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The End of ‘America First’: How Biden Says He Will Re-engage With the World

David E. Sanger — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 05:33:43 +0000

Those who have known President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. for decades say they expect him to move carefully, providing reassurance with a few big symbolic acts.

Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. makes no secret of the speed with which he plans to bury “America First” as a guiding principle of the nation’s foreign policy.

He says he will re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, assuming the Iranians are willing to reverse course and observe its limits.

He would sign up for another five years of the only surviving nuclear arms treaty with Russia and double down on American commitments to NATO after four years of threats from President Trump to withdraw from the alliance, which guided the West through the Cold War.

At the same time, Mr. Biden says he will make Russia “pay a price” for what he says have been disruptions and attempts to influence elections — including his own.

But mostly, Mr. Biden said in a statement to The New York Times, he wants to bring an end to a slogan that came to define a United States that built walls and made working with allies an afterthought — and, in Mr. Biden’s view, undermined any chance of forging a common international approach to fighting a pandemic that has cost more than 1.2 million lives.

“Tragically, the one place Donald Trump has made ‘America First’ is his failed response to the coronavirus: We’re 4 percent of the world’s population, yet have had 20 percent of the deaths,” Mr. Biden said days before the election. “On top of Trump embracing the world’s autocrats and poking his finger in the eye of our democratic allies, that’s another reason respect for American leadership is in free fall.”

But it is far easier to promise to return to the largely internationalist approach of the post-World War II era than it is to execute that shift after four years of global withdrawal and during a pandemic that has reinforced nationalist instincts. The world does not look remotely as it did when Mr. Biden last engaged it from the White House four years ago. Power vacuums have been created, and filled, often by China. Democracies have retreated. The race for a vaccine has created new rivalries.

So while foreign allies may find Mr. Biden reassuring — and smiled when they heard him say in a town-hall meeting that “‘America First’ has made America alone” — they also concede that they may never fully trust that the United States will not lurch back to building walls.

In interviews in the past several weeks, Mr. Biden’s top advisers began to outline a restoration that might be called the Great Undoing, an effort to reverse course on Mr. Trump’s aggressive attempt to withdraw to American borders.

“Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organize itself,” said Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s longtime national security adviser. “Until the Trump administration, in Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States did a lot of that organizing, and we made some mistakes along the way, for sure.” Now, however, the United States has discovered what happens “when some other country tries to take our place or, maybe even worse, no one does, and you end up with a vacuum that is filled by bad events.”

Mr. Blinken acknowledged that for those allies — or opponents of Mr. Trump — looking to reset the clock to noon on Jan. 20, 2017, “it’s not going to happen.”

Those who have known Mr. Biden for decades say they expect him to move carefully, providing reassurance with a few big symbolic acts, starting with a return to the Paris climate accord in the first days of his administration. But substantive rebuilding of U.S. power will proceed far more slowly.

“He’ll inherit a situation which both gives him enormous latitude and, oddly, constrains him,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime friend of Mr. Biden’s. “Clearly, what Trump did by executive order can be undone by executive order.”

But “any act that requires Senate approach or any new use of force, absent a clear provocation, will be pretty much off the table,” he added.

At 77, Mr. Biden has his own back-to-the-future vision of how to dispense with “America First”: “This is the time to tap the strength and audacity that took us to victory in two world wars and brought down the Iron Curtain,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in March.

Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

Yet in a campaign in which foreign policy was rarely mentioned, Mr. Biden was never pressed on how the current iteration of superpower competition differs from what he remembers from early in his political career.

He never stated what kind of “price” he had in mind for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to pay, though one of his longtime foreign policy advisers, Jake Sullivan, offered a bit of detail. Just before Election Day, he said that Mr. Biden was willing to impose “substantial and lasting costs on perpetrators of the Russian interference,” which could include financial sanctions, asset freezes, counter cyberattacks, and, “potentially, the exposure of corruption by the leaders of foreign countries.”

That would signify a hardening in U.S. policy. But it would also involve steps that the Obama administration considered taking in its last six months when Mr. Biden was vice president, and never carried out.

The sharp change on Russia offers a glimpse of the detailed planning that Mr. Biden’s transition team, organized late last spring, has engaged in to reverse Mr. Trump’s approach to the world. It has built a foreign policy team of formal and informal advisers, largely drawn from midlevel and senior Obama administration officials who are poised to return. There are timelines for opening negotiations, re-entering treaties, and early summit meetings.

But their plans show some notable breaks from the Obama administration’s strategy. Mr. Biden is clearly rethinking positions he took in the Senate and in the White House.

The most vivid example, officials say, will come in rethinking China strategy. His own advisers concede that in the Obama years, Mr. Biden and his national security team underestimated the speed with which President Xi Jinping of China would crackdown on dissent at home and use the combination of its 5G networks and its Belt and Road Initiative to challenge U.S. influence.

“Neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted,” Kurt Campbell, who served as the assistant secretary of state for Asia, and Ely Ratner, one of Mr. Biden’s deputy national security advisers, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article in 2018 that reflected this shift. “Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the U.S.-led system.”

China is just one arena — though probably the most important — where Mr. Biden’s long-held views will come into first contact with new realities.

Afghanistan and the Use of U.S. Force

Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary who served both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, described Mr. Biden as “impossible not to like” because he was “funny, profane and humorously self-aware of his motormouth.” But Mr. Gates also famously declared that Mr. Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times.

That assessment included Mr. Biden’s view on Afghanistan — where he argued, in the early days of the Obama administration in 2009, for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission. Mr. Gates later recalled in his memoir that Mr. Biden was convinced that the military was trying to put the squeeze on the president to send more troops for a war the vice president thought was politically unsustainable.

Mr. Biden was overruled — by Mr. Obama, who nearly doubled the force size in Afghanistan in 2009 before moving to a drawdown.

But what was once a setback for Mr. Biden has now become something of a political asset: Mr. Trump’s effort to cast him as an advocate of “endless wars” fell flat. Mr. Biden, according to Mr. Sullivan, “wants to convert our presence to a counterterrorism capability” aimed at protecting the United States by keeping Qaeda forces or the Islamic State from establishing a base in Afghanistan.

“It would be limited and targeted,” Mr. Sullivan said. “That’s where he was in 2009, and that is where he is today.”

Confronting Russia

In the Cold War, Democrats were often portrayed as the party of appeasement to Moscow. Mr. Biden is the first Democrat to turn the tables: He is neither dismissive of the Russian threat as Mr. Obama was when he debated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, nor is he eager to bring a big red “reset” button to Moscow, as Hillary Clinton did in her opening days as secretary of state.

In the campaign, Mr. Biden seized on the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia preferred Mr. Trump, telling reporters in Nevada that “Putin knows me, and I know him, and he doesn’t want me to be president.” He is probably right: After details of the extent of Russian interference in 2016 became clear, followed by Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to confront Mr. Putin, Democrats have become the party of Russia hawks.

For most of the campaign, Mr. Biden assailed Mr. Trump for “cozying up to dictators” and describing how, if elected, he was prepared to punish Russia. As president, Mr. Biden will have to deal with a Russia whose arsenal includes 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and a raft of tactical nuclear weapons that it has been deploying freely, even before Mr. Trump exited the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

How would Mr. Biden end the downward spiral? He would start with a five-year extension of New START, Mr. Blinken said in an interview, since the treaty lapses 16 days after inauguration. Then he would seek to expand the treaty to other types of weapons and perhaps more countries. And he would play on Mr. Putin’s growing economic fragility.

Credit…Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

“We will deter, and impose costs for, Mr. Putin’s meddling and aggression,” Mr. Blinken said. “But there’s a flip side” to dealing with Moscow, he added. Mr. Putin is “looking to relieve Russia’s growing dependence on China,” Mr. Blinken said, which has left him in “not a very comfortable position.”

That suggests the Biden administration could try to use the suspicions that Moscow and Beijing have of each other to split the two superpowers — just as President Richard M. Nixon used it, in reverse, to win his opening with China nearly 50 years ago.

On Iran, a Resurgent Crisis

“Oh, goddamn,” Mr. Biden fumed in the Situation Room in the summer of 2010, according to participants in the meeting, as news began to leak that a highly classified effort by the United States and Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear program with a cyberweapon — later called “Stuxnet” — was about to be exposed because the computer code was being replicated around the world. “It’s got to be the Israelis. They went too far.”

A decade later, that effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear effort appears to be the birth of a new age of conflict, one in which Mr. Biden was a key player. He favored the covert effort because he was looking for any way to slow Iran’s progress without risking war in the Middle East. He later told colleagues that he believed the covert program helped bring the country to the negotiating table for what became the Iran nuclear deal five years later.

Now Mr. Biden says the first step with Iran is to restore the status quo — which means re-entering the deal if Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is willing to return to production limits announced in 2015. But it won’t be that simple. The Iranians have indicated there will be a higher price to pay for Mr. Trump’s breach. And some of the key restrictions on Iran begin to lift soon: The first phase of an arms embargo expired in October, clearing the way for the Russians and the Chinese to begin resuming sales. And there will soon be a new Iranian president, with unknown effects on potential talks.

Mr. Biden’s aides say that returning to the deal that Mr. Trump left “shifts the burden” back on Tehran.

“If Iran decides it’s not going to come back into compliance,” Mr. Blinken said, “we’re in a much stronger position to elicit support from allies and partners” who are now blaming Mr. Trump for starting the crisis by rejecting an agreement the United States had already made.

The China Challenge

In 2012, Mr. Biden was the host when Mr. Xi came to Washington. The vice president praised the guest from Beijing as a rising reformer who was “prepared to show another side of the Chinese leadership.” Mr. Biden was among those to celebrate China’s inevitable but “peaceful rise,” followed by assurance that trying to contain its power was a fool’s errand.

By this year, he had revised his view. “This is a guy who is a thug,” Mr. Biden said.

Credit…Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

So during the campaign, he went after Mr. Trump for “fake toughness” and argued that “Trump lost a trade war that he started.” What he meant was that the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods were ultimately underwritten by American taxpayers in the form of government subsidies to compensate farmers and others who lost sales.

Mr. Biden has said little about how he would push back. And even if he settles the long-running arguments over agricultural goods and the theft of intellectual property by Beijing, Mr. Biden will face challenges never discussed when Mr. Xi was visiting eight years ago: managing technological inroads by companies like Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and TikTok, the app that has seized the imaginations and phones of 100 million Americans.

Mr. Biden has suggested that the Trump crackdowns may continue — though surrounded by more skillful diplomacy to bring European and other allies on board.

“God only knows what they’re doing with information they’re picking up off of here,” he said of the Chinese. “So as president, I will go into it very deeply. I’ll get the cyber experts in with me to give me what is the best solution to deal with it.”

Complicating the issue is Mr. Biden’s insistence that, unlike Mr. Trump, he will put values back at the center of foreign policy, including how to approach the United States’ relationship with China, a milder echo of Bill Clinton’s pledge in the 1992 presidential race to take on “the butchers of Beijing.”

Presumably, that means making China pay a price for Mr. Xi’s controls on dissent, including the national security laws that led to detention camps in Xinjiang, arrests of dissidents in Hong Kong, and the ouster of foreign journalists who were the last bastion of independent reporting in China.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/politics/biden-foreign-policy.html

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Ukraine’s President Seeks Face-to-Face Meeting With Putin

Andrew E. Kramer — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 04:02:56 +0000

President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed direct talks with President Vladimir V. Putin, as his American diplomatic backing unraveled in the impeachment scandal.

Credit…Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

MOSCOW — As the formal peace process for the Ukraine war bogged down last month, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, reached out for a direct meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, an intermediary in the talks revealed on Tuesday.

The United States does not participate directly in the negotiations, which are overseen by France and Germany. But Mr. Zelensky had pressed for a more robust American role, in part by seeking a meeting with President Trump in the White House.

That effort became entangled in a request for political favors in exchange for the White House meeting — a request that is now a focus of the impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives. There has been no sign of United States pressure on Russia to sit down for the peace talks, and since September, five American officials who dealt with Ukraine have resigned.

With the negotiations delayed, Mr. Zelensky in late October offered a direct meeting, a former president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, said on Tuesday. Mr. Nazarbayev, who is acting as an intermediary, said he had conveyed the offer to Mr. Putin.

“I think we need a separate, personal meeting of the presidents of Russia and Ukraine,” Mr. Nazarbayev said at a policy conference in Kazakhstan.

In announcing the offer, Mr. Nazarbayev also summed up the stalemate in settlement talks for the Ukraine war, which has ground on for five years and killed more than 13,000 people. He suggested that Russia was not seeking to seize territory but rather to trade its de facto occupation of Ukrainian land for “other things.”

Most analysts say Russia, which arms and supports the separatist rebels who control parts of eastern Ukraine, wants changes to Ukraine’s domestic political system that would give Moscow a greater say over the country’s affairs.

“I already received agreement from Zelensky for a tête-à-tête,” Mr. Nazarbayev said. “I have told the president of Russia. Now we will see.” Mr. Nazarbayev suggested the leaders might meet in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, which was recently renamed after him.

The Kremlin’s response on Tuesday was lukewarm. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, suggested in a conference call with reporters that the Russian leader would not immediately accept. Mr. Putin would not hold “a meeting just for the sake of a meeting,” he said.

Russia has for years denied involvement in the war, saying its soldiers in Ukraine are “on vacation” or otherwise not really in military service.

Mr. Zelensky ran on a promise to negotiate an end to the war. One tactic was an effort to maneuver Russia into negotiations that would recognize the Kremlin as a party to the conflict; one-on-one talks with Mr. Putin would signal a Russian role in the war.

The Kremlin has delayed the French- and German-led talks as it demanded ever more concessions. Mr. Zelensky agreed to a Russian-approved political formula for settlement and withdrew troops from the front in some locations — even pulling back some troops under fire, something he had said he would not do.

“He keeps raising the price because he sees that Zelensky is interested,” John E. Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said of Mr. Putin. “There are limits to the price Zelensky is willing to pay.”

One limit is domestic opposition. Concessions are inflaming Ukrainian nationalists, who deride his policies as capitulation. On a trip to the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil earlier this month, Mr. Zelensky was met by a crowd chanting “Shame! Shame!” for caving into Russia’s demands.

Some Russians also see the concessions as signs of weakness from a Ukrainian president whose hopes for American support have evaporated.

Mr. Putin “is not saying directly that Ukraine will have to negotiate because it lost support in the West,” Konstantin B. Gaaze, a politics professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Science, said in a telephone interview. “But he could say that.”

Andrew E. Kramer is a reporter based in the Moscow bureau. He was part of a team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for a series on Russia’s covert projection of power. @AndrewKramerNYT

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-putin.html?emc=rss&partner=rss

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Venezuela’s Collapse Frays Its Economic Ties With Russia

Anatoly Kurmanaev — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 07:37:43 +0000

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, center left, meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, center right.CreditCreditPool photo by Maxim Shemetov

MOSCOW — In his toughest moments, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has turned to Russia for support.

When the United States sanctioned the Venezuelan energy industry in January, Russia’s oil firm Rosneft helped to divert its oil exports to Asia. And when rumors of an armed American intervention reached fever pitch in March, two airplanes with Russian military technicians landed in Caracas — a reminder Russia was on Venezuela’s side.

Yet there is growing evidence that, beyond these high-profile gestures with limited effect on the ground, economic ties between Venezuela and Russia are fraying. Russian banks, grain exporters, even weapons manufacturers have all curtailed business with Venezuela, driven away by the very economic collapse they intended to help Russia’s South American ally withstand.

“Russia’s economic ties to Venezuela have really slowed down in the past few years,” said Maximilian Hess, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in London. “The policies today are really low-cost, but they get a lot of geopolitical play.”

Russia’s public display of support came at a number of crucial moments since the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, proclaimed himself the country’s interim president in January, challenging Mr. Maduro’s grip on power and plunging the country deeper into political crisis. Russia’s support allowed Mr. Maduro to claim the backing of a powerful ally and to maintain critical support in the military and the ruling party.

But in economic matters, Russian state-owned companies are cutting back on the business they do with the bankrupt nation to protect their bottom line, showing the limits of President Vladimir V. Putin’s strategy of propping up an ally and antagonizing the Trump administration. The Russian government has not filled the breach, refusing to issue Venezuela new credit lines, to commit to new investments or even to provide relief on existing debt to ease Mr. Maduro’s battle with the opposition.

As Venezuela’s economy crumbles, gas shortages leave drivers waiting for hours to fill up their cars.CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times

The Kremlin’s preference for symbolic displays of support instead of long-term investments in Venezuela is partly tied to Russia’s own economic woes. Russia’s five-year stagnation has led to the biggest outbreak of protests since 2013, to an exceptionally steep decline in Mr. Putin’s trust ratings and to growing public aversion to costly foreign adventures, according to Russian polls.

Russia exported just $36 million worth of goods to Venezuela in the first four months of this year, less than half the amount it sent three years ago, according to Russian customs data.

Russian wheat sales to Venezuela, which Mr. Maduro touted as the replacement for American grain, plummeted 60 percent, to 187,000 tons, during Russia’s agricultural export season ending in April, compared with the same period a year earlier, the customs data shows. These amounts cover only a tenth of Venezuela’s annual wheat demand.

Moscow’s largest banks have largely shunned Mr. Maduro’s attempts to move Venezuelan government accounts to Russia to escape American sanctions, according to two people knowledgeable about the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The widespread use of the dollar in the Russian financial system means the risk of American sanctions greatly outweighs potential earnings from new Venezuelan business, they said.

None of the top 15 Russian banks had meaningful loans to Venezuelan entities as of April, according to their regulatory filings. State-controlled Gazprombank, which used to be one of the main European bankers for the Venezuelan national oil company, Pdvsa, in April erased nearly all of its Venezuelan credit portfolio after having quit a joint banking venture with Mr. Maduro’s government, the filings show.

Even Russian weapons trade with Venezuela, the cornerstone of the countries’ economic relations, has been hit by Mr. Maduro’s financial woes.

Russia’s industrial conglomerate RosTec, which accounts for the bulk of the country’s defense exports, has reduced its exposure to Venezuela because of unpaid invoices, according to two people close to the company who discussed national security matters on condition of anonymity. The company has chosen not to renew some weapons maintenance contracts and freeze other projects, they said.

Former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, center, applauding a worker during a visit to a weapons factory in Russia in 2006. The multibillion-dollar deals for Russian weapons he signed are long gone.CreditMarcelo Garcia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

This includes the Kalashnikov machine gun factory in the central city of Maracay, which remains unfinished 12 years after the start of construction.

Arms sales can be a politicized business, but it is still business, and it has to make economic sense, said one of those familiar with RosTec.

A RosTec spokeswoman said the company’s staff in Venezuela has remained unchanged in recent years and its technicians come and go according to its projects’ needs.

The multibillion-dollar deals for Russian weapons signed by Mr. Maduro’s charismatic predecessor, Hugo Chávez, are long gone. In the past two years, Russia exported $1 million worth of goods to Venezuela under the “secret” customs code that includes military and security equipment, according to Russian customs.

“We absolutely, officially have sold weapons to Venezuela,” Mr. Putin told reporters last week. “We have not done it for quite a while now.”

Though limited, Russia’s economic help did allow Mr. Maduro to maintain some revenue flow amid tightening American sanctions. The Moscow-based bank Eurofinance Mosnarbank, which is jointly owned by the Russian and Venezuelan governments and is under United States sanctions, continues to process payments for Pdvsa, according to bank wire receipts seen by The New York Times.

The Russian government responded to American sanctions against the bank in March by taking control of the lender.

The Pdvsa petroleum complex, José Antonio Anzoátegui. Venezuela’s oil output plummeted 35 percent since the American sanctions in January, one of the steepest declines of production in modern history.CreditThe New York Times

Despite these moves, Russia remains overtly supportive of Mr. Maduro’s administration, and is part of his major remaining economic and political bulwark.

“Our relations with Venezuela are of strategic nature,” Moscow’s ambassador to Caracas, Vladimir Zaemsky, said after the arrival of two Russian military planes in Venezuela in March. “We’re prepared, as always, to provide complete support to the lawful government of Venezuela and the Venezuelan people.”

RosTec’s inauguration of a helicopter training center in Venezuela in late March provided an important public relations boost to Mr. Maduro.

Rosneft, in particular, has helped Pdvsa to redirect some of its oil exports, targeted by American sanctions, to Asia. The Russian firm bought the oil in five of seven tankers that left Venezuela in the first half of May, according to Pdvsa data.

Rosneft, which has taken on the risky but lucrative role of Pdvsa’s partner of last resort, has said its operations in Venezuela are strictly commercial and compliant with American sanctions. But even it has refrained from putting new money into Venezuela. The company’s outstanding loans to Pdvsa have fallen by more than half in the past year to $1.8 billion, according to its financial statements.

And Rosneft’s lifeline has not been enough to prevent the collapse of Venezuela’s already struggling oil industry. The national oil output plummeted 35 percent since the American sanctions in January, one of the steepest declines of production in modern history, according to estimates by the Institute of International Finance.

“If I was a Venezuelan general debating my future, I wouldn’t count on Russia coming to the rescue,” said Mr. Hess.

Anna Mikheeva contributed reporting.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/world/americas/venezuela-russia-economy.html

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Ronna McDaniel: Democrats owe President Trump an apology

Fox News — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 13:12:04 +0000

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Mueller found no collusion between Trump and Russia: AG Barr

Fox News — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 13:03:25 +0000

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A Cloud Over Trump’s Presidency Is Lifted

Peter Baker - New York Times — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 12:36:01 +0000

President Trump returned to the White House from his Florida resort after Attorney General William P. Barr delivered a summary of the findings in the Russia investigation. Credit Samuel Corum for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — For President Trump, it may have been the best day of his tenure so far. The darkest, most ominous cloud hanging over his presidency was all but lifted on Sunday with the release of the special counsel’s conclusions, which undercut the threat of impeachment and provided him with a powerful boost for the final 22 months of his term.

There are still other clouds overhead and no one outside the Justice Department has actually read the report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, which may yet disclose damning information if made public. But the end of the investigation without findings of collusion with Russia fortified the president for the battles to come, including his campaign for re-election.

While critics will still argue about whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice, the president quickly claimed vindication and Republican allies pounced on their Democratic colleagues for what they called an unrelenting partisan campaign against him. Even as his own party’s congressional leaders called on the country to move on, however, the president indicated that he may not be ready to, denouncing the very existence of Mr. Mueller’s investigation as “an illegal take down that failed” and calling for a counter investigation into how it got started.

Emboldened and angry, the president can now proceed with his administration without the distraction of new search warrants and indictments by Mr. Mueller’s team or the worry that the special counsel might charge Mr. Trump’s family members or even uncover a smoking gun that would prove that his campaign collaborated with the Russian government to elect him in 2016. The questions about the Kremlin’s election interference that dogged the president almost everywhere he went may soon fade, even as other investigators continue to look into other allegations.

Mr. Mueller’s team confirmed that Russia did try to tilt the election to Mr. Trump, but its conclusion that he did not conspire with the effort may ease the way for Mr. Trump to reorient American foreign policy toward Moscow and its strongman president, Vladimir V. Putin, without as much concern about domestic consequences. And it may give renewed confidence to Mr. Trump, who has complained that his dealings with world leaders have been hobbled by their uncertainty about whether he would survive the investigation.

The end of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry also left Democrats on the defensive and will force them to decide how vigorously to continue pursuing allegations of misconduct by the president and his allies, including many that were unexamined by the special counsel, whose mandate was limited to Russia’s interference in the election and any possible obstruction of justice resulting from it.

While Mr. Trump claimed that Mr. Mueller’s findings were “a complete and total exoneration,” Mr. Mueller explicitly said they were not. Although he did not establish a conspiracy with Russia, Mr. Mueller made no determination when it came to obstruction of justice. “While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” he wrote, according to the Justice Department summary sent to Congress.

Instead, according to the summary, Mr. Mueller laid out various actions by Mr. Trump that could be seen as obstruction, letting others decide whether they added up to that. William P. Barr, the attorney general recently appointed by Mr. Trump after drafting a private memo expressing doubt that the president could be accused of obstructing justice for exercising his constitutional power, concluded on Sunday that they did not.

But the House, controlled by Democrats, has the power under the Constitution to decide for itself whether the president’s actions constituted “high crimes and misdemeanors” that justify impeachment, and it could interpret Mr. Mueller’s evidence the other way once it sees it.

The next phase of the story, then, will be the fight by House Democrats to force Mr. Barr to turn over Mr. Mueller’s full report and accompanying evidence, a constitutional battle that could ultimately be resolved in the courts.

Until they read the report for themselves, Democrats are hardly going to agree that the president has been cleared. And they will most likely summon Mr. Mueller to testify, which could provide a public airing of Mr. Trump’s actions that, even if not rising to a crime, may not reflect well on the president.

Still, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already said that she did not favor impeachment unless the evidence was “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan,” a standard that seems even less likely to be met now.

Either way, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has taken its toll on this presidency, leading to indictments, convictions or guilty pleas for a half-dozen of Mr. Trump’s associates, including his campaign chairman and national security adviser, and spawning offshoot investigations. In any other administration, that record alone would be enough to seriously damage a president.

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. Mr. Trump has denounced Mr. Mueller’s investigation as “an illegal take down that failed.”Credit Tasos Katopodis – Getty Images

Moreover, as Mr. Mueller closes up shop, federal, state and congressional investigators are still examining Mr. Trump’s business, his finances, his inaugural committee and his associates.

Federal prosecutors in New York have implicated Mr. Trump in a scheme to violate campaign finance laws by directing hush money to two women to keep them from talking before the 2016 election about alleged extramarital affairs with him. The State of New York forced him to close his foundation after finding a “shocking pattern of illegality.” The House Judiciary Committee has sought documents from 81 people or entities associated with Mr. Trump on a wide variety of topics.

But Mr. Mueller had bipartisan stature and credibility that none of the president’s other pursuers have, despite Mr. Trump’s own efforts to tear him down. Now the president who routinely assailed Mr. Mueller and his “13 Angry Democrats” for their “witch hunt” will surely use the results of the special counsel investigation to dismiss all others as part of a pattern of conspiracy mongering and vindictive persecution, whatever the facts may or may not show.

He presumably will not convince his many critics of that, but he may reinforce his political base heading into a re-election battle where Mr. Trump’s ethical and legal issues will surely be a major focus of debate. In polls, core Republican voters have already expressed deep skepticism about the allegations against Mr. Trump and the legitimacy of the investigations into them.

“Not indicted” or “not impeached” may not have been much of a bumper sticker in times past, but in today’s polarized political environment, each side sees these issues through its own lens.

The notion that the system came after Mr. Trump in the form of Mr. Mueller and failed to take him down will fit neatly into the president’s narrative of grievance and victimization, energizing his self-portrayal as a threat to the existing order.

For Mr. Trump, that is as good a day as they come.

Follow Peter Baker on Twitter: @peterbakernyt.

A version of this article appears in print on March 24, 2019, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Burden Lifts, Leaving Trump Fortified for the Battles to Come.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/us/politics/trump-mueller-investigation.html

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The post A Cloud Over Trump’s Presidency Is Lifted first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Trump Vows ‘Big Price’ for Syria Attack, Raising Prospect of Missile Strike

Julie Hirschfeld Davis — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:10:38 +0000

President Trump laid the blame for a deadly attack in Syria partly on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday promised a “big price” to be paid for what he said was a chemical weapons attack that choked dozens of Syrians to death the day before, and a top White House official said the administration would not rule out a missile strike to retaliate against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

In a tweet, Mr. Trump laid the blame for the attack partly on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the first time since his election that he has criticized the Russian leader by name on Twitter. Mr. Putin’s forces have been fighting for years to keep the Assad government in power amid Syria’s brutal civil war.

Mr. Trump also left no doubt that he believed the assessment of aid groups that Mr. Assad’s military had used chemical weapons to inflict the carnage on Saturday in Douma, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. The attack left at least 42 people dead in their homes from apparent suffocation and sent many others to clinics with burning eyes and breathing problems.

“Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria,” Mr. Trump wrote. “President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad.”

“Big price to pay,” Mr. Trump continued in a second tweet. “Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!”

Thomas P. Bossert, Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, said he and the rest of the president’s national security team had been in talks with Mr. Trump late Saturday and early Sunday about how to respond. Asked specifically about the possibility of a missile strike, Mr. Bossert did not rule it out.

“I wouldn’t take anything off the table,” Mr. Bossert said on ABC’s “This Week.” “These are horrible photos; we’re looking into the attack at this point.”

That raised the prospect of a strike along the lines of one that the president ordered almost exactly a year ago after a sarin gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun that killed more than 80 civilians. In that strike, the United States military dropped 59 Tomahawk missiles on the Al Shayrat airfield, where the chemical weapons attack had originated.

Mr. Trump may be considering such a strike even as he has expressed his desire in recent days to pull American troops out of Syria, where they are seeking to eliminate the last vestiges of the Islamic State. White House officials said Mr. Trump would have a meeting and dinner on Monday at the White House with senior military leaders.

Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, announced an emergency meeting there on Monday to demand immediate access to Douma for emergency workers, urge an independent investigation of the massacre, and “hold accountable those responsible for this atrocious act.”

The assault on Douma and the president’s response also showed how Syria has bedeviled Mr. Trump just as it did his predecessor, repeatedly presenting them with grave challenges and few good options for confronting them.

It was not clear on Sunday whether his tweets reflected serious planning for a military strike, or if the suspected chemical attack had changed the president’s calculation about the necessity for a rapid wind-down of American military involvement in Syria. A White House official said he could provide no guidance beyond what the president had said on Twitter.

But some Republicans urged Mr. Trump to act, saying his talk of pulling United States troops out of Syria had telegraphed to Mr. Assad that he would pay no price for brutalizing his own people.

“President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement, adding that Mr. Assad had been “emboldened by American inaction” to launch the attack in Douma.

“The president responded decisively when Assad used chemical weapons last year,” Mr. McCain went on. “He should do so again, and demonstrate that Assad will pay a price for his war crimes.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said Mr. Trump should make good on what the president appeared to be threatening.

If the president “doesn’t follow through and live up to that tweet, he’s going to look weak in the eyes of Russia and Iran,” Mr. Graham said on “This Week.” “This is a defining moment.”

“You need to follow through with that tweet,” he added. “Show a resolve that Obama never did to get this right.”

In his tweets, Mr. Trump also criticized former President Barack Obama for failing to take military action against Mr. Assad’s government when it used chemical weapons in 2013. Mr. Obama had threatened that any use of unconventional weapons would cross a “red line” for the United States.

e time, though, Mr. Trump argued fiercely against American intervention in Syria. In more than a dozen messages on Twitter in 2013 and 2014, he argued that the nation’s civil war was “not our problem” and that American troops should “stay out.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump’s tweets came not long after a report on Fox News about the massacre in Douma, in which an anchor said that “all eyes” would now be on the president’s response, and that the airstrikes last year had “garnered praise” from American allies.

The timing of the tweets alarmed some progressives who warned that Mr. Trump might make military decisions based on commentary on his favorite cable news outlet.

“If Trump should launch missiles, it is because Fox and Friends told him to,” VoteVets, a group that focuses on military issues and is aligned with Democrats, said on Twitter. “We cannot possibly overstate how insane and disastrous for command of our military that would be.”

In a statement on Saturday night, the State Department called the situation in Douma an “alleged chemical weapons attack” and said the reports about it were “horrifying and demand an immediate response by the international community.”

The statement took Moscow to task, saying it had breached international obligations and calling into question its commitment to weapons nonproliferation.

“The Assad regime and its backers must be held accountable and any further attacks prevented immediately,” it said. “Russia, with its unwavering support for the regime, ultimately bears responsibility for these brutal attacks, targeting of countless civilians and the suffocation of Syria’s most vulnerable communities with chemical weapons.”

But while members of his administration have often been harshly critical of Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump has in general spoken warmly of his Russian counterpart.

American officials said the process was underway to confirm whether the Syrian government had used chemical weapons and, if so, what kind.

Since last April’s strike on the airfield, the Pentagon has updated lists of potential Syrian military and government targets should Mr. Trump order another strike.

A senior Navy officer said on Sunday morning that Navy warships capable of firing cruise missiles were in the Mediterranean on routine, long-scheduled deployments but had not received any orders to prepare to move closer to Syria or to prepare to carry out any strikes.

Before last year’s strike, American commanders at the sprawling Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar — the United States’ air war command for the region — gave their Russian counterparts a warning of no more than 90 minutes before striking the Syrian airfield. The Americans did this under a “deconfliction” agreement with Moscow to try to prevent an unintended confrontation between the two countries.

At a daily operations briefing on Sunday at the air command center, there was no indication of an imminent operation, said one official who was briefed on the meeting. “Things can change pretty quickly, though,” the official cautioned, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Indeed, only 63 hours passed between last April’s chemical attack and the American cruise missile strike.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/us/politics/trump-syria-chemical-attack.html

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Trump, Joining Allies, Expels 60 Russians Over Poisoning in U.K.

Katie Rogers and Eileen Sullivan - New York Times — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 15:15:27 +0000

President Trump at the White House on Sunday. He has been criticized for not being firm enough with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. CreditAl Drago for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russians from the United States on Monday, adding to a growing cascade of similar actions taken by western allies in response to Russia’s alleged poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.

Poland, Italy, Denmark, France and Germany were among 14 European Union member nations announcing plans to expel Russians from their countries in solidarity with Britain, which previously expelled 23 Russian diplomats after the poisoning. Canada also said it would expel four.

The American expulsion order, announced by administration officials, includes 12 people identified as Russian intelligence officers who have been stationed at the United Nations in New York, and also closes the Russian consulate in Seattle. The Russians and their families have seven days to leave the United States, according to officials.

The expulsions are the toughest action taken against the Kremlin by President Trump, who has been criticized for not being firm enough with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The officials said the action was a coordinated effort with other allies. Poland announced it will expel the Russian ambassador and several other diplomats in response to the poisoning. And Germany announced plans to expel four Russian diplomats within the next week.

In a call with reporters, senior White House officials said that the move was to root out Russians actively engaging in intelligence operations against the country, and to show that the United States would stand with NATO allies. The officials said that the closure of the consulate in Seattle was ordered because of its proximity to a U.S. naval base.

“Today’s actions make the United States safer by reducing Russia’s ability to spy on Americans and to conduct covert operations that threaten America’s national security,” the White House said in a statement.

The Kremlin has maintained that it had nothing to do with the poisoning.

Britain’s decision to expel 23 Russian diplomats over the poisoning initially raised tensions between the two countries to a level not seen since the heights of the Cold War. The government vowed to crack down on Russian spies, corrupt elites and ill-gotten wealth in Britain.

On March 15, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on a series of Russian organizations and individuals for interference in the 2016 presidential election and other “malicious cyberattacks,” its most significant action against Moscow until Monday.

Those sanctions came as the United States joined Britain, France and Germany in denouncing Russia for its apparent role in a nerve-gas attackon a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil, calling it a “clear violation” of international law.

White House officials called the nerve agent used against the Skripals “military grade,” but declined to elaborate on the substance used.

American officials estimate there are currently more than 100 Russian intelligence officers in the United States.

Mr. Trump has said that, despite its denials, Russia was likely behind it. “It looks like it,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on March 15, adding that he had spoken with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain.

“We are in deep discussions,” Mr. Trump continued. “A very sad situation. It certainly looks like the Russians were behind it. Something that should never, ever happen. And we’re taking it very seriously, as I think are many others.”

Mr. Trump has been slower to act than leaders in Britain, France and Germany over the attack, in which Sergei V. Skripal, 66, a former spy, and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, 33, were attacked with a nerve agent.

The senior administration officials who described the expulsion order said the three weeks that lapsed between the attack and White House action was due to close coordination among about a dozen American allies.

Poland has positioned itself to take a lead role in coordinating a response from the Eastern European nations traditionally most wary of their giant neighbor to the east.

The Russian ambassador to Poland, Sergei Andreyev, was summoned to the foreign ministry on Monday morning and informed of imminent diplomatic action against his country. The Polish foreign minister was expected to make an announcement later this afternoon.

The Polish foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz called the tragic incident in Britain an “unprecedented attack on civilians with the use of chemical weapon,” that had not been seen since World War II.

Mr. Czaputowicz said the Russian ambassador and three other diplomats were now considered “persona non grata,” giving them until April 3 to leave the country.

Russia’s overall goal, Mr. Czaputowicz said, is to “disrupt international order and create a sense of danger.”

Any expulsion of Russian diplomats would be an unprecedented move on Warsaw’s part, the first time they took diplomatic action against their neighbor due to Russian behavior outside of Poland.

Since Poland broke from the Soviet bloc in the 1990s, it has expelled Russian diplomats only twice — and both times to had to do with Russia’s spying activities in Poland.

Germany’s move not only signaled solidarity with London, but it also suggested the incoming German foreign minister, Heiko Mass, may be more hawkish toward Moscow than his predecessor.

“The attack in Salisbury shook us all in the European Union,” Mr. Maas, said. “For the first time since the end of World War II a chemical war agent was used in the middle of Europe.”

Mr. Maas said Germany did not take the decision “flippantly.”

“But the fact and indications point to Russia. The Russian government has so far not answered any of the open questions and has shown no readiness to play a constructive role in solving this attack,” he said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/world/europe/trump-russia-diplomats-expulsion.html

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Russians Brave Icy Temperatures to Protest Putin and Election

Neil MacFarquhar and Ivan Nechepurenko — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 11:07:06 +0000

Protesters on Sunday in Moscow, where rallies called by the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny were banned. “You have your own life at stake,” Mr. Navalny said in a recorded message.Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

MOSCOW — Protesters across Russia braved icy temperatures on Sunday to demonstrate against the lack of choice in the March election that is virtually certain to see President Vladimir V. Putin chosen for a fourth term.

“What we are being offered right now are not elections, and we must not participate in them,” Yevgeny Roizman, the mayor of the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg and a rare elected official from an opposition party, told a crowd of hundreds that had gathered in protest.

The protests in scores of cities — from Vladivostok in the east to Kaliningrad in the west — were called by Alek sei A. Navalny, the charismatic, anticorruption opposition leader, after he was barred from running for the presidency because of legal problems that he said had been manufactured to prevent his candidacy.

“You have your own life at stake,” Mr. Navalny said in a recorded messageurging protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the rallies were banned, to turn out. “Every additional year of Putin staying in power is one more year of decay.”

Attacking the government as thieves, he said: “How many more years will you keep getting a lower salary than you are due? For how many more years will your business receive less revenue than it is due?”

Mr. Navalny was detained before he reached the several thousand demonstrators gathered in Pushkin Square in central Moscow and other main avenues closer to the Kremlin. Video footage showed police officers, who over all were far more restrained than during previous demonstrations, tackling him and dragging him onto a bus.

A police statement, which put attendance at 1,000 people, said he would be charged with organizing an illegal gathering. Later on Sunday, Mr. Navalny said in a post on Twitter that he had been released. His lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, told Reuters that he would have to face court at a later date.

Mr. Navalny was detained by police officers in Moscow on Sunday. Evgeny Feldman/Associated Press

In June, Mr. Navalny was arrested as he emerged from his apartment to attend an unauthorized anticorruption protest, and he served 25 days in jail. This time, he first stayed in an undisclosed location, taunting the authorities by saying he would announce his whereabouts, and then giving the address where Mr. Putin is registered to vote.

After he was detained on Sunday, Mr. Navalny posted a message on Twitterurging protesters to carry on without him.

The boisterous crowd in Pushkin Square chanted slogans including, “These are not elections!” and “Down with the czar!”

Mr. Navalny organized anticorruption protests across Russia in March and June, mobilizing middle-class youths in particular, and his campaign has vowed to organize repeated protests before the March 18 election to underscore that the vote is a fraud, with the Kremlin manipulating the entire process.

The numbers on Sunday were smaller than previous protests, not least because an election boycott is a less-galvanizing issue than corruption.

“People did not come out for an unsanctioned event,” Marat Guelman, a leading cultural figure, wrote on Facebook. “It’s a defeat. Moscow does not want tensions.”

But even those who despaired of change thought that showing up mattered.

“The boycott won’t likely change anything, but there are two different factors that work against Putin,” said Sergei Zhilkin, 32, a mathematician and IT engineer. “First, he gets older and is increasingly detached from what modern life is like; second, the new generation becomes more and more active in the society.”

Mr. Putin, 65, has refused to even say Mr. Navalny’s name, warning that protest movements would only bring chaos to Russia.

Demonstrators also gathered in St. Petersburg on Sunday. Mr. Navalny urged protesters there and in Moscow to turn out, as rallies in those cities were banned. Anton Vaganov/Reuters

The demonstrations were generally peaceful, with some 240 protesters detained nationwide, according to OVD-Info, an independent organization that tracks arrests. In the far eastern part of the country and in Siberia, crowds gathered despite frigid temperatures, with Yakutsk approaching minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 45 degrees Celsius).

Numerous provincial cities granted permits, although the protests were often shunted to remote locations.

Kazan was typical. The city offered organizers the parking lot of a garbage processing plant in an industrial district 30 miles north of the city, then erected a 10-foot wall of snow with bulldozers so that no passing cars could see the protesters.

Not to be deterred, a number of the roughly 600 demonstrators clambered atop the barricade to wave their protest signs despite the biting wind.

“I’m 23, and Putin’s been in power 18 years, practically my whole life,” said Grigory Bochkarev, an IT specialist. He was not there so much to support Mr. Navalny, he said, but for freedom of choice.

“I pay taxes, and my money goes toward corruption — not toward new roads or my relatives’ welfare, but for expensive cars for officials,” he added.

Another man, who identified himself only as Khaliulla, 79, said he had spent his whole life sacrificing in order to build socialism and now he could barely survive on his pension, forced to choose between rent and medication. “I thought my retirement would be decent,” he said.

He also objected to the forced location of the gathering at a garbage plant. “What are we: trash or something?” he said.

Security forces gathered in Moscow on Sunday ahead of a demonstration there.Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia’s two largest cities, law enforcement officials had warned that they would crack down on illegal gatherings. About 2,000 people demonstrated in St. Petersburg, according to the local news website Fontanka.ru.

State television broadcasts largely ignored the protests. Pictures posted on Mr. Navalny’s website showed the police taking a saw to the door of his headquarters in order to interrupt a live webcast describing events around the country. The police said that they were responding to reports of a bomb in the headquarters, Mr. Navalny said. But the webcasts continued all day anyway from an undisclosed location.

Mr. Navalny’s call for a boycott puts him on one side of a dispute among the opposition about whether exercising the right to vote, however futile, might be preferable.

“Russia has matured to the stage for elections to take place not as a production with Putin seeking pseudo-opponents and everyone goes out and performs,” Vladimir Milov, an opposition figure supporting the boycott, said during a debate on the Echo of Moscow radio station.

Maksim Kats, another opposition politician from one of Moscow’s district councils, countered that voting was crucial, even if the outcome was precooked.

“I think that the most appropriate means is to vote for the candidate that suits you,” he said. “But even if not, then at least spoil the ballot. And vote against Putin.”

Even among the protesters, there was some support for this position, with one man yelling, “Don’t support the boycott! You will be helping Putin if you do!”

Some political analysts also suggested that the boycott was a poor tactic. The absence of Mr. Navalny’s supporters at the polls would most likely not be enough to make a significant difference in the turnout, which is already expected to be lower than usual. The lack of intrigue in the race is expected to hobble the effort to muster a record turnout for Mr. Putin.

He has ruled Russia since 2000, governing as president for all but a four-year stretch, when term limits forced him to serve one term as prime minister. A fourth presidential term — lasting for six years until 2024 — would make him the longest-serving leader since Stalin.

The post Russians Brave Icy Temperatures to Protest Putin and Election first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The Roots of Poland’s Defiance of the European Union

Marc Santoria — Mon, 25 Dec 2017 12:15:36 +0000

Poles demonstrated with Polish and European Union flags and copies of the Constitution in front of the presidential palace in Warsaw last month to protest the new judicial laws.Janek Skarzynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

WARSAW — It is 3:30 p.m. on a Saturday and the sun is already setting over Warsaw. The hours of daylight here are dictated by the tilt of the Earth, Poland’s position in the Northern Hemisphere and the time of year.

But the early time of the sunset is the result of something else. Poland’s fierce desire to be part of Europe after breaking through the Soviet Iron Curtain.

For decades, the Soviet Union was on permanent daylight saving time, its clock constantly racing ahead of the sun. The Poles did not want to be told by the Russians when the day would end. Even if it meant putting up with darkness in the afternoon, they would rather be on European time because it meant being part of the European Union.

But last week, Poland challenged the very notion of what it means to be part of the bloc when the country pushed ahead with controversial measures to overhaul its judicial system and essentially put the courts under the control of the governing party. The action set off unprecedented censure from the European Union.

For the first time, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, used the most powerful threat in its arsenal to try to stop the measure, invoking Article 7 of the European Union treaty, which could strip Poland of its voting rights. It accused the government of trying to undermine core democratic values

President Andrzej Duda signed the measures into law anyway.

This is still a nation, however, that wants to stand with the West. Even though the governing party has denounced the European Union’s officials in Brussels as elitist and condescending, it relies on the financial support that membership brings and continues to deepen its military ties with other NATO nations.

But not only did the defiance put the direction of Polish democracy at stake, critics of the laws said, it also challenged the very notion of how effectively the bloc can deal with countries that step out of line. If Brussels fails to curb what it sees as behavior that undermines democratic values in Poland, other nations with their own populist leaders, like the Czech Republic and Romania, will be emboldened to chart their own course.

A Complex Defiance

Poland is not Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban frequently antagonizes European Union leaders and cozies up to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The dispute with the European Union is a more complex, and uniquely Polish, affair.

The crisis has its roots in 1989, when the country became the first Eastern bloc nation to hold partly free elections after decades of bitter and often-deadly struggle. It would take eight more years to create a constitution, one that Marcin Matczak, a professor of constitutional law at Warsaw University, said was “enacted within a post-totalitarian trauma.”

President Andrzej Duda of Poland signed the judicial overhaul into law hours after the European Union formally registered its displeasure. Radek Pietruszka/European Pressphoto Agency

“There was a great fear that the government may be too strong and that we could return to the old times,” he said. “Even the preamble of our Constitution says so. We remember the time when our human rights were infringed upon.”

Important among its provisions was a clear separation of powers between the courts and the politicians. But when the Constitution was enacted in 1997, no right-wing party was represented, including Center Agreement, a Christian democratic party and the predecessor to Law and Justice, the current ruling party.

“They refused to give this Constitution legitimacy,” Mr. Matcza said.

Mr. Matczak, a fierce opponent of the legislation signed by Mr. Duda, acknowledged that this lack of inclusion led to a bitterness that still fuels the governing party and its powerful leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Igor Janke, a former journalist who now runs a think tank, Freedom Institute, informally advises members of the government. Mr. Janke, who says he is sympathetic to the governing party, points to these early years of Polish democracy as being at the heart of today’s problems.

“When someone tells me we are destroying the judiciary, I say, ‘What judiciary?’” he said.

In the 1990s, he contends, many of those guilty of committing crimes against the Polish people escaped justice. He calls them “the red spiders.”

Red spiders breed more red spiders, and even though only two of the 80-odd justices on the Supreme Court have ties dating to the Soviet era, their influence is still felt, he said, echoing the party line.

First, Attack the Judges

Mr. Matczak says he believes something more sinister is at work.

When Law and Justice briefly held power before, from 2005 to 2007, its leader, Mr. Kaczynski, found himself stymied by the courts at every turn. He coined a term for what he viewed as obstructionism: prawny imposybilizm, or legal impossibilism.

When the party won power again, he said, Mr. Kaczynski “came back wiser and not willing to make the same mistakes.” He added, “They started their actions with removing the legal impossibilism.”

The first move was to dismantle the Constitutional Tribunal, which is empowered to review Poland’s laws. They removed unfriendly justices and ensured the once-powerful body was little more than a rubber stamp for the party, Mr. Matczak said.

“The mechanics of this attack on the Supreme Court are very similar,” he said. “First, you have an attack on judges.”

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki giving an address this month in Parliament.Janek Skarzynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Matczak said a close reading of the new laws shows their true intent. “The whole idea behind these two bills is to have full control over the national judiciary council, which has control over appointing judges,” he said. “And if you have control over the selecting committee, you need vacancies.”

Age limits create those vacancies on the Supreme Court. He said he feared that the next step for the government would be to use a subservient judicial system to go after both old enemies and political rivals.

He pointed to a new provision that allows for something known as a special extraordinary appeal, which would essentially allow any case over the past 20 years to be reopened.

“The result of this new legal tool will be over one million cases reopened over three years,” he speculated.

Mr. Matczak said he also fears that Mr. Kaczynski and his party plan to create a “fourth republic” — one based on conservative values and purged of pernicious enemies dating back to the Communist era.

“He wants to create a new country with new rules,” he said of Mr. Kaczynski.

U.S. and Britain Stand Down

So far, outside the European Union, the reaction has been muted.

Just one day after the legislation became law, Poland’s new prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, stood side by side in Warsaw with Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, to announce a new defense agreement and a commitment to protecting the rights of the one million Poles in Britain after it leaves the bloc.

Mrs. May danced around a question about the battle over the courts. “These constitutional issues are normally, and should be primarily, a matter for the individual country concerned,” she said, expressing the hope that negotiations with Brussels would resolve any outstanding issues.

Likewise, the United States has avoided criticizing Poland, and the government here continues to seek the favor of the Trump administration. When the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to condemn Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Poland was among a number of American allies to abstain.

That leaves the European Union to wrestle with the consequences of the current crisis.

Mr. Matczak, for one, says he sees dark days ahead.

“I am ashamed now,” he said. “We were a paragon of transformation of the rule of law. That has all changed.”

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