I disagree with quite a bit in Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column which focuses on Secretary of State Blinken’s trip to China. For example:

Meantime, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing was a solid though limited success.

Unless you consider the very fact of Blinken’s visit and the fact that he actually met with President Xi a solid success, I don’t see how you can look at the body language and expressions of the various parties in the published photographs and arrive at that conclusion. They look like nine year olds being told they must clean up their rooms. Few smiles, not much eye contact, stiff posture.

But I had the most problem with a single word:

American military spending remains woefully inadequate, and the Biden administration has no serious trade strategy.

which I have emphasized above. What would be adequate? I don’t know how you can separate adequate military spending from objectives. If our objective in the Indo-Pacific is hegemony, will any amount of spending be adequate? I don’t see how when you consider that China’s GDP approximates our own.

And the war games about which I posted several months ago arrived at a somewhat different conclusion. What they revealed was that Taiwanese, Japanese, South Korean, and Philippine military capability was inadequate at present in the event of actual warfare there. The U. S. can’t bear the burden alone. Is that the objective?

In his Washington Post column Mark Thiemann and Danielle Pietka argue that President Biden should pardon Donald Trump:

In his 2020 victory speech, Joe Biden declared that “to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.” If he wants to deliver on his promise to heal the country, he could do so with one action:

Pardon Donald Trump.

On the merits, the case against Trump is damning. And it doesn’t take a close reading of the federal indictment to understand that the former president’s problems are of his own making. He allegedly showed a writer classified material about Iran, saying, “This is secret information. Look, look at this.” And he obstructed the FBI’s efforts to recover classified material in his possession, even allegedly telling his lawyer, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Had he simply returned the documents, as Mike Pence did when it became clear he had classified papers, Trump almost certainly would not have been charged, as Pence has not been. His misconduct was egregious, irresponsible and probably criminal. Anyone else would be seeking a plea bargain.

But his indictment has also put our nation into uncharted territory. The threshold for the sitting president’s administration to indict the leading candidate of the opposing party should be extraordinarily high. High enough to mitigate the suspicion held by 80 percent of Republicans and almost half the nation, per ABC News-Ipsos polling, that these charges are politically motivated. Indeed, millions of Americans believe that our legal system is being weaponized against Trump — and, by extension, against them.

Most Americans don’t look at this indictment in a vacuum. They see it in the context of the decisions not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her mishandling of classified information; the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, which paralyzed our country for two years over a conspiracy theory; two impeachments and Trump’s politicized indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg; and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story that could have damaged Joe Biden and aided Trump’s 2020 campaign. They see a troubling pattern, and they are not wrong.

and this is the editors of the Washington Post’s response:

If Mr. Trump loses in court, on appeal and at the ballot box, it would prove no one is above the law in the American system. Whoever is president might then consider offering clemency to spare the republic the indignity of incarcerating its former commander in chief. Letting Mr. Trump off the hook before that happens would inevitably lead him to falsely claim vindication, even exoneration. A pardon might become warranted if it coincides with the end of Mr. Trump’s political career. But the country is still a long way from that moment.

In all likelihood the trials (there will be more than one) will still be going on in November 2024. When President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon it marked the effective end of both of their political careers. I cannot imagine President Biden doing so whether it marks the end of Donald Trump’s political career or not. I cannot imagine a newly-elected President Christie or DeSantis wanting to.

My question for today: is a Juneteenth national holiday serving its purpose? That’s actually a two-part question. You’ve got to decide what you think its purpose is and then decide whether it’s serving that purpose.

IMO you’ve got to be pretty cynical or pretty hopeful to think it’s serving its purpose.

U. S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has arrived in Beijing to conduct talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Much of the coverage is on what’s at stake but what has struck me is how subdued his reception has been there. Pay less attention to the analysis than to the atmospherics.

Update

I welcome the meeting between Secretary of State Blinken and Chinese President Xi:

Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed “progress” after shaking hands with Blinken at the Great Hall of the People, a grand venue usually reserved for greeting heads of state.

The top U.S. diplomat and Xi both stressed the importance of having a more stable relationship, as any conflict between the world’s two largest economies would create global disruption.

We should not lose sight of Chinese thought respecting the difference between barbarous and civilized countries.

Also, take note of the body language of Secretary Blinken and President Xi. How do you interpret that?

Today is Father’s Day and I’m feeling a bit glum. My wife and I have no children and both our our fathers have been dead for many years (my father died more 50 years ago) so there’s not much celebrating here.

Our fathers are a frequent if not continuous presence for us. One or the other of us frequently quotes our fathers, tells a story about him, or offers another remembrance.

There’s a lot I wish I could tell my father. Seize the opportunity to celebrate your father while you may!

The editors of the Washington Post have realized that rebuilding Ukraine will be very, very difficult:

A trial has begun in London involving efforts by Ukraine’s biggest bank to claw back nearly $2 billion, plus an even larger amount in interest, that it says was siphoned off fraudulently by its former co-owners. It’s an awkward fact that one of those former owners, who denies the charges, was for years a chief benefactor of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Mr. Zelensky has since broken with the former co-owner, Igor Kolomoisky, a media mogul who has been a focus of U.S. investigators probing money-laundering and fraud, and has sanctions imposed on him by the U.S. government for alleged corruption. Mr. Zelensky, elected on a platform of cleaning out the corruption that has long tainted the country, also strongly backed legislation, enacted in 2021, that targets oligarchs such as his onetime patron.

Still, the trial underway in the British High Court is a timely reminder that Kyiv’s work is unfinished, despite measures it has taken to build transparent, accountable, graft-free institutions. That work cannot wait, even as Ukraine fights for its survival against Russia’s calamitous invasion.

What country will want to pour money down the rathole that is present Ukrainian corruption?

I would add that just as Russia is corrupt because of Russia, Ukraine is corrupt because of Ukraine. The Russians didn’t make Ukraine corrupt. They didn’t help but they didn’t force the Ukrainians to be corrupt.

There are other complications as well. Will the Ukrainians that have settled in EU countries return to a non-corrupt Ukraine? How do you rebuild a country that consists mostly of the people who were unable flee?

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner has posted what I think is a pretty good round-up of legal opinion on some of the issues raised in the op-ed I cited yesterday. He concludes:

Like so many other things related to the Trump presidency, the problem is that the Constitution and laws of the land begin with the assumption that the President of the United States is a fundamentally decent human being who takes his oath of office seriously. There have certainly been Presidents who don’t quite meet those standards but none have been anything close to Trump in their sheer and utter disregard for the rule of law. And so here we are.

I was reminded of this observation by John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

which I think is worth taking seriously.

The point I was trying to make yesterday is that the law is not a flashing billboard. It is a labyrinth. If you are looking for justice or clarity, you will search in vain.

I do not know what is going to happen in the case against President Trump about the documents he retained in his residence and I don’t think anyone else does, either. If you think it is an open and shut case, you may well be disappointed.

I found this observation of George Beebe and Suzanne Loftus’s in their post at Responsible Statecraft worthy of consideration:

Although the United States has strong reasons to avoid direct involvement in war against Russia, the Ukrainians may well believe that drawing Moscow into a clash with the US military is their best hope for victory. An American approach to preventing escalation that is premised on tight Ukrainian discipline looks increasingly unwise.

I don’t know what the Ukrainians are thinking but I agree with the observation that they may see it in their interest to draw the U. S. military into the war with Russia more directly than we already are. In their situation it would only be prudent.

It also seems to me that there are factors which would increase or decrease that risk. For example, Ukraine’s counter-offensive succeeding completely would decrease the risk. It faring poorly would increase it.

Michael Bekesha makes a point in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

This should never have happened. The Presidential Records Act allows the president to decide what records to return and what records to keep at the end of his presidency. And the National Archives and Records Administration can’t do anything about it. I know because I’m the lawyer who lost the “Clinton sock drawer” case.

In 2009, historian Taylor Branch published “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.” The book is based on recordings of Mr. Branch’s 79 meetings with Bill Clinton between Jan. 20, 1993, and Jan. 20, 2001. According to Mr. Branch, the audiotapes preserved not only Mr. Clinton’s thoughts on issues he faced while president, but also some actual events, such as phone conversations. Among them:

• Mr. Clinton calling several U.S. senators and trying to persuade them to vote against an amendment by Sen. John McCain requiring the immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia
• Mr. Clinton’s side of a phone call with Rep. William Natcher (D., Ky.) in which the president explained that his reasoning for joining the North American Free Trade Agreement was based on technical forecasts in his presidential briefings.
• Mr. Clinton’s side of a phone conversation with Secretary of State Warren Christopher about a diplomatic impasse over Bosnia.
• Mr. Clinton seeking advice from Mr. Branch on pending foreign-policy decisions such as military involvement in Haiti and possibly easing the embargo of Cuba

The White House made the audiotapes. Nancy Hernreich, then director of Oval Office operations, set up the meetings between Messrs. Clinton and Branch and was involved in the logistics of the recordings. Did that make them presidential records?

The National Archives and Records Administration was never given the recordings. As Mr. Branch tells it, Mr. Clinton hid them in his sock drawer to keep them away from the public and took them with him when he left office.

When Judicial Watch made a FOIA request for the tapes and they lost on these ground:

Judge Jackson added that “the PRA contains no provision obligating or even permitting the Archivist to assume control over records that the President ‘categorized’ and ‘filed separately’ as personal records. At the conclusion of the President’s term, the Archivist only ‘assumes responsibility for the Presidential records.’ . . . PRA does not confer any mandatory or even discretionary authority on the Archivist to classify records. Under the statute, this responsibility is left solely to the President.”

That is very closely related to the point I’ve made in several posts about the constitutionality and enforceability of the PRA.

Said another way the charges filed against President Trump are not open and shut. I’m not staking a position out one way or the other—just pointing out that it’s complicated and may not be settled law.