The Budapest Memorandum.
Stop it, all of you. You’re all missing the point!
From the Kyiv Post:
What’s going on here? Why is Ukraine suddenly on the front page of virtually every American newspaper? The Kyiv Post has broken down the scandal into questions and answers to help you understand what’s true, what isn’t, and why we’re all talking about it now.
Would you please read that first and then come back? Don’t get lost on the Kyiv Post and forget about the newsletter. But read it first. Look at this from Ukraine’s perspective.
The authors have absolutely no reason to want to be embroiled in American partisan politics. They actually live in Ukraine.
Ukrainians are being killed by Russia’s armed forces and mercenaries.
From the Ukrainian media, via Google translate:
Holding up military assistance to Ukraine gets Ukrainians killed. For Ukrainians, it’s literally a matter of life and death.
The Budapest Memorandum
If any of this is to make sense to Americans and not come across as “just another manufactured partisan scandal,” this following point needs to be in the headlines.
In 1994, the United States persuaded Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons—the world’s third-largest stockpile. In exchange, Russia made an explicit and unambiguous promise to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and its existing borders, and never to use arms against Ukraine.
The United States, meanwhile—along with the United Kingdom—promised to “provide assistance” to Ukraine should it ever be the “object of aggression.”
Similar promises were made in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe—and well as the UN Charter and NPT itself.
But the most important thing is the Budapest Memorandum. Ukrainians voluntarily gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile in exchange for a promise that Russia would not invade them—and that if it did, the US and the UK would come to their rescue.
The commitment is not as ironclad as the NATO treaty. It wasn’t ratified as a treaty, and the language has enough ambiguity in it that a skilful lawyer could argue it doesn’t mean what it says. But look, it’s perfectly clear what we meant. And no matter what that skilful lawyer says, our seriousness about it is a bellwether of our commitment to the NATO treaty. If we don’t uphold the Budapest Memorandum, the credibility of our commitment to NATO is diminished.
Here’s the Memorandum in full.
There are many other reasons to provide that aid to Ukraine, including the defense of the moral principle that Russia shouldn’t invade formerly captive nations and kill their citizens, or revise the borders of Europe by force.
But Claire, why shouldn’t they?
I’m not even answering that one.
But Claire, Russia wouldn’t really do that, would they?
They did.
But surely they wouldn’t do it again, would they?
I’m not a Kremlinologist. I don’t read Russian. I don’t want to pretend to have special insight. But you don’t need specialist knowledge be persuaded of the following:
Putin tends to go on reckless foreign adventures when his domestic popularity sags.
His domestic popularity is sagging.
Note from a correspondent who asks for anonymity:
What’s interesting about Putin doing this as his popularity sags is that he’s meant to leave at the end of this term anyway. His popularity shouldn’t matter. But because he’s the pin in the grenade that is the Kremlin, with all its competing factions and fiedoms—the only (or at least main) reason he came back after Medvedev proved ineffective at containing those forces—and has done little to properly develop and train an “heir” (Modi obviously has Shah), there’s a risk he’ll try to run again. Remember that this person also has to have Putin’s absolute trust: …. he will be worried about having a prison cell waiting for him should his successor not prove capable of holding back the tide. …
When the United States does things like “hold up assistance to Ukraine for domestic political reasons,” the rest of the world is apt to draw certain conclusions about our commitment to their security.
They’re apt to draw the right conclusions. It’s manifestly clear Americans are in a profoundly isolationist mood. Iran just knocked out five percent of the world’s energy supplies. Trump said, “Well, screw it.”
There was firm bipartisan support for saying, “Well, Screw it.”
“Screw it” is a recipe for miscalculation and disaster, because we don’t actually mean it. We have American forces deployed as tripwires around the world. If someone gets overconfident and kills thousands of Americans, our response would not be, “Well, Screw it.” We’d fly into thunderous, Jacksonian rage.
Once that’s unleashed, no one has any idea what will happen. We actually don’t have the conventional military strength we need to handle some of the highly imaginable scenarios. We’d end up climbing an escalation ladder so steep that as a matter of superstition, we don’t even speak about it in public.
I’ve been following Blake Hounshell on Twitter, probably, since 2010. He used to be the managing editor of Foreign Policy, and now he’s the editor-in-chief of Politico. I couldn’t remember his title at Foreign Policy so I looked up his name. This was one of the first things I found. I don’t know if it’s accurate.
If that’s correct, let’s use Blake—sorry, Blake—for rhetorical purposes. He’s the elite media personified. He has his finger on the pulse of the things that really matter to our elite. (I am positing, rather than proving, the existence of such a class. I know nothing more than what’s written above about Blake Hounshell. But if there is such a class, rhetorical Blake is its distilled essence.)
Like the rest of the media, he’s preoccupied by this story about Trump and Ukraine.
Yesterday—or maybe the day before?—Media Twitter was abuzz with Steve Mnuchin’s Jake Tapper interview.
Hounshell pointed out, on Twitter, that it’s hard to find a consistent principle in what Mnuchin said. He posted this transcript of the interview:
But this is where the elite mainstream media seems completely to misunderstand the public.
No one but people like us—Blake, me, readers of this newsletter—are looking for things like “consistent principles.” Trump didn’t send Mnuchin off to do that show with the instructions, “Whatever you do, make sure your principles are consistent.”
Mnuchin’s mission was to reinforce the the fundamental premise of the Trump Administration: “Everyone’s a corrupt son-of-a-bitch. Vote for Trump because he’ll be your corrupt son-of-a-bitch.” He stayed perfectly on-message.
It’s is a deep, fundamental mistake to believe that the large majority of the people who voted for Trump care greatly about whether high-ranking politicians obey the law. They take it as given that they do not. They take it as given that politics is a nasty and underhanded business. They do not care if Mnuchin has consistent principles, and they do not care if Trump “abused the power of his office.”
They want a strong economy and they don’t want war.
And they’re getting what they voted for—so far.
As The New York Times reported yesterday, most voters in the United States are paying no attention at all to this story. They are “not into” politics.
Asked on Monday about the current big story in the news — whistleblower accusations involving Mr. Trump and Ukraine — she said she hadn’t heard of it.
“Absolutely no idea,” she said on the phone after picking up her sons from the bus stop. “Get off that,” she said firmly to one of them.
They don't care what happens in Washington and whether what Trump did is legal, constitutional, or fair. It has nothing to do with them.
Newsflash: Populists always screw up
The UK Supreme Court has ruled that Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament was unlawful.
The problem with right-wing populists is that they’re big on tough, crowd-pleasing chest-thumping, but they’re unable to think three steps ahead. They just can’t do it.
The whistleblower pool
My first suspicion was that Trump himself was the whistleblower.
But on reflection: my money’s on Bolton.
Hey! If you send me your bet and five bucks, I’ll run a pool. Winner-takes-all. If there are more than two winning bets, money shared evenly among everyone who got it right.
I fear this scandal is going to result in Trump’s re-election.
Momentum for impeachment is building. Great. ITMFA. But for the love of God, tell the American people why. That way, you might—possibly—be able to convict him. If you don’t, he emerges stronger, and we get four more years.
Stop referring to “aid” for Ukraine. It isn’t aid we’re talking about. We’re not sending them mosquito nets and diversity training teams. Trump held up weapons for Ukraine.
You simply wouldn’t know from reading, say, this story, or this one, is why it’s a big deal. Nor would you know if from listening to our politicians, who are amazingly bad at politics.
Here’s what Nancy Pelosi has to say about it, as The New York Times presents it:
WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, saying that he had betrayed his oath of office and the nation’s security in seeking to enlist a foreign power for his own political gain.
“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” she said after emerging from a meeting of House Democrats in the basement of the Capitol. Mr. Trump, she said, “must be held accountable — no one is above the law.”
You might think it’s kind of a big deal—raised-eyebrow-level-two, say—that the President abused the power of his office to dig for dirt on his only serious rival. But that’s been priced into the Trump-expectations market from the beginning.
The people who voted for him will only see this as evidence that he fights. Whether what he did is lawful or Constitutional or the spirit of fair play will not matter to them.
To the extent they care about rule of law, they believe and have long believed that it’s one law for the little people and another for the elites. They don’t expect those crooks in Washington to do anything but cheat.
But the reason this is a big deal is that the aid to Ukraine was held up, not because Trump held it up in an effort to kneecap his rival. And contrary to widespread belief, the United States does not provided free military equipment as a favor. If we’re shoveling weapons in someone’s direction without asking for money in return, it means we are worried about our interests.
It’s already almost been forgotten that before anyone had heard about this whistleblower, there was growing and bipartisan bafflement and concern, tending toward outrage that the Administration was slow-walking the aid package. You even read about it in this newsletter.
I figured Trump was holding it up to please Putin. (No, I have not “moved on” after the release of the Mueller Report, because I read it.)
I do not imagine the whistleblower, whoever he is, was motivated to blow the whistle because he was shocked by Trump’s corruption or by his efforts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Anyone close enough to Trump to be listening to that conversation knew who Donald Trump was already. Presumably, he figured up to that point that Trump was tolerable because hell, everyone’s corrupt, and because Trump, he reckoned, was better for America than a further weakened president or any plausible alternative.
Also when you’re weak president, the men around the throne get even hungrier than usual. They figure this is their chance to be the real president, the Cardinale Richelieu of the Trump-Louis XIX Administration.
I’d guess the whistleblower changed his mind when he realized Trump was, seriously, holding up the weapons for Ukraine. I don’t imagine he reported it out of a sense of fair play or respect for Biden. I imagine he reported it because he grasped we were signalling a lack of commitment—and that doing that is dangerous. À la April Glaspie.
I assume he feared Putin—who is dropping in the polls, and who tends to gobble up his neighbors when happens—would take this as encouragement to reach for another snack.
Это только для того, чтобы сказать
I have eaten
the Baltics
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for NATO
Forgive me
they were delicious
so small
and so cold
That is the scandal.
The President harmed our national security by harming our credibility and our deterrence.
For years, we’ve given Putin the signal that we won’t tolerate it if he continues his violent expansion—but then again, we won’t do much about it, either. The signal is weak, and Trump has further weakened it. This makes conflict—with Russia and with every hostile power—more likely. Why? Because in fact, we do have limits. I don’t know where they are, but I know we have them.
So Trump—like Obama before him—has increased the risk of war, and when we say war, in 2019, we inevitably mean, “with weapons we don’t even want to talk about.”
He has done this at precisely the moment our adversaries have come to suspect, indeed to be certain, that Trump’s only consistent principle is short-term, domestic popularity.
Here’s what team Trump will say:
The people have spoken at the ballot box. You are unable to accept that the people have spoken, and have now tried—twice—do dislodge the President by means of an extra-constitutional judicial coup.
It is not improper to investigate corruption in the notoriously corrupt Ukraine.
Biden’s son, who had no qualifications for the job, made 50,000 dollars a month there. You tell me how that’s not corrupt.
Biden’s son. Do you think your kids are going to get cushy jobs like that when they grow up? Of course not. Biden’s the Swamp.
Sure, I’m the Swamp too—but I look after you, don’t I? I’m not sending you off to fight in Ukraine. Some country you can’t even find on a map. I’m keeping you out of Iran, too, you may notice? And look: Are you better off that you were four years ago?
Also, that joke about Greta Lindbergh—that was pretty funny, no? And it tells you you don’t have to worry. As long as I’m here, no one’s going to taking 90 percent of your income and your car because some hysterical Swedish schoolgirl is freaking out.
This scandal—indeed, even impeachment—is exactly what Trump wants and needs. It doesn’t work the way the media thinks it does. Trump is right: He could shoot people on Fifth Avenue, someone would find a way to say, “So what? Everyone does it. It’s New York.”
Everyone already knows Trump’s crooked as a three-dollar bill. If, as a result of this scandal—or even impeachment—voters discover that Trump’s a corrupt SOB who’d sell his country out for dirt on a rival, so what? They knew that already. They’ve already made whatever mental adjustments they needed to make to accommodate that.
But Biden is selling himself as a return to normal, a decent guy, just plain cleaner than Trump.
What people will remember is this: Hunter Biden was paid vast sums of money to do something in Ukraine. He was a “consultant,” or he was “on the board,” or he was doing one of those jobs that only the elite do—and the outcome is something that only people like Blake care about—and in doing so he earned more in a month than most Americans earn in a year.
What people will remember is that we have a hereditary class of people who get paid astounding amounts of money because they were born to the right family. The legal technicalities won’t interest them. They will just be moved to remember that the Bidens are “the kind of people we hate.”
Why not hate the Trumps on the same basis? Because they don’t pretend to be anything but what they are. That’s Trump’s whole message. I’m a crook. You know it and I know it. But I’ll give you a cut of the action, and I won’t put on holier-than-thou airs. You sure won’t find me telling you you’ve got to genuflect before Greta Thunberg—and when my judges are on the bench, trust me, no one’s wife is going to be forced to wax some pervert’s hairy balls.
For a considerable number of Americans, that’s good enough.
Biden is the only candidate who really threatens Trump. I just don’t have any confidence the other Democrats are electable.
If Trump gets him out of the way, even if he’s impeached, I reckon he can romp through to re-election.
The Ukraine story is a trap. No one’s going to understand it. It cripples Biden. It leaves Trump the last man standing.
Update: When I wrote this, this morning, I wrote, “Chris Dickey’s speculation is likely correct.” Now we know it is.
This, by the way, is the prosecutor Trump describes as “a good guy.”
On March 29, the Ukrainian Rada finally approved the resignation of Ukraine’s disreputable Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. He was voted out with an overwhelming majority of 289 votes, including 114 of the 134 deputies of the Poroshenko Bloc. On February 16, Shokin was forced to submit his letter of resignation in connection with the failed vote of no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
The amazing thing is not that he was sacked but that it has taken so long. President Petro Poroshenko appointed Shokin to the role in February 2015. From the outset, he stood out by causing great damage even to Ukraine’s substandard legal system. Most strikingly, Shokin failed to prosecute any single prominent member of the Yanukovych regime. Nor did he prosecute anyone in the current government.
Americans aren’t going to be thinking about NATO, Russian aggression, or the signal this sends to our allies in Europe and around the globe. Trump’s base has already been persuaded that NATO’s obsolete, Russia’s our friend. and our allies in Europe are effete, sanctimonious libtard freeloaders who need to be put in their place.
And now they’re willing to believe Viktor Shokin was much-maligned.
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The Iranian attack
So go back to that interview with Mnuchin. The most interesting moment of that video is not the one that attracted Hounshell’s interest. It’s here. (It should search to the right place.)
But let me just say, I find it interesting that we’ve spent close to seven and a half minutes talking about a political issue, and not talking about what’s the real issue of the week, which is, Iran launched an attack on Saudi Arabia which is not just about Saudi Arabia, it’s on the world economic system, and this is a very, very significant issue. That’s really been our focus this week.
Mnuchin is right.
It is unfathomable—beyond bizarre—that the Iranian attack is not the top of the headline, above the fold, in every single news outlet, and dwarfing the story about Ukraine—which, after all, remains speculation.
Update: Well, no longer speculation with the release of the transcript. That’s pretty bad.
Still, I don’t get it that Mnuchin would be deliberately drawing attention to Iran, because that’s got to be the last thing he wants Americans to think about.
I expect Trump is thrilled—positively beside himself with a sense of his good fortune—that for some reason the media has decided to ignore that story and instead go down a hole not even a demented rabbit would get near, given how little Americans want to know about Ukrainian politics.
Somehow, in all the excitement, people have forgotten that the US just sent troops to Saudi Arabia in numbers insufficient to matter, militarily, but sufficient to be killed.
(The US military presence in Saudi Arabia was al Qaeda’s stated casus belli, by the way. Anyone remember the 1998 fatwa? Since then we’ve taken pains to be understated about our troop presence in Saudi Arabia, to the point that since 2003, we haven’t officially had one.)
But I do not believe—I could of course be wrong—that sending a handful of troops will deter Iran from from attacking Saudi Arabia again.
It’s unclear to me what Donald Trump seeks to achieve in Iran. “Regime change” has long been his advisors’ stated goal. Trump says he wants “a deal.” I assume that his overarching goal, in everything, is to be popular. Thus he must project the image of being “tough on Iran” without getting Americans killed.
The Iranian regime knows very well, by now, that Trump is not inclined to respond to provocations with military force. This restraint has proved extremely popular in the United States—and not only on the left, but with Trump’s base. In Trump’s words:
I think the strong person’s approach and the thing that does show strength would be showing a little bit of restraint. Much easier to do it the other way, and Iran knows that if they misbehave, they are on borrowed time.
Misbehave? They just knocked out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. Five percent of the world’s global oil supplies. They caused the most significant supply disruption the oil market has ever seen. The markets went haywire. Leaders around the world opened up their reserves to prevent panic.
The Saudis promised to have everything up and running again by the end of September, which calmed the markets. But the world is running now on “reserves.” And the promise that everything will be working before the reserves run out is very unlikely to be true.
Even if it were true: Iran will do it again.
And again.
There’s a bipartisan consensus that the US hates the Saudis and doesn’t want to be involved in another war in the Middle East. (We’re happy to fund the total destruction of Yemen and strangle Iran economically. As long as we don’t see the photos, we’re okay with that.)
In the words of the Speaker of the House:
Americans are weary of war, and have no interest in entering another Middle East conflict, particularly on behalf of Saudi Arabia.
Imagine you’re an Iranian strategic planner. Your aims are, at a minimum:
Regime survival
Regional hegemony
We can all agree that these are Iranian aims, right?
Does anyone remember what happened the last time the US imposed regime-threatening “maximum economic pressure” on a smaller but capable and ruthless adversary during a period when Americans were overwhelmingly opposed to war?
Class?
Anyone?
No need for Pearl Harbor-style dramatics, even. Iran can just keep hitting global energy supplies. They’ve got to be pretty sure by now that if they do that often enough, we’ll give up.
By the way, contrary to received wisdom, the United States does not, and would not, go to war against Iran “for the oil.” The primary reason we’re so reluctant to see this conflict escalate is that it would be epochly horrific and bloody and no one’s even sure we could win it—certainly not, at least, while staving off China and Russia.
But the other reason is that it would cause oil prices to skyrocket, which no one (but Greta Thunberg) wants.
So: Americans were given a choice between “a good economy and no war” and their honor.
You know how this one ends.