Free At Last
The "two Michaels" are finally free, but their nearly three-year captivity is a useful reminder about the perfidy of the current regime in Beijing.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were forwarded this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
So I first need to apologize. On Friday, I held my first Zoom chat in several weeks, and I had pledged to send around a video of the conversation. Alas, I forgot to hit record — and it only occurred to me as I was finishing the chat. I’m very sorry about that. It was simply an oversight on my part, and I promise I won’t let it happen again. Now, it’s been a hectic week, and it’s only Tuesday, so on to the news!
“Hostage Diplomacy”
First, some good news. On Friday night, my friend Michael Kovrig was finally released from Chinese captivity and allowed to return home to Canada. Michael had been in a Chinese prison for more than 1000 days after his arrest on bogus espionage charges. Michael was held in solitary confinement and not allowed to communicate with his family or the Canadian government. What makes his prolonged captivity so much worse is that Michael did absolutely nothing wrong. He was a pawn used by the Chinese government to exert pressure on Canada and the United States after the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, a prominent and influential Chinese company. Meng was picked up in Canada, at the behest of the United States, just days before Kovrig and his fellow hostage, Michael Spavor, were detained.
It’s long been understood that the detainment of the two Michaels was a response to Weng’s arrest, even as the Chinese government continued to claim that Kovrig and Spavor had committed espionage. China even went to the trouble of formally charging the two men. No one believed that, and, ironically, China confirmed these assumptions by releasing the two men only hours after Weng reached a deal with the U.S. Justice Department to return to China.
Indeed, the brazenness with which the Chinese are now tacitly acknowledging that this was hostage-taking is perhaps the most surprising element of this story. Beijing didn’t even bother to wait a few months to release Kovrig and Spavor to maintain the fiction that this wasn’t “hostage diplomacy.” Instead, they gave up the ghost pretty quickly.
For those who don’t follow China policy closely, this is a clarifying moment about the thuggish nature of the current regime in Beijing — and its willingness to thumb its nose at international norms. To be sure, the Chinese would say that arrest of Meng was an example of the US thumbing its nose at international norms, though that’s not a very compelling or legally sufficient argument. Formal extradition agreements are well-established in international law, and Canada’s arrest of Meng at the behest of a US criminal complaint is fairly standard. So what we have here is China using the leverage of hostage-taking to get a powerful Chinese citizen released — and succeeding in that endeavor.
To be sure, I am wary of the China hawks in the US who are pushing to making Beijing a political bogeyman. And I think that the Biden Administration — if it ever develops and articulates an actual China policy — should be looking at ways to deescalate tensions between the two countries. Ending the pointless and counter-productive trade war initiated by President Trump would be a positive step in the right direction.
But, of course, diplomacy is a two-way street. China’s arrest of the “two Michaels” sent an ominous message to the foreign diplomats, international business travelers, members of the NGO community, and academics that they weren’t safe. Like Kovrig and Spavor, they could be capriciously arrested and detained if the Chinese government concluded that it was in their interests to do so. Moreover, debate in the United States over the “lab leak theory” on the origins of COVID-19 has overshadowed China’s shocking lack of transparency in the early days of the pandemic, which allowed COVID-19 to spread across the globe. The litany of Chinese bad behavior is piling up, and it’s little wonder that it is directly affecting its bilateral relationships, particularly with the United States.
Of course, Washington is not blameless. Last summer, the Trump administration ratcheted up the pressure on Beijing over COVID in what appeared to be a transparent effort to shift blame for the pandemic away from them. And, of course, there’s the whole trade war, which Biden has done little to address since taking office.
So I don’t envy Biden when it comes to China. It’s not easy to thread the needle of containing China’s rise and battling them as an economic rival while at the same time avoiding miscalculation, overreaction, and escalation. Compounding the challenge are the domestic constraints that push Biden in the direction of getting tougher with China, especially on economic issues, while at the same time limiting his ability to strike trade agreements that could constrain China in East Asia, both politically and economically. And I haven’t mentioned the security challenges with Taiwan and the South China Sea, which have escalated in recent months. There’s a lot to juggle and no easy path forward, particularly as China appears unrepentant in thumbing its nose at Canada, the United States, and, indeed, the entire international community. I’m glad that my friend is finally free, but China’s duplicity and aggressive behavior — and the strains in the US-China relationship —are not going away.
Infrastructure Week Continues
As of today, the House of Representatives will vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill on Thursday. And if progressive Democrats are to believed, it won’t pass. Liberals are rightly complaining that they had a deal worked out with the Senate to pass the infrastructure measure in tandem with a budget reconciliation package full of progressive agenda items - and Senate moderates are not holding up their end of the bargain. The problem is that Senate centrists Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are refuse to reveal what topline number they will accept for the size of the reconciliation package. Right now, the number is at $3.5 trillion, but everyone expects it will get a haircut.
So here’s how I expect this will go down. Sometime tomorrow, Manchin and Sinema will reveal what amount they can live with and pledge to support a budget bill of that size if the House passes it — but it’s conditional on the House voting yes on the infrastructure bill. That will put House liberals in the exquisitely tricky position of deciding whether to kill the infrastructure bill, which in turn would kill the reconciliation package. To make matters worse, I wouldn’t be surprised if the House and Senate leadership tries to find some way to get the debt limit legislation and funding to avert a government shutdown into the bill as well. That will only increase the pressure on liberals. To be sure, I’m just idly speculating here, but this feels like the most likely game plan. Will it work? I have no idea. But I think tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day.
Kudos Mark Milley
My brofest with Mark Milley continues. This answer today to a question from Tom Cotton on why he didn’t resign when Joe Biden failed to take his advice on Afghanistan is one of the best descriptions of the sacrosanct notion of civilian control of the military. It’s fantastic.
Most of today’s hearing with Gen. Milley, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and General Kenneth McKenzie, head of US Central Command, was little more than an opportunity for senators to play politics. But I thought this point from Sen. Angus King is worthy of note.
I know there was a pandemic that began in March 2020. Still, the fact that Congress never held a hearing on the decision to end the war in Afghanistan is simply astonishing and a fundamental abdication of oversight responsibility by Congress. It’s also a reminder of how little domestic attention the situation in Afghanistan received until the whole thing went south.
In February 2020, President Trump signed the Doha agreement with the Taliban, which had long been considered a terrorist organization and has the blood of thousands of American troops on their hands. Under the agreement, the US committed to withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan by May 2021 and made this agreement without the input of the Afghan government. Wouldn’t then have been a good time to raise the questions now being asked about the consequences of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan?
This isn’t just a failure of Congress; it’s a failure of the media and the American people. Quite simply, few Americans evinced any great interest in the US war in Afghanistan outside the military and parts of the foreign policy community. They only started to care when images of refugees storming the airport in Kabul and desperate Afghans falling from airplanes showed up on their TV screens. One can argue that this shows an almost criminal level of apathy, but I’d make a slightly different argument. There’s something quite disturbing about wars fought in the name of the American people that are practically non-events for them — and to which few policymakers, outside a small circle of military planners and diplomats, are paying attention. That policymakers were so willing to prolong a conflict that had such little buy-in from the American people — and that Congress wasn’t even willing to hold a hearing on — suggests how powerful and unaccountable our military has become, and the extent to which America’s foreign conflicts have taken on a life of their own.
As we speak, Americans are in Syria, Iraq, and across the Sahel fighting terrorism. Few Americans are aware of these conflicts. But Afghanistan is arguably different. We spent 20 years fighting there at the cost of trillions of dollars — and much of it happened in the dark with little accountability and little public discussion. Policymakers, the media, and Americans need to take a lesson from this: giving the Pentagon near-unfettered ability to conduct overseas military operations is something that never should be allowed to happen again.
“Memory, All Alone in the Moonlight …”
Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has a new book out, and it is a doozy.
(There were other indignities: Ms. Grisham writes that Mr. Trump called her while aboard Air Force One to defend the size of his penis after Ms. Daniels insulted it in an interview. “Uh, yes sir,” Ms. Grisham replied.)
At one point, she writes, Mr. Trump’s handlers designated an unnamed White House official known as the “Music Man” to play him his favorite show tunes, including “Memory” from “Cats,” to pull him from the brink of rage. (The aide, it is revealed later, is Ms. Grisham’s ex-boyfriend. She does not identify him, but it is Max Miller, a former White House official now running for Congress with Mr. Trump’s support.)
The thought of a White House aide being rushed into the Oval Office to play “Memory” while the president sits back in his chair, closes his eyes, takes deep breaths, and finds his happy place is an image of the Trump presidency that, quite simply, I did not have on my Bingo card.
On the other hand, Trump insisting that his penis is, in fact, quite large … I just assumed that at the White House that was called Tuesday.
The best take on "Memory":
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1442868740375392260