https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/trump-will-find-it-hard-to-pardon-himself-here-s-why-1.1135100

Sweeping and self-pardons may not stand up to legal challenges and state courts remain unfettered.

With less than a month remaining in office, Donald Trump is increasingly turning to the most monarchical and unchecked of presidential prerogatives: the pardon power.

He has already pushed the limits of that entitlement, treating it in a far more personalised, partisan and ideological manner than any of his predecessors. But additional political assumptions and constitutional questions may be tested as he moves to pardon more allies, family members and possibly even himself.

The British monarch’s pardon power was one of the few aspects of royal governance that the founders of the American constitutional republic wanted to retain. They saw it as a final recourse of grace and forgiveness that could help protect the ideal of justice tempered with mercy beyond the rigid requirements of the law.

The Constitution treats presidential powers as a kind of fiduciary responsibility and assumes the president will at least try to act in the public interest in all things, including pardons. More than any of his predecessors, Mr Trump is disregarding that standard.

Such deviations aren’t unknown. Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon and George HW Bush’s of several Iran-Contra scandal convicts were plainly political. And Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother, a crony and a major donor.

But, in each case, those were exceptions.

Mr Trump, by contrast, has primarily deployed the pardon power in a self-serving manner. Legal scholars estimate that 60 of his 65 pardons have had clear personal or political motivations, as opposed to any disinterested concern about justice or mercy.

The last two batches in recent days were particularly disturbing. In an obvious effort to rebuke former special counsel Robert Mueller and discredit his 2016 election interference investigation, which Mr Trump derides as a “hoax” but which secured numerous guilty pleas and convictions, pardons have been issued to major and minor players alike.

They include his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, campaign manager Paul Manafort and several lesser figures. Of course, everyone who cooperated with the authorities, such as his former attorney Michael Cohen, has been ignored.

He has also pardoned several corrupt Republican politicians who were his ardent supporters, and his daughter’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner. Ivanka Trump’s children will have the unique distinction of one grandfather pardoning the other.

In none of those egregious cases is there any contrition, rehabilitation or evident mitigation beyond the President’s political or personal concerns. Former adviser Steve Bannon, accused of bilking gullible contributors to a phony border wall fund, could be next.

Perhaps most damaging to the national interest are pardons for four Blackwater mercenaries who committed a wanton 2007 massacre of innocent Iraqi civilians, killing at least 17 including several children. Blackwater was headed by one of the President’s close political allies, Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Mr Trump and his far-right base have a habit of embracing controversial figures charged with brutality in international conflicts. In November 2019, he infuriated the military by intervening on behalf of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy Seal charged with heinous abuses in Afghanistan.

In addition to outraging the memories of the victims and sabotaging efforts to enforce basic conduct standards for US operatives abroad, the Blackwater pardons are detrimental to US foreign policy. As pro-Iranian militias are attacking US interests in an avowed effort to drive the American military out of Iraq, they could put US personnel at risk by providing additional rationalisations for anti-American attacks.

Mr Trump is reveling in this final burst of unchecked authority and reportedly plans many more pardons, although it is a clear admission that he will be leaving office soon.

While he obviously relishes the near-absolute nature of the power, his expansive plans may reveal some unprecedented complications regarding pardons.

Nixon’s pardon was prospective, issued before any possible criminal charges, as well as sweeping and unspecified. While prospective pardons are probably valid, blanket “get-out-of-jail-free for anything you may have ever done” indemnifications are likely not.

The framers of the US Constitution, drawing on their British model, would have expected valid, enforceable pardons to refer to specific offenses.

Nixon was pardoned “for all [federal] offenses” during his time in office. That was never tested because he was never indicted. But if Mr Trump tried to issue such blanket clemency to his attorney Rudy Giuliani, some other ally, or his children, it could well be tested and prove unenforceable.

Such friends and relatives would also undergo the social and political stigma that can and should be attached to pardons, which do not wipe away the reality or guilt of an offense.

The Supreme Court has held that presidential pardons must be based on an assumption of criminal guilt, while accepting one communicates an admission of guilt. Among Ford’s main justifications for pardoning Nixon was that it definitively established his responsibility, and his admission of culpability (certainly for obstruction of justice), forestalling any further controversy.

Courts and the public have every right to know what crime is being pardoned. Yet there is no evident requirement for presidential pardons to be publicized, so theoretically they could be, in effect, secret until the recipient is indicted.

Mr Trump has claimed he has “the absolute right” to pardon himself, but that is extremely unlikely. No president has ever tried this, but since it would place a president literally above the law, it is almost certainly not constitutional. This incongruous possibility goes unmentioned in the Constitution, but it is referred to as a “grant”, which suggests a gift to someone else.

Even if Mr Trump were to successfully pardon his associates, and even himself, there is an additional wrinkle completely beyond his influence.

Presidential pardons only apply to federal offense. They do nothing to protect against prosecutions by state authorities, in this case mainly New York State.

Any criminal defendant would prefer trial in a New York State court than much stricter federal courts, but presidential pardons would not indemnify Mr Giuliani, the Trump family or the President himself from potential liability on state charges.

Should all else fail, federalism ensures that no one is truly above the law in the United States.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-12-23/biden-should-not-give-up-on-syria?sref=tp95wk9l

He should make it plain that there will be no reconstruction while Assad and his clique are running Damascus.

Tucked away in a little-noticed corner of the $900 billion coronavirus relief bill is an allocation of $40 million in “non-lethal stabilization aid” for Syria, with the proviso that none of it should be used to strengthen Iran and its militias, Russia or the government of Bashar Al Assad. This detail of one of the most important recent pieces of recent U.S. legislation illustrates the American conundrum over Syria that will soon be inherited by the new Biden administration.

Years of neglect have left the U.S. with very limited leverage, but Syria remains the epicenter of three key concerns: combating the destabilization of the Middle East, containing Iranian hegemony, and fighting still-potent terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Joe Biden will inherit a considerable mess.

President Barack Obama, never understood the importance of Syria, and the U.S. is still struggling to recover from his folding over the “redline” on use of chemical weapons. President Donald Trump made matters worse in attempting to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria — upon being told soldiers would be required to secure Syrian oilfields, he agreed to a small presence, thereby maintaining some American leverage.

For a decade, skeptics have maintained it’s too late to achieve anything in Syria. But that was never correct.

What’s required is a middle ground between overly-ambitious goals and avoidable pitfalls, a strategy focused on accumulating limited achievements.

This does not require many — perhaps not even any— additional U.S. troops on the ground. But it requires a robust American re-engagement with Syria with clear objectives: weakening the grip of the Assad dictatorship, squeezing Iran and its proxies to the margins and ultimately out of the country; and preventing Turkey from crushing loyal U.S. allies against terrorism.

Biden should maintain pressure on the Assad dictatorship through sanctions. The Caesar Act sanctions which went into effect this year communicates that the reconstruction and international reintegration of Syria cannot be pursued under Assad and his clique. They’ve killed, tortured and displaced too many people, and a reconciliation with them is out of question. There’s room for much tougher sanctions against key regime cronies, institutions and businesses.

But the sanctions must be targeted in order to isolate the regime and its key backers, without punishing or weakening Syrian society. This can be achieved by providing humanitarian assistance exclusively through entities that aren’t manipulated by the regime and focusing aid in areas not under its control.

Biden should not reduce the small U.S. troop presence in Syria. These highly concentrated forces are among the few remaining obstacles to the creation of an Iranian-controlled military corridor arcing through the northern Middle East, from the Islamic Republic to Lebanon’s Mediterranean.

They also have a crucial counterterrorism role. The Islamic State and Al Qaeda are not yet defeated, despite Trump’s claims, and their ambitions remain centered in Syria.

The U.S. should reengage the diplomatic process with other external players, such as Russia and Turkey. The goals should be to isolate terrorist groups and prevent their resurgence, and to ensure that Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, don’t emerge as the big winners from the Syrian war.

Russia has operated in partnership with Iran in Syria, but since the main part of the civil war died down, after the fall of Aleppo to pro-regime forces in early 2017, Moscow and Tehran have found themselves pursuing different, and at times contradictory, goals. Moscow seeks calm in the areas of Syria it cares about, to secure its military bases and maintain growing ties to Gulf countries and Israel, while Iran pursues a path of broader confrontation, viewing Syria and Lebanon as assets in its agenda to expand its regional influence by leveraging confrontation.

One of Washington’s key early goals should be to convince Russia that its gains in Syria are threatened by the broader Iranian agenda for the region. In the long term, Tehran wants complete political control of Damascus, not shared influence with Moscow. 

Assad himself is not keen to be under the thumb of Iran and Hezbollah, and would prefer to be primarily a Russian client. Russian goals are limited and not in conflict with Assad’s agenda, while Iran demands far more of him and plainly views Syria as a potential battleground with Israel and other regional powers.

Washington and Moscow do not share many aims in Syria but there are some important areas of commonality, including combatting the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and easing Iran out. Those goals are even shared with Assad, so progress on those fronts is possible even as the Damascus dictatorship remains sanctioned and stigmatized.

Finally, Washington should be very clear with Turkey that there are limits to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hegemonic agenda in Syria. Biden would do well to recommit to Kurdish allies who fought so well against the Islamic State and have been targeted by the Turkish invasion in the north.

Biden must make it clear that while the U.S. recognizes Turkey’s need to protect its own territory, it is not free to occupy large chunks of Syria indefinitely or attack American allies with impunity. Curbing Turkish adventurism in Syria, the eastern Mediterranean, Libya and elsewhere requires a strong message to Ankara that it must decide if it wants to remain a partner to the U.S. and a NATO ally. Rearming and supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces is key to this, and to almost all U.S. goals in Syria.

This is not an agenda for Middle East adventurism. It’s simply a matter of identifying clear and narrow goals, and pursuing them with limited but sufficient means.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/biden-has-to-get-ready-to-face-a-tea-party-on-steroids-1.1131875

Trump has made the myth of a “stolen election” an article of faith for an increasingly paranoid GOP.

US President-elect Joe Biden’s 2020 campaigns – both in the Democratic primaries and when he beat departing President Donald Trump in the general election – were built on the promise of national reconciliation and a return to the political centre. That was always going to be a tall order, but the post-election aftermath is virtually guaranteeing that partisan antagonism, and concomitant governmental gridlock, will be worse than ever.

While Mr Biden says he wants the deeply divided country to begin to reunite around shared principles and goals, Mr Trump is pushing vigorously, and effectively, to promote extreme outrage among his supporters. Reconciliation cannot begin if much of the country believes that the election was “stolen”, Mr Biden is a usurper and Mr Trump is the “real president”.

Mr Trump and his allies have presented no credible evidence of meaningful irregularities and lost over 50 court challenges on both procedural and factual grounds.

Yet the constant drumbeat of allegations, however fact-free, has by now embedded the myth of the “stolen election” into the belief system of most Republican voters, according to recent polls. It threatens to become a defining creed.

His final month in office could be especially tumultuous. Numerous major newspapers reported that, on Friday, Mr Trump held what was surely one of the most bizarre and disturbing meetings ever in the White House.

Among the ideas seriously contemplated by the President were declaring martial law and using the military to force swing states to redo their elections so that Mr Trump can “win”.

That amounts to serious consideration of a coup d’etat by a sitting US president. Military leaders yet again felt obliged to state publicly that they would not use force to keep him in power.

One adviser describes Mr Trump’s current attitude as seeking any ideas “to stay in office past January 20”. At the meeting he also pondered an executive order seizing control of state voting machines.

Mr Trump will probably never concede defeat and leave the presidency. But the presidency will leave him on January 20 when Mr Biden is inaugurated.

It seems far-fetched for a former president to retain an iron grip on his party without the power of the White House. But Mr Trump could well pull it off. He is likely to go into heavy-duty campaign mode on, or even before January 20, and will almost certainly hold some sort of “Trump 2024” rally at the same time as Mr Biden’s inauguration. Elected Republicans will probably be held to account for which event they attend.

Immediately after the election, many leading Republicans argued that not publicly acknowledging Mr Biden’s victory was merely a way to humour Mr Trump and allow him to ease into a more gracious exit.

This assumption predictably backfired, as they failed to understand that Mr Trump’s masterful demagoguery would trap them into tacitly supporting, or at least not openly contradicting, the “stolen election” mythology. And now that this myth is dominating the political consciousness of many Republican voters, it is becoming an article of faith and a definitive litmus test. That is precisely how Mr Trump will attempt to maintain control of his party.

It sets a new standard whereby ever conceding defeat in an election is anathema for Republicans. Cooperation with the Biden administration may often seem immoral treachery. It might even be difficult for Mr Biden to secure Senate approval for some cabinet appointments, unless Democrats improbably win both Georgia Senate run-off elections on January 5 and gain the narrowest possible control of the Senate.

Challenges to reconciliation will not come just from Republicans. The emerging Biden cabinet is decidedly centrist, angering many left-wing Democrats who never trusted him anyway.

Centrists hoped Mr Trump’s unpopularity would give Democrats a huge victory in Congress along with the White House. Any leftist insurgency could then be contained in the glow of a decisive victory under centrist leadership. But while Mr Biden’s win was comprehensive, Democrats actually lost seats in the House of Representatives and probably will not control the Senate. Leftists are already asserting themselves and they, too, will be militating against compromises as betrayals of principles.

As for Republicans, their determination to not cooperate is clearly signalled in the latest coronavirus relief bill negotiations. These have been complicated by a depressingly predictable though sudden resurgence of Republican concern about budget deficits, which were blithely dismissed during the Trump presidency.

They have also been moving to hamstring the powers of the Department of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank to direct disaster relief and recovery, again attempting to hobble the incoming administration. The national economy may again fall victim to cynical partisan politicking.

Republicans are drifting into an oppositional hysteria that may make the “tea party” extremism of the Barack Obama era look calm and conciliatory.

Mr Trump has often trafficked in conspiracy theories, beginning his political career as the main champion of “Birtherism”, the crude fabrication that Mr Obama was born outside the US and hence ineligible for the presidency. Now he is leaving his own presidency effectively promoting the ideas that not only is Mr Biden an illegitimate president, but the entire US democratic system is a fraud.

Republican leaders must either find a way to convince their voters that this is not actually true or remain in the thrall of Mr Trump for at least the next two years . Almost none of them have even begun to try. Instead, they are allowing their party to become defined by a set of paranoid and dangerous delusions. As ever, they seem to have an inexplicable confidence that they can ultimately control such combustible elements. Or maybe they just do not care.

It is not impossible for Mr Biden to find a way to overcome all of this and really begin American national healing and a centrist resurgence. Much of the public would rejoice at that, but too many political actors have every incentive to oppose it.

His challenge looks far steeper today than immediately after the election. Back then, it merely appeared daunting.

https://reaction.life/ten-years-later-how-the-arab-spring-changed-the-world/

The Arab Spring uprisings exposed chronic shortcomings in Arab republics that remain almost entirely unresolved and reflected a desperate crisis in contemporary Arab political culture, especially at the level of national consciousness. The sources of the rebellions were never mysterious: persistent economic malaise; misrule by patronage-system elites; an absence of accountability, recourse and rule of law; and myriad discontents created by governments that regard their citizenry as problems to be managed.

The Arab Spring was essentially a collective cry for dignity from citizens to their states. Perhaps the reason why the Arab monarchies were largely spared from the unrest – except Bahrain which has experienced numerous uprisings dating back to the 1950s – is that republics promise citizen empowerment in a way subjects of monarchs are not (in addition to the relative wealth of some Arab monarchies).

None of the underlying issues are resolved. Economic malaise and unemployment remain chronic. Except Tunisia, progress towards democratisation has not resulted. Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya are fragment and war-ravaged. Egypt and Syria are more repressive than ever. Meanwhile, transnational religious and/or ideological affiliations and sub-state – local, communal, sectarian or ethnic – identities trump national sentiments. With no shortage of organisations, often backed by regional powers like Iran and Turkey or other Arab countries, offering to champion transnational or sub-national alternatives, these sentiments are all-too easily mobilised to destabilise and undermine Arab states.

Most Arab republics are as hollow and dysfunctional as they were before the rebellions, and many monarchies look brittle. The dignity of Arab citizenship remains elusive. And with traditional power-centers such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq unable to provide regional leadership, the Arab state system is incapable of defending Arab interests in the Middle East. Such leadership now falls to Gulf countries, most notably Saudi Arabia, that are unsuited to, and unenthusiastic about inheriting, this role.

The uprisings were a largely failed experiment, in some cases disastrously so. But the urgent need for Arab reform, growth and change is every bit as desperate as it was ten years ago. And the Saudi experiment in controlled, top-down transformation has yet to prove an effective, let alone transferable, alternative. The peoples of the Arab republics continue to seethe in states that do not meet their basic needs or respect their fundamental rights, and where national consciousness is under effective and sustained attack from sub- and trans-national orientations.

Almost everyone agrees that change must come. But no one has a practicable formula for implementing a such transformation, especially given that it would perforce disempower those who currently control the guns, money, patronage and internal and external support upholding the status quo. Arab political culture seems stuck in deeply engrained patterns of thought that bedevil opposition groups as much as they cripple governments. Yet the unresolved and chronic failures of Arab states and societies almost certainly ensure that if a path to orderly transformation is not discovered, then another set of rebellions is all-but inevitable.

Ten years ago, the marker was set down as a demand for dignity of citizenship and the actual consent of the governed. That demand will not expire. The imperative will resurrect itself, sooner rather than later. Until then the ghosts of the Arab Spring will haunt the Middle East.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-12-16/what-biden-should-do-about-israel-and-palestine?sref=tp95wk9l

His priority should be undoing the mess created by the Trump administration.

One of the most urgent foreign policy tasks facing Joe Biden is repairing the severe damage President Donald Trump has inflicted on U.S. policy towards Israel, and especially the Palestinians. Despite the growing impression, in the salons of Washington as much as the palaces of the Middle East, that the Palestinian issue has become moot, that conflict has demonstrated a persistent ability to suddenly reignite. Resolving it remains crucial to security and stability in the Middle East.

Since the end of the Cold War, there had been a bipartisan American consensus in favor of peace based on a negotiated two-state solution. Trump and several key aides, especially his son-in-law Jared Kushner, spent the past four years trying to destroy that consensus by supporting Israeli annexation of occupied territory in the West Bank, effectively eliminating the prospects for a meaningful Palestinian state.

Biden needs to urgently rebuild robust support for a negotiated peace as the centerpiece of a bipartisan policy. That means not merely ignoring but explicitly repudiating Trump’s proposal of last January that, in effect, invites Israel to annex large chunks of the West Bank.

Biden can draw on the normalization process between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, which are predicated on Israel shelving annexation plans, at least through the end of 2024. That buys time to get American policy back in line with international law, and U.S. and Israeli treaty obligations, most notably the 1993 Declaration of Principlesthey signed with the Palestinians.

Setting the stage for eventual renewed negotiations will require immediate clarity that the U.S. will not support efforts by Israel to use the Trump annexation proposal, as opposed to the agreed-upon 1993 framework, as the starting point.

Such steps should be balanced by encouragement for more Arab countries to engage diplomatically with Israel, while underscoring that annexation and normalization do not mix.

Biden should start that process by immediately rescinding outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s outrageous new order that products made in West Bank settlements be labeled “made in Israel.” It represents a complete betrayal of the 1993 accords that designate borders and settlements as final-status issues to be negotiated and not prejudiced by unilateral actions like annexation.

Biden needs to move quickly to fix things at a practical level too. He should restore U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority, especially if, as it says it will, the PA revises payments to the families of prisoners to address concerns that it could be interpreted as rewarding violence.

Given that the PA has restored pre-existing relations with Israel, including security cooperation, at Biden’s urging, he should restore American diplomatic relations with the Palestinians.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s mission in Washington, the de-facto Palestinian embassy, should be welcomed back. And the U.S. consulate, the de-facto American embassy to the Palestinians, should be extracted from the main embassy now in West Jerusalem, and reopened in occupied East Jerusalem where it can more effectively serve its mission of outreach to Palestinians.

All measures, large and small, should be focused on restoring a constructive American role that can work towards an eventual agreement that allows both peoples their self-determination and first-class citizenship.

Biden needs to make clear that the U.S. is categorically opposed to unilateral annexation and to settlement activity, especially when it alters the strategic equation. Israel needs to face consequences for making the problem significantly more difficult to resolve.

A return to a traditional, constructive stance that emphasizes multilateralism, diplomacy and a rules-based order fits the mainstream of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy

If their goal, as they insist, is to shift U.S. policy in the Middle East to a balancing role based on a robust diplomacy, Biden’s team can’t afford to leave Israel and the Palestinians, where Trump has left them.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a nasty habit of dramatically reasserting its global significance just when it seems to be a historical footnote. Ignoring it would be a huge mistake.

A Resolution of Qatar Boycott Looms, But Can It Last?

Even the UAE seems ready to reconcile but underlying disputes are likely to persist.

The wide-ranging boycott of Qatar imposed in June 2017 by the self-described “anti-terror quartet” of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt finally appears to be on the brink of a broad-based resolution. The outgoing U.S. administration of President Donald J. Trump has made resolving the dispute a priority in its final months and the incoming team of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has strongly indicated its desire not to inherit this standoff among key U.S. partners in the Gulf region. Kuwaiti mediation appeared to bring Riyadh and Doha close to a narrower bilateral reconciliation early in December, but that stalled at the last minute, giving way to what appears to be a broader Gulf Cooperation Council rapprochement. Yet many of the outstanding disagreements may persist, suggesting an uncertain future.

For several years, Washington has been pushing for a resolution of the Gulf states’ standoff. But because the United States did not make its relations with any of these key partners contingent on a specific outcome, its interventions were easily ignored. Over time, however, key actors on both sides clearly began to see the virtue in standing down. With the help of its key regional partner, Turkey, and closer relations with Iran, Qatar was able to develop short-term workarounds for ties with its Gulf neighbors, but in the long run Doha requires working relations with these states, particularly Saudi Arabia.

For their part, the Saudis came to increasingly view the boycott as yielding diminishing returns, and they signaled their interest in finding a solution to both Doha and Washington repeatedly in recent months. For Riyadh, the key is strengthening the coalition against Iran. Increased U.S. pressure on Tehran, Iran’s persistent attacks on U.S. and Saudi interests, and uncertainty about the policies of the incoming Biden administration intensified interest in a unified Gulf position. In addition, Saudi leaders increasingly conceded that the boycott had achieved whatever it was likely to accomplish and Riyadh came to believe it had more to gain than lose by asserting that it has made its point and that it is time to end the boycott.

U.S. and Kuwaiti mediation brought Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the brink of a limited bilateral agreement early in December. Indeed, Qatari officials signaled on Twitter that the Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry was about to make an important announcement regarding the issue, widely understood to be the beginning of a bilateral rapprochement between two Gulf Arab states allied with Washington. But that announcement never came. It appears that rather than proceeding with a more limited bilateral agreement, the potential for and usefulness of a broader GCC reconciliation involving the UAE, which is by far Qatar’s harshest critic, became evident. Talks persisted until late this week when the January 2021 GCC summit was relocated to Riyadh and key UAE officials and analysts began indicating that the UAE is no longer opposedto an agreement and that a “consensus” to end the boycott has been reached.

Hosting the summit in Riyadh allows the agreement to be firmly stamped as “made in Saudi Arabia.” Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani is expected to attend, along with the other Gulf heads of state and government. Details of an agreement remain undisclosed. But Washington has been strongly pushing for the reopening of commercial overflight routes for Qatar Airways in Saudi airspace, the denial of which is by far the biggest practical impact of the boycott. This forced Qatar Airways to take various inefficient circuitous routes and, especially, to obtain overflight permissions from Iran. In the process, Tehran gained important leverage over Doha and, perhaps even more important from the perspective of the Trump administration, $100 million annually in fees for the privilege.

Given the scope of the U.S. “maximum pressure” sanctions, that $100 million is one of the most obvious remaining sources of regular foreign revenue for Tehran that the United States can still try to disrupt. On both scores, therefore, reopening Saudi airspace to Qatari Airways is seen by both Riyadh and Washington as a significant blow to Iran. And both the Trump administration and the Saudi government are seeking to strengthen leverage over Tehran as much as possible in anticipation of an expected conciliatory policy from the incoming Biden administration. If this airspace is reopened, most of the practical impact of the boycott against Qatar will be lifted, and if it is paired with a reopening of the land border with Saudi Arabia, it will be effectively over.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE will have their expectations of Qatar as well. They will continue to press Doha to considerably moderate the use of Qatari-funded media, particularly Al Jazeera in Arabic, to promote populist opposition movements throughout the Arab world. They will continue to press Qatar to attenuate promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist groups, which a number of other Gulf Arab countries have designated as terrorist organizations. And they will seek a reduction in support for pan-Arab nationalist rhetoric as well. Most important for Saudi Arabia, though, will be demands that Qatar cease supporting and hosting opposition groups from other Gulf Arab countries and meddling in the kingdom’s domestic affairs.

Over the long run, there will also be a strong expectation that Qatar will significantly diminish its ties with Iran and also even begin to distance itself from Turkey. This last point may prove wishful thinking. The Ankara-Doha axis is now well established, powerful, and operating on the ground in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa. It has been strengthened by the emergence of Ankara as the senior partner in the relationship and the hub and epicenter of a much more vertically integrated network of Sunni Islamist actors in the region. What had been an inchoate, loose, and informal set of alliances has solidified into a new coalition in the region with Turkey serving as its clear leader and Qatar as its main cheerleader and bankroller.

Because these disagreements regarding the role of political Islam, Islamist groups, and the emerging Turkish reengagement with the Arab world will almost certainly not be resolved, underlying fault lines that gave rise to the boycott are likely to persist, as they did following an earlier diplomatic standoff. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf Arab countries withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar in a dispute in 2013-14 over precisely these issues. That was resolved through a set of agreements that were supposed to address the question of Qatar’s policies that are seen by other Gulf powers as undermining their national interests. But Saudi Arabia and the UAE concluded that Qatar had not changed its ways and their frustration ultimately resulted in the 2017 boycott.

Even if this current GCC standoff is resolved at the January 5 Riyadh summit, given the number of issues likely to remain unresolved, there is significant potential for future discord and perhaps another crisis over Qatari policies sometime in the foreseeable future.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/why-georgia-s-run-offs-could-determine-the-future-of-the-republican-party-1.1123815

The Georgia Senate runoffs on January 5 will indicate how damaging the fracturing has become.

The US political system is designed to funnel Americans into two giant and uneasy coalitions known as the Republican and Democratic parties. So, following every election, internal divisions typically flare.

With Joe Biden set to be sworn in as president next month, the Democratic split between moderates and progressives will be significant. But Republicans are fractured into at least four camps that are already clashing over the two Georgia run-off elections on January 5 that will determine control of the US Senate.

The smallest but most extreme faction is fixated on US President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that he won the election but was robbed through massive fraud.

Many less hysterical Trump supporters also embrace this mythology, despite zero evidence and almost 50 unsuccessful post-election lawsuits. But these dead-enders led by attorney Sidney Powell demand that Republicans boycott the run-offs because the system is irredeemably corrupted.

That could effectively gift Democrats control of the Senate. It’s self-defeating, but more coherent than the narrative embraced by Mr Trump and his political disciples, especially in state legislatures and the US House of Representatives – who make up the second camp.

This camp agrees that the system is indeed rigged and fraudulent, but only when it comes to Mr Trump’s defeat. That somehow doesn’t apply when Republicans won races on those same ballots, or to the Georgia run-offs either. Or, rather, it will apply, but only if one or both of the Democrats win.

That’s essentially the standard that Mr Trump outlined in 2016 and again this year: the system is not to be trusted unless he or his allies win, in which case it is.

Therefore, while denouncing Georgia’s Republican officials, the hardware and software used, and pretty much everything else about the November election, they nonetheless strongly urge Georgia Republicans to vote on January 5. Republican Party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a key Trump ally, was asked by a Georgian why he should bother voting in a pre-determined election, which seems a logical question. “It’s not decided,” she indignantly retorted.

Republicans trying to make sense of this quasi-official double-speak must experience profound vertigo.

A third bloc comprises mainstream party leaders, including many Republican senators. They remain essentially supportive of Mr Trump but avoid conspiracy theories. They are clearly uncomfortable with Ms Powell’s fabrications as well as those being pushed by Mr Trump’s formal legal team, led by Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis (incidentally, Ms Powell’s pronouncements have led to her ousting as one of the President’s official attorneys).

The aforementioned party leaders are lukewarm, neither endorsing nor repudiating – indeed rarely mentioning – the campaign’s claims. Yet they are careful not to refer to Mr Biden as the President-elect or to a forthcoming Biden administration. Although they all know more than enough electoral college votes have now been officially certified by states to guarantee his January 20 inauguration, only 25 Republicans of 249 in Congress will concede that Mr Biden won.

Many Republican stalwarts made it clear before Mr Trump won their party’s nomination in 2016 that they did not like or respect him. But they fear his political dominance and grip on their voters, so their instinct is always to humour him.

Vice-President Mike Pence appears to have effectively joined this camp, keeping a vigilant distance from the campaign against the election, which is no longer promoted under the familiar Trump-Pence banner, but now usually in Mr Trump’s name only. This go-along camp is quietly preparing for life in opposition while trying not to do or say anything to annoy Mr Trump or the Republican base. “What’s the downside,” they ask, “of humouring him for a few weeks more?”

The fourth group of Republicans – the “personally responsible and politically vulnerable” camp – can readily answer that question: incalculable, and literally dangerous, damage is being inflicted on democracy, civic norms and a basic respect for the truth.

The most important members of this fourth camp are Republican officials in key swing states who, because of their positions, are personally responsible according to state laws and constitutions for election processes.

These are mostly ardent Trump backers. But the governors of Georgia and Arizona, the Secretary of State of Georgia, and leaders of the Republican-dominated state legislatures in Michigan and Wisconsin are not merely being asked by Mr Trump for political or rhetorical support. They are being urged to break the law, betray their oaths of office, disenfranchise their constituents and take a range of unprecedented and inadmissible actions to hand Mr Trump a victory despite his defeat by over seven million votes. Long-term consequences for such actions are unpredictable but guaranteed, and possibly dire.

Despite Mr Trump’s constant entreaties, threats and attacks, no Republican-appointed judge or state-level Republican official has been willing to break the rules for him. On Saturday, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp rejected Mr Trump’s demand that he invalidate the election, incurring presidential wrath.

Even the President’s own administration officials have demurred. The head of the election security agency was dismissed and vilified for calling the 2020 vote “the most secure election in American history”. Attorney General William Barr enraged Mr Trump by confirming that the Justice Department found no evidence of meaningful irregularities.

The good news is that personally accountable officials have been unwilling to cheat. The bad news is that it apparently takes the prospect of major legal or political consequences to force many Republicans into the pro-truth contingent. And many disgruntled Republicans seem mainly upset that Mr Trump could be hurting the party in Georgia and beyond, not wreaking havoc on the democratic system.

It was wrenching to watch Georgia election officials, on the verge of tears, pleading with the President to stop declaring that the election was rigged because Republican officials and others could be killed by enraged Trump supporters inflamed by increasingly violent rhetoric from his key advocates.

The Georgia run-offs will provide the earliest indication of which of these Republican camps is winning and how damaging this bitter internecine conflict has become.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-12-06/egypt-s-war-on-civil-society-is-self-defeating?sref=tp95wk9l

But the release of three rights campaigners is a reassuring sign that international pressure works.

After a major international outcry, Egyptian authorities have released three prominent human-rights activists. They were arrested last month after meeting with a group of Western diplomats to discuss civil liberties in the Arab world’s most populous country.

It’s not clear what President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi is hoping to gain from the crackdown, but it seems to have backfired. The latest detentions have drawn much-needed attention to a broad campaign of repression against civil society in Egypt.

The three rights campaigners, Gasser Abdel-Razek, Mohamed Basheer and Karim Ennarah, are members of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, one of the few civil-liberties groups still functional in the country. While the arrests weren’t unusual in Sissi’s Egypt, the relatively quick release was. An international campaign involving activists, politicians and celebrities plainly had its intended effect.

The timing of the arrests was curious. Jess Kelly, Ennarah’s wife, has suggested that they were a deliberate test of the incoming Joe Biden administration, which is expected to be more demanding on human rights from American allies than President Donald Trump has been. That argument was bound to gain traction for the case in Washington, but it’s unlikely that Sisi’s government was deliberately trying to bait the next administration.

The likelihood, arguably more depressing, is that this was essentially a case of more of the same.

The crackdown has gone far beyond the three rights campaigners. The government has recently added over 25 detained critics to its list of terrorism suspects, including the noted political activist Alaa Abdel Fattah and a former presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abou Fotouh. These charges range from the implausible to the absurd depending on the individuals in question, but none of them are convincing.

The government has also executed 57 prisoners in the past two months, a rate of capital punishment unheard-of in recent Egyptian history.

Repression isn’t restricted to the political realm. It’s also increasingly puritanical and prurient, with numerous models, actresses, directors and photographers arrested for “indecency,” for violating “family values,” and other similar supposed offenses.

It is hard to understand what all of this is supposed to accomplish. Since coming to power in July 2013, the Sisi regime has gone from repressing its critics, especially the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, to attacking all opposition, including liberals and rights campaigners. It now appears in open war against Egyptian civil society at large.

Sisi may feel that he can still draw on a reservoir of nationalistic support and lingering horror at the prospect of Islamist rule. But the former general is undermining the case that he is a better alternative.

If the government feels so insecure that it cannot tolerate any criticism or cultural dynamism, those fears are likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Egyptians have already demonstrated twice — rising up against the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship in 2011 and against the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Mohammed Morsi in 2013 — that their patience with unbridled suppression is, ultimately, limited.

It’s not only Egyptian popular goodwill that’s being squandered; so too is international tolerance for repression. It can’t be lost on the government that Joe Biden and the Democrats are unlikely to be as indulgent as Trump, who referred to Sisi as “my favorite dictator.”

The glass-half-full view is that the release of the three rights campaigners shows Cairo is still susceptible to pressure, even if it comes from international civil society rather than the American president.

That’s good news, because Egypt needs continued American goodwill. And Washington, too, needs a robust and responsible Egypt to continue on its path of economic revival — limited and overleveraged, but surprisingly robust — and regional leadership. The stability of the Middle East depends on Egypt playing an engaged and responsible role. Cairo hasn’t been able to do that in many years because of ongoing domestic turmoil.

Heavy-handed repression and assaults on civil society are not a formula for Egyptian political stability, economic revitalization and regional resurgence. That’s a message Egypt’s friends should send, loudly and clearly, to its leader.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-12-03/time-ts-ripe-for-a-saudi-qatar-reconciliation?sref=tp95wk9l

As a farewell gift to Trump and a welcoming present to Biden, Riyadh may agree to an effective end of the Qatar boycott

It looks like the Trump administration’s effort to get some important last-minute gains in the Middle East may be paying off. On a trip to the region this week, the president’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy, Jared Kushner, is reported to have engineered a preliminary agreement between Saudi Arabia and Qatar to end their rift.

The key to the potential rapprochement between Riyadh and Doha is the reopening of a crucial flight route through Saudi airspace for Qatari civilian aircraft. This was cut off in June 2017, when Saudi Arabia, along with  the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt, began an economic embargo on Qatar.

The loss of overflight rights has been by far the biggest practical blow to Qatar from the embargo, and their restoration would represent a major breakthrough. A bonus for the Saudis would be depriving their arch-enemy Iran of the $100 million a year Qatar pays for alternative routes over Iranian airspace. Given the impact of U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic, those payments are a vital source of foreign exchange that the regime in Tehran can ill afford to lose.

It is unclear what Qatar will agree to do in return. The original list of 13 demands from the boycotting nations included the shuttering of the Doha-based Al Jazeera network, the closure of a Turkish military base in Qatar and a scaling down of ties with Iran. At the very least, Riyadh will expect the Qataris to forswear activities that might conflict with Saudi interests and anything that smacks of meddling in Saudi domestic politics.

For the Trump administration, getting Qatar back into the Gulf Arab fold is part of a broader push to strengthen the coalition against Iran, and to make it harder for President-elect Joe Biden to reverse Trump’s confrontational policies and return to the diplomatic outreach of the Barack Obama years.

A raft of last-minute additional sanctions on Tehran are part of that effort, as undoubtedly is the assassination — presumably by Israel — of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist who led Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. The intention is to leave Biden with the most tense and confrontational relationship with Iran possible, short of open conflict.

It will be up to the Biden team whether to view these late salvos as useful leverage or burdensome obstacles, or some combination of the two.

It’s significant that Kushner and his team did not visit Abu Dhabi, undoubtedly because the UAE has made it clear it is not interested in a rapprochement with Qatar. The UAE views the standoff as primarily ideological, and an effort to compel Qatar to stop supporting Sunni Islamist groups, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, throughout the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia shares that goal, but without the Emirati passion. Riyadh has viewed Doha less as an ideological menace and more as an intolerable upstart, a tiny neighboring country meddling in matters above its station — including, the Saudis maintain, in their internal affairs.

Riyadh seems to have decided that it has made its point, and will now use a rapprochement under the pro-American (and at least implicitly, anti-Iranian) banner to simultaneously please both the outgoing Trump administration and the incoming Biden team.

The two other obvious measures that might serve the same purposes, ending the war in Yemen and initiating diplomatic relations with Israel, are both more risky and complex than ending the feud with Qatar.

Riyadh may be hoping to repair its strained relationship with Democrats in Washington, who have been outraged by Saudi Arabia’s close relations with Trump, the war in Yemen, the murder of Saudi journalist Jamaal Khashoggi and worsening human rights abuses in the kingdom under the de-facto rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Making up with Qatar might not mollify the progressive left, but it would help set a positive new tone with the Biden foreign policy team.

The UAE, though, will likely continue to resist any compromise with Qatar, and dismiss any promises by Doha as insincere. The Emiratis will argue that Qatar has joined Turkey in building a regional bloc at odds with both the pro-Iranian and pro-American camps. Kushner’s avoidance of the UAE this time around suggests he’s not interested in hearing that again just now.

Washington has failed to end the standoff among its Gulf Arab allies since the summer of 2017 because it never made relations with any of the key players dependent on a specific outcome. When U.S. officials talked about the need to end the embargo, it was regarded as a suggestion rather than a real demand.

That position was essentially driven by the Pentagon, which has key assets and military bases in Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE, and did not want to complicate its operational military arrangements by intervening in what many considered to be merely “a family dispute.”

For the UAE, it is much more than that, a struggle to define the parameters of mainstream Arab political culture for the coming decades.

Qatar has long been ready for a resolution. It developed various workarounds for the embargo, but recognizes that it ultimately needs to get along with its neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia. And the Saudis, too, may finally be ready to reconcile, given the intensification of the conflict with Iran and a concomitant desire to circle Arab wagons.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/america-s-elections-exposed-flaws-but-also-the-strength-of-its-institutions-1.1120488

There’s compelling evidence on both sides of the argument. But this shouldn’t even be a question at all — and it certainly is.

With the smoke finally clearing from one of the most dangerous and divisive debacles in US political history, Americans are starting to survey the wreckage and assess the damage. The sad, and often pathetic, saga of the 2020 election is effectively over. Outgoing President Donald Trump has no plausible path to block the certification and formalization of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

The story of the past four years and especially the past four weeks has been an extraordinary stress-test for the institutional infrastructure of the American system. It seems to have held together but its profound vulnerabilities have been exposed as never before.

So the question now is, was the outcome reassuring or alarming? Is the constitutional glass half-full or half-empty? Any answer can only be tentative because dynamics are still unfolding and there is so much compelling evidence on both sides of the argument.

A positive case would concede that for the first time a remarkably unsuited individual, with no regard for the fundamental logic of the democratic system, ascended to the presidency. And while the other guardrails put in place by the framers of the Constitution – particularly the Senate’s refusal to hold a meaningful impeachment trial or seriously examine the evidence presented by the House of Representatives – generally proved ineffective, the ultimate check, the will of the voters in a national election, prevailed and blocked a dramatic slide towards authoritarianism.

This case would add that it is perhaps unrealistic to expect a political procedure such as an impeachment trial not to be determined by the partisan interests of duly elected officials and that is part of the anticipated process.

It would note that some of Mr Trump’s worst excesses were blocked by courts, the Congress or even his own officials, and that many of his more controversial actions will be reversible by Mr Biden, in some cases fairly easily.

The positive argument would dwell on the November 3 election. None of the nightmare scenarios anticipated beforehand played out. State and local officials throughout the country, Republicans and Democrats alike, worked diligently, honestly and often together to ensure a free and fair vote with the highest participation rate in over a century.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and given the large number of other significant obstacles, the US held one of its best elections in modern history. The election security agency of Mr Trump’s own administration called it “the most secure in American history,” with “no evidence” of any votes being tampered with or “in any way compromised.”

State officials, including diehard Republicans, have refused to intervene to help Mr Trump remain president even though he lost. Courts, too, including those dominated by Republicans and even his own appointees, have derisively dismissed his efforts to invalidate huge numbers of votes based on spurious technicalities.

Mr Trump may have been a lawless and potentially dangerous president, it would conclude, but the real test was whether he could avoid being voted out of office. The answer is a resounding no. And indeed, all his efforts to change or ignore the outcome and stay in power failed completely and never gained any traction at all.

US democracy has triumphed, this positive narrative concludes, because it proved to be far stronger than was widely feared.

There is another, negative interpretation of the same set of facts that highlights the inadequacies and vulnerabilities that have been exposed.

If the only effective guardrail against a president who disregards the norms that undergird democracy is a finally-balanced quadrennial election, then that system is so vulnerable as to be fundamentally broken. Mr Trump’s tenure in office proved that existing checks on executive power are woefully insufficient.

No matter how badly the president is behaving, Congress apparently will only act in a partisan and not an institutional manner. Courts, too, have limited their own authority. And this administration argued the president is literally above the law and, while in office, cannot be investigated, let alone indicted, for any unlawful act.

Even the election is not really a good-news story, according to this narrative. It would note that a couple of hundred thousand, or even less, flipped votes in key areas would have given Mr Trump another electoral college victory, despite a massive popular vote defeat, and what a second Trump term might have meant for democratic institutions.

It would highlight Mr Trump’s ongoing considerable support, his refusal to concede, his bizarre conspiracy theories and verbal attacks on the election and the American democratic system itself, endorsed by most leading Republicans – except the officials who oversaw the election process.

Before November 3, Mr Trump was campaigning more against the election than his opponent, and now most of the Republican Party has joined him in an ongoing campaign against the election and implicitly, the entire system.

Plainly if Mr Trump had found a way to invalidate the results, he would have done so. All evidence suggests that most leading national Republicans would have supported that. Given the stances they have taken, how could they not? What else could they say?

Plausible nightmare scenarios illustrated how many gaps and ambiguities would have plagued the system in the event of a closer outcome.

So, the glass half-empty narrative would emphasize how close the US democratic system came to collapse and how easily it might in the future, especially with growing Republican indifference or even antipathy to its basic structures.

On balance, the alarmist argument is far more persuasive. If proponents of the ongoing strength of the US democratic system can point at best to a half-full glass, the institutional structures are at grave risk.

The last remaining guardrail, the national election, held. But since that is probably because the result was not closer, within “cheating distance,” and only a few small changes could have brought that guardrail crashing down as well, anyone who is not deeply alarmed is not paying close enough attention.