Foreign Policy

Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, U.S. Senate

Afghanistan as Metaphor

Posted on by mjohnson

The 20 years of American misadventure in Afghanistan, and the deadly, messy departure from that misadventure, is an apt metaphor for our broken, unserious politics.

The congressional hearings this week about the American withdrawal offer a window into the barren soul of not just American foreign policy, but those who pretend to make and influence it. We seemed to have learned almost nothing from two decades of death, destruction, delusion and debt, but assigning blame, as was the purpose of congressional hearings this week, sure makes for a great video clip.

In the period between when a Republican president warned that putting troops and treasure into Afghanistan would mean a long slog to when another Republican president made an ill-considered deal with the Taliban to withdraw, congressional Republicans rarely said a peep about our policy or priorities.

The former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, never once conducted a hearing on the Afghan withdrawal when he chaired the committee. This week he assigned all the blame to a Democratic administration that has been in office for less than a year, because, well, American foreign policy has become all about assigning blame.

Congressional Democrats have an only marginally better record since all but one Democrat who is still in Congress voted to launch the Afghan/Iraq misadventure in the first place.

“We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target,” California congresswoman Barbara Lee said in 2001 when the House voted to give George W. Bush his blank check for war. “There must be some of us who say: Let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today. I do not want to see this spiral out of control.”

Congresswoman Barbara Lee

The gentlewoman from California had it right. And she knew her history, equating the open-ended authorization to allow every subsequent president to wage war wherever they wanted to Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 that paved the path to the American misadventure in South Vietnam.

Afghanistan was and is a manifest, bipartisan failure: a failure of congressional acquiescence to presidential power; a failure to recognize America’s catastrophic inability to shape cultures we don’t understand into western style democracies; a failure that imagines the country’s bloated military establishment, propping up a bloated military-industrial complex, can exercise its will at will; and ultimately a failure of American voters to take any of this even remotely seriously.

One of the few bright spots in this week’s performative soundbite trolling on Capitol Hill was the evidence that the current president actually had the backbone to override the advice of his military advisers, who apparently to a man argued to keep American forces in Afghanistan indefinitely.

Republicans, who once won elections on the question of who most supported the military, attacked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs – by one account “assassinated his character and impugned his patriotism” – for his failure to resign when his advice was rejected. General Mark Milley then schooled the odious senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, about the critical importance of civilian control of the military. The general might have reminded the senator that American presidents are often at their best when they reject the conventional wisdom of men in uniform, but that may be expecting too much from a military that still cannot imagine its limitations.

Lincoln replaced generals repeatedly, even popular ones. Harry Truman rejected Douglas MacArthur’s advice to bomb China during the Korean War and then sacked the strutting mandarin for insubordination. John Kennedy rejected the advice of his military advisers when they wanted to invade Cuba in 1962. Barack Obama fired another egocentric general for popping off to a journalist. You might argue that civilian deference to gold braid has been out of balance since Vietnam, but to examine that thought you would need a level of discernment and self-awareness impossible for most politicians today.

Afghanistan, with all its mistakes, missteps and misfortunate, cries out for the kind of sober and reasoned debate and review that we seem incapable of mustering.

It is not just Afghanistan, of course, but the failure of our too partisan, too trivial, too odious political class to deal with almost everything. Pick your issue: immigration, infrastructure, income inequality, domestic terrorism, climate, debt, health care – we’re treading water at best, floundering at worst.

And it really is our fault – individually and collectively. We send small people, with small minds and outsized opinions of themselves to do adult work.

“The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves…”

History often celebrates, too late, the naysayers who are prophets, the Barbara Lee’s and the Wayne Morse’s.

Morse, an Oregon senator, was an irascible, pedantic gadfly – a “sanctimonious bore” by one account – and also the kind of politician indispensable in a democracy. Morse early on saw where American involvement in southeast Asia would lead. He was one of two votes in the Senate against LBJ’s Tonkin Gulf resolution, and he also correctly diagnosed where American politics were headed.

“Having abandoned its responsibilities for the big things,” Morse said in 1964, “Congress falls back on making the most of the small things. Frustrated members who fear to question the Pentagon brass, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency, concentrate on the full exercise of more petty powers … having swallowed the camel, Congress strains at the gnats.”

American democracy is imperiled. We know it. Some of us welcome the chaos believing it benefits our tribe. But the fix, if there is one, is not more chaos, not more simple-minded, small-bore politicians focused on today’s soundbite rather than tomorrow’s substance. The fix is to commit to greater seriousness, more personal involvement in a civil and civic life, more engagement with the common good.

Wishing for it isn’t going to work. Electing better people might work, but time is short.

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Additional Reading:

Somethings you might find of interest…

The Constitutional Crisis is Here

The historian Robert Kagan authored the most talked about political essay of the season recently, arguing in the Washington Post that a second Donald Trump presidential candidacy is a near certainty, and also a huge threat to American democracy. It is sobering stuff.

Robert Kagan says we’re not done with him

“The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.

“But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.”

I’ve taken to thinking of myself as (I hope) informed, but a pessimist. This piece made me really nervous.

Why I’m A Single Issue Voter

I’ve long considered Mona Charen among the most orthodox of conservatives – a columnist of the Reagan/Bush ilk. In a recent piece she argued that she’s voting for the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia next month, because the only issue that matters right now is, well, truth.

“The Republican party, in Washington and nationally, has become a conspiracy of liars. As such, it threatens the stability of the republic. Even a seemingly inoffensive candidate like Glenn Youngkin has given aid and comfort to this sinister agenda by stressing ‘election integrity’ in his campaign. It doesn’t change a thing to reflect that he’s almost certainly insincere. He stopped talking about it after winning the primary, suggesting that all the “integrity” talk was just a sop to MAGA voters. Still, a victory for him will send a message that the Republican party is normal again, a party that good people can support.”

Charen’s tour of the current GOP is also pretty chilling.

Pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun Opposed Infrastructure Spending for a Reason.

A really interesting piece here from a historian of the Civil War era on slavery and infrastructure. Seriously.

Calhoun: He was for infrastructure before he was against it

“Calhoun is rarely thought of as a monetary theorist, but his comments on monetary architecture and government spending are surprisingly relevant. Though nearly two centuries old, they hold a lesson about the politics of austerity today, as Republicans oppose needed federal investment in green technology and infrastructure, climate change mitigation, pandemic preparedness, affordable housing, equitable broadband access, and low-cost, high-quality education from pre-K to college. To realize these goals, which are both popular and urgently necessary, federal, state, and local governments will have to deploy the full scope of their fiscal and monetary capacities. We who support those goals can expect Republicans (and corporate Democrats) to blow a lot of smoke in our eyes, generating word cloud after word cloud dominated by ‘deficits,’ ‘inflation,’ and ‘pay-fors.’ Calhoun can help clear the air. His ideas expose the conservative, hierarchical commitments that have always worked to thwart the promise of democratic governance.”

Worth your time.

Daniel Craig Will Now Take Your Questions

Sean Connery is still my ideal James Bond, but you have to admit Daniel Craig has filled the role of the Brit spy like few others. Something a bit lighter here, and pretty funny.

“At 53, Craig is cheerful and clever and friendly. He has bright blue eyes in a tanned and tired face. It is day five of six at the junket which may or may not decide the future of cinema, and he is about 36 hours off quitting Bond for ever. After 2015’s Spectre (most of which he filmed with a broken leg), Craig notoriously claimed he would rather slit his wrists than return to the role.”

From The Guardian, and some of the questions are great.

Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, Politics

This Is On Us …

Posted on by mjohnson

In his first book, published in 1898, the solider, politician, historian and future British prime minister Winston Churchill wrote about The Malakand Field Force, a military unit that fought native tribes in the wild region along the Indian-Afghanistan border. As junior cavalry officer in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, Churchill was a first-hand observer of the campaign.

With words that ring down through the years, Churchill, very definitely a proper English gentleman, wrote: “The difficult language, and peculiar characteristics of the tribesmen are the study of a lifetime.” To operate in this place, Churchill suggested, required mastery of the local conditions, the role played by the tribal power brokers in every village and region, and “the general history and traditions of the country.”

Winston Churchill about the time he wrote The Story of the Malakand Field Force

“Men are needed who understand the whole question,” Churchill wrote, “and all the details of the quarrel, between the natives and the Government, and who can in some measure appreciate both points of view. I do not believe that such are to be found in an army.”

Re-read that last sentence as you think about sorting through the debris of 20-years of American military intervention in Afghanistan. Then consider the words of John Sopko, the special inspector general at the Pentagon, who just released what can only be termed a scathing report on the American misadventure.

Among the inspector general’s conclusions: Not only did the United States – both militarily and diplomatically – lack a coherent strategy in Afghanistan – another way of saying we didn’t know what we were trying to accomplish – but the entire $145 billion effort was crippled by the lack of “a detailed understanding of the country’s social, economic, and political dynamics … U.S. officials [were] consistently operating in the dark, often because of the difficulty of collecting the necessary information.”

Nearly the same words Sir Winston penned at the end of the 19th Century.

The recriminations and blame assigning are in full flower, a typical if wholly ineffective Washington, D.C. reaction to a military and diplomatic failure. American politicians are terrific at hyperbole and denial, not so good at solutions.

Idaho’s Jim Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to cite just one example, helpfully noted this week: “We cannot treat [the Taliban] or its leaders as a legitimate government.” Risch went on to assign all the blame to the current occupant of the White House, who has lived there for eight months. “President Biden and his administration must answer for this disaster,” Risch said. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Taliban fighters in control of Kabul…and all of Afghanistan

But of course, Risch offered no real policy ideas. What would he do not to have it this way? When Risch chaired the Foreign Relations Committee for two years during the Trump Administration not once did he hold a public hearing on American policy in Afghanistan. He could have summoned any “expert” in the world to testify. He didn’t, and only one time did Risch succeed in getting the secretary of state before his committee, and that hearing was almost entirely devoted to the department’s budget and Mike Pompeo’s ethics, or lack thereof.

You’ll search in vain for any Risch concern about the Trump negotiated deal that released 5,000 Taliban fighters and effectively did recognize the Taliban as “a legitimate government.” In June, Risch was meeting in Washington with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, who it is now reported fled the country with bags filled with millions of U.S. dollars.

Risch said at the time, “there are options in-between departing Afghanistan entirely or remaining there forever.” Risch did not – and still has not – spelled out what he meant by that. One suspects because what he said sounds better in theory than in practice.

To be sure, Risch is not alone in embracing the attitude of “don’t do anything, fail to suggest any workable approach, but keep you options open to complain.” It’s the modus operandi for official Washington. Risch is a good example, however, if only because he is so blatantly obvious about playing the game.

Let’s stipulate at least two things: Joe Biden is the responsible party. He made the call and set the timeline, but he also inherited a colossal mess that has bedeviled four presidents, two from each party.

Second, the Americans who fought, were injured and died in Afghanistan deserve our respect, admiration and thanks, even as we must hold to account those who sent them and commanded them; those who lived for 20 years in a la la land of self-delusion.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has consistently offered some of the most important insights into our Afghan debacle. “The hard truth is that this failure is shared by a generation of military commanders and policymakers,” Ignatius wrote this week, “who let occasional tactical successes in a counterterrorism mission become a proxy for a strategy that never was. And it was subtly abetted by journalists who were scratching our heads wondering if it would work, but let the senior officials continue their magical thinking.”

In his narrative of “magical thinking,” Ignatius quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, the former Joint Chief’s chairman, during one particularly rough patch in the long history of rough patches in Afghanistan. “We need to tell our story,” Mullen tells a group of military and diplomatic officials during a video conference, to which Ignatius remarks: “With all due respect to Mullen: The problem isn’t with the story. It’s with the reality.”

Here are two big realities in the wake for the chaotic U.S. departure from Kabul:

Americans who say they venerate our military must quit asking those soldiers to do impossible things in our names, while we largely ignore the reality of their sacrifice and steadfastly refuse to focus on serious issues. Truth be told many Americans couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map. We autopiloted this catastrophe, handing it over to a bunch of petty partisans like the junior senator from Idaho and then fell back on our tribal divisions.

Next week it we’ll be on to something else because, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, we are unserious people governed by unserious politicians. By huge margins we originally embraced the effort in Afghanistan only to lose interest and then ignore things, at least until this week.

Unless we wise up, we’ll do it all again, and again. 

“But before we move on, before we head back to the mall,” Nichols wrote, “before we resume posting memes, and before we return to bickering with each other about whether we should have to mask up at Starbucks, let us remember that this day came about for one reason, and one reason only. Because it is what we wanted.”

Next time you’re tempted to thank a veteran for his or her service, ask yourself whether you’ve exercised your responsibilities as well as they have.

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Additional Reading:

Searching high and low on the World Wide Web to bring you a few good reads…

Blame the Army, Not Biden

Kevin Drum with a provocative take.

“For partisan reasons, Republicans will blame Biden. Even some Democrats and policy experts will do the same. But it just isn’t so. Nobody wants to say this out loud, but the real blame lies with the US military.”

Short and to the point. Read it all here.

The Civil Rights Leader Who Thinks America Is “In Many Ways Worse Off Than It Was Then”

Andrew Young with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jonathan Alter talks to Andrew Young, a conversation from the Washington Monthly.

“People have every reason to be deeply concerned. This country is in many ways worse off than it was then. We don’t have a strategy for combating voter subversion. We have to depend on Congress or the Supreme Court and both are long shots now, though I haven’t given up on the Supreme Court.”

Andy Young on our present moment.

Bill Murray is Playing Golf in Ireland

I am a passionate follower of all things Irish – football, whiskey, politics. I love The Irish Times, which had this story this week about the actor Bill Murray swinging his way through the Olde Sod.

“The wires are alive with the news that Bill Murray is in Ireland to play golf. He will hack his way through courses such as Druids Glen, Rosapenna and Ballybunion for a YouTube series called The Links Life.”

Here is the link:

Nanci Griffith

The folk and country music singer/songwriter died recently at age 68 – too, too young – and what a charming, talented artist.

Nanci Griffith, 1953-2021

I’ve been playing her songs over and over this week. Including one of the classics.

“Love at the Five and Dime.”

Rita was sixteen years
Hazel eyes and chestnut hair
She made the Woolworth counter shine

And Eddie was a sweet romancer
And a darn good dancer
And they waltzed the aisles of the five and dime

Here’s a video of Nanci singing that fabulous song.

Be well, friends. Write when you get work…all the best.

Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Johnson, Obama, Vietnam

We Never Learn …

Posted on by mjohnson

Unless you served or protested, the ignominious end of America’s tragic experience in Vietnam, a war driven by myth, hubris, political calculation and ignorance, is at best a distant memory for most of us. It’s no memory at all for Americans born after 1975, even if our history books remind us that more than 58,000 of our fellow citizens paid the ultimate price for a mistake.

America’s role in Vietnam directly bedeviled and haunted five presidents, ultimately driving two – Johnson and Nixon – from office. Every president since, whether they admit it or not, lives with the Vietnam legacy.

Lyndon Johnson was a political product of a vast, injurious and phony debate over “who lost Red China” to Communism in the 1950’s. When Johnson reached the Oval Office in 1963, he was determined not to be judged as having “lost Vietnam.”

Johnson won a landslide election in 1964 against a candidate – Barry Goldwater – who spoke casually of using nuclear weapons to win a jungle war in Southeast Asia. After that election, Johnson began the long and tragic slog to make a Vietnamese war, that had once been a French war, into an American war.

Lyndon Johnson’s presidency – and legacy – were and are haunted by the American war in Vietnam

The complicated, crass, brilliant Texan oozed cornpone, but he lived and breathed what he called “that bitch of a war,” a years-long struggle that derailed his Great Society and has permanently defined his legacy.

The great economist John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked that a friend told him had it not been for Vietnam, Johnson would be considered a great president. Galbraith replied: “If it weren’t for the Alps, Switzerland would be a flat country.” That war sticks to LBJ like Texas barbecue sauce sticks to a napkin.

Most Americans would say that Nixon was forced from the White House by the crimes of Watergate, which, of course, is correct. But those Watergate crimes had roots in Nixon’s reaction to the Pentagon Papers, an exhaustive account of the American involvement in Vietnam that was leaked to the New York Times in 1971. The papers were a damning indictment of the mendacity, political maneuvering and American delusion that led Dwight Eisenhower, then John Kennedy and finally Johnson to burrow ever deeper into a futile “land war in Asia.”

Had Nixon been as smart a political operative as he thought himself to be he would have used the evidence contained in the leaked Pentagon Papers to discredit the two previous Democratic administrations. The papers were not critical of him, after all. He had inherited the mess. But Nixon was Nixon.

As a brilliant new podcast – “Nixon at War” explains, “Nixon’s long festering paranoia and indignation zeroe(d) in on two of his most despised ‘enemies’ – the press, for publishing the government’s closely held secrets, and the leakers within his own deep state, now personified by Daniel Ellsberg, for the growing threat he believes they pose to his own buried secrets.”

Nixon ordered his political spies to break into Ellsberg’s – the leaker – psychiatrist office in search of dirt. Viola! The seeds of the Watergate break in are planted, the fate of Nixon cast. Were it not for the break ins … well, you know.

Wise voices warning of American folly in Vietnam were everywhere to be found in the 1950’s and 1960’s. During the Eisenhower Administration, Montana Senator Mike Mansfield foresaw that only the Vietnamese could create a stable, democratic government, and they certainly couldn’t accomplish that if millions of Vietnamese thought the United States was merely a colonial substitute for the French, who retreated after their own dismal Vietnam failure.

Others like Idaho’s Frank Church, Oregon’s Mark Hatfield and South Dakota’s George McGovern saw clearly where American hubris was headed. The diplomat George Kennan testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966 – back when the committee actually had serious hearings about American foreign policy – and declared that the United States was deluded if it thought it had legitimate national security interests in Vietnam. We should get out, Kennan said.

Vermont Republican Senator George Aiken, a flinty New Englander not given to mincing words, had a blunt suggestion: declare victory and leave. We didn’t, until it was too late.

Now, a generation and more on, we have a new reckoning with the curious American belief that our arms and money and good intentions can shape a country far away for a people who have very different ideas. Our longest war – another American war of hubris – is winding down in Afghanistan, and if history is not precisely repeating it is certainly rhyming.

Helicopters carrying U.S. Army soldiers from the 1-320 Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, take off from Combat Outpost Terra Nova as the soldiers head home following a 10-month deployment in the Arghandab Valley north of Kandahar April 23, 2011. REUTERS/Bob Strong

As the Washington Post reported this week on a new secret account of the Afghan War. Ironically the Post kept printing the Pentagon Papers when the Times was enjoined from doing so, further fueling Nixon’s paranoia. The document reeks of the same stench of fabrication and dishonesty that marks the American experience in Vietnam.

Among the revelations are details of a heretofore unknown suicide bomber attack, aimed at then vice-president Dick Cheney. The Pentagon and Bush Administration flat out lied about the attack, and “how close the insurgents had come to harming Cheney.” In the wake of this lying came more lying, and “the U.S. military sank deeper into a pattern of deceiving the public about many facets of the war, from discrete events to the big picture. What began as selective, self-serving disclosures after the 2001 invasion gradually hardened into willful distortions and, eventually, flat-out fabrications.”

The Afghan Papers will be published in book form soon. The Post said in a preview: “The interviews and documents, many of them previously unpublished, show how the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump hid the truth for two decades: They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Instead, political and military leaders chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift, culminating in President Biden’s decision this year to withdraw from Afghanistan, with the Taliban more powerful than at any point since the 2001 invasion.”

To Joe Biden’s credit, he made the tough call to finally end a war that America should not have fought and could not win.

Now, there will be an awful reckoning on the ground in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. The murderous Taliban will control most of the country, thousands of lives, many of them American, and billions in American treasure will have been squandered. It was all inevitable.

We think we can bomb and purchase our way to democracy in a country that has never had democracy and may not be capable of creating it. We try again and again to re-create the world we want only to fail.

You might think we’d learn. But we never do.

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Additional Reading:

Some additional items you may find of interest…

How The Pandemic Now Ends

A must read from The Atlantic’s Ed Yong.

“In simple terms, many people who caught the original virus didn’t pass it to anyone, but most people who catch Delta create clusters of infection. That partly explains why cases have risen so explosively. It also means that the virus will almost certainly be a permanent part of our lives, even as vaccines blunt its ability to cause death and severe disease.”

Yong won great recognition for his reporting on the pandemic. This piece is well worth your time.

And here is related piece by Scott Galloway that I found very interesting.

How a Trail in Rural Oregon Became a Target for Far Right Extremists

Another great piece of reporting from Leah Sottile in High Country News about how a trail has divided an Oregon community.

“In a state where politics is dominated by the urban-rural divide, it’s as if the proposed Yamhill County trail is the actual place — the exact line — where that divide begins.”

Read the entire piece:

Press Secretary Jen Psaki is Good At Mending Fences. Just Don’t Call Her Nice

The best political job I ever had was the five years I spent as press secretary to candidate and then Idaho Governor Cecil D. Andrus. The job, at least with the right boss, puts one daily in the midst of big events. You deal with interesting people – reporters, too. (Inside joke.) You travel with the politician. You may even have a chance to influence policy.

I’ve made an informal study of people who have been or are press secretaries. I’m convinced that Jan Psaki, the current White House press secretary, is one of the very best to ever hold the position.

White House press secretary Jan Psaki

“When Psaki first appeared in the press briefing room, in January 2021, there was a collective swoon from roughly half the country. This was largely due to what she was not doing: berating the assembled reporters, griping about CNN’s coverage of a presidential tweet, or spouting flagrant, easily disprovable lies. Like her boss, Psaki was being graded on a curve. The New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb tweeted, ‘I really should not be impressed with a calm, professional, and factual press briefing, but I am where I am.'”

Here’s the link to the piece in Vogue:

Brett Kavanaugh Without Tears

Journalist Jackie Calmes has a new book that revisits the story of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. You might have thought you knew everything there was to know about him – of perhaps everything you wanted to know.

I found this excerpt both fascinating and infuriating.

“Kavanaugh emerged from Yale Law School, two appellate clerkships, an internship with the Solicitor General, and a third clerkship at the Supreme Court as a deeply conservative but not especially partisan young man. That changed after the Solicitor General Kavanaugh worked for, Ken Starr, was appointed independent counsel to investigate the Clintons and an Arkansas real estate investment called Whitewater. In 1994, Starr invited Kavanaugh to join him for what he promised would be a short gig. It lasted nearly four years.”

From The Washington Monthly:

Giants? World Series, Anyone?

I sure hope this doesn’t jinks my favorite baseball team, but...Dieter Kurtenbach writes in the San Jose Mercury News what I’ve been thinking, but can’t bring myself to say out loud.

Buster Posey, the catcher, is the heart of a pretty amazing team

I kind of checked out of following the great game last summer, but this San Francisco Giants team has been something else.

“Now, I wish I knew exactly what it was that makes the Giants a true contender,” Kurtenbach wrote this week. “Call it gumption, togetherness, a never-say-never-ness — there’s something special about this team.”

Let’s end with a good news story.

Thanks, as always, for following along. Stay well.

2020 Election, Foreign Policy, Trump

Our National Humiliation…

Posted on by mjohnson

During a week when coronavirus deaths in the United States topped 120,000 and the president of the United States admitted he was trying to slow testing for the virus – more testing means more cases, after all – it might be difficult to fully process that we are also living through a unprecedented time of upheaval in American foreign policy. 

Whether you love him or hate him, Donald Trump has remade American standing in the world with consequences hard measure, but with impact long lasting. Trump’s upheaval has led to dangerous decline.

“Donald Trump has taken America out of key multilateral agreements, crossed swords with allies and pulled the U.S. from a leading role in geopolitical hot spots,” Bloomberg noted this week in an article about how Russian president Vladimir Putin was celebrating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II with a big parade in Moscow. Since Trump’s election in 2016, Putin has expanding his influence, while angling to stay in office much longer. 

The great American decline: Trump at the G-7 summit in 2019

The Trump led retreat from world leadership has, Bloomberg reported, “opened the way for Putin to build influence in Russia’s western flank, the Middle East and Africa, and to tighten an alliance with China. The planes flying in formation … over Moscow are a reminder that others will be eager to fill the gap if the U.S. withdraws further.”

One can deny the existence of Russian election help to Trump in 2016, but it’s impossible to deny the success of Putin’s repositioning at the expense of the United States and out closest, post-World War II European allies. 

Putin is certainly the largest beneficiary of Trump’s reported decision to remove nearly a third of U.S. troops based in Germany, a key NATO ally, a decision the BBC reported that was meet with widespread dismay in Europe, in part because there was no consultation or even warning. Many German officials believe the decision was prompted when chancellor Angela Merkel cancelled her visit to the U.S. because of the pandemic. In other words, the decision had less to do with a coherent national policy than the president’s personal pique. 

The administration’s Asia policy is in tatters with North and South Korea relations on a hair trigger. Trump tariffs on Chinese imports have cost American consumers (and farmers) billions and left the president begging Chinese president Xi Jinping, according to fired national security advisor John Bolton account, to help him win re-election by buying more U.S. goods. 

Bolton’s hefty book, its publication resisted to the very end by Trump, actually matters to our understanding of the feckless, chaotic Trump foreign policy. As conservative columnist Steve Hays argues only the most cultish Trump defender could dismiss a first-hand account “written by a longtime Republican and stalwart conservative—whose mustachioed face has appeared on Fox News more often than just about anyone other than the anchors.”

Pals: Donald and Vladimir

The power of Bolton’s book rests, Hays says, “less in attention-grabbing disclosure than in the relentless, almost mundane stupidity and recklessness of it all.” 

Or as David Ignatius, a long-time observer of American foreign policy, notes: “Among the most startling disclosures in [Bolton’s book] is his account of President Trump’s dealings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkey story — featuring the American president assuring Erdogan he would ‘take care of things’ in an ongoing federal criminal investigation — may be the clearest, most continuous narrative of misconduct by Trump that has yet surfaced.”

Ignatius says, “It’s a tale that connects some of Trump’s closest advisers: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.” 

Former John McCain advisor Steve Schmidt says of all this that Trump, “has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.”

Trump is not alone, of course, in creating our unparalleled national humiliation. He had plenty of help, most notably in the foreign policy field from the junior senator from Idaho James E. Risch, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Enabling Trump, encouraging his worst instincts and behavior and assisting his destruction of American standing have been the raison d’être of Risch’s otherwise vacuous Senate career. 

When Trump’s first secretary of state Rex Tillerson was fired sometime after calling the president “a moron,” Risch said nothing, made no inquiry, expressed no concern. The same pattern unfolded when retired Marine general James Mattis quit in dispute with Trump over Syrian policy. When Bolton was fired Risch let it pass. He’s said nothing about Bolton’s disclosures. Following the Trump playbook, Risch regularly bashes China, but like the president has no policy ideas to deal with the Chinese military and economic threat. 

Risch has not pursued the case of brutally murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi but has effectively stonewalled efforts to hold the Saudi crown prince to account for the crime. When the State Department’s inspector general was fired recently for reportedly investigating why the administration sidestepped Congress to sell more arms to the corrupt kingdom, Risch said nothing and then helped the secretary of state evade an appearance before this committee.  

Murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi

Risch has gone down the line with Trump is dismissing Russian malevolence, while ignoring the clear effort by the president to coerce the Ukrainian president into a phony investigation of Joe Biden. And when six Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee recently complained to Trump that his draw down of U.S. troops in Germany would “place U.S. national security at risk,” helping only Putin, Risch was silent.

“We live with the idea that the U.S. has an ability to rebound that is almost unlimited,” Michael Duclos, a top European foreign policy official, told The Atlantic’s Tom McTague recently. “For the first time, I’m starting to have some doubts.” For good reason.

As Jim Risch mounts a low-key campaign for re-election, he’s counting that his weakness, his failure to use his position to stem American decline, won’t matter in the deluge of division and misdirection that will increasingly mark all Republican campaigns. Faced with an opponent who so far has been unable – or unwilling – to highlight the senator’s servile deference to Trump’s plundering of America’s standing, Risch will likely continue a 50-yearlong political career distinguished only by its overwhelming partisanship.

History will not be so forgiving. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Bolton and the GOP

Michael Cohen writes in the Boston Globe: “I have little doubt that most every member of the GOP caucus, as well as Trump’s Cabinet, knows that Bolton’s account is spot-on, but the price for being a card-carrying member of the modern Republican Party is to regularly refuse to see what is in front of one’s nose. All of this makes the Bolton story more than your garden variety tale of grifters grifting. It’s the perfect parable for Trump’s malevolent presidency and the cabal of corrupted enablers too weak, too greedy, and too feckless to stop it.”

The Painful Reckoning 

Many stories this week about the faltering Trump campaign – I know it’s just June – and many, including this piece by Tim Miller, see the campaign’s recent Tulsa rally as a metaphor. Or as Vice President Mike Pence said – they’re going to make America great again, again.

The underwhelming Tulsa rally

Here’s Miller: “Donald Trump doesn’t know how to manage a global pandemic. He doesn’t understand how said crisis intersects with our economic decline or what to do about it. He is fundamentally incapable of being a uniter or a salve for a country that is raw with pain over police violence and racial tensions. And he doesn’t know what to do about the fact that Joe Biden is schlonging him in the polls.” Read the whole thing.

EU Considers U.S. Travel Ban

As the European Union considers keeping American’s out because of the uncontrolled spread of the virus, novelist Francine Prose asks how did we become a pariah nation?

“Unlike the US states that rushed to reopen too soon, that so clearly prioritized economic recovery over human life, the EU countries are saying they’d rather take the financial hit than see more of their citizens die.”

Gore Vidal

I’ve been reading a collection of essays by the late novelist Gore Vidal who, say what you will about his politics (or whatever), was a truly brilliant writer. Here’s a link to his still controversial post 9-11 essay – “The End of Liberty” – that was commissioned for Vanity Fair, but rejected.

Gore Vidal

And if you want to recall what Vidal was like on television you might find this amazing appearance on Dick Cavett’s show in 1971 interesting – or appalling. Cavett’s other guests were Norman Mailer and Janet Flanner, the great New Yorker writer.

Mailer refused to shake hands with Vidal and, well, it kind of went downhill from there. Watch it here.

And thanks for reading.

2020 Election, Foreign Policy, Trump

America’s Retreat…

Posted on by mjohnson

The United States, the acknowledged world leader in the post-World War II era, is in retreat and decline. Among America’s closest international friends the deterioration of our country’s standing is simply astounding. In a recent survey of our once closest European allies only 28% of the residents of the United Kingdom said the U.S. would act responsibly in the world. In France, 3% – you read that correctly – think the U.S. is best positioned to confront global challenges. 

That this disastrous retreat has taken place under a Republican administration and with a GOP-controlled Senate is a stark reminder of how far Donald Trump’s Republican Party has retreated from the place Ronald Reagan once proclaimed the “shining city on a hill.” 

A portion of Ronald Reagan’s farewell speech in January 1989 as printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The number two Senate Republican, John Thune of South Dakota, actually said the quiet part out loud this week, admitting that Trump not only owns the GOP soul, but apparently more importantly has also squeezed the last ounce of independence from his frightened lackeys. “I just think that everybody realizes that our fortunes sort of rise or fall together,” Thune said as he placed a priority on re-election at the expense of absolutely everything else. 

As capable as the president has been of destroying U.S. credibility and puncturing the myth of American exceptionalism, he didn’t get us here all by himself. He had a lot of help from this feckless, rudderless, incompetent collection of Republican senators and members of Congress. And no one wears the feckless label more notably than Idaho’s Jim Risch, who, in title only, sits atop the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

A comprehensive listing of Trumpian ineptitude in the foreign policy arena, combined with the willful rejection of critical allies and international institutions, would fill a library shelf, so consider just the most recent examples of America trashing itself with Republican approval. 

Anyone with a sense of how political leadership works would have known that a crisis like a global pandemic would lay bare Trump’s unfitness. “Trump’s handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First,” says William Burns, a 33-year career foreign policy professional who now heads the Carnegie Endowment. “America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America’s influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.”

Risch was Tweeting on January 24, “Today I was briefed by leading global health experts about the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China. We learned that the risk of transmission within the U.S. is low at present. I will continue to work closely with U.S. officials to ensure Americans are protected.” But what has he actually done? 

Well, he’s embraced the White House blame China message, while totally ignoring the epicenter of the crisis – the White House. Even that begs the question of just what is Risch’s China strategy? Trump’s only approach, beyond unbroken fidelity to China’s dictatorial leader, involves tariffs that have crippled trade, while forcing U.S. taxpayers to bail out American farmers.

And what of the World Health Organization (WHO)? If the WHO needs reform, is the best strategy to eliminate U.S. funding in the middle of the pandemic? Again, the Idaho senator has no strategy and nothing to say. 

Meanwhile, under cover of COVID-19 confusion, Trump has fired the inspector general at the State Department, Steve Linick, an issue that had the Foreign Relations Committee a real chairman, would be front and center on the committee’s agenda. Risch has said nothing and will do nothing even in the face of published reports that the firing is linked to a number of questionable actions, including an investigation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to circumvent Congress and make a controversial $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. (I asked Risch’s office for a comment on the IG firing and received no response.) 

Trump’s cashiering of Linick marks the fourth such dismissal in three months and is an obvious effort to eliminate any visage of independent oversight of Trump and his administration’s conduct. The only Republican to immediately express concern about this blatant authoritarianism was Utah’s Mitt Romney who called Trump’s action “a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.” Risch, meanwhile, is silent. 

Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

It is telling that in his year and a half as Foreign Relations chairman, Pompeo has not once appeared before Risch’s committee to answer questions about China, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea, deteriorating relations with NATO countries, or anything. With dereliction of his Senate duties – never more on display than the recent IG firing – Risch is abetting Trump’s efforts, as Aaron Blake wrote recently in the Washington Post, to “undermine independent oversight of his administration.” 

For good measure this week, Risch, acting as ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, voted to advance the nomination of Texas congressman John Ratcliffe to be director of national intelligence. Ratcliffe is a dedicated Trump toady widely described as the least qualified person ever nominated for such a position. Ratcliffe, with Risch’s help, will complete the politicization of the nation’s intelligence agencies.  

To be sure hypocrisy is part of this story, as well. Risch never tempered his criticism when a Democrat occupied the White House and his partisan disdain was regularly on display during the Obama Administration. “This is a foreign policy that is in shambles,” Risch said in 2012. “In the Middle East, it is a foreign policy of apology, it is a foreign policy of appeasement, it is a foreign policy of dithering and looking the other way. This cannot go on.” Yet, when it comes to Trump, Risch doesn’t critique, analyze or even discuss, he accepts – everything. 

Who benefits from Risch’s behavior and Trump’s foreign policy incoherence and incompetence? China, of course, (and Putin’s Russia) whose aim is to diminish American influence and weaken historic alliances, while discrediting democracy.

Michael Fullilove, a decidedly pro-American scholar who heads the Lowy Institute, Australia’s largest think tank, described it succinctly: “We increasingly feel caught between a reckless China and a feckless America that no longer seems to care about its allies.”

Meanwhile, Jim Risch is on track to be remembered as the worst chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the post-war period. He has certainly earned the distinction. 

—–0—–

Additional reading:

Can these awful times make us better? 

I really admire the work of Rebecca Solnit who writes eloquently and profoundly about many things. In her recent piece for The Guardian she reflects on all the small, but incredibly important acts of kindness by ordinary people right now. She says: “I sometimes think that capitalism is a catastrophe constantly being mitigated and cleaned up by mutual aid and kinship networks, by the generosity of religious and secular organizations, by the toil of human-rights lawyers and climate groups, and by the kindness of strangers. Imagine if these forces, this spirit, weren’t just the cleanup crew, but were the ones setting the agenda.” 

What it’s like to be a Democrat in Montana?

With no official sanction, I like to think of myself as an honorary Montanan. I’ve never lived there, but I feel about the state like John Steinbeck who wrote in Travels with Charley: “I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love, and it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.” Yup. From the fishing to the political history to Glacier Park, I love the place. Now, read this from a real Montanan, Sarah Vowell, who gets the state pretty well. 

What it was like to have lunch with Noel Coward?

Dorothy Parker was a great wit and a great writer. Among her many quotable quotes: “That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.” Parker was also a charter member of the Algonquin Roundtable and they surely had a good time. 

The Algonquin Roundtable…

And finally, was Donald Trump a good baseball player? 

“I was supposed to be a pro baseball player,” Donald Trump wrote in 2004. “At the New York Military Academy, I was captain of the baseball team. I worked hard like everyone else, but I had good talent.” Er, well, turns out like so much else he says that isn’t really true. 

Thanks for reading…

Congress, Foreign Policy, Iran, Russia

The Risch Doctrine

Posted on by mjohnson

In 1965 when Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright publicly expressed the private concerns he had long harbored about growing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson blew his top.

LBJ had known for some time that the influential chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee had profound misgivings about the president’s policy, systematically shifting the burden of waging a Vietnamese civil war from the South Vietnamese army to American soldiers. Fulbright had been privately pressing his view on Johnson to little effect, so he went public.

Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright and President Lyndon Johnson

Johnson, who could be almost as mean in private as President Donald Trump is in public, complained to an aide that Fulbright “is a cry baby — and I can’t continue to kiss him every morning before breakfast.” The public criticism by a Democratic senator of a Democratic president effectively ended Johnson’s relationship with Fulbright.

But, occasionally history has an interesting way of rewarding political dissent. Today Fulbright is remembered as among the earliest and most prescient voices in opposition to the American tragedy in Southeast Asia. Johnson’s presidency was destroyed over the war and the 58,000 Americans and the millions of Vietnamese who died will forever define his legacy.

The Johnson-Fulbright history is worth recalling in the context of how virtually every other senator who has chaired the Foreign Relations Committee in modern times viewed that role in relation to the White House. The words that define that relationship would be “independent” and “equal.”

By contrast, a year into his tenure as chairman of the committee, the approach of Idaho’s James Risch stands out like a skunk at a garden party. Risch contends his approach — maintaining access to Trump, but never publicly taking issue with anything — is working because as he put it during a recent interview with Boise’s KTVB, “I think it’s good for Idaho and it’s good for me.”

The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee is among the most consistent endorsers of Trump foreign policy

But the evidence in plain view tells an entirely different story. If Risch really enjoys the vaunted influence at the White House he claims — “I have some influence on what happens in the White House,” he told KTVB — it’s difficult to see how that influence is impacting American foreign policy in any positive manner.

Trump’s decision to kill Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a demonstrably evil influence in the Middle East, was immediately endorsed by Risch who parroted the shockingly thin administration assertions that Trump acted on information indicating the Iranians were planning imminent attacks on Americans.

“His death presents an opportunity for Iraq to determine its own future free from Iranian control,” Risch said just hours before the Iraqi parliament voiced support for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, a decision, should it happen, that would turn Risch’s assertion on its head. Rather than diminish Iranian influence the administration has enhanced Iranian influence.

Meanwhile, while endorsing the “we must act” mantra of the administration, Risch has squandered a chance to help craft something approaching a coherent policy to replace Trump’s ignorant, impulsive and frightfully dangerous policy of threat by tweet. Additionally, Risch has yet to answer why the attack on Soleimani, an option open to previous presidents but rejected by them, happened when it did.

As Bloomberg News put it: “If Soleimani presented an imminent threat, why was Trump given several retaliatory options that didn’t include Soleimani? If there was an imminent threat, how would killing the top general end that threat? And if Team Trump has lied about everything, why wouldn’t they lie now?”

The administration’s justification for the attack has shifted with the news cycle and you can bet Risch will stay the course with Trump, no matter how scattered and incoherent the ration-ale becomes. Yet, the bigger question is simply: What now?

An independent chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee would have moved immediately to conduct hearings, sought the advice of experts on the region and attempted to shape what happens next. But Risch knows that any real effort to grapple with the reality of what Trump hath wrought would involve stinging bipartisan criticism of Trump’s haphazard, dangerous “make it up as you go” foreign policy.

Trump, a thin-skinned, pseudo tough guy, would interpret any critique as disloyalty and almost certainly would lash back. So complete is the president’s hold on people like Risch that the senator dares not utter an even remotely critical comment, even when the stakes amount to war and peace.

The funeral of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Teheran

Risch admitted as much in the Boise interview. “Look, I don’t go out and criticize him publicly,” he said, claiming “spirited conversation” takes place in private, where he’s able to exercise influence. Yet, consider the facts behind Risch’s assertion.

On Risch’s watch, the efforts at detente with a North Korean dictator who sent Trump “beautiful letters” continues to unravel. Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw U.S forces from Syria has strengthened Russia in the region and enhanced Turkey’s reach. Both countries, by the way, are close to Iran. Iran has resumed its nuclear weapons program after Trump’s Risch-endorsed decision to abandon an international agreement to contain such an effort. NATO is weaker than it has been at almost any time in the post-World War II period. And the post-Soleimani turmoil seems almost certain to give ISIS a new lease on life.

If Risch truly has exercised positive influence behind the scenes, it’s far from evident. In fact, the opposite seems more probable in that whatever influence he has is lost on Trump, a reality Risch came near to admitting in that recent interview. “He is different,” Risch said of Trump, “his decision-making is different.”

No kidding, which is why a person holding the premier position in Congress related to foreign policy must be more than a partisan determined to hold his tongue to maintain dubious “influence.” Risch’s servility enables, even encourages the reckless Trump activities we’ve seen in the first days of 2020.

“What is the point of having a Congress if it has no say about a new American war?” The Atlantic’s George Packer asked recently. Good question. And why have a Foreign Relations Committee chairman if he’s not willing to publicly engage the president?

Risch actually had an answer for that during his KTVB interview. “When I’ve (privately) disagreed with (Trump) he has never, ever treated me with anything but the greatest respect. Now, I’m sure that would change dramatically if I went out on TV and tried to take it on like that. But, but, you have to deal with it as it is.”

By choosing to follow, not lead, the senator has made a historic, career-defining blunder. The mistake has never been more obvious than it was this week.

—–0—–

2020 Election, Foreign Policy, Idaho Politics, Trump

Leadership Failure

Posted on by mjohnson

The shambolic, incoherent, incompetent, lie-infested and often just plain crazy foreign policy of Donald Trump was on full display in recent days, while what passes for the TOP (Trump Old Party) foreign policy establishment, including Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, was on August vacation.

In the space of a few days: 

Trump threw a hissy fit when the Danish prime minister rebuffed his scheme to “buy” Greenland and Trump responded by cancelling a state visit. 

Trump wanted to buy Greenland, the Danish prime minister said that was “absurd” and he got mad.

The chaos of the president’s Iranian policy was on full view at the G-7 summit in France where Trump’s decision to pull out of the agreement to control Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with no realistic alternative in place, has become a signature foreign policy failure.  

Trump claimed, with no evidence that talks with China to end an escalating trade war were back on. They were not. Nor had the U.S. made a trade deal with Japan, as Trump claimed. 

And, of course, Vladimir Putin’s best friend, the president of the United States, was doing PR work for the Russian thug with our G-7 allies, while dishonoring years of bipartisan and international condemnation of the former KGB officer. 

Oh, yes, after three Trump photo ops with Kim Jong Un, events that gave the North Korea dictator precisely the legitimacy he craves, that murderous thug is still firing off missiles in violation of United Nation’s sanctions. 

A president who disses our allies and coddles the world’s dictators

“The First Lady has gotten to know Kim Jong Un, and I think she’d agree with me—he is a man with a country that has tremendous potential,” Trump told reporters at the G-7. 

But as journalist Robin Wright pointed out, “Melania Trump has never met Kim.” The White House later issued a “clarification.” Stephanie Grisham, the latest dissembler in the White House press office, said that Trump “confides in his wife on many issues including the detailed elements of his strong relationship with Chairman Kim—and while the First Lady hasn’t met him, the President feels like she’s gotten to know him too” Right. 

It’s difficult to pick the most serious of Trump’s fables from among his smorgasbord of foreign policy lies, half-truths and bouts of wishful thinking, but the continuing championing of Putin has to be among the most worrisome. 

In arguing to readmit Russia to the group of seven, which include the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, Trump offered a twisted rationale that was head spinning in its nonsense. Remember that Russia was expelled from the group after Putin’s unlawful and forced “annexation” of Crimea in March 2014. That move marked the first time since the end of World War II that national boundaries in Europe were altered by force. It was, and remains, a very big deal. 

Yet, Trump said, “[Crimea] was sort of taken away from President Obama. Not taken away from President Trump, taken away from President Obama … President Obama was not happy that this happened because it was embarrassing to him. Right. It was very embarrassing to him and he wanted Russia to be out of the, what was called the G8, and that was his determination. He was outsmarted by Putin. He was outsmarted. President Putin outsmarted President Obama.” 

No, Putin did not “outsmart” Obama. Putin invaded a territory that was once part of the old Soviet Union because he wants to put the old union back together. It’s why he’s constantly meddling in Ukraine. His action was a blatant, aggressive violation of international law and the world’s major democracies sanctioned him and kicked him out of the G-7. 

“Trump is the one working to undo those punishments,” Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine, “allowing Putin to reap the rewards of the invasion at no cost, and possibly to grab more territory if he desires. It is a completely Orwellian spectacle: the president trying to reward Russia’s attack is blaming the president who punished the attack for the invasion itself.” 

And this from conservative writer Andrew Egger: “The fact that Trump is more comfortable savaging other U.S. politicians than our actual adversaries isn’t exactly surprising by now, yet the brazenness of it is still sufficient to shock.”

Which brings us to Risch, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who recently announced his re-election campaign and promptly received Trump’s full-throated endorsement “Senator Jim Risch of the Great State of Idaho has been an incredible supporter of our Agenda!,” Trump Tweeted. It was pay back for Risch’s blind adherence to a foreign policy, as former Defense Secretary James Mattis said recently that “puts us at increasing risk in the world.”

Jim Risch of Idaho, the completely self-assured and totally ineffectual chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In the state’s history only a handful of Idahoans have been given – or earned – a place of national leadership. I think of Republican Sen. James A. McClure, who led the Senate Energy Committee in the early 1980s with considerable distinction, while also serving in a Senate leadership position. Cecil Andrus’s tenure as Secretary of the Interior ranks among the very best in history. William Borah and Frank Church both chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and distinguished themselves by, among other acts, calling various presidents over foreign policy blunders. 

Risch has now reached the pinnacle of a lifetime in public office – he’s a case study of a career politician – but he’s apparently willing to squander any influence he might have over foreign policy to remain “an incredible supporter” of Trump’s agenda. 

Does that mean Risch endorses Putin’s return to the G-7? Does he really believe the efforts to control Iran or North Korean nuclear weapons are in good hands with this president? Does he think it appropriate that the next G-7 summit should be held at Trump’s struggling Florida golf resort, a multi-million dollar scheme to put money in the president’s own pocket? 

We don’t know the answer to these and a dozen other questions because the senator rarely – if ever – comments on anything having to do with Trump’s foreign policy. No statements. No hearings. No leadership. And there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that Risch’s strategy of whispering in Trump’s ear, as he claims to do on a regular basis, has had any effect on either his behavior or his policy. 

It’s not his job, Risch infamously said, the call out the president’s lies.

Risch has arrived at his moment of power and prestige, but he’s opted for partisan politics – and his own re-election – over the national interest. If there were any justice in politics it should cost him his job. 

Foreign Policy, Trump

New World Order…

Posted on by mjohnson

This piece originally appeared in the Lewiston, Idaho Tribune

———–

Sometimes, what appears to be a minor change in political direction turns out to be a historic turning point.

Did most Americans in 1933 realize that the slew of legislation that flew through Congress in the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency would shape the American political environment for decades? The New Deal was a marketing slogan, but the legislation behind the words continues to define the Democratic Party. 

Did most Americans know that an obscure Supreme Court decision in January 1976 involving little understood aspects of campaign finance law – Buckley v. Valeo– would become the triggering event that transformed American politics, leading eventually to “dark money” and vast amounts of unregulated cash perverting democracy? 

Political change rarely comes quickly or decisively, but most often plays out over time in fits and starts. The Age of Trump may be an exception to that rule. 

Will historians look back on Trump’s tenure as a blip or a head spinning turning point? In one area – foreign policy – I’d bet on chaotic turning point. And Idahoans have, if they choose to pay attention, a front row seat to this turning point with their junior senator now chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Yet, Jim Risch seems wholly content to get along and go along with the chaos in American foreign policy rather than make even a feeble effort to shape the direction. 

Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall challenging the Soviet leadership

As proof that we have arrived at a historic point rather than a one-off deviation from norm, consider the fact that the party of “tear down this wall,” Ronald Reagan’s famous challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, has transformed itself into a party that not only tolerates, but meekly acquiesces to the former KGB operative who seeks to re-establish the Russian empire. And a Republican president willingly helps him. 

Beyond the stunning and unequivocal conclusions of the Mueller report regarding Russian election interference, including the widespread distribution of disinformation designed to sow discord and help elect Trump, there is other growing evidence of Vladimir Putin’s “grand strategy” to reassert Russian influence in a host of ways. 

A new analysis prepared for the U.S. military reads like something Reagan would have reacted to: “Contrary to conventional analysis, after two decades under Vladimir Putin, Russia represents an ideological challenge to the West, not just a political and military rivalry. Although NATO continues to possess impressive overmatch against Moscow, that edge is dwindling, and Western vulnerabilities in certain military areas are alarming. Moreover, the unwillingness of Western experts and governments to confront the ideological — as well as political and military — aspects of our rivalry with Putinism means that the threat of significant armed conflict is rising.”

The key phrase there is “the unwillingness . . . to confront.”

Donald Trump this week verbally assaulted the British prime minister and the UK’s ambassador to Washington for the handling of Brexit, the still pending UK withdrawal from the European Union, and for a leaked series of British assessments of Trump and his administration, but there has never been even a mild rebuke from the president for Russian actions. Instead, Trump recently joked with Putin about not again interfering in an American election and, of course, Putin favors anything weakening European unity.

As for the Brit ambassador who reported to London that stories of chaos in the Trump White House were mostly true and that Washington has become an unreliable ally, the president Tweeted: “The wacky Ambassador that the U.K. foisted upon the United States is not someone we are thrilled with, a very stupid guy.” 

Two pals in Helsinki…

After Trump repeatedly praised Putin before his election as “a strong leader” and someone he could make great deals with, Trump dismissed all the U.S. intelligence agency’s belief that Russia interfered in his election. “I have President Putin here,” Trump said in that surreal moment in Helsinki in July 2018, “he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be …” 

Trump recently questioned the long-standing U.S.-Japan mutual defense agreement and he has repeatedly diminished the NATO alliance that has kept the peace in Europe for 75 years. He has shredded relations with France, Canada and even Australia. Yet after North Korea’s murdering dictator called Trump mentally deranged, a dotard, a gangster and a frightened dog, the president chose to coo over the “love letters” between the two, while angling for yet another face-to-face meeting. 

In almost all of the post-war period the Republican Party has claimed the mantle of being strong on national security and the GOP language about protecting American interests often put Democrats on the defensive. Republicans routinely assaulted their opponents for opposing expensive weapons systems. Steve Symms made hay with such issues when he defeated Frank Church in 1980 in the most celebrated Idaho Senate race ever. 

Yet, the challenge presented by Putin and his fellow autocrats must be countered with more than military might, as the new Pentagon report makes profoundly clear. “Political objectives matter to the Kremlin in a zero-sum worldview,” the report asserts. “For Russia to win, the U.S. has to lose.”

Or as the commentator Philip Rotner wrote recently: “Trump’s retreat from the values that defined the post-World War II era of American exceptionalism has immediate negative consequences, above and beyond the long-term damage it does to America’s unique place in the world (as if that weren’t enough).

“It’s a gift to the tyrants of the world. It gives them the one thing they most covet: Impunity.” 

So where is Idaho’s Risch during this historic transformation of U.S. foreign policy? I’ll remind you again that he said recently that, “Russia is the most overrated country in the world.” Putin must live to hear a conservative Republican in the foreign policy establishment say such things because the Russian knows where he wants to go even if the senator does not. 

Risch has explicitly rejected the kind of activist role in shaping foreign policy that marked Church’s long career, as well as that of Idaho’s William Borah in the interwar period. He has the title of chairman, but he is clearly a figurehead, content to win re-election next year by embracing all things Trumpian.

History will not treat either of them well.  

Foreign Policy, U.S. Senate

The Surest Senator of All…

Posted on by mjohnson

When he speaks about big issues Idaho Senator Jim Risch, the new chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, likes to invoke his experience, the dozens of times he’s been on the ballot, his leadership of the Idaho State Senate and his early years as the Ada County prosecutor. One of Risch’s go-to lines is “I’ve been at this a long time.” 

In the increasingly rare interviews Risch grants or when he, also rarely, entertains questions from voters his setup often goes something like this: “I’ve been at this [politics] a long time, I’ve been through 34 elections, I was a prosecutor and [in the context of the Russia investigation] I know what evidence looks like.” 

Idaho Senator James E. Risch

All politicians display a certain level of confidence. It goes with the territory these days. The humble, self-effacing public servant is a relic of American political history, if indeed it has ever existed. But Risch has raised self-assurance to a new level, unlike anything Idaho has seen, well, ever and it’s gotten him into trouble. 

Risch’s first real controversy as chairman came over his initial handling of the Senate’s demand for information from the Trump Administration on the murder of Washington Postcolumnist Jamil Khashoggi. When senator’s demanded that the administration follow the law and report on who had ordered Khashoggi’s brutal murder, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – Risch calls him a close friend – essentially said: “Mind your own business.” 

Risch’s initial response was to fully back the Trump line. “We asked for the information. They sent it. And I put out a press release,” Risch told reporters. Then the proverbial organic matter hit the fan. Senate Republicans on Risch’s own committee demanded more and he did schedule a closed hearing earlier this week, but not before apparently misleading fellow Republicans on just how forthcoming the administration had been. All in all it was a stumbling, incoherent performance by a guy who has “been at this a long time.” 

You have to wonder why? 

Why has Risch worked so hard to shield the president from confronting the murder of a journalist, a murder the nation’s intelligence agencies have placed squarely at the feet of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? Why are fellow Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley and Mitt Romney confronting the administration over reprehensible Saudi behavior, while Risch has been carrying Trump’s water on both shoulders? 

Remember that Trump has said of the Crown Prince, a pal of his son-in-law, that “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t” order the journalist’s murder.

During a contentious recent television interview, recorded while Risch was attending the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany, the senator invoked his “I’ve been at this a long time” certainty with another wrinkle he likes to use – “I know more than you, but because it’s classified I couldn’t possibly comment.” 

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, identified by U.S. intelligence agencies as the man responsible for ordering the death of Washington Post columnist Jamil Khashoggi

Asked by veteran journalist Tim Sebastian whether he agreed with Graham’s characterization that there “was zero chance” that bin Salam had not ordered Khashoggi’s murder, Risch spun into a linguistic tap dance, first refusing to answer whether he agreed with the South Carolina senator and then invoking secrecy.

“I’m on the Intelligence Committee,” Risch said, “Lindsey isn’t. I’ve looked at every scrap of evidence there is on [Khashoggi’s murder] and unfortunately because of my position on the Intelligence Committee I can’t sit here and reiterate that for you, and in that regard I can’t comment on that.” Risch then said he could comment on the 17 Saudi nationals sanctioned by the U.S. government, but apparently his opinion about the Crown Prince is classified. 

Again the question is why? Does Risch so value his access to the White House that he won’t summon moral outrage at the murder of a journalist whose body was dismembered with a bone saw and has still not been found? Why was he willing to launch his chairmanship by alienating fellow Republicans who must increasingly see him as an apologist for the heinous? Is Risch so concerned about a primary challenge from the far right that there is no “red line” of support for Trump that he will not cross? 

In the same period that the senator was covering for the president and the Saudi Crown Prince he was effectively dismissing concerns about Trump campaign involvement with Russia. “It is simply not there,” the former prosecutor explained of his reading of Trump-Russia collusion. That certainty comes even as we now know that Paul Manafort, the convicted former Trump campaign chairman, was meeting with Russian operatives and sharing polling information literally while Trump was securing the GOP nomination in 2016.

In the face of mounting evidence of ongoing Russian efforts to interfere with American elections Risch told the Boise Chamber of Commerce recently “Russia is the most overrated country on the face of the planet. They get so much ink here. They get so much attention here, simply because of Trump, of course. These guys are incredibly inept. They are a nuclear power, there is no question about it. They certainly have some juice, there is no question about it. These guys, they are all bluster.”

Put that comment in context and again ask yourself why? 

On July 27, 2016, then-candidate Trump looked straight into television cameras in Florida and said, “Russia, if you’re listening. I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” — messages Hillary Clinton was said to have deleted from a private email server.

“Actually, Russia was doing more than listening,” as the Associated Press reported last week. “It had been trying to help Republican Trump for months. That very day, hackers working with Russia’s military intelligence tried to break into email accounts associated with Clinton’s personal office. It was just one small part of a sophisticated election interference operation carried out by the Kremlin — and meticulously chronicled by special counsel Robert Mueller.” 

And ask yourself why wouldn’t the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee want to get to the bottom of that and so much more?  

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Borah, Church, Foreign Policy, Trump, U.S. Senate

The Risch Doctrine…

Posted on by mjohnson

Idaho Sen. Jim Risch became chairman of the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee last week and as nearly his first act he bashed the two Idahoans who held that position in the past, William Borah and Frank Church.

In an interview with Idaho Press reporter Betsy Russell, Risch also said his “repertoire does not include sparring publicly with the president of the United States. For many, many different reasons, I think that’s counterproductive, and you won’t see me doing it.”

UNITED STATES – APRIL 8: Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, questions Secretary of State John Kerry, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

In one interview, the new chairman offered a remarkable display of historical ignorance, senatorial obsequiousness, hubris and blind partisanship. Call it “the Risch Doctrine.”

Let’s take them one by one.

“William Borah was around at the time when it was very fashionable, and indeed you could get away with non-involvement in a great matter of international affairs,” Risch told Russell.

The senator is correct that Borah, who represented Idaho in the Senate for 33 years, was, to say the least, skeptical about an aggressive U.S. foreign policy. More correctly, Borah was a non-interventionist, an anti-imperialist and a politician who believed passionately that the Senate must exercise a significant role in developing the country’s foreign policy. He would have been the last to say he would avoid “sparring publicly” with a president. He did so repeatedly, including with presidents of his own Republican Party.

Borah’s determined opposition to the peace treaty after World War I was based in large part on Woodrow Wilson’s arrogance in insisting that the Senate rubber stamp his handy work, accepting his terms or no terms.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Risch says he has his disagreements with President Donald Trump, but you’d be hard to pressed to find even one, while his record is ripe with acquiescence to an administration whose foreign policy from Syria to North Korea and from NATO to Saudi Arabia feels more unhinged, more chaotic by the day.

While Borah elevated the Foreign Relations Committee to something approaching equal standing with Republican presidents such as Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, Risch is first and last a partisan, even to the point of going down the line with Trump, while many other Senate Republicans broke with him this week over sanctioning a Russian oligarch. With a Democrat in the White House, Risch was never reluctant to bash a foreign policy decision. His “sparring” was always in plain sight. Now, it’s all quiet on the Risch front.

Risch also could not refrain from repeating an old smear against Sen. Frank Church, effectively accusing Church of weakening the nation’s intelligence agencies.

“In my judgment,” Risch said, Church “did some things regarding our intelligence-gathering abilities and operations that would not serve us very well today. We need a robust intelligence operation.”

We have a robust intelligence operation, one that has frequently made serious mistakes that require constant vigilance from U.S. senators.

Risch should know this. He’s on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but he has repeatedly excused Trump’s own disregard, indeed contempt, for intelligence agencies, including dismissal of an FBI director who was just a bit too independent for Trump’s taste. You have to wonder if the new chairman has read even a summary of Church’s still very relevant work.

What Church’s landmark investigation really did in the 1970s was to explain to the American people, as UC-Davis historian Kathryn Olmsted told me this week, “what the CIA and FBI and other agencies had been doing in their name during the height of the Cold War.” As professor Olmsted, a scholar of American intelligence and its oversight noted, Church’s investigation “revealed many abuses and some crimes that had been committed, for example, by the CIA.”

One of those crimes was spying on American citizens. The National Security Agency actually conducted mail and phone surveillance on Church and Republican Sen. Howard Baker.

“Thanks to the Church Committee,” Olmsted wrote, “we now know that the CIA engaged mafia dons to stab, poison, shoot and blow up Fidel Castro; that it tried to poison Patrice Lumumba’s toothpaste and that it hired goons to kidnap the general in Chile who was trying to uphold his country’s constitutional democracy and thus stood in the way of a U.S.-backed coup. (He was killed in the course of the kidnapping.) The committee also revealed the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program, including the harassment of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Church didn’t weaken the intelligence community — he held it accountable. His work created the modern framework for congressional oversight, that is if Congress would use the power of oversight, and Church’s investigation led to the protections of the so-called FISA court that requires a judge to sign off on surveillance of a kind that the intelligence agencies once initiated on their own.

“This is a great time to be a Republican,” Risch told a partisan crowd at a Lincoln Day dinner in Shoshone last week. “You will not hear about this in the national media, but we have done a great job running this country.” Quite a line to utter while a quarter of the federal government remains shut down and while the president is operating with an “acting” chief of staff, Interior secretary, Office of Management and Budget director, attorney general, Defense secretary and has yet to even nominate ambassadors to a couple dozen countries.

Jim Risch, the committed partisan, has always been the kind of politician focused on his next election. He’s up in 2020 in what should be one of the safest seats in the country and he’s put all his chips on Trump.

But what if things are different in a few months or in a year? What if Robert Mueller’s investigation unspools a web of corruption that makes President Richard Nixon and Watergate look like a third-rate burglary? What if Risch has bet on the wrong guy?

He’s standing on the rolling deck of the USS Trump right now, raising nary a question about a president implicated in scandal from porno payoffs to Russian collusion. The super-partisan will never change, but his hubris may yet — and again — get the best of him.

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