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Will the US and Iran Meet Jaw to Jaw?
On February 4, US President Joe Biden visited the US State Department, located down the street from the White House. He went to deliver a foreign policy message much needed by the men and women of that department and the nation. His audience was a receptive one, not surprising given that nearly all of the hundreds in attendance were career diplomats and civil service employees. He delivered exactly what they wanted to hear, affirming that, “You are the center of all that I intend to do … the heart of it.” That message dovetailed with his plans for an expansive reassertion of American diplomacy. It was necessary because American diplomacy had been absent for the last four years under the Trump administration.
Unchanged or Unchained: What’s in Store for the JCPOA?
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The foreign policy agenda outlined by Biden variously referred to: fortifying ties with America’s key allies and partners in Europe and Asia; serving notice to Russian President Vladimir Putin that Biden will challenge, “in a manner very different from my predecessor,” Moscow’s cyber threats and authoritarian moves against neighbors; challenging America’s new nemesis, China, on human rights, intellectual property and global governance but also offering cooperation when it serves US interests; calling out Saudi Arabia on Yemen and Myanmar on the recent coup; and recommitting the US to defending democracy and human rights and to upping immigration numbers into the US.
The one major foreign policy challenge staring President Biden directly in the face but not mentioned was Iran. During his election campaign, he had promised to re-enter the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear accord with Iran from which then-President Donald Trump had withdrawn the US in May 2018.
So Many Voices
Not mentioning the subject in this — Biden’s first major foreign policy address of his brief presidency — may have been a wise course of action. First, his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have promised that the US will consult with America’s P5-plus-1 partners — Britain, France and Germany — as well as regional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia before making decisions or taking any action. Moreover, at this stage, speaking too critically or harshly so soon would only trigger further stubbornness and resistance from an already recalcitrant Iran. And speaking too hopefully would ignite strong pushback from members of Congress resistant to almost anything short of Tehran’s capitulation.
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.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}Rejoining the JCPOA is replete with challenges that Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, also faced but badly mishandled. Both Blinken and Sullivan have indicated that simply re-entering the nuclear agreement cannot be this administration’s sole objective. Any agreement with Iran that lasts into and through the next Republican administration must also address Iran’s growing missile arsenal and its meddling behavior in the Middle East, including in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and elsewhere.
Just getting these issues on the agenda with Tehran would be an achievement, given the Islamic Republic’s oft-stated opposition to such discussions. Nevertheless, Biden knows that to reach a genuinely enduring agreement that survives his presidency, these issues must be on the table. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, should also understand that for any agreement to offer his country predictability and stability in its international endeavors into the future, these issues are inescapable.
Iran isn’t the only party with whom the Biden administration will have to negotiate. First, there are America’s allies who are part of the accord and who, for the last four years, have battled to keep the JCPOA on life support. It will be Britain, France and Germany who will run the initial interference for the US before it can meet face to face with the Iranians. Furthermore, the US will have to have their firm support before it can reach out to the other P5-plus-1 members, China and Russia. So, winning their support will be vital to the administration’s success.
Second, there are America’s regional allies, most especially Israel, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, who have a genuine — they might say existential — interest in the outcome of any future talks. There was considerable dissension among these countries in the run-up to the 2015 accord and in its aftermath. Some, most especially Israel, made their objections known publicly and undiplomatically. Nevertheless, their concerns were valid, and President Biden and his team will have to find a way to ensure that these governments’ concerns, fears and interests are taken into account.
Moreover, any dialog addressing the regional issues — whether on Iran’s malign activity in the Middle East or perhaps even the presence of US forces in the region — will likely have to include these countries. (How that might happen is a mystery, given that states like Saudi Arabia and Iran don’t yet officially recognize Israel.) What is essential for the Americans, however, is that these governments are somehow a part of the negotiations and that whatever results from the next round of negotiations is acceptable to the nations of the region most impacted. Blinken and Sullivan, chastened by the experience of 2015 and what came after, undoubtedly understand this.
The Invisible Partner at the Negotiating Table
Then, there is the final and likely most challenging party to future talks. That is the US Congress. Securing congressional approval for a follow-on agreement(s) and ensuring it endures beyond the Biden presidency will depend on winning that body’s approval. While Biden probably will not submit any new agreement to the Senate for approval, as the Constitution requires for formal treaties, he will nevertheless need to have at least its implicit support.
Biden cannot afford to make the mistake of Woodrow Wilson in 1918 with the League of Nations and President Obama in 2015 with the JCPOA. He must find a way to bring in key members from both the House and Senate, even if only indirectly, in order to ensure that whatever results reflects their concerns. If Biden and his team can satisfy the concerns of the other two major groups — America’s P5-plus-1 partners and regional allies — then they will likely have addressed many of Congress’ concerns. But he cannot afford either to take their support for granted or to neglect Congress. They will have to be engaged throughout the process.
Complexity (Times 100): Iran and All the Issues
Of course, there is also the heart of the issue: the longstanding distrust and animus between the US and Iran. The imperfect deal brokered by Obama and the withdrawal from it by Trump served to exacerbate these feelings among Americans and Iranians, respectively. So, the sides may be starting from a more difficult position than they did in 2012, when they initially began their dialog that culminated with the JCPOA. Hardliners on both sides have further hardened their positions, Republicans (and some Democrats, too) in the US and the all-powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its leadership in Iran. They’re not just polar opposites — they live at opposite ends of the galaxy.
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Furthermore, the issues have been brought into stark relief as a result of the American exit and subsequent imposition of crushing sanctions on Iran, its leadership, banking institutions and the IRGC. The country’s economy is reeling, though it has managed to finally stabilize. But any notion or hope of significant growth that reaches rank-and-file Iranians and businesses is non-existent under US sanctions. In 2021 and beyond, a nation of some 84 million people must be a part of the international community and most especially the global economy. That can’t happen as long as US sanctions hang over Iran’s head. The choice is stark, albeit hard, for Iran’s leadership: continue on the path to nuclear capability or join the rest of the international community.
Despite Iran’s early declarations, an immediate US return to the JCPOA and suspension of sanctions prior to some of the aforementioned talks are a chimera. The Biden administration hasn’t taken the bait and shouldn’t. With sanctions in place, Biden has an advantage, no matter how much he may have opposed them in 2018.
The administration should use this advantage. So, at the very least, before rejoining the JCPOA, it should insist on Tehran’s acceptance of follow-on negotiations on: the various time horizons on Iran’s nuclear development with weapons implications; the range and numbers of missiles; more comprehensive inspections, including of military sites; and its involvement in countries of the region and support for various militias and groups almost universally viewed as terrorists. Iran’s hardliners see some of these issues — like missiles and support for militia groups in the Middle East — as necessary and even existential, but there may be no avoiding talking about them.
Iran doubtlessly has its chronic issues with the Americans, from threats of regime change to menacing military presence throughout the region, including US Navy aircraft carriers off its coast to American Air Force heavy bomber flights near its borders. It will also want some guarantees that whatever is agreed this time has some assurance of continuing. Then there are America’s non-nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, e.g., those relating to terrorism, terrorism financing, human rights, religious persecution, etc. These also are likely to become issues in any future talks.
The Main Thing
Hanging over all of this is the justifiably feared nuclearization of the Middle East. There can be no doubt that a nuclear-armed or -capable Iran would inevitably trigger similar strategic moves by Saudi Arabia and perhaps the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Such a development in the world’s most volatile region is nightmarish.
Resolving these supremely difficult issues will come down to some hard diplomacy and earnest, patient dialog. There is no military solution. Nuclear weapons can never be one either. And, as the previous administration’s “maximum pressure” approach demonstrated, Iran cannot be sanctioned into capitulating.
In the words of Winston Churchill, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” It’s time for both sides to set their jaws to work.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Biden's announcement on Yemen is a hopeful sign – now the UK must follow suit | Anna Stavrianakis
In a speech at the US state department last week, President Biden turned the war in Yemen from a forgotten crisis to front-page news. Since March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition, militarily and diplomatically backed by the US and UK in particular, has been involved in the conflict, which grew out of a failed political transition following the 2011 revolution.The war has killed more than 100,000 people, destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, subjected large swathes of the population to famine and generated the worst cholera outbreak since modern records began. All parties to the war have likely committed violations of international law.Biden’s announcement of an end to “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales” has been widely welcomed as part of a US return to multilateralism and an active step to end the conflict. The news should be greeted with cautious optimism: the sense of relief that the US administration seems to be taking the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen seriously is tempered by concerns about the policy detail and the memory that Joe Biden was vice-president under Barack Obama, who initiated US involvement in the war.Changes in US policy will have significant ramifications for the UK, not least in the area of arms sales, which is one of the main ways the UK is involved in the war. First, the UK risks being isolated diplomatically as US policy becomes more focused on preventing the Saudi-led coalition from violating international law and as EU states continue to operate more restrictive arms export policies, most recently in Italy.For a country so invested in its reputation as a leader in the rule of law, this is dangerous territory. The UK can continue on the path of supplying weapons, be castigated as an outlier and risk even greater criticism for putting the arms industry and relationships with the Saudi royal family above human rights and humanitarian law; or change course, restrict or halt arms transfers, and face further censure about the integrity of its policy up to this point.Second, the US decision indicates that the sale of precision-guided munitions will be halted, which will have implications for UK industry. The CEO of Raytheon, one of the world’s largest arms producers, has stated that the company has removed a $500m deal from its books – widely understood to refer to the planned sale of Paveway bombs. Paveway IV bombs are produced in the UK by the British subsidiary of Raytheon, so any cancellation of US deals would probably mean a halt to UK exports. Ministers are no doubt involved in frantic attempts to figure out the implications of this for the UK arms industry.Third, the US developments may well affect the course of justice in the UK. The Campaign Against Arms Trade has launched a second judicial review of UK arms export policy, challenging the government’s position that violations of international humanitarian law in Yemen are only “isolated incidents” and do not constitute a pattern. Depending on the reasoning behind and scope of changes to US policy, the UK government’s position may become even harder to sustain.For these reasons, I think there are grounds to be somewhat hopeful that something will have to change in UK arms export policy, to restrict, suspend or halt transfers – including actual deliveries, not just licences – to the Saudi-led coalition. However, there are no guarantees in terms of the details and practical implementation of Biden’s announcement, and there is room for manoeuvre afforded by the qualifiers around what constitutes “offensive” operations and what the “relevant” arms sales are that will be cancelled.The UK has its own record of playing with words while Yemen burns: take the corrections to the parliamentary record to amend what the government says it knew about the Saudis’ conduct in the war; the narrowing down of all potential breaches of international law in Yemen to only a “small number” and the implausible claim that they are only “isolated incidents”; or the endless repetition of the mantra that the UK operates a “robust” control regime. What we can expect is the government to come out robustly in defence of its own actions.This behaviour is part of what has allowed the war in Yemen to continue for so long and so horrifically. UK policy is to assess whether there is a clear risk that arms transfers might be used in violations of human rights and humanitarian law: risk assessment is supposed to prevent the use of UK-supplied weapons in such violations. But the UK has applied its risk assessment in such a way as to facilitate rather than restrict arms exports. The government also points to the very fact that it conducts risk assessments as a way of legitimising and justifying further arms sales.An end to US/UK arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition won’t end the war in Yemen by itself. But it could force a change by pushing the warring parties back to the negotiating table. As Radhya Almutawakel, the chair of the Yemeni organisation Mwatana for Human Rights, put it, all the parties to the conflict are weak in different ways such that none can “win” outright. In this context, the Biden announcement could be a catalyst for change.The current strategy of the Saudi-led coalition and its western backers has not been working for a long time: the war has not made the Houthi rebel movement any weaker. The conflict won’t end overnight, but the principles of justice and accountability demand an end to arms sales now. More
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To restore trust in democracy, the US should lead a global 'fact fightback' | Timothy Garton Ash
To survive, democracy needs a minimum of shared truth. With the storming of the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, the US showed us just how dangerous it is when millions of citizens are led to deny an important, carefully verified fact – namely, who won the election.
To prosper, democracy needs a certain kind of public sphere, one in which citizens and their representatives engage in vigorous argument on the basis of shared facts. Restoring that kind of public sphere is now a central task for the renewal of liberal democracy. Call it the fact fightback.
The basic idea comes to us from the very beginnings of democracy, 2,500 years ago. The citizens of ancient Athens gathered in an open air debating place known as the Pnyx – the original “public square”. “Who will address the assembly?” asked the herald, and any citizen could get up on a stone platform to speak. After facts and arguments had been presented and debated, a policy was put to a vote. It was through this deliberative process that the ancient Athenians decided to fight the invading Persians at sea, in the Battle of Salamis, and saved the world’s first democracy.
To be sure, ancient Athens never entirely measured up to its own revolutionary ideal of equal, free speech for the public good; nor did the US “public square”, even before the arrival of Fox News and Facebook. Beware the myth of a pre-Zuckerberg golden age, when only the purest waters of Truth flowed from the mouths of supremely principled newspapermen, and all citizens were rational, informed and respectfully open-minded. But most democracies have in recent years moved further away from the Athenian ideal: some rapidly (the US, Poland), others more slowly (Germany, Britain).
To address this challenge, we need a twin-track strategy. On the first track, individual democracies must tackle the particular problems of their own national information environments. In Britain, for example, the battle to defend and improve the BBC is more important than anything the UK government does about Facebook or Twitter.
A public service broadcaster such as the BBC gives us not just verified facts but a curated diversity of arguments in one place: a digital Pnyx. Any democracy that has a decent public service broadcaster should double its budget, strengthen its independence from government and task it with enhancing the digital public square for tomorrow’s citizens.
In Poland, where public service broadcasting has been destroyed by a populist ruling party, it is now crucial to defend independent private media such as the TVN television channel and the onet.pl internet platform. They and others are coming under sharp attack, with measures straight out of the playbook of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
In the US there is no shortage of diverse, free, privately owned media, including some of the best in the world. The problem there is that Americans have largely separated out into two divorced media worlds – with different television channels, radio stations, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds (such as the currently deleted @realDonaldTrump) giving them incompatible versions of reality.
It is as if half the citizens of ancient Athens had assembled on the old Pnyx, where they were addressed by Pericles, while the other half gathered on a counter-Pnyx, where the would-be tyrant Hippias (Donald J) held them enthralled. How do you bring Americans back together so they listen to each other again?
Yet no single nation is big enough to take on the private superpowers of the digital world – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Netflix. Here, on this second track, we need the co-ordinated action of a critical mass of democracies, starting with the US and those of the European Union.
Outside China, the US is the world’s leading digital trendsetter while the EU is its leading norm-setter. Put together the trendsetter and the norm-setter, add a bunch of other leading democracies, and you have a combination of market and regulatory power to which even His Digital Highness Mark Zuckerberg must bow.
When I hear politicians confidently pontificating about Facebook or Google, I am reminded of HL Mencken’s remark: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Make them pay for news links on their platforms! (The Australian solution.) Put the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre on to them as head of the UK media regulator Ofcom! Treat platforms as publishers!
The US’s giant for-profit platforms are neither “dumb pipes” nor publishers, but a new creation somewhere in-between. They are algorithmic selectors, distributors and promoters of content provided by others and, at the same time, mass collectors and commercial exploiters of our data.
At best, they are important aids to truth-seeking. (We Google the sharpest criticism of Google.) At worst, they are unprecedentedly powerful amplifiers of lies. The profit motive pushes them towards the dark side, via algorithmic maximisation of the currency of attention. In a 2016 internal report, Facebook itself found that 64% of those who joined one extremist group on Facebook did so only because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them. (“We’ve changed, you know!” protests Facebook, like a reformed alcoholic. But has he really stopped drinking?)
What we need now is a process, led by the US and EU, to distil some coherent policies from what is already a large body of good research. Some, such as amending the US Communications Decency Act to make platforms more directly responsible for curbing harmful content, will depend on the new US Congress. Others, such as breaking what are clearly monopolies or near-monopolies, will require a strategic combination of EU competition policy and revised US anti-trust legislation.
For content moderation, we should build on the hybrid regulation model pioneered in Facebook’s new oversight board, which has just issued its first rulings. (Next challenge: should Facebook, and by implication Twitter, continue to ban ex-president Trump?) Serious solutions will involve technological innovation, business practice, fact-checking and digital education, as well as democratically mandated law and regulation.
Ideally, this would result in a set of proposals being put before the “summit of democracies” planned by the US president, Joe Biden. Of course, 80 different countries are not going to adopt identical measures. But there must be some coherence in the underlying principles and basic approaches, otherwise the internet of the free, which has already lost China, will become even more of a splinternet. Moreover, the private superpowers will be the only ones who can afford the cost of complying with 80 different sets of regulations, thus unintentionally strengthening the fateful trend to monopoly. Since these are US companies, a special responsibility falls on Washington. Here is a unique opportunity for Biden’s US to show that it can listen as well as lead.
Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World More - in US Politics
Stormy Daniels to Michael Cohen: Fox News movie brought back memory of sex with Trump
Stormy Daniels has said she could not remember key details of the sexual liaison she claims to have had with Donald Trump, until seeing a film about Roger Ailes’ sexual harassment of women at Fox News prompted her to remember.“I went to see that movie Bombshell,” she said, “and suddenly it just came back.”Daniels, an adult film star and director whose birth name is Stephanie Clifford, was speaking to Michael Cohen on the former Trump lawyer’s podcast, Mea Culpa, made by Audio Up Media and distributed by PodcastOne and LiveXLive. Excerpts were shared with the Guardian.Daniels also described Trump “doing his best yet horrifyingly disturbing impression of Burt Reynolds”, on a bed, clad only in his underwear.Daniels claims to have had sex with Trump in Nevada in 2006. He denies it, but a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels reimbursed by Trump contributed to Cohen’s downfall in 2018.Trump’s longtime fixer was jailed for tax fraud, lying to Congress and violations of campaign finance law. He cooperated with investigators and published a book, Disloyal, while completing a three-year sentence.The payment to Daniels, and Cohen’s role in a payment to another woman, Playboy model Karen McDougal, during the 2016 election, are at the centre of ongoing investigations. Stripped of the protections of office, Trump is vulnerable to prosecution.Daniels’ appearance on Cohen’s podcast marks a rapprochement between the two. After Cohen orchestrated Trump’s attempts to keep Daniels quiet, Daniels had harsh words for Cohen in her own book, Full Disclosure.Daniels called Cohen a “dim bulb” and “a complete fucking moron”. She also detailed what she claims was a threat to her safety and that of her daughter, allegedly from Trump. In 2018, she said: “It never occurred to any of these men that I would someday have a voice.”Cohen is now a vocal critic of his old boss. Daniels remains a thorn in Trump’s side. “Both of our stories will be forever linked with Donald Trump, but also with one another,” Cohen said, apologising for inflicting “needless pain” and adding: “Thanks for giving me a second chance.”The details of Daniels’ alleged liaison with Trump at a charity golf event in Lake Tahoe in 2006 are well known, not least thanks to her book, which the Guardian first reported.“I couldn’t remember,” she told Cohen, “how I got from standing in that bathroom doorway to underneath him on the bed, like I couldn’t remember how my dress came off or how my shoes got off, because I know I took my shoes off because I clearly remember putting them back on and they were buckled, like they’re really gold strappy heels that were not easy to, you know, come off.“And I just, there’s like 60 seconds where I just had no recollection of it and it’s not in the book, and nobody really wanted to ask about it. They just wanted to know the details of what his appendage, or lack of appendage, looked like. And I was like, it really bothered me for, like, years, like, I definitely wasn’t drinking so I’m like why don’t I remember this.“And I’ll never forget this moment. I went to see that movie Bombshell, and suddenly it just came back.”Bombshell was directed by Jay Roach, starred Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie and was released in 2019. It told the story of the downfall of Roger Ailes, chief executive of Fox News and a key Trump ally, over sexual harassment.Trump denies accusations of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women. Shortly before the 2016 election, Fox News killed a story about Trump and Daniels. Ailes resigned in July that year and died the following May.Daniels’ own case against Trump for defamation is heading for the supreme court. She told Cohen: “I’ve already lost everything, so I’m taking it all the way.”Of Lake Tahoe in 2006, Daniels also told Cohen she now remembered thinking, ‘Oh fuck, how do I get myself in this situation. And I remember even thinking I could definitely fight his fat ass, I can definitely outrun him. There’s a bodyguard at the door. But I wasn’t threatened, I was not physically threatened.“And then so I tried to sidestep … I was like, trying to remember really quickly, where did I leave my purse, like I gotta get out of here. And I went to sidestep and he stood up off the bed and was like ‘This is your chance.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ and he was like, ‘You need to show me how bad you want it or do you just want to go back to the trailer park.’”Daniels has said Trump told her he would get her a slot on The Apprentice, the reality TV show for which he was then most famous. At the time of the alleged encounter, Trump’s third wife, Melania Trump, had recently given birth to their son, Barron.Daniels told Cohen she went to the bathroom, then “was genuinely like startled to see him waiting” when she came out.“I just froze,” she said, “and I didn’t know what to say. He had stripped down to his underwear and was perched on the bed doing his best yet horrifyingly disturbing impression of Burt Reynolds.”She “didn’t say anything for years”, she said, “because I didn’t remember.” Now the star of a ghost-hunting reality TV show, Spooky Babes, she added: “I’ve been face to face with evil in the most intimate way. Demons don’t scare me any more.”Daniels has described what she says happened next. Speaking to CBS 60 Minutes in 2018, she said: “And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ And I just felt like maybe it was sort of … I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone.”The interviewer, Anderson Cooper, said: “And you had sex with him.”“Yes,” Daniels said. More
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Donald Trump impeachment trial: what you need to know
Donald Trump’s unprecedented second impeachment trial begins on Tuesday 9 February in the Senate. He is the first US president to be impeached twice, and it is the first time an impeachment trial has been held against a former president. The trial will hear allegations that he committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” before leaving office.
What is Trump charged with?
On 13 January, the US House of Representatives voted by 232 to 197 to impeach Trump over “incitement of insurrection” after his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn November’s election result. 10 Republican representatives voted to impeach him, making it the most bipartisan presidential impeachment in US history.
Prosecutors place the blame for the violence squarely on the former president. Five died, hundreds were injured, members of Congress and staff were terrorized and the seat of US government building was left with “bullet marks in the walls, looted art, smeared faeces in hallways” – all in a bid to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. “President Trump’s responsibility for the events of 6 January is unmistakable,” the prosecutors charge in an 80-page memorandum submitted last week.
They will argue that his actions in whipping up the crowd with unfounded accusations of election fraud “endangered the life of every single member of Congress” and “jeopardized the peaceful transition of power and line of succession”.
What is Donald Trump claiming in his defense?
Trump has had trouble assembling a legal team. His usual personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, had to recuse himself because he also gave a speech at the event where the former president is accused of fomenting insurrection. Trump then appears to have fallen out with his first legal team, which was led by Butch Bowers.
Now led by lawyers David Schoen and Bruce L Castor, Trump’s team issued a thinly argued 14-page document last week that said his speech did not amount to a call to storm the Capitol and that his trial was unconstitutional anyway, because he has left office. Trump will not testify personally.
Who presides over the trial?
Trump’s first impeachment was presided over by chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts, as set out in the constitution. However, as this trial is of a former president, 80-year-old Patrick Leahy, the longest-serving Democratic senator – who holds the title of president pro tempore – will preside. It will be prosecuted by a team of nine impeachment managers from the House, and the whole Senate was sworn in as the jury on 26 January.
How long will the trial last?
How long the trial will take is not known, but most people believe it will be much shorter than the three-week trial the last time Trump was impeached over his actions over Ukraine, when he was accused of abusing his power and obstructing Congress.
It is unclear yet whether the Senate will vote to allow the legal teams to call witnesses in person, although the trial is highly unusual in that the jury are witnesses, as senators were present in the Capitol and were forced into hiding as the mob invaded the very chamber where the trial will be held. The prosecution team are expected to include video footage and eyewitness testimony from members of Congress while building their case.
Will Trump be found guilty?
On the face of it, it seems unlikely. An impeachment trial requires a two-thirds majority for a conviction. If every senator votes, then at least 17 Republicans would need to vote against their former president to reach the required 67-vote threshold.
Already, 45 senators have supported a motion presented by Kentucky Sen Rand Paul that the process itself is unconstitutional and against holding the trial at all. It would be quite a leap for them in the space of a few weeks to go from saying the trial should not take place, to finding Trump guilty.
For many Republican senators the calculation is political. House Representatives who voted to impeach Trump, such as Republican Liz Cheney, have already faced protest and censure from their state Republican parties over their failure to back Trump, who still has strong grassroots support despite losing November’s election.
Will a second impeachment bar Trump running from office in 2024?
Not necessarily. If he was found guilty, there’s no immediate punishment, since he is no longer in office. The Senate could, with a simple majority vote, bar him from holding federal elective office in the future. With the Senate split 50-50, and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, holding the casting vote, that could pass quite simply.
There is a constitutional argument to be had that the Democrat-controlled Senate might try to do this anyway even if Trump is found not guilty, by invoking section three of the post-civil war 14th amendment to the US constitution. That forbids anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US from holding federal office, but that is likely to be the subject of a significant legal dispute should it arise.
An earlier version of this article was amended on 13 January 2021. It had incorrectly said that not a single Republican in the Senate found Trump guilty in his first impeachment trial. In fact, one Republican senator, Mitt Romney, voted to impeach him on one charge. The article was republished on 8 February to reflect updated developments with the trial. More - in US Politics
‘This fever will break’: Republican Jeff Flake on the slow fade of Trumpism
By now, Jeff Flake thought this would all be over.
Flake, the former Arizona Republican senator and outspoken critic of Donald Trump, concedes that he expected the ripple effects in the Republican party Trump’s loss of the White House to have been bigger by now.
Instead, Flake has had to watch as Trump departed office but Trumpism refused to fade around the country. That includes in Flake’s home state, where the Republican party recently censured him alongside the two other most prominent Republicans – Cindy McCain, the widow of the late senator John McCain, and Doug Ducey, the Arizona governor.
“I do think this fever will break, but it’s been slow,” Flake said in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s been really slow.”
For much of the Trump administration Flake was something of a solitary voice within his party, opposing him first as a rare anti-Trump statewide elected official and then as a member of the club of Republicans who stood up to the 45th president only to face blowback.
Throughout all of that Flake hoped Trump would leave office one way or another, other Republicans would see the same light he did, and the opposition to the 45th president would grow. Flake calls it a “migration” of Republicans away from their fealty to Trump.
“This migration will start,” Flake said chuckling. “It’s just slow to get going.”
These days the outlook for anti-Trump Republicans can feel both bright and dark. Trump is out of office and there are elected Republican officials actively working to move on from Trump under the specter of blowback from activists within the GOP.
Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois has set up a political action committee to fight against the QAnon movement saturating the Republican party. The House Republican conference chairwoman, Liz Cheney, and almost a dozen other Republicans voted to move forward with impeaching Trump again.
Other Republicans stood up to Trump as he was pedaling unfounded claims about voter fraud after Joe Biden won the presidential election but before he took office.
But those forces are more a small rebellion or insurgency and less an army involved in an inter-party civil war. The anti-Trumpists are growing but very slowly, Flake concedes. Flake thinks successfully convicting Trump in his upcoming impeachment trial would help speed things along. More - in US Politics
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