CLASH OF IDEALS
SWEDES RETHINK
IMMIGRATION
SLAVERY IN U.S.
SECRET PATHS
TO FREEDOM
ART MARKET’S STRENGTH
AUCTIONS TEST BUOYANCY
IN THE ERA OF TRUMP
PAGE 4 | WORLD
PAGE 19 | TRAVEL
PAGE 17 | CULTURE
..
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2017
With media,
Trump is in
unfamiliar
territory
Britain’s
absent
opposition
Kenan Malik
Contributing Writer
WASHINGTON
OPINION
He mastered the tabloids
that record gossip, but
Washington is different
LONDON On Thursday, a storm lashed
Britain with ferocious winds and driving snow. That same day, England’s
main opposition parties faced a battering almost as fierce.
Two special elections for the Westminster Parliament took place, one in a
Midlands constituency named Stokeon-Trent Central, the other in Copeland
in Cumbria, near the Scottish border.
In Stoke, the Labour Party held on to
its seat, just. In Copeland, Labour lost
to the Conservatives. It was a shattering defeat, only the fourth time since
1945 that a governing party has taken a
parliamentary seat from the opposition
in a special election.
Stoke-on-Trent and Copeland are
both historically rock-solid Labour
districts. In both
cases, Labour
With Labour
had won every
in decline and
election since the
UKIP
districts were
created
sabotaging
(Copeland in
itself, Theresa
1983; Stoke in
May’s Tories
1950). It was said
go all but
that you could
put a red rosette,
unchallenged.
the Labour emblem, on a donkey, and it would walk to victory.
But these are not normal times.
British politics is still feeling the aftershocks of last year’s referendum vote
to leave the European Union. Across
the Western world, insurgent parties
and politicians have rocked the political establishment. Against this
background, what was striking about
the two special elections was, first, the
crumbling of the opposition parties,
both Labour and the U.K. Independence Party, which likes to portray itself
as Britain’s populist upstart, and second, the resilience of the Conservatives, the party of government.
This should be Labour’s moment.
The referendum deeply divided the
Tories. It led to the resignation of
Prime Minister David Cameron. The
government of the new prime minister,
Theresa May, has faced ridicule for
disarray over its plans to carry out
Brexit.
Yet it is Labour, not the Conservatives, that now faces an existential
crisis. It has plummeted in national
opinion polls, trailing the Conservatives by as much as 16 percentage
points. In both elections on Thursday,
Labour’s share of the vote fell.
Many see Labour’s problems as
deriving from just one person: the
party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Two
years ago, this maverick left winger
unexpectedly won the leadership
contest, propelled by a surge of new
MALIK, PAGE 14
BY GLENN THRUSH
AND MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
FAZRY ISMAIL/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
Decontamination
A hazardous materials team at Kuala Lumpur’s airport on Sunday. Malaysian authorities declared the area safe after the half brother of North
Korea’s leader was assassinated on Feb. 13 with VX nerve agent. The killing may be a signal by the North that it holds lesser-known weapons of mass destruction. PAGE 5
Wary eye as China moves in next door
DJIBOUTI
Naval base in Djibouti
is only a few miles from
vital American installation
China Sea, American strategists worry
that a naval port so close to Camp Lemonnier could provide a front-row seat to
the staging ground for American counterterror operations in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.
“It’s like having a rival football team
using an adjacent practice field,” said
Gabriel Collins, an expert on the Chi-
nese military and a founder of the analysis portal China SignPost. “They can
scope out some of your plays. On the
other hand, the scouting opportunity
goes both ways.”
Established after the terror attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, Camp Lemonnier is home
to 4,000 personnel. Some are involved in
secretive missions, including targeted
BY ANDREW JACOBS
AND JANE PERLEZ
The two countries keep dozens of intercontinental nuclear missiles pointed at
each other’s cities. Their frigates and
fighter jets occasionally face off in the
contested waters of the South China
Sea.
With no shared border, China and the
United States mostly circle each other
from afar, relying on satellites and cybersnooping to peek inside the workings of each other’s war machines.
But the two strategic rivals are about
to become neighbors in this sunscorched patch of East African desert.
China is constructing its first overseas
military base here — just a few miles
from Camp Lemonnier, one of the Pentagon’s largest and most important overseas installations.
With increasing tensions over China’s
island-building efforts in the South
JASON STRAZIUSO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ammunition being loaded into an American helicopter at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, in
2010. Across town, China is constructing its first overseas military base.
drone killings in the Middle East and the
Horn of Africa, and the raid last month
in Yemen that left a member of the Navy
SEALs dead. The base, which is run by
the Navy and abuts Djibouti’s international airport, is the only permanent
American military installation in Africa.
Beyond
surveillance
concerns,
United States officials, citing the billions
of dollars in Chinese loans to Djibouti’s
heavily indebted government, wonder
about the long-term durability of an alliance that has served Washington well in
its global fight against Islamic
extremism.
Just as important, experts say, the
base’s construction is a milestone marking Beijing’s expanding global ambitions — with implications for America’s
longstanding military dominance.
“It’s a huge strategic development,”
said Peter Dutton, professor of strategic
studies at the Naval War College in
Rhode Island, who has studied satellite
of the construction.
“It’s naval power expansion for protecting commerce and China’s regional
interests in the Horn of Africa,” Professor Dutton said. “This is what expansionary powers do. China has learned
lessons from Britain of 200 years ago.”
Chinese officials play down the signifDJIBOUTI, PAGE 6
The White House press secretary, Sean
Spicer, has taken to slapping journalists
who write unflattering stories with an
epithet he sees as the epitome of lowroad, New York Post-style gossip:
“Page Six reporter.”
Whether the New England-bred
spokesman realizes it or not, the expression is perhaps less an insult than a reminder of an era when Donald J. Trump
mastered the New York tabloid terrain
— and his own narrative — shaping his
image with a combination of on-therecord bluster and off-the-record gossip.
He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This
New York-iest of politicians, now an
idiosyncratic,
write-your-own-rules
president, has stumbled into the most
conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government
of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.
Instead, President Trump has found
himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he
has long prided himself on vanquishing.
Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his
chief strategist, Mr. Trump has turned
on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”
His latest swipe — pulling out of
Washington’s so-called nerd prom —
came via Twitter on Saturday. “I will not
be attending the White House
Correspondents’ Association Dinner
this year,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Please
wish everyone well and have a great
evening!”
He has made a sharp break from previous presidents — and from his own
comfortable three-decade tango with
the tabloids.
“New York is extremely intense and
competitive, but it is actually a much
smaller pond than Washington, where
you have many more players with access to many more sources,” said Howard Wolfson, who has split his career between New York and Washington, advising former Mayor Michael R.
MEDIA, PAGE 9
NEW FREEDOM ON DEPORTATIONS
Some American agents say they feel
unshackled by President Trump’s plan
to deport illegal immigrants. PAGE 6
TIME FOR REPUBLICANS TO STAND UP
Republicans may someday need the
journalism that President Trump is
attacking, Jim Rutenberg writes. PAGE 9
Explaining loss of fortune: It’s family
SAN FRANCISCO
BY SCOTT JAMES
One of Frances Stroh’s earliest lessons
about wealth involved a game she
played as a 6-year-old with her father:
how to not be kidnapped.
Ms. Stroh would stand outside the
family’s six-bedroom Spanish Mediterranean home in the manicured Detroit
suburb of Grosse Pointe in 1973 as her
father, Eric Stroh, pretended to be a
stranger as he drove by in his silver
Chrysler, waving a chocolate bar as
temptation and beckoning her to the car.
As instructed, Frances would run away
in tears.
Her father explained that as an heiress to the largest private beer company
in America, kidnapping was a concern,
especially because, “They’ll ask for a
ransom that we can’t possibly afford to
pay,” Ms. Stroh recalled him saying.
“There were very mixed messages”
about money, she said in an interview.
Her father’s words about their fi-
Y(1J85IC*KKNMKS( +#!"!$!z!}
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Frances Stroh has written a book about how her family lost its company, the Stroh
brewery, and its fortune through a series of failed investments and personal missteps.
nances were indeed prescient. The
Stroh family wealth, at its height in the
1980s, was estimated by Forbes to be
about $9 billion in today’s dollars. Now,
that money is almost gone.
And Ms. Stroh has taken the rare step,
in the secretive world of America’s
wealthiest, of going public with her family’s downward spiral in a remarkably
intimate book, “Beer Money: A Memoir
of Privilege and Loss.” In revealing detail, she documents a trifecta of misfortunes, some of them self-inflicted: the
unraveling of her immediate family,
shaken by alcohol and drug abuse; the
collapse of her family’s brewing empire;
and the fall of Detroit, hometown of
Stroh’s beer.
The book has struck a nerve in certain
circles, and Ms. Stroh says she has received an outpouring of support and
commiseration.
“I heard from all kinds of people about
lost fortunes, lost businesses, often coupled with substance-abuse issues within
the families,” she said. “My story resonated with their own experience be-
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