Trump ran for president in large part on a platform of economic nationalism that put America First while deprioritizing the interventionism that defined the Republican Party under Bush and the neocons. Now, however, he appears to be backing away from that pledge despite its importance to his electoral base. Not only has he enthusiastically supported Israel’s war against the Gazans and bombed Iran on Israel’s behalf, he is ensuring that NATO continues to provoke confrontation with Russia by requiring European nations to pay 5% of their GDP into the military alliance.
No More No More Wars
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The TMI Show" talk show. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Re ” …deprioritizing the interventionism that defined the Republican Party under Bush and the neocons.”
The Trump first term policy was hardly 1) non-interventionist*** nor 2) without direction by neo-cons (e.g., John Bolton, appointed “by accident” along with Victoria Nuland, publicly ever-present and untold legions lurking in the bowels of the deep state like a national metastatic stage 4 melanoma.)
Some low lights of first Trump term that, of course, are being wildly exceeded in the second:
Trump continued Obumma’s campaign against 1) Ansar Allah (aka “Houthis”) and 2) Syria, at least being open and straightforward about implanting US troops to facilitate stealing its oil and presumably sending it to Israel.
In early 2020 Trump gave a preview of the tactics that he’d use in 2025 by assassinating the Iranian general Soleimani (Iran’s second in command) who was to discuss with the Iraqi PM the chaotic situation in the region caused by Trump having negated the JCPOA nuclear treaty with Iran.
Trump began the serious armament of Ukraine after the Obumma-engineered coup in Ukraine. That weapons influx stepped up the civil war sparked by the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s brazen antics, thus insuring Russia’s ultimate response.
Trump negotiated the “Abraham accord” to generate friendly relations with Israel among the various Arab nations in the vicinity (those Arab nations not yet destroyed, or in the process of being destroyed by Israel.) This, of course, was intended to provide an advantage in the ultimately planned (bipartisan) regime change action against Iran. Of course, Israel’s subsequent genocidal attempted extermination of Palestinians has somewhat dimmed the complete ratification of said accords.
Trump did nothing to alleviate the ongoing Bush II-intiated atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan while adding a reckless match to Bush II’s abrogation of the ABM treaty, Trump dumping the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. These together allowed Russia to surge ahead, unchecked, in advanced arms technology leaving the US in the dust, design-wise, at best two-generations behind, across the board. This could prove terminal for the MIC-dominated, self-proclaimed imperial protector and arms provider of “the free world,” whose neo-liberal chosen path to deindustrialization leaves it incapable of supplying even needed numbers of such military banalities as artillery shells in Ukraine and air defense missiles, however intrinsically inferior (bordering on useless), “supplies” of which have had to be diverted from Ukraine to Israel for its defense against Iranian retaliation to Israel’s recent unprovoked attack.
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*** here interventionism does not necessarily require real-time mass death but “merely” actions that can’t avoid causing such in the future, or already have done so. This includes, but is not not restricted to, uniformly bellicose, apparent death-cult member, US presidents boxing themselves tightly into the single, unavoidable, exceptional, ultimate choice of igniting complete and total nuclear annihilation
I’ve mentioned the trivium before — the method of learning that runs from grammar to logic to rhetoric. That is, “let us get our terms precisely understood, let us apply rational thinking so that we know we are using our common grammar to form coherent arguments, let us communicate those new understandings to others in a way that allows them to follow us.”
As per Ted: “interventionism that defined the Republican Party under Bush and the neocons.” See? “Interventionism” has a multitude of definitions; no two people are seeing the same word. It’s “interventionism” to talk to your drunk friend and say, “You need to dry yourself out. You are causing a lot of trouble.” It’s also “interventionism” to bring food and water to starving people living under a brutal regime. It’s also “interventionism” to drop napalm on filthy, godless brown civilians in huts in Southeast Asia because that’s what Uncle Sugar wants for his owners.
We — and by we, I mean Ted — must be cautious to not fall into the trap of using the generic when the specific is necessary. The Republican version of “intervention” was — and is — more precisely and accurately described as “military force.” I’m not trying to scold. I realize how difficult it is to constantly push back against this form of groupthink and doublespeak.
I can appreciate the attempt at fostering clearer communication here in the faculty lounge, but I think we can all agree that for any sentence, paragraph, spoken word, hieroglyph et al from Rall that contains the word “America,” it’s reasonable to assume the worst possible insinuation of any such word / hieroglyph