The major—perhaps only—redeeming virtue of Donald’s
ersatz campaign platform was his clear intent to seek a rapprochement with
Russia, revamp America’s commitments to NATO and other cold war relics and
to discard “Regime Change” as the core tenant of
foreign policy in favor of an “America First” approach to
domestic security and safety.
Those eminently
sensible notions struck the Deep State’s raison d’etre to the
quick. The fact is, there would be no justification for
the $800
billion defense,
intelligence and foreign aid apparatus on which the very prosperity of the
Imperial City depends in the absence of a large state-based
enemy; or, better still, without an imperial foreign policy
that is implicitly designed to either bully or remove recalcitrant governments
anywhere on the planet—-whether or not they have the intent or capacity to
harm the US homeland.
And that’s not the half of
it. Lurking not far below the surface of the “America First” slogan was
the ghost of Senator Robert Taft’s profoundly correct understanding that
free enterprise prosperity, minimal government and maximum personal
liberty were incompatible with a permanent, fiscally debilitating Warfare
State leviathan designed to function as the world’s boots-&-suits-on-the-ground
hegemon.
Consequently, Taft strongly
opposed a big peacetime navy, a large standing army with forward
stationing and rapid global deployment capacities and the proliferation of
foreign treaties and aid commitments. To the contrary, he
reasoned that in the nuclear age a US-based bomber and missile force of
unquestioned striking capacity would more than adequately protect the
homeland from foreign military aggression, and at a fraction of the cost of
what amounted to permanent imperial legions assigned to patrolling the
better part of the planet.
Today
Taft’s vision of a homeland defense would be more apt than ever. It would
constitute an even cheaper and more efficacious guarantor of the
safety and security of the American people than in his time because there
are now no rival super-powers with the military and economic might of the
Soviet Union. Moreover, missile technology has become so advanced that a
relative handful of submarines and hardened domestic launch sites can
deter any conceivable foreign threat, which is inherently a nuclear one.
That
is, in this day and age there is absolutely no conventional military threat to the safety
and security of citizens in Omaha NE, Spokane WA or Springfield MA.
That’s because there is
no nation on earth that could mount a giant Naval and Air
Armada sufficient to invade the American homeland. Or, if it were foolish
enough to try, could it survive the guided missile blitz that would
send its forces to Davy Jones’ locker long before they crossed the blue
waters which surround the North American continent.
Stated differently, nuclear
deterrence, the great ocean moats and a territorial military defense is all
that it would take to keep America secure in today’s world. There is no need
for Pax Americana, even if it could succeed, which manifestly it has not; and
even if it could be afforded, which clearly it can’t be.
To be sure, the Donald
is too full of egotistical bluster and to0 infatuated with militarist
trappings to go the full Taft-isolationist route, but given a fair chance
his campaign slogans might have shimmied policy in that direction. Clearly
a rapprochement with Russia would have enabled a de-escalation of Washington’s
imperial presence in the middle east and avoided a dangerous build-up of
military tensions and expense in eastern Europe.
In
any event, the Deep State was not taking any chances. Trump’s crude and
bombastic articulation of the America First proposition amounted to a frontal
attack on the intellectual superstructure which keeps the Fifth Fleet in the
Persian Gulf, 35,000 troops
in Germany, 28,000 of America’s
military personal in harm’s way on the Korean peninsula, 11 carrier battle
groups on the oceans, a continued expeditionary force of 100,000 troops,
dependents and support personnel in Japan and military
operations and economic and military aid in more than 100 other nations
around the planet.
We are referring here to the
utterly bogus notion that Washington represents the indispensable super-power
and that American Leadership is always and everywhere the sine quo non of
stability, order and peace all around the planet. Indeed, even though Trump has
been totally throttled by the War Party in his discombobulated and
amateurish pursuit of America First, that has not stopped its leading
spokesman and institutions from lambasting him for allegedly sullying
Washington’s self-assigned “leadership” role in the world.
In that respect there are few
grand poobahs of the War Party who better embody the
arrogant pretensions of the American Imperium than the odious president of
the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Hass. According to the
latter, the trouble with Trump after one year in office is that he still
doesn’t get it; he’s turned his back on the core predicate that animates the
Imperial City:
“Trump
is the first post-WWII president to view the burdens of world leadership as
outweighing the benefits. The United States has changed from the principal
preserver of order to a principal disrupter.”
Exactly what hay wagon does
he think we fell off from?
How did the war on
Vietnam, the First Gulf War to save the Emir of Kuwait’s oil wealth, the futile
17-year occupation of Afghanistan, the destruction of Iraq, the double-cross
of Khadafy after he gave up his nukes, the obliteration of much of civil
society and economic life in Syria, the US-supplied Saudi genocide in
Yemen and the Washington sponsored coup and civil war on Russia’s doorstep in
Ukraine, to name just a few instances of Washington’s putative “world
leadership”, have anything to do with preserving “order” on
the planet?
And exactly how did the
“benefits” of these serial instigations of mayhem outweigh the
“burdens” to America’s taxpayers—to say nothing of the terminal costs to
the dead and maimed citizens in their millions who had the misfortune to
be domiciled in these traumatized lands?
Likewise, have
the refugees who have been flushed out of Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq
and elsewhere in the middle east by Washington’s wars done anything for the
peace and stability of Europe, where Washington’s victims have desperately fled
in their millions?
Yet, there would have been no
long-lasting civil war in Syria without the billions of cash and weapons
supplied to the so-called rebels and the real jihadis by Washington and
its Persian Gulf vassals; nor would Yemen by sinking into famine and cholera
plagues without the American bombs, missiles and drone dispatched by
the Saudi pilots essentially functioning as hired Pentagon mercenaries.
Indeed, the smoldering ruins
of Mosul, Aleppo, Fallujah, Benghazi and lesser places in their thousands
hardly speak to a beneficent hegemony. Yet had Washington never brought its
fleets and occupying forces to the Middle East after 1970 and had the region
not come under the heavy boot of the Central Command and Washington’s
assorted proconsuls and plenipotentiaries, the plague of radical
Sunni jidhadism would never have arisen, nor is it likely that the ancient rift
between the Sunni and Shiite confessions of Islam would have erupted into
today’s lethal conflicts.
It is well to note that
before 1970, no American soldiers were killed in the middle east; after 1990
virtually all US serviceman who were killed or wounded in combat were stationed
in the greater middle east.
It is also worth noting that
the answer to high oil prices is high prices, not the Fifth Fleet. In fact,
global oil production today has doubled since 1973 owing to price, technology
and the worldwide quest for profits by state and private oil companies
alike—-even as constant dollar prices per barrel stand far below
the peaks reached during that decade. There never was any economic imperative
whatsoever to bring the American armada into the region.
So when candidate Trump said
the Iraq invasion was a stupid mistake, that Hillary’s war on Khadafy was
misbegotten, that he would like to cooperate with Putin on pacifying Syria and
that NATO was obsolete, he was actually calling into question the
fundamental predicates of the American Imperium.
And that gets us to the
Russian threat bogeyman, the War Party’s risible demonization of Vladimir
Putin and the cocked-up narrative about the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016
election.
When Trump captured the GOP
nomination against all odds and expectations in the spring of 2016, the War
Party went into hyper-drive. Each of these bogus themes were promoted to a
fare-the-well through the MSM in order to derail his candidacy; and
then, after the fact, to delegitimize and imperil his presidency.
Yet when you examine the thin
gruel behind each of these memes, its is fair to say that the Donald has caused
the Imperial City itself to become: Unhinged.
In
the case of the election meddling meme, there are few more hypocritical
instances of the cat-calling-the-kettle-black than this one. The total US
intelligence community (IC) budget is upwards of $75 billion—-25%
more than Russia’s entire military budget including ships, planes, tanks, ammo,
fuel, rations, operations, maintenance and even spare boots—and a big
part of that giant IC spend goes to, well, meddling, hacking and sabotage
of foreign nations!
The Targeted Access
Operations (TAO) unit inside NSA alone has a multi-billion budget which funds
thousands of in-house and contractor personnel who spend day and night
hacking the communications channels of virtually every government in the world,
friend, foe and enemy alike. The very purpose of these intrusions is
to interfere with the domestic politics and governance of most of the
planet’s population, and in some cases to actually sabotage perfectly
appropriate operations, such as the Natanz centrifuges in Iran which were
destroyed by the Washington’s stuxnet virus.
If you are not caught up in
the War party’s self-serving groupthink, of course, it seems entirely
plausible that in the face of these massive Washington cyber-assaults that
targeted nations might indeed seek to counterattack, as apparently the Russian
security services have done. But for all the beltway bluster, what military or
intelligence secrets have actually been compromised by the Russians?
In fact, none have been
claimed or have been made public in recent years, and you can be sure that
LeakyTown would have made it known had any material national
security breaches actually happened.
So what the whole Russian
meddling meme boils down to is an assertion that Kremlin operatives have been
attacking America in plain sight. That is, they hacked the DNC’s gossip
and intrigue-ridden computers and breached the content of Podesta’s password
protected political skull-duggery. But airing intra-party skull-duggery is
neither a national security matter nor does its disclosure jeopardize
American democracy in the slightest.
For crying out loud,
if political parties and operatives don’t want to be embarrassed owing to
being hacked by commercial blackmailers, political adversaries, just
plain misanthropes or foreign security services, as the case may be, they
can do what every business in America is required to do. That is, purchase
the requisite protective services and software on offer from the world’s $200
billion internet security business.
The very idea that these two
alleged hacks amount to some grand assault on American democracy is just plain
laughable; and it surely does not take a dozen congressional investigations and
the rogue Mueller witch-hunt to preclude any future recurrence. The DNC can
just buy some protection—–or maybe even run a level playing field
during the next presidential primary.
Besides, as the Donald
rightly said, any 400-pound fat guy laying in a bed in Brooklyn could have
figured out “password” to gain entrance to Podesta’s computer; and if Russian
operatives actually penetrated the DNC computers why weren’t they even examined
by the FBI or any other IC agency?
Instead, we have only the
word of the Russophobic proprietor of a cyber-security company
named Crowdstrike. Need we mention that he is in the business of selling
computer security services and software and promoting his apparently dubious
products in a field bustling with first rate competitors?
In that context, the $50k of
pre-election Facebook ads allegedly purchased by a mythical Russian troll farm
are not even a bad joke. That is, not in an election that saw $6 billion
of registered campaign expenditures and multiples of that by independent
committees and the anti-Trump media.
At
the end of the day, we are supposed to believe that a country with a puny $1.3 trillion GDP, which is
just 7% of
the US’ $19.5
trillion GDP, and which consists largely of aged
hydrocarbon provinces, endless wheat fields, modest industrial capacities and a
stagnant Vodka-favoring workforce, is actually a threat to America’s
security.
And we are also supposed
to fear the military capacity of a country that has no blue water Navy to speak
of and no conventional air-lift and air-attack capacity which could remotely
threaten the New Jersey shores, and that spends less in a full year than the
Pentagon consumes every 35 days.
Oh, yes, and this midget
military is run with an apparent iron-hand by the Cool Hand Luke of
the modern world. Putin may well jail his adversaries in ways that offend
western sensibilities, but the last thing he is going to do is commit Russian
national suicide by launching a nuclear attack on America.
Yet that’s all he’s got: To
wit, a non-existent military threat and a justifiable desire to protect the
Russian-speaking populations on his doorstep in Crimea and the Donbas from
the depredations of the Civil War that was instigated on the streets of Kiev in
February 2014 by the advance guards–the CIA, NED, State Department and
Washington funded NGOs—of the American Imperium.
But here’s the thing. The
Dems were caught so flat-footed and befuddled by the Donald’s “impossible”
win that they have succumbed to the rank anti-Russian propaganda that was
fed to them by Brennan, Clapper, Comey and the rest of the Obama inner circle
on the eve and aftermath of the November 8th election.
They have now turned this
preposterous malarkey into a fevered witch-hunt that has made them—and most
especially the MSNBC-following progressive Left—-handmaidens of the Warfare
State, even as the baseless claim that Trump colluded with the Russians paralyzes
the White House and blocks any movement at all toward the America First promise
that flickered briefly during the Donald’s run for the Oval Office.
Needless to say, we know how
this movie will end. The Donald is destined to be shown the way by his GOP
Capitol Hill “friends” to his last ride on the Richard Nixon Memorial
Helicopter. That is, when the polls indicate a Republican mid-term
election massacre is in the making.
And that will leave the
neocon War Party firmly in control of the GOP and the hysterical Russophobes on
top of what was once the Peace Party in post-Vietnam America.
Throughout the length and
breadth of the Imperial City, the military-industrial-intelligence-think
tank-War Party complex will be laughing all the way to the bank.
It is American democracy and
the disenfranchised citizens of Flyover American that will be hung out to
dry. Again.
Reprinted
with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
Former
Congressman David A. Stockman was Reagan’s OMB director, which he wrote about
in his best-selling book, The Triumph of Politics. His latest book
is The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in
America. He’s the editor and publisher of the new David Stockman’s
Contra Corner. He was an original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads
LRC the first thing every morning.
Copyright © 2018 David Stockman
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article by David Stockman: Unhinged