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Illustration by R Fresson
Robert Reich
The
founding fathers said betraying America to foreign powers was an impeachable
offense. The president must go
Sun 13 Oct
2019 06.00 BSTLast modified on Sun 13 Oct 2019 06.45 BST
The most
xenophobic and isolationist American president in modern history has been
selling America to foreign powers for his own personal benefit.
Trump
withdrew American troops from the Syrian-Turkish border, leaving our Kurdish
allies to be slaughtered and opening the way for a resurgent Islamic State.
Trump’s rationale? He promised to bring our soldiers home.
There could
be another reason. Trump never divested from his real estate business, and the
Trump Towers Istanbul is the Trump Organization’s first and only office and residential
building in Europe. Businesses linked to the Turkish government are also major
patrons of the Trump Organization. Which may be why Trump has repeatedly sided
with the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been intent on
eliminating the Kurds.
Back home,
Trump has separated families at the border, locked migrant children in cages
and tried to ban Muslims from entering the country. He says he wants to protect
America’s borders.
Under Trump, thuggery has replaced diplomacy
But
guarding America’s geographic borders isn’t nearly as important as guarding the
integrity of American democracy, which Trump has repeatedly compromised for
personal political gain. He did this on 25 July when he asked the president of
Ukraine to do him a personal “favor” by digging up dirt on Joe Biden, his most
likely 2020 opponent.
Trump
justifies his trade war with China as protecting America from Chinese
predation. But he asked China to start an investigation of Biden, and last week
his adviser on China conceded he spoke with Chinese officials about the former
vice-president.
During the
2016 election, Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s
missing emails. Within hours, Russian agents sought to do just that by trying
to break into her computer servers.
Special
counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia sought to help Trump get elected, and
Trump’s campaign welcomed the help.
Now Trump
is playing at being a double foreign agent – pushing the prime minister of
Australia, among others, to gather information to discredit Mueller.
Rudy
Giuliani is Trump’s international thug, arranging deals with foreign powers. On
Wednesday, two of Giuliani’s business associates were arrested in connection
with a criminal scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for office,
including donations to a Super Pac formed to support Trump.
Under
Trump, thuggery has replaced diplomacy. On Friday, in an opening statement for
congressional impeachment investigators, Marie Yovanovitch, former US
ambassador to Ukraine, said people associated with Giuliani “may well have
believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our
anti-corruption policy in Ukraine”.
You don’t have to be an originalist to see the
dangers when a president seeks personal favors from foreign governments
Meanwhile,
even as Trump spews conspiracy theories about the Biden family, his own
children are openly profiting from foreign deals. Eric and Don Jr have projects
in the works in Ireland, India, Indonesia, Uruguay, Turkey and the Philippines.
Trump is
pocketing money from foreign governments eager to curry favor by staying at his
hotels. The practice has become so routine that during Trump’s 25 July phone
call, the Ukrainian president assured him that the “last time I traveled to the
United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump
Tower”.
According
to a former Trump Organization official, foreign governments spent more than a
million dollars at Trump businesses in 2018, mostly at the Trump International
hotel in Washington. Trump will make even more money if he carries out his plan
to host next year’s G7 meeting at his Doral golf resort, in Florida.
All of this
is precisely what the founding fathers sought to prevent.
When they
gathered in Philadelphia 232 years ago to write a constitution, a major goal
was to protect the new nation from what Alexander Hamilton called the “desire
in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils”.
To ensure
no president would “betray his trust to foreign powers”, as James Madison put
it, they included an emoluments clause – barring a president from accepting
foreign payments.
They also
gave Congress the right to impeach a president for “treason, bribery, or other
high crimes and misdemeanors”. During the Virginia ratifying convention, Edmund
Randolph confirmed that a president “may be impeached” if discovered “receiving
[help] from foreign powers”.
You don’t
have to be an originalist to see the dangers to democracy when a president
seeks or receives personal favors from foreign governments. There is no limit
to how far a foreign power might go to help a president enlarge his political
power and wealth, in exchange for selling out America.
Donald
Trump is a xenophobe in public and international mobster in private. He has
brazenly sought private gain from foreign governments at the expense of the
American people.
This is
shameful and criminal. At the very least, it is impeachable.
Robert Reich,
a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University
of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many,
Not the Few and The Common Good. He is also a columnist for Guardian US
Trump’s
Ukraine call could get him impeached – but his Syria betrayal is worse
Jonathan
Freedland
Jonathan
Freedland
The US
president’s transactional approach to the world around him poses a grave threat
@Freedland
Fri 11 Oct
2019 16.52 BSTLast modified on Fri 11 Oct 2019 17.45 BST
Donald
Trump is set to face impeachment for a phone call that came to light last
month. The crimes he committed in that call were serious, and merit the
ultimate sanction that can be imposed on a sitting president, namely removal
from office. And yet even since that conversation took place, in fact this very
week, Trump has had another call that included an act that may not meet the
constitutional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanours” and for which he
will face no such punishment – but whose consequences will surely be even
graver. For they will be measured in life and death.
The first
of these two fateful calls was, of course, with the president of Ukraine,
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, featuring a request that he dig for dirt on Trump’s
would-be Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. Even if that demand did not form one
half of a clear quid pro quo, in which US military aid and future arms sales to
Kyiv would be contingent on compliance – though the grammar of the phone call
very much suggests it did – it is still an impeachable offence. The soliciting
of foreign interference in US elections has been forbidden since the birth of
the republic. It was one of the menaces against which the framers of the constitution
were most determined to protect their infant nation.
The second
call was Sunday’s conversation with the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan. This time it was Trump from whom a “favour” was sought. Erdoğan urged
Trump to remove a small contingent of US troops from along the Turkish-Syrian
border, where they had acted as a kind of tripwire, preventing Turkey from
attacking its longtime enemy, the Kurds, in northeastern Syria. Trump agreed,
and within hours Turkey was unleashing its full might on the Kurds, the same
Kurds who’d believed they were brothers in arms with the Americans in their
shared war against Islamic State in Syria. Yes, the losses had been lopsided in
that struggle. More than 11,000 Kurds had been killed, while US combat deaths
in Syria numbered six. But now their US brothers had abandoned them to their
fate.
Current US
political chatter is much more about Trump’s pressure on Ukraine than it is
about his betrayal of the Kurds, and you can see why. The latest twist in the
Ukraine scandal, featuring Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, and a couple of
characters who ran an outfit called Fraud Guarantee, is compelling: Goodfellas
with Russian subtitles. And yet it is the Syria decision that will cost lives,
including in ways that may not be instantly obvious.
The most
immediate impact will be on those Kurdish forces who, under previous US-Turkish
agreements, were only ever lightly armed and who had removed what
fortifications they had built along the border. With no air force, no
surface-to-air missiles, no armoured personnel carriers, they are massively
outnumbered and outgunned by Turkey. Many of them will die. What’s more,
Erdoğan has made no secret of his plan to move vast numbers of Arab refugees
who had fled from Syria into Turkey over the border. Ankara will call it
“resettlement”, and it might look reasonable: repatriating Syrians to Syria.
Except these areas are Kurdish. The result, says Carne Ross, the former Foreign
Office official whose Independent Diplomat group now advises the Kurds of
northeastern Syria, is inevitable: “It’s ethnic cleansing.”
Those of us
far away can have a more selfish anxiety, too. One of the tasks that had fallen
to the Kurds was the imprisoning of former Isis fighters, preventing them
returning to combat. Now the Kurds’ limited resources will be too stretched:
they can’t both defend themselves from the Turks and act as jailers for a group
of Isis fighters, their families and followers that together number 70,000.
This is why, says Ross, “Isis prisoners are jubilant – jubilant – at the
Turkish invasion,” seeing it as the harbinger of their liberation.
When asked
if all these Isis men might now escape and pose a threat elsewhere, Trump’s
response was telling. “Well, they’re going to be escaping to Europe. That’s
where they want to go.” Meaning if, thanks to me, Isis terrorists are now free
to shoot people in Paris or blow up buses in London, that’s not my problem.
In other
words, you can make a good case that the Erdoğan call will have a more lethal
impact than the Zelenskiy one, even if it is the latter for which Trump will be
held to account. But the two conversations have much in common.
First, they
both reveal the readiness of this president to act alone and against all
advice, ignoring his military top brass, national security team and Congress.
On Ukraine, his own appointees and Republican allies on Capitol Hill were clear
that aid to Kyiv was in the US strategic interest. No matter. Trump was ready to
withhold $400m in aid if that’s what it took to coerce Zelenskiy into helping
his re-election campaign. Similarly, even Trump’s most ardent cheerleaders
agreed that the Kurds were allies whose loyalty should be rewarded and that a
green light to a Turkish invasion would be unforgivable treachery. No matter,
he did it anyway. In both Ukraine and Syria, Trump was ready to jettison
long-established US policy to serve his own interests – keeping everyone else
in the dark until it was too late.
In Ukraine,
his personal motive is clear enough. In Turkey, less so – though it is not
irrelevant that there are two “major, major” Trump Towers in Istanbul, giving
Trump what he himself once called “a little conflict of interest” when it comes
to that country. We have surely seen enough by now to know that when Trump
hears a request from an authoritarian leader, especially one who could have
business leverage over him, he likes to say yes.
The
flipside is his casual disregard for America’s allies. Ukraine is loyal, but
was threatened with being starved of cash unless it agreed to act as Trump’s
covert opposition research unit. The Kurds have fought valiantly, but Trump
brushed them off, saying bizarrely that “they didn’t help us with Normandy”. He
approaches all alliances as mere transactions, tweeting that: “The Kurds fought
with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.” As one
observer put it, for Trump the Kurds weren’t allies – they were subcontractors.
And note the contempt for Europe in both cases. His call with Zelenskiy was
full of disdain for the EU; now we know he doesn’t mind Isis terrorists
murdering and maiming – so long as they only murder and maim Europeans.
There’s a
last connection, too. For who benefits from a Ukraine deprived of cash and
military equipment? Why, it’s the same person who benefits from a US pullback
from Syria: Trump’s old friend, Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s
conduct in these two very different situations – a deliberate political
strategy in Ukraine, an apparent whim in Syria – has one common result, namely
the further destruction of America’s reputation in the eyes of its allies. It
shows that Donald Trump is not just corroding vital democratic norms and
conventions in the US. He is also endangering human lives far away from
America’s shores. It is not just the US that needs to see him removed from
office and soon – it is the whole world.
• Jonathan
Freedland is a Guardian columnist
O admirável
talento de semear caos
Jorge Almeida Fernandes
COMENTÁRIO
Depois de Trump
ter proclamado o fim do Estado Islâmico, os Estados Unidos deixam de precisar
dos curdos sírios, que foram a força determinante na derrota da organização
terrorista, o que lhes custou 10 mil mortos. Podem os aliados confiar na
América?
10 de Outubro de
2019, 6:00
O exército turco
começou ontem a bombardear objectivos das forças curdas sírias, como preparação
para uma ofensiva terrestre. É o efeito de uma declaração do Presidente Donald
Trump, no passado domingo, quando anunciou a retirada das últimas tropas
americanas na Síria. Fê-lo por pressão do Presidente turco, Tayyip Erdogan. Foi
objectivamente uma luz verde para a ofensiva militar.
À medida que se
aproximam as eleições de 2020, Trump manifesta um ilimitado talento para
produzir caos. Ao abandonar os aliados curdos, põe em causa a credibilidade dos
Estados Unidos. Não é apenas uma questão moral. Será a América uma potência
fiável? Por outro lado, ameaça reabrir a infindável guerra síria e precipitar
novas tragédias.
A Rússia e o Irão
têm tudo a ganhar com a iniciativa de Trump, apostando em ocupar o vazio criado
na Síria. E, por outras razões, também Pequim, que observará as reacções dos
aliados asiáticos dos EUA. Será que a América acabará também por os abandonar?
Sair da Síria era
uma velha intenção de Trump. Uma primeira decisão, em Dezembro de 2018, levou à
demissão do secretário da Defesa, general James Mattis, que denunciou na carta
de despedida a indecência do Presidente no tratamento dos aliados. Segundo o general,
a permanência das últimas forças americanas na Síria era económica e de baixo
risco, e tinha dois objectivos importantes. Primeiro, prevenir uma ressurgência
do Estado Islâmico (EI). Segundo, evitar uma ofensiva militar da Turquia contra
os curdos que resultaria na reabertura da guerra síria.
Erdogan terá
interpretado bem os desejos de Trump e soube contornar os diplomatas e generais
americanos muito hostis à ideia. Na segunda-feira, o Pentágono advertiu os
militares turcos de que a declaração do Presidente não significava uma luz
verde para um ataque na Síria, com “consequências desestabilizadoras.” Mas o
ataque já começou.
Juntando-se aos
democratas, importantes figuras republicanas criticaram Trump. O senador
republicano Lindsay Graham, influente apoiante do Presidente, disse duas
coisas. “Abandonar os curdos é uma mancha na honra da América. (…) É uma grande
vitória para o Irão, para Assad e para o Estado Islâmico.” Acrescentou: “A
maior mentira desta Administração é a de que o EI terá sido vencido.”
Trump fez uma
rectificação. Disse que a retirada não seria total. Os soldados americanos que
permanecerem não tomarão partido. Assistirão. Por outro lado, justificou-se: “É
tempo de sair destas guerras ridículas e sem fim, sendo muitas delas tribais.”
É uma promessa eleitoral.
Depois de Trump
ter proclamado o fim do Estado Islâmico, os Estados Unidos deixam de precisar
dos curdos sírios, que foram a força determinante na derrota da organização
terrorista, o que lhes custou 10 mil mortos. Podem os aliados confiar na
América?
O plano turco
Erdogan, depois
de ter acolhido dois ou três milhões de refugiados sírios, e de ter feito a
exibição da solidariedade sunita, quer agora ver-se livre deles. Para isso,
projecta criar uma “zona tampão” na Síria, para onde serão enviados.
Aparentemente, a ofensiva militar destina-se a isso. Mas o objectivo é outro:
isolar os curdos sírios. É um cálculo potencialmente explosivo.
“O plano [de
Erdogan] é enviar milhões de árabes sírios refugiados para as áreas de maioria
curda dentro da Síria”, escreve o turco Gunul Tol, director do centro de
estudos turcos no Middle East Institute. Não é por acaso. “Do ponto de vista de
Erdogan, mudar a composição étnica da região contribuiria para enfraquecer os
curdos.” É o convite a uma nova guerra, agora com dimensão étnica – curdos
contra árabes.
Observa ainda:
“Este plano é uma boa nova para os adversários dos EUA na Síria – a Rússia, o
Irão e o regime de Assad – que acreditam que resistirão, ao mesmo tempo que a
invasão turca levará à completa retirada americana. Para, no fim, recapturarem
a área e expulsarem os turcos.”
O analista
americano Steve A. Cook, do Council on Foreign Relations, tem uma opinião
análoga: “A guerra civil síria está a entrar numa nova fase. “A curto prazo, as
forças curdas não poderão resistir à superioridade militar turca. Mas podem
lançar-se numa “guerra assimétrica” e devolver os golpes aos turcos.
A invasão tem
ainda um efeito perverso. Os curdos sírios têm cerca de dez mil prisioneiros do
EI. Que lhes acontecerá? “O EI foi derrotado mas poderá estar perante uma
oportunidade para reemergir como grande ameaça”, conclui Cook.
Só boas notícias.
tp.ocilbup@sednanrefaj
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