Revenge of the wonks
Hard to do better than this for a preview of today’s impeachment testimony in the House:
Bill Taylor and George Kent are people who know Ukraine well and thought they understood US policy towards it.
What they didn’t figure on was a President willing to upend that policy in favor of his own personal interests, as he will no doubt do again today when he meets with Turkey’s President Erdogan. Those interests are still obscure, but Trump has consistently yielded to Erdogan’s desires and ignored important US interests, in particular in protecting the Kurds in Syria and continuing to use them to fight any resurgence of the Islamic State. As with Ukraine, the Congress is mostly united in the opposite direction: it wants sanctions on Turkey for its purchase of a Russian air defense system and enormously resents Ankara’s behavior towards Kurdish forces that have partnered with the US.
What might Trump give to Erdogan this time around? The Turkish President more than anything else wants the extradition of his arch rival Fethullah Gulen, the 78-year-old Pennsylvania resident whom Erdogan accuses of plotting the attempted coup in 2016. He also wants to avoid sanctions and convince Trump to allow Turkey’s purchase of F35 fighters, some parts of which are made in Turkey, to go ahead. I’d bet on Erdogan getting some or all of his wish list, without any clear quid pro quo. That is Trump’s pattern with strong leaders whom he admires, and there may well be other still unknown business or financial interests at stake.
Of course American presidents often make decisions on foreign policy based on their own domestic political interests. There is nothing new in that. President Trump is however an outlier: nothing else seems to matter, and he acknoledges no restraint on asking for electoral help from foreigners even if it is against the law. It is already well-established that he tried to extort the promise of a judicial investigation of the Bidens from Ukrainian President Zelensky. He also offered US aid, already authorized by the Congress, as an incentive. “Abuse of power” is almost too good a label for this behavior.
We will all be consumed for the next few weeks by impeachment testimony and the eventual vote in the House, whose outcome is already clear. To know whether Trump will be removed from office, keep an eye on opinion polling in red states and districts. If his support starts to fade there, at least a few Republican Senators may betray the Trump bandwagon. A president who loses his solid majority in the Senate on removal from office would be enormously weakened, even if the 2/3 majority is not reached.
The wonks are going to have their days in the House. Whether they will get their full measure of revenge for a president who fails to defend US interests is still not clear.
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