In the previous piece — “Hearings Show ‘Patriotism’ Is the Noose that Can Hang Trump” — I proposed that the picture that the hearings are showing is – and can usefully be presented as – a matter of Trump acting the very opposite of patriotism, of his betraying his country by taking a course of action that seriously undermined American national interests and that did so for selfish, illegal, corrupt reasons (i.e. to help him win the second term he wants). And that even as Trump undermined American national security, he also advanced the interests of America’s most threatening adversary on the world stage today, i.e. Putin’s Russia.
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The impeachment hearings have laid out why Trump’s conduct in the Ukraine matter represents a most fundamental betrayal of the nation.
There are two big powers contending in Europe. Again. As in the cold war, there is a Russian power seeking to expand its empire, and threatening the democracies to its west. And as in the cold war, there is an American power seeking to maintain its world position and to defend democracy in Europe.
Ukraine is currently a major focus in the battle between those two powers.
Everything that is wrong about Donald Trump’s wrong-doing in Ukraine-gate 1) undermines America’s long-standing interests in Ukraine, and 2) advances Russia’s interest.
America’s bi-partisan policy in Ukraine has had two major goals: 1) to help root out corruption that has been endemic in that nation since it was part of the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, and 2) to help Ukraine to resist Russian military aggression, by which the Russia has seized part of the Ukraine for itself, and has waged a war against the Ukrainian state in other parts of eastern Ukraine.
All that remains official U.S. policy in Ukraine.
But Trump’s bribery/extortion gambit with Ukraine runs directly counter to both of those goals.
Whereas official U.S. policy has worked assiduously to help Ukraine to become a rule-based order, with the rule of law instead of the use of law to advance the political goals of the powerful, Trump’s infamous “quid pro quo” demanded that the Ukrainians descend further into that very kind of corruption. Whereas official U.S. policy has been to help the Ukrainian nation deter and even roll back Russian incursions into its sovereignty – using both military aid and the demonstration of American support to deter the Russian’s bullying -- Trump’s (illegal) withholding of the military assistance passed by Congress calls into question – in the eyes both of the Ukrainians and their Russian adversaries – Trump weakened that part of the American position on the world chessboard both by withholding the aid (which the law required him to pass straight along in executing the will of Congress); and also by ceasing to be the reliable ally, which simultaneously emboldens the Russians if the American back-up becomes questionable and diminishes the fortitude of the Ukrainians. (An American ambassador wrote that the failure of the aid to arrive has “already shaken their faith in us.”)In both those respects, Trump also fortifies Putin’s regime in its goals for Ukraine. (In the meanwhile, so also does that “Crowdstrike” investigation that Trump was demanding—for it furthers a bogus notion, floated by Russian military intelligence, that it was Ukraine and not Russia that meddled in the 2016 American elections.)
All of which raises the question of whether Trump simply doesn’t care about what’s good for the United States, or whether – for whatever reason – he’s actively working against the United States on behalf of the Russian kleptocracy that wants to bring America down.
What Trump did with Ukraine would have been intolerable for any President of the United States to do with any nation. But to do it with Ukraine reveals Trump’s astounding indifference to American national interests. And Trump’s conduct thus amounts to an especial betrayal of the nation: an especial betrayal – from an American president, no less -- that should especially outrage any patriotic American.