centre to be outside its borders. There is a clear potential for blackmail here.

Second, it is trivially true that Britain has a smaller weight in eurozone trade than the eurozone has in UK trade. This is because the eurozone is bigger. But do not underestimate that manufacturing supply chains work in both directions. A sudden break could disrupt manufacturing production everywhere. Remember that a single bank, Lehman Brothers, was able to blow up the global financial system in 2008. Dynamic effects are harder to calculate than the static ones but they can be much bigger.

Third, the UK is a member of the UN Security Council, the Group of 20 advanced industrial nations, and the Group of Seven. If EU countries want to fight tax avoidance by multinational companies, manage globalisation in a fairer way, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or come up with policies to combat terrorism, they will need the UK.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Tony Blair

He doubtless justifies to himself his work for Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose regime has been strongly condemned by human rights organizations, in the same strange antinomian way he justified the manner in which he took us into the Iraq war: whatever he does must be virtuous because he does it.

Fintan O'Toole on the Easter Rising on the NYRB

The Rising acquired its imaginative potency not in spite of its small scale but precisely because of it.  It's power lay in its manufacture of highly individual and meaningful deaths during a period of mass, apparently meaningless, slaughter. It was handcrafted martyrdom in an age of industrial massacre.