China & Russia’s “Marriage of Convenience”

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 21, 2023

As you know, I try to write this record of modern America from the perspective of what stories will matter in 150 years (about the span between the present and the Civil War). 

So, for all the chop in the water about the former president facing indictments, the story that really seems uppermost to me today is the visit China’s president Xi Jinping made today to Moscow for a meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters today that China and Russia would both like “to see the rest of the world play by their rules rather than the ones that…are enshrined in the U.N. Charter and what everybody else is…following.” Kirby said the White House sees the relationship of Xi and Putin as a “marriage of convenience.” He explained: 

“In President Putin and Russia, President Xi sees a counterweight to American influence and  NATO influence certainly on the continent and elsewhere around the world. In President Xi, President Putin sees a potential backer.” Putin needs Xi’s support because of his misadventure in Ukraine. There, Kirby said, Putin is “blowing through inventory.  He’s blowing through manpower. His military is getting embarrassed constantly. They’ve lost greater than 50 percent of the territory that they took in the first few months of this war.  He needs help from President Xi, and that’s what this visit was all about.”

“Now,” he added, “whether it results in anything, we’ll see.”

When a reporter asked Kirby if Xi would provide lethal aid to Russia, Kirby answered, “We don’t think that China is taking it off the table, but they haven’t moved in that direction.  We’ve seen no indication that they’re about to or — or fixing to provide lethal weapons.”

The Institute for the Study of War concluded that the outcome of the meeting was likely less than Putin wanted. It noted that Putin represented the meeting as showing the two countries working together against an adversarial West, while Xi only said the two countries were working together. This is a significant step down from the stance China took before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, in which it declared it had a “no limits partnership” with Russia, suggesting China is not inclined to give Russia all the support it needs for that war. 

Putin has been trying to rally states in Africa to his cause and likely hoped Xi would help that effort, but he did not. 

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia put out a statement deepening their cooperation, but Sam Greene, Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London, noted that the economic benefits of the statement all flowed from Russia to China, including Russia’s announcement that it will use yuan for foreign transactions with Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

“This summit…brings home exactly how much Putin has lost,” Greene wrote. “Prior to the war—even after 2014—Putin occupied a position of strategic maneuverability. He could arbitrage between east and west, reaping windfalls for his regime along the way. That’s all gone now. Putin tells his people he’s fighting for Russia’s sovereignty. In truth, he’s mortgaged the Kremlin to Beijing.”

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky today in a surprise trip to Ukraine at Zelensky’s invitation. It is the first visit of a Japanese prime minister to a country at war since World War II and demonstrates Japan’s growing international foreign policy presence. Last month, when Japan pledged $5.5 billion in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Kishida said: “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is not just a European matter, but a challenge to the rules and principles of the entire international community.” Today, he confirmed Japan’s “solidarity and unwavering support for Ukraine.” 

The next most important issue of the day, to my mind, was President Joe Biden’s designation of two new national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906: Avi Kwa Ame in Nevada and Castner Range in Texas. These are Biden’s second and third new monument designations. Last fall he created the Camp Hale–Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado, and in 2021 he restored the protections to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase–Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments that Trump had removed. Both of the new monuments cover land sacred to Indigenous American tribes. Together, they protect nearly 514,000 acres.

Biden also directed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to start the process of designating a marine sanctuary in the Pacific covering 777,000 square miles. 

Biden is advancing his promise to conserve American lands, but he is also answering criticism of his administration’s approval of the controversial Alaska Willow oil drilling project on March 13. ConocoPhillips had existing leases for the project, and it has bipartisan support in Alaska, where locals expect it will bring jobs and income, so after debate, the administration let the project move forward. But environmentalists and those who recognize the immediate need to address climate change vehemently opposed the project, launched lawsuits immediately, and criticized the president.   

“Our national wonders are literally the envy of the world,″ Biden said as he announced the new monuments. “They’ve always been and always will be central to our heritage as a people and essential to our identity as a nation.″ 

But while conservation groups and tribal members cheered the new designations, the new Republican governor of Nevada, Joe Lombardo, said that the federal government was confiscating Nevada land—a red-hot issue in the home state of the Bundy ranchers who have engaged in armed standoffs with law enforcement officers over public land—and said the new Nevada monument is “a historic mistake that will cost Nevadans for generations to come.”

None of this is to say that Trump’s troubles are not important. Indeed, the indictment of a president is unprecedented, and there is good reason to watch it closely, not least because the Republican Party has tied itself to him so completely it is now responding to the growing tide of legal news by calling for the investigation or even the arrest of those handling Trump’s many lawsuits– an alarming development. 

Right now, though, much of what we are seeing is being churned up by Trump himself, and it feels far less important than the fact it appears that neither the legal nor the political momentum is in his favor. 

GasLit Nation: Scholar Nancy MacLean on “the Trump Crime Cult’s Capitol attack,” and more

June 8, 2022

GASLIT NATION WITH ANDREA CHALUPA AND SARAH KENDZIOR

This is Part II of our interview. In this two-part interview, we take a deep dive into a right-wing hellhole with acclaimed scholar Nancy MacLean, the author of the bestseller Democracy in Chains, which discusses how anti-democratic networks run by powerful plutocrats came to hold the United States hostage. MacLean discusses the Koch dark money network and its shadowy political partners, the decades-long libertarian takeover of the Republican Party by far-right mercenaries, the infrastructure of this extremist network and how it has sustained itself for so long, the rise of the neo-confederacy, and the dystopian plans billionaires have for the American future. We also get MacLean’s opinions on recent crises like the pandemic, the Trump Crime Cult’s Capitol attack, and the assault on voting rights. And of course we ask her how we best battle these insidious adversaries, break America’s Koch addiction, and get our country back!

GasLit Nation: Help Ukraine by Cleaning Up Western Corruption. The Maksym Eristavi Interview

May 18, 2022

GASLIT NATION WITH ANDREA CHALUPA AND SARAH KENDZIOR

In this interview conducted a few weeks before Russia’s escalation of its invasion of Ukraine, Eastern European journalist and writer Maksym Eristavi explains the social and political crises that led the world to this point. Andrea and Maksym discuss corruption in Ukraine, how the Kremlin has weaponized that corruption, and how corruption in Ukraine is an enduring legacy of Russian genocidal colonialism, and how the West can help Ukraine by cleaning up its own corruption. They also discuss Ukraine’s efforts to build a free and just civil society despite corruption, in particular ongoing initiatives to preserve LGBTQ rights. This interview provides vital historical context on the ongoing regional conflict.

Republican Minority Leader McCarthy: “The country is too crazy … this is serious sh*t”

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 27, 2022

Last night, New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin released more of the audio recording of Republican leadership that they obtained in the process of writing their forthcoming book. This recording features a conversation among the House leadership on January 10, 2021. In it, the two top Republicans in the House of Representatives—House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House minority whip Steve Scalise (R-LA)—agreed that the Trump loyalists calling out other Republicans as “anti-Trump” were endangering lives, including that of the third-top House Republican at the time, Liz Cheney (R-WY), who was also on the call. 

McCarthy noted that Representative Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH) had just sent him a recent tweet from Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) about Cheney and that McCarthy was going to talk to Gaetz to get him to stop. “We saw what people would do in the Capitol,” he said. “These people came prepared with rope, with everything else.” Scalise agreed, saying “it’s potentially illegal what he’s doing.”

McCarthy singled out Representatives Gaetz and Mo Brooks (R-AL) as key culprits, but he and the others on the call also discussed Representatives Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Barry Moore (R-AL). McCarthy said he was going to be talking to those people because “this is serious sh*t,” and they needed “to cut this out.” “The country is too crazy,” he said. “I do not want to look back and think we caused something or we missed something and someone got hurt. I don’t want to play politics with any of that.”

And yet, of course, they did not cut it out. Instead, McCarthy did play politics with it. He caved, Cheney lost her position in House leadership, and Gonzalez, once seen as a rising star in the party, announced in September 2021 he would not run for reelection. Gonzalez’s vote to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection and his support for an investigation into the events of January 6 led Trump supporters to threaten him and his family. In his announcement that he was leaving Congress, Gonzalez called Trump “a cancer for the country.” 

Last night, after news broke of the recording, Gaetz issued a statement saying that McCarthy and Scalise “held views about President Trump and me that they shared on sniveling calls with Liz Cheney, not us. This is the behavior of weak men, not leaders…. While I was protecting President Trump, they were protecting Liz Cheney from criticism…. On the bright side, you no longer have to be a lobbyist with a $5,000 check to know what McCarthy and Scalise really think. You just have to listen to their own words as they disparage Trump and the Republicans in Congress who fight for him.” 

Gaetz is clearly throwing himself entirely behind Trump. Even his language here is like that of the former president. While Gaetz’s political loyalty is part of a larger story, it is also worth remembering that Gaetz is still under investigation for sex trafficking, and two of his associates have pleaded guilty in that case. One admitted to sex trafficking, and the other admitted to drug and fraud charges. Both are cooperating with authorities. Seeing Trump back in power could smooth Gaetz’s potential legal troubles.

Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson also went after McCarthy, calling him “a puppet of the Democrats…a man who, in private, turns out sounds like an MSNBC contributor. The chyron under his monologue read: “KEVIN MCCARTHY HATES PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND THIS SHOW.” News broke today that Carlson, who has openly supported Hungary’s rising authoritarian Viktor Orbán, will speak this summer at the Iowa Family Leadership Summit, a gathering traditionally used to launch presidential campaigns. 

Meanwhile, excerpts from that same new book say that early in the morning of January 7, after the January 6 insurrection, then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told Martin: “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow [Trump] finally, totally discredited himself.” McConnell said of Trump, “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger,” adding, “Couldn’t have happened at a better time.” McConnell vowed to crush the extremist “sons of b*tches… in the primary in ’22.”

And yet now, a year later, the Trump loyalists are running strong, having abandoned the democratic ideology of the U.S. and replaced it with white Christian nationalism. They are embracing the same idea that Russian president Vladimir Putin advances: that the democratic principle of equality is immoral because it does not privilege white, straight, Christian men. They are trying to stop public discussion of race or gender, end the constitutional right to abortion, and center schools around the Christian religion. 

While pro-business Republicans could live with these ideas in the past if it meant getting the economic legislation they wanted, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott have illustrated that the Trump wing of the party has abandoned Republicans’ traditional support for business. DeSantis infuriated Republicans as well as Democrats when he demanded a new—and evidently illegal—law to break up the independent governing zone under which the Walt Disney Company operates in Florida unless Disney stops supporting LGBTQ rights. And Abbott’s recent shutdown of trade to and from Mexico in order to “search” for drugs and undocumented immigrants cost the U.S. an estimated $9 billion in gross domestic product while turning up no drugs or immigrants. 

Meanwhile, 18 House Republicans, led by Jim Jordan (R-OH), warned Twitter that it could be investigated if it didn’t accept an offer from billionaire Elon Musk for its purchase. This is an uncanny echo of the techniques of the Ukrainian leaders who worked for oligarchs: those leaders used “investigations” to punish opponents, just as Trump hoped to do to Hunter Biden in 2019.   

The business Republicans appear finally to be fighting back, at least a little, likely recognizing that the extremes of the Trump loyalists will hurt them with the “suburban” voters they badly need. (By “suburban voters” they usually mean white middle-class voters, although the last census showed that in 2020, about 54% of Black residents within the 100 biggest American metro areas lived not in the cities themselves but in suburban areas.)

This week, they went after Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), in what sure looks like a strategic move to distance the party from the Trump loyalists without actually losing the religious base. Cawthorn’s remarks about being invited to orgies with drugs made headlines a few weeks ago, and he has been embarrassed since by photos of him in lingerie, drinking with women, at a party. Perhaps to distract from that story, Cawthorn tried to take a loaded gun on a plane and was caught—this was the second time he was caught doing this—and then complained that the “political establishment” was out to get him. 

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) called for a “thorough and bipartisan” investigation of Cawthorn’s potential involvement in an insider trading scheme involving the “Let’s Go Brandon” cryptocurrency, which appears to have been a pump-and-dump scheme. (But former president Trump and his son Don, Jr., also promoted the coin, and no one has complained about their participation.) Cawthorn called Tillis a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only. 

Today, 17 Republicans were the only lawmakers to vote against a House resolution expressing support for Moldova’s democracy. As CNN reporters Melanie Zanona, Manu Raju, and Gabby Orr noted, when Trump loyalists do such a thing, they might be reminding McCarthy of their power to force more concessions on him if he becomes speaker with a small majority, enabling them to move the country in their direction no matter how unpopular they are.

The chaos in the Republican Party inspired Democratic political consultant Tim Hogan to tweet: “At this point I’m willing to believe Kevin McCarthy accidentally turned on a voice memo for the month of January and when he tried to delete it he accidentally forwarded it to the New York Times.”

GasLit Nation: “Targeted by the Mafia State” – An Interview With Cheri Jacobus

April 20, 2022

GASLIT NATION WITH ANDREA CHALUPA AND SARAH KENDZIOR

Back in 2015 and 2016, as the GOP caved to the Trump crime cult and the mainstream media normalized their corrupt ambitions, a few voices from the right rose up in dissent. One of the leading lights in this regard was Cheri Jacobus, a political commentator and former Republican who was an early target of Trump’s vicious campaign and its propaganda machine. Currently a registered Independent, Cheri was the founder, President, and Executive Producer of “America Reads The Mueller Report” and the former host of the podcast “Politics with Cheri Jacobus”. She remains an outspoken critic of the Trump crime cult and its enablers..