Trepidations: Trumpian Foreign Policy

Trump famously ran as a peace candidate of sorts. The claim was that he kept us out of war and end the Russia - Ukraine war in 24 hours. This claim, of course, amounted to a lie, multiple lies, in this sense—Trump’s policies paved the way for the current wars, both against Russia and against the Palestinians. All systems were go, so to speak, when Trump was ousted in 2020. Trump got away with this gaslighting simply because the Dems were unable convincingly disavow their huge role in mongering for war on Russia—going back to the Russia Hoax. Moreover, claiming that Trump was to blame for our genocide against Palestinians would have required more close argumentation than the public could readily absorb. And might jeopardize Zionist donations.

Consider.

With regard to Russia, Trump’s initiatives—including at the Helsinki meeting—were strictly in accord with Neocon goals (Bolton was NSA at the time). Trump tried to get Putin to push Iran’s military presence out of Syria and to withdraw from Crimea. For the rest, Trump ramped up sanctions against Russia—that has been his proud boast all along—and ramped up the arming of Ukraine. Russia was put on notice that war was an inevitability.

With regard to the Middle East, the attempt to get Russia to oust Iran from Syria fell in line with the overall aim to establish a US - Greater Israel hegemony over the Arab Middle East through the so-called Abraham Accords. This was an effort to isolate Iran by lining up the Arab states of the Arabian Peninsula under the US - Israel hegemony. As such it put Iran on notice that they had best prepare for war. However, it was also a warning to Hamas that they would be isolated from the Arab world, and so they, too, had best prepare for war. Finally, the same warning was clear to Hezbollah. While Zhou screwed up these plans by offending the Saudis, all that remained was the trigger—the Israeli enabling of the Hamas raid of October 7th.

All of these things were Neocon pipe dreams long before Trump, going back into the 1990s.

Having won re-election, so to speak, thanks to overwhelming or enormously increased support from Catholics, Protestants, Hispanics and Asians, Trump named Jewish billionaire Howard Lutnick as co-chair for personnel matters on Trump’s transition team. If we accept the adage that personnel is policy, we still probably need to break Lutnick’s policy influence down into domestic and foreign policy components. The presence of goofball Brian Hook on the transition team is being taken as a sign that Trump has once again subcontracted foreign policy to the biggest donor bloc with the keenest and most one sided interest in foreign policy.

This is not to say that Trump will inevitably lead the clueless American public into open war. I have argued that Trump is aware that he cannot accomplish his major goals if he does that and, further, that the Pentagon is almost certainly strongly opposed to such a policy. Even so, these personnal initiatives are very worrisome—stuff (if only back stabbing) happens, in spite of basically good intentions. In an interview with Danny Davis (substantially transcribed below), Doug Macgregor argues that Trump looks, at this point, poised to attempt to repeat his misguided policies from his first term. This probably dooms America to a rougher than necessary transition into the multi-polar world, unless Trump reasses very rapidly after getting stiffed by the rest of the world.

Col Douglas Macgregor: Trump's Maximum Pressure on Iran

DD: I want to look at two specific areas. Trump was famous for was his so-called MAX Pressure campaign on Iran, when he ended the JCPOA, the nuclear deal, kept pressure on Iran, etc. Some people say it was a great success, others argue it was actually a disastrous failure, but it was also done in an environment where there wasn't a war raging in the Middle East. Now some people say he's just going to reboot that [approach]. There was an interview on CNN with Brian Hook who is currently helping the transition. What he says is important and it gives some clues as to what the Trump Administration is going to do--and maybe what they're not going to do:

If the United States, working with our Gulf Partners and Israel, are not able to deter Iran and its proxies you have war and violence and bloodshed in the Middle East, and if you take a policy of appeasement and accommodation with Iran and increase the daylight between America's partners--calling countries [i.e., Saudi Arabia] pariahs and lecturing them on how they're supposed to live--you lose deterrence. And if nobody believes that you have a credible threat of military force then you're going to lose deterrence, and so I think president Trump, as he demonstrated during the four years of his first term weakened Iran economically and militarily and weakened its proxies, and he deepened his alliances with Israel and our Gulf partners and if you do that it's a winning formula.

I wonder what your thoughts are on Brian Hook?

DM: He will certainly be the Under Secretary in the Department of State for something--or the Deputy, one of the two--so he'll play a very strong role. I would regard Brian Hook as a more aggressive version of Tony Blinken, so in that sense nothing is changing at the Department of State, except the new incoming crowd is likely to be far more beligerent about the use of force, specifically against Iran.

DD: What do you make of what Brian Hook said specifically--[that] Trump had a winning formula in his first administration so he's going to replay that?

DM: The discussion about deterrence and appeasement--this is old worn out Neocon nonsense. The Neocons permanently live in the 1930s, and everyone that doesn't like them or support them is Hitler. So I would just dismiss all that nonsense immediately. I think there is a danger that President Trump will come into office with a group of people all of whom share the view that nothing has really changed substantially since they left--and that, of course, is fundamentally wrong. The Middle East, in particular--but I would argue the entire world--has changed dramatically and the catalyst for the change has obviously been the war in Ukraine, which has been won by Russia and resulted in the destruction of all the Ukrainian forces that were NATO trained, equipped, and in many cases NATO forces masquerading as Ukrainians have all failed and been destroyed. So our position in the world, our credibility, militarily, right now is very much in question.

That's a very serious problem, but I don't think it's hopeless. But the answer is not to bully and threaten people that join BRICS, bully and threaten China with tariffs that we cannot possibly enforce, and are largely meaningless now because China, like Russia, has grown dramatically and is really no longer vulnerable to our threats. The Middle East in particular is now solidly opposed to Israel and the word in the Middle East is very straightforward--the age of the Balfour Declaration is over. There will be no more peace with the Israelis unless, of course, they accept in principle and in fact as the precondition for any sort of relationship in the future, a Palestinian State. Those things are facts. Iran is infinitely stronger and more capable, although pitted against us and Israel it's certainly in a lot of trouble. But now Iran is tied very closely to Russia, China will back Russia, and whatever Russia does. Everyone in the Middle East that may have disliked Iran in the past is now agreed that Iran deserves support. Turkey is on the edge of intervention in this war because of what's happening in Syria and Lebanon, so I would say [Hook’s] general description and the notion that this old formula has any validity is absurd.

DD: The CNN reporter who was interviewing Hook tried several times to ask him, What is going to be the Trump Administration [sic]? Instead of answering that question he talked about how successful the IDF was:

He isolated Iran and he weakened Iran economically. You talked about a regional balance of power shifting. Israel has had enormous success against Hamas and Hezbollah, which are two terrorist proxies of Iran, Muslim Brotherhood offshoots, and part of the extremist ideology that President Trump worked with leaders in Saudi Arabia and UAE and Egypt to combat. I have no reason to think that he won't do that again.

Do you agree with his contention that the IDF has had enormous success?

DM: Brian Hook is doing exactly what Tony Blinken did, which is repeat Netanyahu talking points. This signals unambiguously to everyone in the Middle East--in fact, I suspect throughout most of the world--that nothing is going to change. If anything, things could get worse, and of course this is the question on everybody's mind in Iran. Are things going to get worse or are they going to stay the same? I think they can bank, based on his comments on things getting a lot worse. Now as far as his assertions, they're no more valid than the assertions made by Netanyahu. The truth is very different and there's no point in debating it with these people because they're ideologues. [Hook is] very much an Israel firster and he's going to continue to repeat whatever Netanyahu says. I wouldn't even debate it.

You can't get your policies accomplished the way that you want them to if you're not playing with the full deck of cards and recognizing all the factors that are at play on the table. Otherwise you'll be seeking the unattainable.

DD: I'm going to play one more piece from Brian Hook because, on the one hand he's talking about we can't appease Iran and we have to go back to maximum pressure and all this other kind of stuff which implies the threat of military action against Iran, but then at the same time he says this:

President Trump has no interest in regime change. The future of Iran will be decided by the Iranian people. I think we've said that repeatedly over four years, but what president Trump did say in Riyadh was that we will isolate Iran diplomatically and weaken them economically so that they can't fund all of the violence that's going with the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas, Hezbollah, and these proxies that run around Iraq and Syria today, all of whom destabilize Israel and our Gulf partners.

I just don't see how those things are are congruous. Will Trump have any better record at pushing back on Netanyahu than Biden did?

DM: Let's step back for a minute and consider president Trump's larger strategic approach, which I think is now emerging in the team that he's putting together. He said that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and I think he's communicated that to Putin. He's also said that if Putin refuses to end the war, assuming on whatever terms are offered [by Trump], then he'll double down and support Ukraine--which I think is an unhealthy and ill-considered comment at this point. But this is part of the neocon approach. I don't know how that'll go, but I think his hope is that he can meet with Putin and that in doing so he's going to make an offer. I don't know if he'll say, 'We'll delay NATO membership for 20 years and in the interim Ukraine or what's left of it can be neutral,' is he going to quibble over territory? Is he going to offer to lift sanctions?

We don't know, and in the meantime I think he's going to try to do all of those things in some form. Maybe more in the hope that he can persuade President Putin to do two things--obviously, to abandon Iran in the Middle East to us and Israel, and then, secondly, ultimately try to drive some sort of wedge between Russia and China. Let's take the last point. The wedge between Russia and China is an impossibility. Russia and China have a mutually beneficial relationship on every level and neither is going to walk away from the other, so that's a dead end. There's no hope for that at all, and even to pursue it is absurd. This is like tariffs against China. China now does more business with the rest of the world than it does with us and Europe and, as a result, they could care less what we do. If we don't want to do business with them anymore they've got 1.8 trillion on an annual basis with the rest of the world as it is, and they can make do without us, just as Russia has learned they can do without us.

Now, on the second point--abandoning Iran--I think that Iran is a very important state in the larger calculus of this BRICS organization because of its oil and natural gas wealth. It's not the only thing that Iran offers, but it's substantial. It represents a nation of over a 100 million people, it is enormous in size, almost the size of Western Europe, and it is wedged in between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean and, of course, Turkey and the Caucasus. This is very important to Russia. Russia wants to build this relationship, so whatever we think we can offer I see absolutely no chance whatsoever that President Putin is going to abandon Iran or anything else and say, 'Okay, in return for that if you just let us alone and we're allowed to sit here and we do this deal on Ukraine then we won't interfere with anything else.' I think that's nonsense and has no chance of success, but my impression is that that is the strategic approach that is developing.

DD: So he's not going to have any success with Putin, but what about Netanyahu? If Trump gets to a position where he thinks, 'Okay, this is not in America's interest,' Netanyahu has shown that he would completely ignore Biden. Will that continue under Trump?

DM: I suspect it will. I don't think that president Trump is going to discover the gulf that exists between Israeli interests and American interests. I think he's going to insist on seeing them as one and the same, which of course is Mr Netanyahu's desire and the desire of The [Israel] Lobby and the enormously powerful forces that have helped to elect Trump and poured so much money into his campaign. I think that the view will be that we must press ahead in order to secure Israel's position in the region permanently. That means more than defeating Hezbollah temporarily or Gaza temporarily, because those problems are not going to go away. They're permanent. I don't think the Israelis can kill their way out of that, contrary to what they may think, but I think it means helping to establish Jewish Supremacy in the entire Middle East, with pieces of other people's countries and the expulsion or killing of Arabs inside Israel. I think all of this rests on wishful thinking, but I see no evidence that [Trump] is going to abandon it now. Maybe once he's inaugurated and he realizes the costs to us. I think the costs to us are enormous. I think our position in the region, frankly, at this point in the Middle East is finished. We have not a leg to stand on anymore, so I don't see it working, but that's what I see happening. I just don't see President Trump backing off of his current position, which is that [Israel’s] interests and our interests are the same.

Let's just make sure the audience understands something. When you go to Washington and you begin talking to these people--whether it's Brian Hook or Tony Blinken or any number of these characters--they really feel nothing but contempt for much of the world. They see us as the superpower that can march with immunity and invulnerability all over the place. They continue to view, particularly in the Middle East, these countries as weak countries that can't put up any resistance to us. Countries that can be bullied into submission and eventually compelled to bend the knee and accept Israeli dominance of the Middle East. I think they're delusional, but I think they really feel that way. So when someone says, 'Well, so and so in Iraq says this,' their view is, 'Who cares what these people think. They're going to have to do what we make them do anyway.' I don't see it that way. I think the world has changed dramatically.

I think president Trump simply looks at this as a setting where he can, because of his unique attributes and talents, march in and "cut a deal." I'm not sure it's going to work that way. You've got to look at the battlefield right now from the Baltic all the way down to the Persian Gulf. Russia has won. That's not in dispute, and president Trump knows that. He also knows that going to war with Russia is something to be avoided. I'm glad he understands that. What he may not understand is that Russia is going to sit across from him and say, 'We've won the war. This is what we control. We're going to keep it, and if we don't get a settlement that makes Ukraine neutral, period, unconditionally, permanently'--because that's the precondition for peace from the Russian standpoint--'we will continue to move towards the Dnieper river and right up to Kiev.'

I think president Trump is going to go in there with some suggestions that I think are impossible. One is we want a free hand in the Middle East to do whatever we and the Israelis want to do. 'Please [Russia] get out of Iran.' Wrong. That's not going to happen. Secondly, we want Ukraine to be neutral but they ought to be able to do the following 10 things and perhaps neutrality only for 20 years. Wrong. Absolutely out of the question. And then the next question that Putin is going to ask is, 'When are you going to stop aiding the Ukrainians? When are you going to withdraw all of your forces inside Ukraine--that means all these Americans and Ukrainian uniformed Americans and whatever guys CIA, Army, Air Force whatever is there--when are you going to get them out?' If Trump says, 'Well if you'll sign up for this and this then we'll do that,' I don't think it'll work. I just don't think we have anything to offer. We'll lift sanctions, and the Russians aren't completely stupid. They know that sanctions have been imposed on them for years and they found a way around them, so their attitude may be, 'Fine, it doesn't make any difference to us whether you impose sanctions or not, we're not going to back down.’ I think it's a hugely difficult situation now.

I think Putin said the right thing: 'We're going to listen, we'll talk.' They would like to end all of these things, they would like good relations, but how do you get there unless the United States are first of all willing to treat Russia as a great power, treat it with respect, respect Russia's interests? We've never done that and that has to happen. I think it's going to be difficult for this Administration to do everything that it needs to do to get to that point because of all the other things I discussed--the Hook, the underlying purposes and strategic interests that we're [the US] trying to promote: abandon the Middle East, let us run that, let us and the Israelis do whatever we want. No, that's not going to happen. We [the US] want you to back away from China. No, it's not going to happen.

President Trump has to go into any discussion with President Putin armed with facts and information. In other words he's got to sit down and study carefully what are Russia's interests in Ukraine specifically, in Europe, and in adjacent areas: the Caucasus, the Middle East, Iran. Those things have to be viewed together. You cannot view what happens in Ukraine as completely separate and distinct from what's happening today in the Middle East, because the same forces that propelled the war against Russia in Ukraine are operating today in Israel, compelling us into the war in the Middle East on their behalf. I don't know if he understands that. Perhaps he does. This is the problem. We don't know yet, but listening to Brian Hook suggests that there is no rational worldview--there are irrational expectations, unrealizable goals in his mind, and the United States has to be dragged kicking and screaming in those directions. This has been the Neocon problem from day one--we can go all the way back into the 1990s. The larger plan the Neocons had was, if we dominate the Middle East and we get control of the oil and natural gas, then we have China on its knees and we can dominate China. This is before they discovered there was such a thing as Russia again. They thought that Russia was utterly ruined, destroyed. These goals and aspirations haven't changed. This mentality is still there. I don't think they see the world as it truly is.

So we don't know what president Trump will say or do when he gets there. The other thing is, frankly, if I were advising him I would not meet with President Putin until I thoroughly understood all these things and I had sent an advance team over there to talk privately at the level just below the president, with people that President Putin trusts, and try to discover what are their expectations and what do they want. I don't see that right now happening, so if you rush off to Ukraine with a promise that you're going to end everything and then you go in with false expectations and unreasonable demands, you don't end anything. In fact, you guarantee its extension and continuation, or that it will end in spite of you.

[Re the lying about North Korean troops in Russia]

It's tragic that these lies continue to be disseminated by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the mainstream media, cable, same thing in Western Europe. It's a shame because people are beginning to wake up, and then the question comes up: Why do Americans increasingly not believe what they're told? Why should they? They're just being told lies. This is a lie. It's disgraceful. The people that are part of this should be dealt with very severely in the future, but I'm sure they won't be. No one will be held accountable for this.

DD: Other than the Western countries--and that means the United States--coming in on [Ukraine's] side and actually fighting a war for them, there is zero hope of even holding the line. None, even theoretically, for a victory. Ever. But of course that is extremely unlikely because, then, that almost certainly would mean nuclear war, and why would any Western State, certainly the United States, take a risk like that for a country that has already been militarily defeated?

DM: I think that's true, but we've already run those risks and we continue to do so in the Middle East. It's a very misguided approach. It's back to Wag the Dog. You have two countries--puppet governments sponsored by Washington, who are part of the same cabal that Brian Hook is--who are trying to drag us into wars that we do not want to fight, that we have no interest in fighting, but we haven't had anyone at the top with either the courage or the character or the brains to simply stand up and say: 'Wait a minute--this is not in our interest! It's not in our interest to wage war on hundreds of millions of Muslims, Arabs, Turks, and Iranians. It's not in our interest to wage war against the Russians, the Chinese, or anybody else!’ No one wants to stand up and say that.

It's a fascinating phenomenon. Everyone has benefited so much from these conflicts over the years, the military industrial complex, the Israel Lobby, all these things. Everyone has profited. They don't want the money to stop, but at the same time some of them must at least have an inkling of the danger they're courting. The danger is real and we're closer to it with each passing day.

I've said this on a couple of occasions. If president Trump views the world through a realistic lens and he's given facts and he understands the true situation, I know president Trump's someone who understands that it is peace, not war, that the United States and the West needs, and that's where he's going to go--if he can, if he's not constrained to go in other directions. And I mean that very sincerely. I think president Trump may also understand that wars have always destroyed presidencies. President Trump knows that he has a population that doesn't want war, so I don't see him signing on for these open-ended commitments, which is essentially what he's being prompted to do by all the same people--you know, Victoria Nuland, Bob Kagan, Brian Hook, Elliot Abrams. I mean, just go down the list. They're all in this together, they're all committed to the same things. I don't think Donald Trump is but, let's be frank, he was elected at least in part--some people would say in large part, but at least in part--due to the enormous donations that he received. Hundreds of millions of dollars from people that back the individuals I just cited.

DD: Can America actually fight and sustain any major wars right now?

DM: No. We've got serious morale problems in the armed forces that have been discussed routinely in Stars and Stripes and other outlets. People are sick of this DEI nonsense. They're disgusted with the focus on everything but what really counts, which is performance under under fire soldiers. You've got a leadership that is horribly politicized. They've always got their fingers in the wind. That's how they got to be four stars. And it's no longer just four stars. The flag ranks throughout most of the armed forces are desperately infected with the the political sort of maladies that make them unreliable as custodians of American military power. I hope that that will eventually dawn on President Trump and he'll do something about it, but I'm not hopeful.

Here's the the ultimate bottom line. We are not a continental power. We are primarily a maritime and aerospace power. China, Iran, Turkey, Russia, any of these countries. India, Pakistan--these are Continental Powers. They have the size, the population, and the capability to fight major wars on their turf. We don't [i.e, not on their turf]. We just can't fight that way, and so we turn instead to what I would call the hope that naval and air power--by lobbing bombs and missiles--can beat people into submission. I would argue that that really hasn't worked very well for us, and it's created more trouble and more problems for us than anything else. There's certainly no appetite in the United States to suddenly draft millions of men and then to try to push them onto the Eurasian landmass. We're back to MacArthur warning JFK, who already had the 173rd Airborne Brigade and other units ready to go to Vietnam, not to go. He made the same argument: we're not capable of waging war on the Eurasian landmass. If you look at what we did on the ground during World War II or World War I, those were really modest compared with what you saw the Continental Powers commit--Germany, Russia, China. Japan obviously ran into the same problem because they, too, are a maritime power and once it became clear they couldn't sustain themselves in their island it was over. If the terms of battle are not favorable to us we shouldn't fight. I hope that President Trump comes to that same conclusion. I think that his intent has always been to avoid wars.

DD: We just have to hope that Trump surrounds himself with people who see the things that you're talking about.

DM: We'll soon find out. It won't take very long. What we don't know is what happens now between where we are today and the inauguration.