(In response to question from Sputnik about Washington’s intention to leave the Open Skies Treaty)

The ABM Treaty and the CFE Treaty were already dead and the Trump Administration seems to be determined to kill off every remaining Cold War arms control Treaty. The Open Skies is just the latest. Russia will, of course, be blamed: it’s been “cheating“.

What’s driving this? I suspect it’s the post Cold War triumphalism that we have seen in every previous administration: We won, we’re Number One, suck it up Russia, you’re unimportant. The difference is that the Trump Administration makes no attempt to sugar-coat.

The irony of course is that the whole thing was President Eisenhower’s idea in the first place.

More of Washington’s short-term gain for long-term pain.

Answer to question from Sputnik

Three pretty likely consequences: Washington has begun its last foreign war and Trump’s future is in Tehran’s hands. Iran’s reaction will completely surprise Washington for the simple reason that smart people are smarter than stupid arrogant ignorant people.

(First published Strategic Culture Foundation

Let us contemplate what John Bolton, quondam National Security Advisor to US President Trump, had in mind for “restoring democracy” to Venezuela. We are familiar with the first phase: 1) accusations, 2) threats, 3) stunts, 4) “world community” recognition, 5) appeals for coup, 6) sanctions.

1) You know, Venezuela is one of the three countries I call the troika of tyranny. It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela. It’d be good for the people of Venezuela. It’d be good for the people of the United States. (January 2019)

2) All options are on the table. (January 2019)

3) After diverting aid needed badly by Venezuelans to Cuba last week (100 tons), and giving away billions of the Venezuelan people’s wealth to Cuba – now Maduro seeks aid from Cuba and China. All while denying the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis and rejecting aid at the border. (February 2019)

4) National Security Adviser John Bolton said on April 30, 2019 that what’s happening “is clearly not a coup” because the U.S. and many other countries recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president. (April 2019)

5) The FANB [Venezuelan military] must protect the Constitution and the Venezuelan people. It should stand by the National Assembly and the legitimate institutions against the usurpation of democracy. The United States stands with the people of Venezuela. (April 2019)

6) Bolton said the U.S. is “sending a signal to third parties that want to do business with the Maduro regime: proceed with extreme caution. There is no need to risk your business interests with the United States for the purposes of profiting from a corrupt and dying regime.” (August 2019)

Despite “corrupt and dying”, Maduro was still in power, still supported by the population, the “burning aid” stunt failed (when you’ve lost even the NYT…) and the Venezuelan military remains loyal. (Irony alert! Washington’s sanctions on Venezuela increased Russian oil exports to the USA and Europe!)

What would Bolton have wanted to do next? (Easy speculation – we’ve seen it before.) A “coalition of the willing” (no matter how artificial), US aircraft attack key targets with “precision” “surgical” strikes; (more strikes added until, à la Serbia, bombing random bridges 200 kilometres away from the supposed target). The bombing and destruction would eventually force Maduro to leave. Enter the “liberators”, the “legitimate National Assembly” takes power, the “world community” recognises “Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president”. With “democracy restored” and “freedom returned” the next stage: “American oil companies really invest[ing] in and produce[ing] the oil capabilities in Venezuela“, privatisation and IMF austerity. Happiness all round: “good for the people of Venezuela… good for the people of the United States”. Is Maduro still resisting in the hills and jungles? A surge or two will take care of that; there’s plenty of light at the end of the tunnel and the obedient corporate media will bleat that Maduro will soon be gone: March, April, May, May again, August, September (The Latin America version of the Assad Must Go Curse.)

That would have been Venezuela’s fate with Bolton fully turned on. But Bolton has been turned off. Maduro is still in Caracas and the story has tip-toed off the front pages. Although Hollywood leaps to obey its Master’s Voice and Jack Ryan will save us from a nuclear-armed Venezuela.

The war party is accustomed to blame its quagmires on someone else. Iraq was a success until Obama spoiled it:

because Hillary Clinton failed to renegotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed some American combat troops to remain in Iraq and secure the hard-fought gains the American soldier had won by 2009, [the Islamic State] was able to be literally conjured up out of the desert.

Afghanistan likewise: Obama’s Failed Legacy in Afghanistan. Libya is far down the memory hole: an MSNBC special on Libya as the gateway of migrants to Europe never uses the word “NATO”.

To tell the story of Libya’s escalating migration crisis, one must weave together the threads of instability left behind by a toppled dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, and the power vacuum filled by rivaling factions vying to take his place.

But Qaddafi didn’t just topple in a high wind, earthquake or other random phenomenon: NATO decided to topple him and did so – “We came, we saw, he died” cackled one of the architects. But MSNBC wants us to believe that the destruction was an inexplicable random event that nobody could have foreseen. And so, helped by the corporate news media’s goodthink, the war party slithers away from responsibility: Qaddafi “toppled”, we have a problem; nothing to do with us, or NATO, or Hillary. Bad stuff just happens. “The story of how Kosovo hosted an illegal market in human organs began to unfold today in a district court in the capital, Pristina” is so distant in time that only fringe websites talk about it. As to the Ukrainian disaster, news is starting to leak through the complacency membrane: Canadian officials honour Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, angering Jewish groups, Biden involvement, blowback.

With their excuses and deniability clutched in their hands, knowing the complaisant news media will back them up (CNN: Biden and Ukraine is a conspiracy theory), the war party rolls along. The wars start well, given the US military’s immense destructive power, and then bog down: US war-fighting doctrine is hard-wired for failure. Bolton’s Venezuela adventure, had it advanced to the bombing phase, would also have been pimped as a “success” – Guaidó inauguration, selected interviews, toppling of statues and the rest of the package. But Maduro and his supporters would not have given up and there’d be years of patrolling, “precision” bombing (eventually indistinguishable from “carpet bombing” – see Raqqa), door kicking, IEDs, ambushes, training failures. Iraq and Afghanistan again. They, in their turn, having repeated Vietnam.

But Bolton’s Excellent Adventure never got to that point because Trump would not sign off on the bombing stage and so his scheme failed in plain sight. Let us remember what Trump said while he was campaigning: everyone would be better off had President Bush taken a day at the beach rather than invade Iraq; the “six trillion dollars” spent in the Middle East would have been better spent on infrastructure in the USA; NATO is obsolete and the USA pays a disproportionate share; it would better to get along with Russia than not. Bolton, on the other hand, was all in favour of the Iraq war, believed one more war in the Middle East would have been good, thought NATO was great, and Russia terrible. (There’s a rumour that Trump was considering easing the failed Iran pressure and Bolton’s objections led to his firing.)

So why did he appoint Bolton in the first place? A theory: Keep you friends close but your enemies closer. The late Justin Raimondo agrees: “Instead of taking on the neocons directly, Trump embraces them – and we can see the knife go in as this whole scenario plays out.” When it’s clear that everything Bolton had a hand in was a spectacular flop, he’s tossed out of the tent with the knife in his back.

But Venezuela was not Bolton’s only failure in plain sight: his “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran turned out to be much feebler than Tehran’s “maximum”: the strike on Saudi oil production. Note that, despite billions of dollars of weapons, air defence, radars and the like, neither Riyadh nor Washington has any idea of where the attack came from. Whether Iran did it directly, indirectly, at a distance, supplied some or all of the weapons, was entirely uninvolved or any other possibility you can think of doesn’t really matter: it’s checkmate. Lots of entities in the region are friendly to Tehran and so we can know that:

The attack was an amuse-bouche for what Iran

and its many allies could do

if Washington attacked it.

Another Bolton failure. Read his How to Get Out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and note that he assumes that Tehran has no response. The greatest blind spot of the war party is its assumption that Washington always has the initiative and that its targets can only feebly squirm. But Tehran has been on Washington’s hit list for four decades and it hasn’t wasted that time. A war with Iran will, I am certain, be the Last War for the Imperium Americanum because Iran will stop the oil and the world economy will stagger and probably fall. It has outwitted Washington every step of the way. If Trump really is a reader of Sun Tzu, he should reflect on “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle“. The war party overestimates US power and underestimates the enemy’s will. Succumbs.

Returning to Raimondo’s theory, Trump is now in a position to tell the war party “see, we did what you told us to and it was a complete failure”. Will he appoint people in tune with his campaign thoughts? Apparently not, Bolton’s replacement is more of the same: “peace through strength”, US military dangerously weak, Obama “emboldened our adversaries and disheartened our allies” and the rest of the unreflective claptrap.

This is all part of the Mystery of Donald Trump: on the one hand he surrounds himself with the war party, on the other he hasn’t started any wars. (Bolton was fired in Trump’s day 963; by contrast Obama attacked Libya on his day 788 and called for Assad’s departure on day 940.)

But the war party has painted him into several corners.

(How can he get out of the corner? Easy – just blame his “bad advisors” and do it. The Trump haters won’t think any the worse of him and the rest of us will be glad to step away from the endless war and give him credit for deviousness in a good cause. Or, à la Macron’s suggestion, he can surrender while pretending to have won.)

(Response to a question from Sputnik on what’s next now that the INF Treaty is dead.)

Washington has killed the third of the four arms control treaties left to us by the Cold War. All that remains is the strategic agreement of Obama and Trump says he doesn’t like that either. It’s possible that Trump expects some re-negotiation of these treaties this time involving China as well but, if so, Beijing is probably not going to bother. So all that’s left is mutually assured destruction: no matter what one side does, the other can obliterate it.

We know what Moscow’s response will be but because it’s already here: a new ICBM, a hypersonic re-entry vehicle, a nuclear-powered cruise missile with enormous flight time and a similar underwater cruise missile. No defence will stop them and so MAD returns. Checkmate.

If the US re-creates the Pershing missile, where will it station it? Many European and Asian countries would be unwilling to paint a target on their heads. So that remains to be seen.

(First published Strategic Culture Foundation, Picked up by SOTT, entelekheia, astutenews.com, aisle c, apokalyps nu, The Russophile,

Unlike the American Democratic Party, the Western news media and most of my neighbours, I do not fully understand Trump. Although, unlike all of them, I thought from the start he had a good chance of winning and, as time went on, became more confident and finally bet he would win.

One of the consistent themes of Trump’s campaign was that foreign entanglements were not to the country’s advantage and the wars were a waste of resources; bad for business, as it were. Now, I’m not so simple-minded as to believe campaigning politicians. Bush promised a quieter foreign policy and Obama was going to close Guantánamo; but what made me pay attention to Trump’s statements was that they weren’t just the disconnected laundry list of focus-groups handed out by most politicians, they had an internal consistency. (And consistent over quite some time: watch this interview from 1987.)

That consistency could be found in his slogan Make America Great Again. It was the “again” that was the clue. Shattered tells us that Bill Clinton tried to get his wife to perceive the dissatisfaction in the USA, Sanders tapped into some of it but Trump saw and understood it early and based his campaign on it; Clinton never understood. Again, that’s the clue. I concluded that Trump saw a connection between the loss of “greatness” and the foreign entanglements: the “six trillion dollars” spent in the Middle East would have been better spent on infrastructure“. Of course he was right: there is a direct connection. But to stop that drain, Trump, now President, has to break the entanglements and that will not be easy. Last year I formed the theory that he would try to get the allies to break these entanglements and updated the idea recently. (It was written just before we heard that Trump is considering to charging allies 150% for the cost of US bases – something that is sure sure to cause a lot of re-thinking and disentangling.)

So I expected a Trump Administration to cut entanglements and not create any more. But here we come to the inconsistencies. There have been three actions inconsistent with this view: important inconsistencies. Added to which, Trump seems to have gone out of his way to surround himself with entanglers. And that is a major and puzzling inconsistency: he’s free to choose his advisors but he has chosen warhawks almost every time. This inconsistency has driven many people to conclude either that he didn’t mean what he said when he was campaigning or that he has been captured by the war party. (Others – see first sentence – remain certain that he’s just an idiot, unfit for the office, can’t be elected and so on.)

There are three events of the Trump period that I cannot fit into either the Trump-the-disentangler theory or the Trump-dupe-of-war-party theory. These actions just don’t fit either: they are inconsistently inconsistent.

On 7 April 2017 the USA attacked a Syrian airfield with (it said) 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles. This was in retaliation for a supposed CW attack for which (certainly wrongly) Assad was blamed. No time was allowed for inspections or any other examination before the strike. The attack was entirely consistent with the long-time attempt by the war party (entanglers all) to overthrow Assad. But, on closer look, while loud (“beautiful” missile launches at night) it would be hard to imagine a less effective strike. The airfield they hit was empty and no real damage was done to anything. At the time I assessed it as a show for the home audience designed to take the pressure off the “Trump isn’t legitimate” meme and, certainly, there was much effusion from the war party and anti-Trump media. But the strike could hardly have been less effective if Assad himself had picked the targets.

A year later there was another bogus CW attack blamed on Assad. And another immediate missile attack (this time France and the UK joined in thereby creating the memorable acronym FUKUS). Again it was a stunningly ineffective attack in which nothing was destroyed. Added to which, it appears that many of the attacking missiles were shot down – unless you can bring yourself to believe the official story that 76 missiles hit this site (here’s just one missile hit for comparison). Again the loud, immediate but completely ineffective action. (And, a year later, the attack justification is looking poorly – a BBC producer has just said the hospital scenes were faked and the OPCW found no nerve agent traces. But anyone paying attention already knew this at the time.)

Mystery piled on mystery: the disentangler would realise that Syria was no concern of the US and have done nothing. (And Trump has ordered the troops out.) As to the CW attack claims from the media and the intelligence agencies, the disentangler would immediately ask cui bono? and realise that it certainly wouldn’t be Assad; and Trump is surely the last person to believe what the media or intelligence agencies tell him. The disentangler would do nothing, or at least wait until there was some actual evidence. On the other hand, always ready to blow something up, the warhawk would have found valuable targets and struck them hard. No attack – yes; an effective attack – yes; but an immediate attack that does no damage? You can’t make any sense out of it.

And now we come to Venezuela. Venezuela has been on the war party’s hit list for many years: Obama declared it an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and there were many attempts to overthrow Chavez. The disentangler would immediate know that that was nonsense on stilts – nothing Caracas could do would affect the MAGA goals: no bridges would be built or destroyed, no opioid victim cured or addicted, no manufacturing jobs gained or lost. Nothing. But the warhawk wants a regime-change/resource-theft operation to bring Maduro down.

But what do we see? Certainly an rc/rt op but a singularly incompetent one. The USA is good at these, it’s had a lot of practice, its allies are toeing the line, the media is re-typing the handouts: it should be well on the way by now. But what do we see: the US official put in charge is notorious for involvement in shady coups in Latin America and the Iran-Contra affair, the puppet president is almost completely unknown in Venezuela, the concert was a flop, the “humanitarian aid” another flop, the Venezuelan Army holds firm, no country is willing to provide troops, the big demos in the country are pro-Maduro and anti-intervention (small “thousands” here). So inept a performance that even the NYT is losing enthusiasm: “Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Maduro Burned Aid Convoy” thereby blowing up all the faux outrage of “What kind of a sick tyrant stops food from getting to hungry people?” (The significance is not that the NYT has suddenly discovered fact-checking after years of cheering on rc/rt ops but that it is trying to distance itself from this particular one.) Which is not to say that Washington can’t destroy Venezuela: enough “precision bombing” can turn Caracas into Raqqa.

One of the reasons Trump won was his implied promise that he would stay at home and repair domestic deficiencies. And yet he jumped to bomb Syria twice and is involved in a regime change/resource grab in Venezuela. But the two bombings could not have been less effective and the Venezuela adventure is looking more idiotic by the moment. Contradiction within contradiction and it’s hard to make sense out of it.

Justin Raimondo has been brave enough to try; he thinks the Venezuela rc/rg op is a cunning plot by Trump: “Instead of taking on the neocons directly, Trump embraces them – and we can see the knife go in as this whole scenario plays out.” The ridiculous concert just reinforced his conviction “It’s all a show, produced and directed by that expert showman: Donald J. Trump.” I’ve wondered that myself – it’s so incompetent and at the same time so transparent that it can’t be real. For example, Bolton says out loud what is supposed to be said in private: the “humanitarian concerns” are just a cover for the resource grab:

You know, Venezuela is one of the three countries I call the troika of tyranny. It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.

I don’t know, but I wonder why such noisy but ineffective missile strikes by people who know how to find and destroy valuable targets and such an idiotically-incompetent rc/rt op effort by people with many successes under their belts.

First published Strategic Culture Foundation

About a year ago I advanced the theory that US President Trump understood that the only way to “Make American Great Again” was to disentangle it from the imperial mission that had it stuck in perpetual wars. I concluded that his statements implied that he believed that

1) the post 911 military interventions did nothing for American security;

2) foreign interventions impoverish the country;

3) the alliance system is neither useful nor a good deal for the country;

4) Russia is not the once and future enemy.

I further argued that he understood that the Gordian Knot of entanglements could not be cut from the American end because Americans were too wedded to the idea that the USA was “the indispensable nation” or too complacently accepting of the conceit that it had a moral obligation to set the world aright. (Gallup has just revealed that Americans greatly overestimate the respect and affection the rest of the world holds for them.) In any case “The Swamp” was too entangled in the war business ever to change. I speculated that he understood that the cutting could only come from the other side.

In short I saw method in Trump’s boorishness and well-displayed contempt for Washington’s allies.

So what do we find thirteen months later? Well, of course, one year is not nearly enough time to cause American allies to quit. Washington has not pulled out of NATO and no one has left it, the wars continue, the bases remain; but the Knot is loosening a bit. Despite very strong pressure from Washington, Ankara is going ahead with its S-400 purchase and Berlin is determined to complete Nordstream. Washington has made its opposition plain – and with menaces – but these two important allies persevere in their contumacy.

Recently more cracks widened. Secretary of State Pompeo at Warsaw, trying to get everyone on board with attacking Iran: “Sadly, some of our leading European partners have not been nearly as cooperative. In fact, they have led the effort to create mechanisms to break up our sanctions.” Vice President Pence at the Munich conference all but ordering the allies to get on board with Washington’s leadership, to stop buying weapons from “our adversaries” and equating opposition to Washington’s stand on Iran with anti-semitism.

These efforts fell flat. Even The Economist called the Warsaw effort “shambolic” and a number of invited key players sent lower-ranking substitutes. So unenthusiastic was the response that the meeting had to be rebranded as about security in the Middle East rather than about making war on Iran. So, altogether, a bust: the whistle blew but the dogs didn’t come. But worse, Pence’s speech at Munich, praising Trump in every paragraph and threatening allies, fell completely flat with almost no applause. German Chancellor Merkel, speaking for the opposition (lots of applause) demurred. NPR sums up the two meetings:

First, in Warsaw, Poland, the U.S. organized a conference seeking to marshal international outrage over Iran, and Vice President Pence urged France, Germany and the U.K. to abandon the Iran nuclear deal, accusing them of concocting a “scheme” to continue to business with Iran. Top European allies trying to keep the nuclear deal alive declined to send top-level diplomats to the conference.

Then on Saturday, in Munich, German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the security conference with several critiques of U.S. foreign policy – and received a sustained standing ovation.

So, a failure for Washington but, if you agree with my theory, a success for Trump’s scheme.

Merkel devoted some time in her speech to Russian gas supplies, pointing out that in the Cold War, both Germanies reliably received gas from Moscow, thereby reminding Pence, if he was listening, of Disagreement Number Two – Nordstream. We had earlier been reminded of Disagreement Number One which was the unilateral American rejection of the JCPOA. Washington has sanctioned Tehran; the repellent CAATSA (not, in fairness, Trump’s doing) means that anyone who trades with someone Washington dislikes will also become a target of Washington’s sanctions. In reaction, Germany, France and the UK have developed a Washington-independent payment system. How effective it will be remains to be seen but it is undeniably a rebellion against Washington’s fiat.

And now we come to Disagreement Number Three: Washington’s rejection of the INF Treaty. Negotiated in 1987 between the USA and the USSR, it eliminated all land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5500 kms. The Treaty had been preceded by large demonstrations across Europe against the deployment of American missiles. Washington’s excuse is that Russia has violated the Treaty (Theodore Postol has convincingly argued that, whatever Russia may have done, the USA did violate it). Some see it as the latest target of Washington’s dismantling of the arms control treaties of the Cold War, although one cannot rule out the possibility that this is Trump’s opening position to get an new INF Treaty with Russia and China. But it could put the Europeans on Moscow’s target list if the US puts intermediate range missiles into Europe. (The European protests were a causative factor of the original treaty.) In her Munich speech, Merkel called the cancellation “very bad news” and the former head of the NATO Military Committee, Harald Kujat, flatly called it “a betrayal of the security of the European allies“. The full ramifications of this latest trampling of allies’ interests have not been felt but the Atlantic Alliance will not be stronger for it. And I doubt allies will be any happier with Pompeo’s latest blank war cheque.

Even in Korea, where Trump’s new foreign policy has had, perhaps, its greatest success, we see a touch of the same thing. The two Koreas and China are moving forward whatever Washington does or, as in the Hanoi meeting doesn’t, do.

The economic integration plans are moving forward even before the nuclear issue has been resolved, the sanctions have been lifted, or a formal treaty ending the war has been signed. The entire region appears to be breaking out of Washington’s orbit and charting a new course on its own.

Two things seem pretty clear: the Trump Administration is alienating its allies and it doesn’t seem to care very much that it is. Washington has always overborne its allies but it has usually been more polite and discreet about it. Today there is no attempt to hide it: Trump & Co brusquely tell them our way or else.

Will Washington’s contempt and indifference make Europe start to look east?

Donald Trump and his “America First” attitude has thereby afforded Europeans some space to maneuver and establish some level of autonomy, resulting in increasing synergies with Moscow and especially Beijing.

Or will Europe swallow the insults? Will it stand on its “own two feet“? Or have its feet atrophied? We don’t know yet: there is talk, but talk is cheap and easy.

My question remains: we see the alienation but is it deliberately-caused or is it not? Is Trump behaving in a boorishly unilateral way to force his allies to break the imperial connection, or is it just the habitual “America First” style now crudely stripped of the earlier politesse?

(Which is not to say that they’re aren’t some significant inconsistencies in Trump’s foreign policy and, on closer examination, these exceptions become very confusing and inconsistent themselves. I will take up this question separately.)