Mainer makes Putin's interrogation wish list

In today's Portland Press Herald, I have the story of how a guy from Maine wound up on Vladimir Putin's list of Americans he'd like turned over for interrogation, a request he made of President Trump at this week's summit in Helsinki and one that - to widespread horror - Trump appeared to entertain.

Kyle Parker, raised in Old Town, educated at the University of Maine, is a pretty big deal: the guy who by most accounts made the Magnitsky Act happen. If you don't know what that is and why Putin cares, please dig into the story, which includes an interview with Parker.

For a deeper dive into Magnitsky, Parker, and Putin, I recommend this November 2017 story from GQ.

Meanwhile, just to keep things strange, Maine Governor Paul LePage showed up in Montenegro earlier this month to meet with President Djukanovic, supposedly because of the Maine National Guard's 12 year old partnership with the Balkan country. LePage's office, as usual, is providing few details.

Senators King and Collins want Senate intel committee to conduct Trump-Russia investigations

I've been remiss in posting this story from Tuesday's Press Herald, wherein I talked to Maine US Senator Angus King -- who sits on the intelligence committee -- and Rep. Chellie Pingree about the biggest issue of an insane news week: investigating the Trump administrations' ties to Russia. Among other things, I learned that the committee is indeed investigating former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's contacts with Russian diplomats before inauguration day, and that King and Sen. Susan Collins oppose the creation of an independent select committee take over from senate intel. (Pingree says this is essential.)

Details in the story.

In Europe, trepidation over Trump

In this past week's Maine Sunday Telegram, I have a commentary piece from my trip to Europe last month sponsored by the German Marshall Find of the United States.

In the audiences Sewell Chan and myself spoke with in Brussels, Paris, and Belgrade, concern was focused on the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency, a potentially cataclysmic event they'd previously been assured could never occur, just as American experts had told them the New York billionaire could never win the Republican Party nomination.

What were their specific concerns and what feedback did I have? It's all in the piece.

My last story from Europe was this POLITICO Magazine piece on Viktor Orban's Hungary.

(Art (c) Portland Press Herald, and created by staff artist Michael Fisher.)

Goodbye, Marrakesh

I've spent the last few days in Marrakesh, near the edge of the Sahara, attending "Atlantic Dialogues 2014", an international conference convened by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the OCP Policy Center here in Morocco.

I've greatly enjoyed the proceedings and the opportunity to meet, converse, and share ideas with such an intriguing group of people from around the Atlantic Basin, including former heads of state, foreign ministers, policy advisers, scholars, parliamentarians, and journalists.

I also had the privilege to share the American Nations paradigm whilst part of a panel on "Decoding the United States" that included former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former City of Denver chief of staff Kelly Brough, and the state department's special representative for global intergovernmental affairs, Reta-Jo Lewis. Thanks kindly to the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart for deftly moderating the session, where I did manage to make a pitch for Maine and other essentially "city-less" actors on the global stage of trade, investment, and cooperation.

For those who attended and wanted to learn more about American Nations, we've posted this Washington Monthly article and this follow-up here and on the AD Connect app; it should give readers a broader sense of what the paradigm is all about and its utility in understanding ongoing events as well as historical ones.

Thanks again to GMF and OCP for inviting me. Now, back to Maine.

At Maine hearing, many call for full restoration of St. Croix alewives

For those following the strange saga of the St. Croix River's alewives, some fresh developments to report.

At a legislative hearing here in Maine today, a wide range of stakeholders called for the full restoration of the small schooling fish to the watershed, which straddles the U.S.-Canada border between eastern Maine and southwestern New Brunswick, and rejected the compromise Adaptive Management Plan. These included the government of Canada, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the NOAA Fisheries Service, the Passamaquoddy tribe, the Passamaquoddies of New Brunswick, all the state's major environmental groups, Maine and New Brunswick lobstermen, Maine alewife fishermen, groundfisherman-turned-scientist Ted Ames, and George Smith, the retired longtime head of the Sportsmens Alliance of Maine, who had once backed the closures.

On the other side were the bass fishing guides of interior Washington County, who rejected both approaches that were on the table, over concerns over the possible effects on smallmouth bass largely founded on anecdotal evidence.

The latter appear isolated and, in both scientific and political terms, outgunned. As I report in tomorrow's Portland Press Herald, even if the Adaptive Management Plan were passed, Canada appears unwilling to stop alewives from passing a dam it controls in Vanceboro, effectively vetoing the plan.

For those seeking more background, start with this detailed feature I wrote for the Maine Sunday Telegram last July.

Reviewing "Governing the World" in the Washington Post

As a longtime foreign correspondent and onetime student of international relations, I've had an interest in how it is that the United States went from being the leading force in the creation of institutions of international governance to an opponent of the same. Under Woodrow Wilson, F.D.R., and Harry Truman we worked to build the League of Nations and United Nations -- the latter, at least, a powerful lever for implementing American policies for decades -- only to have neoconservatives and the Rapture-minded-faithful-in-office work to take them down.

There were reasons for this conversion, of course, and  Columbia University historian Mark Mazower relates them in his new book Governing the World: A History of an Idea. My review of the book is in this morning's Washington Post if you'd like to learn more.

For those looking for other reading suggestions, my most recent reviews for the Post were of Mike Lofgren's The Party is Over, Eric Ratkow's American Canopy, E.O Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth and David Hackett Fisher's Fairness and Freedom.

[Update, 11/25/12: The Denver Post picked up this review.]

Canada: Despite Wikileaked cable, Canadian TV Producers say they don't hate America

Reading the U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, I've generally had the same reaction voiced by many commentators: they show U.S. diplomats to be capable, professional, well-informed and sometimes even witty.

So on a recent reporting trip to Canada, I followed up on one of them: a 2008 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa warning that the television dramas and sitcoms aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were engaged in "anti-American melodrama" and "insidious negative popular stereotyping" of Washington officials. This, the diplomats warned, either reflected or perhaps cultivated anti-American feeling in the Canadian public, with potentially serious long-term consequences.

Heady stuff. But, as my story over at The Christian Science Monitor reveals, largely off-base. (Headline: "Canadian TV producers: We don't really hate America.")

A few items that didn't make it into the story. In initial reports on this cable, many journalists mistakenly attributed it to then-Ambassador David Wilkins, whose name appeared at the end of the cable. Wilkins subsequently denied it, and experts pointed out that the name at the end of each State Department cable doesn't denote authorship, but rather the highest level official on station at the time the cable was sent. The real authors, Wilkins told CBC's As It Happens, were staff with "too much time on their hands."

Also, in the course of reporting the story, I got a chance to watch some of the shows in question, and to interview their creators. For American viewers: Little Mosque on the Prairie evokes Northern Exposure in both tone and its "fish out of water" premise. Intelligence - now available instantly at Netflix -- is a complex crime-and-espionage drama that's been compared to The Wire, with the refreshing twist of being set in Vancouver, and written with a Canadian audience in mind.