Government Executive - Authors - Steve LeVine

Would Hillary Clinton Appoint a 'Team of Rivals'-Style Cabinet as President?

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 09:38:31 -0400

The aggregate polls tell us that Hillary Clinton is likely to decisively beat Donald Trump on Nov. 8 and become the United States’ next president. What they—and almost all analysts—fail to prescribe is how she will govern after a quarter-century of obstructionist partisan rancor and the ugliest national election in modern American history.

As a starting point, a rationalist might suggest that Clinton (if she wins) will attempt to rise above the extraordinary political animus by convening the equivalent of a “war cabinet”: a willing coalition with members of both major parties intent on putting the nation on a healing track.

One can easily imagine, for example, former secretary of state Colin Powell, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, and maybe even senator Susan Collins of Maine serving in a Clinton administration. With their input and a bit of cooperation, Democrats and Republicans conceivably could hammer out deals on the economy, health care, climate change and gun violence, and perhaps even move on to a united strategy on the wars in the Middle East.

But such a concession by Clinton appears improbable. Neither does it seem likely that the presence of these Republicans—nor perhaps any Republican—in her cabinet would attract the policy support of the bulk of their party members in Congress.

The real “Team of Rivals”

In the US, the practice of bringing together bitter political enemies for the good of the country dates back to George Washington, the first and only nonpartisan US president. He invited both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson into his cabinet despite their very different visions for the fledgling democracy. (Hamilton, a northerner, was a Federalist; Jefferson would go on to form the Democratic-Republican party, a Southern grouping in the early 1800s.)

The “Team of Rivals” chronicled by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her 2005 biography of Abraham Lincoln has helped to fuel our modern fantasies of bipartisan cooperation. But in Lincoln’s case, the rivalry was strictly intra-party; the men who agreed to join his cabinet as the nation devolved into civil war had been Lincoln’s fiercest competitors for the Republican nomination in the election of 1860.

If Clinton has rivals in her cabinet, they will be assembled in the style of Lincoln’s, as an attempt to defuse still-raw tensions within the Democratic party, analysts say. While Clinton will be instinctively drawn to appoint Democratic centrists, she will somehow have to appease her left-wing Democratic rivals, senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have supported her while also protecting their own progressive agenda.

Matthew Dallek at George Washington University says Clinton’s cabinet, like US president Barack Obama’s, is likely to be “highly diverse and include lots of women, African-Americans, and Latinos.” She may appoint a couple of Republicans as well, he says.

But in terms of restoring a working relationship between the parties, that won’t be decided in the cabinet. “I don’t think her cabinet appointments are going to have much if any impact on whether or not the country will have gridlock,” Dallek says.

Instead, peace will have to come in the give and take of Congress.

Right now, that’s looking like an especially tall order for Republicans in the legislature, who will first have some work to do putting their own house in order.

“The Republican party has a real mess on its hands,” says Mark Peterson, a political science professor at UCLA. “There is an enormous divide between much of its a base and a substantial part of its intellectual elite, leadership, and past participants in actual governance in previous administrations. There are also a number of deeply conflicted elected officials at all levels who felt they could not abandon their party’s nominee but who would not ever had made that selection themselves, and they have tied themselves in knots trying to identify a survival strategy. It is still unclear how these divisions will get resolved.”

The safe bet: When the party is not chewing itself up in internecine conflict between its establishment, Trumpian, Freedom Caucus, and Tea Party wings, it will be at daggers drawn with Clinton.

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Monday May Have Been the First Time Presidential Candidates Were Asked If They Will Honor the Election's Outcome

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 10:15:11 -0400

A major frustration for elections in under-developed countries is that the only party to accept the outcome is often the winner; the opposition stays in the streets and either gets crushed, or makes life difficult for the folks in power. In places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, the result is mayhem and a paralyzed government.

But there is no example in memory in which a US presidential election winner faced an implacable opponent who simply would not concede. In the hotly disputed 2000 election, for instance, Democrat Al Gore immediately conceded when, in an unprecedented ruling, the US Supreme Court effectively declared Republican George W. Bush the winner.

Which made the final question of Monday's debate extremely odd, and astounding. The question was, If you lose election, will you accept the result of the election? In no US presidential debate, at least in modern times, has that question been asked.

Astounding in a historical sense perhaps, but not in the current election. Numerous times, Republican Donald Trump has told his supporters that the election will be rigged, especially if he loses, thus suggesting to some that he would challenge such an outcome.

Clinton replied immediately that she would accept the outcome. Trump danced for a few minutes about making America great again, his campaign slogan, then, after moderator Lester Holt asked him again, he replied that he would also accept the outcome.

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The Secret Service Has Spoken to the Trump Campaign About His Apparent Threat Against Clinton

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 10:52:36 -0400

The US Secret Service has had “more than one conversation” with Republican nominee Donald Trump or his aides about what has been widely perceived as an assassination threat against Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, according to CNN.

In the conversations , Trump or campaign aides denied any threat of violence against Clinton, CNN quoted a Secret Service official as saying. “There has been more than one conversation,” the official said.

The Secret Service is in charge of security for the United States’ most powerful politicians. CNN did not report whether the questions were raised to Trump himself.

In a late-afternoon tweet, Trump himself denied the story.

No such meeting or conversation ever happened - a made up story by "low ratings" @CNN .
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2016

The remarks came a day after Trump ignited a firestorm of criticism with an apparent off-the-cuff remark in a speech to a crowd in Wilmington, NC. In the speech, Trump alleged that Clinton intends to “abolish” the Second Amendment to the US constitution, which guarantees the right to bear arms. With a seat currently open on the nine-justice US Supreme Court, he said that Clinton would appoint a jurist who would weaken the Second Amendment.

Then Trump seemed to suggest, however, that gun-owners could stop her from doing so. He said, “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is.”

The remark was widely interpreted as a suggestion that gun owners could shoot either Clinton or liberal judges. Trump later told Fox News he was only talking about their “political” power – and saying of the media coverage: “Give me a break.”

In a column, New York Times writer Thomas Friedman said that the episode reminded him of the toxic rhetoric that preceded the 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhaq Rabin.

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Obama Taunts Republican Claims About the Islamic State Threat

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 10:06:41 -0500

President Barack Obama challenged the narrative of American decline in his final State of the Union address, and ridiculed the scare-mongering of Republican presidential candidates over ISIL, with their “over-the-top claims that this is World War III.”

But even as Obama implicitly mocked critics who say he is soft and irresolute against enemies abroad, he pointedly ignored a looming crisis that threatened his signature foreign policy achievement: Iran’s detention of 10 American sailors, whose vessels appeared to have accidentally drifted into Iranian waters.

Although officials in Tehran and Washington are working to resolve the standoff, it threatened to derail a hard-won nuclear deal with Iran, just days before foreign sanctions were set to be lifted. As long as the US sailors are in Iran, the nuclear deal is effectively on hold.

Obama’s speech was effectively a rejoinder to the Republican presidential candidates who have spent the last several months painting Obama as a threat to US security. And indeed, an audible grumble of incredulity arose from the Republican side of the congressional chamber as Obama closed out the section of his speech on domestic policy, and shifted to his record on foreign affairs.

“I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air,” he said. “Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker.”

As guffawing could be heard from Republicans, Obama launched into a series of predictable applause lines. They included: “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period,” and, “No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin.”

Obama went on to stoutly challenge a central plank not only of every Republican presidential candidate, but of most mainstream foreign policy analyses: that respect for America has diminished on his watch.

“Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to this office,” he claimed, “and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead — they call us.”

It was on the subject of ISIL that Obama was at his most acerbic:

“Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence,” he said. Rather, went on, ISIL is amounts to “killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed. [And] that’s exactly what we are doing.”

If anyone doubts America’s determination to hunt down its enemies, Obama said—in what has become a personal mantra—he suggested they “ask Osama bin Laden.”

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CIA Director Brennan: Paris Attacks Should Bring U.S. and Russia Closer

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 15:44:54 -0500

For years, governments in the Persian Gulf and the West alike, while disagreeing on much, have been in accord on one big thing—Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is among the most heinous forces on the planet and has to go. But after the Islamic State attack on Paris, he improbably seems much less odious and most likely now has a lifeline to continued power.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin, too, has been one of the West’s leading villains, particular since sending his troops into Ukraine, annexing Crimea, and destabilizing the eastern part of his neighboring country. Suspicious of Putin and his motives, the West has ignored his entreaties for a joint Syrian strategy, one that from his own side has meant an air campaign designed to bolster Assad’s hold on power.

But in the wake of the November 13 Paris attack, Ukraine has abruptly vanished into the background, and the West, if not precisely embracing Putin himself, will embrace him as a partner in Syria.

President Barack Obama signaled this shift in a very public appearance with Putin on November 15, ahead of a G-20 summit in Turkey. CIA Director John Brennan today added to the picture of Putin coming in from the cold in a speech in Washington.

We’ve been exchanging info w/ Russia, I think it needs to be enhanced. -@CIA Dir Brennan https://t.co/xTBIIdH0fR pic.twitter.com/2awwp4W64d
— CSIS (@CSIS) November 16, 2015

Paris was the last of three major strikes in which the Islamic State claimed responsibility—the first was the October 31 downing of a Russian airliner, killing 224 people; the second was a pair of Beirut suicide bombings on November 12 in which 43 died. As a whole, the Islamic State seemed to be sending a message that it can and will attack anywhere.

But the assault on the French capital has seemed particularly potent because of Paris’s stature as a primary Western city and, going back to the 18th century, a symbol of Western ideals alongside ancient Greece and the American revolution. At least initially, the attack has claimed the status of a great inflection point that, like 9/11, instantly shifts geopolitics.

It’s yet to be seen whether it assumes grander scale in global geostrategy and the popular imagination, like Pearl Harbor, or Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. But look now for startlingly high-profile unity among formerly tense rivals and enemies.

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The Military Will Try to Shut Down the Islamic State's Oil Fields

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 11:00:00 -0500

More than a year since the US started attacking ISIL’s oil-led financial network, American bombers are finally being used in an attempt to entirely shut down the fields.

As early as last September, oil experts from the region said that the best way to stop ISIL’s estimated $40 million a month in oil revenue was to destroy any equipment with rotating machinery or electric supply.

Instead, though, US bombers appeared to attack mostly small refineries and some trucks. As a result, the flow of money to ISIL persisted.

Now, though, put under pressure by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s foray into Syria and Iran’s more aggressive posture there, the US has begun to bomb the oilfields aggressively, according to a Nov. 13 reportin the New York Times. Among the targets, the report says, are fuel-oil equipment and pumping stations.

The Pentagon has dubbed the mission Tidal Wave II, after a World War II campaign called Operation Tidal Wave, which persistently attacked Hitler’s oil infrastructure in Romania and significantly reduced his oil supply.

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George Washington Was the Last President to Face an All-out Foreign Policy Uprising

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 12:00:00 -0400

Turns out there’s a close precedent for the spectacle of a poisonously contrary opposing party urging Americans and foreigners alike to ignore the sitting US president. But we must reach back all the way to George Washington and the 1790s, says a leading scholar.

In his day, Washington was branded senile by his opponents—the precursors to today’s Democrats but back then called Republicans—one of whom wished for his early death, according to Joseph Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US revolutionary-era scholar. Calling Washington a traitor, the Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, tried to defund a treaty he had negotiated with the British.

“To the degree that the current right-wing Republicans don’t think that Obama represents the best interests of the country, they felt the same way about Washington,” Ellis tells Quartz. “The lunacies that we see are not unprecedented. They were there at the creation.”

First, let’s discuss contemporary politics

Today’s Republicans have been in a fairly regular lather almost since Barack Obama was elected president, casting doubt on his legitimacy and generally working to lock him in a full nelson. But over the past two weeks, they’ve gone into a higher state of agitation, into something resembling open rebellion.

On March 4, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell urged governorsof the 50 states to defy expected new federal rules governing carbon emissions from power plants, rules that in his view are illegal.

The day before that, House of Representatives speaker John Boehner hosted Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu for a big speech. Obama had opposed Netanyahu’s appearance because it was staged to undercut advanced nuclear negotiations under way with Iran. But, in one of history’s strangest episodes of diplomatic sabotage, it went ahead anyway: House and Senate Republicans, plus some Democrats, cheered as Netanyahu, facing a close election at home, suggested that Obama is a naïve foreign policy actor.

In the latest event, 47 Republicans on March 9 signed an open letter to Iran’s leadership: Tehran could conclude any nuclear deal it wanted with Obama, but Congress would have to approve it, and “the next president could revoke” it, the signees said. The letter appears not to have violated the Logan Act, which bars unauthorized people from conducting negotiations on behalf of the US, a role relegated solely to the president, but some legal scholars say it came close.

Aaron David Miller, a presidential scholar at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, says both the invitation to Netanyahu and the Republican letter are unprecedented. Other experts and commentators have said the same—that the president’s right to conduct foreign policy has never been so infringed. “Together they demonstrate that while politics really never stopped at the water’s edge, these days those domestic politics are way off shore,” Miller tells Quartz.

But that ignores the father of the nation

Perhaps no modern president has faced such a revolt, but Ellis points out that Washington confronted—and defeated—a similar uprising.

The issue back then was a diplomatic accord with Britain that came to be called the Jay Treaty. Negotiated just a few years after the cessation of the Revolutionary War, a time when emotions remained brittle between Britain and its former American colonies, the treaty, Washington argued, was nonetheless necessary if the US was to get onto its feet and not disintegrate.

But Jefferson and his political allies wanted the young country to enter a commercially hostile posture with Britain, and instead maintain its cozy relationship with the French.

Washington proceeded, peacefully settling outstanding issues from the Revolutionary War, including extricating residual British troops from present-day Ohio and neighboring states, and ushering in a decade and a half of normal trade between the former combatants.

So began the open warfare among the founding fathers. James Monroe, a Jefferson acolyte (and future president) who was then US ambassador to France, openly told Parisians they could ignore Washington—arguing that he was not the United States’ legitimate leader. Washington summarily fired Monroe. Another Jeffersonian aide behaved similarly, and Washington sacked him, too.

Paine’s diatribe against Washington.

The rhetoric became shrill. Jefferson called Washington senile. A grandson of Benjamin Franklin—Benjamin Franklin Bache—charged that Washington was a traitor, who had collaborated with the British in the war. Tom Paine wrote an open letter (left) in which he prayed for Washington’s imminent death, Ellis said.

To withhold Senate approval of the treaty, Jefferson and his acolytes fired up the public into an anti-British frenzy. Washington out-maneuvered them and won Senate ratification, at which point the Republicans shifted the field of battle to the House of Representatives, where they attempted to deny funding to put the treaty into effect. Washington won that, too, by a close, 51-48 vote.

Ultimately, Jefferson abided by the treaty when he himself became president in 1801. But the die for no-holds-barred partisan politics was cast.

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Putin Is Violating a Rule That Was Designed to Prevent World War Three

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 12:27:51 -0400

Russian president Vladimir Putin expressed the bitterness of the ages when he addressed his compatriots this week. For three centuries, the West had conspired to bottle up Russia within its borders—since the time of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and the establishment of the country’s sweeping empire. But no longer. The world would have to accept a confident new Russia that no longer tolerated such affrontery. Unspoken but communicated plainly were the words “or else.”

But Putin’s March 18 address to parliament was notable for other reasons, and that was in declaring a clear conclusion to two overlapping eras. One is the “post-Soviet period,” the quarter-century-long age defined by the 1991 collapse of the USSR and the triumph of the West and its ways. Russia is no longer supine and prepared to accept the faits accompli as presented by Washington and its allies, he said.

The second, though, is far more consequential: the post-World War II Pax Americana, the UN-led security architecture under which countries pledge not to forcibly annex one another (article 2, paragraph 4). Putin has not suggested that the UN charter be rescinded, but his absorption of Crimea—not to mention the 2008 effective annexation of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia—amount to the same thing. The only other significant forceful annexation since 1945 that has not been rolled back was Israel’s occupation of territories in 1967, writes the historian Juan Cole. (Others that were rolled back include Indonesia’s takeover of East Timor in 1975 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.) Certainly, no other major world power has broken the pledge.

The Pax Rossiyana

Putin did not spell out the new rules of this still largely vague new period, but he did make one matter unmistakable: some of the rules will be set by Russia.

“There is a limit to everything,” Putin said. He added, “Today, it is imperative to … accept the obvious fact: Russia is an independent, active participant in international affairs; like other countries, it has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected.”

This state of affairs infuriates NATO. In a speech yesterday at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the western military alliance’s secretary general, said “we live in a different world than we did less than a month ago.” He said the Russian adventure involved:

“attempts … to re-write or simply rip up the international rule book. And to use force to solve problems rather than the international mechanisms that we have spent decades to build. We had thought that such behavior had been confined to history. But it is back. And it is dangerous.”

At the moment, Putin remains on the offensive and appears to be the winner from the crisis. The West has so far imposed only a light slap of sanctions against individual Russians. Today the US opened the door to the possibility of broader sanctions against sectors of the Russian economy, and tonight European officials will discuss a UK proposal to escalate efforts to become less reliant on Russian natural gas. But if Putin’s territorial ambitions stop at Crimea, there may be no further action.

Where else Russia might expand

Putin has left the question of further territorial interest ambiguous. He said he respects Ukraine’s integrity, but at the same time suggested its borders are not hard and fast. This is the “or else” part of his message. In line with that dimension, a Russian diplomat at the UN suggested March 19 that Moscow continues to be unhappy with the treatment of ethnic Russians in Ukraine—and also Estonia. There are also concerns about Russian intentions in Transnistria, a disputed majority ethnic-Russian area of Moldova.

One can see some of the outlines of the new homeland in Putin’s mind. With the establishment of a federated Ukraine—one of Moscow’s demands—he could go on to dominate eastern Ukraine, the country’s industrial bedrock. Since he already has drawn Belarus and Kazakhstan into his Eurasian Union, a Moscow-led economic alliance scheduled to launch next year, absorbing more of Ukraine would give him stewardship over the muscle of the Soviet Union’s industrial and resource base while ignoring its less-productive fat.

As discussed in another post, this is a new Putin, a messianic Russian leader telling his countrymen he will lead them to the promised land. His strategy has been an appeal to deep-seated Russian insecurities and a righteous, us-against-them instinct. “We have every reason to assume that the infamous policy of containment, led in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today,” Putin said March 18. “They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner because we have an independent position, because we maintain it and because we call things like they are and do not engage in hypocrisy.”

One result is that Putin has domestic latitude (paywall) to do as he wishes—an ultra-nationalistic, anti-western hysteria that appears likely to support almost any foreign adventure. The lone member of Russia’s 450-seat Duma to vote against the Crimean annexation, an opposition politician called Ilya Ponomarev, said that he did so only because he thought it was too hastily done (link in Russian).

The world is conflicted. Markets have said ho-hum—stock markets have ralliedsince Putin’s address—while political and military leaders have been in a panic. But those who deal in global security—NATO in particular—are worried that the underpinnings of the six-decade “long peace” since World War II are at risk.

Reprinted with permission from Quartz. The original story can be found here.

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New Global Navy Challenges U.S. Dominance on the Seas

Steve LeVine, Quartz — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:30:43 -0400

Offshore from Syria, Russia’s navy is conducting probably its largest naval deployment outside its own waters since the Soviet breakup. The Chinese navy is in another potential confrontation today with Japan in the East China Sea, and raising questions about where it is headed next.

But the BRIC nations as a whole—a force in the global economic conversation since the acronym was coined by Goldman Sachs to refer to the high-growth economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China—are becoming an increasing naval presence on the high seas. One reason is simple nature—when nations become wealthier, they tend to build up their fighting capabilities. But another is natural resources—all four nations either want to buy or sell oil and natural gas, and they are venturing further and further to do so.

A paradox is that while the shift challenges US primacy on the high seas, the US itself—because of its oil and gas boom—is driving part of the BRIC naval expansion.

Because it is providing for more and more of its own energy requirements, the US is importing much less African and Middle East crude, and the chief new buyers replacing it are BRIC nations—the US is about to be displaced by India as the largest buyer of Nigerian crude oil, for example. “It is only a matter of time before we see Indian ships in the South Atlantic [to patrol the coast of West Africa],” Brahma Chellaney, of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, told the Financial Times.