Tag: Democracy and Rule of Law
Ugh
President Trump last night read slowly from a teleprompter and convinced much of America’s media that he could behave soberly and offer an opportunity for bipartisan action on immigration and infrastructure.
Less visibly, the speech was full of indications that danger lies ahead. This is a radical Administration. The President harbors ambitions that could get the country into lots of trouble.
Among these is a commitment to purging the Federal government of his opponents, who admittedly are many. As Slate notes, he called on Congress
…to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers—and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.
This is a blatant attack on the Civil Service (and presumably also the Foreign Service), which he wants to replace with loyalists. He is accomplishing just that at the Justice Department already, where he has fired a Deputy Attorney General, an FBI Director, and a Deputy Director. All were well-respected professionals. Less visibly, hundreds and perhaps thousands of professionals are leaving other government departments. Trump will try to replace them with people who share his views on immigration, climate change, abortion, race, and the economy.
The President’s economic braggadocio failed to acknowledge that job growth was marginally faster under his predecessor, that record low unemployment for blacks had already been achieved before he was inaugurated, and that the benefits of his income tax cut go overwhelmingly to the very rich. Nor did he mention the big declines in the stock market yesterday and the day before, claiming credit only for the big run up in stocks since his inauguration. It would be odd indeed if the market had not reacted positively to his massive corporate tax cut, but I won’t be surprised if stocks now correct. Since he has claimed credit for the rise, he deserves blame for any fall.
Turning to foreign policy, the President prioritizes fair trade. So far he has done nothing to achieve it. He abandoned the Trans Pacific Partnership, which would have given the US a leading role in Asian trade. The 11 other countries involved are proceeding without the US, and without the provisions on labor and environmental standards the US championed. His renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement is going slowly, not least because so many American companies benefit from it. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe is moribund. The US trade deficit has increased under Trump.
He also prioritizes immigration, blaming illegal immigrants for murdering two Long Island girls. But crime rates among immigrants are lower than in the general population. He wants an immigration bill that would provide a path to citizenship for people brought to the US illegally as children, but it would also fund his dubious “great wall” and shifts immigration away from family unification and diversity towards more “qualified” white people, even though current immigrants are already more qualified than native-born Americans.
Turning to more conventional foreign policy issues, the President said:
Around the world, we face rogue regimes, terrorist groups, and rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, our economy, and our values. In confronting these dangers, we know that weakness is the surest path to conflict, and unmatched power is the surest means of our defense.
Then he promises to boost defense spending in general and nuclear weapons in particular. The latter have little to do with current challenges, and the former is proving inadequate to meet them.
Yes, ISIS as an organized military force that controls territory in Iraq and Syria has been largely defeated, but no one expects its militants to evaporate into thin air. The civilian assistance efforts needed to counter the terrorists as they head underground–building inclusive and effective governance and economies–are nowhere to be seen in this Administration’s plans. Instead, Trump threatens to cut foreign aid to countries that vote against the US in the UN General Assembly, a threat that failed to garner support for the US move of its embassy to Jerusalem. Such heavy-handed conditioning of US assistance on a single issue irrelevant to US interests is guaranteed to reduce American influence abroad.
North Korea is the toughest of this Administration’s foreign policy challenges. Trump offered nothing in response to the threat its missiles and nuclear weapons pose. Instead he waxed eloquent North Korean oppression. This implies an American commitment to regime change, which is precisely the wrong thing to be signaling if you want to somehow limit Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. Kim Jong-un sees them guarantees of regime continuity and will pursue them as long as thinks the US is out to overthrow him.
What was missing from the speech? Trump failed to mention the rules-based international order the US has painstakingly built since World War II, Russian interference in the US election, and his own Administration’s refusal to follow Congressional instructions to levy additional sanctions on Moscow. Putin is still pulling the strings. Ugh.
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My state of the union
My Fellow Americans,
It has been a year since an unqualified braggart and blowhard bully was elected without a numerical majority to the presidency of the United States. His lies and offensive remarks about women, Mexican Americans, Africans, and Haitians have brought the nation to a new low. American prestige and influence are declining everywhere but Russia and Israel, a massive tax cut is enriching the already rich and has boosted the already high stock market, and the risks of war with Russia and China are increasing. With Trump as their prime mover, racism and anti-immigrant fever have surged worldwide.
American institutions are struggling to contain and neutralize the worst of these enervating impacts. The media are facing unprecedented attacks on their freedom and objectivity. The courts are being packed with unqualified bag carriers while the President makes prejudiced remarks about sitting judges. The Congress is sharply split and unable to conduct a bipartisan investigation of well-documented Russian interference in the American electoral process. Special Counsel Mueller and the FBI are under daily attack by both the Administration and the Congressional majority. Nothing has been done to counter Russian interference in this year’s Congressional poll.
Political tensions are generating social turmoil. Undocumented immigrants and those with temporary protected status are facing forced repatriation, including people who have never lived as adults in the countries from which they immigrated. Poor people risk being deprived of health insurance, food stamps, and other social safety net mainstays. People who live in coastal areas face disaster from global warming and newly allowed offshore drilling for oil and gas. Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Muslims are suffering heightened prejudice and discrimination. Gun violence is increasing, especially at schools, even as crime rates decline. The proportion of national wealth accumulating to the very wealthy is increasing, while the middle and working class get less.
What should be done? The Trump Administration is proposing to build a wall along the Mexican border. This will do nothing to help anyone but the contractors who win the bid. The flow of Mexicans out of the US has for years exceeded the net flow of Mexicans into the country. The promise that Mexico will pay for the wall was audacious foolery. So too was the pledge to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It isn’t going to happen, because too many US producers benefit from it.
The Administration’s incoherence reaches epic dimensions in foreign policy. It has declared Israel good and Palestinians bad, thus ending any hope for a US role in bringing about a peace settlement. It has extended the US presence in Syria, only to find US-allied Kurds at war with NATO ally Turkey. A one-off cruise missile attack has done nothing to prevent President Assad from continuing to use chemical weapons. The Administration has failed in its intention to block Iranian development of ballistic missiles and North Korean development of both missiles and nuclear weapons. The ruling figures of Venezuela, the Philippines, and Burma have thumbed their noses at Washington, which has failed to respond effectively. Withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Change agreements has vitiated years of successful US diplomacy and enabled China and others to step into the breach.
Russia and China are exploiting American incompetence to extend their influence in the Middle East, Africa, Europe (both the Balkans and Ukraine), and the Pacific. War with other great powers, unthinkable since 1989, has become more likely due ineffective American diplomacy. The State Department is degenerating, the intelligence community is demoralized, and the military is overstretched to the point of breaking. The National Security Council is struggling to provide a minimum of coherence while the President gleefully upsets the apple cart with ill-considered tweets alternately complimenting and criticizing foreign leaders, with the notable exception of Vladimir Putin. Russian financing for Trump real estate projects guarantees him special treatment, including the Administration’s decision yesterday not to impose new sanctions Congress authorized.
Declining American influence after World War II, as other countries recovered, was inevitable. The main job of American diplomacy was to slow the process during the Cold War and help the country outlast the Soviet Union. The unipolar moment that followed was only a temporary respite from relative decline, which started again with the mistake of invading Iraq. Now the decline has become precipitous. American incoherence, as colleague Mike Haltzel notes, is becoming dangerous: Trump defends national sovereignty over universal norms for the US, but not for our enemies like North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. The post-World War II international order is under attack, not by America’s enemies by America’s own president.
President Trump is putting the US into a tailspin. Recovery is unlikely. We are going down at a faster pace than ever before. Brace for the crash.
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Unwise
In response to protests in Iran, President Trump is calling for regime change:
The entire world understands that the good people of Iran want change, and, other than the vast military power of the United States, that Iran’s people are what their leaders fear the most….
Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. The world is watching!
He is also suggesting that the United States might do something about oppression:
Big protests in Iran. The people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any longer. The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations!
Iran is failing at every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama Administration. The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry for food & for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!
Is this wise?
As regular readers will know, I am an enthusiast for civil resistance. Not only because people have the right to express their views, but also because nonviolent protests are the safest and best way to promote democratic reform. While Iran experts are still debating the character and significance of the last week of protests in Iranian cities, it is clear that at least some of them, while triggered by economic disappointment, are also seeking political change, targeting in particular the Islamic Republic and its Supreme Leader.
Supreme Leader Khamenei has so far been silent. President Rouhani has defended the right to protest but also warned against violence and disorder. The internet has been either blocked or slowed. At least a dozen people have been killed, apparently by the security forces. They could still react more forcefully. The last time widespread protests erupted in Iran, in 2009, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps rolled out the pro-regime paramilitary forces known as the basij, who beat and shot protesters into submission.
Former Obama Administration official Phil Gordon thinks Trump speaking out in favor of the protesters will do more harm than good. I agree. It tars them with an American brush that many Iranians despise: a president whom they perceive as unreliable and reprehensible, because of his opposition to the nuclear deal and his concerted efforts to deny Tehran the benefits of it. In order to be effective, the protests need to have an entirely indigenous flavor. The regime will rejoice if they come to be seen as instruments of American foreign policy, especially if the source for that impression is Trump.
No doubt the President figures he is a winner either way. If the protests succeed and lead to real change in Iran, he’ll claim credit and point to the contrast with President Obama’s restrained reaction in 2009. I can hear the chest thumping already. If they fail, he can complain bitterly about repression and heighten his rhetoric against the Islamic Republic.
But the truth is the President is undermining pillars of democracy at home and abroad by harsh attacks on the US press and independence of the US judiciary as well as his affection for would-be autocrats in Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Russia, and elsewhere. He has no standing at home or abroad for a pro-democracy Twitter campaign that lacks any serious follow-through. Rested from five or six days of golf at one of his own resorts, Trump is starting the New Year with the same lack of wisdom that has characterized his presidency since last January 20.
PS: Vice President Pence has now chimed in:
As long as
@RealDonaldTrump is POTUS and I am VP, the United States of America will not repeat the shameful mistake of our past when others stood by and ignored the heroic resistance of the Iranian people as they fought against their brutal regime.The bold and growing resistance of the Iranian people today gives hope and faith to all who struggle for freedom and against tyranny. We must not and we will not let them down.
This certainly implies that Washington will do something more than tweet. What is that? Where is the game plan? How will we not let them down?
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Violence won’t stop in Syria when war ends
I haven’t had a moment to write today, but I did this video a few days ago for the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, on whose board I serve. Enab Baladi Newspaper published it:
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Enjoy the family, bemoan the country
I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Family members are responsible for this extraordinary new museum, this incredible piece for The Atlantic, this wonderful dining hall, helping keeping poor kids in college, and serving he US Army in Korea. Not to mention two grandchildren getting ready to outperform and a host of brothers, in-laws, and nieces and nephews doing great things. What could be better?
Alas, my country could be in better shape. It is over-committed abroad and seems unable to figure out how to withdraw without creating vacuums that get filled with people who generate more commitments. At home it is polarized between protectionist nationalists led by white supremacists and a multi-ethnic coalition led by internationalist liberal democrats. Racism remains the country’s original sin, one it cannot acknowledge without contradicting its ideals.
Sexism is racism’s twin and perhaps even more original, as it came over before the first slaves. Its contemporary prevalence is becoming all too obvious. No one should assume that it is only the great and famous who abuse privilege to intimidate, harass, and abuse women. The headlines are the tip of the iceberg, one that extends deep into the working world in all its many sectors, professions, and occupations. Whoever finds herself below someone else in the pecking order runs risks.
Our current national leadership is both racist and sexist. It is also radical and stupid. The combination is causing serious damage internationally, which my colleague Mike Haltzel outlines skillfully at the HuffPost. I nevertheless found something comforting in Dana Milbank’s thanks to those who have blocked so much of the evil the Trump Administration has tried to do, especially on the domestic front. The so-called tax reform, which would dramatically increase the government deficit while transferring wealth from the less affluent to the very rich, is just the latest, sad example. The repeated and so far failed attacks on a conservative, market-oriented system for providing healthcare to most of the heretofore uninsured is another.
President Trump is using executive action in favor of deregulation in many sectors to make up for his total failure so far in the legislative arena. His efforts on environmental issues have been particularly successful and harmful. His minions will soon end the rules that require internet service providers to treat all content equally, allowing the bigger ones to rule the roost in a way that would have prevented the internet from becoming the indispensable tool for virtually everyone that it is today. No doubt there are other areas in which the Administration can give to private companies the public benefits that belong to the country’s citizens. Trump’s conservative judicial appointments will no doubt help that effort.
What everyone whom I know wants to know is when this will end, and how. The stock market, which is performing well (but no better than it did under President Obama), is betting on business as usual, including the proposed corporate tax cut. I’m not. The implications of the tax cut will, I hope, sink it into oblivion before the New Year. Some combination of Congressional and Special Counsel investigations, election losses, Republican retirements or defections, and journalistic revelations will pull down not just Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner but also the President himself. That will be a serious test of our institutions. If they survive, we’ll be saying an even bigger thanks for them the next time Thanksgiving rolls around.
In the meanwhile, I’m going to enjoy this Thanksgiving with my terrific family, even if the country is in big trouble.
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The best available, unsatisfying outcome
Ratko Mladic was convicted today in The Hague. The sentence is life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws and customs of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s. He will presumably appeal.
Re-reading the Mladic indictment is a terrifying reminder. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) originally accused him in 1995, but the trial that ended yesterday was based on an indictment in 2011 of participating in a joint criminal enterprise responsible for the removal of Bosnian Croats and Muslims, the years-long siege of Sarajevo, the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims after his military seizure of Srbrenica, and the taking of UN personnel as hostages. It has taken 22 years for this first conviction.
International justice today is agonizingly slow, meticulously detailed, procedurally complex, and ultimately decisive. I attended an afternoon of Mladic’s trial a few years ago. It was dull. The prosecutor would read volumes of detailed eye-witness testimony of atrocities to a Mladic underling who would deny that anything like that happened. Mladic sat silent. His defense lawyer would occasionally intervene, but to little avail. I could well imagine that this orderly process, involving years of hearings in which to air his denials, would not satisfy his victims.
In fact, the Tribunal is not looked on favorably in the region. Each ethnic group resents the indictments of its own military heroes. No group thinks its tormentors have been adequately punished. The procedural niceties are largely lost in a flood of self-justifying nationalistic fervor. There has been little reflection, at least in popular culture, on the villainy of one’s own, only of the others. Leading politicians exploit the popular sentiment. Few acknowledge their own group’s culpability or laud accountability.
I would nevertheless judge the Tribunal a success, less for its jurisprudence and more for its political impact. Even when it did not capture war criminals right away, indictments sooner or later forced wartime leaders out of the political arena. Had that not been the case, politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia would have been far more fraught. Mladic and his political counterpart Radovan Karadzic were forced into hiding. Slobodan Milosevic was defeated at the polls and extradited. Had they remained politically active, or even just present in their respective political environments, Sarajevo and Belgrade would have been far more fraught.
That is less true for the Croatian, Bosniak, and Kosovar indictees, not least because their top political leaderships were never indicted. Croatian President Tudjman and Bosnian President (Alija) Izetbegovic are dead. Kosovo Prime Minister Haradinaj was indicted but acquitted. He is again prime minister now. He, Kosovo President Thaci, or other KLA fighters could still be indicted, by a Kosovo “special court” staffed with internationals convened in The Hague to deal with post-war crimes.
Some will say the failure to hold more Croat, Bosniak and Kosovo political leaderships accountable, and the acquittal of some of their military leaders, proves that ICTY is biased against Serbs, or implemented only victor’s justice. I find some of the acquittals difficult to understand, but it is important to remember that a court like ICTY that follows best practices in contemporary criminal procedure is more likely to acquit the guilty than convict the innocent, which is as it should be.
There is however no question of innocence in Mladic’s case. The evidence presented at trial was overwhelming and compelling. Someone else unjustly getting off is no reason to doubt Mladic’s guilt. He will now have ample opportunity to appeal, but odds are he’ll spend the rest of his life incarcerated in a fairly comfortable place, telling himself he was right to protect Serbs by murdering and expelling Muslims and Croats, firing at civilians in Sarajevo, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage. It’s an unsatisfying outcome, but the best available.
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