America’s Europhiles frame Trump on Russia

It is no longer Moscow, but Beijing that challenges Washington’s pre-eminence.

November 8, 2016 was a mournful day for Europhiles in the United States. Their candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had lost in delegate count to Donald Trump, who would consequently become the 45th President of the United States on 20 January. Promotions, fees and sinecures hinge on the access that individual “strategic experts” have to the powerful within the Washington Beltway, and few from this community had cared to establish contact with the New York celebrity businessperson. In contrast, hundreds of them knew one or the other of the Bill and Hillary Clinton duo, dozens very well. Much time and effort had been squandered on nurturing this relationship, and on Election Day, the US voters rendered that effort a waste. Cruelly, Hillary got defeated even after a frenzy of antiTrump hysteria inflamed the media, not to mention Europhile Republicans such as Senators Lindsey Graham or John McCain, as well as other notables such as House Speaker Paul Ryan and former Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Each had worked tirelessly to get Hillary elected, and yet had failed. Of course, after 8 November, almost all of them sidled across to Trump Tower in a local version of the Chinese imperial kowtow, the exception being McCain, who clearly regards this as his last term in the Senate and consequently has little to lose by being honest about his dis- like for the President-elect. As for Henry Kissinger, he must be regretting the fact that so little of his time has been spent with Trump during the years gone past, for he must believe that greater exposure to his admittedly impressive packaging of clichés and homilies may have converted even Trump into a Europhile, despite global geopolitics having moved its centre of gravity from Europe to Asia. That Moscow was and has to remain the declared “principal foe” of the US is explained by the fact that such a positioning has resulted in the UK, France, Germany and even Poland being the key allies of the US. Contrarily, if China were to be understood as the primary threat to US primacy, the focus of attention would need to move eastwards, towards India, Japan and even Iran. For the Europhiles, ensuring that the US remains locked in hostility towards Russia is essential for the continued flow of their funding and high level administrative positions.

Although President Barack Obama understands that Europe’s baton has passed to Asia, he has shown himself too timid to seriously challenge Clintonian Euro-orthodoxy, in the process even making himself and his wife into (albeit adequately clothed) cheerleaders for the failed Clintron campaign. In the ongoing effort to ensure that Moscow and not Beijing remains at the centrepoint of US strategic hostility, the higher ranks of the US intelligence community (who are Europhile almost without exception) have been brought into the arena. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would be a tad more convincing had he not been exposed as a liar more than a year ago, when he mendaciously downplayed before the US Congress the extent of intrusion of intelligence agencies into the lives of millions of citizens. So who were the actual hackers and leakers of DNC emails? It was clear that in Washington, several within the intelligence community loathed the Clintons for the manner in which they lobbied for handouts from any possible source to the institutions run by them, just as many within the Democratic Party disliked the amoral way in which they perpetuated their death grip over the Democratic Party machine in a style not seen since Richard Daley’s period as Mayor of Chicago. As it was Julian Assange who exposed Clapper as a smoothfaced liar, it is understandable that the DNI would badmouth the Australian. And given that Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham and more than a few others within the Republican establishment are looking to the day when (they hope) President Trump will trip up and be forced to resign his charge into the hands of Mike Pence, it is small wonder that so much of their time gets expended on seeking to damage Trump’s credibility by echoing in different ways Hillary Clinton’s laughable charge that the billionaire is a “Putin puppet”. Within the US intelligence community, of course at levels lower than those few who have been favoured with positions and largesse by the Clintons, the Bushes and other Europhile biggies, there is silent dismay at the way in which it is being sought to get established that there is a “Slam Dunk” case that Putin, rather than Democratic Party rebels sore at the way in which the nomination had been stolen from Bernie Sanders, orchestrated the DNC hack. It is pertinent to point out that the then CIA director, no less, gave a “Slam Dunk” verdict that Saddam Hussein was swimming in WMDs, a lie that he knew to be false, but made anyway.

Geopolitical reality is on Trump’s side. It is no longer Moscow, but Beijing that poses the definitive challenge to Washington’s pre- eminence, and in the present century, Tokyo and Delhi are far more consequential for the future of the US than Paris or Berlin. When he was accused of having WMD, Saddam Hussein repeated over and over again that this was a lie, but this was not merely ignored but distorted to imply the opposite. The arcana of gossipy— indeed, bitchy— emails between Clinton staffers would be incomprehensible to the GRU or the KGB, but be clear as glass to insiders in the Democratic Party, who were almost certainly the source of the email revelations. US interests mandate that President-elect Trump succeed in reconfiguring US policies, so as to fit reality rather than nostalgia, but the Europhiles will not surrender their long-held primacy within the US establishment without a long and ugly fight against a US President whose only crime is that he sees the world far more clearly than the Europhiles do.