Foreign Policy US

generic node 818 PRIMAY 1 26 MAD KING NATO

see foreign aid USAID = soft power

SEE RBIO RULES Based intl order

w/ QS BS adding DoD military

witkoff kushner

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see many tags ppp vpence....

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kush witk

an 9 26

'Widely circulating' Russian nickname for 'clownish' Trump aides revealed

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an 10 26

Trump is 'making America little at last' by abdicating global power: experts

Thomas Kika

Warning of a major rupture of the post-WWII global order, two experts who spoke to the New York Times in a new podcast said that President Donald Trump is "abdicating" the country's global influence "at a very, very difficult time," with one claiming that his MAGA promises have actually been "making America little at last."

On Wednesday morning, the Times released a new edition of its podcast, "The Opinions," hosted by Lydia Polgreen, which dug into the state of the post-WWII global order nearly two years into the second Trump administration, which has made unprecedented moves to pull the U.S. back from its spot as de facto world leader. As part of the discussion, she welcomed Rahmane Idrissa, "a political scientist and historian based at Leiden University in the Netherlands," and Kaiser Kuo, the Beijing-based host of a podcast focused on Chinese current affairs.

"The global order that’s been in place since World War II is falling apart, and no one knows exactly what will replace it," Polgreen said. "The United States has been stepping away from its role as a leader, while China has emerged, in many ways, as a peer power."

Providing context for the conversation about "the decline and fall of the American hegemony," Idrissa described a "hegemon" power as akin to the conductor of a symphony, but in this case, one acting to direct the entire global order. Later, she continued that metaphor to describe how the U.S. has retreated from that spot under Trump.

"But Trump has decided that the U.S. is no longer the conductor," Idrissa said. "The U.S. is now a player in the orchestra, a big-bully player. He came to power with this slogan, 'Make America Great Again.' But what he’s doing, basically, is making America little at last. Because the idea is now: We are going to make America a nation-state like others. It’s no longer this kind of top power, this hegemon who is hovering around the world. And since it has this very, very large amount of power, it can pretty much do what it wants. Which, of course, the adventure in Iran is revealing that not to be the case. But this is the route that he has taken."

Idrissa also noted that U.S. allies like Canada and Europe "really wanted the American hegemonic system to continue, because they drew lots of benefits from it — like the security guarantees of the Europeans, trade in the case of Canada." Now, their recent hostile reactions to some of Trump's new global economic and defense policies can be understood as "traumatized."

"[We] are in such a trap right now, I think, where the United States has abdicated its traditional role of provision of public goods, and it’s unclear that China is willing to do all of that. In some areas, it clearly is," Kuo added. "In development, in infrastructure lending, in provision of manufactured goods, in absorbing all the demand for commodities. There are a lot of things in which China has stepped up, but it’s clearly shown no appetite for much of the rest of it. Look at its relative absence of a role in the Iran crisis. It’s not going to step in. And the United States doesn’t want it to. The United States seems hellbent on preventing China from filling that role."

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an 9 26

President Donald Trump and his high-ranking officials are engaged in a simultaneous project of spreading far right ideologies worldwide — and raking in billions while doing so.

In an article by The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum on Monday, Americans learned the full extent of Trump's mixing of exporting paranoid politics and turning a profit from Brazil and the United Arab Emirates to threatening longtime democratic allies like Canada and Denmark. She added that the major industries helping Trump do this include oil and gas, rare earth minerals and cryptocurrency.

"American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more," Applebaum wrote. "Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can."

She also added that "the clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government is no different. Wrongly described as 'isolationists,' many of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the world."

Applebaum contrasted the attitude of Trump supporters with that of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who famously said during the 2008 election that his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), was a decent man with whom he happened to disagree.

"Their enemies are existential, and they are international: super-spreaders of a 'wokeness' plague, or proponents of a fictitious 'censorship-industrial complex,' or advocates of 'regulation' that will hamper American business, or self-hating promoters of “mass migration” who want to drown Western civilization in a sea of brown-faced aliens," Applebaum explained. "To maintain their power and defeat these enemies, the predators, like their Bolshevik counterparts, cannot rely on traditional diplomacy, because they don’t trust its practitioners."

She concluded, "Nor do they trust many of the leaders of the democratic states that have long shared the same political and economic values as America. Although the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to cooperate closely with allied governments, the ideologues in and out of the administration are actively seeking to replace them with people and parties who share their disdain for liberal democracy and for what were once considered, at least aspirationally, to be American values. To do so, they need to expand their global influence, manipulate elections in former partner nations, and alter the flows of money and power, especially inside other democracies. Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists."

Trump himself has raked in billions since assuming office in his second term, while his sons have netted millions using their foreign policy connections to get involved in matters like investing in tungsten mines. Earlier this month, a Gallup poll found a historically high number of Americans are upset with government corruption, writing that "Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89 [percent] of U.S. adults saying it is widespread. That figure is up 10 percentage points from last year and well above readings in the 72 [percent] to 79 [percent] range between 2010 and 2025."

The poll added, "Democrats’ perceptions of government corruption have risen the most sharply since 2024 compared with other party groups. In former President Joe Biden’s final year in office, 57 [percent] of Democrats said corruption was widespread in government; that rose to 76 [percent] in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, and reached 91 [percent] this year. The figure among political independents (90 [percent]) aligns more closely with Democrats’ than with Republicans’ (83 [percent]) and is up 12 points since 2024."

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SAME NEW RT?

AN 826

Over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term, many in his coalition have been disappointed by his decidedly interventionist approach to international affairs. Once he leaves office, warns one distinguished security expert, those in the “New Right” with a stricter ideological agenda will redouble their efforts to “upend America’s role in the world” even more than Trump has.

This is according to Leonard Schuette, an international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, who wrote in Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, “The intellectual movement that provided the ideological fuel for U.S. President Donald Trump’s rise to power, the New Right, is forging a new contender” to the traditional American grand strategy. Schuette calls it “civilizationism.”

As Schuette explains, “References to Western civilization permeate strategy documents and speeches by key members of the administration. Vice President JD Vance set the tone in his February 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference, stressing the ‘threat from within’ to the fundamental values that characterize ‘our shared civilization.’ The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned of ‘civilizational erasure.’ This January, at Davos, Trump emphasized ‘the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization’; the next month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the United States’ transatlantic partners to ‘renew the greatest civilization in human history.’”

Rather than the concept of Western Civilization long held by many in the U.S., which is “rooted in a shared set of principles that anyone, regardless of origin, can espouse, such as constitutional democracy, liberty, and equality,” according to Schuette, “for thinkers on the New Right, the West is defined by a specific geographic territory, a shared ancestry, and Christianity.” And “rather than aspiring to global leadership,” “they reject the universal ambitions of primacy and the constraints imposed on U.S. sovereignty by liberal internationalism.”

As Schuette explains, “Civilizationism differs markedly from Trump’s approach to the world. Although the Trump administration often speaks the language of civilizationism, Trump’s behavior is primarily motivated by personal grievance, transactional impulses, and a private interest in maximizing the wealth of his kin and clique. The biggest rupture between the administration’s foreign policy and civilizationism lies in Middle East policy. Contrary to his campaign promises, Trump did not retrench from the region, instead launching what he initially billed as a regime-change war against Iran. His attitude toward Israel — mostly treating it as a privileged ally — resembles that of neoconservative hawks such as the late U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.”

But civilizationists reject neoconservative positions like this. According to Schuette, “If Washington were to adopt a consistent civilizational grand strategy, it would completely upend U.S. foreign policy. It would allow for previously unthinkable concessions to the United States’ geopolitical rivals. Civilizationism would pose a historic challenge to the already battered transatlantic relationship by granting Russia de facto control over eastern Europe or treating Moscow as part of a common Western civilization and agitating more openly against sitting governments in Europe. Other historical U.S. alliances would suffer, too. Tolerating Chinese regional hegemony would throw East Asian allies under the bus, and disengaging from the Middle East would leave Israel to fend for itself.”

He warns that civilizationism would end up being both contradictory and violent, writing, “Civilizational claims could overlap and become a recipe for regional wars. By defining other civilizations as alien cultures, a civilizationist grand strategy might fuel antagonism rather than tolerate differences. Even European far-right parties seem increasingly uninterested in being so overtly backed by their U.S. counterparts. And even if great-power conflict could be avoided, intracivilizational violence would abound. Japan, Pakistan, and Poland would be unlikely to accept regional hegemony by China, India, or Russia, respectively.”

With Trump’s reign soon to end, concludes Schuette, “the American right wing’s ideological future, and the future of U.S. grand strategy, is wide open. The Trump administration has broken with the bipartisan post–Cold War consensus on liberal hegemony but has failed to offer a coherent alternative. In the coming contest to define Washington’s foreign policy, civilizationism is poised to be a central contender.”

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AN 8 26

While President Donald Trump has repeatedly upended U.S. foreign policy over the course of his second term, a whistleblower from his first administration warns that over the past few days, the commander-in-chief may have “sold us out to our enemies” once and for all. This is according to Miles Taylor, who during Trump’s first term served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security and famously revealed the existence of a resistance group within the administration. “The president,” wrote Taylor on Monday, “is abandoning our friends in all the places where we are needed most, and he is leaving behind vacuums to be filled by his dictator buddies.”

“Start with Korea,” said Taylor. “On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce’ our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is ‘inappropriate and hostile’ to our friends in North Korea, which he called ‘unthreatening and respectful.’ Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so ‘unthreatening’ that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so ‘respectful.’ By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.”

“Then look at what else is happening in the Pacific,” wrote Taylor. “This weekend, the Navy pulled the USS George Washington out of Asia to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a single American aircraft carrier, while China grows more aggressive toward Taiwan by the month. In fact, Taiwan has been holding emergency drills practicing what to do if Beijing orders an invasion. So why is America pulling back vital resources? Because Trump has no real interest in deterring China, where he has marveled enviously at Xi Jinping’s power and toyed with the idea of a ‘grand bargain.'"

Instead of opposing China, warns Taylor, “his ego has America mired in an open-ended war with Iran that is grinding down our ships, draining our missile stockpiles, and running our sailors ragged. So he’s sending more ships into that quagmire.”

“Finally,” says Taylor, “take a look at what’s happening in Europe. Satellite imagery revealed this weekend that Russia is building a network of secret drone bases within striking distance of NATO, with storage for a thousand attack drones at a single site. German authorities just found a suspected Russian drone rigged with explosives at the Leipzig airport. And Western planners are quietly admitting they have no real plan for NATO’s nightmare scenario, a coordinated Russian and Chinese strike on two fronts, at the very moment Trump has hollowed out the alliance that exists to prevent such a surprise attack.”

“Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening,” Taylor predicts. “Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.”

With all this in mind, Taylor arrives at a grim conclusion, writing, “Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.”

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CDA WILL JOIN EU? EVEN EUR ALT RT DISTANCE? ORBAN FAIL

AN 4 26

Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward America’s allies may please his domestic political base, but it is harming America’s international standing — perhaps permanently.

“Trump, for so many people, epitomizes the ugly American — somebody who is bumptious and vulgar and ignorant about foreign cultures,” former Time Magazine editor Rick Stengel said in a recent podcast appearance on The Bulwark with former Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon. “So I think people sort of have come to the end of their patience with America.”

Avlon replied to Stengel by noting that polls found presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who engaged in positive diplomatic relationships with other countries, were far more popular than the bellicose Trump. Indeed, Stengel noted that America’s foreign standing has “plummeted” during Trump’s two terms.

“It always seemed absurd to me when Trumpists would say that we need to be respected on the world stage, when you could see in the data that America was not respected — was held in worse regard when Trump was president, even than Chinese president-for-life Xi,” Avlon told Stengel. “So I wonder now with Iran, though — we seem to have crossed a Rubicon, because it was a war of choice, because our allies are not with us. And tell me about the downstream effect of that as you see it.”

Stengel added that, even though Joe Biden tried to reverse the damage to America’s reputation caused by Trump’s first term, America’s allies were not convinced that Biden would remain in power long enough to keep those policies in place. Trump’s reelection in 2024 confirmed their fears.

“This seesaw in presidential politics is something that people don't really understand,” Stengel told Avlon. “And then this Iran thing — by the way, what was probably most popular about Trump on the world stage was his sort of isolationism: that this isn't about America invading foreign countries and this world of endless wars, that America would retrench globally in terms of militaries but increase their presence globally in terms of trade and globalization. In some ways, it's the exact opposite. The alliances are also part of this idea of soft power, because — and I hate that phrase we used to use — we're not the world's policemen. We weren't the world's policemen, but we were the kind of foundation of the global world order, that people could trust America to abide by the rule of law, to be a pretty fairly honest broker. Not to say we wouldn't do bad things, but that is completely out the window.”

He concluded, “And the kind of ‘America First’ which has now actually caused it to get into a war is something that makes us much more isolated and much less popular, to an extraordinary extent.”

In February the New York Times reported that Trump’s imperialist rhetoric toward Denmark about acquiring Greenland and his conquest of Venezuela had convinced America’s European allies to decouple their most valuable financial and digital assets from American corporations. His tariffs have similarly prompted talk among Europeans of a permanent “divorce” from the US, with a senior European official telling Politico that “there is a shift in U.S. policy and in many ways it is permanent. Waiting it out is not a solution. What needs to be done is an orderly and coordinated movement to a new reality.”

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AN 2 26

The global diplomatic goals of the U.S. used to be handled by a vast corps of skilled professionals, but under Trump, virtually all overseas goals are in the hands of one "witless" envoy, as James Ball wrote for The i Paper, possibly because he has a background "almost identical" to the president's.

Ball broke down Steve Witkoff's unlikely and alarming ascent in a scathing analysis from Wednesday. Initially chosen to oversee an Israeli ceasefire deal in Gaza, he was later upgraded to overseeing all missions in the Middle East, including brokering a deal to defuse tensions with Iran.

Now, he is also handling talks to end the years-long war between Russia and Ukraine. This high-stakes job has seen him make many alarming breaks from standard diplomatic procedures, such as meeting solo with Russian President Vladimir Putin and insisting that he trusts the Kremlin's English interpreters. These decisions overwhelmingly give Russia an upper hand, something Witkoff might not mind, Ball noted, as he has previously praised Putin and said that he does not "regard him as a bad guy."

"Is he amoral, or just incompetent?" Ball asked. "Usually, sensitive diplomatic negotiations are left to people with huge experience of the areas in which they operate. Typically, the lead negotiator has lived and worked in the region for decades, speaks the relevant languages, and has relationships with key power brokers in the various factions involved. They know the history, the resentments, the red lines. The hope is they can leverage that into the patient drudgework of diplomacy, dragging often reluctant parties over the line to a deal none of them will love, but that they can all live with."

Witkoff cannot meet that standard for all the missions he has been tasked with, Ball argued, because "No one on the planet has intimate experience of Israel, Gaza, Iran, Russia and Ukraine." That matter is made by the fact that the billionaire has had no diplomatic experience at all prior to his appointment as Trump's "Special Envoy for Peace Missions." The president, Ball suggested, seemed to pick him because of their strikingly similar professional backgrounds.

"His background is almost identical to Trump’s – Witkoff is a billionaire who made his money through real estate deals," Ball explained. "His portfolio is even more U.S.-focused than the President’s, and the handful of major deals his company closed outside the U.S. were in London. Witkoff knows the world of US real estate, and little else."

With "the witless Witkoff" now handling the Russia-Ukraine peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, Ball wrote that Trump has made him all of Europe's problem, with no regard for the consequences of his failure.

"It is Ukrainians first, and then Europeans, who will pay with their lives if Witkoff screws up," Ball wrote. "Americans will sit a continent away and pretend it’s not their problem if it blows up in their faces."

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AN 2 26

Conservative columnist and historian Max Boot explained on Monday that President Donald Trump has “become toxic” even among right-wing movements in Europe analogous to his MAGA movement in the United States.

“I've been covering Trump's unprecedented interference in foreign elections, and what strikes me most is how brazen it's become,” Boot wrote for The Washington Post. “We're not talking about subtle diplomatic preferences here—Trump is issuing formal endorsements in other countries' elections as if they were Republican primaries back home.”

After listing the foreign politicians to receive Trump’s endorsement — including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the UK’s Boris Johnson, Giuseppe Conte in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentia, Karol Nawrocki in Poland, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Sanae Takaichi in Japan — Boot wrote that the first problem is that it continues “Trump’s unfortunate habit of personalizing relations with other countries: He rewards leaders he likes and punishes those he dislikes.” Not only does this risk “making an enemy of the political opposition in their countries,” as happened when Trump “all but endorsed Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre” only for Poilievre to lose to Liberal Party leader Mark Carney, but it also could boomerang against Trump in areas where he is very unpopular.

“Now Trump is inviting a similar backlash in Europe, where he has become toxic with his tariffs, his attacks on European digital regulations and immigration policies, his attempt to take over Greenland, and his insults about European soldiers supposedly shirking combat in Afghanistan,” Boot wrote. “A poll released last month by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that only 16 percent of Europeans now consider the U.S. an ally. In Denmark, 84 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States.”

Boot added that “Vice President JD Vance was booed at the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies in Milan, even though Italy has a Trump-friendly prime minister” in Giorgia Meloni. Meloni even joined the rest of Europe in rebuking Trump last month for his Greenland threats, a fact which further demonstrates even the European far right does not necessarily want to be associated with the American president.

“A Politico poll in December found that in France and Germany, only a third of the people who support right-wing parties have a favorable view of Trump,” Boot wrote. “Little wonder that far-right leaders in Europe denounced Trump’s attempted takeover of Greenland and sought to distance themselves from the American leader.”

He concluded, “A president who zealously guards America’s sovereignty should show more respect for the sovereignty of other countries.”

Boot is not alone in raising the alarm about Trump’s meddling in other nations’ politics. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Susan B. Rogers has repeatedly met with far right parties in Europe and characterized efforts to marginalize extremists as anti-free speech, prompting criticisms from the British publication The Guardian. Vice President JD Vance has encouraged Germany to allow the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party to have a greater role in its political life, which was roundly denounced throughout Germany.

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OMFG

AN 2 26

Donald Trump's aggressive "America First" agenda has caused a "profound shift" around the world, with a new analysis reported on by The Guardian showing the extent to which more countries are siding with China as strong U.S. alliances have "crashed."

On Friday, The Guardian published a report sharing the findings of a survey by the firm, FocalData. Using the results of United Nations votes over the first year of Trump's second term as a measure of how much the nations of the world are siding with either the interests of the U.S. or China. The results, as depicted in a chart showing a map of the world, are significant, with many more countries, including once-key allies, shifting towards China, as Trump's machinations have "started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China."

Based on the map created with FocalData's findings, every UN country in Europe has shifted more towards China in the last year, as have the likes of Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Most of South and Central America has made the same shift, except for Peru. Africa and Asia are closer to an even split, but countries that shifted towards China are still in the majority, including major players like Japan, South Korea, India and even Russia.

Among the countries that have shifted more towards the U.S. are North Korea, South Africa, Madagascar, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

Though the shifts show some notable trends, many countries have not yet changed their overall voting allegiance. Most of Europe, for example, remains largely aligned with the U.S. despite the shift towards China. Still, the trends show a world power balance in the midst of a historic shift.

"In 2026, the world is now diplomatically closer to Beijing than it has been in recent memory," The Guardian explained. "With significant shifts in alignments taking place during the start of Trump’s second presidential term."

The report further detailed: "The total number of countries strongly aligned with the US has crashed under Trump, in contrast to China, which has maintained its allies. When comparing all of Trump’s years in the White House, including his first term, with those of his immediate predecessors – Barack Obama and Joe Biden – the number of countries strongly aligned with the US has collapsed, from 46 to just seven. The number of countries closely in China’s orbit has remained broadly constant."

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AN 1 26

Trump’s playbook threatens US as foreign allies reevaluate 'endgame': British intel expert

Alex Henderson

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an 1 26

Canada's Prime Minister fears 'brutal reality' Trump has already broken world order

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

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AN 1 26

In a stark warning on the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second term in office, The Bulwark’s editor, Jonathan V. Last, suggests that under Trump, America may adopt Putinism as its domestic policy, having already adopted it for its foreign policy.

“Will Putinism take over American domestic politics, too?” Last asks, in an opinion piece titled, “This Is the End.”

“America has adopted Putinism as its modus operandi for foreign affairs,” he says. “Why would America not also adopt Putinism in its domestic affairs? Why would the American regime tolerate free and fair elections or the transfer of power to an opposition party?”

Pursuing the question, Last continued: “Are there examples of expansionist, rogue regimes which ignored international law and attempted to subjugate free people abroad, but respected liberal democratic outcomes that terminated their possession of power at home?”

To those who suggest Trumpism is temporary, Last suggests he disagrees.

“Many people comfort themselves by saying some version of ‘Donald Trump is an aberration’ or ‘This isn’t who we are,'” he writes.

But, he continues, “If Trump was an aberration and his actions did not have sufficient public support, then he would be removed from office. There are two mechanisms for doing so—impeachment and the 25th Amendment.”

“Trump will not be removed from office; which allows one of two conclusions. Either: Trump’s policies are supported by a sufficient percentage of Americans to be viable; or America’s constitutional order is so ossified that it no longer functions to safeguard the will of the people.”

“Neither of these is an alibi,” Last warns, noting that, “either one supports the conclusion that the problem is not Trump. It is America and Americans. This is who we are. Like it or not.”

Last also makes several other predictions:

“The days of intelligence sharing between America and our former allies are drawing to a close.”

“The death of NATO.”

“Germany, Poland, and Canada will acquire nuclear weapons. So will Japan. Sweden, Australia, and South Korea may develop nuclear capabilities as well.”

“Europe will draw closer to China.”

“Greenland will become disputed territory.”

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an 12 25

President Donald Trump's Sunday night decision to name Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) as his administration's new special envoy to Greenland is already making waves around the world.

Trump posted late Sunday to his Truth Social account that Landry "will strongly advance our Country’s Interests for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Allies, and indeed, the World," and that the Louisiana governor "understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security." Landry appears to accept the role, though he posted on his official X account that his new "volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the U.S." would not intrude on his ongoing responsibilities in Baton Rouge.

Simon Marks, who is a contributor to the United Kingdom-based iPaper, quipped that Landry's role advancing U.S. efforts in Greenland's capital city of Nuuk "won’t be easy, since so far there is limited appetite for non-stop flights between the two cities." He also observed that Trump's announcement has caused a significant amount of consternation for Denmark, which has dominion over Denmark and controls its military and foreign policy (though Greenland has its own parliament).

"Land borders and the sovereignty of states are rooted in international law," Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Parilament chairman Frederik Nielsen said in a joint statement. "You cannot annex other countries. Not even with an argument about international security. Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders … We expect respect for our territorial integrity."

Marks went on to note that Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called Landry's appointment "unacceptable" and that he was "deeply angered" upon learning of Trump's announcement. Ken Howery, who is the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark (and a co-founder of PayPal) has reportedly been summoned to Copenhagen to discuss Landry's appointment.

Trump's announcement that he was putting Landry in charge of the United States' diplomatic efforts in Greenland comes as his administration continues to threaten Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, which Trump recently admitted was about "getting land" and "oil rights." Marks wrote that "Trump is indicating that his expansionist tendencies are back in vogue, especially with regard to worldwide locations that are rich in natural resources."

The iPaper columnist hypothesized that if Venezuela is about oil, Trump's efforts in Greenland may be about mineral resources. He reminded readers that Greenland was rich in 25 of 34 minerals classified as "critical raw minerals" by the European Commission.

Click here to read Marks' full column in iPaper.

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an 12 25

America’s closest allies increasingly view Trump-era US as 'negative force' in the world

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yikes

an 12 25

Despite being given powers well beyond previous presidents, President Donald Trump has largely outsourced his duties to advisors who are actually running the White House's day-to-day operations, according to a recent analysis.

In a Wednesday op-ed for the New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie argued that Trump is mostly "uninterested in anyone except his most devoted fans, and would rather collect gifts from foreign businessmen than take the reins of his administration." Bouie pointed to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles' recent bombshell profile in Vanity Fair, in which she maintained that despite occupying America's highest office, Trump "doesn't know the details" of the "smallish agencies" that his administration decimated earlier this year.

"The president doesn’t know and never will," Wiles said.

Despite Trump being "practically AWOL," Bouie pointed out that he is president at a time when the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has dramatically expanded the powers of the executive branch under the philosophy of "unitary executive theory." Under that system, Trump himself is vested with all the powers of the executive branch as outlined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which SCOTUS' conservative majority has clarified includes the ability to fire executive branch employees at will — even those at independent agencies.

However, Bouie asserted that the caveat of SCOTUS' new broad definitions of executive power is that Trump is mostly idle, "rarely meets with ordinary Americans" and "is shuttled from one Trump resort to another to play golf and hold court with donors, supporters and hangers-on." He added that SCOTUS' empowering of Trump to act beyond traditional checks and balances has, by default, meant that his cadre of advisors has free reign to run the White House as they see fit.

"[T]here is something ironic at work in this effort to concentrate executive power in the name of constitutional fidelity. It is being done on behalf of a president who is mostly missing from the business of government," Bouie wrote. "The unitary executive lacks an executive. And the president we have isn’t unitary. He has given his newfound power away to a small set of virtually unaccountable advisers, insulated from public outcry and indifferent to public opinion."

These advisors include Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, who Bouie characterized as the "de facto shadow president for domestic affairs," and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who the Times columnist called the "shadow president for internal security." Bouie noted that the work of foreign policy — which has always traditionally been seen solely as the president's wheelhouse — is largely being handled by Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Bouie quoted former President John F. Kennedy, who wrote in the foreword of his advisor Ted Sorensen's 1963 book Decision Making in the White House that the “secret of the presidential enterprise is to be found in an examination of the way presidential choices are made."

"What do we make of a president who chooses not to make these choices?" Bouie wrote.

Click here to read Bouie's New York Times column in full (subscription required).

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an 12 25

As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.

*This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it.

It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.

“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”

These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.

The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.

In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last year than in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.

China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago.

These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms.

“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonization will prove to be more successful, he predicted.

Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and other Asian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.

African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”

The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”

Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said.

But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.

In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/international/2025-trump-climate-change-paris-agreement-china/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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HUH? AN 12 25

President Donald Trump's administration is being sharply criticized by conservatives in both government and media for reportedly sending tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban-controlled government in Afghanistan.

Newsweek reported Tuesday that, according to Amrullah Saleh, (who leads the anti-Taliban political party Afghanistan Green Trend) the Trump administrationflew $45 million in cash to Afghanistan on Monday. Saleh's group alleged that the money was "flown in via a chartered flight by Moalem Airlines," which is based in Kyrgyzstan.

The post caught the attention of conservative commentator Ann Vandersteel, who said of the cash payment "this is not America First" but rather "America deceived." Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who is a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, responded to Vandersteel's post by adding that the massive cash shipments to the Taliban are happening "every week." He then called on the U.S. Senate to "pass my bill."

Burchett's legislation — the "No Tax Dollars for Terrorists Act" — passed the House of Representatives in June, and would empower the U.S. State Department to identify and publish the names of every organization providing financial support to the Taliban-controlled government.

"The United States has sent over $5 billion in cash to Kabul. It is the duty of the State Department to ensure that any aid from the United States is kept out of the hands of terrorists in Afghanistan. The terrorists can hate us for free," Burchett stated after the bill was passed.

Burchett has been a vocal proponent of cutting off U.S. cash shipments to Afghanistan ever since U.S. troops withdrew from the war-torn country in 2021. The issue has also attracted interest from MAGA influencers in close proximity to Trump, like unofficial "loyalty enforcer" Laura Loomer.

"Why is the United States still funding the Taliban?" Loomer wrote on Tuesday. "What the hell do our reps do all day aside from ruin our country and the world?"

"Because we are crooked Laura," Burchett responded.

Click here to read Newsweek's full article.

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In a newly released 33-page document called "the National Security Strategy of the United States of America," the Trump Administration details its foreign policy objectives — including its views on Europe, which Trump officials claim is in danger of "civilization erasure."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir analyzes the document in an article published on December 7, attacking the Trump White House's arguments as an "unhinged" and deeply racist blueprint for "making Europe white again."

O'Hehir draws a parallel between the arguments in the National Security Strategy (NSS) document and arguments of the Clairmont Institute, which was once a mainstream conservative think tank but has, in recent years, taken a far-right MAGA turn.

"To be fair, the poison-steeped Claremont Institute pseudo-intellectuals behind the Trump regime might well argue that their NSS is not contradictory in the least, since it can be boiled down to a straightforward message: Tyranny is awesome, but democracy sucks," O'Hehir warns. "OK, it doesn't actually say that, but it's hard to imagine how else to reconcile its Great Replacement-fueled fanboy enthusiasm for far-right parties in Europe and its high-minded refusal to lecture autocratic regimes in the Middle East and Asia about 'democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.' Understandably enough, it's the unhinged and unconcealed racist panic shoveled out in the Trump NSS that has generated international headlines."

The Salon journalist continues, "Europe, the document warns, is losing its historic cultural identity and faces the 'stark prospect of civilizational erasure.' Exactly what is meant here by 'identity' and 'civilization' is only barely left unsaid, and the Great Replacement rhetoric is not so much borrowed as copied and pasted: It is 'more than plausible,' we are told, that in coming decades, 'certain NATO members will become majority non-European,' and may no longer 'view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way' they used to."

The "point" of the NSS, O'Hehir laments, is to "rip the liberal democracies of the EU a new one for their perceived wokeness."

"If we try to map the NSS claims onto the realm of reality," O'Hehir writes, "they fall apart. But that's hardly the point: It is not, in fact, plausible that any European nation will have a Muslim-majority population, or a mostly nonwhite population, or anything close to that, in the foreseeable future. Second and far more important, what message is being sent when the government of a multiethnic democracy built on three centuries of immigration — roughly 99 percent of the U.S. population has ancestral ties to other continents — makes the official claim that 'immigrants will corrupt the values of the societies they move to,' as The Economist puts it?"

According to O'Hehir, the NSS "is dangerous because no American president, whether good, bad or indifferent, clear back to roughly the days of Andrew Jackson, would have published such blatant racist fiction as an official statement of U.S. foreign policy."

*Andrew O'Hehir's full article for Salon is available at this link.

During his first presidency, Donald Trump clashed with a long list of traditional conservatives he appointed — from two U.S. attorneys general (Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr) to a secretary of state (Rex Tillerson) to a White House chief of staff (retired Gen. John F. Kelly). But the second Trump Administration, in contrast, is filled with ultra-MAGA loyalists. And those loyalists shaped the America First views expressed in a new 33-page document called the National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

Eric S. Edelman, who served as undersecretary of defense in the George W. Bush Administration, examines the new NSS in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 8. And Edelman, who now co-hosts the publication's "Shield of the Republic" podcast, emphasizes that it is radically different from the NSS published by the first Trump Administration.

"The first Trump Administration's NSS was written by serious people and marked a crucial inflection point by noting that the United States was moving away from the kind of conflict which had marked the previous decade and a half — namely the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations of the fight against violent Islamist extremism — and had entered an era of great-power conflict, in particular with a rising China and a revanchist Russia," Edelman explains. "The document, although festooned with references to America First, was clearly in the mainstream of U.S. post-World War II strategic thinking — even as Trump's speech announcing its publication suggested that he had never read the document. Nor did he agree with its reliance on working with and through America's traditional alliances."

Edelman continues, "The strategy published late last week with no fanfare presents something altogether different. Filled with chest-thumping pomposity, shrill rhetoric —and more than a whiff of white nationalist/supremacist idiom — it marks a sharp break not only with the post-Cold War trajectory of American strategy, but more broadly, with the direction of U.S. national security strategy since 1941. With 27 instances of Trump's name in a mere 29 pages of text, it is a strategy document worthy of North Korea."

The new NSS, the former Bush Administration official argues, is an "expression of Trumpism in full," including an "invocation of immigration restriction."

"The core of the strategy comes in a sentence midway through the document: 'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,'" Edelman notes. "This resignation from the role of chief maintainer of the global order is what marks the real break from 80 years of American foreign policy…. The Trump NSS sketches out an approach to national security policy that carries with it very real dangers."

*Eric S. Edelman's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

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MMA

September 3, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): I want start with a story yesterday, which I love, and it was not getting enough coverage. We can go to the b-roll. President Donald Trump has been very clear that he wants to shrink the map and focus on hemispheric dominance. He was trying to end wars abroad and really focus on our own hemisphere being abused. Yesterday — this is the MAGA doctrine, otherwise known as the Monroe Doctrine 2.0 — President Donald Trump authorized a military strike yesterday of drug runners and drug traffickers of Tren de Aragua that were bringing life-ending drugs to the United States, you can kind of see here in a speedboat.

They're in international waters. I don't know all the legal technicalities here. Obviously, it passed the muster because they authorized it, and they did a drone strike in the Caribbean. Alex, what are your thoughts here? I'm at least thrilled finally that we're using military force in our own hemisphere against people that would have done harm against the American homeland. They actually are a much greater threat, what you are seeing on-screen are a much greater threat than Vladimir Putin. Those drug traffickers would've killed a lot more people than Russian soldiers. Alex Marlow.

ALEX MARLOW (EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, BREITBART): Yeah. You're absolutely right about this, Charlie, and this is just perfect in terms of Trump national security doctrine focusing on our hemisphere first, which — I will tell you, our national security editor at Breitbart News, Frances Martel, she's a Latin American woman, and I'll tell you, this hits such close to home with people who've survived — of ancestry who survived communism in our hemisphere, and have seen Democrat after Democrat and establishment Republican after establishment Republican in this country focus on Europe, focus on the Middle East, and not remember our own hemisphere.

Now we're all aware of the threat of Far East in China, but China's has an encroachment that's taking place into that exact hemisphere, into Central and South America, and so I look at all of this as countering China. But let's be specific about fentanyl and drugs and these gangs that are taking advantage of our open border and have created these industries that bring devastating drugs, the type of stuff that not just ruin lives, that ruin families, ruin communities. They come up into our country, and we've allowed it. We've tolerated it. And Trump comes in one fell swoop, wipes out a bunch of them, sends an unbelievable signal that if you try to bring this poison into America, you're going to face deadly consequences. It is just peak Trump, and I love it.

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During his four years as president, Joe Biden worried that if Donald Trump ever returned to the White House, it would pose a major threat to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Trump, during his first term, toyed with the idea of withdrawing the U.S. from NATO — whereas Biden, as president, aggressively championed NATO's expansion when Sweden and Finland opted to join the alliance.

Seven months into Trump's second presidency, the U.S. is still a NATO member. But author/military historian Phillips O'Brien, during an interview with economist Paul Krugman, stressed that Trump's return to the White House marks a dramatic change in U.S./Europe relations.

Krugman, on August 23, posted video of the interview on his SubStack page and also published it as a Q&A article. And O'Brien voiced major concerns about the United States' relationship with Europe.

"The United States is going to great lengths to antagonize its allies," O'Brien told Krugman. "I don't get it. None of this makes any sense to me."

IFrame Content

The author/historian said of the Ukraine/Russia War, "I think what happens to Ukraine will determine how Europe deals with this. If Ukraine is sacrificed, I think Europe is going to have a terrible future. Because it's going to be dependent on the U.S., which has basically sacrificed Ukraine to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's Russia. Europe might even break apart, structurally, such that you'll have the Central Eastern Europeans, the ones who want to stand by Ukraine, the Finns, the Baltics, the Nordics going one way and then the Western Europeans sort of pretending things are OK."

O'Brien added, "So, I think people are underrating the chance of Europe splitting over Ukraine, which is why it's so important, I think, that Ukraine comes out of the war in good shape."

According to O'Brien, U.S. allies in Europe will be paying very close attention to the outcome of the United States' 2026 midterms.

"Well, that's the key thing, isn't it? The 2026 midterms," O'Brien told Krugman. "I don't think people are paying enough attention, because they have to be run fairly. I do think the Democrats have a very good chance of winning them if they are run fairly and happen under normal conditions. But they could also be easily perverted…. I would say that 2026 elections will show not whether America can come back, but whether it has a chance to come back — or whether the period we're going into could be a lot longer and darker than we imagined."

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note kim jung un, bibi and putin all disobey trump; ordered no strike iran; refused love ltr?

86’d his leverage when he trashed nato and imposed tariffs? switch side in cold war with zelensky ambush? TAco? NO ONE TRUSTS HIM?

an 6 25

'Kremlin-owned puppet': Critics slam Trump for jetting off to Canada to defend Putin at G7

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TRUMP BOASTS LIES WORLD NOW RESPECTS US AGAIN, BUT OPPOSITE; HEGSETH JDV UNDO POSTWAR SYSTEM; NEGOIT UKR 3 DICTATOR PETRO-STATES SAUDI

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Last week in Europe, the United States sent some very strong messages it is prepared to upend the established global order.

US Vice President JD Vance warned a stunned Munich Security Conference that Europe has an “enemy within”, referring to leaders who ignore their citizens’ concerns and values. He also advocated for right-wing political groups to be brought into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, at a meeting of NATO defence ministers, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth talked about hard power, the warrior ethos and the need for NATO members to spend up to 5% of their GDPs on defence. Most have only just climbed to about 2%, the longstanding NATO guideline.

In Poland, he reaffirmed the US commitment to the defence of Poland (and NATO) and committed to bolstering the US military presence there. So, despite the mixed messaging, the United States is not leaving Europe anytime soon. YOU SURE?

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is reportedly demanding a significant levy from Ukraine as payback for US protection and support.

The combination of remarks has left pundits and policymakers wondering – is the US-led international order, with its multilateral institutions, nearing its end?

The demise of the rules-based order?

The United States played a leading role in establishing the rules-based international order from the ashes of the second world war.

Critics have decried the UN-related institutions that arose at this time. But the rules-based order is perhaps best viewed as Voltaire saw the Holy Roman Empire: “no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. Those proclaiming the demise of the rules-based order should be careful what they wish for.

Such a system of trusted international exchanges barely existed prior to 1945. And while superpowers have carved out many exceptions for themselves, the rules-based order has nonetheless resulted in a time of remarkable stability and prosperity for the world.

So, why would the United States now appear to be retreating from this arrangement? The declining centrality of US influence goes some way to explain this.

China’s rise and the rise of Trump

To place the current events in proper context, we need to go back 25 years, when China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

This move was supported by and facilitated by then US President Bill Clinton in a belief that market liberalisation would eventually lead to political liberalisation.

Since then, China’s growth has skyrocketed thanks to its ready access to global markets. But it’s retained a strong mercantilist approach, counter to the spirit of the WTO. This has generated much resentment and nervousness among Western powers about the changing global power balance.

Since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, in particular, China has taken on an adversarial position to the rules-based order, following its own set of rules.

In effect, the world got neither the political nor the trade liberalisation that it once sought from China. Rather, the rules as they applied in China (and to an extent in Russia) allowed state-owned enterprises to co-opt – if not outright steal – technology shared by their international industry partners.

Foreign companies were squeezed out of China and had difficulty competing with lower-priced Chinese products at home.

Trump’s rise is, in part, a reaction to these developments. During his first term from 2017–20, Trump fitfully attempted to take a retaliatory, transactional approach to international relations. Now, as he begins his second term, he has a much more clear-eyed plan of action.

What Trump expects now

What became startlingly clear at the Munich Security Conference was Trump’s new vision of transactional alliances with America’s traditional partners.

In his view, the United States is not so much retreating into isolationism as much as it’s acting as a great power with its own economic interests at heart. Trump is eager for the US to assert its place in a world where spheres of influence matter as much – if not more – than any particular set of rules.

Evidently, the US is no longer advocating for multilateralism, in which states cooperate as equals. Now, it’s focused more on multi-polarity – a world with several great powers, in which the US puts its own interests first. As Trump frequently reminds us, “America First”.

According to this world view, allies and adversaries have equally been taking unfair advantage of:

America’s famous openness (notably its borders)
its liberal trade policies (which, according to Trump, has led to the de-industrialisation of the American heartland).

Its allies have also taken advantage of the generosity of its security umbrella, leading to their cavalier approach to security.

The Trump administration’s remedy to all of this involves doling out sanctimonious advice. An example of this: Vance telling European allies they should.JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference.

It’s also doling out some tough medicine, apparently trying to provoke a reaction in European capitals so they significantly increase their defence spending. This would enable the US to step back from being Europe’s security guarantor and finally undertake its long-talked-about pivot to Asia and focus on its main adversary: China.

Russia evidently features as part of this plan. Trump appears intent to try to cleave Russia from its Chinese embrace in order to either isolate or weaken China. A hard-nosed deal with Russia over Ukraine may well be the price he’s willing to pay to make that happen. JUST HAD ANOTHER GREAT CALL W XI

For America’s close security and economic partners, this presents an unprecedented challenge. The old preconceptions and expectations no longer seem to apply. What’s important now is not so much America’s shared values with Europe, it’s their overlapping interests.

For America’s allies, as well as its adversaries, this is going to require some hard thinking and new strategies, both economically and militarily.

John Blaxland, Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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NO LNK AN

Why is Trump bending the knee?

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Thom Hartmann February 19, 2025

What if Putin owns Trump?

I mean, seriously, what the hell is up with this? The BBC reported yesterday that Trump gave Russia everything they want with regard to Ukraine, rewarding Putin’s invasion of a sovereign European nation, and even took steps to help rebuild Russia’s economy that sanctions and the war damaged:

“The Americans said they agreed to four principles with the Russians, maintaining talks between the delegations, restoring broader diplomatic ties, enabling teams to work on a path to end the war in Ukraine, and then what the US called historic economic and investment opportunities with Russia.

“But what of any concessions being demanded of Moscow? Mr. Rubio wouldn't set any out to reporters after the meeting, saying only that it would be a matter for future talks. Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, made clear European peacekeeping forces were out of the question. …

“Pressed on why the US wasn’t laying down conditions for Moscow in order to agree to a durable peace, Mr Rubio said the two sides would only agree to ending the war on terms they were each happy with.” (emphasis mine)

Trump, in other words, has ordered Lil’ Marco to give Russia whatever they want and to hell with Ukraine. It’s a complete betrayal of Ukraine, America, democracy, and our European allies.

He even incoherently blamed Ukraine for Russia invading them, killing their people, stealing their children, and destroying their cities:

“Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it.

“You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down.”

This morning, Trump went even farther, lying with Russian talking points about how much money America has spent in Ukraine and calling President Zelenskyy a “dictator.”

Why?

ALSO READ: 'Outrageous lies': Trump floats kicking millions off of Social Security

What if Trump is working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? And has been running him as an asset since at least 2017?

That would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).

That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through his operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for this second term?

And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow documented last night?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his last presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Postreported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it.

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

And now, to complicate matters, Elon Musk has access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, himself, has also reportedly been having secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bildwhen the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had also taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957, aka Schedule F.

It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.

And now Musk is doing it for him. Deconstructing the American government. For Trump. Or for Putin.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine this week to demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a rightwing coup attempt before in this country: wealthy Republican industrialists tried to kidnap and kill President Franklin Roosevelt 92 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.”

Not a single one of those traitors, some aligned with Hitler, was ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

NOW READ: Trump's view of the world is becoming clear

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In an October 16, 2023 column for the New York Times, liberal economist Paul Krugman lamented the decline the "Pax Americana" and argued that MAGA Republicans were to blame. The term "Pax Americana" refers to a period of relative stability in the West following World War 2, and that stability, according to the concept, was encouraged by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

A lot has happened politically since Krugman wrote that column. Donald Trump won the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign following a widely criticized debate with Trump, Republicans flipped the U.S. Senate, and Trump narrowly defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the general election before returning to White House on January 20, 2025.

Krugman revisits the "Pax Americana" subject in an article posted on his Substack page on February 10, warning the stability of the West is in serious danger during Trump's second presidency. And Krugman is highly critical of the "destruction of" the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which, he says, Trump ally Elon Musk encouraged.

"USAID is just the most extreme example of how the Musk/Trump Administration is sabotaging the American empire," Krugman laments. "For years, America is or was an imperial power, although in a different way from most past empires — less reliant on force, more reliant on good will and trust. What Musk and Trump have done is to destroy much of the basis for U.S. influence, leaving America far weaker than it was just a few weeks ago."

The economist continues, "America's imperial era — the Pax Americana — began after World War II. With Europe and Japan in ruins and Britain exhausted, the U.S. had no military or economic peers outside the Soviet Bloc. "

Krugman stresses that "humanitarian aid," USAID's mission, plays "an important role in supporting America's moral authority."

"Were we always the good guys? Of course not," Krugman writes. "America engineered the overthrow of democratically elected leaders it didn't like, from Iran's Mohammed Mosaddegh to Chile's Salvador Allende. We supported tinpot dictators where that served U.S. interests, or in some cases, corporate interests. We killed huge numbers of civilians in Korea, and then again in Vietnam."

Krugman adds, "But compare the Pax Americana with any previous hegemony, and we look like a beacon of enlightenment. And our relative decency was rewarded."

Krugman warns that between threatening allies like Canada and Mexico with high tariffs "on spurious grounds," Trump's "threat to seize Greenland," and "the abrupt demolition of USAID," Trump and their allies "have taken a wrecking ball to the foundations of the Pax Americana."

"So now we're a nation that doesn’t keep its word, that can't be trusted to honor its agreements…. All of this makes us distrusted and friendless," Krugman warns. "It also makes us weak, because America needs allies even more now than it did during the Cold War."

*Paul Krugman's full SubStack column is available at this link.

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// arms sales

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/noam-chomsky-vijay-prashad/

Large parts of the world—outside of China and a few other countries—face a runaway virus, which has not been stopped because of criminal incompetence by governments. That these governments in wealthy countries cynically set aside the basic scientific protocols released by the World Health Organization and by scientific organizations reveals their malicious practice. Anything less than focused attention to managing the virus by testing, contact tracing, and isolation—and if this does not suffice, then imposing a temporary lockdown—is foolhardy. It is equally distressing that these richer countries have pursued a policy of "vaccine nationalism" by stockpiling vaccine candidates rather than a policy for the creation of a "people's vaccine." For the sake of humanity, it would be prudent to suspend intellectual property rules and develop a procedure to create universal vaccines for all people.

Although the pandemic is the principal issue on all of our minds, other major issues threaten the longevity of our species and of our planet. These include:

Nuclear Annihilation

In January 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, too close for comfort. The clock, created two years after the first atomic weapons were developed in 1945, is evaluated annually by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board, who decide whether to move the minute hand or keep it in place. By the time they set the clock again, it may well be closer to annihilation. Already limited arms control treaties are being shredded as the major powers sit on close to 13,500 nuclear weapons (more than 90 percent of which are held by Russia and the United States alone). The yield of these weapons could easily make this planet even more uninhabitable. The United States Navy has already deployed low-yield tactical W76-2 nuclear warheads. Immediate moves toward nuclear disarmament must be forced onto the world's agenda. Hiroshima Day, commemorated each year on August 6, must become a more robust day of contemplation and protest.

Climate Catastrophe

A scientific paper published in 2018 came with a startling headline: "Most atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century because of sea-level rise exacerbating wave-driven flooding." The authors found that atolls from the Seychelles to the Marshall Islands are liable to vanish. A 2019 United Nations (UN) report estimated that 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Add to this the catastrophic wildfires and the severe bleaching of the coral reefs and it is clear that we no longer need to linger over clichés about one thing or another being a canary in the coal mine of climate catastrophe; the danger is not in the future, but in the present. It is essential for major powers—who utterly fail to shift from fossil fuels—to commit to the "common but differentiated responsibilities" approach established at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. It is telling that countries such as Jamaica and Mongolia updated their climate plans to the UN before the end of 2020—as mandated by the Paris Agreement—even though these countries produce a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions. The funds that were committed to developing countries for their participation in the process have virtually dried up while external debt has ballooned. This shows a lack of basic seriousness from the "international community."

Neoliberal Destruction of the Social Contract

Countries in North America and Europe have eviscerated their public function as the state has been turned over to the profiteers and civil society has been commodified by private foundations. This means that the avenues for social transformation in these parts of the world have been grotesquely hampered. Terrible social inequality is the result of the relative political weakness of the working class. It is this weakness that enables the billionaires to set policies that cause hunger rates to rise. Countries should not be judged by the words written in their constitutions but by their annual budgets; the U.S., for example, spends almost $1 trillion (if you add the estimated intelligence budget) on its war machine, while it spends a fraction of this on the public good (such as on health care, something evident during the pandemic).

The foreign policies of Western countries seem to be well lubricated by arms deals: the United Arab Emirates and Morocco agreed to recognize Israel on the condition that they could purchase $23 billion and $1 billion worth of U.S.-made weapons, respectively. The rights of the Palestinians, the Sahrawi, and the Yemeni people did not factor into these deals.

The use of illegal sanctions by the United States against 30 countries including Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela has become a normal part of life, even during the COVID-19 public health crisis. It is a failure of the political system when the populations in the capitalist bloc are unable to force their governments—which are in many ways democratic in name only—to take a global perspective regarding this emergency. Rising rates of hunger reveal that the struggle for survival is the horizon for billions of people on the planet (all this while China is able to eradicate absolute poverty and largely eliminate hunger).

Nuclear annihilation and extinction by climate catastrophe are twin threats to the planet. Meanwhile, for victims of the neoliberal assault that has plagued the past generation, the short-term problems of sustaining their mere existence displace fundamental questions about the fate of our children and grandchildren.

Global problems of this scale require global cooperation. Pressured by the Third World states in the 1960s, the major powers agreed to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968, although they rejected the deeply important Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order of 1974. The balance of forces available to drive such a class agenda on the international stage is no longer there; political dynamics in the countries of the West, in particular, but also in the larger states of the developing world (such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa) are necessary to change the character of the governments. A robust internationalism is necessary to pay adequate and immediate attention to the perils of extinction: extinction by nuclear war, by climate catastrophe, and by social collapse. The tasks ahead are daunting, and they cannot be deferred.

1020

addis Ababa (AFP) - Ethiopia on Saturday accused Donald Trump of inciting "war" over a massive Nile River mega-dam after the US president spoke out against the project and suggested Egypt might destroy it.Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew summoned US ambassador Michael Raynor to clarify Trump's comments, which mark the US president's latest foray into a delicate, long-running dispute between Ethiopia and downstream neighbours Egypt and Sudan. Gedu told Raynor that "the incitement of war between Ethiopia and Egypt by a sitting US president neither reflects the long-standing partnership and str...

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

house Foreign Affairs chairman slams Trump’s State Department for its ‘indifference to civilian casualties’ in Gulf arms deal

Alex Henderson September 16, 2020

In May 2019, President Donald Trump made an emergency declaration in order to complete the sale of more than $8 million worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx aidio

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president of the United States takes the following oath at his or her inauguration: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly betrayed this promise, and should long since have been removed from office for doing so.

The Constitution deems that the president is commander in chief of the military. As revealed in famed journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage”, Donald Trump believes that members of the U.S. military who have been wounded or killed in battle are “suckers” and “losers” for not being as selfish and cowardly as he is. Trump also believes that disabled veterans should not be seen in public because they somehow shame or embarrass the country.

Trump also has no respect for the United States military’s role as defender of the country’s democracy from threats both foreign and domestic. To that end, he attempted to order military commanders to attack Americans who were (and are) exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights by protesting against his regime in response to the police killing of George Floyd, as well as in support of social justice more generally.

Fortunately, military commanders put the institutional legitimacy of the armed forces ahead of the president’s whims by deflecting his orders. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also apologized for appearing alongside Trump on the streets of Washington.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is likely ignore the results of the 2020 election, and may seek to use the military to quell protests or other acts of resistance, perhaps by invoking the Insurrection Act.

Trump has also pardoned accused or convicted war criminals because he idolizes cruelty and lawlessness. Trump and his regime, in fact, views war criminals as useful tools in his authoritarian campaign against American democracy.

Many of the United States’ most senior retired military personnel, members of the intelligence community and diplomats, as well as other elites in the national defense community, have publicly condemned Donald Trump as an extreme threat to the country’s safety, security and democracy.

Overall, Donald Trump has made the United States less safe, less respected, less powerful, less influential, and less respected as a world power. In the Age of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has become a pariah nation, shamed before the world.

Is there any strategic logic to Trump’s decision-making about the United States and its role in the world? How do Trump’s ignorance, selfishness and authoritarian beliefs, combined with his conviction that his own personal interests are identical to the nation’s, imperil our safety and security? Does the Trump regime’s contempt for the truth and empirical reality endanger the long-term future of our nation?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom.” Sciutto previously served as ABC News’ senior foreign correspondent and during his extensive career has reported from more than 50 countries, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His new book is “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World.”

At the end of this conversation Sciutto warns that the consensus among many of the country’s senior defense and intelligence professionals is that Donald Trump idolizes Vladimir Putin, and is somehow personally bound to him. If this is true, Trump’s fealty to a foreign leader has fatally compromised his ability to make decisions in the best interests of the United States and the American people.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jim Sciutto on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

How are you feeling, given all that is happening and has happened with Donald Trump and his administration?

I’m feeling stress for my country. That is not a political sentiment. I love my country. I’ve spent a lot of time outside of it for professional reasons. As a foreign correspondent, you end up loving America more because you live in places where they do not have our freedoms or institutions, many of which we take for granted. When I see those institutions being undermined here in the United States and people losing confidence in their own country, I am very concerned. I am still an optimist, but there is much to be concerned about here in the United States because of Donald Trump and all that has happened.

How does America look from abroad?

There is not a lot of respect right now for the United States. I do not want to overstate that because, frankly, there are many countries in the world with much bigger problems than this country right now.

For example, the COVID outbreak. The U.S. has certainly been one of the worst in terms of responding to it. That is not a political statement. It is based on the data. Europe is doing much better for example than the United States with the pandemic and its deadly consequences and other problems.

The state of the country’s political discourse is also not good. Is the United States able to solve problems in the way it did not too long ago? Pew polling shows that the world’s opinion of the United States has greatly diminished. The world is viewed much worse than it was during another low point, which was during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

How are career diplomats and other public servants reacting to the Trump regime and its assaults on norms and values? These are government professionals who have served in multiple administrations. How are they making sense of this tumult?

Here is what is different. There have always been disagreements about policy and how best to accomplish those goals. What is different now is that there is an assault on the truth. There is not an agreed-upon set of facts. At first, I thought that maybe having to confront a pandemic would do that. Another example would be Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. There was a bipartisan judgment that Russia interfered, and that the Russians did so to help Trump win.

It came out of committees, as well as the intelligence agencies. Trump attacked those findings and took them personally. That was a consensus not just of a bipartisan committee but the country’s intelligence community as well. Intelligence findings can be attacked more easily because it is still a matter of interpretation.

But in the middle of a pandemic, there are hard facts. People are dying. You can count the number of people dying. You can count and document the positive infection rates.

You can count the number of infections. One can easily disprove Donald Trump’s claims that cases are only rising because there is more testing, because the percentage of people testing positive is also going up. But not in this environment where even the facts are disputed. Conspiracy theories existed well before Donald Trump, but he has super-turbocharged them to the point where they are leaking more and more into mainstream conversation. Democracy cannot operate without an agreed-upon set of facts and the country is miles down that rabbit hole right now.

Does Donald Trump have an ideology? Is his administration guided by some overriding principle that orients its approach to the world?

He has an approach and a view of the world. It is an open question as to whether he has a strategy — and that is a question raised by people who worked for him. For my new book, I spoke only to people who worked for Trump and were appointed by him at the highest levels.

When I asked those officials to describe Trump’s view of the world it was described as transactional: “What can you do for me? I scratch your back. You scratch mine.” Trump has done that equally with adversaries and allies. Trump has no worldview beyond that. There is no understanding of the ancillary benefit of friendships and alliances.

[Former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster told me how much trouble he had convincing Trump that there was more to alliances than just some sort of quid pro quo bottom line.These include shared history, shared values, a shared interest in the rule of law, sharing of intelligence to fight terrorism and other understandings. Trump does not see the world and alliances in that way. As such, Donald Trump will just as easily upend a friendship as he will antagonize a competitor. The United States is on a path of confrontation with China. But the United States also has highly antagonistic relationships now with our closest allies in Europe. With South Korea, the president is demanding they quintuple their contribution to the deployment of U.S. forces there and is threatening to take those forces away in the midst of the worsening standoff with North Korea.

Or even consider Canada, arguably one of our closest allies. Trump has used national security powers to impose economic sanctions on them including tariffs. In essence, Donald Trump has labeled Canada a national security threat.

Donald Trump does not read. He is proudly ignorant. He is a malignant narcissist. How is it even possible to have a coherent foreign policy with such a president?

Trump’s national security advisers knew and realized that he was not reading any of the briefing notes. So early on, McMaster’s team came up with the idea of boiling the briefings down to note cards with just three bullet points, thinking that would get through to Trump.

They tried it, and discovered pretty quickly that Trump was only reading the first two of the three bullet points. That is as much as Trump would read.

Then the national security advisers started concentrating the most important information in the first two bullet points and the third became a throwaway line.

Then they figured out Trump was not even reading the note cards. Trump does not process the material. He does not take the time to read it. Even worse, Trump will just reject it. He’ll contradict it and say, “I know better,” in effect. Trump does that not just with opinions but with facts and analysis.

And not just opinions, analysis, but even facts. Sue Gordon briefed Trump a number of times when she was on track to be the country’s highest-ranking intelligence official, until he forced her out. Gordon communicated how the most alarming times were when Trump rejected things that the intelligence community knew to be true, which they could show definitively. Trump would reject those facts because they did not fit his worldview or were somehow inconvenient for him.

Trump’s advisers told me that his personal interests were often indistinguishable from the nation’s interests in his mind. He mixed the two together. In Trump’s mind, his re-election is a goal in itself that is as important as the country’s national interests. That is what happened with Trump and Ukraine. Trump denied an ally military aid during a war to get political dirt on Joe Biden. Right now, Donald Trump is refusing to hold Russia accountable for interfering in the presidential election again, to help him.

How do you explain Donald Trump’s public deference to Vladimir Putin and Russia?

I asked everyone I interviewed for the book to explain it. The best explanation they could come up with, and this was a consistent belief held by more than one person, was that Donald Trump has an inexplicable admiration for Vladimir Putin.

Another former senior adviser said that Vladimir Putin is Donald Trump’s honey trap. A honey trap is the beautiful woman the other side sends to try to influence you, to bring you over to the enemy or rival.

There were concerns within the intelligence community that what Russia was doing, and is still doing, with Trump is running an influence operation on him. The Russians are trying to influence Trump’s view of the world to make it more in line with their national interests. There are examples of this, such as the way Trump is parroting Vladimir Putin’s view of Europe and countries such as Germany. Trump has also parroted Putin’s comments about Russia’s role in World War II and how it was supposedly always America’s friend. To hear such things about Trump and Putin’s relationship from people who worked with Trump at the highest levels is very alarming.

Given Trump’s behavior and escalating authoritarian policies and personal threats, it appears that he is actually being mentored or somehow guided by Putin and other authoritarians.

Some of Trump’s comments can be readily dismissed. But Trump’s admiration for Putin’s power is real. That is something that his advisers spoke about openly to me, and many of them did so on the record.

We also see that admiration in Trump’s public statements and his tactics. Repeatedly declaring the press to be “the enemy of the people” is intentional. Trump has made these threats so often during his time in office that it has created open hostility toward the news media, to the point where there has been violence, such as those exploding letters that were sent to CNN. We had to have security at Trump’s rallies because he would point to the press and say, “Enemy of the people.” Trump’s behavior is right out of the authoritarian’s playbook.

Why don’t we see mass resignations by the professional public servants? Why do they stay, given what Trump is doing?

There are still a lot of people in government who believe in what they do. They love their country and they believe that they are doing good work. They also believe that they have a role to play. We still see that. Members of the Postal Service raised the alarm about what was happening there, with slowing down the processing and delivery of the mail during election season. Many of these people who still believe in what they are doing and are fighting to do their best in public service have paid a hefty price for that decision.

I’m in touch with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the whistleblower who exposed what Trump was doing with Ukraine, who made a decision to leave the military because he was told that his career was basically over. Many good public servants stay as long as they can, even with Trump. There are still true believers in this country’s government and public service.

What happened to the story about Russian bounties on U.S. troops? That would have ended another presidency. Why wasn’t there been daily coverage of it by the mainstream news media?

Two years prior, Donald Trump also rejected the fact that the Russians were supplying arms to the Taliban. The lives of U.S. troops were threatened and Trump did not treat it as a big deal. It is hard for the news media and others to stay focused on the Russian bounty scandal because there is something new every day from the Trump administration. We need to do our best to keep asking questions about the Russian bounties and other such issues, even though they quickly fade out of the spotlight. I try to connect the dots on these issues. But it is hard because there is a portion of the country right now that will just ignore whatever wrongs are done by the Trump administration.

Your book is called “The Madman Theory.” How do you make sense of Trump’s strategic approach to foreign policy?

Donald Trump has put his own spin on it. If we go back to the origins of the “madman theory,” it was Richard Nixon who came up with that. Nixon deliberately had his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, communicate to North Vietnam that he was just mad enough to launch a nuclear strike. The intention there was to gain leverage in negotiations with North Vietnam on ending the war. It did not work.

Fifty years later, there is a president in the form of Donald Trump who for years in his business dealings bragged about keeping the other side off balance, surprising them at the last minute, making big demands and then making a concession or the other way around, etc. But in practice, Trump’s madman theory is one where the victories that do occur are because of accident and not intentional strategy. Trump uses his madman approach both with allies and enemies. Trump also does that to his own staff. I was repeatedly told by Trump’s staffers of many examples where they would be surprised by the president and then have to explain to America’s allies what had just happened.

If you’re unleashing the madman on everyone, including the people on your side, that’s just chaos. It is not a viable plan. On issues from North Korea to Iran and China, Trump has left those situations worse than before he became president. By and large, his madman approach has failed.

I discuss the North Korea situation a great deal in the new book. I walk readers through the “fire and fury” period of Trump’s approach to North Korea, and then Trump’s love-affair approach to Kim Jong-un.

The bottom line on North Korea is that both approaches failed. Four years later, North Korea has more, not fewer, nukes. They’ve got a more advanced ballistic missile program, not a less advanced ballistic program.

Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon, not further, with Trump having withdrawn the United States from the nuclear deal. One can argue about whether Iran has been cowed or deterred by the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. If seeking a less aggressive Iran was Trump’s goal, such an approach failed because Iran is now more aggressive, not less.

How do you explain to the public how perilous the situation with North Korea was in 2017?

The crisis with North Korea was so close to war that Donald Trump’s own military advisers hesitated to give him military options. During the worst, most tense period in late 2017, his own military advisers were concerned that Trump was going to put the two countries on a path to war. The advisers were so concerned that they communicated to their North Korean counterparts that they did not know what President Trump was going to do next. They described him as “unpredictable” because they were concerned the two sides would get on an unstoppable path toward war if Trump had his way.

In total, North Korea was an example where Trump’s own advisers were so concerned about the madman that they held back. It’s a remarkable judgment on his decision-making.

What happens when there is an imminent threat to the United States and Trump’s national security advisers tell him, “Mr. President, we must act now!” and Trump just says “Who cares?”

We’ve seen it happen. It’s not even a hypothetical. Trump was briefed on Russia paying bounties to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and he just said, “I don’t want to believe it.” Yes, it was not a high-confidence assessment, but the president went so far as to say it was another Russia hoax.

That was not the first time that Trump had done such a thing. In 2018, we knew that the Russians sold weapons to the Taliban. So we’ve already seen the president deny the best advice and ignore clear U.S. national security interests. What is more important than protecting U.S. soldiers abroad? Donald Trump will not do it.

What is a more important institution for American democracy than a free and fair election? Four years after Russia interfered in 2016 to benefit Donald Trump, the Russians are doing it again. Again, Donald Trump will not accept that intelligence assessment. He won’t warn Vladimir Putin and Russia to stop interfering in America’s presidential elections.

We are seeing your dire scenario play out in real life, right before our eyes.

What do America’s enemies and rivals see in Donald Trump?

Donald Trump projects a false image of strength. Vladimir Putin sees weakness in the NATO alliance and a leader, Donald Trump, that he can exploit and influence.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, saw a leader in Trump whom he could, on private phone calls, convince to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria because that was in Turkey’s interest.

This false idea that Trump is somehow kicking ass and taking names is not the way that Putin and other leaders view him. With Trump the United States is a paper tiger. It’s not the real deal.A senior intelligence official told me that adversaries, our enemies, know that the United States with Trump as president does not know the next play.

They know we don’t know it. They know that Trump is unpredictable. They know that he keeps his own staff and policymaking institutions off balance. America’s enemies and adversaries know that the United States does not know what is coming next and they seek to take advantage of that.

It is a weakness. America’s enemies perceive weakness in Donald Trump. They do not see that as some great strength or the “art of the deal.” They see a country, arguably the most powerful country in the world, lurching around with no idea of what is coming next. The country is just being led by the whims of the moment from the commander in chief. That’s a pretty damning assessment.

Foreign policy is complicated. Most Americans are very ignorant about it. How would you explain why Donald Trump’s approach to international relations should matter to them?

Because their country’s national security is at stake. The threats facing the United States have gotten bigger during his term. North Korea’s nuclear program, Iran’s nuclear program, Russia’s threat to Europe and the West have all gotten bigger, not smaller, during Trump’s term. In our lifetimes we benefited from a peaceful world where the United States has been largely secure from those kinds of threats. With Trump, the United States is less safe.

Beyond that, what is your view of your own country? Do you see the United States as not just standing for something different as compared to many other countries, but also operating differently, where people here can rely on their democratic institutions? The rule of law? Fair elections? All those things are being undermined by Donald Trump and his administration. People have to know exactly what is happening with Trump and America before they vote on Election Day.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-used-a-surprisingly-effective-trick-to-hide-his-disastrous-foreign-policy/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/dont-be-hoodwinked-by-trumps-uae-israel-peace-deal-its-a-sham/

eabrams envoy to IRAN and venez 820

Trump’s ‘delusional’ GOP enablers are finally shaken by Bernstein’s reporting on president’s ‘uninformed’ calls with foreign leaders

putin paid KIA am 720

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-day-he-was-briefed-about-russian-bounties-trump-was-busy-meeting-actors-for-play-about-peter-strzok-and-lisa-page/

Trump’s disastrous record on foreign policy: Lost wars, new conflicts and broken promises

linick IG

update report

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/fired-state-department-official-says-he-was-pressured-to-drop-probe-of-trumps-shady-saudi-arms-deal/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-tragic-clowning-and-his-global-surrender-to-china-and-russia-have-exposed-america-as-a-declining-empire

xi putin

OMG foreign policy?

sheldon adelson and ...

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/27/iran-environmentalists-panthera-thomas-kaplan/

in SEPTEMBER 2017, a group of Iranian environmentalists working on Asiatic cheetah preservation with the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation felt a pang of alarm. Thomas S. Kaplan, a billionaire precious metals investor then best known for his fine art collection, had just made a surprise public appearance in New York at the annual conference of United Against Nuclear Iran. The Iranian environmentalists were concerned because their group had gotten aid from one of Kaplan’s nonpolitical charities. Now, he was speaking before a group that was extremely hostile to their country.

They were right to be alarmed. Within a few months, several of the group’s members would find themselves behind bars — hit with espionage charges by Iran’s notorious judiciary...

an 220

United States’ global power is slipping away as its contempt for others fuels the decline of the West M.K. Bhadrakumar / Independent Media

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-u-s-foreign-policy-triggers-crisis-and-immigration/

omg

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/20/erik-prince-fbi-investigation-trump-barr

_{FBI Is Investigating Erik Prince for Trying to Weaponize Crop Dusters

Matthew Cole

Attorney General Barr has been criticized for intervening in cases involving Trump associates. Prince’s may be the most politically sensitive of all.

last MAY, SHORTLY after Congress accused Erik Prince of lying under oath and referred criminal charges to the Justice Department, an associate approached the Blackwater founder to offer help and commiserate about Prince’s potential legal jeopardy.

Prince, who once moved to the United Arab Emirates to avoid being caught up in a federal prosecution, immediately dismissed the associate’s concerns. He was untouchable, he bragged, and would face no legal troubles.

“Not under this guy,” Prince said referring to President Donald Trump, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange.

Blackwater’s Founder Is Under Investigation for Money Laundering, Ties to Chinese Intel, and Brokering Mercenary Services

That assumption is about to be tested.

Prince, an heir to a billion-dollar fortune who is widely viewed as a shadow adviser to the president, is under federal investigation for his 2015 attempt to modify two American-made crop-dusting planes into attack aircraft — a violation of arms trafficking regulations— two people familiar with the investigation told The Intercept. The planes became part of private military services Prince proposed to sell or use in mercenary operations in Africa and Azerbaijan, as The Intercept has previously reported.

The investigation into the modified crop dusters is one of several ongoing probes targeting Prince. Another focuses on the allegations that he lied to Congress during the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 presidential election interference; a third concerns a 2017 armed aviation proposal to the UAE, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The investigation of Prince coincides with heightened scrutiny of Attorney General William Barr, who has been heavily criticized for intervening in two other prominent criminal cases involving friends and associates of Trump. The Prince investigations, and decisions about whether or not to charge him, are perhaps the most politically charged of all.

That Prince’s efforts to arm and sell the two American-made crop dusters are part of the FBI’s investigation into his activities has not been previously reported.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Prince also did not respond to a request for comment.

[ pix One of the Thrush 510G aircraft being modified at Airborne Technologies’ hangar in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Prince owns at least 25 percent of the company.

Photo: Provided to The Intercept]

Prince’s connections to Trump reflect the netherworld of deniability in which he operates: He has no official role with the White House or Trump campaign, but appears to benefit from the association. Prince donated $250,000 to help elect the president and worked to help his campaign dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton, according to the Mueller report. Prince also worked closely with Steve Bannon, then Trump’s campaign manager, trying to shape Trump’s foreign policy and national security positions throughout the campaign.

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no lnx

Nations are rejecting the president’s foreign policy puffery as autocrats ditch Trump and embrace China

Written by Washington Monthly February 18, 2020

Venezuela is a bipolar nation in the eyes of the world. More than 50 countries recognize the government of interim President Juan Guaidó. The rest of the world — most significantly Russia and China — continue to support and strengthen the grip of President Nicolás Maduro.

It’s bad enough that the Trump administration has been all bark and no bite, trying to flip the failed Latin American state’s leadership with tough rhetoric and State of the Union ovations. What’s worse is that America under its current leadership has shown that there are neither significant consequences nor consequential actions that can be taken when a foreign country snubs Washington in favor of Moscow or Beijing.

The latest nation to reject President Trump’s foreign policy puffery? The former American colony and current conflict-ridden country of the Philippines.

Flattery is not foreign policy, and Trump’s fan-boy attitude towards Rodrigo Duterte has not convinced the populist Filipino leader that Manila’s future and his personal power are assured by remaining allied with the United States. Instead, he has chosen to throw in his lot with Xi Jinping and the promise posed by China as a regionally rising economic superpower.

This is not only bad news for America’s strategic rebalancing in the Pacific and for regional security. It is really bad news for those other Southeast Asian nations looking around their neighborhood and trying to figure out how to balance their economic and security interests against their long-standing American trading and security alliance partners.Any way you look at this, Duterte’s move is big. On Tuesday, Duterte let the United States know that he was dumping the 69-year-old treaty alliance that allowed American forces to remain and train in the Philippines.

It’s not just the carrot of Chinese capital that has attracted Duterte to Beijing. The Philippine president feels insulted and justifies turning away from the United States by saying “America is very rude” to Filipino friends accused of human-rights violations.

Human rights, however, have never been a priority for the Trump administration. POTUS arrived in the White House ready and willing to toss democratic principles, values, norms and rules in the dumpster.

Duterte has it all wrong.

Trump is a true ally who embraces Duterte’s autocratic rhetoric. Trump envies Duterte’s dictatorial style and tough-guy approach to law enforcement and politics. Trump entered office encouraging American law enforcement to use extrajudicial measures —whether slamming perps heads into cop-car roofs or encouraging the illegal actions of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The latest outrage is Trump’s admiration for summary death penalties for drug dealers.

Duterte has encouraged vigilantism by everyone from civilians to police to government forces. His approach has been to give a pass to anyone who kills a suspected drug user or dealer. He flaunts his own tough-guy credentials by bragging about personally killing criminals. He waves around guns to prove his seriousness and reinforce his power.

Trump has tried to court Duterte’s loyalty to — and love for — America. POTUS practices a populism aligning his personal leadership style with Duterte’s. Despite the anti-charm offensive, and regardless of the two countries’ clearly shared interests, the Philippine leader just bet his country’s future on the People’s Republic of China.

In effect, long-standing military relations have just been reversed, and America has been told to go home.

The U.S.-Philippine relationship has never really been smooth. Duterte still harbors resentment for a 1906 Moro massacre so fierce and unjust that it drew the attention of Samuel Clemens—Mark Twain. Volcanoes and tightening American budgets in the 1990s shut down Clark Air Base. Entire Filipino communities that relied on employment and business from U.S. bases suddenly were out of luck.

The two countries’ relationship survived the Marcos regime and the destructive Mt. Pinatubo volcano. In fact, the Yellow Revolution that overthrew full-fledged dictator Ferdinand Marcos brought to power an Aquino family boasting deep American training and credentials. Corazon Aquino felt both grateful and indebted to the United States for supporting the overthrow of the Marcos regime and the successful transition to a civilian-led and functional electoral democracy.

The bad news? Philippine’s successor democracy gave voters the conditions to sweep into office the tough-talking populist politician Duterte in 2016.

Philippine democracy is now threatened, in part, because China is happy to support reliable autocratic leaders and because Trump’s feckless and personality-driven foreign policy toward Asia has alienated and pushed away Manila. The Trump administration’s foreign policy lacks strategic coherence. Instead, it favors super-summitry and presidential high-fives.

From Manila to Caracas, rightist and leftist leaders calculate which allies will serve them best and where to place their bets. Throwing off perceived post-colonial American shackles for neo-colonial Chinese chains is a bad choice. Unfortunately for the West and democracy, both Venezuela and the Philippines have wagered against Trump’s America.

===

pompeo pvt mtg lavrov, no report US]

Trump’s US delegation was ‘dumbfounded’ by hostile reception at Munich conference: report

According to a report from Politico, the U.S. delegation attending…

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QS kill in sotu, but no cas --> headaches --> 50 tbi?! he said isis defunct when his kurd fail let 100's out of prison?!

an 220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bombshell-report-finds-iraqi-officials-doubt-trumps-basis-for-escalating-to-the-brink-of-war/

no lnx

‘Bombshell’ report finds Iraqi officials doubt Trump’s basis for escalating to the brink of war

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, senior White House advisors and senior military personnel, delivers remarks during a national televised address Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020, from the Cross Hall of the White House, responding to the retaliatory missile strikes against U.S. military and coalition forces in Iraq on Tuesday by the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

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Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams February 7, 2020

In a “bombshell” revelation that calls into question one of the Trump administration’s stated justifications for assassinating Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani—a move that nearly sparked a region-wide military conflict—Iraqi intelligence officials told the New York Times that they believe ISIS, not an Iran-linked militia, was likely responsible for the Dec. 27 rocket attack that killed an American contractor at an airbase near Kirkuk, Iraq.

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The Times reported Thursday that “Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets… saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack” was responsible.

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“All the indications are that it was Daesh,” Brigadier General Ahmed Adnan, the Iraqi chief of intelligence for the federal police at the K-1 air base, told the Times, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. “We know Daesh’s movements.”

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The Trump administration has not released a single piece of evidence showing that the Iraqi militia Khataib Hezbollah, which has ties to Iran, was responsible for the attack on K-1. The group has denied carrying out the attack.

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The U.S. responded to the rocket attack days later with deadly airstrikes on Khataib Hezbollah targets in Iraq and Syria, setting off a dangerous escalatory spiral that brought Iran and the U.S. to the brink of war.

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On Jan. 2, the U.S. assassinated Soleimani with a drone strike in Baghdad ordered by President Donald Trump. Following the assassination, which was widely condemned as an act of war, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a statement claiming without evidence that Soleimani “orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months—including the attack on December 27th—culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel.”

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But Iraqi officials told the Times that “based on circumstantial evidence and long experience in the area where the attack took place,” there is good reason to be skeptical about U.S. claims that Khataib Hezbollah was behind it.

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As the Times reported:

The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.

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Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.

The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces…

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These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.

“We as Iraqi forces cannot even come to this area unless we have a large force because it is not secure,” Brig. Gen. Adnan said of the area from which the rocket attack was launched. “How could it be that someone who doesn’t know the area could come here and find that firing position and launch an attack?”

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In response to the Times report, Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, tweeted: “Al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and we went to war with Iraq. If this report is true, ISIS attacked the U.S. and we nearly went to war with Iran.”

Sina Toossi

@SinaToossi

This is huge: Iraqi military & intelligence officials say it’s highly unlikely that a rocket attack that killed an Iraqi-American contractor in early January—& led to an escalation cycle that almost started a war—was carried out by an Iran-allied militia.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/world/middleeast/iraq-iran-hezbollah-evidence.html …

Iraqi soldiers at the K-1 base, which was struck by rockets on Dec. 27.

Was U.S. Wrong About Attack That Nearly Started a War With Iran?

Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started a dangerous spiral of events.

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nytimes.com

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3:57 PM - Feb 6, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

119 people are talking about this

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CODEPINK

@codepink

The US almost started WWIII based on questionable evidence.

After all of the violence in the Middle East following the attack on US bases, #Iraqi officials are now questioning the US's claim that the #Iran-backed militia Khataib Hezbollah are to blame. https://buff.ly/31CpWqT

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Iraqi soldiers at the K-1 base, which was struck by rockets on Dec. 27.

Was U.S. Wrong About Attack That Nearly Started a War With Iran?

Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started a dangerous spiral of events.

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nytimes.com

1:15 PM - Feb 6, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

44 people are talking about this

U.S. officials insisted to the Times that they have “solid evidence” showing that Khataib Hezbollah carried out the attack, but they have not released any of this evidence to the public or to Iraqi officials.

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“We have requested the American side to share with us any information, any evidence, but they have not sent us any information,” Lt. Gen. Muhammad al-Bayati, chief of staff for former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, told the Times.

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Ilan Goldenberg, Middle East security director at the Center for a New American Security think tank, tweeted that the U.S. Congress “must ask questions about this and get the intel.”

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Responsible Statecraft managing editor Benjamin Armbruster agreed.

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“Congress needs to investigate ASAP,” Armbruster tweeted.

the American chaos machine: How U.S. foreign policy goes off the rails

Danny Sjursen / TomDispatch

In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took…

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why Bernie Sanders is too ‘evidence-based’ and ‘cautious’ on foreign policy for the DC elite Alex H

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-has-never-been-anti-war-if-you-understand-the-history-of-gop-foreign-policy-hes-always-been-just-another-republican/

no lnx

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Trump has never been anti-war. If you understand the history of GOP foreign policy, he’s always been just another Republican

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Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon January 12, 2020

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American foreign policy has always been dictated by the wants and whims of powerful business interests.

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As I plowed through my favorite works of historical literature to trace the evolution of Republican foreign policy through alternating periods of imperialism and isolationism, that fact was unavoidable. We are a capitalist society, and the dictates of our business community trump all other considerations in shaping public policy. It is foolish to pretend there was ever a time when those financial interests were not critical in determining our foreign policy.

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Having said that, there is still a crucial difference between our isolationist and interventionist eras — as well as a way of understanding how Donald Trump, for all his efforts to depicting himself as something new on the foreign policy scene, is just a continuation of the status quo that has existed for the last century or so.

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1. Republican foreign policy was isolationist from the party’s founding through the 1890s.

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The Republican Party was founded in 1854, and acquired national power until the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Not surprisingly, Lincoln’s administration was so focused on winning the Civil War that foreign policy was an afterthought; to the extent that the 16th president took a serious interest in foreign affairs, it was in making sure that the Confederacy did not receive assistance from world powers like the British and French empires.

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His successor, Andrew Johnson, was the first Republican president to make a major foreign policy move. (Admittedly, calling Johnson a Republican is problematic: He had been a lifelong Democrat, and became so estranged from Republicans in Congress he was eventually impeached.) In 1867, Johnson allowed Secretary of State William Seward to purchase Alaska from Russia for $7 million. This acquisition, which was roughly one-fifth the size of the rest of the United States, went a long way toward furthering America’s ambition to become an empire in the Western Hemisphere. At the time, however, it was ridiculed as “Seward’s folly,” with many in the press arguing that he had wasted taxpayer money on a frozen wasteland. It wasn’t until gold was discovered in Alaska in 1898 — an important year in American foreign policy for other reasons — that Seward’s wisdom became apparent.

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After Seward, however, America’s post-Civil War foreign policy was defined by isolationism. The Civil War had made Americans weary of bloodshed. During this time some smaller imperialist overtures were undertaken, such as Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to annex Santo Domingo (as the future Dominican Republic was then known) and Benjamin Harrison’s support for a coup led by American businessmen who overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy.

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For the most part, though, the guiding rule of American foreign policy was to follow the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which held that the U.S. would protect the Western Hemisphere from foreign invasion and otherwise stay out of foreign affairs, and the dictates of George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796, which similarly urged that the nation resist foreign entanglements).

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2. Republican foreign policy went through an imperialist phase after the Spanish-American War in 1898.

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If there is one book you should read after looking at this article, it is Kristin L. Hoganson’s “Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.” Hoganson discusses how cultural concerns about a decline in American masculinity during the late 19th and early 20th century bled over into politics. William McKinley, despite not being inclined toward imperialism by nature, was so harshly criticized for refusing to wage war with Spain in order to “liberate” Cuba and the Philippines that the pressure caused him to declare war after the USS Maine exploded in 1898 — an explosion that was blamed on the Spanish Empire but is now believed to have been an accident.

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This was a turning point in the history of American foreign policy. America’s victory of Spain meant that our nation began to take on the trappings of a true world power for the first time. Matters were exacerbated under Theodore Roosevelt, for whom imperialism wasn’t a reluctant “obligation” but a grand adventure. Roosevelt may be deified today, but his blatantly racist and jingoistic philosophy solidified the imperialist ventures that had begun under McKinley. He oversaw the building of the Panama Canal and established a “Roosevelt corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that would allow America to intervene in Western Hemisphere nations on economic issues. Even his successor, William Howard Taft, implemented a policy of “Dollar Diplomacy” in which he blatantly admitted that American financial interests would dictate its foreign policy decisions.

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When World War I broke out in Europe, the Republican Party was split between the internationalist faction that wanted the U.S. to get involved and the isolationist faction eager to stay out of the bloody conflict. Because public opinion was overwhelmingly against American involvement, the isolationists prevailed. Then came the Zimmerman Telegram in 1917, which revealed that Germany had tried to seduce Mexico’s support by offering to give back the lands America had seized during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). At that point, Republicans joined the rest of the country in supporting American involvement on behalf of the Allies during World War I.

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3. Republican foreign policy was isolationist and anti-immigrant from the end of World War I until Pearl Harbor.

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After World War I, Woodrow Wilson tried to create an international alliance called the League of Nations that would prevent another world war from breaking out. His plan was met with suspicion by the leader of the Senate Republicans, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, and the GOP emerged as staunchly isolationist in response to Wilson’s sudden intense internationalism. The Republican presidential candidate in 1920, Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, ran on his opposition to the League of Nations and won what was then the biggest popular vote majority in history. Not surprisingly, he and his two successors — Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover — continued his larger tradition of being avowedly isolationist.

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One striking parallel between this period and the era of Trump is in its open hostility toward immigrants. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were all supporters of the Johnson-Reed Act, which established quotas for individuals from Southern and Eastern European countries, and outright banned immigration from Asian countries (many of whom had already been barred under previous immigration laws). It isn’t much of a leap to go from the prejudices of that era to Trump’s open hostility toward immigrants from Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. It was rooted in an ingrained xenophobia among the nation’s more powerful demographic classes, fueled by obvious racism.

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Not all of the Republicans from this era were isolationist, however. The GOP’s 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, defeated challengers who opposed doing anything to help the Allies during World War II and instead pushed an internationalist perspective. In 1952 — when it looked like one of the Senate’s premier isolationists, Robert Taft, was poised to get the Republican presidential nomination — the GOP instead chose Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, an internationalist and war hero who became the first Republican president in 20 years.

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4. World War II and the Cold War changed everything.

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By then, however, World War II had already fundamentally transformed American society. The trauma of Pearl Harbor convinced the American government, and its people, that the nation needed to have a strong military and play a leading role in world affairs. The growth of the Soviet Union, and the spread of socialist or communist revolutions throughout the world, convinced Americans that they faced an existential threat during the Cold War. After the Cold War ran its course in 1991, Islamist terrorists became a new existential threat that (purportedly) called for a strong military-industrial complex.

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Despite warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex near the end of his presidency, Eisenhower believed in a robust military that used America’s clout to shape foreign affairs. This philosophy was shared by every Republican president that followed him: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush the father and George W. Bush the son. The names of the countries where those presidents waged war have varied — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Some of them were more favorable toward international institutions than others: There’s a considerable contrast between George H.W. Bush and his son on that issue, for example. But overall, the idea was that the U.S. had both national security interests and ideological responsibility as the leader of the “free world,” in contrast to fascism, Soviet expansion and Islamic terrorism.

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5. Aside from a handful of minor issues, Trump is basically continuing the foreign policies of the last 80 years of Republican political leaders. He ain’t that special.

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I will leave it to the psychologists to speculate why Trump has chosen a handful of issues on which to be non-normative. It’s a subject I’ve discussed with one of his favorite Fox personalities, Steve Hilton, and I’ve sought comment from the White House with minimal acknowledgment. Either way, it is fair to identify a few semi-arbitrary issues where Trump’s ideas differ from those of mainstream Republicans since World War II.

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Trade is a big one. The last president to actively promote a protectionist perspective on trade was Herbert Hoover, who is associated with the Great Depression. Trump also likes to make a big deal about his reluctance to participate in multinational organizations like NATO, and tends to cozy up to authoritarian leaders like Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Kim Jong-un, Rodrigo Duterte and Vladimir Putin. He pulled U.S. forces largely out of Syria and generally appears to make decisions at random, with no consistent philosophy at work. Or rather, if there is one, it’s rooted in the character flaws of one man rather than a body of thought about how the world works.

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Where it has counted, though, Trump has been a traditional Republican. He pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal long before the assassination of Qassem Soleimani; he has pumped up the military budget; and his contempt for international institutions like the UN was foreshadowed by presidents like George W. Bush. Let’s not pretend that Trump is the first Republican president who has made deals with disreputable foreign regimes (think of Ronald Reagan and apartheid South Africa). Trump’s “America First” and “nationalist” rhetoric may sound like Republicans of the 1920s, but he is only amplifying the prejudices that his party has always held.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-actually-does-have-a-strategy-for-iran-and-its-deeply-disturbing/

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wa mo for pol

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/germans-think-trump-is-bigger-threat-to-world-peace-than-dictators-as-he-becomes-a-global-laughing-stock/

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FAIL? pompeo talks only w/ mbs/mbz?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/world-war-iii-trends-as-hawks-rejoice-at-trump-decision-to-assassinate-iranian-military-leader/

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no lnx

‘World War III’ trends as hawks rejoice at Trump decision to assassinate Iranian military leader

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams January 3, 2020

As peace advocates voiced alarm at the very real prospect of all-out conflict with Iran following the assassination Thursday night of that country’s top military leader on orders from U.S. President Donald Trump, war hawks who have had their crosshairs trained on Iran for years enthusiastically celebrated Trump’s decision—and even suggested the president should go further by targeting the nation’s oil refineries.

“To the Iranian government: If you want to stay in the oil business leave America and our allies alone and stop being the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a longtime supporter of regime change in Iran.

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Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Jim Risch (R.-Idaho), and Ben Sasse (Neb.) joined the chorus of applause, hailing Trump for taking “decisive action.”

Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, tweeted in response to the torrent of praise that “hawks are celebrating [Qassem] Soleimani’s assassination not because they believe it weakened Iran. Or the IRGC. Or that Iran will lose in Iraq. But because they believe we have passed an irreversible point of escalation.”

“From here, war is unavoidable, they believe,” Parsi added. “And celebrate.”

The likely unlawful U.S. assassination of Soleimani—and the jingoistic applause it provoked—led many to express fears of a global conflict, briefly catapulting “World War III” to the top of Twitter’s trending list. Trump, for his part, simply tweeted an image of an American flag following the strike:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani, as well as at least six others, with a drone strike in Baghdad came after the Pentagon threatened Iran with preemptive action in response to supposed indications it was planning attacks on U.S. forces in the region.

Though the Pentagon did not offer a shred of evidence that Soleimani or militia groups were planning attacks, corporate media outlets dutifully echoed the Trump administration’s line, leading some commentators to see parallels with the buildup to the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“I don’t see any way to stop what is coming, war from the Mediterranean to the Indus and harsh repression in the U.S. that may vitiate the 2020 election,” said Barnett Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation. “This is the test for the Democrats: have our leaders learned anything since 2003? I fear the answer.”

Observers warned the U.S. assassination of Soleimani, on top of the Trump administration’s violation of the nuclear accord last year and other aggressive actions, effectively foreclosed the possibility of peaceful negotiations with Iran.

“Whatever happens next, understand and never stop pointing out that Donald Trump walked into office with no crisis with Iran,” said Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War. “He then filled his cabinet with warmongers, walked away from a multilateral diplomatic accord, and purposefully engaged in ‘maximum pressure.’ He owns this.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei quickly vowed “harsh retaliation” in response to Soleimani’s assassination, and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused the U.S. of committing “an act of state terrorism.”

Amid fears of revenge attacks, the State Department on Friday urged U.S. citizens to leave Iraq immediately.

“Trump’s Iran policy has been seeking to incite war with Iran since he reneged on the nuclear deal in May 2018,” said Sina Toossi, senior research analyst with the National Iranian American Council. “If a war breaks out, the blame lies squarely with this disastrous policy and its proponents.”

“Trump thinks he got his Bin Laden moment in an election year,” Toossi added. “In reality, he’s made the worst strategic mistake by an American leader since the Iraq invasion. The consequences will be felt for years to come.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-year-trump-botched-us-foreign-policy

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The year Trump botched US foreign policy

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Written by Terry H. Schwadron / DC Report December 26, 2019

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End of year proves a good platform for looking back to sum up administration achievements or missteps over the year, as well as how certain we are about the directions in which our nation is moving.

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Americans looking at foreign policy and our relationships overseas will find this year deepened U.S. isolationism, widened support for authoritarian governments, made American primacy in trade the weather vane for our thinking, as opposed to, say, human rights, and continued Donald Trump’s role as a worldwide disrupter.

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The year will start and end with Trump’s confusing meld of domestic political gain toward his reelection with the formation of the people and policies of America’s standing with the rest of the world. The impeachment proceedings that hang over the end of the year are a textbook on using the levels of official policies and rogue personal political desire for dirt on political enemies with interference in domestic elections by foreign governments.

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Overall, our foreign policy year is a mixed record at best, even if you somehow subscribe to American boorishness in the china shop of diplomacy.

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Breaking Traditional Alliances

Clearly, Trump’s backers see Trump somehow standing up to Europe, backing nationalist efforts including Brexit, efforts to build a Wall on the southern border and the endless White House campaigns against non-white immigrants of all stripe as positives. To the rest of us, those ideas crystallize the breaking of traditional alliances, the extension of racist and non-caring immigration thinking and the spread of institutional uncertainty.

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The biggest wins of the year–progress toward new bilateral trade agreements with China and other nations and adoption of a rewritten North American trade agreement to replace 25-year-old NAFTA–show the role of trade (and hoped for U.S. jobs) in forming national policy. They also show that a foreign policy built on tariffs and the threat of tariffs creates and maintains an underlying sense of uncertainty among investors.

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My take: There is not a clear win in any individual deal, but a set of policies that are positive, just never to the degree that Trump promises or describes.

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A Year Ago

Step back to ask about national security—whether we are safer today than a year ago:

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Ham-handed efforts with North Korea look to be a failure. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is threatening renewed missile tests on rockets that can deliver a nuclear warhead with no sign of de-nuclearization in the offing, despite Trump’s personal diplomacy. Best evidence is that we’re upset about a threatened North Korean Christmas “gift” of a missile launch.

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China is actively pushing our interests around in an increasing number of ship incidents in the South China Sea, in investing in the Middle East and Africa to displace us as a chief influencer, hoarding various metals resources and trade practices that are advantageous to them and hurting us. China is among Trump’s biggest vocal targets, but outside of trade, it is unclear that Americans have an effective policy.

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Russia and Turkey, and their authoritarian leaders, have gained clear influence in the Middle East, dividing Syria between them. Russia has gained through its spread of undercutting disorder in the United States, and is the obvious victor of new tensions with Ukraine, the split between Britain and Europe and Trump’s incessant attacks on the NATO alliance.

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In the Middle East, Trump has doubled down on backing Israeli intentions to grab more Palestinian land in the West Bank, guaranteeing the trashing of any hope for a two-state political solution. At the same time, the policy toward Iran is a hopeful belief in starving the country through winning diplomatic gains through sanctions, which remains pretty much a hope rather than a reality. And our kowtowing to Saudi Arabia, and continued support for an inhumane war against Yemen, raise a host of questions only deepened by recent attacks by Saudis on a U.S. military base.

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Trump’s start/stop strategies towards troop deployment in Syria and Afghanistan have left those areas uncertain, and vulnerable to other outside forces.

Meanwhile, Trump displays little tactical understanding that terrorism has been moving increasingly toward smaller, de-centralized groups that continue to attack Western cities.

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Banished Advisers

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Part of the foreign policy picture is that Trump this year has rid himself of the most respected of his advisers. Instead, he has increasingly isolated himself, a mirror of his foreign policy, to make decisions based largely on gut and on personal relationship.

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So, our European alliances have further frittered as personal relationships with France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canadian leader Justin Trudeau and plenty of others. The oversized attention to a video of other political leaders laughing privately behind his back just shows how sensitive Trump is to criticism of any kind. In response, Trump stomped out early from a NATO summit to the isolation of his Twitter account.

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Exiting Experts

Even the hawks like John Bolton are gone from the National Security Administration, as well as anyone, including Pentagon brass, who might question his uninformed decision-making. Because we had a whistleblower who went to superiors about Trump’s statements in a phone call to Ukraine, we have the White House now whittling down the list of official listeners, not changing the content of these calls to conform with U.S. policies.

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In the Trump re-telling, all these events are good for him and great for the country. He is draining the swamp by removing people who have spent their careers studying Russian or Middle-Eastern cultures and decision-making. He is making America seem strong by threatening friends with economic sanctions. He is appealing to the personality cults of the world’s dictators.

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Much of this gets mixed up, of course, with Trump’s domestic election focus and his personal need for adoration.

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But for the rest of us, this year of America on the world stage proved a divisive, increasingly bare-knuckled affair that often has not proved effective.

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aha: note ~ norms irregular channels pvtize BWtr; go'vt is inept, so pvtize foreign policy by hard-headed bizmen (even literal mercenary) o get it done/transactional

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-rudy-giuliani-how-americas-mayor-became-trumps-grifter/

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no lnx

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The rise and fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ became Trump’s grifter

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Written by The Washington Monthly November 18, 2019

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Rudy Giuliani was a shoo-in for attorney general or secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in a nascent Trump administration. Not only was Giuliani “America’s Mayor” following his command of the situation on 9/11, he was a former federal prosecutor, presidential candidate, and an early validator—if late endorser—of Donald J. Trump.

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Life looked pretty rosy for the ambitious pol, with a clear path to power and privilege, given his expertise.

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He didn’t want the jobs proffered, however. He wanted something bigger.

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Whether he was done with the law or just wanted something that approximated the power and prestige of the presidency, he postured and heavily lobbied to be Trump’s secretary of state. As the former mayor of America’s most important city, he was regularly in the company of foreign dignitaries and, of course, 9/11 gave him a global stage from which to show off his leadership skills.

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But translating international experience and foreign hobnobbing into policy focused on America’s global role required diplomatic skill not often associated with New York moxie. It would have been a hard sell—even to a pliant Republican-dominated U.S. Senate. After all, John McCain—and even Lindsey Graham 1.0—were actively looking out for America’s national security interests back then.

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Giuliani’s jones-ing to become America’s lead diplomat seemed to have more to do with a desire for his own publicly financed jet and private traveling press corps than any real interest or ability to negotiate long, hard hours toward solutions that required uncomfortable trade-offs. He wanted the position’s perks and platform more than the work—or the extraordinarily demanding work schedule that comes with the job.

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Fast forward to 2019, and the Giuliani scorned by Jared Kushner has become the roiling Rudy who plays Donald Trump’s personal attorney on TV. Giuliani has never met a Sunday news show he doesn’t like. Trump has turned to this anti-matinee idol and put personal business and state policy in the hands of a freewheeling, out-of-control—and sometimes crazed—Giuliani. His uncanny ability to stay simultaneously both on message and off—yet claim to be reliably consistent and coherent—has allowed him to play rough in all positions of Trump’s political defense and remain untouched.

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Until now.

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Now he’s all lawyered up, as investigators in the U.S. House release State Department officials’ closed-door testimony implicating Giuliani in Trump’s move to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless it agreed to investigate Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

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Giuliani so desperately needed to play the globetrotting role of secretary of State that he got to become Trump’s “Shadow Secretary.” In that role, he used presidential proximity to guide America’s foreign activities, fire its diplomats, bully its allies, and bank on the nation’s sheer power to leverage lethal aid into forced foreign state-sponsored oppo research on 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

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Biden became the target of the externally run, illicitly operated Giuliani Shadow State Department, doing the Trump-Kushner-Pompeo trio’s dirty work while operating with Oval Office assurances that his free hand and opaque operation was guarded by attorney-client privilege. This questionable privilege was also supposed to protect Michael Cohen, Trump’s previous personal attorney. Cohen is now serving a prison sentence for doing Trump’s shadowy business.

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A one-man, oversight-free, power-drenchedShadow State Department is a heady thing. Giuliani recognized that he no longer had to play by the same rules as a government agency. He could operate the way Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, did with his paramilitary organization, Blackwater.Renamed Xe, Blackwater was a private entity conducting a contracted war, freed from the constraints of treaty obligations, multilateral engagement, long-standing bilateral relations, protocol, congressional oversight, budgetary limits, press access, or full transparency.

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Giuliani was as free to disregard established foreign policy and practice as Prince’s locked-and-loaded organization was to end-run military rules of engagement.Bonus points: Giuliani also was able to profit as a free agent. Who was going to question his private authority when the imperial presidency, with its seemingly unchecked privilege, had his back and could dangle a potential blanket pardon?...

wa mo

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-trump-doctrine-how-the-presidents-foreign-policy-is-shaped-by-the-one-world-leader-who-actually-wanted-him-to-win/

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...And that means we’re in real danger: There’s only one country on earth whose leaders haven’t at some point evinced an antipathy toward our Dear Leader—and that’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

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While it’s true that various Ukrainian officials expressed concerns about the possibility that Trump might become President of the United States, that isn’t exactly surprising: Trump repeatedly displayed his affinity for Putin and suggested that he should be allowed to take the Crimea region from Ukraine. It’s easy to see why Ukrainians might have been apprehensive that he could become the leader of the free world.

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But they weren’t alone: You can find leaders and officials in almost every country who were worried about Trump, for many, obvious reasons. In fact, you don’t need to be a member of an intelligence service to have been aware of this. You only needed to have met almost anyone from anywhere outside the U.S.

...

trump mayflower hotel sp putin talk pts:

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/dc-wise-man-had-early-access-to-trumps-pro-russia-speech

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dC. Wise Man Had Early Access to Trump’s Pro-Russia Speech

Photos obtained by The Daily Beast show that controversial think tank chief Dimitri Simes was closer than previously known to the speech’s drafting.

Betsy Swan

Political Reporter

Updated 09.06.18 9:49PM ET / Published 09.06.18 4:54AM ET

In the morning of April 21, 2016, a staffer at the Center for the National Interest, a Washington D.C., think tank, wandered into the office of Dimitri Simes, the group’s president.

The staffer saw a pile of papers on the desk titled “FOREIGN POLICY AND DEFENSE OUTLINE.” The staffer realized the papers were the detailed outline, in bullet-pointed paragraphs, of a major foreign-policy address that then-candidate Donald Trump was set to deliver six days later as a guest of the center. The staffer used a cellphone to snap pictures of all five pages of the document.

More than two years later, Maria Butina, who once wrote for the center’s magazine and occasionally emailed with Simes, was arrested as an accused Kremlin agent. Subsequently, the person provided the photos to The Daily Beast. The photos’ metadata confirm they were taken on a cellphone on the morning of April 21, 2016. A second former staffer told The Daily Beast that he saw the same documents on Simes’ desk.

The pictures provide new insight into the creation of Trump’s historic foreign-policy speech. They also indicate that Simes was closer than previously known to the drafting of that speech. (Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the center’s magazine, wrote for Politico shortly after the speech that he didn’t know what was going to be in it. “I was curious as anyone to see what Trump would actually say,” he wrote.)

“The Committee has reason to believe that Mr. Simes played a central role in drafting portions of the speech related to Russia.”

— House Intelligence Committee Democrats

It isn’t unusual for a think tank chiefs to preview drafts of a speeches presented at their invitation. But Simes’ proximity to the speech shows that he had an early view into the crafting of a speech that would have historic significance for American foreign policy.Democrats on the House intelligence committee tried to investigate Simes’ relationship to Trump’s campaign, but Republican committee Chairman Devin Nunes blocked their efforts.

Presented with this account and with the pictures of the document, the center’s executive director, Paul Saunders, declined to comment. Heilbrunn emailed that he did not receive any preview of the speech. Simes did not respond to a request for comment but wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Sept. 5, 2018, that his think tank’s interaction with the Trump campaign had a “small scope.” Michael Glassner, the chief operating officer at Donald J. Trump for President, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. J.D. Gordon, a foreign-policy adviser to Trump on the 2016 campaign, told The Daily Beast he was not familiar with the document.

commentary

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trump-realized-that-on-foreign-policy-there-are-few-constraints-on-his-power-and-it-may-be-his-undoing/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-national-plot-against-american-global-leadership/

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no lnx wa mo

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nat'l plot against American global leadership

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Written by Washington Monthly September 30, 2019

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America is looking inward, resembling a sullen, sometimes confused navel-gazing couch-potato. It’s tired of going outside and bored with the world.

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The president of the United States went to the United Nations last week to let foreign leaders know we were picking up our marbles and going home. He just told the entire world that globalism is dead. Long-live insular, parochial patriotism!

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National pride, defense, and attention to domestic issues are keenly important, of course. But America’s two wide oceans and friendly neighbors do not divorce us from the rest of the world’s trade, economy, or politics, even if our national “Netflix and Chill ” attitude makes foreigners seem distant and irrelevant.

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As America sits in darkness, twiddles its thumbs and fiddles with its video-game controller, our country is also desperately trying to figure out how to reckon with our failed overseas adventures. How do we extract ourselves from our foolish foreign wars. Recent steps forward seem instead to take us down a notch. We’re still trying to reconcile how we spent such unjustifiable amounts of our nation’s blood and treasure in places we bombed and occupied, uninvited, after 9/11.

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During this expensive 18-year distraction and our current global withdrawal, the rest of the world has taken advantage of our insecurity and division, recognizing that this is the moment for our adversaries to grow their influence and stretch their borders—a chance to build their global futures.

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China is busy constructing islands to expand its territory, Russia is building bridges to physically tether its illegally occupied neighbor to the motherland. America’s strategic power competitors are actively developing, squatting or usurping land to grow their power and presence beyond their current boundaries. They are sparing no expense to buy and bully their way further onto the world stage.

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What about the United States? Under the current leadership, it’s still trying to get Mexico to sign an IOU to build a border wall with a “big beautiful door.” Instead of bridges, America is building walls.

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America’s new foreign policy lens is a monocle focused on China’s meteoric growth and insatiable ambition. Our policymakers should instead be wearing bifocals. Better yet, progressives should see the whole picture, becauseas America actively tries to ground a high-flying China, it has lost sight of a Russia quietly spreading its wings.

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Russia’s recent 12-mile, $4 billion dollar bridge to its occupied and annexed Crimean peninsula is the most obvious of connectors to an expanded future. Less visible are Moscow’s growing military and economic ties to various nations around the world.

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In Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s presence is increasingly permanent. From Syria to Egypt, Turkey, and Iran, Moscow’s strategic and regional interests are an exercise in thuggish petro-politics. Its unstated “Energy First” security policy is driving its aggressive meddling in Venezuela. Most concerning, the Kremlin’s relationship with Beijing is warming up.

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Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping now are besties who conduct joint military exercises and form a U.N. Security Council veto bloc. With Russia economically sanctioned and China in the U.S. penalty box, these two nations are accommodating each other’s needs and finding common cause. They are witnessing a fracturing, anti-globalist and increasingly insular West ready to forsake the world entirely. New Russian relationships may seem like ephemeral convenient alliances, but Putin wants to make them enduring and permanent, beyond just friends with benefits.

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President Trump may think his personal touch, Russian outreach, and Putin praising is going to entice Moscow to help contain Beijing, but this scenario is a policy fantasy. Russia pursues its raw economic and security interests in a cynical zero-sum game. It supports authoritarians and ignores abuses of human rights, press freedom, and democratic norms. This suits many world leaders perfectly.

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Erdogan, Orban, Sisi, Assad, Xi—a rogues’ gallery of authoritarians and assassins make up Moscow’s expanding universe. These nations together seek to challenge the previously stable Western-dominated world order and are maneuvering to limit Washington’s influence.

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The Trump administration favors bilateral agreements over multilateral institutions and alliances, hoping for weaker partners and better deals by dumping allies to pursue an America First folly. This practice allows Russia both to build bridges and destroy American inroads. It helps give Xi a boost when America threatens his economy. It keeps Nicolás Maduro in power—despite Vice President Mike Pence forcefully telling Caracas he must go.

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China and Russia are going for broke in this great game by building ports, dams, roads, railways, pipelines, communications infrastructure, and political partnerships around the world—and, eventually, all the way up to America’s borders. They may be making an expensively bad geopolitical bet. Or not.

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Trump doesn’t really care. Instead of countering or matching our adversaries’ expansionist global strategy, America’s developer-in-chief wants to build only one permanent thing: a solid, reliable, and exclusively nativist political movement at home.

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Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D. is a foreign affairs columnist for McClatchy News, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and President and Publisher emeritus of the Washington Monthly.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-pompeo-doctrine-a-formula-for-catastrophe

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no lnx

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The Pompeo Doctrine: A formula for catastrophe

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Written by Michael Klare / TomDispatch September 12, 2019

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Donald Trump got the headlines as usual — but don’t be fooled. It wasn’t Trumpism in action this August, but what we should all now start referring to as the Pompeo Doctrine. Yes, I’m referring to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and, when it comes to the Arctic region, he has a lot more than buying Greenland on his mind.

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In mid-August, as no one is likely to forget, President Trump surprised international observers by expressing an interest in purchasing Greenland, a semi-autonomous region of Denmark. Most commentators viewed the move as just another example of the president’s increasingly erratic behavior. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen termed the very notion of such a deal “absurd,” leading Trump, in an outburst of pique, to call her comments “nasty” and cancel a long-scheduled state visit to Copenhagen.

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A deeper look at that incident and related administration moves, however, suggests quite a different interpretation of what’s going on, with immense significance for the planet and even human civilization. Under the prodding of Mike Pompeo, the White House increasingly views the Arctic as a key arena for future great-power competition, with the ultimate prize being an extraordinary trove of valuable resources, including oil, natural gas, uranium, zinc, iron ore, gold, diamonds, and rare earth minerals. Add in one more factor: though no one in the administration is likely to mention the forbidden term “climate change” or “climate crisis,” they all understand perfectly well that global warming is what’s making such a resource scramble possible.

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This isn’t the first time that great powers have paid attention to the Arctic. That region enjoyed some strategic significance during the Cold War period, when both the United States and the Soviet Union planned to use its skies as passageways for nuclear-armed missiles and bombers dispatched to hit targets on the other side of the globe. Since the end of that era, however, it has largely been neglected. Frigid temperatures, frequent storms, and waters packed with ice prevented most normal air and maritime travel, so — aside from the few Indigenous peoples who had long adapted to such conditions — who would want to venture there?

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Climate change is, however, already altering the situation in drastic ways: temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet, melting parts of the polar ice cap and exposing once-inaccessible waters and islands to commercial development. Oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered in offshore areas previously (but no longer) covered by sea ice most of the year. Meanwhile, new mining opportunities are emerging in, yes, Greenland!Worried that other countries, including China and Russia, might reap the benefits of such a climate-altered landscape, the Trump administration has already launched an all-out drive to ensure American dominance there, even at the risk of future confrontation and conflict.

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The scramble for the Arctic’s resources was launched early in this century when the world’s major energy firms, led by BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Russian gas giant Gazprom, began exploring for oil and gas reserves in areas only recently made accessible by retreating sea ice.Those efforts gained momentum in 2008, after the U.S. Geological Survey published a report, Circum-Arctic Resources Appraisal, indicating that as much as one-third of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas lay in areas north of the Arctic Circle. Much of this untapped fossil fuel largess was said to lie beneath the Arctic waters adjoining Alaska (that is, the United States), Canada, Greenland (controlled by Denmark), Norway, and Russia — the so-called “Arctic Five.”

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Under existing international law, codified in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal nations possess the right to exploit undersea resources up to 200 nautical miles from their shoreline (and beyond if their continental shelf extends farther than that). The Arctic Five have all laid claim to “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs) in those waters or, in the case of the United States (which has not ratified UNCLOS), announced its intention to do so. Most known oil and gas reserves are found within those EEZs, although some are thought to be in overlapping or even contested areas beyond that 200-mile limit, including the polar region itself. Whoever owns Greenland, of course, possesses the right to develop its EEZ.

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For the most part, the Arctic Five have asserted their intent to settle any disputes arising from contested claims through peaceful means, the operating principle behind the formation in 1996 of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental organization for states with territory above the Arctic Circle (including the Arctic Five, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden). Meeting every two years, it provides a forum in which, at least theoretically, leaders of those countries and the Indigenous peoples living there can address common concerns and work towards cooperative solutions — and it had indeed helped dampen tensions in the region. In recent years, however, isolating the Arctic from mounting U.S. (and NATO) hostilities toward Russia and China or from the global struggle over vital resources has proven increasingly difficult. By May 2019, when Pompeo led an American delegation to the council’s most recent meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, hostility and the urge to grab future resources had already spilled into the open.

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Reaping the Arctic’s Riches

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Usually a forum for anodyne statements about international cooperation and proper environmental stewardship, the lid was blown off the latest Arctic Council meeting in May whenPompeo delivered an unabashedly martial and provocative speech that deserves far more attention than it got at the time. So let’s take a little tour of what may prove a historic proclamation (in the grimmest sense possible) of a new Washington doctrine for the Far North.

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“In its first two decades, the Arctic Council has had the luxury of focusing almost exclusively on scientific collaboration, on cultural matters, on environmental research,” the secretary of state began mildly. These were, he said, “all important themes, very important, and we should continue to do those. But no longer do we have that luxury. We’re entering a new age of strategic engagement in the Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate, and to all of our interests in that region.”

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In what turned out to be an ultra-hardline address, Pompeo claimed that we were now in a new era in the Arctic. Because climate change — a phrase Pompeo, of course, never actually uttered — is now making it ever more possible to exploit the region’s vast resource riches, a scramble to gain control of them is now officially underway. That competition for resources has instantly become enmeshed in a growing geopolitical confrontation between the U.S., Russia, and China, generating new risks of conflict.

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On the matter of resource exploitation, Pompeo could hardly contain his enthusiasm. Referring to the derision that greeted William Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1857, he declared:

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“Far from the barren backcountry that many thought it to be in Seward’s time, the Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30% of its undiscovered gas, and an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources.”

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Of equal attraction, he noted, was the possibility of vastly increasing maritime commerce through newly de-iced trans-Arctic trade routes that will link the Euro-Atlantic region with Asia. “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade,” he enthused. “This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days… Arctic sea lanes could come [to be] the 21st century’s Suez and Panama Canals.” That such “steady reductions in sea ice” are the sole consequence of climate change went unmentioned, but so did another reality of our warming world. If the Arctic one day truly becomes the northern equivalent of a tropical passageway like the Suez or Panama canals, that will likely mean that parts of those southerly areas will have become the equivalents of uninhabitable deserts.

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As such new trade and drilling opportunities arise, Pompeo affirmed, the United States intends to be out front in capitalizing on them. He then began bragging about what the Trump administration had already accomplished, including promoting expanded oil and gas drilling in offshore waters and also freeing up “energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” a pristine stretch of northern Alaska prized by environmentalists as a sanctuary for migrating caribou and other at-risk species. Additional efforts to exploit the region’s vital resources, he promised, are scheduled for the years ahead.

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A New Arena for Competition (and Worse)

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Ideally, Pompeo noted placidly, competition for the Arctic’s resources will be conducted in an orderly, peaceful manner. The United States, he assured his listeners, believes in “free and fair competition, open, by the rule of law.” But other countries, he added ominously, especially China and Russia, won’t play by that rulebook much of the time and so must be subject to careful oversight and, if need be, punitive action.

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China, he pointed out, is already developing trade routes in the Arctic, and establishing economic ties with key nations there. Unlike the United States (which already has multiple military bases in the Arctic, including one at Thule in Greenland, and so has a well-established presence there), Pompeo claimed that Beijing is surreptitiously using such supposedly economic activities for military purposes, including, heinously enough, spying on U.S. ballistic missile submarines operating in the region, while intimidating its local partners into acquiescence.

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He then cited events in the distant South China Sea, where the Chinese have indeed militarized a number of tiny uninhabited islands (outfitting them with airstrips, missile batteries, and the like) and the U.S. has responded by sending its warships into adjacent waters. He did so to warn of similar future military stand-offs and potential clashes in the Arctic. “Let’s just ask ourselves, do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims?” The answer, he assured his listeners, is “pretty clear.” (And I’m sure you can guess what it is.)

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The secretary of state then wielded even stronger language in describing “aggressive Russian behavior in the Arctic.” In recent years, he claimed, the Russians have built hundreds of new bases in the region, along with new ports and air-defense capabilities. “Russia is already leaving snow prints in the form of army boots” there, a threat that cannot be ignored. “Just because the Arctic is a place of wilderness does not mean it should become a place of lawlessness. It need not be the case. And we stand ready to ensure that it does not become so.”

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And here we get to the heart of Pompeo’s message: the United States will, of course, “respond” by enhancing its own military presence in the Arctic to better protect U.S. interests, while countering Chinese and Russian inroads in the region:

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“Under President Trump, we are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area. On the security side, partly in response to Russia’s destabilizing activities, we are hosting military exercises, strengthening our force presence, rebuilding our icebreaker fleet, expanding Coast Guard funding, and creating a new senior military post for Arctic Affairs inside of our own military.”

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To emphasize the administration’s sincerity, Pompeo touted the largest NATO and U.S. Arctic military maneuvers since the Cold War era, the recently completed “Trident Juncture” exercise (which he incorrectly referred to as “Trident Structure”), involving some 50,000 troops. Although the official scenario for Trident Juncture spoke of an unidentified “aggressor” force, few observers had any doubt that the allied team was assembled to repel a hypothetical Russian invasion of Norway, where the simulated combat took place.

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Implementing the Doctrine

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And so you have the broad outlines of the new Pompeo Doctrine, centered on the Trump administration’s truly forbidden topic: the climate crisis. In the most pugnacious manner imaginable, that doctrine posits a future of endless competition and conflict in the Arctic, growing ever more intense as the planet warms and the ice cap melts. The notion of the U.S. going nose-to-nose with the Russians and Chinese in the Far North, while exploiting the region’s natural resources, has clearly been circulating in Washington. By August, it had obviously already become enough of a commonplace in the White House (not to speak of the National Security Council and the Pentagon), for the president to offer to buy Greenland.

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And when it comes to resources and future military conflicts, it wasn’t such a zany idea. After all, Greenland does have abundant natural resources and also houses that U.S. base in Thule. A relic of the Cold War, the Thule facility, mainly a radar base, is already being modernized, at a cost of some $300 million, to better track Russian missile launches. Clearly, key officials in Washington view Greenland as a valuable piece of real estate in the emerging geopolitical struggle Pompeo laid out, an assessment that clearly wormed its way into President Trump’s consciousness as well.

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Iceland and Norway also play key roles in Pompeo’s and the Pentagon’s new strategic calculus. Another former Cold War facility, a base at Keflavik in Iceland has been reoccupied by the Navy and is now being used in antisubmarine warfare missions. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps has stationed several hundred combat troops at bases near Trondheim, Norway, the first permanent deployment of foreign soldiers on Norwegian soil since World War II. In 2018, the Pentagon even reactivated the Navy’s defunct Second Fleet, investing it with responsibility for protecting the North Atlantic as well as the Arctic’s maritime approaches, including those abutting Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. Consider these signs of heating-up times.

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And all of this is clearly just the beginning of a major buildup in and regular testing of the ability of the U.S. military to operate in the Far North. As part of Exercise Trident Juncture, for example, the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman and its flotilla of support ships were sent into the Norwegian Sea, the first time a U.S. carrier battle group had sailed above the Arctic Circle since the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. Similarly, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer recently announced plans to send surface warships on trans-Arctic missions, another new military move. (U.S. nuclear submarines make such journeys regularly, sailing beneath the sea ice.)

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The Irony of Arctic Melting

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Although Secretary Pompeo and his underlings never mention the term climate change, every aspect of his new doctrine is a product of that phenomenon. As humanity puts more and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and global temperatures continue to rise, the Arctic ice cap will continue to shrink. That, in turn, will make exploitation of the region’s abundant oil and natural gas reserves ever more possible, leading to yet more burning of fossil fuels, further warming, and ever faster melting. In other words, the Pompeo Doctrine is a formula for catastrophe.

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Add to this obvious abuse of the planet the likelihood that rising temperatures and increasing storm activity will render oil and gas extraction in parts of the world ever less viable. Many scientists now believe that daytime summer temperatures in oil-producing areas of the Middle East, for instance, are likely to average 120 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, making outdoor human labor of most sorts deadly. At the same time, more violent hurricanes and other tropical storms passing over the ever-warming waters of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico could imperil the continuing operation of offshore rigs there (and in other similarly storm-prone drilling areas). Unless humanity has converted to alternative fuels by then, the Arctic may be viewed as the world’s primary source of fossil fuels, only intensifying the struggle to control its vital resources.

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Perhaps no aspect of humanity’s response to the climate crisis is more diabolical than this. The greater the number of fossil fuels we consume, the more rapidly we alter the Arctic, inviting the further extraction of just such fuels and their contribution to global warming. With other regions increasingly less able to sustain a fossil-fuel extraction economy, a continued addiction to oil will ensure the desolation of the once-pristine Far North as it is transformed into a Pompeo-style arena for burning conflict and civilizational disaster.

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Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His new book, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books), will be published in November.

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Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

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Bolton and Trump fed each others’ dark ambitions — and they did tremendous damage together Mark Sumner / Daily Kos

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-unlikely-rise-and-spectacular-fall-of-john-bolton/

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no lnx

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The unlikely rise and spectacular fall of John Bolton

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Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon September 11, 2019

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When John Bolton was named as Donald Trump’s national security adviser I was as stunned as anyone. After all, he’s well known as a man who wants to blow up the world while Trump is a man who thinks he can bring world peace by offering condo development deals to dictators and terrorists. They didn’t seem like a good match. I did, however, think they might find a meeting of the minds under certain circumstances. After all, if a war were to happen, they share a similar philosophy about how it should be fought:

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Trump’s words, both in public and private, describe a view that wars should be brutal and swift, waged with overwhelming firepower and, in some cases, with little regard for civilian casualties. Victory over America’s enemies for the president is often a matter of bombing “the s— out of them,” as he said on the campaign trail.

Neither Trump or Bolton have any use for nation-building and both are contemptuous of America’s allies as well. But other than a shared love for brutality they really didn’t have anything in common. If Trump didn’t hire people just because they’re on Fox News, he would have known that an egomaniacal super-hawk with a taste for fierce bureaucratic infighting wouldn’t mesh with his own belief that he can con anyone into doing his bidding by the sheer force of his personality.

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Yesterday, Trump tweeted that he’d fired Bolton, and Bolton immediately fired back that he’d offered his resignation. Since Trump is the more notorious liar, I’m going to assume Bolton is telling the truth. From the sound of it, Bolton’s going to make a whole lot of money on a book, probably set to come out right before the election. Trump may regret not keeping him in the fold.

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This has been a long time coming, with Bolton clashing with everyone else in the administration and being publicly humiliated at every turn. But the precipitating event seems to have been last weekend’s Camp David debacle in which Bolton adamantly opposed Trump’s plan to bring Taliban leaders to the U.S. a few days before the 9/11 anniversary. He wasn’t the only one, of course. It was a daft idea. But he seems to have been the one who spoke up and became the fall guy for that embarrassment.

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Bolton never accepted that Trump doesn’t have a geopolitical view or a foreign policy philosophy. He just wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, he’s convinced he can do it simply by holding a photo op.

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Never Trumper David Frum described the dynamic on MSNBC:

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This is a story about fantasy and envy. The president’s fantasy about being a great deal-maker and his envy of President Obama’s peace prize. Zalmay Khalilzad, our former ambassador to Afghanistan, was running a process of negotiation with the Taliban to see if an agreement could be reached. About the first of September, he seems to have reached some kind of interim deal. What should have happened at that point [is] it goes into the government and different agencies look at it and say, “Do we like it, can we look at it, do we go forward, do we stop?” Trump got the smell of this and thought, “This is a done deal, Zalmay is going to get the credit, he’s going to get the Nobel Peace Prize.”

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Frum added that Trump “wanted to be Jimmy Carter without the work.”

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Everything about that had to make Bolton crazy. Nothing could be more antithetical to his hawkish views than making peace in the first place, let alone doing so out of shallow self-interest. One assumes he didn’t hold back his dismay. So his time was up.

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Bolton had been working at cross purposes with Trump and the rest of the administration from the beginning. His legacy will be a bunch of failed initiatives and bad judgment. Most impressive of those failures was on Venezuela, the one policy he managed to persuade Trump to undertake. He was the main mover behind the campaign to push out President Nicolás Maduro and back opposition leader Juan Guaidó by imposing sanctions on the country under the assumption that Maduro would go quickly. That didn’t happen and Trump lost interest, seeing yet another opportunity to be a hero go down the drain.

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As a long-time North Korea hawk who had been instrumental in George W. Bush’s failed policy and who had openly advocated bombing the country for years,Bolton had been pushing the administration to get tough with Kim Jong-un. Trump, of course, believes that his supposed friendship with the North Korean leader will persuade the dictator to give up his nuclear weapons. North Korea is a problem from hell, but any day that Kim hasn’t launched one of his nukes is a good day. So Trump’s delusions are at least buying time until someone who knows what he or she is doing can take over.

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And then there’s Iran, Bolton’s great white whale. He has been agitating for war with Iran for decades now, and every time he seems to get close it slides out of his grasp. During the Bush years the plans were at the ready but even that administration, burned badly in Iraq, didn’t pull the trigger. Watching from the wilderness during the Obama administration, Bolton no doubt felt deeply frustrated by the nuclear deal and undoubtedly felt that if nothing else, as national security adviser he would be able to get Trump to make his longed-for regime change happen. Trump was an Iran hawk too, after all.

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Once again, Bolton misunderstood what Trump was after. The president knows nothing about Iran or the Middle East. He withdrew from the nuclear deal not because he wanted to go to war but because he wanted to make his own deal and have a big ceremony announcing that he can make better deals than Obama.

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The results of all this have been disastrous. American foreign policy is failing everywhere in the world. From Trump’s reckless trade war with China to North Korea (which tested more missiles this week) to Iran, Afghanistan and everywhere else it’s a mess. But John Bolton was the one person in Trump’s orbit who has consistently tried to get him to go to war.

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Trump wants to economically dominate other countries, backed up by military force. He wants to be hailed as a great hero and dealmaker who solved intractable problems with his personal acumen and charm. He is incapable of doing any of that, of course. But at least with Bolton gone, we don’t have to fear that one day the president will wake up and realize he’s failed on all those counts with the nation’s most aggressive über-hawk whispering in his ear that he can get what he wants by using overwhelming military force. In the Trump era, that’s about the best we can hope for.

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yikes:

Since the US ambassador, Nikki Haley, announced her departure in October and Pompeo took more direct control, the US mission has become increasingly combative, blocking references to gender and reproductive health in UN documents.

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no lnx gul

“Brought to Jesus’: the evangelical grip on the Trump administration

The influence of evangelical Christianity is likely to become an important question as Trump finds himself dependent on them for political survival

Julian Borger in Washington

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Fri 11 Jan 201907.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 18 Jan 2019 21.51 GMT

In setting out the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, one of the first thingsMike Pompeo made clear to his audience in Cairo is that he had come to the region as “as an evangelical Christian”.

In his speech at the American University in Cairo, Pompeo said that in his state department office: “I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and his word, and the truth.”

The secretary of state’s primary message in Cairo was that the US was ready once more to embrace conservative Middle Eastern regimes, no matter how repressive, if they made common cause against Iran.

His second message was religious. In his visit to Egypt, he came across as much as a preacher as a diplomat. He talked about “America’s innate goodness” and marveled at a newly built cathedral as “a stunning testament to the Lord’s hand”.

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['Toxic Christianity': the evangelicals creating champions for Trump

Foreign Policy US

Trump’s playbook threatens US as foreign allies reevaluate 'endgame': British intel expert

Canada's Prime Minister fears 'brutal reality' Trump has already broken world order

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Trump’s ‘delusional’ GOP enablers are finally shaken by Bernstein’s reporting on president’s ‘uninformed’ calls with foreign leaders

United States’ global power is slipping away as its contempt for others fuels the decline of the WestM.K. Bhadrakumar / Independent Media

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