One of the problems the world faces is that the dominant power on the planet has entered a period of incoherence. Joe Biden has come to symbolize the country he allegedly leads in that he is old, frail and not always understandable. This is how much of the world now sees the United States. What they see from Washington are people either trapped in a bygone era or divorced from present reality. It is as if the last several decades never happened.
You see this in this Financial Times post about what foreign policy could be like under a second Trump presidency. Keep in mind that the Financial Times is often used by the intelligence community to plant stories it wants to launder. The audience is not just the English-speaking world, but also Europe. The people quoted are all said to be associates of the Trump team. Their views may or may not reflect the thinking of Trump’s inner circle.
That aside, the first thing to note is that there is no acknowledgement of present reality in the story. For example, Congressman Michael Waltz is quoted often about how to resolve the Ukraine war. He says, “Trump could threaten to crash Russia’s economy by lowering the price of oil and gas.” According to Waltz, this will force the Russians to beg for peace negotiations. This policy makes sense if it is 1985 and Russia is still the Soviet Union with a brittle command economy.
For starters, the president cannot willy-nilly change oil prices. No amount of American production can drive down prices to a level where it would have an impact on the Russian economy. The “break even” point of Russian crude is well below that of the cheapest American production. Then you have the fact that it will take a decade to bring American crude production to the levels needed to crash prices. There is also the fact that Biden emptied the strategic oil reserve.
In other words, the big idea from the foreign policy experts is something they read about from the Reagan years that has no chance of working now. It is as if they are unaware of the sanctions war they launched two years ago that not only failed to crater the Russian economy but boomeranged back on them. The German economy is in in free fall because they no longer have access to cheap Russian gas. Meanwhile, the Russian economy is booming.
Of course, there is the fact that these people can only think in terms of threats when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Congressman Michael Waltz is a neocon sock puppet who was an early cheerleader for Project Ukraine. He was also wrong about every aspect of it. In any other profession, being as wrong as Mike Waltz would be disqualifying, but here he is being quoted as an authority on Russia. This is what happens when there are no consequences to failure.
Elsewhere in the article, they quote Fred Fleitz, a former John Bolton staffer and current foreign policy adviser at the America First Policy Institute, which promotes itself as helping shape Trump policy. With regards to Iran, Fleitz argues “The objective should be to bankrupt Iran again and to reinstitute maximum pressure.” Again? Has he not noticed that Iran survived sanctions for three decades? Is he not aware that Iran now has the support of China and Russia?
With regards to settling the war in the Ukraine, Fleitz says, “We freeze the conflict, Ukraine does not cede any territory, they don’t give up their territorial claims, and we have negotiations with the understanding there probably won’t be a final agreement until Putin leaves the stage.” Unlike Waltz, Fleitz has no clue as to why the Russians would entertain such a silly offer. Note that this idea was first floated by the neocons when the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed.
The jaw droppingly ignorant part of that post is the use of the term “Minsk-3” to describe the Trump strategy. The Russians correctly view the Minsk agreements as a Western ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine. The reason they think this is Angela Merkel said this in an interview last year. Naming the Trump strategy after two prior efforts to trick the Russians is just a way to make sure there can be no negotiations between the Trump people and the Russians.
This is probably why this story was planted in the Financial Times. The hope is to poison the well, so to speak, for the next administration with regards to negotiating with the Russians. They may not be able to control what Trump does, but they can give the Russians many reasons to not trust any overtures. After all, Trump will be gone in four years, so if they can freeze the Russia situation, they have a chance to get back in power and resume their efforts to start a war with Russia.
What becomes clear in that Financial Times story is that the American foreign policy establishment does not have a clue as to how to address the many problems the next president will face. The main reason for their incoherence is they seem to be unaware that these problems were caused by them. Compounding it is the toxic ideology of neoconservatism that has poisoned the foreign policy community. It is a cancer in the bowels of America’s most important institution.
It is what makes prospects for a sober minded and realistic approach to foreign policy under Trump unlikely. Trump’s instincts are good, as are those with many of the people around him, including JD Vance, but he will inherit a foreign policy establishment that is both stuck in the past and corrupted by a worldview that is inconsistent with the world as it is today and with the needs of the country. Fixing this problem without the use of extrajudicial means may not be possible.
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When you say “the American foreign policy establishment does not have a clue as to how to address the many problems the next president will face” you seem to imply that the American foreign policy establishment wants to solve American foreign policy problems when the reality is actually along the lines of what Julian Assange said: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.” If we assume… Read more »
I always get a kick out of these “reports” that quote people who claim to be close to Trump. They are always and everywhere fake. Trump will probably kneecap Ukraine. That’s the most likely strategy. To end the fighting, Russia likely keeps most of what they took, Zelensky is removed and exiled, and a new government is put in place. If there’s an agreement, it’ll include guarantees that what is left of Ukraine will not be permitted to join NATO. And Russia will demand guarantees that the west won’t fink on them again (lol, but okay). We broke Saudi Arabia’s… Read more »
The most likely outcome of the war is the Ukraine army surrenders, Zelensky flees and the Russians facilitate a new government through internationally supervised elections. That new government signs the deal the Russian put in front of them. That deal gives Russia control of everything to the east of the Dnieper and control of the Dnieper. Ukraine becomes a neutral, agricultural country within the Russkiy Mir.
I wonder how the media will try to blame Trump for losing Ukraine? They will do it and it will be non-stop once the Ukrainian army collapses.
the coverage of the war if trump gets in will turn like they flipped a lightswitch. It’ll go from “russia is failing” to “ukraine is failing” so quick you’ll get whiplash.
It’ll start with Trump kneecapping Ukraine to accelerate the collapse. All he’d have to do is turn off the money and pull our troops out. Stop sharing overhead imagery and comms. Poof, Ukraine army collapses. You might be right, but “total capitulation” in a war hasn’t happened since Japan in WW2. A Korea-like split is more likely. We’re not far apart. But I think it gets done in away that doesn’t involve some sort of military surrender. It’ll be more subtle than that. I’ve said since 2021 that this will wind up a lot like Georgia. Longer war, bigger country,… Read more »
The Russians will never accept a Korea solution. They have no reason to accept it. The thing people need to understand about Russia is they never trade what they have for what they already have or what they can get on their own. They are not the Republican Party. The four regions plus the Crimea are Russian lands. They can demilitarize Ukraine and impose neutrality on it without talking to the West. That means the West has to offer something the Russians do not have now in order to get talks. That is what the experts fail to grasp. To… Read more »
Agree, but how does Russia ensure that in five or ten years, the West doesn’t meddle in Ukrainian politics, causing another Zelensky to get elected demanding NATO membership?
The Russians seem to be getting smarter about this stuff. They outmaneuvered the NGO’s in Georgia, for example. They will make sure the NGO’s cannot setup shop and that Ukrainian pols who head West for grooming stay in the West.
Good point. Indeed, countries around the world have figured out that the West’s favorite tool is regime change. Orban certainly has worked to counter this.
I also seem to remember Xi very publicly removing a pro-Western politician a few years back. Seems that the word is out.
Everything is a risk and the future in unknowable, but if I were Putin or Putin’s hand-picked replacement, I’d be subverting like there’s no tomorrow: *Keeping those migrants flooding into Europe and the Anglosphere *Distracting the GAE with Middle Eastern/European Muslim shenanigans *Double-paying the online Civnat Right and “Dissident Right” to attack the GAE and play nice with Russia *Doing the chaos-agent thing where Russian officials compliment publicly some US official who is known to be a Russia hawk, thereby making other American officials now suspicious of the Russia hawk *Sending pretty Tatar boys to Lindsey Graham to record his… Read more »
“and in general honeypotting like hell (because who can’t resist a young Russian lady?)”
Easy, Marko! I’m beginning to think you may have been compromised…
Sure. If I was Russia, China, India, Iran, any other country or group, I’d simply follow the Jewish blueprint. Set up various organizations, launder money into them and let them start funding politicians, writers, NGOs, etc.
I’d also get some intelligence guys into the mix to use blackmail and intimidation against those who don’t play ball. I’ve often wondered why various groups don’t follow the Jewish playbook. It’s not complicated.
Pretty much…Putin was tricked by the Minsk agreements and will not be allowed to sign anything that requires honesty or good faith, because Medvedev and the General Staff have had enough..I doubt the international involvement, however…the new Ukraine doesn’t need Western support, just the support of BRICS, which will be no problem..
Ukraine is loaded with valuable minerals and fertile farmland, so it has plenty to offer…
I’ve wondered greatly about this dynamic. Clearly, some are more tepid in their feelings towards Putin. But one has to think that, if people such as populate the General Staff are intelligent, they view Putin as a pretty darn effective leader, considering the perilous waters he has pretty effectively (not perfectly) navigated for over two decades. But, who knows?
A better deal for Russia would be taking over all of Ukraine. Second best would be taking most of Ukraine without the parts that are claimed by Poland, Hungary or perhaps even Slovakia and Romania.
No Ukraine, no problem. Kiev is an ancient Russian city anyway.
Cool. Any chance we could get a post about how this outcome will affect both the GAE and the American people?
Israel’s belligerence toward its neighbors is probably the most important foreign policy issue right now because it threatens to cause a global disaster, yet neither a Harris nor a Trump administration will deal with Israel as the rogue state it has become. Until Israel no longer controls much of our foreign policy apparatus, we will not be able to address many of the problems cited above. Since this is never going to happen, we’ll just have to hope that sober minds will prevail in Iran, Russia, and China.
Going forward, it’ll be interesting to see how the American Jews get along with the Israeli Jews. Yes, Jews control US foreign policy, but the American Jews seem to be tiring of the Israeli Jews and that will only get worse as Israel’s demographics change.
Kneecap Israel and DOS jewdom
However, Israel is proving to the peoples of the West that large numbers of Muslim enemies can be forcibly removed and the Muslim world won’t do sh*t. No reason it can’t be done in Lyons, Bradford or Berlin.
“… yet neither a Harris nor a Trump administration will deal with Israel as the rogue state it has become.” Both are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Zionist lobby. We all know that. But there’s more. USA and Israel are like the Earth-Moon system, a binary system, which is a key component of the US imperial system. Even were Trump not owned by the Zionists, there would only be certain things he can do within the parameters of the imperial system (notwithstanding his radical rhetoric). Look at the structural logic of the declining US empire to understand what… Read more »
These people are playing yesterday’s game of white nations against white nations. It was pathetic 100 years ago. Today it is unspeakable. Every group of white people wants to pound their chest about how they beat the devil out of some other group of white people (Russia, Germany, England, America, France, etc). This has to stop. Save the ire for race traitors.
My first post was a general comment on the inability to negotiate with US (really, the neocons). But let’s look specifically at the why the neocon threats are laughable, really delusional. Russia – Freeze the Conflict As Z notes, this seems almost designed to anger the Russians, or, at this point perhaps, make them chuckle. Why on earth would Russia agree to letting Ukraine and the West off the hook, just as they are so clearly winning. The only leverage that the West has over Russia is that Putin has no desire to occupy western Ukraine. That’s it. At best,… Read more »
The neocons think all golem cattle are equally inferior and interchangeable.
It’s why the Chinese are so frustrating to them.
“Fixing this problem without the use of extrajudicial means may not be possible.” I agree. A big chunk of the problem is that those in the DC bubble are blithely unaware of the sharp and irreversible decline in US influence and hard power. The USA is no longer a “superpower.” Its latitude in policy is now sharply circumscribed. Rule #1 is “not to get high on your own supply” of propagandistic BS but that seemingly is what has happened to those in the DC bubble. And of course you can’t get to be an Inner Party member if you don’t… Read more »
The System accepts no feedback and is basically a “closed loop” because dissent has been crushed. So any correction to it is going to be “thermodynamic” now.
I find it grimly amusing that the (((people))) currently shrieking about starting a four-front WW3 are the same people who got rich spending the last 50-plus years shipping, “the Arsenal of Democracy,” to various Asian countries.
These people are impossibly dense, delusional or disingenuous – or all of them. What’s perfectly clear is that the US foreign policy establishment – and let’s face it, they run the show, not the president – simply cannot be negotiated with.
That’s the lesson of the article. The neocons and their sock puppets are used to being able to lie to people or to use US power to force other countries to negotiate. Now that those levers are gone, they are lost and refuse to accept the new reality. The rest of world understands this and is acting accordingly.
I argue today that these guys are smart and still “screw up” from our point of view. We have to be open to the idea that The Purpose of the System is What it Does, as other dissidents argue. The MIC/grift/war machine has become a self-licking ice cream cone. It will break from thermodynamic, not political, force.
Yes, permanent war is quite lucrative. It also fits the nature of the neocons, which simply love to meddle in other people’s affairs. They’re a middle-man people after all. Fixing infrastructure, health care, etc., bores the living daylights out of them and their WASP sock puppets.
That’s pretty much the game right now, good summary
They’ve really gaslit themselves into thinking Putin is some great Satan when he’s probably (to his own detriment) the most pro-western leader Russia has ever had, and probably will ever have. Whoever they get next isn’t going to be nearly as accommodating (if at all).
I wouldn’t go quite that far, but he’s certainly no Ayatollah Khomeini or Xerxes.
Yes. None of these problems can be fixed without extraordinary measures, including threats and use of violence. The word is that Trump is surrounded by steely-eyed dudes this time around who know what to do. I am not so sure.
One has to wonder if Trump’s people have been in touch with say, Erik Prince, with regard to security, potential clandestine action, etc.
Let us not put Descartes before da hearse! Ergo, what mightn’t Kamaltoe’s foreign policy look like? Perhaps that’ll be Z’s offering–appropriately enough–for Halloween.
The American empire is not only in retreat, but the nation itself appears on the verge of collapse. Normies are looking at the burning drop boxes filled with smoldering ballots and wondering if this is the last election. Some of them are even wondering if the last election was the last one. Wouldn’t it be ironic, after decades of fear-mongering, if a foreign superpower actually did try to occupy America? Not just buy it up piece by piece, like Chinese oligarchs, but literally like something out of “Red Dawn.” There aren’t enough normal white guys left to take to the… Read more »
jj-
There is an argument to be made that the real long-term goal behind the destruction of California is to prepare it for eventual red Chinese occupation and colonization.
“This is what happens when there are no consequences to failure.”
THIS. Not just the foreign policy community, but also the military, government, government contractors, labor unions, major corporations in general. Bloated, arrogant, incompetent, unaccountable.
“Congressman Michael Waltz is quoted often about how to resolve the Ukraine war.” Amazingly, this guy is probably in the upper decile of Congress (brains, guts and experience) and still gets it wrong. I’ve heard Fred Fleitz speak and I suspect he’s way smarter than anyone in the senior security/diplomacy ranks of the Biden Administration. And he’s just got this wrong. Look at our recent record – the Kennedy/LBJ team (Vietnam) was very smart and screwed up. W’s team – evil but they were not stupid. They f’d up massively. The Founders understood how fraught foreign entanglements were. That’s why… Read more »
I’d love to know what George Kennan would’ve thought of all this.
He’d be on Napolitano’s podcast with Sachs, McGregor, and Mearsheimer, because like them he’d have been blacklisted from “respectable” media.
I am not sure the problem is how dated their worldview is or how inconsistent it appears to be. As for the needs of the country, they don’t give the first fig about the country. In fact, they are complicit with its controlled demolition. I think that Patraeus and other Iraq generals have since 2006 or so been going around openly discussing their plan to make from the northern tip of Canada to the southern tip of Argentina a giant economic zone. This isn’t about old modes of thinking. This is about a longstanding project that they have a deep… Read more »
There will be extreme tension between the UK’s Starmer government and any Trump Administration. Starmer actually praised Trump’s New York conviction, and members of his party stupidly waded into the upcoming American election (Labour is full of Kamala Harris-level morons). Starmer also is very unpopular and with great justification if polls there are to be believed. Trump already had little appetite for the Ukraine war, and its biggest foreign cheerleader has as its PM someone who publicly hates him. Additionally, both the Macron and Olaf governments are deeply unpopular, and the EU is increasingly ridiculous. Yes, the Foreign Policy establishment… Read more »
Starting with Wilson, or Lincoln, the feds have convinced White boys to go off on some fantasmical foreign adventure to die. A far cry from Jackson convincing a bunch of Tennessee farm boys to fight the British rather than work the farm. There has always been an element, Charles Lindbergh, that has resisted. As a complete aside, I went to Wikipedia to refresh my knowledge of Lindbergh, and his antiwar stance was based on his…wait for it…not yet… his “antisemitism”. I know a large number of Iraq/Afghanistan vets that regret their post-9/11 enthusiasm. Regardless, the sixty+ year war on YT… Read more »
“extrajudicial means”
Shoot about half the staffers in the State Department?
Or perhaps Kerry’s plane could “vanish”, but it isn’t just him. A professor friend of mine who used to work on capitol hill around forty years ago told me that at this point, the top 1/3 of the “leadership”/buracracy at foggy bottom not only has to be removed – probably forcefully – but has to be literally banished somewhere where they’ll have no contact with anyone.
He went on to explain that even if they’re removed from the State Department, they’ll still continue to exert influence and screw up any attempt to fix things through proxies.
A not knee jerkingly anti Trump piece. I will watch for falling chunks of sky when I step out for lunch.
Thr ground hog year of foreign policy in Washington is 1942. It is always 1942 to them: America is the world beating arsenal of democracy, overflowing with “can do!” vigor. And Russia is hanging on by the skin of their teeth, hoping for almighty America’s forebearence
The State Department suffers from groupthink more than even the average Washington ministry. In those unhallowed halls, the support for Kamala Harris must rise past 80 percent. The State Department was always pink or red; even when McCarthy was waving around fake papers, there were Communist fellow travelers in it’s ranks. Its love of the capitalist system is tepid, its adoration of “free” government money genuine. It would take a nuke blast under their bums to realize how much Russia plays by its own rules, not theirs. At least during the Cold War there was Das Kapital and the other… Read more »
I disagree with the assertion that there is no “book of putin”. It exists, its “The prince” by machevelli.
Then there is Dugin’s oeuvre.
“The German economy is in in free fall because they no longer have access to cheap Russian gas.” This is not a criticism of the Z-man, because I read story after story of many, many troubles in Germany. But check out a graph of the German stock market. From the invasion low of 13100 in February 2022, it has grown steadily to its current 19200, or 47% rise. In fact, its post invasion low was 12100 the day before the Nordstream pipeline explosion on September 25, 2022, it has seen a 54% rise (23% annual compound return)! Since that day, it’s been straight… Read more »
In American, we have an old expression, “Wall Street ain’t Main Street.” If you a German worker losing your job at VW or taking a ten percent pay cut, the euphoria in Frankfurt means nothing.
Too lazy to look, but how much of that has to do with the German economy, i.e., Volkswagon’s stock goes up because now they’re building more cars in Brazil than Germany (also: infaltion).
The DAX (Germany’s S&P) reflects a small number of very large companies – around 40 companies. While Germany’s big automakers have been hammered, German tech companies, which are global and not dependent on energy costs, have soared.
If you look at Germany’s mid- and small-cap company stocks prices, it’s a different story. They are the industrial backbone of Germany. The indices that measure their stock returns are slightly down for the year. Germany is in trouble.
It is almost as if small and medium-sized businesses are the ligaments required to hold any sizeable economy together.
Now, if only we could get the dummies at the WEF, EU, and CFR to understand this.
That’s even more the case in Germany. The Mittlestand as it’s known is incredibly important to Germany’s economy. If they’re in trouble, it’s very bad news for Germany.