#sometimes there may be convincing reasons why not....other times the reasons may be the hegemonies....

[unproduciblesmackdown]

it's a cyril krampusfucking year we should be nonrhetorically asking why we can't have anything we want

[christineremos]

minsan may isang puta

Mike Portes is the author of the dove files and Minsan May Isang Puta, a short fiction. She composed the narrative ( minsan may isang puta ) that talks about how our own country suffer and struggle because of the other countries and it is because to assist others understand what is truly going on in the town and what the reality is.

sometimes there's a whore, is it just really sometimes?

the short story talks about the hegemony of the other countries to our own country, suffering and mistreatment. many filipinos affected of what happened and what happening in their environment. The three foreigners who are said to have feasted on the body of the Philippines are the three countries that conquered or enslaved it: Japan, the United States, and Spain. Of these three countries, Spain was the one that suffered the most and occupied it for the longest time. because, in the long run, it also has many suitable Filipino words. It is said in the story that the last country that wants to conquer the Philippines is Japan. This occupation had many effects on the Filipinos; many died due to the forces of the Japanese soldiers.

The word "whore" used in the short story served as a symbol to introduce the Philippines as a nation that suffered, became a slave and was broken. in the conquest of those countries, some Filipinos chose to side with the forces of those who wanted to conquer the Philippines and rejected their own origin.

Our country, the Philippines, and the Filipinos who fought for their own lives even though many of them died because of the war continue to attack the outsiders.

Many Filipinos died and suffered because of the wars that came. The war that came to our own country had many bad effects. hunger, harassment of women, and death. Some of the bad things happened during the years when our own country or the Filipinos were trapped in the hands of the oppressors.

Although the Philippines has prospered, it has not been without difficulties. Due to the difficulties they were having in life up until this point, many of them decided to live and work abroad.

The short story explained how much persecution our country suffered because of the powers of the countries that tried to take and own this land. Their greed is one of the reasons why, until now, there has been a lot of anger over that event. Also, the short story shared how other fellow Filipinos have betrayed their own country. The country or the government has control over and does not control the war or occupation that has taken place, convincing and clarifying that the Philippines should fight against fellow Filipinos who join those who want to conquer the country. If the leaders or government could control the invasion and attack of countries that tortured the country and its inhabitants at that time.

 the reason why spain wants to conquer the philippines is to spread the christian faith so they can bring their colorful speech 1521 this conversation started. now, Why does the United States want to conquer our country? because the central market is good, and above all our country is rich in natural resources. when the americans conquered our country they also left many policies that have good and bad effects on our people. Japan overturned several places in the Philippines when they conquered us, which is why there was a great deal of suffering as a result.

How is it possible to murder another human being? They have their own laws to uphold, despite their dislike for it for a variety of reasons. Seeing other people murder each other when all they desire is a quiet existence is difficult and cruel. What makes war a necessity? This is a result of their personal conflicts. A large number of Filipinos also turned against, joined, or betrayed their own nation. The conflict caused many people to lose their homes, families, wealth, and loved ones. Poverty is caused by more than simply the subjugation of other nations; it is also a result of our own governance. The lifting could have been beneficial if the treatment and care were both excellent.

the short story narrating reality and what really happened then. deprived of dignity, justice, and poor treatment of the Filipinos back then. One of the effects was evidence. The poor became slaves, and the rich people became more elevated. This is one of the reasons why the Filipinos had the courage to fight those who were oppressing them and put an end to it.

Our country is the one who struggle, it is harmed by the Filipinos' mistreatment. they are Filipinos who knows why the country is struggling, acts and decisions that will have a negative impact on our country, they did not think about what will be the effects of that.

 The narrative utilized a woman who endures a great deal of hardship due to poverty and persecution to represent historical events that have occurred in the Philippines. Her offspring represent the Filipinos who bragging about one another rather than supporting one another, while the foreigners represent the nations vying for control of the nation.

The story's goal is to expose us to the reality that we need to see and the terrible truths about the past and present that we ought to be aware of.

i am Christine remos, and this is my interpretation in the short story " minsan may isang puta " by mike portes.

references :

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

Okay, so here are my spicy Xmas takes: (Chanukah takes to follow)

Yes, CHRISTmas is 100000% a xtian holiday and pushing it on non-xtians, especially Jews and Muslims and other religious minorities, is actually a microaggression and part of a broader colonial narrative that xtian evangelism both supports and is supported by.

Yes, xtians appropriated facets of pagan rituals to appeal to a European pagan base to convince them to convert.

Sometimes this was actually a totally voluntary thing! There were plenty of European pagans that chose to convert to xtianity and brought their traditions with them.

Sometimes it was very definitely colonialism/appropriation. That sucks a lot and I can respect that frustration, particularly if you are the descendant of one of those colonized groups, e.g. you have actual Celtic heritage.

However, that should mean that better than people who xtians didn't appropriate culture from, you should understand why demanding that people give up their own beliefs and customs to participate in whatever the xtians are pushing now is actually at a minimum a microaggression and only escalates from there.

Yes, plenty of ex-xtians and non-xtians willingly participate in some Xmas stuff. That could be for any number of reasons and does NOT make Xmas religiously neutral or make it okay to demand that ex-xtians and/or non-xtians participate in any Xmas stuff.

The fact that American consumerism is a cult of its own that also has its claws tightly sunk into the ""holiday season"" aka Xmas season from November September until February proves nothing except that capitalism makes existing cultural hegemony worse.

YOU might approach Xmas in a secular way, but that does not make Xmas itself a secular holiday.

(I would actually make the argument that no holidays are actually religiously neutral in the U.S. but that's another take for another post.)

I hope you have a very nice Xmas if you celebrate it, unless you believe in the so-called "war on Xmas" and/or believe that non-xtians asking to be left alone about Xmas is a threat, in which case I hope you get nothing but coal in your stockings.

Chanukah takes:

Chanukah isn't like a super minor holiday, nor is it a major holiday. The focus on it is disproportionate because of xtian hegemony/Xmas, but it's still an important holiday.

It is 100% valid to celebrate it in what are arguably Jewish-American ways (that have definitely been influenced by how American xtians celebrate Xmas), even though that may be too assimilationist for other folks.

Conversely, refusing to engage any non-traditional ways of celebrating Chanukah because Chanukah is fundamentally about refusing to assimilate into the surrounding non-Jewish culture, is equally 100% valid.

They are actually both really interesting assertions of Jewish identity and ways of pushing back against those who would subdue us.

(I actually saw a really interesting take that there have been three major ways of reimagining Chanukah in modern times: (1) As a way to show off one's pride in being a Jew at a time when that is particularly painfully visible, (2) as a way of reasserting the place and importance of Jewish fundamentalism, and (3) as the first "independence day" of the Jewish people.)

Only Jews should celebrate Chanukah. Non-Jews should feel welcome to participate in anything Chanukah related that their Jewish friends/family/etc. invite you participate in, but do NOT try celebrating it on your own without Jews.

There are a lot of valid ways to transliterate "Chanukah/Hanukkah/etc." but the only correct spelling is חנוכה.

Latke discourse is fun silliness but you're never going to convince me that applesauce is good on anything, let alone potatoes.

[reimenaashelyee]

History for Granted, or When a Marginal Voice Tackles The Main Text

My thoughts about being a marginalised creator who chose to make a graphic novel on a historical figure in the dominant Western canon. About why I didn't choose a lesser-known history instead. About why, either way, it is not a loss to POC representation

Reposted from my official blog, where I keep all my long-form thoughts.

Some of you may know I write historical fiction. Some of you may also know I’ve been chipping away on an Alexander the Great graphic novel.

My role as a historical graphic novelist has been stewing in the back of my mind for a while now. Actually, the stewing began when I first thought of The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya, but I already know my insights from that project. Be actively thoughtful. Be self aware of how your own biases and societal context influence your storytelling. Recognise the people before and around you. Use your power to bring up voices. Understand that the work of being a responsible author lasts beyond the final page of your story.

Such is the case for Alexander, The Servant and The Water of Life. What I have learnt from TCM still carries over, thank goodness.

However, since last November, I realised that Alexander is a different kettle of fish. I already knew this early on: the mindboggling breadth and scope of research material, the baggage carried by the subject, and the newness of everything. While TCM focused on a narrow historical context (Ottoman era Istanbulite migrates to Georgian era England), and had the advantage of me knowing the lead character for years prior (Zeynel, my precious nerd son…), Alexander was from scratch. I didn’t know just how many Alexander Romances I really needed to read. I didn’t know much about ancient Greek anything. I didn’t know an atom about Alexander the Great himself – really, it was zilch.

Which means my responsibilities this time have a somewhat different character. A different edge.

I don’t write historical fiction about royalties or the elite. The most I have ever been interested in is a well-to-do merchant. Even then, my merchant would have an uncommon edge; he is with the common people. That’s where my interests lie: in the common people. The ordinary people outside of the court who go about their daily ordinary lives and daily ordinary struggles. The ups and downs and ins and outs of aristocrats and royals don’t excite me as much.

Then why Alexander? Honestly, he’s an exception.

Not because he’s suddenly a royal that interests me. Seriously, no royal will ever interest me enough to make a GN out of their life, based on their biography alone. (Though King James of the King James Bible and the secret tunnel to his boyfriend make a convincing petition) Alexander came to me in a roundabout way. A trick. He fooled me to exception by showing me his resume: Macedonian king, prophecised Egyptian pharoah, Persian king, son of a god, Jewish convert, Christian hero, Muslim prophet. And he showed me how many different cultures have absorbed him into their folk mythology over 2000 years. Even as the world changed and his body laid somewhere in Egypt, his shade travelled the world. He’s the only secular figure with similar cultural-legendary reach as Jesus. King Arthur can’t claim that. Heck, even Odysseus can’t claim that. Oh, how could I have resisted? This is exactly what I am all about.

This is all Alexander by the way.

The common people’s Alexander. The story of how different places have appropriated and localised him over time. Gave him different faces. Gave him slightly different names. Gave him quests and adventures and stories that had absolutely nothing to do with ancient Greece. Made him the believer of a pantheon into a believer of a singular God.

What brought me here is this literal embodiment of world literature. But he’s not an epic. He’s popular legend. And he doesn’t belong to any one culture or time or place. He’s everywhere.

But like I said, this kettle of fish is different.

Alexander the Great is not exactly the most obscure of histories. He’s a military idol. A national figurehead. He was a man. He was from ancient Greece. He’s claimed as a “heritage of the Western (read: white) world”, an excuse for why conquest is the legacy of the white, Western man. This is Alexander’s baggage, as I call it.

As a woman of colour (WOC) author from the global south, I’m aware of my (small, individual amount of) power to bring up unheard of histories. Unseen biographies of little known people. A glimpse into outside cultures and voices that Western-dominated media and education gloss over like wallpaper. I could have written about Puteri Gunung Ledang, or May 13th 1969, or the history of how my family came to Malaysia sometime during the Xinhai Revolution. I have no obligation to write about Alexander, because until last November, he was seriously a cultural nobody to me. I have no stake in the furthering the hegemony of Western history.

And I think, maybe not owning that stake is why it’s necessary.

Just as important as minorities writing about little known histories, minorities should write about the histories that are taken for granted. Because of our unique experiences with the consequences of colonialism, slavery, violence, discrimination, dehumanisation, etc, we look at history differently. It’s not about who wins or who loses. It’s about who is missing, who is harmed, what is lost…the gaps made by what was edited out.

With those glasses on, history taken for granted – if not already thoroughly given a critical cleansing – is shown to be what it really is: a history that isn’t as well-known as we thought. (and that’s okay)

I won’t be alone in saying I had no clue Alexander belonged to nobody and everybody (because everyone in the old world has an Alexander). For a long time, Western white history was gatekept, using the reasoning that whatever they claimed had an easy connect-the-dots relationship to their present day (even though I always knew that claim was oversimplified, anti-intellectual thinking). But, all of these things are simply whitewashed facades. The truth is that, like Greco-Roman everything, like Norse history, like Christian destiny, they are more complex, more diverse, more ambiguous, than what these facades can contain.

Just working with Alexander through the framework of the Alexander Romance already blows up general misconceptions about history: that history was a bubble, homogenous and separated from each other (“Egyptian history” “Chinese history” “Roman history”, “Christian world”, “Muslim world” “East”, “West”), rarely interacting and influencing.

And looking at Alexander’s actual biography says a lot about how open the world already was in his time. He was king of three empires. His pre-Hellenistic world was multicultural and diverse. It wasn’t all white marble statues. It was, like what reality is, painted technicolour marble statues.

The Victorian era archeologists who whitewashed those statues stripped off more than just the colour. They took off knowledge.

After a lot of thinking, I feel like I’m in a good place to make a GN about Alexander and the Alexander Romance.

It’s not a confidence thing, though tbh, I believe that as a WOC creator from the global south I cannot afford to doubt myself. It’s more about the position I am in and the new perspective I can offer about a historical-legendary figure taken for granted. And there’s my endless well of passion for multicolour histories. Alongside my desire to decolonialise everything.

It’s not a loss that I have chosen to work on a history taken for granted. Historical GNs are still dominated by the white Western cis-male perspective, both in subject and authorship. To be clear, I wouldn’t consider that particular perspective wrong or lesser on its own. My only qualm is when that perspective becomes the majority perspective, or worst the only perspective, which is given to an audience. I always think about this TED Talk by Chimamanda Adichie, about the Danger of a Single Story:

Me being here, telling an entirely different story, is a statement by itself.

Even then, I shouldn’t need to justify my choice. Whether it’s to a person who tells me I shouldn’t pursue Alexander because he’s a part of the dominant narrative, or to another person who tells me that as a minority creator I must adhere to my social responsibility (responsibility demanded by whom?) to tell little known histories or stories. Again, in my case, I think it’s not a loss which way I go, Alexander or not, because whatever I write is going to be a different story.

I think the only loss is when there aren’t still yet more marginalised authors to take on both the little known histories and histories taken for granted. The project of diversifying storytelling is not demanding the few marginalised voices to choose the correct, exotic, culturally-representative dish they had to bring to the potluck, but making the table wider, inviting more voices, so that, by author’s choice, any dish can be present and enjoyed by everyone.

My choice in whatever story I desire to write, as long as it doesn’t bring harm and intolerance and it undergoes the necessary self-interrogation, should be a choice that is already given. If white, Western authors can have this freedom, why not everyone else? Why must minority voices be defaulted to never having this good faith at the start?

Is it not enough that we already suffer from a lack of representation and a lack of self-esteem? Must our hands be tied even tighter, to be told that even our own voice cannot be trusted, because that trust has been abused over and over by the dominant voice?

Every new voice that is encouraged to speak is one more step towards making the table bigger.

This is one of my responsibilities of being a (historical) graphic novelist. I am here to encourage, and to make the table bigger. I am here to say, oh look, this particular history is exciting too, see how weird and creative and large the world already was.

And for Alexander GN in particular, it’s about showing that we have shared a historical-literary figure. That Alexander (and his baggage) isn’t immune to criticism. That by bringing him back the way I’m planning to, I’m no longer just talking about Alexander of Macedon. I am talking about Sikandar. I am talking about Alisaunder. I am talking about the Alexander conceptualised by Nizami, by Arrian, by Joseph Flavius, by every hand who has ever written and drew their own Alexander.*

Already, is that not a hundred different stories? * despite the fact all of these voices were male…well that’s gonna change

There will be time for me to write of lesser-known histories, if I feel the calling. Maybe I won’t ever. (I did tell myself The Carpet Merchant was the last historical GN I’ll ever do in forever…here I am. Nothing is predicted.) And if I’m not compelled, again, that is not a loss.

I am not the only one with a voice.

[idolstylekpop]

I have been meaning to write on this subject for some time now, but somehow there has been no opportunity. However, we know that Internet trolls never sleep and are the first to want to kick anyone's ass just to vent their emotions. Today I come to you with the problem of hegemony on the Internet. Especially in groups such as fandoms, people who feel part of society forget that by following the opinion of others they will not be excluded from responsibility for their opinion later. Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs when the desire for group consensus overrides people's common sense desire to present alternatives, critique a position, or express an unpopular opinion. Here, the desire for group cohesion effectively drives out good decision-making and problem solving.

But how does groupthink relate to k-pop and all the heebie-jeebies? Fans oftentimes will critics an idol for a situation solely because they don’t like the idol or group based on their own personal views. It doesn’t matter the situation, but they will do anything in their favor to “drag” the idol, creating an uncomfortable online environment. It also has to do with criticising fans who side with such an idol. 

A real-life example - Jaemin of NCT Dream fell victim to this in May 2020, when a translator's account mistranslated a quote from him, claiming that he had called a member of his group a slur. Many international fans then withdrew from supporting the idol and those who tried to defend him became targets for people for other minds. Although the whole matter has been cleared up many people still remain negative towards the NCT member.

Initially TXT members were criticized for having no talents and were accused of gaining popularity due to BTS. Most of the people showing hate were toxic Army’s who claimed that TXT earned their name only through BTS. Fans accused the new band of lacking originality and "that something" that a band should have. A storm then arose between the new fandom - MOA and the old ARMY veterans. 

As for BLACKPINK and the criticism that falls on the girls, this is something that I think even they have become accustomed to. Jennie, the most recognisable and most criticised member of the band, once said that she didn't understand what the criticism was about. Jennie is 25 years old, and her nicknames go from ” YG’s Princess” to ”The Villian of Kpop”. She is mostly hated due to three main reasons: her supposedly bad attitude and "bitch face", her dating scandals and "lazy" dancing. These three reasons are also the most frequent cause of disputes between BLINKs members. Many fans siding with the idol get many unkind comments or messages related to their support of her. We can take the situation where Jennie was dating EXO member Kai as an example, where some fans were outraged by the situation while the other side was very supportive of the idol. The same was true for rumours of the BLACKPINK member dating BigBang leader GDragon. There was a spate of very unfavourable comments at the time. 

The other BLACKPINK member on whom much unfair criticism falls is Lalisa Manoban.  Born Pranpriya Manoban and known as Lisa, she is a Thai rapper, singer and dancer. And that's without mentioning the situations in which many fans have criticised the idol for her background. Recently, however, a huge wave of hatred fell on her in connection with her participation in one of the popular TV shows in which she was a trainer. A portion of their hate comes from netizens who think she was rude to trainees in ‘Youth With You’, although she was showing professionalism. Both ladies are also criticised by fans for usually having more lines from other two girls - Jisoo and Rose, being better dressed, having more media activity or collaborations with brands. Although it is not at all up to them, some fans (anti-fans) do not understand this situation. 

When it comes to hatred between fans and criticising and calling each other names, we can mention the two biggest fandoms ARMY and BLINKs, where both bands have as many toxic people in the group as the band's anti-fans. The eternal war between the different fandoms, and not just the two mentioned above is sometimes unbearable. Sometimes even people who are not related to any band get hurt, and the scale of hatred is out of the known norm.

The same situation applies to Cha Eun-woo, a member of ASTRO, who fulfils himself as an actor and is thus more recognisable than the whole team. Many fans have criticized his "selfish" behavior and trying to be "better" than the other team members. On the other hand Eun Woo is praised for meeting Korea’s toxic and unrealistic beauty standards, which is a huge part of the reason why he is so popular. This is probably the only such unrealistic case mapping the love-hate principle. 

And at the very end of course the solo stans. A phenomenon that is quite common and yet heavily criticised by internet users. Many people do not understand why someone can only stand for one or two team members and try to convince them at all costs. I don't know, but I don't think this is what mutual respect and tolerance are about. While we may not agree with excluding a band member, such as Lay from EXO, where the Chinese member is often overlooked by fans, we can't tell someone to just like them. The statement that "a true fan likes all members" is also not true. It is human nature that even if we like a band we have our "favourite" members in it, regardless of the popularity of the band. This can be seen, for example, with BTS, where some members are more criticized and overlooked by fans than others. Although the ARMY fandom is considered a real shield to protect their idols, sometimes they can hit off their own idols. 

To sum up, what I mean is: appreciate the work of your idols, do not spread or try not to spread rumours, try not to judge everyone by one post on the Internet and strive for the truth. Let us respect ourselves, let us respect our idols, let us respect their work and, above all, their mental health. I know that the Internet is a "mine" and sometimes it lacks "oxygen" or "light", but following the first "tunnel" may do us more harm than good. 

[xtruss]

ARGUMENT

Wolf Warriors Killed China’s Grand Strategy, And We’ll All Come To Miss It.

— By Sulmaan Wasif Khan | May 28, 2021 | Foreign Policy

Chinese soldiers carry the flags of the Communist Party, the state, and the People’s Liberation Army during a military parade at the Zhurihe training base in the Inner Mongolia region on July 30, 2017. STR/AFP Via Getty Images

Sometime in 2020, China came unmoored from its grand strategy. Until then, Beijing’s diplomatic, military, and economic efforts were all directed toward national security. Learned observers could quibble about whether Beijing saw security as inseparable from hegemony; they could debate how productive China’s policies were. But the consistency of purpose underpinning China’s behavior was hard to miss.

Of late, however, China has lost that purposefulness—one of the hallmarks of grand strategy. The predominant feature of Chinese conduct today is not grand strategy but a belligerent, defensive nationalism that lashes out without heed of consequences. Just why that breakdown has occurred is uncertain, but it is clear that the change has put both China and the world in jeopardy. China risks undoing all it has gained—at considerable cost—since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power. And the rest of the world, particularly the United States, finds itself confronted not with the hard task of managing a rising, reasonably predictable power but the infinitely harder job of managing a flailing one.

A seller adjusts a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping next to pictures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong at Dongfanghong Theater in Yan’an, China, on May 10, ahead of the 100th year of the Communist Party’s founding in July. Hector Retamal/AFP Via Getty Images

Grand strategy is the integration of different kinds of power to achieve an overarching objective. How a state defines its objective and how it weaves together diplomacy, military power, and economic policy to pursue it will vary, but certain features are usually clear. First, grand strategies are long-term. The idea is to be safe not just now or tomorrow but a decade or so down the line. Second, they are all-encompassing. Be it Iran or environmental change, the cost of potatoes or military modernization, grand strategies consider these items as they relate to an overarching objective, not in isolation. Third, they have flexibility. The grand strategist is capable of shifting tacks: This particular path isn’t getting me where I want to go; therefore, I must try another way.

In China’s case, a grand strategy has defined the Communist Party’s conduct for most of its time in power. From Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, China has sought to secure the state by weaving together diplomatic, economic, and military power. Diplomatically, the country sought a balance of power that left it, inasmuch as possible, closer to other powers in the world than those powers were to one another. For an insecure country, having friends wherever possible made sense—and that meant continuing to talk even in the face of disagreements. China strove for a productive economy, which served multiple purposes: It allowed for aid to foreign countries that could be friends in times of need, it kept the citizenry on the CCP’s side, and it paid for military modernization.

There were, to be sure, times when the grand strategy led to incomparably foolish policies (the Great Leap Forward) and times when China seemed to forget its purpose (the first two years of the Cultural Revolution or Deng Xiaoping’s war in Vietnam). But for the most part, China did a reasonable job of sticking to a plan. The country’s vision remained forward-looking: A look at Chinese decision-making, whether on the Korean War or the latest military spending, suggested long-term security calculations. There was a sense of connectedness—how one did diplomacy with India affected how one did diplomacy with Pakistan and so on. And finally, there was room to reevaluate when things went awry. The foreign aid of the Mao years was pared back to put China on a more stable fiscal footing under Deng. Xi’s more recent diplomacy with Japan was marked by an extreme escalation of tensions, a realization that things had gone too far, and a subsequent move toward what is now almost cordiality.

A decades-long grand strategy doesn’t die suddenly. Its death is a process, with warning signs along the way. In China’s case, the Xi era has seen the accumulation of somewhat counterproductive policies that catalyzed a breakdown.

Xinjiang was probably the first. Jiang Zemin had championed a policy of living with the religious and ethnic differences that marked that distant territory; it would create the occasional problem, but it was part of what being an empire meant. Xi saw difference as something that could be eradicated, brought under complete control. This meant policies that eventually hardened into genocide. Xinjiang may be under tight control, but the long-term costs, in terms of China’s reputational damage among Muslims abroad and the resentment among China’s faithful at home, however, have yet to be added up.

Then came Hong Kong. Deng seems to have been perfectly sincere about “one country, two systems”; there was no need to bring Hong Kong into synchrony with the rest of China because Hong Kong worked. And Hong Kong working was good for China, a country big enough to contain multiple ways of doing business. For Xi, though, Hong Kong had to look like all of China—and that meant a flurry of attempts to undercut the autonomy that territory had enjoyed. The result was an eminently avoidable surge of anger and protest in Hong Kong, one that shows no sign of abating. It also killed any lingering possibility of convincing Taiwan that union with China was in its long-term interests.

These missteps could still be seen as bad grand strategy. It wasn’t that Xi didn’t want to make Xinjiang as secure as possible or Hong Kong as quiescent so as to keep China secure by weaving in the peripheries more tightly; it was just that he didn’t have the best grasp of how to do so. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to win Taiwan over peacefully; it was just that he thought throwing China’s weight around would terrify those benighted islanders into submission. And in dealing with other matters—relations with Australia or Japan, say, or winning hearts and minds in Africa—his government was doing reasonably well, if not perfectly. His was a more assertive brand of Chinese grand strategy, and the assertiveness had its successes and failures.

But “wolf warrior” diplomacy marks a significant change. The term, viral among those seeking to explain Chinese conduct, is often misused to encompass all forms of Chinese nationalism. But distinctions are important because different types of nationalism are symptoms of different issues in China’s conduct.

Two things set wolf warrior diplomacy apart.

First, there is no obvious point to it. The Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi’s strident performance in Alaska was arguably tin-eared and undeniably excruciating, but there was a purpose. He was trying to save Chinese face after being denounced (however justly); the idea, not exclusive to China, is that one has to demonstrate that one cannot be bullied before getting down to the hard business of resolving—or failing to resolve—differences. Yang was not engaged in wolf warrior diplomacy.

By contrast, it was completely pointless for Foreign Ministry spokespeople Zhao Lijian and Hua Chunying to tweet conspiracy theories about COVID-19 or for China to launch a trade war with Australia simply because the Australians had the gall to call for an investigation of China’s handling of the pandemic. These are knee-jerk reactions, bereft of the cool maneuvering that defines grand strategy.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian packs up his notes after speaking at the daily media briefing in Beijing on April 8, 2020. Greg Baker/AFP Via Getty Images

Second, there is no attempt to rein these fits of temper in. When Jiang encouraged protests against the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, there were careful directives about nationalism not being allowed to run too far. There is no evidence to suggest that such directives have been issued here. Worse, it seems likely that even if they were issued, they would be difficult to enforce, with purposeless nationalism now run amok.

To be sure, China has always had a nationalistic streak, and it (as in the case of many other countries) has sometimes been counterproductive. Some of China’s diplomatic moves have been clumsy: cutting tourism to South Korea when that country insisted on hosting the U.S.-made THAAD missile defense system or telling Indian diplomats that those from Arunachal Pradesh didn’t need a visa to visit China because Arunachal Pradesh was Chinese territory.

But seen as a whole, Beijing’s conduct still appeared, for the most part, that of a calculating, purposeful actor. What changed in 2020 was that nationalism for its own sake became the predominant motif of Chinese conduct. From that year on, what stands about China’s diplomacy is spreading wild rumors about COVID-19, getting in a shouting match with Australia, and threatening dire consequences for anyone who opts to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

China’s President Xi Jinping, left, and Premier Li Keqiang vote in favor of a resolution to overhaul Hong Kong’s electoral system during the closing session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 11. Kevin Frater/Getty Images

One hypothesis for China’s abandonment of grand strategy is that it is out to dominate the world, sees an America in decline, and figures that this is a good opportunity to amass more power.

But its behavior doesn’t seem geared toward exploiting U.S. decline; if anything, China has squandered all the advantages it could have won in 2020 as the United States went through utter chaos. Another suggestion is that China now feels it can get away with belligerence because it is stronger. This might be part of the explanation, but it does raise the question of why it would want to fritter away strength on folly.

The most persuasive explanation is that China has poisoned itself through its own rhetoric. In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, nationalism was seen as a way to get citizens on the same page as the party. It was not really meant to inform practical foreign policy. But as the United States discovered in the Donald Trump years, one cannot stoke nationalistic fires without their eventually blazing beyond control. Over the years, rhetoric about how Taiwanese needed to be made grateful, about the protests in Hong Kong being a product of Western influence, about Western aggression, about Japan never apologizing for World War II, about the righteousness of the party and the infallibility of the Chinese government and the hurt feelings of the Chinese people—all this seeped in and took hold. And it made grand strategy hard to keep alive.

Two caveats are worth noting. First, highlighting the strategic questionability of China’s policies doesn’t mean that Beijing’s fears of the outside world are completely unjustified. The Trump administration aired a deep Sinophobia that has continued into the Biden era. The U.S. defense budget is still heavily focused on countering China; the Quad seems to have been reinvented for the same purpose. It would be irresponsible for Chinese leaders not to take these developments seriously. The problem is not China’s threat assessment. It is rather that the wolf warriors seem to be reacting not out of a dispassionate assessment of that threat and how best to address it but simply out of pique.

Second, buried as it may be, grand strategic thinking is not yet entirely snuffed out. There are still voices that hark back to China’s older style of conducting foreign affairs. Vigorous debate about cutting Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects suggests that there is a segment within China’s policymaking circles focused on assessing pros and cons. With Japan, China has managed to improve relations since 2015. Even the skirmishes with India were the product not of mindless nationalism but of a considered policy that is willing to risk force in securing vulnerable borderlands. All this suggests that there are still calculating heads in Beijing and they might yet prevail.

Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping is pictured in Beijing on Sept. 1, 1981. AFP Via Getty Images

Both China and the rest of the world should hope they do. For China, the risks of its current drift are immense. It’s not just that the bombast has managed to generate resentment. It’s not even that alienating much of the rest of the world would turn China into a giant version of North Korea. The real danger is that once toxin has spread through the system, there is no knowing where it will end. In China’s own past, similar blindness led to the bloodletting of the Cultural Revolution. If Zhao or Hua can tweet nonsense about outsiders today, it is but a hop, skip, and jump to smearing any measured policymaker tomorrow. Ultimately, that spells death for sound policymaking.

China can step back, but it would take people within the policymaking apparatus deciding that wolf warrior diplomacy has gone too far. They will have to tamp down on blind nationalism in the name of national security. And they will have to commit to a grand strategy and policies that support it. Those could involve easing up in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, declaring that Taiwan is being granted independence, cutting back on BRI, and recognizing any missteps on COVID-19. A tall order, but it would put China on a more stable footing, cut costs, and win friends. Short of all this, even simply backing off the most strident rhetoric, ceasing disinformation campaigns, and easing up on activity in the Taiwan Strait would save money and make it harder for the rest of the world to sustain a hostile posture toward China.

Course corrections are hard, but there are two examples that Chinese leaders might turn to: the attempt to restore national strength in the mid-1800s that Qing statesmen like Li Hongzhang spearheaded and Deng’s attempt to quash the remains of the Cultural Revolution when he came to power. The Qing restoration—seeking to bring technology, modern armaments and military methods, and scientific learning from the West to China—ultimately didn’t go far enough, and the empire crumbled. Deng’s ruthlessness in weeding out those who sympathized with the Cultural Revolution’s worst excesses, however, managed to create an intellectual climate conducive to his “opening and reform.” (It is one of those cruel ironies of Chinese history that Tiananmen Square and the “patriotic education” that followed it also happened on Deng’s watch.)

For the rest of the world, China’s abandonment of grand strategy poses a problem. It is one thing to deal with a power that has a clear goal; one might be at cross-purposes, but at least one knows where matters stand. A power lashing out like a belligerent drunk, however, is more difficult to address. First, the United States will have to distinguish between vital interests where China has to be resisted and ones where letting China do as it pleases would do no harm. There is, for example, genuine reason to resist a Chinese attempt to seize Taiwan. There is less at stake for the United States if China gets bogged down in development projects in places like Pakistan or Kenya. Second, when China does something that is helpful—making vaccines available or doing something constructive on climate change—there is no harm in commending its conduct, instead of vowing to compete (as the United States has taken to doing with the Quad). Finally, when competing, it should be done quietly. Chest-thumping or forceful statements elicit similar responses in Beijing and rarely do much good.

A policy like this will not turn China into a peace-loving democracy. But it would deprive the wolf warriors of attention, which is what they seek in the first place. And it might maximize the chances of reaching a modus vivendi with China while it sorts out its own internal problems.

— Sulmaan Wasif Khan is the Denison chair of international history and diplomacy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. He is the author of Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy From Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping.

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When it comes to Ukraine, Trump’s alleged misdeeds go beyond quid pro quos

By Jason Pack | Published November 25 at 6:00 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted November 25, 2019 |

Part of any impeachment fight is the fierce and sometimes memorable campaign to educate and sway public opinion. The Clinton impeachment, for example, exposed Americans to arcane debates about the meaning of the word “is.”

But today, while Americans are learning Latin phrases such as quid pro quo and hearing about the Founders’ intentions regarding impeachment, Democrats seem to be squandering a golden opportunity to convey something crucial: Ukraine is, and has always been, of the utmost strategic import, which means that President Trump’s actions go beyond bribery or quid pro quos. He has been accused of trading U.S. security for his personal, political gain — the most flagrant of high crimes and misdemeanors.

On Thursday, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) called into question Ukraine’s strategic import, hinting that the country’s value had been exaggerated by Democrats and “deep state” bureaucrats: “Okay, suddenly they’re a key strategic ally. I never heard that before the last eight weeks.”

And herein lies the problem. Ukraine’s supreme geostrategic and historical importance shouldn’t be in question, and it doesn’t have anything to do with partisan politics. It certainly didn’t during the Cold War or early post-Cold War eras. Politicians ranging from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton to John McCain all spoke publicly about the importance of Ukraine for U.S. national security. They understood, like statesmen and strategists had before them, that holding sway over its strategic territory, the pivotal buffer zone separating Western and Central Europe from Eastern Europe and Asia, was the key to becoming the trendsetting global power.

Halford Mackinder (the inventor of the discipline of geopolitics) postulated in 1904 that “Eurasia is the cockpit of world history and Ukraine is its pivot.”

Although the British establishment at the time viewed Germany as its primary adversary, Mackinder envisioned that the future geopolitical struggles would probably pit the West against Russia. He anticipated that whichever bloc dominated the grain fields, strategic highways and Black Sea ports of Ukraine would ultimately prevail.

The world started to glimpse the pivotal import of Ukraine when Tsarist Russia’s inability to hold Poland and Ukraine after their decisive early defeat at Tannenberg essentially knocked Russia out of the Great War, fomenting the domestic unrest that eventually led to the rise of the Soviet Union.

During the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) that followed, the French, British and Americans backed what were known as the White Russians, who opposed Communism and Lenin’s forces. Despite this Western support, once the White Russians lost Crimea — the peninsula that holds the nearest warm-weather port (Sevastopol) that is required to feed the Russian people, base its navy and fuel its economy — they succumbed.

Soviet control of Ukraine meant that Communism would be Eastern and Central Europe’s (as well as Asia’s) dominant ideological force for the next 75 years. Hitler’s desire to use Ukraine as Lebensraum (living or buffering space) for the Aryan race was the primary reason he abandoned his non-aggression pact with Stalin. This crucial blunder, which necessitated fighting a two-front war, eventually cost the Nazis World War II.

During the Cold War, Soviet control of Ukraine connected it to the advanced economies of Central Europe and was essential for the Soviet Union to be a global power: Crimea was its industrial and naval transport link to the rest of the world, while Ukrainian grain and nuclear power plants fed and fueled Russia.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the world’s new hegemonic power, which gave it the opportunity to dominate Central Europe and Ukraine via a web of investment and security linkages.

Conversely, Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and later Vladimir Putin wanted to dominate Ukraine, believing that Russia deserved a buffer zone — just as the czars and Soviets had before them. Western leaders disagreed, pushing for Ukraine’s participation as a fully sovereign state in a rule-based global order, rather than remaining a Russian satellite.

In 1994, the United States, Russia and Britain signed the Budapest Memorandum, laying out the crucial conditions for a peaceful post-Cold War order. This agreement contained an ironclad commitment to preserving Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine handing over all its nuclear weapons to Russia. It appears that at side meetings, American diplomats informed the Russians of the United States’ eventual plans to extend NATO to former Warsaw pact countries. The Russians grudgingly assented but drew their own redline: no NATO or European Union expansion to Ukraine.

Russian concerns about NATO enlargement and E.U. expansion came to a head in 2014 when pro-Western Euromaidan protesters ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The protesters waived E.U. flags and clamored to join NATO. Acting out of what he perceived as defense, Putin sprang into action, invading Eastern Ukraine (the Donbas region) and annexing Crimea. Since that point, atop Putin’s geostrategic wish list has been the entry into the White House of a president who would condone Russia regaining its “traditional” hegemony over Ukraine.

The historical importance of Ukraine, however, explains why securing a pro-Western government that regains sovereignty over Crimea and the Donbas must be the United States’ top geostrategic goal abroad. More than any other international hot spot, the future of Ukraine can fundamentally alter the power balance at the heart of the Eurasian landmass.

Russia’s policies reflect this underlying truth. Ukraine’s economy is not only deeply intertwined with Russia’s — Ukraine is a key consumer and primary conduit through which Russian gas flows to Western Europe — it also has a totemic importance in the psychology of Russians. Slavic civilization and the Russian Orthodox Church started with the Kievan Rus. Mother Russia was born in Ukraine.

This is the history lesson that Democrats must teach the American public. Simply put, Ukraine is the most important piece on the chessboard of geopolitics. And it always has been.

Until the American populace is convinced that Ukraine is truly our top geopolitical concern, Republican talking points about how there may have been a quid pro quo or how Trump exercised bad judgment on a phone call with Ukraine’s president will continue to convince many.

Understand Ukraine’s strategic importance, however, and it becomes clear that Trump’s conditioning of security assistance to Ukraine on investigations was not merely a quid pro quo or attempted bribery. It fundamentally traded away the United States’ most sacrosanct national security objectives in an attempt to advance Trump’s personal political ones. This is what members of Congress must hammer home, because it’s the key to comprehending the gravity of Trump’s alleged high crimes.

______

Jason Pack is the founder of Libya-Analysis LLC. He also writes about Anglo-American politics through a historical lens. He frequently briefs the US, UK, UN, and NATO about combatting Russian expansionism in the Middle East.

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The latest Ukraine revelation spotlights a major gap in Trump’s defense

By Aaron Blake | Published November 25 at 9:07 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted November 25, 2019 |

One quid pro quo between the Trump administration and Ukraine is well-established: Trump invited new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House in a May letter, then his aides repeatedly dangled that meeting as a reward for Ukraine granting Trump his investigation announcements.

The other alleged quid pro quo, though — the one involving military aid — is more nebulous. It’s not clear exactly when Ukraine even became aware the aid was being withheld, and it wasn’t as frequently tied to the investigations in talks with Ukrainians.

That said, there is one big question about that aid that remains conspicuously unanswered: If it was all on the up-and-up, why did nobody seem to know why the aid was being withheld?

The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey, Carol D. Leonnig and Tom Hamburger had a must-read report Sunday about the White House’s effort to craft a justification for the aid. The key here is that the effort took place the month after the aid was withheld and also shortly after the White House became aware of the whistleblower complaint that has since ripped the lid off the Ukraine scandal:

A confidential White House review of President Trump’s decision to place a hold on military aid to Ukraine has turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal, according to three people familiar with the records.

The research by the White House Counsel’s Office, which was triggered by a congressional impeachment inquiry announced in September, includes early August email exchanges between acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House budget officials seeking to provide an explanation for withholding the funds after the president had already ordered a hold in mid-July on the nearly $400 million in security assistance, according to the three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

One person briefed on the records examination said White House lawyers are expressing concern that the review has turned up some unflattering exchanges and facts that could at a minimum embarrass the president. It’s unclear whether the Mulvaney discussions or other records pose any legal problems for Trump in the impeachment inquiry, but some fear they could pose political problems if revealed publicly.

And then the key paragraph:

Mulvaney’s request for information came days after the White House Counsel’s Office was put on notice that an anonymous CIA official had made a complaint to the agency’s general counsel about Trump’s July 25 call to Zelensky during which he requested Ukraine investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as an unfounded theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The timeline, as it has been throughout the Ukraine scandal, is key:

July: Trump orders the aid withheld.

July 25: Trump asks Zelensky for investigations, including one involving the Bidens.

Soon after: Whistleblower files a complaint related to the call, relying upon evidence from officials who were concerned. The White House Counsel’s Office becomes aware of the complaint.

Days after: Mulvaney asks acting OMB director Russell Vought for an update on the legal rationale and about how much longer the aid could be delayed.

What’s remarkable about what happens then is that they still apparently struggled to find one. To the extent they did, it wasn’t shared with some of the key figures in this investigation.

By Aug. 29, the day after Politico first reported the aid was withheld, Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak prodded the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., about the aid. Taylor said he was “embarrassed” that he had no explanation.

Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, would soon tell both Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Ukrainian officials the aid was tied to Trump’s requested investigations, but he also testified this was merely his presumption, in the absence of another credible justification.

Vice President Pence meet with Zelensky on Sept. 1 in Warsaw and, according to Pence, relayed the aid was broadly conditioned on rooting out corruption — which has come to be the Trump team’s justification.

There are reasons to be skeptical that that’s the case. One is that Trump hasn’t shown an interest in investigations that don’t benefit him; another is he has shown almost no interest in corruption in countries not named Ukraine (even when they are more corrupt). Another is that the Defense Department, as part of its process for disbursing security assistance, determined in the spring that Ukraine was taking adequate steps to reduce corruption, according to Pentagon official Laura Cooper’s October testimony.

But there’s one other big reason to be skeptical that that’s true: Nobody seemed to be aware of it in real time. It was nearly a month and a half after the aid was withheld, and top Trump administration officials were still freelancing. Not even Trump’s top aide, Mulvaney, had nailed down a justification as of two weeks after the hold. Even as late as Oct. 17, Mulvaney said in a news conference that the aid was tied to the other investigation Trump wanted — the one involving 2016 election interference, which confirmed the quid pro quo — but Mulvaney soon recanted.

There remain valid questions about the aid and its proximity to a quid pro quo. Some witnesses have testified they didn’t think Ukraine was aware the funds were being withheld before the Aug. 28 Politico article. New evidence, though, indicates its embassy was asking about the aid on July 25. If it was a quid pro quo, it was one that Ukraine was apparently going to have to piece together itself. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t intended as leverage — just as the meeting rather obviously was.

The fact that White House officials were seeking a reason for the hold, in the absence of a clear rationale and well after it happened, suggests the real reason wasn’t a good one.

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How Richard Spencer’s firing illustrates some of Trump’s most corrupt impulses

By Paul Waldman | Published November 25 at 12:21 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted November 25, 2019 |

One key reason Donald Trump’s presidency has been so damaging is that he has a way of corrupting all the people and institutions he comes in contact with, infecting them with his virus. No one remains untouched.

As the sudden firing of Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer shows, that includes the military. Spencer’s story also bears a remarkable resemblance to the Ukraine scandal, in the way people with their own agendas played on Trump’s most repugnant impulses to manipulate him.

Spencer’s firing has its roots in the case of Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who became a Fox News hero. Gallagher’s long and complicated case began when members of his own unit accused him of a series of war crimes, including firing on civilians and murdering a wounded teenage Islamic State fighter receiving medical treatment from his unit.

Gallagher allegedly stabbed the wounded fighter multiple times, then took a picture with his corpse and texted it to friends, with the caption “Got him with my hunting knife.” He was also charged with covering up his crime by threatening to kill members of his platoon if they reported it. They did anyway.

Gallagher’s trial was a chaotic mess marred by accusations of prosecutorial misconduct and a witness who abruptly changed his story on the stand. In the end, Gallagher was acquitted of murder but convicted of posing with the corpse, a violation of the laws of war.

Then Trump pardoned him, along with two other servicemembers who had also been accused of war crimes.

Those pardons generated enormous controversy both inside and outside the military, but they were not surprising. From the time he began running for president, Trump has shown nothing but contempt for ideas like military order and discipline, respect for human rights and standards of wartime conduct. He has advocated torturing detainees, suggested that a way to fight terrorism would be to murder the families of suspected terrorists and mused about committing genocide. Accused war criminals are his kind of people.

Which those advocating on their behalf understood — just as Rudolph W. Giuliani and his goons understood that the way to get Trump to fire the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was to tell him that she wasn’t loyal to him.

While the details of the Gallagher case are complex, what we know is that after Trump’s pardon, the Navy began a formal review to determine if Gallagher should be stripped of his Trident pin, removing his status as a member of the SEALs. Trump then tweeted, “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin,” effectively saying he didn’t care what the service’s procedures were or what its inquiry found, he was going to overrule them.

It appears Secretary Spencer was attempting to find some kind of compromise; according to the Pentagon, he suggested to the White House that if the president allowed the inquiry to go forward, he would permit Gallagher to retire with his status as a SEAL intact. This proposal then became the stated justification for Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper to fire Spencer.

In a striking letter to the president, Spencer wrote that “The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries,” then went on to say this:

Unfortunately it has become apparent that in this respect, I no longer share the same understanding with the Commander in Chief who appointed me, in regards to the key principle of good order and discipline. I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took in the presence of my family, my flag and my faith to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

While Spencer is Trump’s appointee and not a career civil servant, you can’t help but hear the echoes of the many national security and foreign policy professionals who testified in the impeachment inquiry. They believed their purpose was to advance the interests of the United States, in keeping with the Constitution and the values we seek to uphold and spread. Then they discovered to their dismay that policy was being propelled instead by Trump’s personal interests.

Spencer seemed to get caught in the same tension. And here’s the important context to understand how this all happened: Just as Giuliani and others used Fox News as a tool to spread misinformation on Ukraine, those advocating for Gallagher and other accused war criminals have used Fox as a direct pipeline to Trump to plead their case and convince him to issue pardons.

Fox host Pete Hegseth has been their most aggressive cheerleader, but family members, lawyers and sometimes the accused themselves have made regular appearances on the network. In fact, after Spencer was fired, Gallagher quickly went on Fox to praise Trump and attack his superior officers in the Navy, an extraordinary thing for someone on active duty to do.

Or at least it was extraordinary before Trump became president.

“If you set this sort of precedent, then how do you tell the next SEAL that is up on charges not to go public, not to try to undermine their superiors, not to try to change a military judgment and make it a political one?” asked Ray Mabus, secretary of the Navy under Barack Obama. It’s a good question.

From the moment he took office, Trump related to the military in ways completely at odds with how other presidents, Democrat and Republican, had conducted themselves. He regularly talks about “my generals” and “my military” as though they are his personal property. He goes in front of military audiences and gives overtly political speeches bashing the opposition party.

Likewise, Trump twisted U.S. foreign policy into a means to help him get reelected.

There might be some small agencies here and there in the federal government that have resisted the Trump virus and continue to operate with the same integrity and commitment to their mission they had before he became president. But if there are, it’s only because he hasn’t gotten around to corrupting them yet.

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The worst commander in chief ever

By Jennifer Rubin | Published November 25 at 9:45 AM EST. | Washington Post | Posted November 25, 2019 |

President Trump has repeatedly dishonored the military. He sent troops to the southern border before the 2018 midterms in a xenophobic stunt designed to win votes. He seized funds for military construction to build his useless wall, which will never be built. He humiliated our forces by announcing an impulsive retreat from Syria, betraying our allies and allowing Russians to seize and occupy our former facilities. Then came the case of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher.

Joseph Kristol and Stephen Petraeus wrote for The Post:

On Thursday, the president showed fresh contempt for the professional judgment of military officers, tweeting “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin.” The Navy had intended to oust Gallagher from the SEALs for, among other things, his conviction at court-martial for posing in a photograph with the corpse of a 17-year-old captive Islamic State fighter.

Trump seems to think that condoning war crimes (as he did during the campaign) and freeing those who violate the code of conduct for our armed forces make him a tough guy, one of the boys and a hero to the military. The opposite is true. (“The U.S. military is given a unique charge: the right to kill on behalf of the state. Exercising that right, though, must be done in a manner consistent with the nation’s ideals,” Kristol and Petraeus write. “With only rare exceptions, members of the well-trained and professional U.S. military execute their missions with honor. For the few who don’t, the armed services must be allowed to hold them accountable.”)

Then, on Sunday, something curious happened. The secretary of the Navy refused to go along with this abomination. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer was fired for allegedly trying to cut a private deal with the White House to "ensure that Gallagher retired as a Navy SEAL, with his Trident insignia, if they did not interfere with a review board convened to determine his fitness to stay in the elite force.” Spencer is accused of not relaying this proposal to the defense secretary, which differed from reports that he would resign unless the president relented.

It is hard to tell what to make of this convoluted explanation. As my colleague Josh Rogin and others point out, the story does not make much sense, and one might surmise Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper may have been dispatched to find a pretext for firing Spencer. (One cannot help but think of the firing of former FBI director James B. Comey whom Trump smeared to distract from his true motive, getting rid of his antagonist in the Russia investigation.)

What is clear is that Spencer could not abide by Trump’s contempt for the code of honor that our military must inculcate in all personnel and uphold even in moments of extreme duress in battle.

Spencer spoke for many military personnel and civilians when he wrote in a letter to Trump, “The lives of our Sailors, Marines and civilian teammates quite literally depend on the professional execution of our many missions, and they also depend on the ongoing faith and support of the people we serve and the allies we serve alongside.” He said he could not "in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took.”

Spencer delivered Trump a message that few aside from former defense secretary Jim Mattis have managed to do:. “The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. Good order and discipline is what has enabled our victory against foreign tyranny time and again, from Captain Lawrence’s famous order “Don’t Give up the Ship”, to the discipline and determination that propelled our flag to the highest point on lwo Jima,” he wrote. “The Constitution. and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, are the shields that set us apart. and the beacons that protect us all.”

Trump’s juvenile conception of manhood and utter inability to conceive of laws, codes of conduct or professional responsibilities that constrain us and reinforce our deepest-held values make him uniquely unfit to lead. Just as he remains a menace to the rule of law and to our international alliances, he is doing his best to degrade the respect for our military and erode morale.

Three points should be underscored.

First, the congressional hawks who act as apologists for everything from betraying the Kurds to extorting the Ukrainians should see that they are enabling a president who undermines the honor and discipline of the military. Rather than falling all over themselves to defend Trump or make excuses for leaving him in office, perhaps hawks and former military men and women such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) should start defending the principles Trump attacks.

Second, Spencer is another in a line of public servants (e.g., Fiona Hill, William B. Taylor Jr.) who put their careers in jeopardy to defend our basic values and objective truth even as their superiors remain mute or continue to encourage Trump. Isn’t it time for Mattis to drop his inconsistent rule of silence and begin to defend the military’s honor, making clear that Trump is entirely unfit to lead?

Finally, it is essential for the House to conduct oversight hearings, calling Spencer and military experts to testify. Trump’s presidency is unraveling before our eyes, and it is up to Congress and current or former executive branch employees to expose this president’s wrongdoing and defend the military, the rule of law, the Western alliances and democratic norms against a commander in chief who literally cannot discern right from wrong.

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Trump’s impeachment trial will be a sham. Here’s how to blow up his lies.

By Greg Sargent | Published November 25 at 9:09 AM EST | Washington Post | Posted November 25, 2019 |

President Trump’s coming impeachment trial in the Senate will be awash in Russian propaganda. Literally.

Senate Republicans are planning to use the trial to promote the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election, in collusion with Democrats. They will do this even though intelligence officials have privately warned those same Republicans that this has been a central trope in Russian disinformation efforts for years.

But there may be an easy way to blow up this strategy, which will be absolutely central to Trump’s defense. Indeed, there may be an easy way to show that Republicans privately possess extensive concrete information that undermines this theory — yet continue to push it anyway.

In an ugly preview of what’s to come, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) on Sunday brushed off our intelligence services’ hard conclusion that Russia sabotaged the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. “It could also be Ukraine,” Kennedy shrugged. “I’m not saying that I know one way or the other.”

Life is full of mysteries, man. Who can say what really happened, anyway?

Senate Republicans can, that’s who.

GOP SENATORS HAVE ALREADY INVESTIGATED THIS

Here’s how we know this. The GOP-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has been running its own investigation into Russia’s attack on our political system for three years. The committee has already released the first two volumes of its findings, detailing efforts to infiltrate U.S. elections infrastructure and sow social discord with disinformation warfare.

But here’s something that has been overlooked: As part of this investigation, the committee has also been examining whether there was U.S. coordination with foreign interference — by the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns.

The committee’s findings on that front are currently in the beginning stages of getting written up into a report, a Democratic aide on the committee tells me.

And so, if Kennedy is uncertain about whether Ukraine, too, interfered in 2016, he should just ask his colleague who chairs the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, what he has found.

Burr himself already signaled this would be extensively investigated. In October 2017, he said the committee would examine “collusion by either campaign during the 2016 elections." Because Republicans will be Republicans, alleged Clinton collusion would also be examined.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee, recently dropped a tantalizing hint about what this has turned up, suggesting the committee was “wrapping up” this part of the investigation, and that it wouldn’t even “remotely” support various Trump narratives.

So it’s time for Republicans to put up or shut up: What did their investigation find?

WHY THE UKRAINE CONSPIRACY THEORY MATTERS

It’s important to stress how central this theory is to Trump’s defense against impeachment — and to Trump’s overall corrupt project going forward.

Trump will get impeached in part because he corruptly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce sham investigations that would validate this 2016 conspiracy theory, as well as a series of lies about Joe Biden.

Trump also used officials acts to leverage this. He dangled a White House meeting to secure it. And the ringleader of his scheme told a top Zelensky aide that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid was also conditioned on it, in effect soliciting a bribe with the obvious awareness that this is what Trump wanted him to do.

So the 2016 conspiracy theory serves Trump in two key ways. First, it’s supposed to show he had legitimate reasons for demanding that Zelensky investigate what happened with Ukraine in 2016.

The central theory here is that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked Democratic servers and that the FBI failed to investigate that crime. Trump’s own former homeland security adviser told him this is nonsense, but Trump nonetheless pressed Zelensky to make it true, and Trump’s propagandists regularly claim he had good reason to want this investigated.

Indeed, at Trump’s impeachment trial, Republican plan to use this story line to portray Trump as the “victim” of the “deep state,” the fake news media and Democrats, the New York Times reports.

The second way this theory serves Trump is that it purportedly absolves Russia of its role in sabotaging the 2016 election — and by extension the Trump campaign’s extensive efforts to coordinate with and benefit from it.

That’s why Russia has spent years pushing this theory, to “frame” Ukraine and protect its own ongoing electoral interference, which will continue in 2020, with Trump’s blessing. As the Times also reports, intelligence officials briefed GOP senators about the centrality of this theory to Russian propaganda.

In so doing, those intelligence officials demonstrated agreement with Fiona Hill, the former top White House Russia expert, who explosively testified that Trump and Republicans are pushing a “fictional narrative” that helps Russia use disinformation to undermine public faith in our democracy.

Yet in spite of all this, Senate Republicans will make this central in the impeachment trial.

REPUBLICANS SHOULD BE PRESSED ON THIS POINT

In the coming days, Republicans should be pressed on what the GOP-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has turned up in the way of evidence supporting this narrative. The answer to this is likely to be: Nothing.

Indeed, every Republican on that committee may well already know this to be the case. If and when they echo the Trump narrative, they should be pressed on that point as well. And so should Burr.

None of this, of course, will stop Trump’s defenders from continuing to make these wild claims. But hopefully it can be demonstrated to the American people that Republicans themselves possess extensive information debunking them.

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