July 28, 2017, "Trump’s 'America First' vs. McCain’s 'America Last'," Spengler, David P. Goldman, PJ Media
"Not the supposed protectionist
Donald Trump, but the “free trade” wing of the Republican Party has
taken the United States into a trade war that it can only lose. New
sanctions against Russia passed by the House and Senate last week force
Europe into a de facto alliance with Russia against the United States,
and by extension with China as well. It is the dumbest and most
self-destructive act of economic self-harm since the United States
de-linked the dollar from gold on August 15, 1971, and it will have
devastating consequences.
The charade in the House and Senate may
embarrass Trump, but it also poses a threat to European energy supplies
as well as an extraterritorial intrusion into European governance.
Berlin, Paris and Rome will conspire with Moscow to circumvent the
sanctions while attacking the United States at the World Trade
Organization and other international fora.
Sen.
John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), and their counterparts
in the House of Representatives allowed their dudgeon against a
sometimes provocative president to overwhelm their sense of
self-preservation. The sanctions will hurt Russia, but not nearly as
much as they will hurt the United States over the long term. The White
House envisioned sanctions as a bargaining chip,
to be used to persuade Moscow to behave in the Ukraine and to limit the
ambitions of its Iranian ally of convenience. In their present form,
however, the president will have no authority to remove sanctions
imposed by Congress. That turns a feint into a threat. Wars have been
started over less.
The
Democrats along with the McCain Republicans, it will be remembered,
accused Trump of undermining the Atlantic Alliance, of isolating the
United States, and of handing a diplomatic victory to Russia. Not Trump,
but his detractors have given Moscow a degree of leverage over Western
Europe to which it has not aspired since the height of the Cold War in
1983, when Soviet premier Yuri Andropov considered a pre-emptive Russian
attack in response to Western plans to deploy medium-range missiles in
Germany.
Supposedly it was
Trump who ignored the exigencies of international relations in favor of
domestic political theater. Yet it is the Establishment wing of the
Republican Party and its Democratic allies who combined to embarrass the
president, without a moment’s consideration of the consequences
of
their actions. Among Washington’s elite, Trump Derangement Syndrome has
nothing to do with ideology. It is about jobs and patronage. This is not
hypocrisy. It is chutzpah. Trump humiliated the Democrats and the Establishment rump of the Republican Party last November. The losers now face the prospect of permanent exile from political life. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement July 25, historian Edward Luttwak predicted a Trump dynasty lasting sixteen years, in which Ivanka Trump Kushner would succeed her father. “No wonder that leading Democrats and non-Trumpers continue to act hysterically even eight months after the election. President Trump’s plan threatens to exclude them all from office until long past their retirement age,” Luttwak wrote.
The hopes
of high office of the defeated Establishment can be realized only by
stifling the Trump administration in its cradle.
That is the motivation behind the Black Legend of Russian collusion that continues to occupy the waking hours of the American media while putting most Americans to sleep. As Sen. McCain said after the Senate vote July 27, the sanctions “respond to Russia’s attack on American democracy….We will not tolerate attacks on our democracy. That’s what this bill is all about. We must take our own side in this fight, not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans.”
That is the motivation behind the Black Legend of Russian collusion that continues to occupy the waking hours of the American media while putting most Americans to sleep. As Sen. McCain said after the Senate vote July 27, the sanctions “respond to Russia’s attack on American democracy….We will not tolerate attacks on our democracy. That’s what this bill is all about. We must take our own side in this fight, not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans.”
The
notion that Russian machinations explain Trump’s electoral victory is
fanciful, although Russia’s intelligence services no doubt sought
targets of opportunity in the American electoral scramble. McCain’s
outrage over the violation of America’s political virginity, though,
rings rather hollow. Some of his friends, for example National Endowment
for Democracy President Carl Gershman, publicly advocate regime change in Moscow, a topic that has been a matter of on-and-off public debate
in Washington for years. A 2016 Defense Intelligence Agency document
reported that Russia believes that the United States favors regime change.
The U.S. supported the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, which threatened
Russia’s access to its Crimean warm-water port. America’s capacity to
influence political events in and around Russia is vastly greater than
Russia’s.
After the fall of
Communism, the dominant strain of American thinking held that the march
of liberal democracy was unstoppable, and that it would transform the
Muslim world as well as Moscow. I played a bit part in this project; in
1992, then Ambassador to Moscow Robert Strauss arranged for me to advise
President Boris Yeltsin’s finance minister, Yegor Gaidar. Strauss did
so at the behest of private equity investor Theodore Forstmann, who had
funded a proposed study of the Russian economy. As it turned out I had
little advice to give to the Yeltsin government, which was acting as a
family office for various Russian oligarchs who divided up the Russian
economy. The free-for-all of theft left the economy in ruins. One needed
a large shopping bag full of currency to do ordinary shopping. A few
hundred meters from the Kremlin, old people sold used clothing to buy
food, and World War II veterans wore their medals to beg in the streets.
No-one who had first-hand experience with Russia’s brief experience
with democracy was surprised at Vladimir Putin’s subsequent popularity.
The oligarchs continued to steal, but in a measured and organized
fashion that allows ordinary life to proceed without catastrophic
disruption. Putin rules Russia by means I sometimes find abhorrent, but
his is a land where people don't talk of Ivan the Reasonable.
An
ideological residue of the utopian attitudes of the 1990s colors the
Republican Establishment’s attitude towards Trump, but it does not
really inform them. This is not about the U.S. elections, or Putin's
nastiness, or freedom and democracy. It's about privilege and the
pecking order in the Washington swamp. McCain and Schumer want to
destroy Trump because a successful Trump administration would destroy
them, and destroy the reputation of an entire generation of diplomats,
intelligence officers, academics
and military officers who achieved rank
by promoting the export of democracy, nation building,
counterinsurgency, and so forth.
The
trouble is that the Schumer-McCain combination has taken aim at Russia
but inflicted collateral damage on the Europeans. The sanctions
legislation in its present form allows the United States to impose heavy
fines on European companies involved in energy infrastructure with
Russia, and threatens several major projects now in progress, including
the Nord Stream II natural gas pipeline, the Baltic Liquefied Natural
Gas Project, and the Russia-Turkey Blue Stream pipeline, among others.
EC Commission chief Klaus Juncker warned July 27, “The U.S. bill could
have unintended unilateral effects that impact the EU's energy security
interests. If our concerns are not taken into account sufficiently, we
stand ready to act appropriately within a matter of days. 'America
First' cannot mean that Europe's interests come last.”
The
Trump administration has annoyed America’s trading partners previously
by complaining about the exchange rate of the euro and about Germany’s
trade surplus with the U.S. But those were cosmetic issues compared to
sanctions which the Europeans see as a threat to essential economic
interests. The French and German foreign ministries denounced the
sanctions as a “violation of international law” and national governments
as well as the European Commission are preparing as yet unspecified
countermeasures.
Europeans
suspect that the U.S. wants to sabotage Russian natural gas deliveries
to Europe and replace them with LNG exports from the United States.
Neither the Trump administration nor its opponents in Congress entertain
such a Machiavellian agenda. On the contrary, the Trump administration
initially supported sanctions against Russia as a bargaining chip, to be
played to extract concessions from Moscow over the Ukraine, Iran and
other matters of contention. The House and Senate bills in their present
form effectively tie the president’s hands, turning what was a
bargaining chip into a declaration of trade war. This would not be the
first war to begin when what was intended as a feint was interpreted
after the fact as a threat.
Not
Trump, but his domestic opponents have set in motion an unprecedented
disturbance in Atlantic relations, and effectively put Berlin, Paris and
Rome in the same camp with Moscow in opposing American policy. European
governments are already consulting with Moscow about mechanisms to get
around the sanctions. Russia has responded by expelling a large number
of diplomats from the embassy in Moscow, but that is merely a symbolic
gesture. There are more disagreeable measures that Moscow might take,
such as providing advanced weapons to Iran, giving close air support to
Iranian-controlled militias in Syria, and increasing military
cooperation with China. Russia and China, as I have reported
elsewhere, already back Iran’s international brigades of Shi’ites as a
counter-toxin to Sunni jihadists shaken loose by America’s blunders in
Iraq.
America won the Cold War by driving a wedge between Russia and China,
and by persuading a frightened Western Europe to point medium-range
missiles at the Russian heartland. Russia sought to compensate for its
economic inefficiency by turning Europe into an economic colony, and the
most dangerous operations of the Cold War were undertaken to prevent
this. Now, for narrow political reasons, Trump’s enemies propose to undo the whole structure of relationships that won the Cold War and drive Europe into the arms of the Russians and Chinese. I do not believe for a
moment that McCain and Schumer have a clue about this—they are like the
“sleepwalkers” in Christopher Clark’s brilliant history of the outbreak
of the First World War—but if I were a Russian operative, I would try
to invent someone like John McCain, if McCain did not already exist."
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Added:
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Added:
7/22/17, "Helping the Victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome"
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