Wednesday, December 27, 2023

The US Democratic Party's Troubling Recent History Concerning Russia

 From Brookings:

"Why it’s hard to take Democrats seriously on Russia

James Kirchick Former Brookings Expert

July 27, 2017

Democrats are exasperated that Republicans don’t share their outrage over the ever-widening scandal surrounding Donald Trump and Russia. The president’s personal solicitousness toward Vladimir Putin, the alacrity of his son in welcoming potential assistance from Russians during the 2016 campaign, and mounting questions as to whether Trump associates colluded with Russia as part of its influence operation against Hillary Clinton are leading Democrats to speak of impeachment and even treason.

As a longtime Russia hawk who has spent most of the past decade covering Kremlin influence operations across the West, I share their exasperation. Over the past year, I have authored pieces with headlines like “How Putin plays Trump like a piano,” “How Trump got his party to love Russia,” and, most recently in this space, “How the GOP became the party of Putin.” As I see it, conservatives’ nonchalance about Russia’s attempt to disrupt and discredit our democracy ranks as one of the most appalling developments in recent American political history.

But as much as Democrats may be correct in their diagnosis of Republican debasement, they are wholly lacking in self-awareness as to their own record regarding Russia. This helps explain why conservatives have so much trouble taking liberal outrage about Russia seriously: Most of the people lecturing them for being “Putin’s pawns” spent the better part of the past eight years blindly supporting a Democratic president, Barack Obama, whose default mode with Moscow was fecklessness. To Republicans, these latter-day Democratic Cold Warriors sound like partisan hysterics, a perception that’s not entirely wrong.

Consider the latest installment of the unfolding Trump-Russia saga: Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting last summer with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Clinton. Before inexplicably publicizing his own email correspondence, which revealed him eager to accept information that would allegedly “incriminate” his father’s opponent, Trump Jr. claimed the confab concerned nothing more salacious than the issue of “adoption.” Democrats have rightly pointed out that this was a ruse: When the Russian government or its agents talk about international adoption, they’re really talking about the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 measure sanctioning Russian human rights abusers named after a Russian lawyer tortured to death after exposing a massive tax fraud scheme perpetrated by government officials. The law’s passage so infuriated Putin that he capriciously and cruelly retaliated by banning American adoption of Russian orphans. Five years after its enactment, the law continues to rankle Russia’s president. According to Trump himself, it was the ostensibly innocuous issue of “adoption” that Putin raised with him during a previously undisclosed dinner conversation at the G-20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month.

Yet for all the newfound righteous indignation in defense of the Magnitsky Act being expressed by former Obama officials and supporters, it wasn’t long ago that they tried to prevent its passage, fearing the measure would hamper their precious “reset” with Moscow. In 2012, as part of this effort, the Obama administration lobbied for repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Cold War-era law tying enhanced trade relations with Russia to its human rights record. Some voices on Capitol Hill proposed replacing Jackson-Vanik with Magnitsky, a move the administration vociferously opposed. Shortly after his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul (today one of the most widely cited critics on the subject of Trump and Russia) publicly stated that the Magnitsky Act would be “redundant” and that the administration specifically disagreed with its naming and shaming Russian human rights abusers as well as its imposition of financial sanctions. McFaul even invoked the beleaguered Russian opposition, which he said agreed with the administration’s position.

This was a mischaracterization of Russian civil society, the most prominent leaders of which supported repeal of Jackson-Vanik only on the express condition it be superseded by the Magnitsky Act. “Allowing [Jackson-Vanik] to disappear with nothing in its place … turns it into little more than a gift to Mr. Putin,” Russian dissidents Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov wrote for the Wall Street Journal days after McFaul’s remarks. (Nemtsov, one of Putin’s loudest and most visible critics, was assassinated in 2015 just a few hundred meters from the Kremlin walls). Anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, meanwhile, wrote that while he supported repealing Jackson-Vanik, “no doubt the majority of Russian citizens will be happy to see the U.S. Senate deny the most abusive and corrupt Russian officials the right of entry and participation in financial transactions in the U.S., which is the essence of the Magnitsky Bill.”

Nevertheless, the Obama administration not only persisted in opposing Magnitsky, but continued to claim that it had the support of the Russian opposition in this endeavor. “Leaders of Russia’s political opposition,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, “have called on the U.S. to terminate Jackson-Vanik, despite their concerns about human rights and the Magnitsky case.” Despite administration protestations, Congress passed the Magnitsky Act and Obama reluctantly signed it into law. Reflecting on the legislative battle two years later, Bill Browder, the London-based investor for whom Magnitsky worked and the driving force behind the bill, told Foreign Policy, “The administration, starting with Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, did everything they could do to stop the Magnitsky Act.”

Today’s liberal Russia hawks would have us believe that they’ve always been clear-sighted about Kremlin perfidy and mischief. They’re displaying amnesia not just over a single law but the entire foreign policy record of the Obama administration. From the reset, which it announced in early 2009 just months after Russia invaded Georgia, to its removal of missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland later that year, to its ignoring Russia’s violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (while simultaneously negotiating New START) and its ceding the ground in Syria to Russian military intervention, the Obama administration’s Russia policy was one, protracted, eight-year-long concession to Moscow. Throughout his two terms in office, Obama played down the threat Russia posed to America’s allies, interests and values, and ridiculed those who warned otherwise. “The traditional divisions between nations of the south and the north make no sense in an interconnected world nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War,” Obama lectured the United Nations General Assembly in 2009, a more florid and verbose way of making the exact same criticism of supposed NATO obsolescence that liberals would later excoriate Trump for bluntly declaring.

When it abandoned missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic that same year—announcing the decision on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland, no less—the Obama administration insisted that the move wasn’t about kowtowing to Moscow but rather more robustly preparing for the looming Iranian threat. Notwithstanding the merits of that argument, perception matters in foreign policy, and the perception in Central and Eastern Europe was that America was abandoning its friends in order to satiate an adversary. That characterizes the feelings of many American allies during the Obama years, whether Israelis and Sunni Arabs upset about a perceived tilt to Iran, or Japanese concerned about unwillingness to confront a revisionist China. Liberals are absolutely right to criticize the Trump administration for its alienation of allies. But they seem to have forgotten the record of the man who served as president for the eight years prior.

Three years later, in the midst of what he thought was a private conversation about arms control with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama was famously caught on an open microphone promising that he would have “more flexibility” (that is, be able to make even more concessions to Moscow) after the presidential election that fall. (Imagine the uproar if Trump had a similar hot mic moment with Putin.) Later that year, after Mitt Romney suggested Russia was America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Obama ridiculed his Republican challenger. “The 1980s are now calling and they want their foreign policy back,” Obama retorted, in a line that has come back to haunt Democrats. An entire procession of Democratic politicians, foreign policy hands and sympathetic journalists followed Obama’s lead and repeated the critique. According to soon-to-be secretary of state John Kerry, Romney’s warning about Russia was a “preposterous notion.” His predecessor Madeleine Albright said Romney possessed “little understanding of what is actually going on in the 21stcentury.”

This wasn’t merely a debate talking point. Downplaying both the nature and degree of the Russian menace constituted a major component of mainstream liberal foreign policy doctrine until about a year ago—that is, when it became clear that Russia was intervening in the American presidential race against a Democrat. It provided justification for Obama’s humiliating acceptance in 2013 of Russia’s cynical offer to help remove Syrian chemical weapons after he failed to endorse his own “red line” against their deployment. Not only did that deal fail to ensure the complete removal of Bashar Assad’s stockpiles (as evidenced by the regime’s repeated use of such weapons long after they were supposedly eliminated), it essentially opened the door to Russian military intervention two years later.

Even after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, the first violent seizure of territory on the European continent since World War II, Obama continued to understate the severity of the Russian threat. Just a few weeks after the annexation was formalized, asked by a reporter if Romney’s 2012 statement had been proven correct, Obama stubbornly dismissed Russia as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength but out of weakness.” Truly. Russia is such a “regional power” that it reached across the Atlantic Ocean and intervened in the American presidential election, carrying out what Democrats today rightly claim was the most successful influence operation in history. “It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend,” a senior Obama official, speaking of the administration’s halfhearted response to Russia’s intrusion, told the Washington Post. “I feel like we sort of choked.”

Yet rarely in the course of accusing Trump of being a Kremlin agent have liberals—least of all the president they so admire—reflected upon their hypocrisy and apologized to Romney, whose prescience about Russia, had he been elected in 2012, may very well have dissuaded Putin from doing what he did on Obama’s watch. In Obama, Putin rightly saw a weak and indecisive leader and wagered that applying the sort of tactics Russia uses in its post-imperial backyard to America’s democratic process would be worth the effort. The most we’ve seen in the way of atonement are Clinton’s former campaign spokesman Brian Fallon admitting on Twitter, “We Dems erred in ’12 by mocking” Romney, and Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau sheepishly conceding, with a chuckle, “we were a little off.” If Obama feels any regret, maybe he’s saving it for the memoir.

But even if liberals do eventually show a modicum of humility and acknowledge just how catastrophically wrong they were about Romney, this would not sufficiently prove their seriousness about Russia. For their current criticisms of the Trump administration to carry water, liberals will have to do more than simply apologize for regurgitating Obama’s insult that Republicans are retrograde Cold Warriors. They will have to renounce pretty much the entire Obama foreign policy legacy, which both underestimated and appeased Russia at every turn. Otherwise, their grave intonations about “active measures,” “kompromat” and other Soviet-era phenomena will continue sounding opportunistic, and their protestations about Trump being a Russian stooge will continue to have the appearance of being motivated solely by partisan politics.

For now, the newfangled Democratic hawkishness on Russia seems motivated almost entirely, if not solely, by anger over the (erroneous) belief that Putin cost Clinton the election—not over the Kremlin’s aggression toward its neighbors, its intervention on behalf of Assad in Syria, its cheating on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty, or countless other malfeasances. Most Democrats were willing to let Russia get away with these things when Obama was telling the world that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” are obsolete, or that Russia was a mere “regional power” whose involvement in Syria would lead to another Afghanistan, or when he was trying to win Russian help for his signal foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. If the Democrats’ newfound antagonism toward the Kremlin extended beyond mere partisanship, they would have protested most of Obama’s foreign policy, which acceded to Russian prerogatives at nearly every turn. As the former George W. Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer cleverly imagined in these pages, had Trump ran for president and won with the assistance of Russia but as a Democrat instead of a Republican, it’s not difficult to imagine Democrats being just as cynical and opportunistic in their dismissal of the Russia scandal as Republicans are today.

Democrats’ lack of introspection about their past policy failures, along with their amateurish, newfound zeal for opposing Russia, hurts the wider effort to convince the American public that Russian meddling in our democracy is a serious issue. The most credible voices in this discussion are those genuinely knowledgeable about Russia’s grand strategy to disrupt Western democracy, of which the Trump case is but one element of a long-running global campaign. Not coincidentally, these people have also been consistent in their hawkishness across presidential administrations, as willing to confront the Obama administration over its failures as they are today lambasting Trump. Yet largely because of a media preference for sensationalism, these nuanced voices are being drowned out in favor of Democratic partisans and internet conspiracy theorists peddling wild accusations of “treason.” Most liberals, to put it bluntly, are new to the cause, and their obvious overcompensation and shrill rhetoric is degrading our civic culture. “We were and are under attack by a hostile foreign power and … we should be debating how many sanctions we should place on Russia or whether we should blow up the KGB, GSU [sic], or GRU,” Democratic factotum Paul Begala recently blathered on CNN, referring to, successively, the Soviet-era intelligence service, a non-existent agency, and Russian military intelligence. On Twitter, MSNBC host Joy Reid recently opined, apropos of nothing, that “Donald Trump married one American (his second wife) and two women from what used to be Soviet Yugoslavia: Ivana-Slovakia, Melania-Slovenia.”

Put aside the weird, inquisitorial implication that Trump, solely by virtue of his having married two women from the former Eastern bloc, must therefore be a Russian mole. Reid’s assertion managed to fit three basic errors into a single sentence: 1) Ivana Trump was born in the present-day Czech Republic, not Slovakia 2) Slovakia, furthermore, was never part of Yugoslavia and 3) Yugoslavia, though socialist, was never part of the Soviet Union and famously resisted incorporation into the Warsaw Pact. This is what happens when partisan Democrats who never expressed an iota of interest in Russia before June 2016 try to impersonate Scoop Jackson: They end up sounding like a less methodical Joe McCarthy.

Taken too far, liberals’ Russia obsession could hurt them. Many Democrats seem to genuinely believe that Putin is the only reason Clinton isn’t America’s first female president. Seeing Russian meddling as the single or most significant explanation for their electoral woes conveniently lets Democrats ignore the many other factors—a lousy candidate, an uninspiring and unconvincing platform, a left-wing identity politics that alienates many Americans, just to name a few—that thwarted what ought to have been an easy victory against the most toxic and unqualified individual ever to run for president. While the American people certainly need to be better educated about the breadth of Kremlin influence operations and the multifarious ways Russia threatens the free world, a fixation on Russia to the exclusion of all else will not win elections.

Hypocrisy is no stranger to politics, of course, and it’s never too late for people to come around to the realization that Russia poses a danger. But with Democrats seriously talking about impeachment or even treason, a reckoning is in order. Constantly harping on Trump’s strange affinity for Putin and suspicious connections to Russia isn’t sufficient; the far more substantive policy concessions made to Russia by the previous administration did at least as much damage to American interests, if not more. Are liberals willing to admit the reset was a giant miscalculation from the start? Are they willing to support sending arms to Ukraine? To redeploy missile defense systems to allies in Eastern Europe? Are they willing to concede that Obama’s Syria policy was an epic disaster that paved the way for Russia’s reemergence as a Middle Eastern military power? Are they, in other words, willing to renounce the foreign policy legacy of one of their most popular leaders? Because only that will demonstrate they’re serious about confronting Russia. Anything short reeks of partisanship."

 


Monday, December 25, 2023

Ukraine abandoned

 From the Los Angeles Times:

"Congress has left Ukraine in the cold. The consequences will be dire if aid isn’t renewed soon

Doyle McManusWashington Columnist 

Dec. 24, 2023

Ukraine’s war to repel Russia’s invasion suffered two major setbacks this year.

The first was on the battlefield, where a long-promised Ukrainian ground offensive was stymied by Russian fortifications that were stronger than expected.

The second is underway in Washington, where Republicans in Congress have held up President Biden’s request for $61 billion to keep Ukraine’s war effort going in 2024.

The battlefield setback was a painful disappointment for Ukrainian leaders, who hoped the offensive could turn the tide of the war.

The political problem could be even worse. If U.S. funding isn’t approved quickly, aid from Europe could dry up as well, and Ukraine’s ability to fight could erode dramatically.

Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told an audience in Washington that if the deadlock persists, it will create a “big risk to lose this war.”

His warning was for naught. Republican leaders in both houses of Congress say they support helping Ukraine in principle, but they‘re holding the aid hostage to bargain for tougher immigration rules, especially toward asylum seekers. .

The House of Representatives went home 10 days before Christmas without acting on the administration’s request. Senate negotiators from both parties stayed behind last week to try to strike a deal, but they fell short, too.

As a result, Ukraine doesn’t know whether it can count on more funding for the artillery shells and air defense weapons it needs to defend its cities from Russian onslaught.

Military experts say Ukraine’s armed forces can keep fighting until the end of January with ammunition they already have. But the uncertainty over future supplies has forced them to scale back operations and reduce their rate of artillery fire.

“A lower level of resources is going to mean a lower chance of success,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The effect of delayed funding … will result in tangible deficits at the front line.”

There’s a broader political impact, too.

If Congress doesn’t approve funding quickly, the lesson to other countries will be that domestic politics has made the United States an unreliable ally.

For almost two years, Biden promised that the United States would support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” and urged other governments to do the same.

This month, faced with pushback, he downsized the commitment. Now it’s “as long as we can.”

“If Congress passes new funding by the end of January, it won’t be a major blow to our credibility,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow. “But if it drags on for months, it will be a disaster.”

GOP leaders said their decision to delay the funding was ordinary legislative hardball — a bargaining chip to win concessions on immigration, which most voters consider more important than Ukraine. But their willingness to stiff-arm Zelensky also reflected eroding support among GOP voters for Ukraine’s battle against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Polls show most Americans support helping Ukraine at current or higher levels of aid. But conservative Republican voters — the ones most likely to turn out for primary elections — are disproportionately opposed.

The logjam has left Ukraine in the cold, literally and figuratively.

The Ukrainians’ short-term military goal is to survive Russia’s winter offensive, which is likely to focus on civilian targets such as cities, electrical power plants and other economic infrastructure.

After that, the Ukrainians hope to use long-range missiles supplied by the U.S. and other countries plus home-grown drones to strike Russian targets.

In a recent interview with the Economist, Ukraine’s military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, called the situation a “deadlock,” adding that trench warfare does not favor Ukraine in the long run.

Without a technological breakthrough, he warned, “Sooner or later, we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight.”

In some wars, a deadlock might open the way for peace negotiations. Not this one.

At his four-hour-long news conference Dec. 14, Putin buoyantly declared: “Victory is ours.”

One reason for his confidence, he said, is how shaky Ukraine’s Western support appears.

Ukraine is “getting everything as freebies,” he said. “But those freebies can run out at some point, and it looks like they’re already starting to run out.”

He did not sound interested in seeking a compromise settlement. “There will be peace when we achieve our goals,” he said.

Those goals, he added, include replacing Zelensky’s government and disbanding Ukraine’s armed forces.

He doesn’t sound ready to give up his ambition to absorb Ukraine into Russia.

Our aid to Ukraine isn’t an act of charity. It’s in our interest to prevent Putin from expanding his empire.

Putin still thinks he can wait out the West — that the United States and Europe will tire of helping Ukrainians defend themselves and walk away.

The grim lesson of the last few weeks is that he may turn out to be right."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Grief, anger and hope on Chanukah

 Today is the last day and culmination of Chanukah (Hanukkah), the Jewish festival of light. Here is the synagogue in my city of  Sofia, illuminated for the occasion:


This year, sadly, the festival is passing under the shadow of the Oct. 7 massacre when Hamas launched a massive attack and killed about 1,200 innocent Israelis - the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. A young man from the kibbutz Kfar Aza was a guest of the Jewish community of Sofia. He had suffered from Palestinian terrorists before, having lost an eye in Gaza during his military service in 2014. He told how on Oct. 7, together with other residents, he desperately fought to protect his kibbutz from the surprise attack, while his wife and baby were hiding in the "safe room" for 30 hours. Many people of the kibbutz were killed, and some were taken hostage. The survivors became refugees in their own country because it is still too dangerous to return to Kfar Aza. The young man angrily condemned the hypocrisy of the world which pressures Israel for cease-fire while the terrorists are still holding Israeli hostages. I am glad that two days ago in the UN, my Bulgaria abstained when an anti-Israeli resolution in this line was voted:


 Throughout the world, a terrifying anti-Semitic orgy has been raging since the Oct. 7 massacre, with Arab immigrants and morally and intellectually degraded Westerners celebrating it and condemning Israel and the Jews. In these dark times, anyone who has at least a little integrity should support Israel to its victory.

May light banish darkness!

Happy Chanukah!