EDITOR'S CHOICE | 22.08.2018

Trump Lied About His Intentions Toward Russia

Eric ZUESSE

On August 20th, Gallup headlined “More in U.S. Favor Diplomacy Over Sanctions for Russia” and reported that, “Americans believe it is more important to try to continue efforts to improve relations between the countries (58%), rather than taking strong diplomatic and economic steps against Russia (36%).” And yet, all of the sanctions against Russia have passed in Congess by over 90% of Senators and Representatives voting for them — an extraordinarily strong and bipartisan favoring of anti-Russia sanctions, by America’s supposed “representatives” of the American people. What’s happening here, which explains such an enormous contradiction between America’s Government, on the one side, versus America’s people, on the other? Is a nation like this really a democracy at all?

Donald Trump understood this disjunction, when he was running for President, and he took advantage of the public side of it, in order to win, but, as soon as he won, he flipped to the opposite side, the side of America’s billionaires, who actually control the U.S. Government.

While he was campaigning for the U.S. Presidency, Donald Trump pretended to want to soften, not harden, America’s policies against Russia. He even gave hints that he wanted a redirection of U.S. Government expenditures away from the military, and toward America’s economic and domestic needs.

On 31 January 2016, Donald Trump — then one of many Republican candidates running for the Republican U.S. Presidential nomination — told a rally in Clinton Iowa, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with Russia and China and all these countries?”

On 21 March 2016, he was published in the Washington Post as having told its editors, that “he advocates a light footprint in the world. In spite of unrest abroad, especially in the Middle East, Trump said the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding domestic infrastructure. … ‘I do think it’s a different world today, and I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,’ Trump said. ‘I think it’s proven not to work, and we have a different country than we did then. We have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting, probably, on a bubble. And it’s a bubble that if it breaks, it’s going to be very nasty. I just think we have to rebuild our country.’” On that same day, The Daily Beast’s Shane Harris wrote that:

Trump’s surprising new position [is] that the U.S. should rethink whether it needs to remain in the seven-decades-old NATO alliance with Europe.

Sounding more like a CFO than a commander-in-chief, Trump said of the alliance, “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” adding, “NATO is costing us a fortune and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.”

U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have said that European allies have to shoulder a bigger burden of NATO’s cost. But calling for the possible U.S. withdrawal from the treaty is a radical departure for a presidential candidate — even a candidate who has been endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Withdrawing from NATO would leave European allies without a forceful deterrent to the Russian military, which invaded and annexed portions of Ukraine in 2014. That would arguably be a win for Putin but leave U.S. allies vulnerable.

It also wasn’t clear how Trump’s arguably anti-interventionist position on the alliance squared with his choice of advisers. …

One other Trump adviser had previously been reported. Retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn had told The Daily Beast that he “met informally” with Trump. Flynn was pushed out of his post as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and has since spoken out publicly about the need for the U.S. to forge closer ties with Russia.

Five days later, on March 26th, the New York Times bannered, “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views” and David Sanger and Maggie Haberman presented their discussion with Trump about this, where Trump said:

I have two problems with NATO. No. 1, it’s obsolete. When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country. There was a different threat. Soviet Union was, the Soviet Union, not Russia, which was much bigger than Russia, as you know. And, it was certainly much more powerful than even today’s Russia, although again you go back into the weaponry. But, but – I said, I think NATO is obsolete, and I think that – because I don’t think – right now we don’t have somebody looking at terror, and we should be looking at terror. And you may want to add and subtract from NATO in terms of countries. But we have to be looking at terror, because terror today is the big threat. Terror from all different parts. You know in the old days you’d have uniforms and you’d go to war and you’d see who your enemy was, and today we have no idea who the enemy is. …

I’ll tell you the problems I have with NATO. No. 1, we pay far too much. We are spending — you know, in fact, they’re even making it so the percentages are greater. NATO is unfair, economically, to us, to the United States. Because it really helps them more so than the United States, and we pay a disproportionate share. Now, I’m a person that — you notice I talk about economics quite a bit, in these military situations, because it is about economics, because we don’t have money anymore because we’ve been taking care of so many people in so many different forms that we don’t have money — and countries, and countries. So NATO is something that at the time was excellent. Today, it has to be changed. It has to be changed to include terror. It has to be changed from the standpoint of cost because the United States bears far too much of the cost of NATO. And one of the things that I hated seeing is Ukraine. Now I’m all for Ukraine, I have friends that live in Ukraine, but it didn’t seem to me, when the Ukrainian problem arose, you know, not so long ago, and we were, and Russia was getting very confrontational, it didn’t seem to me like anyone else cared other than us. And we are the least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we’re the farthest away. But even their neighbors didn’t seem to be talking about it. And, you know, you look at Germany, you look at other countries, and they didn’t seem to be very much involved. It was all about us and Russia. And I wondered, why is it that countries that are bordering the Ukraine and near the Ukraine – why is it that they’re not more involved? Why is it that they are not more involved? Why is it always the United States that gets right in the middle of things, with something that – you know, it affects us, but not nearly as much as it affects other countries. And then I say, and on top of everything else – and I think you understand that, David – because, if you look back, and if you study your reports and everybody else’s reports, how often do you see other countries saying “We must stop, we must stop.” They don’t do it! And, in fact, with the gas, you know, they wanted the oil, they wanted other things from Russia, and they were just keeping their mouths shut. And here the United States was going out and, you know, being fairly tough on the Ukraine. And I said to myself, isn’t that interesting? We’re fighting for the Ukraine, but nobody else is fighting for the Ukraine other than the Ukraine itself, of course, and I said, it doesn’t seem fair and it doesn’t seem logical.

The next day, March 27th, on ABC’s “The Week,” Trump said, “I think NATO’s obsolete. NATO was done at a time you had the Soviet Union, which was obviously larger, much larger than Russia is today. I’m not saying Russia’s not a threat. But we have other threats. We have the threat of terrorism and NATO doesn’t discuss terrorism, NATO’s not meant for terrorism. NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism.”

It’s easy to see why Trump was opposed by not only Hillary Clinton and other Democratic Party neoconservatives, but also by all Republican Party neoconservatives. The main target of neoconservatives — ever since that movement (which only in the 1970s came to be called “neoconservatives”) was founded by Democratic U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson back in the 1950s — has been to conquer Russia. That’s the ultimate objective, toward which they all and always have striven.

Even Barack Obama, despite his pretenses for ‘a reset in U.S.-Russia relations’, had had actually the opposite of that pretension in mind — a doubling-down on the Cold War. And Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, doubles down on his predecessor’s double-down, there.

Of course, neocons aren’t only against Russia; they also are against any country that Israel and Saudi Arabia hate — and, of course, Israel and Saudi Arabia are large purchasers of American-made weapons, such as weapons from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. In fact: Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest purchaser (other than the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department itself) of their products and services. In fact, soon after coming into office, Trump achieved the all-time-world-record-largest international weapons-sale, of $350 billion to the Sauds, and it was quickly hiked yet another $50 billion to $400 billion. It’s, as of yet, his jobs-plan for the American people. Instead of Trump’s peaceing the American economy, he has warred it. Consequently, for example, the Koch brothers’ Doug Bandow, who represents his sponsors’ bet against neoconservativsm, headlined on 27 April 2017 “Donald Trump: The ‘Manchurian (Neoconservative) Candidate’?” and he itemized what a terrific Trojan Horse that Trump had turned out to be, for the war-lobby, the ‘neocons’, or, as Dwight Eisenhower had called them (but carefully and only after his Presidency was already over), “the military-industrial complex.” They’re all actually the same people; they serve the same billionaires, all of whom are heavily invested in these war-makers — all against two main targets: first, Russia (which America’s aristocracy hate the most); and, then, Iran (which Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s aristocracies hate the most). Any nation that’s friendly toward those, gets destroyed. Other people (the masses) fight, kill, die, get maimed, and are impoverished, while these few individuals at the very top in the U.S. profit, from those constant invasions, and military occupations — which Americans admire (their nation’s military, America’s invasion-forces) above all else.

On the Bill O’Reilly Show, 4 January 2016, Trump was asked to announce, before even the Presidential primaries, what would cause him as the U.S. President, to bomb Iran, and Trump then was panned everywhere for refusing to answer such an inappropriate question — to announce publicly what his strategy, as the U.S. President, would be in such a matter of foreign affairs (in which type of matter only the President himself should be privy to such information about himself, namely his strategy) — but Trump did reveal there his sympathy for the Sauds, and his extreme hostility toward Iran, a nation which is a bête noire to neocons:

I will say this about Iran. They’re looking to go into Saudi Arabia, they want the oil, they want the money, they want a lot of other things having to do…they took over Yemen, you look over that border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, that is one big border and they’re looking to do a number in Yemen. Frankly, the Saudis don’t survive without us, and at what point do we get involved? And how much will Saudi Arabia pay us to save them?

The Sauds have already answered that question, with their commitment to paying $400 billion, and they’re already using some of this purchased weaponry and training, to conquer Yemen. But who gets that money? It’s not the American people; it is only the stockholders in those American war-making corporations (and allied corporations) who receive the benefits.

And what’s this, from Trump, about “at what point do we get involved” if Saudi Arabia’s tyrants “don’t survive without us”? America is now supposed to be committed to keeping tyrannical hereditary monarchies in control over their countries? When did that start? Certainly not in 1776. Today’s America isn’t like the country, nor the culture, that America’s Founders created, but instead is more like the monarchy that they overthrew. This was supposed to be ananti-imperialist country. Today’s American rulers are traitors, against the nation that America’s Founders had created. These traitors, and their many agents, are sheer psychopaths. The American public are not their citizens, but their subjects — much like the colonists were, who overthrew the British King.

Donald Trump just wants for Europeans to increase military spending (to buy U.S.-made weapons) even more than the U.S. is doing against Russia, and for the Sauds and Israelis also to buy more of these weapons from America’s weapons-firms, to use against Iran and any nation friendly toward it. Meanwhile, America’s own military spending is already at world-record-high levels.

That’s Trump’s economic plan; that’s his jobs-plan; that’s his ‘national security’ plan. That is Trump’s Presidency.

He lied his way into office, just like his predecessors had been doing. This is what ‘democracy’ in America now consists of: lies — some colored “liberal”; some colored “conservative”; but all colored “profitable” (for the ‘right’ people); and another name for that, in foreign affairs, is “neoconservative.”

About Russia, he’s continuing Obama’s policies but even worse; and about Iran, he’s clearly even more of a neocon than was his predecessor. However, as a candidate, he had boldly criticized neoconservatism. Democracy cannot be based on lies, and led by liars.

thesaker

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

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