Well, the House Democrats seem to have rested their case in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. There seem to be too different movies being played in different people’s minds. In one of the movies the House Democrats have definitively made their case for removing Trump and that even if the Senate Republicans were to acquit Trump for purely partisan reasons it will all work to their advantage in the 2020 elections. In the other movie the House Democrats have been conducting an auto-da-fé against Trump since June 2016 for purely partisan reasons of which the impeachment inquiry is only the most recent chapter.

Earlier I characterized the president’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Zelensky as “unseemly”. Recently, I heard it called “contemptible”. That works, too. The question before the Senate will be if something that is contemptible is also impeachable in any sense other than that of Gerald Ford’s remark that “impeachable” means anything the House says it does.

The RCP Average shows that 47.8% of Americans support impeachment while 45.8% oppose. Both sides think they’re winning. Can they both be right?

I cannot imagine the Senate removing any president with a 44% overall approval rating and 75% approval rating among Republicans. It would be electoral suicide which I presume is a factor in the Democrats’ calculus.

AS I wrote the last post it occurred to me that it might be interesting to speculate about the desired world order for each of the United States, Russia, and China. I suspect I’ll get the most disagreement about what I think our preferred world order is.

Basically, I think that you can get a glimpse of the U. S.’s preferred world order by considering the world between 1988 and 1993 or, to stretch things a bit, until 1999. The U. S. was clearly the preeminent world power. We were prosperous. We had successfully negotiated a free trade agreement with Canada and, building upon that, with Mexico. When we went to war it was with UN Security Council authority. It was the apogee of internationalists’ aspirations.

IMO things began to go downhill with Security Council Resolution 678. The United States persuaded the Soviet Union to support 678 which gave Iraq a deadline for withdrawing from Kuwait after which Iraq would be removed “by all necessary means”.

Basically, from our perspective all of the systems put in place after World War II were working as they should.

I do not believe that Americans in general are particularly interested in other countries and by preference are not expansionary.

Both China and Russia are irredentist meaning that they want to restore vanished glory. It’s easier to describe China’s objectives than Russia’s. China wants to restore its Qing Dynasty borders which includes Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and parts of Central and East Asia including areas presently parts of Russia, North Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, India, and Pakistan. It wants to be respected as the world’s preeminent nation and the top members of the CCP and their families want to be rich.

Russia wants the restoration of Byelorussia and Ukraine (or at least parts of them). It wants to be acknowledged as the champions of

Russians
Slavs
people of the Orthodox faith

in that order. It wants to be free of threats which, in Russia’s paranoid way, means that any country that borders Russia must either be neutral or a Russian vassal.

It should be obvious that those preferred orders are not consistent with one another. We could probably come to a modus vivendi with Russia. We cannot come to one with China.

I was very gratified to see something approximating my view of what U. S.-Russian relations should be like in Thomas Graham’s piece in Foreign Affairs:

U.S. policy across four administrations has failed because, whether conciliatory or confrontational, it has rested on a persistent illusion: that the right U.S. strategy could fundamentally change Russia’s sense of its own interests and basic worldview. It was misguided to ground U.S. policy in the assumption that Russia would join the community of liberal democratic nations, but it was also misguided to imagine that a more aggressive approach could compel Russia to abandon its vital interests.

A better approach must start from the recognition that relations between Washington and Moscow have been fundamentally competitive from the moment the United States emerged as a global power at the end of the nineteenth century, and they remain so today. The two countries espouse profoundly different concepts of world order. They pursue opposing goals in regional conflicts such as those in Syria and Ukraine. The republican, democratic tradition of the United States stands in stark contrast to Russia’s long history of autocratic rule. In both practical and ideological terms, a close partnership between the two states is unsustainable.

In the current climate, that understanding should come naturally to most U.S. policymakers. Much harder will be to recognize that ostracizing Russia will achieve little and likely prove to be counterproductive. Even if its relative power declines, Russia will remain a key player in the global arena thanks to its large nuclear arsenal, natural resources, geographic centrality in Eurasia, UN Security Council veto, and highly skilled population. Cooperating with Russia is essential to grappling with critical global challenges such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism. With the exception of China, no country affects more issues of strategic and economic importance to the United States than Russia. And no other country, it must be said, is capable of destroying the United States in 30 minutes.

I don’t quite agree that “relations between Washington and Moscow have been fundamentally competitive from the moment the United States emerged as a global power at the end of the nineteenth century”. It is, at least, an over simplification. I think that on most issues there is no conflict because our countries’ interests are too disparate. Russia not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was expansionary and millennialist; Russia is irredentist. The Soviet Union pursued objectives that Russia never had before 1918; Russia is pursuing the same objectives that Russians have for the last 300 years at least.

There are some areas, e.g. the Arctic, in which our interests conflict. There are some areas in which our interests coincide.

Our problem is that for the last 30 years individuals who are, frankly, anti-Russian have had too much influence at high levels of government. They have fostered an attitude in which ensuring that the Russians did not achieve their policy goals was a major objective of U. S. policy despite the reality that it did not actually promote our own interests.

There’s something that I think is at risk of being lost in all of the huggamuggah about the impeachment inquiry. We need to think very clearly about the U.S. interest in cultivating a relationship with Ukraine. To the best of my ability to determine, all of those encouraging a close relationship between Ukraine and the U.S. are either a) Ukrainians by birth or b) unreconstructed Cold Warriors. I’m not challenging anyone’s patriotism, just pointing out that just as Ireland looms larger in the thinking of Irish-Americans than would reflect the U.S.’s actual interest in Ireland, it shouldn’t be entirely surprising if Ukraine looms larger in the thinking of Ukrainian-Americans than actually reflects a more general American interest.

I’m a skeptic about cultivating a close relationship with Ukraine. It didn’t become a distinct Soviet republic until the 1950s; it had been an actual part of Russia for hundreds of years. And Russia is quite sensitive about the foreign policies of former Soviet republics. Is it really in the U.S. interest to aggravate the already tense relationship between the U.S. and Russia? Our two countries are, after all, the only places on earth equipped to render the earth uninhabitable.

I’m not sure what the point of Fareed Zakaria’s latest Washington Post column is other than that he doesn’t like Trump. Let’s start here:

This week, talks between Washington and Seoul broke down after the Trump administration demanded a 400 percent increase in what South Korea pays for the stationing of U.S. troops in that country. The annual operating cost of the U.S. military presence there is approximately $2 billion. Seoul pays a little less than half that. Trump is asking for $4.7 billion.

I think that Trump’s asking South Korea to pay more than the cost of our maintaining troops in South Korea was dumb. Presumably, he thought he was at the beginning of a negotiation rather than in the middle of one in which the price had already been established (less than half the cost) and he didn’t know what the insult price was. Blowing up the talks with the increase was outrageous but thinking that South Korea should be paying more isn’t. We should have a plan for increasing South Korea’s tithe until it’s at least the full cost. South Korea isn’t a poor, broken down country. It’s one of the most prosperous countries in Asia and, indeed, a competitor. Signalling to them that under the circumstances they should be carrying more of the freight isn’t that bad an idea.

Or this:

Trump’s impulse everywhere is to quit the field. He has done so in the Middle East, ceding U.S. foreign policy to his favorite strongmen, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The American withdrawal from northern Syria has handed over a large swath of the country to Turkey and bolstered Russia, Iran and the Bashar al-Assad regime. When Republican senators complained about the abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, who lost 10,000 troops supporting the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State, Trump’s response was to let Erdogan show them a propaganda video claiming that our allies were actually terrorists.

I don’t honestly know what “Trump’s impulse” is. I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t understand the man. IMO Mr. Zakaria is misstating what actually happened. Were the Kurds “supporting the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State” or were they defending their homeland? What’s the U. S. interest in Syria? I don’t think that establishing Kurdish homeland there is and, presumably, neither do the Turks. I also think that Erdogan’s Turkey is a major problem but, again, what’s the U.S. interest?

The Trump administration has also given up on support for broad-based norms and values. It withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council, ceding the field to countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. The American Civil Liberties Union has charged that the Trump administration has ended all cooperation with international human rights monitors in the United States. Trump’s tariffs have rocked the free-trade system, perhaps irretrievably. This week, the administration reversed the long-standing U.S. position that Israeli settlements violate international law.

IMO Mr. Zakaria should look at the membership of the UNHCR, present and past. It has included and presently includes members who are not signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m not sure how much value there is in being a member of a committee that can’t even agree on what human rights are. That’s a persistent misconception of internationalists. There is no global consensus on human rights. In the absence of such a consensus anything else is just wishful thinking.

There’s a lot in the column about what Mr. Zakaria is against but next to nothing about what he’s for. I have some questions for him.

1. Why was replacing the Assad regime either with Al Qaeda or DAESH in the U.S. interest? Those were the only alternatives. There were no liberal democrats waiting in the wings to take over.
2. The concept behind the system of “forward deployments” put in place in the decade following World War II was that we would provide security from the surplus we realized as being the only major industrial economy left intact by the war. China is now capturing that surplus. The circumstances have changed. Why doesn’t it make sense for the arrangement to change?
3. Kemalist Turkey was the country that joined NATO. Why is Islamist Turkey still a NATO member?
4. Finally, why is invading one country after another internationalist while avoiding such invasions is isolationist?

I’m still waiting for the overnight polls to come out before making any more observations about the impeachment inquiry. I doubt that anyone’s listening any more.

The New York Times panel rates the winners and losers of last night’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate (in descending sequence): Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Steyer. Notice anything about that list? It’s not until you get to the fifth candidate on the list that we encounter someone who actually has a chance of winning and overall the candidates in the bottom five are more likely to win than those in the top five.

What does that tell us?

1. Debate performance is irrelevant.
2. The NYT panel is completely out of touch.
3. The candidates are completely out of touch.
4. The members of the NYT panel really don’t like Tulsi Gabbard (the only candidate actually running on a foreign policy platform).
5. Each of Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Joe Biden have more Washington political experience than all of the other candidates put together
6. Nothing
7. Other

Offhand I’d say we all lost that debate.

A regular commenter brought the clip above to my attention. In it the Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell distinguishes among four categories of crime fiction. It’s short and I encourage you to watch it but here’s an even briefer summary.

In “Westerns” there is no law and the protagonist imposes law on a lawless territory. In “Northerns” there is a flawless legal system in place which is effective in enforcing the law. In “Easterns” the legal system is corrupt; it must be fixed from the inside. In “Southerns” not just the legal system but everything is thoroughly corrupt—it must be fixed from outside.

I would point out that this taxonomy doesn’t just apply to crime fiction but to sci-fi in the movies and television and even medical dramas. Star Trek is a Northern. Star Wars is an Eastern. Serenity is a Western. There are even a few isolated Southerns (Riddick).

It occurred to me that it is productive to look at the way that different groups view the political drama that has been unfolding since 2016 using Gladwell’s prism. Democrats tend to look at the last nearly three years as a Northern. The system is working well to rid itself of a criminal. The Republicans, not terribly surprisingly, see it as a Southern—a man comes from outside to fix a thoroughly corrupted system.

I view it as an Eastern with the needed reform yet to appear.

Imagine that what you like and what you can’t stand are different from the preferences of other people. That shouldn’t be too hard. To some degree that’s true of all of us. Now imagine that you can make broad generalizations about those preferences based on what part of the country people live in. There’s actually some evidence to support that, as this article from Atlantic points out:

Rentfrow had a breakthrough in 2013, when he and others published a study that suggested the U.S. has three “psychological regions.” The first, in the Midwest and parts of the Southeast, is “friendly and conventional.” It has high levels of extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—three more of the big-five personality traits. “The characteristics of this psychological region suggest a place where traditional values, family, and the status quo are important,” the authors wrote. (The southern United States also tends to be more courageous, according to his research.)

In a second region, which consists of the West Coast, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southwest, meanwhile, Americans tend to be “relaxed and creative,” the authors wrote. People in these areas are very open—another big personality measure, marked by a tendency toward curiosity, variety, and imagination—but rank comparatively low on most all other traits. “In general, the qualities of this region depict a place where open-mindedness, tolerance, individualism, and happiness are valued,” the authors noted.

Finally, there’s the “temperamental and uninhibited” region, which consists of the Northeast and, to some extent, Texas. These states have higher neuroticism than the others and are moderately high on openness. “This particular configuration of traits depicts the type of person who is reserved, aloof, impulsive, irritable, and inquisitive,” he wrote. To which we on the East Coast say, You talkin’ to me?

Get that? Your ideas of what’s good, what’s bad, how you want to live may differ from those of people in other parts of the country. That you’re right and they’re wrong is far too simplistic a way of looking at it. Their history, culture, experiences, and relative preferences are just different from yours. Your idea of heaven and that of your neighbors may be different from that of mine and my neighbors. It might even be my hell.

Sounds like a darned good case for federalism to me.