Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

  1. A Russian brigade shot down a Malaysian plane over Ukraine and killed 298 civilians.

    The Obama team was slow to rebuke Putin and sloppy in coordinating with European allies. “The 2014 crisis was one that sharpened a lot of minds,” said Max Bergmann, who was a State Department official at the time. “What I think you see now is the effort to get the ducks in a row right away, to send very clear messaging about what the cost would be to Russia.”

    Putin will spoil your plans

    In the first month of the Obama presidency, Vice President Biden said the administration would work to reset relations with Russia. Initially, the US pushed for Russia to join the World Trade Organization. Antony Blinken, who advised Biden for almost two decades, suggested a new beginning. “We’re not trying to build our own sphere of influence,” he said in 2009 while visiting Ukraine with Biden. “The partnerships aren’t being built against anyone. They’re being built for the purpose of addressing common challenges that Russia also faces.”

    The annexation of Crimea put an end to this.

    Alexander Aksakov/Getty Images
    People walk by a mural depicting Vladimir Putin in Simferopol, Crimea, on August 17,

  2. Blinken, about one year out of the Obama administration, said they had “misjudged” Putin, whom he ultimately concluded was a kleptocrat and rogue. By the time he invaded Crimea, “we really were in the zero-sum world where, from Moscow’s perspective, Russia’s strength was our weakness, and our gain was their loss,” said Blinken, who now serves as Biden’s secretary of state.

    The Biden team learned that Putin will advance his goals with “asymmetric” tactics, or military and non-military approaches that operate within a gray zone, to trip up the United States. In 2014 and onward, Russia leaked a phone call to embarrass US diplomats, spread fake news, and sowed disinformation, which culminated in unprecedented attacks on the 2016 election in the US. It’s led Biden to grapple with “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin,” as was the title of a 2018 essay he co-authored for Foreign Affairs. He argued that the US must “impose meaningful costs on Russia when they discover evidence of its misdeeds.” He also said that, despite Russia’s belligerent tactics, “Washington needs to keep talking to Moscow,” to avoid unintended escalations of conflict.

    As president, Biden has again taken on the role of problem-solver. He spent two hours meeting with Putin in a video call in December as Russia had mobilized troops to its border with Ukraine. “Biden is personally very active on this stuff,” said Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group. “Biden runs those meetings. He understands the details.”

    Allies count

    It’s tough to corral the 27 member states of the European Union and the 29 other members of NATO. In 2014, the US and its allies in Europe moved slowly in response to Russia’s aggression. That spring the US kicked Russia out of the G8 grouping of countries, worked with the EU to sanction Russian leaders, and began multilateral negotiations over the crisis. But it was not enough to deter Russia.

    At the time, Julie Smith, a former adviser to Biden, was taking a break from government. Speaking at a panel in March 2014, she said the US and Europe deserved “pretty low marks, close to a fail.” The Obama administration’s attention had been trained on Asia and the Middle East, leaving behind Russia and Eastern Europe. “All in all,” she said, “a really rough start in part because of the blind eye that we had on this corner of the world for so long.”

    Smith is now the US ambassador to NATO, and has focused on a united front in Europe. “I can’t remember a situation where we have seen such dogged diplomacy, day by day, almost hour by hour, to try to prevent a war in Ukraine. It really is all hands on deck,” said Charles Kupchan, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow who worked in the Obama White House from 2014 to 2017.

    The Biden team internalized the lesson that allies count. Blinken in 2016 acknowledged that sanctions against Russia were more effective when “we rallied others” to participate.

Several former ambassadors to Europe told me that they were impressed by how quickly the Biden administration has employed old-fashioned diplomacy. “They have clearly inspired a purposeful, thorough, robust engagement with allies around this crisis that has already paid dividends,” said Dan Baer, an ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe from 2013 to 2017, who is at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“They are leaning into diplomacy big time, and they’re confronting the prospect that diplomacy might fail,” added Kupchan.

Patrick Semansky/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin greets President Biden during a summit at Villa la Grange in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 16, 2021.

Free weapons for Ukraine

Biden cares about Ukrainian democracy and is cognizant of the endemic corruption that makes good governance difficult for the country. Nevertheless, he has unequivocally advocated for what the White House euphemistically calls “lethal aid” — that is, free weapons.

This contrasts with debates within the Obama administration. Obama was against quickly arming the Ukrainians for fear of agitating Russia, and perhaps because the Ukrainian army was undisciplined. (And once so-called defensive weapons were approved for Ukraine, the transfers were slow.)

Biden was in the camp urging Obama to increase weapons transfers. Now, many Obama-era officials who took the hawkish position in advocating for sending weapons to Ukraine are in positions of power. As Biden explained in 2015, “Believe me, helping Ukraine in its defense and deterrence against Russian aggression is critical, is critical to checking further aggression down the road.” He later described President Donald Trump’s shipment of advanced missiles to Ukraine as “a wise decision.” Biden pledged to deliver weapons to Ukraine on the 2020 campaign trail, long before any new flareups.

So it should be no surprise that the Biden administration has quickly sent to Ukraine $200 million of weapons and more are likely on the way. Ukraine, for its part, is the fourth-largest recipient of US military funding for weapons. Thousands of American soldiers are also headed to NATO partners in Europe.

Ian Kelly, who served as ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018, speculates that Putin thought that the “Obama holdovers” on President Biden’s team would be reluctant to move like last time. “Obama didn’t want to sell lethal weapons, Obama didn’t want to escalate, Obama didn’t really react with much in 2014,” said Kelly. But Putin “miscalculated,” he explained, and the Biden team are “firm trans- atlanticists who believe in NATO.”

Still, lessons learned only go so far.

Like the Obama administration, Biden’s inner circle hadn’t prioritized Europe on paper. The interim national security strategy from last year, a document that guides the Biden administration’s thinking, did warn of “strategic challenges” from a “destabilizing Russia.” But the Biden White House indicated that they wanted to prioritize above all China and climate change, addressing the pandemic and rebuilding the economy.

Now, Russia is taking much of the Biden team’s attention, and the new national security strategy that was due out in early 2022 has been delayed.

The RNC censured two members of Congress for refusing to play along.

On Friday, the Republican National Committee officially stated that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, which left at least five dead and about 140 injured, was “legitimate political discourse.”

In a two-page censure resolution condemning Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their participation in the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack, the RNC wrote that “Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.”

In a subsequent tweet, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel expanded on the language of the censure to clarify that it referred to “ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”

The original text of the resolution, however — which, the New York Times notes, was “carefully negotiated in private among party members” before publication — is a fitting cap to a week that saw the GOP, led by former President Donald Trump, draw closer than ever to explicitly supporting the attack on the Capitol and its goal of overturning the 2020 election.

In addition to the censure, Trump last Saturday told supporters at a rally in Conroe, Texas, that he would consider pardoning those charged in connection with the January 6 attack, and Politico reported on Wednesday that he also contemplated doing so before leaving office in January last year.

“If I run and if I win [in 2024], we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly,” Trump said at the rally, without addressing any specific concerns about the treatment of rioters. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”

Trump also said in a statement last week that former Vice President Mike Pence “could have overturned the Election!” — an assertion that, while incorrect, is among Trump’s most overt remarks about the intent behind January 6 and his actions leading up to it.

Trump has not yet announced an official run for the presidency in 2024, but signs point to a likely White House bid as he retains a tight grip on the GOP rank and file.

In the meantime, large swaths of the Republican party, still apparently in Trump’s thrall, have shifted their position on the Capitol insurrection, distancing themselves from the disturbing reality of those events and positioning the insurrectionists as innocent protesters, or even patriotic guardians of the Constitution.

That reversal — from horror at the falsehood-fueled spectacle that unfolded at the Capitol last January to condemnation of Republicans who defy Trump’s narrative — may have coalesced even more clearly over the past week and a half, but it’s been building almost since the attack, spearheaded by members of Congress like Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

While some establishment Republicans, including Sen. Mitt Romney, have spoken out against the censure and praised Cheney’s and Kinzinger’s moral compasses, while others have expressed dismay at the idea of a future President Trump pardoning January 6 rioters, many have bought so wholeheartedly into Trump’s narrative that they attacked Pence for accurately disputing on Thursday Trump’s assertion that he could have overturned the results of the election.

What Trump means when he says he wants January 6 prisoners treated “fairly”

Trump’s assertion that he wants fair treatment for the January 6 defendants may be superficially benign, but in reality, it’s just one front in the GOP attempt to mythologize the attack as less severe than it was.

Trump, along with members of Congress like Gaetz and Greene and would-be members like Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance, have made misleading statements about the slightly more than 700 people arrested for their roles in the attack, including describing them as “political prisoners” and claiming that they haven’t been charged with crimes (they have).

The subtext of Trump’s argument about fairness is particularly alarming, given the shocking violence directed against police defending the Capitol on January 6. By floating pardons should he regain office, Trump rewrites the limits of acceptable behavior for his supporters — and reinforces that those loyal to Trump are in the right and will be rewarded for their loyalty, while those who oppose his claims to power are not only wrong, but unprincipled.

“There is no room for dissenters from Donald Trump’s views in the Republican party,” Alex Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told Vox in a Sunday interview.

Gaetz and Greene — both ardent supporters of Trump — are leading proponents of the narrative that January 6 attendees are being mistreated (they’re not). Last summer, they, along with Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) visited a DC jail where some January 6 defendants were being held, demanding access as members of Congress and erroneously claiming they oversaw the budget for the jail, according to the Washington Post.

The group, joined by Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Bob Good (R-VA), also barged into the Justice Department this past summer, with Gosar calling January 6 defendants “political prisoners” and attempting to ask whether any of the defendants were being held in solitary confinement, the Washington Post’s Meagan Flynn reported at the time.

The January 6 defendants are facing a variety of charges, ranging from obstructing an official proceeding of the government to seditious conspiracy. Some have already been convicted and sentenced; as of the one-year anniversary of the attack, the longest sentence was just over five years in prison.

As Keyssar told Politico in a 2021 retrospective in December, the insurrection of January 6 accelerated “the downward spiral of American political life” and set off an “intensified, rancorous struggle over the preservation of democratic values and institutions.”

Trump’s insistence on pursuing his self-serving narrative of victimhood — and pulling the Republican Party along with him — doesn’t just affect the GOP, as Keyssar points out; it ultimately affects the functioning of democracy and people’s ability to participate in it. “It’s not just a matter of telling different stories,” Keyssar told Vox on Sunday.

Specifically, he said, Trump’s rhetoric around the insurrection is “storytelling to justify a particular social order.” According to Keyssar, the narratives forming around the insurrection echo the end of the Reconstruction period in the South following the Civil War. The Reconstruction era gave Black Americans unprecedented rights, power, and political representation for a brief period, until the end of the 19th century; in the decades following Reconstruction, the prevailing narrative among white Southerners was that the Civil War was an attack on Southerners’ ways of life, and the Reconstruction period was the result of corrupt Northern “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” taking over the remains of that society.

At the time, Keyssar said, the white Southern narrative argued that the disenfranchisement of Black Southerners and reinforcement of white supremacy “had to be restored in order to have a ‘good society’ again.” In the same vein now, Trump’s fiction — that he was the true winner of the 2020 election and widespread fraud robbed him of a second term in office; that members of his own party who don’t support his lies are unpatriotic; and that the people who protested and stormed the Capitol on January 6 aren’t criminals — aims to restore him to power.

Just because Trump’s talking points around the 2020 election and the Republican Party’s embrace of them aren’t exactly unprecedented, that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous, Keyssar said.

The polarization of the two parties, and their dominance in state legislatures, has emboldened some places to propose laws targeting voter fraud — though there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election — which can have the real-world effect of making it more difficult for disenfranchised communities, including Black people and those in poverty, to vote.

Furthermore, Keyssar said, the constant effort to delegitimize the election does serve to negate the peaceful means of changing power, which could portend further violence in one form or another. “If you discredit the mechanism of elections,” he said, “then what are you left with? Force.”

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