America’s Deep State players have tied down President Trump on Russian sanctions and other foreign and economic policies but that doesn’t mean the struggle is over, writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.
By Alastair Crooke
President Trump has had his foreign policy hands and feet tied by the Russia (and Iran) Sanctions Act. He now has been rendered “helpless”: in respect to détente with Russia — gulliverized, spitefully, by his own party, working with the Democrats, to empty Trump’s constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy – and to seize them for Congress.
President Donald Trump announces the selection of Gen. H.R. McMaster as his new National Security Adviser on Feb. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
And in a further humiliation, Trump has been “rolled” by his military minders (Generals James Mattis, H.R. McMaster and John Kelly) on his Afghan policy: he has relinquished civilian oversight of this military expedition in Afghanistan to McMaster and Mattis — the former being the presumed author of the “new” Afghan policy. The President was “rolled” on his foreign military prerogatives too – as Commander in Chief – by his triumvirate of military minders in the White House. The “civilian” leadership has given place to the “military.”
The question is whether these humiliating concessions will appease his opponents sufficiently to allow the President to “live on,” albeit as an incapacitated President, or is this just the hors d’oeuvre? It seems that the entrée may be being planned as the complete discrediting of Trump’s base – ordinary Republicans being lashed to the Trump “Titanic” – to be sunk along with its captain – as “white-supremacists, white bigots and Nazis.”
Professor Walter Russell Mead – and he should know – tells us that “President Trump’s highest officials remain committed, one way or another, to defending the global order the U.S. has been building since the Truman era. That includes [Secretary of State RexTillerson, Mattis, Kelly and McMaster]: These men share a disdain for the Obama administration’s retrenchment and retreat. … They…