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The Weekly GAB Friday, February 10, 2017
U.S. Global Leadership Coalition | www.usglc.org
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Transition 2017

USA TODAY

Rex Tillerson's First Week at State: Cleaning Up After President Trump
|

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Oren Dorell

Rex Tillerson spent much of his first week as the nation's top
diplomat smoothing relations with countries in the wake of President
Trump's tweets, phone tirades and threats that roiled allies and
adversaries around the world. The latest example came Thursday night,
when Trump told Chinese President Xi Jinping that he would honor the
"one-China" policy that has guided U.S.-China relations for 40 years.
The two leaders had an "extremely cordial" phone call and invited each
other to visit in the future, according to a White House statement.

CNN
Abrams, a Trump Critic, Considered for Key State Department Post |

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Elise Labott

Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative Republican insider, is emerging as
President Donald Trump's choice be Deputy Secretary of State -- a pick
that could test Trump's willingness to work with members of a foreign
policy establishment that didn't back him during the campaign,
according to sources familiar with the situation. Trump will meet
Tuesday with Abrams, who served under Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has met with
Abrams and wants him for the job, also will attend the meeting.

THE WASHINGTON POST
Jared Kushner Proves to Be a Shadow Diplomat on U.S.-Mexico Talks |

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Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker and Joshua Partlow

Kushner, 36, has no traditional foreign policy experience yet has
become the primary point of contact for presidents, ministers and
ambassadors from more than two dozen countries, helping lay the
groundwork for deals. His influence extends throughout the Americas,
Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. In another sign
of Kushner's growing importance, Tillerson invited him into his
meeting with Videgaray, which for the first half hour was just the
three men - the U.S. secretary of state, the Mexican foreign
minister and the U.S. president's son-in-law - before they
were joined by additional aides.

Who's in the News

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Bill Frist: The Case for Keeping America's AIDS Relief Plan

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Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN)

Among global public health advocates, there is a growing concern that
President Trump may cut back, or even eliminate, programs that have
played a critical role in fighting diseases worldwide. While every
administration should strongly review our nation's overseas
commitments, and there are undoubtedly programs that we should cut, I
hope he recognizes the success and importance of one in particular:
the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. President Trump,
like his predecessors, will have the chance to put his own stamp on
this winning program.

POLITICO MAGAZINE
America Must Stand Tall

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Gen. David H. Petraeus (U.S. Army, retired), former director of the
CIA and former head of CENTCOM

To keep the peace, we led an effort to establish a system of global
alliances and security commitments...These were the bipartisan
foundations for the international order that emerged after World War
II. They were the product of American leadership, American power and
American values. And while imperfect, on balance they succeeded. It is
also the world that, I fear, is now in danger of being unmade. The
international order that America created is now under unprecedented
threat from multiple directions.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Vice President Joe Biden to Lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy
and Global Engagement

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University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann today announced that
Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. has been named the Benjamin
Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he will lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy
and Global Engagement, a new center focused principally on diplomacy,
foreign policy, and national security. The Penn Biden Center for
Diplomacy and Global Engagement will open its Washington, D.C. office
later in 2017.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

I Was on the National Security Council. Bannon Doesn't Belong
There.

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Admiral Michael G. Mullen, U.S. Navy (Ret.), Chairman, Joint Chiefs of
Staff, 2007 - 2011

In his first weeks in office, President Trump has outlined plans to
reorganize the White House's National Security Council. This is
in keeping with tradition: new presidents regularly reconfigure the
council to fit their management style and national security
priorities. But some of Mr. Trump's other plans are unsettling
and should be remedied as soon as possible - in particular the
role he has given to his top political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon.
Putting aside for a moment Mr. Bannon's troubling public
positions, which are worrisome enough, institutionalizing his
attendance threatens to politicize national security decision making.

Development & Diplomacy

THE WASHINGTON POST

Malaria Is Getting Bigger and Badder - and We're Not Ready
For it | |

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Robert Gebelhoff

Over the past 15 years the number of annual deaths due to malaria has
plummeted by about 400,000, according to the World Health
Organization. Scientists also estimate that more than 660 million
cases of the disease were averted thanks to scaling up of prevention
and treatment. But that progress is in jeopardy. Thanks to decades of
using insecticides and drugs to stave of the mosquito-borne disease,
malaria has slowly been evolving to get around our offenses. Without
any effective vaccine in place, we're in desperate need of new
tools to fight it.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Turning the Tide Against Cholera |

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Donald G. McNeil

Today cholera garners panicky headlines when it strikes unexpectedly
in places like Ethiopia or Haiti. But it is a continuing threat in
nearly 70 countries, where more than one billion people are at risk.
Now, thanks largely to efforts that began in cholera's
birthplace, a way to finally conquer the long-dreaded plague is in
sight. A treatment protocol so effective that it saves 99.9 percent of
all victims was pioneered here. The World Health Organization
estimates that it has saved about 50 million lives in the past four
decades.

CNN
Diplomats in State of Confusion Over US Transition |

http://action.usglc.org/site/R?i=QQfQUH0sKIJGL4F3f9tuEA

Nicole Gaouette, Elise Labott and Michelle Kosinski

From Moscow to Monrovia, there's a new guessing game: What's going on
with US foreign policy? And is there anyone at the State Department to
call to find out? With the new president signaling significant changes
in the US approach to the world, key job openings at the oldest US
Cabinet agency remain unfilled, leaving some of the State Department's
day-to-day business frozen and foreign capitals unsure whom to reach
out to for clarity on new directions the US may take. The policy
murkiness is compounded by the fact that the administration didn't
seem ready to immediately take on the duties of running the State
Department, several diplomats and State staffers said.

THE WASHINGTON POST

The Panic Is Over at Zika's Epicenter. But for Many, the
Struggle Has Just Begun. |

http://action.usglc.org/site/R?i=YM609TbSUdXQq2N68fIItA

Marina Lopes and Nick Miroff

A year after U.N. health officials declared Zika a global emergency,
the city that produced some of the outbreak's most terrifying
and indelible images of badly deformed infants feels like a place that
has mostly moved on. But not everyone has bounced back so fast. Not
the parents of the babies in those heartbreaking photographs.
Initially, many feared that the infants would be merely the first wave
of Zika victims, with many more to follow. Yet as the virus spread
across the Americas and infected hundreds of thousands, it did not
inflict the kind of damage seen here in northeast Brazil, where
three-quarters of Zika-related birth defects have been reported.

Politics & Foreign Policy

NPR

In Phone Call With Xi, Trump Reaffirms U.S. Commitment to One-China
Policy |

http://action.usglc.org/site/R?i=aZZbf0OZZ5Vh8RG-f5kofw

Anthony Kuhn

President Trump spoke to around 20 world leaders before calling
China's president, Xi Jinping. But he finally did it Thursday evening.
And despite earlier remarks threatening to upend long-standing U.S.
policy, Trump promised Xi that Washington will stick to the
"one-China" doctrine. This makes Trump only the latest in a series of
U.S. presidents who have railed against Beijing while on the campaign
trail, only to be forced by geopolitical realities and U.S. business
interests to fall back on established policies once in office.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Pentagon Leader Assumes New Role: Turning Down the Temperature on
Trump |

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Missy Ryan

As President Trump's new Pentagon chief, Jim Mattis has a long
list of tasks ahead, including devising a more aggressive campaign to
combat the Islamic State and restoring military readiness after years
of budget cuts. But a few weeks into his tenure, the retired
general's most visible role has been of a different sort:
soothing Americans and allies unnerved by the president and some of
his top advisers. Mattis, wrapping up a visit to Japan and South
Korean last week, carried a message of constancy and restraint on many
of the foreign policy issues whose fate has generated anxiety since
Trump's election.

FOREIGN POLICY
Why Trump's Short-Term Focus Could Put America Last |

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Kristin M. Lord

The biggest unanswered question about President Donald Trump's
foreign policy is when - or indeed if - he will move past
the administration's current "live in the now"
approach and try to proactively shape the world Americans must live
in. So far, the administration's approach has been to strike
hard and fast at urgent challenges, without worrying about cascading
effects or long-term consequences. The administration appears to view
this approach as a feature - not a bug - having criticized
former President Barack Obama's administration for deliberations
that produced, according to the Trump worldview, paralysis and for a
failure to act.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Syria Has Secretly Executed Thousands of Political Prisoners, Rights
Group Says |

http://action.usglc.org/site/R?i=NMNGW8N7ZctRMM_eD4ndfA

Liz Sly

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government secretly executed
between 5,000 and 13,000 people in just one prison as part of its
campaign to eliminate opposition to his rule, a new report by the
watchdog group Amnesty International has found. The killings took
place over a four-year period between 2011 and 2015 in the notorious
Sednaya facility outside Damascus, and the bodies were later disposed
of in mass graves, according to the report released Monday by Amnesty.
The accounts of these killings are in addition to the figure of 17,000
that Amnesty counted in an earlier report on the extrajudicial
killings issued last August.


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