The U.S. establishment disdained Donald Trump because he didn’t know how to do the war-making thing, so he had to go through some tough boot camp training to learn the ropes, as filmmaker John Pilger told Dennis J Bernstein.
By Dennis J Bernstein
President Donald Trump has bathed in the praise from both Democrats and Republicans for his surprise missile attack on Syria last week, even as he prepared for a state dinner with the president of China at Trump’s elite Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
As U.S. policies now push the world closer to World War III, I interviewed John. Pilger, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who has just completed his 60th film for TV, which anticipates a global conflagration.
The Coming War on China, says Pilger, “reveals what the news doesn’t – that the world’s greatest military power, the United States, and the world’s second economic power, China, both nuclear-armed, are on the road to war.”
Journalist John Pilger (Wikipedia)
Dennis Bernstein: This is Trump’s first major foray into international relations and Pentagon guided missile diplomacy. Could you please talk about this?
John Pilger: Well, it’s very consistent, Dennis. My first reaction was career, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, and, of course, Syria. All the result of provocations. Provocations in complex situations. But provocations by the United States.
The United States is a war state and, very much like Israel, it doesn’t really, as far as the U.S. elite is concerned, it doesn’t really function properly without being on a major war footing. And the problem with Trump was that he didn’t, apparently, didn’t quite get this, at first. Well, now he’s got it. He’s been hauled into line. It seemed in the beginning that Trump wanted to do a deal, make peace with Russia. And he made some rather bellicose noises about China, and about the Middle East.
But he wasn’t really on message with those who control the U.S. in terms of its “relations,” so-called, and I use that word almost in a satirical way, that the CNN person who’s used it without the satirical intention. But, he didn’t understand that there has to be a permanent…