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Stevenson’s army, August 2
My SAIS colleague, Charlie Stevenson, distributes an almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. This is a first tasting. If you want to get it directly, follow the instructions below:
WSJ [alone among the media I see] reports that none of the president’s economic advisers except Peter Navarro supported the new 10% tariffs on Chinese imports.
WaPo has more on the planned reductions in US troops in Afghanistan.
WSJ reports Israel launched two air attacks inside Iraq.
New Republic says swing states get special favors in Congress, like ethanol for Iowa and coal for Pennsylvania.
In my assessment, Lindsey Graham has a lot of pluses and minuses, but this week’s gross abuse of Judiciary Committee rules and norms is a big minus.
[I’m not sure if you can open this, but CFR has a good set of articles on cyber issues.]
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 real America
I take as proven and irrefutable that President Trump is a racist (call it white nationalist or white supremacist if you prefer), so I won’t offer evidence. It is pointless to argue the case both with his supporters and with his opponents, since the former aren’t interested in evidence and the latter are already convinced. Even National Public Radio, usually shy of controversy, is referring this morning to Trump’s tweets about black politicians as racist. A racist is as a racist says and does.
The question is whether racism is politically advantageous or not. The best numbers I’ve seen on this subject say not. Even among white males, who constitute his core support, Trump is not breaking 50% approval. His overall approval rating has never broken 50%, and in fact he got only 46% of the votes in the 2016 election.
That is possible for a winner because:
- third party candidates in 2016 arguably deprived Hillary Clinton of some key states;
- the electoral college, where states have votes equal to their number of representatives plus their number of senators, favors less populous, more rural states that are predominantly Trump supporters.
The United States does not have a one-person, one-vote system for presidential elections. Someone living in Wyoming has about three times of the weight of someone living in California in electing the President. Odds are Trump will get an even smaller percentage of the popular vote in 2020 than he did in 2016, because populous Democratic-leaning states like California and New York will vote overwhelmingly against him, whereas Texas and Florida (both of which went for Trump in 2016) will continue to be fairly close, whoever wins.
If Trump wins without a majority of popular votes in 2020 it will be the third time since 2000 that has happened, with increasingly wide popular vote margins for the Democratic loser. That is a formula for minority, racist rule even before we take into account racist efforts to suppress voting by non-whites. Let’s ignore for the moment the racist drawing of Congressional districts by Republican-dominated state legislatures, which doesn’t directly affect the electoral votes, and the effort to undercount non-whites in the 2020 census, which does.
America is a young country. But it is an old governing system. No other written constitution has been in effect for more than 230 years. The electoral college is a feature of the original. It cannot be changed without a constitutional amendment, which is unthinkable, since the states that gain political weight in the electoral college would not agree to surrender their privilege. Its anti-democratic feature can be defeated by a compact among states to give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. Such a compact is in process of adoption, but it seems unlikely to be in effect by 2020.
So the 2020 election will be an unfair referendum not only on Trump but on racism, as well as the misogyny and xenophobia that accompany it. I’d like to think that the outcome is predictable, even if the playing field is not even. Any American who believes people are born with inalienable rights should have no problem voting against Trump. Anyone who doesn’t believe that–who believes instead that a white skin, male genitalia, or birth to an American parent conveys entitlement beyond that of other citizens–should vote for Trump. The 2020 election will reveal the real America.
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Don’t blame Mueller
Yesterday’s appearance confirmed what we already knew about Special Counsel Mueller and his report: yes on President Trump’s obstruction of justice, no exoneration on either obstruction or conspiracy with the Russians, whose help the Trump campaign openly welcomed.
Some are disappointed. I’m not. No one should have expected this taciturn and self-controlled lawyer, a life-long Republican, to eviscerate the President.
But what he did is more than enough to begin an impeachment inquiry. Speaker Pelosi is holding back until she is certain of bipartisan support in the House and perceives an inkling that some Republican Senators might be amenable. That will only happen if public sentiment turns against Trump, which it manifestly has not yet. He is at the peak of his popularity, even if the peak is low. Pelosi is as savvy a political operator as exists on The Hill today. She is more interested in beating Trump in the 2020 election than in helping him turn out his base with an impeachment inquiry.
Mueller was interesting on the question of the President’s credibility. He hinted that lack of credibility was among the reasons he did not subpoena Trump–what light could a committed liar shed on the facts?–along with pressure to complete the investigation. We all know where that pressure was coming from. I might have preferred that Mueller force testimony from the President and catch him perjuring himself. That is what got President Clinton impeached. But to expect that of the super-cautious Mueller would be wrong. Unlike Ken Starr, he is not a perjury trap kind of guy. He stuck to his mandate.
The action now will shift in two directions: counterintelligence and financial investigations, the latter also in New York State. Mueller was unequivocal in calling out the Russians not only for interfering in 2016 but for continuing to do so up to the present, and intending to do so through 2020. His message was clear: you haven’t done enough to prevent it. Senator Majority Leader McConnell claims that a few hundred million dollars in grants to the states is a sufficient response. That amounts to less than $10 million per state. It’ll surely go far.
The President’s financial shenanigans are both obvious and obscure. Deutsche Bank, the only one prepared to loan Trump money after his bankruptcies, is under investigation for multiple malfeasances. It’s hard not to imagine that Trump’s real estate business was recycling Russian oligarchs’ ill-gotten gains, with the help of Deutsche Bank. We don’t yet have the outcome of a serious investigation, but there must be good reasons why Trump has gone into Federal court to block New York State from getting his tax returns.
Mueller did his job: he gathered incontrovertible evidence of Donald Trump’s unfitness for office. The problem is the country, which Trump has succeeded in dividing so profoundly that close to half of voters would let him shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, as he claimed in 2016:
America needs to set this right, either by impeachment and conviction or by electoral defeat. Neither course of action is Mueller’s responsibility.
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Calm in Pristina
I’ve been in Pristina all week, where yesterday Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj resigned. A Special Tribunal concerned with crimes committed after its 1998-99 war has summoned him to The Hague. It is not yet known whether he is an indictee or a witness. He has been tried twice before at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and found not guilty.
I talked with the Prime Minister Wednesday. He gave no hint of what was coming and likely didn’t know.
It’s a fraught time here. Tariffs Ramush levied on Serbian imports have stalled a European Union dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina that aimed to resolve the many issues remaining a generation after Slobodan Milosevic expelled half of Kosovo’s Albanian population but yielded after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign to UN administration of the Serbian-ruled province. Kosovo is now a parliamentary democracy–not yet recognized as sovereign by some–that requires elections within 45 days of resignation of the prime minister. The opposition, which had aimed for elections in October, is unlikely to be ready for them by the beginning of September.
Some will wonder whether the United States is behind the judicial maneuver that caused Ramush to resign. The Special Court is constituted under Kosovo law, but manned by mostly Europeans with an American chief prosecutor, one appointed by the Trump Administration. You don’t even have to be a practiced conspiracy theorist to imagine that the Americans, who were upset with Ramush’s tariffs and opposition to an ethnically based land swap deal with Belgrade, decided to get rid of him.
If so, they’ve made a big mistake. Ramush’s previous two court battles in The Hague did nothing but increase his popularity here. The tariffs and opposition to the land swap deal are popular here. Ramush’s summons to The Hague is far more likely to strengthen his political support than diminish it.
But it may well be that the court, acting on its own volition, thinks it has reason to question Ramush or even indict him. We just don’t know. Certainly Serbs and Albanians were murdered after the war; most people here think the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of which Ramush was then a regional commander was in part responsible. I would favor holding the guilty accountable for those crimes. But it would be entirely premature to judge who.
So far, the popular reaction to Ramush’s resignation is calm. We attended the ongoing Pristina Film Festival last night, across from the Prime Minister’s office. A street basketball tournament occupied the space between the two. Families strolled happily in Mother Teresa Boulevard. Of course all that could change, but for the moment people seem more interested in enjoying the relatively cool, clear weather than worrying about what has happened to their prime minister.
Kosovo President Thaci, also a former KLA cadre, will need now to oversee the formation of some sort of caretaker government. That itself will be difficult as Ramush had a narrow margin in parliament. The election outcome is unpredictable. That’s the good news: despite political party abuses both in the campaigns and at the polling places, the press here is free by Balkan standards and elections are serious political contests. Coalition formation before and after leaves a lot uncertain about their outcome.
Elections are inherently divisive. Before it goes back to talks with Belgrade, Pristina will need more unity than it has had during Ramush’s tenure. My advice to whoever the powers will be: the only way to get a good deal is to be willing to walk away from a bad one. And the only way to make a good deal stick is to ensure that most of the citizens are convinced it is good.
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Your Saturday video
Nothing finer this week than Congressman Adam Schiff’s response to the Republican request that he resign:
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Your Saturday video
I’ve written many screeds against partition schemes, but none more effective than this from Yes Prime Minister:
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