On today’s BradCast: Making history and breaking history. From historic worldwide climate pacts to nuclear arms treaties, from Trump and Russia to Nixon and the Soviet Union and back again. [Audio link to show follows below.]
First, in an historic Rose Garden speech on Thursday, President Donald Trump — against the advice of world leaders, major American companies, and even many in his own Administration — announced his intention of pulling the U.S. out of the historic Paris Climate Agreement. The landmark 2015 pact is signed by nearly 200 nations and was crafted as part of a 20-year U.N. effort to decrease greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, in hopes of avoiding the worst effects of man-made climate change.
Trump’s announcement has largely been met with worldwide derision from China to India to Russia to the EU and back here at home. And his announced intention of “renegotiating” a different deal was quickly nixed today by France, Germany and Italy. We offer extended experts from Trump’s remarks announcing his intention to withdraw, some much-needed fact-checking, and a look at where the tortured decision — which will take four years and another Presidential election — leaves the U.S.
But, as that unfortunate history was being made today, we also take a look back at historic parallels for the recently reported, and seemingly bizarre, attempt by Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner to create a secret back-channel line of communications with Russia during last year’s Presidential transition.
Princeton University political history professor and author Julian E. Zelizer, joins us to describe two different similar back-channels created with two different countries (including one to Russia — actually, then, the Soviet Union) by Richard Nixon, both during his campaign and his transition.
One such line of secret diplomacy, Zelizer explains, turned out to be hugely successful for both the U.S. and USSR alike. The other…well, it didn’t turn out so well, even as we’ve only learned details about both in recent years. Zelizer also describes the recent history of diplomatic back-channel diplomacy by Presidents other than Nixon and Trump, offers a few other uncomfortable parallels for the current President, and explains why Kushner’s purported scheme to use Russian facilities to speak with the Kremlin is so bizarre, even, apparently, to the Russians themselves.
“Part of the idea that both Richard Nixon believed in, and his top National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, was that there needed to be a new approach to handling U.S. relations with the Soviet Union,” Zelizer tells me. “The key to doing this was simply opening up the lines of dialogue. [Kissinger] sets up a back-channel, as it was called, to the Soviet ambassador, which is top secret. He believed this had to be done around the existing government bureaucracy. They were worried about leaks, they were worried about political push-back.”
“Nixon was totally paranoid and frightened about the existing bureaucracy in the State Department, and to some extent in the Defense Department, and was really determined to try to do things — which would ultimately lead to his downfall — on his own. And to have these kinds of communications without the official government knowing what he was doing, and subverting him.”
Sound familiar? In that case, as Zelizer writes at CNN, it was actually a huge success that eventually resulted in the SALT I Agreement to limit nuclear weapons in both nations. The other Nixon back-channel was far more nefarious, dealing with his campaign’s attempt to scuttle peace talks by Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam before his election.
In both Nixon cases, it took years before we even learned about any of it. In the more recent case of Kushner and Russia, Zelizer notes, “There’s a lot of uncertainty, both about context and the substance of this effort, which is why it is something that’s raised a lot of suspicion and is the focus of an investigation. It’s not the back-channel, it’s what this back-channel was meant to do and why it was being put into place — if it’s true.”
Finally, Desi Doyen re-joins us for special, breaking Green News Report coverage of, well…see if you can guess…
This makes no difference since nobody is respecting the Accords. No financial institution has discussed the Abandoned Assets since we have to leave fossil fuels in the ground. The Petroleum lobby has too much control. Look at the film “Revenge of the Electric Car” in 2012. You can look at this film as a comedy or a tragedy. At the end, the credits showed that by 2015 car makers would start the transition and 2017 would be the turning point and most people would be buying EV. We will not make a transition to EV until battery production is increased. Only Tesla and North Volt are doing any efforts. I know that Daimler announced a Gigafactory near Dresden, but they have been refusing for the last 18 months to do any production. But Germany does not have a clean electricity system to lower the carbon footprint of lithium ion batteries, which are energy intensive. Germany only has 15% of their energy from renewables, and instead of going on an all-out effort to do a 7X increase, they are trying to get a return on a 30 year investment in their coal fields. And the supply chain for the German auto makers is too entrenched. China is becoming the new leader for going electric. I think htat have already started 10 battery factories this year. Are you driving an EV, Brad and Desi?