December 6 – A View From Israel on Trump’s Dangerous Gambit; Could Tax Reform Die in Conference?; Trump’s 3 Month Window to Attack North Korea

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Part 1

We begin with President Trump’s formal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital announced today and his plan to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv. The former spokesman for Shimon Peres, Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist and columnist for Ha’aretz joins us from Tel Aviv to discuss Trump’s gift to Netanyahu that leaves the U.S. totally isolated as the only country in the world to have an embassy in Jerusalem. We assess the likely impact of Trump’s announcement on the Palestinian territories and in the neighboring countries and the extent to which it dims the hope for any future two state solution, a prospect that already appears to be dead in the water. We will also examine the similarities between Trump and Netanyahu in as much as both are pursuing aggressive right wing policies while judicial inquiries close in on them and threaten their political futures.

 

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Part 2

Then we get an analysis of whether the rush to get something passed by the Republicans so that they will not have to run next year as the “do-nothing” congress will result is a worse backlash once their constituents know what is in their so-called tax reform bill and how much it will hurt average Americans. Paul Waldman, who writes for The Washington Post’s Plum Line and is a contributing editor to The American Prospect where he has an article “How Republicans are Digging Their Own Grave for 2018” and another at The Week “Republicans’ remarkable self-deception on tax cuts”, joins us to discuss the possibility that the bill will die in conference as many members from blue states begin to realize how much their vote for the bill will amount to political suicide.

Part 3
 
Then finally we speak with the former speechwriter for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Mark Seddon, a professor of international relations at Columbia University about his article at The Guardian “Have we got just three months to avert a US attack on North Korea?” He joins us to discuss John Bolton’s recent trip to the U.K. House of Commons where the former US Ambassador to the UN relayed a message from the Trump White House that the CIA head had told Trump he had a “three month window” to strike North Korea before they had the capability to hit Washington with a nuclear-tipped ICBM.