Graham Fuller Gives Strong Backing to Trump’s Rejection of U.S. Imperial Policy

FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Graham Fuller Gives Strong Backing to Trump’s Rejection of U.S. Imperial Policy

Jan. 7, 2019 (EIRNS)—Former leading CIA official Graham E. Fuller made a devastating attack on the imperial nature of the U.S. policy establishment in his blog yesterday. Fuller does not mention the British role, and refers to Trump disparagingly; nonetheless, his conclusion reads:

“However feckless the Trump Administration and its style may be, perhaps we should consider carefully whether at least one of Trump’s default instincts—gradual American disengagement from myriad unending U.S. overseas military commitments—might have some merit. Foreign policy must consist of something more than perpetual identification of enemies, and perceptions of ‘threats’—long a special and costly cottage industry of Washington.”

Along the way, Fuller’s analysis, also reprinted today on leftist Jim Lobe’s blog, titled “Trump: Lurching Towards a New Foreign Policy?” correctly makes the following observations:

The current global crisis is largely due to “the massive U.S. foreign policy blunders of the past three decades, and the brutal deprivations that these losing wars have exacted upon the American political, economic and social order—not to mention upon the overseas victims of those wars.”
The crisis traces back “at least to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the so-called ‘unipolar moment’ when the U.S. embraced the idea that it was now the world’s sole superpower, capable of establishing long-term unchallenged global hegemony. Remember how this was to herald the coming ‘American Century?’ Most of the U.S. foreign policy elite still embodies these notions. They perceive U.S. hegemony as the natural state of affairs, perhaps even God-given; any views that work against that belief are alien, naive about the nature of the world, ideologically unacceptable, or even treasonous.”
This is evident, Fuller writes, in the media and policy establishment attacks on Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un, with the reaction to his decision to pull out of Syria, and with his “efforts to overcome the truly dangerous deterioration of U.S. relations with Moscow—in which Washington finds it inconceivable that any element of its own policies could have any kind of causal effect on such deterioration.”
“Some will take issue with my views here,” Fuller writes. “They believe the U.S., as an ‘exceptional nation,’ has the right, nay the duty, to serve, indefinitely and unchallenged, as policeman to the world.... Does the global order really require the permanent presence of some kind of a policeman? ... Or should there be a global policeman at all?”
Fuller maintains that the cost of trillions spent on military adventures “robs money that should go to decaying U.S. infrastructure, public transportation, sustainable income distribution, ... failing health care, the building of civilian sciences, free higher education, and fostering social harmony. It seems like China itself is investing heavily in many of these socially productive spheres even as the U.S. prefers to put its money into building geopolitical alliances and preparing for conflict.”