With all due respect to Ukraine’s struggling democracy, would Pompeo place his own fate in the hands of the Ukrainian justice system? If not, why would he trust the results of any investigation the Ukrainians might conduct?
Only certain kinds of countries would even accede to the kind of request President Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani made, and they are precisely the countries whose judicial systems are least trustworthy. No U.S. president could ever ask Britain or France or Japan or any other deeply rooted democracy with an impartial justice system to investigate an American whom those governments had not already decided on their own to investigate. Much less would such governments be willing to investigate a U.S. president’s political opponents at the president’s behest. The only kinds of countries that would conceivably succumb to such pressure — and it is to this Ukrainian president’s great credit that he did not — are precisely those whose judicial systems were already corrupt and easily manipulated for political purposes. Again, how reliable could such an investigation be? Why would we not expect it to produce whatever answer was most conducive to that government’s interests? The U.S. president wants an investigation to prove that his opponent is dirty. Okay. Done. He’s dirty. Now release the aid.
But that is just part of the problem. Consider what it will mean if we decide that what Trump and Giuliani have already acknowledged doing in Ukraine becomes an acceptable practice for all future presidents. Sending the signal that other governments can curry favor with a U.S. president by helping to dig up dirt on his or her political opponents would open our political system and foreign policy to intervention and manipulation on a global scale. Every government in the world wishing to influence U.S. foreign policy will have an incentive to come to a sitting president with information on his or her potential political opponents.
That information might be related to investments or other financial dealings in a particular country, as in Ukraine. Or it might have to do with the behavior of a particular individual while traveling abroad — who he or she sees and what he or she does. Other governments will therefore have an incentive to conduct surveillance of political figures traveling through their countries on the off chance of gleaning some bit of information that could be traded in Washington for some favor. Nor would other governments be limited to what they can see in their own countries. They would have an incentive to dig into the lives of potential opposition politicians in the United States, through monitoring their social media and other Internet presences, their bank accounts and other personal information — as already happened in 2016, and which Trump openly welcomed then, too.
Today, foreign leaders come calling with golf clubs and promises of greater market access to win a U.S. president’s favor. What if they came with secret transcripts and videos, or promises of investigations? In the high-stakes game of national security, if other governments discover that one of the currencies of relations with the United States is dirt on opponents, they will do their best to arm themselves. If we legitimize this kind of behavior by a U.S. president, if no price is paid for this kind of conduct, it will be open season on the American political system.
You Must Serve Trump
Of all the conservatives who opposed Donald Trump during his campaign for the presidency, his most vehement opponents were the men and women who had served in past Republican administrations, and particularly in the departments of state and of defense. One hundred and twenty-two Republican foreign policy hands signed a letter denouncing Trump as a menace to American values and world peace.
.. George W. Bush’s C.I.A. director, Michael Hayden, suggested that Trump was a useful idiot for Russian interests. Both neoconservatives and realists — Robert Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Armitage — indicated that they would vote for Hillary Clinton.
.. If they fear how Trump might govern, can they in good conscience work for him?
The answer, for now, is that they can and should — and indeed, precisely because they fear how Trump might govern, there is a moral responsibility to serve.
.. For the next four years, the most important check on what we’ve seen of Trump’s worst impulses — his hair-trigger temper, his rampant insecurity, his personal cruelty — won’t come from Congress or the courts or the opposition party. It will come from the people charged with executing the basic responsibilities of government within his administration.
.. So to the extent that Trump’s approach to governance threatens world peace, that threat can be mitigated by appointees with experience and knowledge, and magnified if their posts are filled by hacks and sycophants instead.
.. But here the Republican Senate has a crucially important role to play. Trump cannot appoint cabinet officials without the approval of many senators who opposed or doubted him throughout the campaign — from Mike Lee and Jeff Flake to John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
.. If a Trump presidency lurches into naked authoritarianism — abusing executive authority in unprecedented ways, issuing immoral or illegal orders to the military — then there will be an obligation not to serve, but to resign.
And the gray area between these two obligations will create a lot of territory in which Trump appointees could succumb to moral corruption, justifying their toleration for enormities on the grounds that “the greater good requires me to stay.”