Neocon Establishment Moves To Contain the Trump Effect

by Harley Schlanger

[Print version of this article]

Nov. 22—It didn’t take long for the Anglo-American establishment to launch operations to counter the strategic intent of United States voters who provided U.S. President-elect Donald Trump with a resounding victory on November 5. The dramatic rejection by the electorate of the policies of President Joe Biden-Vice President Kamala Harris was taken by Trump as a go-ahead to fulfill his mission from his first election in 2016, to “drain the swamp,” and end the “permanent wars” favored by the “swamp” since the first Gulf War began in January 1991. The “swamp,” for Trump and his supporters, is a reference to the permanent bureaucracy running U.S. foreign and domestic policy, sometimes identified as the “Military-Industrial Complex,” or the “Deep State.” His pledge to purge the swamp operatives, which had helped to carry him to victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, was undermined by the persistent drumbeat of the fraudulent Russiagate narrative—which falsely attributed his victory to meddling in the election by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian cyber-networks—and by the presence of a gang of neocons in his administration, many of whom had been appointed by Trump. He campaigned in 2024 with a renewed pledge that, this time, it would be different.

While his 2024 election victory provoked across-the-board shock and dismay among the trans-Atlantic establishment figures who oversee the neocon and neoliberal swamp creatures, his first appointments to cabinet positions produced outright panic. Among the most controversial were his selection of U.S. Representative for Florida’s 1st congressional district Matt Gaetz, a Republican, as Attorney General, and former Congresswoman and Democratic Party presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

As Republicans gained the majority in the U.S. Senate, which must confirm appointments, a frantic mobilization was started by Never-Trump war hawks in both parties to persuade at least four Republicans to vote against the two, presuming unanimous opposition to them from the Democrats. The announcement by Gaetz on November 21, that he was withdrawing his name from consideration as Attorney General came after an onslaught of media attacks on him over charges of sex trafficking and drug use. Gaetz steadfastly denied the charges, pointing out that the U.S. Justice Department had dropped its investigation already in February 2023, citing the lack of credibility of the witnesses making the charges against him. When several Republican Senators expressed concern over the charges, implying that they might not support his appointment, he removed his name from consideration, to avoid “unfairly becoming a distraction” to pursuing the agenda of the Trump Presidency.

The Threat from Gaetz and Gabbard

Gaetz had endeared himself to Trump for his zealous attacks on those pushing the Russiagate narrative, which was used to undermine Trump’s Presidency. He was tenacious in debunking the lies coming from President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, Democratic Party officials, and the media, proving that there was no evidence to back up the charges of Russian meddling, or of Trump collusion with Putin. His attacks on the FBI were especially troubling to anti-Trumpers, because the agency operates under the jurisdiction of the Attorney General. The hearings on his nomination would have provided an opportunity to show that charges of illegal FBI activity against Trump are true, tarnishing further the reputation of the Bureau as a hit team of the permanent bureaucracy.

The withdrawal of his candidacy may take some pressure off the defenders of the DOJ. However, Trump’s intention to pursue the fight to clean out political operatives in the Department is not over, as he has appointed several of his personal attorneys to be deputies to the Attorney General.

The verbal fireworks against Gaetz have been accompanied by an aggressive assault against the Gabbard appointment. She was an outspoken opponent of the pro-war neocons while serving in Congress from 2013 to 2021. Her January 2017 trip to Syria and her criticism of U.S. support for Ukraine in the proxy war against Russia have led to charges that she favors “ruthless dictators” over “democracy,” with venom spewed against her from both sides of the Atlantic. NATO and European Union officials have been warning of the danger of a U.S. break with Europe by the Trump administration, with special concern that Trump would cut off aid to Ukraine, leaving Europe on its own to cope with the alleged threat from Russia. They are in ongoing discussions with U.S. neocons on how to “Trump-proof” NATO, so as to be prepared for a sudden move by the new President to end the war! For the neocons in European governments, this means a commitment to increasing budget outlays for military production at a time when there is growing opposition in the population to spending for a war which most know cannot be won, and while their living standards are sharply declining.

From the UK comes the fear that the “Special Relationship” may be broken by Trump. The Telegraph reports that Gabbard’s appointment has “sparked concern over potential reductions in intelligence-sharing across the Five Eyes alliance” [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—ed.]. It quotes former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, who called it “a maverick appointment,” of a person with “no experience of intelligence and security.” Dearlove was involved in the UK-concocted hoax of Iraqi weapons of mass-destruction which led to the Iraq war in 2003, and played a role in promoting the fake stories of Russiagate, e.g. defending the author of the phony Steele dossier, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. (The Steele dossier alleged that Putin controls Trump through compromising videos of sexual activity during a trip to Moscow. It has been thoroughly debunked as a fraud.)

Gabbard’s appointment was singled out by Chatham House fellow and leading British Russophobe Keir Giles in a Daily Mirror op-ed on November 15. After asserting that the U.S. national security community will be “more alarmed by [Trump] appointments to intelligence positions,” he zeroed in on the threat to the “Special Relationship,” claiming that these appointments, such as Gabbard’s, will “have an immediately chilling effect on international cooperation in intelligence between the U.S. and its closest partners.”

Gabbard: Diplomacy Instead of War

As a candidate for the 2020 presidential election, Gabbard was smeared by Hillary Clinton as “a favorite of the Russians.” Gabbard had exposed the Clinton networks for rigging the 2016 Democratic primaries against Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (then seeking the Democratic nomination for presidential candidate), which was a factor in the initiation, by Clinton’s campaign, of the charges leading to Russiagate. Her appointment has also been targeted by discredited war hawk John Bolton, who described it as the “worst cabinet-level appointment in history.” He said her “judgment is nonexistent” and that putting her in charge of the U.S. intelligence function “should be giving our adversaries in Moscow and Beijing a lot of relief.”

One Democratic opponent of the Gabbard appointment is Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA case officer from Virginia. Typical of the attacks on Gabbard from members of her former party, Spanberger accused her of being “ill-prepared and unqualified,” adding that she “traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators,” like Putin and Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

Gabbard’s critique of the U.S. role in Syria is of special concern to the CIA, which she and others, including former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. General (ret.) Michael Flynn, accused of aiding, arming, and training Islamic terrorists attempting to overthrow President Assad. She also charged that the allegations that Assad used chemical weapons against Syrians were false, and came from British intelligence-funded networks, such as the White Helmets and fake investigative journalists of Bellingcat.

She met with Assad twice during her January 2017 fact-finding mission to Syria. Under fire for the meetings, she said she did so because “we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there’s a possibility that we could achieve peace. And that’s exactly what we talked about.” When this was thrown at her again in 2019, she debunked the U.S. narrative on Syria, saying, “Assad is not the enemy of the United States, because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.... [W]hether it is Syria or any of these other countries, we need to look at how their interests are counter to or aligned with ours.”

Gabbard’s defense of diplomacy with Syria made her a special target of U.S.-UK neocons. She was critical of Obama’s support for anti-Assad terrorists, which the CIA called the “moderate” opposition. She told CNN that instead of backing regime change in Syria, “Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the U.S., not some foreign country.” The “foreign country” she was probably referring to was the UK, which admitted in 2018 to spending 2.7 billion pounds on “non-military programs” in Syria.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the oldest British military think tank, defended air strikes in Syria by the UK’s Royal Air Force as conducted on behalf of a “global coalition against Daesh,” as part of a “counterterrorism effort.” A report released by RUSI in July 2023, “The UK Has Reached a Watershed Moment in Syria” concluded, “The UK’s military activities in Syria are more diplomatically precarious than they have been for a long time.” Gabbard’s appointment makes them more precarious!

Gabbard versus the Uniparty War Hawks

In a Democratic presidential primary debate in 2020, Gabbard called for:

an end to this ongoing Bush-Clinton-Trump foreign policy doctrine of regime-change wars, overthrowing dictators in other countries, needlessly sending my brothers and sisters in uniform into harm’s way to fight in wars that actually undermine our national security and have cost us thousands of American lives.

In a video message on Twitter in 2022, Gabbard said:

Dear Presidents Putin, Zelensky, and Biden. It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country—no military alliance with NATO or Russia—and therefore alleviate the legitimate security concerns of both [the] U.S. and NATO countries as well as Russia, because there would be no Russian or NATO troops on each other’s non-Baltic borders. This would allow the Ukrainian people to live in peace.

She made clear her rejection of the narrative which describes the launching by Putin of the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine as “unprovoked.” Instead, she maintains that it was provoked by the U.S. and NATO, and has insisted on negotiations between the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine, rather than arms deliveries. She endorsed Trump for President based on his call for putting an immediate end to the war in Ukraine.

As DNI, Gabbard will be positioned to block efforts for instigating future regime-change coups and wars by neocons in the eighteen agencies under her jurisdiction. Further, the Establishment war hawks fear she may rip the lid off past operations, exposing the U.S. role in instigating and running geopolitical wars at least since the first Gulf war, including targeting Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, resulting in millions of deaths at a cost of trillions of dollars.

With Gaetz now out of the way, it can be expected that the attacks against Gabbard will escalate.