Why It’s Hard to Take Democrats Seriously on Russia

Source: Politico Magazine | July 24, 2017 | James Kirchick

They’re right about Putin’s threat to American democracy. But wrong on just about everything else.

Democrats are exasperated that Republicans don’t share their outrage over the ever-widening scandal surrounding Donald Trump and Russia. The president’s personal solicitousness towards Vladimir Putin, the alacrity of his son in welcoming potential assistance from Russians during the 2016 campaign, and mounting questions as to whether Trump associates colluded with Russia as part of its influence operation against Hillary Clinton are leading Democrats to speak of impeachment and even treason.

As a longtime Russia hawk who has spent most of the last decade covering Kremlin influence operations across the West, I share their exasperation. Over the past year, I have authored pieces with headlines like “How Putin plays Trump like a piano,” “How Trump got his party to love Russia,” and, most recently in this space, “How the GOP became the party of Putin.” As I see it, conservatives’ nonchalance about Russia’s attempt to disrupt and discredit our democracy ranks as one of the most appalling developments in recent American political history.

 

But as much as Democrats may be correct in their diagnosis of Republican debasement, they are wholly lacking in self-awareness as to their own record regarding Russia. This helps explain why conservatives have so much trouble taking liberal outrage about Russia seriously: Most of the people lecturing them for being “Putin’s pawns” spent the better part of the last 8 years blindly supporting a Democratic president, Barack Obama, whose default mode with Moscow was fecklessness. To Republicans, these latter-day Democratic Cold Warriors sound like partisan hysterics, a perception that’s not entirely wrong.

Consider the latest installment of the unfolding Trump-Russia saga: Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting last summer with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. Before inexplicably publicizing his own email correspondence, which revealed him eager to accept information that would allegedly “incriminate” his father’s opponent, Trump Jr. claimed the confab concerned nothing more salacious than the issue of “adoption.” Democrats have rightly pointed out that this was a ruse: When the Russian government or its agents talk about international adoption, they’re really talking about the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 measure sanctioning Russian human rights abusers named after a Russian lawyer tortured to death after exposing a massive tax fraud scheme perpetrated by government officials. The law’s passage so infuriated Putin that he capriciously and cruelly retaliated by banning American adoption of Russian orphans. Five years after its enactment, the law continues to rankle Russia’s president. According to President Trump himself, it was the ostensibly innocuous issue of “adoption” that Putin raised with him during a previously undisclosed dinner conversation at the G-20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month.

Yet for all the newfound righteous indignation in defense of the Magnitsky Act being expressed by former Obama officials and supporters, it wasn’t long ago that they tried to prevent its passage, fearing the measure would hamper their precious “reset” with Moscow. In 2012, as part of this effort, the Obama administration lobbied for repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Cold War-era law tying enhanced trade relations with Russia to its human rights record. Some voices on Capitol Hill proposed replacing Jackson-Vanik with Magnitsky, a move the administration vociferously opposed. Shortly after his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul (today one of the most widely-cited critics on the subject of Trump and Russia) publicly stated that the Magnitsky Act would be “redundant” and that the administration specifically disagreed with its naming and shaming Russian human rights abusers as well as its imposition of financial sanctions. McFaul even invoked the beleaguered Russian opposition, which he said agreed with the administration’s position.

This was a mischaracterization of Russian civil society, the most prominent leaders of which only supported repeal of Jackson-Vanik on the express condition it be superseded by the Magnitsky Act. “Allowing [Jackson-Vanik] to disappear with nothing in its place … turns it into little more than a gift to Mr. Putin,” Russian dissidents Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov wrote for the Wall Street Journal days after McFaul’s remarks. (Nemtsov, one of Putin’s loudest and most visible critics, was assassinated in 2015 just a few hundred meters from the Kremlin walls). Anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, meanwhile, wrote that while he supported repealing Jackson-Vanik, “no doubt the majority of Russian citizens will be happy to see the U.S. Senate deny the most abusive and corrupt Russian officials the right of entry and participation in financial transactions in the U.S., which is the essence of the Magnitsky Bill.”

Nevertheless, the Obama administration not only persisted in opposing Magnitsky, but continued to claim that it had the support of the Russian opposition in this endeavor. “Leaders of Russia’s political opposition,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, “have called on the U.S. to terminate Jackson-Vanik, despite their concerns about human rights and the Magnitsky case.” Despite administration protestations, Congress passed the Magnitsky Act and Obama reluctantly signed it into law. Reflecting on the legislative battle two years later, Bill Browder, the London-based investor for whom Magnitsky worked and the driving force behind the bill, told Foreign Policy, “The administration, starting with Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, did everything they could do to stop the Magnitsky Act.”

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For now, the newfangled Democratic hawkishness on Russia seems motivated almost entirely, if not solely, by anger over the (erroneous) belief that Vladimir Putin cost Hillary Clinton the election – not over the Kremlin’s aggression toward its neighbors, its intervention on behalf of Assad in Syria, its cheating on the INF Treaty, or countless other malfeasances. Most Democrats were willing to let Russia get away with these things when President Obama was telling the world that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” are obsolete, or that Russia was a mere “regional power” whose involvement in Syria would lead to another Afghanistan, or when he was trying to win Russian help for his signal foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. If the Democrats’ newfound antagonism toward the Kremlin extended beyond mere partisanship, they would have protested most of Obama’s foreign policy, which acceded to Russian prerogatives at nearly every turn. As the former George W. Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer cleverly imagined in these pages, had Trump ran for president and won with the assistance of Russia but as a Democrat instead of a Republican, it’s not difficult to imagine Democrats being just as cynical and opportunistic in their dismissal of the Russia scandal as Republicans are today.

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Hypocrisy is no stranger to politics, of course, and it’s never too late for people to come around to the realization that Russia poses a danger. But with Democrats seriously talking about impeachment or even treason, a reckoning is in order. Constantly harping on Trump’s strange affinity for Putin and suspicious connections to Russia isn’t sufficient; the far more substantive policy concessions made to Russia by the previous administration did at least as much damage to American interests, if not more. Are liberals willing to admit the reset was a giant miscalculation from the start? Are they willing to support sending arms to Ukraine? To redeploy missile defense systems to allies in Eastern Europe? Are they willing to concede that Obama’s Syria policy was an epic disaster that paved the way for Russia’s reemergence as a Middle Eastern military power? Are they, in other words, willing to renounce the foreign policy legacy of one of their most popular leaders? Because only that will demonstrate they’re serious about confronting Russia. Anything short reeks of partisanship.

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