Latest News Updated: Can Impeachment Rein in the ‘Imperial Presidency’?

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Can Impeachment Rein in the ‘Imperial Presidency’?

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

January 22, 2020

Can Impeachment Rein in the 'Imperial Presidency'?

Impeachment is the ultimate check on presidential power, but neither the Senate trial nor the recent backlash against President Trump's Iran strike will dent executive authority in a serious way, according to a Foreign Affairs essay by Sarah Binder, James Goldgeier, and Elizabeth N. Saunders. Executive power has only grown since the 1970s, the authors write, thanks to Congress's reluctance to claw it back—and they expect that hesitancy to continue.

Much about today hearkens back to the Nixon era, the authors note—from impeachment itself and the accusation of power abuse, to Trump's strike on Qasem Soleimani and the ensuing debate about the War Powers Resolution (vetoed by Nixon in 1973), to the GAO's conclusion that Trump's White House broke the Impoundment Control Act (passed in 1974 among post-Nixon reforms) by withholding aid from Ukraine. Despite those echoes of "Nixon's power grab" and the legislative response to it, they don't see structural changes on the horizon.

"[T]he same intensely partisan forces that have dominated Trump's presidency will shape lawmakers' views about removing him from office—or even restraining his scope of action," the authors write. "Much as we might wish them to, lawmakers are unlikely to seize this opportunity to reassert the powers entrusted to them by the framers of the Constitution."

A 'Legitimacy' Crisis in Iran

Following anti-regime protests over the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752, two new Atlantic essays examine the direction and momentum of Iran's body politic. Iranian opinion is complicated, writes Graeme Wood, but citizens are now stuck in an uneasy place: Having wanted out from under the clerical regime's thumb, its opponents may now wonder "whether the U.S. would care about their survival" were it ever to fall.

The regime is facing opposition that's notably broad based, writes Suzanne Maloney, who sees the Flight 752 disaster prompting students and the middle class to join in voicing discontent, after poor and working-class men protested over economic strife in November. "The country is experiencing what journalist Christian Oliver recently described as 'a crisis of competence'—a growing sense among the population that a government whose legitimacy had become increasingly associated with quality of life rather than revolutionary fervor is no longer capable of delivering the goods for its people," Maloney writes. "On the streets, the factional blame game has proven irrelevant; the protests are denouncing the system as a whole."

How Might 'Cold War II' Play Out?

As tensions simmer between the US and China, several analysts are asking how a burgeoning Cold War might unfold. Some have marketed it as a clash of civilizations: In The American Interest, for instance, Andrew Michta writes that the US and China have "two mutually exclusive visions of how to organize society: on the one hand, an increasingly disaggregated liberal democracy and, on the other, an increasingly consolidated Chinese brand of commercial communism, both steeped in historically incompatible cultures."

Whether or not such a cultural framing is helpful, Robert Kaplan writes in The National Interest that a US-China Cold War will be fundamentally different from the last one. China is a more powerful adversary than the USSR, he writes—it has a long warm-water coast, the ability to project sea power, and a knack for technological development—and the contest will play out on different terrain. It will focus on a new wave of technology (microchips and circuitry, not nuclear warheads and tank battalions) and will be "conducted on a teeming planet whose anxiety is intensified by the passions and rages of social media," Kaplan writes. What's missing now is sustained dialogue between the two sides, but the US could once again rely on the appeal of its liberal governance model as a winning strategy, Kaplan argues, as new technology poses new problems for citizens worldwide.

Dubbing it "Cold War II," Niall Ferguson writes in The Boston Globe that the US is already at a disadvantage, as President Trump focuses narrowly on trade (and alienates allies) while the standoff has already shifted to tech. The roles of Russia and China have largely flipped this time around, Ferguson writes; where Henry Kissinger courted a less-powerful China to peel it off from Russia, the US must once again seek to drive those two countries apart.

Hong Kong's Protests and the Principle of Nonviolence

Despite the widely held view that protest movements effect change, gain popular support, and win defections from authorities by practicing nonviolence, Candice Delmas writes for the Boston Review that Hong Kong's disobedience is decidedly "uncivil," with protesters organizing themselves militaristically and clashing violently with police—but its violent character, for some reason, hasn't seemed to hurt the movement. One analyst puts its participation rate at 45% (well above the 3.5% seen as requisite for success), and Delmas writes that the "combination of high participation and population support with brutally repressive security forces bears resemblance to decolonization struggles—which, historically, have been mostly violent." That would seem to suggest, at least, that Hong Kong's protests are a particular case.