By M D Nalapat
It is no longer Moscow, but Beijing that challenges Washington’s pre-eminence.
November
8, 2016 was a mournful day for Europhiles in the United States. Their
candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had lost in delegate count to Donald
Trump, who would consequently become the 45th President of the United
States on 20 January. Promotions, fees and sinecures hinge on the access
that individual “strategic experts” have to the powerful within the
Washington Beltway, and few from this community had cared to establish
contact with the New York celebrity businessperson. In contrast,
hundreds of them knew one or the other of the Bill and Hillary Clinton
duo, dozens very well. Much time and effort had been squandered on
nurturing this relationship, and on Election Day, the US voters rendered
that effort a waste. Cruelly, Hillary got defeated even after a frenzy
of anti-Trump hysteria inflamed the media, not to mention Europhile
Republicans such as Senators Lindsey Graham or John McCain, as well as
other notables such as House Speaker Paul Ryan and former Republican
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Each had worked tirelessly to get
Hillary elected, and yet had failed. Of course, after 8 November, almost
all of them sidled across to Trump Tower in a local version of the
Chinese imperial kowtow, the exception being McCain, who clearly regards
this as his last term in the Senate and consequently has little to lose
by being honest about his dislike for the President-elect. As for Henry
Kissinger, he must be regretting the fact that so little of his time
has been spent with Trump during the years gone past, for he must
believe that greater exposure to his admittedly impressive packaging of
clichés and homilies may have converted even Trump into a Europhile,
despite global geopolitics having moved its centre of gravity from
Europe to Asia. That Moscow was and has to remain the declared
“principal foe” of the US is explained by the fact that such a
positioning has resulted in the UK, France, Germany and even Poland
being the key allies of the US. Contrarily, if China were to be
understood as the primary threat to US primacy, the focus of attention
would need to move eastwards, towards India, Japan and even Iran. For
the Europhiles, ensuring that the US remains locked in hostility towards
Russia is essential for the continued flow of their funding and high
level administrative positions.
Although President Barack Obama
understands that Europe’s baton has passed to Asia, he has shown himself
too timid to seriously challenge Clintonian Euro-orthodoxy, in the
process even making himself and his wife into (albeit adequately
clothed) cheerleaders for the failed Clintron campaign. In the ongoing
effort to ensure that Moscow and not Beijing remains at the centrepoint
of US strategic hostility, the higher ranks of the US intelligence
community (who are Europhile almost without exception) have been brought
into the arena. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would
be a tad more convincing had he not been exposed as a liar more than a
year ago, when he mendaciously downplayed before the US Congress the
extent of intrusion of intelligence agencies into the lives of millions
of citizens. So who were the actual hackers and leakers of DNC emails?
It was clear that in Washington, several within the intelligence
community loathed the Clintons for the manner in which they lobbied for
handouts from any possible source to the institutions run by them, just
as many within the Democratic Party disliked the amoral way in which
they perpetuated their death grip over the Democratic Party machine in a
style not seen since Richard Daley’s period as Mayor of Chicago. As it
was Julian Assange who exposed Clapper as a smooth-faced liar, it is
understandable that the DNI would badmouth the Australian. And given
that Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham and more than a few others within the
Republican establishment are looking to the day when (they hope)
President Trump will trip up and be forced to resign his charge into the
hands of Mike Pence, it is small wonder that so much of their time gets
expended on seeking to damage Trump’s credibility by echoing in
different ways Hillary Clinton’s laughable charge that the billionaire
is a “Putin puppet”. Within the US intelligence community, of course at
levels lower than those few who have been favoured with positions and
largesse by the Clintons, the Bushes and other Europhile biggies, there
is silent dismay at the way in which it is being sought to get
established that there is a “Slam Dunk” case that Putin, rather than
Democratic Party rebels sore at the way in which the nomination had been
stolen from Bernie Sanders, orchestrated the DNC hack. It is pertinent
to point out that the then CIA director, no less, gave a “Slam Dunk”
verdict that Saddam Hussein was swimming in WMDs, a lie that he knew to
be false, but made anyway.
Geopolitical reality is on Trump’s side.
It is no longer Moscow, but Beijing that poses the definitive challenge
to Washington’s pre-eminence, and in the present century, Tokyo and
Delhi are far more consequential for the future of the US than Paris or
Berlin. When he was accused of having WMD, Saddam Hussein repeated over
and over again that this was a lie, but this was not merely ignored but
distorted to imply the opposite. The arcana of gossipy—indeed,
bitchy—emails between Clinton staffers would be incomprehensible to the
GRU or the KGB, but be clear as glass to insiders in the Democratic
Party, who were almost certainly the source of the email revelations. US
interests mandate that President-elect Trump succeed in reconfiguring
US policies, so as to fit reality rather than nostalgia, but the
Europhiles will not surrender their long-held primacy within the US
establishment without a long and ugly fight against a US President whose
only crime is that he sees the world far more clearly than the
Europhiles do.
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