President
Donald Trump’s recent statement on the Jamal
Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince might well be considered a
metaphor for his foreign policy. Several commentators have suggested that the
text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult
supervision, similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his
tweeting only longer. That might be the case, but it would not be wise to dismiss the document as merely
frivolous or misguided as it does in reality express the kind of thinking that
has produced a foreign policy that seems to drift randomly to no real end, a
kind of leaderless creative destruction of the United States as a world power.
Lord
Palmerston, Prime Minister of Britain in the mid nineteenth century, famously
said that “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have
permanent interests.”The United States currently has neither real friends nor
any clearly defined interests. It is, however, infested with parasites that have
convinced an at-drift America that their causes are identical to the interests
of the United States. Leading the charge to reduce the U.S. to “bitch” status,
as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has artfully put it, are Israel and Saudi
Arabia, but there are many other countries, alliances and advocacy groups that
have learned how to subvert and direct the “leader of the free world.”
Trump’s
memo on the Saudis begins with the headline “The world is a very dangerous
place!” Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House
since 2000 is largely to blame. It is difficult to find a part of the world
where an actual American interest is being served by Washington’s foreign and
global security policies. Indeed, a national security policy that sees
competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear
war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once
again. The fact that no one is the media or in political circles is even
talking about that terrible danger suggests that war has again become
mainstreamed, tacitly benefiting from bipartisan acceptance of it as a viable
foreign policy tool by the media, in the U.S. Congress and also in the White
House.
The part
of the world where American meddling coupled with ignorance has produced the
worst result is inevitably the Middle East. Washington has been led by the nose
by Israel and Saudi Arabia, currently working in sync, to have the United
States destroy Iran even though the Iranians represent no threat whatsoever to
Americans or any serious U.S. interests. The wildly skewed view of what
is taking place in that region is reflected in Trump’s memo in the first paragraph,
which reads:
“The country of Iran, as an example, is responsible for a bloody
proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq’s fragile
attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping
up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria (who has killed millions of his own
citizens), and much more. Likewise, the Iranians have killed many Americans and
other innocent people throughout the Middle East. Iran states openly, and with
great force, ‘Death to America!’ and ‘Death to Israel!’ Iran is considered ‘the
world’s leading sponsor of terror.’”
Almost
all of that is either patently untrue or grossly exaggerated, meaning that
Trump’s profoundly ignorant statement is remarkable for the number of lies that
it incorporates into 631 words which are wrapped around a central premise that
the United States will always do whatever it wants wherever it wants just
because it can. The war being waged by the Saudis against Yemen, which reportedly has killed as many as 80,000 children,
is not a proxy struggle against Iran as Trump prefers to think. It is naked
aggression bordering on genocide that is enabled by the United States under
completely false pretenses. Iran did not start the war and plays almost no role
in it apart from serving as a Saudi and Emirati excuse to justify the fighting.
Other lies include that Bashar al-Assad of Syria has killed millions of his own
citizens and that Saudi Arabia is fighting terrorism. Quite the contrary is
true as the Saudis have been a major source of Islamic terrorism. And as for
Iran being the “world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” that honor currently
belongs to the U.S., Israel and the Saudis.
The
core of Trump’s thinking about Khashoggi and the Saudis comes down to Riyadh’s
willingness to buy weapons to benefit America’s defense contractors and this
one sentence: “The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi
Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in
the region.” Yes, once again it is Israel pulling Trump’s strings, with Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leading the charge to give Crown Prince Mohammad
bin Salman a pass on the gruesome murder of a legal resident of the United
States who, once upon a time, might have actually had the U.S. government on
his side.
The
reckless calibrations employed to set American policies in other parts of the
world are also playing out badly. Russia has been hounded relentlessly since
the 2016 election, wasting the opportunity to establish a modus vivendi that
Trump appeared to be offering in his campaign. Russian and American soldiers
confront each other in Syria, where the U.S. has absolutely no real interests
beyond supporting feckless Israel and Saudi Arabia in an unnecessary armed
conflict that has already been lost. There is now talk of war coming from both
Moscow and Washington while NATO in the middle has turned aggressive in an
attempt to justify its existence. The bilateral relationship between the U.S.
and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War while the
expansion of NATO up to Russia’s doorstep has threatened the Kremlin’s vital
interests without advancing any interest of the United States.
Afghanistan
has become the longest war in U.S. history with no end in sight and China too
has seen what began as a dispute over trade turned into something more
vitriolic, a military rivalry over the South China Sea that could explode. And
North Korea? A love fest between two leaders that is devoid of content.
One might also add Venezuela to the list, with the U.S. initiating
sanctions over the state of the country’s internal politics and even
considering, according to some in the media, a military
intervention.
All of
the White House’s actions have one thing in common and that is that they do not
benefit Americans in any way unless one works for a weapons manufacturer, and
that is not even taking into consideration the dead soldiers and civilians and
the massive debt that has been incurred to intervene all over the world. One
might also add that most of America’s interventions are built on deliberate
lies by the government and its associated media, intended to increase tension
and create a casus belli where none exists.
So what is to be done as it often seems
that the best thing Trump has going for him is that he is not Hillary Clinton?
First of all, a comprehensive rethink of what the real interests of the United
States are in the world arena is past due. America is less safe now than it was
in 2001 as it continues to make enemies with its blundering everywhere it goes.
There are now four times as many designated
terrorists as there were in 2001, active in 70 countries. One would quite
plausibly soon arrive at George Washington’s dictum in his Farewell Address, counseling his
countrymen to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate
peace and harmony with all.” And Washington might have somehow foreseen the
poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that “…a
passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.
Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary
common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing
into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in
the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or
justification.”
George Washington or any of the other
Founders would be appalled to see an America with 800 military bases overseas,
allegedly for self-defense. The transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the
military industrial complex and related entities like Wall Street has been
catastrophic. The United States does not need to protect Israel and Saudi
Arabia, two countries that are armed to the teeth and well able to defend
themselves. Nor does it have to be in Syria and Afghanistan. And, by the way,
Russia is no longer the Soviet Union and NATO should be abolished.
If the United States were to withdraw
its military from the Middle East and the rest of Asia tomorrow, it would be to
nearly everyone’s benefit. If the armed forces were to be subsequently reduced
to a level sufficient to defend the United States it would put money back in
the pockets of Americans and end the continuous fearmongering through surfacing
of “threats” by career militarists justifying the bloated budgets.
Will
that produce the peaceable kingdom? Probably not, but there are signs that some
in powerful positions are beginning to see the light. Senator Rand Paul’s courageous decision to place a “hold”
on aid to Israel is long overdue as Israel is a liability to the United States
and is also legally ineligible for aid due to its undeclared nuclear arsenal
and its unwillingness to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The
hysterical reactions of American Jews and Israel suggest that any redirection
of U.S. Middle East policy will produce a hostile reaction from the
Establishment, but even small steps in the right direction could initiate a
gradual process of turning the United States into a more normal country in its
relationships with the rest of the world rather than a universal predator and
bully.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is
Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax
deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157,
Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.