In April of 1949 the United States and 11 Western European countries signed an agreement establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. The most significant clause in this treaty was "Article 5," in which signatories agreed that "an armed attack against one or more of them.... shall be considered an attack against them all." Following such an attack each ally would take "such action as it (considered) necessary, including the use of armed force". In retaliation, in 1955, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states formed the Warsaw Pact. Aside from the USSR, this group included Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. Fast forward 70 plus year, after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire, all of these former satellite states are now part of NATO, a significant thorn in the side of Russia's current autocratic leader Vladimir Putin.
Putin, a foreign intelligence Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB for 16 years, has effectively run the Russian government ever since President Boris Yeltsin appointed him on August 9, 1999. He continues to articulate his disenchantment with Russia's diminishing strategic power and influence vis-à-vis NATO and the European Union, and he has been vocal about what he considers to be an existential threat to his country from these two organizations. He is dedicated to weakening the EU and undermining the NATO military alliance to extend his power and potentially recover a hegemonic role for Russia. In his mind the collapse of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. The fact that 10 formerly Communist states joined the EU rubbed additional salt into Russian wounds. As a former KGB puppet master Putin initiated subtle, and not so subtle, attacks on his adversaries.
It should be understood that nothing significant emerging from Russia happens without Putin's consent. In 2007, Estonia, which with six other Eastern European nations joined NATO in 2004, suffered a crippling cyber attack, essentially shutting down the entire country, solely because, contrary to explicit warnings emanating from Moscow, it removed a Soviet WWII memorial from its capital's downtown. In 2008, after Georgia expressed an interest in joining NATO, Russia invaded its provinces Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ultimately declaring them independent states, and regrouping them under the Russian umbrella. In 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Later that year, the 53rd Anti Aircraft Rocket Brigade of the Russian Federation shot down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over rebel territory in Ukraine, killing all 298 on board. In 2016 Russia plotted to overthrow Montenegro's government and assassinate its Prime Minister, Milo Djukanovic, to sabotage that country's plan to join NATO, something they did a year later anyway. That same year, allegedly with support of the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB, and the GRU, the military intelligence service, Russia effectively meddled in the British "Brexit" referendum, supporting the "leave" campaign headed up by Nigel Farrage. Subsequent Russian interference in the U.S. and French elections has also been well established. In the meantime dozens of Putin's critics died violently or disappeared altogether. Boris Nemtsov - shot in the back in front of the Kremlin, Alexander Litvinenko - poisoned with Polonium 210, and Sergei Magnitsky - killed in prison, are cases in point. In short, Vladimir Putin will stop at nothing to accomplish his objectives. He is the consummate professional KGB officer, accomplished puppet master, a merciless killer, and no friend of the West.
President Trump's open skepticism of NATO, its continued relevance, and the viability of "Article 5" of its charter, mouthing Russia's talking points, is playing into Putin's hands. During an interview on Fox News Trump explicitly questioned why an American would have to defend a small country like Montenegro, which is more than 5,000 miles away. Qualifying and conditioning the notion of NATO's defense guarantee is a major step towards abandoning it. The only time in history when the Article 5 guarantee was invoked was after 9/11. Our allies sent tens of thousands of troops to fight alongside Americans in Afghanistan, spent tens of billions of dollars, and suffered more than 1,000 casualties in defense of an ally. Georgia and Ukraine were invaded with impunity, without eliciting military retaliation, because they did not belong to the NATO alliance.
After Trump's private meeting with Putin in Helsinki, and subsequent to his submissive participation in their press conference, patriots on both sides of the political aisle, and most of our allies who stood by us for 70 plus years, questioned U.S. bias and commitment after the president publicly challenged the veracity of his own intelligence experts while chastising NATO and branding the EU a "foe," again effectively doing Putin's bidding. Former CIA director and career intelligence officer John Brennan tweeted that Trump's performance in Helsinki "rises to and exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' Nothing short of treasonous," while calling his comments "imbecilic, wholly in the pocket of Putin." Rumor has it that one of the items the two leaders agreed to is that Georgia and Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO. Not entirely unexpectedly, Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov asserted that the summit results were "better than super," while our own senior staff appeared reticent about discussing the meeting's content at all.
By tweeting that: "Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of US foolishness and stupidity, and now the Rigged Witch Hunt," (sic), Donald Trump either reflects ignorance, is gullible, or somehow beholden to the Russian dictator. As Charles de Gaulle, and numerous others following him, remarked: "No nation has friends, only interests." If Trump insists on inviting Putin to DC this fall, we are essentially bringing the KGB into the White House, the inner sanctum of our democracy. In some sense we are encountering a scene from a play detailing the onset of our revolution. The composite intelligence services play Paul Revere, screaming: "The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming." Unfortunately, someone also needs to play the role of Benedict Arnold.....
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE ABYSS
Donald Trump is frustrated, suffering from a severe dose of "relative deprivation," the conscious experience of a negative discrepancy between his expectations and political reality. Trump is frustrated in part because he has been unable to secure funding for his signature campaign issue of building a wall along the length of our southern border. Mexico won't pay for it, and Congress has not been able to secure the votes to do so either. Given this reality, it is not difficult to imagine that Mr. Trump, with assistance of his senior advisor Stephen Miller, a former aide to then Senator Jeff Sessions, and well known for echoing white supremacist and anti-immigrant viewpoints, would conjure up a strategy intended to create a hostage situation designed to shame Democrats into helping move a Republican backed immigration measure across the line in Congress.
On April 6 Trump issued a memorandum ending "catch and release" at the border, a practice which releases illegal immigrants from detention while they wait for their immigration court hearing. He directed Homeland Security, the Justice and Defense departments to come up with measures they would be able to take to end this practice. Attorney General Jeff Sessions subsequently ordered federal prosecutors to adopt a "zero tolerance" policy. A month later he clarified what he really meant: "If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border." Six week later 2,300 plus kids had been separated from their parents, interred into wire cages, forced to sleep on concrete floors, housed in warehouses and internment camps reminiscent of conditions that existed in the camps Japanese-Americans were forced into during World War II. To avoid transparency, the press and elected representatives were denied access to these hastily erected internment facilities.
As the reality of this process became clear, its consequences quickly generated overwhelming critique from every corner of the country, and from the world at large. The 47-member United Nations Human Rights Council, which began its latest session on June 18 with a broadside against Mr. Trump's immigration policy by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegal and unconscionable. The next day the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the council.
Instead of immigration reform, kids in cages, considered child abuse by many, became the focus for politicians of both parties, people from all faiths from the Vatican on down, and from all First Ladies still living. While acting like ventriloquist dummies, A.G. Jeff Sessions, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, remained unapologetic in their support of Trump's policy. Sessions justified his decision to separate families by citing a biblical admonishment from Apostle Paul in Romans 13 to "obey the law of the government, because God has ordained them for the purpose of order." In response, more than 600 clergy and lay members of the United Methodist Church, to which Sessions belongs, signed a letter opposing his viewpoint. In the mean time Trump doubled and tripled down on this policy, blaming Democrats for the problem. "They don't care about crime, and want illegal immigrants to pour into and infest our country, like M.S. - 13" [sic].
Trump, Sessions, Nielsen and other apologists continued their bombastic lies as international pressure mounted. Comparisons to Nazi-Germany's forcible removal of 400,000 children from their parents, and Putin's goons arresting kids first at anti-Putin rallies, began to surface regularly. Democratic leaders lamented that taking children from their parents was a form of state terror, and that hostage taking was one of the most effective tools of terror most of us never thought we would see an American administration implement. Trump finally appeared to back down and signed a Presidential Executive Order nominally halting the practice, a political document entirely unnecessary and still lacking clarification and follow-through. A day later the president followed up by featuring an event in the White House rose garden callously showing off families who were "permanently separated" from their children killed by illegal aliens. A few days later he proposed to deport asylum seekers immediately after crossing the border without extending to them their legal right to due process.
None of this should have surprised us. Donald Trump feels the need to project strength without restraint. He routinely indicates that he prefers "strong" autocratic leaders over our "meek, dishonest and weak" traditional democratic allies. His new-found friend Kim Jong Un, China's Xi Jinping, Egypt's Fatah al-Sissi, Turkish Erdogan, Russia's Putin and others appear to have more what our president looks for in a leader. Not surprisingly, none of these criticized him about his stance on immigration. While Trump refers to illegal immigrants as vermin infesting our country, they routinely and openly dehumanize migrants and other irritants as well. In the president's mind compassion and empathy are signs of weakness. He won't acknowledge that those are character traits that actually make us human. Given the chance, it would not be much of a stretch to imagine him rubbing shoulders with Hitler and Mussolini.
His relentless attacks on the free press, his disregard and disrespect for our laws and democratic institutions, even suggesting that he is above the law and could pardon himself, unilateral withdrawal from international agreements, and his perpetual lies leading up to and surrounding this disgraceful episode, makes us wonder how close we have come to the end of rules based democratic government in our country. London's King's College instructor Angelos Chryssogelos, in a May 31, 2018 Time magazine article, warned: "Populism can indeed become a threat to democracy if populists in power undermine liberal institutions and enable illiberal democracy that can, with time, degenerate into outright electoral autocracy."
Mussolini was known for having said that "if you consolidate power by plucking a chicken one feather at a time, people won't notice." Trump is considerably less subtle, he plucks them out by the fistful. We need to pay attention. The abyss lies at the bottom of a slippery slope.
On April 6 Trump issued a memorandum ending "catch and release" at the border, a practice which releases illegal immigrants from detention while they wait for their immigration court hearing. He directed Homeland Security, the Justice and Defense departments to come up with measures they would be able to take to end this practice. Attorney General Jeff Sessions subsequently ordered federal prosecutors to adopt a "zero tolerance" policy. A month later he clarified what he really meant: "If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border." Six week later 2,300 plus kids had been separated from their parents, interred into wire cages, forced to sleep on concrete floors, housed in warehouses and internment camps reminiscent of conditions that existed in the camps Japanese-Americans were forced into during World War II. To avoid transparency, the press and elected representatives were denied access to these hastily erected internment facilities.
As the reality of this process became clear, its consequences quickly generated overwhelming critique from every corner of the country, and from the world at large. The 47-member United Nations Human Rights Council, which began its latest session on June 18 with a broadside against Mr. Trump's immigration policy by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegal and unconscionable. The next day the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the council.
Instead of immigration reform, kids in cages, considered child abuse by many, became the focus for politicians of both parties, people from all faiths from the Vatican on down, and from all First Ladies still living. While acting like ventriloquist dummies, A.G. Jeff Sessions, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, remained unapologetic in their support of Trump's policy. Sessions justified his decision to separate families by citing a biblical admonishment from Apostle Paul in Romans 13 to "obey the law of the government, because God has ordained them for the purpose of order." In response, more than 600 clergy and lay members of the United Methodist Church, to which Sessions belongs, signed a letter opposing his viewpoint. In the mean time Trump doubled and tripled down on this policy, blaming Democrats for the problem. "They don't care about crime, and want illegal immigrants to pour into and infest our country, like M.S. - 13" [sic].
Trump, Sessions, Nielsen and other apologists continued their bombastic lies as international pressure mounted. Comparisons to Nazi-Germany's forcible removal of 400,000 children from their parents, and Putin's goons arresting kids first at anti-Putin rallies, began to surface regularly. Democratic leaders lamented that taking children from their parents was a form of state terror, and that hostage taking was one of the most effective tools of terror most of us never thought we would see an American administration implement. Trump finally appeared to back down and signed a Presidential Executive Order nominally halting the practice, a political document entirely unnecessary and still lacking clarification and follow-through. A day later the president followed up by featuring an event in the White House rose garden callously showing off families who were "permanently separated" from their children killed by illegal aliens. A few days later he proposed to deport asylum seekers immediately after crossing the border without extending to them their legal right to due process.
None of this should have surprised us. Donald Trump feels the need to project strength without restraint. He routinely indicates that he prefers "strong" autocratic leaders over our "meek, dishonest and weak" traditional democratic allies. His new-found friend Kim Jong Un, China's Xi Jinping, Egypt's Fatah al-Sissi, Turkish Erdogan, Russia's Putin and others appear to have more what our president looks for in a leader. Not surprisingly, none of these criticized him about his stance on immigration. While Trump refers to illegal immigrants as vermin infesting our country, they routinely and openly dehumanize migrants and other irritants as well. In the president's mind compassion and empathy are signs of weakness. He won't acknowledge that those are character traits that actually make us human. Given the chance, it would not be much of a stretch to imagine him rubbing shoulders with Hitler and Mussolini.
His relentless attacks on the free press, his disregard and disrespect for our laws and democratic institutions, even suggesting that he is above the law and could pardon himself, unilateral withdrawal from international agreements, and his perpetual lies leading up to and surrounding this disgraceful episode, makes us wonder how close we have come to the end of rules based democratic government in our country. London's King's College instructor Angelos Chryssogelos, in a May 31, 2018 Time magazine article, warned: "Populism can indeed become a threat to democracy if populists in power undermine liberal institutions and enable illiberal democracy that can, with time, degenerate into outright electoral autocracy."
Mussolini was known for having said that "if you consolidate power by plucking a chicken one feather at a time, people won't notice." Trump is considerably less subtle, he plucks them out by the fistful. We need to pay attention. The abyss lies at the bottom of a slippery slope.
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