Notes from New Washington

Occasional dispatches about the governance battlefield otherwise known as Washington, DC

Mar 05, 2025

Washington Monument (Image by Rizka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

It seems impossible to keep up with all the news from New Washington. Here are some notes about noteworthy events you may have overlooked.

European military spending rising, but …

March 4: Following the US suspension of military assistance to Ukraine on March 3, the military historian and defence scholar Lawrence Freedman wrote: “As the Russians currently spend over 8% of GDP (and probably more) on their military, Europe’s targets are moving from 2% of GDP to 2.5% and on to 3% or even more.”

But those are relative measures. What does it mean in absolute terms, and with what implications?

Someone with good databases could do a better estimate, but here’s a crude calculation from stats found by Google:

Britain spends annually, say, 2 per cent of ~$3.38 trillion of GDP on defence = ~$67 billion.
The EU spends 1.3 per cent of ~$18.59 trillion of GDP = ~$242 billion.
Russia spends 8 per cent of ~$2.02 trillion of GDO = ~$162 billion.

That is, Britain and major European countries may already outspend Russia in absolute terms by a factor of almost two. The gap points to four factors in terms of defence effectiveness of that spending:

How integrated that spending is;
How unified its command is;
How willing the state is (or states are) to impose wartime-like sacrifices on their populations; and
How willing the state is (or states are) to pull the trigger, press the button.

With a strong lead, NATO’s strength has been a pretty good deterrent for 75+ years, though not enough to stop Russia from invading Ukraine. And this: Money-spend alone doesn’t necessarily deter aggression. Leadership matters, and perhaps the structure of leadership.

The EU isn’t the same as Keir Starmer’s “coalition of the willing”, of course. The EU includes Hungary, Austria and others may not stand with a non-NATO, ex-US defence of Europe. But the coalition – or a longer-term grouping of like-minded defenders of European peace – might include Norway and even Canada. Who would pull the trigger, who press the button?

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Trump v. First Amendment?

February 28: This day was what New York Times columnist Bret Stephens called America’s “day of infamy”. (See also my account of just wars and the visit of Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the White House.)

That event also saw the White House “pool” reporters without any major newswire to provide an account. The “pool” is a group of reporters selected to attend an event but with the obligation to report first to the rest of the White House correspondents. From first-hand experience, I can say that 30 years ago, and for a long time before that, the pool for any event would always include at least one wire reporter. In the recent past it has been either the Associated Press, Reuters, or Bloomberg News. The White House also announced that it – not the White House Correspondents’ Association – would select the pool. Press control?

In the build up to that, on February 11, the White House barred reporters from the Associated Press from attending press events and would offers the AP’s places to other news organisations. It cited as grounds the AP decision not to adopt the new language of the new administration about the name of the body of water between Florida and the Yucatan peninsula. The White House based its decision because the AP continued to use “Gulf of Mexico” in its copy. The agency, an organisation owned mutually by US newspapers, had agreed to change the name of the Alaskan mountain Denali back to Mount McKinley because it lies entirely in US territory. But the Gulf of Mexico, a term used internationally for more than 400 years, would remain to make the agency news reports understandable to readers around the world. The AP said the White House move “plainly violates the First Amendment”.

New Washington takeover bid for New York City?

February 15: How will the US Department of Justice choose between the legal imperative to enforce the rule of law and the political imperative to do the president’s bidding? A test case involves an unlikely setting: New York City. Here the White House is meddling outside its jurisdiction. One matter concerns congestion charging in sections of Manhattan. This looks like a city matter, not even one for New York State, let alone the federal government. Except that NYC did ask for federal funding.

But the second matter involves directly the Justice Department and Trump’s acting attorney general, Emil Bove III, who was standing in while Bondi’s confirmation hearings were underway. The federal attorney general for New York’s Southern District – Manhattan – had indicted the city’s Mayor, Eric Adams, for corruption. Bove ordered the acting prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, to drop the charges. She refused – and resigned rather than be fired. News organisations widely reported that Adams had agreed to facilitate deportations of illegal immigrants, ignoring the city’s “sanctuary” policy.

Bove claimed that administration officials did not arrange to dismiss charges against Adams in exchange for his political support. But on February 14, Adams and Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan appeared together on the Fox News Channel. "If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said of Adams, “I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’” (listen from 11’30” to 20’20”).

Trump grew up in the city and ran his real estate business from there. It’s also where Trump was convicted of multiple felonies. See also https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/us/politics/justice-department-trump-eric-adams.html

Speaking up, staying quiet

February 10: Five former secretaries of the Treasury wrote an opinion column for the New York Times decrying the way that Elon Musk’s Office of Government Efficiency has infiltrated the Treasury and tried to seize control of the payment system to access private information. These five “formers” worked for Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden. Where were the ones who served under Presidents Bush the younger, or indeed Trump the first time around? (Let’s excuse the elder Bush’s treasury chief, Nicholas Brady. He’s 94.)

It’s not just a ‘coup’, It’s a ‘self-coup’, an ‘autogolpe’

February 7: Paul Krugman – a Nobel prize-winning economist, former New York Times columnist, and now a Substacker – writes that this time, the coup attempt is succeeding. And it’s not just a coup, he says, it’s an autogolpe, the expression used in Latin America for attempts by a victorious politician to seize whatever powers of the state he does not have – that is, a self-coup.

He is picking on a theme that Charles Call at the Brookings Institution highlighted on January 8, 2021, when he wrote that the storming on the Capitol Building by Trump supporters two days earlier, was not a coup but a failed self-coup.

Noise and signal, flooding the zone

January 28: I’ve seen several references to how difficult it has become to separate the noise in Washington from the signal. That’s an expression used in telecommunications to discuss how hard it was, in the early days of the telephone to distinguish the voice (signal) from the crackle (noise) on the line. But this time, the noise is signal. It’s deliberate distraction, “flooding the zone”, some people have said, drawing on a metaphor from gridiron football when you send multiple receivers into the same part of the field to confuse the opponents. See https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/trump-policy-blitz.html

I’ll add items as they come along, starting at the top. They’re all examples of …

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