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Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Sane While Clinton’s Is Belligerent
Some highlights of a recent Donald Trump interview with Reuters:
U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Democrat Hillary Clinton's plan for Syria would "lead to World War Three," because of the potential for conflict with military forces from nuclear-armed Russia.
In an interview focused largely on foreign policy, Trump said defeating Islamic State is a higher priority than persuading Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down,..
Trump questioned how Clinton would negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin after demonizing him; blamed President Barack Obama for a downturn in U.S. relations with the Philippines under its new president, Rodrigo Duterte;…
Trump's foreign policy talk is far more sane than Clinton's and her camp's. It is ludicrous to event think about openly attacking Russian (or Syrian) troops in Syria with an al-Qaeda supporting "no-Fly-Zone". Russia would respond by taking down U.S. planes over Syria. The Russian government would have to do so to uphold its authority internationally as well as at home.
The U.S. could respond by destroying all Russian assets in and around Syria. It has the capabilities. But then what? If I were Putin my next step would be a nuclear test shoot in Siberia – a big one – to make a point and to wake up the rest of the world. I would also provide secret support to any indigenous anti-U.S. movement anywhere. China would support Russia as its first line of self defense.
"What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria," said Trump as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. "You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.
"You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk," he said.
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On Russia, Trump again knocked Clinton's handling of U.S.-Russian relations while secretary of state and said her harsh criticism of Putin raised questions about "how she is going to go back and negotiate with this man who she has made to be so evil," if she wins the presidency.
On the deterioration of ties with the Philippines, Trump aimed his criticism at Obama, saying the president "wants to focus on his golf game" rather than engage with world leaders.
The last two points are important. Trump, despite all his bluster, knows about decency. What is the point of arrogantly scolding negotiation partner who have the power to block agreements you want or need?
Why blame Russia for hacking wide open email servers when no Russian speakers were involved? Why blame Duterte? It is the U.S. that has a long history of violent racism in the Philippines and FBI agents committed false flag "terrorism" is Duterte's home town Davao. Bluster may paper over such history for a moment but it does not change the facts or helps solving problems.
Trump's economic policies would be catastrophic for many people in the U.S. and elsewhere. But Hillary Clinton would put her husband, the man who deregulated Wall Street, back in charge of the economy. What do people expect the results would be?
The points above may be obvious and one might be tempted to just pass them and dig into some nig-nagging of this or that election detail. But the above points as THE most important of any election. The welfare of the people is not decided with some "liberal" concession to this or that niche of the general society. The big issues count the most. Good or evil flow from them. Trumps principle, and I think personal position, is leaning towards peaceful resolution of conflicts. Clinton's preference is clearly, as her history shows, escalation and general belligerence. It is too risky to vote for her.
I’ve written along this line before, apologies for the repeat.
The US has lost power, particularly economic power, and some soft power -not military power- in the last 20 or ++ years. An uncomfortable situation. This has disturbed, and will continue to disrupt, nay shatter, the PTB (Shadow Gvmt., fake duopoly, corporate rule, neo-fascism, slot in yr perso description) control.
The selection of Obama was a simplistic move: he could be ushered in as representing ‘change’, and seemingly ‘win’ an ‘election’ twice, with biz as usual (hopefully) maintaining itself, continuing with a puppet President. (As is organised ‘abroad’, see Poroshenko for ex.)
A crack on the political scene was the Tea Party, within Repub. circles, and it was genuine (if wacky), unlike Occupy Wall Street, or the present Black Lives Matter, which are more or less ‘fake color revol.’ controlled splinters that can be turned on or off. The Sanders candidacy split the Dem. base, and was either a nasty surprise for the neo-libs (they brought it on themselves, read Podesta e-mails) or an ‘allowed’ move to maintain the pretense of real political options.
The Repubs. could not turn up a convincing candidate (anyone with brains would avoid this situation like the plague, and the Rubio, Cruz type personas were just ‘place holders’) so the plan morphed into letting Trump win the nomination and lose the election to the neo-lib-con (HRC) faction. This plan was born out of arrogance, hubris, ‘bubble’ blindness and ignorance, and the supposed iron grip control of the MSM, aka ‘the narrative.’
Trump did much better than expected, went on doing so. CNN at first gave him a 1% chance of winning the nomination, what a laugh. Imho Trump played the MSM masterfully, but that is neither here nor there — the PTB were shocked to see their hold erode, they never imagined losing control of the ‘opposition’ or the discontents, aka the rabble, the compliant sheeples: many different strands: Greens, e.g. Stein, whose vicious tweets against HRC are something to behold, libertarians, BernieBros for ‘social democracy’ and free college, now turned to Cleaning Out the Swamp, law -n- order types, gun toters, Blacks for Trump, and on and on ..unimaginable.
As no reasoned politically argued response was available, the PTB went into attack mode which completely backfired, as could readily be predicted. This is the post-Democracy Age (if it ever existed and the term ‘democracy’ is of course BS.)
Trump appears to confusedly propose a way of dealing with the US loss of economic domination, of power and place on the World Stage: nationalistic retrenchment, “better deals”, OK, plus “a stronger military,” a double-pronged sword, not pacifist, on the face of it.
Makes a kind of hopeful sense, and appeals greatly. HRC (she is just a propped up figure) in a corrupt circuit of PTB-NWO – the top 20% globalist class – has to push the agenda of the MIC, of Wall Street, Big Corps, Silicon Valley, etc. for personal position. Donors who give mega-cash get corp. and pol. favors, etc.
Posted by: Noirette | Oct 27 2016 15:33 utc | 134
My take is similar to rufus magister, namely that Trump (a) talks a lot of nonsense, but unlike a disciplined robot like Marco Rubio, he is eclectic and mixes that nonsense with surprisingly reasonable statements.
Many attacks on Trump almost convince me that he is the best candidate out there. But his own web site is much less convincing, and his personal appearances may be outright scary.
On domestic issues, he more or less follows all bad aspects of GOP model. His trade policy ideas are so unworkable that nothing will come out of them. Not that I disagree that there is too much of “free trade”, but like with any complex system, it is much easier to make it worse that to make it better.
Back to Trump as an architect of new, improved foreign policy. Here the room for improvement is much more clear, because so much of the current policy is to effectively do little shits here and there, and to sell more arms than before, so totally ineffective policy would be a plus. It does not even need to be particularly consistent etc. But “greedy merchant” mentality exhibited by Trump in many quotes, like “take their oil”, “those allies do not pay their dues”, and “why did we give [returned!!!] money to Iran”, make me genuinely worried that he would continue selling weapons to Gulfies and help them bombing Yemen and smuggling weapons to Syria: if they pay us that this is OK. Secondly, he was abjectly pandering to AIPAC. Thirdly, some mad statements about decisive direct intervention and using torture. The only change that I would be sure under Trump presidency is that CIA would be out of the loop, or at least, much less visible than now. And he would probably stop pressing EU to maintain and expand sanctions on Russia. But he would restore sanctions on Iran??
In other words, a mixed bag at best on foreign policy, probably ineffectual nonsense on trade policy and very retrograde changes in domestic policy. To name the few, green light to all possible abortion restriction, if not outlawing the abortion by SCOTUS, advocacy of police brutality, regressive taxation, letting people with chronic diseases die as uninsurable etc. So one has to consider how scary HRC is.
My estimate is that she would be basically Obama with inferior rhetoric. Leaked e-mails show that her decision making is quite deliberative, and the circle of opinions that are included not particularly insular. It is too neocon to my liking, and “Obama as is” happened to be much less appealing than “Obama before elected”. Since there is no consensus to attack the Russians, she would not hammer it through.
Thus one can reasonably hope that HRC will be relatively harmless. And it is not even clear that Russia is harmed by sanctions. They restrict somewhat the access to goods and financial services, but during cheap oil, the top issues for Russia is import substitution, development of domestic production, and curtailing the capital flight. Good access to financial services can be quite detrimental to a country, as we can study on the example of Greece: joining Eurozone vastly improved the access to the financial markets and enabled to borrow much more that prudent. As Russia remains a net exporter by a quite large margin, keeping money at home is much more important than access to credit.
That said, a reasonable hope does not exactly dispel the fears described above. Moreover, it is predicated on the lack of “imperialist/neo-con consensus”, and wobbly results of the elections would help. Thus, everybody here who can vote should vote as she/he damn pleases. If you do not like Clinton, I would suggest Stein, because she actually spells out a coherent and sensible position, and not patches of senses and horror, so this is Trump’s policy and this is Stein’s policy.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Oct 27 2016 16:57 utc | 137
neo con and neo lib warmongers seem to think Russia will back down if they get tough, or could eadily be defeated if it refuses to buckle. Talk about underestimating a potential opponent.
Posted by: Andoheb | Oct 27, 2016 3:05:07 PM | 141
I am so so sure. There is this “fractured fairy tale”: Sir Walter in his travel found a sleeping princess in a crystal coffin, and was informed that she can be rescued from her slumber with a kiss. He observed “Awake, she is just another princess, asleep, she is worth a fortune!” and built a theme park around her coffin.
Russia that backed down and got defeated could be “just another country” and this would spell the end of their theme park.
Unfortunately, it is not economically advantageous for Russia to acquiesce. An economy built predominantly on services, lik UK, or industry, like Germany (or China, by now) does not need to be dominant to enjoy most of the fruits of the labor within. But when a lion share of export is in oil or other primary products, “free market” can syphon most of the potential wealth from the country, with little to be seen inside. Check amazing statistics of Angola, one of large oil producers, with enormous trade surplus and around the bottom in health, education etc. Chevron is doing a good job there in terms of having productive operations, but it is not a good deal for Angolans. Not like in Bangladesh where self-combusting factories at least provide jobs for many millions. not good job, but at least people seem to live better than in Angola (health and mortality indices etc.)
Russians “have been to Angola”, and can choose, so they reject the liberal model (which may be perfectly good for Bangladesh which is “a bit liberal”). It is a bit surprising, not the least to neocons, that Russia could accelerate quality improvements in their arms and the military as much as they did, but the business model of “cold warrior” is to cry wolf, Russians have enough tanks to occupy Europe in few days etc. whether it is true or not.
It is a bit funny in my native Poland. Current government is vocally paranoid about the Russian threat. In the same time, in EU there are significant difficulties in running large budget deficit — and the idea of deficits is not particularly popular. The same government is populist about welfare. So they decided to embark on the program of a huge expansion of the military without spending any extra money. Perhaps they could recreate cavalry, but even that would break the budget, so the plan is to expand the ranks of the military by ca. 50-60% with lightly armed and modestly paid units of volunteer territorial defense, who would meet once a week and practice markmanship. It would be logical to give them all-terrain bicycles to assure mobility. Machine rifles and bicycles would be domestically produced, stipend to participate ca. 130 dollars per month. So you could have 50,000 defenders for something like 100 million dollars a year. According the negativist weekly “Nie”, this program may have serious difficulties, you cannot run things THAT cheap. For example, the defenders must get shooting ranges to practice, and each would cost 2 million dollars, they need armories (or good metal cabinets to keep arms at home, Swiss style?), perhaps vehicles etc. But a single contract to import combat helicopters saves more than 2 billion dollars.
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You can buy a complete suit of cavalry armor for mere 2000 dollars, from the ads I have seen on youtube, but you also need a lance, a sword, a pickaxe, a dagger, a pair of pistols, a good horse and few years of training. But it was perhaps the best looking (and effective in 17-th century) cavalry in the world.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Oct 27 2016 20:00 utc | 143
Hungary, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal. If there are 5 or 6 countries willing to do this [resign from NATO] then that would really weaken the whole alliance structure and bring questions to other countries about just why they are part of NATO in the first place.
Posted by: Julian | Oct 27, 2016 6:31:18 PM | 146
Resigning from NATO is not highly probable. To the contrary, NATO can bolster its ranks with Montenegro, nicely rounding up the balance of forces in Europe. The population is almost as large as in the state of Maine! The malaise has different forms. First, slacking. When 2008 crisis was followed with austerity, military budgets got a series of haircuts. Now those budgets are rebounding, but they are not that impressive even when they reach the required 2% of GDP. Second, in East-Central Europe there was a replacement of old Soviet weapons with much more advanced Western weapons, but they are not really affordable. As a result, the number of troops went quite drastically down. This would be OK, quality may beat quantity, except that Russia is modernizing forces now, and their cost structure is much lower, weapons made in Russia have costs in rubbles. As oil went down, the weapon costs measured in dollars went down as well.
Second, NATO has solidarity clauses etc., but the slacking spirit saps effectiveness of those clauses. NATO does not really operate as NATO, but as “coalitions of the willing”. Some countries were willing to liberate Afghanistan and maintain order there. Another list of countries send contingents to Iraq during Bush war, and another list is engaged now with some forces, quite a bit smaller. Decision process is rather lengthy. I understand that for NATO to engage as NATO you need unanimity, and once it failed because of Belgium. I think that Portugal and Greece never sent forces anywhere, so it does not really matter if they are in NATO or not, which decreases pressures to leave to slack alliance.
Third, Europe has quite variable climate and amenities. Living on a military base in a place like Wiesbaden is close to paradise: mild climate, good shopping, biergarten with nice food and beer, and so on. Orzysz in Poland where a new unity battalion will be stationed is a bit different. The climate is quite a bit harsher, the culture has nothing of note (the place is rather remote in Poland, it was well known mostly for its penalty military unit where one month of service was worse than a year in regular prison). I suspect that service in solidarity battalions will not be a reward for the best soldiers and officers, which explains why these are not solidarity brigades.
Fourth, today I read an interview with NATO spokesperson that was translated into Polish, Pretty terrifying stuff. One solidarity battalion will be in Polish Orzysz, and three in the Baltic States. The Polish-based forces are separated from the Baltics either by the sea, or by newly discovered Suwalki Gap/Corridor, where Russia-friendly Belarus gets very close to Kaliningrad enclave of the Russian Federation (former northern part of East Prussia). So what would happen if the independence of the Baltics was threatened? There will be a resolute response, that’s what will happen!
And what that response would be? Measured. Hm. More concrete: NATO has designated Response Force, not measly four battalions, but 40 thousands of foot and horse (or whatever they have nowadays, tanks, choppers and so on). Of which, hear, hear, 10% are in rapid deployment units! Which can be deployed in a mere week! And what would remain of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after that week? So some forces could invade from Russia, with numeric superiority say, 10 to 1, and decent weapons, while Kaliningrad enclave will be bristling with land-air and land-sea missiles, thus cutting the relief routes until the missiles are decimated by NATO missiles that can overwhelm the defense systems. That may be tricky if Russians will resort to lowly subterfuges like having 10 nice decoys for each real weapon system. Baltic as a route can be out of commission for quite a while, bringing up, once more, the question of Suwalki Gap: for NATO forces to run in, like cockroaches into a cockroach trap, or for Baltic people to run out? I would advocate staying away.
So here we have declared Threat Number One, and the mighty alliance, with Bulgaria or without, cannot do much. Of course, there is an issue of much more weighty economic retaliation, but on the periphery, military options are unappealing. No wonder that Lithuanians did not bother to purchase any tanks. Realistically, the proper policy would be a combination of economic solidarity and preventing the Baltic nationalists, some of whom are rather extreme, from annoying Russia too much. One could even consider such extreme measures like good neighborly relations (I feel that translated into contemporary political English, the latter is thoughtcrime).
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Oct 28 2016 8:00 utc | 151
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