Eighteen months after the 2016 presidential elections, the United States of America finds itself in the throat of a most destructive existential crisis. The over two hundred forty years old Republic has been placed in this dangerous situation by the illegal manipulations of the political and legal systems of the extremely politicized Obama appointed political elite, in cohut with the entrenched Republican establishment, and not by the actions of the Trump Administration. These two political groups have been afraid of being exposed as conspirators to overturn the verdict of the majority of the American people against their steadily growing bureaucratic dictatorship. Hence the unending barrage of baseless allegations and outright lies to paralyze and ultimately overthrow the legitimately elected President of the United States of America.
The glaring contradictions between the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and the gross abuses of bureaucratic powers by the Obama Administration have caused too many hatred and fears across all elements of American society. This toxic mix of hatred and fears has obscured the very real difference between right versus wrong, has made a mockery out of the rule of law, has introduced insanity as the new normal in the general discourse, and has destroyed basic morality in public life.
In order to manage this idiotic hysteria wisely, the Trump Administration has decided to first break the bonds with which the Obama Administration shackled the economy. Yet, once the new tax law passed and the number of burdensome regulations has been reduced, the media frenzy has been unleashed with even greater vehemence than before. Now, the object of the anti-Trump resistance is again the myth of the “Russia Collusion.” Albeit absolutely and totally groundless, the Washington, D.C. swamp with its obsequious media have gone insane – threatening both the constitutional order at home and the international standing of the United States of America abroad.
There has always been a close relationship between the domestic and foreign affairs of all the states across the globe. A well functioning state has a bureaucracy whose members are not beholden to any political party, ideology, unbridled lust for power, or even to individual megalomaniac ambitions. There is no doubt that former President Barack Hussein Obama himself has been haunted by conflicting ideologies that have constantly fought for preeminence in his troubled mind. For individuals like him, nothing has been more annoying than subordinates who might have appeared to be smarter than he. Therefore, his appointees were without exception intellectually substandard, such James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, to name only a few. In brief, they were little more than political strumpets.
During his two presidential terms, President Obama faced several seemingly insoluble problems in foreign affairs. Should the United States of America leave Afghanistan and Iraq? Should he get involved in the quagmire of the greater Middle East and, especially in the conflict between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran? Should he let Russia regain influence in the “near abroad?” How should he fashion a foreign policy toward an increasingly assertive People’s Republic of China? What should be his stance toward the European Union? Should NATO be expanded further to the Ukraine, Georgia, or even beyond? What should be the United States of America’s anti-terrorist policy worldwide? How should the United States of America relate to Islam and its many manifestations?
These complex issues, coupled with his real personality under the public facade of coolness, which exhibited a volatile and unbalanced personality with a restless desire to make the world adapt to him rather than basing his policies on the existing realities, rendered him uniquely unqualified to become a real statesman. Clearly, throughout his political career he was a man of irresponsible and unfulfilled promises without any meaningful solutions. Moreover, because of his chaotic upbringing, he led a life of permanent revolt against everything that appeared to be normal and stable. The result was an undisciplined individual, who instead of being uplifted by the powers of the presidency, became wholly controlled by it. Thus, his presidency was dominated by boundless contradictions and spectacular failures.
Indeed, President Obama left for his successor an office that internationally no one respected and had confidence in. More importantly, he bequeathed to President Donald J. Trump a country that was deeply divided among ethnic, racial, and economic lines, and in which existential envy, lawlessness of the allegedly victimized minorities, who felt entitled to do whatever they thought would duly avenge their presumptive past humiliations in the hands of the “white majority” took preeminence over the wellbeing of the population at large. In brief, President Obama was a bungler, an incompetent politician, and a terrible destroyer of the domestic and international orders.
Meanwhile, then President Barack Hussein Obama and his loyal coterie engaged in classic espionage against then candidate Trump and his campaign staff. In due course, they enlisted a former British spy to collect whatever damaging information he could on the candidate and his campaign. Christopher Steele obliged and with the money generously given to him by the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign, and of yet unidentified individuals, he produced, with the help of rogue Russian intelligence officers a Dossier that, in turn, was presented to the FISA Court for legalizing the illegal spying. In this infamous Dossier, the seeds of the false allegations about Russian blackmail and large scale meddling in the 2016 elections have been sown. More than two years after these allegations, the Mueller investigation is yet to find even the slightest trace of any evidence to support Steele’s fantastic claims. Following the unexpected election of President Trump, they succeeded to get a Special Counsel appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, a good friend of the conspirators.
In this poisonous context, the Obama Administration’s holdovers and former grandees declared a total resistance against President Trump and his Administration with the clear intent of destroying democracy at home and of adding their discombobulated malice to the already chaotic international order. Indeed, the United States of America and the rest of the world have been in danger of collapsing and leaving only a huge vacuum, in which humanity would disappear.
President Trump the builder has had a constructive and not a destructive mind. He has seen it correctly that his main responsibility is to fight the attraction of this looming vacuum. In spite of the country’s enormous domestic problems, he has set about to construct a positive domestic agenda as well as a restorative foreign policy. Indeed, in spite of the unrelenting barrage of unsubstantiated allegations, President Trump has a global foreign policy vision. As a visionary among his detractors who have been blinded by their irrational hatred, he has seen that the greatest failure of American foreign policy has been since the end of the Cold War the United States of America’s inability to turn its triumph over the Soviet Union into a lasting peace in Europe and beyond.
Furthermore, he has correctly assumed that what followed the collapse of the Soviet Empire has merely been a truce, in which the United States of America’s international position has become more tenuous after each foreign adventure. To wit, these foreign adventures have been compounded by equally disastrous new ones, exposing the United States of America to more, seemingly insoluble challenges. Therefore, what his opponents have failed to understand has become the United States of America’s major nightmare, namely, that the unresolved relationship with Moscow remains the main reason for the crises within NATO as well as the European Union. Finally, he alone has grasped that lasting stability in Europe could only be achieved through a fair equilibrium among these two organizations and Russia. This means that a mutually accepted balance is needed among all the parties, which necessarily must include territory, population, economic and financial stability, and the military.
Thus, in these contexts, candidate and later President Trump’s desire to sit down with President Putin and try to reach a permanent solution has been the correct and necessary foreign policy strategy. Clearly, the expansion of NATO to the east and the south of the continent has given birth to a renewed Russian militarism, which has nicely dovetailed with the even more robust Chinese militarism, directed against the United States of America and NATO – leading to a convenient and ad hoc alliance of the two most powerful Western adversaries.
In this light, the rapid expansion of NATO has been the greatest stupidity of American and European foreign policies. Having a constructive mind, President Trump has understood the ever present danger to long term European stability, faced the political risk and marshalled the courage to save NATO from itself – a political revolutionary and a statesman among the hate-blinded political minions of fifteen minutes fame. More importantly, among all these hypocrites, he has steadfastly remained the only non-ideological politician. And herein lies the real reason for his advocacy for the normalization of relations with Putin’s Russia. Alone in Washington, D.C. and the European Union, alone even among most of the grandees of his Republican Party, President Trump is simultaneously a political genius and a tragic figure, permanently fighting against Congress, the media, and his foreign detractors.
In this hellish atmosphere, President Trump recently embarked on his trip to Brussels, London, and Helsinki. His opponents were ready to seize the opportunity to again fall on him and to destroy him. Yet, his negotiations in Brussels were unquestionably successful. The agreement concerning financial contributions alone has set NATO on the course of renewal and much needed individual responsibility by all members states. Equally important is the fact that his long overdue criticism of Germany have reminded everybody of the obvious fact that Berlin’s oscillation between the United States of America and the Russian Federation has been hurting the stability of the European Union and the unity of NATO.
In Helsinki, President Trump again showed the correctness of his political instincts. The question of European stability has been closely related to the problems in the greater Middle East, South-East Asia, and North Africa. In the greater Middle East countries, the so-called Arab Spring in alliance with the forces political Islam, has tried to destroy the status quo and superimpose a destructive ideology on the existing order. In South-East Asia, the People’s Republic of China with its military expansion, has created global instability. Since the overthrow of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, this country has become a nonstate. In Algeria, the army has had difficulties to keep the peace. In Morocco, the monarchy’s stability has been challenged constantly. Even Tunisia has labored under protracted political instability since 2011. Stability in these areas cannot be imposed exclusively externally by the United States or in collaboration with the other NATO countries. Any foreign interference, peaceful or military, must take into account the vital interests of each country. This incontrovertible logic of international relations indicates that the West cannot reach a permanent solution unless it enlists the cooperation of the Russian Federation and even that of the People’s Republic of China.
By meeting first with the leaders of the allied states and then with President Putin, President Trump rose to the occasion. Contrary to his detractors who are many, the President did not lose to President Putin. Neither did he betrayed the intelligence agencies by voicing some doubts about all the details of their findings. Certainly, doing so he did not commit “high treason” as the former Communist turned Obama CIA Director John Brennan claimed in his idiotic outburst. The meeting was merely about exploring each others’ views on a host of issues.
Rightly, President Trump decided to set aside the usual rituals of bilateral meetings burdened with cumbersome diplomatic bargainings and attempted to reduce everything to a few clear and simple principles. In that he again succeeded. The most important of those is that trust must be rebuilt between the two countries and their leaders. Secondly, President Trump emphasized, and President Putin agreed, that the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1991. Thirdly, ideology should not drive relations between the United States of America and the Russian Federation any more. Fourth, that cooperation is possible and even obligatory in many areas, such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, Syria, Iran, and generally the Middle East. Finally, President Putin got the message that even the most minimal degree of Russian meddling and other Cold War shenanigans in the domestic affairs of the United States of America will not be tolerated in the future.
Clearly, the domestic and foreign opposition to President Trump has no coherent counter-strategy. They are like pilots without a compass. President Trump’s declared objective is to construct a new practical American foreign policy free of the ideological spirit of adventurism and false grandeurs. For this purpose, he would like to facilitate a closer cooperation among Washington, D.C., Moscow, and Beijing. Hence his reference during the press conference to his “good friend” Chinese President Xi Jinping. With his comment, he put an end to the useless and ineffective practice of the old fashioned tactical implementation about playing either the “China Card” against Russia, or vice versa the “Russian Card” against China.
While President Trump’s opponents have been concerned only with deposing him by any means possible, his constructive mind knows that traditional diplomacy and statecraft will fail in the present poisonous international situation. To his credit, President Trump also understands that only by establishing certain basic and shared principles within the larger international community could a measure of normalcy be restored to the world. Helsinki, with its attempt to establish a triple alliance among the United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China, was a great step in this direction. President Trump’s just announced intention to extend an invitation to President Putin to visit Washington, D.C. presumably in early fall of this year, will definitely mean that he is determined to retain the initiative vis-a-vis his opponents in guiding American foreign policy toward pragmatic sanity.