5 W Main: State of Silence. On taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify the remaining files pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The executive order stated that continued secrecy “is not consistent with the public interest.”

It’s still possible, though, that the American intelligence community will refuse to cooperate. In 1992, when Congress passed a law to release all JFK documents within 25 years, officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency prevailed on a succession of presidents—including Trump himself—to keep thousands of pages secret. And it worked, at least until now.

Why is it so hard to get the the American national-security state to release classified informations, decades after it was classified?

As Matthew Connelly said here at The Signal last summer, there are a number of factors in play. More than a million people in the United States have a Top Secret security clearance, but only some two thousand government employees work to release files to the public. And the incentives favor overclassification: No one has ever been fired from the U.S. government for classifying too promiscuously, but the bureaucrat who lets the wrong thing slip out might not only lose his or her job but face prosecution, as well.

In State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime, Sam Lebovic explores how the American national-security state is underpinned by a vague law enacted more than a century ago: The Espionage Act of 1917 is the keystone in this “secrecy regime.” Originally intended to help the government root out foreign spies, this obscurely worded statute has been reinterpreted and patched up so many times that it now gives the government a near-absolute right to censor its own employees—in many cases even long after they’ve left their jobs.

As Lebovic shows, the government polices its own employees so diligently because that’s the most efficient way within its means of controlling American public opinion. During World War I, the government could censor the press fairly easily. But that censorship sparked a counter-reaction. A free-speech movement began gathering momentum. The government, realizing it could no longer prevent the press from publishing state secrets, mounted a concerted effort to make sure such secrets never reached the press in the first place. So paradoxically, one of the main reasons the American secrecy regime is so vast is the fact that the American media can say what it likes.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Issa.’ The Malian desert blues band Songhoy Blues is back with their fourth album, Heritage. From which, here’s a crackerjack, up-tempo single, written to promote keeping their rivers clean and navigable. “Issa” means “river” in the Aynehan languages. A love letter to the waterways of Mali.

—Brendan Hasenstab

111 MHz: ‘Twilight.’ Hiroshima native Sakura Tsuruta is making waves in the world of dance music with an expressive style of club music. It fuses skittery, multilayered beats and dark pads, warm harmonies and celestial swirls. From her recent album, GEMZ.

—Brendan Hasenstab

‘The firewall’ falls in Berlin. On January 29, the German Bundestag passed a nonbinding motion aimed at cutting off undocumented immigration at the country’s land borders. The proposal, drafted by the center-right Christian Democrats, passed by only three votes, and it might never become law. Germany is holding national elections on February 23, and if the Christian Democrats and their right-wing allies don’t win, the new cabinet is unlikely to adopt the measures.

And yet German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said that the Christian Democrats’ leader, Friedrich Merz, had made an “unforgivable mistake” and had crossed “boundaries that a statesman should not overstep.”

The offense? To pass the motion, Merz relied on votes from the Alternative für Deutschland, a populist-right party with extensive ties to Germany’s far right. For many years, all of Germany’s mainstream parties had agreed not to work with the AfD, either in sponsoring legislation or including them in a governing coalition—a consensus they’ve referred to as der Brandmauer, or “the firewall.” But the vote on the immigration motion ended it.

Why did the Christian Democrats do this?

Last March, just after AfD became the second-most popular party in Germany, Liana Fix looked at the reasons for their rise—and saw two things that likely influenced the Christian Democrats.

One is that German public opinion on immigration has been consistently moving toward the views of the AfD, which has focused on the issue for more than a decade. Polls showed that 66 percent of Germans supported Merz’s plans—including 56 percent of the voters for Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats.

The second thing is the transformation of German politics in the context of an ongoing shift across Europe. The European political landscape is now fragmenting, as small new parties emerge on the right and left. One major effect is to leave traditional center-right parties like the Christian Democrats with increasingly fewer options for partners to form majority governments or pass legislation—meaning that working with the AfD would begin to look less like a taboo and more like practical politics.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Things Ain't What They Used to Be.’ Setting the time machine for 1957, and the album that epitomized the notion of cool electric guitar in West Coast jazz. Jim Hall began his long career with this record—and established the setup he’d use for decades: the simple guitar-piano-bass trio. Here, they play a 1942 standard written by Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington’s son.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: We May Dominate the World. During his inauguration last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said, “China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.” He was apparently referring to the fact that the Hong Kong-based company CK Hutchison Holdings operates two of the Panama Canal’s five ports. Meanwhile, Trump has recently mused about annexing Canada and Greenland.

All three countries have let the United States government know they’re not available for seizure. Fortunately for Canada, the U.S. is in no position even to try taking it, and Greenland is covered by the European Union’s security guarantees. But could Panama be different?

In international relations, Trump has exhibited a tendency to open with maximalist threats, later to settle through normal negotiations. But there’s at least a strategic through line between his invocation of the Chinese presence in Panama and America’s diplomatic past: Historically, great-power rivalries have, in moments, given Washington a rationale to threaten or even launch military interventions in nearby countries.

Sean Mirski’s We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus traces the history of how the United States pushed the European empires out of the Western hemisphere. It happened, Mirski writes, through a series of “security dilemmas,” in which the U.S. feared that European powers, if given the least foothold in the Americas, might potentially use it to strike America in the future. In essence, Washington faced the option either to let its rivals establish a presence in weak neighboring states or preemptively to do so itself through military intervention or outright conquest.

So, too, in Panama. In the late 1870s, when French engineers organized the Compagnie Universelle to build a canal through the country, the U.S. objected on the grounds that it’d give a foreign power control over one of America’s most vital maritime routes. “The politics of this country,” said President Rutherford B. Hayes, “is a canal under American control.”

By the turn of the century, the U.S. had ejected the European powers from the region altogether. And in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt sponsored a revolution in Panama against Colombia in order to complete the canal under American control. But as Mirski notes, Roosevelt went for a far more aggressive course than what security considerations alone really needed. In other words, Trump’s rhetoric may be strange, but it isn’t new: Great-power rivalries have long afforded their rivaling great powers the pretext to play rough with smaller countries.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘The Diviner’s Prayer to the Gods of the Night.’ You may not have asked for Belgian progressive doom metal, but here’s Wyatt E. with Lowen’s Nina Saeidi. This track scans less as heavy and more as something adjacent to Dead Can Dance, with swirling mysticism and propulsive acoustic guitars. And the liner notes offer some unexpected interpretive guidance: “Wyatt E. writes the soundtrack of the exile of the people from Bethlehem to Babylon in 587 B.C.” From the new album Zam​ā​ru Ultu Qereb Ziqquratu Part 1.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Europe talks the talk. One day after Donald Trump took office in Washington for a second time, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen appeared in Davos to give a speech at the World Economic Forum. She made a point of repeatedly describing Europe as an independent and powerful actor in global politics and economics, regardless of what happens in the U.S. Which seems about normal for a high-ranking official in Brussels.

She also called for a new era of EU integration and presented three major economic reforms that her office plans to roll out shortly: 1) to unify the bloc’s fragmented capital markets, to channel the billions of euros in EU savings accounts into investments; 2) to build world-beating companies by cutting bureaucratic burdens in favor of a single set of rules across the union; and 3) to create a new “energy union” that will permanently end Europe’s reliance on natural gas from Russia.

But if all is as well in the EU as she says, why does she think it needs these economic reforms?

Despite Von der Leyen’s assuring delivery, the EU is facing entrenched economic problems: The bloc’s economy is stagnant, and it’s falling farther behind the U.S. every year. In 1995, worker productivity in the U.S. and the EU was roughly the same. But today, European productivity is 20 percent below that of the U.S. America’s GDP is now 30 percent higher than the EU’s, and the gap has doubled over the past 20 years.

Earlier this month, Martin Wolf looked at the reasons why Europe has fallen so far behind the U.S.—and the weaknesses he sees track with the targets of Von der Leyen’s plans. For example, European companies have failed to innovate in the way that U.S. companies have, which is why so few of the world’s biggest tech firms are headquartered in the EU. Innovation in America, Wolf says, is largely fueled by massively higher investment, which is mostly mediated through dynamic capital markets and venture capital—whereas in Europe, most business funding comes from banks, which are much more cautious about where they invest depositors’ money. Europe can take some important steps to increase its firms’ competitiveness, Wolf says—but even so, it’s not likely to catch up to America anytime soon.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘8th Deadly Sin’ The former Lush front woman Miki Berenyi is back with a sleek trio that includes her husband on bass. Some dream pop with an indie tilt and lyrics expressing a matured sense of urgency about the world. From the album Tripla, due out April 4.

—Brendan Hasenstab