Tag: Russia
Up creek, no paddle
The North Koreans celebrated July 4 with launch of a missile they claim (and some expert observers confirm) could be an inter-continental one. While they are still presumably some distance from being able to mount a nuclear weapon on an ICBM and deliver it to the US, President Trump had said they wouldn’t be allowed to continue to test this capability.
Trouble is, he seems to have no idea what to do about it. The US and South Korea launched a couple of missiles into the sea in response, but that is really pointless. Kim Jong-un knows full well that Seoul and Washington can obliterate Pyongyang, but he also knows that he has the capability to do likewise to Seoul. He has tens of thousands of well-hidden conventional artillery pieces within range of the South Korean capital. Even if most of them miss their targets, they will do colossal damage, mainly to civilians.
Trump’s bluff and bluster is also failing with the Chinese, who have reached an agreement with the Russians not to up the sanctions pressure on the North. Without Moscow and Beijing, American sanctions are essentially meaningless. Even the recent move against Chinese banks that finance business with North Korea won’t have much impact. The Chinese will likely move their operations to more opaque institutions. We’ll discover those and levy sanctions, leading to an interminable game of cat and mouse.
Admittedly, Trump is doing no worse than previous American administrations, which have likewise found a dearth of options. The difference is that Trump mocked “strategic patience” and promised success, repeatedly. He thus put US credibility on the line and thereby forced his own hand. He may have to “do something” for the sake of his own prestige.
What Beijing and Moscow want is a deal that would suspend at least some US and South Korean military exercises in exchange for freezing the North Korean missile program. That would be a good deal for the Washington and Seoul, since they really have little need to continue the exercises, except as a (feeble) response to Pyongyang’s provocations. It is not however clear that North Korea sees much advantage in that sort of mutual freeze, since the threat their missiles pose is a hypothetical one until they gain a real operational capability.
The US finds itself reduced to asking for a UN Security Council meeting. That is the kind of diplomatic gesture Trump would have mocked while President Obama was in office. It is nonetheless a good idea, to see if there might be some area of agreement among China, Russia, and the US.
Jaw-jaw in this case is certainly better than war-war. The US is up a creek without a paddle. Maybe someone will loan us one.
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Sessions’ session
Unless you find a white supremacist’s indignant defense of his honor interesting, Attorney General Sessions’ appearance yesterday at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing offered little:Sessions was keen to reject allegations of collusion with the Russians but refused to discuss the substance of his conversations with the President about the Russia investigation, claiming they might be subject to a future claim of executive privilege. Mostly he just doesn’t remember anything about his contacts with the Russians:
His memory problems aside, I am inclined to believe Sessions’ denial of collusion, which is for amateurs. No collusion was necessary among the pros. As candidate and president, Trump has generally agreed with Vladimir Putin. They see the world through the same lenses: power is something they wield mainly to enhance their own standing, they think of themselves and their countries as superior to the rest of the world, and they disdain knowledge and expertise. Putin and Trump share worldviews and objectives: to make themselves important and to milk their governments for as much loot as possible.
Neither Trump nor Sessions has ever shown the slightest concern about Russian interference in the US election. Why should they? As with Wikileaks, they were all for it–Trump remember invited the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails–so long as it wasn’t against them. Fortunately the Senate is now moving to block Trump from removing the sanctions on Russia without Congressional approval. If the Russians ever take up the cudgels against him, Trump will no doubt get very concerned about their interference in the electoral process. Until then, they are his BFF.
A serious Attorney General would be anxious to see the Russia probe uncover the truth and even help it to do so. Sessions is not a serious Attorney General. He is far more concerned with a 10% bump up in US murders in 2015 than with the sharp decline in the murder rate for more than four decades. He is still worrying about enforcing marijuana prohibition, when most states have already legalized marijuana in some form. He has also been busy making sure that legal settlements can’t support good causes and failing to get US attorneys appointed, to replace the ones Trump summarily dismissed.
Sessions is correct: his honor is being impugned. Some of us view him and his support for a president who doesn’t hide his affection for autocrats and disdain for democracy as dishonorable. Not so much to him as to the nation. These are people who make America small again: they return it to its not so distant racist past, when the Ku Klux Klan ruled many states, miscegenation was prohibited in the South, and blacks were treated as third class citizens (other minorities were second) not entitled to the education and public accommodations afforded to others. I bet Sessions fondly remembers all of that.
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Trump excels at disappointing
I regret to inform
my august readership that Piglet is correct. Trump isn’t gone. He is claiming to have been vindicated, 100%. That of course is false. He was wounded, not vindicated, by the revelation that he hoped former FBI Director Comey would let former National Security Adviser Flynn off the hook and wanted the “cloud” of the Russia investigation lifted. But wanting and hoping are arguably not obstruction, even if I–like Comey–would have taken a president’s hope as an order.
Obstruction for now is in the eye of the beholder. Democrats see obstruction, though they might not if the president were one of their own. Republicans don’t, though there is no doubt they would if the president were not one of their own. Both seem to agree that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should make the determination, which demonstrates his considerable value added: removing the issue from a venue in which it can’t be settled to one in which it can be, on technical legal grounds.
But that will take time. In the meanwhile the Administration is demonstrating once again that it is incoherent. Yesterday, the President blasted Qatar again for financing terrorists, almost in the same moment that the Secretary of State was asking the Saudis and Emirates to back off their embargo of the tiny monarchy that hosts the largest US base in the Middle East:
Weeks after his disappointing appearance at NATO, the President also reaffirmed the Alliance’s “Article 5” mutual defense obligation, though in doing so he continued to suggest that the money is “pouring into NATO” as a result of his effort to press the allies to meet the commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defense. That isn’t the way this works: the money goes to the allies’ own defense efforts, not to the Alliance, and it is trickling in as allies begin to meet a commitment set in 2014 under President Obama, as a goal to be reached by 2024.
Some are happy to point out that Trump has not yet had a complete foreign policy disaster. A chipmunk could make it over that bar. He has however
- weakened NATO,
- split the Gulf Cooperation Council,
- boosted China by withdrawing from the Paris climate accord,
- ended a trade agreement for the Asia Pacific without proposing anything else as a keystone for US policy in the region,
- failed to respond effectively to North Korean provocations
- even begun to repair relations with Turkey,
- and proposed a budget that would decimate US diplomacy and international aid.
America is in worse shape on the international stage than it was at the end of the Obama administration, when many thought we were already in pretty bad shape. Ironically, the best that can be said for Trump is that he has continued Obama’s military efforts against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, though he shares with Obama failure to enunciate a clear plan for how areas like Raqqa and Mosul will be governed once liberated.
Yesterday the President promised “100%” to testify under oath in the Special Counsel investigation of his campaign’s and administration’s connections to Russia. File that with his promise to release his tax returns, to provide documentation of his wife’s legal employment in the US, to prove his claim that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the election, and a dozen other commitments. The President is unprepared, unreliable, and inconsistent. To my satisfaction, he has even botched repeal and replacement of Obamacare and is well on his way to botching tax reform. The alleged adults in the Administration haven’t yet fixed anything. Trump excels at disappointing.
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Dobrodošli!
I’m thrilled Montenegro joined NATO yesterday, not least because it signals to the rest of the Balkans that the door to Atlantic institutions is still open. But I’ve got to admit that it is a difficult moment for the Alliance: Russia is doing its best to block NATO expansion and the President of the United States is doing his best to undermine its mutual defense commitment.
Moscow’s efforts are by now obvious: an attempted coup in Podgorica last October, hybrid warfare efforts in Macedonia, political and financial support for Bosnia’s Republika Srpska. A rational patriot would react to these attacks on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of their respective countries by trying to get into NATO, not stay out of it. Only Serbia has (so far) concluded that it is better off outside NATO than inside it, even if its newly inaugurated president thinks NATO membership would solve many of the countries problems and appears to regret the domestic opposition to it.
But if NATO is now more attractive than ever to the Balkan aspirants, which of course include Kosovo as well, the Article 5 commitment to mutual defense is on shakier ground than ever. President Trump not only omitted it from his speech at NATO. He also neglected to mention it either before or after that speech. Defense Secretary Mattis is busy reassuring the world that the President did recommit to Article 5, but that simply is not true anywhere but in the talking points that the Pentagon and State Department proposed and the President did not use.
What difference does this make? Here is the text of Article 5:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.
The mutual defense requirement was triggered for the first time after 9/11, as as an expression of allied solidarity with the United States, including patrolling by allied AWACS over the US and later other measures in support of US operations in the Mediterranean. NATO has also taken collective defense measures in response to threats to Turkey and threats from Russia.
Would NATO defend Montenegro? I have my doubts, especially with Trump in the presidency. Fortunately, an attack on the small country from another state isn’t likely. Podgorica for now at least has good relations with its neighbors, even if the Kosovo parliament has refused to allow demarcation of the border. Far more likely: Russia will continue to try to destabilize Montenegro, using the anti-independence Serb opposition and other Russophiles as its hybrid warfare instrument. Another assassination attempt cannot be ruled out, though Serbia is presumably still ready to foil it.
NATO members, Montenegro now included, are of course expected to meet their own defense requirements. Each NATO member by 2024 is expected to spend 2% of GNP on defense. Montenegro does not meet that goal yet. It makes little difference to Alliance capabilities whether it does so, but its claim on NATO support would be enhanced if it did. Petty it may seem, but President Trump is nothing if not petty.
He allowed Montenegro membership in NATO, once the Senate had approved it overwhelmingly and Defense Secretary Mattis presumably weighed in heavily. For that, not only Montenegro but also the rest of the Balkans should be grateful.
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Memorial Day for America and the Alliance
Donald Trump has done more damage to the NATO Alliance than the Soviet Union managed in more than 40 years. Even after its implosion, the Alliance endured for another 27 years, fighting its first wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. It has taken only a bit more than four months for Trump to cast a pall over Europe’s most important link to the United States and to render the Alliance irrelevant.
German Chancellor Merkel has concluded that Europe, “to some extent,” has to go it alone. This was her reaction to Trump’s miserable performance at the NATO Summit meeting last week, when he failed to mention the Article 5 commitment to come to the defense of our allies and harshly criticized their failure to meet NATO’s exhortation that they spend 2% of GDP on defense. That guideline was intended for 2024, but Trump treats it as a treaty commitment and pretends that the allies owe arrears for their many years of not meeting it.
This purposeful mendacity has consequences. It has convinced the allies that they cannot rely on the United States. An important corollary is that they need not follow the US on other issues. Trump will soon discover that our allies have no interest in ratcheting up sanctions on Iran, for example, but instead prefer to continue doing good business with Tehran. Nor are the allies likely to line up and salute on the wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Libya. “All for one and one for all” has for decades meant Washington could “to some extent” depend on European backing for American initiatives worldwide. That presumption is now null and void.
Who benefits from this Alliance decay? Russia of course. The vodka flowed in the Kremlin last week. Trump’s own ineptitude and the consequent investigations have stymied his efforts to reach out to Moscow. He is nonetheless proving a useful pawn. Russian President Putin’s fondest hope is to throw NATO into disarray. Trump has done it for him, without any apparent quid pro quo.
The notion that the US or NATO would contest Russian action in Ukraine or Syria has evaporated. The consequences will be felt not only in those two countries but also in increased Russian audacity in the Baltics, the Balkans, Georgia, Moldova and elsewhere. I was just informed of a Montenegrin detained and expelled from Moscow. Apparently he was on an unpublished non grata list. We’ll be seeing a lot more of that kind of harassment. Putin will push until there is a push back, which he will have concluded isn’t coming any time soon.
He is correct. Trump is pushing back against his democratic allies far more than against any autocracy. His only real enemies at this point are what he likes to call radical Islamic terrorism and Iran, the two of which he has somehow managed to conflate despite their mutual sectarian enmity. Trump simply ignores the fact that Russia is increasingly aligned if not allied with Iran, not only in Syria. Nor does he pay any attention to the fact that Russia and Iran have never focused their attacks there on the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, but instead collaborated in launching the latest chemical weapons attack on more moderate anti-Assad forces.
This is a brave new world in which the president of the United States is not what I would regard as loyal to democratic principles, at home or abroad, or to our democratic allies. Memorial Day commemorates those who have died in the nation’s service. I feel their loss even more deeply when we abandon the ideals they were seeking to defend. This is indeed a sad Memorial Day for America and its allies.
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Back channels
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser, is reported to have tried to set up a secret “back channel” with the Russians, using Russian communications and circumventing US intelligence agencies and the National Security Council. Is there something wrong with that?
Not necessarily. The president can set up pretty much any channel he wants. President Obama set up a secret channel with Cuba in preparation for normalizing diplomatic relations. He also set up a secret channel with Iran in preparation for the nuclear deal. Both these were kept hidden not only from the American people, but also from most of the bureaucracy, in particular much of the State Department. I don’t know about the intelligence agencies. It’s not smart to try to keep anything from them, as they may well pick up traces of it and blow a back channel the president values.
First problem: Trump wasn’t yet president when Kushner’s effort allegedly took place in early December. That makes it more analogous to the allegations against Ronald Reagan, who some allege encouraged the Iranians via a back channel to hold on to the American hostages captured in 1979 until he took the oath of office in January 1980. Those allegations have not been proven.
Second problem: It is illegal for US citizens to negotiate with foreign powers in a dispute with the United States, but the 1799 Logan Act has only once led to an indictment and no one has been successfully prosecuted. So that is an unlikely legal course of action, especially as the Russians seem to have rejected Kushner’s overture, unless the overture itself is regarded as the opening of a negotiation.
Third problem: A lot will depend on what Kushner wanted to use the channel for. Many of us–I count myself in this category–are coming to believe that both Kushner’s companies and Trump’s are heavily dependent on Russian investment in, and purchases of, real estate. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that American companies are required to do due diligence on investors and purchasers to ensure that their assets are not derived from criminal activity. Clean Russian assets of the size Trump needed after his bankruptcies, and that Kushner needed for his big deals, have got to be pretty rare.
So questions become: was the due diligence adequate? If not, were the Russians blackmailing Kushner or Trump, thus making a secret communications channel desirable even before January 20? Was the back channel being set up to negotiate improved conditions for Kushner or Trump companies, perhaps in exchange for support for Russian ambitions in Ukraine or Syria once Trump was in office? There are many other possibilities, but few of them are savory and some of them are downright malevolent. All are speculative and unproven at this point.
Fourth problem: Now that a serious Special Counsel has been appointed, we can expect the FBI to examine Trump’s and Kushner’s personal and campaign finances with a fine tooth comb. Trump will react to that angrily, obfuscating where he can and trying to disrupt and divert the investigation by throwing in other issues, in particular the leaks that Trump seems unable to stop despite his many threats. The effort at coverup may turn out to be just as important as the intended uses of the back channel. That’s certainly what happened in the Watergate case: the break-in was a problem, but the cover-up was a full-blown crisis that would have led to impeachment, hence Nixon’s resignation.
Nothing can lead to impeachment so long as the House Republicans remain loyal to a president they dislike and even despise. There is no telling how long that will last, but the smart money is betting at least through the 2018 election. It is just impossible to predict which straw will break the camel’s back. In Bill Clinton’s case, it was lying about Monica Lewinski, after years of far more serious allegations (none of which panned out). Trump has already survived far more than anyone would have predicted. He may well survive much more.
Or not. No telling. But Kushner’s back channel isn’t going away any time soon.
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