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Joe Biden: Speak Softly and Stand Your Ground.

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

(Background reading: “Did the War in Afghanistan have to Happen?” in the NYT: https:// www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/world/middleeast/afghanistan-taliban-deal-united-states.html

Let me be the first to congratulate Joe Biden for his handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

He had the guts to make a tough decision and stick to it. This is leadership. This is courage. Joe Biden is a hard truth guy, a guy you can trust.

At the moment the departure is not a wholly appreciated decision. Especially its culmination at the airport in Kabul. But anyone who thought that the extraction of tens of thousands of foreigners and anti-Taliban Afghans was going to be smooth and painless is living in fantasy land. The Taliban were wise enough to facilitate (more or less) the departure of diplomats and other foreigners, but they have little to gain from easing the scampering of the hordes of Afghans who preferred reform to be imposed by outsiders, not won and held by their own efforts. Winners, not surprisingly, prefer their unpopularity to be less visible.

I don't understand why the speed of the Taliban takeover has astonished observers, including those who should know better.  It’s been obvious for years that the Afghan army couldn’t (or wouldn’t) hold a position without solid American support. Don’t listen to the ex post facto propaganda machine. Recall what’s been happening on the ground. Whenever, in the past, the U.S. has pulled out from a town or a position, that space has been occupied—rapidly!—by Taliban elements lurking in strength in the countryside.

The idea that outsiders had to train an Afghan army to recover the country from the Taliban was absurd from day one. Afghans know how to fight Afghans—and when they’re motivated, they’re fearless and creative. Did the Taliban have tanks and heavy artillery? No. They had machine guns and pick up trucks. Fast and lethal. Did they have sophisticated missiles? No. They had RPGs. They also had motivation. They believed in what they were doing the first time around, and they wholeheartedly believe in the form of Islam they intend to re-impose, which won’t be ideal for women, even if it’s a trifle less restrictive, which I doubt.

Here’s the crux: the Taliban believe more strongly in a society that severely sequesters women than their secular counterparts believe in a world of women’s liberation. So don’t blame Americans, meaning Joe Biden, for abandoning Afghan women. Blame their own fathers, brother, sons and husbands. These non-Taliban men saw how gloriously women flourish when released from patriarchal tyranny, but they weren’t willing to risk own their lives to preserve that interlude of opportunity for their own sisters, wives and daughters.

As for the so-called Afghan government during the American occupation, it’s never been anything but an oxymoron, a sand castle, a money dump for billions of American dollars, a profit-making operation for American contractors. (Talk about corruption!). Hamid Karzai tried to govern the ethnic, religious and tribal agglomeration that’s Afghanistan. For all his grave imperfections and inclinations toward nepotism, he tried to represent Afghans to Americans who couldn’t bear contradiction or resistance. So the Americans dumped him, supporting instead Ashraf Ghani, an American-trained academic without a political bone in his body, which means he lacked leadership instincts as well. What did Ghani do when things got tough? He abandoned the ship of state. And who stuck around to deal with the Taliban? Hamid Karzai.

And the Russians!

President George W. Bush turned a clear cut mission into a morass. President Barack Obama didn’t have the guts to get us out. Neither did President Donald J. Trump. Joe Biden did—and history will praise him for it.

January 6, 2021: More questions than answers

By Patricia H Kushlis

What did Trump know and when did he know it?  Why was Trump reportedly passively watching on television the events unfold on Capitol Hill yet refusing to order the DC, Maryland and Virginia National Guards to help the overrun Capitol and DC police forces stop the violence as his angry and deluded mob attacked Congress? 

Why didn’t he accompany the people on their march to the Hill as he had promised?

And why is Trump so desperate to remain in office when he makes it so obvious that he doesn’t like the job, that he is in way over his head and his performance has been an abject failure? 

Who were the primary organizers?

What role did certain members of Congress play?

What role did Moscow play in promoting and instigating the insurrection at the Capitol? 

Why weren’t the DC National Guard allowed to defend the Capitol and reinforce the vastly outnumbered Capitol and DC Metropolitan police until almost too late? Why and how were calls from Pence, Pelosi and other Congressional leaders finally able to get the Pentagon to release the National Guard? 

Why did the Pentagon refuse to allow Maryland Governor Larry Hogan to respond to calls to send the Maryland National Guard in to help deal with the Trump incited angry mob on January 6 as they attacked the Capitol?  Why did the Pentagon only allow the DC National Guard to direct traffic for hours after the attack had begun?

Did a few Capitol police allow rioters to breach the barricades or were the policy so outnumbered they had no choice?  Who spread the false rumor to the mostly white insurrectionists that the police were on their side? When this failed to transpire, the mob became sorely disappointed and turned on them.  One policeman was brutally killed and others injured as a result. 

Why did Trump’s GOP Congressional supporters object to the results particularly for states other than their own after those results had been recounted, verified and adjudicated in multiple courts? 

Could this, perhaps, have been a delaying tactic to give time for Trump’s mob to disrupt Congress to stop the vote  count so that Trump could enact emergency powers, retain control, establish a dictatorship and nullify the election of Joe Biden as the next president?

Why did Trump fire his chosen Secretary of Defense Doug Esper and others in line of succession at the Pentagon  as well as the Defense advisory board just last fall and replace them with his cronies who he thought would support him regardless of what he said or did?

Where was Secretary of State Pompeo during all of this. What did he know - or does it matter?  He had tried to be out of the country when this occurred so its possible he knew something was up but  his European trip to Brussels and Luxembourg was cancelled because the Europeans refused to meet with him. 

Why has it taken the social media companies so long to ban Trump from Tweeting lie after lie with little or no attempt to stop the spread of his malicious  and unfounded claims?  Freedom of speech is one thing in this country.  Shouting fire in a crowded room is illegal and must be stopped immediately.

If it’s Monday, It Must Be Helsinki

By Patricia H Kushlis

On Monday, July 16, Donald Trump is scheduled to meet one-on-one with Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin.  I could suggest that Trump is salivating for this meeting on the Baltic although why he wants it so much, remains unclear.  Is it the prestige of meeting face to face in an hour long meeting a deux with another male autocrat for whom he has a special affinity?

It doesn’t take that long for a photo op after all.   

Normally, as former Ambassador Nicholas Burns observed in a PBS Newshour interview Friday evening, the principals are well prepared and the topics of such meetings are clearly defined and set out in advance.

When President George H W Bush met with Mikhael Gorbachev his Soviet counterpart in Helsinki September 9, 1990 in the very same location – the Presidential Palace near Senate Square – Bush knew in advance what the topic would be - in fact he had called the meeting - and also knew what he wanted out of it:  the topic then was Iraq’s illegal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and Bush wanted Gorbachev’s support, if not just his tacit approval, to launch an invasion of multilateral forces to expel Saddam Hussein’s troops from the country.  Bush got what he wanted. 

But what does Trump want from a meeting with Putin aside from a photo op and a pat on the back?  Kudos for bashing NATO and insulting German President Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Teresa May?  Bravos for kicking up sand in the Alliance’s face and interfering in British domestic politics in support of the hardline Brexiteers who are May’s primary opposition?  Another chance to insult the EU?  A pay raise from his ultimate paymaster? 

We know that the Kremlin has a well defined foreign policy.  It is revisionist; revanchist and aggressive.  Putin and his oligarchs see the US and Western Europe as major impediments to the Kremlin's ambitions and are using cyber warfare all too effectively to achieve their aims.  Putin’s policy demands a restoration of the borders of an almost mythical Russia with territory that extends far into Russian speaking lands extending well beyond the largest borders ruled by the Czars.

International recognition of Russia's incorporation of Crimea is the first step; Eastern Ukraine will be next along with the breakaway statelets of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia that the Russian military wrested from its neighbor summer 2008 but that no one else in the international community has recognized a decade later.

Is Trump prepared to agree? 

He's demonstrated time and again his lack of diplomatic negotiating skills.  His foreign affairs background is exceedingly weak, he never prepares and he's far too conceited to agree to including advisors who actually know the subjects to be raised into such high stakes meetings.

Is he going to agree to a lifting of the economic sanctions on Russia imposed by the Obama administration in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014?  This is what Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Advisor, fears will happen behind those closed doors in Helsinki.  She argues that “at the behest of his favorite foreign partners – Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia – Mr Trump has been encouraged to trade recognition of Russian annexation of Crimea and the termination of sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, for Russia’s pledge to curtail Iranian influence in Syria and the region.” And for what in return?   If this is the outcome, what would the US get out of it and what would be the repercussions?  Rice could be right.

And by the way, whatever happened to Reagan’s “trust but verify?”        

Now, on top of this, the Mueller investigation took Russia’s interference in the 2016 US elections at least one step further.  On Friday, while Trump was drinking tea with Queen of England, the Mueller investigation announced it had charged 12 active duty officers of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence of conspiracy to interfere in the US campaign through cyber warfare attacks on the Democratic Party, its officials and staff, as well as state and local election websites.  These fishing expeditions were made all on behalf of assisting Mr. Trump's election. The investigation also charged the GRU -12 with contacts with at least two unidentified Americans to share the stolen information  – one American with close connections to the Trump campaign (read Roger Stone who has already admitted as much) and the other running for Congress.   

I tend to think that the tight-lipped highly professional Mueller investigation runs on its own schedule and we know that Mueller, in all fairness, notified Trump before his departure for Brussels of the forthcoming charges so it should have come as no surprise to Trump that the indictments would be announced publicly while he was in Europe.   

Nevertheless – as usual – Trump has continued to falsely accuse Mueller’s team of conducting a witch hunt, and I can only assume, therefore, that he will not raise the conspiracy charges with Putin on Monday, or if so, down play them as erroneous and inconsequential as opposed to praising Putin to the hilt.   

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.        

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.