Sunday observe
United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions must be the first such American Cabinet officer to cling to his post after his President virtually trashed him. Marking six months in office, President Donald Trump chose a landmark interview with the New York Times last week to express his disgust with his own, appointed head of the Department of Justice, prompting peculation that Sessions, one of Donald Trump’s first political allies, would resign his post.
President Trump told the NYT that, had he known Sessions would recuse himself from his Department of Justice probe into Russia’s election-meddling, he would never have made him Attorney General. On Friday, Sessions, a one-time federal prosecutor and former US Senator, told new media that he intended to stay on. US media is speculating how Attorney General Sessions will testify to Congress questions whether the President asked him and all others to leave the room in the meeting with then FBI director James Comey when Trump allegedly asked Comey to soft-peddle on aspects of the Russia probe.
The Russia probe has dug up so much collateral ‘dirt’ that there is now a widening circle of ‘suspects’ or ‘persons of interest’ of top aides and officers all around the US President who are becoming subjects of several parallel investigations conducted at the highest levels of legislature and judiciary. The activities and actions being probed, would, if proven, amount to serious misdemeanours and possibly treason, as well as violations regulations and procedures.
Legal defence
Significantly, the President and, some seniors and former seniors in Trump’s team at the White House have now “lawyered up” – an Americanism for hiring lawyers in anticipation of a legal defence. Vice President Mike Pence and Senior Adviser (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner now have their legal defence teams. Such seems to be the mire into which many have been dragged by the Trump presidential project.
What is telling about the Trump presidency is that, unlike other presidencies that ended under a cloud, his presidency is beginning under a cloud, a blacker one than most. Things have got so bleak for his presidency and, perhaps, for his personal legal safety, that the US news media reported that Trump’s legal advisers were even exploring the use of the Presidential power to pardon in favour of his possibly convicted associates as well as himself!
It was at the end of his presidential tenure that Richard Nixon faced impeachment while Bill Clinton approached similar congressional action also at the end of his tenure. Both were immensely popular in the first years of their presidencies in complete contrast to impresario Donald Trump who has had popularity ratings of not more than forty per cent, and low as 34 per cent.
Much of America’s mainstream news media were quick to point out many failures on key election promises in Trump’s first six months: no southern boundary wall, no health care reform, no tax reform. The pro-Trump segment of the news industry staunchly pointed to Trump’s unwavering support from his core electoral constituencies despite all the controversies and blunders of this first half-year of Republican governance.
Foreign
One election promise Trump seems to be keeping, though, is in foreign relations. Trump’s isolationism in practice has meant a crude bilateralism in foreign relations, much of it not even succeeding in its intent – thankfully, since some of this isolationism undermines global collective action and international order.
Thus, Trump has virtually ruined the healthy trust between the key allies of the post World War 2 Western alliance. Now NATO no longer runs on that element of trust that once was part of the chemistry uniting the world’s most powerful and longest lasting military alliance. Today the Alliance’s dynamics has been reduced to realpolitik – at its most sophisticated, of course.
And Europe, for whom the threats on its continental margins are very immediate, is now designing its own parallel military force capable of meeting such multiple threats.
The distancing between the US and the rest of its NATO allies, especially in Europe, was starkly evidenced at the formal dinner event of the recent Group of Twenty summit in Hamburg, Germany. Ordinarily, the US would have led the Western Allies attending the dinner in circulating among other friendly states while cold-shouldering European maverick leader Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This time, US leader Donald Trump left his allotted dining place early on and was seen in private conversation for a whole hour with none other than Vladimir Putin! Ordinarily, even such an informal chat of that length would have included at least an American interpreter. Instead, Trump spoke alone with Putin depending entirely on Putin’s interpreter.
Subsequently, Washington was in uproar since the US President ordinarily would never engage with such an adversarial state without support staff, if not to advise, at least to interpret and record, as well as to bear witness to the interaction. The world is unlikely to ever know what exactly was spoken between the leaders of the world’s two leading military powers at the dinner.
Some of Trump’s enemies in the US are now claiming that one outcome of the secretive Trump-Putin meeting was last week’s muted acknowledgment that the CIA was suspending military aid to rebels fighting to topple the Syrian government. It was later revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency decision to withdraw support for the rebels had been taken last month and was the result of measured assessments by the Agency over a longer period.
The Washington Post newspaper’s major report last week about this dramatic reversal of US policy toward Syria was lost amid the continuing furore over the Trump-Russia scandal. In any case, the CIA’s support for the rebels had begun declining as the rebels’ military momentum weakened in the face of the Syrian government forces advances.
In a sense, this withdrawal of support by the US, done in the name of democracy, amounts to a betrayal of the rebels who had been encouraged to resort to armed struggle against the Assad dictatorship.
Dictatorship
In a more immediate sense, it is a recognition of the failure of the US’ infamous policy of ‘regime-change’ originated by the George W. Bush Jr government as an excuse to overthrow the Saddam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq. This same line was followed by the Obama-Clinton foreign policy during Barak Obama’s presidency in their disastrous intervention to topple the Qaddafi dictatorship in Libya and, finally in Syria.
Today, Syria is on the verge of chaos, if not for the current Syrian government. Despite years of rebellion mainly with Arab cash support and some Turkish support, the Syrian regime has remained both militarily and politically strong and the very dis-united rebel movement is now weakening and losing ground.
Turkey, hugely affected by the flood of refugees and the emergence of the Islamic State brigand enclave on its borders, has given up on its agenda to topple the Assad regime in Damascus.
Certainly the withdrawal of US support is in line with the Trump worldview.
It is also a triumph of Putin’s strategy to militarily commit in defence of the Assad regime, a long time military ally from the Soviet era onward.
Meanwhile, as the US withdraws from the world, China advances. Unlike the Republican US, communist republican China no longer thinks in old-fashioned imperial-political terms. China’s rise has been a mix of people-power, military might and, most importantly, economic might.
The trillion-dollar New Silk Road is a project that reaches across whole continents in a breath-taking vision of economic endeavour – in trade, aid and investment.
While Chinese investments have been flooding Asia, Africa and Latin America over the past decade, it is only now that China seems to have begun high profile moves.
Last week, the founder-CEO of internet sales giant Alibaba.com, Jack Ma was leading a delegation that included 38 Chinese bilionnaires in a tour of Kenya, Nigeria and other African economic majors.