Trump’s
‘Orwellian’ strategy speech: Triumph of the neocons?
RT,
18
December, 2017
US
President Donald Trump’s new national security strategy pledges to
maintain global supremacy while defending America at home. Many
observers noted disconcerting echoes of neoconservative policies
Trump himself once criticized.
Trump
administration officials welcomed the new strategy. Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson praised it for bringing “all elements of
American power to protect our people, generate new economic
opportunities, and advance our interests and democratic principles.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions lauded its commitment to protecting
the US by securing the borders and reforming immigration.
President Trump is announcing a new National Security Strategy for a new era. Read more: http://45.wh.gov/69H9BV
Many
observers of US foreign policy, however, were alarmed by the
strategy’s continued insistence on American global dominance.
“Pretending
we are at peace and vowing to preserve it by diverting even more of
our resources to the military industrial complex is not a national
security strategy. It is an Orwellian deception taken straight from
the pages of 1984,” added Davies, author of Blood On Our Hands: the
American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Matthew
Hoh, a former US Marine and now a leader of Veterans For Peace,
called Trump’s speech “both more Orwellian and less polished than
we have seen before from the White House.”
“Trump’s
actions overseas have not been much different than any of his
predecessors,” Hoh told RT. “His actions have been a
military-first, interventionist and hypocritical foreign policy, not
based on cooperation between nations and a respect for human rights
and dignity, but rather a preservation of American hegemony and
primacy that results in mass suffering and death.”
Trump
is continuing with his predecessor’s confrontational stance in
Europe against Russia and the “pivot to Asia” against China,
while giving the US military more money than it knows what to do
with, noted Dave Lindorff, founding editor of
ThisCantBeHappening.net.
“His
calls back during the presidential campaign for the US to be done
with ‘nation building’ appear to have been forgotten as the US
forges ahead with increased combat in Afghanistan. It looks like
after appearing to be on the run, the neocons have taken control of
foreign policy again,” Lindorff told RT.
In
the speech announcing the strategy Monday, Trump criticized his
predecessors for engaging in nation-building abroad while neglecting
the American homeland, but did not say he would abandon the practice
going forward. He also framed the world relations as a competition
between the US and other countries, which America was determined to
win.
“There
was a considerable amount of boasting, some of it quite ridiculous,
as in the implication that it was the Trump administration that had
succeeded in defeating ISIS,” former CIA officer and
counter-terrorism specialist Philip Giraldi told RT. “There were
only two concrete pledges: we will built a wall along the Mexican
border and we will spend more money on the military.”
“I
was pleased that Russia and China were described as rivals, not as
enemies,” added Giraldi.
Some
of the rhetoric in Monday’s speech can be understood as catering to
Trump’s domestic political base, maintaining the narrative of
American exceptionalism and a “religious worldview that views the
US as inherently good and moral, despite the reality of US actions,”
said Hoh.
Monday’s
speech sounded a lot like Trump’s inauguration address, and the big
takeaway is that imperialism is still on track while “the man who
said that he would drain the swamp has taken up residence right in
the middle of it,” Jason Hirthler, author of The Sins of Empire,
told RT.
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