[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Sign-in]  [Mail]  [Setup]  [Help] 

Status: Not Logged In; Sign In

List Of 18 Things That Are Going To Happen Within The Next 40 Days

Pentagon Taps 600 Military Lawyers To Serve As Temporary Immigration Judges For DOJ

81 Actors Who Have Passed Away So Far in 2025

High school is different now

Banks REMOVING CASH and nearing major DISASTER. Prof St Onge.

Did America Pick the Wrong Side in WWII?

Chicago in CHAOS – Mayor Tells Police to Stand Down as Trump Says ENOUGH Murder

Graham Linehan ARRESTED in UK for gender critical tweets - UK COLLAPSE IS IMMINENT

Cash Jordan: 400,000 Illegals ‘Forcibly Returned’ To Mexico… as NYC COLLAPSES

The ChatGPT CEO's Web Of Lies by Vanessa Wingardh

The Fall of the Israel Lobby Has Begun — And This Is Just the Start | Denzel Washington speech

'Statistically Almost Impossible' – 4 AfD Candidates Have Died 'Suddenly And Unexpectedly' Before Key State Election

Israel And The West Set The Stage For Next Round Of Warfare On Iran

Last night in Milan, an 18-year-old girl was beaten and raped while trying to catch a train home

Russia has developed a truly modern system of warfare.

Alberta's Independence and Finances

Daniela Cambone: 100% Loan Losses Loom as Fed Shrinks Balance Sheet-

Tucker Carlson

Cash Jordan: ICE HALTS 'Invasion Convoy'... ESCORTS 'Armada' of Illegals BACK to MEXICO

Cash Jordan: “We’re Coming In"... Migrant Mob ENTERS ICE HQ, Get ERASED By 'Deportation Unit'

Opioids More Likely To Kill Than Car Crashes Or Suicide

The association between COVID-19 “vaccines” and cognitive decline

Democrats Sink to Near Zero in New Gallup Poll, Theyre Just Not Satisfied

She Couldn't Read Her Own Diploma: Why Public Schools Pass Students but Fail Society

Peter Schiff: Gold To $6,000 Next Year, Dollar Index To 70

Russia Just Admitted Exactly What Everyone – But Trump – Already Knew About Putin's Ukraine Plans

Sex Offenses in London by Nationality

Greater Israel Collapses: Iran the Next Target

Before Jeffrey Epstein: The FINDERS

Cyprus: The Israeli Flood Has Become A Deluge


Ron Paul
See other Ron Paul Articles

Title: Who Is Making US Foreign Policy?
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://www.unz.com/scohen/who-is-making-us-foreign-policy/
Published: Dec 6, 2019
Author: Stephen F. Cohen
Post Date: 2019-12-06 07:12:34 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 203
Comments: 1

An anti-neocon president appears to have been surrounded by neocons in his own administration.

President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where, he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente (“cooperation”) with Moscow.

And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.

Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president’s thinking about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.

How did this unusual and dysfunctional situation come about? One possibility is that it was the doing and legacy of the neocon John Bolton, briefly Trump’s national security adviser. But this doesn’t explain why the president would accept or long tolerate such appointees.

A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained a “Kremlin puppet.” Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump’s political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have kept the allegations alive.

The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington’s permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a “deep” or “secret” state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington’s foreign-policy “blob,” as even an Obama aide termed it, will remain.

Click for Full Text!

Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread  


TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest

#1. To: Ada (#0)

To answer the question: jews and the jew controlled congress and white house.

Darkwing  posted on  2019-12-06   15:13:08 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest


[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Sign-in]  [Mail]  [Setup]  [Help]