What If...?
One president's scandal is another president's nothingburger
Here’s a counterfactual for you.
Imagine that it’s the spring of 2023, and Donald Trump is president. Just as occured on our actual timeline, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, V. Putin calculating that the Americans would do nothing. But mercurial as ever, Trump took Putin’s action as a slap in the face, and he, like Biden in reality, pledged to support Ukraine in its fight against the aggressor. The Ukrainians managed to blunt the initial Russian advance and, with military assistance coming in from the US and other NATO countries, is now planning a summer counteroffensive.
Trump’s decision to render aid to Ukraine has outraged the natcon Right, which accuses him of succumbing to pressure from the “deep state” to embroil American in another “forever war.” Though most congressional Republicans support Trump’s policy, a loud and disruptive faction does not. The Democrats are similarly split, with the party’s progressive wing pressing for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war.
As these debates are raging, the Ukrainian military command shares with its US counterparts its detailed plans for the projected summer offensive. Three or four weeks later, these highly secret plans are leaked to the press. The suspicion is that some senior official in the Defense Department or the State Department, who opposes the President’s policy, is responsible for the leak.
Without a doubt, in the context of a Trump Administration something like that would have been huge news—indeed, a gigantic scandal. Democrats, seconded by the media, would have denounced the Trump Administration in lurid terms as a dysfunctional entity harboring a cabal of traitors. Demands for congressional and criminal investigations would have been strident and incessant.
But here in the real world, where someone in the Biden Administration leaked highly secret documents about Israel’s planned retaliation against the Islamic Republic of Iran, there’s little more to be heard than the chirping of crickets.
The two documents in question were prepared by the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, detailing Israel’s plans and preparation for a large-scale attack on Iran. They were leaked to and published by Middle East Spectator, an obscure media outlet with ties to the Iranian regime. Identifying the leaker may prove to be difficult, since the documents were posted to a classified database to which thousands of US officials enjoy access. But there cannot be much doubt that whoever leaked them is a person (1) hostile to Israel and (2) sympathetic to the Islamic Republic.
And the Biden-Harris Administration is full of such people. Right from the beginning of the current war, there has been dissent verging on insubordination within the State Department and the US intelligence community. President Biden’s early declarations of support for Israel were received in those quarters with anger and dismay. A senior Biden-Harris administration official, speaking on background, described the leak as a "deadly serious breach” and added: “For at least the past year there has been a concerted campaign to leak what at least seems to be classified information by anti-Israel elements in large part to impact media narratives—but, if true, this obviously goes beyond that.”
How could things have gotten to this point? Consider the case of Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian-American academic now serving as chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations. Tabatabai is an alumna of the Iran Experts Initiative, an organization controlled by the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its purpose is to identify and co-opt foreign academics willing to disseminate regime propaganda. It seems odd, to put it no more pointedly, that a person with her background was selected to serve in such a sensitive post.
The FBI has launched an investigation into the source of the leak, in which connection Tabatabai’s name has been mentioned, but so far at least she seems not to have been interviewed by investigators.
And with Election Day just around the corner, the Biden-Harris Administration, the Democratic Party, and its media accomplices are not at all desirous of publicizing such an unsavory scandal. What would the American people think if it were brought to their attention that the federal government departments and agencies responsible for foreign policy and national security are infested with people both hostile to Israel and in sympathy with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s leading terrorist state and a self-declared enemy of the Great Satan, as the ayatollahs are wont to characterize America.
No, no—that most certainly would not be a good look for Kamala Harris…
This is a very interesting hypothetical. What your readers may not know, Thomas, is that Philip Gordon is a key foreign policy advisor to both Biden and Harris and that he is a lock to be the National Security Advisor in a Harris Administration. He has worked closely with Ariane Tabatabai and in 2020 he coauthored a New York Times op-ed with her. In their first sentence, they lamented President Trump’s decision to order the killing of Qassim Suleimani. They said,
“The costs of the United States’ targeted killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, are mounting beyond the already significant risks of Iranian retaliation and subsequent military confrontation.”
Without detailing all the points that Gordon and Tabatabai made, their take home message was this,
“Instead of continuing on its current path, the Trump administration needs to urgently de-escalate tensions with Iran. Some American allies, such as President Emmanuel Macron of France, have offered to help, but so far the administration has declined their services. Mr. Pompeo has expressed disappointment with Europe’s unwillingness to back the American attack on General Suleimani.
A genuine policy of de-escalation would require facing the reality that the maximum pressure campaign has failed. That campaign was designed to curb Iranian violent behavior in the region and stop its nuclear program. The tragic irony is that it now seems set to do the opposite.
If the Trump administration does not move to reduce tensions, it will soon find itself facing the very dilemma the nuclear deal was designed to avoid: the choice between a nuclear Iran or the need to start a war to prevent one.”
You can read the whole op-ed here,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/opinion/irans-crisis-nuclear-expansion.html
I doubt either of them are the leaker; Gordon is too high profile and given her past sympathies, Tabatabai is too obvious a candidate to get away with it. What’s clear is that in a Harris Administration both of them will be even more powerful figures than they are now. They will both end up in senior positions that won't require Senate confirmation.
Their tenure would prove disastrous, especially for Israel. They are both partial to Iran and fully buy into the concept of empowering Iran to serve as a counterweight to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arabs.
Your hypothetical made me think about what might happen in an alternate universe where it wasn’t hypothetical but true. I think that instead of the alt-right MAGA crowd opposing Trump’s Ukraine policy, he would have convinced that crowd to go along with him. That would have united MAGA Republicans, traditional Republicans and many Democrats in favor of supporting Ukraine. Only the Squad and their fellow travelers would have been in opposition. They would reflexively have opposed anything Trump was for.
Your hypothetical may end up closer to reality than you might think. Ukraine is slowly but surely being defeated by Russia. Ten million Ukranians have left the country and its fertility rate has fallen to 1.0, almost the lowest rate in the world. Russia is suffering too, but much less than Ukraine. Although Russia has a very low fertility rate, its rate is somewhere between 50 percent and 75 percent higher than Ukraine’s. Then there's the death rate which is very high in both nations because of the war but Russia has a much higher population to begin with.
To put this in perspective, with a fertility rate of 1, if the death rate remains constant, Ukraine’s population will decline by 50 percent in 25 years. Sadly, its worse than that because Ukraine’s death rate isn't stable, its rising. Then there’s the fact that if the war doesn't end soon many of those Ukrainian expatriates will settle in their temporary homes permanently and never return.
This article may be interesting to you and your readers. See,
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraines-population-has-fallen-by-10-million-since-russias-invasion-un-says-2024-10-22/#:~:text=BERLIN%2C%20Oct%2022%20(Reuters),United%20Nations%20said%20on%20Tuesday.
The only hope for Ukraine is for the war to end soon. If it doesn't, Ukraine wont survive and will end up totally dominated by Russia. A Harris Administration will offer more of the same. Under a Harris Administration, Ukraine will bleed to death. If there's any evidence that Harris has a better plan for Ukraine than Biden, I haven't heard it.
As you outlined in your hypothetical, Trump doesn't like losing. That's actually not hypothetical; its obviously true. Trump will get the best deal for Ukraine that's possible under the circumstances. If Harris wins, sadly, Ukraine will go down for the count.
The Biden/Harris administration is like most progressives who wear the rose-tinted glasses: if we're just really, really nice to the Iranians they'll play nice with us.
Wrong. Like the progressive secularists they are, the Biden/Harris crowd don't accept the fact that there is such a thing as true evil, and that the Islamist regime is precisely that. As Substacker Ryan McBeth posted at X: "Unfortunately, sometimes you don't get a choice. Evil doesn't care if you don't want a war. Evil doesn't care if you want to ignore it in the hope that it just goes away. Evil will come and do evil to you unless you stand up to it and fight. It's not fair, but it is reality."