#in an election where we KNOW there's been both internal and external interference attempts

[glimblshanks]

Also am I absolutely crazy to think these election results are just like... Off. I mean you're telling me that a bunch of Republicans went out, voted for abortion rights, and then voted for Trump. Is that what we're saying happened? For real?

[khalilhumam]

Pompeo’s surreal speech on China

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/pompeos-surreal-speech-on-china/

Pompeo’s surreal speech on China

By Thomas Wright

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave one of the most surreal speeches of the Donald Trump presidency at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, on Thursday. In his speech, titled “Communist China and the Free World’s Future,” he declared the failure of 50 years of engagement with China and called for free societies to stand up to Beijing.

I am sympathetic to the argument. I wrote a book in 2017 about how Western hopes that China would converge with the liberal international order have failed. I have argued for almost two years that when Trump leaves office, the United States should put the free world at the center of its foreign policy.

Unfortunately, Pompeo, like his targets in Beijing, is engaged in doublespeak whereby he offers win-win outcomes, but his words are at odds with his actions. He says the U.S. will organize the free world, while alienating and undermining the free world; he extols democracy, while aiding and abetting its destruction at home; and he praises the Chinese people, while generalizing about the ill intent of Chinese students who want to come to America.

Pompeo is also ultra-loyal to a president who cares not one whit for democracy, dissidents, freedom, or transparency overseas. Trump’s long track record on this is well documented, and it has defined his personal approach to China.

On June 18, 2019, Trump spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping by phone and told him he would not condemn a crackdown in Hong Kong. On August 1, Trump told the press that the unrest in Hong Kong was between Hong Kong and China “because Hong Kong is a part of China. They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.”

In his book, the former national security adviser John Bolton wrote that on two separate occasions, Trump told Xi that he “should go ahead with building the [concentration] camps in Xijiang, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.” Pompeo said nothing about these revelations, although he called Bolton a traitor.

And in January and February of this year, Trump infamously praised Xi’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even though the World Health Organization was privately alarmed by Beijing’s actions and its lack of transparency (it praised China publicly in the hopes of coaxing it into cooperation). The Trump administration would have known this and could have built a coalition to increase pressure on China, but instead it ignored the behavior.

For three and a half years, senior members of the administration have tried to downplay Trump’s words as if they don’t make policy. But they do, especially if consistently expressed. His serial dismissal of the values of the free world has a real impact. Pompeo has some nerve to now claim that what is upside down is right side up.

An ideological struggle is underway between China and free societies, but Trump is on the wrong side. The Chinese Communist Party wants a tributary international system where smaller countries are deferential to larger powers, instead of a rules-based international order where small countries enjoy equal rights. The CCP also sees no place for universal rights or global liberal norms, and wants to ignore the principles of open markets to pursue a predatory mercantilist economic policy. So does Trump. Indeed, Trump never speaks in terms of a competition of systems between democracy and authoritarianism. He rarely criticizes authoritarian governments on their human-rights records. He has done little to press China to free the Canadian hostages. He and Pompeo sought to rehabilitate Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia after the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He has embraced the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán as he shredded his country’s democratic institutions. The only countries that need to fear a reprimand from Trump on human rights are those led by left-wing Latin American authoritarians—everyone else gets a pass.

Meanwhile, Trump and Pompeo have turned social distancing into a diplomatic doctrine. The subject of Russian election interference has never featured on the agenda of NATO summits. Officials told me they wanted to but worried that Trump would walk out in protest. The administration repeatedly rejected requests from Europe to work together on China until a few weeks ago. The Trump administration also sees its traditional allies — countries that belong in the free world — as economic competitors. If other countries’ economies are doing badly, the U.S. looks better, or so they think. With that type of mindset, there is no incentive to think deeply about how to tackle our shared challenges.

Even discussing the ideological component of the U.S.-China rivalry is a delicate matter. I have lost count of the number of times European diplomats have told me they want to work with the U.S. on China but get nervous and reluctant whenever ideology is broached.

In his speech, Pompeo painted a picture of a Chinese leader driven by Marxism-Leninism and executing a plan to fulfill his “decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism.” Ideology is at play in the U.S.-China rivalry, but in a much more complicated and nuanced way than Pompeo suggests. The U.S. and China both offer different social and governance models — one is generally free and open and the other is authoritarian and closed. Each threatens the other, not necessarily because of the foreign-policy choices the leaders make, but because of what the governments are at their core. Beijing believes that the freedom of the press, the internet, social media, NGOs, economic interdependence, and exchange programs all have the potential to undermine their regime. They are not wrong. Indeed, many Americans saw this as a positive side effect of engagement.

Many Americans rightly understand that China’s authoritarian model has negative externalities that threaten U.S. interests and freedoms. Tools of repression domestically find their way overseas. Beijing seeks to censor all criticism of its regime by coercing other governments, companies, and individuals. It sucks up data on foreign citizens. It employs mercantilist techniques to pursue dominance of new technologies. China is actively seeking to eviscerate liberal norms around human rights, anti-corruption, and freedom of speech. The regime interferes in democracies to advance its interests.

Neither side can accommodate the other without compromising the essence of its system. Americans would like China to become less repressive, but there is zero chance of that under Xi. China would like the U.S. to respect what it calls its core interests, but this would mean unpalatable concessions that would compromise our values and interests — such as acquiescing in the suppression of free speech. So we are destined for rivalry. The question is how to inoculate the free world against the negative effects of the authoritarian model while also engaging with China on shared interests.

This clash of systems is actually fairly accurately described in parts of the White House’s official strategy on China, which bears the hallmark approach of Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser. Pottinger is a hawk on China, but he has gained the bipartisan respect of Asia experts and that of U.S. allies, including in Europe, by staying out of the limelight and by making a sophisticated and nuanced version of the case, albeit one that has its own shortcomings and is still inconsistent with Trump’s personal worldview. Pottinger has also engaged in patient, low-key diplomacy on China in Europe from early on in the administration and avoids any hectoring or partisanship.

Pompeo’s account, by contrast, is a Manichean politicized caricature. For instance, consider the difference between Pottinger’s document and Pompeo’s speech on Chinese students. The official strategy says:

Chinese students represent the largest cohort of foreign students in the United States today. The United States values the contributions of Chinese students and researchers. … The United States strongly supports the principles of open academic discourse and welcomes international students and researchers conducting legitimate academic pursuits; we are improving processes to screen out the small minority of Chinese applicants who attempt to enter the United States under false pretenses or with malign intent.

At the Nixon Library, the sum total of what Pompeo said about Chinese students was the following:

We know too, we know too that not all Chinese students and employees are just normal students and workers that are coming here to make a little bit of money and to garner themselves some knowledge. Too many of them come here to steal our intellectual property and to take this back to their country.

In the first, the U.S. welcomes the Chinese people to its shores and recognizes that a small minority could have ill intent. The second is torn right out of the Trump “I assume some are good people” playbook.

It’s a subtle but important difference that repeats itself again and again. The official strategy talks about China’s hegemonic aspirations in Asia, particularly in the maritime domain, and not “global” domination of “Chinese communism.” It says that “the United States stands ready to welcome China’s positive contributions” and mentions several examples and ways of going about that. Pompeo is utterly dismissive of any cooperation or engagement. Some, he says,

are insisting that we preserve the model of dialogue for dialogue’s sake. Now, to be clear, we’ll keep on talking. But the conversations are different these days. I traveled to Honolulu now just a few weeks back to meet with Yang Jiechi. It was the same old story—plenty of words, but literally no offer to change any of the behaviors.

That was as constructive as it got.

Pompeo’s tirade will discredit the case for competition with China among allies, in Asia and Europe, who are petrified of a full-blown Cold War where the U.S. and China have no interest in diplomacy. He couldn’t resist a thinly veiled, and inevitably counterproductive, sideswipe at German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is under pressure to take a tougher stance on China, saying cryptically,

We have a NATO ally of ours that hasn’t stood up in the way that it needs to with respect to Hong Kong because they fear Beijing will restrict access to China’s market. This is the kind of timidity that will lead to historic failure, and we can’t repeat it.

By far the biggest problem with Pompeo, or the administration, invoking the free world is that he said nothing about the free world itself. Free societies are in trouble. As the NGO Freedom House has documented, the world has become less free over the past four years, due in large part to illiberal forces within democracies. Many democracies also struggle to cope with fundamental challenges, including inequality, racial injustice, the automation of work, and new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Free societies also face the very real threat of political interference from authoritarian states and networks of corruption.

Getting serious about defending the free world has to start with restoring the rule of law and democracy at home and seriously examining what it will take to remain free and democratic in the decades to come. Instead of tackling this problem, the Trump administration has thrown more fuel on the fire raging inside the free world. Trump has said he may not accept the results of the forthcoming election. He has claimed that mail-in voting, a staple of American democracy, is fraudulent. He has sent troops into American cities against the wishes of their mayors. And he has called for Russia and China to interfere in the election process.

America is a work in progress. The U.S. is entitled to carry the banner of freedom, as it did in the Cold War, even as it wages the struggle for freedom at home. But it is quite another matter for an administration that is actively undermining American democracy to claim the mantle of the free world.

A different administration has an opportunity to put the free world at the heart of its strategy. It would involve working with other free societies to modernize our systems of governance so they are collectively resilient to shocks—whether they are financial, environmental, political, or public-health-related. This will, by necessity, involve major changes domestically. It means tackling international networks of oligarchs and corruption that exploit a country’s openness in order to penetrate their systems and distort their democracy. It also allows for a robust national and international conversation about what a free society means in the modern world—one that should include voices from across the political spectrum.

Competing with China is an important component of the free-world strategy but only one part, and the competition is not an end in itself. Some critics will still worry that talking about the free world will bring about a Cold War with China, dividing the world in two. But this fear is misplaced. Kelly Magsamen of the Center for American Progress recently put it succinctly. “Rather than organizing U.S. foreign policy purely around competition with China,” she told me, “we should be organizing it around our democratic allies with the goal of strengthening and catalyzing the free world. That’s a far more affirmative theory of the case that would better reflect American values, play to our comparative advantages, and frankly get better collective results.” That strategy is the way to get allies and Americans on board with a competition between governance systems because it recognizes that the challenge comes from within and is something the U.S. should do even if there were no competition with China.

[globaltotal]

Ukraine: Waiting for Donald, worrying about the EU

Ukraine's prospects are under threat from developments on both sides of the Atlantic.

Something is stirring in Ukraine. The most obvious cause is Donald Trump’s imminent inauguration on 20 January, and the widespread fear in Kyiv that his push for some kind of Yalta 2.0 agreement with Russia will be at Ukraine’s expense.

But another parallel cause is the fear that the European Union is losing interest in Ukraine. After Dutch voters rejected the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement at a referendum in April 2016 (though many were really voting about the Netherlands and Europe), the price of bringing the Dutch government into line was high. In fact, it took a triple reassurance just to get PM Mark Rutte to take the issue back to parliament for a vote to overturn the referendum result.

Those reassurances came in the European Council’s resolution of 15 December, which declares that ‘the Agreement does not confer on Ukraine the status of a candidate country for accession to the Union, nor does it constitute a commitment to confer such status to Ukraine in the future’. Furthermore, it ‘does not contain an obligation for the Union or its Member States to provide collective security guarantees or other military aid or assistance to Ukraine’. And finally, it ‘does not grant to Ukrainian nationals… the right to reside and work freely within the territory of the Member States’. While this resolution does not roll back existing, modest, European commitments to Ukraine, it was interpreted as a major setback in Kyiv.

Partly as a result, disillusion with the EU in Ukraine is spreading from the margins to the mainstream. Support for ‘entry into the EU’ is still holding up as the most popular foreign policy option, at 49 percent as of September 2016, not too far down from a peak of 55 per cent in December 2015.But the image of an EU racked by crises and too preoccupied to care about Ukraine is chipping away at this plurality, as seen by the growing popularity of the ‘Eurorealism’ trope (as in, ‘Let’s be realistic, our prospects are not good’).

This view is both real and promoted by Russian stooges like the Opposition Bloc and fake ‘think-tanks’ like the Ukrainian Policy Fund. With the war in eastern Ukraine bogged down, Russia has shifted its attention and resources to winning the battle for hearts and minds. Fake letters from ‘ordinary’ Ukrainians and workers are launched online or in social media, and then fed into friendly traditional media controlled by local oligarchs. This multifaceted anti-EU campaign, including a big drive to restore the ‘normal’ levels of Ukrainian-Russian trade that Russia has been busily destroying these last three years, will only grow in the short term, as Russia switches from anti-US propaganda as it sees how its relationship with Trump pans out.

‘Ukrainian Eurointegration’: The Ukrainians are barred entry to the locked doors of the ‘EC’(EU).

Whatever the cause, a series of commentaries and op-eds appeared over the holiday period airing previously heretical thoughts. Most controversial was the piece by leading oligarch Viktor Pinchuk in the Wall Street Journal on 29 December that recommended trading Crimea for peace in the Donbas and abandoning aspirations towards NATO and the EU. President Petro Poroshenko’s adviser Kostiantyn Yeliseyev produced a rejoinder in the Wall Street Journal on 4 January; Poroshenko also reportedly will not attend the traditional Ukraine event organised by Pinchuk in Davos. A collection of other rebuttals can be found here. But others have joined in on Pinchuk’s side, or close to it; some objecting to Pinchuk wanting to give away everything at once, others claiming that there was nothing heretical or treasonous about specific proposals, such as Vasyl Pilipchuk, head of the International Centre for Prospective Research, who argued for a 20-year moratorium on the status of Crimea, for Ukraine to stop ‘beating on the closed door’ of the EU, and even for a restoration of military and technical co-operation with Russia.

Another Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, currently still facing legal problems in Austria, has made similar noises to Pinchuk about reviving trade with Russia. Both men have a personal interest in their companies regaining access to Russian markets. But the campaign also anticipates and feeds a Trumpist agenda, when Ukrainians are profoundly split about how to approach his presidency after Trump’s string of pro-Russian comments and gaffes during the campaign.

The first thing Kyiv did after Trump’s victory was quietly to drop the local investigation against his former campaign chief Paul Manafort, who also worked for exiled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. A second gambit was to build bridges with the ‘traditional’ Republican Party. On a visit to Kyiv in December, three United States senators, John McCain (R-Arizona) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), together with Amy Klobuchar(D-Minnesota) promised that the US would not abandon Ukraine, and proposed even tougher sanctions on Russia. The group followed up once they were back home by launching a bipartisan bill in January that would toughen up Barack Obama’s belated reactions to Russian interference in the US election campaign, and encode some of his executive orders on financial support for Ukraine in law, making them more difficult for Trump to overturn. McCain, Graham and Klobuchar also visited Georgia and the Baltic States as part of their ‘reassurance tour’. But given McCain’s role in publicising accusations about Trump’s long-standing Russia links, the action may backfire. There were, hopefully exaggerated, claims that the damage to Ukraine-Trump relations had already been done.

Other Ukrainians have proposed aligning with Trump’s business instincts rather than confront his agenda head on, and the dilemma of whether to bandwagon with Trump or pre-empt his policies will only sharpen after the inauguration. According to Catherine Smagliy, who runs the Kennan Institute’s Kyiv office, Ukraine must ‘move away from the image of the victim, and focus on the development of economic and cultural cooperation. Don’t forget that the president is a representative of businesses, big business’, for which there could be big opportunities in Ukrainian industry, construction and agriculture.

Oleksandr Sushko of the Institute of Euro-Atlantic Partnership talks in a similar vein: ‘it is clear that we cannot carry on in the same rut. We need to propose new approaches, be more pragmatic. To explain and motivate the American side not only by Ukraine’s ability to confront Russia, but also by our ability to create an attractive investment climate, to become interesting for US investors. ’Significantly, not only has Kyiv announced a deal with the traditional Republican lobby group BGR, led by the former Republican Party leader and governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, to lobby Ukraine’s line in Washington; but BGR’s brief includes ‘strengthening US-Ukrainian relations and increasing US business investment in Ukraine’. This is the kind of language that Kyiv hopes that Trump will understand.

But Ukraine will have to redouble its effort after Trump’s inauguration, if it is not to be left out in the cold. There is much more that Ukraine can do in a practical vein. Some optimists have even argued that Trump is an opportunity for Ukraine, to show that it is not dependent on external sponsors and can get its act together on reform. Most obviously, Ukraine can advertise its high defence spending to show its value-added in a Trumpist world (Ukraine has been spending 5 percent of GDP on defence since 2014, plus huge contributions from the voluntary sector).

Some have argued that ‘Ukraine itself should create defences strong enough to make large-scale war inconvenient and very costly for Russia’, hoping that even Trump might be swayed by global opinion if Russia crosses that threshold. But Ukraine cannot defend itself alone. NATO membership prospects were already distant and will recede further under Trump, although public support stands at 39 percent. There will therefore be a growing trend towards alternative ideas, such as building a Baltic-Black Sea Alliance of local states uncomfortable with Russian pressures.

This concept was originally launched by (mainly) Ukrainian and Polish thinkers in the interwar period, and was briefly popular again the 1990s before Ukraine’s would-be partners found a more direct route to NATO. Now it is revving up again, albeit in different forms. Poland’s new authorities emphasise building links in the międzymorze (‘between the seas’), also now called the ‘ABC’ region (the triangle between the Adriatic, Baltic and ‘Czarne’, or Black, Sea). As a lesser alternative, there will be growing talk on both sides to allow for flexible partnerships across NATO boundaries – particularly between central European and Baltic NATO member states and east European partner states like Ukraine.

And then there is the EU, where Ukraine faces another difficult year in 2017. Potentially traumatic elections, ripe for Russian interference, in the Netherlands, France and Germany (plus possibly Italy and even the United Kingdom), will see continued obsession with migration from the Middle East and North Africa unfairly tainting Ukraine, too. As EU bureaucrats work on yet another reworking of the Eastern Neighbourhood Policy, Ukraine needs to show that the new Brussels buzzword of ‘stabilisation’ is not an alternative to reform. If Ukraine remains unreformed, it will remain unstable.

Just as a ‘Yalta 2.0’ between Trump and Vladimir Putin will not enforce stability over the heads of small states, internal opposition from those Ukrainians who violently oppose it will increase. (We do not know the details of any putative deal, but the most likely elements –any deal on Crimea, any reduction of sanctions on Russia, any attempt to force Ukraine to make constitutional accommodations with the Donbas ‘Republics’ – will be bitterly opposed in Ukraine).

Dealing with the EU will be completely different to dealing with Trump, however. Instead of talking business and realpolitik, Ukraine will need to get serious about tackling corruption and advertise some big reform success stories in the coming year if it is to improve relations with the EU. This may not be the top item on Trump’s agenda, but European public opinion cares more about whether Ukraine is worth saving; and Kyiv needs to do much more to make a convincing case in this respect.