Impeachment, Unpredictability, and Chaos

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, faces a real, non-negligible chance of impeachment. As this issue of The Diplomat went to press, the Democratic Party continued its inquiry into Trump's misuse of office to pursue apparent political ends. The spark that lit the fuse of impeachment was an anonymous whistleblower complaint detailing a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

U.S. politics have been a global spectacle since the start of Trump's administration, but the lurch toward impeachment has elevated global interest in what might or might not happen in the halls of power in Washington, D.C.

In the U.S. political system, impeachment is provided for constitutionally to hold a president accountable for "high crimes and misdemeanors" while in office. Few American presidents have faced impeachment proceedings and in each case where a president was impeached, the outcome was different. No president to date has been successfully impeached and then procedurally removed from office.

The best-known cases in recent memory are those of Bill Clinton and Richard M. Nixon. Clinton was impeached in the House of Representatives, but survived the subsequent trial in the Senate. Had he failed to survive the Senate trial, he would have faced removal. Nixon, meanwhile, faced impeachment, but given his pathetic favorability ratings following the Watergate scandal, and generally good political sense, realized that the least humiliating course of action was preemptive resignation. Nixon resigned before the House could even vote on his case.

Further back in history, there's the case of Andrew Johnson. The first post-Civil War, or Reconstruction, era president, Johnson was impeached in the House. Like Clinton, however, he survived his trial in the Senate, albeit by a much slimmer margin. He was impeached during his first term in office and the spectacle was enough for the Republican Party to abandon him when the next election came. Impeachment effectively made Johnson a deeply unpopular one-term president.

Across these three examples, however, foreign policy matters were largely insulated. Nixon’s resignation, for instance, failed to dramatically turn the course of the war in Vietnam. Clinton, meanwhile, also managed to keep his foreign policy on track through impeachment. Given Trump’s propensity for unconventional preferences in foreign policy and his eagerness to depart from decades of American foreign policy norms, this is one area where his possible impeachment course might depart sharply from his predecessors.

Predicting the course of Trump's impeachment at this point is a fool's errand, but what appears mostly certain is that the Democratic Party's inquiry will move into formal proceedings, which will almost certainly result in a successful impeachment in the House of Representatives where the Democrats hold a majority. What happens from there is much less certain. Trump could survive in the Republican-dominated Senate, like Clinton, or the politics of impeachment in the Republican Party might rapidly shift.

There are already a few indicators of the latter possibility. Remarkably, 51 percent of respondents in a poll conducted by Fox News – a news channel notorious for its friendly coverage of the president – said that Trump ought to be impeached. The slow drip of presidential impropriety has turned into a burst dam, inundating Trump's less ideologically rigid supporters with enough evidence to apparently change some minds.

Meanwhile, in an apparent own-goal, Trump's betrayal of the Syrian Kurds in October has given members of his party a cudgel with which to criticize him. If the politics of impeachment continue to shift within the Republican Party, foreign policy and national security issues may give tactical defectors the issue they need to turn on the president without necessarily alienating a Republican Party base that largely seems to buy into Trump's broader political agenda.

In Asia, impeachment-mode Trump has already given into his instincts, leaving his administration’s strategy far behind. For instance, the whistleblower’s complaint over Trump’s call with Ukraine’s Zelensky pertained to an alleged quid pro quo demand that Kyiv open an investigation into Joe Biden, the former U.S. vice president and one of the forerunners for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination. As the Democratic inquiry into this call was ongoing, Trump, whose administration has failed at “great power competition” with China, called on Beijing to also open an investigation into Biden.

In response, Beijing professed noninterference in American affairs, but Trump’s behavior clearly represents a source of vulnerability that is likely to manifest in U.S.-China relations in the short-run. For instance, as the trade war enters a new “truce” cycle, China may look to exploit the president’s political weakness to settle a deal that is disproportionately favorable to its interests. Trump, eager for any win, may agree to just about any deal.

This risk also presents itself in talks with North Korea. Of late, it appears that Trump himself has largely disengaged from the process with North Korea, leaving matters in the hands of the U.S. Department of State and, in particular, his special envoy, Stephen E. Biegun. As the collapse of the first working-level talks between the two sides since the February 2019 summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, underscores, there may not be any progress to be found soon. But Trump’s interest in North Korea has waxed and waned; certainly, the North Koreans see him as their best chance at a deal that would be unavailable under any other U.S. president.

For allies – particularly South Korea and Japan – impeachment may make for more treacherous alliance cost-sharing discussions than normal. This risk is especially apparent in the alliance with Seoul, where Special Measures Agreement talks to work out a five-year cost-sharing plan will be soon underway. Washington is planning to demand $5 billion from South Korea despite Seoul’s willingness to pay no more than a fraction of that. If political survival at home becomes paramount, there’s no telling whether Trump would seriously float the idea of pulling U.S. forces back prematurely from South Korea to send a message. (He’s already privately mooted this possibility in the context of Japan.)

The final months of 2019 will reveal just how great the stakes around impeachment are likely to get. If the administration enters survival mode, the most important consequence for American foreign policy might be intensified unpredictability – beyond that of the administration’s first three years in office. A distracted White House, prone to erratic moves at home and abroad, should be a major concern for all American partners and allies. As Syria’s Kurds learned, it’s never too soon to imagine the worst possible thing the United States could do in the short-term and begin planning for it – now.