Trump Enrages the War Party
How sweet is that!
Started by Robert M
He’s challenging 70 years of US foreign policy – and they hate him for it!
by Justin Raimondo, July 22, 2016
This
election season is so much fun because Donald Trump keeps enraging all
the right people – and his timing is perfect. Just as the Republican
convention was at its height, with his running mate up there on the podium perorating about the alleged threat of Vladimir Putin, along comes Donald with an interview in the New York Times that has the War Party yelling and screaming bloody murder. The head of NATO; the foreign policy pundits; even some alleged “non-interventionists”
– they’re all aghast that Trump is questioning the supposedly sacred
tripwires that commit us to going to war if Lower Slobbovia invades
Upper Slobbovia.
It started with this article, in which Trump’s views on NATO, the Turkey coup, and other matters were summarized, but it caused such a commotion that the Times published the entire interview,
and it is really a sight to see – good news for us
anti-interventionists, and very bad news for the internationalists, i.e.
the entire foreign policy Establishment.
It starts off with Times reporter
David Sanger trying to bait him into attacking Paul Ryan, who, he says,
“presented a much more traditional Republican, engaged internationalist
view of the world.” Sanger reminds him of his previous comments on
NATO: that our shiftless “allies” need to start paying their fair share
of the costs of the alliance. Sanger adds in Korea and Japan, and ask:
what if they won’t pay? What then?
Trump’s
answer is vintage Trump: “Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to
tell those countries, ‘Congratulations, you will be defending
yourself.’”
He
is challenged by Sanger – who asks most of the questions, by the way –
who avers that our system of alliances is in our interests as well,
because of “trade.”
Does
Sanger imagine Russia going to somehow stop trans-Atlantic commerce? It
isn’t clear, but Trump comes back at him by saying it’s “a mutual
interest” – in which our NATO allies are not doing their part. Stopped
in his tracks – because even President Obama, as well as traditional Republicans like Robert Gates, have complained that our allies aren’t paying – Sanger reverts to the default interventionist argument:
“Even
if they didn’t pay a cent toward it, many have believed that the way
we’ve kept our postwar leadership since World War II has been our
ability to project power around the world. That’s why we got this many
diplomats ...”
Trump’s answer is perfect:
“How
is it helping us? How has it helped us? We have massive trade deficits.
I could see that, if instead of having a trade deficit worldwide of
$800 billion, we had a trade positive of $100 billion, $200 billion,
$800 billion. So how has it helped us?”
Here
Trump has stumbled on the dirty little secret of the post-World War II
security architecture so beloved by our elites: for the privilege of
paying for their defense, and in effect militarily occupying our
allies-cum-satellites, we allow them to flood our markets with
tariff-free goods, while they wall off their markets with trade barriers
and subsidies. As the Old Right economist and prophet of empire Garet
Garrett put it at the dawn of the cold war, it’s a peculiar sort of
empire in which “everything goes out and nothing comes in.”
It’s really quite interesting to see Sanger take on the role of the defender of our role as “the indispensable nation”
– although to be fair, it’s his job to challenge the candidate – and
see how Trump argues in favor of a new policy, one that recognizes the
limits of power. In their discussion of the US presence in South Korea,
Sanger argues that this has prevented war, but Trump avers that it has
only led to the radicalization – and nuclearization – of the North, and
heightened the prospect of a really catastrophic conflict, one in which
the 28,000 American troops stationed in the South would be instantly
incinerated. And Trump goes further, opining that if we hadn’t
intervened and stationed our troops there to begin with, things might’ve
turned out differently:
“Maybe
you would have had a unified Korea. Who knows what would have happened?
In the meantime, what have we done? So we’ve kept peace, but in the
meantime we’ve let North Korea get stronger and stronger and more
nuclear and more nuclear, and you are really saying, ‘Well, how is that a
good thing?’”
The
fact is that the Koreans were getting closer to unity and resolving
their own problems back during the Bush administration, but the neocons
stepped in and scotched what was a hopeful process of reconciliation and
reunification. I wrote about that here and here.
And here Trump lets it rip with a reiteration of his essential point:
“I’m
only saying this. We’re spending money, and if you’re talking about
trade, we’re losing a tremendous amount of money, according to many
stats, $800 billion a year on trade. So we are spending a fortune on
military in order to lose $800 billion. That doesn’t sound like it’s
smart to me. Just so you understand though, totally on the record, this
is not 40 years ago. We are not the same country and the world is not
the same world. Our country owes right now $19 trillion, going to $21
trillion very quickly because of the omnibus budget that was passed,
which is incredible. We don’t have the luxury of doing what we used to
do; we don’t have the luxury, and it is a luxury. We need other people
to reimburse us much more substantially than they are giving right now
because [they] are only paying for a fraction of the cost.”
Sanger,
defeated, can only point to the logical conclusion of Trump’s foreign
policy: “Or to take on the burden themselves.” Trump is ready for him:
“In
a deal, you always have to be prepared to walk. Hillary Clinton has
said, ‘We will never, ever walk.” That’s a wonderful phrase, but
unfortunately, if I were on Saudi Arabia’s side, Germany, Japan, South
Korea and others, I would say, “Oh, they’re never leaving, so what do we
have to pay them for?’ Does that make sense to you, David?”
Sanger
is forced to concede: “It does, but ...” and he falls back on the
far-fetched question of how will we defend the United States – as if
there’s going to be an attack on the continental US. Trump comes back at
him with the rather obvious fact that we can always deploy from the US –
“and it would be a lot less expense.”
Exhausted
by the pushback, Sanger switches to “current events” – the recent coup
attempt in Turkey. Shouldn’t we stick our noses in that mess, too,
because Erdogan is jailing people left and right. Trump says no, and in
quite a remarkable way:
“I
think right now when it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot
of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other
countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see
straight in our own country. We have tremendous problems when you have
policemen being shot in the streets, when you have riots, when you have
Ferguson. When you have Baltimore. When you have all of the things that
are happening in this country – we have other problems, and I think we
have to focus on those problems. When the world looks at how bad the
United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t
think we’re a very good messenger.”
Who
are we to lecture the world when we’re in a mess ourselves? That’s a
viewpoint I’ll bet Sanger never expected to hear – and, frankly, neither
did I. Trump continues to surprise us with his common sense approach
and his willingness to tell the truth, no matter how it grates against
the delicate sensibilities of the political class – a class so buried in
its own conceit that it has lost touch with the reality most ordinary
Americans have no trouble seeing. This is why Trump has come so far, so
fast.
What
really has the War Party bent out of shape is Trump’s refusal to go to
war with Russia over some minor border dispute between Russia and the
Baltic states, which have been palavering about alleged “Russian
aggression” for years now. Sanger channels their palaver by accusing the
Russians of doing all sorts of provocative things – never mentioning NATO’s unprecedented military “exercises” right
on Russia’s border – and positing a scenario where Russia “comes over
the border into Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania, places that Americans
don’t think about all that often, would you come to their immediate
military aid?” When Trump fails to answer with an unequivocal yes,
Sanger presses the point: “They are NATO members, and we are
treaty-obligated.”
This isn’t true. Article 5 of the NATO treaty says if another NATO member is attacked each member “shall take such action as it deems necessary.” Republican opposition to the NATO treaty in 1949, led by “Mr. Republican” Sen. Robert A. Taft,
would have defeated it in the Senate if any more binding language had
been included. Since neither Sanger nor Trump seems to realize what the
NATO treaty actually says, the discussion continues along these lines:
“TRUMP: We have many NATO members that aren’t paying their bills.
SANGER: That’s true, but we are treaty-obligated under NATO, forget the bills part.
TRUMP: You
can’t forget the bills. They have an obligation to make payments. Many
NATO nations are not making payments, are not making what they’re
supposed to make. That’s a big thing. You can’t say forget that.
SANGER: My
point here is, Can the members of NATO, including the new members in
the Baltics, count on the United States to come to their military aid if
they were attacked by Russia? And count on us fulfilling our
obligations –
TRUMP: Have they fulfilled their obligations to us? If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.”
Of the three Baltic states, only Estonia is – just barely – fulfilling its obligation to NATO. And if we subtract the enormous amount of
military and other aid provided to Estonia, their account is in the
red. Lithuania and Latvia are being similarly lavished with American
taxpayer dollars, and they don’t even pretend to be trying to fulfill
their obligations to NATO.
Furthermore,
Estonia in particular has been provoking the Russians due to their
policies toward those Russians who live in Estonia – and have lived
there for generations – by depriving them of the privileges of
citizenship. When Estonia declared independence from the former USSR, it
granted citizenship only to those who had lived there since 1940: this
left hundreds of thousands and their descendants out in the cold, with the threat of deportation hanging over them. To date, nearly 7 percent of
the Estonian population consists of stateless ethnic Russians. They
cannot vote in national elections and encounter systematic
discrimination in housing and employment. It’s ironic that the same
people who denounce Trump for his anti-immigration stance are defending
the policies of a government that has built a de facto wall excluding a
significant portion of the population on purely ethnic grounds.
It’s
truly amazing how the neocons on the right and the Clintonistas on the
left are uniting in outrage against Trump’s refusal to start World War
III with the Russians. Jeffrey Goldberg has declared that “Hillary Clinton is running against Vladimir Putin,” and Mrs. Clinton, for her part, has issued a statement that does everything but accuse Trump of being a Manchurian candidate. Neocon Jamie Kirchick, in his bizarre piece for the Los Angeles Times advocating a military coup against Trump should he be elected, cites the Trump campaign’s successful effort to scotch a plank in
the GOP platform calling for arming the Ukrainian government with
offensive weapons as a reason to oust President Trump. Similarly, the
Clinton statement attacks Trump for the same thing – as if the American
people want to start a military conflict in Europe for the sake of a
corrupt kleptocracy that came to power by overthrowing the elected
President.
We
haven’t seen a smear campaign like this since the frigid winter of the
cold war, when anyone who deviated from the “commies under the bed”
paranoia of that era was denounced as a “subversive” and hauled before a
congressional inquisition. Both wings of the War Party are united in
their hatred for Trump’s “America First” policy of minding our own
business and staying out of foreign wars.
Yet
Trump has turned the tables on the War Party: it is they who are being
put on the defensive by his relentless assault, and his willingness to
say what most normal people are thinking. His disregard for the pieties
of the Beltway, his contempt for the self-proclaimed “experts,” and his
ability to mobilize the American people behind a foreign policy that
puts them first, is the best thing that has happened to this country in
the modern era.
Somewhere, Bob Taft is smiling....
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