Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Trump, Niger and Connecting the Dots

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Nigerian refugees waiting for aid in Diffa, Niger, last year. CreditAdam Ferguson for The New York Times
It is easy to ignore the recent story of four U.S. servicemen killed in Niger, the giant state in central Africa, because the place is so remote and the circumstances still so murky. That would be a mistake. Niger highlights a much larger problem — just how foolish, how flat-out dumb President Trump is behaving.
Trump is a person who doesn’t connect dots — even when they’re big, fat polka dots that are hard to miss. Rather, he thinks inside narrow little boxes built from his own simplistic impulses and applause lines — and that tendency is leading us into a web of contradictions abroad. Niger is a perfect example.
I know something about Niger because I did a documentary there last year for National Geographic’s “Years of Living Dangerously” climate series and wrote several columns about it for The Times. To understand why groups affiliated with ISIS and Al Qaeda are popping up in that region of central Africa, you have to connect a lot of dots, and recognize the linkages between a number of different problems — not just say, in effect: There are bad guys there. I will call “my generals.” They will kill them. I will take credit.
As defense systems expert Lin Wells once put it: To ameliorate problems in places like Niger, you must never think in the box. You must never think out of the box. “You must always think without a box.”
Why? Because what is destabilizing all of these countries in the Sahel region of Africa and spawning terrorist groups is a cocktail of climate change, desertification — as the Sahara steadily creeps south — population explosions and misgovernance.
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Desertification is the trigger, and climate change and population explosions are the amplifiers. The result is a widening collapse of small-scale farming, the foundation of societies all over Africa. And that collapse is leading to a rising tide of “economic migrants, interethnic conflicts and extremism,” Monique Barbut, who heads the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and guided me in Niger, explained.
A few numbers: Niger, with rampant poverty and poor access to contraception, has one the highest birthrates in the world: 7.6 children per woman. I met a man there who boasted of 17 kids. Neighboring Nigeria is growing so fast it will replace the U.S. as the third-most-populous country in the world by 2050. Nigeria is a third bigger than Texas.
Meanwhile, climate change in the region is so severe that nearby Senegal’s national weather bureau says that from 1950 to 2015, the average temperature there rose two degrees Celsius and the average annual rainfall declined by about two inches. The Paris climate accord was designed to keep global average temperatures from rising two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100.
In other words, parts of sub-Saharan Africa are already at heat levels that Paris was supposed to prevent by the end of the century — and the region is heading for a four-degree rise, which will lead to the collapse of even more small farms and lead to a mad scramble of refugees toward Europe, competition for food and more unemployed males ready to join ISIS for $50 a month.
Barbut, as I reported, reinforced her point by showing me three maps of Africa with dots concentrated in the middle of the continent. Map No. 1: the most vulnerable regions of desertification in 2008. Map No. 2: conflicts and food riots in 2007 and 2008. Map No. 3: terrorist attacks in 2012. All the dots of all three maps cluster around Niger and its neighbors. Hello?
And what is Trump’s response to this reality? It’s to focus solely on using the U.S. military to kill terrorists in Africa while offering a budget that eliminates U.S. support for global contraception programs; appointing climate-change deniers to all key environmental posts; pushing coal over clean energy; and curbing U.S. government climate research.
In short, he’s sending soldiers to fight a problem that is clearly being exacerbated by climate and population trends, while eliminating all our tools to mitigate these trends.
That’s just stupid, reckless and irresponsible — and it evinces no ability to connect the dots or think without a box.
But this is not only in Africa: Trump was obsessed with defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq — but with as few U.S. troops as possible. The only way he could do that was by tacitly allying with Iran, Syria’s regime, Russia, pro-Iranian Shiite militias, and pro-U.S. Kurds, who were the main anti-ISIS forces on the ground. We could not defeat ISIS or stabilize Syria and Iraq without all of them.
And what is Trump’s strategy now? I have no clue. We’ve distanced ourselves from the Kurds, moved to tear up the nuclear deal with Iran and added U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a country we also can’t stabilize without the tacit help of Iran next door. If you know how these dots connect, please write.
Also: How do we stabilize our border with Mexico and maintain our neighbor’s cooperation in holding back the main source of illegal immigration today — refugees from Central America — while pursuing trade policies that have weakened the Mexican peso and the Mexican economy and could lead that country to elect its own anti-American populist-nationalist?
Nothing Trump ever says has a second paragraph. His whole shtick is just a first paragraph: Build a wall, tear up the Iran deal, tear up TPP, defeat ISIS, send troops to Niger and Afghanistan to kill terrorists, kill climate policy, kill family planning, cut taxes, raise military spending. Every box just marks an applause line he needed somewhere to get elected. Nothing connects — and we will pay for that.
Indeed, if you want to know what it looks like when a country follows a leader with no second paragraph and no ability to connect dots, visit London. I was there last week. Britain’s political system is in turmoil and its economy is facing declining growth prospects, because a bare majority voted to follow leaders with no second paragraph — we’ll just quit the European Union and everything will be fine, they said.
Well, now it’s a fine little mess they have. The ruling Conservatives have no clue how to quit the E.U. without doing even more damage to their country’s future. That’s what happens when you vote for “disrupters” who never spent a second thinking through how all of their disruptions connect the morning after the morning after.
Sound familiar?

That Crazy Talk About Robert Mueller


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CreditIllustration by John J. Custer; Photograph by Tom Brenner/The New York Times
And then they came for Robert Mueller.
If there were any remaining hope that Republicans would accept the precise, methodical work of this veteran, highly respected, Republican-appointed law enforcement official — the man Newt Gingrich once called a “superb choice to be special counsel” — it has evaporated in a fog of propaganda and delirious conspiracy theories.
In the real world, Mr. Mueller, appointed as special counsel after President Trump fired the F.B.I. director, James Comey, in May, is doing the job he was hired to do — smoke out any and all links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government officials who assaulted American sovereignty in 2016 in an effort to get Mr. Trump elected. These days, the most serious attacks on American governance are coming not from abroad, but from Mr. Trump’s aides and his allies in the right-wing media and Congress. As ludicrous as these attacks seem, they could yet lead to a constitutional crisis.
Reading the increasingly outlandish theories cooked up by Mr. Trump’s defenders and apologists is like entering an alternate, upside-down universe where Hillary Clinton remains Public Enemy No. 1.
In these irrelevant tales, Mrs. Clinton (or, as Sean Hannity called her on Monday, “President Clinton”) is the real colluder, working stealthily with the Russians to — stay with us here — destroy her own candidacy. Also, she and Bill Clinton once sold American uranium to the Russians. Also, Robert Mueller failed to fully investigate that sale when he led the F.B.I., so he’s complicit in it, too, not to mention he has ties to Mr. Comey, who also led the F.B.I. Also, some of his investigators donated to Democratic candidates.
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There’s no bottom to the delusion on display. At this point, investigators could release videotapes of Vladimir Putin personally handing Mr. Trump a uranium-lined briefcase filled with stolen emails, and the right-wing armada would find a way to blame Mrs. Clinton. (This would be followed, of course, by a congressional investigation to identify who leaked the tapes.)
These efforts at obfuscation and misdirection would be laughable, but they are linked to a very real and dangerous move by Trump allies throughout right-wing media and the government to shut down the Russia investigation for good.
It’s no secret that Mr. Trump has been itching to get rid of Mr. Mueller since soon after his appointment as special counsel in May. Mr. Trump’s advisers have told him that would be a terrible idea and have reportedly talked him out of it more than once. But the calls for such a move are now coming from some of the most influential voices in conservative media, as are other equally bad proposals, like urging that Mr. Mueller resign and that Mr. Trump pardon anyone and everyone caught up in the Russia investigation — including himself.
Mr. Trump would be wise to continue to ignore these loony ideas and restrain his own authoritarian reflexes. The president of the United States, no less than any citizen, lives under the law, not above it; Mr. Mueller’s investigation is the embodiment of that fact. Removing him now, after he has already secured two indictments, including one for Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief, and a guilty plea by a foreign-policy adviser, would send the message that Mr. Trump and his aides are accountable to no one.
Over the last several weeks, a few top Republicans have found the courage to say out loud what a majority of Americans have known for a long time: With his erratic behavior and antidemocratic eruptions, Donald Trump is presenting a profound danger to security of the nation and the stability of the world order. So far, these dissidents have beat their chests in a safe space, giving eloquent speeches on their way out the door.
But it will not be hard for them to turn their words into actions if Mr. Trump gives in to an impulse to fire Mr. Mueller. Do the math: Three Republican senators (looking at you, Mr. McCain, Mr. Corker and Mr. Flake), joining with 48 Democrats, could bring the Senate to a halt until Mr. Mueller was reinstated — no tax cuts, no more judges confirmed.
The scenario in which Mr. Mueller loses his job, or Mr. Trump further abuses his pardon power, is hypothetical — and may it remain so — but if it materializes, it will fall to Congress to defend the foundations of American democracy, the separation of powers and the rule of law.

The Papadopoulos Plea Deal and the Great Blowhard Convergence of the 2016 Election






The texts of the Mueller probe read like minutes of a Politburo meeting, in which everyone reports a triumph and everyone is lying.
Photograph by Brett Carlsen / Getty
Among Monday’s many revelations, the most interesting reading came in the form of George Papadopoulos’s plea deal. Papadopoulos is the former Trump-campaign adviser who, we found out, has for months been coöperating with the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The text laying out Papadopoulos’s guilty plea, in which he admitted to making false statements to the F.B.I., introduced new characters into the Trump-Russia story: the Professor and the Female Russian National. It revealed that Papadopoulos had worked with the Professor and the Female Russian National to try to arrange meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. The new members of the cast appear to be every bit as incompetent and mendacious as the ones we already know. This text thus moves us one step closer to understanding the scale of the great blowhard convergence that was the 2016 campaign.
Take the Female Russian National. Papadopoulos, according to the plea agreement, believed her to be Vladimir Putin’s niece. To have a niece, however, the Russian President would have had to have a sibling. All of the available biographies of Putin, both official and unauthorized, agree: the Russian President had two older brothers who died as children, before Vladimir was born. He was an only child. He doesn’t have a niece.
Then there is the London-based Professor. E-mail messages cited in the plea agreement provided enough clues to his likely identity: Joseph Mifsud of the London Academy of Diplomacy, an institution that seems to have been started as a for-profit venture by the University of East Anglia and then transferred to the University of Stirling. Stirling’s Web site lists Mifsud as a teaching fellow, with no additional details. Until about the middle of the day on Monday, Mifsud had a profile page on the site of a London law firm; he was also identified here as a “professor,” until the page was taken down. Mifsud’s presence on the Russian Web barely predates his acquaintance with Papadopoulos: starting in November, 2015, three articles with Mifsud’s byline appeared on the site of the Valdai, Putin’s personal club for Kremlin-friendly Western academics. Mifsud’s pieces, written in heavily accented English, are disjointed compilations of Euroskeptic grumblings. By Tuesday, Mifsud had confirmed, to the Daily Telegraph, that he was the professor in question and acknowledged that he had met with Papadopoulos, but he denied that he had introduced him to the Female Russian National.
According to the plea agreement, the Professor and the Female Russian National (who was not Putin’s niece) promised Papadopoulos that they would introduce him to the Russian ambassador in London. They were lying. But that’s O.K., because Papadopoulos lied, too: he reported back to the campaign that his “good friend” the Professor and “Putin’s niece” had introduced him to the Russian ambassador. A campaign supervisor praised his effort: “Great work.”
Reading the plea deal is a bit like reading the minutes of a Politburo meeting, in which every speaker rises to report a triumph and receive a round of applause and everyone is lying. Bonuses and medals are dispensed for roads constructed or steel produced in the imagination—and the ritual is the sole point of the exercise.
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Or maybe it’s like watching a Donald Trump rally, or reading Trump tweets claiming that he has accomplished more than any President in history. Or like watching the June Cabinet meetingduring which members of the Administration took turns lauding Trump and thanking him for the honor of serving in his great Administration. In all of these cases, people with imaginary expertise boast of phantom accomplishments and receive praise for them.
Back in April, 2016, the Professor told Papadopoulos, over breakfast at a London hotel, that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton to the tune of “thousands of emails.” (Mifsud has now told the Telegraph that he never said that.) At the same time, a (presumed) Russian Foreign Ministry functionary, with whom the Professor and the Female Russian National had connected Papadopoulos by e-mail and Skype, was asking Papadopoulos to arrange a visit to Moscow for Trump. Papadopoulos bombarded the campaign with requests and promises. The campaign seemed to have no interest in arranging a visit, and strung Papadopoulos along for months before finally encouraging him to go on his own. He didn’t.
Earlier, the Trump associate Felix Sater had been sending e-mailspromising to use his Kremlin connections to arrange a real-estate deal in Moscow so impressive that, as Sater wrote to Trump’s lawyer, it would “get Donald elected.” (In the same e-mail, Sater claimed that he had “arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.”) Sater appears to have been lying about the connections. The deal never materialized, even if the Presidency did.
At around the same time that the Professor was dangling the “dirt” carrot in front of Papadopoulos, the British music producer Rob Goldstone used the same bait to get Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, and members of the Trump family to sit down with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But Goldstone (or Veselnitskaya) appears to have lied about having the dirt—unless, of course, it’s the Trump clan that lied about the contents of the meeting. A few months later, following the election, a new round of boasting commenced. Just as the President-elect was starting to trumpet his extraordinary accomplishments, an unknown number of Internet-ad-buying and troll-deploying executives back in Russia reported that they had succeeded in influencing the American election. Putin took a victory lap as the most powerful man in the world.
The peculiar problem of the Mueller investigation shows up in the footnotes of the Papadopoulos plea deal. “Defendant Papadopoulos later learned that the Female Russian National was not in fact a relative of President Putin,” one footnote says. “In addition, while defendant Papadopoulos expected that the Professor and the Female Russian National would introduce him to the Russian Ambassador in London, they never did.” The next one notes that the Trump campaign never had any intention of arranging a trip to Moscow for the candidate.
How do investigators decipher a story in which just about every participant was lying to just about every other participant just about all the time, usually for the sole purpose of exaggerating his own significance and power? And how do the rest of us connect it to reality?

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