Stevenson’s army, August 28
– WSJ is filled with several important stories today.
– Excerpt of a book by former SecDef Mattis, due to be released next week.
– Hurricane relief funds are being diverted for border wall. In class, we can talk more about Congressional rules about transferring funds.
– US wants to block undersea data cable involving Chinese and US tech companies.
-US plans direct talks with Houthis about Yemen war.
– WaPo says niche publications are surging. That’s why it’s hard to research Congress through Google: all the inside information is behind paywalls that lobbyists are willing to fund.
– Defense News says SecDef Esper wants more US basing in Indo-Pacific.
– Lawfare, a site with good articles on legal aspects of national security, says Congress is concerned but unlikely to act on 5G.
– NYT has article by former FSO who wrote dissent channel message critical of Muslim ban and now feels she has to leave State Dept.
– Boris Johnson can also play constitutional games: he has asked the Queen to suspend Parliament.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Full control
Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat, writes:
Talk in Syria is that a government-sponsored money laundering commission has unleashed a wave of investigations on 29 major business elites, including Dureid Assad, Jaber , Hamsho and most significantly Rami Makhlouf himself and his family (his brothers and his father).
Reports are that Rami Makhlouf’s offices at the free zone were raided by the money laundering commission. The scope of the investigations has sent shockwaves into Latakia too. Hamsho’s tender with the Education Ministry is supposedly under investigation
Source:
Analysis:
- The Assad regime is a big mafia and the the fight within the family was expected
- Assad does not want any center of power within his inner circle.
- All the businesspeople who are now under house arrest have created and sponsored local militias in the past 8 years. Some of these militias started challenging Assad forces, especially in Latakia and Hama.
- The regime may feel more confident to do such big step against the warlords after winning in Idlib. This step could be encouraged and/or pushed by Russia to counter Iranian economic influence.
- aSnctioning of Samer Foz was a clear message for the regime that his investments and assets outside Syria by using businesspeople as cover do not help or provide protection. So he is burning all the known names and their affiliations to make it harder for the West to sanction the new faces.
- Asaad wants to send the message that he and his family are in full control.
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Trump caves on Iran
President Trump has apparently agreed in principle to a meeting with Iran’s President Rouhani. Best bet is that this might occur at the United Nations in September or October. The big question is what the conditions are: has Trump offered sanctions relief and has Rouhani agreed to talk about the detailed provisions of the nuclear deal, Iran’s missiles, or Iran’s behavior in the region? The answer to the former is clearly yes; the answer to the latter is that there is no evidence Rouhani has agreed to discuss any of these matters. Trump has caved.
It has been clear for some time that Trump was begging for a meeting with the Iranians, who have resisted unless promised sanctions relief. He now says he wants a discussion of missiles as well as extension of the nuclear deal (aka the sunset clauses). He has made it explicitly clear that Iran can hope for economic relief and that he is not looking for regime in Tehran. Both are major concessions. The latter, a no regime change pledge, was a prelude to President Obama’s negotiations with the Iranians and one that will displease many in the Trump Administration, especially National Security Advisor Bolton.
If the sunset clauses of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) were the major issue, it would have been much wiser to stay in the agreement than to renege on it. Missiles were never part of the JCPOA. There was no reason to withdraw from it on that basis. Trump is essentially retreating from the more extreme positions held in the Administration, which regard the JCPOA as fundamentally flawed (and therefore extension would not be desirable) and the Iranian regime as an illegitimate one that should be replaced before any further negotiations.
Trump did not mention Iran’s regional behavior. This could of course have been an unintentional omission. Surely the Israelis, the regional Sunni powers, and America’s Iran hawks will be unhappy about it. On the merits it is the most important issue right now. Iran is actively involved in arming and training militia forces in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. This is not an issue that should be ignored, though once again: the US would have been better off had we raised the issue while still a party to the JCPOA.
Only time will tell whether the meeting with Rouhani will actually come off, but President Trump is clearly ready and willing, despite Iran’s regional behavior and Israeli resistance to the JCPOA. He has decided to cut and run. But he is erratic, vulnerable to pressure, and may change his mind.
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Stevenson’s army, August 26
[The Congress class starts next week, so I’ll be giving extra emphasis to news about the legislative branch.]
Congress will be in session only 15 days in September, then recessing for two weeks [Jewish high holidays]. Lawmakers have to fund the government, probably by passing a short term continuing resolution. They dodged a bullet by approving a two year budget topline and suspending the debt limit last month.
Another July accomplishment was a new law making it easier for congressional offices to do constituent casework that requires some kind of approval paperwork.
In an apparent effort to preclude further stock market declines, President Trump said the Chinese had called and wanted to restart trade talks. Bloomberg says the Chinese Foreign Ministry knows of no such calls, and other US officials previously said there would be more talks next week. Anyway, the president has now discovered the International Emergency Economic Powers Act [IEEPA] and thinks it would allow him to forbid US companies from having Chinese customers or subsidiaries. Here’s background on IEEPA from the Congressional Research Service, and another paper on broader national emergencies laws. [Note that both CRS and FAS have CRS papers now.]
The Atlantic has a piece showing China’s effective soft power at work.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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The mercantile solution
Maybe trade talks with China are back on, or so says Donald Trump. The Chinese want to talk, he claims. More likely he is the one that needs to find an out: the slowing world and American economies and sharp drops in the stock market are flashing alerts: by November 2020 we could be in recession. His re-election prospects would be dealt a big blow if that materializes. No doubt he got an earful about all this from his G7 colleagues over the weekend.
An early solution to the trade war appears unlikely. The American position in the talks advocates fundamental changes in the way the Chinese manage their economy and treat foreign investors. The American negotiators want no technology transfer requirements, a free-floating Chinese currency, and an end to state subsidies. These are so-called “structural” changes that are difficult for the Chinese to concede. China needs more than 6% growth to accommodate its population’s expectations.
President Trump couldn’t care less about all that. He is interested mainly in the bilateral trade balance. A mercantilist, he regards imports as bad and exports as good. What he wants is not complicated structural change–which takes time and attention to detail–but rather simple Chinese commitments to import more from the US. The Chinese have understood this and are likely willing to give him what he wants: they should not care less whether they get soybeans from the US or from Brazil.
Negotiating with the US is therefore a two-level game. The Chinese have understood this: they will do their best to satisfy Trump on reducing the giant bilateral trade deficit while stiffing his negotiators on the structural changes. They will hope this approach will bend the President towards lifting the tariffs he has imposed while Beijing avoids fundamental reforms.
It may work, but it may not. If Trump is a true mercantilist, he will want to make the tariffs permanent, or at least of indefinite duration. Only then could he hope for American companies to do what he “ordered” last week: return to the US, where he would need to protect them from foreign competition with tariffs. If this is Trump’s real ambition, you can expect any renewed trade talks to fail.
You can also expect a permanent decline in US competitiveness as other countries meet competitive challenges while the US is protected from them. Americans will be less well off, productivity will suffer, foreign investment will shrink, the economy will grow more slowly, and the stock market–hesitant now–will fall to new lows. The mercantile solution is a bad one, but hard to rule out with a President who is a mercantilist.
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Trump’s folly
It’s not a good week for the buffoon-in-chief. His proposal to buy Greenland ran into a Danish prime minister who said no. The budget deficit is soaring. The economy is weakening. Beijing is not yielding in his easy-to-win tariff war, but Trump is softening his stance by postponing some promised tariffs. He has retreated from requiring universal background checks for gun purchasers, routed by a phone call from the National Rifle Association. American Jews he has accused of disloyalty to Israel by voting for Democrats are up in arms. Half a dozen potential Democratic candidates are out-polling him.
Trump’s reaction? He is doubling down on satisfying his anti-immigrant, Christian evangelical, racist base. You don’t want to separate migrant children from their parents? He proposes locking up both parents and children indefinitely. He declares himself the “chosen one” with a glance at the heavens. He retweets white supremacist, anti-Jewish trash talkers who claim Jewish Israelis, who don’t believe in the first coming of the Messiah, regard him as the second coming.
In any place but the White House, such jabber would be regarded as symptomatic. The mental illness is however not only his. This folly is still getting more than 40% approval. Americans have lost touch with reality.
This is not a conservative administration. It is a radical one sending the country to ruin. The deficit alone should be enough to make real Republicans doubt Trump’s wisdom. The trade war and slowing economy are putting the long expansion begun under President Obama at serious risk. Trump’s petulant cancellation of a trip to Denmark is making all America’s allies blanch. America’s adversaries are delighted: the West and its democratic ideals could be collapsing.
What can be done? Very little. Until Republicans tire of Trump and decide he will lead them to defeat in 2020, the Democrats are stuck: the House they control can indict but not convict or remove from office. Proceeding with impeachment before the election is a risky move. Their best bet is to investigate as thoroughly as possible and hope what they find will dent Trump’s support and encourage their own voters to turn out.
The Democrats’ best hope in 2020 is the economy: if recession hits by next summer, Trump is toast. There are a lot more voters interested in their jobs than in how many “conservative” pro-business, pro-gun, anti-immigrant judges he has managed to appoint and get confirmed. Wishing recession however is political self-immolation. So is internecine bloodletting through the primary season. All the Democratic candidates would do well to keep their focus on the miserable performance of the Trump Administration rather than on each others’ shortcomings.
Making Trump’s folly apparent should be easy. Hammer away at the weakening economy, the disrepute America has fallen into abroad, the silliness of a president who spends his days watching Fox News, and his failure to deliver on infrastructure, tax cuts for working people, and health care. Trump has made himself an easy target. Keep firing at it.
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