John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK LAWRENCE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The Trump Administration’s Spoiler Foreign Policy
“U.S. strategy abroad is assuming a curious shape. Whether the president or his minders are running affairs, Patrick Lawrence sees the U.S. being reduced to playing a spoiler role in the Middle East and Northeast Asia.”
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Response to a comment:
Noisy, ugly, and unpleasant – all qualities Trump possesses in abundance – have nothing to do with the power relationship between a President and the Washington establishment.
My point is that Obama, from whom we expected a little heroism, proved almost a complete coward. He did as was expected of him by an establishment with which he previously had no experience – in Libya, in Syria, in Bahrain, in Egypt, in Ukraine, and in China. He gave us industrial-scale drone murder, something every American should be deeply ashamed of.
Trump had no promise at all in most areas, but on the crucial matter of the Neocon Wars across the Middle East and relations with Russia – both extremely important matters – he did offer some promise of change. And he has been completely unable to deliver. He’s paralyzed. And you might well think all the constant ugly noise that he makes reflects in part his frustration and his immense ego’s need to pretend that it isn’t so.
George Bush was the first convincing proof that America doesn’t even truly need a President, except for the legalities of signing papers put before him by powerful establishment figures such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. A huge imperial state with many powerful organizations and institutions deeply embedded in its structure is guided in foreign policy by a consensus of its establishment. It is Presidents who must adjust and conform, no matter which party they represent or what rhetoric they used to be elected.
Obama’s sad time proved the observation further, as the man, who once wore sandals and eschewed a ridiculous American flag pin on his lapel when campaigning, ended up killing more than half a million people across the Mideast, creating millions of refugees to nearly destabilize Europe, and supporting a dangerous and destructive coup in Ukraine. And then there’s those drones, a program he created, killing thousands of innocents, because even the targets are legally innocent, let alone the “collateral damage.”
And Trump hasn’t delivered on one important imperial matter. The killing goes on across the Mideast, and an important country like Russia is treated in a dangerous and de-stabilizing fashion. Utterly needless antagonisms and threats are generated against a rules-abiding, large, and important state like Iran.
These are things the American power establishment wants in its new drive for complete global domination, and no mere elected official, not even a President, can successfully challenge that reality.
So, it’s what America gets, no matter who is elected, rendering American elections, realistically, close to meaningless. There would appear to be some room in domestic policy for differences between candidates, but realistically these don’t greatly matter because it is the empire which consumes all resources and rivets the attention of all ambitious politicians. Actually, it consumes more than existing resources because it is financed with huge debt.
You know - and I’ve said this many times, but it is a fundamental truth worth repeating - you can either have an empire or you can have a decent country. You cannot have both, and Americans very much do not have both.
Great empire - with its vast, anti-democratic and authoritarian military and its many secret security agencies and its great plutocratic corporations who benefit from military and security arrangements - is about as far from decent and truly democratic government as you can go.
That’s America today.
You may find interesting:
https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/?s=beast+bellowing
https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/the-cia-and-americas-presidents-some-rarely-discussed-truths-shaping-contemporary-american-democracy/
