| | | | When They Included Impeachment, the Founders Had Foreign Policy in Mind | | Writing for Project Syndicate, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt notes a big difference between the impeachment inquiry into President Trump and those into Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and Andrew Johnson: This time, it's about foreign policy. Those previous episodes did little to rock the foreign-policy boat—Henry Kissinger kept things steady under Nixon, and the Clinton White House maintained normalcy in its foreign dealings in 1998—but the Trump inquiry has the potential to "jam up the machinery of US foreign policy."
Novel as that may be today, Frank O. Bowman III writes for Foreign Affairs that historically, it's the norm. Impeachment is older than America: Britain's Parliament initially used it to hold nobles to account over dealings with foreign regimes amid Europe's constant wars and close political quarters. When the framers included it in the US Constitution, Bowman writes, they recognized that foreign policy presented a unique opportunity to subvert the national interest; when George Mason proposed the inclusion of "high crimes and misdemeanors" as impeachable offenses, he did so in response to the widely publicized impeachment of Warren Hastings, British governor general of Bengal, whose behavior hadn't violated any specific criminal statutes.
The risk is palpable under Trump, Bowman argues, thanks to the eroded role of Congress in foreign policy and Trump's unabashedly transactional approach. | | Hong Kong Votes to Give Xi Trouble | | Hong Kong's district councils may not have much power, but after the city voted overwhelmingly for pro-democracy candidates to fill out the posts, Joe Leahy writes in the Financial Times that these elections (the freest Hong Kong holds) were an apt referendum on the city's demonstrations.
The results raise the specter of a "nightmare scenario" for Beijing in which pro-democracy forces gain significant ground in Hong Kong's Legislative Council, Leahy writes. "An emboldened protest movement will press its demands even harder," he predicts—which will ultimately lead to a crackdown by Beijing.
Writing for The National Interest, Gordon Chang poses Hong Kong as a serious internal problem for President Xi Jinping, who handled the Hong Kong portfolio as a politburo member. "Mainland people may not sympathize with Hongkongers, but they can be inspired by them to act on their own grievances," Chang writes. "Xi now also has to worry about his fellow senior leaders in Beijing, who can convincingly argue that, by pushing too far with his extradition bill, he is to blame for the unfolding debacle in Hong Kong." | | The Liberal Order Runs Aground in Ukraine | | The center of America's impeachment drama, Ukraine has been a victim of circumstance since well before President Trump, Serhii Plokhy and M.E. Sarotte write in Foreign Affairs. To understand why, one has to go back to the fall of the Soviet Union, when Boris Yeltsin chose to dissolve the USSR rather than preserve it without Ukraine, after the latter voted for independence in a referendum. As the other major Slavic state in the former Soviet Union, Ukraine is key to Russia's imperial sphere—and to President Vladimir Putin's goal of reviving it.
After 1991, the West enlarged NATO and the EU right up to Ukraine's western borders. It was enough to provoke Russia, but not enough to protect Ukraine—stranding the country between an embittered Moscow and an expanding West. The Western liberal order found trouble in Ukraine when NATO and EU expansion stopped short of Kiev and again when a proposed EU trade deal resulted in Putin's 2014 interference and invasion; in the current US impeachment scandal, the liberal order is running aground there again, Plokhy and Sarotte write. | | What Syria's War Has Meant for Women | | In a New York Review of Books essay, Lindsey Hilsum reviews two books and a film that paint vastly different pictures of how women have experienced the war in Syria. In Guest House for Young Widows, Hilsum writes, Azadeh Moaveni traces the paths women took to join ISIS, pushing back on stereotype of naïve "jihadi brides"—though for some, Hilsum writes, expectations of living as the wives of pious men gave way to a more cruel reality. Some remain true believers: Reporting an encounter in the massive al-Hol camp in Syria with a female ISIS member that was "less of an interview and more of a harangue," Hilsum writes that a woman told her, of the fallen Islamic State, "I swear to God it was brilliant."
At al-Hol, women police strict rules and dress codes and make life miserable for any violators. In stark contrast are the female Kurdish fighters who patrol the camp, "dressed in fatigues with brightly colored flower-patterned scarves tied around their heads as bandannas."
Then there is a generation of female Arab journalists, Hilsum writes, "often living with their families while the combatants they report on may be relatives or boys with whom they went to school"—reflected in the contributors to Our Women on the Ground, a collection of essays edited by Zahra Hankir. Finally, there is For Sama, a documentary about a woman who returns to Aleppo; the film is dedicated to her daughter, after whom it is named. "At twenty-eight, she is having to come to terms with survivor guilt and the end of the most intense, terrifying, and essential experience of her life," Hilsum writes. | | | | | | |
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