Tag: United States
Trump and anti-regime protests worldwide
Notable protests against ruling regimes are occurring these days in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and Hong Kong. Recent months have seen similar protests in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Sudan. These are not your garden variety protests for more jobs or better wages, against police abuse and corruption, or in favor of improvements in education and health care. They are “regime change” protests: cases in which citizens have concluded that the social contract between themselves and their government no longer serves their interests. Rather than asking for reform, the protesters are asking for fundamental changes in the way they are governed.
Most of these protests are against regimes the US doesn’t much like. Washington is happy to see the Islamic Republic targeted not just inside Iran but also–despite good relations with Baghdad and Beirut–in Iraq, where Iranian consulates have been burned, and Lebanon, where Hizbollah is suffering criticism. The Bolivian president demonstrators chased from power, Evo Morales, was no friend of the US. Washington would like the same thing to happen to Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. In Sudan the Americans helped broker the agreement that deposed President Omar al-Bashir, whom the International Criminal Court indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur.
Hong Kong is a case of its own. There the protests are in favor of preserving the justice system’s autonomy and expanding democratic representation. President Trump, engaged in a massive tariff war with China, has been hesitant to criticize Beijing for fear of the cost to his trade agenda. But Congress compelled him to sign a bill providing for the possibility of sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials responsible for repression of protests. The bill passed both Houses with veto-proof majorities. It will be difficult, however, to convince Trump to use the authority provided, unless he feels it will help in some way his trade agenda.
With that exception, the protests seem good to President Trump. But take another look.
These protests are without exception in favor of more liberal democracy and rule of law, not less. In Iran, demonstrators want the fall of a regime that is an anocracy: it mixes democratic forms like elections and a parliament with a dictatorship of the Supreme Leader, backed by security forces loyal to him and not the elected President. In Lebanon and Iraq, the protests have targeted systems that share power on the basis of ethnicity rather than equal rights. Bolivian President Morales’ cardinal sin was tampering with election results, Venezuelan President Maduro has resisted yielding power to a constitutionally elected successor, and Sudanese President al-Bashir was a dictator ousted by the military but in response to popular demand.
Looked at this way, the protests are all antithetical to Trump’s ambitions inside the US:
- he seeks less participation in US elections, not more, and re-election not with the popular vote but with the vote in the Electoral College;
- he is refusing to cooperate with Congress’ constitutionally authorized impeachment proceedings;
- he has sought to enhance presidential power, not limit it;
- he has appealed to his base in blatantly ethnic, white nationalist terms; and
- he is seeking to insulate the US military from accountability and to make it beholden exclusively to him.
The goals of the regime-change demonstrators worldwide point precisely in the opposite directions.
Bottom line: the world the demonstrators want is not Trump’s world. It is the liberal democratic world ruled by law that he is seeking to destroy. You know whom I am rooting for.
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Stevenson’s army, November 30
– What will happen when North Korea’s end-of-year deadline for talks expires?
-Is the Taliban really ready for concessions and especially a cease-fire?
– Who will take over In Iraq, now that the prime minister has resigned under pressure from the Grand Ayatollah?
– How significant is China’s threat to Australia?
– Who cares if the House has passed over 400 bills if few have been taken up in the Senate?
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. If you want to get it directly, 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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Stevenson’s army, November 24
– There is now bipartisan agreement on the 302(b) allocations, so each appropriations subcommittee has a topline for their conferencing.
– CRS has a new report on the legislative appropriations bill.
– Two longtime diplomats note how US presidents have regularly acquiesced in Israeli settlement expansion.
– The Post describes the parallel governments for US foreign policy.
– Politico says Trump does more governing from the residence than the Oval Office.
– Documents link SecState Pompeo even closer to Ukraine policies.
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. If you want to get it directly, 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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Geopolitics in the Balkans
These are the notes that used in making remarks via Skype to the Geoffrey Nice Foundation Conference on “Transitional, Post-Transitional and Strategic Narratives about the Yugoslav Wars: from Wars and Search for Justice to Geo-Political Power Games” in Pristina today.
1. It is a pleasure to be with you remotely, even if I do wish my schedule would have permitted me to join you in Pristina.
2. The world has changed dramatically since the breakup of former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
3. That was, we know now, truly the unipolar moment, when the US had no rivals and together with Europe could do what it wanted in the Balkans and much of the rest of the world.
4. With a lot of help from Croatia, NATO ended the Bosnian war at Dayton in 1995 and forced Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo in 1999.
5. Europe and the US together invested massive financial and personnel resources in Kosovo as a UN protectorate mandated to build self-governing democratic institutions.
6. The unipolar moment ended with the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the US responses in Afghanistan and Iraq.
7. But the state-building process in Kosovo had significant momentum and continued, first with standards before status and later standards with status, leading eventually to supervised and unsupervised independence.
8. You have not had an easy time of it, but I think your young state has risen to at least some challenges quite well: the economy has grown, after an initial spurt you managed to limit Islamist radicalization, your courts have begun to prosecute high-level corruption cases, your army is incubating with nurture from NATO, and you have managed several power transitions in accordance with election outcomes.
9. Today’s world is however dramatically different from the one that existed in 2001 or at independence in 2008.
10. While still globally dominant, the US faces regional challenges from China, Russia, Iran and even North Korea that take priority in Washington over the Balkans.
11. Bosnia and Kosovo, the object of top-tier attention in the 1990s, now get much lower priority.
12. That is true in Europe as well, where Brexit, Ukraine, and illegal immigration are issues that, each in its own way, cast a shadow over Balkan aspirations to join Europe.
13. At the same time, Moscow and Beijing are paying more attention than ever before to the Balkans.
14. The Russians are interfering blatantly by both violent and nonviolent means in the Balkans: assassination, media manipulation, renting crowds and financing political parties are all being used to slow if not halt Balkan progress towards NATO and the EU.
15. The Chinese are using their financial strength to build and buy. Caveat emptor of course, though my own view is that Beijing’s behavior is a lot more salubrious than Moscow’s and likely to produce some positive results for those Balkan countries and companies that know how to do business.
16. Turkey—also a strong force in the Balkans for historical, geographic, and cultural reasons—has taken a dramatic turn in a more Islamist and autocratic direction. The secular Turkey that contributed forces to NATO interventions in the 1990s is moribund. Erdogan’s Turkey is building mosques, capturing Gulenists, and encouraging political Islam while trying to maintain its previous good relations with non-Muslim countries in the Balkans.
17. How does all this affect Kosovo?
18. The Turkish influence is direct and palpable: though still largely secular in orientation, Kosovo is far Islamic than it once was and has cooperated with the capture and rendering of Gulenists in ways that don’t seem right to me.
19. As for the Chinese, most Kosovars might welcome more interest in investment from Beijing. I wouldn’t fault you for that but only urge caution about the financial and political conditions, which can be onerous.
20. The Russians have no purchase on the Kosovo Albanians, but their weight with the Kosovo and Serbian Serbs is certainly felt here. Moscow is a strong advocate of land swaps and of course blocks Kosovo entry into the UN and opposes its entry into other international organizations.
21. How Moscow will be brought around to accepting Kosovo’s UN membership is still a mystery, even to those of us who think Kosovo independence and sovereignty is permanent.
22. Washington continues to have enormous influence in Kosovo, but it is not the same Washington as even three years ago. Today’s Washington has an ethnic nationalist, not a liberal democratic, administration. Trump and some of his closest advisors are self-avowed “nationalists” who do not believe in equal rights.
23. That in my view is why they were open to the failed land swap idea, which may have died in Kosovo but still survives in Washington.
24. As for Europe, it’s failure of nerve is all too evident to everyone in the Balkans: the French and Dutch vetoes on opening accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia—negotiations that might take a decade—was tragic. So too is the failure to provide the visa waiver to Kosovo.
25. The Western, liberal democratic influence in the Balkans has declined. The Eastern, autocratic and ethno-nationalist influence—if I can use that umbrella term to refer to the very different roles of Russia, China, and Turkey—has grown.
26. Bottom line: responsibility for keeping the Western aspiration alive now rests more than in the past with you: the government, citizens, and society of Kosovo. The Europeans have already disappointed you. The Americans may do likewise. The Chinese and Turks will try to lure you in bad directions while the Russians will give aid and comfort to your antagonists.
27. But you showed how unified and good Kosovo can be to the English soccer fans. I hope you will harness that spirit to the cause of maintaining a liberal democracy that treats all its citizens equally!
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Stevenson’s army, November 18
– NYT has a trove of leaked Iranian intelligence reports showing its activities in Iraq.
– Inside Iran, the government has blocked the internet.
– China is criticizing US moves in South China Sea.
– US believes China recruits its overseas students as spies.
– Columnist suggests selling B-21 to Australia.
– NBC says Trump is angry at Pompeo.
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. If you want to get it directly, 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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Two Americas
I won’t claim to have watched all of this, but some of you may want to see what integrity and dignity look like, since it has not been common in American public life lately:
I would say the same about George Kent* and Bill Taylor’s testimony from earlier in the week:
You don’t really need to watch much to understand that these are honest, sincere, knowledgeable, and capable people committed to serving America’s interests abroad. They respond cautiously but clearly to questions and project a coherent and compelling picture of American foreign policy in Ukraine.
The contrast with Donald Trump and his minions, who lie habitually and don’t hesitate to offer illogical and incoherent arguments, couldn’t be more dramatic. No matter how much the Republicans deny it, it is clear Trump sought to serve his own personal political interests by getting Ukraine to open an investigation of Joe Biden and his son, at the cost of weakening Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression. If you can’t see the contrast, it’s time for a talk with your conscience.
The impeachment inquiry is revealing two America’s: one in which unrestrained pursuit of self-interest is paramount and another in which the nation’s interests and values come first. The real charge against Trump is inability even to conceive of the latter as he pursues the former.
But that is not how the indictment will read. More likely it will be something like the following:
- Corrupt abuse of power by trying to bribe Ukraine to open an investigation of a political opponent using military assistance appropriated by Congress.
- Illegally welcoming and accepting assistance from Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.
- Obstructing justice during the Mueller investigation, intimidating witnesses with threatening tweets, and blocking Congressional oversight by ordering officials not to respond to subpoenas.
These are much more serious charges than against Bill Clinton, who lied to a grand jury about an affair with a White House intern. It is also arguably worse than the charges against Richard Nixon, which concerned a burglary and his attempts to cover up his role in ordering it.
As if to confirm his amorality, Trump yesterday pardoned three American soldiers accused of war crimes, over the objection of the Pentagon. The pardon power is unconstrained, so he will likely use it again in the cases of his seven campaign and administration officials already tried and convicted, including one of his best friends found guilty yesterday on seven criminal charges.
Clinton barely survived the vote in the Senate. Nixon resigned rather than allow that vote to seal his fate. Trump may survive and won’t resign. His only protection from financial and legal ruin is remaining in office. Removing him would require 20 honest Republicans to join with the Senate Democrats in finding him guilty as charged. There is no sign there are that many in the Senate. But if Trump loses a simple majority in the Senate, it would be a clear signal that his prospects in the 2020 election are fading. If ever the Republicans in Congress think they are going down with Trump, they may finally abandon him.
The rest of the world will need patience. The America of Yovanovitch, Packer, and Taylor is down but not out. Everywhere I go these days–mainly to talk with people from the Balkans, the European Union, and the Middle East–colleagues are longing for an America committed to democracy, human rights, integrity, and accountability. They can hardly believe it no longer exists in the White House. It does however exist and will return to power, I hope sooner rather than later.
*Apologies: I originally had “Packer” here. I’m reading that George’s bio of Holbrooke, so I plead crossed synapses.
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