https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-30/iran-is-trying-to-play-the-saudis-against-the-us-it-won-t-work?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Five rounds of talks have yielded a truce in Yemen and perhaps renewed diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran.

With US President Joe Biden having departed the Middle East, the region’s two prime antagonists are thinking about just getting along. Iran and Saudi Arabia, having completed five rounds of talks in Iraq over the past year, both said last week they were moving toward higher-level negotiations on reconciliation. Paradoxically, this budding rapprochement between friend and foe offers important opportunities for Washington.

After severing diplomatic ties following a January 2016 mob attack on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, the Riyadh government hoped sanctions on Iran by President Donald Trump’s administration might produce a change in Iranian conduct. Instead, Iran became more aggressive than ever, culminating with a devastating missile strike on Saudi Aramco facilities in September 2019.

The Trump administration, usually bellicose toward Iran, turned a blind eye, noting that no Americans had been killed. That proved a final straw for the Saudis. They were already upset that the Barack Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran ignored two main concerns — Iran’s drone and missile arsenal, and its network of armed gangs in Arab countries including Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

The Saudis concluded that Washington was no longer reliable, and that if they wanted their top security issues involving Tehran to be on the negotiating table, they were going to put them there by themselves. After the 2020 US election, that realization dovetailed with the Biden administration’s encouragement of diplomacy over the use of force in the region.

The formal reconciliation talks began in April 2021 at the Baghdad airport; Iraq constituting something approximating neutral ground. Initially, little progress was made. The Saudis focused on getting Iran to pressure its Houthi clients in Yemen to agree to a cease-fire and eventual peace settlement in a war that has turned into a quagmire for Riyadh. The Iranians wanted only to discuss restoring diplomatic relations.

But after the fifth round earlier this year, and amid the growing sense that Iran was stubbornly blocking Biden’s effort to revive the nuclear deal, there was a minor, but real, breakthrough. Responding to Iranian prodding, the Houthis finally agreed to a truce, which has lasted more than two months and allowed significant humanitarian relief into the beleaguered country.

The Saudis’ securing and maintaining the cease-fire in the bloody conflict pleased the White House and Congress. Riyadh also took the opportunity to finally rid itself of the obstreperous Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, replacing him with a new Presidential Leadership Council.

Another round of talks, which seems imminent, will come at a pivotal moment in US relations with friends and foes in the Middle East. Biden’s visit was intended to repair strained US-Saudi relations. But perhaps more importantly, the president encouraged Saudi Arabia to join other Arab countries, and even Israel, in building a set of informal cooperative security arrangements. These would include air- and missile-defense systems to offset Iran’s increasingly powerful arsenal.

The eventual aim of such expanded collaboration is for the US military to reduce its Middle East footprint, doing less with more, because regional cooperation could prove more effective and sustainable than outside intervention.

Not everything is going smoothly. There are already signs that the Houthis may break the uneasy truce in Yemen. Iran will play a central role in whether that happens, because it uses such militias to increase or relieve pressure on its adversaries, adjusting violence like turning a spigot.

It’s also clear that Tehran hopes to use the reconciliation talks with Riyadh to drive a wedge between the US and Saudi Arabia. The idea is to make the Saudis choose between either rebuilding close cooperation with Washington or achieving rapprochement with Iran and extraction from the Yemen war.

It’s a crude trap. Washington can outflank Tehran by strengthening security commitments to Saudi Arabia, while making it clear it expects greater Saudi cooperation on energy production and pricing, keeping Russia and China at arm’s length, and being open to greater regional security coordination. The Gulf Arab countries still have major doubts about US commitment and reliability, but they understand there’s no practical alternative to American support.

Iranian media are playing up Saudi Arabia’s supposed enthusiasm for wide-ranging reconciliation, but in fact the Saudis remain highly skeptical. The US and Saudi Arabia can give the Iranians a set of clear choices: They can have relations restored with the Saudis, a renewed nuclear agreement with Washington, and respect for legitimate security concerns — but only on reasonable terms, starting with curbing violence by their regional proxies.

The partnership between Washington and Riyadh may not be as strong as it once was, but it’s clearly on the mend. And it’s certainly still strong enough to be able to show Iran that it can’t score cheap victories by trying to divide them.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/07/26/america-has-seen-political-theatre-in-the-past-but-the-jan-6-hearings-were-unparalleled/

The US has seen grand political theatre in the past but not much like the January 6 hearings.

Last Thursday, the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, and the broader campaign by former US president Donald Trump to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, completed its initial schedule.

New evidence and witnesses mean hearings will resume in September. But, for now, the first season of an extremely well-produced, gripping TV show – call it “American Coup” – has wrapped up with a final two-hour episode highlighting Mr Trump’s personal dereliction of duty as the attack unfolded.

The January 6 hearings seek to painstakingly inform Americans – especially Republicans – about essential realities many refuse to acknowledge

These hearings are among the most consequential ever, but don’t much resemble congressional inquiries of the past.

A great deal of credit for their effectiveness ironically belongs to House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy. His spectacular blunder of declining participation has allowed the committee to function as something approaching a “truth – although not yet reconciliation – commission” of the kind convened in numerous countries that suffered traumatic convulsions.

Mr McCarthy attempted to appoint two diehard supporters of Mr Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rightly refused their involvement. These congressmen, most notably Jim Jordan of Ohio, are notorious for shameless grandstanding and stunts, and would have most likely ensured endless disruptive histrionics. But Ms Pelosi agreed that Mr McCarthy’s other three appointees could serve.

As Mr McCarthy recently confirmed on Fox News, he withdrew all co-operation to try to dismiss the investigation as a partisan sham. Ms Pelosi then outflanked him by appointing two very conservative and otherwise loyal Republicans – Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – who are outspoken critics of Mr Trump’s attempted coup. That ensured the committee is indeed bipartisan yet speaks in a unified voice that rejects the former president’s conspiracy theories and is determined to tell the truth about the post-election fiasco and, especially, the January 6 insurrection.

That is how the committee has managed to present such a seamless, artful and authoritative chronicle – devastatingly drawn mainly from evidence given by former Trump loyalists and officials – and has outlined an initial public record of the first attempted coup in US history.

Moreover, their narrative is squarely aimed at swing voters and, above all, reachable Republicans, arguing that whatever they think about policy, the Democrats, Mr Biden and the election outcome, Mr Trump’s reckless irresponsibility renders him permanently unfit for any return to high national office.

There has never been anything quite like this.

Modern congressional hearings began with the explosion of television following the Second World War. The country’s attention was riveted in 1948 when a Time magazine editor, Whittaker Chambers, testified that in the 1930s he had been close comrades in the Communist Party with a former high-ranking State Department official and then-head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Alger Hiss.

Hiss was initially able to brush aside Chambers’ allegations, claiming they had never met. But it quickly became clear this was untrue. It eventually emerged that both men had served as Soviet spies in the 1930s. Hiss was eventually imprisoned for perjury, the statute of limitations on espionage having expired.

It was unparalleled American political theatre, and nothing that has followed has come close to such a dramatic, poignant, and tragic unraveling of bitter personal and national truths. But it was entirely unscripted, and more closely resembled a trial than anything else.

Anti-Communist hearings remained a staple in the 1950s. Demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy shot to fame by destroying countless lives and careers with unfounded accusations of treason at hearings, until his own comeuppance at the 1953-1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. After failing to secure special treatment for a conscripted former staffer, McCarthy accused military leaders of leftist disloyalty. Yet his own reputation was left in tatters after combative televised proceedings revealed his recklessness and dishonesty.

Significant hearings in the 1970s and ’80s were also effectively confrontational and/or investigative rather than expository.

The 1973 Watergate hearings brought down President Richard Nixon by slowly unearthing his corruption. The Church Committee hearings of 1975 probed a sordid history of political abuses by the FBI, CIA, and other agencies against dissident Americans such as Dr Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders. The 1987 Iran Contra hearings discovered how Ronald Reagan’s administration violated the law to funnel lethal support to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

The historical threads from these dramas intertwine and unravel to this day. Before being brought down by much later hearings aimed at him, Nixon became a national figure through the Hiss-Chambers saga. Mr Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, was a key aide to McCarthy and the primary antagonist against the military in those legendary hearings.

The January 6 hearings seek to painstakingly inform Americans – especially Republicans – about essential realities many refuse to acknowledge and to break through a stone wall of psychic denial.

Their closest antecedent wasn’t about politics at all, but organised crime. The Valachi hearings of 1963 revealed a reality that, for still-unclear reasons, the FBI aggressively denied for decades: a national crime syndicate, the Mafia, had infected much of American social, political and economic life.

The FBI’s already threadbare denials definitively collapsed when scores of leading gangsters from around the country were apprehended by astonished local cops at a 1957 “commission” meeting in a small town in upstate New York. After that, an opportunity was required to finally explain the Mafia’s existence and power.

Joseph Valachi, a veteran but low-level and highly disgruntled mafioso, was the first turncoat to publicly break “omerta”, the code of silence. Although he provided lots of genuinely new and valuable facts and history, the FBI prompted him, and larded his testimony with, large amounts of information about Mafia activities – especially outside New York City – of which he was otherwise unaware but which they needed to expose.

At spellbinding hearings featuring this renegade mobster, all major aspects of the Mafia – and the building blocks of a massive cultural industry beginning with the best-selling book, and subsequent blockbuster movie adaptation, The Godfather – became firmly established in American minds. While these definitive stories were drawn largely from the Valachi hearings, coming full circle, The Godfather II included fictional scenes vividly reinventing them. (In yet another twist, Cohn was a noted mob lawyer in the 1970s and 80s.)

That systematic explication of crime, conspiracy, and an ongoing threat to society from almost 60 years ago bears the closest resemblance to the January 6 hearings. And while reconciliation may be a long way off, the truth that the committee is establishing beyond any reasonable doubt is unmistakably having its own profound impact on the American national narrative. Crucially, most viewers have been left wanting more.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/07/20/biden-needs-to-quickly-come-back-from-a-year-of-historic-unpopularity/

Biden’s policies are mostly defensible and sometimes excellent but his unwillingness to be honest with the public is wrecking his popularity.  

There’s much to criticize about Joe Biden’s performance thus far. Yet, the 46th US President’s sustained unpopularity – close to that of his predecessor, Donald Trump, who he now only narrowly defeats in hypothetical one-on-one races in swing states – is hard to explain.

He’s had policy botches, such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and major challenges, several stemming from the coronavirus pandemic.

Still, his administration has been relatively scandal-free and stable, with an extremely low turnover rate. The tasks are generally getting done. That some of the bitterest criticism comes from the far left of his own party, which claims to feel betrayed, should bolster his position with the centre and centre-right – but no.

Unless Mr Biden quickly recovers from this year-long bout of historic unpopularity, the causes will be studied for decades. But even now it is clear that the Biden administration’s messaging mistakes are well worth a “hot take” consideration as the main suspect.

Take what is certainly the main source of discontent: inflation. The rate is now about 9 percent annually, the highest since the early 1980s. Americans have not seen such numbers in almost half a century and are angry. For low-income families this means significant suffering, if not calamity. Even those who can afford higher prices are dismayed.

Few Americans care that this is a global crisis largely produced by the pandemic, or that much of the developed world is experiencing even worse rates. Since it has come as an unpleasant shock, all that most Americans want to hear is what you’re going to do about it.

But it should not have come as a shock. Allowing it to have been a shock was itself a messaging failure. If the administration seriously believed that the massive coronavirus relief spending at the beginning of Mr Biden’s administration – $1.9 trillion in the American Reiscue Plan alone – wasn’t going to risk significant inflation, such wilful blindness is its own form of incompetence.

Surely they knew such spending could overheat the economy and contribute to inflationary pressures. Yet they never explained to the public that this spending was needed to stave off a nationwide unemployment crisis and other catastrophes, and that everyone should brace for a potential surge in inflation.

Instead, when inflation hit, the administration promised the problem would go away, and then blamed “corporate greed”, and a range of other facile excuses. They were right to make the difficult choice they made. The public should be thanking them for that.

But since they never explained what they were doing, they are getting castigated both for inflation and for the fact that unemployment is so low that businesses are having a hard time finding workers.

More than a year ago, Mr Biden needed to give a primetime address to the nation to bluntly say: “We had to choose between saving your jobs or risking a period of higher prices. We saved the jobs. Now we will all work together to bring down the prices.”

Because he didn’t, the austerity-like cooling measures required to do exactly that will feel like yet more unnecessary pain. And once again, they’re going to get the blame for everything bad and no credit for what is good.

Mr Biden just experienced another instance where he could have saved himself a lot of unnecessary grief by levelling with the American public early and bluntly. His Middle East trip was roundly criticised in the western media, largely because of his visit to Saudi Arabia and his meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

During the primary and presidential campaigns, Mr Biden vowed to make US outrage at the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi a centrepiece of his policy towards the kingdom and he even spoke of making it “a pariah”. That was effective politics, especially with regard to his own party’s left flank.

But it was obviously never going to be a basis for US foreign policy. The US-Saudi partnership has endured for almost 80 years because it rests on strong fundamentals, especially maintaining regional security and stability and defending the status quo.

Mr Biden had well over a year to prepare Americans for the fact that he was going to have to repair relations with the Saudi government and the Crown Prince. To help make the case, Mr Biden should have explained that he had indeed taken a range of significant measures to express US anger about the Khashoggi murder, including releasing CIA findings holding the crown prince responsible for the killing and enforcing a range of sanctions against implicated Saudi individuals.

Then Mr Biden should have described how, despite these measures, Saudi Arabia has been cooperating with a range of US requests including maintaining a truce in Yemen despite serious provocations from the Houthis, taking in Afghan refugees, extending financial support to US friends in Lebanon and Iraq, siding with Washington against Moscow at the UN, and increasing oil production (without breaking the existing OPEC+ agreement) to help control the spike in gas prices, largely caused by Russia’s Ukraine invasion.

Eventually, and only at the last minute, in a Washington Post commentary, Mr Biden told his fellow Americans that, whatever his personal feelings, he was elected to protect the interests of the American people and the country and that, therefore, he was going to Saudi Arabia. Coming when it did, it sounded defensive and flimsy instead of the simple truth that it is.

These are just two examples. The international relations analyst Brian Katulis has insightfully catalogued the administration’s extraordinarily muddled messaging on foreign policy – despite its astoundingly successful performance in reviving and revitalising Nato and the Western alliance in Europe to confront Russia and support Ukraine – and the story isn’t much better on the domestic front.

It is easy to imagine Republican and left-wing Democratic voices retorting that no amount of skillful messaging could make Mr Biden and his policies look good. But such predictable ideological carping explains nothing.

Unless Mr Biden rebounds relatively quickly and dramatically, a serious and complex explanation for this bout of extreme unpopularity will be required. For now, we can at least be sure that if his administration were not so dreadful at messaging – even when it comes to usually defensible, and sometimes excellent, policies – the president’s poll numbers couldn’t possibly be quite this dismal.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/07/12/why-do-people-think-of-the-republicans-as-americas-patriotic-party/

The Democratic center that is more in touch with American values, history, traditions and constitutional law.

Last week, the United States celebrated its 246 birthday amid the usual flag-waving enthusiasm. But dire national divisions and the unambiguous threat to democracy posed by an increasingly extremist Republican right, and to liberty posed by the equally extreme Supreme Court, raise difficult and urgent questions.Yet it’s a golden opportunity for the Democrats to redefine the terms of the American debate, if they answer them properly.

What do “freedom” and “liberty” really mean? And why have mainstream Democrats, including the Joe Biden administration, not fought harder over these crucial national tropes and symbols that are often absurdly monopolized by right-wing extremists who are typically the antithesis of patriotism?

The anti-Constitution and anti-democracy mob that attacked Congress on January 6, brutally assaulting police with flagpoles still bearing the US and pro-law enforcement banners, is the ultimate example of this political and cultural dissonance. Right-wingers who joined, supported, or tolerated the insurrection invariably call themselves “patriots”, even as they violently attack the country’s foundational system.

Their leader, former president Donald Trump, is a master of phony nationalistic virtue-signaling. At a notorious annual right-wing jamboree of anti-American lunacy, Mr Trump famously hugged and kissed the US flag, grabbing it as if it belonged to him –- as if it were one of the “beautiful” women he told Access Hollywood, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet… I don’t even wait….Grab them by the pussy.”

Yet he habitually sided with US adversaries, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggested his innumerable vicious assassinations were not an issue because “our country does plenty of killing also,” and routinely savaged core institution such as the military, FBI and intelligence services.

Nonetheless he succeeded in establishing himself as a “nationalist” with his “America First” slogan (that has a long and sordid pro-fascist history). Similarly, the most oppressive and exploitative right-wing extremists in Congress unite in a “Freedom Caucus.”

Democrats rarely play this patriotism-signaling game, but it’s a big mistake. Their extreme left-wing is, at best, uncomfortable with patriotic sentiments and symbols due to their, often reasonable, critique of US racial history and realities, and also their utterly deranged slogans like “defund the police.” Republicans have used them to paint all Democrats as anti-American nuts.

Yet the mainstream Democratic Party, led by Mr Biden, remains centrist and sincerely patriotic. Though they’ve been far more supportive in recent years than Republicans of not just the Constitution but also the FBI, CIA, veterans and often the military itself, Democrats have allowed themselves to be perceived as insufficiently patriotic.

This nationalistic virtual-signaling deficit is largely their own fault. Although the Trump-inflected Republican Party generally speaks exclusively to and for non-urban, white and Christian Americans, and pushes an exceptionally divisive agenda, they nonetheless speak to Americans as a national identity group. In their speeches, Democrats often sound like they are going down a rhetorical checklist of key constituencies instead of promoting a broadly unifying national narrative, although exactly that message of patriotic unity delivered eight years in the White House for Barack Obama.

The January 6 hearings are an ideal starting point for Democrats to contrast their own support for democracy versus the attack on constitutional order, and therefore the country, orchestrated by Mr Trump, who remains an unrivaled Republican leader. Even if he’s fading as I recently argued he clearly is following Cassidy Hutchinson’s devastating testimony at the House Committee hearing, most of his potential successors are striving to echo and emulate him, while his rare and isolated patriotic Republican opponents like Representative Liz Cheney are being purged.

Despite having significant perfectly reasonable reservations about some of its provisions, especially those that form the bedrock for a developing pattern of anti-democracy minority rule in the US, most Democrats uphold the Constitution that US officials vow “to support and defend,” while all but a handful of Republicans are hostile or, at best, indifferent. Democrats must stress that the Constitution IS the Republic, and that both are clearly founded on the principle, only fully realized in 1964, of majority rule..

Between Mr Trump’s failed coup and near-universal Republican support or acquiescence for his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen – and recent highly unpopular, supremely-unrepresentative Court decisions that strip Americans of long-established individual rights based on minority religious dogma in the face of law, history and the principle of separation of church and state – Democrats a golden opportunity to refashion themselves as the party of freedom and genuine patriotism.

They must force the questions of what freedom and liberty mean in the contemporary United States.

When the Court eliminated the constitutional protection of reproductive choice, it sentenced women in many states to the extreme servitude of forced pregnancy and delivery.

Democrats have traditionally supported regulation, especially regarding commercial activities or land-use, that sometimes goes too far, becomes absurd or is used to advantage certain interests. But now they should launch their own campaign against administrative overreach, especially since Republicans, above all in Florida, are now using regulatory authority to punish  corporations uncooperative with their extremist policies.

Crucially, there’s no Democratic equivalent to the Republican rush to use state power to force women to bear children against their will, often even with no exceptions for rape or incest. Mr Biden emotionally cited a 10-year-old rape victim who had to leave Ohio to avoid giving birth to her tormentor’s child. Innumerable tragedies, avoidable deaths, and nightmarish, Kafkaesque prosecutions are inevitable.

Yet the same far-right Court majority insists Americans have a brand-new, yet somehow inviolable, right to wield military weapons of incredible destructive power in most public spaces. States, therefore, are perfectly entitled to use the power of government to force raped little girls to endure a completed pregnancy and deliver a baby into who knows what reality, which the court does not address. But they are not entitled to prevent American men, or others, to brandish instruments of utter mayhem, designed only for the killing and devastation of human bodies, in most public places, although courts, interestingly, are specifically exempted.

The achievement of such cherished goals ought to destroy the right’s ability to pretend to champion freedom as most Americans define it.

Where is the real liberty balance between a supposed right to wield the most terrifying instruments of human destruction in public versus the peaceful, normal, majority’s right not to be menaced, as they go about their daily business with their families, by random strangers flaunting machines designed exclusively to kill people with extreme brutality and almost unimaginable speed?

What’s the calculation between the effectively entirely religious, and distinct minority dogma, that insists on the full legal personhood of the most rudimentary embryo versus a woman’s autonomy over her own body in the early stages of pregnancy?

Democrats shouldn’t be reduced to hugging and kissing flags. But they must prioritize insisting they are the true patriots, supportive of core national institutions and the constitutional and democratic system and therefore far more reliable guardians of real liberty and actual freedom.

These include the freedom not to be forced to live in a society insanely characterized by daily massacres and the unrestricted public flaunting of the apparatuses of masculine, or to be compelled to give birth because of a minority-held, untestable, irrational and fundamentalist insistence that every conception, possibly even in a test tube, represents the will of God, and that the state should use its authority to intervene on behalf of the almighty but oddly powerless divinity in these godawful cases.

Recognizing few limits, the Court’s right-wing theocrats will next target contraception access, marriage equality and other gay-rights, and much more. Everything based on the assertion of a constitutional right to privacy is now up for elimination, even though privacy is only one of scores of establish rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and are not being overthrown by the Christian extremist majority. Democrats must remind Americans that government exists to protect them from, not force them to obey, religious doctrines they, and the vast majority of of their fellow citizens, don’t share.

The right can drone on about taxation and overregulation. But it has completely lost its credibility on fundamental freedom. And the dominant Trump-wing of the Republican Party isn’t just unpatriotic. It’s downright anti-American.

Democrats can and must redefine themselves as the party of patriotism, liberty, and the right of Americans to live their lives as they see fit. But they must start speaking to Americans as a unified nation with a shared identity and common interests that, unfortunately, the Democrats now defend almost entirely alone.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-11/biden-can-unite-israel-and-saudi-arabia-to-meet-iran-threat?sref=tp95wk9l

A guide to what the president can offer and ask for during his crowded agenda.

US President Joe Biden’s success in reunifying and revitalizing the alliance of Western democracies, even expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include Finland and Sweden, has given Washington its most dynamic international leadership role in decades. Now he’s going to try to do the same in the Middle East when he visits the region this week.

There, the common adversary is Iran, not Russia. There’s nothing as galvanizing as the invasion of Ukraine to bring together fractious neighbors Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. But Iran’s nuclear progress, growing missile arsenal and network of extremist militia groups across the region is, or should be, the next alarming concern in geopolitics.

There won’t be a spontaneous re-embrace of US leadership or renewed trust in Washington as there was in Europe. There has been a growing sense that the US is losing interest in the region as it focuses on China and Russia. But there’s an existing pro-American — or, more precisely, counter-Iranian — Middle East camp, and Biden will be meeting all of it.

His biggest challenge is that the two most important actors, Israel and Saudi Arabia, don’t have diplomatic relations, and can’t or won’t cooperate extensively, especially in public. To bring them together in a de facto US-led coalition, even if quietly and behind the scenes for starters, Biden must ascertain what they want from each other and the US, and, especially, how to deal with the Palestinian issue.

Unlike its smaller neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which normalized relations with Israel in the Abraham Accords, Saudi Arabia needs meaningful concessions on the Palestinians to take any major diplomatic steps.

Israel, Biden’s first stop, is again in political tumult, with the coalition government having collapsed last month. Yet this may provide an opportunity: A productive meeting with Biden could give the interim prime minister, Yair Lapid, greater stature heading into elections this fall. Lapid is far more open to restarting talks with the Palestinians than other Israeli leaders.

At the meeting, Biden should stress a halt on the building or expanding of settlements (especially beyond the West Bank separation barrier); protecting the status quo at religious sites in Jerusalem; and halting provocations like evictions and nightly raids into Palestinian-ruled areas.

Biden needs to press Israel to recommit itself to a two-state solution, which remains a key Saudi goal, by expressing support for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state and promising not to annex occupied areas. (Biden is also meeting with former, and possibly future, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who won’t be receptive to any of this.)

Washington has some carrots, mostly in terms of military hardware, but Biden must reinforce the primacy of countering Iran, and that working with the Saudis is the best way to ensure Israel’s safety.

When he meets with Palestinians in Bethlehem, Biden should reassure them the US is serious about a two-state outcome, something former President Donald Trump tried to dump.

But he should also press Palestinian leaders to develop their national institutions, especially in health and education services; to promote, not inhibit, civil society in the West Bank; and to prepare for competitive elections. He should pledge to line up major US and Gulf Arab financial support for this, which would give the Palestinians a tangible as well as aspirational stake in the emergence of a US-led regional partnership.

On Friday, Biden will meet with Saudi leaders, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he has shunned because of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. In addition to pressing the crown prince on human-rights issues, Biden should make clear to him and King Salman that Washington is willing to sincerely recommit to Saudi security on two conditions.

First, Saudi Arabia needs to seriously undertake aiding the US to manage energy pricing, beyond the modest production increases reached by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and thereby abandon the production-limitation agreement reached with Moscow in 2017.

Second, Riyadh must eschew budding ties to China that threaten US security, such as joint manufacturing of drones and missiles. It’s fine for China to buy Saudi oil, but Biden should remind Saudi leaders that Beijing is Tehran’s primary economic and security ally, and emphasize that they can expect much more from Washington, especially in the context of a growing regional partnership.

As Biden presses Israelis and Palestinians to cooperate, the Saudi corner of the triangle is crucial. Meaningful Israeli steps to ease pressure on the Palestinians and re-embrace the goal of a viable two-state agreement should prompt Riyadh to respond with diplomatic outreach and strategic engagement, even if formal relations remain off the table.

Finally, on Saturday, when Biden joins a summit of friendly Arab governments — the six Gulf Cooperation Council states plus Egypt, Jordan and Iraq — they should all hear the consistent message that their interests are best protected through a US-led grouping aimed at maintaining regional order and stability, to which they can each contribute and from which they will all benefit.

In the end, Biden’s trip will raise this question: The US plus Israel plus the Palestinians plus the Saudis plus all the other Arab states equals … what? If the answer is “not much,” then it’s back to business as usual, relying on a hodgepodge of bilateral arrangements with regional partners to contain Iran, combat terrorists and secure other key US goals.

That hasn’t been completely ineffective. But a new de facto regional partnership would be much more potent in advancing both Washington’s interests and those of its Middle East partners.

Biden could be looking at another, even more unexpected, international coalition-building project than he helped forge in Europe. His ambitions for a “transformative presidency,” largely thwarted domestically, might be realized globally.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/07/04/cassidy-hutchinsons-testimony-does-serious-damage-to-trump/

His chances of being the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 have greatly diminished.

The House of Representatives Select Committee hearings on the January 6 insurrection were already among the most momentous in US political history. But no one, apparently including the committee itself, anticipated the almost literal smoking gun it produced last week linking former president Donald Trump directly and personally to the armed assault on Congress.

The brilliantly composed hearings have each focused on one aspect of the seven-phase offensive the committee says Mr Trump instigated to remain in office despite having lost the election to US President Joe Biden.

However, last week their meticulous and cautious planning was suddenly abandoned. On Monday, committee leaders told surprised staffers to announce a hearing the next day with no additional information provided to anyone.

Tuesday’s testimony by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson left no doubt why the committee scrambled so uncharacteristically. She had already testified on video, and was anticipated to join a final hearing focused on the personal conduct of Mr Trump, tentatively scheduled for July 11.

But a dramatic development had quietly occurred. Ms Hutchinson abruptly fired the attorney Mr Trump’s camp had arranged and paid for her. By hiring her own counsel, responsible exclusively to her and with no conflicting interests, she effectively announced her independence from his orbit to both the former president and the committee.

Moreover, she told the committee she was willing to tell the full, unvarnished truth about the former president’s conduct during, and indeed role in, the insurrection. Given the American climate of violent political fury, this young woman’s personal and physical bravery is impressive and even moving. She has nothing to gain and is only imperilled by her honesty, which seems genuinely motivated by patriotism.

The smoking gun was her testimony that Mr Trump, as ever wanting a larger crowd for the cameras, ordered the removal of metal detectors at his rally before the march that turned into the insurrection. “I don’t care that they have weapons – they’re not here to hurt me,” Ms Hutchinson recounted him ordering his staff, “Take the [magnetometers] away and let my people in.”

On June 20, in these pages, I explained how Mr Trump was vulnerable to major criminal charges regarding post-election intrigues, but not seditious conspiracy. That is the peace-time equivalent of treason and, perhaps along with espionage, the most terrible of US political crimes. Although five leaders of pro-Trump white supremacist gangs have been indicted for seditious conspiracy, I strongly doubted evidence would emerge to unambiguously tie the former president to a deliberate effort to use violence to prevent Congress from confirming Mr Biden’s victory. Mr Trump might well, I therefore argued, politically survive even this “tsunami of unheard-of Ignominy”.

Yet that’s exactly what Ms Hutchinson’s testimony unequivocally does. It establishes that Mr Trump knew his supporters were armed and bent on violence before he and his confederates whipped them into an even deeper frenzy with incendiary speeches at the rally, and that he clearly had no objection to them marching on Congress with weapons because they were, as he reportedly said, “not here to hurt me”.

All evidence suggests that chief among those he did not mind might indeed get “hurt” was his own vice president, Mike Pence, held guilty of refusing to misuse his role as President of the Senate, to reject certified electors from key states and generate a constitutional crisis Mr Trump hoped to use to stay in office despite his defeat.

Mr Trump not only knew imminent violence was likely, he appears to have sought to facilitate it by ordering the removal of magnetometers. His culpability in a deliberate attempt to use force to overturn the election and constitutional order can be therefore firmly established.

That will intensify pressure on the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against the former president. And it significantly decreases chances Mr Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024.

He is reportedly considering the early announcement of another run, despite long-standing entreaties from Republican Party leaders not to do that before the November midterms. Mr Trump knows he’s in massive trouble and may calculate that only the announcement of another campaign, complete with raucous, attention-getting and news-generating rallies, will galvanise his supporters and offset the impressions that he is either fatally tainted or yesterday’s news, or both. A political revival could also spook the Justice Department, which is allergic to appearances of political bias.

Yet it is increasingly probable that he will announce a campaign, hold rallies, and, above all, raise money, but ultimately stand down, especially if he thinks he has a good chance of losing. Many Republicans won’t just want their most viable presidential candidate, but also one who can serve a full eight, and not a mere four, years and won’t enter office as a lame duck.

Ms Hutchinson’s testimony also painted a devastating portrait of her former immediate superior, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as detached and disengaged, seemingly either overwhelmed or bored by the insurrection. The White House was doing nothing to defend Congress because, he told her, the president “doesn’t want to do anything” to stop the violence and “he thinks Mike [Pence] deserves” a rampaging mob chasing him down and vowing to “hang” him.

Her testimony included a secondhand account, that reportedly may be contradicted by the Secret Service, of Mr Trump supposedly lunging at the driver of his car to try to join the rioters. She reported what she was told by superiors. Accurate or not it is a minor footnote, as is her testimony he flung plates of food in a rage at the walls of the White House.

The committee wisely calculated that rushing Ms Hutchinson’s testimony onto television before details leaked or she changed her mind was necessary because her account of Mr Trump’s overt acts of support for the armed rebellion changes everything legally and politically.

Many Republicans have tried their best to ignore the hearings, dismiss or downplay the evidence, or pretend it’s not a big deal. None of that is working. The truth is starting to sink in and it is decisive that no one, other than him, has contradicted her account that Mr Trump ordered the removal of metal detectors that would help his armed supporters attack Congress.

So, a soft-spoken, remarkably composed and brave 25-year-old woman appears to have struck a blow from which, finally, the heretofore invulnerable former president may not recover and has probably put an end to the Donald Trump era in US politics.