The Dish

Bill Kristol’s latest column is close to self-parody:

Kiev is ablaze. Syria is a killing field. The Iranian mullahs aren’t giving up their nuclear weapons capability, and other regimes in the Middle East are preparing to acquire their own. Al Qaeda is making gains and is probably stronger than ever. China and Russia throw their weight around, while our allies shudder and squabble.

Why is this happening? Because the United States is in retreat. What is the Obama administration’s response to these events? Further retreat.

PM Carpenter calls the editorial “a magnificent send-up to flamboyant despair and rhetorical folderol”:

Regional history needn’t be consulted, complexities needn’t be pondered, alternatives needn’t be explored. All trouble spots can be explained by America’s “retreat” in confronting what Kristol obliquely calls the world’s “barbarians”–a perilous legacy, he warns us as well, which is at our gates: “Rome fell not to the majestic Hannibal but to groups of unimpressive barbarians.” You might think Rome fell because of a bloated military complex that had extended its imperial borders beyond both affordability and defensibility–by which point those “unimpressive barbarians” were indeed remarkably impressive–but you would only be committing the error of consulting history.

Michael Brendan Dougherty adds:

[T]he idea that America is in retreat is hysterical gibberish. It can only be made plausible if one takes the immediate years after 2001 as the normal state of American foreign policy, or if you consider the emergence of any regional power (whether it be Iran or Russia) a dire threat. The U.S. still maintains 20 large foreign military bases around the globe, including some 70,000 troops stationed throughout Europe. Any diminishment of our war footing initiated by the Obama administration over his last years in office will leave America far and away the largest military force on the globe, better equipped and more easily deployed than any of its rivals.

Larison piles on:

It is absurd to pin these events on American “retreat,” since for the most part this isn’t even happening. So-called U.S. “retreat” didn’t cause any of these things, and all of them would probably still be happening whether the U.S. was “retreating” or “advancing.” The U.S. is responsible for the effects of its own actions and policies, and to a lesser extent the actions of its allies and clients that it supports, but it isn’t responsible for what authoritarian and illiberal regimes do inside their own countries, and for the most part it can’t be held responsible for how other major powers behave.

Vivien Greene, curator of the Guggenheim’s new exhibit on the Italian Futurists, explains how F.T. Marinetti and his compatriots violate our ideas about the avant-garde:

This is sort of a scholarly debate, but I think for many people the definition of avant-garde means it follows the idea of the scholar named Bürger, and to be avant-garde means you have to be of the left. So if you break out of that mold—it’s hard to think of an avant-garde that was on the right. And I think with Futurism you have that, because in every other way, they’re satisfying our ideas of what is avant-garde: they’re new, they’re disruptive, and as they continue to develop into the ’20s and ’30s, they are reinventing themselves. It’s not as though they’re painting the same thing over and over again. They evolve while still keeping in mind the basic tenets of what is Futurist: dynamism, simultaneity, speed, technology, the machines. They embrace new things; they’re not at all static. Innovation is very important to the ideas of the avant-garde.

The Economist suggests that the movement’s fascist associates were one reason the Futurists have never had a major retrospective in the US:

Marinetti, a showman who liked to call himself “the caffeine of Europe” for the energy he put into promoting the futurist movement, was an early fan of Benito Mussolini and took part in the founding of the fascist movement in 1919. Marinetti wanted futurism to be Italian fascism’s official art movement. But the dictator refused, preferring to bestow his favours on different art movements at different times. The two men blew hot and cold about one another. Yet when Mussolini fell from power in 1943 and Hitler named him the head of the puppet Italian republic of Salò, the founder of futurism was one of the first to offer his support. Marinetti died just five months before Mussolini was executed, their lives seemingly forever linked.

In a largely complimentary review, Peter Schjeldahl calls Italian Futurism “the most neglected canonical movement in modern art – because it is also the most embarrassing”:

An avant-garde so clownish, in its grandiose posturing, and so sinister, in its political embrace of Italian Fascism, has been easy to shrug off, but the [Guggenheim] show makes a powerful case for second thoughts. It arrays some superb paintings and sculptures, the best of them by Umberto Boccioni, whose death in the First World War, at the age of 33, deprived the movement of its one great artist. And marvels of graphic and architectural invention reward a stroll up the Guggenheim’s ramp.

(Boccioni’s States of Mind II: The Farewells, 1911, via Wikimedia Commons)

On Saturday, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, was captured after a 13-year manhunt. Daniel Hernández profiles the infamous kingpin:

[In 1993, Guzmán] was sentenced to 20 years in a maximum-security prison, but in 2001 he managed to escape, cartoonishly, in a laundry cart. Guzmán expanded his reach by trafficking marijuana, heroin, and cocaine into the United States, Europe, and Australia. He is said to exert control over most of western Mexico, parts of Guatemala, and trafficking ports in West Africa. While his nickname means “Shorty,” there’s nothing diminutive about El Chapo’s stature in the illicit drug world. Forbes has regularly named him in its lists of richest and “most powerful” people.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo asks the obvious question:

Without a doubt, Guzmán’s capture is a huge success for [Mexican president] Enrique Peña Nieto. In the last seven months, the leaders of Mexico’s top three drug cartels (Zetas, Gulf and Sinaloa) were arrested without a single shot being fired. So, are we on the verge of wining the war on drugs? That all depends on what the ultimate goal is.

Is it taking down drug kingpins or stopping the flow of drugs into the United States? If it’s the latter, the war is far from over. A report from the Office of Intelligence and Operations Coordination of the U.S. Custom and Border Protection agency looked at drug seizure data from January 2009 to January 2010 and matched it with the arrests or deaths of drug operatives (11 druglords in total). It found that “there is no perceptible pattern that correlates either a decrease or increase in drug seizures due to the removal of key DTO [drug trafficking organization] personnel.”

Keegan Hamilton warns that Guzmán’s arrest might actually make matters worse:

Each time a kingpin falls, bloody internecine conflict inevitably follows. When the Gulf Cartel boss Osiel Cárdenas Guillén ended up in Colorado’s infamous “supermax” federal penitentiary after his arrest in 2003 (a fate that may await El Chapo—federal prosecutors have already announced that they will seek his extradition), it paved the way for the Los Zetas cartel to commence its reign of terror across Mexico. The current situation in the Mexican state of Michoacán—where peasants have formed heavily armed militias to fight back against corrupt police and extortionist gangs—stems from the fragmentation of the La Familia cartel after the rumored death of its leader, Nazario “El Chayo” Moreno.

Even with El Chapo behind bars, the Sinaloa Cartel remains the most powerful drug-trafficking organization in Mexico, if not the world. Its operatives have been arrested in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and, of course, the United States. The cartel may have lost its CEO, but its board of directors remains intact.

Mark Guarino highlights Sinaloa’s US distribution operation, based out of Chicago:

The city, centrally located, has become a hub for distributing drugs to other cities across the country, and its sizable Mexican population (both legal and illegal) provides the cartel with ready access to foot soldiers. For those reasons, the US Attorney’s Office in Chicago indicted Guzman in absentia in August 2009 for conspiring to transport drugs across international borders, and the US has prosecuted key figures in the cartel’s US operations here. The Chicago Crime Commission named Guzman public enemy No. 1, a designation previously given to a crime boss from another era, Al Capone.

Keating adds that Mexico’s much-touted drop in violence under Peña Nieto’s leadership is misleading:

According to the government’s statistics, the 18 percent drop in murders in 2013 was accompanied by a 35 percent increase in kidnapping. And Molly Molloy, a research librarian and a specialist on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border at the New Mexico State University Library, argues that the declining murder rate is the result of the country’s statistical agencies classifying fewer killings as “intentional homicides,” coupled with the fact that “the epicenters of extreme violence have dispersed around the country, making it more difficult to know how many people are dying.” She argues that there’s no evidence to suggest the total number of murders has declined at all, though different regions have seen changes in the level of violence.