Capriciousness about International Agreements Is an Old US Tradition

Rasa - On Monday, July 16, negotiations between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded with a joint press conference in Helsinki. The comments by the two revealed, as expected, no major deals were reached, but that some fairly vague plans for improved cooperation were agreed upon.

News ID: 438719

Date: 18 July 2018 - 23:43

RNA - There were disagreements, with President Putin faulting Trump for the withdrawal from the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran, and urging Trump to be more decisive in pushing Ukraine toward peace talks with its eastern neighbors. President Trump brought up the issue of election interference, and accepted Putin’s denial. He praised Putin as a strong leader and competitor. He also defended his decision to attend the summit despite calls by US lawmakers to cancel it.

That the summit’s end was met by furious condemnations from both sides of the aisle in Washington is not the subject of this write-up. That both the Republicans and Democrats called the talks “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” and went even farther, not only faulting Trump for his weakness at the summit, but declaring that weakness to be “proof” that Russia has something on him and is threatening to release it, is also not that much important to talk about.

What’s important is that despite the good and the dialogue of the Helsinki Summit, the Warfare State will still continue to find new enemies to justify its endless wars and occupations in the heartlands of the Muslim world.

For instance, on Sunday night, one day before the summit in Helsinki, US airstrikes (upon an earlier order from Trump) killed at least eight civilians in eastern Syria. The airstrikes against villages in the eastern Deir Ezzur province also wounded dozens of others – on the pretext of targeting an area where ISIL is believed to have a presence. The strikes targeted the town of al-Hajeen and nearby villages.

That’s not all. On the same night, Israeli warplanes attacked the al-Nayrab air base near the Syrian city of Aleppo. Media reports citing opposition sources say the strikes targeted warehouses at the site, killing at least 22 people. This is the third Israeli strike in Syria in the past week, and the deadliest in quite some time.

Therefore, debunking the false mainstream narrative about Trump’s “good intentions” and irrespective of the rapprochement rhetoric during the Helsinki press conference, America’s war on Syria and Yemen, and its military support for Saudi Arabia and Israel to invade and attack neighbors will continue apace.

Just like his predecessors, Trump has also sold his soul to the Warfare State in pursuit of position, power and pelf, and no joint press conference with Putin will change that. There is no turning back. Trump didn’t sell arms to Saudi Arabia worth $110 billion only later to rally the GOP troops on Capitol Hill and his base for peace, or some kind of rapprochement with Russia, or an end to Washington’s arrogant Imperial hegemony in the Middle East.

No doubt that the Warfare State and its shills and Zionist-Saudi assigns will continue to find new excuses and “regional threats” to escalate their wars in the Middle East. The signal for that is how Trump backtracked on almost everything Obama had signed with the international community, including the Iran nuclear deal and Paris Agreement, and then the imposition of Muslim travel ban, separation of migrant children from parents, recognizing Jerusalem Al-Quds as the Israeli capital, launching trade war and threatening Iran and the European Union with sanctions.

Make no mistake. It’s not just Trump. The US has always broken its treaties, pacts and promises. The US has long been one and will always be an unreliable international partner, even before Trump pulled out from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Iran nuclear deal. History is dotted with treaties that the US has signed but not ratified, signed and then unsigned, and even refused to sign after pushing everyone else to sign.

Capriciousness about international treaties is an old US tradition. It started with America’s very creation: hundreds of treaties signed with Native American tribes that were either broken or not ratified. No future treaty and agreement between Trump and Putin can break with that tradition.

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