An Administration Rattling Dangerously at the Joints
The news that Secretary of State Marco Rubio today ordered the vetting of all visa applicants who have been to the Gaza strip since 2007, is indicative of an administration that is driven by eclectic, extremist, theatrical, ideological hysteria, that is lacking in any sense of logic, priority, methodology or coordination. The order applies not just to Palestinians but also anyone there for any period of time, including NGO workers and people there in an official or even diplomatic capacity.
This comes, of course, amidst evidence of an odious combination of rampant, ani-judicial phobia and rank incompetence. Trump has chosen for his leader of the State Department a man whom Trump blocks from doing anything at the State Department that he should be doing - all the things that some random chum of Trump’s, Steve Witkoff, from nowhere (so far as the public is concerned) who is not even a formal member of the Administration, is actually doing or trying to do on Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, but who, while unable to show any success to speak of, is at least more able to do these things with more conviction and sense than Rubio.
Over at Defense, a similar story of utter unsuitability to appointment where Hegseth has launched a costly ($1 billion and counting) war of terrible retribution against the only country, Yemen, that has had the courage to stand up for human decency and against Israel’s US/UK paid-for and in all ways otherwise supported genocide of Palestinians…but a war, mainly against civilians, that nonetheless has yet to unblock the Red Sea, yield any metrics of actual success, and has cost the US the loss of at least seven MQ-9 Reaper ($30 million) drones.
But rather than share with the public any of the details, Hegseth and his team are busy suspending top Pentagon officials in the context of a probe to find out who may have been leaking information about the forever wars, or about a proposed top secret China briefing for Elon Musk, or about censorship of content on Defense websites concerning female, minority or LGBT+ troops.
Who knows? Did you think this was a democracy? No, it very much is not. This is the era of the great tin-pot banana republic despots on a scale we have never seen.
Trump will from time to time present himself as someone who is inclined towards what one might call the “realist” or the “America first” pole of policy option on Ukraine, Gaza or Iran yet has surrounded himself with a team that is almost exclusively neocon and Zionist. If we want to be charitable we might say that he did this because Congress is now ideologically reduced to a hairspan, and promoting neocons and Zionists was the only option realistically available. We can argue whether Vance or Gabbard represent any kind of important exceptions here. In the meantime the great deal-maker of the greatest show on earth proves incapable of making timely and considered decisions or of behaving in ways that show evidence of sustained thought, that are consistent, and logical, and moral, and explicable to the American people in ways that they can understand.
The DonSton Cops, sharp-shooter Trump in the lead and head-butting sidekicks Witkoff and Kellogg in tow, fresh from hurling the international trading system over the cliff of global ridicule to crash far below in economic recession-depression are poised to shoot up Kiev not to forget, while licking the crack of Netanyahu’s whip, messing with Tehran and in all other imaginable ways to provoke World War Three.
What’s wrong with Trump policy on Iran? The whole discourse of Iran posing a nuclear threat against anyone is a totally implausible, untrue, and sick game with which the nuclear powers, at the bidding of nuclear Israel, have taunted and bullied and abused Iran for well over two decades, and still today Iran is barely an inch further towards wanting or having a single nuclear weapon other than enriching some uranium to 60%.
How is it possible to accomplish meaningful dialog about an issue that is wholly fraudulent, through and through, and which is intended to camouflage US obeisance to Netanyau and his eager provocations and deceptions to entrap US into staging in a world war that will conveniently provide cover for the dispossession and murder of two million more Palestinians, a mere prelude for the further genocide of millions more in the West Bank, and the colonization of other Arab peoples in Lebanon and Syria?
How does Israel exercise this stupefying and malignant power over Washington? Well of course it is to a large extent about the power of the Israeli Lobby that has grown and flowered from the coffers of Israeli billionaire benefactors and their allies in the US, and because of the money that the US gives Israel and, not least, because of complicity between US and Isrseli elites across a range of dark and dirty secrets whose tacky files enshroud JFK, RFK, USS Liberty and 9/11 amongst many other slimy things in the depths.
Iran is not the weakling that Washington pretends and perhaps even believes. Washington insists on accepting uncritically Israel’s judgement of its success in hitting Iran last year and of Iran’s failure, in retaliation, to inflict real damage on Israel. It is far more likely the case that the Israeli attack was aborted, and that Iran did inflict significant damage.
Yes, Iran has taken hits on Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Well, Syria is still there. Is HTS Israel’s enemy? Or is it an accomplice? At what point may Turkey-HTS clash with Israel-Kurds and ignite a regional war there, should we need more points of conflagration? As for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, they are all still very much there; they all continue to fight and to recruit.
In the space of little over a year, Iran’s presence on the international scene has transformed: it has an agreement with its former opponent Saudi Arabia which even today is reassuring Iran and the world of its firm support for its Islamic brother; it has a strategic partnership with Russia; it supplies China with 40% of China’s oil needs; it is a full member of the BRICS. The maximum damage of which the Washington-Tel Aviv axis dares to contemplate envisages setting back Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear weaponization program by a year or two at most. In the event that Trump allows himself to be influenced by the lunacy of Senator Lyndsey Graham and decides to hit Iran oil refineries, then Iran warns it will crack apart the global energy market, striking at oil facilities through the Middle East, closing shipping through the strait of Hormuz.
In this, it will have the backing and material support of both Russia and China.
Never before in its history has the world grown so tired and intolerant of Washington hubris and that of its vassal states - many of these latter, in Europe, now growing extremely restless with their condition of vassalage albeit, in their case, exasperation is misdirected less at Washington and more against Russia in the hope that by keeping the war over Ukraine going, the vassal states of the rich world can force the US to hang on in NATO, lounge in Europe, and keep the US paying for European “defense” (against what, really, given Russia’s total lack of interest in Europe and its major preoccupation with strengthening EurAsia?).
European pygmies cling to their dream of being giants, just like the rusty engravings of former imperial forbears like Britain, Spain, Holland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Austria - all of them once imperial, most of them still very much neo-imperial but now sold out, under protest it seems, to Washington.
Macron of France lusts to fulfill Kellogg’s fantasy of a NATO ground force that will “protect” Ukraine (i.e. provoke Russia) following a ceasefire that it seems will now only come into being when one side - Europe - declares it so. Macron proudfully envisions a French military contingent in Romania with the idea that such a force can switftly move on Odessa to “protect” Odessa against what, deluded, Macron would have us believe is a weak and ambivalent Russia.
On the contrary, this will certainly provide Russia with an excellent pretext not just for crushing and humiliating the French but also for extending Russian control to Odessa, which Putin many times has said is fundamentally Russian anyhow.
And should NATO decide to hit back, so what? NATO has been fully and vitally participant in this war - the war could not have been fought this long without NATO, as we now know - in all ways other than having large numbers of soldiers (it has always had some) on the ground.
Are they going to win now, after they have lost for three years? Are they going to win now, now that the US Administration is at best very divided as to whether it will continue supporting Ukraine in any way at all (the position that does seem closest to Trump’s mood at present, given Europe’s ass-licking embrace of Zelenskiy since the fracas at the White House a few weeks ago), and as the US prepares to withdraw troops from Europe and from Syria so as better to prepare for war with China on a paltry (satire alert) $1 trillion budget?
Are they going to win now, now that the flow of US weapons and intelligence is petering out, unlikely to be renewed and as Trump tells Zelenskiy - who is petulantly demanding 10 more Patriot batteries and interceptors - that not only is the US not going to provide him any more weapons, it is not going to even lend him the money to buy them from the US. Who in their right minds (tough bar, that, in the European context) would lend anything to a such a bankrupt and corrupt regime? BUT - who still expects consistency? - the US will supply 5,000 troops for upcoming NATO exercises. Perhaps they weren’t doing very much else anyway.
Is NATO going to win now, now after European and US stockpiles of critical weapons have been critically attrited and depleted? Is NATO going to win now,now that after all its flashy weapons - Howitzers, Leopards, Storm Shadows, ATACAMS, F-16s and all the rest of them - have been found so badly deficient on the battlefields? Almost all European and US tanks have shown themselves unfit for Ukrainian terrain and climate, too heavy, over-engineered, cumbersome or impossible to repair on the field. The impact of drones on this war, it goes without saying, has been profound, but profoundly not only just for one side - a subject for much more detailed consideration at a later date. Proto-autocrat soon-to-be German chancellor Merz was toying with the idea of adding to this history of abject technological embarrassment by sending 160 of Germany’s 600 Taurus missiles to Ukraine but is having second thoughts about signing up to be a formal co-belligerant with Ukraine and marking German military facilities with bright red crosses as targets for Russian Oreshniks or nukes.
Is NATO going to win now, now when the most shells that the US or Europe can produce is a mere fraction of what Russia is producing? (The US takes a month to produce what Russia fires in a day). Is NATO going to win now, now while several large European economies are poised for or are actually in recession, closing steel mills - yes, that’s right, the very steel that you need to make most of those weapons which if you can’t produce you need to import from China - and cutting pensions and disability allowances?
Is NATO going to win now, now that Europe is every day more split, less democratic, more authoritarian and more broke (the latest attempt by Ursula von der Leyen to conjure up another 20 billion euros falling apart as I write). Even as EU leaders manipulate expulsion of popular candidates in Romania who are opposed to the war fever of their losing elite class, even as they try to gag the most popular and anti-war political parties of Germany and France, and stretch to a point of absurdity wherein EU foreign minister Kaja Kallas, she of a tiny Baltic state, imperiously instructs Slovakian prime minister Fico that he cannot attend Russia’s Victory Day on May 9th and threatens Serbian Prime Minister Vuvic that Serbia cannot expect to proceed to EU membership if he dares the same). Who would still want to join this circus of clowns?
It is indeed an attritional war, and NATO and Ukraine have been attrited. As a Frech military observer recently commented, wars of attrition have a habit of coming to an end very suddenly, very unexpectedly. He correctly noted the vulnerability of Kiev to Russian forces now amassing in Sumy and, as I have been arguing for some time, Russian border security in the absence of a good-faith settlement to this conflict (of which I see no sign whatsoever) would require Russia to take Kharkiv, Kiev and Odessa as well as the four oblasts and Crimea already integrated into the Russian Federation.
At a time when the US should be projecting an image of strength to the world to back up its (profoundly unnecessary) threats against China, it is in reality projecting weakness, uncertainty, capricousness, irresolve, foolishness. The Administration is at war with itself, yet not fully understanding the nature of this conflict. Does the Administration stand for the continuation of US hegemony? As do the neocons. This is now simply impossible; the longer the delusion that it is possible is entertained, the deeper the crisis, the more terrible its potential consequences.
Or, does the Administration stand for a new order of great power spheres of neo-imperial interest? As do the “realists” and “America firsters”. This is a possible destination, but it is the wrong destination, in existential conflict with the prevailing winds that gust with ever greater urgency towards multipolarity of sovereign, equal and mutually-respectul states and who together must save the species against the ravages of climate change, and struggle mightily towards the elimination of genocidal movements, obscene hierarchies of wealth, overweening corporate power, and the smashing of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
As for Trump Chump Tariffs, The Economist’s language of denunciation grows more exasperated and extreme by the day - I never expected to find myself in such sympathy with the major bible of neocon economics. Fed Chair Jerome Powell warns that the trade war might affect the American economy, raising prices and suppressing demand, forcing the Fed to choose whether to concentrate on keeping inflation low or the labour market healthy.
Trump wants to get rid of Powell as badly as he wants to see impeached those pesky Federal judges who dare to condemn the criminality of his Administration.