I don’t like Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean I should jump in bed with the CIA. Over the past couple weeks, Democrats and progressives across this country have been doing exactly that. If you look at the reports on Russian involvement in the US election objectively, you quickly realize that there’s nothing surprising here. Countries do propaganda and attempt to influence other countries. This is nothing new. James Comey had a lot more to do with Hillary’s losing the election than Russia did and nobody’s going after him. Trump hasn’t helped matters of course, but this scandal has been consciously manufactured over the past few weeks.
Nobody is focusing on why that is. The US foreign policy establishment is terrified that Trump might actually change Russia policy for the first time since the mid-1990s. The point of the intelligence community leaks and press releases over the past month is to keep that from happening. And we’re all helping out. I’m afraid it might actually be working. Trump may want a good deal with Russia, but he won’t do it if he thinks it will hurt him politically.
One of the misconceptions most in need of correcting in this discussion is the idea that we’ve tried being friendly with Russia before. The story is that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama tried to make peace with Russia and got burned. This is ridiculous. In fact the exact opposite is what actually happened. Yes, W. claimed to look into Putin’s soul and see a friend or whatever, but his policy trampled all over Russian interests and concerns. In 2004 he over saw the addition of seven countries to NATO, some of which were once members of the Russia friendly Warsaw Pact, and some of which were actually part of the Soviet Union itself. Additionally, the war in Iraq was carried out in violation of international law and against Russia’s security council veto.
Obama also claimed that he was going to “Reset” relations with Russia. He didn’t. There was more noise about NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, and there was the support of 2014’s ouster of a democratically elected and pro-Russian government in Ukraine. Perhaps most importantly there has been the massive US sponsored proxy war on Syria between 2011 and 2017. Russia has two or three countries in the entire world that are willing to cooperate with them militarily. Syria is one of them.
In addition to that, there is NATO’s little mentioned betrayal of Russia and China in Libya. I made a video about this just a few weeks ago.
Don’t let anybody tell you that we’ve already tried to be friends with Russia. If they do, they’re lying, or they have no idea what they’re talking about.
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Video Transcript after the jump…
Well it was bound to happen eventually. I just didn’t expect it to happen this soon. Today I agree with Donald Trump on something. Let me be clear. I defer to nobody on Trump Hatred. I am terrified of what his presidency may do to this country. I was willing to get into bed with anybody to defeat him. Really anybody. But my hypocrisy does know some bounds. I refuse to get in bed with the CIA and the Foreign policy establishment.
It’s their fault that Trump got elected in the first place. It’s Washington, DC that killed the Middle East. It’s Washington, DC that kept on fighting the cold war 25 years after the USSR gave up. Without the frustration built by these failures, Trump would never have gotten elected. NO ISIS, NO TRUMP
And that’s why we have to see beyond our hatred of Trump in this fight between the President Elect and the Intelligence Community. Late last week, the spies issued another report on Russian hacking of the US election. Anybody who looked at the new report honestly conceded that there was nothing there. There were no specifics. Nor was there any intelligence you couldn’t have gotten from the Public Domain. Of course Russia hated Hillary Clinton. Of Course Russia does propaganda and tries to hack the computers of foreign leaders. We do that too, and we do a much better job of it.
The amount of supposedly progressive people who are out here defending the US intelligence community right now is deeply disappointing. Why are people flipping out about Russia rather than Trump’s truly frightening eagerness to start a trade war with China? What nobody is asking is why these agencies are willing to go to such lengths to embarrass Trump and Russia. They are trying desperately to block any efforts towards peace from Trump.
It’s because they’re terrified. From the get-go, the only aspect of Trump Policy I have found attractive is his friendliness to Russia. Foreign policy experts will tell you that Bush and Obama started out friendly to Russia as well. Disrespectfully, that’s bullshit. What you do is more important than what you say. Bush added slices of the Old Soviet Union to an anti-Russia military alliance. Obama launched a massive proxy war against Syria, one of Russia’s only allies. This is not friendship. I’ll talk about this a bit more in the blog post.
Trump seems to be willing to do things that Bush and Obama wouldn’t, like concede that Russia has strategic interests, and legitimate security concerns of its own. This is different, and as much as it pains me to admit it it’s better. There is precisely one place in the world that thinks US Russia policy has been successful over the past three years. And that’s Washington, DC.
A Rogue Russia is fantastic for the CIA and the Foreign policy establishment. Arms sales have gone through the roof. Fighting Russia makes all our awful Cold War alliances look sensible again. Also, learning Arabic is hard. It’s much more fun to focus on Eastern European languages and locations. Do you know how hard it is to get a decent beer in the Middle East? These things may sound trivial, but they are really not. Bureaucracies have interests too. And by acting to establish a real friendship with Russia, Trump is threatening Washington, DC’s interests. That’s what we should be talking about this week.
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