This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 3rd, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

When Democrats made their case in the Senate for removing the President, many of their assertions seem to conflate

US security with the security of Ukraine.

And in doing so, according to Cato's Emma Ashford, they presented hawkish foreign policy as the norm.

From the perspective of a foreign policy scholar, what troubled you about how Democrats were

presenting their argument on behalf of removal of the

president. This is kind of a consistent problem in the Trump era. It's not just

the impeachment, it goes back to the Mueller report, and it's a tendency, a very

understandable tendency, I think among Democrats, to claim that what President Trump is doing is not just corrupt, it's not just wrong, it's also a national security threat.

And so this ends up with a position where we see during the impeachment trial last week, we see the

House managers for the impeachment making arguments like the president cut off aid to Ukraine. That's a disaster, you know, that that is going to let Russia do whatever

it wants, that's going to cause the, you know, the collapse of the West practically,

it sounds like what they're saying, And that's not really true.

What the president did was bad enough.

It was corrupt, it was self-serving.

That's an impeachable offense.

But that's entirely different from the foreign policy

implications and when Democrats start to sort of not lie about that but

exaggerated and make it much more about national security I think they put

themselves in a fairly dangerous position.

And specifically not U.S. national security.

Right, so again, this is sort of the problem.

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