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      US Senate panel close to approving ‘mother of all sanctions’ against Russia

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      US Senate panel close to approving ‘mother of all sanctions’ against RussiaNegotiations for package of sanctions against Putin ‘on the one-yard line’, says Bob Menendez of foreign relations committee

      Opinion: Russia’s phony war is playing out as surreal theatre
      The leaders of the Senate foreign relations committee said on Sunday they were on the verge of approving “the mother of all sanctions” against Vladimir Putin, warning there would be no appeasement as the Russian president contemplates an invasion of Ukraine.UK to bring in measures to allow for tougher sanctions on Russia, says TrussRead more“We cannot have a Munich moment again,” the panel’s Democratic chair, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the 1938 agreement by which allies ceded parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, believing it would stave off war.“Putin will not stop if he believes the west will not respond,” Menendez said. “We saw what he did in 2008 in Georgia, we saw what he did in 2014 in pursuit of Crimea. He will not stop.”Menendez said he believed bipartisan negotiations for severe sanctions were “on the one-yard line”, despite disagreements with Republicans over whether measures should be imposed before or after any Russian invasion. The UK government promised to ramp up sanctions against Putin and his associates.Tensions on the Ukraine border continued to escalate with Reuters reporting the Russian military build-up included supplies of blood in anticipation of casualties. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, told Fox News Sunday: “Putin has a lot of options available to him if he wants to further invade Ukraine, and he can execute some of those options imminently. It could happen really, honestly, at any time.”Seeking to show bipartisan resolve, Menendez gave CNN a joint interview with his committee’s ranking Republican, James Risch of Wisconsin.Menendez said: “There is an incredible bipartisan resolve for support of Ukraine, and an incredibly strong bipartisan resolve to have severe consequences for Russia if it invades, and in some cases for what it has already done.“We are building on the legislation that both Senator Risch wrote independently, and I wrote, which I called the mother of all sanctions. It’s to include a variety of elements, massive sanctions against the most significant Russian banks, crippling to their economy, Russia sovereign debt. These are sanctions beyond any that we have ever levied before.”Risch said talks had been a “24 hour-a-day effort for the last several days” in an attempt to reach agreement over sanctions timing and content, and that he was optimistic.“That’s a work in progress,” Risch said, when pressed over discussions about pre-emptive sanctions or measures to be taken in the event of an invasion. “[But] I’m more than cautiously optimistic that when we get back to DC tomorrow that we’re going to be moving forward.”Menendez said he believed western allies did not have to wait to start penalising Putin.“There are some sanctions that could take place up front because of what Russia has already done, cyber attacks on Ukraine, false flag operations, the efforts to undermine the Ukrainian government internally,” he said.“But then the devastating sanctions that ultimately would crush Russia’s economy, and the continuing lethal aid that we are going to send, means Putin has to decide how many body bags of Russian sons are going to return to Russia.“The sanctions we’re talking about would come later on if he invades, some sanctions would come up front for what has been done already, but the lethal aid will travel no matter what.”Risch criticized the stance of several far-right figures, including the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, who have questioned why the US is backing Ukraine and opposing Russia. Carlson said “it makes sense” that Putin “just wants to keep his western border secure” by opposing moves by Ukraine to join Nato.“We side always with countries that are democracies, and certainly there isn’t going to be a truce committed in that regard,” Risch said.“But the people who were saying that we shouldn’t be engaged in this at all are going to be singing a very different tune when they go to fill up their car with gas, if indeed there is an invasion. There are going to be sanctions that are going to be crippling to Russia, it is going to cripple their oil production. And as we all know, Russia is simply a gas station that is thinly disguised masquerading as a country. It is going to have a devastating effect on the economy around the world.”UK ready to commit extra forces to Nato allies as Russia tension mountsRead moreOn NBC’s Meet the Press, Dick Durbin, co-chair of the Senate Ukraine caucus, addressed concerns aired by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday that growing rhetoric over the crisis was causing panic and destabilising his country’s economy.His comments followed a call with Joe Biden that Ukraine officials said “did not go well”.“Any decision about the future of Ukraine will be made by Ukraine,” said Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. “It won’t be made in Moscow or in Washington, in the European Union or in Belarus. It’s their future and their fate and their decision as far as that is concerned.”The caucus co-chair, Republican Rob Portman of Ohio, who is also on the foreign relations committee, told NBC he believed Putin had underestimated the unity of Nato and others.“One thing Vladimir Putin has done successfully is he has strengthened the transatlantic alliance and countries around the world who are looking at this and saying, ‘We cannot let this stand, we cannot let this happen’,” Portman said.“For the first time in nearly 80 years we could have a major and very bloody conflict in Europe unless we stand up together and push back, and so far so good.”TopicsUkraineRussiaUS foreign policyUS national securityUS militaryBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Biden doctrine: Ukraine gaffe sums up mixed year of foreign policy

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      The Biden doctrine: Ukraine gaffe sums up mixed year of foreign policy On Russia and Putin, the president said the quiet part loud. Re-engagement has been welcomed but the exit from Afghanistan was a disaster. Analysts see much to do to rebuild US credibilityJoe Biden marked his first anniversary in office with a gaffe over Ukraine that undid weeks of disciplined messaging and diplomatic preparation.Russian ships, tanks and troops on the move to Ukraine as peace talks stallRead moreThe president’s suggestion that a “minor incursion” by Russia might split Nato over how to respond sent the White House into frantic damage limitation mode.Officials insisted Biden had been referring to cyber attacks and paramilitary activities and not Russian troops crossing the border. That failed to entirely calm nerves in Kyiv and other European capitals, especially as Biden also raised eyebrows by predicting that Vladimir Putin would “move in” to Ukraine because “he has to do something” and would probably prevail.The analysis of Nato’s weaknesses and Putin’s intentions was no doubt widely shared but Biden had said the quiet part loud, contradicting what his own officials had been saying. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, had just been telling Foreign Policy that one of the great successes of the Biden administration was that “the 30 allies of Nato [were] speaking with one voice in the Russia-Ukraine crisis”.Aides who have shadowed Biden through his long career as senator and vice-president are used to his prolix ways, his tendency to draw on his deep foreign policy expense to over-explain, but the stakes are immeasurably greater as a president, trying to stare down Putin as Europe stands on the threshold of war.The stumble distracted from some of the foreign policy achievements of Biden’s first year – the mending of transatlantic ties, the bolstering of US support for the embattled government in Kyiv and the development of a consistent policy towards Moscow – which combined a openness to talks with a readiness to inflict punitive measures and a refusal to be divided from Nato allies.None of those gains were a given in US foreign policy after four years of Donald Trump, a president who frequently put domestic political and business advantage ahead of strategic national interests, particularly when it came to Russia. Mending alliances, returning to multilateralism and restoring predictability to US policy after the volatile Trump era is widely regarded as Biden’s greatest success so far in foreign policy.His claim on taking office that “America is back” was backed up by a quick deal to extend the New Start treaty in Russia and thereby salvage the only major arms control agreement to survive Trump. The US rejoined the Paris climate accord and the United Nations Human Rights Council, re-engaged with major powers in nuclear talks with Iran, and convened a virtual Summit for Democracy in December.All those steps were in line with a broad strategy which Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Institute of International Affairs, describes as a Biden doctrine.“I think it’s a strategic reorientation towards competition/conflict with China and, the other side of that coin, strengthening relationships with partners in Europe and in Asia, both bilaterally and multilaterally,” Tocci said. “And relying less on the military instrument in order to pursue US foreign policy goals.”The Ukraine stumble was not the first time that strategy has been impaired by its execution. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was intended to be a decisive break with the past, extricating the US from its longest war so it could focus on its most important geopolitical challenge, the rapid rise of China.The departure turned to chaos when the Afghan army, which the US had spent $83m and 20 years trying to build, collapsed in a few days in the face of a Taliban offensive. The scenes of desperate Afghans trying to cling to departing US planes, some dying in the attempt, are an inescapable part of Biden’s legacy.Biden has argued he was boxed in by the Doha agreement the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in February 2020, under which the US was due to leave by May 2021. Biden was able to stretch that deadline by four months but maintained that staying any longer would have led to renewed attacks on US troops.Nathan Sales, an acting under secretary of state in the Trump administration, argued that the Doha deal was no longer binding on Biden, and he could have left a force to maintain US leverage.“When one side of an agreement breaches it serially and flagrantly like the Taliban did, I think the Biden administration would have been well within its rights to say: ‘We’re not bound by it either,’” said Sales, now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.Current US officials argue that whether the US declared the Taliban had been in violation or not, there would have been renewed attacks on US troops, forcing a decision to cut and run or send large-scale reinforcements. The status quo, they say, was not sustainable.Putin, a ‘rogue male’ on the rampage, threatens to start a war no one wants | Simon Tisdall Read moreEven considering the constraints imposed by the previous administration, the withdrawal was a fiasco. US planners failed to anticipate the speed of the collapse even though a government watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, had warned in 2021 that without US contractors to service planes and helicopters, the Afghan air force would no longer be able to function, depriving troops on the ground of a key advantage.For Afghans who worked with the US and its allies, and for the country’s women and girls, the departure seemed like a betrayal, raising a serious question mark over the administration’s claims to have restored human rights to the heart of US foreign policy.Its record in that regard was already mixed.On one hand, the administration had taken a firm stand against China’s mass persecution of Muslim Uyghurs, declaring it a genocide. Furthermore, the assembly of a coalition of some 130 countries to establish a global minimum tax was, according to Matt Duss, foreign affairs adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, “a step toward addressing global economic inequality which is one of the drivers of conflict and authoritarianism”.“It’s an important first step and a courageous one,” Duss said. He also pointed to the sanctions against surveillance companies like the Israeli NSO group, whose software was used by authoritarian regimes to target dissidents.“​​That was a very consequential move, and there has been a massive pressure campaign trying to get them to roll it back, but they’ve stood firm,” he said.However, the steps taken against the Saudi monarchy for the heavy civilian toll from its air war in Yemen and the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi felt well short of what human rights campaigners and progressive Democrats had hoped for. The Biden administration continued to sell Riyadh substantial quantities of advanced weaponry.“We’ve basically returned to the traditional US approach of supporting human rights in countries that don’t buy our weapons,” Duss said. “I very much hope that changes.”‘A lot of bad blood’Another way in which the manner of the US exit from Afghanistan undermined the administration’s wider objectives was by alienating European allies, who felt left out of a decision they were obliged to follow.“The pull-out really caused a lot of bad blood unnecessarily,” Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said. “You can call it the root cause of unhappiness within the alliance.”The formation in September of Aukus, a partnership with the UK and Australia to help the latter acquire nuclear-powered submarines, was another sweeping move in the pivot towards Asia.Confusion over UK claim that Putin plans coup in UkraineRead moreBut the protagonists had omitted to inform France, who discovered on the same day that their contract to sell Australia diesel submarines had been cancelled. Biden was forced to acknowledge the “clumsy” way it had been handled, and the rift clouded bilateral relations for months.Putin’s threat to Ukraine has helped rally the transatlantic alliance but as Biden revealed in his own public reflections, there are still serious divisions below the surface, limiting his room for manoeuvre.The president’s freedom of action on other global issues, like making progress in climate action or finding a nuclear compromise with Iran, will be hindered still further if Republicans gain control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections. In that case, the administration’s record until now, mixed as it is, may prove to be the high point of the Biden doctrine.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS foreign policyUS national securityUS militaryUS politicsUkrainefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Russia ‘very likely’ to invade Ukraine without ‘enormous sanctions’ – Schiff

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      Russia ‘very likely’ to invade Ukraine without ‘enormous sanctions’ – SchiffHouse intelligence chair: invasion might draw Nato closerSanctions must be ‘at level Russia has never seen’ to deter Putin Russia is “very likely” to invade Ukraine and might only be deterred by “enormous sanctions”, the chair of the US House intelligence committee said on Sunday.Ukraine crisis: how Putin feeds off anger over Nato’s eastward expansion Read moreAdam Schiff also said an invasion could backfire on Moscow, by drawing more countries into the Nato military alliance.“I also think that a powerful deterrent is the understanding that if they do invade, it is going to bring Nato closer to Russia, not push it farther away,” he said.This week, Joe Biden told Vladimir Putin the US would impose serious sanctions if Russia attacked.Talks are scheduled. But amid tensions heightened by both sides’ possession of nuclear weapons, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that if “the west continues its aggressive line, Russia will be forced to take all necessary measures to ensure strategic balance and eliminate unacceptable threats to our security”.Russia has for years complained about Nato encroachment. Ukraine is not a member of the alliance, which guarantees collective defence, but Nato has expanded eastwards since the fall of the Soviet Union and Kiev is urgently seeking admission.Russia invaded Ukrainian territory in 2014, annexing Crimea.The US has supplied “small” arms to Ukraine.On CBS’s Face the Nation, Schiff was asked what would stop Putin ordering an invasion by Russian troops gathered near the border.“I think that it would require enormous sanctions on Russia to deter what appears to be a very likely Russian invasion of Ukraine again,” Schiff said. “And I think our allies need to be solidly on board with it. Russia needs to understand we are united in this.”Ukraine urges Nato to hasten membership as Russian troops gatherRead moreAn invasion, Schiff said, would see “more Nato assets closer to Russia. [It] will have the opposite impact of what Putin is trying to achieve”.Schiff said he had “no problem” with “going after Putin personally”, but thought “sector-sized sanctions will be the most important”.Asked if he thought scheduled talks had any chance of averting an invasion, he said: “I fear that Putin is very likely to invade. I still frankly don’t understand the full motivation for why now he’s doing this, but he certainly appears intent on it unless we can persuade him otherwise.“And I think nothing other than a level of sanctions that Russia has never seen will deter him, and that’s exactly what we need to do with our allies.”TopicsUkraineRussiaNatoUS foreign policyUS national securityUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Rahm Emanuel leads confirmed Biden nominees in late-night logjam break

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      Rahm Emanuel leads confirmed Biden nominees in late-night logjam breakEx-Obama chief of staff will go to Japan after deal for vote on Russia pipeline sanctions ends Republican Senate resistance The former Obama White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel was among more than 30 ambassadors and other Biden nominees confirmed by the Senate early on Saturday. Trump condemned by Anti-Defamation League chief for antisemitic tropesRead moreThe Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, broke a Republican-stoked logjam by agreeing to schedule a vote on sanctions on the company behind the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany.With many senators anxious to go home for the holidays, Schumer threatened to keep the Senate in for as long as it took to break a logjam on a number of diplomatic and national security nominees.Emanuel was confirmed to serve as ambassador to Japan by a vote of 48-21. Nominees to be ambassadors to Spain, Vietnam and Somalia were among those confirmed by voice vote after an agreement was reached to vote on Nord Stream 2 sanctions before 14 January.The confirmation process has proved to be frustrating for new administrations regardless of party. While gridlock isn’t new, the struggle is getting worse.Democrats have voiced concerns about holds Republican senators placed on nominees in order to raise objections about foreign policy matters that had little to do with the nominees in question. Holds do not block confirmation but they do require the Senate to undertake hours of debate.Positions requiring confirmation can go unfilled for months even when the nominations are approved in committee with the support of both parties.Biden officials acknowledge the president will end his year with significantly more vacancies than recent predecessors and that the slowdown of ambassadorial and other national security picks has had an impact on relations overseas.Ted Cruz, of Texas, held up dozens of nominees at state and treasury, over objections to the waiving of sanctions targeting the Nord Stream AG firm overseeing the pipeline project. The administration said it opposed the project but viewed it is a fait accompli. It also said trying to stop it would harm relations with Germany.Critics on the both sides of the aisle have raised concerns that the pipeline will threaten European energy security by increasing reliance on Russian gas and allowing Russia to exert political pressure on vulnerable nations, particularly Ukraine.Earlier in the week, Schumer demanded that Cruz lift all of his holds on nominees at the two departments as well as the US Agency for International Development, as part of any agreement on a Nord Stream 2 sanctions. Cruz said he was willing to lift holds on 16. The two sides traded offers on Friday.“I think there ought to be a reasonable middle ground solution,” Cruz said.“Let’s face it. There is little to celebrate when it comes to nominations in the Senate,“ said Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of the foreign relations committee.The New Jersey Democrat blamed Republicans for “straining the system to the breaking point” and depriving Biden of a full national security team, “leaving our nation weakened”.“Something’s going to happen in one of these places and we will not be there to ultimately have someone to promote our interests and to protect ourselves,” he said.Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, said some of the gridlock stemmed back to four years ago when Democrats, under Schumer, tried to stop many of Donald Trump’s nominees being confirmed in a timely manner.“Senator Schumer doesn’t have anything close to clean hands here,” Blunt said.Emanuel, also a former member of the House, was backed for the post in Tokyo at a time when Washington is looking to Asian allies to help push back against China.Detractors said they would not back him because of the shooting when he was mayor of Chicago of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who died when a police officer, Jason Van Dyke, fired multiple times.Emanuel’s handling of the case was criticized, especially as video was not released for more than a year. Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder and jailed. Four officers were fired.Biden nominated Emanuel in August. At his confirmation hearing in October, Emanuel said he thought about McDonald every day and that, as mayor, he was responsible and accountable.Eight Republicans voted with a majority of Democrats to confirm Emanuel. Three Democrats voted no: Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.TopicsBiden administrationUS foreign policyUS national securityRahm EmanuelUS politicsAsia PacificJapannewsReuse this content More

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      Trump’s ‘fact-free’ approach caused briefing challenges, CIA report says

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      Trump’s ‘fact-free’ approach caused briefing challenges, CIA report saysEx-president’s chaotic style resulted in presidential daily briefing being delivered more regularly to Mike Pence Donald Trump’s “fact-free” approach to the presidency created unprecedented challenges for intelligence officials responsible for briefing him, according to a newly released account from the CIA.Trump challenges media and Democrats to debate his electoral fraud lieRead moreThe 45th president’s chaotic and freewheeling style, and his disinclination to read anything put in front of him, resulted in the presidential daily briefing, or PDB – a crucial security update including information about potential threats to the US – being delivered more regularly to Vice-President Mike Pence instead, the report states.By the middle of Trump’s term in office, his briefings were reduced to two weekly sessions of 45 minutes each. Briefings were discontinued altogether after the deadly insurrection of 6 January, which was sparked by Trump urging his supporters to march on the US Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.The analysis comes in a 40-page unclassified update to the CIA’s Getting to Know the President, a publication that chronicles efforts to brief presidents-elect through transition periods and into office for every administration since 1952.“For the intelligence community (IC), the Trump transition was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents,” the new chapter, posted to the CIA website, concludes.“Trump was like [Richard] Nixon, suspicious and insecure about the intelligence process, but unlike Nixon in the way he reacted. Rather than shut the IC out, Trump engaged with it but attacked it publicly.”Nixon, who resigned in 1974 after the Watergate scandal, refused to accept any intelligence from the CIA and received briefings instead from trusted insiders such as his national security adviser and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.Trump regularly assailed intelligence officials and famously chose to believe the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over agencies including the CIA which concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.The CIA report’s author, retired career intelligence officer John L Helgerson, said briefers achieved “only limited success” in their mission to deliver timely and relevant intelligence to Trump and to establish a working relationship with him.Pence, by contrast, “was an assiduous, six-day-a-week reader” who made efforts to try to keep Trump focused. The vice-president urged briefers to “lean forward on maps” in graphics-heavy presentations much shorter than those presented to Trump’s predecessors, and “would sometimes ask leading questions” during joint sessions with Trump “so the president would hear his concerns”.Pence’s efforts were largely unsuccessful, Helgerson suggests. James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, said Trump “was prone to fly off on tangents”, according to the CIA report, and said “there might be [only] eight or nine minutes of real intelligence in an hour’s discussion”.Additionally, Clapper said, while “the IC worked with evidence, Trump ‘was fact-free – evidence doesn’t cut it with him’.”Helgerson writes: “Trump preferred that the briefer take the lead and summarise the key points and important items from the days since they had last had a session. The PDB was published every day, but because Trump received a briefing only two or three times a week, he relied on the briefer to orally summarize the significance of the most important issues.”Michael Cohen: prosecutors could ‘indict Trump tomorrow’ if they wantedRead morePerhaps unsurprisingly, the subjects to which Trump paid most attention were China and developments involving Russia and Ukraine. The first of the former president’s two impeachments was for pressing Ukraine to investigate Biden, then his likely 2020 election opponent. He was also investigated for allegedly colluding with Russia.“A few subjects and areas of the world were notable by their relative absence,” the CIA report states. “Regarding Europe, only Nato budget issues, Turkey and approaching elections in France and Germany stimulated much discussion. Latin America, Africa, and south-east Asia received almost no attention.”Overall, Helgerson believes, the briefing process barely survived Trump’s presidency.“[He] publicly criticised the outgoing directors of national intelligence and the CIA, and disparaged the substantive work and integrity of the intelligence agencies. From the outset, it was clear that the IC was in for a difficult time.“The system worked, but it struggled.”TopicsDonald TrumpMike PenceCIATrump administrationUS national securityUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguished

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      Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguished ABC’s man in Washington delivers a second riveting and horrifying read about how close America came to disasterTrumpworld is in legal jeopardy. The 45th president’s phone call to Brad Raffensperger, urging the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, may have birthed a grand jury.‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreIn Manhattan, the outgoing district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, has empaneled one of those, to look at Trump’s business. As a Vanity Fair headline blared, “The Trump Organization should be soiling itself right now.”In Washington, the Department of Justice ponders the prosecution of Steve Bannon, chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign and a pivotal figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement second time round.For Trump, out-of-office has not translated into out-of-mind. He thrives on all the attention.Amid it all, Jonathan Karl dives once again into the Stygian mosh pit, this time with Betrayal, a sequel to Front Row at the Trump Show, a New York Times bestseller.In that book, in the spring of 2020, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent prophesied that “Trump’s war on truth may do lasting damage to American democracy”. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong. Front Row preceded by months a coup attempt egged on by a defeated president. Looking back, Trump’s embrace of birtherism, “alternative facts” and crowd violence were mere prelude to the chaos that filled his time in power, his final days in office and all that has come and gone since then.In his second book, under the subtitle The Final Act of the Trump Show, Karl gets members of Trump’s cabinet to speak on the record. They paint a portrait of a wrath-filled president, untethered from reality, bent on revenge.Karl captures Bill Barr denouncing Trump’s election-related conspiracy theories and criticizing his election strategy. Appearing determined to salvage his own battered reputation, Trump’s second attorney general tells Karl his president “was making it too much of a base election. I felt that he had to repair the bridges he had burned [with moderate voters] in the suburbs.”By that metric, Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s governor-elect, has a bright future, a politician who puts suburban dads and rural moms at ease. No wonder Republicans think they have found a star, and with him a winning formula.As for Trump’s claims about rigged voting machines, Barr “realized from the beginning it was just bullshit” and says “the number of actual improper voters were de minimus”. No matter, to Trump: he continues to demand Republican legislatures carry out post-election audits.Karl delivers further confirmation of Mitch McConnell’s fractious personal relationship with Trump, a man the Kentucky senator reportedly repeatedly mocked. According to Karl, McConnell, then Senate majority leader, sought to formally disinvite Trump from Joe Biden’s inauguration. Kevin McCarthy, the chief House Republican, leaked the plan to the White House. In turn, Trump tweeted that he would not attend.McConnell attempted to thread the needle, placating Trump while keeping the GOP’s Koch brothers wing onside. But once he acknowledged Biden’s victory, the damage was permanently done. McConnell was an object of Trumpian scorn.That the senator jammed Amy Coney Barrett on to the supreme court days before the 2020 election and before that played blocking back for Brett Kavanaugh is now rendered irrelevant. Trump wants McConnell out of Senate leadership. Adding insult to injury, Trump recently told the Washington Post McConnell wasn’t a “real leader” because “he didn’t fight for the presidency”, and said he was “only a leader because he raises a lot of money”.“You know,” Trump said, “with the senators, that’s how it is, frankly. That’s his primary power.”He’s not wrong all the time.Betrayal also documents a commander-in-chief who scared his own cabinet witless. After Trump junked the Iran nuclear deal, for example, Tehran thumbed its nose back. Drama ensued, because Trump wanted to know his options.Chris Miller, then acting defense secretary, tells Karl that to dissuade Trump from ordering the destruction of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, he chose to play the role of “fucking madman” – his words, not Karl’s – which meant advocating that very course of action. According to Karl, not even Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state and an Iran hawk, played along.“Oftentimes with provocative people, if you get more provocative than them, they then have to dial it down,” Miller explains to Karl. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, I was fucking crazy, but that guy’s batshit.’”Here, the reader might pause to imagine a campaign slogan for Trump in 2024: “Fucking crazy, but not batshit”.On a similar note, Karl depicts Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s crony and attorney, as a walking timebomb. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser, avoided the former New York mayor. Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, saw him as a corrosive force.“I’m not going to let Rudy in the building for any more of these,” Meadows reportedly told Chris Christie, New Jersey’s former governor, and Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, as they prepared for debates with Biden.These days, Giuliani is suspended from the bar, reportedly under investigation and unable to persuade Trump to pay his bills. Christie and Trump are at loggerheads too, over sins real and imagined, past and present.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreAs for Meadows and Stepien, they are in the crosshairs of the House select committee focused on the US Capitol attack. From the looks of things only Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have so far remained intact, ensconced in Florida, sufficiently distanced from Big Daddy.Despite such fallout, Betrayal concludes with words of warning. Karl rightly contends that Trump’s “betrayal” of American democracy highlighted “just how vulnerable” the system is.“The continued survival of our republic,” he writes, “may depend, in part, on the willingness of those who promoted Trump’s lies and those who remained silent to acknowledge they were wrong.”In a hypothetical rematch, Trump leads Biden 45-43. Among independent voters, he holds a double-digit lead. Don’t hold your breath.
      Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show is published in the US by Dutton
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansreviewsReuse this content More

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      Master of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neither

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      BooksMaster of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neitherMartin Indyk’s well-woven biography is sympathetic to the preacher of realpolitik condemned by many as a war criminal Lloyd GreenSun 31 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 31 Oct 2021 02.02 EDTAs secretary of state, Henry Kissinger nursed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war to a close. The disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel ultimately yielded a peace treaty. The Syrian border remains tensely quiet. Unlike Vietnam, in the Middle East Kissinger’s handiwork holds.Friendly Fire review: Israeli warrior Ami Ayalon makes his plea for peaceRead moreThe Sunni Arab world has gradually come to terms with the existence of the Jewish state. Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have diplomatic ties with Jerusalem. Relations with Saudi Arabia are possible.For Kissinger, student and preacher of realpolitik, peace was seldom an end in itself. His pivot to China was about boxing in the USSR. To him, the cold war and existing nation states were what mattered most. The Viet Cong earned a seat at the table because US troops were bogged down. The Palestinians were not so high on Kissinger’s agenda.Now comes Martin Indyk with a 688-page, well-woven history fittingly subtitled “Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy”. The book reflects the author’s admiration for and access to his subject.Kissinger last granted Indyk an interview at the age of 97. Now he’s 98. Indyk’s wife, Gahl Burt, once worked on Kissinger’s staff. Indyk himself is a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations. His gigs included ambassador to Israel and Middle East envoy. A former Australian national, he volunteered on a kibbutz. He checks many boxes.Master of the Game does convey a sense that Indyk wishes his own attainments equaled those of his subject. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1998 Wye River Memorandum between the Israelis and Palestinians quickly degenerated into the second intifada, flareups in Gaza and Hamas vying with the Palestinian Authority for power on the ground.In the Obama years, Israel emerged as a partisan flashpoint in the US, like abortion and taxes, to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment and Israel’s diplomatic corps but to the delight of the Republicans and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister.In Master of the Game, Indyk lays out the run-up to the October war of 1973, the responses of the US and the USSR, and Kissinger’s nearly two-year hopscotch between Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus.Indyk confirms what is widely known, that while Kissinger did not explicitly give Egypt the green light to attack Israeli-occupied Sinai, he was pleased with the outcome. The war and its aftermath presented the US with the opportunity to lure Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, even if Israel had to pay a price.The war Kissinger “had not expected at the moment”, writes Indyk, “would provide him with the opportunity to manipulate antagonisms”. Those, in turn, would help “begin the construction of what he intended to be a new, more stable American-led order in the Middle East”.Israeli combat deaths topped 2,600 – reportedly more than 1,000 in the war’s first five days. At the time, Kissinger noted that the latter figure would be proportionally equal to twice the number of US deaths in eight years in Vietnam. As a result, Kissinger coldly “assumed that when he needed Israel to accept a ceasefire it would have no choice but to do so”.Kissinger saw that a ceasefire would yield territorial concessions. He got that right but the pace was not necessarily to his liking. Disengagement arrived too quickly and then too slowly for him.In spring 1975, Gerald Ford announced the reassessment of America’s relationship with Israel. Months later, in early September, Egypt and Israel entered a second disengagement agreement, a precursor to the 1978 Camp David Accords hashed out by Jimmy Carter.While “Start-up Nation” has emerged as durable military power, Indyk yearns for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.After noting the Abraham Accords, agreements between Israel and Gulf states, Indyk contends that the “Trump administration actually made matters worse” by proposing a Palestinian entity “as a heavily circumscribed enclave within Israeli territory”. He also acknowledges that the accords took Israeli annexation of the West Bank off the table.As a Talmudic dictum goes, “avar zemano, batel korbano”. Loosely translated, the train has left the station. What applies to a sacrificial rite may pertain to politics. Even the peace process came with a sell-by date. Indyk admits that “the three presidents who succeeded Clinton” tried but failed to reach a lasting agreement, but while Jared Kushner failed to snag the deal of the century, his diplomatic achievement is tangible.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreIndyk also explores the competing tugs on Kissinger, a refugee, of loyalty, religion and ethnicity. Richard Nixon told Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, Kissinger was prone to “indulge Israel’s nationalist sentiments”. On the other hand, Israeli protestors outside Kissinger’s hotel once bellowed: “Jew boy go home.” The Jackson-Vanick amendment, which linked preferred trade status for the USSR to its performance on emigration, infuriated Kissinger.Kissinger has plenty of detractors. Against the backdrop of Nixon’s Vietnam policy, the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, genocide in Bangladesh and East Timor and a coup and invasion in Cyprus, he has been called a war criminal.On the right, the late Phyllis Schlafly dangled Kissinger’s otherness in the face of Ford’s bid for the nomination in 1976. She said Kissinger did not understand “typical American values” and claimed that the loyalty of the German-born and accented diplomat rested with a “supranational” order.Indyk writes: “When it came to managing violent middle eastern passions and preserving peace, history’s judgment should surely be that Henry Kissinger did well.”Reasonable people will freely differ.
      Master of the Game is published in the US by Knopf
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