John Peffer: Trump and Putin share hatred of liberal democracy and the E.U.

The European Parliament, in Strasbourg, France.

Via OtherWords.org

Donald Trump didn’t fly to Europe to meet with NATO, European leaders, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He got there by stepping through the looking glass.

Once on the other side, he made a series of extraordinary statements.

He accused Germany of being “totally controlled by Russia.” He declared that the European Union is a “foe” of the United States. He told British Prime Minister Theresa May that she should sue the E.U. instead of negotiate with it.

And, just days after the U.S. intelligence community and special counsel Robert Mueller confirmed once again that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election with the aim of electing Trump, Trump said that he believed in Vladimir Putin’s claims of Russian innocence.

Why on earth would Trump embark on this surrealistic misadventure in foreign policy? Does Russia have some dirt on him?

Maybe. But whatever else is going on, Trump’s erratic behavior reflects a very specific worldview. Trump is attacking Europe and siding with Russia for political — and not just personal — reasons.

A segment of the U.S. right wing, which has now coalesced around Trump, has always been skeptical about Europe. It hates the social-democratic ideals baked into the European system. Indeed, any U.S. politician that leans in that direction inevitably gets branded a “European socialist.”

Then there are the more pacifist inclinations of Europe. Old hawks like Donald Rumsfeld famously railed against such E.U. stalwarts as France and Germany that opposed the U.S. misadventure in Iraq. (Remember “freedom fries”?)

These trends converge in the Euroskepticism expressed by media outlets like Fox News, a sentiment that heavily influenced the George W. Bush administration. To them, the European Union represented a kind of super-socialism that was spreading  and threatening U.S. global dominance.

The other major contribution to Trump’s worldview comes from Europe itself. Right-wing nationalist movements such as the Brexit campaign have tried to unravel the European Union.

These Euroskeptics view Brussels as an outside force trying to impose unwelcome regulations, immigrants, and political customs. For instance, the Polish and Hungarian governments are establishing illiberal regimes that challenge freedom of the press, judicial independence, and the free functioning of civil society the EU demands.

But there’s another strong Euroskeptic voice: Vladimir Putin.

Under Putin, Russia has supplied rhetorical and financial support for far-right wing parties throughout Europe — the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Northern League in Italy. Putin and the Euroskeptics are anti-immigrant and anti-liberal, and they favor nationalist and law-and-order policies.

But Putin also sees opportunity in Euroskepticism. A weaker E.U. won’t be able to attract new, post-Soviet members such as Ukraine or Moldova. A weaker E.U. will be more dependent on Russian energy exports. A weaker E.U. would have less power to criticize Russia’s political and foreign-policy conduct.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump.

The president has declared Europe an enemy because of its trade policies. But that’s just a red herring. He actually has a more systemic critique of the E.U. that coincides with the worldview of Vladimir Putin, Europe’s right-wing nationalists, and Euroskeptics among America’s conservatives.

This is very bad news. If the crisis in transatlantic relations were just about trade, it could be handled by some hardnosed negotiating. If the disputes with the EU and NATO were simply about Trump’s disruptive style, then everything could be resolved by a regime change at the polls in 2020.

But Trump has launched a much larger, ideological assault on European institutions and values. What’s worse: It’s part of the same attack on liberal values here in the United States.

Forget about NATO: Maybe we need a transatlantic alliance against Trump.

John Feffer wrote the dystopian novel Splinterlands and directs Foreign Policy In Focus, where a longer version of this piece appeared. 

David Warsh: The wellsprings of Russian hacking

This passage leapt out at me last week as I read Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (Routledge, 2017), by Samuel Charnap and Timothy Colton, a slim and well-balanced recounting of events at the center of the present low state of U.S.-Russia relations.

“Unless Putin changes course, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the current nationalistic fever will break in Russia. When it does, it will give way to a sweaty and harsh realization of the economic costs. Then… Russia’s citizens will ask: What have we really achieved? Instead of funding schools, hospitals, science and prosperity at home in Russia, we have squandered our national wealth on adventurism, interventionism and the ambitions of a leader who cares more about empire than his own citizens.’’

The speaker is Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration. She was testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in May 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Crimea.

Many in the Russian elite took Nuland’s remark as “a de facto declaration of political war,” according to Sergei Karaganov, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a letter to the authors. A sanctions slugfest followed the Crimean takeover, intensifying after pro-Russian rebel or Russian forces in eastern Ukraine brought down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet on July 17, 2014. “Regime change,” an objective of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, Libya and Syria, the Russians concluded, apparently extended to their country as well.  

The Ukraine affair and its consequences seem worth remembering after a week when Putin, speaking to reporters at a meeting in St. Petersburg, conceded that private Russian hackers may well have been involved in probing U.S. polling machinery and leaking emails during our elections last year. So might others around the world have been involved.

“Hackers are free-spirited people, like artists,” said Putin. “If artists wake up in the morning in a good mood, they paint all day. Hackers are the same. If they wake up, read about something going on in relations between nations, and have patriotic leanings, they may try to add their contribution to the fight against those who speak badly about Russia.” His government hadn’t been doing the work, Putin asserted.  He doubted that any amount of hacking could much influence the electoral outcome in another country.

Andrew Higgins, of The New York Times, wrote from Moscow,

“The evolution of Russia’s position on possible meddling in the American election is similar to the way Mr. Putin repeatedly shifted his account of Russia’s role in the 2014 annexation of Crimea and in armed rebellions in eastern Ukraine.  He began by denying that Russian troops had taken part before acknowledging, months later, that the Russian military was ‘of course’ involved.’’

Thus did the attribution problem finally turn into a question of military and industrial organization in Russia’s rapidly growing computer establishment, broadly defined. It seems a safe bet that many, perhaps most, of the hacks detected by U.S. intelligence services during 2016 were of Russian origin, though that doesn’t mean that Putin directed them or even authorized them with any precision. Clearly the level of Russian antipathy towards Clinton was high.     

Already in her first presidential campaign, in 2008, Clinton had scorned Putin.  George W. Bush might have claimed he had looked into Putin’s eyes and gotten “a sense of his soul,” but she knew better. “He was a KGB agent – he doesn’t have a soul,” she told a fund-raising crowd. As secretary of state, she harshly reproached Russia for fraud and intimidation after the parliamentary elections of 2012 – on the eve of Putin’s campaign for a third presidential term.

“Putin was livid,” wrote reporter Mark Lander, White House correspondent for The New York Times, in Alter Egos:  Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power. (Random House, 2016). Clinton had sent “a signal” to “some actors in our country,” Putin claimed. Protesters took to the streets in Russia’s first major demonstrations since the 1990s. U.S. cheerleaders hopefully dubbed it “the Snow Revolution.”

As it happened, Clinton’s spokesperson in those days was Nuland. Born in 1961, a 1983 graduate of Brown University, is daughter of surgeon-author Sherwin Nuland, wife of neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan. She entered government service as chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott during the Clinton administration.  She became Vice President Dick Cheney’s national-security adviser on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, and afterwards served four years as ambassador to NATO. Nuland faced sharp questions about her role as Clinton’s press aide in the wake of the Benghazi attack, but was confirmed as an assistant secretary of state in September 2013 – just in time for the Ukrainian crisis.

After she turned up passing out cookies to Ukrainian demonstrators in Kiev, Nuland was the victim of the very first notable Russia hack, recorded and posted on YouTube, discussing with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who should serve in the Ukrainian leadership following the flight of president Viktor Yanukovych to Moscow. “Fuck the E.U.,” she famously said, referring to the suggestion that the European Union, rather than the United Nations, should serve as a mediator in Ukraine.

Nuland, and her former mentor Talbott, were high up in the plans for a Clinton administration in 2016.  Last week Albright Stonebridge Group, a strategy and commercial diplomacy firm, announced she would become a senior counselor. The Russians, like nearly everyone else, had been preparing for President Clinton. Instead they got President Trump.

Everyone Loses is an excellent summary of the mess that ensued after massive street protests drove a pro-Russian democratically elected president from office in February 2014.  Charap, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Colton, professor of government at Harvard and author of Yeltsin: A Life (Basic, 2008), are eager to propose a set of precondition-free talks.

“The West needs to cease holding out for Russia to surrender and accept its terms. Russia must stop pining for the good old days of great-power politics, be it the Big Three of 1945  {the U.S., Soviet Union and Britain} or the Concert of Europe 1815-1914, and accept that its neighbors will have a say in any agreement that affects them.  The neighbors should stop seeking national salvation from without, and recognize that it will be up to them, first and foremost, to bring about their countries’ security and well-being.’’

But then Everyone Loses was written before the U.S. election.  In order to focus narrowly on the fate of the so-called In-Betweens (Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) and the Central Asian nations along the Russian periphery (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan), the authors left everything out of their book that didn’t “bear directly” on the lose-lose situation that grew out of the crisis in Ukraine. That includes NATO expansion, divergences over Russia’s wars in Chechnya, matters of ballistic-missile defense, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the civil war in Syria and U.S. intervention in Libya.  

That is, of course, no way to understand the larger situation.  The Russians are no angels.  But it is the U.S. that has been on a bender since 1989. A complicated rethinking of U.S.foreign policy is in store.  The largely accidental election of Donald Trump has confused the issue.  But that leaves plenty of time for the retracing of steps before the next election.

 David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist on economic, political and media matters, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran.

Robert Whitcomb; Treatment for Brexit bathos; 'The Genius of Birds'

This first ran in Robert Whitcomb "Digital Diary'' column in GoLocalProv.com.

"There's been a little bit of hysteria post-Brexit vote, as if somehow NATO's gone, the Trans-Atlantic Alliance is dissolving, and every country is rushing off to its own corner. That's not what's happening."

--   President Obama

Quite right. And the Western World has been prosperous for long stretches without the E.U.!

The 51.8 percent vote  in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union stemmed from, among other things, the failure of the E.U. to slow the flood of refugees from nasty places and, somewhat related, the dwindling job prospects of millions of people hurt by globalization and computerization. Outgoing British Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, had vowed to cut net immigration into the U.K. to 100,000 a year. In fact,  it rose to  333,000 in 2015.

Then there was the desire to protect the orderly British way of life.

The British and many people on the Continent understandably fear for their tolerant and opensocieties when so many people from illiberal, corrupt, religiously fanatic and indeed barbaric cultures flee to Europe for its safety andprosperity, not to mention welfare benefits, butrefuse to give up some of the nasty archaic aspects of the cultures whence they came. The British “Leave’’ voters want to adjust the influx of immigrants from non-Western cultures to a pace that  allows for thegradual education of these newcomers so that they come to accept the values of an open, tolerant, democratic and secular society.

What happens next?

Future events might include:

·      The U.K. deciding not to leave the E.U. after all. For one thing, the referendum isn’t legallybinding!

·      Letting Scotland veto Brexit since, under one legal interpretation, leaving requires the Scottish Parliament’s approval and the Scots have strongly favored staying in the E.U.

·      Renegotiating the U.K.’s membership in the E.U. -- for example, giving Britain and other member nations more power to control population movements into their nations.

The U.K. will muddle through with new arrangements with the E.U., perhaps along the lines of non-members Norway and Switzerland and, I hope, develop  even closer connections with its offspring the United States.

Brexit should remind us that we need to strengthen the unity of the wider West – Europe, the U.S. and Canada --  especially as aggressive dictatorships, particularly Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as well as Islamic terrorists, pose intensifying dangers.  NATO must block Putin’s obvious plan to take over the Baltic Republics and that  part of Ukraine he hasn’t already grabbed. And the U.S., the U.K and the E.U. need to accelerate negotiations  to enact  the TransatlanticTrade and Investment Partnership to strengthen the West on both sides of the Atlantic.

An analysis at the World Economic Forum in Davos listed the 10 best nations to live in. All except Japan are Western democracies. Brexit may spawn new ways of thinking to keep it that way.

xxx

MontyBurnham, who chairs the Preservation Society of Newport County,  controlled her exasperation in her recent status report on  long-delayed upgrades to three Newport mansions – upgrades that would draw in more tourist money to the City by the Sea.

Tedious Nimby legal actions have long held up a long-overdue welcome center at The Breakers as well as refreshment services at Marble House and The Elms. The society will almost certainly finally triumph this year, letting these improvements be implemented next year. But what a pity it will have taken so long to offer these amenities. America has become an increasingly difficult place to do public projects, no matter how good for the general public.

xxx

Republican leaders have long denounced the Affordable Care Act without coming up with a detailed plan with a cost-benefit analysis to replace it.

The tradition continues with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s election-year healthcare replacement “plan’’ for the ACA. As usual, it involves further complicating the tax code -- in this case,  with a new tax credit for people (including rich folks) to buy insurance in markets to be regulated by the states.

The speaker doesn’t project how much the credit would be worth, what the total cost would be, how many people it would cover and the range of  health conditions to be covered by such policies. So, at this point anyway, it means pretty much nothing.

Meanwhile, the most cost-effective and least complicated way to improve American healthcare – extending Medicare to everyone – remains off the table. Lobbyists rule!

xxx

Jennifer Ackerman’s new book, The Genius of Birds, about birds’ cognitive abilities, is quite something. Birds use tools, plan, have capacious memories and complex social lives. Many species are anything but what we think of as ‘’birdbrained’’.

But then,  the more we learn about nonhuman animals the more we’re surprised by how many species are smart and deeply feeling creatures. Pigs, certainly. (And some fish?)

And yet we continue to terrify, kill and eat intelligent animals.

Robert Whitcomb is overseer of New England Diary.

Chris Powell: Leaving E.U. essential to protecting British sovereignty, democracy, culture

Recognizing that the objective of the European project, ever-closer political and economic union, meant the destruction of democracy, sovereignty and the country’s very culture, Britain has voted in a great referendum to withdraw from the European Union.

The majority arose from a remarkable combination of the free-market, limited-government political right, the core of the Conservative Party, with the working-class political left, the core of the Labor Party, both party cores repudiating their leaderships as well as the national elites.

The result has enormous implications for the United Kingdom, starting with whether it can remain united, since Scotland -- formerly the most industrious and inventive province in the world, now perhaps the most welfare-addled -- probably will make a second attempt to secede, figuring that free stuff is more likely to flow through continued association with the E.U. than with England, which is growing resentful of the freeloaders up north.

But there are enormous implications for the world as well. The E.U. project has  never won forthright ratification by the people of its member states and indeed has sometimes refused to accept rejection by them. Indeed, the whole E.U. government is largely unaccountable. So the British vote quickly prompted demands for similar referendums in France and the Netherlands, where conservative populist movements have been gaining strength.

The politically correct elites are portraying the British vote as a "xenophobic" response to free movement of labor across the E.U. and particularly as opposition to the vast recent immigration into Europe from the Middle East and Africa. This immigration is widely misunderstood as being mainly a matter of refugees from civil war. In fact this immigration has been mainly economic and it has driven wages down in less-skilled jobs while increasing welfare costs throughout Europe, which explains the British Laborite support for leaving the E.U.

But it is not "xenophobic" to oppose the uncontrolled and indeed anarchic immigration that the European Union has countenanced. For any nation that cannot control immigration isn’t a nation at all or won’t be one for long. Since most immigration into Europe lately has come from a medieval and essentially fascist culture and involves people who have little interest in assimilating into a democratic and secular society, this immigration has threatened to destroy Europe as it has understood itself. Britain has been lucky to be at the far end of this immigration, but voters there saw the mess that it has been making on the other side of the Channel. They wisely opted to reassert control of their borders.

Their example should be appreciated in the United States, which for decades has failed to enforce its own immigration law and as a result hosts more than 10 million people living in the country illegally and unscreened. Fortunately few of this country’s illegal immigrants come from a culture that believes in murdering homosexuals, oppressing women and monopolizing religion. But the negative economic and social effects here are similar to those in Europe and properly have become political issues.

The main lesson of Britain’s decision may be an old one -- that nations have to develop organically, arising from the consent of the governed and a common culture, and that they can’t be manufactured by elites. Having defended its sovereignty and indeed liberty itself against Napoleon and Hitler, Britain now has set out to defend them again. So rule, Britannia -- Britannia, rule thyself.

From “Rule Britannia’’:

The nations not so blest as thee

Must in their turn to tyrants fall,

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

Chris Powell is a political writer and also the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.