The Foreign Policy of the United States
Impeachment Roundup
As I mentioned in the last edition, to keep impeachment news from overwhelming everything else, I’ll be putting almost all of my commentary on this issue into separate updates like this one that will come out every week or two as developments merit. I’m going to try not to get bogged down in too many daily details or rumors and keep my focus on the big picture.
Gathering impeachment news into a single update will also allow those of you who think the whole impeachment inquiry is bunk and don’t want to hear anything about it—and I know there are some of you out there on my subscriber list—a chance to shake your heads, mutter something darkly about “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” decide that I have simply lost it on this issue, and skip these updates entirely.
That’s your prerogative—but before you do it, I’d ask that you consider the first item in today’s update.
The War on the Brains of the Right
In politics, there is always a tension between principle and partisanship. In theory, a political party has to win in order to promote its agenda. In practice, the imperative to support their highest elected official, in the name of winning, often leads parties to sell out their principles. Sometimes it’s a few of their principles, sometimes it’s all of them.
Under Trump, this conflict has become far more intense than usual. To indicate that this is not just my subjective impression, consider the plight of Erick Erickson, a hard-core conservative loyalist who went NeverTrump in 2016. Over the past three years, he slowly drifted back into the fold and announced that while he will continue to criticize President Trump, he will vote for him in 2020. If you’ve been paying attention, you can guess how well that went over.
Now Erickson has announced that he is canceling an annual meeting he hosts of conservative intellectuals and politicians because they cannot even talk to one another any more.
Trump supporters engage in cancel culture, too, and while I support President Trump, I frequently disagree with him. I could easily disagree with George W. Bush or Mitt Romney and no conservative would bat an eyelash. But as if to indicate how precarious the President’s supporters view his position, any sign of disagreement is met with hostility.
I don’t want to put myself in a position where I think I have to bite my tongue from saying something I think is true because doing so could risk the success of the conference or see a speaker back out. I don’t want to be held hostage to the conference and I don’t want to give any person, organization, or the mob power over my ability to be honest with my readers and radio listeners. I don’t want to be like the NBA and think I’ve got to not comment to keep others happy....
I have loved the format of the Resurgent Gathering. For two days, I sit on stage with politicians and policy makers and talk to them about public policy, their world views, their faith, and where we should go as a country. I would love to keep doing it. But 2020 is going to be tribally focused on the election....
Maybe in 2021 people will finally want to have discussions about the future of the country from a conservative perspective that goes deeper than the president’s whims or owning the left.
The Trump era is a real-life version of that moment in Atlas Shrugged when Jim Taggart says, “At a time like this, we can’t afford the luxury of thinking!” Like Taggart, Trump keeps putting himself into emergencies of his own creation—and then invokes those emergencies as the reason why nobody can possibly consider changing course.
When Will Alex Jones Start Writing for The Federalist?
Here’s another example of what I’m talking about. As I have pointed out before, we got into this mess because Donald Trump has been sold on a conspiracy theory in which Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, but Ukraine did.
In service to the need to back Trump unconditionally—a choice they made about the time they fired me—The Federalist has been going into full Alex Jones territory, peddling a conspiracy theory in which Sean Davis sleuths out that this whole thing is secretly being sprung on us by...the Atlantic Council? You see, the Atlantic Council is in the pay of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which is in cahoots with the Bidens. Can’t you see it?
For those who don’t know, the Atlantic Council is a boring, mainstream, non-partisan foreign policy think tank formed to support the NATO alliance. The case for it being in the pocket of nefarious Ukrainians is that Burisma, the energy company that once hired Joe Biden’s son, gave the Council “as much as $250,000”—a very, very small percentage of its budget. The point of the article, as best I can tell, is to try to discredit a former diplomat with connections to the Atlantic Council for saying something that many other people have been saying. So it’s an attempt to create the illusion that The Federalist has discredited part of the case against Trump by discrediting its messenger, when there are many other messengers corroborating the exact same story.
None of this makes any particularly sense unless you view it simply as desperate propaganda cooked up by an unscrupulous hack. Even worse is the preposterously exaggerated way Sean Davis promoted this garbage story on Twitter: “As more facts emerge, we will find that the Atlantic Council, which is awash in Burisma cash, is at the center of the coup attempt against Trump.” Wake up, sheeple!
You see what I mean by the war on the brains of the right. The people who started The Federalist used to talk about it being a serious journal where a wide range of ideas would be debated—but I found that it was increasingly lured by the pull of crudely partisan clickbait, and if Trump and his apologists had their way, nothing else would be permitted to survive.
“Against the President’s Interest”
Why do the brains of the right have to be suffocated? To make it possible to do things like this: Fox News guests and hosts smearing a combat veteran and career civil servant as a foreign spy, merely because he presented evidence that is unfavorable to President Trump.
Part of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman’s testimony is that he was approached by Ukrainian government officials confused by requests being made to them by Rudy Giuliani acting as an unofficial envoy, and Vindman gave them guidance on how to respond. So here was the response.
“Here we have a US national-security official who is advising Ukraine while working inside the White House apparently against the president’s interest,” said an incredulous [Laura] Ingraham on her nightly show. “Isn’t that kind of an interesting angle on this story?” former Bush-administration lawyer John Yoo replied. “Some people might call that espionage.”...
This morning on cable news, the smear campaign continued. “It seems very clear that he is incredibly concerned about Ukrainian defense,” said former congressman Sean Duffy on CNN. “I don’t know that he’s concerned about American policy... We all have an affinity to our homeland where we came from...he has an affinity for the Ukraine.” “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade added, “We also know he was born in the Soviet Union, emigrated with his family. Young. He tends to feel simpatico with the Ukraine.”
Vindman is a decorated Army lieutenant colonel and an Iraq War veteran with a Purple Heart. That, of course, does not mean his conduct cannot be criticized. But Vindman testifies that he reported all his concerns over Trump up the chain of command, following procedure and working within official channels.
It was the object of his concern, Rudy Giuliani, who was going around official channels.
“The Ukraine,” incidentally, is an old-fashioned usage that was dropped to emphasize Ukraine’s status as an independent country. “The Ukraine” means “the borderlands,” implying that Ukraine is merely Russia’s Western border region. Nowadays, that phrase is only used by Russians—and Fox News hosts.
But there are other turns of phrase here that are more interesting. Sean Duffy questions whether Vindman is sufficiently “concerned about American policy” in Ukraine. But “American policy” has been to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russian domination, and that support includes the US Congress allocating aid money to Ukraine, which the president was delaying for his own purposes. So who was really interfering with “American policy”?
Ingraham’s turn of phrase is even more revealing. She complains that Vindman was working “against the president’s interest.” Now that gets us down to the real issue, doesn’t it? Is it the job of diplomats and national security officials to work for “the president’s interest”—or for the interests of the United States?
Barone’s Law
That brings us to the meat of Vindman’s testimony, at least as reported based on leaks from closed testimony.
The leaks have been pretty extensive, which puts a little cold water on all the complaints about this being “secret” testimony. Pro tip: Nothing involving members of Congress is “secret,” because they all leak like sieves. If we’ve been hearing a lot of leaks that are damaging to Trump and not much that is exculpatory, this is not because Republican members of Congress who are sitting in on the testimony have all developed a highly refined sense of honor. It’s probably because they don’t have much to leak that looks good for the president.
Let’s talk about all this manufactured outrage about “secret” hearings. Yes, the House committees preparing for impeachment are interviewing witnesses in private. Former House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, who investigated president Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the Benghazi debacle, has explained that at this stage public hearings can easily become a “circus,” and he has stuck to that opinion.
Overwrought descriptions of this as a “Soviet-style secret proceedings” are willfully obtuse. I’m pretty sure the Soviets did not have an impeachment process for removing Comrade Stalin. As for complaints that the president hasn’t been able to confront witnesses against him or have his lawyers present at the closed hearings, those are due process protections that would apply to a trial—but the trial in this case happens in the Senate, not the House. It’s right there in the Constitution. What’s happening right now is analogous to detectives interviewing witnesses, which they do in private (to allow witnesses to speak more freely and to prevent them from coordinating their stories) and without the suspect’s lawyers present.
Barone’s Law applies: “All process arguments are insincere.” Whether a politician complains about the process by which something is done generally depends on whether he likes the end result. So for example, the Starr Report that was used as the basis for Bill Clinton’s impeachment was also based on testimony made in private and with a great deal more secrecy than today’s hearings. Yet somehow no Republicans objected.
Besides, all of this will become irrelevant in another month, possibly even in weeks, when the impeachment inquiry proceeds to public hearings. (As I’m writing this, I see a report that the House is already beginning to release full transcripts of the testimony so far.) So what’s the point of complaining about a “secrecy” that will soon be obsolete? To poison the well. The whole Republican strategy is to lodge a series of complaints that are promptly dropped when they prove to be invalid or irrelevant—but which accumulate in the minds of uncritical readers and viewers who consume one-sided partisan media. The purpose is to convince Trump “base” ahead of time that the whole process is illegitimate, so they will be primed to ignore any unpleasant facts that are revealed by that process.
So let’s take a look at what some of those facts are.
Quid Pro Quo
As some wag observed on Twitter, we’ve now all said “quid pro quo” more times than Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
Colonel Vindman’s testimony helps further establish the Trump administration’s attempt to seek a quid pro quo in which they would stop withholding aid and support for Ukraine in exchange for actions intended solely to benefit the president’s re-election campaign. Vindman was listening in to the phone call in which President Trump made those demands to Ukraine’s president, and he makes it clear that in addition to the whistleblower who reported the call, many others in the administration’s national security staff also reported their objections.
The big new thing he revealed was his recounting of other meetings in which Ambassador Gordon Sondland, a Trump yes-man, was pushing for the quid pro quo.
Colonel Vindman was concerned after he learned that the White House budget office had taken the unusual step of withholding the $391 million package of security assistance for Ukraine that had been approved by Congress. At least one previous witness has testified that Mr. Trump directed that the aid be frozen until he could secure a commitment from Mr. Zelensky to announce an investigation of the Bidens....
On two occasions, the colonel brought his concerns to John A. Eisenberg, the top lawyer at the National Security Council. The first came on July 10. That day, senior American officials met with senior Ukrainian officials at the White House, in a stormy meeting in which Mr. Bolton is said to have had a tense exchange with Mr. Sondland after the ambassador raised the matter of investigations he wanted Ukraine to undertake. That meeting has been described in previous testimony in the impeachment inquiry.
At a debriefing later that day attended by the colonel, Mr. Sondland again urged Ukrainian officials to help with investigations into Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
“Ambassador Sondland emphasized the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens and Burisma,” Colonel Vindman said in his draft statement. “I stated to Ambassador Sondland that his statements were inappropriate” and that the “request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to do with national security, and that such investigations were not something the [National Security Council] was going to get involved in or push,” he added....
The picture painted by Colonel Vindman’s testimony has been echoed by several other senior officials, including William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, who testified last week that multiple senior administration officials had told him that the president blocked security aid to Ukraine and would not meet with Mr. Zelensky until he publicly pledged to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
It wasn’t just military aid to Ukraine that was used as leverage. The administration was also holding up approval of a trade ruling that would have benefited Ukraine.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
The Constitution says that the president can be impeached and removed from office for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” is a little vague and in practice gives Congress the ability to remove a president for anything it deems to be sufficiently serious misconduct—a political judgment rather than a strictly legal one.
But there is a good argument that what President Trump is accused of is a formal crime. Philip Zelikow makes the case that this is a violation of federal bribery laws.
Any public corruption prosecutor familiar with the federal bribery statute and self-dealing cases will recognize that firsthand witnesses, such as Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, Mulvaney, and Trump himself, have now offered evidence to all the elements of the offense. The bribery law—18 U.S.C. § 201(b)—is easy to understand. The elements, as they pertain here, are as follows:
- Whoever, being a public official...
- corruptly
- directly or indirectly demands or seeks...
- anything of value
- for himself or some other person
- in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act...has committee the felony.
What Zelikow sketches out is a bribery case in which the “anything of value” is Ukraine’s support for Trump’s re-election campaign.
Zelikow’s piece is a thorough rundown from a serious scholar, and it includes a pretty effective demolition of the legal counter-arguments, such as the implausible notion that Trump was merely concerned with uncovering corruption.
If they think Americans have committed crimes, they could have brought those allegations to the public institutions that investigate such allegations, which must follow certain rules—including in an international investigation. Trump and Giuliani did not do that.
Moreover:
[A]t the time it began using the “anti-corruption” cover story, the Trump administration had just officially certified that Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts were satisfactory. Congressional aid could not be released unless the Trump administration certified to Congress that Ukraine was making adequate progress on corruption, at least as it might affect military aid. On May 23, the administration made that certification, in a letter to Congress from Undersecretary of Defense John Rood. In July, when Trump and Mulvaney decided to claim “anti-corruption” as a cover story to block the aid, they did not withdraw the certification to Congress or reveal to the other relevant officials within the administration how they were supposedly redefining anti-corruption progress.
Note, in this regard, that Trump’s big demand from Ukraine wasn’t so much an investigation of Hunter Biden as it was the announcement of such an investigation. It did not matter what the investigation yielded, so long as Trump had a headline he could use going into next year’s election to imply that Joe Biden is corrupt.
A Business Insider article offers a less detailed run-down of the legal issues, but it contains one passage that nicely sums up the big legal issue.
“From a criminal law point of view, that looks like a quid pro quo,” said Patrick Cotter, a longtime former federal prosecutor who was part of the team that convicted the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. “And under federal law, that could open Trump up to allegations that he committed the crime of bribery by offering one thing in exchange for another, and doing so for his own personal benefit and not the country’s.”
Zelikow made the same point.
When [Acting Chief of Staff Mick] Mulvaney was asked about a quid pro quo, he said, on Oct. 17, “We do that all the time with foreign policy.” That is correct. But there is a profound difference between using governmental power in a quid pro quo as part of a public (or fiduciary) duty to advance the public interests of the United States versus using governmental power as a quid pro quo to advance the private interests of Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani.
Now, if you’ve been observing Trump’s defenders up to this point, you know that their next step is going to be, not to deny any of this, but to embrace it.
“The Constitutional Author of Foreign Policy”
It is not news that politics is a domain of partisans and opportunists—the current popular term is “grifters”—and talk-radio loudmouths whose job is to tell their audiences what they want to hear. The disappointment of the Trump era, though, is seeing respectable elder statesmen who ought to know better join their ranks.
One of those disappointments has been Brit Hume, whom I used to watch regularly on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report.” He’s retired now, but not from Twitter, which is proving his undoing as it has for so many others. Repeating the current party line of Trump apologia, Hume linked to an article on Colonel Vindman’s testimony and made this observation: “This from the article: ‘he was deeply troubled by what he interpreted as an attempt by the president to subvert US foreign policy...’ There is a huge fallacy in this. Anyone know what it is?” If we didn’t know what it was supposed to be, he told us: “the president is the constitutional author of foreign policy, so the idea he is ‘subverting’ it is illogical.”
Can you spot Brit Hume’s fallacy? The president is not the sole author of US foreign policy. In this case, that ought to be obvious, because the whole scandal is about the president arbitrarily withholding aid to Ukraine that was approved by Congress.
The president takes the lead in the implementation of US foreign policy, but as with his other responsibilities, he does so in partnership with Congress. The US Congress influences foreign policy through its ability to grant or withhold its approval for the president’s chief foreign policy and military officials—including the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and US ambassadors—through its ability to grant or withhold its approval of treaties, and through the power of the purse, which allows Congress to mandate support for some countries while withdrawing it from others.
The president doesn’t make foreign policy by himself, nor does he make it for himself. He holds an office of trust on behalf of the people of the United States and is required to act in their interests alone—not to sacrifice their interests for his own personal ambitions. That is precisely what he is accused of doing in this case. Heck, it’s what he has admitted to doing. He did not ask whether it was in the interest of the United States to support Ukraine. Instead, he asked what he could get out of dealings with Ukraine that would fulfill his own political needs.
The foreign policy of the United States is not the president’s foreign policy. It is the foreign policy of the United States.
I previously pointed out that the bureaucracy serves as a check on abuse of power by the chief exectuive. One way this works is that the president has to publicly write down his policies in order to communicate them to the bureaucracy. When it comes to foreign policy, Congress mandated in the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 that executive agencies must work together to produce an official National Security Strategy, which defines the national interests of the United States and describes the strategies the administration intends to follow to secure those interests. The purpose of this requirement is precisely to facilitate cooperation between Congress and the president on national security, military spending, and foreign policy.
Right there in the current version of the National Security Strategy, the 2017 version bearing Donald Trump’s signature, is this passage, which is an obvious reference to Ukraine.
The United States will deepen collaboration with our European allies and partners to confront forces threatening to undermine our common values, security interests, and shared vision. The United States and Europe will work together to counter Russian subversion and aggression.
It does not add, “unless European countries don’t give me what I feel I need for the next election.” The benefit of having a National Security Strategy that is written down is that it has to be stated in general principles and in terms of the interests of the United States, not merely of the current office-holder.
So the idea that the president is the sole author of American foreign policy is bunk from top to bottom—and people like Brit Hume ought to know better. But Trump’s defenders have been busy creating a whole novel doctrine of one-man rule. In this theory, the president is not merely the “chief magistrate,” as the Founders called him. He is not just responsible for managing the administration of the government. Rather, he is a kind of elected autocrat who is neither accountable to Congress nor bound by any sort of principle or precedent.
You can see why Trump’s defenders have been forced to do this. Donald Trump doesn’t really stand for an idea or a movement. He stands for the notion of his own “great and unmatched wisdom,” and for the illusion that whatever he feels like doing at any particular moment must be right. You need a theory of one-man rule to defend Trump, because the one man is all he has to offer.
This gives us an idea of what is at stake in the impeachment battle, because the Trump apologists’ view of foreign policy as the personal domain of a single leader, to be used to serve his personal ambitions, is a common one around the world—in authoritarian dictatorships. That’s a good reason to smack down this idea the moment it pops up.
The First Step Is Recognizing That You Have a Problem
President Trump still doesn’t realize that he’s in any kind of trouble, pointing people to the official readout of his call with Ukraine’s president (which he keeps calling a “transcript”)—the one that shows him making these exact demands. Either he’s just trying to brass it out, or he really has no concept of what he did wrong and the difference between his own narrow political interests and those of the United States.
Trump is kind of like an alcoholic: He’s still in denial, but everybody around him knows he has a problem and has been expecting something exactly like this to happen. Here is Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly:
“I said, whatever you do—and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place—I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth—don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached,” Kelly recalled in an interview....
“That was almost 11 months ago, and I have an awful lot of, to say the least, second thoughts about leaving,” Kelly said. “It pains me to see what’s going on because I believe if I was still there or someone like me was there, he would not be kind of, all over the place.”... “Someone has got to be a guide that tells [the president] that you either have the authority or you don’t, or Mr. President, don’t do it,” Kelly said. “Don’t hire someone that will just nod and say, ‘That’s a great idea, Mr. President.’ Because you will be impeached.”
Kelly added, “The system that should be in place, clearly—the system of advising, bringing experts in, having these discussions with the president so he can make an informed decision, that clearly is not in place. And I feel bad that I left.”
Kelly’s regrets are misplaced. President Trump’s desire for a “yes man” is precisely why Kelly or someone like him isn’t there any more. This was a disaster Donald Trump was determined to carry through, and I don’t think anyone could have stopped him.
I don’t think anyone can stop him from doing it again, either, unless he is impeached, convicted, and removed from office.