b here: I do not have any trust in Trump. I do not believe, like English Outsider seems to do, that Trump is fighting the neocons. They have a common program. There is only disagreement about the means, and the rhetoric used to sell the case.
That said – the congruence of methods applied via the Ukrainians and the Zionist is very interesting. It leads me to conclude that both wars are part of one and the same program. But I doubt that Trump has the smarts to run it like this.
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by English Outsider
lifted from a comment
Ceasefire in the Iranian/Israeli war, they say. If so, well done Trump! Hope his odd series of manoeuvres has drawn the teeth of the Washington neocons. Doubt it though. And Trump has failed to stop the atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Plus whatever the proxy regime in Syria is doing by way of atrocity. So a heavily qualified well done at that, even allowing for the ceasefire looking so frail.
The Israelis have ditched themselves and the West along with them. After the Western support for the Gaza atrocities, the US/ UK and Germany in the forefront, the diplomatic and moral credibility of the West, shaky before, is now gone. We Westerners now have to live in a world the majority of which now regards us as pariah states. Oderint dum metuant is the only foreign policy we have left.
That worked when the Western countries were the the predominant and maybe the only serious military powers. Now we're not, all we have left is US nuclear and David Ignatius' "dirty war". When Merz said recently the Israelis are doing the dirty work for us he probably didn't realise he was condemning himself more than them. What some call the "Global South" did and that does for any lingering pretence that we're upholding a "rules based international order".
That reads straight across to the conflict now drawing to its end in Ukraine. The assassinations in the then self-declared republics and the later assassinations in Russia itself are now admitted even in the Western press to have been run out of bases set up by the West for that purpose from 2014 on. Run by "our babies" as they were termed. Those assassinations mirrored by the assassinations in the Middle East, also now openly admitted.
In addition we can now count four attempts to sabotage nuclear power plants – some also admitted to by the Western press and by the Ukrainians – plus the attempts to seize NPP's and use them as bargaining counters. And the use of container drones or pre-placed drones has been seen against both Iran and Russia. Not one-offs from unaccountable terrorist groups but long planned operations conducted by Western countries. This is "dirty war" at its maximum and there is no longer any pretence that the Israelis or the Ukrainians do it all by themselves.
Also long gone is any pretence that the Ukrainians have been running their war over there. Just as with the Iranian war, we've been up to our necks in that war as well. Western countries, mainly the US and UK, micromanaged that war and did so with a merciless disregard for the proxies. The "Summer Offensive", Krinky, the Kursk offensive, to name three of the worst, were operations planned by our General staffs often against the better judgement of the Ukrainian General Staff. Had any NATO General thrown away the lives of NATO troops like that he would, as was remarked at the time, have been cashiered. But it was only the proxies so the Milley/Cavoli/Radakin trio got away with it. The Ukrainian PBI didn't and the way we threw their lives away in suicidal operations that had not the ghost of a chance of success was a war crime in itself.
"Dirty war", incompetent war, sacrificial war, both in the Middle East and in Ukraine, that's the mess Trump's been left with.
There are observers and analysts, respectable analysts at that and not the information warriors who peddle their "analyses" in the degraded Western press, not the Lees or the Kofmans or the ISW, who assert that Trump is merely another face of a predatory and ruthless Western political establishment. Brian Berletic has been foremost amongst those warning us of that. Berletic's got so much right over the years, and that when few others did, that it's maybe over-optimistic to hope he's got that wrong. But I believe it's still possible to argue that Trump, and very many of those supporting Trump, do not see these endless forever wars as the mission. The mission is to rescue the US from the state of near terminal decline it's got itself into. Forever wars are in the way of that.
So it might be legitimate to see Trump as opposed to the powerful war factions in the US rather than as merely another face for those factions. With the midterms looming he doesn't have much choice but to attempt to placate or outmanoeuvre those factions. It doesn't look pretty but maybe he's doing it the only way it can be done.