The New Yorker has a much quoted article about Yuri Lutsenko, the former Prosecutor General who appears to be feeding Rudy Giuliani many of the bizarre stories he keeps spouting, and who was instrumental in ousting Marie Yovanovich as US ambassador. Many have cited it as revealing what utterly corrupt and sleazy people Giuliani was working with.
That was honestly not my primary impression from the story. My primary impression was that it painted a far from flattering portrait if the Obama Administration and its policy toward Ukraine.
Just to be clear, Yuri Lutsenko was not the corrupt prosecutor Joe Biden wanted to force out. That was Viktor Shokin. Lutsenko was Shokin's replacement.
As a rough back story, since the fall of Communism, Ukraine has had two factions, one pro-Western and the other pro-Russian, but both holdovers from Soviet times, and both deeply corrupt and authoritarian. Lutsenko was of the pro-Western faction. He played a major role in organizing (failed) anti-government demonstrations in 2000, and in organizing the Orange Revolution in 2004, which toppled the pro-Russian government in favor of a pro-Western government. When pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych won the election in 2010, he imprisoned Lutsenko for a time, releasing him in response to international pressure. He also played a major role in the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, which toppled the pro-Russian government in favor of the pro-Western faction led by Petro Poroshenko (and led to the Russian invasion).
But none of this actually made him, or the pro-Western faction in general, honest or democratic. Rather, it was more a contest between our thugs and Russia's thugs, with the US desperately wanting to make our thugs into something they were not. The article recounts in some detail US attempts to make Poroshenko's faction over into something like a western-style system and running into resistance from principals who wanted nothing of the kind. As part of the process, Joe Biden forced Shokin out at prosecutor general and Lutsenko took his place, but soon proved just as corrupt. Lutsenko's allegations that US Ambassador Marie Yovanovich gave him a do-not-prosecute list does appear to have some basis in fact. Yovanovich did urge Lutsenko not to use fighting corruption as an excuse to settle scores with his political opponents and did descend to a level of micro-management that Lutsenko understandably resented. The alleged list apparently consisted of a number of anti-corruption activists that Lutsenko expressly reserved the right to prosecute.
The article also points out that, although there is no evidence that either Joe or Hunter Biden ever made corrupt use of Hunter's role on the Burisma board of directors to shield Burisma from prosecution, such protection nonetheless happened more subtly. Clearly the US had great power over Ukraine, and Ukrainian prosecutors did not dare move against a company that had a US Vice President's son on the board of directors, even though nothing was said or even hinted at.* (Hunter denied knowing about the prosecution when he took the job).
The end of the article does discuss Giuliani's attempt to get dirt on the Bidens from Lutsenko and even pressing him to prosecute them. It is certainly not flattering to Giuliani who comes across as a peddler of insane conspiracy theories.
But neither is the article flattering to the Obama Administration or to career diplomats. They come across like members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union caught in gangland war between rival bootleggers, trying to figure out who the good guys are, and lecturing them about their conduct and the evils of the Demon Rum. And to be clear, I do not believe the Obama Administration was solely to blame. It was acting in concert with the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Furthermore, although the article did not address the issue, there is every reason to believe that other administrations have behaved similarly, and other countries have been on the receiving end.
And it is enough to make me wonder whether Trump has a point in calling (frankly) for a more amoral approach to foreign policy. Certainly Trump's amoralism has served him well in his dealings with tyrannies. The Chinese are set to actually prefer Trump to any of his rivals, despite his trade war, because he shows no interest in meddling in their system of government or in pressuring them to do anything they see as threatening to the regime. All he cares about is money, which is easy to bargain over. And since there is no doubt that there will be tyrannies out there for the foreseeable future, and since we will somehow have to deal with them, maybe there is something to be said for the amoral approach.
Our last President to advocate for an honest amoralism in foreign policy was Richard Nixon, together with Henry Kissinger, and Nixon/Kissinger are generally seen as successful in foreign policy, though not without flaws. Nixon and Kissinger essentially saw the world as a gigantic chess game between the great powers, with small countries as the chessmen. Morality no more entered into the equation than it would enter into a game of chess; only the balance of power mattered. Nixon and Kissinger were highly successful in dealing with great power tyrannies. They opened relations with China (long overdue), successfully pursued detente with the Soviet Union, and play the Communist powers off against each other, but kept it from escalating into all-out war. Where they were less successful was in dealing with small countries, who invariably refused to accept their role as chessmen, but kept showing a will of their own.
Between Nixon and Trump, all our Presidents have pursued a policy of what might be called hypocritical moralism. That is to say, they all claimed concern for democracy, human rights, rule of law, etc, but invariably subordinated moral concerns to strategic ones. In general, Republicans were more openly (some might say more honestly) hypocritical, treating moral concerns as weapon to bash our enemies while making no attempt to apply such standards to our allies. Democrats have made some half-hearted attempts at consistency, criticizing allies and pressing them to improve their behavior, but invariably setting such concerns aside when a real strategic concern was at stake.
And just to be clear, I do not believe that a policy of pure moralism could ever be made to work in the real world. A more honest approach to moralism would be to come out an admit that, although it is a goal, it is not our highest priority and will be overridden when a higher priority comes into play.
More to the point, though, a policy of moralism has real costs. Invariably, it means meddling in a country's internal affairs and demanding that governments take actions that they consider incompatible with survival, or at least with some other essential goal. And this opens us up to manipulation, as it has numerous times in the past. Whether we are fighting Communism or Islamic terrorism or (currently) "corruption," this creates an incentive for political leaders to label their opponents as Communists or terrorists or corrupt in order to get us to take sides in normal political rivalries. How many charlatans have finagled our support by claiming to be "democrats" or "reformers" -- a task made easier by our tendency to equate "democracy" and "reform" with support for US interests.
It is all enough to give amoralism real appeal. But not the amoralism of Donald Trump. For one thing, Donald Trump is not pursuing an honest amoralism, but a hypocritical amoralism. That is to say, although he claims to make respect for national sovereignty a priority and to have no desire to dictate morality to other countries, he somehow manages to make exceptions for Iran and Venezuela. Hypocritical amoralism, it turns out, is even harder to swallow than either honest amoralism or hypocritical moralism. Furthermore, Trump's amoralism goes beyond mere amoralism into outright anti-moralism. In other words, he doesn't merely get along with tyrants; he actually seems to prefer tyrannies to democracies, and shows great enthusiasm for semi-authoritarian leaders who are actively undermining democracy.** And finally, Trump's policy is not merely one of amoralism, but of corrupt amoralism. Unable to distinguish between the national interest and his own personal interest, Trump keeps doing things like asking foreign governments to investigate is political rivals and (we suspect) to do him economic favors.
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*And it seems safe to assume that Ukrainians also knew how to read between the lines when Donald Trump responded to a request for military equipment with a request for a "favor."
**Nixon and Kissinger showed some of the same failing. In many ways, they preferred dealing with a dictatorship to a democracy invariably refused to be a mere chessman doing what its government wished. A democracy had numerous actors with wills of their own. Nixon and Kissinger saw the world as immensely complex, but they never fully recognized just how complex.
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