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More than 100 countries are meeting at the United Nations this week to negotiate a global ban on nuclear weapons. That would normally be a big deal, but its not this time. Thats because more than 40 countries, including the United States and many of its closest allies, are skipping the negotiations, hoping in vain the ban will just go away.

In fact, not a single country that possesses nuclear weapons has sent a delegation to the negotiation in New York. The Russians are there in spirit, though because in the absence of the United States and its allies, the negotiations are taking a decidedly anti-American tone, one that will bring a smile to Vladimir Putins face while leaving a lot of us who support the elimination of nuclear weapons shaking our heads.

To be fair, it is far too early to know whether the resulting agreement will be helpful or harmful. There will be two negotiating sessions: the current one, which will last until March 31, and another that will run from June 15 to July 7. The major question is whether the new agreement will strengthen or undermine the existing Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). If the new agreement requires its signatories to be members of the NPT in good standing, as Adam Mount and Richard Nephew have suggested, it will likely be harmless. On the other hand, some may see the new agreement as an alternative to the NPT, one that would create an alternate international legal arrangement for nuclear weapons that imposes far weaker nonproliferation terms. And there may be other problems, nominally regarding the transit of nuclear weapons, that will impede the ability of the United States to provide security guarantees to its allies. For many of us, the wisdom of a ban on nuclear weapons depends crucially on such details. The worry is that this ban on nuclear weapons will actually serve as a legal excuse for states to leave the NPT and start their own nuclear weapons programs.

Of course, a nuclear weapons ban would be less likely to have these problems if the United States and its allies were frickin participating. Having raised international expectations for progress on disarmament with his soaring rhetoric in Prague in 2009, former U.S. President Barack Obama generally took a dim view of the international efforts he inspired. (I cant help but notice he kept the Nobel Peace Prize, though.) The Obama administration reacted with an incredible ferocity to the states that organized the so-called humanitarian consequences initiative, as though its suggestion that dropping a nuclear weapon on a city might have adverse humanitarian impacts posed a mortal challenge to American alliances. The United States largely skipped these meetings until it was too late and was forced to whip votes against the various General Assembly resolutions that followed, including the one that endorsed the idea of negotiating a new ban on nuclear weapons. St. Barry of Prague was not without sin.

The Obama administration opposed all these initiatives kicking and screaming, arguing that banning the bomb should be left to the nuclear weapons states, particularly the United States and Russia. Leaving it to the nuclear weapons states meant nothing happened on disarmament, particularly after U.S.-Russian relations went in the toilet and Moscow rejected Obamas offer to follow the New START treaty with an additional round of nuclear weapons reductions. Russia simply isnt interested in cutting the number of nuclear weapons. Rather, Moscow is in the midst of an ongoing nuclear modernization that includes a revival of Soviet-era plans for new heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles and rail-launch missiles, new cruise missiles that violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and an underwater drone designed to drench coastal cities in radioactivity. So Moscow told Obama where to stick his offer of more cuts.

The United States might have usefully leveraged the worlds enthusiasm for nuclear disarmament to publicly push back against Putins enthusiasm for new nuclear weapons but chose not to. Instead, the United States has largely abandoned leadership to those states that are more interested in using disarmament issues to beat up the United States. As a result, it was pretty easy for people to look the other way with a lame reference to both sides opposing disarmament. If you wonder why it is difficult to persuade European governments to take seriously the new Russian nuclear weapons pointing at them, look no further than Obamas ability to raise hopes with soaring rhetoric, then dash them with timidity and caution.

The ultimate effect of that approach is on display in New York this week and can fairly be described as the worst possible arrangement imaginable. A bunch of states are now going to negotiate a ban on nuclear weapons that may seriously undermine both Americas nonproliferation efforts and its security commitments around the world. And the United States will fecklessly oppose this effort in a way perfectly suited to excuse Russias ongoing nuclear arms buildup.

Pretty much the only way this situation could be worse is if the president of the United States was a pro-Putin stooge who was actively sabotaging NATO and other U.S. alliances while openly musing about expanding U.S. nuclear forces on Twitter.

Oh, hell.

There was no reason for the Obama administration to oppose either the humanitarian consequences initiative or negotiations on a nuclear weapons ban. It is nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which it would be in the interest of the United States to initiate the use of a nuclear weapon. The debate among policy types has long been about whether to say that publicly or just keep thinking it silently to ourselves. Well, at least until now. After watching Ted Cruz and Donald Trump try to outdo each other in the Republican presidential primary debates by proposing various war crimes like torture, carpet-bombing civilians, and murdering terrorists families, I am not so sure. But using a nuclear weapon would likely be far worse than even all that. And yet we cant find it in ourselves to make the same condemnation.

Thats a mistake. After all, it is much easier to imagine Russia or North Korea using nuclear weapons first. And so, by keeping this option open for ourselves, we make it far easier for others to make the same threats. Our inability to admit that simple truth leaves open the possibility for other states to threaten the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons and then neatly deflect criticism by pointing out that the United States reserves the same right.

The Trump administration isnt going to participate in these negotiations, nor is it going to sign a ban. But that wont make it go away. The ban is very real and so are the political currents driving it forward. Ultimately, we will have to reckon with those consequences, sooner or later, in New York or abroad. The challenge of dealing with these headaches will fall first to the same U.S. diplomats sitting out the negotiations in New York. They will be tasked with shoring up U.S. alliances and the NPT, elements every bit as important to reducing nuclear dangers as the nuclear weapons ban. If we are lucky, thats the only fallout we will have to deal with.

Photo credit: SCOTT APPLEWHITE/Pool/Getty Images

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Obama's Dream of a Nuclear-Free World Is Becoming a Nightmare - Foreign Policy (blog)

The former Obama administration official who admitted earlier this month that her former colleagues tried to secretly gather intelligence on President Trumps team was no low-level staffer.

Evelyn Farkas was once considered the most senior policy officer for Russia within the Pentagon, and she is now apparently defending the leaks that have been coming out of the Trump White House.

Now an MSNBC analyst and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, Farkas has "advised three secretaries of defense on Russia policy," according to a senior defense official quoted in Politico. She has served on the Council on Foreign Relations and the Senate Armed Services Committee, among others, and was executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism in 2008-2009.

In an appearance on MSNBC earlier this month, Farkas told Mika Brezinski about her role in the efforts to collect intelligence on Trumps team, and their alleged ties with Russia, in the Obama adminstrations final days.

I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill... get as much information as you can," Farkas said, adding that her big fear was "if [Trump staffers] found out how we knew what we knew about their ... the Trump staff dealing with Russians that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.

At the end of the interview, Farkas said, "we have good intelligence on Russia... that's why you have the leaking. People are worried."

Farkas was responding to a report in The New York Times suggesting the "Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking."

Farkas notably served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia under President Obama, and parted ways with the White House in 2015 after some five years amid the ongoing debate over how to respond to Russia's role in the unfolding conflict in Ukraine. Farkas reportedly supported Ukraine's request for weapons in the fight against Russian-backed rebels. The White House opted to send millions in "nonlethal" aid.

On May 6, 2014, Farkas told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Russia's actions threatened to upend the international peace "that we and our allies have worked to build since the end of the Cold War."

News of her resignation broke just over a year later, at the end of September 2015. It was on Sept. 28, 2015, that President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

At the time, a senior U.S. defense official said Farkas departure was not related to a policy dispute and that she was leaving the job after five years for an opportunity outside of government. Her resignation also came just days after Gen. John Allen announced his departure as the point person for ISIS policy at the State Department.

Farkas would go on to serve as a foreign policy advisor for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, telling the New Yorker earlier this month that she thought Clinton "got it" when it came to issues regarding Russia.

Farkas has been calling for an independent investigation into the alleged ties between Russia and the President's team for some time. In an interview in February of this year, Farkas suggested "the White House is clearly trying to hide something, or the president would have said, on day one, that he would support the investigations that began under his predecessor."

On Twitter, Farkas has been tough on House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.,former Trump campaign advisor Paul Manafort, and she also appears to support efforts by Senate Democrats to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch. "Bring back filibuster 4 democracy," Farkas wrote on March 23, the day Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) urged the rest of his colleagues to vote no on the nomination.

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Who is Obama administration official who spilled beans? - Fox News

The Interior Departmenton Wednesdayofficially rolled back a major Obama administration coal initiative.

Secretary Ryan Zinke formally lifted the ban on new coal leasing on federal land, a policy shift that was one of the cornerstones of the climate and energy executive order that President Trump signedon Tuesday.

Interior also suspended a review of federal coal-leasing rates that the Obama administration and environmental activists had touted as a win-win for the climate and for taxpayers.

The order, while fulfilling a key campaign promise from Trump, generated swift opposition from environmentalists and public lands supporters, who immediately sued over the order lifting the coal-leasing moratorium.

The groups say the in-depth study of the coal program was justified by science and by simple economic facts.

Those facts caused the Obama administration to believe that reforms to the federal coal leasing program were warranted, and in fact they should consider whether to continue federal coal leasing altogether, said Jenny Harbine, a staff attorney at Earthjustice, representing the groups. The plaintiffs on the suit include national organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity and local groups like the Montana Environmental Information Center.

Secretary Zinke has to confront those same facts. Rather than confront them with science and reason, the Trump administration is confronting those facts with politics.

Throughout his campaign, Trump vowed to help coal miners by lifting Obama regulations on fossil fuel production.

For industry supporters, the coal moratorium was among the most egregious examples of Obama administration overreach.

The Interior Department, then led by Sally JewellSally JewellOvernight Regulation: Trump administration lifts Obama freeze on federal coal mining Trump administration ends Obama's coal-leasing freeze Interior secretary reopens federal coal mining MORE, paused the sale of new coal leases on federal land in 2016 and launched a review of the coal program.

That study looked to ensure that leasing royalty rates properly account for the climate impact of burning the coal mined on federal lands. Officials said the review was a matter of fairness for taxpayers: The rates havent gone up in three decades, even though mining on federal lands accounts for 40 percent of all coal produced in the United States.

Mining groups and Republicans slammed Obama for the coal review, saying it would hamstring an industry that has already suffered from declining demand on the open market.

Lifting the moratorium, industry supporters say, will help miners in Western states where there are large tracts of recoverable coal on public land.

Its providing some certainty, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said. These regulations continue to just compound and further exacerbate a difficult situation with low natural gas prices for the coal industry. Now theres new hope.

Opponents of Zinkes action say lifting the moratorium undermines the goals of Obamas review by allowing the payment of royalty rates that are decades out of date.

In lifting the moratorium now, theyre opening the door to new leases that will lock in the royalty rates that have already been found to be unfair to U.S. taxpayers, Harbine said.

They are locking in those really disastrous leases before theyve even completed that consideration.

Zinke vowedWednesdayto continue researching royalty and rent rates for federal coal mining. His office established a royalty policy committee to weigh in on rates for federal energy production and didnt preclude the possibility of raising those rates in the future.

I want to make sure how we value [coal] and our rents are transparent and the taxpayer is getting fair value from assets that are on public lands, Zinke said.

Anti-fossil fuel activists dispute the Trump administrations argument that his order will be a boon for coal mining.

They say Trumps order doesnt change the underlying market challenges facing the coal sector, and even Zinke acknowledged leasing decisions would have to follow demand from mining firms themselves.

There has been, I would say, not a rush in the last few years for coal leases, Zinke saidWednesday, blaming both the energy market and federal regulations.

Well see where the market goes, and well be prepared to process them as we open up the areas for lease, and well see.

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Trump administration ends Obama's coal-leasing freeze - The Hill

Senator Chuck SchumerCharles SchumerSenate seen as starting point for Trumps infrastructure plan Dems wait for GOP olive branch after ObamaCare debacle How Obama's White House weaponized media against Trump MORE and Congressman Adam SchiffAdam SchiffHow Obama's White House weaponized media against Trump Intel Dem: 'What's the holdup' on Yates testimony? Nunes won't reveal sources to Intel Committee members MORE have both castigated Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for his handling of the inquiry into Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election. They should think twice. The issue that has recently seized Nunes is of vital importance to anyone who cares about fundamental civil liberties.

The trail that Nunes is following will inevitably lead back to a particularly significant leak. On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that according to a senior U.S. government official, (General Mike) Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29.

Regardless of how the government collected on Flynn, the leak was a felony and a violation of his civil rights. But it was also a severe breach of the public trust. When I worked as an NSC staffer in the White House, 2005-2007, I read dozens of NSA surveillance reports every day. On the basis of my familiarity with this system, I strongly suspect that someone in the Obama White House blew a hole in the thin wall that prevents the government from using information collected from surveillance to destroy the lives of the citizens whose privacy it is pledged to protect.

The leaking of Flynns name was part of what can only be described as a White House campaign to hype the Russian threat and, at the same time, to depict Trump as Vladimir Putins Manchurian candidate. On Dec. 29, Obama announced sanctions against Russia as retribution for its hacking activities. From that date until Trumps inauguration, the White House aggressively pumped into the media two streams of information: one about Russian hacking; the other about Trumps Russia connection. In the hands of sympathetic reporters, the two streams blended into one.

A report that appeared the day after Obama announced the sanctions shows how. On Dec. 30, the Washington Post reported on a Russian effort to penetrate the electricity grid by hacking into a Vermont utility, Burlington Electric Department. After noting the breach, the reporters offered a senior administration official to speculate on the Russians motives. Did they seek to crash the system, or just to probe it?

This infrastructure hack, the story continued, was part of a broader hacking campaign that included intervention in the election. The story then moved to Trump: Hehas spoken highly of Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite President Obamas suggestion that the approval for hacking came from the highest levels of the Kremlin.

The national media mimicked the Posts reporting. But there was a problem: the hack never happened. It was a false alarm triggered, it eventually became clear, by Obamas hype.

On Dec. 29, the DHS and FBI published a report on Russian hacking, which showed the telltale signs of having been rushed to publication. At every level this report is a failure, said cyber security expert Robert M. Lee. It didnt do what it set out to do, and it didnt provide useful data. Theyre handing out bad information.

Especially damaging were the hundreds of Internet addresses, supposedly linked to Russian hacking, that the report contained. The FBI and DHS urged network administrators to load the addresses into their system defenses. Some of the addresses, however, belong to platforms that are widely used by the public, including Yahoo servers. At Burlington Electric, an unsuspecting network administrator dutifully loaded the addresses into the monitoring system of the utilitys network. When an employee checked his email, it registered on the system as if Russian hackers were trying to break in.

While the White House was hyping the Russia threat, elements of the press showed a sudden interest in the infamous Steele dossier, which claimed that Russian intelligence services had caught Trump in Moscow in highly compromising situations. The dossier was opposition research paid for by Trumps political opponents, and it had circulated for months among reporters covering the election. Because it was based on anonymous sources and entirely unverifiable, however, no reputable news organization had dared to touch it.

With a little help from the Obama White House, the dossier became fair game for reporters. A government leak let it be known that the intelligence community had briefed Trump on the dossier. If the president-elect was discussing it with his intelligence briefers, so the reasoning went, perhaps there was something to it after all.

By turning the dossier into hard news, that leak weaponized malicious gossip. The same is true of the Flynn-Kislyak leak. Ignatius used the leak to deepen speculation about collusion between Putin and Trump: What did Flynn say (to Kislyak), Ignatius asked, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The mere fact that Flynns conversations were being monitored deepened his appearance of guilt. If he was innocent, why was the government monitoring him?

It should not have been. He had the right to talk to in private even to a Russian ambassador. Regardless of what one thinks about him or Trump or Putin, this leak should concern anyone who believes that we must erect a firewall between the national security state and our domestic politics. The system that allowed it to happen must be reformed. At stake is a core principle of our democracy: that elected representatives control the government, and not vice versa.

Michael Doran is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., specializing in Middle East security issues. In the administration of President George W. Bush, Doran served in the White House as a senior director in the National Security Council. Follow him on Twitter at @Doranimated.

The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.

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How Obama's White House weaponized media against Trump - The Hill (blog)

President Donald Trump plans to sign a repeal of Obama-era broadband privacy rules as a bigger fight looms over rules governing the openness of the Internet, the White House said on Wednesday.

Republicans in Congress on Tuesday narrowly passed the repeal of the privacy rules with no Democratic support and over the strong objections of privacy advocates.

The fight over privacy sets the stage for an even larger battle later this year over Republican plans to overturn the net neutrality provisions adopted by the administration of former President Barack Obama in 2015.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said he did not know when Trump would sign the bill.

The privacy bill would repeal regulations adopted in October by the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama administration requiring Internet service providers to do more to protect customers' privacy than websites like Alphabet 's Google ( googl ) or Facebook ( fb ) .

Under the rules, Internet providers would need to obtain consumer consent before using precise geolocation, financial information, health information, children's information, and web browsing history for advertising and marketing.

The reversal is a win for AT&T ( t ) , Comcast ( cmcsa ) , and Verizon Communications ( vz ) . Websites are governed by a less restrictive set of privacy rules overseen by the Federal Trade Commission.

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Republican commissioners have said the rules would unfairly give websites the ability to harvest more data than Internet service providers.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said in a tweet the vote was "Terrible for American ppl, great for big biz."

Republicans next plan to overturn net neutrality provisions that in 2015 reclassified broadband providers and treated them like a public utility.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, in December said he believes that net neutrality's days are numbered.

The rules bar Internet providers from obstructing or slowing down consumer access to web content and prohibit giving or selling access to speedy Internet, essentially a "fast lane" on the web's information superhighway, to certain Internet services.

Critics say the rules opened the door to potential government rate regulation, tighter oversight and would provide fewer incentives to invest billions in broadband infrastructure.

Pai told Reuters in February be backs "a free and open Internet and the only question is what regulatory framework best secures that" but has steadfastly declined to disclose his plans.

Trump has not talked as president about net neutrality but in 2014 tweeted he opposed net neutrality.

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Trump Will Sign the Bill Repealing Obama-Era Internet Privacy Rules - Fortune