{"id":308399,"date":"2017-05-16T14:01:11","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T13:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=308399"},"modified":"2017-05-16T18:54:13","modified_gmt":"2017-05-16T17:54:13","slug":"trumps-plan-finally-becomes-clear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/trumps-plan-finally-becomes-clear\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s Plan Finally Becomes Clear"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The first stage of U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s plan to restore America\u2019s former dominance as a manufacturing country will be announced this coming weekend in Riyadh Saudi Arabia and Washington DC, but its outlines are now already more than clear. The biggest-ever foreign sale of U.S.-made weaponry will be announced at that time, and, according to a little-noticed report by Reuters on May 12th<\/span><\/a>, an unidentified U.S. government official informed Reuters that “We are in the final stages of a series of deals,\u201d whose size will be of truly extraordinary historic proportions. <\/span><\/p>\n

Trump will announce during this, his first trip abroad as the U.S. President, starting on Friday May 19th, deals for the fundamentalist-Sunni government of Saudi Arabia to purchase more than $100 billion, and perhaps more even than $300 billion, in U.S.-made weaponry. The announced intention of Saudi princes is to defeat what they declare to be the \u2018existential threat’<\/span><\/a> they face from Iran and from Shia Islam<\/span><\/a>, and so these weapons will presumably be used for \u2018defense\u2019 against the fundamentalist-Shiite government of Iran, and against any nation whose leader is Shiite (even if not fundamentalist, and including non-sectarian and even secular Shiite, such as Syria\u2019s leader Bashar al-Assad, and such as the Houthis in Yemen). The U.S. (especially the major investors in corporations such as Lockheed Martin) will therefore be in a position to profit from intensification of the wars in Syria and in Yemen, as well as from other national battlefields between Sunni and Shia. That\u2019s the plan, and, on this basis, as soon as Trump won the 2016 election, he appointed to all of his national-security posts people who have solid records as being rabidly hostile, above all, towards Iran, and secondarily, toward Iran\u2019s allies, such as Russia and Syria<\/span><\/a>. (Trump\u2019s opponent, Hillary Clinton, was hostile, above all, toward Russia; her aim was to conquer it, which would entail unlimited spending on nuclear weapons. Trump\u2019s plan is focused instead on unlimited spending on conventional weapons, and the deal that he has reached with the Sauds is designed specifically to supply them with that \u2014 not with nuclear.) <\/span><\/p>\n

The key international ally of the American government has long been the fundamentalist-Sunni Saudi royal family, the world\u2019s wealthiest family, who own Saudi Arabia, including the world\u2019s largest oil company, Aramco, which is 100% owned by the Saudi government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family<\/span><\/a>, actually by whomever the royal family\u2019s princes select to be the King. No one can be selected by the Saud family to become the King who is disapproved of by the nation\u2019s fundamentalist-Sunni Wahhabist clergy<\/span><\/a>, who have been committed ever since 1744 to eliminating Shia Islam<\/span><\/a>. Israel also is allied with the Saud family. Consequently, on the Sunni side are the U.S. and Israel; and, on the Shiite side are Russia and Syria. Other countries are secondary. For example, Sunni Turkey is part of America\u2019s NATO military alliance against Russia, but is obsessed against America\u2019s Kurdish allies and therefore more on Iran\u2019s and Russia\u2019s side in that regard. (A Kurdish state being carved from Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey<\/span><\/a>, would please only the U.S. government.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The Reuters news-report also quoted this unnamed U.S. government official as saying that “Israel would still maintain an edge\u201d so as to remain the most powerful military nation in the Middle East. This suggests that part of these \u201cdeals\u201d will be that the Sauds will continue to say no-thank-you to the repeated offers by Pakistan to sell some of their nuclear weapons to the Saudi government. And it also means that the Sauds will continue to rely upon the U.S. nuclear force as protection or \u2018umbrella\u2019 against any possible nuclear attack, from Israel or any other nation. (The full terms of the \u2018deals\u2019 won\u2019t be made public but will also include purely spoken agreements, more in the nature of the 1945 original deal that was reached in private between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Saud.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The Sauds are buying the U.S., as their ally in their centuries-old war against Shia Islam; and, the U.S. is selling the Sauds the weaponry, and the military trainers (so as to be able to use America\u2019s weapons), against Iran and other Shiia-controlled or -allied countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Trump Administration has already been applying pressure against Russia in an attempt to get them to abandon their support of Syria\u2019s Bashar al-Assad, and of Iran; but this pressure has not yet borne any fruit, and is not currently a front-burner issue in Trump\u2019s plan; it\u2019s on the back burner right now.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Trump Administration has still not decided whether to continue the Obama Administration\u2019s refusal to label as a \u201cterrorist organization\u201d the Syrian jihadists who are led by Al Qaeda<\/span><\/a>, which is funded by the royal Saud family<\/span><\/a> and has been the most effective fighting force in Syria to overthrow Assad\u2019s government<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

As regards domestic U.S. issues, they\u2019re viewed, by the top levels in both the Republican and Democratic Parties, more as vote-getting baits, than as issues of actual primary concern. Whereas the public focuses mainly upon those issues, the political-donor class (owners of international corporations) are concerned mainly about foreign affairs; and, in domestic affairs, on lowering the taxes that they pay and the economic regulations that increase their costs of doing business \u2014 and even those domestic issues have a large foreign-affairs component. So: international alliances are the central concern of America\u2019s wealthy. Since the general public knows and cares little about those matters and doesn\u2019t understand them but instead mis<\/i>understands them, there is virtually no political cost to any politician who, as a public official, gives away the store to the donor-class, on what they care about the most. What the public see in the \u2019news\u2019media is propaganda that\u2019s paid for by advertisers and\/or by the aristocratically controlled government itself, and therefore carefully veils key realities that would enable the public to understand what\u2019s going on and why<\/span><\/a>. Of course, individuals such as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning<\/span><\/a>, are viscerally hated by the donor-class and get thrown into prison even while people such as George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, walk free and are even honored by large portions of the electorate (not to mention by their own financial sponsors) (and even win such things as the Nobel Peace Prize).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org The first stage of U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s plan to restore America\u2019s former dominance as a manufacturing country will be announced this coming weekend in Riyadh Saudi Arabia and Washington DC, but its outlines are now already more than clear. The biggest-ever foreign sale of U.S.-made weaponry will be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":308400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[1036,96,3604,535,698,34,59,1017,1023,987,754,1235,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-308399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-cover-up","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-global-news","12":"tag-hillary-clinton","13":"tag-iran","14":"tag-military","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-nuclear","17":"tag-russia-today","18":"tag-syria","19":"tag-war","20":"tag-white-house","21":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}