Day: September 2, 2020
Why bother with the Balkans?
The short answer to this question is the election campaign. Failed Ambassador to Germany/failed Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell is trying to deliver a foreign policy spectacular to President Trump’s re-election prospects, which right now are dim. The model is the Israel/UAE agreement: bragging rights to something the President can say no one else has ever achieved. Thus the invitation to Serbian President Vucic and Kosovo Prime Minister Hoti to meet under White House auspices and maybe even get a meeting with the President, if the two leaders give him something he can use in the electoral campaign.
The Administration is suggesting that the focus will be on economic issues, perhaps just implementation of agreements on air, rail, and highway links between the two countries. That however would be hard to dress up as worthy of the President’s attention, so more than likely some other things will be on the agenda: maybe special economic zones on the border/boundary between the two, or some sort of agreement to redevelop the mining complex known as Trepca and manage the water supply known as Gazivoda, both of which transcend the border/boundary. Depending on the details, where the devil resides, those could be useful economically.
Everyone is going out of their way to deny that any ethnically-based exchange of territory between Kosovo and Serbia is contemplated, a bad idea that would destabilize the region and help Vladimir Putin justify Russian aggression in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. But that of course doesn’t mean someone won’t try to revive the zombie and repackage it as a Trump achievement. It would be consistent both with his pattern of being good to Putin and with his white nationalist inclinations. Prime Minister Hoti has pledged his government will oppose the idea. His thin majority in parliament would likely evaporate if he returned to Pristina trying to sell it.
There is little likelihood of a so-called “final” agreement that normalizes relations between Kosovo and Serbia through mutual diplomatic recognition, exchange of ambassadorial-level representatives, and membership for Kosovo in the United Nations. President Vucic has telegraphed that he is not prepared for anything big of this sort, despite the fact that he is in a strong political position at home and could likely do it with minimal and temporary political damage. Prime Minister Hoti insists that full normalization is the goal of the talks. He would be a historic figure in Kosovo if he could achieve normalization, but it doesn’t look likely during this visit to Washington. If it happens, I’ll be the first to applaud.
One important issue the President and Prime Minister have seemed ready to proceed on is missing people from the 1999 Kosovo war and its aftermath. The still unidentified whereabouts of the missing (bodies) is inexcusable. This should have been settled soon after the war. But better late than never, as it would give both Hoti and Vucic something their citizens would appreciate on returning from Washington.
But that is not what Trump wants or needs. He is looking for a diplomatic triumph to parade in front of the American electorate. Few Americans care about the Balkans, but in our current highly polarized political scene a Rose Garden ceremony, which President Trump has promised if the two do something really good, might give the flagging Trump campaign a bit of a fillip. That is certainly what Grenell needs, if only for getting the next job he can fail at.
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What isn’t said is revealing
President Trump and Vice President Pence are assiduously trying to hide why the President made an urgent visit to Walter Reed last year. Trump explicitly denied it was due to strokes, which may be the cat out of the bag. But whatever it was, you can be pretty sure it was important from the effort they are making to cover it up.
The same is true for Rod Rosenstein’s ending the investigation into Trump’s financial ties to Russia when he turned the FBI’s work over to Special Counsel Mueller, who should never have accepted a truncated mandate. Rosenstein may not even know what he was hiding, but as Deputy Attorney General he repeatedly did the President’s bidding. If the instruction came from the President, you can be pretty sure whatever was covered up in this maneuver was important.
So now, in addition to his many more blatant disqualifications from a second term, we’ve got two partially hidden reasons to be worried: the President could be both financially beholden to Vladimir Putin and unfit for office by reason of his health. There really isn’t much doubt that these issues. That Trump relied on Russian money he acquired via Deutsche Bank is at this point well-established. No one rushes a President to Walter Reed without good reason.
These are serious matters that require elucidation, but they are unlikely to get it before the election. They would be reason enough for me to vote against Trump, if I hadn’t decided that five years ago on other grounds. I’m hoping a few of the fence-sitters will now think twice: do you really want a President who can’t tell us why he made a rushed visit to Walter Reed? Do you really want one who might be selling out the country for the sake of Russian financing for his real estate? Remember: he still hasn’t raised with Putin Moscow’s bounties to Taliban for killing Americans. Nor has he objected to the Kremlin poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the single most important opposition figure in Russia.
Never mind Trump’s mindboggling defense of a 17-year-old vigilante accused of murder for killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, or his failure to offer to visit the family of a man shot seven times in the back there by a policeman. The President excused that violent act with the allegation that he must have “choked,” like a golfer. The President’s preference for white perpetrators over their black victims is no surprise, but no less reprehensible for its predictability.
Worried about other issues? No one pays any attention now, but
- The budget deficit was ballooning even before Covid-19 due to Trump’s tax cut for the wealthy. GNP and job growth had slowed below the pace set in the Obama Administration.
- The Chinese are not meeting their obligations under the agreement that suspended the tariff war to import vastly more agricultural products from the US.
- The promise of more spending on infrastructure has gone unfulfilled.
- The Social Security/Medicare tax holiday the President declared will leave many people with a giant tax bill at the end of the year, so most companies are not opting to implement it.
- The suspension of housing evictions just announced comes without the $100 billion in funding the Democrats have included in the latest Covid relief bill that the Republicans refuse to consider.
These are all relatively undiscussed issues that even the most ardent supporters of Trump should contemplate. Instead, the President expects them to respond to the siren call of “LAW AND ORDER,” intended to appeal to white suburban fear of minorities and stem the hemorrhaging of Trump’s support there. Anyone who falls for that deserves what they get: an unqualified president who has failed at almost everything, except lining the pockets of the wealthy and appointing equally unqualified judges to the Federal courts. That’s another subject too few are talking about.
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Stevenson’s army, September 2
- DOD’s annual report on China’s military power was released yesterday. Here’s a story. And here’s the report.
- NYT notes increased Russian military provocations around the globe.
Facebook & Twitter say Russians are spreading election disinformation now. - But ABC says DHS politicized an intelligence report about that.
- Senate Democrats consider changes to filibuster rules.
[FYI, I favor keeping the filibuster but making it rarer and harder to pursue.] - Fred Kaplan says US military are far better than most police at crowd control.
- SAIS grad Robin DIckey has written a report on US policy toward space militarization.
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. 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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