RNA - Trump’s administration released the National Security Strategy on Monday. He attacked other superpowers, saying, "China and Russia challenge American power, influence and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
Trump also repeated his allegations against Iran and North Korea, claiming that they are trying to “destabilize regions, threaten Americans and our allies, and brutalize their own people.” This is while both the regions have been suffering from decades of intrusive and aggressive US strategy, that has led to unprecedented phenomena such as ISIL in Iraq and Syria – among others. On that note, let’s play the game:
A- The US Military Industrial Complex is the single biggest threat to the world. Both Republican and Democratic parties unquestioningly support it. If you look back in history, you will have all the proof you need that the warmongers of America are not a stabilizing force in the world, but a destabilizing one. As others have noted, empires collapse from within. While they continue expanding outward and investing in their reach of hegemony, the needs of their citizens are overlooked and neglected.
B- What the Trump White House released on Monday is business as usual. When the warmongers touch on foreign and military policy, in every case they tacitly assume that the US has the right to antagonize, sanction, bomb, invade and conquer any country it chooses. The discussion on the Capitol Hill deals with the expediency of such military actions; not whether they are legally or morally justifiable.
C- While they create enemies to fight, real man-made dangers like global warming and climate change are growing, threatening to wipe all of humanity off the face of the Earth. In other words, US politicians have no intention to make a wise decision to ratchet back all the war mongering, move away from a war-based economy, and try another approach to how they interact with the rest of the world before it all ends in more and more resource wars.
D- After many years of doing its damnedest, on one side of the Greater Middle East, war-party Washington has somehow overseen the rise of the dominant narco-state on the planet in Afghanistan with monopoly control over 80–90 percent of the global opium and heroin supply. On the other side of the region, it has been complicit in the creation of the first terrorist caliphate in history, a post–Al-Qaeda triumph of extreme jihadism in the name of ISIL.
E- Little wonder the denunciations of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are blistering, that the assorted pundits and talking heads in Washington are excoriating, that the fake fear and hysteria over that heroin and America’s favorite terrorists crossing Western borders are somewhere in the stratosphere. It just doesn’t take a strategic mind to realize that this avalanche of disaster was no happenstance but planned by that same grim power with its hand on the trigger these last sixteen years, in part to harm the interests of the Muslim world. Guess what? The world would never hear the end of it - Trump’s new National Security Strategy makes that clear.
All in all, we are going to experience a new performance here when it comes to not connecting the dots or feeling the need to assign responsibility or accountability for what has happened to the world in these 16 years. Per usual, the Trump White House will continue to show themselves as victims, not destabilizers, of the world.
Add to this spectacle the fact that the Trump administration seems to be in the grips of a similar escalatory fever and on a somewhat similar schedule, even if ahead of his predecessors when it comes to loosing air power over post-ISIL Syria and Yemen, or taking on US nemeses Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Obviously, they are in the dark; they don’t have International Law on their side.
847/940