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President Donald Trump is back from his business trip to China which had a lot of ambiguity over issues like Taiwan without having done either much discernible damage or benefit to American interests. The trip ended with the American participants dropping all the gifts that they had received from the Chinese into a large garbage bin on the tarmac before they boarded their plane. And while the president was gone Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to everyone’s surprised announced that he was canceling plans to deploy an additional 4,000 Texas-based US soldiers to Poland for a long-planned nine month rotation that includes training with NATO allies. The assignment was also originally intended to serve as a possible resource should the situation with Russia-Ukraine happen to spill over into adjacent NATO countries. The troops were already moving to establish themselves and their equipment in their new Polish bases when the surprise cancellation order was issued, possibly as a follow-up to Trump’s threats against NATO for failure to support the US war against Iran. As the situation in Eastern Europe stands, Russia has warned that an increasing level of NATO involvement in the conflict through its provision of weapons, intelligence and even some boots on the ground is already crossing several red lines which might quite plausibly be regarded as acts of war.
It might be possible to regard the decision not to add American soldiers to a region already awash with bellicosity as positive, but it could possibly be premature to regard it as so. The Trump Administration has been admittedly nearly always inclined to go for the most aggressive option whether it be in what adversaries regard as foreign policy “negotiations” or in terms of supporting even more violence prone allies like Israel. Indeed, two other foreign policy issues that are currently on the news front pages are renewed drives to send more soldiers to Greenland, presumably as another step forward to annexation, and the apparent desire to invade Cuba before too long and remove its Communist government.
Cuba is currently being blockaded by the US and has completely run out of fuel, leading to unrest which is being cynically exploited just as the White House manipulated the situation in Iran where riots among the public due to shortages were cited as sign that the government would easily fall. And the Trump administration is about to pull another rabbit out of its hat concerning Cuba, preparing to indict former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges in connection with shooting down planes 30 years ago, a move similar to the indictment of now deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro before his recent kidnapping by US Delta Force commandos.
Negotiations with Cuba were in fact launched after Trump suggested a “friendly takeover” of what he called a “failed nation,” while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, himself a Cuban refugee, said the country would need to change not just its economic policies but move away from the current regime, which he has called both “incompetent,” which admittedly sounds like the Trump Cabinet, as well as being Communist.
And as if that were not enough, there is even talk in Washington about making Venezuela the fifty-first state, though it should be observed that the Venezuelans, already on the receiving end of Yankee largesse when Maduro was kidnapped, have not been consulted on that possible development.
But the biggest issue confronting the returning Trump is what to do about the Iran War monster that has been confronting him since before he departed for Beijing, leading many observers to believe that he may have been looking for a way out of the situation with the help of China, which in the even only advised him to “end the war.” That the conflict was entered into by choice with considerable prodding and lying coming from his “best friends” the Israelis is, of course, the background to what developed. Trump returned to the confusion generated by negotiations that go nowhere wrapped around a ceasefire that is generally being regarded as only a pause in the action.
Trump may have gone to China with expectations that the Chinese government would suggest to him some face saving way to extricate the US from the Iran quagmire, but if that was so he was mistaken and China did not offer an acceptable off ramp for Trump to extricate himself. China, for its part, and like Russia, is undoubtedly delighted that the United States is finally knocked down from its pedestal as the world’s preeminent superpower. President Xi Jinping, to cite only one example of how China clearly regards itself as a major power equal to the US, made clear to Trump that Beijing will tolerate no US interference with Taiwan, which the Chinese consider an integral part of their country. Trump could not push back on that assertion.
There has been considerable news concerning Iran while Trump was gone, most notably in the United States due to the release of several articles in the mainstream media suggesting that the politically powerful neoconservatives, who normally delight both in global dominance by Washington as well as in any conflict directed against Israel’s enemies, are now calling the Iran war an unmitigated disaster, a “checkmate” by Iran and a “humiliation.” They are even arguing that there is no way to move forward with it. And there is more than that with the Saudi Arabians also chiming in on what a disaster the war has been to themselves and also to the other Gulf States. The Arabs now believe that the assumption that they were protected by a US security umbrella proved to be absolutely worthless. Beyond that, they also have observed that they were without any consultation dragged into an unnecessary and unwanted war against Iran by the US and Israel.
American neoconservatives have been a major force in support of US military dominance policies since the nineteen nineties, when they launched the international side of their movement with the A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm document in 1996, a policy statement that was prepared by a study group led by prominent Jewish neocon Richard Perle for then-as-now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The report argued that Israeli security would be served best by regime change in surrounding countries brought about with the aid and assistance of the US. The “clean break” was a rejection of the Oslo Accords that actually sought to develop a modus vivendi between Israel and the Palestinians. This was followed by the Project For The New American Century (PNAC) in 1997, which had as its stated goal “to promote American global leadership.” The organization stated that “American leadership is good both for America and for the world” which it described as “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity. ” Both Clean Break and PNAC fit together nicely to promote a policy of political and military dominance for the United States. And, as most of the neocons were Jewish, one of the principal arguments made by them was that a confident and aggressive United States would be better able to support and protect Israel as it moved to establish dominance over the Middle East.
One of the founders of Neoconism (and of the PNAC) was Robert Kagan, who has now written a lengthy May 10th piece in the Atlantic Magazine entitled Checkmate in Iran: Washington can’t reverse or control the consequences for losing this war. He begins with: “It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region… Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done… Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.”
Another neocon godfather Max Boot set the stage by preceding Kagan in an April 8th Washington Post opinion piece entitled The Iran ceasefire was a TACO Tuesday, and thank goodness: Trump gets to act like his bloodcurdling threats worked, but he’s giving up far more than Tehran did. Both Kagan and Boot are well known and respected in the neocon movement. Kagan is the husband of the deplorable Victoria Nuland who, as a US Diplomat, did so much to create the political crisis in Eastern Europe that has led to the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Kagan and Boot are not particularly regarded as fans of Donald Trump, but they are reliable supporters of Israel and all its works, which should be considered when examining their writings and speeches on Iran, which they would be quite pleased to see destroyed.
The Kagans in particular are enamored of stirring up conflict when other options are available. Robert’s brother Frederick is a resident scholar at the neocon American Enterprise Institute. His wife Kimberly is founder and head of the aptly named Institute for the Study of War. And, to be sure, the Kagan hearts belong only to Israel…
One might reasonably consider what Kagan might be trying to accomplish by dissing Trump’s war. In my opinion he is of course deliberately depicting and over-emotionalizing the consequences of a “worst case” outcome to come into play if Trump panics and actually ignores Israel’s demands and decides to pull the plug on the war. By taking an adversarial position he is instead playing the Trump personality card by focusing on the president’s clear vulnerability when it comes to rationally considering policy options. In this case Kagan as well as Boot are seeking to humiliate Trump by emphasizing how the status quo is a disastrous defeat because the real objective is to take advantage of an insane T’s limited mental capability and non-existent moral code to shame him into changing the narrative on his personal failure by pursuing the “worst course” of action in the viewpoint of many observers, i.e. total war against Iran using all available weapons including nuclear to utterly destroy it!
Other neocons are also recognizing that the Iran war is going disastrously bad but are less ambivalent about the options they see, namely being openly and clearly focused on doubling down for victory. Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute sees success coming from a change in personnel in and around the White House coupled with a stiffening of Trump’s will to win. The-Iran focused neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) also wants more war no matter what it takes to destroy the Persians.
Overall, I think that some neocons like Kagan and Boot are calling for not going back to a mismanaged and pointless war because they believe an embarrassed and ego driven Trump will seek to repair and reverse course on his damaged reputation and do precisely that. That is exactly what they want him to do! And bear in mind that Trump is being heavily pressured by the Israel Lobby and its billionaire donors like Miriam Adelson to continue war. And then there are the near daily phone calls from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has the same objective, i.e. to keep America in the fight to eliminate Iran. So one might assume that if indeed Trump would like to escape from the Iran quagmire there are a lot of reasons why he will not opt to do so. That, unfortunately, opens the door to what comes next. Dare one mention that madmen like Trump and Netanyahu might well consider that if they can get away with an endless war that is damaging the whole world’s economy they can go one step further with their nukes to finish the job!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.