By Randy Alonso Falcón on March 27, 2018
In the midst of the feverish atmosphere in the White House, the recent appointments of President Trump to key positions in his administration clearly reflect the warmongering emphasis of strong power and imperial blackmail that is imprinting itself into US foreign policy.
Along with the changes in the command of the State Department and the National Security Council, also the budget that Trump just signed last Friday, for the remainder of fiscal year 2018, shows the pre-eminence of policies of force over the diplomacy, in the most classic style of so-called “hard power”. While the Department of Defense budget grew by more than 60 billion dollars, the budget of the US Foreign Ministry and its related bodies for public diplomacy has been cut by 32%. While total defense spending, including the renewal of the nuclear arsenal, has reached 700 billion dollars, while the rest of the expenses will total 591,000 million. The United States spends on defense more than the spending of the following seven countries together.
Introducing the budget proposal 2018 a year ago, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, was resounding in his press conference, “The president said that he would spend less money on people from outside and more at home” […] “It’s a hard power budget, not soft, and it’s intentional. This is the message we want to send to our allies and adversaries. This is a strong and powerful government.”
The Hawks Make their Nest
In an imitation of the most sinister days of the Bush administration, old and new hawks are assuming the leadership of imperial foreign policy.
Donald Trump has just named as his National Security Adviser the sinister John Bolton, one of the main promoters of the Iraq war. In 2001, Bolton became deputy Secretary of State for arms control, a position that gained weight in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq because Bush’s rationale for attacking was focused on the alleged possession of chemical and biological weapons by Saddam Hussein, that later were not found. “We are sure that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction,” Bolton said in a speech in 2002.
He is such a controversial figure in Washington that in 2006 he had to leave his position as US ambassador to the UN after just 14 months due to the refusal of the Senate to confirm him definitively for the post, which Bush appointed him to, taking advantage of a congressional recess.
Bolton, 69, who will assume his new duties on April 9, was one of the candidates shuffled by Trump to win the nomination to be at the head of the State Department. The man is a reluctant advocate of Washington’s hegemonic unilateralism. Among his famous phrases, is one that is a true example of his intolerance, “For me, if the UN loses 10 floors, there will be no difference,” he said in 1994 when Kofi Annan announced his willingness to limit armed conflicts in order to install UN peacekeeping forces. At a press conference he also said that “the United Nations does not exist as an institution” and when asked how he would reform the Security Council Bolton was absolutely clear. “The reform would be to put in the Security Council a single permanent member because it is the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world. That member would be the United States.”
A regular commentator on the FOX television network, Bolton is an ultraconservative ideologue, a vehement defender of the “national interest” of the United States and someone who supports without pretense military attacks as a preventive strategy. “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to attack first to respond to the ‘need’ (self-defense) of North Korea’s nuclear weapons,” he wrote in an article published two weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal.
Bolton will apparently have a good ally in the Secretary of State. The exit of Rex Tillerson from that position did not surprise anyone. The oil tycoon did not agree with the real estate mogul and his television reality shows that today dominates the White House; even though in the long run they shared strategic purposes. Quite the opposite of what will happen with Mike Pompeo, the new head of American diplomacy, who is considered as the most loyal to Trump of the any member of his cabinet. “With Mike Pompeo, we have a very similar way of thinking,” the president said when announcing his new appointment.
Pompeo comes from a meteoric political career, conveniently financed by the reactionary Koch brothers. Graduated from the Military Academy of West Point, in 2010 he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he spent six years, until Trump appointed him to be head of the CIA.
He gained fame in Washington for the harshness with which he punished Hillary Clinton in the special commission to investigate the Benghazi (Libya) bombing of 2012, when the former presidential candidate was Secretary of State. The investigation ended without finding responsibilities in Clinton, but Pompeo came to describe the case as something “worse than Watergate in some aspects.” That put him in a favorable line of sight for Donald Trump when shaping his government.
He is considered a hawk, follower of the ultra-conservative Tea Party philosophy. His vision as director of the CIA was clearly imperial: “To be successful the CIA must be aggressive, implacable, tenacious,” he said. He frequently, mockingly invoked the possibility of assassinating the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, raising fears of a probable return of Washington to the practice of assassinations of foreign leaders.
Pompeo, who now has to deal with the twists and turns of foreign policy, has been in favor of “regime change” in North Korea and sabotaging nuclear agreements with Iran.
The Bolton-Pompeo duo will be well assisted in the aggressive projection towards the rest of the world by US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, a despot with a diplomatic post.
Last December, Haley threatened UN member states with reprisals if they supported a resolution that criticized Washington’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and said President Donald Trump took the vote as a “personal matter” and the United States will “write down names.”
In a letter she sent to representatives of 180 countries, Haley warned, “The president will observe this vote carefully and has asked me to report on the countries that voted against us. We will take note of each vote on this matter.”
To this she added an energetic message in her twitter account: “At the UN we are always asked to do more and give more. That is why, when we make a decision at the will of the American people on where to place OUR Embassy, we do not expect those we help to attack us. On Thursday there will be a vote on a critique against our choice. The U.S. will write down the names. ”
Two simple pearls of thought and acting of the woman of Trump’s team for foreign policy.
Venezuela and Cuba in the Cross Hairs
If something distinguishes and unites the people named above it is their obsessed imperialist vision of Venezuela and Cuba, their closeness to Senator Marco Rubio and his look towards Latin America as a backyard that must be obedient.
Everyone should remember Mrs. Haley’s overbearing intervention in the United Nations on the day that the resolution against the US blockade against Cuba was approved by an overwhelming majority; which, incidentally, received a strong response from the Cuban Foreign Minister.
Haley has not stopped using the tribune of the UN to repeatedly attack Cuba and Venezuela.
She recently went to Miami to meet with the most anti-Cuban elements. Haley was at the International University of Florida (FIU) with anti-Cuban congressmen Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Marco Rubio, Carlos Curbelo and Mario Diaz-Balart to discuss, according to reports, “how democracy can be strengthened in Latin America and especially in Cuba and Venezuela.”
According to Senator Marco Rubio, the meeting was organized at the request of Haley to know the demands of exiles from Cuba and Venezuela, although there was also talk of the current state of American business in Latin America and the relationship of the United States within the region.
The new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on the other hand, is the support arm of Marco Rubio in the framework of the lies of the supposed “sonic attacks” in Cuba against US officials, a good part of who are, according to AP, intelligence officials. This has been denounced by several sources and recently ratified by the Spanish newspaper El País, which attributes the supposed acoustic attacks against US officials in Cuba as a trick by the CIA to cool down and eventually eliminate the process of rapprochement between both nations.
Both Pompeo and Rubio share the ultra-conservative ideological line of the Tea Party. They have a close bond for several years. In 2015, when Pompeo was a representative for Kansas, he co-sponsored the bill promoted by Rubio, entitled the Cuban Military Transparency Act, to prevent any financial transaction with companies managed by the Cuban military. It was not approved then, but President Trump pleased them in his policy announcements for Cuba in June 2017.
Just three days after Trump’s speech in Miami, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Mike Pompeo, met in Langley, on June 19, with several members of the mercenary Brigade 2506 headed by Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia (one of those involved in the assassination of Che in Bolivia) and other characters, including Miami-Dade County Commissioner Esteban Bovo Jr., Sheriff Jorge Gutiérrez Izaguirre and Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio.
Pompeo has also been an active champion of the Trump administration’s anti-Venezuelan policies. Last January, during an exchange at the American Enterprise Institute, he alluded to the influence that the CIA had with Trump to order sanctions against the government of Nicolás Maduro, based on “the intelligence we had delivered and he had requested.”
As early as July 2017, the then director of the CIA had made some controversial statements about Venezuela during a security forum at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. “We have high hopes that there may be a transition in Venezuela and the CIA is doing its best to understand the dynamics there.”
“Venezuela could become a risk for the United States,” he would say a month later to the Fox television network. “The Cubans are there; the Russians are there, the Iranians, Hezbollah are there. This has the risk of becoming a very bad place, so the United States should take it very seriously. ”
The Lies of Bolton
Few American politicians in recent decades have been as perverse and manipulative towards Cuba as John Bolton. His accusations are well remembered in May 2002 (when Bush spoke of attacking 60 or more countries, Afghanistan had been invaded by imperial forces, Iraq was threatened for allegedly building chemical weapons and Chavez had suffered the Coup d’état promoted by Washington ) that Cuba was manufacturing biological weapons and was passing them to “terrorist” countries.
“Here’s what we know; the United States believes that Cuba is conducting at least a limited offensive work of biological warfare research and development. Cuba has provided dual-use technology to other renegade states. We are concerned that this technology could support biological weapons programs in those states. We urge Cuba to cease all cooperation applicable to biological weapons with the renegade states and to fully respect all its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention. “Bolton told a surprised audience listening to him at the Heritage Foundation.
A few days later, Fidel Castro would respond bluntly to Bolton: “As far as weapons of mass destruction are concerned, Cuba’s policy has been blameless. No one has ever presented a single proof that a program for the development of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons has been conceived in our country. For those who do not understand ethics, and transparency in the conduct of a government like Cuba, they could at least understand that doing the opposite would have constituted colossal stupidity on our part. Any such program ruins the economy of any small country; Cuba would never have been able to transport such weapons, would not commit the additional error of introducing them into combat against an adversary that has thousands of times more weapons of that character, which would then be receiving, as a gift, the pretext of using them.
From the political point of view, we live in a time when there are and will be more and more powerful weapons than any of those born out of technology; the weapons of morality, reason and ideas. Without them no nation is powerful; with them, no country is weak. Such an apothegm requires an exceptionally deep motivation, cold blood and intelligence. It should be known that for the Cuban people, above any other value on Earth, are the values that inspire freedom, dignity, love for their country, their identity, their culture and the strictest sense of justice that human beings can conceive. They are not weapons of mass destruction, they are weapons of massive moral defense, and we are willing to fight and die for them. ”
Will Mr. Bolton have Understood the Message?
In 2014, when the Presidents of Cuba and the United States announced the beginning of a new stage in bilateral relations, John Bolton declared on a radio program: “I believe it is a tremendous defeat for the United States. The President, with his action, has given political legitimacy to this dictatorship and has extended an economic lifeline to the regime precisely at the moment when we should increase the pressures “.
The return of Bolton to positions of power in imperial foreign policy augurs new days of threats and conflicts. On his projections, a senior official of the Republican administration told El Nuevo Herald, “For Latin America, it has always been emphasized how Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have undermined the interests of the United States throughout the region” […] “Bolton believes that Venezuela, with its economic crisis, is vulnerable and that other countries, including Iran, continue to have a great influence in their government.”
While Senator Marco Rubio showed his rejoicing at the appointment of the new White House Adviser: “I know John Bolton well, he’s an excellent choice and he’s going to do a great job as national security adviser,” Rubio wrote in his Twitter account.
Last August, Bolton told the far-right Breitbart that Venezuela was a threat to the United States and urged Washington not to be “timid” about Nicolás Maduro’s “dictatorship,” calling for more support to the opposition that seeks to “restore” a representative government.
“Let’s not forget that Iran has a lot of weight in Maduro’s Venezuela and it also had it during the government of Chávez,” he said. “Why is the largest Iranian embassy in the world in Caracas? Because through it they are laundering money and because Venezuela, together with Canada, has the largest proven reserves of uranium. ”
Another God Son of Rubio in the OAS
Cashing in on the many favors that Trump apparently owes him, Senator Rubio reinforces his influence in the current US foreign policy when he succeeded in appointing Florida’s former state representative Carlos Trujillo as US Ambassador to the OAS.
“Carlos has served his constituents diligently in the Florida House of Representative for the past eight years and I know he will do the same as a representative of the American people in the OAS,” Marco Rubio said in a statement, as he was in charge of reporting the appointment.
Trujillo thus becomes a pre-eminent voice of the Trump administration’s policy towards Latin America, since Congress has not yet confirmed Kimberly Breier as undersecretary of State for the Western Hemisphere.
Along with the hypocrite Almagro he will make a good duo in the OAS to conduct the imperial interests in our region. Trujillo has expressed that Venezuela is the priority of his administration.
Latin America will live a moment of redefinition of its relationship with the United States at the very next Summit of the Americas. There Trump will come surrounded by his entire band of hawks, heirs of the Monroe Doctrine. Withering times are approaching.
Source: Cubadebate, translation: Resumen Latinoamericano, North American Bureau