OCTOBER 7, 2019   by PATRICK COCKBURN

By George Friedman – Oct. 8, 2019

The evolution of the American political system inevitably has an impact on the global system. If the United States shifts direction in even minor matters, there are regional consequences. Political events are difficult to predict, but the key variables of the process can be identified by comparing the current evolution to a roughly similar prior event. My intent is to benchmark the current impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump to the one that forced Richard Nixon to resign. It is an attempt to define what matters and what doesn’t within the impeachment process, rather than the potential global outcome triggered by hypothetical events.

The Watergate Scandal

Nixon resigned as president in August 1974. Tapes of him discussing the break-ins at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate building were released on Aug. 5, and he resigned four days later. Until that point, a substantial segment of the electorate continued to support him. He had won reelection in 1972 by defeating George McGovern, who ran on an anti-war platform. That platform was perceived by many as supporting what was then called the “counterculture,” which was seen as a systematic attack by a marginal group on American middle-class values. Nixon positioned himself as the spokesman for the “silent majority,” which was seen as the politically subdued core of American society and values.

Nixon did not simply run against McGovern or the counterculture. He ran against the media, which he saw as having been hostile to him well before his first election, hostile to the war in Vietnam from the beginning, and unwilling to praise him for his foreign policy initiatives (including the opening to China and detente with the Soviets) and his championing of middle American values. Looking back at Nixon’s press conferences, the hostility and contempt of the reporters was palpable, as was Nixon’s defensive anger.

The Watergate scandal began in August 1972 and developed with increasing intensity for two years. There was much discussion of impeachment or criminal indictment of the president, but this was impossible. A substantial part of the electorate supported him, seeing the scandal as something manufactured by his political enemies and the media. Interestingly, despite Nixon’s landslide victory, both houses of Congress were controlled by the Democrats, who held hearings on the Watergate affair in the summer of 1974.

The Democrats understood that while they might be able to impeach the president in the House of Representatives, they did not have anywhere close to the two-thirds majority needed to convict in the Senate. Given the passions on both sides, the Democrats were loath to bring an impeachment vote up in the House knowing that conviction was impossible. It would be seen as useless political melodrama. In addition, they could not try him on the same offense later. Likewise, senators did not want the House to put them in a position of holding a vote that might fail. Since both houses were controlled by the same party, they were equally solicitous of each other.

The problem for the Democrats, then, was the deep division in the country. According to polls, a majority of voters were hostile to Nixon, but he retained enough support – in the 40 percent range – to deter Democrats running in districts that were close (and many were close in 1974). Since impeachment is a political rather than a judicial process, a powerful minority of voters saw it as a desire to reverse McGovern’s defeat. Indeed, the number of voters who opposed Nixon politically was larger than the number of voters who wanted him impeached. The political risk of alienating those voters was too great.

The debate might have gone on indefinitely but for the emergence of a “smoking gun,” a bit of evidence so conclusive that even Nixon’s Republican supporters could not ascribe it to Democratic or media manipulation. The smoking gun was the revelation that Nixon had taped many of his office conversations and that some included conversations on Watergate. The House and Senate demanded the tapes, but Nixon refused to release them. That alone started to erode his political support on the theory that he would only hide the tapes if they were harmful to him.

After the courts ordered the release of the tapes, it was discovered that one of them had been erased while others clearly implied Nixon either had knowledge of the cover-up or ordered the break-in himself. The mood among his Republican supporters and in the Senate then shifted. A group of senior senators told Nixon that he would be convicted by the Senate if it came to a vote and convinced him to resign.

The key to this event had little to do with members of Congress. It had everything to do with Republican voters, who were persuaded that, while the attacks on Nixon had been carried out for political reasons, he was guilty and had to be removed. The smoking gun had brought them there (and Republican anger at the media and the Democrats was no less then than it is today). So despite the loathing for Nixon’s enemies, there was a sea change among his supporters, such as never took place during the Clinton impeachment. During the Clinton impeachment, Democratic voters did not agree that there had been a smoking gun requiring conviction, and therefore the Senate found Bill Clinton not guilty.

Neither the House nor the Senate held the power to remove Nixon from office. Nor did those who despised him. That power was held by Nixon’s supporters, who represented a substantial minority by 1974 that could sway state and local elections. Their standard for removal was far higher than others’, and without a smoking gun, the scandal would likely have lurched on indefinitely. But there was a smoking gun, one that tore away illusions about Nixon. But Nixon’s supporters never forgave the Democrats for trying to destroy him before they had a smoking gun, and for 12 years after Jimmy Carter, Republicans dominated the presidency.

The Ukraine Affair

The United States today is at a point similar to where it stood in 1974. The country is divided into two camps, as alienated from each other as were middle America and the counterculture. The Democrats are becoming the political party of the current culture, and the Republicans are the party seeking to hold on to past values. Trump has the support of a minority of voters, which still represents a significant segment of the electorate. He and his backers hold the media responsible for the political crisis, and the media is strongly arrayed against Trump. The passion on both sides is extreme. The president’s opponents and supporters not only are extraordinarily convinced of their positions but, more important, have little contact with each other. Both groups represent hostile tribes, much as it was during the Nixon crisis.

But the important thing to keep in mind is that opposition to impeachment is larger than Trump’s own support base. This is the single most important fact that will determine the future course of this debate. Just as the Republicans in 1974 required a smoking gun to support impeachment, so too does the system today.

The question is whether the Ukraine affair is that smoking gun. There have been many allegations leveled against Trump that were supposed to be smoking guns – but that turned out not to be. Ultimately, the public, not politicians, will decide what really is a smoking gun. And if one were found, the public mood would shift in support of impeachment. It would slash support for Trump into the 20s or less. That would change the decision-making process of politicians in both parties. What happened with Nixon had many predecessors, but it wasn’t until the tapes were released that his presidency collapsed. There are many precursors with Trump as well, but none were sufficiently convincing to cause the voters to shift dramatically. And as in 1974, it is not the Democratic voters that are decisive but the Republican ones. It was their shift that freed Republican senators to change their position and guarantee Nixon’s removal from office. Today, the Democrats have fixed positions, and they can’t remove Trump from office. Only the Republicans can, and their voters aren’t convinced.

There are two things that the Nixon and Trump impeachment processes have in common. The first is that the social divide during both events was profound. The second is that for a couple of years before Nixon’s end, and before this moment for Trump, there were endless assertions of impeachable offenses that alienated the Nixon faction and energized his enemies. That process raised the bar for conviction, because it made the smoking gun essential. So many accusations arose, all of which ultimately went nowhere, that incontrovertible evidence – the tapes – became necessary.

On the current claim against Trump – that he tried to persuade the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden – my opinion or any one of yours really doesn’t matter. The key is whether this charge breaks the back of his support, leaving him with only a handful of supporters. In the Nixon era, evidence exhaustion was overcome by the tapes. The issue now is whether anything will come out that can overcome evidence exhaustion in this case. If Trump’s political support remains as is, he will not be convicted. Most understand that impeachment and conviction are a political, not judicial, process, but many fail to see that this doesn’t mean politicians get to decide what happens. Politicians want to be reelected, so in the end, as is appropriate in a republic, the people will decide this issue. They will decide if Ukraine is a smoking gun.

The Washington Post

(Ahmad Baderkhan/AP)

BY ISHAAN THAROOR

Edited by Ruby Mellen

Already locked in a heated impeachment battle, President Trump found a new way to rile Washington this week. Late Sunday, the White House announced that it would not impede an imminent Turkish invasion into northeastern Syria. By Monday morning, my colleagues confirmed that the United States had begun withdrawing troops from the Syrian-Turkish border, where they had been stationed alongside U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish fighters. It seemed the first phase of a possibly new and destabilizing military conflagration in war-ravaged Syria. By Monday evening, there were already reports of Turkish artillery shelling and airstrikes on Syrian Kurdish positions.

The moves followed a Sunday phone call between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government considers the main Syrian Kurdish faction that fought the Islamic State to be as much of a danger as the Islamist militants themselves. That’s because of their direct ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, an outlawed separatist group in Turkey that’s designated as a terrorist organization by Washington and Ankara.

Erdogan and his government long resented the outsize influence of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the name of the coalition of Syrian Kurdish-led militias that was instrumental in rolling back the Islamic State, as well as the outside support they received from the United States and other European partners. No matter the thousands of lives lost by the SDF, Trump now appears to have given Erdogan what he’s wanted — an open invitation to weaken if not break Rojava (what Syrian Kurds call an enclave in northeastern Syria largely administered by the SDF) and potentially repopulate a belt of territory with Syrian refugees currently living in Turkey.

A definitive U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria — or whatever it is that Trump championed in tweets Monday morning calling for an end to America’s “endless wars” — could have serious ramifications. If Turkey pursues a significant ground invasion, it would overrun SDF defenses, fracture their fighting forces, compel a possible exodus of Syrian Kurdish refugees toward Iraq (a country that’s hardly stable itself), and, as many security analysts fear, create enough of a security vacuum to pave the way for the Islamic State’s resurgence.

For that reason, many Trump allies expressed outrage with his decision-making. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted that leaving the Syrian Kurds “to die is a big mistake.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has carried water for Trump on almost all other fronts, warned that a Turkish foray into Syria would provoke sanctions from Congress and a move to suspend Ankara’s participation in NATO. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters that “a precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria would only benefit Russia, Iran” and the Syrian regime.

Trump predictably justified his actions not with a strategic vision for a troubled region, but campaign talking points. He told reporters on Monday afternoon that he was following through on what he “got elected on” — in this instance, disentangling the United States from the Middle East’s intractable conflicts. He said it was the responsibility of other countries, including Turkey, to deal with what’s left behind. For good measure, he threatened Ankara with crippling economic sanctions if the Turks did anything “outside of what we think is humane.”

Whatever Trump thinks “inhumane” may mean, it was a far cry from the somewhat rambling remarks Trump made at a news conference a year ago hailing the United States’ Kurdish partners.

“We do get along great with the Kurds. We’re trying to help them a lot,” the president said then in response to a Kurdish journalist’s question about U.S. interests in Syria and Iraq after the defeat of the Islamic State. “Don’t forget, that’s their territory. We have to help them. … They fought with us. They died with us. They died. We lost tens of thousands of Kurds, died fighting ISIS. They died for us and with us. And for themselves. They died for themselves. They’re great people. And we have not forgotten. We don’t forget.”

The Middle East’s largest stateless ethnic group, close to 40 million Kurds are scattered throughout Turkey and parts of Iran, Iraq and Syria. They are hardly a monolith; numerous political and factional divisions exist within Kurdish communities. There’s little love lost, for example, between the party that controls the semiautonomous regional government in Iraqi Kurdistan and the PKK-linked elements across the border in Syria. But they all share a long history of frustrated national ambitions, punitive state violence and abandonment on the world stage.

Betraying the Kurds is, at this point, an American tradition. In the early 1970s, as a favor to the shah of Iran, the administration of President Richard M. Nixon helped foment a Kurdish uprising in Iraq. But once Baghdad and Tehran mended fences in 1975, the United States turned its back on the insurrection, many of whose combatants were slaughtered or driven into exile. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, is said to have quipped about Kurdish disappointment then that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.” In 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on Iraqis to rise up against the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. But the United States then stood by as Iraqi forces brutally crushed separate Kurdish and Iraqi Shiite rebellions.

We’ll see what script from history gets reread in the coming weeks. In early August, the United States and Turkey agreed to a “security mechanism” that led to Syrian Kurdish forces pulling back from near the Turkish border and dismantling some of their critical fortifications. The SDF cooperated in good faith but now is even more vulnerable to a Turkish advance. A statement from the SDF on Monday expressed disappointment that U.S. forces “did not carry out responsibilities” and a grim resolve “to defend our land at all costs.”

What distinguishes the current moment of Kurdish betrayal from earlier eras is perhaps its seeming strategic incoherence. On Monday morning, officials in the Pentagon and State Department voiced bewilderment over the president’s tweeted announcements; reports suggested that neither the SDF nor other U.S. coalition partners on the ground were given warning of Trump’s decision.

Brett McGurk, Trump’s former top diplomat in the war against the Islamic State, savaged his ex-boss on Twitter. “The value of an American handshake is depreciating,” he said. “Trump today said we could ‘crush ISIS again’ if it regenerated. With who? What allies would sign up? Who would fight on his assurances?”

The front-page leading piece from my colleagues digs deeper into Turkey’s thinking and options, looks at earlier Turkish incursions over the course of the Syrian conflict and the extreme complexity of resettling Syrian refugees in places they don’t come from.

“Kurdish leaders have accused Turkey of trying to settle Arabs in historically Kurdish lands,” my colleagues reported. “Arab residents, in turn, have accused the Kurds of carrying out ethnic cleansing in areas they control.”

• European officials lamented what they saw as an abrupt and unfortunate decision that would raise tensions in an unstable region, reported my colleagues across the pond. The Post’s Ruby Mellen also compiled this handy brief history of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

• Washington Post columnist David Ignatius spoke to a top SDF commander, who warned of an imminent Turkish land invasion. Gen. Mazloum Abdi urged Trump “to keep his promise” to preserve safety and security for Kurdish allies. He asked U.S. policymakers “to stop this decision and stop the Turkish attack.” He said that abandoning the Kurds “is hurting U.S. interests and reputation. It’s not acting according to American principles.”

• Iraq’s military acknowledged Monday that security forces have used “excessive force” to quash anti-government demonstrations while journalists described growing efforts to suppress reporting on the deadly violence. Security forces have killed more than 100 people since protests erupted in Baghdad and southern cities last week. Hospitals have overflowed with more than 6,000 wounded. By Monday, the most serious clashes had been confined to Baghdad’s sprawling and impoverished district of Sadr City, where 15 deaths were reported the night before.

• An anodyne tweet from Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests triggered a huge backlash in mainland China, a scandal engulfing the National Basketball Association, and yet another reminder of the depth of the growing rift between the United States and China.

• The Post’s Will Englund looks at how Russia may be trying to exploit the swirling turmoil of Trump’s impeachment inquiry, which centers on incidents and dealings in next-door Ukraine.

“I have no doubt [the Russians] will try to take advantage of this situation,” said Bohdan Yaremenko, the former Ukrainian ambassador to Turkey who now has a seat in parliament in Kiev. “They’re masters of the under-carpet game.”

By Emil AvdalianiOctober 8, 2019

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,308, October 10, 2019

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Many believe the Russian-Chinese partnership, which functions across a variety of economic and political spheres, is only temporary. But Moscow’s disenchantment with the West, and the redirection of its foreign policy toward Beijing and beyond, is rooted in Russian historical thinking. The disagreement between Russia and the West is a full-scale geopolitical separation.

The most popular topic in modern geopolitics these days is probably the budding relationship between Russia and China. Articles on the subject are produced regularly, almost all of them concluding that Russia is only temporarily siding with China. It is just a matter of time, these articles claim, until disagreements between the two powers become inevitable.

These articles miss the fact that Moscow’s move away from Europe is rooted deeply in Russian history. It goes back much further than the Ukrainian crisis, which triggered Moscow’s recent troubles with the West.

The Russian-Chinese partnership is built around their common animosity toward the US. Both have been confronted by the US and have taken actions that go against Washington’s worldview, which favors a division of the Eurasian landmass among multiple powers and the maintenance of control over the world’s oceans.

These issues drove Moscow and Beijing to work together, but it should also be noted that each stealthily tries to use the other to gain political leverage in economic, military, and other spheres. Indeed, Russian tactics since the deterioration of relations with the West in 2014 have been to move closer to China and other Asian states, such as Iran and Turkey, to show how far Moscow is willing to distance itself from the West against the background of growing US-China competition.

Putin’s strategy seems to have worked to a degree, as various statements and policy moves over the past year or so indicate that the West is anxious not to lose Russia to Asia (especially to China). As troubles with China grow and the West is forced to contemplate the possibility of a China-led world, the loss of Russia would be tantamount to a geopolitical catastrophe.

That is because in that scenario, Chinese influence would spread to most of Eurasia and even to the Arctic, which is a rising geopolitical hotbed. Recall the first decades of the Cold War, when the Moscow-influenced communist movement controlled territory from Berlin to Vietnam.

But for the West, the loss of Russia to China would mean more than just a geopolitical catastrophe. Despite eternal discussions within Russia over who the country really belongs to, Asia or Europe, the West has always considered the Russian world to be a part of it. True, the West considered Russians to be barbarians during wartime, and tsarist ruthlessness, as well as Soviet methods of state-building and policy-making, were appalling. But from a grand strategic or even philosophical perspective, for the West to lose Russia would mean the reversal of almost a millennium of western European economic and cultural export eastward. In a sense, the Romanovs and the Soviets copied the West, which made them geographic and cultural extensions of European civilization.

This would represent a reversal in which the influence of China’s culture and worldview – for the first time in many centuries – would extend beyond its borders, right up to the edges of Eastern Europe.

There are worrying signs that many in the Russian political class no longer want the same level of psychological attachment to the West, but prefer to be more evenly directed (in terms of foreign policy and economic relations) toward both Europe and China. Moreover, Moscow is building closer relations with Turkey and Iran. The Middle East can thus be a third theater of active Russian diplomacy.

There is a great deal of logic to this strand of Russian thinking. In a way, Moscow wants to free itself from “singularity” in its geopolitical approach to the outside world. We like to believe this change in perception began under Putin, but it has been at work since the 1990s, when Russia was weak and disillusioned. The only way to uphold its position was to stress global multipolarity, meaning the US would no longer be the sole dominant power but one of the many.

In fact, one can go even further back to trace attempts to “de-Europeanize” Russian foreign policy. When Peter the Great reformed Russia and heavily Europeanized the ruling elite, he was widely praised, but there were some who were deeply disenchanted. They believed Peter broke the bridge between the common folk and the Russian political elite and distanced one from the other. Moreover, many in Russia believed the country’s Europe-centrism limited Russia’s ability to position itself as a true global power.

In retrospect, it can be argued that the Bolsheviks came to power to bridge the gap with the ordinary population. In foreign policy they wanted to be internationalist, not Europe-centered, and this worked for a time. But Western technological progress eventually attracted the Russian elites of both the Romanovs and the Soviets, leaving no room for Russia’s Asian roots.

Putin’s “de-Europeanization” of foreign policy should thus be seen as a recurrence of this grand historical cycle. His foreign policy might be viewed as reflecting the Eurasianism created in the 1920s, which held that Russia’s Asian roots should be respected at least to the same degree as its European heritage.

But Putin can also be seen as a shrewd follower of yet another radical strand of Russian political thought: Slavophilism, which was created well before Eurasianism. Putin and the rest of the Russian political elite often make semi-nationalistic statements the Soviet leaders would not have uttered – statements that reflect Slavophile reasoning.

All Russian philosophical ideas have been deeply Europeanized. Not even those who severely criticize Russia’s Europeanness can deny those roots.

And this is a fundamental problem for the Russians. The country spans almost the entire north Eurasian landmass. It is culturally close to the West, but ever since the loss of Ukraine and the Baltic states, it has grown increasingly Asian because of the rise of China and the fact that most of Russia borders Asia. (This is speculation, but it is possible that if the ruling elite goes all the way with the nascent alliance with China, Russia could split violently into at least two large segments: the western part, populated with a more or less Europeanized population, and the rest of the country bordering on the Chinese giant.)

Russia’s distancing from Europe is likely not a temporary affair. Even if Brussels suddenly decides to take part in a grand geopolitical bargain in which Moscow reclaims Ukraine and other former Soviet states, Russia’s “de-Europeanization” of foreign policy is likely to continue. The political class within Russia is doing what Russian leaders have been trying to do for centuries: make Russia more independent in its foreign policy focus and diversify it toward other regions.

Russia’s split with Europe is not about China’s rise. It reflects Russian history and marks a continuation from previous centuries. What it will bring to Russia in the end is difficult to say, but the trend is likely to continue at least for the next decade.

Much will depend on what western Europe and the US offer Moscow in exchange for a near alliance to contain China. While this might sound unrealistic, recent discussions among western political elites show a shift on Russia. Serious concessions to Moscow might forthcoming.

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Emil Avdaliani teaches history and international relations at Tbilisi State University and Ilia State University. He has worked for various international consulting companies and currently publishes articles on military and political developments across the former Soviet space.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/russia-china-cooperation/