Month: January 2017
The problem with Tillerson
Everyone seems concerned that Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is too close with the Russians and won’t be tough with them. That in my view is not the problem. Anyone who has successfully negotiated oil deals with Moscow on behalf of an American company has had to be tough.
The problems lie elsewhere:
- with the President-elect himself;
- in Tillerson’s international experience at Exxon.
Trump, who prides himself on negotiating skills, is approaching Moscow in a way that makes me doubt he has any at all. Rather than making it clear what Moscow needs to do to improve its relationship with the US–an end to destabilization in Europe and the Caucasus, withdrawal of Russian troops from all of Ukraine, real cooperation in reining in Bashar al Assad and attacking the Islamic State in Syria–Trump is putting the cart before the horse: he wants “improved relations” and appears willing to give rather than get. He has cast doubt on US commitment to NATO allies in the Baltics, has suggested he would accept Russian annexation of Crimea, pledged to drop US support for non-extremist opposition in Syria, and neglected to criticize Russia for its failure to attack the Islamic State.
Trump has never to my knowledge stated what he would ask from Russia for the improved relations he seeks. Putin however has made it clear that improved relations will have to be on his terms. He is planning to get without giving.
This fits of course with Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the Russian role and objectives in hacking the Democrats during the election campaign. He is not just soft on Russia. He has adopted Moscow’s views and even aligned himself with Moscow’s Wikileaks proxy, Julian Assange. Trump is doing just about everything he can to convince the world that he is Moscow’s patsy. How could a Secretary of State Tillerson be “tough” with the Russians if his president is their man?
Tillerson himself has proven skillful not only in negotiating with the Russian but also in gaining reserves for Exxon in the developing world, in particular its more autocratic corners. That also requires negotiating skills. What it does not require is any commitment to American values beyond the legal restrictions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Exxon is famous worldwide for doing straight-up business deals: no do-g0od sweeteners. This has served the company well: it makes most of its money outside the United States, often in less salubrious environments.
Of course Tillerson could learn to mouth commitments to human rights and democracy as well as the next CEO of a major American company. But neither Trump nor a National Security Council run by General Flynn is likely to want him to do so. Even with North Korea, Trump has been far more interested in making a deal than in undoing the dictatorship–he even thought sharing a hamburger with Kim Jong un might seal a deal. So the real problem with Tillerson is again not Tillerson, but his boss, who is committed to the status quo when it comes to dictatorships.
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Never never land
Today, Sean Hannity is tweeting:
Question of the Day: Who do you believe? Julian Assange or President Obama and Hillary Clinton
Sarah Palin has apologized to Assange, the Wikileaks guru, for criticizing him in the past and is recommending Oliver Stone’s film about Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who leaked some of its most tightly held secrets. President-elect Trump has in the meanwhile quietly cancelled providing the information he said he had on the hacking of the Democrats during the election campaign.
We have somehow entered never never land, where some Republicans (conservatives?) are unwilling to accept the considered judgments of the intelligence community that the Russians were not only responsible for the hacking but also did it to favor Trump’s election. Opposition to President Obama and Hillary Clinton has driven people who used to wear American flag lapel pins into the arms of an autocratic president of Russia and his collaborators in unveiling and publishing private emails and government secrets.
We used to call people like this “traitors” when they were on the left. You don’t have to think Russia has somehow re-inflated itself to the Soviet Union to realize that Putin, Assange, and Snowden are out to weaken the United States and help Moscow regain its great power status. Of course Snowden and Assange have no choice: the former has taken refuge in Russia and the latter in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. Both will be prosecuted if the US government ever gets their hands on them. The one virtue of the burst of Republican enthusiasm for Snowden is that it will end any idle chatter about a pardon for him from President Obama. I wonder about Trump though.
Hannity, Palin, and Trump are not under constraints that force them to favor Moscow. They are choosing to align themselves with Putin and his enmity to the US. A significant portion of the Republican electorate has also turned in that direction. Why? My own suspicion is that the ethnic nationalists–white supremacists in the language of my youth–recognize in Putin (as well as Netanyahu, by the way) a Russian analogue: someone who believes profoundly in the superiority and rights of his ethnic group and gender, to the exclusion of others. In other words, it is racism and misogyny that have brought us to never never land.
Many Republicans in Congress are not following Trump in his Russophile direction. Publication within the next couple of weeks of the Obama Administration’s findings on the email hacking will be a moment of truth: will Senate Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham follow through on their many sound bites and take up the cudgels against Trump’s unrealistic attitude toward Moscow during Rex Tillerson’s confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State, or will they let things slide, allowing the new administration to end the sanctions on Russia and recognize the annexation of Crimea?
If the latter, there are real risks that partition efforts elsewhere will be encouraged. Re-establishing Ukrainian sovereignty over Donbas would become even more difficult. Russia might well annex Transnistria (in Moldova) as well as South Ossetia and Abkhazia (in Georgia). In the Balkans, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and possibly even Serbia would find their efforts to establish Europe-eligible multi-ethnic democracies undermined. Instability and possibly worse would ensue. The sooner we get out of never never land, the better.
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This isn’t likely to go well
While there are a lot of other candidates for first international crisis in the new administration, North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs are a likely one. Donald Trump tweeted yesterday, apparently in response to a remark by North Korean President Kim that his country would soon have an intercontinental ballistic missile:
North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!
He then added a bit later:
China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won’t help with North Korea. Nice!
If Trump intended that first tweet as a threat of unilateral US military action, he was not the first to propose it. More than ten years ago, current Defense Secretary Carter and former Democratic Defense Secretary Perry proposed the same thing. They wanted to destroy any North Korean missile capable of reaching the US on the launch pad.
But of course it is not clear what the tweet really means. Nor is it clear why Trump assumes that the ICBM in question would be capable of carrying a nuclear weapon to a US target. What he is doing here is what he often does: throwing ambiguous remarks into the public sphere with little or no concern for their factual basis or their impact on others.
That is also true for the second tweet about China. Trump wants Beijing to help with North Korea and to stop what he regards as unfair trade practices. Nothing wrong with that: presidents from Clinton onwards have wanted pretty much the same. But criticizing the Chinese publicly for the one is not likely to get you help on the other. And linking the two is disadvantageous for negotiating both. Trump has threatened to improve his negotiating leverage on trade by unilaterally imposing tariffs, a move that would precipitate Chinese retaliation. What would the odds be then for getting Beijing to move more firmly on North Korea?
Trump is now in a world far more complex than the one he is used to. I’m willing to believe that his business deals are complicated, but they are basically questions of how much people will pay to use his name. There are few other, unrelated, issues between him and his business partners. In international affairs, there are a lot of linked issues between major powers, making it exceedingly difficult to predict the consequences of any particular move. In military parlance, these are “wickedly” complex problems.
Trump can of course learn. He learned that he couldn’t make money running casinos, got out of that business, and started to sell his brand instead. But he doesn’t readily learn from the experience of others. He may listen attentively to Al Gore, but then nominated an Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who doesn’t believe in human contributions to global warming. He pretended to listen to Mitt Romney, who has named Russia as the greatest strategic threat to the US, but he passed him over for Secretary of State.
A possible exception: his position on torture appears to have shifted after talking with his Defense Department nominee, General Mattis. But that is a rare exception. He has stubbornly persisted on many other issues where the weight of evidence is against his policy prescriptions: the wall with Mexico, repeal of Obamacare, making nice with Vladimir Putin, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, blocking Muslims from entering the US and registering them once they are here….
We’ve got a president-elect who listens mainly to himself (and has even said as much publicly). The odds of that going well, especially when it comes to North Korea and China, are piddling.
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What the Free Syria Army wants now
Earlier today I posted a message from Syrian civil society organizations. The situation they described appears to be deteriorating, as the Free Syria Army has now posted the message below. “Potemkin” is the word that comes to mind to describe this ceasefire, but the question is whether the opposition still has a viable military option:
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What Syrian civil society wants now
Baytna Syria sent this message early today, representing the views of an important segment of opposition-oriented Syrian civil society:
The Syrian civil society organizations followed closely the recent developments and discussions regarding the ceasefire agreement signed by opposition armed groups and the Syrian regime mediated by Russia and Turkey as endorsed by UN Security Council resolution 2336.
The signatories welcome any serious and credible ceasefire agreement as it will spare our people further blood, killing, and destruction. Such an agreement should be a prelude to a credible political process that will lead to the realization of the Syrian people’s aspirations in freedom, justice, and dignity.
For such an agreement to acquire the necessary seriousness and credibility, it shall:
- include a publicly published monitoring, verification and accountability process. The signatories declare their readiness to participate in any monitoring role required, each according to its mandate and principles.
- specify a single wording for the agreement signed by parties to the conflict and the guarantors, and carbon translated to Arabic, Russian, English, and Turkish. The details of the agreement should be made public.
- include a published and clear description of the role of the guarantors (Russian Federation and Turkey) and means to verify and sanction any violation.
- declare the UN Security Council resolutions as the unique political reference to the negotiation process, especially UNSCR 2118 and UNSCR 2254.
The signatories see in the Higher Negotiations Committee the sole representative of the Syrian revolution and opposition in the negotiations. The Syrian regime should appoint its delegation and negotiations should be between two parties only.
The continued shelling of the Barada valley in Damascus suburbs, Atareb in Aleppo suburbs and other areas in Syria proves yet again the lack of seriousness of the regime to positively engage in any ceasefire process, its insistence on its security/military solution to crush any opposition, and its non-credibility when declaring adopting a political solution to the conflict.
Russian maneuvering with different versions of the agreement and its attempt to impose a new UN Security Council resolution that would give it a role in defining the Syrian opposition team worries us a lot, especially regarding its role as a guarantor to the agreement. This pushes us to ask Turkey, the other guarantor, and countries of the Friends of Syria group, to follow matters closely and to block any understandings or agreements that do not meet the criteria above.
At the end, we would like to stress that the continuous and unhindered delivery of humanitarian and medical aid to all Syrian territories and primarily to the besieged areas remain the real test on the willingness of the regime and its allies to abide by UNSC resolutions, including the latest one 2336 and to engage in a serious and credible political process that leads to the desired political transition in Syria.
Signatories:
Baytna Syria
The Day After
RM Team
Syrian Network for Human Rights
Maram Foundation
Space of Hope
LACU
Afaq Academy
SNVM
Violations Documentation Center in Syria
Bihar Relief Organization
LDSPS
Emissa
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