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Mostrando postagens com marcador Trump diplomacy. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Trump diplomacy. Mostrar todas as postagens

segunda-feira, 30 de dezembro de 2019

Venezuela: a confusa atuação diplomática dos EUA para pressionar a saída de Maduro

Que o governo de Trump seja um perfeito retrato da confusão mental que domina seu principal ator, disso não há dúvida. Que essa confusão afeta igualmente a sua "diplomacia", isso também não é novidade.
Nesta matéria, alguns detalhes sobre essa confusão, que pode ter algum significado para a igualmente confusa diplomacia brasileira em relação ao mesmo assunto.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 30/12/2019


Trump’s lawyer and the Venezuelan president: How Giuliani got involved in back-channel talks with Maduro


Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with senior military officers in Caracas on May 24, 2018. (Wil Riera/Bloomberg News)
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with senior military officers in Caracas on May 24, 2018. (Wil Riera/Bloomberg News)
The international call came in September 2018, after months of rising tension between the United States and Venezuela, a key strategic player in South America.
On one end of the line was Venezuela’s socialist president, the pariah leader of a disintegrating economywhom President Trump’s administration was seeking to isolate.
On the other end: the U.S. president’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.).

Both were part of a shadow diplomatic effort, backed in part by private interests, aimed at engineering a negotiated exit to ease President Nicolás Maduro from power and reopen resource-rich Venezuela to business, according to people familiar with the endeavor.
Sessions had served as emissary in the back-channel effort, visiting Maduro in Caracas that spring. The phone call, which Giuliani joined, was a follow-up to that visit, Sessions’s spokesman Matt Mackowiak told The Washington Post.
The phone conversation involving the Venezuelan president and Trump’s personal lawyer, which has not been previously reported, provides another example of how Giuliani used his private role to insert himself into foreign diplomacy, alarming administration officials confused about whose interests he was representing.
Giuliani operated a similar campaign this year in Ukraine, where he pressured officials to announce investigations to benefit Trump — an endeavor that led to the president’s impeachment this month.
The impeachment inquiry pushed into the spotlight consulting work Giuliani has undertaken around the globe even as he has been representing Trump at no charge. His freelancing has triggered concerns among White House officials that his intercessions have muddied and at times undercut official U.S. policy, according to people familiar with the worries, who, like others cited in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors are scrutinizing the former New York mayor as part of an investigation into possible foreign lobbying violations.
Word of Giuliani’s call with Maduro eventually reached White House officials who did not know why he was involved, according to one former senior administration official.
Giuliani’s willingness to talk with Maduro in late 2018 flew in the face of the official policy of the White House, which, under national security adviser John Bolton, was then ratcheting up sanctions and taking a harder line against the Venezuelan government.
Around the time of the phone call, Giuliani met with Bolton to discuss the off-the-books plan to ease Maduro from office — a plan Bolton vehemently rejected, two people familiar with the meeting said.
Giuliani did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A lawyer for Bolton declined to comment. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
In January 2019, the United States formally recognized Maduro’s rival Juan Guaidó as president, a policy move backed by Bolton. Later in the year, Giuliani would pick up a client in the region: a Venezuelan tycoon under investigation by the Justice Department for possible money laundering.
It is not clear why Giuliani became involved in the back-channel negotiations with Venezuela’s president or the extent of his role. But the tale of behind-the-scenes talks with Maduro offers another example in which the president’s personal attorney aligned with private interests to try to sway U.S. foreign policy. And the episode involves some of the figures who played a role in the Ukraine effort — including Sessions, an 11-term congressman who pushed for the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine around the time he met with Giuliani associate Lev Parnas in 2018.
Sessions, who lost his seat that November and is now running for Congress in another Texas district, said through his spokesman that he has known Giuliani for three decades but has never worked with him on any private-sector activities.

Back-channel mission


When Trump took office, he promised to take a tougher stand against Maduro, who has been Venezuela’s president since the 2013 death of leader Hugo Chávez and has grown increasingly repressive, even as his country has sunk into economic crisis.
That approach had the backing of Republicans in Florida, which has large and politically engaged Venezuelan and Cuban communities. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) accused then-President Barack Obama of failing to hold Maduro accountable and of naively pursuing negotiations that failed to remove him from office.
Trump’s personal interest in the country was piqued by a February 2017 White House visit by Lilian Tintori, the wife of a prominent Venezuelan political prisoner. She was also a former kite-surfing champion who had appeared in that country’s version of the reality show “Survivor.”
Trump quickly adopted Venezuela as a cause, surprising some in the human rights community, who noted that he did not show similar interest in abuses in countries such as North Korea and Russia.
That year, the Trump administration labeled Venezuela’s vice president a drug kingpin and froze his assets in the United States. It also imposed economic sanctions on Venezuelan companies and banned travel to the United States by government officials and their families.
“This corrupt regime destroyed a prosperous nation by imposing a failed ideology that has produced poverty and misery everywhere it has been tried,” Trump declared before the U.N. General Assembly in September 2017. “To make matters worse, Maduro has defied his own people, stealing power from their elected representatives to preserve his disastrous rule.”
Conditions worsened in Venezuela, where there were frequent shortages of basic goods including food and medicine, runaway inflation and spates of civil unrest. But Maduro remained in power.
In February 2018, Maduro announced that a presidential election would be held that spring. But most opposition candidates would be banned from running, leading to fears that the vote would be a sham election used to consolidate his power.
U.S. business executives with interests in Venezuela, among them Harry Sargeant III, the chief executive of a Florida-based global energy and shipping company who has worked extensively in the country, began encouraging negotiations to ease Maduro out of office.
In a statement, Sargeant said he “supported the idea of a back channel based on my over 30 years of firsthand experience in Venezuela and my observation of the political dynamic going on in Caracas at the time.”
“I believed then and now that an adversarial sanctions policy alone would have two profoundly negative effects,” he added. “First, it would exacerbate Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis. Second, I believed it would undermine key U.S. business interests in Venezuela to the benefit of American adversaries like the Russians and Chinese.”
It was against this backdrop that Mackowiak said Sessions accepted an invitation from Maduro to quietly visit Caracas and try to negotiate a path to improved relations between the United States and Venezuela.
Sessions, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee who chaired the House Rules Committee at the time, had long been interested in Venezuela, in part because many of his Texas constituents had energy interests there, according to his spokesman.
“He was pleased to help with this back-channel mission, which was coordinated with the highest levels of the U.S. State Department,” Mackowiak said, adding that Sessions met with top U.S. officials before and after his trip.
The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
But people familiar with State Department officials’ role said those officials did not initiate the trip or organize or participate in Sessions’s meeting with Maduro. And several U.S. officials disputed the notion that the trip was done with the government’s backing, noting that the White House at the time wanted to take a harder line with Maduro and was not interested in making concessions.
National Security Council officials, in particular, were opposed to the kind of settlement with Maduro that Sessions was advocating.
“There was absolutely no interest or appetite for negotiations,” said a former White House official. “We generally did not welcome efforts like this one. It wasn’t consistent with our policy goals. We saw it as a nuisance and a distraction.”
Sessions’s spokesman dismissed such complaints as part of a “turf battle” among Washington bureaucrats.
“There might have been a disagreement between the State Department and the NSC about how best to bring peace to Venezuela,” Mackowiak said. “But Rep. Sessions was pleased to be part of an effort, coordinated closely with the State Department, to bring a democratically elected president to Venezuela.”

List of concessions


Sessions’s district is home to ExxonMobil and other oil companies that were once active in Venezuela but were forced to scale back amid political turbulence. But Sessions told the Dallas Morning News in 2018 that the oil interests did not play a role in his decision to become involved. He said he had been working with various players, including representatives of the Venezuelan opposition, to negotiate a solution for more than a year.
Sessions told the newspaper he was working to make “dialogue between parties that are trying to make progress.”
Mackowiak said Sessions used his own funds to pay for the two-day trip.
Two people with knowledge of the visit said he was hosted by Raúl Gorrín Belisario, the owner of a major television network in Venezuela who was viewed with distrust by some U.S. officials and months later would be indicted in Florida on charges of money laundering and bribery.
The people said that rather than staying in a U.S. facility, Sessions stayed at Gorrín’s lavish, modernist, walled compound in a fashionable part of the capital.
Mackowiak said that Sessions’s trip, including where Sessions stayed, was coordinated with State Department officials.
Sessions left Caracas with a list of concessions that had been agreed to by Maduro — his departure from power and a commitment to allow free and fair elections in exchange for leniency from the United States — according to Mackowiak.
But some U.S. officials said they worried that the deal Sessions was floating was intended to legitimize the upcoming election by opening up the vote to at least some opposition candidates, which could help Maduro remain in power, rather than ease him from office, according to a person familiar with the conversations. And they were concerned that the back-channel overtures sent mixed messages to the Maduro government.

A cigar bar meeting


About five weeks after returning from Caracas, Sessions met in his Capitol Hill office with Parnas, who Mackowiak said wanted to discuss a proposal to sell liquefied natural gas in Ukraine.
In an indictment this fall charging Parnas and his business partner Igor Fruman with illegally channeling foreign money into U.S. election campaign accounts, federal prosecutors said Parnas sought Sessions’s assistance in ousting then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch at the behest of “one or more Ukrainian government officials.”
On May 9, the same day that Parnas posted photos of his meeting with Sessions on Facebook, the congressman sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a letter urging Yovanovitch’s removal.
Mackowiak said Sessions did not act at the request of Parnas but wrote the letter after hearing concerns about the ambassador from several members of Congress who had traveled to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, Maduro won reelection in May with nearly 68 percent of the vote. The international community largely rejected the vote because of allegations of fraud and the banning of key opposition parties, and civil unrest ensued as Maduro prepared to begin another term.
In August, U.S. prosecutors charged Gorrín, Sessions’s host for the congressman’s Venezuela visit, with participating in a $1 billion money-laundering and bribery scheme. Prosecutors have said Gorrín is a fugitive. Neither Gorrín nor his Miami-based lawyer responded to requests for comment.
Around that time, Giuliani, who had joined Trump’s legal team months earlier, began talks with individuals who were part of the back channel to Maduro. In August, Giuliani met in New York with Parnas and two American business executives with investments in Venezuela to discuss the effort, according to people familiar with the gathering.
The meeting took place at a favorite Giuliani hangout, the Grand Havana Room cigar bar, blocks from Trump Tower in Manhattan. Over whiskey and cigars, Giuliani agreed to try to see whether there was a way to negotiate with Maduro and perhaps reach a diplomatic solution to the political chaos and economic collapse overtaking the country, one of the participants said.

The phone call


About a month later, Maduro was on the phone with Sessions. In the room with the Venezuelan president at the time was the country’s first lady, who serves as a close adviser to her husband, as well as Venezuela’s vice president and information minister, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Giuliani was introduced at the beginning of the call but appeared mostly to listen as Maduro and Sessions spoke, Mackowiak said.
In the nearly hour-long conversation, they reviewed the concessions that Maduro had agreed to make during Sessions’s visit months earlier, according to the person familiar with the call.
The Communications Ministry of Venezuela did not respond to a request for comment.
Later, word filtered to the White House that Giuliani and Sessions had participated in a call with Maduro, causing confusion, said a former senior administration official.
“We didn’t know why Rudy was involved at the time,” the person said.
Not long after the call, Giuliani told some of his associates that he had taken the idea of a soft landing for Maduro to Bolton, the president’s national security adviser. But he said the meeting had not gone well, according to people familiar with his account.
Charles Cooper, a lawyer for Bolton, declined to comment.
Bolton’s distaste for Giuliani’s foreign policy freelancing emerged during the impeachment inquiry. Former national security official Fiona Hill testified that Bolton warned her not to interact with the president’s lawyer, calling him “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”
In January of this year, the situation in Venezuela disintegrated as Maduro prepared to be formally inaugurated for another term. The legislature, led by Maduro’s opposition, declared that the election had been illegitimate and named legislative leader Guaidó the nation’s new president. He was quickly recognized by the United States and dozens of other countries.
Some Venezuelan business leaders who had amassed vast wealth under Maduro but had been severely constrained by U.S. sanctions switched sides and began to assist Guaidó.
Among them was Gorrín, who played a key role in a failed effort to persuade the nation’s Supreme Court to recognize Guaidó over Maduro, part of an effort to curry favor with the Americans, as The Post has reported.
This summer, another wealthy Venezuelan energy executive, Alejandro Betancourt López, hired Giuliani to serve as his lawyer and help argue that he should not be charged in a $1.2 billion money-laundering case in Florida.
Eight men — including Betancourt’s cousin — have already been charged in the case, which alleges that top officials of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, business leaders and bankers conspired to steal money from the company and then launder it through Miami real estate purchases and other investment schemes. Two people familiar with the matter said that Betancourt is referred to in the criminal complaint as a uncharged co-conspirator.
Jon Sale, a Miami-based lawyer representing Betancourt, has said his client denies any wrongdoing. He declined to comment on Betancourt’s relationship with Giuliani.
In early August, Giuliani was hosted at Betancourt’s lavish estate outside Madrid when Giuliani met at Trump’s direction with a top aide to the Ukrainian president, as The Post previously reported.
Giuliani later met with Justice Department officials and urged them not to charge Betancourt, The Post reported.
In response to questions about his work for Betancourt, Giuliani wrote in a text message last month: “This is attorney client privilege so I will withstand whatever malicious lies or spin you put on it.”
The news that Giuliani was representing the wealthy energy executive before the administration while also serving as the president’s personal attorney disturbed veteran U.S. officials who have experience in Venezuela.
“You have to ask, ‘Why is he doing this?’ ” said one former senior administration official.

Alice Crites and Carol Morello contributed to this report.

sexta-feira, 18 de outubro de 2019

A tragedia da diplomacia americana sob Trump - William J. Burns (Foreign Affairs)

Se ouso mimetizar o artigo de Bill Burns, seria para também lamentar o desmantelamento da diplomacia brasileira, mas não desde meio século apenas, como ele faz, mas nos últimos DUZENTOS ANOS. José Bonifácio foi nosso primeiro chanceler, e conduziu um delicado processo de afirmação do novo Estado em construção e seu reconhecimento no plano internacional, inclusive por meio de sua atuação como constituinte, até ser afastado e exilado pelo imperador, o que mergulhou a diplomacia numa primeira fase de confusão e incertezas. 
Com o início do funcionamento pleno da Assembleia Geral, e o escrutínio que os parlamentares exerceram sobre a diplomacia, o papel da diplomacia na construção da nação – para usar o título que o embaixador Rubens Ricupero deu ao seu livro que já nasceu clássico – pode se exercer de maneira plena, e ao longo das décadas seguintes a política externa do Estado serviu aos interesses nacionais, de forma bem estruturada e consciente, com poucas exceções (como a infeliz defesa inconsequentemente do tráfico e da escravidão). Depois, a despeito de uma representação bem mais voltada para a defesa de um Brasil oligárquico e desigual, a diplomacia continuou servindo de maneira efetiva e adequada ao processo de modernização do Brasil. 
Mesmo durante o regime militar – quando eu ingressei na diplomacia profissional – e a despeito de uma adesão de princípio do lado do Ocidente, na defesa contra uma suposta ameaça comunista, a diplomacia serviu com sua proverbial competência ao esforço de modernização material do Brasil, ainda que menos enfática na defesa da democracia e dos direitos humanos. Na redemocratização, e até recentemente, a diplomacia profissional foi absolutamente essencial na configuração e conformação de um papel e de uma imagem internacional eminentemente positivos para o Brasil, como um todo, com alguns problemas que detectei durante a era lulopetista, dada a empatia dos companheiros por regimes execráveis na região, como a ditadura castrista e os bolivarianos chavistas, além da corrupção nos negócios com ditaduras africanas e os mesmos regimes em nossa região.
O que se vê na atualidade, porém, é um rebaixamento inacreditável dos padrões de qualidade da nossa diplomacia, devido à direção aloprada exercida sobre o Itamaraty por um serviçal da Família Bolsonaro e seus gurus ineptos e incompetentes em relações internacionais. Isso passa, evidentemente, pelo próprio chefe de Estado, um notório inepto nesse quesito, pelo seu filho ambicioso, mas despreparado para qualquer função na diplomacia, pelo atual conselheiro presidencial nessa área, um verdadeiro true believer fundamentalista, discípulo do suposto guia das novas orientações governamentais, um cidadão sem qualquer qualificação em assuntos internacionais. Juntos, esses responsáveis conduziram a diplomacia brasileira a uma "demolição" inacreditável, para usar o conceito de Bill Burns, uma adesão sabuja e grotesca a um outro desmantelador da diplomacia americana, o presidente trambiqueiro que está destruindo toda a ordem internacional construída laboriosamente pelos Estados Unidos desde Bretton Woods. 
A atual diplomacia brasileira envergonha o país e o corpo profissional de diplomatas, e eu tenho os personagens acima citados como responsáveis por essa diminuição de nossa reputação e pelo rebaixamento do prestígio internacional do Brasil.
Isso passará, um dia, estou seguro disso. Por enquanto fico na resistência.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 18 de outubro de 2019


The Demolition of U.S. Diplomacy

Not Since Joe McCarthy Has the State Department Suffered Such a Devastating Blow

In my three and a half decades as a U.S. Foreign Service officer, proudly serving five presidents and ten secretaries of state from both parties, I’ve never seen an attack on diplomacy as damaging, to both the State Department as an institution and our international influence, as the one now underway.
The contemptible mistreatment of Marie Yovanovitch—the ambassador to Ukraine who was dismissed for getting in the way of the president’s scheme to solicit foreign interference in U.S. elections—is just the latest example of President Donald Trump’s dangerous brand of diplomatic malpractice. His is a diplomacy of narcissism, bent on advancing private interests at the expense of our national interests.
Ambassador Yovanovitch is not the first professional diplomat to find herself in political crosshairs in the history of the State Department. Trump is not the first demagogue to bully career personnel. And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not the first secretary of state derelict in his duty. But the damage from this assault—coming from within the executive branch itself, after nearly three years of unceasing diplomatic self-sabotage, and at a particularly fragile geopolitical moment—will likely prove to be even more severe to both diplomatic tradecraft and U.S. foreign policy.

THE NEW MCCARTHYISM

Almost 70 years ago, in the early years of the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a savage campaign against “disloyalty” in the State Department. Partisan investigators, untethered to evidence or ethics, forced out 81 department employees in the first half of the 1950s. Among them was John Paton Davies, Jr., an accomplished China hand. His sin was to foresee the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. Davies was subjected to nine security and loyalty investigations, none of which substantiated the paranoid accusation that he was a communist sympathizer. Nevertheless, in a moment of profound political cowardice, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles fired him.

Purging Davies and his colleagues was not only wrong but also foolish. The loss of such expertise blinded American diplomacy on China for a generation and had a chilling effect on the department and its morale. One of the United States’ most distinguished diplomats, George Kennan, was also pushed out of the Foreign Service during this era. He tried to defend Davies, who had served with him in Moscow and on the Policy Planning Staff, to little avail. Years later, Kennan wrote in his memoirs that McCarthy’s onslaught and the department’s failure to defend its employees was the most “sobering and disillusioning” episode of his long career.
That Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, was also Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor is one of history’s sad ironies. Trump’s scorched-earth tactics, casual relationship with truth, and contempt for career public service bear more than a passing resemblance to the playbook that Cohn wrote for McCarthy. And when Trump cried out for a “new Roy Cohn” to replace the late original, it was hardly a surprise that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared—or that he dove into the muck of the Ukraine scandal and agitated for the removal of a career ambassador whose integrity and expertise proved to be an obstruction.
One might imagine that the State Department’s leadership would stand up to the president and for its personnel—so many of whom are doing hard jobs in hard places around the world. If only that were the case.

Trump’s scorched-earth tactics, casual relationship with truth, and contempt for career public service bear more than a passing resemblance to the playbook that Cohn wrote for McCarthy.
Instead, today’s leaders have shown no more spine than Dulles did. Secretary Pompeo apparently worked around the embassy in Kiev to advance the president’s private agenda, allowed specious opposition research about Yovanovitch to circulate around the department, and sat on his hands as Trump slandered Yovanovitch on the infamous call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and warned ominously that “she’s going to go through some things.” The ghost of Roy Cohn was smiling somewhere.
Even before the Ukraine mess, the Trump administration had been waging a war on diplomacy for nearly three years. The White House regularly pushes historic cuts to diplomacy and development spending, which is already 19 times smaller than the defense budget. Career diplomats are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history. One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.
Not coincidentally, applications to join the Foreign Service have declined precipitously, with fewer people taking the entrance exam in 2019 than in more than two decades. The pace of resignations by career professionals is depressing, the pernicious practice of retaliation against individual officers just because they worked on controversial issues in the last administration is damning, and the silence from the department’s leadership is deafening.

AGAINST THE AMERICAN INTEREST

Last spring, I wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Lost Art of American Diplomacy.” It was meant less as an elegy than as a reminder of diplomacy’s significance. I’m feeling much more elegiac today.
To clean up the institutional wreckage in the State Department will take many years. The damage to our influence and reputation may prove to be even longer lasting—and harder to repair.
The practical consequences are not hard to discern. If a U.S. ambassador doesn’t speak for the president, and the embassy is seen as an enemy of the White House, why would the local government take seriously its diplomatic messages? Why use official channels, rather than speak directly to the president’s personal lawyer and his grifting confidants? If the key to unlocking aid is stroking the president’s vanity, why undertake the hard work of economic or political reform, with all the risks that entails?

For dictators, Trump is the gift that keeps on giving, a non-stop advertisement for Western self-dealing.
The president’s actions distort diplomatic practice and decapitate the American interest. Because of them, a new Ukrainian administration is all the more exposed to corruption and democratic backsliding, and all the more vulnerable to Russian manipulation and aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, professionally trained to manufacture compromising material on all sorts of opponents, couldn’t have produced a more disruptive document than the summary of the Trump-Zelensky call last July, which has sowed political dysfunction in both Washington and Kiev.
By using his public office for personal gain, Trump has affirmed Putin’s long-held conviction—shared by autocrats the world over—that Americans are just as venal and self-absorbed as they are, just more hypocritical about it. For dictators, Trump is the gift that keeps on giving, a non-stop advertisement for Western self-dealing. So much for enlightened self-interest. So much for the power of our example. So much for our credibility.
We are digging a deep hole for ourselves in a world that is changing fast, filled with players who won’t wait for us to stop digging and a landscape that is quickly hardening against U.S. interests. Our allies are confused. Our adversaries are quick to take advantage. The institutions and coalitions we shaped over decades are wobbling. The confidence of the American people in the power and purpose of disciplined American leadership is evaporating.

THE URGENCY OF RENEWAL

The Trump administration’s dereliction of duty takes place at a time when the United States will need to rely on diplomacy more, not less, to advance its interests and values in an ever more competitive world.
I closed my essay six months ago on a reasonably optimistic note. I acknowledged that a long, tough journey lay ahead—that American diplomacy would take a lot longer to fix than it has taken to break. But I also emphasized the opportunity before us, which the malpractice of the Trump administration has thrown into sharp relief. The journey toward renewal will be even more arduous now, and even more urgent.