FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Trump Is ‘Emboldened To Challenge the Essential Logic’ of the Anglo-American Empire
Oct. 7, 2018 (EIRNS)—Veteran investigative reporter Gareth Porter, in a column posted on Truthdig on Oct. 2, has found that President Donald Trump really is opposed to the Anglo-American Empire, particularly in the Southwest Asia, though he doesn’t mention the British Empire side of it, and some of the other characterizations of Trump that Porter uses may be open to debate.
“He has complained bitterly, both in public and in private meetings with aides, about the suite of permanent wars that the Pentagon has been fighting for many years across the Greater Middle East and Africa, as well as about deployments and commitments to South Korea and NATO,”
Porter writes at the outset.
“This has resulted in an unprecedented struggle between a sitting President and the national security state over a global U.S. military empire that has been sacrosanct in American politics since early in the Cold War.”
Porter draws on the Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House, for a number of accounts of the tug-of-war between Trump, who doesn’t understand why the U.S. has to have troops all over the world, and his advisors, who claim that those troops are needed to do things like keeping bombs from exploding in Times Square, and otherwise keep the peace around the world.
“Trump’s national security team became so alarmed about his questioning of U.S. military engagements and forward deployment of troops that they felt something had to be done to turn him around,”
Porter reports. This was in the summer of 2017. The other standard argument that they gave him, which U.S. and British officials repeat ad nauseam with respect to Russia and China, is that we must maintain the “rules-based, international democratic order,” which Porter characterizes as the term used to describe the global structure of U.S. military and military power, because this had “brought security and prosperity,” a statement which casually ignores the decades of destabilizing wars in Southeast and Southwest Asia that the U.S. has engaged in.
What’s clear from Porter’s account is that Trump hasn’t bought any of it, though he’s acceded to some of it, particularly on Syria and Iran, and Porter worries that Trump may eventually totally cave in. “But Trump’s unorthodox approach has already emboldened him to challenge the essential logic of the U.S. military empire more than any previous President,” Porter concludes. “And the final years of his administration will certainly bring further struggles over the issues on which he has jousted repeatedly with those in charge of the empire.”
