Uncategorized

The French presidential race presents Macron with a daunting challenge

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

On the surface, things are looking up for the endlessly ambitious Emmanuel Macron, president of France. With the recent installation of the fledgling German government of Olaf Scholz, Macron, at last, finds himself the senior partner in the pivotal Franco-German alliance, finally able to try to harness France’s over-sized geostrategic ambitions to the world-class German economic motor.

While the new Green German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, has ambitions to remake Berlin’s foreign policy in a more pro-Atlanticist, activist direction, German foreign policy is traditionally made in the chancellery. If this holds true, Scholz — the Finance Minister in the last Merkel government — and his immediate allies can be counted on to continue with Germany’s weak, commercially-driven, neutralist foreign policy. This is all the better for Macron, who yearns to stride the world stage as a major player.

Even the United States, the perpetual foe of France’s self-aggrandizing instincts, seems to have fallen into line. Following the furor over the AUKUS defense treaty between Australia, the UK, and the US, in which Canberra unceremoniously ditched defense ties with Paris of favor of closer links with the Anglosphere, the Biden administration has raced to mollify a furious Macron. The practical result of this American charm offensive was Washington’s new rhetorical support for Macron’s dream of an independent European defense entity. This sea change has left the foreign and strategic policy field open to Paris.

But if things are looking up internationally, domestically mortal threats to Macron’s regime are brewing. With the French presidential contest set to get into full swing in the new year, the most recent polling numbers present Macron with a real challenge to his re-election prospects. The latest Politico poll of polls of December 15th found Macron with 24 percent of the likely first-round votes. Newly anointed Gaullist Party candidate Valerie Pecresse came next at 17 percent, with far-right populists Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour just behind at 16 percent and 13 percent respectively. At present, Macron would make it through to the climactic second round of voting, but who his opponent would be is unknown.

What is clear is that, as the French presidential campaign gets underway, there are two scenarios potentially impacting Macron’s re-election, one secondary and one primary. The French president must have been thrilled when television star Zemmour entered the fray, as he is sure to split the far-right vote in the first round, diluting its overall threat to his presidency, as it is inconceivable that Le Pen and Zemmour (drawing on the same pool of voters) can both thrust ahead of Macron in the initial voting round.

This leaves the French President in the comfortable position of taking on a single far-right challenger in the second round, a result whose outcome would not be in doubt. For example, Politico’s estimation of present second-round voting intentions finds that he would defeat Le Pen comfortably, by 56-44 percent.

The only drawback to this highly favorable outcome for the Elysee would be that if in beating back Pecresse — a mainstream candidate if ever there was one — Macron so demonized her that Pecresse’s first-round supporters failed to come out in the second round to see off the far-right challenge to the country as a whole. While Pecresse’s supporters in aggregate are highly unlikely to support either Le Pen or Zemmour in the second round, they might be so turned off by Macron’s attacks that they simply stay at home.

A similar process is presently well advanced on the splintered left, where it seems increasingly likely that voters will not show up for second-round voting to put a mainstream rightist in power in order to keep a far-rightist from the Elysee, as they did in the last French presidential election. If this apathy extends to both the Gaullists and the Socialists, the traditional center-right and center-left parties respectively, and with the far-right bound to coalesce around whichever of its two candidates reaches the second round, Macron could find himself in real peril.

However, the second, more likely, political threat to Macron comes directly from Pecresse and the mainstream Gaullist Party itself. Present polling has Pecresse as the president’s likely challenger in the second round of voting. But Politico finds her only a nose behind Macron, presently trailing him by merely 52-48 percent in terms of voting intentions, almost within the margin of error. It is obvious that Pecresse is far more of a threat to Macron’s re-election than any other candidate.

Reasonable, presentable, experienced, and policy-oriented, Pecresse cannot be demonized by Macron as simply dangerously unsuited for the Elysee in the way he can tar both Le Pen and Zemmour.\

Better still, and unlike the personality-driven candidacies of the two far-rightists and Macron himself, Pecresse has a real party behind her, with organizational capacity, fund-raising abilities, and — best of all — longstanding traditional political loyalties throughout the country. Macron is taking on the Gaullist institution in France, and not just another personality.

This is precisely why, at this time of relative international success, the French president must worry about domestic political dangers which could undo all his grandiose hopes, both for himself and his country. 

This blog post was originally published in Arab News.

Time to leave the hysteria out of COVID-19 decision-making

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

To say necessary but unpopular things is the lot of any good columnist. What I am about to say will be met by many with hysteria: At how unfeeling I am, how I don’t care about the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, how I don’t take the virus seriously enough. But this is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. That is a small price for me to pay to get at the truth.

The truth is this: The greatest problem exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic — the first global, historical political risk of the new century — is that Western leaders and publics are fundamentally illogical, being unable to understand how daily risk has always (up until this crisis) been managed. I am certain that, within a generation, there will be a series of questions in college history classes that amount to this: “Unlike during the global pandemics of the Spanish flu of 1918-20, the Asian flu of 1957-58 or the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69, why did the COVID-19 pandemic result in the panicky closing down of the entirety of global society for years at a time?”

Part of the problem is the way Western leaders have handed control of their governments to a series of unelected healthcare professionals. The contrast with how Franklin D. Roosevelt ran the historical crisis of the Great Depression is instructive. Without ever tipping his decision-making hand to anyone, Roosevelt would call in teams relating to every aspect of the crisis — economists, social workers, political advisers, the implementers of his myriad programs —cheerfully hear them out, charmingly thank them, and then send them all on their way. Only when he had heard from everyone over every aspect of the Great Depression would FDR act in a holistic way, taking what they all said into account in order to make for a rounded policy.

That sense of policymaking balance has sadly been nonexistent during the COVID-19 crisis, where instead we await the words of the virologists as if they have just descended from Mount Olympus. Unsurprisingly, given their professional career choices, doctors err on the side of healthcare caution. That is understandable and is what they have been summoned to do. What is debilitating is that every other voice has been drowned out, as the medical side of the emergency has swamped all others.

There is a tremendous price to be paid for such an approach. The rates of suicide, spousal abuse, child abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, and teenage self-harm are all off the charts. We all know the dirty secret that children have fallen far behind in their educational attainment; it is as plain as day. It is not too much to say that the generation of today’s children have — without any real political debate — made onerous sacrifices for the elderly, a price that will continue to be paid by an unheeding society for decades to come.

But, yet again, those waiting for a utopian level of safety they will never find have latched onto the new omicron variant as the latest reason to keep the world shut down, whatever the consequences. It is time for the rest of us to utilize the abandoned power of logic and stop them.

Initially, in faraway March 2020, lockdowns were (rightly in my view) proposed as a means to stop the West’s healthcare systems from being overwhelmed, spreading out the death rate, perhaps even lessening it at the edges. Let us keep this as the one standard for how to judge the pandemic now.

By this original standard, is omicron about to ruin the world? Almost no one has died so far from omicron; this past week, the UK announced its first death from the new strain. Yes, that’s correct, one death in a country of 67 million. Almost no one has been hospitalized from omicron; again, only a score of hospital cases has been reported. While, as of next week, a majority of COVID-19 cases in the UK will be of the omicron variety, it shows no sign of leading to either mass carnage or the ruination of the healthcare system. So what exactly is the problem?

Omicron illustrates that COVID-19 — in line with the history of the Spanish, Asian and Hong Kong flus of the 20th century — seems to be becoming more transmissible and milder as each new wave emerges. This is perfectly in line with the teaching of Charles Darwin that, in order to survive, the parasite virus must get beyond vaccines (as omicron seems to do in some cases) and yet not kill its host. Therefore, omicron is paradoxically good news for the world as a whole. COVID-19, in line with the general history of viruses, is becoming milder and more transmissible. More like merely another strain of the common flu, in other words. Just another disease man has to live with.

The question is, can we finally leave the COVID-19 hysteria behind and actually evaluate what is truly happening before our eyes, without totally ruining the next generation’s chances at a decent future? It is well past time for brave, logical thinking such as this if we are to do so.

This blog post was originally published in Arab News

To avoid calamity with Russia, the US must help Ukrainians to help themselves

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

If the 20th century teaches us anything, it must be that either you master history or history masters you. In his 2014 book, “The Sleepwalkers,” historian Christopher Clark makes it tragically plain that “the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers … blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”

By taking their eye off the ball over what seemed yet another minor Balkan crisis — following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo — Western statesmen neglected to take seriously a calamity that would come to sweep away their glorious belle epoque world, at the cost of 20 million deaths in the charnel house of World War I.

Today’s statesmen simply must do better than what happened during that fateful summer of 1914. For now, Presidents Biden and Putin have avoided a massive escalation between the U.S. and Russia, but systemic challenges plaguing Eastern Europe’s borderlands remain.

The West must not be caught sleepwalking again.

What can the U.S. do to avert this coming storm? First, we must clearly understand the geostrategic stakes. Ukraine is ground zero in this conflict. Ideally, Putin hopes to grab Kyiv and subjugate Ukraine as a vassal state. The second-best outcome for the Russian president is that his current brinkmanship yields fruit in the form of panicky Western appeasement. 

His price for pulling back? A Russian veto over any further eastern expansion of NATO. Whatever one thinks of further NATO membership, Washington must categorically reject this. The U.S. is an autonomous superpower; it does not let other countries tell it who it can, and cannot, ally with. To give Russia such control over U.S. foreign policy would telegraph to the rest of the world that America has embarked upon a dangerous new age of isolation. This would have long-term consequences in the global balance of power to the detriment of the U.S.

Putin’s third best strategic option is Ukraine as a domestic basket case, refuting the very notion that an aspiring Eastern European country’s westward tilt can yield independence, prosperity and democracy. Putin can live with each of these three strategic outcomes. It is up to Biden to deny him these clearly articulated goals. 

Ukraine’s resurgence rests on a three-legged policy stool: a resurgent military, a vibrant domestic political scene, and an autonomous energy policy. While much attention has been focused on the first, equally important is the United States’s involvement in helping to nurture the latter two imperatives.

In terms of domestic politics, that means America must remind novice President Volodymyr Zelensky that personality-driven populism is a dangerous road for him to travel upon. Zelensky was catapulted to the Ukrainian presidency by virtue of the character he played in the popular political satire, “Servant of the People.” In it, a decent, ordinary schoolteacher, Vasyl Holoborodko, remakes Ukraine’s murky politics. Coming to office with a broad mandate for change, Zelensky won an overwhelming 73 percent of the vote in the Ukraine presidential election. But, after taking office in May 2019 — much as has proven true for political populist amateurs around the world — Zelensky has found governing harder than satire.

Now, more than two years into his term, Zelensky has run into real political difficulty. An October poll taken by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found the president’s approval rating has plummeted to a subterranean 25 percent, and 59 percent of the voters don’t trust him. 

First, the leaked Pandora Papers revealed that Zelensky held several offshore financial holdings in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus and Belize — hardly the actions of a scourge of the oligarchs. Second, he sacked his youthful reformist ally, Dmytro Rozumkov, from his position as speaker of the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. 

Third, Zelensky has chosen to pick a fight with Ukraine’s richest businessman, who is a major player in the country’s media and energy sectors. While government figures long have been welcome on his television stations, recently opposition political figures have appeared on his programs more often. This seems the likely cause of this unedifying fight; Zelensky is growing thin-skinned when it comes to the absolutely pivotal notion of freedom of the press and would like to have unfettered opportunities to promote his agenda in any media in the country. This conflict in the face of the imminent Russia threat undermines Ukraine’s security.

For all these reasons, the U.S. must support Ukraine robustly, while reminding Zelensky that America supports the country’s democratic future, rather than the personal prospects of any one man.

Lastly, Ukraine must deal with its looming energy crisis. Perilously, more than half of the country’s electricity is produced at aging, state-owned nuclear power plants, run on Russian fuel. In another sign of Ukraine’s dependence on Moscow, only one of these power plants has its own fuel storage facility; the rest are bound to export their waste for storage in Russia. An overwhelming 70 percent of Ukraine’s coal imports comes from Russia. 

Rather than push through the necessary reforms, the Zelensky government is accusing DTEK, a private company that manages a large part of Ukraine’s thermal generation, of poor planning for the winter to come. But, as DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko put it, “As we approach winter every year, we cannot assume that we have a crisis. We need to prepare for winter in advance.”

The Ukrainian government, which accumulated large debts to energy producers from renewable sources since 2020, has recently paid these off, with the exception of DTEK’s, which is a major investor in this sector. 

Over the pivotal energy issue, the U.S. has a large policy role to play here, sustaining Ukraine’s energy (and thus political) independence. The Biden administration should strongly support Kyiv’s efforts to integrate its energy grid with European Union energy markets as soon as possible. Otherwise, Putin can turn on and off the power to Kyiv at will. Predictably, on Nov. 1, that is what he did — the Kremlin stopped thermal coal exports to Ukraine just as the cold winter is setting in. 

It is time to end America’s passive approach to the coming crisis in Ukraine. The best way to avoid sleepwalking into calamity is to swiftly and decisively help Kyiv to help itself, in order for a far more resilient Ukraine to meet the perilous times ahead.

This blog post was originally published in The Hill.

Troubled Democrats have one thing going for them — Donald Trump

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

During my recent trip to Washington, the dirty secret that, strikingly, almost every Democratic Party operative I spoke with confessed to is that — while their party is surely on the ropes — it is counting on Donald Trump, the cancer still bedeviling their Republican rivals, to bail them out in 2024.

While many Democrats accept that the 2022 midterms will lead to a Republican wave, with the GOP retaking the House easily and quite possibly the Senate, this tsunami will have the paradoxical effect of tempting Trump to run again in 2024, a reality that had Democratic Party operatives literally cackling with glee. For while — as Glenn Youngkin just showed in the Virginia governor’s race — Trumpism (deregulation, tax cuts, disdaining fighting wars of choice, a strategic focus on China, and protectionism) remains popular, Trump assuredly is not, particularly with the independent voters who tend to determine the outcome of American presidential elections.

Unquestionably, the GOP is still Trump’s party. An October Morning Consult poll found that a dominant 47 percent of Republicans said they would vote for Trump if he ran in the 2024 party primaries, with only 13 percent supporting former Vice President Mike Pence and 12 percent rising star Ron DeSantis, the present governor of Florida. Reading the tea leaves, most Republican presidential hopefuls have not dared to declare, preferring to wait and see if Trump throws his hat into the ring once again.

By all accounts, a Republican sweep of the 2022 midterms will paradoxically be the single most important event tempting him into the 2024 presidential race. The Trump camp’s view is that, with the Republicans on the rise and with their man — according to Gallup polling — the most popular leader of the party ever, the political circumstances could not be more propitious for his return to front-line politics, as he tries to become only the second president in US history (after Grover Cleveland) to regain the White House after losing it.

Up to a point, all of this makes eminent sense. But it ignores the elephant in the corner of the room: Trump’s culpability for the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill, the worst stain on America’s democratic reputation in memory. Beyond the events tarring Trump historically in perpetuity, more practically, since that remorseful day, independent voters have deserted the former president in droves. It is safe to say that, during the coming presidential campaign, Trump will be asked about this damning incident incessantly.

Worse still for the GOP, Trump simply cannot let the calamity fade from view. He is the first president in the history of the country to refuse to accept defeat in an election, all facts to the contrary. To put it mildly, endangering America’s cherished and unique political stability — all for the sake of one man’s ego — is not something it seems likely most Americans are likely to warm to.

Yet, unrepentant as ever, Trump plows ahead, citing conspiracy theories and refusing to accept the facts in front of his nose. In mid-October, the former president erratically insisted that his populist base won’t be voting in 2022 unless Republican lawmakers prioritize his baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a statement that (although merely amounting to wish-fulfillment) obviously delighted the embattled Democrats.

It has come to this for the Republican Party. The leader of the GOP is forcing them into pursuing extraconstitutional claims that a national presidential election was stolen from him. This is the price the party leadership is paying for its continued cowardice (and, yes, privately they all know better) in not refuting Trump’s poisonous claims or even publicly making it clear that his dangerous, selfish actions in January were deeply wrong.

While they are not and will not pursue Trump’s 2020 election vendetta, by not refuting it and him, the rest of the party remains firmly tied to the whims of this erratic man. When I asked what the endgame was to get the party finally past Trump — as no one of stature has the courage to refute him — I was bluntly told: “We are waiting for him to lose again.” Such is the GOP’s lack of political courage at present.

My Washington trip made it crystal clear that both parties’ critique of the other is spot on. Republicans are correct in that the Democrats are seen as navel-gazing infighters, who are worrying about everything but the one major issue (inflation) that Americans are most concerned with, while having an alarmingly aging president meekly follow the dictates of the out-of-control left of his party. At the same time, Democrats are right that the GOP’s cowardly failure to get to grips with the seminal problem that is former President Trump leaves them securely tied to him as a political millstone.

In normal times, both these critiques would be more than enough to doom the party in question to years in opposition. But, of course, these are not normal times. In the end, the party that leaves its analytical blinders behind and actually looks at itself squarely in the mirror, moving on from its current myopia, is likely to emerge victorious in 2024.

This blog post was originally published in Arab News.

Biden’s misreading of his narrow mandate may be his biggest mistake

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

Part of the reason for my fascination with the classical Greek world is the beguiling notion that, if it can be understood, life itself can be understood. That is why I began my last book, “To Dare More Boldly: The Audacious Story of Political Risk,” looking at the story of the Pythia of Delphi, seeing the priestesses of Apollo as the first practitioners of the ancient and noble art of political risk analysis.

Carved deep in the dank cave where the Pythia made her predictions is an inscription that amounts to the Greek world’s ultimate contribution to philosophical thought: The Socratic admonition to “know thyself.” Just back from a week of grueling high-level meetings in Washington, where I met leading members of both parties for a series of candid discussions, I can say in all honesty that — if Socrates is the intellectual bar by which we are going to measure the world’s greatest power — it is failing, and doing so badly.

This is because both parties’ analytical observations stop with themselves. Obsessed with the all-too-real problems crippling their rivals, they seem unable and unwilling to come to grips with their own equally obvious political handicaps — problems that will surely consume one or both parties over the next three fateful years. However, the time frame of their political peril is different. For the Democrats, the problems are now; for the GOP, they are more in the medium term.

In terms of the 2022 midterms, the Republicans have always had history on their side. The party holding the presidency has lost House seats in 36 out of 39 midterm elections since the Civil War.

Beyond this historical record of “buyer’s remorse,” Republicans are in charge of the lion’s share of the statehouses and governorships that control the 10-year process of census redistricting of House seats, a new cycle that will be put into place in 2022. It is estimated it will give the GOP an extra 10 to 15-seat advantage going into the midterm campaign. As the Democrats presently only control the lower chamber by four seats, it was always likely that the GOP would regain control of the House in 2022.

What was not preordained was the possibility of a Republican landslide in the midterms. However, following on from Republican Glenn Youngkin’s surprise victory in the 2021 governor’s race in Democratic-leaning Virginia (a state Joe Biden won by a decisive 13 points over Donald Trump just a year ago), all the signs point to a significant Republican victory in the midterms, with the Democratic loss of the House seeming a foregone conclusion. The 50-50 Senate, meanwhile, seems to remain in play, even though 20 of the 34 seats up for election in the upper chamber are currently Republican-held.

What has gone so wrong for the Democrats? Gleeful Republicans forensically shared with me the symptoms of the Democratic Party’s disease. First, the Biden administration is not getting credit for its historically significant legislative achievements, while the ugly sausage-making manner of the law-enactment process seems to be counting as a mark against it. People have already factored in the popular $1.1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and his earlier $1 trillion-plus COVID-19 emergency bill. The Democrats’ negotiations with themselves have made for a publicly unedifying scene, as in this time of COVID-19 — a worldwide historical emergency — the Democrats have seemed petty and small, navel-gazing about themselves at the expense of the country.

At the same time, voters increasingly (correctly in my view) think the party has been worrying about every issue under the sun except inflation, the one issue that matters. A mid-October Fox News poll found that 53 percent of voters said they were extremely concerned about inflation; no other issue topped 50 percent.

With inflation soaring to 6.2 percent in the US last month and with the Democrats pouring fuel on an already raging fire, given their gigantic spending bills, an increasing majority of voters fault the ruling party for having loosed the beast of inflation, quelled now for 40 years by Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan. The Biden administration seems to have forgotten the basic political rule that, while unemployment is terrible for the minority of voters afflicted, high rates of inflation affect literally everyone, serving as a form of taxation on the living standards of the working poor and lower middle class. This has obvious and drastic political consequences.

Lastly, rather than repairing the breach in American political life, following on from the chaos and hyperpolitical partisanship of the Trump years, to many voters Biden has instead served as an empty vessel for the excesses of the out-of-control progressive left of the Democratic Party. The Biden White House seems to have forgotten it won the Democratic nomination in 2020 precisely because Biden was not a leftist, unlike Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont or Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Rather than wanting the new Biden team to embark on the most ambitious, leftist-leaning domestic agenda since Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s, voters wanted a moderate, decent Biden to inaugurate a period of peace and quiet. Biden’s misreading of his narrow mandate to instead enact gigantic social spending bills may be his greatest mistake of all.

This blog post was originally published in Arab News.

Can the Republicans move beyond Trump?

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

The fate of political movements comes down to a simple adage: Either you master history or history masters you. In the case of the recently mighty Republican Party, we are about to see if it can truly get beyond the obsessive roller-coaster ride that has been the Trump era.

The current impeachment saga highlights the two dueling political narratives as to how to do this. In a test vote initiated by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, calling for dismissal of the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump as unconstitutional, 45 Republican senators voted to dismiss the charges, with only five of their colleagues siding with the Democrats to continue the trial. Given that fully 17 Republican senators would have to side with the 50 Democrats to convict Trump, it is highly likely that — while the former president is the first president in American history to be impeached twice — he will again escape conviction.

The five Republican dissenters and the 50 Democrats have a view of how to get beyond Trump that goes something like this: First, a failure to hold Trump accountable for lighting the fuse that set the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill insurrection into motion would be a gross dereliction of duty, giving the ex-president the veneer of total immunity for his disastrous actions. Second, there is historical precedent in impeaching a former official: In 1876, the Senate failed to convict former Secretary of War William Belknap in a financial scandal after he had already resigned his office. Third, the penalty for conviction — disallowing him from running for office again — fits the crime of which Trump stands accused. The fourth argument, this one advanced by Republicans only, is that the only way to begin to lessen and limit Trump’s extraordinary popularity within the GOP is to tar him with the stigma of an impeachment conviction. Hard as it is for non-Trump supporters to fathom, the ex-president is by far the most popular Republican chief executive with the Republican base since modern polling began in the 1920s.

A CNN poll, taken this month, found that 80 percent of Republicans still supported Trump, even after the insurrection. As rabid Trump supporter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bluntly put it: “The vast majority of Republican voters, volunteers, and donors are no longer loyal to the GOP, Republican Party, and candidates just because they have an ‘R’ by their name. Their loyalty now lies with Trump.”

Whether this is true or not (and former Republican mega-donors have been deserting the party in droves because of Trump’s actions), this is the great fear of the wing of the party that sees the president as an extra-constitutional millstone, doomed to drown the Republicans in his excesses. For those holding this view, Trump’s conviction would amount to a seminal moment when the GOP comes back to its senses, with Trump’s stranglehold on the party finally lessening.

The majority Republican view to this is almost diametrically opposed. First, horribly irresponsible as it was, Trump cannot be tried for free speech; he is allowed (and is not alone in American political history) to tell his supporters to “fight like hell” for his political cause, never expecting them to take him literally.

A form of Trumpism without Trump must be adopted by the party, whether its members are specifically enamored with the former president himself or not.

Dr. John C. Hulsman 

Second, the Senate has no business hounding a former government official, with the whole impeachment process merely making Trump a martyr to his followers, the worst course of action there could be. As his former National Security Adviser (now turned enemy) John Bolton noted as to why he was against Trump’s conviction: “Attention is what Trump lives for. If they (the Senate) really want to punish him, if they wanted to inflict the most terrible fate possible, they would simply ignore him.”

So how should the Republican Party proceed following the insurrection of Jan. 6, an epoch-altering event that has the dangerous potential to toxify the GOP for a generation? First, Trump must be held accountable for his extra-constitutional actions. I would advocate a Senate censure of Trump, which would be a significant stain on his name, but a lesser one to conviction. Any Republican not agreeing to this — to the basic, irrefutable fact that Trump did something very wrong — is merely serving as an apologist for such behavior.

However, trying to forget that Trump ever existed doesn’t seem a viable way for the party to move forward. A form of Trumpism without Trump — based on his hawkish China views, deregulatory instincts, concern for the working people of the country, support for the nomination of originalist judges, and belief in tax cuts — must be adopted by the party at large, whether its members are specifically enamoured with the former president himself or not.

But, likewise, the Republican Party must explicitly refute the aspects of political life where Trump went off the rails: His flirtation with extra-constitutionalism, crude trashing of political norms, and selfish disparagement of objective facts. It is this strange intellectual fusion of what Trumpism has brought to the party and where it must be entirely repudiated that is the only way for the Republicans to move on and survive. The GOP must master Trump if it is to master history.

  • Dr. John C. Hulsman is the president and managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a prominent global political risk consulting firm. He is also senior columnist for City AM, the newspaper of the City of London. He can be contacted via chartwellspeakers.com.