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House of Trump House of Putin – Book Review Essay

By Patricia H Kushlis

The subtitle of Craig Unger’s new book House of Trump House of Putin is The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia.  Basically, Unger’s book explores the multi-faceted connections between Donald Trump, his family, his campaign committee, his personal lawyer and staff with members of the Russian mafia, government and its intelligence services well prior to and during the 2016 campaign.

 I don’t see that Unger has revealed much new because almost all of the information he includes is well footnoted and available piecemeal in various media including in two of his own commentaries.  But I certainly found information I had not come across before. More importantly what makes this book worth reading is his careful assembling of the many pieces of this still unraveling story into a well written, searing and coherent fashion.

The case he makes for these all too close ties is damming.

If anyone is still critical of the amount of time, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is taking to investigate and document the 1,000 piece or more jigsaw puzzle that composes Trump’s Russian connections, I think he or she should stop right now.  Complex money laundering cases with lengthy histories just take time and fastidious research to put the parts together and connect the multitude of dots.  

Beginning at the beginning

Unger identifies an incredibly complex relationship or series of intricate relationships beginning with Trump’s first visit to Moscow in 1987 if not beginning with his marriage in 1977 to Ivanka Trump, a Czech citizen who was working as a model in Canada and whose father was under surveillance by Czech intelligence. 

Yes, Trump’s first Moscow visit took place during the Gorbachev years, a time when the US had begun to encourage American business and private contacts with Russians four years before the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991.  Nevertheless, in this context, perhaps the most important thing to consider is that although Gorbachev represented a new form of Soviet leadership, the country’s security services continued to march to their own drumbeat: collecting and carefully filing away compromising information on potential foreign targets for possible future use. Men like Trump were part of their bread and butter.  For those of us who served in the Soviet Union, the police state and its secret services targeted against visiting westerners were daily realities.

The overall picture Unger portrays is one of the US president tethered to the Russian mafia which is tethered to Vladimir Putin and his Russian security services. The late Karen Dawisha described the Putin-oligarch-mafia connections accurately in her 2014 book Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia as a mafia state. 

In a nutshell, if this sprawling tale can be condensed into a single nutshell, the Russian mafia was born and bred in Stalin’s gulags. Many of that future mafia were Russian Jews, discriminated against by Stalin. They had served prison terms in Siberia as a result.  After Stalin’s death, the gulags were emptied and the former prisoners came home.  But in reality, there was very little for the former Jewish prisoners to come home to especially since Jews continued to be heavily discriminated against in the Soviet Union - Stalin or not. 

In the early 1970s they became some of the people that the Jackson-Vanik Amendment aided.  This piece of legislation spurred the Soviets to issue exit permits to Jews and Armenians – the Jews to Israel and the Armenians mostly to the US - in return for enhanced trade.  Many Russian Jewish emigres remained in Israel but some of them then emigrated to the US.  In the US, the Russian Jewish mafia was concentrated in New York’s Brighton Beach whereupon they opened small scale businesses, got to know and became involved with Italian crime families and over time became conduits for incredible amounts of illicit cash flowing out of the Soviet Union and particularly Russia.  The oligarchs needed places to park the money they had received from the cheap sales of Russian natural resources and the most legally opaque form of investment in both the US and the UK was real estate. 

Donald Trump - "The King of Debt's" re-entry

Re-enter Donald Trump, a failed New York real estate developer with an enormous ego who had happened upon a simple but surprisingly effective financial model notes the author after his fourth bankruptcy.

“The King of Debt” was in desperate need of cash and the Russian oligarchs needed a place to launder their illicit fortunes in the West.  A central player in this money laundering scheme appears to have been a now defunct real estate company called Bayrock LLC; and its collaboration with Trump became a match made in heaven.  Trump’s name had brand value which he licensed to developers “who would do all the work and he could sit back and collect the royalties – often 18% of more.” (p. 125) As he marketed his Sunny Isles branded Florida apartments in Moscow, St Petersburg and other locations they were seemingly “designed to attract Russian organized crime money.” (p. 126) 

As his son Donald Jr said at a Manhattan real estate conference in 2008, “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of our assets. . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” (p. 153) That statement, in and of itself, should have raised  all sorts of red flags.

 Thus, in 2004 when Trump was about to hit rock-bottom, he rose from the dead as it were and was suddenly making large cash expenditures for golf courses, estates, and up market houses in the US and abroad by 2006.  This spending spree continued at least into 2014.

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.

 

A Not-So-Golden Shower of Missiles

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Donald Trump’s greatest triumph re Syria last weekend was probably the feat of roping the Brits and the French into a fireworks show that didn’t accomplish much.

Let’s begin with the positives.

1. The coordination was impressive. Missiles rained in from all directions and they hit their targets. As good as the Rockettes at their Christmas best!

2. What’s more the hail of incoming wasn’t intercepted by an effective missile defense. This, unfortunately, could mean two things. The defenders lacked the capacity to protect the targeted sites—or they chose not to, thus cannily not betraying the full force of their defensive capacity, given the relative insignificance of the sites at risk.

3. Meanwhile, always a good thing: there wasn’t much “collateral damage” in the way of civilians killed. This could be understood in several ways. The strikes were artfully selected and targeted. Or the people normally on site were evacuated. Or the sites, no longer of critical importance, had been largely abandoned anyway. Also to the good, moreover, none of the losses were Russians, the potential killing of whom had much occupied the planners of the strike.

In sum, the NATO trio had reinforced stern warnings with dramatic, highly visible action, and although the results might have been better, they might also have been much worse.

Does this "mission accomplished" mean that a consistent, coherent, long term Syrian strategy has now been put in place?  Evidently not.   The strike had all the appearance of a caper designed to allow Donald Trump to distract critics, impress the base and allow the impresario-in-chief to take a bow. So let’s examine the three stages of the latest Trump “reality show.”

1. First came the promotion, the days and days of audience-building by bluster and hype. And oh! the suspense! Will he or won’t he?

2. Then came the performance, the rain of missiles, which hit their targets. A great show! “Fire and fury,” initially obscuring the sad futility.

3. Finally came the victory lap, the epic boasting, the strutting, the exaggeration of effect: “A perfectly executed strike last night!” True enough. But the further claim that the American-led strikes had taken the “heart” out of Syria’s chemical weapons program was already being contradicted by Pentagon officials who conceded that Bashar al-Assad probably retained the capacity to slaughter many more Syrians with chemical agents whenever he saw the need.

In short, Trump’s missile strike turned out to be as successful as the Obama/Russia negotiations which also failed to rid Syria of chemical weapons. What an irony!

Your Silence Is Deafening.

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

More than deafening. Damning.

I’m speaking to you, Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein. And here’s the problem: I don’t understand your near perfect silence as we assess the nature and effect of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Only Donald Trump’s diehards continue to resist the avalanche of evidence that Russia interfered massively during the period leading up to and following the 2016 election. Only the willfully blind and deaf doubt that those Russian tricks overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump.

Despite Trump’s self-interested claim to the contrary, however, no U.S. intelligence agency has issued an opinion on the bombshell question: did Moscow determine who’s U.S. president today? Meanwhile, the search for clarity is driving Trump crazy.

Whether or not the trump card was Moscow’s, we know for sure that the Russians spent a small fortune to keep Clinton out of the White House, even during the primary season, when Russian operatives schemed to smear Trump’s opponents while promoting Clinton’s competition.

Yes, Bernie and Jill. In addition to hammering at Clinton throughout the 2016 election process, Moscow worked at garnering votes for you during the primaries. Does this please you? If not, why aren’t you vigorously and vociferously supporting the Mueller inquiry? * Is it even remotely possible that your silence means that you are grateful for favors that can’t be acknowledged?

Of course, there were other Hillary-harming complications that had nothing to do with her notorious lack of charisma. FBI Director Comey’s deviously-phrased, suspiciously-timed refusal to prosecute her for longstanding email stupidities, for example. Julian Assange and Wikileaks didn’t help either.

Nevertheless, Clinton won the popular vote by 3,000,000, a victory that was nullified by the Electoral College, which awarded the election to Trump. This is SOP in today’s America. Donald Trump isn’t the only modern President to fall short of a popular majority, although he seems to be more defensive about this entirely-Constitutional absurdity than his predecessors have been.

As if Hillary’s majority vote weren’t hard enough to swallow, the Russian factor compounds the damage to his fragile ego by introducing a legitimacy question despite Trump’s Electoral College victory. Still, the normal reaction to evidence of foreign meddling wouldn’t be dismissal or denial. A self-confident, non-colluding president would throw all possible resources into the job of uncovering Russia’s role and preventing a repeat. Whatever the fallout re votes, history would be kind to such a president.

But Donald Trump needs to be a winner at all costs. What’s more grace and generosity aren’t his strong points. All of which leaves him open to an entirely credible alternate hypothesis, the possibility that he really was colluding with a foreign power to win an American election. The more he schemes to abort the Mueller investigation the guiltier he looks.

Meanwhile, we mere citizens need Robert Mueller to continue his methodical dissection of the Russian-tainted anomalies of the 2016 election.  So why, Jill and Bernie, are you not leading the clamor for answers and solutions? And why, have you not unequivocally disavowed all the unwelcome—surely, it was unwelcome!—support you received from Russian operatives?  Once upon a time there were credible reasons for idealists on the American left to be soft on Russia. That was before Communist realities relegated all hopes for a workers’ paradise in the Soviet Union to the dustbin of history.

 

*If you've spoken up and I've missed it, you need to speak a little louder and more broadly.

 

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.