Economics

America’s role in the Middle East

Published

1 year ago

March 31, 2024

This is the introduction to Checks and Balance, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter bringing exclusive insight from our correspondents in America.

James Bennet, our Lexington columnist, says America neglects the Middle East at everyone’s peril

The secretary of state declared he was not going to waste his energy chasing peace among Israelis and Arabs. The region was a quagmire, he told an aide as he took office, and he was “not going to fly around the Middle East” like his predecessor. That attitude might sound familiar from the last three American administrations, but the secretary in state in question was James Baker, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, as described by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their biography, “The Man Who Ran Washington”.

Mr Baker’s aide, Dennis Ross, responded to him with a warning that more recent administrations should also have heard: while Mr Baker “might want to ignore the Middle East, it would not ignore him”.

Like Donald Trump and Barack Obama, President Joe Biden came into office wanting to focus his attention on Asia. When it came to Israelis and Palestinians he stuck with the “outside-in” approach of Mr Trump, hoping that more Arab states would sign peace deals with Israel, and that that would somehow put pressure on the Palestinians eventually to strike a deal, too. As our briefing this week explains, both those goals now seem out of reach.

It was the first Gulf war that prompted Mr Baker to embark on his own round of intense Middle East peacemaking, taking at least eight trips to the region, including one three-week marathon, that led to the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He did not achieve a peace deal; as Mr Ross had also warned him, he would need “heroes for dramatic breakthroughs”, leaders like Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who gave his life for peace with Israel. No such heroes were on offer.

But Madrid paved the way, as did pressure from the Bush administration that brought down a right-wing Israeli government, elevating a new prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. During the Clinton administration, Rabin sealed the Oslo accords, the interim peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. Then, like Sadat, he was killed.

I’m not suggesting this war in Gaza is about to lead to some kind of reset, much less a breakthrough. But I found myself thinking about this history as I wrote this week about the public rupture between Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and a champion of Israel within the Democratic Party, and Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. It seems worth thinking back on the more hopeful moments and what made them possible, including the sort of intelligent, focused attention from American peacemakers that has been missing from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for far too long.

Economics

Layoff announcements surge to the most since the pandemic as Musk’s DOGE slices Federal labor force

Published

25 seconds ago

April 3, 2025

Business Finance News

Employees of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hug each other as they queue outside the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Building, after it was reported that the Trump administration fired staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at the Food and Drug Administration, as it embarked on its plan to cut 10,000 jobs at HHS, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 1, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

A surge in federal government job cuts contributed to a near record-setting pace for announced layoffs in March, exceeded only by when the country shut down in 2020 for the Covid pandemic, according to a report Thursday from job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Furloughs in the federal government totaled 216,215 for the month, part of a total 275,240 reductions overall in the labor force. Some 280,253 layoffs across 27 agencies in the past two months have been linked to the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency and its efforts to pare down the federal workforce.

The monthly total was surpassed only by April and May of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when employers announced combined reductions of more than 1 million, according to Challenger records going back to 1989.

“Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] plans to eliminate positions in the federal government,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert at the firm. “It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs.”

However, DOGE has continued to cut aggressively across the government.

Various reports have indicated that the Veterans Affairs department could lose 80,000 jobs, the IRS is in line for some 18,000 reductions and Treasury is expected to drop a “substantial” level of workers as well, according to a court filing.

The year to date tally for federal government announced layoffs represents a 672% increase from the same period in 2024, according to Challenger.

To be sure, the outsized layoff plans haven’t made their way into other jobs data.

Weekly unemployment claims have held in a fairly tight range since President Donald Trump took office. Payroll growth has slowed a bit from its pace in 2024 but is still positive, while job openings have receded but only to around their pre-pandemic levels.

However, the Washington, D.C. area has been hit particularly hard by the announced layoffs, which have totaled 278,711 year to date for the city, according to the report.

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Economics

Trump will ‘buckle under pressure’ if Europe bands together over tariffs: German economy minister

Published

2 hours ago

April 3, 2025

Business Finance News

BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 24: Robert Habeck, chancellor candidate of the German Greens Party, speaks to the media the day after German parliamentary elections on February 24, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. The Greens came in fourth place with 11.6% of the vote, down 2.9% from the previous election. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images

U.S. President Donald Trump will “buckle under pressure” and alter his tariff policies if Europe bands together, acting German economy minister Robert Habeck said Thursday.

“That is what I see, that Donald Trump will buckle under pressure, that he corrects his announcements under pressure, but the logical consequence is that he then also needs to feel the pressure,” he said during a press conference, according to a CNBC translation.

“And this pressure now needs to be unfolded, from Germany, from Europe in the alliance with other countries, and then we will see who is the stronger one in this arm wrestle,” Habeck said.

Elsewhere, outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he believed the latest tariff decisions by Trump were “fundamentally wrong,” according to a CNBC translation.

The measures are an attack on the global trade order and will result in suffering for the global economy, Scholz said.

On Wednesday, Trump imposed 20% levies on the European Union, including on the bloc’s foremost economy Germany, as he signed a sweeping and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy.

Germany is widely regarded as one of the countries likely to be most impacted by Trump’s tariffs, given its heavy economic reliance on trade.

This is a developing story, please check back for updates.

Economics

The Trump train slows

Published

3 hours ago

April 3, 2025

Business Finance News

THESE DAYS are dire and dour for Democrats. But April 1st brought a brief reprieve—and not because of jokes. That was the day that the most expensive judicial election in American history in the battleground state of Wisconsin ended in a decisive triumph for the left-leaning candidate. It had drawn $100m of spending, including an estimated $25m from Elon Musk who also, perhaps unhelpfully, personally campaigned in the state. The same day, two special elections in Florida for vacant congressional seats took place in safe Republican districts. Although they did not win, Democrats improved their margins by 17 and 20 percentage points compared with the general elections held just five months ago. Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, staged a one-man protest on the floor of the Senate, excoriating President Donald Trump’s administration for 25 hours straight—a stunt, to be sure, but one that demonstrated proof of life in a party that supporters worried had gone limp.