The Untold Story of the Trump-Ukraine 'Scandal': The Routine Corruption of
US Foreign Policy
September 26, 2019
The impeachment offensive against Donald Trump is another symptom of a
partisan disease that ignores an even greater malignancy, writes Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
The most crucial aspects of the Trump-Ukraine "scandal," which has led to
impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, are not being told, even by
Republicans.
Trump was very likely motivated by politics if he indeed withheld military
aid to Ukraine in exchange for Kiev launching an investigation into
Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden, though the transcript of the
call released by the White House between Trump and Ukrainian President
Volodymr Zelinsky does not make certain such a quid-pro-quo.
But what's not being talked about in the mainstream is the context of this
story, which shows that, politics aside, Biden should indeed be investigated
in both Ukraine and in the United States.
We know from the leaked, early 2014 telephone conversation between Victoria
Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs,
and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that then Vice
President Biden played a role in "midwifing" the U.S.-backed overthrow of an
elected Ukrainian government soon after that conversation.
That's the biggest crime in this story that isn't being told. The illegal
overthrow of a sovereign government.
As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president's son, Hunter Biden, soon
got a seat on the board of Ukraine's biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings.
This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a
country and install one's own people. But Biden's son wasn't the only one.
Left to right: Kerry, post-coup president Petro Poroshenko, Pyatt and
Nuland, June 2014. (State Dept.)
A family friend of then Secretary of State John Kerry also joined Burisma's
board. U.S. agricultural giant Monsanto got a Ukrainian contract soon after
the overthrow. And the first, post-coup Ukrainian finance minister was an
American citizen, a former State Department official, who was given
Ukrainian citizenship the day before she took up the post.
After a Ukrainian prosecutor began looking into possible corruption at
Burisma, Biden openly admitted at a conference last year that as vice
president he withheld a $1 billion credit line to Ukraine until the
government fired the prosecutor. As Biden says himself, it took only six
hours for it to happen.
Exactly what Biden boasted of doing is what the Democrats are now accusing
Trump of doing, and it isn't clear if Trump got what he wanted as Biden did.
Threats, Bribes and Blackmail
That leads to another major part of this story not being told: the routine
way the U.S. government conducts foreign policy: with bribes, threats and
blackmail.
Trump may have withheld military aid to seek a probe into Biden, but it is
hypocritically being framed by Democrats as an abuse of power out of the
ordinary. But it is very much ordinary.
Examples abound. The threat of withholding foreign aid was wielded against
nations on the UN Security Council in 1991 when the U.S. sought
authorization for the First Gulf War. Yemen had the temerity to vote
against. A member of the U.S. delegation told Yemen's ambassador: "That's
the most expensive vote you ever cast." The U.S. then cut $70 million in
foreign aid to the Middle East's poorest nation, and Saudi Arabia
repatriated about a million Yemeni workers.
Katharine Gun
The same thing happened before the Second Gulf War in 2003, as revealed by
whistleblower Katharine Gun (who will appear Friday night on CN Live!). Gun
leaked an NSA memo that showed the U.S. sought help from its British
counterpart in signals intelligence to spy on the missions of Security
Council members to get "leverage" over them to influence their vote to
authorize the invasion of Iraq.
In 2001 the U.S. threatened the end of military and foreign aid if nations
did not conclude bilateral agreements granting immunity to U.S. troops
before the International Criminal Court.
More recently, the U.S. used its muscle against Ecuador, including dangling
a $10 billion IMF loan, in exchange for the expulsion of WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange from its London embassy.
This is how the U.S. conducts "diplomacy."
As former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali wrote:
"Coming from a developing country, I was trained extensively in
international law and diplomacy and mistakenly assumed that the great
powers, especially the United States, also trained their representatives in
diplomacy and accepted the value of it. But the Roman Empire had no need for
diplomacy. Nor does the United States. Diplomacy is perceived by an imperial
power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness."
This fundamental corruption of U.S. foreign policy, which includes
overthrowing elected governments, is matched only by the corruption of a
political system that exalts partisan political power above all else.
Exposing this deep-seated and longstanding corruption should take precedence
over scoring partisan scalps, whether Biden's or Trump's.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent
for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and
numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at
joelauria@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and followed on Twitter @unjoe .
