Particularly, Trump could break
the death grip that neoconservatives and their
“liberal interventionist” tag-team partners now have
locked around the throat of U.S. foreign policy.
Trump owes
little to these “regime change” advocates since
nearly all of them supported either other
Republicans or his Democratic rival, Hillary
Clinton. And the few who backed Trump, such as John
Bolton and James Woolsey, have been largely passed
over as Trump assembles his foreign policy and
national security teams by relying mostly on a
combination of outsiders and outcasts.
Obviously,
there remains much uncertainty about what foreign
policy direction a President Trump will take and the
neocons/liberal-hawks in Congress are sure to mount
a fierce battle to defeat or intimidate some of
his nominees, particularly Exxon-Mobil chief
executive Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State
because of his past working relationship with
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However,
assuming that the neocon/liberal-hawk establishment
fails to stop Trump from escaping Official
Washington’s foreign policy “group thinks,” the new
president could radically reorder the way the U.S.
government approaches the world.
Lost Opportunity
Eight years
ago, President Barack Obama had a similar
opportunity but
chose to accommodate the Establishment and
empower the neocons and liberal hawks by appointing
his infamous “team of rivals”: Republican Robert
Gates as Defense Secretary, liberal-hawk Hillary
Clinton as Secretary of State, and leaving in
place President George W. Bush’s military high
command, including neocon-favorite Gen. David
Petraeus.
Image
Right: Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton on May 1, 2011, watching
developments in the Special Forces raid that killed
Osama bin Laden. Neither played a particularly
prominent role in the operation. (White House photo
by Pete Souza)
For doing
so, Obama won applause from the editorial and op-ed
writers but he doomed his presidency to a foreign
policy of continuity, rather than his promised
change. Only on the edges did Obama resist the
neocon/liberal-hawk pressures for war and more war,
such as his decision not to bomb Syria in 2013 and
his negotiations with Iran to prevent it from
building a nuclear weapon in 2014.
But Obama
bowed down more than he stood up. He let Secretary
Clinton push a neoliberal economic agenda by
supporting oligarchic interests in Latin America,
such as the 2009 Honduran coup, and extend the
neocon “regime change” strategy in the Middle East,
with the brutal overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in
Libya and covert support for rebels in Syria.
Even after
the original “team of rivals” was gone at the start
of his second term, Obama continued his pathetic
efforts to appease the powerful, such as Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by undertaking a
submissive three-day tour of Israel in early 2013
and cozying up to the Saudi royals with trips to the
kingdom despite intelligence that they and their
Gulf state allies were financing
Al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists.
Though
Obama would eventually boast
about the rare moments when he defied what he
called the Washington “playbook” of relying on
military options rather than diplomatic ones, it was
a case of the exception proving the rule. The rule
was that Obama so wanted to be accepted by
Washington’s well-dressed and well-heeled
establishment that he never ventured too far from
what the editorialists at The Washington Post and
The New York Times deemed permissible.
Still, the
neocon/liberal-hawk establishment continued to scold
America’s first African-American president for not
doing everything that the “smart people” demanded,
such as escalating the U.S. role in the “regime
change” war in Syria or fully arming Ukraine’s
military so it could more efficiently slaughter
ethnic Russian rebels on Russia’s border.
Power Consolidated
In the end,
however, Obama did nothing to alter Official
Washington’s balance of power on foreign policy.
Indeed, over his eight years, the neocons and
liberal hawks consolidated their power, essentially
banishing the once-relevant “realists” from
establishment circles and smearing the few anti-war
and independent voices as fill-in-the-blank
“apologists,” maybe even “traitors” deserving FBI
investigation.
It now is
clear that if Hillary Clinton had won, the
drive to silence any dissent against the
neocon/liberal-hawk orthodoxy would have escalated.
The recently revealed strategies
for isolating and punishing dissident Web sites took
shape before the Nov. 8 election, not afterwards.
The U.S.
government also continues programs to throw tens of
millions of dollars to contractors whose job it is
“to counter Russian propaganda,” code
words for going after and harassing Web sites and
other news outlets that question U.S. State
Department propaganda.
For
historians, there may be a reasonable debate about
whether Obama was an enthusiastic supporter of these
anti-democratic policies or was simply too eager to
please the Establishment to resist them.
Nevertheless, despite his early
promises of transparency and openness, he
oversaw an administration that ruthlessly suppressed
government whistleblowers and bought into the neocon/liberal-hawk
manipulation of the American people via
“perception management” or what NATO likes to
call “strategic
communications.”
Obama then
sat back passively as his Democratic Party sought to
replace him with Hillary Clinton who had done as
much as anyone to turn his beloved motto of “change”
into the sad reality of “more of the same.”
I’m told
that Obama privately had grave doubts about Clinton
but he did nothing to encourage alternative
Democratic candidates, like Senators Elizabeth
Warren or Sherrod Brown, to take on the
money-churning Clinton machine.
Because of
Obama’s miscalculations and timidity, he now will
have to take part in the painful and humiliating
process of handing over the keys to the White House
to a man who launched his national political career
by pushing the racist canard that Obama was born in
Kenya.
Trump’s Challenge
But the
question after Jan. 20 will be whether Trump has the
guts and tenacity to enact some of the “change” that
Obama promised. Particularly, will Trump stay the
course in challenging the neocon/liberal-hawk
establishment that rules the roost of Washington’s
foreign policy?
Saudi King
Salman bids farewell to President Barack Obama at
Erga Palace after a state visit to Saudi Arabia on
Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete
Souza)
Can Trump
withstand the barrage of slings and arrows that will
zero in on him if he rejects the neocons’ “regime
change” ambitions and if he presses for a détente
with Russia to resolve the Ukraine crisis and to
present a united front against Islamic terrorism?
If Trump
moves in those directions – pulling
back on the New Cold War with Russia and ending the
coddling of Saudi Arabia over its covert backing of
jihadists across the region – he could finally
put the U.S. government on a more rational track for
achieving its national interests.
One of
Official Washington’s favorite “group thinks” has
been that Iran is the “chief sponsor of terrorism,”
a formulation favored by Israel and Saudi Arabia –
as part of their
anti-Shiite alliance – but it is clearly a lie.
Yet, to take on the Saudis over their real leading
role as state sponsors of terrorism, Trump would
have to take on the Israelis, a daunting prospect.
In that
regard, Trump’s choice
of lawyer David Friedman, a staunch supporter of
right-wing Israeli settlers, to be U.S. ambassador
to Israel has been viewed as a major concession to
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, but it could be a
decidedly mixed blessing.
If Israel
gets its way and further expands Jewish settlements
in Palestinian territory, it will be jettisoning the
longstanding false hope for a “two-state solution.”
That means Israel will have to either become a
blatantly “apartheid state,” holding Palestinians as
stateless or second-class citizens, or accept a
“one-state solution,” granting both Jews and Arabs
equal rights, arguably the most logical and humane
answer to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma.
In other
words, if Trump takes on Saudi Arabia – finally
recognizing its role as the principal state sponsor
of terrorism – and sweeps away the “two-state
solution” which has been a liberal excuse for doing
nothing to resolve the Israel-Palestine mess for
years, he could be clearing a path to a saner U.S.
policy toward the region, not one dictated by the
likes of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Saudi
King Salman.
Obviously,
the powerful neocons and their “liberal
interventionist” sidekicks would not sit idly by and
accept such a radical challenge to their preferred
options in the region, i.e. more “regime changes”
for countries that get onto the Israeli-Saudi
“enemies list.”
And, it is
certainly possible that President Trump would
retreat when he confronts the Establishment’s fury
that would surely come. However, if he follows
through on this course of action, he might finally
shatter the neocon/liberal-hawk monopoly over
Official Washington’s bloody foreign policy. And the
world and the American people might find that a very
positive thing indeed.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of
the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book,
America’s Stolen
Narrative, either in print
here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
