The powers ascribed to the President of the United States of America give him broad authority to define and carry out foreign policy matters. However, for decades this “power” has been guided from a retinue of advisers who past presidents have blindly trusted, perhaps even against their own inclinations. Sometimes, they appear to have been themselves aligned with the FP positions themselves. But it was a commonly accepted understanding that any presidential candidate with aspirations to make major changes in the foreign policy of the US might win the office of President on this promise, but once in the White House, that resolve would quickly disappear, under the “for your own good” advice of the non-elected “experts” in this area. When Donald Trump became president, for the first time in modern history, we saw a President trying repeatedly to do what he campaigned on, and at times he was shut down or overridden by the FP “community” embedded in DC. The Compleat Fake Impeachment Inquiry is the most clear expression of the desire of the embeds to keep and expand their power over the elected President. In fact, even for the media – ALL the media, the core issue is American policy in and about Ukraine and Russia. The question that was up for debate this week and last week was really about the direction the President wants to take in foreign relations, and the argument is whether or not he is endangering the US by wanting to pursue a foreign policy that is sharply at odds with the so-called “experts” in the field.
To the average American this is a tough question to resolve. The main reason lies in the massive disinformation campaign operation that almost all of the media has either actively run or complied with.
The essence of the narrative as applied to the impeachment inquiry is simple: “Russia bad”, “Ukraine good.” “NATO good.” “Putin bad.”
It really is that simple. The reasons why Russia is bad and Putin is bad are primarily expressed in one or two soundbites taken out of context: President Putin is on record for saying that he missed the Soviet Union; that he regretted its dissolution. After decades of the Cold War, this statement was ripe for cherry picking and placing in the context that President Putin wants the return of Communism, and that by extension, since Communists were supposed to be seeking world domination, President Putin seeks to restore the Soviet Union to its original size and scope and to become… well, something like what the United States actually is.
It does not ever get reported how many Russians say they miss the USSR because, at least at the end, it provided stability and some sense of order. Contrasted with the almost completely unknown (in the West) chaos that rocked post Soviet Russia for years until Vladimir Putin began to help bring things into check, it is easy to understand why folks would want stability, even if it was clad in gray unintersting buildings and worn-out technology. Only a very small minority of people in Russia would prefer to go back now, because things are much better. Even President Putin would be more likely to agree that Russia going forward is far better than a retreat into those former times. It shows, because Russia is an increasingly capitalist nation, even as it aligns and humbles itself increasingly to the will of God and the guidance of the Russian Orthodox Church. That is the fact of things. Don’t take my word for it, though. Research this and see for yourself.
The US bills itself as an exporter of democracy. Since we are free and love it, we should make sure everyone else in the world should have the freedom we do. Right?
This is the by-line and a great many Americans, including myself, believe it is true, and even noble. Most of us also believe that this objective was the motivation for the US involvement in the Second World War, and at least as applied to the territory of the United States itself, it is true. For American citizens, all politics are ultimately local, and the imminent danger of a Japanese or German assault on our lands was significant and real, so much so that it seems there was little controversy about the US alliance with the likes of none less than Josef Stalin, who had conducted pogroms in the Soviet Union that dwarfed the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust.
Since WWII, though, the idea of “protecting the United States” became more conflated with the notion of “exporting democracy to the world”, to the point where in 1991 and later in 2003, the Iraq wars over control of oilfields in Kuwait and the deposition and murder of the former “ally” to the US, Saddam Hussein, became “vital to American security.”
This was already ringing hollow, and occasionally the Hollywood movie making community pointed it out, one of the most famous lines being “you killed 100,000 people to save a nickel on a gallon of gas…”
And now, we are here. The US is a power looking for a threat, and ever since 2013-2014 when President Vladimir Putin addressed the decadence and decline of the West because of the rejection of traditional values of religion and culture, most particularly Christian culture, his 2014 restriction on homosexuals participating in the Sochi Olympic Games, and his assertion that Russia has every right to pursue and live within its own cultural norms, not to be interfered with or modified by anyone else, the FP wonks perceived that Russia would be the new “threat” to American democracy and security, and the game was on.
President Trump, like a great many Americans, began to see through this narrative. He ran for and won the Presidency with his own sentiments making up part of the reason why: That American forces are sent everywhere for no good reason, and they fight wars for people who do not really appreciate our efforts, but merely use them to their own ends. There are no actual threats to American security from Russia or China, but ISIS, whom Obama carefully ignored and maintained, was a problem.
Now he is facing impeachment because he wished to follow through with this policy idea. It rubs the embeds the wrong way. The problem here is that most of the elected officials are in some way or another either on the embeds’ side or too afraid to speak out and declare to the world that “well, we have been lying about most of this for many, many years.”
Readers of The Duran are often very knowledgeable about the real challenges in foreign policy and geopolitics. Some are very given to their own personal variations on this matter, but a great many of us know, for example, that Russia presents no threat to the United States whatsoever, but that the Russian government perceives the US’ aggressive behavior by expanding NATO to surround the territory of the Russian Federation. Georgia. Ukraine. Mongolia. Estonia. Lithuania. Latvia. Poland. Look on a map and one can see the makings of a new “wall” around Russia, armed to the teeth with missiles pointed into Russian territory or at least “over and beyond it to threats like Iran…”
Nonsense. Saudi Arabia is much closer and it is a US ally or its master, depending on perspective.
President Trump however, is not interested in marginalizing Ukraine. He is not interested in marginalizing Russia either. His admission that it is the best idea to accept that Crimea is part of Russia is an example of accepting the reality of the regional politics without digging into either its “inside information” or calling out the generally accepted US position as fundamentally false, fabricated.
A tremendous amount of information on this matter is unacceptable to the press and people in power in the United States. It is unacceptable to move the Overton Window on Russia and Ukraine to the truth. Only a very few journalists seem able to talk about how things really are without retribution from their employers. Tucker Carlson is one example of such an honest journalist. But even his network, Fox News and some of its otherwise excellent reports and anchors all buy into false information about Russia.
More regrettably, this bad intelligence even causes President Trump to make or allow policy moves that are damaging to his own work and wishes. The biggest example of that is his support of the Ambassador-at-large for Religious Affairs, former Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, as he goes throughout the Orthodox Christian world and presses the hierarchy of various churches to accept the creation of the new Ukrainian church structure that itself was a US State Dept operation, worked against the Orthodox Church through its own Ecumenical Patriarch. This is abetted by American ignorance about Orthodox Christianity, and it is also abetted by the stubborn belief among many in power in the United States that people in these other places actually really want the same things we do.
Often, they don’t.
What do many of these nations want? Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, China, and so on?
Mostly it appears that they want to be left alone. The world needs no imperial policeman. Ukraine is not wrong for wanting independence from Russia, but those Ukrainians that favor a close relationship with Russia are also not wrong. And probably neither side in that conflict wants to be an American vassal state, living on some foreigners’ own tired propaganda. The same thing is true in Syria. No one there wants ISIS (except ISIS) there, but they also don’t want to be an American vassal state. President Trump has been very wise in making moves to pull our troops out of that region, ceding it to the Russians, who were invited into the country by its leadership.
Does Syria itself present a threat to the United States? Absolutely not. Not even for the sake of oil production, as the US is energy independent now. Is Syria a land of strategic importance? Yes. But to the US, it is not.
President Trump sees this and he moves on facts like this. These facts are easy to spot and most Americans who know them agree with what the President is trying to do. It isn’t hard.
But the narrative of the embeds is like an old song that you listen to so many times that you know every note, every whisper, every breath. It may be a bad song, but it is “comfortable” – what is says is simply part of the environment, requiring no thought, no critical analysis whatsoever, and it is just plain easy.
So when, in the impeachment hearings last week and this week, the framework was built that somehow Ukraine is a vital element to American national security (because, Russia bad, Putin bad), this no doubt was enough to convince many in America that this is the truth because we hear it so often. For Orange Man to come and say it is nonsense is disturbing to people. If it isn’t true, then why do we keep saying that it is? How do we know? And then the next step, so fatal to the Deep State: The American citizen begins to think about this, to investigate it, maybe even do so deeply, critically and honestly, and then learns that it isn’t true, and has not been true in a long time.
Chaos.
President Trump is a genius at creating chaos, the kind of chaos that can lead to re-evaluation, reflection, discursive thought, and analysis. This is dangerous to the FP establishment and policy embeds because at best, it may put them out of a job. But at worst, it can cause a massive realignment in the world, a decrease in warfare, and probably some very serious investigations and prosecutions for crimes, even crimes against humanity.
This leads the embeds to fight with everything that they have, and that, my dear readers, is what we have been witness to these last several weeks and months. I could write ad nauseam about the exceptionally childish behavior of grown-up men and women as they prosecute the Fake Impeachment Inquiry, but you see it for yourselves. Even John Bolton, that poor reviled man, jumped into the act today with his own version of a four-year-old screaming how Jonny took his favorite toy away. It is embarassing.
But it also explains why we need a President like Trump, who is unafraid to avoid the childish, puerile acts of otherwise physically grown-up men and women, and he gets down in the trenches and fights on their level. He has to. Bratty kids will not listen to a statesman. Think about it.
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