Aside from North Korea, and his trade war’s impact on jobs, the average American doesn’t care if Donald Trump loses his European allies over demands that they cease all business with Iran. During the recent school graduation season, former oil man Rex Tillerson, Trump’s short-lived Secretary of State, and his successor, Mike Pompeo, gave speeches that illustrate the fracture in America’s attitude toward the world at large.
At the graduation ceremony of the Virginia Military Institute, Tillerson said: “If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.” He added that citizens “must demand that America’s future be “fact-based, not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises, but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges.”
Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo, the new Secretary of State, who formerly headed the CIA, promised America’s diplomatic back office, whose ranks had been decimated under Tillerson, that he would “bring the State Department’s swagger back.” He defined this as an “aggressiveness born of the righteous knowledge that our cause is just, special and built upon America’s core principles,” adding that: “We should carry that diplomatic swagger to the ends of the Earth, humbly, nobly and with the skill and courage I know you all possess.”
President Trump’s other appointees, including federal judges and the cabinet secretaries who head the US government’s various ‘Departments’ (the equivalent of ‘Ministries’), are all hard-line conservatives, who can be counted upon to pursue the agenda brazenly announced by Alt-right former advisor, Steve Bannon, to dismantle the State (‘in pure Leninist tradition’). If this sounds strange, Bannon is just back from Italy where he encouraged and learned from the populist coalition that just came to power, claiming it had overcome the left-right divide in order to fight immigration. Verifying this dubious claim in the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s ‘daily of record’, it turns out that unlike its governing partner, the League, the Five Star Movement, particularly admired by Bannon, published a comprehensive program for the integration of African refugees. That didn’t bother the Trump whisperer, as he has been called, who, in an interview with Indian born Fareed Zakaria, doubled down on the need for a wall to prevent brown people from entering the US…
And yet, unrecognized, the President may actually be applying the smarts that made his fortune in real estate to the big picture. By appearing to disrespect the North Atlantic Alliance, Trump may, in fact, be deliberately encouraging the Europeans to turn from the United States toward Russia. The ‘deep state’, Washington’s real rulers, can prevent the President from abandoning America’s role of ‘world cop’, in particular vis a vis Russia, however Europe offers him a back door to achieve the same result. In a recent interview RT’s Oxana Boyko prompted a former French Minister of Foreign Trade to declare that if the EU failed to prevent the US from using its domestic legal system to punish trading partners, it would fall, amidst ever louder calls by other leaders for Europe to stand on its own.
American observers are beginning to notice these belated calls for independence, but President Trump’s indifference to ‘briefing papers’ has led them to take his apparent mistreatment of the EU as the ultimate ineptitude, instead of a clever ploy. By giving America’s closest allies ever more reasons to turn from fearing Russia to allying with it, Trump is saving them from becoming the battlefield that two cold wars sought to create, a major plus for everyone. With white-on-white Armageddon avoided, it will fall to a future American president to join Putin and Xi’s geographically-based condominium with India, South Africa and Brazil (the BRICS), that will enable the Caucasian minority to continue to thrive in what will increasingly be a honey-colored world.