Trump’s Foreign Policy Philosophy Hard to Pin Down
Trump’s Foreign Policy Philosophy Hard to Pin Down
Masood Farivar, Voice of America
Is President-elect Donald Trump a foreign policy realist or idealist? Is he bringing Richard Nixon’s hard-edged realpolitik to his foreign policy or following in the footsteps of the more idealistic Ronald Reagan?
The question has become a parlor game among Washington's policy pundits.
Trump’s frequent invocation of Reagan’s “peace through strength” mantra and campaign pledge to rebuild America’s “depleted” military has invited comparisons to the Republican icon credited with winning the Cold War.
His advocacy of a foreign policy based on America’s national interests has led some to liken it to Nixonian realism, while his aversion to foreign interventions has won him the label of a non-interventionist and even isolationist.
Don’t Fence Trump In
Trump has professed no great power doctrine and his advisers discourage applying labels to his vision of the world.
“I’m not going to be put into the little academic, graduate school box because I think it doesn’t suit, and it doesn’t apply in a rapidly changing world,” said K.T. McFarland, Trump’s incoming deputy national security adviser, when asked to describe the Trump doctrine.
While Trump’s call for “peace through strength” reflects Reagan’s view of deterrence, “there are parts of Nixon and (Henry) Kissinger that Donald Trump has also advocated,” McFarland said at the U.S. Institute of Peace, alluding to Trump’s interest-based approach to world affairs.
Trump’s Speeches
A foreign policy neophyte, Trump has shied away from declaring any grand foreign strategy during the campaign, though he did give two major speeches devoted to foreign policy and national security.
In the first speech, delivered at the realist-leaning Center for the National Interest in Washington in April, Trump outlined what he called a “coherent foreign policy based on American interests” and called for “getting out of nation building,” creating stability and quashing “radical Islam.”
“Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed the world,” Trump said. “Events may require the use of military force, but it’s also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War.”
In the second speech, at Youngstown University in Ohio in August, Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric about terror, warning countries around the world that they’d be judged based on their commitment to the U.S. goal of fighting terrorism.
“All actions should be oriented around this goal, and any country which shares this goal will be our ally,” Trump told a rally of supporters.
‘Strategic Surprise’
It was a theme that Trump would repeat, in one iteration or another, throughout the campaign, but his advisers say Trump’s pre- and post-election pronouncements on foreign policy, often delivered off the cuff, should not be read as policy prescriptions.
“Actually, he didn’t say a lot about foreign policy and national security on the campaign trail, and what he did say really doesn’t add up to a policy,” said James Carafano, director of foreign policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation who advises the Trump transition team on foreign affairs. “That’s very frustrating because the people want to know what’s this guy going to do.”
With the new administration yet to take office, McFarland, too, cautioned that Trump’s foreign policy is in an early stage of development.
“That’s what a new administration does: It takes time to rethink things and to come up with policies,” she said.
If history is any guide, Trump could quickly find himself facing a set of foreign policy crises different from the issues he campaigned on. Political scientists have a term for an unexpected world event that drives a new president into uncharted territory: “strategic surprise.”
For former President George W. Bush, who campaigned on pursuing a “humble foreign policy,” the strategic surprise came September 11, 2001.
For President Barack Obama, who vowed to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the “Arab Spring” protests in North Africa and the Middle East marked a strategic surprise, leaving his administration more deeply mired in the region than he’d hoped.
What international crisis might alter the trajectory of the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda has become a guessing game, with the number of scenarios exceeded only by the variety of foreign policy labels attributed to Trump.
A game-changing terrorist attack on American interests is one possible candidate. Another contender: an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) launch by North Korea.
“I think the world is not necessarily going to allow President Trump to do everything he’s planned on,” said Blaise Misztal, director of the national security program at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “I think you’re going to see a triangulation between what he’s said, what he’s advised to do, and what is actually feasible on the world stage.”
Flip Flopping on Issues
While Trump has flip flopped on some issues, NATO and torturing terrorists, for example, he’s held steady on others. Among them: terrorism, trade, China and Russia.
In the weeks since his election, he’s reiterated his pledge to make terrorism a focus of his foreign policy, talked tough on trade, challenged the “One China” policy, and iterated again a desire to reset relations with Russia even as he embraced intelligence findings that Moscow interfered in last year’s presidential election.
Brian Katulis of Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank, said the “most radical shift” Trump will likely undertake will be “engagement and involvement” with Russia, something Obama unsuccessfully attempted during his first term in office.
But former CIA director Michael Hayden said Trump is likely to reconsider his approach to Russia once he learns from intelligence agencies and allies that Russia and Syria are not committed to fighting IS.
“I’m personally very, very skeptical of any convergence between American and Russian interests in this part of the world,” Hayden said. “In fact, I’d offer the view that American and Russian interests are actually heading in different directions.”
Another major change: downplaying a postwar American foreign policy tradition of promoting democracy and freedom around the world.
“Trump has signaled as a candidate and in the transition a proclivity to appreciate authoritarian and repressive leaders around the world,” Katulis said. “And this may be the biggest departure that is historic, that there really won’t be as much of a values-based approach that focuses on human rights democracy and freedom in other countries. And that I think puts the United States itself on shaky territory.”
But McFarland played down those concerns, saying “the three bedrocks of (postwar) American foreign policy” — American leadership, American values and international alliances — will remain under the Trump administration.
Unpredictability
There is usually some continuity between administrations on foreign policy, but “that rule actually may not apply under Trump,” Katulis said.
“We’re dealing with something here that is just fundamentally different and off the charts,” Katulis explained.
That 'something' is Trump’s well-known unpredictability. Trump has criticized President Obama for telegraphing his policy moves and has vowed to remain unpredictable. But experts say unpredictability can be dangerous in the international arena where both allies and adversaries expect a certain degree of predictability from the United States.
"Predictability is the cornerstone of deterrence," said Clarke. "You need to be predictable if you’re the United states, both in what your allies know you’ll do and in what your adversaries know you’ll do and how you’ll respond."
‘Stay tuned’: Trump spokesman on possibility of U.S. Embassy moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
http://reut.rs/2jCqY2y
QUOTE
President-elect Donald Trump’s spokesman said on Thursday there will be an announcement on whether the United States will move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“Stay tuned,” incoming White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters, asked about the issue at a briefing the day before Trump takes office. “There’ll be a further announcement on that.”
While campaigning for the presidency, Trump pledged to switch the embassy from Tel Aviv, where it has been located for 68 years, to Jerusalem.
The proposal drew an outcry from Palestinians and others who said it would kill any prospect for peace.
Actually the Trump FP is really easy to fully understand now since we have a number of major indicators since his election……China…..Israel….Syria…EU/NATO…..Germany and ESPECIALLY Russia…..
If one takes his rally speeches…his interviews…his press conferences and especially his tweets…the man is literally stuck information wise on about 1973….this man is WYSIWYG…..and he is a driven authoritarian racist narcissist and it is a shame that many are unwilling to either recognize what that is or they do recognize it but for the hatred of Obama/Clinton and the Democratic Party and the deep desire to hold and take total power…..they look the other way ignoring the damage to both our democracy and the US in general…
Many of his FP ideas are from the alt Right blog world…much from Bannon who made Breitbart.com and who is engaging with his company in Europe on the populist support side ……
This is a man who will have a FP driven by the moment…literally which way the wind is blowing the flag….he has no ideology other than “winning and making money”…at the cost of others….
Trump will never get into FP mode as long as he and his advisors are constantly dodging questions about Russia and their ties to Russian black money…Nixon in his last months found this to be total true.
EXCLUSIVE: Tomorrow, our 45th POTUS enters the Oval Office under multiple espionage investigations. What’s next?
http://observer.com/2017/01/spy-clouds-hang-over-trumps-inauguration/
QUOTE
Tomorrow Donald J. Trump will become our 45th president, an event heralded by his supporters as a big step towards changing the course of our politics and, per their mantra, making America great again. While the festivities have produced giggles from the president-elect’s semi-comical inability to get top talent to play his inauguration, a considerably more serious problem for Trump has emerged on the espionage front.
He weathered last week’s spy-storm, generated by Buzzfeed’s leak of a 35-page dossier of allegations regarding his clandestine ties to the Kremlin, by mocking them in customary Trumpian fashion. In a series of angry tweets, the president-elect denounced the Intelligence Community as the source of that leak—even though it was not—while proclaiming the dossier to be “fake news.” Since he recently compared American spies to Nazis on Twitter, Trump seemingly wants a full-fledged war with the IC from his first day in the Oval Office.
If America’s 17-agency spy empire isn’t on Trump’s side, Vladimir Putin is. In defense of the president-elect, the Kremlin strongman proclaimed the dossier to be “rubbish” and “clearly false information,” mocking reports of Russian kompromat, colorfully adding that those who he claimed were smearing Trump were “worse than prostitutes.”
To be fair, the dossier, which was compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with extensive experience in Russian matters, does have dodgy aspects. As I explained last week, it’s raw, unfiltered human intelligence from multiple sources with varying levels of access and credibility. Some of the dossier’s claims are quite plausibly true, others are demonstrably false, while much of it is unverifiable and may be Kremlin disinformation. Given the long history of Russian provocation and deception against Western governments, a high degree of skepticism is in order here.
In particular, Steele’s most important accusation, that Trump’s lawyer met in Prague in late August to coordinate Russian hacking of the Democrats, has yet to be confirmed and in fact seems likely to be false—a case of mistaken identity. Steele presented his findings to the FBI months ago, but they were unable to verify the Prague meeting, leading the ex-spy to grow frustrated with what he considered to be Bureau foot-dragging as the election loomed.
Newsweek has reported that Estonian intelligence actually did have information that confirmed the meeting in Prague, which would be a game-changing fact if true. But the author of that piece, Kurt Eichenwald, has a history of making fanciful claims about Trump’s foreign ties based on unnamed intelligence sources. Moreover, it would be a very exceptional thing for Estonian intelligence to surveille a meeting in the capital of a fellow NATO and European Union country without conducting a joint operation—which would mean the Czechs and presumably the Americans know about it too. Most importantly, my friends in Eastern European intelligence think the Prague story is deeply flawed. One top security official in that neighborhood flatly told me, “If there’s intelligence confirming that meeting, I would have been briefed on it—and I wasn’t.”
It seems that the Prague story is based on a kernel of truth. However, the story which Steele reported seems to be disinformation, notwithstanding the fact that, as I reported when it happened, Czech security really did arrest a prominent Russian hacker in Prague, at the request of the FBI, just a couple weeks before our election. There appears to be a trail that might have led back to Trump in that case, but the Russians are playing their usual spy-games, exposing false trails of inquiry to muddy the waters and confuse investigators.
Now the whole case has been blown wide open again with yesterday’s bombshell McClatchy report that the IC has been looking into possible ties of, as the McClatchy report put it, “a few Americans who were affiliated with Trump’s campaign or his business empire” to individuals “from Russia and other former Soviet nations.” This has supposedly happened at least since the spring, months before Steele shared his dossier with anyone in Washington. In particular, a specially created IC working group, comprised of representatives from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the Departments of Justice and Treasury, looked into clandestine Russian money that may have been sent to finance the Trump campaign.
In other words, the Steele report is hardly more than a cover mechanism for the real IC investigation, which knew everything that was true in that dossier already – and presumably knows what’s not true as well. The IC working group found sufficient information on Trump’s secret ties to Putin to get a Federal court to issue warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which gives them access to phone calls, emails, and bank accounts which may be tainted by connections to foreign spies.
Team Trump refused comment on the McClatchy story. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee will be conducting an investigation into Trump’s Russian links, including subpoena powers and full access to what the IC knows, the president-elect may have a great deal to worry about. The clearest sign of Trump’s concern is that, almost 24 hours after the report appeared, he hasn’t taken to Twitter to denounce or mock it. His uncharacteristic silence indicates serious trouble in the Trump camp.
Neither are the Senate and the IC all that Trump has to worry about. Several European intelligence agencies have watched the new president’s clandestine ties to Putin with interest and alarm. For small countries close to Russia, the prospect of an American president colluding with the Kremlin is terrifying. What they know was hinted at in a tweet by Harri Ohra-aho, in response to an all-caps claim tweeted by Trump: “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” Ohra-aho’s response, which translates as “Lord, give me patience, AND NOW!” is important mainly because the tweeter is a two-star general serving as the chief of Finnish military intelligence.
Plenty of intelligence services know parts of the truth about our 45th president’s potentially unsavory ties to Moscow. Starting tomorrow, Trump will try hard to shut down IC inquiries, but he cannot curtail the Senate investigation and doesn’t have any power to silence worried allies and partners who consider him a threat to their countries.
FP is designed to keep both a nation and her citizens safe….secure…AND alive….not to create a “reality show for a single person”….
Trump’s transition team inquired about tanks/missile launchers for inaugural parade, got 20-plane flyover
DOD denied request because (1) 100,000 pound tanks are not props and DC roads cannot structurally support and (2) “Optics.”
How do you know when your supposed FP is a “farce”??????
When a local German radio station in Berlin/Brandenburg report during their hourly news….
1. there are still virtually a lot of important government positions not yet filled yet by Trump and he starts today..US government is now government of a single person doing everything
2. used as a joke the Trump statement that he has assembled one of the smartest/brightest Cabinet in the US history….if so then why so many
“forgotten financial disclosures” during their hearings???
Here is the problem and I am surprised that the article sidesteps it….we simply already know what Trump will do and yet we look and look and look for some kind of “sign from heaven” he will not do it and or will do it……
Trump made a lot of promises about what he will do as president. We’ve documented 663 of them.
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-made-a-l
ot-of-promises-about-what-he-will-do-as-president-weve-documented-663-of-them-3d28f0131e7f#.2i38p335n
Here in Germany on German TV station this morning their carried interviews with Trump voters….
1. well yes he has a “steep learning curve” but he is a highly successful great businessman and will make it….forgetting along the way his SEVEN bankruptcies
German response…this job is not where you “learn on it “…
2. second comment…you have to let Trump ease into it and he needs to calm down
It seems that all who voted for him apparently did realize that Trump had major baggage but they assumed that his claims of being this great businessman evidently outweighed their basic instincts that something was wrong….
Think about it…..663 confirmed and recorded promises….and he is a sane FP thinker with a plan and an ideology and or philosophy ????
Elijah Cummings: ‘If the public knew what Congress knows’ they would boycott the inauguration too
http://ow.ly/wrOh3089JOT
Interestingly well put…..
Let’s be clear: Trump’s legitimacy is badly tarnished not by some shrewd Russian conspiracy—but by PEOTUS’s stunningly inept crisis response
When we talk about Russia as a superpower …a true superpower…has values..has an ideology and or philosophy lending it political power….is an ECONOMIC power and has military power and Russia is not yet a true ECONOMIC power ……
Friendly reminder that Russia’s economy is
~1/14th the size of the EU
~1/3rd the size of Germany
~half of California (!)
~behind Canada
New York City has a larger economy, at $1.56 trillion, than the entire economy of Russia, at $1.27 trillion.
IF you exclude oil and gas revenues it would be a disaster…..
TAKEN from the just recently released CIA documents…
“The idea that the US and the USSR are both ‘superpowers’ [is] a primary goal of Soviet propaganda”
We see the same exact Putin drive in trying to get the US to “recognize” Russia as a superpower….
AND Trump plays straight into that drive…so who needs FP if it is driven by an underlying need to have people “like you” which we have seen a number of times in the Trump tweets….
With no FP plan……with no experienced FP personnel..with no ideology…with no FP philosophy…BUT with a strong handful of “right wing white supremacist ideologues” what can you expect for a FP?????
Can someone point me to the true adults in the room on Trump FP…this cannot be actually stated…..think about it and mull over what it means….
Incoming WH Chief of Staff @Reince “We are going to make the US great again first, and then we are going to go out there and help Greece”
@Reince:We want to put the Patriarch of Constantinople & the recognition of the struggle of Orthodox Church in the center of White House
SO is now Reince NOW actively supporting the Russian Orthodox Church as well?????
I have often used the term “altered state of reality” when posting about Russian Ukrainian statements and actions…
Now it perfectly fits Trump and his so called team…..
EXAMPLE..there was a leaked story via a proRussian funded site that the ODNI was to be abolished and taken under control of Flynn…..Flynn has been dying to destroy the very ISC system that fired him “for cause” for failing at being even the Director of DIA….by of all people Clapper..
NOT TRIVIAL: @GenFlynn tweets story about HIS SECRET PLANS published by a Kremlin-employed, Damascus-based, 9/11 denier.
“according to our sources”, and story tweeted by none other than Flynn’s son. I wonder who those sources might be.
Here’s an insane quote by Thierry Meyssan, referenced by the son of National Security Advisor Flynn:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article184874.html …
Meyssan has been tied to Assad regime for years.
Here with French far-right extremists, Beirut 2006
https://contresubversion.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/les-liens-entre-lextreme-droite-francaise-et-le-regime-syrien-des-assad/ …
So the guy who wrote some of the most disturbing truthist books about 9/11 was/is paid (in)directly by the RU state. I rest my case.
And here’s where it gets weird. Thierry Maysson is paid by Russian magazine “Odnako”. Guess who funneled 170 mln into “Odnako”? Rossneft.
Video footage exists on this…
Before we address what Trump might do and or might not do on FP…WHY not ask him if as the US President he is going to actively push back on Russian influence operations/hacking still being directed at the US and NATO…
Kind of reminds of the following….”I will not connect the dots…I will not connect the dots….I will not connect the dots….I will just ignore the dots….BUT WAIT they are still there…….”
Disinformation at work. Germany dispatches 500 soldiers to Lithuania. Russian Headline: “German forces to amass near Russian border”. Appeared on Russia Today Germany
In the post-truth era Sweden’s far right fake fact checker was inevitable
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/19/in-the-post-truth-era-swedens-far-right-fake-fact-checker-was-inevitable?CMP=share_btn_tw
Yesterday I attended a Berlin art school for those getting career recertified into new art professions and the audience was say in their 20s-60s and I was constantly asked about Trump….I have seen the days of when Reagan was elected or Bush Jr/Iraq/Gitmo/torture and heard the comments then..but to a person Trump is now seriously impacting the image of the US and I can say their arguments have a certain validity to them….out of their perspective which Trump has failed to understand in his extremely loosy goosey interviews/tweets.
Kind of sums up their general tenor….this will damage the view of the US overall for the next four years and Trump in his interviews has shown them his disdain for EU and NATO and that he is basically a fool….and uneducated in IR.
Tomorrow a fascist will get a nuclear code & start governing the most powerful country on Earth.
I’ll never forgive you, America
This German generation does not use the word fascist lightly but when they do use it… they thoroughly understand it’s definition….DO we in the US understand that simple fact?
I have never seen this great of a disconnect between the US and Germany…never….
HERE is the difference….yes Germans had their problems with Obama but his final foreign telephone call was to Merkel and that earned him great respect in their eyes….
NOW reread the Merkel comments made after Trump won….she is willing to break from the US and lead Europe..not so sure that is what America as a whole really wants…regardless of what the Germans have often said about US FP they have supported the US to the bitter end when crunch time came….
In some ways it is now surprising that Germany is telling the US under now Trump exactly how democracy is to function and what the democratic values of the West really are..
NOTE: We get a printed readout of every single call Obama has made with foreign leaders AND from the Trump side…..nothing…nada…nichts….
I am not the only one saying Trump has no “believe system” other than for himself…AND without a true personal and deep “believe system” no one can drive a coherent FP for even mice….certainly not a coherent one for 300M Americans….
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/20/america-s-trial-by-fire-begins-today.html
QUOTE
BY THE WAY check the last sentence from a well known conservative writer…
In the meantime, there will be the daily, weekly, monthly slog of feeling the man drag us all down, as he already has. How much worse are we as a people than we were 17 months ago? It’s impossible to measure precisely.
But we know that we’ve gone from being shocked at the idea of having a presidential candidate shout about building a wall to debating whether Congress would appropriate the funds for it; from being scandalized at the very idea of a Muslim registry to wondering how such a thing could be implemented; from being aghast that a sexual predator could sit in the Oval Office to not even mentioning it anymore. All that happened without him even being president. To what will we be sensitized with him holding the office?
We survived the crooks and liars and incompetents and alcoholics. I think we’ll survive Trump too. But it will require people on the left and the right to guard our institutions, and to say to him no, you just can’t do that.
I was struck Thursday by words written by Eliot A. Cohen, a conservative, writing in The American Interest: “nothing will teach him gravitas, magnanimity, or wisdom.”
REMEMBER a total of 78,000 votes in three key States gave the Electoral College to Trump who actually lost the overall general vote by roughly 3M votes…WHICH does not give him the “mandate” to speak for 48% of those that voted……
Those votes came after the impact of the Russia influence operations…and Trump cannot wipe that away with any amount of tweets….
While Trump thinks he is the greatest “reality show games man”…this is a game he has absolutely no understanding of…..
Incidentally, the Assad regime is hardly shy about having de-prioritized IS
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2017/…slamic-state/#
Assad + #IS will fight full-force once binary
Meanwhile, some heaviest fighting actually in areas of closest co-op
http://bit.ly/1IuiXPr
“you fight and kill…to influence the deal..BUT the deal does not end”…….
Assad’s ultimate goal is reconquering the country; building IS up short-term helps that, though he has to fight them in some areas.
Not difficult, but every scuffle (Palmyra, Kuweris, Deir Ezzor) is taken as “proof” they’re full-bore enemies *now*.
WONDER if Trump and his will to work with Assad/Putin/Iran understands this Assad/IS game and in the end he is actually then supporting IS….
BTW…this does not even take in the role Putin/Russia has played in building up IS…working with IS and now in Syria now even fighting IS….
WHY is that …BUT WAIT…Trump thinks Putin is his greatest buddy….maybe not????
Trump is now causing NATO members to cross over their own political shadows in their common defense….
This is a direct response to Merkel’s recent comments on where Europe should be going…without a Trump……
Slovenia offers to deploy troops in Latvia to boost NATO presence
http://www.unian.info/world/1733976-slovenia-offers-to-deploy-troops-in-latvia-to-boost-nato-presence.html
Second direct change based on the US Russian influence operations that Trump still basically believes did not occur……
Good move @BBC ! Debunking fake news should be done journalists & media and not by the Governments &their agencies
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/12/bbc-sets-up-team-to-debunk-fake-news?CMP=share_btn_tw
This will be a counter to fake news/disinformation by EU/Bannon populists and Russia…
With all of this in the background how is Trump even to get to FP…..
Don’t be fooled by any sunshine in DC today — the gathering spy clouds over Trump are dark, real….and Russian.
Those dark Russian espionage clouds are loaded with incriminating SIGINT, folks… get ready for YUGE drama in DC.
Manafort is openly GRU, Page is on the Gazprom payroll, and Stone boasts of ties to Wikileaks, an RIS front.
This is not a tough case here.
Bannon and Kushner, who’ve emerged as key nat sec players, had to reassure worried Cabinet picks about Mike Flynn.
Manafort has been in bed with GRU for years, as I told you months ago. We have reams of intel on him+his “friends.”
If you’re surprised we have SIGINT implicating Manafort, Page & Stone in dirty ties to Moscow, you’ve been paying no attention for months.
If brand-new-POTUS Trump tries to shut down IC investigation into his Kremlin ties, the loaded phrase “Russian coup” then becomes operative.
FROM Russian TV today…..
Zhirinovsky on Russian TV says Trump and Russia can solve all problems in the world together.
State tv showing Russian Trump Zhirinovsky: we should all be in a good mood. Expect ‘neutral’ position on Ukraine, no NATO, no EU.
Zhirinovsky on RussianTV says Trump can deal with China and all Russia needs is to deal with borders of former USSR.
NOTICE the not so subtle threat to Baltics and Ukraine…..
AND the Trump Russian FP we already have seen in his tweets and public comments….
Russia and the US Can Never Be Long-Term Partners, Russian Historian Says
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/01/russia-and-us-can-never-be-long-term.html
Head of Austrian party founded by Nazi SS met w/Mike Flynn at Trump Tower last month (& signed pact w/Putin’s party)
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/world/europe/austrias-far-right-signs-a-cooperation-pact-with-putins-party.html
WHAT is a US natsec advisor doing meeting with a Austrian Far Right Party…here is meant Nazi Party…?????
The Caspian Times
@thecaspiantimes
More
“Trump will relinquish Balkans to Putin” – German analyst http://www.thecaspiantimes.com/trump-will-relinquish-balkans-putin-german-analyst/ …
European comments below on Trump speech today….
Trump: We’re transferring power from Washington DC to you the people. Washington flourished but people didn’t.
TRUMP: from this day forward it is going to be only America first, America first
Trump: We’ve made other countries wealthy at expense of Americans. US wealth ripped from us & redistributed across the world.
Trump’s opening remarks descend into isolationism now. “Defended other nation’s border while refusing to defend our own.”
‘America First’. ‘Protectionism’. ‘Borders’. The day internationalism died. Europe be warned – the 1930’s are back.
“America First, America First.’ – channelling Lindbergh now. So we have 1. Elites vs people. 2. Isolation. 3. Nationalism.
If anyone doubted that nationalism has arrived in America, this speech should clarify things.
Classic populist demagoguery
They commonly call this “fascism”….
AND we debate here where Trump is headed with his FP…..?
TRUMP: “we will reinforce old alliances and make new ones.”
Anti-politics, anti-free trade, anti-internationalism. In it’s place isolationism, fetishisation of military and rhetoric of the demagogue
ACTUALLY in typical Trump fashion…this is a recycled stump speech from this summer…..
Instead of being the so called uniter he claimed he wanted to be…it will just get worse….
Let’s see…since say about 1964 we have had terrorism much of it jihadist..Taliban still working hard in AFG…IS as well…AQ is still active around the world as is IS….IS still fighting hard in Iraq and never really going away there as well as they are doing well in Syria…and IS has gone global in their attacks….as is AQ…..
So Trump is going to do what exactly what ….eradicate an entire religion.
AFP news agency
✔
@AFP
#BREAKING Trump says “radical Islamic terrorism” will be eradicated
With Trump WYSIWYG…..and his first FP statement…..
“America First Foreign Policy” statement on incoming admin’s new http://WhiteHouse.gov site
https://www.whitehouse.gov/america-first-foreign-policy …
FROM a former high level European political figure…
Carl Bildt
✔
@carlbildt
Probably first time a new US President doesn’t use the term “the free world”. Instead unite “the civilized world”. Clearly a difference.
Anonymous @YourAnonCentral declares war on @realDonaldTrump and threatens to expose ‘Russian ties’
http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/anonymous-declares-war-donald-trump-9636367#ICID=sharebar_twitter
With a Trump mouse click..climate change no longer exists for the President of the US…appears he has never spoken to the polar bears about it….
All references to climate change have been deleted from the White House website:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/all-references-to-climate-change-have-been-deleted-from-the-white-house-website
AND yet we debate his FP directions…..
What a so called leader of the Free World…..
Trump’s new Twitter background photo is from Obama’s #Inauguration.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/01/20/donald_trump_s_new_twitter_background_is_a_photo_from_the_inauguration_of.html
What not enough people actually showed up to create a photo op for Trump’s twitter site?????
What many in the US do not remember..nor want to remember….
Never forget “America First” was motto of the 1930s movement that opposed US involvement in the war against Hitler and fascism
Is the so called US values of democracy…rule of law…transparency now fully and completely broken….and broken by the very FBI who supposedly is the guarantor for defense of the US inside the US or at least that is their so called remit….
We know for example that the FBI comments towards Clinton and the “newly found emails” was a fake news story which actually some polling experts are saying directly contributed to the loss of 77K key votes in three key electoral college states costing Clinton the election….they are actually able to depict statistically that 77K shift……
BUT where is the outrage???
We now know the FBI was already on a long hunt for Russian connections to Trump and his advisors….LARGELY driven by US IC under the Espionage Act..NOT driven by surprise surprise FBI CI Division….
I know for a fact that an email server was in fact talking to another email server between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank in Moscow yet the FBI said and did nothing..AND I sit in Berlin…..WHY is that??
NOW if this article is correct…the FBI actually covered up the now ongoing Trump advisor Russian investigation by blocking correct information about to be published….UNTIL AFTER the election….
AND this is the current form of US democracy..really no different that what goes on inside Moscow only we do not yet kill the opposition…not yet at least…
I was once told by an intel analyst instructor..”to be good in this business drain your blood and replace it with ice water”…..but what we are seeing in the actual already proven Russia connections between Page via Gazprom which every Ukrainian knows is the corruption machine of Moscow…Stone a former dirty tricks 19 yr old for Nixon and Manafort who is directly tied to the GRU…and how FBI has to a degree largely covered up..goes beyond being pale……it now goes to the destruction of the US form of checks and balances………..
Trump, Russia, and the News Story That Wasn’t
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/public-editor/trump-russia-fbi-liz-spayd-public-editor.html?smid=tw-share&referer=https://t.co/ya5671xH7p
LATE fall was a frantic period for New York Times reporters covering the country’s secretive national security apparatus. Working sources at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., Capitol Hill and various intelligence agencies, the team chased several bizarre but provocative leads that, if true, could upend the presidential race. The most serious question raised by the material was this: Did a covert connection exist between Donald Trump and Russian officials trying to influence an American election?
One vein of reporting centered on a possible channel of communication between a Trump organization computer server and a Russian bank with ties to Vladimir Putin. Another source was offering The Times salacious material describing an odd cross-continental dance between Trump and Moscow. The most damning claim was that Trump was aware of Russia’s efforts to hack Democratic computers, an allegation with implications of treason. Reporters Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers led the effort, aided by others.
Conversations over what to publish were prolonged and lively, involving Washington and New York, and often including the executive editor, Dean Baquet. If the allegations were true, it was a huge story. If false, they could damage The Times’s reputation. With doubts about the material and with the F.B.I. discouraging publication, editors decided to hold their fire.
But was that the right decision? Was there a way to write about some of these allegations using sound journalistic principles but still surfacing the investigation and important leads? Eventually, The Times did just that, but only after other news outlets had gone first.
I have spoken privately with several journalists involved in the reporting last fall, and I believe a strong case can be made that The Times was too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had.
I appreciate the majority view that there wasn’t enough proof of a link between Trump and the Kremlin to write a hard-hitting story. But The Times knew several critical facts: the F.B.I. had a sophisticated investigation underway on Trump’s organization, possibly including FISA warrants. (Some news outlets now report that the F.B.I. did indeed have such warrants, an indication of probable cause.) Investigators had identified a mysterious communication channel, partly through a lead from anti-Trump operatives
At one point, the F.B.I. was so serious about its investigation into the server that it asked The Times to delay publication. Meanwhile, reporters had met with a former British intelligence officer who was building the dossier. While his findings were difficult to confirm, Times reporting bore out that he was respected in his craft. And of his material that was checkable, no significant red flags emerged. What’s more, said one journalist frustrated with the process, a covert link seemed like a plausible explanation for the strange bromance between Trump and Putin.
There were disagreements about whether to hold back. There was even an actual draft of a story. But it never saw daylight. The deciding vote was Baquet’s, who was adamant, then and now, that they made the right call.
“We heard about the back-channel communications between the Russians and Trump,” he said. “We reported it, and found no evidence that it was true. We wrote everything we knew — and we wrote a lot. Anybody that thinks we sat on stuff is outrageous. It’s just false.”
I don’t believe anyone suppressed information for ignoble reasons, and indeed The Times produced strong work on former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. But the idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct.
If you know the F.B.I. is investigating, say, a presidential candidate, using significant resources and with explosive consequences, that should be enough to write. Not a “gotcha” story that asserts unsubstantiated facts. But a piece that describes the nature of the investigations, the unexplained but damning leads, with emphasis on what is known and what isn’t.
Running every detail of the dossier, as BuzzFeed did, would have been irresponsible. Writing about a significant investigation would not. Weeks after The Times had the goods, Franklin Foer of Slate and David Corn of Mother Jones each took a turn at such pre-election articles. Their stories may not have been precisely what The Times would have done, but they offered a model.
If The Times didn’t write about ongoing investigations, it wouldn’t have produced the excellent scoop on Trump associates and Russia that broke Thursday night. Nor would it have so relentlessly documented the F.B.I.’s pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s emails until all facts were resolved. That investigation was fair game, and so was Trump’s.
A wave of readers over the past week have challenged The Times’s decision to sit on its reporting about the dossier. Among them was Michael Russo of Brooklyn, who had this to say:
I can appreciate that journalistic diligence requires your paper to describe these memos as “unsubstantiated.” But the “unsubstantiated” allegations described in this article have been circulating for months. While your editors made a value judgment about the veracity of these claims, American intelligence agencies apparently took the memos seriously enough to open their own investigations. How is this not newsworthy in its own right?
There is an unsettling theme that runs through The Times’s publishing decisions. In each instance, it was the actions of government officials that triggered newsroom decisions — not additional reporting or insight that journalists gained. On the server, once the F.B.I. signaled it had grown wary of its importance — without giving conclusive evidence as to why — the paper backed off. Weeks later, the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, publicly admonished the F.B.I. for being secretive about its probe of Trump. That gave The Times cover to write what it knew about the bureau’s investigation into the bank server.
It was the same pattern on the dossier. Only after learning from CNN that Trump and President Obama had been briefed on the document did The Times publish what it had known for months. Its confidence in the material had not changed, nor did its editors know whether the top level briefing meant the government believed the information was true. But the briefing became justifiable cause to publish.
In this cat-and-mouse game between government and press, the government won.
After-action insights are easier than in-the-moment decisions. Back then, the media still thought Trump was a weak challenger to Clinton, a mind-set that might have made taking the risk of publishing explosive allegations all the more fraught.
But it’s hard not to wonder what impact such information might have had on voters still evaluating the candidates, an issue I chided The Times for not pursuing enough in an earlier column. Would more sources have come forward? Would we already know the essential facts?
If the new president was in fact colluding with a foreign adversary, journalists and investigators should feel enormous pressure to conclusively establish that fact. If it is not true, both Trump and the country deserve to have this issue put to rest.
NOW just as I have repeatedly stated here…what you see in Trump is what you will be getting….his FP is actually quite simple….this proves it….
US is heading straight into numerous trade wars and total isolation…..but that is what those that voted for Trump failed to realize…it is about their jobs…they are right ..their own …..
BY ditching TTP…Trump as effectively handed the entire Asian trade markets to China to dictate standards…tariffs and trade agreements…AND a lot of US allies I the Asian area put their political careers on the line to swing this trade deal who will now shift their trade alliances towards China…as they see the US as an “unstable” trading partner who cannot be trusted to delivery on anything….
Trump trade strategy starts with quitting Asia pact: White House
http://reut.rs/2iVtnBb
The next FP policy change with be the Trump ditching of the US/Chinese “One China policy”….but the Chinese have already signaled they are ready for retaliation on that move…Trump just does not believe they will…a seriously fatal mistake as China has the NK card to yet play…..
The third move will be clashing with the EU over his 35% tariff threats and the resulting EU 35% tariffs on critical US exports especially agricultural products…
Fourth move….lifting of all US sanctions on Russia…unless the US IC investigation into his and his advisors ties to Russia comes home faster than he thinks or he thinks he can stop….
Fifth move…curtailing US participation in the numerous ongoing NATO exercises under the guise of it costs US to much money which we could spend at home….and his curtailing of Article 5..all which he has already signaled his intention on…all in print to be read by all…
If he is successful at stopping that espionage investigation then US allies will leak…is a given these days….
Trump talks a tough line of adding more ships to the Navy..but first he needs more manpower to man them..BUT more importantly is he ready to place the 6th Fleet with two carrier groups fully and completely back into the Med..which would anger his great friend Putin who has now taken over the Med…
While we watched the inaugiration distraction, Russia & Syria signed a 49 plus 25-year agreement for deployment of RU nuclear subs/ships in Syria.
Here’s the full text of the unannounced treaty that makes Syria a de facto perpetual free military base of Russia
http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Docu…pe=pdf#…
Up to 11 [nuclear] ships will be able to dock in at any time. Agreement
automatically extended for 25 further years after inital 49 term.
* RU has no-cost right to use Syrian territory for deployment of its bases
* Syrian gov’t have no right of access
* Full immunity for RU
BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT…..
Even if the anti Assad opposition gets into power and Assad is thrown out…they still have to deal with Putin and Russia for 49 plus 25 years…Syria is now effectively part and parcel of the Russian sphere of influence FOREVER….
Thanks to Obama ditching 70 odd years of US ME FP and we will be thanking Trump as well as he wants to eradicate IS using Russia and Assad and IRAN…..AND especially Hezbollah….
Trump stated he wants to eradicate radical Islam……HOPEFULLY he also includes the Iranian IRGC…Hezbollah and the Iraqi Hezbollah under that statement…otherwise it was just for PR effects for his voting base….
Shia radical Islam is just as deadly as Sunni jihadists….and Iran has US blood on their hands WHICH Trump appears to have totally forgotten….
Ever notice that the Trump influence operations still continue at virtually every level……
Book about Trump for sale at National Museum of American History is riddled with falsehoods
So for 50 USDs you can get a book from a National Museum loaded with falsehoods????
BUT WAIT a Trump nominee who plagiarized her books and PhD..had to be pounded by MSM to get her removed……AND her publishers pulled the books from the market place……BUT a Museum can continue to sell “falsehoods”…where is the difference….????
I have written this a number of times concerning Trump and his “Movement” as he calls it…BTW using the term “Movement” much in the style of the Nazi NSDAP in the German 30s……
“People love populists…until they govern…..”
REMEMBEr this one simple fact the Trump use of “America First” was not his creation …was a movement in the 30s to keep the US out of the war…..
So again when one is so wrapped up in a “Movement” what will the FP look like…we are already seeing it…as voiced in the Trump speech yesterday…….
The defining feature of populism is not anti-elitism but anti-pluralism. Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the “real” people.
Populists do not really call for greater democracy: populism without participation is an entirely coherent proposition.
Populism is based on a fiction but it is not fictional politics: there are real citizens supporting it.
Conspiracy theories are rooted in the very logic of populism itself.
http://bostonreview.net/politics/jan-werner-muller-populism?utm_content=buffer284c0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Hopefully all SWC readers fully understand the Trump statement…
QUOTE:
“I will eradicate radical Islam from the face of the earth”
UNQUOTE:
As a call to total war against a religion called Islam and a massive recruiting tool now handed AQ and IS AS this is exactly what they tell all Sunni’s over and over and over…the West is not your friend and protector and democracy is worthless….
NOT so sure those in the US military signed up for a total war after 15 years of war already which has not eradicated “radical Islam”…..
BESIDES it means war with Iran as well as they export their model of radical Islam called “Revolutionary Islam”…since Khomeini’s days….
BUT WAIT…is this war not what Flynn …Bannon….and others have been calling for….?
I am not the only one seeing the FP problems with the Trump speech…..
Asian media decry isolationist Trump, fear economic, diplomatic turmoil
http://reut.rs/2jJxPXz
THIS is what is bothering the Asians and the European allies….appears the US no longer needs allies of any sort under the world vision of Trump and his merry company of isolationists and billionaires…..
Trump’s dark promise to return to a mythical past
http://wpo.st/qH4T2
BUT how he is eradicate radical Islam from the earth with other countries outside of Russia who cannot even find IS in Syria in order to bomb them…AFTER this speech and he has virtually no ambassadors in place on Day 1……
Remember when Trump critiqued NATO for not “fighting terrorism” thus being obsolete???????
Denmark to Send Special Forces Into Syria | via @UPI
http://tinyurl.com/jswgvk5
Polar bears are dying in record numbers…and the ice is melting at the North and South Poles in record amounts BUT all is well in Trumpland….
BUT…it ain’t humans”…..just as Russia states…it ain’t us invading eastern Ukraine…..
President Trump’s new administration has already announced its commitment to eliminate the Climate Action Plan.
http://abcn.ws/2ka54jQ
Climate change defined by the DoD as a major security risk for the US…looks like SecDef Mattis is in for a rough ride these coming weeks….
Notice the interesting similarities between Brexit and the US election of Trump….for almost the same reasons….also driven by populism….
Brexit is the result of an English delusion, a crisis of identity resulting from a failure to come to terms with the loss of empire and the end of its own exceptionalism, argues Cambridge University professor Nicholas Boyle
http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/the_problem_with_the_english_england_doesn_t_want_to_be_just_another_member_of_a_team_1_4851882
Trump lied to the general public in his last press conference…did he not????
AND this bodes well for his FP..can it even be trusted to not constantly change…..
He has stated no one ..meaning his 46% voters are interested in his tax returns but the “others” 48% are in fact interested AND he stated he was going to leave his companies….BOTH have not been done……no tax returns published nor did he leave his companies before he became President THUS he is now in full conflict of interests and no long an ethnical president is he???
President Trump has not yet resigned from his companies:
http://hill.cm/5DA42P9
QUOTE:
President Trump has not yet formally resigned from his business empire, despite taking office on Friday, Pro Publica reports.
As of 3:15 p.m. on Friday, officials in New York, Delaware and Florida, where Trump’s companies are registered or incorporated, said they had not yet received the paperwork necessary for Trump to officially transfer control of his businesses to his two eldest sons and a longtime associate, according to the report.
The Pro Publica report examined more than a dozen of Trump’s largest companies and found that the newly inaugurated president hasn’t yet taken the proper steps to remove himself from their business operations.
The report raises further questions about potential conflicts of interest the real estate mogul could face in the Oval Office.
Trump has also said he would shut down the controversial Donald J. Trump Foundation, but the report found that documents pertaining to the charitable organization haven’t been updated.
The finding contradicts Trump’s claim last week that he has completely removed himself from his companies.
A lawyer for Trump, Sheri Dillon, said at the same news conference that the president’s business interests would be placed in a family trust by Inauguration Day.
Despite those announcements, ethics experts and lawyers have argued that doing so would not truly resolve Trump’s potential conflicts of interest, saying that the only way for him to avoid such issues would be to fully divest from his businesses.
Trump and his associates “are not doing what they said they would do,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics attorney, told Pro Publica. “And even that was completely inadequate.”
But Trump has held that he will not do so, and Dillon said last week that total divestiture could take a financial toll on Trump. What’s more, Trump’s massive real estate holdings, like golf courses and hotels, would prove difficult to sell off.
“President-elect Trump cannot be expected to destroy the company he built,” Dillon said at the news conference.
The president isn’t required by law to completely divest from business interests. But no past president has had a web of business interests as vast as Trump, who owns properties around the world.
Trump’s Inauguration Speech Was A Clear Declaration Of War
http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/20/tru
mps-inauguration-speech-declaration-war-ruling-class/#.WIMIoDk6wVo.twitter
Under the term “ruling class”…Europeans and Asians view themselves as now the Trump “ruling class” that he is targeting…especially after his recent interview was published….where he bashed EU…NATO…and Germany…all in the same interview…
Just how is he to conduct a FP with countries who basically now are not so trusting of Trump and or US intentions…and who is to step up and “fight together” with Trump against IS when you are being bashed by Trump…..
Trump repeatedly invited his “Movement” to come to DC..well they came but no so many of them it appears….
Inauguration crowd size estimates are in:
-Trump 2017: 250,000
-Obama 2013: 1,000,000
-Obama 2009: 1,800,000
OUT of the 250,000 over half of them were counter Trump demonstrators…..
So much for the Trump “Movement”….
So when Trump talks about his new American FP…who is he really talking about????
TELLING to say the least……
This is #Texas Anti Trump rally tonight: more attendees than his #Inauguration And a red state, too.
Trump and Bannon FP hard at work already in Europe which Trump basically dismissed in his press interview recently….stating that it was going to break up anyway…..
REMEMBER while Trump is President his senior advisor Bannon is running his white nationalist company in France…Holland….UK and Germany supporting far right/neo Nazi parties against their own governments….how is that possible……double dipping at tax payers expense….????
Europe’s far-right meeting in Germany today
Gang’s all here: Petry, Le Pen, Wilders, Salvini, Pretzell. And the crowd already chanting ‘Lügenpresse!” #Koblenz
Lueggenpresse is a Nazi slogan…the press lies…..notice anything similar in that slogan and to Trump’s tweets about the US MSM????
Exactly the same thing is it not????
NOW:
Geert Wilders, in German: “Europe needs Frauke, not Angela.” Crowd: “Merkel must go! Merkel must go!”
Le Pen: “In a world in which the US turns inward…patriotism is not a policy of the past, it is the policy of the future.”
Salvini: “Mr. Renzi is not the only face of Italy and Mrs. Merkel is not the only face of Germany.”
BUT WAIT he is in Germany right now….using German democracy to critique Germanns…the same Italians that fought with Hitler and sent Jews to their deaths…something the Italian neo right always tends to forget these days….
British govt tells incoming US administration that Russia and Putin have been ‘up to all sorts of very dirty tricks’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/10/putin-moscow-boris-johnson-hacking-democratic-national-committee-russia …
THE WINDS OF CHANGE are getting a tad colder now coming out of EU towards Trump…..
German official to Trump: “If you meddle with the cohesion of the EU…you’re actually treading on our front lawn.”
Blunter that statement cannot get….
The last US President that used the term “enemies” was Nixon….
Trump asks an inaugural ball crowd if he should “keep the Twitter going?” Because “the enemies keep saying” it’s terrible
This is from the European addition this morning in Germany….
Donald Trump channels Steve Bannon in nationalist anti-Washington inaugural speech.
http://europe.newsweek.com/donald-trump-channels-steve-bannon-inaugural-address-545423
JUST how is Trump going to convert so much distrust on the EU side into a valid US FP????
The drive to control the flow of information is a distinct characteristic of an authoritarian regime…..are we there now?????
Trump team shut down NPS Twitter accounts after they reported crowd sizes today.
Now they’re barred from sharing road conditions in winter.
Embarrassment=endangered drivers OR the first indication of an authoritarian regime building????
Interestingly Russia state media is doing it’s hardest to whitewash any Russian connections and or Ukrainian connections to the Trump advisor Manafort because they sense if these connections are proven they led onwards to Trump ……
I have not seen this much Russian propaganda efforts thrown at a single issue……
Russia has officially turned its media terror machine on whitewashing Paul Manafort, demeaning #Ukraine episode.
Russian state propaganda already tried to severe Manafort’s connect /w injected deliberate spins
Not satisfied with its successful efforts to manipulate the US election, Russia accuses Ukraine of sabotaging Trump
http://politi.co/2fY5OcH
This Russian senior official said :”Russia, unlike America, has never interfered into other countries state” https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/822495669755801600 …
LESSONS LEARNED from Ukrainian Russian propaganda…when Russia denies something it is true…when they accept something it is a lie……
Trump initially declared war on the US IC ovr their reports on Russia hacking…then came the revelations of a joint US agency investigation of Trump advisors close to Trump being connected to Russia and Russia black money and Russia black money used to support Trump election raised by the Steele reports….
THEN Trump was to go to Langley today to make nice…BUT THEN
QUOTE:
WASHINGTON
An objection from three Democratic senators will delay the U.S. Senate’s vote to confirm Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said on Friday that they oppose “a rushed confirmation” of Rep. Mike Pompeo to serve as CIA director unless senators get the opportunity to debate the nomination.
“The importance of the position of CIA Director, especially in these dangerous times, demands that the nomination be thoroughly vetted, questioned and debated,” the senators said in a statement.
The vote had been expected to happen on Friday, after the swearing-in of Donald Trump as the 45th president.
The move means Trump likely will start his presidency without his own nominee at the head of the CIA.
The senators said the CIA can protect the nation “under the leadership of its senior professional personnel” in the meantime.
“Certainly the incoming administration acknowledges that this would be consistent with their decision to hold over 50 current administration national security appointees,” the senators said. “Our constituents expect Congress to be a check and balance on the incoming administration, not a rubber stamp.”
The CIA is locked in a battle with Trump over allegations that the Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind an effort to sway the election in Trump’s favor.
“While members of the Senate give Rep. Pompeo’s nomination the careful consideration it deserves, Senator Schumer has asked Vice President Pence to keep Director Brennan on the job over the weekend,” said Matt House, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a statement.
“Just as Director (Michael) Hayden served as a bridge between the Bush and Obama presidencies eight years ago, Director (John) Brennan could play the same role for the incoming and outgoing administrations, if the President is willing to keep him on,” House said.
NOW the war that Trump started has reached an interesting point….are the Democrats in the Senator ensuring with the hold which can be indefinite that the joint agency investigation does not get stopped by Trump and his advisors….maybe actually….
With Brennan resigned and Pompeo not yet confirmed, Meroe Park is now the Acting Director of the CIA. She is career CIA.
Truly remarkable listening to my national security colleagues working the phones to figure out: Who’s running the CIA?
APPEARS to me that there is a serious consideration being given by senior Senate Deomcracts that Trump was going to bury the CIA portion of the investigation as they were the ones that briefed him on the accusations against him and his advisors…
By ensuring that the CIA continues to be led by an Acting Director ensures that that investigation goes forward and is not impeded…WHICH could have been buried by a new Trump nominee….
Some Congressmen who have seen the classified briefing have indicated Trump would not be President if the current classified information had been released before the election.
Trump’s FP of lifting of Russian sanctions in exchange for nuclear weapons reductions ain’t about to work……shot down by his very good friend Putin personally…
Today….
Kremlin spox says reductions in nuclear arms can’t be symmetrical with the US or done in any way that undermines Russia’s deterrence.
He also says that Moscow won’t trade its nukes for an end to US sanctions, and now suddenly states …..an end of sanctions isn’t a priority for Putin.
AND there are no ties between far right/neo Nazi European political parties…Trump…Bannon…Brietbart.com and key Republicans in Congress….??????
REMEMBER..”perception is the key”…..not reality…..
Austrian Freedom Party (FPO)head Strache is in Washington meeting with US Senators and members of Congress, his general secretary Vilimsky says.
Who was attending today in Koblence Germany a meeting of the European Far right/Neo Nazi parties…..all stating they was a “free Europe”…..
One of the German AfD Far Right member taking part in the meeting had his Crimea trip in the face of EU sanctions paid for by a Russian far right think tank….who supports the Russian far right ideologue Dugin
NOTE: Comment from Le Pen who was there from her Far Right Party funded in this election by Putin to the tune of 9M Euros…initially he promised her 21M Euros but the Russian bank he recommended went bankrupt and now they are demanding her 9M back…..
Le Pen: Trump Inaugural speech featured “similarities to that which some of us have been saying for months, and some of us for years.”
AT least someone in the States liked Trump’s speech….
Former KKK Head David Duke: Trump’s Speech is ‘War’ on Jews
http://forward.com/fast-forward/360691/former-kkk-head-trumps-speech-is-war-on-jews/
In the face of KKK Trump support…Trump has only once and very lukewarm pushed by on KKK/Duke support…..
“In a war of perception….perception is all that counts….”
AND right now Europe “perceives” Trump to be neo right…actually a half step away from “smiling fascism”….
How can Trump even formulate an effective FP when the divide between his rhetoric and reality is so massive …
This tweet sums up his potential FP failures….
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 20h
20 hours ago
We will follow two simple rules: BUY AMERICAN & HIRE AMERICAN!
BUT WAIT…all those red Trump MEGA hats were either made in China and or Vietnam…and he has a large number of employees in his hotels and golf courses working that are not American and have visas to work there…..BTW these hats are sold often by immigrants during his rallies and this weekend in DC….
So when will people wake up to this misuse of information actually often called propaganda and or disinformation….will they then question his FP…
BUT WAIT…Trump tweeted he was writing his own inaugural speech at his winter WH……and tweeted a photo of him supposedly writing….
.@WhiteHouse official finally concedes Trump’s inaugural speech was written by Bannon and Stephen Miller
http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-strikes-nationalistic-tone-in-inaugural-speech-1484957527?tesla=y&mod=e2tw
SO explain to me if he cannot write his own inaugural speech JUST how he is to formulate FP when he is so under educated on global affairs….and the intertwining of events over decades….
US taxpayer government research had to be protected by academic hackers out of fear that the Trump administration would destroy the data….WHICH has actually been done…
So when the rest of the world works on one FP answer…the Trump FP will be what exactly?
“Hackers downloaded US government #climate data and stored it on European servers as #Trump was being inaugurated”
https://qz.com/891201/hackers-were-downloading-government-climate-data-and-storing-it-on-european-servers-as-trump-was-being-inaugurated/
Europeans protecting global climate change data paid for by US taxpayers..protecting it from an incoming US President…..how strange is that????
Biggest Trump danger isn’t that he implements crazy policies but that thru incompetence & inexperience WH crashes the whole natsec system.
Wall Street Journal
Verified account
U.S. under Trump won’t send a delegation to Syria talks
State Department cites demands of transition for decision not to send a delegation to Kazakhstan
http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-under-trump-wont-send-a-delegation-to-syria-talks-1485019644?mod=e2tw
BUT WAIT…Iran did not want the US to come…the Turks did and the UN stated it must be under UN supervision…
Why bother when Trump is just gonna do whatever Putin wants in #Syria anyway?
REMEMBER when the Trump spokesperson Spicer stated they are planning to do away with the WH Press Corp….
Authoritarian governments just love to control the flow of information…what happen to US freedom of speech and free press….
Maggie Haberman
✔
@maggieNYT
The WH press list that I’ve been on for 8 years and Trump campaign and transition lists I was on for 18 months, I’ve suddenly fallen off of.
Now is press censorship a new element of US FP….????
OR is this the new Trump form of punishment for not reporting what he wants MSM to publish….