By Patrick Buchanan
April 28, 2017 Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46955.htm
Has President Donald
Trump outsourced foreign policy to the generals?
So it would seem.
Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S.
intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS.
He spoke of getting out
and staying out of the misbegotten Middle East wars into which Presidents Bush
II and Obama had plunged the country.
President Trump’s
seeming renunciation of an anti-interventionist foreign policy is the great
surprise of the first 100 days, and the most ominous. For any new war could
vitiate the Trump mandate and consume his presidency.
Trump no longer calls
NATO "obsolete," but moves U.S. troops toward Russia in the Baltic
and eastern Balkans. Rex Tillerson, holder of Russia’s Order of Friendship, now
warns that the U.S. will not lift sanctions on Russia until she gets out of
Ukraine.
If Tillerson is not
bluffing, that would rule out any rapprochement in the Trump presidency. For
neither Putin, nor any successor, could surrender Crimea and survive.
What happened to the
Trump of 2016?
When did Kiev’s claim to
Crimea become more crucial to us than a cooperative relationship with a
nuclear-armed Russia? In 1991, Bush I and Secretary of State James Baker
thought the very idea of Ukraine’s independence was the product of a
"suicidal nationalism."
Where do we think this
demonization of Putin and ostracism of Russia is going to lead?
To get Xi Jinping to
help with our Pyongyang problem, Trump has dropped all talk of befriending
Taiwan, backed off Tillerson’s warning to Beijing to vacate its fortified reefs
in the South China Sea, and held out promises of major concessions to Beijing
in future trade deals.
"I like (Xi
Jinping) and I believe he likes me a lot," Trump said this week. One
recalls FDR admonishing Churchill, "I think I can personally handle Stalin
better than … your Foreign Office … Stalin hates the guts of all your people.
He thinks he likes me better."
FDR did not live to see
what a fool Stalin had made of him.
Among the achievements
celebrated in Trump’s first 100 days are the 59 cruise missiles launched at the
Syrian airfield from which the gas attack on civilians allegedly came, and the
dropping of the 22,000-pound MOAB bomb in Afghanistan.
But what did these
bombings accomplish?
The War Party seems
again ascendant. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are happy campers. In Afghanistan,
the U.S. commander is calling for thousands more U.S. troops to assist the
8,500 still there, to stabilize an Afghan regime and army that is steadily
losing ground to the Taliban.
Iran is back on the
front burner. While Tillerson concedes that Tehran is in compliance with the
2015 nuclear deal, Trump says it is violating "the spirit of the
agreement."
How so? Says Tillerson,
Iran is "destabilizing" the region, and threatening U.S. interests in
Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon.
But Iran is an ally of
Syria and was invited in to help the U.N.-recognized government put down an
insurrection that contains elements of al-Qaida and ISIS. It is we, the
Turks, Saudis and Gulf Arabs who have been backing the rebels seeking to
overthrow the regime.
In Yemen, Houthi rebels
overthrew and expelled a Saudi satrap. The bombing, blockading and intervention
with troops is being done by Saudi and Sunni Arabs, assisted by the U.S. Navy
and Air Force.
It is we and the Saudis
who are talking of closing the Yemeni port of Hodeida, which could bring on
widespread starvation.
It was not Iran, but the
U.S. that invaded Iraq, overthrew the Baghdad regime and occupied the country.
It was not Iran that overthrew Col. Gadhafi and created the current disaster in
Libya.
Monday, the USS Mahan
fired a flare to warn off an Iranian patrol boat, 1,000 meters away.
Supposedly, this was a provocation. But Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif
had a point when he tweeted:
"Breaking: Our Navy
operates in – yes, correct – the Persian Gulf, not the Gulf of Mexico. Question
is what US Navy doing 7,500 miles from home."
Who is behind the
seeming conversion of Trump to hawk?
The generals, Bibi
Netanyahu and the neocons, Congressional hawks with Cold War mindsets, the Saudi
royal family and the Gulf Arabs – they are winning the battle for the
president’s mind.
And their agenda for
America?
We are to recognize that
our true enemy in the Mideast is not al-Qaida or ISIS, but Shiite Iran and
Hezbollah, Assad’s Syria and his patron, Putin. And until Hezbollah is
eviscerated, Assad is gone, and Iran is smashed the way we did Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Yemen, the flowering of Middle East democracy that we all seek cannot
truly begin.
But before President
Trump proceeds along the path laid out for him by his generals, brave and
patriotic men that they are, he should discover if any of them opposed any of
the idiotic wars of the last 15 years, beginning with that greatest of
strategic blunders – George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
