John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Trump’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad National Security Team”
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Response to a comment which said, “America is declining and has been for years. It struggles on and the question is, will it give up gracefully as the USSR did, or will the current neocons go out with a bang?”:
The decline is very real.
In the postwar period, America's glory days and the time when the expression "the American Dream" was popularized, America was responsible for over 40% of the globe's output.
After all, everyone else was flat on their backs.
Today, that has declined to 20-odd %.
It isn't just America falling behind, it's others, inevitably, coming up.
The Washington power establishment's new efforts at being aggressive everywhere are in large part based in recognition of this fact. It is also vociferously supported by the influential Neocons who see an aggressive America as the best possible thing for Israel.
They want to use Washington's still-immense military and financial strength to push their way to advantages all over the globe. Literally, a kind of Mafia protection-racket approach.
Clearly, some of the people in Trump's crew - Haley, Pompeo, Bolton, and others - couldn't be distinguished from Mafiosi, or perhaps fascists. He appointed these horrible creatures to appease an establishment which does not like him.
It is obviously a very dangerous philosophy and is not all that different than old-fashioned imperialism.
Trump's silly slogan about "Making America Great Again" comes right out of this reality. It's just a new formulation of “the American Dream,” but you cannot re-create 1953, so it will remain a largely empty phrase. But it is also a dangerous phrase in a number of ways, including its potential to leave his followers extremely enraged by failure.
And if he keeps attacking global economic and trade arrangements - activity which appears to be his only strategy to “making America great again” - he is, in fact, going to make America a whole lot worse off, with global recession, changed arrangements among other countries resentful of American belligerence, perhaps losing the dollar's privileged position, and new alliances forming.
Very short-sighted, to say the least.
However, for now, his ugly, bellowing rhetoric about other countries is somewhat in step with the power establishment's new goals, who also I believe are destined to fail utterly unless America really does transform itself into a fascist, aggrandizing state.
It already has taken many steps in this direction, in matters as wide-ranging as violating every American’s privacy to pushing the enforcement of American laws onto other countries and to supporting a number of governments who work against human rights and working to destroy international institutions dedicated to fairness among nations.
America's becoming a fascist state is a genuine possibility, and we have Israel, already one in all but name with the way it holds millions as prisoners and regularly steals their land and ignores all international law and custom, pushing America in that direction every step of the way.
Clear back in the 1930s, the great American journalist and chronicler of Nazi Germany, William L. Shirer, said he believed it was possible America could be the first country to go fascist by choice.
He was referring to attitudes and sympathies he observed in America, and not to the same world situation we see, but those attitudes and sympathies are still there, as we are reminded often when Trump or other senior American officials open their mouths.
Just give America another Great Depression, which the combination of Trump’s browbeating trade and America’s recklessness with its financial affairs both work towards, and all bets are off. Nazism arose out of the despair of millions crushed by economic catastrophe.
