Globe Trot: Building a wall

MEXICO: President Enrique Peña Nieto took to Twitter yesterday to announce he was canceling his meeting next week with President Donald Trump. The move is unsurprising given Trump’s insistence that Mexico pay for a wall between the two countries.

With Trump hinting of new border fees as payback, it’s worth remembering that Mexico is the second largest export market for U.S. goods, with 6 million jobs dependent on the trade. As America adopts a no-compromise America first policy, other nations will respond in kind. As the (conservative and bullish) Wall Street Journal editorial team states, “Mr. Trump fancies himself a negotiating wizard, but in this case he is out-negotiating himself.”

Yesterday I was in Kern County, Calif., a bastion of Trump support, yet among many I spoke with, a wall is impractical and unhelpful. WORLD’s Marvin Olasky saw similarly the difficulty of a wall, in his 320-mile trek last year along the Texas-Mexico border.

GREAT BRITAIN: In the first visit from a foreign head of state, Trump met with Prime Minister Theresa May and announced renewing “our great bond” with the United Kingdom and encouraged Brexit, saying, “A free and independent Britain is a blessing to the world.” May in turn invited Trump to Britain this year, which he accepted.

There’s a fascinating exchange that begins at about the 7:45 mark of this video of the press conference, when a BBC reporter asks about disagreements. After May responded, Trump, who has been in intimidate-the-media mode, clearly stated he will defer to some he disagrees with, specifically Secretary of Defense James Mattis on the issue of torture.

REFUGEES: Full text of the president’s draft executive order on refugees is here. Among many important issues is the issue of dampening cooperation abroad, for example, military translators who no longer may be able to count on U.S. asylum if their lives are put in danger by working with U.S. forces. But an important note: Under President Obama, military translators regularly were denied asylum.

IRAQ: As I’ve been saying all along, Christians are being excluded from Iraq’s reconstruction plans.

CHINA: The amazing landscape photography of Thierry Bournier came to mind yesterday as I had the rare opportunity to board the SOFIA space plane at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Using a 1960s-era refurbished 747 and 17th century mechanics invented by Galileo, SOFIA is collecting amazing data about the universe using an infrared telescope.

I’M READING Graeme Wood’s The Way of Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State.