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Gifted Greek: the Enigma of Andreas Papandreou by Monteagle Stearns, A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H Kushlis

Being US Ambassador to Greece is not easy and it was particularly difficult from the end of World War II until 2004 well after the US military presence had been withdrawn following the Cold War’s end, and N-17 - a domestic terrorist group that had killed three Americans between 1975 and 2004, wounded another and murdered multiple Greek conservative politicians and newspaper editors as well as a British defense attache -  was finally rounded up.  Its members were tried, sentenced and imprisoned just before the 2004 Olympics opened.

Ambassadors come and go and although Greece’s sunny Aegean beaches have tempted many the political appointee as well as career diplomat, in reality, that position belongs in the hands of a professional – one who speaks the language, understands the politics and knows the country’s personalities, society and culture, as well as how the State Department and Embassies function.  

I was an Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer and Executive Director of the Hellenic American Union (then our binational center) and my late husband William (Bill) Kushlis was a political officer in the Embassy during the first three years of Ambassador Monteagle Stearns four-year tenure as Ambassador.   I later served as Country Affairs Officer for Greece, Turkey and Cyprus from 1986-7 at the US Information Agency and Bill headed the Greek desk at the State Department from 1985-87.   

This was Ambassador Stearns third posting to Athens.  We all arrived during the summer of 1981 as political power was about to shift from a Conservative government to the center left and one led by the charismatic, enigmatic, and mercurial Greek politician Andreas Papandreou, a former economics professor and department chair at the University of California Berkeley, Harvard PhD, son of the Greek liberal and anti-monarchist politician George Papandreou and neighbor of the Stearns from 1959-61 in Psychiko, a near suburb of Athens.

In this book, Stearns describes Papandreou’s history as well as writes about the time during his first assignment to Athens as a political officer when he and his wife Toni (Antonia) were part of the boisterous crowd on Syntagma (Constitution) Square watching the George Papandreou rally the evening before the national elections of October 1961, an electoral contest that Andreas’ father George Papandreou lost to the conservative politician Constantine Karamanlis.

What Stearns does not say, however, is that he and several Embassy officers including the then chief of the political section, and my husband and I watched the enormous rally unfolding in this central square from a room in the Grande Bretagne Hotel that preceded Andreas Papandreou’s victory the next day in the November 18, 1981 elections twenty years later.   

Stearns notes in Gifted Greek that he had predicted the Conservatives would win by a thin margin in 1981, but then gives credit to his “first rate political section (whose members) heartily disagreed, and of course, they were right.”  In fact, PASOK, Papandreou’s party which had replaced his father’s Center Union Party, won by a comfortable margin. (p.99)   

In this newly published book and Stearns’ final one – not finished when he died in 2016, but completed by his wife Toni who had accompanied him throughout his Foreign Service career - he (and she) provide a first hand recounting of their relationship with the Papandreou family from their first meeting as neighbors during Stearns initial assignment to Greece to his final meeting with Andreas Papandreou not long before he died.  

In this book, Stearns describes some of his interactions with Papandreou but most importantly uses them to make sense of Papandreou’s seemingly complex dual or Janus like personality and sometimes consequently difficult to understand decisions.   As he tells the story Stearns also provides a crystal clear, perceptive, objective and concise description of modern Greek politics and US-Greek relations even after he concluded his Ambassadorship in Athens.

In so doing, he raises questions that troubled that binational relationship and others elsewhere for decades:  the over-reliance on the US military, the too close relationship between the CIA and the conservatives – in particular the monarchy, and consequently the too strong support for the political right including the Fascist right in the name of anti-Communism without recognizing the importance for the country to develop a cohesive non-Communist center left rather than driving them into a closer relationship with the Communists as happened too often.  In an ADST and DACOR virtual book launch video with Antonia Stearns and Dr. Constantine Arvanitopoulos now online, it was suggested that Papandreou’s fiery anti-EU, anti-NATO and anti-US Bases populist rhetoric could be seen as a part of the Greek nationalist backlash at the time.   

In this excellent book (although the chapter on Papandreou’s generally illustrious academic career was slow going for this non-economist), Stearns did make two observations that I question.

First, he dates the terrorist threat against Americans as beginning in 1975 and says it came from the domestic political left.  And second, he describes Andreas’ relationship with his father as stormy. I don’t dispute the overall difficult father-son relationship which Stearns describes as continuing into the next generation– it’s well documented and unsurprising.   Yet I also remember father and son Papandreou attracting a huge crowd at a campaign rally they held together in downtown Thessaloniki in 1965-6, the year I worked at Anatolia College as a Teaching Fellow, so the break between the two may not have been as immediate or abrupt and likely more complex than seen from the outside.     

With respect to the terrorist threat to official Americans, I know that the Embassy had already been threatened by two Greek Cypriot terrorists in late August 1970.  This occurred during my first tour at the Embassy in Athens as a very junior officer in the US Information Service.  Fortunately, the Cypriots succeeded only in killing themselves in their car in the Embassy parking lot due to their ineptness at handling explosives.  This as opposed to destroying the Embassy as they had planned.  I had just walked through that lot and behind their car twenty minutes before the bomb exploded blowing up the two young people along with their car as well as damaging other cars in the lot.

Their goal, we were told at the time, had been to protest US policy towards Cyprus by destroying the Embassy from the inside.  So it is quite likely that at least some increased security had already begun before CIA station chief Richard Welch was murdered outside his home in 1975 in the first of the multiple N-17 (November 17) attacks.  However, obviously not enough because we had one military attache murdered and another seriously wounded by N-17 while I worked in Athens.  Another became a victim of N-17 after I had left.

 By 1981, it was difficult to fathom why the Greek security forces had not rounded up N-17.  I at least still cannot find an answer to that question to my satisfaction.  In the end, they turned out to be a small band of ultra Greek nationalists led by a Trotskyite professor. Three were from the same family including an icon painter. Their fatal mistake was made by one member who was carrying a bomb down a street in the port city of Piraeus in 2004. The bomb exploded injuring him badly enough for him to be hospitalized.  This led to the group’s unraveling, arrests, subsequent trial and imprisonment. 

But back to the Stearns.  Stearns was not only a consummate Greek hand but also the most experienced Ambassador I ever worked for and his expertise is once again demonstrated in this final book.   It is quite possible that had the US been represented by someone less expert and without his extensive knowledge of Greece, his personal contacts and his diplomatic finesse that the tenuous US-Greek relationship could have unraveled entirely before the Cold War’s end and with ensuing recriminations.   This book, then, should be read not just by Greek hands and Greeks but also by those who want or need to know how to be a successful US Ambassador faced with a troubled relationship in difficult times.

Monteagle Stearns, Gifted Greek:  the Enigma of Andreas Papandreou, An ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Book, Lincoln: Potomac Books, in imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2021.   

Transactional Diplomacy Trump Style

By Patricia H Kushlis

In May 2017, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told State Department staff in his first of few meetings with them that he preferred to operate along the lines of transactional diplomacy which subordinates American values to a form of foreign policy based on cash-register type one-on-one trades.  This way, the US could deal with the “bad guys” without having to consider whether they represented countries with ethical governments or not. 

During my own Foreign Service career, I certainly worked in countries where the rule of law was nonexistent and where the US needed to base its relationship with the government in question on a transactional form of diplomacy. But that’s not what Trump’s version of transactional diplomacy is all about.    

The Soviet Union was one of those countries where I served but others were Thailand under the Thai military and Greece under the Colonels.  Our cultural exchanges agreement with the USSR is the most compelling example:  everything was quantified and codified down to the number of students and faculty each country sent on research trips to the lengths of their stay by exact numbers of days, the access they had to research materials and the locations they could visit.  My job was to see that the Soviet bureaucracy kept its word.  It was not easy but without the formal agreement the exchanges would not have happened.          

Trump’s own brand of transactional diplomacy, however, is different.  For him, it’s a narrow and personally based world view couched in bluster and incendiary Tweets sent at weird hours of the night but what’s different is that it’s not designed to further or even support US national goals and objectives – those don’t matter.  Rather it’s designed to enrich Trump and/or his company and children personally.

Much diplomacy – especially bilateral - has its roots in transaction:  the goal is to see that both countries maximize their objectives.  Essentially, it’s ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.’   But it’s government to government not government to the bank account of an individual official. That, however, is not how Trump operates.

Watch:  every time US foreign policy – as defined by Trump – does not seem to make sense in terms of the overall US national interest - which is most of the time - there’s likely to be an under the table financial transaction which personally benefits Trump or possibly a member of his family.

We know, for instance, that Ukraine president Poroshenko paid over $400,000 for an Oval Office meeting with Trump just last year.  The money went to Trump’s fixer Roger Cohen and some may have gone to Felix Sater, a pal of Cohen’s, who has been involved in connecting Trump and company to Russian oligarchs connected to Putin.  What we don’t know is how much of the Ukrainian treasury Cohen passed on to Trump too:  Hopefully the Southern District Court of New York is investigating the question.

Moreover, Ukraine apparently simultaneously agreed to sideline its investigation of Paul Manafort’s payoffs from pro-Russian sources. Perhaps part of the deal from the US SIDE also included anti-tank military equipment suddenly released to the Ukrainian armed forces by the Trump administration that the Obama administration had refused to send.  Not bad for $400,000 or more – but that’s not how rules- based government operates.  The Ukrainian funds should never have wound up in Cohen’s bank account.   

There was also an Oval Office meeting earlier this year by the president of Uzbekistan.  Supposedly that was to seal the deal on several deals that, in fact, had already been sealed.  How much did that photo op cost the Uzbeks I wonder?  Does anyone know?  What did Trump get out of it?

Moving right along, the Chinese government has been playing Trump for all he’s worth since shortly after he entered the White House – first approving trade marks for Ivanka to manufacture and sell her apparel brand in China (the second tranche of 13 patents was approved just before the Trump-Kim photo op “summit”) to agreeing to finance the theme park, as a part of a the Lido resort complex to be built in Indonesia adjacent to a Trump Tower Hotel.  The theme park’s cost to the Chinese is $500 million; its cozy location is surely designed to enhance the value and revenue of the hotel.  Is this deal still on the table given Trump's tariff war against the Chinese?

In return for this Chinese largesse?  Trump suddenly reversed his decision to enforce punitive US tariffs for the telecommunications company ZTE which the Trump administration has placed on certain Chinese goods and which, in the case of this company are forcing it into bankruptcy.  The Senate may block the Trump flip flop on ZTE – which will complicate the matter if this happens, and who knows how this could affect Trump’s personal finances.  ZTE, according to AP reporting, “is accused of violating trade laws by selling sensitive technologies to North Korea and Iran.” But the Senate is meeting with Trump to discuss the issue.  Will that cave?  And what's the payoff if so?      

This makes me wonder what under the table deals were negotiated with the North Koreans for that feel good "meeting" with Kim shortly after the G6 plus 1.   

And in the Middle East, Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, his support for the Saudi led war against Qatar and its bombing of the Shiites in Yemen combined with his decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem only make sense when viewed from the standpoint of at what benefit to Trump personally.

Here’s why. Trump’s biggest individual campaign backers were Adelman, the Koch Brothers, Singer and via Cambridge Analytica the Mercers – father and daughter.  These same people are also big backers of the right wing, greater Israel policy of Netanyahu who vociferously opposed the Iran deal and has been itching to move the Israeli capital to Jerusalem for years all the while ignoring the rights of the Palestinians, rights that date back to the international recognition of the state of Israel in 1948.

And what have the Saudis gotten out of this – higher gas prices on the international market with Iran’s sales curtailed and yet additional military equipment from the US to wage more attacks on the Shiites in Yemen (although Trump’s advisors l-ikely including that ‘great’ foreign policy savant Jared Kushner - clearly forgot to tell him that we have important military bases in Oman and the US support for the Saudi blockade of that small Gulf country was in direct contradiction to our national interests.)  An Oops moment.  Clearly the US military was not amused.

What is still unclear is the nature of the relationship being brokered by Eric Prince (the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of Blackwater fame) and the Russian oligarchs and Donald Trump, Jr at a hotel in the UAE last fall.  But it also seems to be a piece of the jigsaw.  Did it relate to a potential hotel construction project to which Trump could affix his name and collect user fees?  Or could money have changed hands under some table or even behind that weird green orb the Trump clan was photographed fondling May 2016 on their very first stop on their very first official overseas trip? 

Nevertheless, perhaps this helps explain Trump’s rude behavior to the European, Canadian, and Japanese leaders at the G-7 (or maybe G-6 plus 1) meeting in Quebec June 9, his reneging on the joint statement and his acrimonious tweets about meeting host, Justin Trudeau, thereafter.  These are rule of law countries, their leaders are not on the take and, therefore, Trump can’t shake them down.    

The Kremlinologist: A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H Kushlis

Much has been written about American Soviet experts George Kennan and Charles Bohlen but knowledge of their contemporary, the more reserved Llewellyn E. Thompson had all but disappeared from view until his daughters, Jenny and Sherry Thompson published his biography earlier this year – a work 15 years in the making. It is painstakingly researched and draws upon multiple, often primary, sources from now unclassified documents, diplomatic oral histories from the American Diplomatic Studies and Training collection, interviews with contemporaries as well as letters and photographs from their own personal archives – all coherently presented in a single 477 page volume plus copious end notes and a substantial bibliography that documents the meticulous work presented throughout the book.

Shortly after I arrived in Moscow in 1978 to begin a two year stint as an Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer at the US Embassy, an American specialist on Russian history told me that to understand the Soviet Union I needed to understand the Russian Empire.  That much of what masqueraded as part and parcel of the Communist system, in reality, often dated back to the Czarist period magnifying but also obscuring the country’s excesses, backwardness and insecurities shrouded in a powerful foreign ideology designed to promote world domination.

I think today that this fundamental observation remains valid. 

To understand the Russian Federation we need to understand both of its predecessors. Although the ideological cloak of Communism has disappeared, the insecurities and the deep seated feelings of Russian inferiority to the West have brought a dangerous new form of ultra-nationalism to the fore something that Thompson, who had proposed Russian nationalism as a benign and more flexible substitute for a virulent Communist ideology, failed to foresee.

He was not alone and hindsight is, of course, often more accurate than foresight: it is far easier to predict what is, than to divine what will be.  Regardless, Thompson understood the country and the Russians extremely well and provided a significant bridge between rigid Soviet leadership and a series of US Presidents over decades: all of whom needed to make policy decisions of international consequence.  Neither side understood the other well which is why seasoned Soviet experts like Thompson were, and in my view, remain still crucial.                

I think we also need to revisit the diplomatic path to place US-Russian relations in today’s context and Thompson’s biography provides a much needed and thoughtful link heretofore missing from the historical chain.

In a nutshell, Thompson himself saw his role as an explainer of the Soviet system, the Russian people and the role of Communist ideology in the country’s foreign policy to a largely clueless American leadership.  He also perceived his position as providing a personal bridge for US leaders to Soviet officials as he represented and explained US foreign policy interests and constraints. I think he fundamentally saw at the root of both US and Soviet policy interests the need to establish a peaceful form of coexistence through a network of nuclear arms control negotiations as well as by the expansion of people-to-people contacts to help allay misperceptions and misunderstandings that inevitably occur.

He also realized that when relations between the two countries’ officials had ebbed because of policy differences, bad timing, or misunderstandings that it was equally as important if not more so to maintain contacts with Russian intellectuals and artists not just because of their innate vibrancy and insights into the society but also because these were the people who would be the most likely to provide a moderating influence and, hopefully, usher in long term systemic change. 

In fact and much to his credit, the first of several US-USSR Cultural Exchange agreements was signed in 1957 when Thompson was Ambassador to Moscow, agreements that formed the foundation of people-to-people exchanges between Soviets and Americans until the end of the Soviet Union; and even after he retired in 1969 after forty years in the Foreign Service, he had been serving as a member of the US delegation on the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) almost until his death.        

Unlike most U.S. diplomats at the time, Thompson did not come from the East Coast elite.  Perhaps this is why he communicated with Nikita Khrushchev so well:  both had rural backgrounds and well understood the importance of agriculture and its unique challenges.   Thompson was a Colorado rancher’s son who had graduated from the University of Colorado. He learned about a Foreign Service career by fluke from a retired US Consul while on a coastal steamer between Seattle and San Francisco.

As a result, Thompson went to Washington, DC and worked his way through the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.  He passed the Foreign Service exam, entered the service in 1929 and was assigned as vice consul in Ceylon.  He was first assigned to Moscow in 1941, twelve years later, not long before the Germans laid siege on the Russian capital where he was one of only two employees left behind to staff the Embassy while everyone else was evacuated to the relative safety of Kuybyshev.  His posting came with no training in Russian which he learned from the street, radio broadcasts, the Russian press and likely a Russian girlfriend – not considered a security problem at the time.   

North Korea, Iran and other thoughts on Trump’s Approach to Nuclear Proliferation Deals

By Patricia H Kushlis

Let me get this straight.

President Trump is planning to renege on the Iran nuclear deal but is pressing all steam ahead on a perhaps nuclear deal with North Korea. Is that correct?

Something doesn’t compute.

Look, I have no objection to settling the decades old conflict on the Korean Peninsula between North and South. The South Koreans refused to sign the armistice in the 1950s so a new approach seems to be way past time; and it’s good to see the two Koreas themselves take the initiative.

Good time to talk 

Besides, the North just managed to destroy the mountain which they had been using to test nuclear weapons so it will take them time to adjust to a nuclear reality without their former test site. They likely have completed a testing cycle anyway so now is as good a time to talk – as opposed to test - as any. Whether they can actually pull this off is another chapter in the never-ending Korean Peninsula saga. I hope they can.

But why renege on the Iran nuclear deal? 

But why renege on the multinational Iran nuclear deal which has been in place for a year and to which the Iranians are complying. Well, it seems to me there are two likely reasons:

1) it was negotiated under the Obama administration and Trump had demonstrated time and again his determination to eliminate all that the Obama Administration accomplished and if a deal included more than two parties then all the more reason to forget it; and

2) it’s all about oil and Trump’s fawning relationship with the Saudis especially King Mohammed Bin Salman.

In this case, I’m betting on oil and fealty to Salman. The former explanation seems like thin icing on the cake.

Think about it. The first place Trump stopped on his inaugural trip to Europe and the Middle East in late May 2017 was Riyadh where he was widely photographed stroking some kind of weird mystical greenish colored orb and blaming Iran for most of the problems in the Middle East.

He then went on to Israel to convene with Netanyahu, who also hates Iran, and finally Brussels for a NATO heads of state meeting. Later he sided with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt against the mostly Shiia Qatari government in a spat over funding terrorism.

The major problem for the US is that Qatar houses an important US military base in the Middle East. The only other problem is that it puts the US even more firmly on the Sunni side in this multi-centuries old religious conflict  when the issue of funding terrorists is certainly as much an issue for the Saudis as it is the Shiia Iranians. In fact, much of the Sunni-Shiia rancor and ensuing violence is foremost targeted at each other in particular the two largest protagonists Saudi Arabia and Iran. Siding with the Saudis also inserts the US into the seemingly never-ending Yemen civil war that began with a botched intelligence raid shortly after Trump became president to Trump’s more recent attempts at playing peacemaker.

So what about oil?

The price of oil is not rock bottom but it has been higher. Saudi controls OPEC but Iran is a competitor and as international sanctions are removed on Iran the more Iranian oil hits the markets and the price per barrel for all oil producers declines. This is also a problem for states like Russia which is highly dependent upon the sale of fossil fuels internationally as well.

Of course, the development of alternative energy sources would resolve the Middle East and Russian oil dependency question, but American oil companies too have a stake in continued reliance on high global oil and gas prices which is why, from Trump’s perspective, Rex Tillerson with his friendly relations with the Saudis and the Russians, made a logical pick for Secretary of State. When his appointment did not turn out the way Trump had expected, he dumped him and turned to Pompeo. But Trump had also inserted his son-in-law Jared Kushner into the diplomatic stew.

Now that Kushner has been denied a security clearance and the continuing drumbeat of his questionable relations with Russians and Russian money laundering associated with the Kremlin, he seems to be less and less identified as Trump’s number one go-to guy for solving all the world’s problems – or even the Middle East’s thorny bramble thicket. In fact, he has almost disappeared from sight.

With Pompeo on the job less than a week, I see that he has been tapped to venture in that direction. Since Trump really has no Middle East foreign policy or clue as to solving the jigsaw puzzle known as the Middle East, perhaps Pompeo can fashion and implement one. Just as long as he bows, kowtows or genuflects appropriately to the green orb, the Kremlin’s double eagle and the unhinged occupant of the White House.

 

What Asian foreign policy?

By Patricia H Kushlis

Overall the White House did not have a good week the week before the Olympics opened.  After a brief teleprompter read of his State of the Union address which improved his polling numbers in the short run, Trump became Trump again enraging women and many men with his defense of two accused wife beaters who he only reluctantly let go from his troubled staff.  This was compounded by Vice President Pence looking like the uncomfortable midget he is, sitting, rather than standing – like everyone else – for the joint Korean team when it appeared at the Pyeongchang Olympics Opening Ceremony.  That appearance as one team was a big deal and perhaps the first sign of a thaw in years of frozen and dangerous conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

As the Games closed, the President of South Korea indicated that the North Koreans would be interested in talks with the US. And Ivanka Trump, apparently the lone US government representative in the official reviewing section, stood respectfully as she should have upon the entrance of the joint Korean team.    Nevertheless, the fact that the administration has yet to nominate an Ambassador to this important Northeast Asian country sends a different signal. And why the president’s daughter should be meeting with South Korean leaders to discuss substantive sensitive national security issues just makes no sense.  Has this country become some kind of Middle Eastern potentate?    

Yet, for someone who had all too recently self-righteously castigated black athletes who had dropped to their knee at the singing of the Star Spangled Banner to protest this country’s racial policies under the Trump administration, Pence really should take a long hard look at his petty behavior that Friday night.  He needs to understand that pictures often speak louder than words and his disrespectful demeanor came through loud and clear on every television set and video screen at home and abroad.  

Bread and Circuses

Then, don’t forget the fanfare that accompanied Trump’s call for a military parade – presumably with him riding atop the front tank – down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Hill to the White House on July 4^th.  This now several million dollar spectacle seems to have been switched to Veterans Day.  Whether one agrees with the questionable optics or not, its costs of an estimated $30 million would be considerable and unwarranted.  What would be the purpose?  To celebrate what?  Why? The US military certainly should have better uses for the money.    

But then what isn’t new with this dysfunctional and embarrassing White House? 

If anything signaled to the world that America has withdrawn from its multi-century commitment to Asia, then Pence’s appearance at the Olympic Games opening ceremony spoke volumes.  That’s the picture that shot round the world:  a cowering Pence seated in the reviewing stand while everyone else, including Kim’s sister stood nearby and applauded the athletes in respect to the Korean national anthem.

US relations with Asia, in particular the Pacific Rim countries, had been remarkably stable for decades once we figured out that our projection of military might did not include ground intervention on a continent wracked by civil war.  That message got across to administration after administration since the end of the Vietnam war in 1975.  Until this one.  The Trump administration has done much to undermine the policies in place by previous administrations since then and it’s hard to know where to begin or whether they can be undone when this horror of a nightmare government is over.

But let’s start with lasts year’s rejection of TPP or the Trans Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade agreement being negotiated with almost all Asian countries except China.  That gratuitous and small minded decision has provided the Chinese with an easy path to far greater influence in Asia from North to South which a more coherent, nuanced and activist US foreign policy had been countering reasonably successfully.  That is, up until Trump.

Then let’s move on to Trump’s inane Twitter War with Kim Jung Un.  Turns out Kim is as much of a showman as the large Orange One and he certainly out-staged Trump on the world scene in the run-up to the Olympics.   Thank heavens neither were personally there. 

Whether the North Korean Olympics peace offensive will pay off in the long run is anyone’s best guess but Trump’s over-reliance on US military hardware alone to counter the North Koreans has certainly resulted in nothing to show – and is being promulgated at a far too large cost to the American taxpayer not to mention producing the overwrought nerves of American citizens who live in Hawaii and Guam.

But a major question still remains:  what is this administration’s policy towards Asia?  Military games played in Korean waters designed to intimidate the North Korean regime do not a foreign policy make.  The threat of increased sanctions to be applied after the Olympics won’t work either. And China is flexing its muscles over Taiwan yet again which means additional American military expenses to ensure that the island is not forcibly absorbed by its huge neighbor.

Running up American indebtedness through an ill-thought through tax “reform” which benefits the superrich at the expense of everyone else, increasing our trade deficits with China so Ivanka can market a few trinkets on the Mainland is a classic case of shortsighted, selfish transactional behavior that benefits the Chinese economy and Ivanka’s pocket book – but certainly not ours.  Ironically, since Trump took office, the US trade deficit with China has ballooned, not decreased as Trump promised on the campaign trail. and manufacturing jobs have not returned home.

The denigration of Muslins of every stripe to placate a xenophobic and largely ignorant  minority here in the US  also influences the attitudes of Muslim majority nations in Asia – in particular those in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, not to mention Muslim majority Malaysia and a restive Muslim minority in the southern Philippines.  These are island nations with which we have had strong relations for decades.   

In short, a policy singularly reliant upon the 21^st century’s equivalent of gun boat diplomacy is unlikely to succeed in the long run.  If that, in fact, is what American foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific has come to be. I’d like to know.        

Tillerson's Shriveled State - Maybe It Just Doesn't Matter Any More

By Patricia H Kushlis

Last Sunday’s  New York Times lead editorial “The Shriveling State Department” excoriated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for his deplorable management of this country’s oldest cabinet department, and his mishandling of its most senior career officers to the detriment of US foreign policy expertise – and in particular - his poor treatment of and regard for the US Foreign Service in general. The Times followed a few days later with a lengthy news report by Gardner Harris “Diplomats Sound the Alarm as they are pushed out in droves."

Convinced that the tiny Department was bloated before having even crossed its threshold last winter, Tillerson had already decided to cut the budget by 31% to $37.6 billion (or 14% of the military’s request) and reduce personnel by 2,000 by November 2018 – a reduction in force of about 8% according to David McKean, head of State’s Office of Policy and Planning from 2013-16, in a November 26 article in Politico Magazine.

How Tillerson came up with these numbers remains a mystery and how he plans to take a 31% budget cut but reduce staff by only 8% makes no sense for a department which relies largely upon staff expertise. Maybe he just expects that his flying solo management style and refusal to fill vacancies will make any number of staff look for greener pastures elsewhere as apparently happened when he headed Exxon.  And maybe he's right.  

He’s already been told by Senate Foreign Relations that the 31% budget cut is dead on arrival but then the question becomes whether he will simply refuse to spend the appropriation allocated by Congress or ultimately grudgingly acquiesce to Congressional demands.

Regardless, Tillerson began by summarily firing senior career officers at the very top of the agency upon arrival. At latest count, 100 senior officers have been fired or left voluntarily after seeing the handwriting on the wall. This has reduced the number to 388 – from 464 based on statistics from the American Foreign Service Association which the Politico article incorrectly identified as an alumni association. In fact, AFSA is the professional and labor organization of the Foreign Service to which both active duty and retired Foreign Service Officers and Foreign Service Specialists belong.  (Note:  I was a member for years before retirement and have retained my membership thereafter.)

Back to Tillerson: He is reportedly relying upon two staffers with sparse knowledge or expertise in foreign affairs or management to develop and oversee implementation of a major departmental reform with assistance from two private sector firms contracted to conduct a study of the department’s operations and make recommendations for change without much thought given to the companies’ abilities to do the job.

In August, Tillerson brought in Maliz Beams, as Counselor to the Department of State, as a consultant to implement the radical reform plan.  She abruptly quit after just three months on the job.  No explanations have been forthcoming.    

A “listening” questionnaire sent by email to a selection of staff earlier this year was supposed to provide career staff buy in. A small group of career employees sworn to secrecy regarding its implementation is another part. When the resulting product was first unveiled to the Hill, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who know far more about the State Department than Tillerson and his merry band of so called reform experts found laughable.

Russian cyber warfare: The message, the method and the medium

By Patricia H Kushlis

At long last the US – albeit thanks to a few NGOs – has begun to make public the unabated Russian disinformation campaign which engulfed last year’s American elections and continues today.  The Kremlin’s helpers primarily boosted and continue to bolster the pro-Trump message aimed at the largely under-educated American political far right. But more insidiously the Russian campaign has been designed to challenge democratic governance in the eyes of the world including and not unimportantly among Russia’s own domestic audience in the run up to the Russian Federation's own presidential election on March 18, 2018.

The Kremlin’s American campaign is a mix of propaganda and disinformation and it is part and parcel of Russia’s cyber warfare against the West – its goal is to upend Europe and the US and thereby eliminate the economic sanctions against Moscow which were enacted after Russia illegally invaded Crimea and then Eastern Ukraine in 2014.  The US Congress voted just last spring to strengthen the sanctions not, as Moscow had hoped with Trump’s ascension to the White House in January, to weaken or better yet eliminate them.

Potemkin Villages Live On

Some of the Russian stories being propagated are total fabrications- pure Potemkin Villages - but the most insidious are laced with tinges of the truth – enough to hoodwink the unwitting.  They take their cues from America’s own alt-right, neo-Nazi messages which reinforce racism and economic inequalities.

Regardless, these messages are amplified through multiple bots and cyberborgs and are targeted at the aggrieved far right Trump voters. Their goals are to undercut the veracity of the reporting in the established US media.  The stories are designed to tear a multiethnic society apart.

The Russian information warfare campaign also targets America’s far left especially those enamored by conspiracy theories but its activities against the left are far weaker than the high decibel volume aimed at the right. This campaign often echoes and amplifies Trump’s worst and most fallacious charges against the veracity of the western major media, his enemies, his fake news claims against the Mueller investigation and anyone else he perceives to be thwarting his efforts as well as promoting and encouraging his racist views.  The Kremlin goal:  to destabilize and hence weaken the US, its greatest nemesis, and Europe. 

Last January, the Obama administration publicly released an unclassified version of the DNI report.  The final quarter of the report was devoted to an analysis of the propaganda and disinformation aspects of Russian cyber warfare against the US electoral system, a campaign which inundated specific voters in swing states.  The Russian message – which succeeded – was anti-Hillary and pro-Trump.  Whether this was the deciding factor in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin is still questioned but the barrage of Internet delivered messages via Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media aimed at these vulnerable voters in certain districts was relentless and appears to have paid off.

Donald Trump – who profited from the Russian assistance - still claims the DNI report - signed off on by the heads of the most important US intelligence agencies - is “fake news.”  He is even more disparaging of the Steele Dossier. 

Nevertheless, the Russian cyber warfare campaign against the US continues. 

Ben Nimmo, Obama’s chief advisor on cyber warfare now heads a research unit on Russian disinformation at the Atlantic Council and as importantly for the media, the German Marshall Fund of the US has recently launched a crucial public website named Hamilton-68 which continually tracks Russian disinformation and propaganda activities aimed at Internet users in the US.  This website has identified 600 different bots which magnify the Russian messages via Twitter.       

The good news is that Hamilton-68 is functioning as it should. Just in the past month, I have seen information used in various reputable US media accounts that cite its data base.  This gives the reporters, researchers, and academics for the first time, access to accurate and on time data that graphically depicts how Russian cyber warfare operates in the US through substantial, near real time data which shows which stories are being promoted and by whom.  Hamilton-68 does not claim to refute them – it just makes it very clear to anyone who can read its simple graphs - the sources of stories which somehow climb to the top of the charts in now not so mysterious ways.

The fact that Facebook has finally owned up to the fact that it sold over $100,000 worth of ads despite months of denials no questions asked - which were traced back to the Internet Research Agency, an organization controlled by the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence agency) during the 2016 US presidential campaign and that those ads were designed to smear Hillary and promote Trump is a piece of the puzzle.   Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reluctantly agreed to turn over 3,000 of these ads to a Senate investigating committee.  Twitter and Google have also finally admitted that they too had published IRA ads during the 2016 campaign. These tech titans are far from alone.

Meanwhile, the investigations into the Trump campaign’s likely connections with the Kremlin grind on.  The interrelationships are complex and those under investigation are engaged in cover ups that make Nixon’s Watergate read like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The Mueller investigation has divided its work into 13 areas of inquiry.  One is looking at the potential relationships between Trump’s own campaign cyber operation run by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Russian intelligence, and Facebook ad buys – albeit a small amount in overall campaign spending on advertisements.  This investigation may hold a key to unraveling the connections.

Microtargeted campaign ads

We know that campaign ads were microtargeted at potential voters in swing districts in swing states.  Could these districts also be ones where the voting machines were antiquated and did not provide possibility of a recount?  Is there a correlation between the hacking of 21 states electoral systems and these same districts?  Did these campaign ads include Russian government buys?  Were the voting machines and the voter registration lists in these same states the targets of Russian government hacking?   If so how did they gain the electoral data upon which to base those buys?    From whom?  Or was this just coincidental?  What was the content or contents of those ads?  What role, if any, did the data mining company Cambridge Analytica play in guiding all of this?  Or did Russian intelligence just rely on readily available audience profile data on Facebook? Or what about the relationship with Jared Kushner who oversaw the Trump cyber campaign? And where did the internet security firm Kaspersky come in?

American voters, at the very least, are owed truthful answers.

A Post Script:  Last week even I received a gmail from a Russian internet source – a London based company named Quizzically Idiosyncratic TM - advertising a sweatshirt with photos of the American flag, Putin and the logo “I wish he were my president.”  Huh?  Don’t think so.  But why was I a target via gmail for that particular Russian internet campaign?

Just because I’ve made it clear publicly that I think Donald Trump is unfit for the US Presidency does not make me long for the country to be run by an autocratic Russian.  I just think the Congressional Republicans should do their duty and get rid of Messrs Trump and Mr. Pence, clean up our antiquated electoral system which the Russians have taken advantage of and apparently continue to use, reign in the Russian influence campaign itself and restore the vestige of dignity and power the US deserves.   

 

Revisiting the October Revolution 100 Years Later: A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H Kushlis

Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – A World On Edge provides a different vantage point of the Communist Revolution that engulfed this huge country and changed the course of the world after October 1917 from other accounts that I’ve previously read. 

Her story is based on eye-witness observations by more than 80 foreigners living and working in then Petrograd - as chronicled in their letters home, personal journals, foreign office dispatches, newspaper reports and columns the months prior to and during the “Ten Days that Shook the World.”   This former capital city on the Gulf of Finland had, of course, begun as St. Petersburg, the name was briefly changed to Petrograd then Leningrad which it remained until 1991 when it was rechristened St. Petersburg as the Communist regime sputtered out after 70 years.

What distinguishes Rappaport’s account from others?

Because Rappaport chose to tell the story as seen through the eyes of the city’s expatriate residents, she provides a particularly unique vantage point – well connected people living in the city at the time but themselves not of it who witnessed and chronicled the chaos brought about by among other things endless strikes and blockades to the government’s efforts to deliver food from the countryside to city residents.  These accounts of the daily life in the then capital city were written as events happened in mostly unpublished diaries and letters home.    (photo right:  Winter Palace-Hermitage Museum, April 1990 by PHKushlis)        

Her principal sources included the British, US and French Ambassadors and their families or households, political and military mission staff assigned to their respective Embassies, the staff of the Petrograd branch of US National City Bank of New York and other western businesses, various charity and medical missions like the Red Cross as well as correspondents  and photographers – some who came and stayed, others who breezed in at the last moment with an agenda to promote the revolution in sympathetic terms - like Louise Bryant and John Reed who went on to write the best seller “The Ten Days That Shook the World.”  Rappaport begins the book with a useful forward, or Glossary of Eye Witnesses identifying each by name in alphabetical order.

Her work highlights the importance of the two Russian revolutions – one closely following the other:  the first in February 1917 which resulted in the Czar’s abdication, his replacement by a weak provisional government dominated by many Socialists and Communists led by Alexander Kerensky and a bloody massacre of untold thousands on the Field of Mars in front of the Winter Palace.  The picture Rappaport paints is of a largely absent Czar far more engaged in military campaigns against the Germans than in protecting his throne and family dynasty or tending the well-being of his suffering population in the capital city as the war ground on.

By 1917, Petrograd (the name was changed in 1914 from St Petersburg and then to Leningrad in 1924) was a rapidly industrializing city spearheaded by and supported with – as usual in Russia – strong government support.   Yet, as Rappaport writes, these factory workers and Baltic fleet sailors had become the country’s Achilles Heel, radicalized as a result of their harsh conditions and political naivety who had become ripe for use as storm troops by the Communists to overthrow the Czar and then six months later the Provisional Government.    

Trotsky, not Lenin was the Communist Party’s public face

Rappaport’s book describes how Minister of Foreign Affairs Leon Trotsky was the real orator, public face and spokesperson for the Communist Party, not Lenin.  The far less charismatic Lenin, who the Germans had transported into Russia from exile in Switzerland, spent his time once in Petrograd in a converted palace running the printing presses and the party propaganda apparatus rather than venturing out in front to address the crowds. 

When the Bolshevik coup finally happened, as Rappaport describes, it was “not the heroic showdown of Soviet historiography, but more an exhausted capitulation of Kerensky’s moribund and virtually defenseless government.”  By mid-October, “the Bolsheviks had gained the upper hand in Petrograd with about 50,000 party members and control of the Petrograd Soviet.  They were well armed, and the soldiers and sailors who had gone over to them were increasingly belligerent.”   In contrast in Moscow, the fight for the Kremlin had taken ten days with fierce fighting on the streets and over 1,000 dead and atrocities against the defending cadets far worse.                  

The forgotten election of 1917

Soon after the Communist coup, Lenin held a popular election for a new Constituent Assembly in November 1917 under the misapprehension that his party would win.  The election took place over two weeks.  When the Bolsheviks garnered only 23.5% of the total vote to the Social Democratic Party’s 41% and the smaller parties refused to support him, Lenin abolished the Assembly after its first day.   A 24% approval by an electorate does not exactly provide the underpinning for takeover of a government and the institution of a single party authoritarian state but that’s what happened.  At the ballot box, Lenin’s popular support was in Moscow, Petrograd and among the soldiers on the Western Front and sailors in the Baltic Fleet but not in the country’s vast rural areas.   Then, only as the German troops approached within 100 miles of Petrograd, did Lenin move Russia’s capital to Moscow.

Seventy years on the road to nowhere

In reality, the October 1917 revolt was the third revolution for Russia between 1906 and 1917 each one becoming more radical in nature. With no experience in democratic governance and a popular longing for a “good Czar” to look over Russia, it’s not surprising the country had turned towards authoritarianism once again in times of trouble – just as happened in 1999 – with Yeltsin’s selection of Vladimir Putin as his successor less than ten years after the country’s 4^th revolution in August 1991.

This, then, is the ages old dilemma that Russia has yet to resolve – the desire for a strong leader to hold the vast territory together – but simultaneously praying that the strong leader stays as far away as possible from “us.”  There’s a lot to be learned from the historical record of this complex and troubled country that remains relevant today.  Rappaport’s contribution is to help us place it in a different light.                      

Helen Rappaport, Caught in the Revolution, Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – a World on Edge, St Martin’s Press, New York, February 2017, pp 334.                   

Searching for Peace in Afghanistan: No Regional Solution without Kashmir

Patricia Lee Sharpe

Stephen J. Hadley, former National Security advisor, now chairman of the U.S. Institute for Peace, and his colleague Moeed Yusuf have blessed us with some rational thinking about “How to Bring Peace to Afghanistan,” the title of their recent op-ed piece in the New York Times. Their bedrock assumption is this: Afghanistan does not exist in a geographic or historical vacuum.

No serious observer believes that peace can come to Afghanistan without the cooperation of the government of Pakistan, most especially not without Islamabad’s willingness to resolutely destroy peace-violating elements, be they Afghan or Pakistani, pious or not, anti-Indian or not. But it's not that simple.

Although many analysts give a nod to India’s relevance, especially in so far as India has provided economic and security assistance to the government in Kabul, the more general tendency is to relegate the disfunctional India-Pak relationship to a separate, if not wholly seep-free, compartment. This is where Hadley and Yusuf part company with conventional wisdom: Pakistan’s destructive meddling in Afghanistan, they believe, can be eliminated only by addressing Pakistan’s oversized fear of its gigantic neighbor India.

According to Hadley and Jusuf, a less paranoid (my word) Pakistan would benefit the U.S., too. “United States policies toward Pakistan have long underestimated the centrality of this regional dynamic in defining Pakistan’s choices.” Not only will better Indo-Pak relations “reduce Pakistan’s apprehensions in Afghanistan,” they write, their rapprochement will also serve “other long term U.S. interests: eliminating terrorist threats from the region, reducing the risk of nuclear war and supporting a greater global role for India.” Enhancing India’s importance would have anothe benefit as well, it seems to me. It would help to counterbalance the rising power of the dragon to the North.

As a border state with its own claims to regional territory, China would, in any event, need to be a party to any agreement, which brings me to Kashmir, where some bits of China’s ambition lie. Since the creation of Pakistan and the birth of post-colonial India, nearly seventy years ago, Kashmir has been a major, if not the primary, stumbling block to amicable relations between the two neighbors. If anything, since the rise of ISIS and the increase in fervent Hindu nationalism, the potential for a war between two nervous nuclear powers has increased, but it’s hard to see a way to regional peace without a resolution of the Kashmir problem. Pakistan’s flirtation with cross-border, Islamic terrorism was initially aimed at India.

It won’t be easy, as Hadley and Jusuf concede, to bring a rivalry-ridden Afghan government, a squabbling Taliban, a self-righteous India, a defensive Pakistan and an opportunistic China to the table (or tables, for parallel and eventually converging negotiations), but the status quo is unhealthy for everyone.

And, surely, getting hard-nosed, realistic talks underway is preferable to the current thinking in the Trump administration. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, apparently, has been given carte blanche to up the troop level in Afghanistan, doubling it, at least. Another surge, in short. History replayed as a bad joke. For a couple of years the foreign troop level in Afghanistan, mostly American, was over 100,000. Yet even that huge force wasn’t enough to secure, on a permanent basis, the territories recurrently seized from Taliban occupation. It was a thoroughly disheartening seesaw war.

I feel a little uneasy about stating this so baldly, but I’ll do so anyway. No surge of foreign troops, however massive, will “solve” the political problems of Afghanistan. The best hope is dogged, intelligent diplomacy. Not smirks over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The real thing.