Im-Politic: Why It’s Time to Probe the Bidens

Tags

Burisma, corruption, election 2020, Hunter Biden, Im-Politic, impeachment, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham, Mykola Zlochevsky, Obama administration, The New Yorker, Trump, Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, Yuriy Lutsenko

Yesterday morning, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham made clear his determination to investigate the activities of Hunter Biden in Ukraine. That’s good news for two closely related reasons. First: The decision by the son of former Vice President and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to work for a big, politically connected company in that notoriously corrupt country was pretty central to the recently concluded (for now?) Trump removal effort, and there are still lots of loose ends that need tying up.

Second, no one has yet adequately explained why Biden Junior continued to earn tens of thousands of dollars monthly from Ukraine energy company Burisma, and why the company remained in business, for the entire time that Senior was supposedly pushing hard on behalf of the top stated Obama administration priority of ending the graft and similar abuses that had long hampered Ukraine’s economy and transition to real democracy.   

Junior’s lucrative service on Burisma’s board strongly influenced the impeachment effort because of the major role it played in spurring President Trump to seek Ukraine’s help in probing a matter that was certain to affect the Biden Senior’s chances of winning the White House. 

The President and his supporters claim that looking into the Bidens was justified because the big bucks Junior he made from Burisma at the least looked like a classic conflict of interest, and at the most could have corruptly influenced American policy while Senior was running the Obama administration’s operations toward the country on a day-to-day basis.

And as I’ve noted, far from Senior’s presidential candidacy justifying shielding him from official scrutiny, it actually calls for special attention – unless Americans aren’t supposed to care that a future chief executive might be in some foreign oligarch’s hip pocket. That would be quite a position to take for those who have portrayed President Trump as Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s compromised puppet. The Biden connection of course logically also warrants similarly special Trump attention to Burisma, rather than to Ukraine’s many other unmistakably corrupt entities.

For their part, Trump opponents insist that the President was simply trying to smear a possible rival in this fall’s general presidential election.

It’s true that impeachment and removal supporters leveled other Biden-specific charges at Mr. Trump – for example, attacking his decision to use his personal lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, as his main Ukraine sleuth, rather than going through standard Justice Department channels. But the first Article of Impeachment, the one alleging abuse of power, focused tightly on the claim that the President endangered America’s national security (by delaying military aid needed for Ukraine’s defense against Russia) for personal gain (improved reelection chances).

In this regard, the President’s opponents have noted that there’s no evidence indicating that the Ukraine policy of Biden Senior and the Obama administration permitted Junior’s job to influence American statements or actions. Indeed, they maintain that throughout his time as Ukraine point man, Senior championed exactly the kind of Ukraine corruption fighting efforts that threatened whatever dirty work they acknowledge Burisma was up to. And specifically, they point to Senior’s demands – clearly, by the way, reflecting U.S. policy –  that Ukraine fire a prosecutor thought to be soft on corruption and replace him with someone they considered truly committed to cleaning up the system – including the situation at Burisma.

But this is where the pro-Bidens story gets fuzzy, at best. The reason? Because more than four years after Biden demanded the canning of Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, and after Yuriy Lutsenko came on the job, Burisma is still open for business. Moreover, the co-founder widely fingered as its corruption mastermind, Mykola Zlochevsky, is still in charge. The only price the company has paid for its alleged misdeeds was a small ($7 million) fine for tax evasion. And this four-year period of course includes the year-plus that passed between Biden’s December, 2015 ultimatum and the Obama administration’s last day in office.

As a result, Junior was paid handsomely (some $83,000 monthly at least for some period of time, according to this Reuters report) from the time he joined Burisma (in April, 2014) till his departure (August, 2019). When was Senior put in charge of Obama administration Ukraine policy? Early 2014. And Mr. Trump’s opponents truly believe that there’s “nothing to see here”? And that it’s not the slightest bit fishy about Senior huffing and puffing about corruption in Ukraine but never actually blowing that house down (or at least actually denying Ukraine the $1 billion in international loan guarantees – including to the energy sector of which Burisma was a part – he threatened to cut off unless Shokin was pink-slipped) – which left Burisma free to keep stuffing Junior’s bank account?

Then add in this tidbit from The New Yorker (not a publication often favorable to Mr. Trump). In an article leaving no doubt that Senior had long been financially stressed despite his political prominence, author Adam Entous reported, “Hunter saw himself as a provider for the Biden family; he even helped to pay off Beau’s law-school debts.”

Therefore, it’s easy to see how it would have been easy for Senior “to deal with Hunter’s activities by largely ignoring them” – as stated in the New Yorker piece linked above.  Except he didn’t just ignore them.  His aides actively rejected numerous attempts by Obama administration officials to raise concerns about the subject – including by Geroge Kent, one of the State Department officials who testified at the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachement hearings.  That sounds like they worked for someone who actively didn’t want to know.   

It’s still possible that Senior was simply an ineffective Ukraine corruption fighter when it came to Burisma, rather than one who was conveniently indifferent. But since that question remains unanswered, since Senior is still running for the White House, and since Junior’s dealings with China during Senior’s Vice Presidency also seem to have contributed to the family’s considerable rise in net worth (see that above-linked New Yorker story for these details, too) how could anyone reasonably object to the proposition that it’s time to probe the Bidens?  

Following Up: Vital Background on “Idea Laundering” — and Washington Corruption

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Bloomberg.com, conflicts of interest, corruption, hedge funds, idea laundering, Im-Politic, James K. Glassman, journalism, lobbying, Mainstream Media, Nick Confessore, special interests, The Washington Monthly, think tanks

Since I’m a great believer in giving credit where it’s due, I feel honor-bound to report that I just learned that a development I thought I first identified (along with a catchy name) wasn’t spotted first by me after all. At the same time, it’s also a pleasure to make this confession, because it creates a golden opportunity to recommend two excellent pieces of journalism that shine much needed additional light on this development – which has tremendously deepened corruption in American policymaking.

The development? “Idea laundering” – which I’ve defined as the now widespread practice of special interests (like corporations) using think tanks to issue materials that push the particular agendas of these funders while garbing them in quasi-academic raiment to create the impressions of objectivity and intellectual respectability. In other words, it’s become practically standard operating procedure in the policy world for outfits with scholarly-sounding names like “The Brookings Institution” to put out reports and articles that flack for the companies and other donors (now including foreign governments) that pay the rent without disclosing the hand that’s feeding them. Just as bad, journalists almost never reveal these conflicts of interest – or even ask about them.

I thought that I was the first to spotlight and name this deception, in 2006 testimony before Congress on Chinese influence-peddling operations in America. But yesterday, while reading a terrific piece on Bloomberg.com on how hedge funds have been using an especially insidious variant of the practice, I learned that it was first described in a 2003 Washington Monthly article by Nick Confessore, who is now a reporter for The New York Times. Interestingly, the individual at the center of both articles is James K. Glassman, a long-time fixture in the Washington, D.C. chattering class scene who Confessore credited with pioneering this deceitful new version of lobbying.

I do believe that I’ve been writing and warning about idea laundering more than anyone else. But I’m glad to acknowledge publicly that I was beaten to the punch when it comes to parenthood. It’s also great to see that more and more journalists are looking underneath the hood of the writings and Congressional and media appearances that so profoundly shape America’s approach to virtually all foreign and domestic issues.

Unfortunately, as made clear by this recent post, we’re a long way from the point at which reporters name the donors routinely, and when editors demand this vital information just as often. Until they do, the idea launderers and their paymasters will keep winning far too many victories at the expense of Main Street Americans.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Case for a “Made in America” Approach

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Africa, AIDS, border security, climate change, corruption, diseases, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, globalism, HIV, human rights, internationalism, Iran, Iran deal, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Middle East, missile defense, nuclear proliferation, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, population control, Project-Syndicate.org, shale, terrorism, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman

I’m picking on New York Times uber-pundit Thomas Friedman again today – not because of any personal animus, but because, as noted yesterday, he’s such an effective, influential creator of and propagandist for the conventional wisdom on so many public policy fronts. And just to underscore that it’s nothing personal, I’ll also put in my cross-hairs another, though lower profile, thought leader: Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. The reason? Both recently have provided us with quintessential illustrations of how lazy – and indeed juvenile – the justifications for American international activism served up by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment have grown.

The analyses I’m talking about aren’t quite as childishly simplistic as the establishment theme I wrote about last month – the assumption that American involvement in alliances and international organizations and regimes is automatically good, and that withdrawal or avoidance is automatically bad. But because it’s a little more sophisticated, it can be even more harmful. It’s the insistence that whenever the United States faces a problem with an international dimension, the remedy is some form of international engagement.

A recent Friedman column revealed one big weakness with this assumption: It often logically leads to the conclusion that a problem is utterly hopeless, at least for the foreseeable future. Just think about the only sensible implications of this October 31 article, which insists that the apparently metastasizing threat of Islamic terrorism in Africa can’t be adequately dealt with through the military tools on which the Trump administration is relying.

Why not? “Because what is destabilizing all of these countries in the Sahel region of Africa and spawning terrorist groups is a cocktail of climate change, desertification — as the Sahara steadily creeps south — population explosions and misgovernance.

“Desertification is the trigger, and climate change and population explosions are the amplifiers. The result is a widening collapse of small-scale farming, the foundation of societies all over Africa.”

I have no doubt that Friedman is right here. And as a result, he has a point to slam the Trump administration “for sending soldiers to fight a problem that is clearly being exacerbated by climate and population trends….” (That’s of course a prime form of American international activism.)

But he veers wildly off course in suggesting that other forms of such activism – “global contraception programs,” “U.S. government climate research” and the like are going to do much good, especially in the foreseeable future. Unless he supposes that, even if American policies turned on a dime five or even ten years ago, Africa would be much less of a mess? The only adult conclusion possible is that nothing any government can do is going to turn the continent into something other than a major spawning ground for extremism and refugees.

And this conclusion looks especially convincing considering the African problem to which Friedman – and so many other supporters of such approaches – gives short shrift: dreadfully corrupt governments. For this is a problem that has afflicted Africa since the countries south of the Sahara began gaining their independence from European colonialists in the late-1950s. (And the colonialists themselves weren’t paragons of good government, either.)

So I’m happy to agree that we shouldn’t pretend that sending American special forces running around Africa helping local dictators will actually keep the terrorists under control (although as I’ve argued in the case of the Middle East, such deployments could helpfully keep them off balance). But let’s not pretend that anything Friedman supports will help, either – at least in the lifetime of anyone reading this.

Nye has held senior government foreign policy posts in Democratic administrations and, in the interests of full disclosure, we have crossed swords in print – mainly about the proper definition of internationalism and about a review of an anthology he edited that he didn’t like (which doesn’t seem to be on-line). But I hope you agree that there’s still a big problem with his November 1 essay for Project-Syndicate.org about the implications of America’s domestic energy production revolution for the nation’s approach to the Middle East.

In Nye’s words: “Skeptics have argued that lower dependence on energy imports will cause the US to disengage from the Middle East. But this misreads the economics of energy. A major disruption such as a war or terrorist attack that stopped the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz would drive prices to very high levels in America and among our allies in Europe and Japan. Besides, the US has many interests other than oil in the region, including nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, protection of Israel, human rights, and counterterrorism.”

Two related aspects of this list of reasons for continued American engagement in the region stand out. First, it’s completely indiscriminate. And second, for this reason, it completely overlooks how some of these unmistakably crucial U.S. interests can be much more effectively promoted or defended not through yet more American intervention in this increasingly dysfunctional region, but through changes in American domestic policies.

For instance, we’re (rightly) worried about nuclear proliferation, especially in Iran? How can today’s engagement policy help? Even if the the current Iran nuclear deal works exactly as intended, what happens when it runs out? Should we simply assume that Tehran will be happy to keep its nuclear genie in a bottle for another fifteen years? Will Iran be persuaded to give up the nuclear option permanently if Washington cultivates even closer ties with its age-old Sunni Muslim enemies, like Saudi Arabia?

Although I’m a missile defense skeptic – especially when it comes to the near-term threat from North Korea – isn’t figuring out a more effective way to repel an Iranian strike more likely to protect the American homeland? It’s certainly a response over which the United States will have much more control – and indeed, any control. In addition, if the United States withdraws militarily from the Persian Gulf region, Iran’s reason for launching such an attack in the first place fades away and, as I’ve argued in the case of North Korea, America’s own vastly superior nuclear forces become a supremely credible deterrent for any other contingencies.

Of course the United States faces a big Middle East-related terrorism problem. But as I’ve argued previously, the keys to America’s defense are serious border security measures. They, too, pass the “control test” with flying colors, and consequently seem much more promising than the status quo approach of trying to shape the region’s future in more constructive ways. But as I’ve also written, it would also make sense to keep in the Middle East small-scale American forces whose mission is continually harassing ISIS and Al Qaeda and whatever other groups of vicious nutballs are certain to appear going forward.

Nye’s point about the integration of global energy markets is a valid one. But in the same article, he acknowledges how the U.S. domestic energy revolution’s “combination of entrepreneurship, property rights, and capital markets” has changed the game for America. Why does he suppose that its effects won’t spread significantly beyond our borders?

As for Nye’s other two reasons for continued U.S. Middle East engagement, the notion that Washington can do anything meaningful to promote the cause of human rights simply isn’t serious, and Israel has amply demonstrated that, with enough American military aid, it can take care of itself.

Moreover, as you may recognize, the arguments for mainly focusing on border security to handle the Middle East terrorist threat applies to the African menace that’s preoccupying Friedman.

The main takeaway here isn’t that U.S. international engagement will never be needed to protect national security, safeguard the nation’s independence, or enhance its prosperity. It’s that Made in America approaches will turn out to be vastly superior in many cases – and certainly in many more cases than the bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment recognizes. How long will it take for President Trump to get fully on board?

By the way, I first began exploring the idea of Made in America solutions to foreign policy problems and international threats when I read this article by current Atlantic Monthly Editor Jeffrey Goldberg. He argued in 1999 that the nation was making a big mistake ignoring Africa in its diplomacy because the continent was likely to become a source of deadly diseases sure to cross oceans and eventually afflict Americans and others; that “H.I.V., of course, is a particularly vicious warning shot”; and that it was high time for Washington to deal with “poverty, poor sanitation and political instability” as well as put “a global system of public health and disease surveillance in place.”

Not that Goldberg presented a stark either-or choice, but my reaction was “If we do need to figure out whether to place more AIDS-fighting emphasis on promoting African economic development, or on finding a cure through medical research, isn’t the latter much likelier to deliver major results much sooner?”

As is clear from the Friedman article, Africa’s array of problems continues unabated. And according to no less than the (devoutly globalist) Obama administration, as of last year, the United States was “on the right track to reach most of its “National HIV/AIDS Strategy” goals for 2020 – which seek an America that’s “a place where new HIV infections are rare” and where “high quality, life-extending care” is available.

Im-Politic: Why Washington’s Latest Think Tank Scandal Should Matter – but May Not

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corporations, corruption, democracy, Google, idea laundering, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, New America Foundation, Silicon Valley, special interests, think tanks

Slowly, and not so surely, the American media is waking up to the pervasiveness of corporate corruption of the nation’s think tank complex. I say “slowly” because revelations of the way these special interests – which include foreign governments – have used these supposedly quasi-academic institutions to promote and defend their own selfish agendas has tended to drip out in individual exposes usually separated by years (literally). And I say “not so surely” because these reports rarely connect any of the important dots. Worse, it’s ever clearer that the Mainstream Media itself is a big part of the problem.

The latest example: the uproar set off by revelations that the New America Foundation (NAF) recently fired a team of analysts because it started goring the ox of one of the organization’s main funders, Google.

It’s been gratifying to see that nearly everyone who has commented on this incident considers NAF and Google to be in the wrong, and no one whose work I’ve seen has given the slightest credence to the organization’s insistence that the team was canned because he wasn’t sufficiently collegial in his work habits.

Much less gratifying has been the almost equally widespread tendency to interpret the incident as a sign that Google itself has become way too powerful on America’s policy and intellectual scenes, and in underhanded ways. Or that Silicon Valley itself is now exerting way too much of this power just as sneakily, and without adequate checks.

That’s all true, and important. What’s been almost completely missed, however, is that Google’s muscle-flexing is anything but limited to Google or to the tech sector or to the New America Foundation. It is now Standard Operating Procedure in the think tank world, which has become what I’ve called an idea-laundering racket. That is, donors use the tanks they support to dress up various self-serving ideas in respectable-looking scholarly raiment that can be sold to policy-makers as the products of disinterested truth-seeking.

Not that special interests lack the right to bring their concerns to official-dom. But they should be correspondingly obligated to display some transparency – and where they’re determined to be secretive, or to capitalize on the general public’s understandable unwillingness to investigate the information they do need to disclose, the press needs to step in. Sadly, it’s almost unheard of for journalists to link think tank staff quoted in news articles as scholarly experts to the donors that pay them and the agendas they’re pushing.

Indeed, as I’ve documented, there’s a strong tendency on the part even of news organizations that have reported on think tanks’ corporate and other special interest connections to ignore their own findings and permit idea laundering as usual.

One big reason that’s become clearer to me than ever as I’ve been looking into the NAF scandal is the remarkable extent that journalists have formally been part of its operations and structure. The informal connections between journalists and think tankers have always been important, however neglected. Think tank staff and establishment journalists tend to come from the same kinds of fairly affluent backgrounds, have attended the same kinds of schools, graduate with the same kinds of ideas, and – since so many are clustered in Washington, D.C. – live in the same kinds of neighborhoods, send their kids to the same schools, and generally move in the same social circles.

Moreover, it’s been routine for media figures to take sabbaticals at think tanks to write books or just get some relief from the day-to-day grind and study subjects in depth. How realistic is it to expect any of them to turn around and then bite the hand that literally fed them?

The inevitable result is downright scary if you believe (as you should) that a robustly functioning democracy depends in large measure on individuals and institutions playing distinct roles that enable them to function as balancers and watchdogs or simply reinforcers of needed degrees of political and social pluralism. When they interact too closely and especially too systematically, temptations to scratch each other’s backs inevitably mushroom.

But perhaps more subtly, and therefore more importantly, these actors (especially the individuals) just as inevitably begin to know and understand each other too well, to like and admire each other too much, to recognize each other’s wants and needs too willingly, to agree with their legitimacy too thoroughly, to avoid any potential awkwardness or unpleasantness, and to cut them considerable slack when any kinds of trouble arise. And as these patterns emerge and consolidate, the lines separating these actors blur, their independent outlooks start dissolving, and they begin to merge into a genuine establishment (or “swamp,” if you will) with a common mindset, a consequent tendency toward group-think, and an increasing dedication to promoting and protecting its position – which tends to be pretty privileged.

In this vein, NAF’s journalistic connections are truly eye-opening. Its first board chairman was The Atlantic‘s James Fallows. An early president was Steve Coll, formerly with the Washington Post and The New Yorker. One of its board chairs today is National Review Executive Editor Reihan Salam, and he’s joined on this body by Fallows (still with The Atlantic), Steven Rattner (a New York Times columnist and financier), David Brooks (another New York Times columnist), and Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria.

NAF also has developed a network of “media partners” that regularly publish its material via syndication deals. These news organizations include The Atlantic, Quartz.com (which is owned by The Atlantic‘s parent company), Slate, National Review (Salam’s publication), and TIME.  

The organization’s governmental connections are extensive as well. Like more and more think tanks, NAF also gets funding from the U.S. and foreign governments and international organizations. These official donors include the U.S. State Department and Agency for International Development, the U.S. government-funded U.S. Institute of Peace, the European Union, the European Commission, Norway’s foreign ministry, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Germany’s Embassy to the United States. (See NAF’s latest Annual Report for documentation of current Board members and donors.)

Again, it’s been encouraging to see NAF take its lumps. But real progress toward breaking up the Washington swamp won’t be made until journalists and policymakers start treating the think tanks with the skepticism they deserve, and if not ignoring the information they generate, at least considering the source much more exactingly before internalizing and further propagating it.

And all RealityChek readers will easily be able to tell whether the NAF scandal brings genuine change. Check your favorite news sources to see whether NAF staff keep appearing as founts of scholarly wisdom – and when they are used, if the reporters or anchors in question tell you whose signing their paychecks, and what stakes these donors have in the issue in question. And look for the same treatment for all the other major think tanks. Even better? Start giving them heck in their comment sections and on social media when they don’t.

Im-Politic: Beyond Parody with Uber-Pundit Thomas Friedman

Tags

China, corruption, foreign students, higher education, Im-Politic, Immigration, Muslims, Reuters, tech workers, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, travel ban, Trump

Last March, I took one look at a column by Thomas Friedman on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s trade policies and concluded that the multiple New York Times Pulitzer winner must have been hacked. Any other interpretation would have meant that Friedman was either stunningly ignorant about these subjects or (at best) willfully ignorant.

A year later, it’s painfully obvious that either some impostor is still publishing pieces with The Times, or that Friedman is still reality-challenged. His March 29 offering contains the same kinds of trade fakeonomics and crackpot geopolitics as that piece I spotlighted last March. But even worse this time around are some out-and-out howlers about major implications of the Trump administration’s travel ban proposals.

According to Friedman, President Trump wants to “make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This…signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in America. “

As evidence, Friedman writes that “NBC News reported last week that applications from foreign students, notably from China, India and the Middle East, ‘are down this year at nearly 40 percent of schools that answered a recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.’”

In other words, could any Trump policy be more catastrophically dumb, especially over the long-term? The trouble is, when you look at these matters in any depth whatever, you realize how deeply silly these claims and fears are. In the first place, the idea that foreign students on U.S. college campuses are all or mainly or even disproportionately academic superstars is completely fallacious. And nowhere is it more fallacious than in the case of Chinese students.

For anyone knowing anything about contemporary China knows that it’s become one of the world’s leading plutocracies. The wealthy generally either make (or keep or lose) their fortunes depending on their connections with or via help from the Chinese government, or are comprised of political leaders themselves who have exploited their power and contacts to become millionaires many times over. Given the astronomical costs of American higher education (especially by the standards of even the typical Chinese urban – meaning relatively well-off – family), it could not be clearer that the main distinguishing characteristic of Chinese students on U.S. campuses is family money, not brains.

The money angle is further strengthened by admissions practices of so many American colleges and universities. After all, even well-endowed schools prize foreign students to a great extent because they’re wealthy enough to pay “full freight.” That is, they don’t need financial aid. Indeed, they’re profit centers. In fact, as I reported last October, a Reuters investigation found out that many Chinese students have gained access to American colleges and universities through payments to these institutions that can only be called corruption. In other words, their parents have bought their way in. Would most of this bribery be necessary if the kids were such geniuses?

Moreover, if you think that the money issue is confined to China, think again. For an expensive American college education is also far beyond the reach of most families in most of the rest of the world, too – especially the developing world.

As for the world’s math and science whizzes, especially from the Muslim world, avoiding the United States and choosing other regions and countries to open up businesses, ask yourself the simple question, “Like where?” Economically speaking, America’s growth prospects continue looking brighter – as they have for most of the current global recovery – than those of other major economies. The United States also offers among the world’s best levels of intellectual property protection.

And as for tech whizzes from the Muslim world, does Friedman really think they’re going to be increasingly welcome in, say, Europe, given its understandable anxieties about Islamic extremism and global terrorism? Japan and South Korea, it’s widely known, aren’t welcoming to any immigrants. And the idea that China, which has long battled Muslim separatists in its western regions, is going to open its doors wider just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Canada and Australia are unmistakably examples of national economies that are both successful and immigration- (and refugee-) friendly. But I’ll take my chances on America retaining its competitive edge over them for many decades to come.

These kinds of gargantuan goofs and omissions would be bad enough coming from a run-of-the-mill journalist or even pundits. Coming from Friedman, they are nothing less than appalling. For his almost uniquely lofty status stems for the most part from his (supposedly) unique knowledge of how the world works in the most fundamental senses. Indeed, he’s especially well known for writing books purporting to know what the world’s becoming in the same fundamental senses. Columns like his latest indicate that Friedman at best should spend more time learning about the present than predicting the future.

Im-Politic: America Keeps Importing Corruption from China

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admissions process, China, colleges, corruption, education, higher education, Im-Politic, meritocracy, Reuters, universities

Sorry for the recent hiatus! Those darned computer problems!

Luckily, although today’s subject is based on a news story more than a week old, it will be incredibly timely for as long as the problem it describes is with us. Simply put, Reuters has reported – complete with devastating evidence – that China is corrupting the U.S. college admissions process. And the findings should prompt Americans and especially their leaders to start asking much more searching questions about the People’s Republic’s growing role in the nation’s economy and society than they’ve been posing so far.

As is no doubt known by anyone who’s sent a kid to college lately (or who keeps up with China-related developments), the population of students from the PRC on American college and university campuses has been surging for years. China’s nouveaux riches and Communist Party leaders (two classes with lots of overlap) increasingly want to give their kids the benefit of an American education. And since they’re able to pay full freight, American higher education has been only to happy to welcome them.

This practice has disturbing enough overtones – especially when you find it in taxpayer-supported public institutions. But assuming that the Chinese students involved meet a school’s academic standards, or come close, it’s not outright corrupt – at least no more so than the longstanding admission of children of wealthy actual or prospective American donors or influential alumni even when they’d otherwise be uncompelling candidates.

As the Reuters investigation shows, however, at least one Chinese “education company” has paid thousands of dollars in perks or cash to admissions officers at top U.S. universities “to help students apply to American schools.” The perks consisted of travel expenses for “workshops” held in China to advise students whose families are clients of Shanghai-based Dipont Education Management Group “on how to successfully apply to U.S. colleges.”

In theory, that can be excused. (Although one Boston University researcher quoted in the article claimed that such behavior, too, raises major ethical problems.) But not the payments – which consisted of “honoraria” for attendance that went right into the pockets of U.S. admissions officers, which amounted to $4,500 per head in the last two years, and typically in the form of hundred-dollar bills.

Moreover, the seven schools that have confirmed that their employees have been on the take from China aren’t only or even mostly smaller private institutions that, especially since the Great Recession, have been struggling financially. They’re Carleton College, Hamilton College, Lafayette College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tulane University, the University of Vermont, and the University of Rochester.

In addition, the following schools declined to comment or did not respond at all about the travel expenses or the honoria when contacted by Reuters about the article’s allegations: Davidson College, Wesleyan University, Claremont McKenna College, Colorado College, Harvey Mudd College, Syracuse University, and Texas Christian University.

Nothing reported by Reuters about the Chinese practices should surprise any knowledgeable readers. After all, a perfect storm of skyrocketing national wealth, the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power, and the millennia-old absence of rule of law has produced in China a society that arguably is the most corrupt in contemporary history. Nor should it be news that the United States is full of individuals, organizations, and institutions that are happy to play along.

Here’s what Americans should be asking, though: Given the undeniable reality of systemic Chinese corruption, why are any Chinese organizations permitted any contact with the admissions offices of any American institutions of higher learning? Indeed, given Chinese corruption and the importance of fund-raising in U.S. higher education, why are any Chinese organizations permitted any contact with any American colleges or universities that may have an impact on admissions.

And, as suggested, the main reason for barring the Chinese has nothing to do with the supposed purity of American morals. Instead, it’s a matter of recognizing how extensively home-grown pollution has already stained this supposedly meritocratic system, and wondering why a well-known foreign source of corruption needs to be invited in.

In fact, the same question should be raised about China’s growing economic footprint in the United States (on top of crucial national security and economic concerns). For any Chinese actor large enough to consider buying into America has surely succeeded at least in part due to its mastery of the country’s kleptocratic politics. Does business in the United States really need immense new injections of graft and cronyism from abroad?

Openness to foreign individuals, organizations, capital, goods, technology, cultures, and other influences unquestionably has been a tremendous boon to the United States throughout its history (and a decisive one when it comes to immigration). But not all foreign countries are created equal, and the example of China strongly suggests that some systems are at best incompatible with and at worst dangerous to America’s well being. China’s undermining of U.S. higher education’s integrity signals loud and clear that the actual downside of permitting Chinese participation is already outweighing any conceivable benefits – and that more wide-ranging official U.S. discrimination is needed in order to choke off similar Chinese threats in other spheres of American life.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: America’s Real Russia Policy Scandal

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allies, Baltics, corruption, Jeffrey Goldberg, Leon Hadar, Moldova, NATO, NATO expansion, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, The Atlantic, The National Interest, think tanks, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Scandalous charges have abounded recently in connection with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s support for recasting U.S.-Russia relations into a more cooperative mold. Trump has been accused to seeking rapport with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in return for promoting his business interests in the former Soviet Union. Some of his top aides have been identified as lobbyists for Russian interests. (As with China, even those that are called “private” are subject to state control.) And suspected Russian cyber-hacks that have revealed politically damaging material about the Democratic Party have fueled speculation that Moscow is working actively to put him in the White House.

Plenty of evidence shows significant business ties between Trump and his aides, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. An especially thorough job of reporting on Trump himself can be found at this link. Of course, though it’s gone almost completely unreported, there are years’ worth of much more evidence of extensive relationships between the offshoring businesses that have lobbied very effectively for China in recent decades, and Trump’s rivals and critics. These include many of this year’s Republican presidential candidates, the so-called conservative intellectuals who work at think tanks funded heavily by these multinational companies, and Democratic Party leaders (chiefly from the Clinton wing) who have dependably backed Beijing-friendly policies. (See this Congressional testimony of mine on how the corporate funded think tanks have served as highly effective “idea launderers” for offshoring-happy business interests.)

In other words, there are few virgins in America’s political and policy establishment when it comes to serving unfriendly foreign interests, whether directly or indirectly.

All the while, however, an even more important scandal has been enveloping U.S.-Russia relations. It entails the way all these accusations are preventing an urgently needed national substantive debate – over whether the course of American policy has been boosting the odds of an East-West military clash that could be as completely unnecessary as it would be dangerous.

Specifically, the insinuation that only Putin toadies would oppose efforts to raise the military ante to prevent further Russia’s expansionism in European areas around its border has obscured a crucial reality: how Washington’s bipartisan decision to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance to Russia’s doorstep has created deadly risks to the U.S. homeland. Both Democratic and Republican presidents enthusiastically supported a policy that has saddled the nation with commitments to risk nuclear war over countries that (a) have never been considered important U.S. interests, largely because (b) they are located so close to Russia that they are completely indefensible with conventional forces.

Even worse, in recent years, the bipartisan Washington establishment has doubled down on this policy. In the face of Putin’s efforts to reestablish Russian hegemony in its so-called “near abroad,” American leaders have insisted not only that Washington reaffirm its intent to abide by its NATO commitment to view any attack on new members like the Baltic countries as a casus belli with Russia. Both Democratic and Republican establishmentarians have also called for admitting into NATO – and thereby extending American security guarantees over – countries like Ukraine and Moldova, which are even less defensible. (Indeed, during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Ukraine champions included major party nominees Barack Obama and John McCain.)

And because Western forces have no hope of defeating the Russian military in its own neighborhood, if Moscow did move in those circumstances, the United States and the rest of NATO would be placed in the position of threatening nuclear weapons use (and possibly following through, as per U.S. military doctrine) or suffering a humiliation that could dwarf that experienced in Vietnam (with all of its domestic and international repercussions).

To his credit, President Obama hasn’t accused Trump of pushing his Russia views for self-seeking reasons. But he’s played his own part in trying to ostracize Trump-like views by attributing them to the Republican nominee’s supposed ignorance about foreign policy matters generally, and about the ostensibly indisputable value of alliances like NATO.

Weirdly, however, although he has repeatedly endorsed the decades-long American commitment to risk nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland to protect any and all NATO members – however new and vulnerably located – as well as treaty allies in Asia, Mr. Obama also recently argued, in a lengthy interview with The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, that forcibly attempting to resist Russia’s moves around its littoral would be foolhardy at best:

“‘The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,’” he said.

“I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“‘It’s realistic,’ he said. ‘But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.’”

And the president stated even more emphatically:

“[I]f there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.”

What the president doesn’t seem to understand, though, is that these sensible arguments and cautions also apply to the Baltics – which Putin has frequently targeted. Yes, they’ve been admitted into NATO. But they have never been viewed as “core interests” of the United States. And for good reason. In fact, they were actually occupied by Moscow in 1944, as the Soviet military was fighting its way to Berlin during World War II, and turned into Soviet “republics” until the USSR disintegrated. Do any Americans genuinely believe that the tragedy unmistakably suffered by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania ever affected America’s security or prosperity in the slightest?

My good friend, journalist and foreign policy analyst Leon Hadar, has just written compellingly in The National Interest that Trump’s Russia and overall foreign policy positions – however crudely and vaguely expressed – overlap with President Obama’s to a vastly underappreciated degree:

“[B]oth the liberal internationalist Obama and the conservative nationalist Trump are pragmatists and not ideologues by nature when it comes to foreign-policy issues. They both eventually gravitate towards choices based on cost-effectiveness calculations. The two have rejected the grand Wilsonian designs of promoting democracy and nation building pursued by George W. Bush under the influence of his neoconservative advisors, and believe that Washington needs to readjust its global strategy to the changing international balance of power and under the pressure of diminishing economic and military resources.”

The only problem with this theory is that precisely he is a liberal internationalist at heart, the president not only backs the basic structures of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy – the security alliances in Europe and Asia. He has both supported the aforementioned dangerous post-Cold War expansion of the former, and has ordered concrete measures to buttress them militarily.

But because, as Mr. Obama himself admits, America’s stake in the security of NATO’s newest members is anything but vital, it’s all too likely that the increased U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe could leave the nation in the worst of all possible circumstances – more deeply tied than ever to a military mission almost certain to fail,, and in all likelihood disastrously. (For somewhat different reasons, as I’ve contended most recently in this post, a similar argument can be made for America’s Asia policy under Mr. Obama.)

Trump, by contrast, is both spotlighting the risks created by U.S. alliances and similar policies and questioning the worth of these alliances and policies themselves. There’s a perfectly respectable argument to be made that Trump is wrong because the continuing nuclear commitments – and the U.S. forces deployed in harm’s way precisely in order to narrow America’s choices and ostensibly cow U.S. rivals – are protecting the allies at a risk to American territory that’s completely acceptable. But that’s not the argument being made by supporters of the foreign policy status quo – who also, perhaps not so coincidentally, never mention in public the nuclear dangers.

Instead, both the Democratic and Republican mainstays of the foreign policy establishment, and the Mainstream Media journalists who faithfully parrot their views, prefer to demonize Trump. And all of course in the name of “responsibility.”