Following Up: The Democrats’ Trump/Ukraine/Impeachment Hypocrisy is Now Complete

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Adam Schiff, Alexander Vindman, Biden, Bill Taylor, Bob Mendendez, Democrats, Donald Trump, Eric Swalwell, Fiona Hill, Following Up, foreign policy, globalists, impeachment, Jeanne Shaheen, Mainstream Media, Marie Yovanovitch, Nancy Pelosi, national security, natural gas, Nordstream 2, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

As known by RealityChek regulars, I’ve devoted two posts lately (here and here, and here) to the puzzling matter of President Biden’s policies toward the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline. The reason: For months during the last half of the Trump administration, any number of leading Democrats and globalist U.S. diplomats and other officials had justified the first effort to impeach the former President largely because he allegedly threatened key U.S. national security interests by hinging American military aid to Ukraine to its government’s cooperation in investigating charges against Mr. Biden (then a likely Democratic presidential candidate and therefore political rival) and his family.

Indeed, the first Article of Impeachment expressly stated that Trump “compromised” and “injured” national security for precisely this reason.

Mr. Biden never explicitly accused Trump of comprising American security by weakening ties to a supposedly crucial ally. But he certainly insinuated comission of this “high crime or misdemeanor” by charging that Trump “betrayed this nation.”

So I believed it was worth spotlighting that the Biden administration had for months been moving toward a decision that would both unquestionably endanger Ukraine and enrich Vladimir Putin’s Russia – whose apparent designs on Ukraine have prompted the United States (including the Trump administration) to provide it with various kinds of weapons and other military supplies to begin with. That decision: nixing significant sanctions on companies building the pipeline, which would transport Russian natural gas directly to Europe, in the process bypassing the previous transit route through Ukraine and enabling Russia to avoid the need to pay literally billions of dollars’ worth of tolls to its neighbor. And yesterday, the Biden administration made the move official.

For the record, I don’t consider Ukraine a vital or even important ally of the United States (for reasons explained, e.g., here). But Americans were told consistently during the first Trump impeachment hearings and actual proceedings that it was, making at least ironic a Democratic administration’s pursuit of a policy bound to enrich the country threatening Ukraine – and at Ukraine’s expense.

And at least as interesting, during the period that Mr. Biden has made his Nordstream intention clear, and since the final decision was announced, it’s become clear that most of the Democratic and diplomatic voices that touted Ukraine’s centraility to America’s own safety didn’t believe their own claims either. And ditto for the Mainstream Media news organizations that breathlessly reported and even endorsed them.

How do I know this? Because none of Trump’s main accusers along these lines seems to have had anything to day about Mr. Biden’s unmistakably anti-Ukraine decision. And my charge is easily verifiable. Just Google “Nordstream” and any of the following names: Alexander Vindman, Marie Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, Bill Taylor, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell. In various roles, these folks were leading the charge to dump Trump because of his Ukraine record and the related claim that he was a ” Manchurian” candidate and then President who won the presidency by accepting Putin’s help during the campaign in return for doing the Russian dictator’s bidding.

And do you know what these Google searches come up with? Not a peep of protest about Mr. Biden’s Nordstream decision. Incidentally, some of these figures have been commenting some on Ukraine-related issues. Vindman, for example, co-authored a Washington Post op-ed piece in March urging the West as a whole to toughen its stance against Russia’s “blatant violations of human rights and unrestrained repression of opponents both at home and abroad.” He urged Germany “in particular [to] reconsider its business ties to Moscow — specifically the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline which is nearing completion” and the United States and the United Kingdom to strengthen existing Nordstream sanctions. But nothing about Biden indifference to the matter even though it was already becoming apparent – and certainly nothing since.

Three weeks later, after the President imposed sanctions on Russia for cyberattacks and election meddling, Schiff – the lead House impeachment manager in 2019 – noted that “While appropriate, sanctions alone will not be enough to deter Russia’s misbehavior. We must strengthen our own cyber defenses, take further action to condemn Russia’s human rights abuses, and, working in concert with our Allies and partners in Europe, deter further Russian military aggression.” But he said nothing about Nordstream at all.

At least as important, I can’t find a single instance of a Mainstream Media journalist even seeking the Nordstream views of either figure, or of their other impeachment-period Ukraine-philes.  

Some Democrats have condemned the Mr. Biden’s Nordstream decision – notably, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. But although both voted to remove Trump from office in part because his Ukraine actions jeopardized national security (see here and here), neither mentioned taking any punitive measures against Mr. Biden even though in the long run his Nordstream decision could undermine Ukraine’s independence far more than Trump’s brief suspension of the arms aid.     

It’s true that the Ukraine national security charge wasn’t the only accusation leveled against Trump in 2019. He was also impeached for violating the law in holding up the military assistance Congress approved for the country.  But as pointed out in this post, nothing in the statute in question regards such presidential actions as impeachable. Certainly they’re far from the first course of action. Instead, the law specifically instructs Congressional plaintiffs to bring a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court.

As for the claim that Trump abused the power of the Presidency by launching an official investigation of a political opponent for purely political reasons, the revelations since of Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine during his father’s vice presidency show how premature – to put it kindly – that conclusion was.   

Aa a result, given the outsized role played by the Ukraine charge’s substance, the indifference shown this year to that country’s fate by Trump’s 2019 prosecutors strengthens the case that the first impeachment pretty thoroughly abused power itself.  The one silver lining (and it’s not negligible):  At least the Democrats and other Never Trumper globalists aren’t beating the Ukraine war drums for now.

Im-Politic: Evidence of a Backlash Against Woke Education

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Black Lives Matter, Democrats, education, gender, history, identity politics, Im-Politic, Josh Kraushaar, National Journal, parents, Parents Defending Education, racism, Republicans, schools, students, systemic racism, teachers, Virginia, white privilege, woke capitalism, wokeness

If you, like me, are worried sick by the prospect of Woke ideology totally poisoning all of America’s major institutions, you just got some great news in a new poll. Commissioned by an organization called Parents Defending Education, it indicates that you’ve got plenty of company when it comes to how this fact-free propaganda is increasingly shaping what the nation’s children learn in school.

Not that the case is airtight. For example, the sponsoring organization is avowedly worked up about “indoctrination in the classroom,” so it’s anything but a neutral, passive observer. And its sample seems to skew somewhat too heavily Republican.

But before you conclude that the poll therefore gives far too much weight to conservatives or traditionalists or racists or homophobes or however you care to describe opponents of these new programs (like the New York Times‘ race-mongering 1619 Project), think about this: Fully two-thirds of respondents placed some value on “promoting social equity” in the classroom. Moreover, nearly 45 percent give “the Black Lives Matter Movement” very or somewhat favorable marks, versus very or somewhat favorable ratings from just over 48 percent  – which closely mirrors how this group of groups have fared in other polls.

The respondents, however, strongly disagreed with the ways that Woke propagandists have been defining social (and racial) equity and the role of educators. Specifically:

>Eighty percent “oppose the use of classrooms to promote political activism to students….”

>By a whopping 87 percent to six percent, respondents agreed that teachers should present students “with multiple perspectives on contentious political and social issues….”

>Fifty-five percent attached no importance on teachers placing a “greater emphasis on race and gender,” including about a third of Democrats.

>Seventy percent opposed schools “teaching their students that their race was the most important thing about them.”

>Seventy-four percent opposed “teaching students that white people are inherently privileged and black and other people of color are inherently oppressed.”

>Sixty-nine percent opposed teaching students “that America was founded on racism and is structurally racist.”

>Fifty-nine percent were against reorienting history classes to “focus on race and power and promote social justice,” with 50 percent opposing this idea strongly.

>By a 75 percent to 18 percent margin, respondents opposed “teaching there is no such thing as biological sex, and that people should choose whatever gender they prefer for themselves.”

>Proposals that schools hire “diversity, equity and inclusion consultants or administrators to train teachers,” were rejected by a 51 to 37 percent margin.

Moreover, respondents saw the propaganda problem growing:

“When asked whether their local K-12 school has increased or decreased its emphasis on issues of race, gender, and activism in the last two years, 52% said it had increased a lot or a little. Only 2% said it had decreased. Similarly, 57% said their local schools had become more political, with only 4% saying less political.”

In his writeup of the survey, National Journal reporter Josh Kraushaar correctly observed that the education versus propaganda issue hasn’t yet been tested significantly where it counts most – in local or state elections. But he also observes that Republican strategists smell a big winner along these lines, and I’m encouraged by the fact that such divisive drivel polls so poorly on a national basis after at least a year of it being promoted actively and synergistically by a major American political party (including the current President), the Mainstream Media, the academic world, the entertainment industry (including sports), and Wall Street and Big Business.

Kraushaar also notes that this year’s Virginia Governor’s race could provide highly suggestive evidence. Although campaigns rarely turn on a single issue, U.S. history makes clear how combustible the mixture of race and education in particular is (just think of the school desegregation battles in North and South alike). So having been a major political battleground in recent decades – because of its steady transition from (moderate) Republican mainstay to (also moderate) Democratic strong point – the Old Dominion could soon become known as a socio-cultural battleground with comparably high stakes.  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Real Afghanistan Mistake

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Afghanistan, Biden, border security, Democrats, Donald Trump, jihadism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Putin, Russia, September 11, Tajikistan, Taliban, terrorism

Isn’t President Biden supposed to be a foreign policy whiz? If so, why has he just stuck the United States with the worst of all possible worlds with his announcement Wednesday that all American military forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 11?

Mr. Biden’s big mistake isn’t promising to pull all the troops out by a date certain. It’s definitely a mistake, for all the (obvious) reasons noted by critics. Specifically, it tells the fanatic Taliban insurgents that if they just wait a few more months, the only obstacle they’d have left to taking over the country (and gaining the capacity to give the world’s jihadists all the kinds of advantages they enjoyed from the support of a sympathetic sovereign state, a la before the first September 11) will be the current, clearly ineffective Afghan government and its military. (America’s allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – have stated that they’re withdrawing their troops, too.)

But as I’ve written previously (see, e.g., here), the reestablishment of a national terrorist base in Afghanistan need not expose the United States to devastating terrorist attacks once again. The reason? Because “fighting ’em there so we don’t face ’em here” has always been sounder in theory than in reality. After all, “fighting ’em there” means chasing extremist groups around the Middle East for as long as that completely dysfunctional region keeps producing them – i.e., a very long time. 

At the same time, I’ve continued, there’s always been a way to prevent “facing ’em here” – by more effectively securing America’s borders, so that they can’t get “here” to begin with.

And here’s where we come to the President’s biggest mistake: Not only is he pulling the troops out of Afghanistan without improving border security. He’s pulling them out while substantially weakening border security with his raft of Open Borders-friendly immigration policies. So jihadists soon will both be free to resume organizing and training in Afghanistan and face a much easier challenge slipping back into the United States.

What he should be doing instead (and Donald Trump didn’t emphasize this crucial combination, either) is what I’ve been recommending for years: Pursuing the goal of keeping the Taliban off balance by keeping small contingents of U.S. and allied special forces units in Afghanistan to conduct harassment and disruption operations while putting into place the tough measures needed to make America’s borders truly secure. Once the latter have been completed, the American soldiers could safely leave. This strategy is much more promising than any tried to date because not only is controlling the Middle East intrinsically difficult – at best – but controlling America’s own borders is clearly far easier.

Interestingly, Mr. Biden himself clearly recognizes that the U.S. military’s Afghanistan mission hasn’t been accomplished completely enough to justify a complete withdrawal. That’s why he promised to “reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent reemergence of terrorists — of the threat to our homeland from over the horizon.” and to “hold the Taliban accountable for its commitment not to allow any terrorists to threaten the United States or its allies from Afghan soil.”

What’s missing so far, though, is any explanation of how he’ll “refine” America’s strategy “to monitor and disrupt significant terrorist threats” that could emanate from that country. The monitoring part arguably could work, given the remote surveillance capabilities of the U.S. military and intelligence community. But the disruption part? Without U.S. troops on the ground? Good luck with that, along with holding the Taliban accountable in any meaningful way. For the nearby bases that would be needed to host the American force that the President presumably believes would be on call to do the disrupting etc – at least in a timely way – simply aren’t available.

(Actually, there’s one intriguing possibility: Tajikistan, which borders the eastern Afghanistan region where jihadists have been strongest. But as the afore-linked Politico article notes, it’s “heavily dependent on Russia economically,” and Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s cooperation would be needed. Since its own ill-fated Afghanistan war decades ago, it’s been obvious that Moscow is also strongly opposed to any increase in Islamic extremists’ presence near its own southern borders. But the President and the rest of his party seem to equate any cooperation with Russia with – alleged – Trump-style collusion, so that option seems to be out unless his party’s Never Putin-ers relent.)

As the Politico piece observes, Mr. Biden is putting all of America’s Afghanistan chips on what national security types call an “offshore counterterror approach” – and has long advocated this strategy since his vice presidential days. What’s supremely ironic is that the best offshore counterterror approach by far has always entailed focusing tightly on the entirely feasible task of securing America’s own borders – and that the President has been bent on achieving exactly the opposite.

Im-Politic: Why Progressives (& Mainstream Democrats) May Ditch American Workers For Good

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Bernie Sanders, Biden, budget deficits, Democrats, Donald Trump, economics, Elizabeth Warren, Im-Politic, Immigration, imports, manufacturing, Modern Monetary Theory, productivity, progressives, Stephanie Kelton, The New York Times, Trade, wages, working class

If you want to start a (hopefully verbal only) fight about American politics, one good way is to tell a Democrat that his or her party – and especially its powerful progressive wing – has been abandoning the country’s private sector working class in favor of what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat just called “the winners of globalization, from wealthy suburbanites to Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites….”  (Here’s some polling evidence for this proposition.)

So it’s more than a little interesting that if you take this position, you’ve recently gotten some devastating ammunition from no less than one of progressivism’s leading intellectual lights – economist Stephanie Kelton.

Kelton has achieved renown for her pioneering “Modern Monetary Theory” take on economic policy. As she has explained, it holds that “Governments in nations that maintain control of their own currencies — like Japan, Britain and the United States, and unlike Greece, Spain and Italy — can increase spending without needing to raise taxes or borrow currency from other countries or investors.”

Naturally, Democrats of most stripes have seized on this argument to varying extents to justify running much bigger federal budget deficits to deal much more ambitiously with a whole host of national problems – to engineering an adequate recovery from the CCP Virus-induced recession to remedying major social and economic ills that they believe dangerously plagued the economy before the pandemic.

One aspect of Kelton’s views, though, has been widely ignored, and it’s this stance that led her last week to support explicitly measures with proven records of harming domestic U.S. private sector workers but with which the increasingly elitist Democratic Party has grown increasingly comfortable over the last decade or so – on trade and especially immigration policy.

The ignored Kelton stance: on inflation. As she has specified (in the column linked above), “Politics aside, the only economic constraints currency-issuing states face are inflation and the availability of labor and other material resources in the real economy.” And in the author’s latest column, she argues that it’s precisely the appearance of these threats today that require the Biden administration to embrace unfettered trade and mass immigration policies.

As Kelton puts it, the combination of (1) President Biden’s massive spending plans and (2) undeniable contraints on the nation’s capacity to supply all the new demand that they’ll create will produce worrisome inflationary pressures. Too many customers will be chasing too few products to buy, thereby forcing up the prices of the latter and possibly generating more economic problems than this new consumption solves.

Among the solutions she offers? Enabling the economy much more easily to satisfy all the new demand by accessing productive capacity from abroad. Thus she suggests both

“Repealing tariffs would make it easier and cheaper for American businesses to buy supplies manufactured abroad and easier for consumers to spend more of their income on products made outside of our borders, draining off some domestic demand pressures” and

“loosening legal-immigration policies, so that even once America nears full employment there would still be an adequate labor pool to meet the increased demand for workers.”

These arguments are entirely consistent with more conventional schools of economic thought – which have long insisted that the freest possible worldwide flows of goods, services, and people will lead to the greatest possible degree of prosperity for the world as a whole.

The problem, though, is that recent decades have taught that when the United States opens its economy wide to a world full of countries that still tightly protect their own markets, and when it opens its borders wide to enormous foreign populations with much lower living standards, American workers take major hits. Abundant research even in the mainstream economics community, for example, has documented the devastating impact of the “China shock” on trade, and the Trump years showed that when immigration curbs helped U.S. labor markets tighten to unprecedented levels, wages for low-income workers, who overall compete directly for employment against illegal aliens, rose especially strongly.   

For many years, Kelton’s fellow Democrats and progressives have been increasingly determined to deny these immigration realities – even when employment levels have been less than stellar. And although private sector labor union-oriented Democrats and even progressives like Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont still champion what might be called America First trade policies, the party’s rank and file has grown much more enthusiastic about the pre-Trump version of economic globalization — as indicated by the below survey results from the Pew Research Center.

Even more curious, and troubling for the economy as a whole: Kelton sorely neglects the concept of productivity, and the importance of continually boosting the economy’s efficiency in order to boost living standards in sustainable, as opposed to bubbly, ways.

Kelton does write that “Over time, the Biden plan’s investments in our physical and human infrastructure will enhance our economy’s productive capacity, leaving us with a better educated and more productive work force, more efficient railways, less congested roadways, improved technologies and much else.”    

But she also adds, crucially, “this can’t happen overnight. It will take years.”  Presumably, then she’d be OK with dropping the open trade policies at least to some degree.  What she misses, however, are the (further) productivity-killing effects bound to emerge during that period of re-enabling imports in sectors like manufacturing – which are central to the nation’s hopes for retaining sufficient productive capacity. 

Indeed, she seems unaware that those manufacturing sectors that have been heavily dependent on artificially cheap imports have been major productiviy laggards. (The same holds for parts of the economy that have leaned heavily on the comparable crutch of immigrant labor – especially low-wage, low-skill immigrant labor).

Kelton of course is only one Democratic party thinker, and as she complained in her latest Times column, too many Democratic leaders – including the President – are still clinging to their supposedly outmoded views on spending and taxing and promoting U.S.-made manufactures.  And as mentioned, even within progressive ranks, her views on trade may not prevail against the Warren and Sanders perspective.

But it’s just as reasonable to believe that progressives hold the whip hand among  Democrats today on many issues, and Kelton played the biggest role in turning their spending-happy views into virtual party orthodoxy.  If her immigration and especially trade positions take the same course, the Democrats’ once unchallengeable identity as “the party of the common man” will become an example of transparently false advertising.       

P.S. Special thanks to my Twitter friend who goes by the handle @RocCityBuilt for first alerting me to the trade and immigration material in Kelton’s latest article.   

Im-Politic: Why Democrats’ Latino Problem is Much Bigger Than They Think

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conservatives, David Shor, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2016, election 2020, Equis Research, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latino men, Latinos, New York magazine, Populism, progressives, racism, Republicans, Ruy Teixeira, sexism, The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, xenophobia

You know that “Wow!” emoji, with the wide open mouth and eyes? Here’s some political news genuinely deserving that reaction. Remember how all the presidential election exit polls last November showed significant gains by Donald Trump among Latino voters? And how so many analysts attributed this progress to the former President’s “macho” appeal to Latino men – an appeal that was so strong that it overrode Trump’s supposedly obvious anti-Latino racism and xenophobia?

Well, at the beginning of this month, a major survey of Latino voters found that, actually, the Trump Latino vote was driven by women.

“Big deal,” you scoff? Absolutely. Because the results indicate that these voters’ backing for Trump didn’t stem mainly from his personality traits, which are not only pretty peculiar to him, but which repel at least as many voters of all kinds as they attract. Instead, the findings suggest that Latinos’ growing Trump-ism owes more to support for his economic message and record (including on immigration) – which signals big opportunities for other Republican/conservative populists not saddled with Trump’s often -putting character, but who focus on issues that will remain crucial to much of the Latino and overall electorate long into the future.

Examples of the “macho” theory include this piece from the New York Times and a later article in the Washington Post Magazine. And they nicely illustrate how it also reenforced the impression of Trump voters generally as “deplorables” that’s been spread relentlessly by the former President’s opponents of all stripes, and that conveniently strengthens the case for seeking to ignore and marginalize them.

It’s true that both these analyses recognized that Trump’s own business experience and the state of the economy for most of his presidency also attracted many Latino males. But their greater emphasis was on how these voters liked the fact that, as the Times piece put it, Trump is “forceful, wealthy and, most important, unapologetic. In a world where at any moment someone might be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and does not bother with self-flagellation.”

The Post Magazine article was much more nuanced and even-handed, but the author nonetheless described a not-trivial number of Latino men (using his own father as an example) as “archconservatives” and “conservative talk radio” fans. He also presented plenty of analyses from supposed experts likening them to low-status males desperately clinging to any patriarchical life-saver to preserve their remaining self-esteem, and consequently as prime suckers for any “self-made man” and any other bootstraps-type myths contributing to the brand Trump cultivated.

The Post Magazine piece also contrasted these Latino male views with

“the experiences of Latinas, many of whom are running their households, managing child care or employed as front-line and domestic workers — nurses or caretakers for the elderly. ‘They are making sure their kids are prepared for Zoom school,’ [one expert] explains. ‘I think there’s a fundamentally different experience that Hispanic men and women have in both what they experience day to day and what information they consume.’”

In other words, Latino men: kind of neanderthal and delusional. Latino women: nose-to-the-grindstone essential workers and heroines who are not only staffing the front lines at work, but keeping ther households together. Therefore, even if you were willing to hold your nose and wanted any opponents of conservative populists to reach out more effectively to Latino men, you’d have to admit that many are too unhinged to be reachable.

Significantly, the new findings – by a data firm called Equis Research – don’t dispute that Trump did better among Latino men than among Latino women. Equis did, however, generate data showing that, between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the Trump Latino male vote grew by three net percentage points, but his Latina vote grew by eight percentage points. That’s what’s called “statistically significant.” And poll skeptics should note that Equis interviewed 41,000 Latino voters in battleground states, and studied voter file data, precinct returns, and focus groups.

Equis didn’t endorse any explanations for this Latina shift, although a Democratic analyst named David Shor believes that “the concentration of Trump’s gains among Latinas is consistent with his hypothesis that ‘defund the police’ influenced Hispanic voting behavior since, in his polling, women rank crime as a more important issue than men do.”

But to me, the new findings matter most for a more fundamental reason:  They further debunk claims from Never Trumpers in both parties that Trump’s Latino gains resulted from appeals to some Americans’ worst (i.e., most sexist) instincts (as mentioned above), or from simple misinformation, or from the Democrats’ alleged failure to court Latino voters ardently enough – that is, from problems that either shouldn’t be fixed, or that can easily be solved without compromising the party’s strong shift to the hard Left on issues across the board.

Instead, Equis’ report adds to the case that  a huge part of the problem is the shift itself – and with Americans of all races, colors, and creeds.

Special thanks to old friend Ruy Teixeira, a distinguished opinion analyst in his own right, for calling this news to my attention. And for a very good summary and analysis of the findings, see this piece from New York magazine (in which you’ll find David Shor’s arguments).

Following Up: Biden’s Cave-In on Ukraine, Russia, and Germany and Why It Matters

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Adam Schiff, alliances, allies, America First, Angela Merkel, Democrats, Donald Trump, energy, Eric Swalwell, Following Up, Germany, impeachment, NATO, natural gas, Nord Stream 2, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Earlier this month, I wrote about the weirdness of the Biden administration’s seemingly blasé attitude toward Ukraine’s security, given the President’s long record of support (including military aid) for its independence from an expansionist Russia, and especially given the determination of the entire Democratic party to impeach Donald Trump largely because his allegedly blasé attitude toward Ukraine security treasonously endangered America’s own security.

Today I can report that the situation has grown even weirder – and in the process, raised major questions about the administration’s view of smooth alliance relations as a top foreign policy priority, and about its adults-in-the-room reputation itself for foreign policy competence itself.

As explained in my March 17 post, the issue at hand is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, That’s a natural gas transport project that the Trump administration opposed because it threatened to, among other problems, increase Europe’s energy dependence on Vladimir Putin’s Russia, provide this aggressive autocrat with a big new source of revenue and therefore of funds for his military, and ace Ukraine itself out of natural gas earnings, thereby weakening its economy and ultimately its ability to defend itself.

So why is Nord Stream 2 being built? Two main reasons. First, lots of big German (and other European) companies have been involved in its financing and nearly finished construction, and will profit from its operation. (See here and here for good summaries.) Further, the German government is obliged to cover the multi-billion dollar losses that would result from cancellation. Second, Chancellor Angela Merkel;s government views the project as a means of keeping Germany, and Europe in general, economically engaged, influential, and therefore at peace with Russia.

The Germans also say they need the new gas because of its plans to de-nuclearize and de-carbonize its economy. Berlin also has the option of filling the looming energy supply gap by purchasing more gas from the United States than at present.  But Germany seems more impressed by the fact that higher transport costs make the U.S. product more expensive than Moscow’s.

You’d think, therefore, that Germany would be facing heavy pressure to cancel the pipeline from the Biden administration and especially from the impeachment enthusiasts in the Democrats’ Congressional ranks – like California’s Adam Schiff, the lead House manager for the first Trump impeachment trial, who described Ukraine’s sovereignty and safety as nothing less than a vital interest of the United States.

Not a peep about Nord Stream has been heard from Schiff or from other Trump impeachment hard-liners, like California Democratic Congress Member Eric Swalwell – confirming suspicions that their main concerns all along during both the Trump-Russia collusion and impeachment dramas were somehow ousting Trump for purely partisan or possibly simply deranged reasons, not safeguarding America’s security or democracy.

But Mr. Biden’s stance is more puzzling and disturbing – the latter since Presidents matter so much more than individual legislators. As my earlier post noted, his administration has seemed more relaxed about Nord Stream even though it, too, has claimed to harbor major concerns about Ukraine’s fate.

In fact, as recently as a few days ago, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken declared that “President (Joe) Biden has been very clear, he believes the pipeline is a bad idea, bad for Europe, bad for the United States, ultimately it is in contradiction to the EU’s own security goals, It has the potential to undermine the interests of Ukraine, Poland and a number of close partners and allies.”

Yet just this morning, when asked whether Washington could (and by extension, actually would) do anything to stop Nord Stream 2, Blinken “Well, ultimately that is up to those who are trying to build the pipeline and complete it. We just wanted to make sure that our … opposition to the pipeline was well understood.”

In other words, “La de dah.”

Such quick and complete turnabouts by America’s top diplomat are disturbing in and of themselves, but the real problems with the Biden Nord Stream stance go far beyond the impotence claimed (and therefore advertised) by Blinken.

After all, avoiding a showdown with Germany on the pipeline would be understandable and even smart if Mr. Biden really didn’t view Ukraine’s security, and/or Russia’s aims and power, as terribly important in the first place, or if (as I offered as a possibility in my previous post), this decision reflected some broader administration conclusion that relations with Russia should be improved in order to outflank the stronger and more dangerous Chinese.

But not only is the President a strong believer in deterring Russian designs on Europe. He recently seemed to go out of his way to antagonize Putin by calling him a “killer.”

So the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that, at least for now, Mr. Biden is so determined to keep America’s wealthiest European ally happy that he’s given it a veto on a matter he himself has deemed a major U.S. interest. Worse, he seems indifferent to Trump’s (correct) complaint that Germany evidently has no problem with enriching Moscow while continuing to rely on the U.S. military to defend it from Russia. This doesn’t necessarily leave the President guilty of carrying out an “America Last” foreign policy. But it makes you wonder how far he’ll drift from from putting America First.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Return of the Lippmann Gap?

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alliances, allies, Biden, burden sharing, China, defense budget, Democrats, Donald Trump, Europe, globalism, Japan, Lippmann Gap, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, progressives, Russia, soft power, South Korea, Walter Lippmann

No, it’s not the title of a newly discovered Philip Roth novel. Instead, the ”Lippmann Gap” is a phrase coined by scholars to describe the result of a country’s aims in foreign policy exceeding the means available to pursue them.

It was named after the twentieth century journalist, philosopher, and frequent adviser to leading politicians Walter Lippmann, who called attention to its frequency and dangers in his classic 1943 book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic. (P.S. In this post, I described a major flaw in Lippmann’s thinking, but he was right about the importance of establishing a sustainable relationship between a country’s ambitions and its ability to realize them.)

Troublingly for Americans, and for other countries that have long relied on the United States for protection, evidence has emerged that the gap could soon return in a big way under the Biden administration – whose principals, including the President, are typically described as diplomatic “adults in the room” making the welcome return to power after the dangerous tumult of the Trump years.

The evidence consists of reporting (see here and here) that the administration later this spring will submit a defense budget request that seeks no new funding over last year’s levels. Of course, this reporting may turn out to be inaccurate. Or the Biden-ites could still change their plans even if it is currently accurate. In addition, negotiations with Congress, which needs to approve these plans, could result in some increases.

Moreover, a flat defense budget request is by no means necessarily bad news for anyone, except for whichever defense contractors lose expected sales to the Pentagon. For example, the Defense Department has long been notorious for wasteful spending. And adopting different priorities, or more efficient weapons and other equipment, could well provide America and at least most of its allies with just as much “bang for the buck” as previously, as changing circumstances produce a shift in deployments from missions judged to have lost some of their importance to missions seen to have become more significant. In fact, I’ve long favored major cuts precisely because the nation spends way too much seeking objectives – like shoring up the defense of Western Europe – which haven’t been necessary in decades, and indeed in theory create greater dangers than they can address.

But there’s no reason to think that such considerations would be driving forces behind a reported Biden defense spending freeze, or near-freeze. And this is where the Lippmann Gap comes in. Because there’s every reason to believe that Mr. Biden intends to expand America’s foreign defense commitments on net, and because in at least one major reason of concern, the main potential enemy (China) keeps strengthening its militaty and has been acting more aggressively in recent years, and because a major object of China’s expansionist aims, Taiwan, has become the manufacturer of the world’s most advanced semiconductors – the computer chips that serve as the brains of an explosively growing number of civilian and defense-related products.

What other conclusions can one draw from the President’s repeated globalist assertions that “America is back,” and that in particular, it means to reassure allies around the world that allegedly become unnerved about U.S. reliability after four years of being (rightly, in my view) harangued by Trump attacks on their own skimpy defense spending, and threats to leave them in the lurch unless their alleged free-riding ends? (P.S. – not only weren’t these threats carried out, but as I noted in this article, in some noteworthy ways, the former President actually bolstered America’s alliance-related foreign military deployments.  Mr. Biden, meanwhile, has decided, at least for now, to let Europe’s members of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance – Japan, and South Korea all off the burden-sharing hook, as made clear here, here, and here.)

Indeed, a flat or even reduced Biden defense budget request might come about in part from pressure from Democratic progressives to cut spending significantly. Fifty House members of his party have just urged him to reduce the defense budget “significantly.” And their rationale has nothing to do with the aforementioned potentially sensible reasons for cuts. Their case for a smaller U.S. military emphasizes that

“Hundreds of billions of dollars now directed to the military would have greater return if invested in diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research. We must end the forever wars, heal our veterans, and re-orient towards a holistic conception of national security that centers public health, climate change and human rights.”

I’m all for many of these particular aims, and also strongly support developing new definitions of national security and how to achieve and maintain it. But the Biden administration seems likeliest not to redefine national security significantly, but at most add these new domestic-oriented objectives on to the existing list of traditional goals. Therefore, if the progressives get even some of what they want, the effect inevitably would be to assume that “diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research” can substitute adequately for military force in carrying out an American foreign policy agenda that’s growing, not contracting.

Whether or not I believe this (I don’t), or you the individual reader believes, this is beside the point. U.S. adversaries seem unlikely to be impressed with these forms of what political scientists call “soft power.” Hence China keeps boosting its own military budget, and Russia responded to Obama administration Europe troops cuts by invading Crimea and attacking Ukraine.

U.S. allies are reacting skeptically, too. For example, European leaders evidently worry that Trump’s election revealed a strong popular U.S. desire to shed many global defense burdens that the Biden victory hasn’t eliminated. Therefore, there’s been increasing talk, anyway, in their ranks about reducing reliance on U.S. hard power by building up their own. And as I’ve repeatedly written, that would be great for Americans. But it’s sure not part of any Biden plans that have been made public.

A defense budget request fully reflecting the President’s bold “America is back” vow wouldn’t make me especially happy. But it would be far better than one that reopens or widens (depending on your views of current U.S. capabilities) a Lippmann Gap – and indicates to both domestic and global audiences that he really means to carry out globalism on the cheap.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Is Biden Going Trump-y on Russia and Ukraine?

Tags

Adam Schiff, alliances, Atlantic Council, Biden, China, Democrats, Donald Trump, energy, Frederick Kempe, Germany, globalism, impeachment, natural gas, Nord Stream 2, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Something weird’s going on with the Biden administration, Ukraine, and Russia, and it could eventually put lots of Democrats in an awfully awkward position.

I’m old enough to remember when helping the eastern European country maintain its independence against Russia’s aggression was considered so important by leading Democrats, along with U.S. foreign policy establishmentarians, that it justified impeaching Donald Trump. For allegedly he illegally slow-walked Congressionally approved military aid to the Ukrainians – allegedly because he wanted to force Ukraine’s government to help him dig up political dirt on then soon-to-be Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

As a result, for months, Americans heard again and again how critical Ukraine’s security was to America’s own security, and how Trump’s actions therefore endangered U.S. national security. In the words of lead House impeachment trial manager Adam Schiff (D-California):

“[T]he military aid that we provide, Ukraine helps to protect and advance American national security interests in the region and beyond. America has an abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism and resisting any nation’s efforts to remake the map of Europe by dent of military force, even as we have tens of thousands of troops stationed there. Moreover, as one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Mr. Biden has never gone quite this far in public, either as former President Obama’s vice presidential point man on Ukraine, as presidential candidate, or as chief executive himself. Nonetheless, he continually pressed his former boss to provide more and better weapons to the Ukrainians than Obama was willing to approve, indicating he, too, considered Ukraine’s security closely related to America’s own.

Indeed, last year, his campaign issued a statement declaring that “Ukraine’s success will contribute to a more stable and secure Europe, which is in America’s interest.”

More recently, however, President Biden has been sending out significantly different signals. For example, his statement last month marking the seventh anniversary of Russia’s “illegal invasion of Ukraine,” he pledged to “stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggressive acts” and condemned Moscow for violating “international law, the norms by which modern countries engage one another,” but didn’t draw any direct connections between Ukraine’s fate and America’s.

More concretely, Mr. Biden has been looking pretty slow-walking-ly himself on an issue vital to Ukraine’s prosperity: preventing Russia and Germany from completing a natural gas pipeline that would bypass that country, deprive it of billions of dollars worth annually in badly needed revenues from transit fees from existing pipelines across its own territory, heighten its vulnerability to Russian gas blackmail (as candidate Biden noted himself last year), and increase Europe’s energy dependence on Vladimir Putin’s regime to boot. His press secretary has called the Nord Stream 2 project a “bad deal for Europe.” But the project is nearly finished, and his administration isn’t displaying much urgency. As State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters blandly, “we are always looking at pipeline activity that would be sanctionable, so if we see activity that meets that threshold we are prepared to follow the law.”

Not that the administration doesn’t have some good reasons for caution on the Nord Stream 2 project. After all, improving relations with allies like Germany, which were strained by Trump’s “transactional” approach, is a top Biden priority.

Perhaps more important, and revealing, Mr. Biden might be reacting to signs of ever closer ties between Russia and China, since responding to the latter’s rise and increasingly aggressive behavior is also a U.S. priority now. Indeed, just last weekend, leading think tanker Frederick Kempe, whose Atlantic Council sees the world in precisely the kinds of globalist ways as the President, cited growing Sino-Russian cooperation as one reason for America moving away from an indiscriminately anti-Moscow hard line to “a more strategic approach” that would “combine more attractive elements of engagement with more sophisticated forms of containment alongside partners.”

During his first presidential campaign, Trump responded to complaints about his supposedly excessive and even corrupting regard for Russia by asking “If we could get along with Russia, wouldn’t that be a good thing, instead of a bad thing?” and noting possible benefits like defeating ISIS jihadists in the Middle East. No remotely comparable statement has come from the Biden administration, but its deeds on the Ukraine-Russia front are starting to send a similar message. Expect the silence from the Democrats’ ostensible Ukraine hawks and Russia hawks to be deafening.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! A Progressive Democrat’s Middle East Muddle

Tags

Biden administration, Democrats, foreign policy, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Middle East, progressives, Ro Khanna

Rep. Ro Khanna “is among the Democrats who dislike President

Biden’s Middle East strategy, as his administration signals the region

is no longer the priority it was for President Obama and his

predecessors.”

– Axios.com, March 5, 2021

 

“Khanna…backed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president and has worked

with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to enact a non-interventionist foreign

policy.”

– Axios.com, March 5, 2021

 

(Source: “Ro Khanna wary of Biden approach on Middle East.” Axios.com, March 5, 2021, Ro Khanna criticizes Biden on Syria, MBS, accuses president of quitting Middle East – Axios )

Im-Politic: Looking Backward and Forward on Trump and Trumpism

Tags

cancel culture, Capitol Hill, Capitol riots, China, climate change, Congress, Conservative Populism, Constitution, Democrats, election 2016, election 2020, election challenge, Electoral College, establishment Republicans, Hillary Clinton, identity politics, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, incitement, insurrection, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, left-wing authoritarianism, mail-in ballots, nationalism, Populism, Republicans, sedition, separation of powers, tariffs, Ted Cruz, Trade, trade war, Trump, violence

(Please note: This is the linked and lightly edited version of the post put up this morning.)

The fallout from the Capitol Riot will no doubt continue for the foreseeble future – and probably longer – so no one who’s not clairvoyant should be overly confident in assessing the consequences. Even the Trump role in the turbulent transition to a Biden administration may wind up looking considerably different to future generations than at present. Still, some major questions raised by these events are already apparent, and some can even be answered emphatically, starting off with the related topic of how I’m viewing my support for many, and even most, of President Trump’s policies and my vote for him in both of his White House runs.

Specifically, I have no regrets on either ground. As I’ll make clear, I consider Mr. Trump’s words and deeds of the last few weeks to represent major, and completely unnecessary, failures that will rightly at least tarnish his place in history.

All the same, legitimate analyses of many developments and resulting situations need to think about the counterfactual. Here, the counterfactual is a Trump loss to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. And I’m confident that her presidency would have been both disastrous in policy terms (ranging from coddling China to moving steadily toward Open Borders immigration policies to intervening militarily more often and more deeply in numerous foreign conflicts of no importance to the United States) and heatedly divisive in political terms (because of her grifting behavior in fundraising for the various supposedly philanthropic initiatives she started along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton; because of her campaign’s payment for the phony Steele dossier that helped spur the unwarranted and possibly criminal Obama administration investigation of the Trump campaign; and because of intolerant and extremist instincts that would have brought Identity Politics and Cancel Culture to critical mass years earlier than their actual arrivals).

As for the worrisome events of the last several weeks:

>As I’ve written, I don’t regard Mr. Trump’s rhetoric at his rally, or at any point during his election challenges, as incitement to violence in a legal sense. But is it impeachable? That’s a separate question, because Constitutionally speaking, there’s a pretty strong consensus that impeachment doesn’t require a statutory offense. And since, consequently, it’s also a political issue, there’s no objective or definitive answer. It’s literally up to a majority of the House of Representatives. But as I also wrote, I oppose this measure.

>So do I agree that the President should get off scot free? Nope. As I wrote in the aforementioned post, I do regard the Trump record since the election as reckless. I was especially angered by the President’s delay even in calling on the breachers to leave the Capitol Hill building, and indeed the entire Capitol Hill crowd, to “go home.” In fact, until that prompting – which was entirely too feeble for my tastes – came, I was getting ready to call for his resignation.

>Wouldn’t impeachment still achieve the important objective of preventing a dangerously unstable figure from seeking public office again? Leaving aside the “dangerously unstable” allegation, unless the President is guilty (as made clear in an impeachment proceding) of a major statutory crime (including obstruction of justice, or incitement to violence or insurrection), I’d insist on leaving that decision up to the American people. As New York City talk radio host Frank Morano argued earlier this week, the idea that the Congress should have the power to save the nation from itself is as dangerously anti-democratic as it is laughable.

>Of course, this conclusion still leaves the sedition and insurrection charges on the table – mainly because, it’s contended, the President and many of his political supporters (like all the Republican Senators and House members who supported challenging Electoral College votes during the January 6 certification procedure) urged Congress to make an un-Constitutional, illegal decision: overturning an election. Others add that the aforementioned and separate charge not includes endorsing violence but urging the January 6 crowd to disrupt the certification session.

>First, there’s even less evidence that the lawmakers who challenged the Electoral College vote were urging or suggesting the Trump supporters in the streets and on the lawn to break in to the Capitol Building and forcibly end the certification session than there’s evidence that Mr. Trump himself gave or suggested this directive.

>Second, I agree with the argument – made by conservatives such as Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul (often a Trump supporter) – that authorizing a branch of the federal government unilaterally to nullify the results of elections that the Constitution stipulates should be run by the states is a troubling threat to the Constitutional principle of separation of powers. I’m also impressed with a related argument: that sauce for the goose could wind up as sauce for the gander.

In other words, do Trump supporters want to set a precedent that could enable Congress unilaterally to overturn the election of another conservative populist with something like a second wave of Russia collusion charges? Include me out.

>Further, if the Trump supporters who favored the Electoral College challenge are guilty of insurrection or fomenting it, and should be prosecuted or censured or punished in some way, shouldn’t the same go for the Democrats who acted in the exact same ways in other recent elections? (See here and here.) P.S. Some are still Members of Congress.

>Rather than engage in this kind of What About-ism, and help push the country further down the perilous road of criminalizing political behavior and political differences, I’d much rather consider these challenges as (peaceful) efforts – and in some cases sincere efforts – to insert into the public record the case that these elections were marred by serious irregularities.

>How serious were these irregularities? Really serious – and all but inevitable given the decisions (many pre-pandemic) to permit mass mail-in voting. Talk about a system veritably begging to be abused. But serious enough to change the outcome? I don’t know, and possibly we’ll never know. Two things I do know, however:

First, given the thin Election 2020 margins in many states, it’s clear that practices like fraudulent vote-counting, ballot-harvesting, and illegal election law changes by state governments and courts (e.g., Pennsylvania) don’t have to be widespread. Limiting them to a handful of states easily identified as battlegrounds, and a handful of swing or other key districts within those states, would do the job nicely.

Second, even though I believe that at least some judges should have let some of the Trump challenges proceed (if only because the bar for conviction in such civil cases is much lower than for criminal cases), I can understand their hesitancy because despite this low-ish bar, overturning the election results for an entire state, possibly leading to national consequences, is a bridge awfully far. Yes, we’re a nation of laws, and ideally such political considerations should be completely ignored. But when we’re talking about a process so central to the health of American democracy, politics can never be completely ignored, and arguably shouldn’t.

So clearly, I’m pretty conflicted. What I’m most certain about, however, is that mass mail-in ballots should never, ever be permitted again unless the states come up with ways to prevent noteworthy abuse. Florida, scene of an epic election procedures failure in 2000 (and other screwups), seems to have come up with the fixes needed. It’s high time for other states to follow suit.

As for the politics and policy going forward:

>President Trump will remain influential nationally, and especially in conservative ranks – partly because no potentially competitive rivals are in sight yet, and possibly because Americans have such short memories. But how influential? Clearly much of his base remains loyal – and given his riot-related role, disturbingly so. How influential? Tough to tell. Surely the base has shrunk some. And surely many Independents have split off for good, too. (See, e.g., this poll.) Perhaps most important, barring some unexpected major developments (which obviously no one can rule out), this withering of Trump support will probably continue – though the pace is tough to foresee also.

>The Republican Party has taken a major hit, too, and the damage could be lasting. In this vein, it’s important to remember that the GOP was relegated to minority status literally for decades by President Herbert Hoover’s failure to prevent and then contain the Great Depression. Those aforementioned short American memories could limit the damage. But for many years, it’s clear that Democratic political, campaigns, and conservative Never Trumper groups like the Lincoln Project, will fill print, broadcast, and social media outlets with political ads with video of the riot and Mr. Trump’s rally and similar statements, and the effects won’t be trivial.

>What worries me most, though, is that many of the urgently needed policies supported and implemented by the Trump administration will be discredited. Immigration realism could be the first casualty, especially since so many of the establishment Republicans in Congress were such willing flunkies of the corporate Cheap Labor Lobby for so much of the pre-Trump period, and Open Borders- and amnesty-friendly stances are now defining characteristics of the entire Democratic Party.

The Trump China policies may survive longer, because the bipartisan consensus recognizing – at least rhetorically – the futility and dangers of their predecessors seems much stronger. But given Biden’s long record as a China coddler and enabler, the similar pre-Trump views of those establishment Republicans, and their dependence on campaign contributions from Wall Street and offshoring-happy multinational companies, important though quiet backtracking, particularly on trade, could begin much sooner than commonly assumed. One distinct possibility that wouldn’t attract excessive attention: meaningfully increasing the number of exemptions to the Trump China and remaining metals tariffs to companies saying they can’t find affordable, or any, alternatives.

>Much of the political future, however, will depend on the record compiled by the Biden administration. Not only could the new President fail on the economic and virus-fighting fronts, but on the national unity front. Here, despite his reputation as a moderate and a healer, Biden’s charge that Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have used Nazi-like tactics, and race-mongering comments accusing law enforcement of handling the overwhelmingly white Capitol Rioters more gingerly than the racial justice protesters earlier this year represent a lousy start. And as his harsh recent rhetoric suggests, Biden could also overreach greatly on issues like climate change, immigration, and Cancel Culture and Identity Politics. Such Biden failures could even shore up some support for Mr. Trump himself.

>How big is the violence-prone fringe on the American Right? We’ll know much more on Inauguration Day, when law enforcement says it fears “armed protests” both in Washington, D.C. and many state capitals. What does seem alarmingly clear, though – including from this PBS/Marist College poll – is that this faction is much bigger than the relatively small number of Capitol breachers.

>Speaking of the breachers, the nature of the crimes they committed obviously varied among individuals. But even those just milling about were guilty of serious offenses and should be prosecuted harshly. The circumstances surrounding those who crossed barriers on the Capitol grounds is somewhat murkier. Those who knocked down this (flimsy) fencing were just as guilty as the building breachers. But lesser charges – and possibly no charges – might be justifiable for those who simply walked past those barriers because they were no longer visible, especially if they didn’t enter the Capitol itself.

>I’m not security expert, but one question I hope will be asked (among so many that need asking) in the forthcoming investigations of the Capitol Police in particular – why weren’t the Capitol Building doors locked as soon as the approach of the crowd became visible? The number of doors is limited, and they’re anything but flimsy. The likely effectiveness of this move can be seen from an incident in October, 2018 – when barred Supreme Court doors left anti-Brett Kavanaugh protesters futilely pounding from the outside when they attempted to disrupt the new Supreme Court Justice’s swearing in ceremony. Window entry into the Capitol would have remained an option, but the number of breachers who used this tactic seems to have been negligible.

What an extraordinary irony if one of the worst days in American history mightn’t have even happened had one of the simplest and most commonsensical type of precaution not been taken.