FOCUS: The Trump-Russia Dossier: Why Its Findings Grow More Significant by the Day
Sunday, 08 October 2017 10:51
Borger writes: "Nine months after its first appearance,
the set of intelligence reports known as the Steele dossier, one of the
most explosive documents in modern political history, is still hanging
over Washington, casting a shadow over the Trump administration that has
only grown darker as time has gone by."
Donald Trump and the Steele Dossier. (image: Guardian UK)
The Trump-Russia Dossier: Why Its Findings Grow More
Significant by the Day
By Julian Borger, Guardian UK
As US officials investigate potential collusion between Trump and Moscow, the series of reports by the former UK intelligence official Christopher Steele are casting an ever darker shadow over the president
ine months after its first appearance, the set of intelligence reports known as the Steele dossier, one of the most explosive documents in modern political history, is still hanging over Washington, casting a shadow over the Trump administration that has only grown darker as time has gone by.
It was reported this week that the document’s author, former British intelligence official, Christopher Steele, has been interviewed by investigators working for the special counsel on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Senate and House intelligence committees are, meanwhile, asking to see Steele to make up their own mind about his findings. The ranking Democrat on the House committee, Adam Schiff, said that the dossier was “a very important and useful guide to help us figure out what we need to look into”.
The fact that Steele’s reports are being taken seriously after lengthy scrutiny by federal and congressional investigators has far-reaching implications.
The question of collusion is at the heart of the various investigations into links between Trump and Moscow. Even a senior Republican, Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, admitted this week it was an open question.
Burr said his committee needed to talk Steele himself to assess the dossier properly and urged him to speak to its members or staff. According to an NBC report on Friday, Steele had expressed willingness to meet the committee’s leaders.
In his remarks this week, Burr said his committee had come to a consensus in supporting the conclusions of a US intelligence community assessment in January this year that Russian had conducted a multi-pronged campaign to interfere in the 2016 election, in Trump’s favour.
It is a finding that echoes the reports that Steele was producing seven months earlier. Trump has called the assessment a “hoax”, but there is no sign the three agencies that came to that conclusion, the CIA, FBI and NSA, have had any second thoughts in the intervening months.
“Many of my former CIA colleagues have taken [the Steele] reports seriously since they were first published,” wrote John Sipher, a former senior officer in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service on the Just Security website.
“This is not because they are not fond of Trump (and many admittedly are not), but because they understand the potential plausibility of the reports’ overall narrative based on their experienced understanding of both Russian methods and the nature of raw intelligence reporting.”
Sipher emphasised the “raw” nature of the reports, aimed at conveying an accurate account of what sources are saying, rather than claiming to be a definitive summary of events. There are spelling mistakes and rough edges. Several of the episodes it described remain entirely unverified.
But as every passing month brings more leaks, revelations in the press, and more progress in the investigations, the Steele dossier has generally gained in credibility, rather than lost it.
Just 11 days after that meeting – but more than a year before it became public – Steele quoted a source as saying that “the Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton”, for several years.
A later report, dated 19 July 2016, said: “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them and the Russian leadership.”
The report said that such contacts were handled on Trump’s end by his then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who participated in the 9 June Trump Tower meeting.
Manafort has denied taking part in any collusion with the Russian state, but registered himself as a foreign agent retroactively after it was revealed his firm received more than $17m working as a lobbyist for a pro-Russian Ukrainian party. He is a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and in July the FBI raided his home in Virginia.
Other key protagonists in the Steele dossier have surfaced in subsequent disclosures and investigation. Two of them, an Azeri-Russian businessman Araz Agalarov and his son Emin, are described in emails released by Donald Trump Jr as offering to serve as intermediaries in passing on damaging material on Clinton and is reported to have help set up the Trump Tower meeting.
Carter Page
Another key figure in the Steele dossier is Carter Page, an energy consultant who Trump named as one of his foreign policy advisors. Steele’s sources describe him as an “intermediary” between Manafort and Moscow, who had met a Putin lieutenant and head of the Russian energy giant, Rosneft, and a senior Kremlin official, Igor Diveykin.
Page denied meeting either man on his trips to Moscow, which he has said were for business purposes and not connected to his role in the Trump campaign.
Nonetheless, he has become a focus of investigation: it was reported in April that that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued an order last year for his communication to be monitored. To obtain the order, investigators would have to demonstrate “probable cause” to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power. Page has said he welcomed the news of the order as it demonstrated he was being made a scapegoat of the investigation.
Elsewhere, a Steele memo in September 2016 mentions a “Mikhail Kulagin” who had been withdrawn from the Russian embassy in Washington because of his “heavy involvement in the US presidential election operation”.
There was no diplomat of that name at the mission, but there was a Mikhail Kalugin; five months later, it emerged that he had left the embassy in August 2016.
More recently, there has been a slew of revelations about the role of disinformation spread by Russians and other eastern Europeans posing as Americans on social media. The New York Times reported that hundreds and possibly thousands of Russian-linked fake accounts and bots on Facebook and Twitter were used to spread anti-Clinton stories and messages.
Facebook disclosed that it had shut down several hundred accounts that it believes were fabricated by a Kremlin-linked Russian company to buy $100,000 in ads that often promoted racial and other divisive issues during the campaign.
A Steele memo from August 2016 states that after Russia’s hand had been discovered in the hacking of Democratic party emails and passing them to WikiLeaks for publication, another avenue of influence would be explored.
The memo says “the tactics would be to spread rumours and misinformation about the content of what already had been leaked and make up new content”.
The Russian official alleged by Steele’s sources to be in charge of the operation, Sergei Ivanov – then Putin’s chief of staff – is quoted as saying: “The audience to be targeted by such operations was the educated youth in America as the PA [Russian Presidential Administration] assessed that there was still a chance they could be persuaded to vote for Republican candidate Donald Trump as a protest against the Washington establishment (in the form of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton).”
The Steele dossier said one of the aims of the Russian influence campaign was to peel off voters who had supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and nudge them towards Trump.
Evidence has since emerged that Russians and eastern Europeans posing as Americans targeted Sanders supporters with divisive and anti-Clinton messages in the summer of 2016, after the primaries were over.
Unsubstantiated claims
There are other details in the Steele dossier that have echoed in subsequent news reports, but there are also several claims and accounts for which no supporting evidence has emerged.
The startling claim that Trump was filmed with prostitutes while staying at a Moscow hotel in November 2013, when he was staging the Miss Universe contest there, has not been substantiated in any way.
Nor has the allegation that Trump’s lawyer and vice-president of the Trump Organisation, Michael Cohen, travelled to Prague in August 2013 to conspire with a senior Russian official. In a letter to the House intelligence committee, Cohen said he never went to Prague and took issue with a string of other claims in the dossier.
It has however emerged that Cohen was involved in exploring a real estate deal in Moscow for the Trump Organisation while the campaign was in full swing. He has been summoned to appear in open hearing before the Senate intelligence committee later this month.
The Steele dossier, its author and the firm who hired him, Fusion GPS, have become favoured targets for Trump’s loyalists on Capitol Hill. They point to the fact that the genesis of the documents was a paid commission to find damaging facts about Trump.
But the dossier has not faded from view. Instead, it appears to be growing in significance as the investigations have gathered pace.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Sunday, 08 October 2017 08:42
Ash writes: "The current push in Congress to ban 'bump
stocks' is a purely cosmetic, politically motivated, and virtually
meaningless exercise in face-saving by a Congress which has for decades
put gun lobby interests ahead of public safety."
Former Alabama Supreme Court Justice and Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore draws a gun from his pocket for emphasis on the campaign
trail. (video image: Media pool)
A Bandaid on a Bullet Wound
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
08 October 17
he current push in Congress to ban “bump stocks” is a purely cosmetic, politically motivated, and virtually meaningless exercise in face-saving by a Congress which has for decades put gun lobby interests ahead of public safety.
For the record, bump stocks were a perfectly foreseeable consequence of a deregulated gun industry. The watchword for decades, firearms regulation in America has been hands-off. In that climate, workarounds like bump stocks, which are intended as a means to circumvent the law, flourish.
All of which totally misses the bigger question of military weapons in a civil society. Equally to blame for the current crisis of gun violence are the conservative members of the Supreme Court. Their rulings on Second Amendment cases in recent decades have been as categorically politically motivated as they have been constitutionally meritless.
The Second Amendment is and was from its inception what it was intended to be — a political instrument, not a legal one. Who in the world, by reading the Second Amendment, could know whether it allows the common citizen to possess or carry a pocket knife or a nuclear bomb?
A hyper-literal reading of the Second Amendment might suggest that any citizen is allowed to possess and/or carry any “Arm(s)” of any description at any time. The lawmakers and the courts have really done as they pleased with regard to the Second Amendment over the years, hewing more to social trends and political climates than to a statute so ambiguous as to be legally inert.
Supporting arguments by the Supreme Court’s conservative justices in the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller ruling border on incoherence — in fact, they do more to disprove their conclusions than support them. They’re pure gibberish. They admit on one hand that laws can be enacted that limit the right to keep and bear “firearms,” but then they conclude that the right to keep firearms is absolute, but that doesn’t extend to other armaments with greater killing power because they know it doesn’t. Ignoring entirely the actual text of the Second Amendment, which, read literally, neither addresses nor supports any of their findings.
Congress and the conservative members of the Supreme Court currently seem to adopt the position of the gun lobby: “Weapons with a lethality capacity up to and including that of a semi-automatic assault rifle are ok, but weapons possessing greater killing capacity are not.” But none of that is even remotely addressed in the Second Amendment’s language.
Traditionally, the courts have found that restrictions can be imposed on the type of “arms” that American citizens can possess. That’s a good thing. Does anyone really believe that if average citizens were allowed to purchase Howitzers some individuals would not do so? Or for that matter a nuclear bomb? Make no mistake, if available for sale to the public, those weapons would be purchased by some people. You can be sure.
We keep hearing comparisons between gun violence in America and in other “civilized” or “developed” nations. As though the United States is somehow automatically entitled to be viewed in those terms. The reality, however, is that no other nation on earth has anywhere near as many firearms or firearm-related deaths per capita as we do. America stands alone in this disgrace, separate from all other nations.
In 1994, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a federal ban on military-style assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines. The ban was allowed to expire ten years later under the administration of George W. Bush. Since that time, the incidents of mass shootings have skyrocketed.
Public pressure on lawmakers would quickly and surely restore the ban. Now IS the time. Steven Paddock shot 500 people in 12 minutes. This is a clarion call to defend the nation from an immediate and growing threat. The country must act to restore order, even if the lawmakers and the courts lack the courage.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35489"><span class="small">Isaac Chotiner, Slate</span></a>
Sunday, 08 October 2017 08:40
Chotiner writes: "President Trump is (reportedly) very
angry that his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (reportedly) called him
a 'fucking moron.'"
Rex Tillerson. (photo: Zuma Press)
Tillerson vs. Trump
By Isaac Chotiner, Slate
08 October 17
The tension between a president and his secretary of state has never been this bad.
resident Trump is (reportedly) very angry that his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (reportedly) called him a “fucking moron.” Now Trump is reportedly weighing whether to replace Tillerson—mere days after undercutting him via pointlessly aggressive tweets about North Korea. Has the relationship between a president and his chief diplomat ever fallen so far, let alone so fast?
To discuss Tillerson’s bizarre tenure, and much else, I spoke by phone recently with Aaron David Miller, the Middle East program director at the Wilson Center who served in the State Department for 25 years and advised secretaries of state of both parties. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed Tillerson’s mistakes at the State Department, why it’s so disturbing when a president and secretary of state don’t get along, and why Trump will never allow an effective person to run the department.
Isaac Chotiner: Have you ever seen an equivalent to the Trump-Tillerson relationship among presidents and their secretaries of state?
Aaron David Miller: No. I worked for half a dozen—Shultz to Powell—and for one of my books I interviewed every living secretary of state, including Alexander Haig. There is no precedent either for this kind of public tension, and no precedent for a secretary feeling compelled to respond to press reports the way Secretary Tillerson did the other day. And there is no precedent for open talk of resignation by a secretary of state, at least in the modern period. That also sets this whole episode apart.
Only three secretaries of state in the whole history of the republic have resigned over principle. And only two in the modern period served less than a year and a half. Ed Muskie, when Cyrus Vance resigned in March of 1980 in opposition to Carter’s military mission to rescue the hostages in Iran, served out the rest of his term. Haig served about a year and a half and then left because of tensions within the [Reagan] Cabinet.
What effect will this have on America’s diplomatic posture, even if things are admittedly not going well anyway.
This is the first president in the modern period who failed to have gone even through the motions of empowering the secretary of state as the repository of his policy and as his public voice. When you don’t do that, it is virtually impossible for allies or adversaries to understand what the policy is and who is speaking authoritatively about it. There is no go-to address. You can’t go to the president. You have to go through the secretary of state, which is the reason why presidents create some rule of order on this particular question.
Plus when you have the amount of flowers blooming in the Trump administration—with Nikki Haley talking about all kinds of foreign policy issues, and Jared Kushner managing the Arab-Israeli issue, and Gary Cohn leading the policy on climate change at the U.N., and the president tweeting and making policy unilaterally—it creates the perception abroad that there is a competency issue, and that’s part of the problem now with both the formation and implementation of foreign policy.
But in Trumpland, it is not going to matter who the secretary of state is. Everyone wants Tillerson to resign, but they don’t understand that a secretary of state’s effectiveness is tied to two things. No. 1 is whether the president has his or her back at home, in the shark-infested waters of the Washington bureaucracy, and abroad, because it takes allies and adversaries five minutes to understand whether there is daylight. And if there is, you might as well hang the “Closed for the Season” sign on the effectiveness of the State Department. And No. 2 is whether there are problems in the world that are ripe for resolution. And I would argue to you that the world right now is filled with mission impossibles for the United States. Anyone in Tillerson’s position is going to find himself or herself severely disadvantaged.
OK but even if that is all true, and Trump is Trump, it seems like maybe Tillerson should still resign because, at the very least, maybe you get someone in who has more of a rapport, and that would be helpful for diplomacy, even if nothing very big or great is remotely possible.
Mattis has a good rapport with Trump, and maybe McMaster does as well. It doesn’t stop the dysfunction.
Of course, but still—
If the reports are true, and it’s hard for me to believe, but no other secretary of state would be empowered in another administration and go to Asia, and make comments about three open channels to North Korea. I am told the president was not aware of this. That’s extraordinary! That’s not on Tillerson—that’s on the system. So, would it help, if you had a secretary of state who agreed with everything the president said, and agreed to reflect everything the president wanted whether it was good or bad? No, it would not be good. We don’t need an echo chamber; you need someone who will carry out the president’s policies but will offer an independent judgement.
Isn’t that what Mattis is?
There’s no question about it. What you need, frankly, is a diplomatic equivalent of Jim Mattis. The problem is that the reason Mattis has influence is that, for one, Trump prides himself on being tough and pro-military, and that toughness resonates with the base. And even Trump understands what he doesn’t know about issues relating to national security and projecting military force abroad. Mattis holds a position that is not even first among equals. It’s almost unprecedented that a Cabinet-level official has this kind of influence. It would be great if you had a diplomatic equivalent of that, but you are not going to be able to duplicate it.
Don’t forget Jared. Anyway, how do you understand Tillerson? Sometimes it seems like he is trying to gut the State Department, and then sometimes it seems like he is one of the adults in the room who is sane.
Isaac, it’s both. Look, you have a guy, Tillerson, who, unlike his predecessors in the modern period, has no government experience at all. Shultz was also from the private sector and was at Bechtel for eight years, but he also had three or four significant positions in the government. Tillerson knows the world, and I would argue has good instincts on Qatar, on Iran, on North Korea, on Russia. They are better than the president’s, in my judgment. But he also doesn’t know the ways of Washington, is unfamiliar with the “building.” The State Department is in bad need of reform, but to make that the first priority … when in fact the first priority was creating a credible image, and basically doing everything he could to ensure that his voice—with the president’s approval—was more authoritative than any other person in the administration, he obviously didn’t help himself.
And I think the decision to create no profile in the media was impossible since so much of what his job is for is public diplomacy. But remember, was he Trump’s first choice? No. Second choice? No. Third choice? Among the four candidates, there was Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, and Jon Huntsman, and maybe more. Tillerson wasn’t included.
David Petraeus, yeah.
And Petraeus, sorry. Exactly. So my question is, would anyone have been a good fit? Would anyone have been able to deal with the reality of Trumpland?
It seems like what would have been best was Petraeus because of Trump’s respect for the military, but again, the problem is obviously, again, having another military guy run the State Department. It’s no win.
To borrow from the Star Trek series, the prime directive of a secretary of state is not just to have the “confidence” of the president, but to actually be able to work with the president to shape foreign policy. Mattis has done it, but I just don’t know given Trump’s lack of interest in diplomacy, and conviction that there are no good agreements unless they were negotiated by him, and a disregard for State, whether he would allow it with anyone.
Congress Is So Incompetent It Can't Fund Health Insurance for Kids
Sunday, 08 October 2017 08:39
Hay writes: "Last Saturday, Congress failed to
reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), jeopardizing
systems that provide low-cost insurance for almost 9 million kids and
hundreds of thousands of pregnant women in families that make too much
money to qualify for Medicaid but still need assistance."
Trump and the capitol building. (photo: Vice)
Congress Is So Incompetent It Can't Fund Health Insurance for Kids
By Mark Hay, Vice News
08 October 17
The latest failure by the House and Senate is one of the most jarring.
ast Saturday, Congress failed to reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), jeopardizing systems that provide low-cost insurance for almost 9 million kids and hundreds of thousands of pregnant women in families that make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but still need assistance. Legislators failed to renew other safety net programs as well. But missing the window on CHIP was a particularly egregious fumble, and one of the clearest signals to date of how desperate this Republican-led Congress is.
"A deadline is often a reliable tool for kicking Congress into high gear," said Brookings Institute Congress watcher Molly Reynolds, "especially on a popular program like CHIP."
Only this time, that wasn't enough.
Since its birth in 1997, the bipartisan brainchild of Republican Orrin Hatch and Democrat Ted Kennedy has lowered children's uninsured rates from 14 to 4.5 percent and demonstrably improved the wellbeing of children and families benefitting from it. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 75 percent of respondents thought it was very or extremely important to get it reauthorized, making it voters' leading healthcare priority. Even when Congress has gotten into spats about the program in the past, politicians have at least managed to pass short-term extensions. To wit, in 2015, conservatives moved to strip an increase in the share of CHIP the federal government would pay mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Congress never resolved that tiff, but it still managed to kick the can down the road with a two-year extension of CHIP as it stood, with five months to spare before its expiration date.
Getting at least a similar deal done this year should have been easy, especially after the deal between President Donald Trump and the Democrats in early September on the budget and the debt ceiling significantly cleared Congress's schedule. "At the start of September," said Reynolds, "a CHIP reauthorization was likely to be one of the top items on their agenda."
And by most accounts it was. Hatch and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden had been working for months on a bipartisan compromise bill to reauthorize CHIP for five years, while slowly phasing out the federal funding boost that stirred up so much trouble in 2015, which seemed like it had a good chance of passing. They introduced it on September 12.
Then Republicans decided to throw that reasonable piece of legislation under the bus in favor of the unpopular Graham-Cassidy bill, another crack at repealing and replacing the ACA, and a blatantly desperate bid that failed just as badly as their previous efforts had.
"There was growing attention and movement towards getting [CHIP reauthorization] done," Bruce Lesley of First Focus, a children's advocacy group, told the New Republic last week. "Then Graham-Cassidy came up and everyone stopped talking to us about it. It was hard to get meetings after that, to talk to people."
In theory, the House could have moved on CHIP while the Senate duked it out over the ACA. But, Joshua Huder of Georgetown University's Government Affairs Institute said, "they were essentially in a holding pattern, waiting for the Senate to act on Graham-Cassidy."
Congress could have double-timed it on CHIP reauthorization after the Graham-Cassidy push fell apart last week. Hatch and Wyden both speculated that it still could have passed in time. After all, within the space of one day last week both chambers managed to pass a bill that included the short-term reauthorization the Federal Aviation Administration and three other healthcare assistance programs, at the 11th hour and despite unresolved debates swirling around them, by attaching them to hurricane relief and stripping out contentious elements.
But again, none of this happened when it came to CHIP. This may have been, as Wyden mused last week, because there wasn't enough political will behind the reauthorization push. But it was also because Congress managed to convince itself that the deadline to save the program wasn't the actual deadline. Every state's CHIP program still had some funds left, some reasoned, so missing the deadline wouldn't actually hurt anything as the program could continue functioning as-is for a few days or weeks beyond September 30.
This wasn't an wholly insane assumption; CHIP's funding lapsed in 2007 when George W. Bush vetoed its reauthorization twice, and it did not fall apart. But while no one is losing healthcare instantly as a result of this failed deadline, studies suggest three to ten states will run out of funds for their programs by the end of 2017. Minnesota could run out of funding tomorrow , forcing it to spin up extraordinary measures to keep running, and both that state and Utah are planning to send out notices that the program will be winding down if it's not reauthorized by November 1. Even approaching the red comes with real administrative costs, and all states' budgets are thrown into disarray by this doubt.
"Every day [of] delay increases the risk of funding problems," said George Washington University health policy researcher Leighton Ku. "Some might hit the wall soon."
Now that Congress has scratched its ACA itch, said Huder, it should be able to move quickly on CHIP. The House released a five-year reauthorization bill on Monday and both chambers passed their bills through relevant committees with no incident on Wednesday.
But some outlets are no longerreporting the bills as sure-thing votes. The House is insisting on coupling reauthorization with a sliver of aid for Puerto Rico's Medicaid system and provisions offsetting CHIP's costs with highly contentious tweaks to Medicaid and Medicare. This stands in contrast to the Senate's insistence on a clean reauthorization bill. And the bills only sailed through the committee stage because everyone promised not to propose amendments, but that détente is over and now folks have all sorts of ideas for tweaking the CHIP bills.
"I believe they'll get something across the line before it gets bad," said Huder.
But Congress is now playing with a much fuzzier deadline for CHIP. And as Ku points out, the solutions to current partisan politicking are extremely foggy. It doesn't help that the Senate is about to take a weeklong recess starting on October 9.
"Some in Congress are taking the issue seriously," said Ku. "But overall, the federal government, including Congress, is having difficulties right now because of partisan strife."
In broad strokes, Huder points out, the situation Congress has dug itself into around CHIP is not exceptional. Although we talk about deadlines as motivating action, it's actually imminent and clear crises that do the trick, he says. That's been true for ages, and especially so over the last decade. To Huder, this Congress is not that different from many of its recent predecessors.
But failing to reauthorize CHIP on time arguably crosses a new line of dysfunction. At the very least, this case study tells us that Republican leaders are now so desperate to make good on their Party's promises, like repealing the ACA, that they're willing to justify failing to support vital programs voters really care about in a timely manner. They're also willing to risk terrible optics: Failing on CHIP makes them look incompetent and cruel, all the more so because they openly did so for the incompetent and cruel Graham-Cassidy bill.
This is, in short, another landmark in tone-deaf, scrambling disarray for what was supposed to be one of the most prolific congresses in modern history. It's also a warning that the deadlines fast approaching in December to keep the government running may not prompt action. In other words, maybe the worst is still to come.
Trump's Threat to Decertify Iran Nuclear Deal Is Scarier Than You Think
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47271"><span class="small">D. Parvaz, ThinkProgress</span></a>
Sunday, 08 October 2017 08:38
Parvaz writes: "In a White House briefing on Thursday,
President Donald Trump said that he will not recertify the the 2015
nuclear deal with Iran, according to The Washington Post. The story is
couched in caveats, but if Trump does, indeed announce on October 12
that he will not recertify the deal because he doesn’t view it as being
in U.S. national security interests, then there are two clear takeaways
from that decision."
Donald Trump. (photo: Nigel Parry/CNN)
Trump's Threat to Decertify Iran Nuclear Deal Is Scarier Than You Think
By D. Parvaz, ThinkProgress
08 October 17
It not only escalates tensions with Iran, but further subverts U.S. diplomatic efforts for decades to come.
n a White House briefing on Thursday, President Donald Trump said that he will not recertify the the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, according to The Washington Post. The story is couched in caveats, but if Trump does, indeed announce on October 12 that he will not recertify the deal because he doesn’t view it as being in U.S. national security interests, then there are two clear takeaways from that decision. First, Trump is upping the ante in his rhetoric against Iran, and second, he is committed to publicly undermining his top advisers, undoing U.S. diplomatic protocols and progress.
It was only on Monday that Defense Secretary James Mattis told a Senate hearing that it was “in our best interest” to stick with the Iran deal. He added that if there’s no proof that Iran is violating the terms of the agreement (there is none) then the deal “is something that the president should consider staying with.”
Since his candidacy and certainly throughout the his first nine months as president, Trump has threatened to pull out of of the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Russia). The certification process is the first wrung on the ladder of escalation — in action, not just words — that Trump could take. Under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA), the U.S. president must evaluate the agreement every 90 days to see if Iran is still in compliance and if the deal still serves U.S. interests. Decertifying the deal would not necessarily mean that the United States is pulling out of it. It would mean that Trump would be punting the Iran problem — a key campaign promise of his — to a reluctant Congress to deal with and decide if sanctions should be snapped back.
Trump has already twice recertified the deal and even signed off on extending sanctions waivers in September. Whether Trump actually decertifies the deal and pushes the sanctions question to Congress remains to be seen, but what is immediately evident is that the discord and chaos within Trump’s inner circle has reached new levels. Put bluntly, the Trump administration can’t stop punching itself in the face. And the way things are going, this brawl is going to leave a lasting bruise on the face of U.S. diplomacy.
Perhaps the weekend’s developments were an omen of things to come: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Saturday said that the United States has several open lines of communication with North Korea — meaning that the only solution to the escalating tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs might not be “totally destroying” a country of 25 million, as Trump promised in his speech at the United Nations last month. This was the first sign of a de-escalation in the two-month long war of words (with the occasional war games and test missile) between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. By Sunday, however, Trump told the world — and certainly Tillerson — that the United States was wasting its time in pursuing negotiations with North Korea.
I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man...
Far more significantly, though, this means that the president has twice, in the space of five days, dismissed the advice of two of top cabinet officials: his secretary of state and his secretary of defense.
Sandwiched in this PR nightmare for the White House was the remarkable spectacle of Tillerson’s brief, jaw-dropping press conference on Wednesday, wherein he refuted an NBC report saying that he wanted to resign in July. The story also said that Tillerson called Trump a “moron” (or “fucking moron” according to other reports) after a national security press briefing, and when asked about that incident at the press conference, Tillerson did not deny calling Trump a moron and said, he wasn’t “going to deal with petty stuff like that.” In the language of PR, and certainly journalism, a non-denial is essentially a confirmation.
Tillerson announced he won’t resign for now, but there is still serious damage being done to the institution of U.S. diplomacy — damages that might well reverberate well beyond this administration.
“When he [Tillerson] says things like ‘I support the president’s foreign policy’ and ‘I wasn’t trying to quit,’ he’s partially trying to stabilize things in his own building, but he’s also trying to reassure allies that there’s no daylight,” said retired Ambassador Chester Crocker, who in September co-authored a report on State Department reform for the Atlantic Council.
“But this administration leaks like a sieve, so allies have to figure out who to listen to and which phone calls to listen to what’s going on,” said Crocker, who said Trump’s off-the-cuff messaging on Twitter does not help, with technology making it easy to respond immediately, even “when the best course of action would be to shut up.”
“The president seems to specialize in unrehearsed, spontaneous utterances that don’t reflect careful staffing or anything else,” said Crocker. Regardless of what might be going on behind the scenes, he said, “It’s really remarkable to have a president publicly appear to pull the rug out from under the most important person in his cabinet.”
Messaging — to the domestic base, to various media and to the international community is a skill, one that requires nuance and experience, explained Crocker. “One of the hardest jobs in foreign policy is how to get the voice right, so that you’re able to say what you mean to say, so that your allies understand what you’re doing, so that your rivals and adversaries understand what you’re doing, so your negotiating partners understand what you’re doing,” he said. “I don’t think the president thinks that equation through at all.”
Chaos and subversion
One of the dangers in what Trump is doing with the Iran deal in using Congress to (possibly) provide him with a way to back out of the deal short of actually pulling out of it, is involving the government in an international agreement. And, as Barbara Bodine, a retired ambassador and director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University noted, such agreements are between states, not individual governments. This is done by design, she said, for the purpose of protecting a deal from the “chaos” of changing leadership.
In other words, there is no strategy — no “method to the madness,” no “good-cop/bad-cop” plan, as some have optimistically indicated, said Bodine. “I’ve never seen this amount of space at this level and this publicly before. And that is certainly befuddling.”
She said she’s never seen a government “do unto itself” what the Trump administration is doing — undoing crucial institutions across the board, with, perhaps, the exception of Iraq circa 2003-2004, in the early days of the U.S. invasion, when the government embarked on a wholesale deconstruction of Iraqi bureaucracy, leaving nothing to replace it or manage its functions.
Of course, it’s not just maintaining current international agreements — it’s also about who’s around to help make sure diplomacy works. In August, Tillerson announced cuts to dozens of positions at the State Department, and there are continued reported issues with recruiting and retaining talent in diplomatic corps.
“The only method to what is going on [in the U.S.] seems to be a very unstrategic effort to simply reduce the size of the foreign service and civil service part of the department in a draconian way,” said Bodine. “If you go after the senior, the bottom and the middle, and there’s not a coherent policy. You are making it extremely hard for the country to be credible and to be effective, internationally,” she said. And the damage from what she describes as “public food fights” between Trump and his cabinet members is already showing.
“I was at an international conference in September and was the only American in the room. What I was struck by was not so much an animus towards the U.S. but more that ‘We, the rest of the world, are going to move on,'” said Bodine. “What I was getting a strong sense of — although everyone was far too polite to say it to my face — is that we’re almost irrelevant… We’re going to be in the room but we’re not going to have the influence that we had.”
Without diplomatic muscle, all the United States has left is the military, she said, “And you can’t use the military for most things.”
“The greater danger for us is that the world will move on,” said Bodine. “That’s what President Trump doesn’t understand. The problem with ‘it’s all about me’ is that it becomes about no one.”
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