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Marines Will Begin Withdrawing From Los Angeles

Marines Will Begin Withdrawing From Los Angeles

New York Times3 days ago
Pentagon officials will begin withdrawing 700 active-duty Marines who were sent to Los Angeles last month, the latest scaling back of the Trump administration's contentious military deployment in Southern California.
The withdrawal of the Marines follows the departure of nearly 2,000 California National Guard soldiers and a smaller contingent of about 150 specialized Guard firefighters. The troops had been dispatched to Los Angeles by President Trump starting on June 7, after protests erupted there over immigration raids. More than half will now have been ordered back to base; an 1,892-member brigade of military police remains.
The Pentagon's chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, framed the pullout as the natural closure of a successful military response that was needed to quell civil unrest in the nation's second-largest city.
'With stability returning to Los Angeles, the secretary has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: Lawlessness will not be tolerated,' Mr. Parnell said Monday in a statement, referring to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. 'Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law. We're deeply grateful for their service, and for the strength and professionalism they brought to this mission.'
Democratic leaders in California have accused the Trump administration of provoking the protests by sending masked federal agents to carwashes and other sites to detain immigrants, and then using the subsequent public outrage over the raids as a pretext for military action.
Since June, the troops have stood guard outside federal office buildings and have accompanied agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol and other agencies during immigration raids. Pentagon officials estimated that the cost of deploying the Marines and National Guard soldiers would run to about $134 million.
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I had a written agreement between Australia and the United States to resettle refugees, and Trump wanted to renege on it. We had a huge argument about it, where he became very incensed and furious. The call started off with him saying, No way, Jose! and ended with him saying, I hate you. He said the call was the worst one he'd had all day. But after that, we got on very well. He respected me because I stood up to him. The problem with all the flattery and the sycophancy — he will recognize weakness and exploit it. And so that's why people who suck up to bullies invariably get bullied more. Think about this, Mishal. JD Vance — who is, if you like, the future of the MAGA movement — praised General Charles de Gaulle for having ensured in the 1960s that France retained control over its own military capabilities and, above all, over its nuclear deterrent. Whereas the United Kingdom did not. The UK's nuclear deterrent really cannot be operated without the concurrence of the United States. 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In many respects, America's allies need to be more like Donald Trump. Not in the sense of engaging in the extreme rhetoric and braggadocio, but simply to be putting their country first. 5 Maintaining strong economic ties with Beijing and a security alliance with Washington has long been a balancing act for Australia. During a visit to China earlier this month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sought to focus on business and trade opportunities, while sidestepping thornier issues around US-China competition. China Takes a Quarter of Australia's Exports Australia's top five trading partners I want to put to you a couple of scenarios — and they're not completely hypothetical because China has conducted live-fire exercises off the Australian coast. If there was a crisis over Taiwan tomorrow, how would Australia respond? The first question you've got to ask is: What is the crisis and how is the United States responding? If there was a war in the Pacific between the United States and China that began over Taiwan — no Australian government would make a commitment, but you could reasonably expect Australia to be aligned on America's side. We have the ANZUS Treaty with the Americans, and it certainly envisages that if either party were attacked in the Pacific, the other would come to their assistance. But how much do we have to? There's a lot of complexity. Albanese was just in China, and he was right to push back against people saying to him: Why aren't you guaranteeing that you would fight to defend Taiwan? No American president has given that guarantee. Biden wobbled a bit on this, Trump's explicit position, given in an interview to Bloomberg, is that Taiwan may well be indefensible because of its proximity to China. The question to Australia is asking for a hypothetical on a hypothetical. 6 In July 2024, Trump told Bloomberg Businessweek: 'Taiwan is 9,500 miles away. It's 68 miles away from China. A slight advantage, and China's a massive piece of land. They could just bombard it.' 'Our objective should be to ensure that the United States remains engaged, so that we maintain a region wherein the big fish can't eat the little fish, and the little fish can't eat the shrimps.' Except that Pentagon officials have said they would like clarification from Australia and Japan about what they would do in the event of a conflict with China over Taiwan. They're also reviewing the Aukus submarine deal. 7 The 2021 agreement committed the US and UK to helping Australia develop a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines over 30 years. It scuttled a previous agreement for France to build a diesel-powered submarine fleet for Australia. Aukus was a very bad deal for Australia. It scrapped the deal that you had reached to buy submarines. It scrapped the partnership we had. We were building submarines in a partnership with France. The difference there was we were in control of our own destiny. We'd acquired the IP, we had the shipyard that was going to build the subs. The problem with Aukus is that the longer-term plan is to have a partnership with the United Kingdom to build submarines, the first of which would be likely delivered sometime in the 2040s. So the Americans generously said: We will sell you a number of secondhand Virginia-class submarines, and several new ones. But they put a very big proviso on this, which is that the US president has to certify that the sale would not degrade the undersea capabilities of the US Navy. Now they are currently short of what they believe they need. So the point that [US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Elbridge Colby has made is that if the US is short of these submarines, how can they responsibly transfer them to anyone, even to a friend? I think almost certainly, we'll end up with no submarines, at least for a very long time. Let's say the submarines materialize at whatever point in the future, and America wants Australia to use them to patrol the Strait of Taiwan? Australian submarines do operate in the South China Sea already. And there's a high degree of interoperability with the United States. Now the question is what do you do in the event of a conflict? And look, the reality is if there were a full-blown war with China, it is likely that Australian territory will be attacked, because there are American bases — well, they're Australian bases but used by American forces — on Australian soil. But leaving aside what America might want to do, Australia's objective is to have no conflict in this region. Australia's objective should not be to support American primacy in the region, such as might have been the case 20 or 30 years ago. Our objective should be to ensure that the United States remains engaged, so that we maintain a region wherein the big fish can't eat the little fish, and the little fish can't eat the shrimps. 'We do not lose respect in Washington if we are seen to be fighting for our own corner and focused on our own interests — because that is absolutely what the American president is doing for his country.' Is the effect of the last few months that China is getting bigger and more powerful and therefore the era we're looking at is Chinese supremacy in the region? No, I don't think it's Chinese supremacy. Certainly China is more powerful. If you look at this hemisphere, you've got Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and [a] host of other, important economies including Australia, of course. So I don't think China's in a position to become the sole unchallenged hegemon in this region. You've called for an ' Australia First ' approach to defense, and yet the realities are that your country is a middle power. How realistic is it to think that Australia can look after its own interests in a world where America is not the partner it was? We're stronger with allies and partners, but you have to be able to do what you can to defend yourself. There is an unfortunate tendency in Australia for too many people to think that the best definition of Australian national security or even Australian patriotism is to be more and more tightly zipped onto the United States. We do not lose respect in Washington if we are seen to be fighting for our own corner and focused on our own interests – because that is absolutely what the American president is doing for his country. Look at the leaders that [Trump] respects, whether you like them or not. The leaders around the world that he respects and pays great attention to are ones who are ruthlessly – often brutally – determined to defend their own country's interests as they see them. Putin, you mean? Yes. Netanyahu, Orban. Take Netanyahu. Brutal is probably an understatement, although he wouldn't cavil at that, I imagine. The point I'm making is, there's no point going to Washington flattering Trump. In the imperial capital, they regard deference as their due. Is one possible lesson that ' Australia First, ' in defense, might mean nuclear weapons? I know you've said in the past that the capacity isn't there, but it is one way that smaller nations have had to be taken seriously. Nuclear proliferation in East Asia has been really limited to North Korea. But the countries that are close to the United States, like Japan and South Korea, who certainly would have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons very quickly, have not done so because they feel protected by the American nuclear umbrella. If they felt that protection was unreliable or couldn't be counted on, then I think they would move to nuclear weapons very quickly. Australia doesn't have a nuclear industry. We have a small scientific reactor and limited expertise in that area. But you're absolutely right. If you look at Iran, the American efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, you can imagine people in Iran today saying: Our mistake was not to have developed a weapon already. We are on the brink of greater proliferation. That's a possibility that wouldn't be regarded as a serious one in Australia at the moment. But it could well be in the years to come, depending on how this new American posture in the world evolves. Can we close by looking back to an earlier stage of your own life? I'm conscious that it's 40 years since you started working on the Spycatcher case. It made your name, didn't it? It was probably the springboard to your political life. Donald Trump had The Apprentice and you had the Spycatcher case. 8 Turnbull gained international prominence as a lawyer in the 1980s, when he successfully defended former British intelligence officer Peter Wright against the UK government's attempt to prevent publication of his memoir, Spycatcher. [ Laughs ] Yes. It certainly gave my career a big lift. The team was basically me and my wife Lucy. We only got the brief because the publishers were convinced the case was a dead-set loser, and they didn't want to spend any money on an expensive lawyer, so— You were cheap. [ Laughs ] I was cheap and cheerful, but happily successful. And it was a huge win and a big political furor at the time. It led to a phrase notoriously entering the public domain, when you cross-examined a British civil servant, Robert Armstrong. He ended up describing something he had said as not a lie but being ' economical with the truth.' Once you became a politician, there must have been times when you had to be economical with the truth — where you wouldn't have wanted civil servants saying everything that they knew in a court of law. He was trying to put a gloss on something that was a lie, a falsehood. Look, I'm not going to say I'm George Washington, I've never told a lie, 9 but I have always tried in public life, and in private life for that matter, to be accurate about the facts. When you're prime minister, that's quite tricky because you can get asked any day about any subject. And so there's always the risk that you'll get something wrong. I think if you want to build confidence in government, trust in government, there are two keys: truth and transparency. The story of a young George Washington damaging his father's cherry tree and then admitting to it by saying 'I cannot tell a lie' was invented by the president's biographer in 1800. Do you miss the power? [ Laughs ] I don't miss the politics. It can be a pretty ghastly business in terms of the pressures and strains and so forth. I miss the opportunity to do good things, to effect good reforms. I've never enjoyed power for its own sake. A lot of people do. For a lot of people, it is like a drug. For me, power has always had to have a purpose to it. You can't have these roles forever, at least not in democracy. And you shouldn't be able to. Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend. More On Bloomberg Terms of Service Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information Trademarks Privacy Policy Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices Help ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.

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