Trump’s Foreign Policy Philosophy Hard to Pin Down
Masood Farivar, Voice of America
Is President-elect Donald Trump a foreign policy realist or idealist? Is he bringing Richard Nixon’s hard-edged realpolitik to his foreign policy or following in the footsteps of the more idealistic Ronald Reagan?
The question has become a parlor game among Washington's policy pundits.
Trump’s frequent invocation of Reagan’s “peace through strength” mantra and campaign pledge to rebuild America’s “depleted” military has invited comparisons to the Republican icon credited with winning the Cold War.
His advocacy of a foreign policy based on America’s national interests has led some to liken it to Nixonian realism, while his aversion to foreign interventions has won him the label of a non-interventionist and even isolationist.
Don’t Fence Trump In
Trump has professed no great power doctrine and his advisers discourage applying labels to his vision of the world.
“I’m not going to be put into the little academic, graduate school box because I think it doesn’t suit, and it doesn’t apply in a rapidly changing world,” said K.T. McFarland, Trump’s incoming deputy national security adviser, when asked to describe the Trump doctrine.
While Trump’s call for “peace through strength” reflects Reagan’s view of deterrence, “there are parts of Nixon and (Henry) Kissinger that Donald Trump has also advocated,” McFarland said at the U.S. Institute of Peace, alluding to Trump’s interest-based approach to world affairs.
Trump’s Speeches
A foreign policy neophyte, Trump has shied away from declaring any grand foreign strategy during the campaign, though he did give two major speeches devoted to foreign policy and national security.
In the first speech, delivered at the realist-leaning Center for the National Interest in Washington in April, Trump outlined what he called a “coherent foreign policy based on American interests” and called for “getting out of nation building,” creating stability and quashing “radical Islam.”
“Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed the world,” Trump said. “Events may require the use of military force, but it’s also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War.”
In the second speech, at Youngstown University in Ohio in August, Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric about terror, warning countries around the world that they’d be judged based on their commitment to the U.S. goal of fighting terrorism.
“All actions should be oriented around this goal, and any country which shares this goal will be our ally,” Trump told a rally of supporters.
‘Strategic Surprise’
It was a theme that Trump would repeat, in one iteration or another, throughout the campaign, but his advisers say Trump’s pre- and post-election pronouncements on foreign policy, often delivered off the cuff, should not be read as policy prescriptions.
“Actually, he didn’t say a lot about foreign policy and national security on the campaign trail, and what he did say really doesn’t add up to a policy,” said James Carafano, director of foreign policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation who advises the Trump transition team on foreign affairs. “That’s very frustrating because the people want to know what’s this guy going to do.”
With the new administration yet to take office, McFarland, too, cautioned that Trump’s foreign policy is in an early stage of development.
“That’s what a new administration does: It takes time to rethink things and to come up with policies,” she said.
If history is any guide, Trump could quickly find himself facing a set of foreign policy crises different from the issues he campaigned on. Political scientists have a term for an unexpected world event that drives a new president into uncharted territory: “strategic surprise.”
For former President George W. Bush, who campaigned on pursuing a “humble foreign policy,” the strategic surprise came September 11, 2001.
For President Barack Obama, who vowed to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the “Arab Spring” protests in North Africa and the Middle East marked a strategic surprise, leaving his administration more deeply mired in the region than he’d hoped.
What international crisis might alter the trajectory of the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda has become a guessing game, with the number of scenarios exceeded only by the variety of foreign policy labels attributed to Trump.
A game-changing terrorist attack on American interests is one possible candidate. Another contender: an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) launch by North Korea.
“I think the world is not necessarily going to allow President Trump to do everything he’s planned on,” said Blaise Misztal, director of the national security program at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “I think you’re going to see a triangulation between what he’s said, what he’s advised to do, and what is actually feasible on the world stage.”
Flip Flopping on Issues
While Trump has flip flopped on some issues, NATO and torturing terrorists, for example, he’s held steady on others. Among them: terrorism, trade, China and Russia.
In the weeks since his election, he’s reiterated his pledge to make terrorism a focus of his foreign policy, talked tough on trade, challenged the “One China” policy, and iterated again a desire to reset relations with Russia even as he embraced intelligence findings that Moscow interfered in last year’s presidential election.
Brian Katulis of Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank, said the “most radical shift” Trump will likely undertake will be “engagement and involvement” with Russia, something Obama unsuccessfully attempted during his first term in office.
But former CIA director Michael Hayden said Trump is likely to reconsider his approach to Russia once he learns from intelligence agencies and allies that Russia and Syria are not committed to fighting IS.
“I’m personally very, very skeptical of any convergence between American and Russian interests in this part of the world,” Hayden said. “In fact, I’d offer the view that American and Russian interests are actually heading in different directions.”
Another major change: downplaying a postwar American foreign policy tradition of promoting democracy and freedom around the world.
“Trump has signaled as a candidate and in the transition a proclivity to appreciate authoritarian and repressive leaders around the world,” Katulis said. “And this may be the biggest departure that is historic, that there really won’t be as much of a values-based approach that focuses on human rights democracy and freedom in other countries. And that I think puts the United States itself on shaky territory.”
But McFarland played down those concerns, saying “the three bedrocks of (postwar) American foreign policy” — American leadership, American values and international alliances — will remain under the Trump administration.
Unpredictability
There is usually some continuity between administrations on foreign policy, but “that rule actually may not apply under Trump,” Katulis said.
“We’re dealing with something here that is just fundamentally different and off the charts,” Katulis explained.
That 'something' is Trump’s well-known unpredictability. Trump has criticized President Obama for telegraphing his policy moves and has vowed to remain unpredictable. But experts say unpredictability can be dangerous in the international arena where both allies and adversaries expect a certain degree of predictability from the United States.
"Predictability is the cornerstone of deterrence," said Clarke. "You need to be predictable if you’re the United states, both in what your allies know you’ll do and in what your adversaries know you’ll do and how you’ll respond."
Comments
NOW these 11 Asian countries will do trade deals with China NOT the US...BUT WAIT Trump said they would be happy do deals with the US on a bi-lateral level.....??
Asian TPP nations pledge to salvage trade accord after U.S. exit
http://reut.rs/2jT5HBs
Dear media: The Trump White House has total contempt for you. Time to react accordingly.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/23/dear-media…
By Greg Sargent January 23 at 9:37 AM
Trump questions media reports of inauguration crowd size
President Trump questioned media reports and photographs that showed the size of Inauguration Day crowds, speaking to CIA employees at CIA headquarters on Jan. 21 in Langley, Va. (The Washington Post)
THE MORNING PLUM:
Here is one thing we learned about the new Trump White House this weekend: It views the institutional role that the news media is supposed to play in our democracy with nothing but total, unbridled contempt. We may be looking at an unprecedented set of new challenges for the media in covering the new president. What remains to be seen is how it will respond.
The New York Times reports this morning that journalists are deeply alarmed by statements made by Trump’s top advisers over the weekend, in which they faulted the media for reporting accurately on his inaugural crowd size. Jeff Mason, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, is quoted lamenting that the Trump White House must “get started” on a more constructive basis with the media.
[How to deal with the lying liars]
But I fear these journalists are understating the problem. This isn’t simply a matter of signaling bad relations. Rather, what Trump and his advisers are doing is explicitly stating their contempt for the press’ institutional role as a credo, as an actionable doctrine that will govern not just how they treat the press, but how they treat factual reality itself.
Trump's team responds after his controversial first day
President Trump and White House press secretary Sean Spicer made public statements questioning the media on Saturday, Jan. 21. The following morning, Trump's White House team, his supporters and his opponents responded to the controversial day. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
On Saturday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer shocked the news media by reading them a prepared statement in which he accused the press of deliberately minimizing impressions of Trump crowd sizes, before saying:
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
This was absurdly, preposterously false, but then top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway defended it yesterday by saying that Spicer had merely provided “alternative facts.” Meanwhile, Trump himself accused the press of lying about his crowds while pointedly noting that he and the media are in a “running war.”
All White Houses spin and try to pressure the media into reporting stories their preferred way. But this looks like something considerably more: A concerted effort to erode the core idea that the news media is legitimately playing its role in informing the citizenry. If the media challenges or factually debunks the fabricated, Trump-aggrandizing narrative that is coming out of the Trump White House, it will respond by simply repeating relentlessly that the fabricated story-line is the truth. Needless to say, there cannot be any shared agreement on facts or reality, except on the ones that the Trump White House has validated. This is why the most important thing about Spicer’s statement is the word “period.” When the Trump White House declares what the truth is, the discussion is over.
[Here’s the statement Sean Spicer should give]
This is not a conventional dispute over the facts. It is not about “relations” between the press and the White House. It is about truth and power. The message this is designed to send is that Trump has the power to declare what the truth is, and the news media does not. The Trump White House is maintaining this posture while telling enormous, demonstrable lies, but no matter — according to the new White House Ministry of Disinformation, the truth is what Donald Trump says it is. Bank on it: This will hold true even when Donald Trump contradicts Donald Trump.
Remember the larger context: For many months during the campaign, Trump not only told lies to a degree that was unprecedented in volume and egregiousness; his staff also mostly refused to engage fact checkers at all when they questioned his claims, showing he felt no obligation whatsoever to back them up. And then, even when they were widely debunked, he simply kept on repeating them. Then, and now, this was, and is, an assertion of the power to declare what the truth is regardless of what is empirically, demonstrably true.
Anyone who is not considering the possibility that this may be an outgrowth of Trump’s well-established authoritarian streak is missing what may be happening here. As libertarian writer Jacob Levy has written, Trump may be experimenting with a time-tested tactic, in which a leader “with authoritarian tendencies” will regularly lie in order to get others to internalize his lies, as “a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them.” It is hard to say how deep Trump’s authoritarianism runs and how it will impact his presidency. But this is something worth being prepared for. What’s more, all of this cannot be disentangled from Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interest and lack of transparency about them. The press is going to dig up all manner of conflicts and potentially corruption, and the White House’s gaslighting now lays the groundwork to discredit any such efforts later.
Here’s another worrisome thing about all of this. One would hope President Trump has advisers around him who are willing to offer a forceful check on him when he flies off the rails of reality. Some advisers were reportedly worried about Trump’s flights of fancy about crowd size and attacks on the media. But needless to say, they did not win out: Two advisers went out there and flatly declared that his reality is impervious to challenge.
What can the media do about this?
* HOW THE MEDIA SHOULD RESPOND: Margaret Sullivan lays out a path for journalists to follow:
Recalling at all times that their mission is truth-telling and holding public officials accountable, they should dig in, paying far more attention to actions than to sensational tweets or briefing-room lies — while still being willing to call out falsehoods clearly when they happen.
Yes. And as Jay Rosen writes, the media must direct more resources into investigative reporting, because that is where the real action is. Indeed, as noted above, the new White House strategy is preparation to discredit that reporting later.
This goes to the hear of a coming disaster for the US FP....when a leader especially a US President continuously lies and or constantly places fake stories in circulation then we have a problem...we are use to this from Putin BUT not from a US President.....
YESTERDAY we got another total lie from this new President....
WaPo: At White House, Trump tells congressional leaders 3-5 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/23/at-whit…
In fact, if there were even 1 million illegally cast votes (there weren't), a president would be derelict to not order a major investigation
3-5 million illegal votes??? Why, if it were true, why would @SpeakerRyan and @SenateMajLdr not be talking about this every single day???
Unless of course it's not even remotely true and we all know this but no one in the WH and no GOP Leaders are willing to say this to him.
NOTE: those around Hitler had the same problem..no one could tell him what actually was ongoing out of fear....same now in this WH.....
Trump’s assault on globalization will hurt Russia badly and soon, Russian analysts say
http://euromaidanpress.com/2017/01/24/trumps-assault-on-globalization-w…
This is just how bad Russia propaganda effects Russians.....
Grandma in Moscow says Russian TV said #WomensMarchOnWashington participants got $2,500 a pop.
BUT WAIT....this is US propaganda....
Whether using buzzwords like "elites" or by mentioning Soros' name, Republicans are openly encouraging the demonization of Jews.
Remember that when Trump, Glenn Beck, WikiLeaks, RT, or Bill O'Reilly say that Soros paid protesters, they are inciting hate for Jews.
THIS is just how bad Trump misrepresents his concept of trade that he envisions will help the common worker in the US..ALL the time sidestepping the economic reality that whatever he does benefits really the manufacturers not the workers...
QUOTE
By withdrawing from TPP today, Trump -- "the dealmaker " -- just handed China a giant victory. For free.
By backing the US out...Trump fully allowed China to control future trade deals within the Asian area thus cutting the US out...
AND has handed the EU a one time opportunity to complete a free trade agreement with China allowing for a consumer market of roughly 4B....cutting out the US worker...
IT took 7 years to achieve TTP..WHY
HERE is what Trump does not tell the American worker....TTP was to be the core ability for US companies to both export and import from the Asian market..which benefits the American worker in two distinct ways...one goods and products would remain cheap for the average woker and THEN the manufacturers can import the required production parts cheaper thus allowing to export for a profit thus employing workers....
BUT WHAT Trump has not stated not Obama either...all trade treaties always favor exporting and manufacturing companies....
the majority of what was in the deal came from American companies demanding advantages that they knew they could not get with any Congress....
Remember all trdae treaties only bring extra dividends to the shareholders and or more profit for companies affected by the treaties...there has not been a documented single case that a trade deal has brought any increases in salaries for their workers....
In some ways EU has overcome this and there most workers do in fact profit fro open trade as they have strong unions that forces an increase in wages with increased company profits....
Remember...one can trace decreased wages and salaries with decreased union activities in those industries...even the German auto makers in the US are not happy about that as that is not what they wanted as they attempted to export their worker council/union model from Germany which has been the cornerstone of their success and failed..AS Germany is use to working with not against their unions.....as both sides make money....
AND what Trump does not tell you his bi-lateral trade s export focused
Trump does not believe in climate change BUT when 50 unconfirmed tornados...extremely unusual for winter roar through four southern states BTW all voting from Trump and killing at least 20 those governors asked FEMA for help and got nothing....they even sent open letters to Trump actually begging for help for their hard hit areas..."where are the FEMA boots on the ground"??? Trump did not even realize that as CinC he must federalize NG troops to assist......
Trump has spent the better part of his life in NYC so the massive changes seen in the serve storm patterns increasing with each year.... he has not been exposed to..so climate changed simply does not exist for him.
BUT WAIT..FEMA has no leader because Trump has failed to fill over 600 government positions before he came in...
Trump can tweet all day about the dishonest media...tweet all day the IC lies..tweet all day about manufacturing and jobs.....
BUT not a single tweet for the tornado hard hit areas and the resulting damages and deaths.....
This new President has no compassion other than for himself and he literally shows us that from DAY ONE....
Well said.....
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/no-way-to-honor-sa…
Cheapening a Sacred Space
On Saturday, President Trump stood in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall and gave a speech that said more about himself than those the wall commemorated, or the agency they served
QUOTE:
As Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. The president is exactly the man he was while running: petty, vindictive, and easily distracted by blows to his ego. Saturday afternoon’s surreal press conference—in which the president sent out his spokesperson to make demonstrably false claims about the size of the crowds at the inauguration—was consistent with the president’s remarks earlier in the day. Many Americans—and especially those on the right—convinced themselves that the man they were electing would be moderated by the office. That will not be the case. We have four years of this in front of the Republic.
Russia Claims First Joint Raid With Coalition
http://abcnews.go.com/International/
wireStory/latest-syria-talks-focused-truce-begin-kazakhstan-44979106
… Still unconfirmed by Washington.
Russian propaganda hard at work.....
The Associated Press
✔
@AP
BREAKING: Spokesman for US-led coalition: Russian claims of joint air mission over Syria 'rubbish.'
QUOTE from the research team that identified the 350K hidden twitter botnet....
Twitter bots have been accused of warping the tone of the 2016 election. They also can be used for entertainment, marketing, spamming, manipulating Twitter's trending topics list and public opinion, trolling, fake followers, malware distribution, and data set pollution, among other things.
The researchers say they were lucky to have spotted the bots, which appear to have been designed to thwart automated detection methods. They note that being human helped make the discovery possible.
"The fact that the bots tagged their tweets with random locations in North America and Europe was a [deliberate] effort to make their tweets look more real," the paper explains. "But this camouflage trick backfired – the faked locations when plotted on a map seemed completely abnormal. It's important to note that this anomaly could only be noticed by a human looking at the map, whereas a computer algorithm would have a hard time to realize the anomaly."
Curiously, the Star Wars bots have been silent since 2013. The researchers observe that pre-aged bots can be sold for more than newly created bots on the black market, presumably because bot detection methods consider older accounts more likely to be reputable.
For anyone who truly understands Russian hacking and their use of social media botnets...should take this article to heart.....
Who unleashed the botnet armies?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603404/cyber
security-experts-uncover-dormant-botnet-of-350000-twitter-accounts/
THERE is further evidence of another 500,000 botnet quietly sitting in reserve around the global internet...
FOR a grant total of 850,000 social media bots.......capable of pulling off major social media attacks and or to pass propaganda/disinformation and or fake news....
So once you understand this...this this article make full sense to the ongoing and continuing Russia influence operations both in the US and Europe right now....THEY have simply not stopped....
Dear Mr. Putin, Let’s Play Chess
January 17, 2017 ~ patribotics
PART ONE: PAWN TAKES QUEEN
I have an overarching theory of Russia’s attack on America and the West. Here it is.
There have not been a series of attacks on America and Europe by Vladimir Putin. There has been one single operation; it is the same operation.
https://patribotics.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/dear-mr-putin-lets-play-ch…
NOTICE the tie into the two EU/FBI arrests of two major Russian hackers that potentially have been involved in the DNC hacking and flowing black money to the Trump campaign as Steele in his report alludes to...one arrested in Prague and one in Spain in the last month.....
"The Americans can’t go back to being the only superpower.” on Trump's Mideast prospects after eight years of Obama
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/trump-might-not-find-i…
Without the US, China will create its own trade bloc, Europe will create its own military alliance, and the UN will fall apart
EU is now talking directly straight at Trump...if the US continues on their path of a 35% tariff then the EU will do a free trade agreement directly with China and tie into those countries that were attached to TTP....AND then place equal tariffs on US products....
THUS creating a free trade block of consumers the US will be cut out of....
Without the US, China will create its own trade bloc, Europe will create its own military alliance, and the UN will fall apart
IF we look at all of Trump's statements...this is apparently what he actually wants....
The New York Times
✔
@nytimes
Senators want a congressional vote if Donald Trump moves to lift sanctions on Russia
http://nyti.ms/2kj2o3h
Wow I just realized this from a thrilled pro-Kremlin TV pundit: in his inauguration speech, Donald Trump didn’t utter the word “democracy.”
Obama, Whom Moscow Placed Great Hopes In, Couldn’t Make a Deal with Putin – Because of Putin, Says Portnikov
http://www.interpretermag.com/january-20-2017-2/#15981
The mayor of Jerusalem says Trump is 'serious' about moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem
http://read.bi/2k80Z0e
Trump Admin Starts Big Lie Over Small Thing
http://thebea.st/2k41OqO
The Big Lie, an end in itself, allows u to own 'truth'
Four years of "alternative facts"....or "an altered state of reality"...fascism with a smile.....
The New York Times
✔
@nytimes
Sean Spicer shares Donald Trump's dark view of the news media and advocated an opening-day declaration of war
http://nyti.ms/2kiCFrV
Since he is already at war with the entire US IC why not go all the way with a total war on US MSM...
All you need to know about Russian Information Warfare from a @NATO point of view.
http://www.ndc.nato.int/download/downloads.php?icode=506
Gotta say, most frustrating about these intelligence investigation 'bombshells' is that much of this was already public pre-election.
Both @DavidCornDC and @LouiseMensch were reporting out details before the election re: both the IC memo and the Fisa warrant.
From Harry Reid to the Clinton campaign, there was clamoring for the intelligence community to be more forthright about investigation.
Most egregious: no major media organization put effort into investigating story; in fact, the NYT even concluded there was nothing to it.
My guess is reporting failed because most couldn't bring themselves to believe what read like a fictional spy novel. But here we are.
Goes to the heart of Trump's anti trade and anti EU/NATO comments...what you see is what you get with Trump....what he is doing now is what he has been stating fro years..nothing has changed and to think it will otherwise change because he is now President ...think again.....
Trump in Playboy interview 27 years ago: "Our so-called #Allies make billions by F.......g us... #Germany & #Japan flood #US with products..."
This theme was picked up in his recent media interview when he bashed EU/NATO/Merkel/Germany ad attempted to bully German auto manufacturers who were not bullied as they employ 170,000 US employees they could ditch and move the factory to Mexico...
BTW...the arrest of a major Russian hacker on 5 October in Prague is being rumored as part of the information provided by the Steele report to the FBI....the Russian government went ballistic when they learned he had been arrested and still have not calmed down....and now the second Russian hacker arresedt in Spain....rumored also to be someone who supported and or participated in the US Russian hacking....
To put it In a very modest language this Prague arrest is pretty remarkable detention. LinkedIn was just a portion of bigger game.
https://patribotics.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/dear-mr-putin-lets-play-ch…
@LouiseMensch: a unifying theory of Trump & Russia's moles, from Snowden to Carter Page
REMEMBER when the news was leaked that Flynn was communicating with the US Russian Ambassador on the exact same day as the US levied sanctions against Russia for Russian hacking?????
FIRST not a single response by the Trump transition team when queried about the leaked news article....
THEN...well yes he had called but it was to wish the Ambassador a Merry Christmas....BUT then when the media pushed harder WELL it was FIVE times in one day...a lot of Merry Christmas wishes it appeared.....
THEN it was leaked that Flynn had been in multiple other conversations with the ambassador...AND the Trump team never responded to that......
At the least he is under suspicion of violating the Logan Act....
AND now we see....
Flynn’s communications with Russia investigated: report
9 / 17
The Hill
Cyra Master
U.S. counterintelligence agents investigated National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's communications with Russian officials, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday night.
Flynn is the first person inside President Trump's White House whose communications are known to have been combed as part of a multiagency investigation by the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, among others, into whether Russia's government secretly helped elect Trump.
The WSJ said it's unclear when the inquiry began or whether it produced any incriminating evidence. Its unknown if the matter is closer or ongoing. The report came hours after Flynn was sworn in Sunday, along with other senior advisers.
The key focus is a series of calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak on Dec. 29, the WSJ reported, the day the Obama administration announced sanctions against Russia.
The goal of the probe is to determine the nature of Flynn's contact with Russian officials and whether it may have violated the law, people familiar with the matter told the WSJ.
But the White House denied the investigation on Sunday.
"We have absolutely no knowledge of any investigation or even a basis for such an investigation," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement to the paper.
The report follows a similar one from the New York Times published Thursday that said intelligence and law enforcement agencies are looking at intercepted communications and financial transactions from former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and campaign advisers Carter Page and Roger Stone.
SO now indirectly confirmed are the FOUR FISA requests NOT the single one...THIS was also leaked right after the Joint Agency briefing of Trump on the Russian hacking.....the figure of FOUR FISAs has been out there as well....
REMEMBER the FBI cannot get approval for a FISA request without showing "probable cause" backed by other information....
Germany must ready for turbulent times under Trump: foreign minister
Trump and his advisors should actually heed German comments....and seriously reflect just where they want to take the US......
"Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit -- has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it....Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage...of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come...when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris & rub the dust of a thousand years...from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals."
Heine, who saw it all in 1834 /5
Then jump to 1945 and watch what is happening in the US now under Trump...the US has had a tendency towards...a "smiling fascism".....are we now reaching that stage.
Carl Bildt
✔
@carlbildt
Three reasons to be alarmed by Trump's inaugural address. My take in @washingtonpost.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/01/22/why-e…
QUOTE
Was Europe in any way reassured by what we heard from President Trump in his inaugural address?
Hardly. And let me mention just three points.
First: America First!
That’s a story that Europe is much too familiar with. Each nation putting itself first, explicitly or implicitly seeing other nations as hostile to its interests, is the European story of centuries of real carnage and catastrophe.
Italy First! Sweden First! Serbia First! Germany First! Russia First! France First! Ireland First!
We have been there, seen that and done that in Europe. And carnage was the consequence for generations.
That doesn’t mean these slogans don’t have popular appeal. Trump knows they do, and the history of Europe certainly proves that this is the case. Every confrontation with any other nation normally starts out with being popular — but that has nothing to do with where the story normally ends.
And there is — or should be — something in politics called leadership. To learn the lessons of the past, to try to see ahead, to lead and inspire people to go beyond where just the raw emotions of the day might take them.
Second: The Civilized World.
As long as I can remember, the concept of freedom was key to not only the American conception of itself but also to its view of the wider world and what the United States tried to achieve in its global role.
Sometimes, no doubt, the concept of “the free world” has been simplified and abused. But this in no way denies that the dream of freedom has been at the core of that shining city on a hill that America has been and still remains for generations around the globe.
Apart from a passing reference in a domestic context, freedom was notably absent from Trump’s remarks.
In his inaugural address in 1981, President Ronald Reagan spoke to “those neighbors and allies who share our freedom, we will strengthen our historic ties and assure them of our support and firm commitment.”
And that theme has been resounding from that podium, in the one way or another, at every inauguration since then.
Trump pledged to unite “the civilized world” in order to “eradicate completely from the face of the Earth” radical Islamic terrorism.
Undoubtedly, the fight against terrorism, in whatever form, must be fought also by and in cooperation with nations we hardly would acknowledge as free, but to completely dump the idea of freedom is to deprive us of one of our most powerful ideological weapons in a struggle that in the end is far more ideological than kinetic.
And then, of course, it invites the question of what a “civilized” nation is. No one can deny that China and Iran, to take two obvious examples, represent ancient and proud civilizations. But should we now describe them as “civilized nations” in the Western use of that term?
So what does this jettisoning of “freedom” in favor of “civilized” actually mean? Is it just a way of including Russia in the family?
Third: Economic Protectionism.
The thrust of the address was efforts to create jobs for Americans. That’s fine, although the U.S. economy is producing jobs at a pace that’s the envy of the world.
But traditionally the United States has led the world because of innovation, entrepreneurship and competitiveness. Of these we heard nothing; instead, the message was: Buy American! Hire American!
“We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs, Trump said. “Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.”
Will it? Isn’t the lesson of history the opposite?
North Korea certainly has a protected economy; South Korea radically less so. And in Europe, it has been the dismantling of barriers that has created prosperity, not least for those nations that liberated themselves from the borders, walls and restrictions of the communist system.
They were “protected” — and they were poor.
Trump’s message can easily be translated into “Don’t Buy European!” — and then we will soon have “Don’t Buy American!” spreading throughout Europe. The most integrated, most innovative and most productive economic relationship in the world would risk unraveling.
By themselves, these are each disturbing and worrying issues. If you add them together, and see them reinforcing each other, the risks magnify.
Translating the populism of a campaign into the politics of an administration is never entirely easy. There has to be a difference, but there also has to be some continuity.
We had been hoping things would settle down. And there is still the hope that the inaugural address will be seen by history as the end of the campaign rather than as the start of the administration.
But are we reassured? Far from it.
We're on day two of a president who just paid $25 million to settle claims he defrauded people; he is dispatching deputies to lie for him
We're on day two of an administration where the president is strangely loyal to Vladimir Putin and we don't know why.
We're on day two of an administration where the president hasn't disclosed who pays him money and to whom he owes debt
This explains Trump's ongoing war with the US IC....
.@KellyannePolls: "It's really time 4 [Trump] 2 put in his own security & IC." What? @ThisWeekABC
Whose only spy-partner will be FSB.
Cannot get much clearer than that statement about "smiling fascism"....
HERE comes the American "Stasi".....to your local neighborhood...
When Churchill wanted euphemism for a lie he used "terminological inexactitude". I suppose "alternative facts" trips easier off the tongue.
Trump/Bannon want to control information & the public by sowing distrust in facts/truth. Scientists, journos=the first thrown to the wolves.
Trump's "smiling fascism" hard at work......
Trump’s real war isn’t with the media. It’s with facts.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/21/14347952/trump-spicer-…
Facts are the death of "smiling fascism"....
QUOTE:
Speaking at the CIA this afternoon, President Donald Trump said, “I have a running war with the media.”
Like much that Trump says, this isn’t quite true. His war isn’t with the media. Trump lives off media attention and delights in press coverage. His war is with facts. And it’s there that his tactical skirmishes with the press begin to make sense. Delegitimizing the media is important to Trump because delegitimizing certain facts is important to Trump.
The topic today — and trust me, it feels as strange to write this as it does to read this — is crowd size. Trump’s inaugural was sparsely attended compared with President Obama’s inaugural. We don’t have exact estimates yet, but aerial shots are clear on this point, as is secondary data, like Metro ridership and television ratings.
There is no great mystery to this. Trump lost the popular vote in the presidential election — and by a wide margin. Since the election, poll after poll has shown him to be unpopular. A lackluster response to his inauguration is precisely what you would predict in this situation.
But Trump has insisted that turnout was, well, yuge. Speaking at the CIA, he said he “looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.”
To be fair, the crowd might have looked much larger to Trump. Where you stand matters quite a bit in making these estimates:
But it soon came clear that this wasn’t an off-the-cuff comment from the new president. Trump then had press secretary Sean Spicer call an impromptu briefing in which Spicer lashed the press for estimating crowd size. “Nobody had numbers, because the National Park Service does not put any out,” he insisted. Seconds later, he said: “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, both in person and around the globe.”
This, along with much else Spicer said, was plainly untrue. But there’s a strategy at work here. The Trump administration is creating a baseline expectation among its loyalists that they can’t trust anything said by the media. The spat over crowd size is a low-stakes, semi-comic dispute, but the groundwork is being laid for much more consequential debates over what is, and isn’t, true.
Delegitimizing the institutions that might report inconvenient or damaging facts about the president is strategic for an administration that has made a slew of impossible promises and takes office amid a cloud of ethics concerns and potential scandals.
It also gives the new administration a convenient scapegoat for their continued struggles with public opinion, and their potential future struggles with reality. This kind of “dishonesty from the media,” Spicer said, is making it hard “to bring our country together.” It’s not difficult to imagine the Trump administration disputing bad jobs numbers in the future, or claiming their Obamacare replacement covers everyone when it actually throws millions off insurance.
Spicer ended the statement on a warning. “There has been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility of holding Donald Trump accountable. I am here to tell you that it goes two ways. We are going hold the press accountable as well.”
MORE Trump tweet lies...
Donald J. Trump
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
Wow, television ratings just out: 31 million people watched the Inauguration, 11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!
Media analysts announced before Trump tweeted that the actual viewing audience of Trump's inaugural were lower than the 2009 Obama inaugural....
SO WHO is feeding Trump the false information...Bannon by any chance...
WHEN you surround yourself with yes people the only echo's in your own echo chamber are the yes people.....and if you hate MSM then you take their information as valid...or from Breitbart.com.
JUST exactly WHAT ratings has Trump been given before he tweeted this?????
Nielsen ratings, first term inaugurations:
Trump: 20.1
Obama: 25.5
GWB: 20.8
Clinton: 24.5
GHWB: 20.0
Reagan: 37.4
Carter: 31.5
Nixon: 33.5
BLUF:
Anyone know what alternative facts mean in Trump doublespeak????
Conway: WH Spox Wasn't Lying, He Was Just Offering 'Alternative Facts'
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/conway-spicer-offered-alternative…
BUT WAIT...the Trump stated attendance numbers were actually false...thus he lied....
“Whatever his intentions, it was horrible...He has no understanding of the world & what is going on...really ugly.”
Love fest?????????
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trumps-vainglorious-affront-to-…
Trump’s Vainglorious Affront to the C.I.A.
By Robin Wright January 22, 2017
The death of Robert Ames, who was America’s top intelligence officer for the Middle East, is commemorated among the hundred and seventeen stars on the white marble Memorial Wall at C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. He served long years in the region’s hellholes—Beirut; Tehran; Sanaa, Yemen; Kuwait City; and Cairo—often in the midst of war or turmoil. Along the way, Ames cultivated pivotal U.S. operatives and sources, even within the Palestine Liberation Organization when it ranked as the world’s top terrorist group. In April, 1983, as chief of the C.I.A.’s Near East division, back in Washington, Ames returned to Beirut for consultations as Lebanon’s civil war raged.
Shortly after 1 P.M. on April 18th, 1983, Ames was huddling with seven other C.I.A. staff at the high-rise U.S. Embassy overlooking the Mediterranean, when a delivery van laden with explosives made a sharp swing into the cobblestone entryway, sped past a guard station, and accelerated into the embassy’s front wall. It set off a roar that echoed across Beirut. My office was just up the hill. A huge black cloud enveloped blocks.
It was the very first suicide bombing against the United States in the Middle East, and the onset of a new type of warfare. Carried out by an embryonic cell of extremists that later evolved into Hezbollah, it blew off the front of the embassy, leaving it like a seven-story, open-faced dollhouse. Sixty-four were killed, including all eight members of the C.I.A. team. It was, at the time, the deadliest attack on an American diplomatic facility anywhere in the world, and it remains the single deadliest attack on U.S. intelligence. (Only one of the thirty attacks on U.S. missions since then, in Nairobi, in 1998, has been deadlier.)
Ryan Crocker, the embassy’s political officer, had met with Ames earlier that day. Crocker was blown against the wall by the bomb’s impact, but escaped serious injury. He spent hours navigating smoke, fires, and tons of concrete, steel, and glass debris, searching for his colleagues.
“This is seared into my mind, irretrievably,” Crocker recalled for me this weekend. “There wasn’t an organized recovery plan, not in the initial hours after the bombing. I was de facto in charge that first awful night, when you dug a little and shouted out in case there was someone alive there, and then dug a bit more. Somewhere that night, I was on that rubble heap, and a radiator caught my eye. There was an object at the foot of the radiator. It looked like a beach ball, covered thick with dust. It was Bob Ames’s head.”
Ames left behind a widow and six children. He was so clandestine that his kids did not know that he was a spy until after he was killed. President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, saw the flag-draped coffins of the American victims arrive at Andrews Air Force Base, and met with the families of the deceased.
Reagan, who had known Ames, recounted the meetings in his diary, according to Kai Bird’s book about Ames, “The Good Spy”: “We were both in tears—I know all I could do was grip their hands—I was too choked up to speak.” More than three thousand people turned out for the memorial service at the National Cathedral for Ames and the other American victims.
On his first full day in office, President Trump spoke at the C.I.A. headquarters in front of the hallowed Memorial Wall, with Ames’s star on it. Since his election, Trump has raged at the U.S. intelligence community over its warnings about Russian meddling in the Presidential election. After CNN reported on, and BuzzFeed published, an as-yet unsubstantiated dossier about Trump’s ties to Russia and personal behavior, the President erupted on Twitter, “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
On Saturday, speaking to about four hundred intelligence officials, Trump blamed any misunderstanding on the media. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth,” he said. (The official White House transcript notes “laughter” and “applause” here.) “They sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. And I just want to let you know, the reason you’re the No. 1 stop is exactly the opposite—exactly.”
Trump vowed greater support for America’s sixteen intelligence agencies than they had received from any other President. “Very, very few people could do the job you people do,” he said. “I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you’ve wanted, and you’re going to get so much backing. Maybe you’re going to say, Please don’t give us so much backing. Mr. President, please, we don’t need that much backing.” Trump said he assumed that “almost everybody” in the cavernous C.I.A. entry hall had voted for him, “because we’re all on the same wavelength, folks.”
In his remarks, Trump made passing reference to the “special wall” behind him but never mentioned the top-secret work or personal sacrifices of intelligence officers like Ames and the others who died in Beirut, including the C.I.A. station chief Kenneth Haas, and James F. Lewis, who had been a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, and his wife Monique, who was on her first day on the job at the Beirut embassy. Nor did the President refer to any of the dozens of others for whom stars are etched on the hallowed C.I.A. wall of honor. It was like going to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and not mentioning those who died in the Second World War.
Trump’s unscripted remarks were, instead, largely about himself, even as he praised Mike Pompeo—a West Point and Harvard Law School graduate, Kansas congressman, and Tea Party supporter—as his choice to lead the C.I.A.
“No. 1 in his class at West Point,” Trump said. “Now, I know a lot about West Point. I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics. In fact, every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at M.I.T. for thirty-five years, who did a fantastic job in so many different ways, academically—was an academic genius—and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart persona.”
Apparently as proof, the President noted that he had set an “all-time record” in Time magazine cover stories. “Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover, it’s one time, because he won the Super Bowl or something, right?” he told the intelligence officials. “I’ve been on it for fifteen times this year. I don’t think that’s a record that can ever be broken.” Time told Politico’s Playbook that it had published eleven Trump covers—and had done fifty-five cover stories about Richard Nixon.
Trump spoke briefly about eradicating “radical Islamic extremism,” a cornerstone of his foreign policy. But he devoted more than twice as many words to the dispute over the turnout at his Inauguration. “Did everybody like the speech?” Trump asked. “I’ve been given good reviews. But we had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I say, wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, the field was—it looked like a million, million and a half people.”
Crowd scientists who spoke to the Times estimated that about a hundred and sixty thousand people attended, compared with the record-setting 1.8 million who were estimated to have been at President Obama’s first Inauguration. Trump was defiant. “We caught them, and we caught them in a beauty,” he told the C.I.A. crowd. “And I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
Trump’s remarks caused astonishment and anger among current and former C.I.A. officials. The former C.I.A. director John Brennan, who retired on Friday, called it a “despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of C.I.A.’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes,” according to a statement released through a former aide. Brennan said he thought Trump “should be ashamed of himself.”
Crocker, who was among the last to see Ames and the local C.I.A. team alive in Beirut, was “appalled” by Trump’s comments. “Whatever his intentions, it was horrible,” Crocker, who went on to serve as the U.S. Ambassador in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Kuwait, told me. “As he stood there talking about how great Trump is, I kept looking at the wall behind him—as I’m sure everyone in the room was, too. He has no understanding of the world and what is going on. It was really ugly.”
“Why,” Crocker added, “did he even bother? I can’t imagine a worse Day One scenario. And what’s next?”
John McLaughlin is a thirty-year C.I.A. veteran and a former acting director of the C.I.A. who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He also chairs a foundation that raises funds to educate children of intelligence officers killed on the job. “It’s simply inappropriate to engage in self obsession on a spot that memorializes those who obsessed about others, and about mission, more than themselves,” he wrote to me in an e-mail on Sunday. “Also, people there spent their lives trying to figure out what’s true, so it’s hard to make the case that the media created a feud with Trump. It just ain’t so.”
John MacGaffin, another thirty-year veteran who rose to become the No. 2 in the C.I.A. directorate for clandestine espionage, said that Trump’s appearance should have been a “slam dunk,” calming deep unease within the intelligence community about the new President. According to MacGaffin, Trump should have talked about the mutual reliance between the White House and the C.I.A. in dealing with global crises and acknowledged those who had given their lives doing just that.
“What self-centered, irrational decision process got him to this travesty?” MacGaffin told me. “Most importantly, how will that process serve us when the issues he must address are dangerous and incredibly complex? This is scary stuff!”
Trump could have taken a page from Reagan, whom he has often invoked. In 1984, at a groundbreaking ceremony for an addition to C.I.A. headquarters, Reagan told the intelligence community, “The work you do each day is essential to the survival and to the spread of human freedom. You remain the eyes and ears of the free world. You are the ‘trip wire’ over which totalitarian rule must stumble in their quest for global domination. . . . From Nathan Hale’s first covert operation in the Revolutionary War to the breaking of the Japanese code at Midway in World War II, America’s security and safety have relied directly on the courage and collective efforts of her intelligence personnel.”
Bruce Riedel was a protégé of Ames at the C.I.A.; they travelled together in the Middle East. For more than three decades, he has made an annual visit to Ames’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. He noted one glaring omission from Trump’s comments: a third of the stars are from deaths that have happened since 9/11, “making it more dangerous to work for the agency now than ever before.” He faulted Trump for not visiting the Counterterrorism Center, talking to the team now tracking Al Qaeda and Islamic State leaders, and seeing how drones work—all “invaluable experience when he later needs to make life-and-death decisions,” Riedel, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me.
Paul Pillar, a Vietnam veteran, rose to become deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center and later the National Intelligence Officer in charge of the Middle East and South Asia. He, too, was anguished by Trump’s comments. “He used the scene as a prop for another complaint about the media and another bit of braggadocio about his crowds and his support,” Pillar told me Sunday. “That the specific prop was the C.I.A.’s memorial wall, and that Trump made no mention of those whom that wall memorializes, made his performance doubly offensive.”
At 7:35 A.M. on Sunday, Trump responded on Twitter to the negative reactions to his comments. “Had a great meeting at CIA Headquarters yesterday, packed house, paid great respect to Wall, long standing ovations, amazing people. WIN!”
But it’s hard to see how America’s new leader will recoup from a performance so shallow, irreverent, and vainglorious.
Love fest with the very people Trump recently compared to Nazis & WH accused of sabotaging the new admin.
Uh-huh.
QUOTE:
White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Sunday defended President Donald Trump's relationship with the intelligence community, saying a meeting on Saturday at CIA headquarters was a "love fest."
"I was there yesterday. I'm telling you it was a love fest if you were in the room," Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday."
NOTE: was not the so called "love fest" that Preibus made it out to be as the speech was rambling...all over the place and largely a critique of the "dishonest media" and complaining about attendance numbers which Trump actually then lied about...so love fest?????
"These are men and women that President Trump loves and respects."
UNQUOTE:
BUT WAIT......
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Jan 15
.@FoxNews "Outgoing CIA Chief, John Brennan, blasts Pres-Elect Trump on Russia threat. Does not fully understand." Oh really, couldn't do...
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Jan 15
much worse - just look at Syria (red line), Crimea, Ukraine and the build-up of Russian nukes. Not good! Was this the leaker of Fake News?
NOTE..this tweet was a blatant lie...
Donald J. Trump
Verified account
James Clapper called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated. Made up, phony facts.Too bad!
THIS was not what Clapper told Trump when he called...
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Jan 11
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?
BREAKING: White House confirms #Trump admin has started "beginning stages" of discussing moving @usembassyta to #Jerusalem
WELL there goes all our Arab allies in the entire ME and most Sunni populations in the other parts of the world on top of it.....
AND it gives Hezbollah/Hamas/IS added emphasis in their stated goal of attacking Israel through Jerusalem...
NOW that is a truly FP dumb move....it just makes AQ/IS even more important in the eyes of Sunni's in the ME ....as they have stated the US is against Islam as a whole not just IS and or AQ....
BREAKING: Israeli news channel (Channel 2) reporting that Trump will announce the move of US embassy to Jerusalem - @IsraelHatzolah
BUT WAIT........
Hey, it's not like we need Arab allies to fight jihadists.
Oh.
AND eradicating radical Islam from the earth does not need any allies at all...with this single move Trump will lose the EU and especially France...and then try to go it alone with just Russia who we knw is deeply in bed with IS...
While Trump obsesses about crowd size, he's wrecking the top-secret shield that has kept the West safe for decades.
80%+ of the terror plots stopped "left of boom" since 9/11 were thanks to intel sharing -- which Trump is wrecking
http://observer.com/2017/01/donald-trump-intelligence-community-kremlin…
QUOTE:
For three-quarters of a century it’s ranked among the world’s most important secrets. The American-led global spy alliance, born in the early years of the Second World War, is beyond question the most effective partnership in espionage history. Now, it’s all starting to come unraveled.
This remarkable hush-hush story began in the summer of 1940, in the dark days after the fall of France to the Wehrmacht, when Britain stood alone against Hitler, who occupied most of Europe. With his ally Stalin, the Nazis and Soviets had divided much of the continent between them, and it seemed only a matter of time before Britain gave in—as several ministers in Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s cabinet were counseling, so bleak did London’s odds appear.
Britain’s secret ace in the hole, known to only a privileged few, was her ability to crack German codes, above all the Nazi Enigma machine, which gave London deep insights into the enemy camp. The Poles were the first to break into Enigma, and shortly before their country fell to Hitler and Stalin in September 1939, Polish intelligence shared their secret knowledge with Britain. There, codebreakers made quick progress against Enigma, a top-secret program they termed ULTRA. But they needed help.
That’s where American code-breakers came in. In the bleak summer of 1940, in a desperate effort to stave off British collapse, which would leave all Europe under the Nazi-Bolshevik yoke, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began assisting London with money, supplies—and weapons.
The cornerstone of FDR’s plan was the Lend-Lease program, which gifted Britain billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry to resist the Nazis. The U.S. Navy even began escorting convoys of freighters bound for Britain to protect them from German U-Boats. Hitler was hardly wrong when he insisted, a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that America was a neutral in name only.
Unknown to the public, FDR also dispatched experts across the Atlantic to assist the British in the SpyWar. British and American spies began sharing secrets in the late summer of 1940, and in January 1941 U.S. intelligence officers were sent in secret to assist British code-breakers with ULTRA. Here, American know-how paid dividends, and months before the United States was officially in the Second World War, its spies were serving on its clandestine front lines.
So was born history’s greatest spy alliance. Anglo-American signals intelligence cooperation in the ULTRA secret, which soon encompassed Canada, Australia, and New Zealand too, played a role on all fronts in the global conflict and made possible numerous Allied victories. That ULTRA shortened the Second World War by months and perhaps years is not in doubt.
This secret alliance was so successful that the Anglosphere SIGINT partnership continued after Allied victory, and would soon prove vital in the budding Cold War too. The Five Eyes family, as it’s called, eventually expanded into other kinds of intelligence, but code-breaking remained its heart. Anglosphere SIGINT played a key role in keeping the Cold War from going hot, and it’s continued to the present day, keeping global peace while tracking terrorists and other international malefactors such as nuclear proliferators and narco-thugs.
After 9/11, intelligence-sharing became more important than ever and it’s no exaggeration to term the American-led spy alliance the secret shield that keeps the West safe from jihadists. In a high percentage of cases, operations to take down terrorists before they kill innocents begin with a tip, usually from SIGINT, that’s shared among intelligence partners rapidly, leading to successful disruption “left of boom” as the spies say.
Unfortunately, newly-inaugurated President Donald Trump is threatening the whole Western intelligence system with his brusque comments about our spies and worrisome ties to Moscow. For the first time, an American president is causing our allies and partners to wonder if Washington can still be trusted.
As I’ve explained, Trump’s aggressive comments about American spies—mocking them and comparing them to Nazis on Twitter, for example—have generated unprecedented enmity in our Intelligence Community. Going to war with the IC is a bad idea for any new administration, particularly given the new commander-in-chief’s rumored links to Vladimir Putin, which are keeping American spies up at night.
It’s not just Washington that’s worried. Throughout the Western spy alliance, intelligence agencies are pondering the previously unthinkable: Is the American president compromised? On several occasions over the decades, the IC had to reduce spy-links, usually only temporarily, to various partners when a new government contained too many cabinet ministers with Moscow linkages. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and it’s the American government that seems to have a Kremlin problem.
Just how alarming things are was revealed by a recent report in The Times of London that British intelligence has asked the IC for reassurances that the new administration—which has several officials with Kremlin ties that aren’t exactly hidden—won’t compromise British spies operating clandestinely inside Russia. When America’s oldest and most intimate intelligence partner is worried that the White House can’t be trusted with secrets, we’re in uncharted and dangerous waters.
The cost of breakdowns in the Western spy alliance won’t be theoretical. If intelligence sharing wanes, the world gets more dangerous and jihadist attacks will increase, perhaps quite quickly. When spy-partners aren’t confident their shared secrets can be protected, they will become reticent to talk to us. As Mike Hayden, the former director of both NSA and CIA explained, “How many foreign intelligence agencies might say, ‘I’m not sure giving this information to the Americans will do any good anyway. So why should we share it in the first place?’ If they come to the conclusion that the decision-makers don’t pay attention to the intelligence and the Intelligence Community is not respected, then why take the risk?”
If President Trump doesn’t explain his shady Kremlin ties soon, the impending Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, which will have subpoena powers, will explain them for him. Our allies and spy-partners are watching with baited breath. If they don’t get answers soon, the 75-year-old American-led Western espionage alliance will start breaking down, with ominous real-world consequences. The public won’t hear much about the collapse of the West’s spy alliance, which works hard to keep itself out of the newspapers, but if terrorist attacks are suddenly on the rise, with innocents dying in greater numbers, you will know it’s happened.
UNQUOTE
This is exactly why the bill was introduced...remember Trump has in fact stated NATO is obsolete.....
NATO is based on UN Charter and US membership in UN.
American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2017 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/193 …
"This bill repeals the United Nations Participation Act of 1945..." Step directly back to events of before 1945.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/193
Trump continues to led the American people into the believe he is this great businessman...an HONEST businessman would not be afraid to release his tax records.....
WHAT is he really trying hide......
Conway makes it official: Trump won't release his tax returns
http://hill.cm/lfBxeP9
BUT WAIT.....Conway lies as well as her boss and his spokesperson.....
71%n of American polled recently stated he must reveal his tax records with 57% of even his own voters....
AND 48% of American voters voted against him and demanded he reveal his records and those were 3M more than he received in the general votes...
"He's not going to release his tax returns. We litigated this all through the election. People didn't care," Kellyanne Conway says on ABC.
SO YES it was litigated...with the majority still demanding he release hos records...
SO gain any honest businessman even Soros reveals his records if need be....SO is Conway telling us indirectly Trump is not an honest businessman...????
God help the US....it is just getting worse from Trump..they have got to take his twitter account away from him.....
THIS is a proven blatant lie....CNN via the pool media indicated that those applauding were staffers from the Trump team...not from CIA personnel....
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 9m
9 minutes ago
Had a great meeting at CIA Headquarters yesterday, packed house, paid great respect to Wall, long standing ovations, amazing people. WIN!
NOW see if this matches his tweet?
Trump's @CIA speech; 15 mins but worth it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMBqDN7-QLg
HE paid absolutely no repest to the 117 members of the CIA the Wall he used to bash the media..complain about them being dishonest and his Time covers....AND that he was not at war with the US IC..
Orwellian "doublespeak"....
We are now officially in the 1930s "America First" Isolationist Movement....
UNITED STATES: Bill to withdraw the US from the United Nations has been submitted to Congress as the 'American Sovereignty Restoration Act'
Never knew the US was not a sovereign nation?????
Make sense to anyone other than those "America First"?????
People love a populist until he/she gets into power....
We see this all the time with Russian propaganda/disinformation and fake news.....WE call this the SIX Ds....ALL designed to create Doubt and Distrust....
Very good read.
"4D Approach: dismiss, distract, distort and dismay."
Now also applied by the #Trump administration.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/trump-russia-kremlin-propag…
Trump has been doing this for over 18 months now....
Now that you know the SIX Ds...the listen to the Trump CIA speech and see just how many are at work...
Trump's @CIA speech; 15 mins but worth it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMBqDN7-QLg
BUT WAIT.....
Here is Trump in 1980, at age 33.
Note: Capable of eye contact, focused, normal speech, complete coherent sentences.
https://youtu.be/0-w47wgdhso?t=46s
Trump's war on the media is going to 'make journalism great again' as reporters rise to his challenge.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/trump-is-making-journali…
Trump is really going great now he is in office....
War with the US IC he can never win and now a war with the US MSM...one he will certainly not win in the long game.....
It is often hard to match some of Trump's own personal lying and or playing fast and loose with facts...figures and the truth....
Seems to be now equally matched by his onw spokesperson....even in the face of helicopter video and ground video footage...in the face of TV viewing numbers...and even in the face of DC police estimates.....
Spicer blatantly lied......there is a term I use on the Ukrainian thread that reflects the exact same behavior but from the Russian side..."altered state of reality"....OR as Orwell put it..."doublespeak".....
.@seanspicer "This was the largest audience to ever witness an #inauguration, period," @PressSec Spicer said, contradicting all available data.
What exactly has he been smoking lately?????
I have mentioned it in this long series of comments...Trump has no believe system....that is why we get this type of speech in front of the CIA famous Wall of Americans who gave their lives defending the US from enemies near and far....
Truly read the entire Trump speech and then tell me what his FP will be..chaos...
Full transcript of President Trump's remarks to @CIA, as delivered https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jSf6Uxm2u2aPjyQsms-Iir6_0R2aMznB8tt… …
We now have a corrupt...lying...dishonest ..narcissist potentially tied to the Russian Intelligence Service dependent on Russian oligarch black money to support his empire that he stated he was backing away from....remember he must service a 650M USD debt load and has seven bankruptcies so he needs outside US money because no US bank will lend to him...
BUT a check yesterday of his 97 Delaware LLCs indicates that Trump HAS NOT handed a single one of his 97 companies to his sons as per what he himself publicly has stated he would be doing/has done in his press conference....not even the required ownership change notice has been received which is first before the rest arrives...
AND that my friends is blatant lying....
ALL authoritarian regimes want to control and or control the "fourth estate"...many might not like this comment...but Americas tend to have a slant towards "smiling fascism"....or did Trump and company totally forget along the way....that McVeigh and Oklahoma City was not a jihadi attack but an attack from the far right????
Under this President we are seeing the example of freedom of press and free speech being bent to that authoritarian goal....
Watch the new @PressSec literally giving the press a dressing down on how it attempted to "lessen the inauguration".
https://youtu.be/9AjjVMAdWm4
Spicer: "We're going to hold the press accountable as well."
For the PressSec to call a presser, then not take any questions is the journalistic equivalent of doorbell ditch...
Spicer claims 1.2M came...the DC Police estimated the crowds at 250,00 and they have been doing such estimates for years as part of their job....
Trump claimed the crowds went all the way to the Washington Memorial....BUT WAIT..Video footage shows Trump literally walking past totally empty bleachers...
What we have with the Trump spokesperson Spicer is known as "Gaslighting"....
Gaslighting, also spelled gas-lighting, is a form of manipulation through persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying in an attempt to destabilize and delegitimize a target. Its intent is to sow seeds of doubt in the targets, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.