Trump Says The Quiet Part Out Loud On American Foreign Policy.

Trump is saying some shockingly true things about American foreign policy, but will his polices match up to the rhetoric?

One of the most interesting aspects about Donald Trump is the fact that despite being an American imperialist, he often says the quiet part out loud regarding American foreign policy.

Lately he has taken this to the next level saying some shockingly accurate things about American foreign policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but there is still doubt over his policies matching this rhetoric.

Trump’s Shocking Ukraine Comments

On the campaign trail, Trump often railed against the Ukraine war but never got into the specifics. He repeated again and again that the war “never would have happened” under his presidency and claimed he would end the war “on day one”, but never actually got into specifics over the NATO expansion that provoked the war, or the fact that the Biden administration blocked a peace deal that could have ended it in April of 2022.

This has changed recently in a speech he gave where he blurted these facts out. Starting with NATO expansion in the speech he said

Russia for many many years- long before Putin- said you could never have NATO involved in Ukraine .. . and somewhere along the line Biden said they should be able to join NATO, well then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep and I can see their feeling about that. There were a lot of mistakes made in that negotiation and when I heard the way Biden was negotiating I said you're gonna end up in a war.

What Trump said here is undeniably correct. As far back as 2008, CIA head William Burns warned that the threat of NATO expansion in Georgia and Ukraine would “touch a raw nerve in Russia” and “engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region”. He said that it could “lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war (in Ukraine)” meaning, “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene”.

Far from the only expert to warn of of this, as Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson wrote in their recent book “The Myth of American Idealism”, U.S. diplomat George Kennan warned in the 90s that NATO expansion was a “tragic mistake” that would lead to “a new cold war”. Kennan warned that NATO expansion would make Russia “react quite adversely”.

As for what Trump said about Biden's failure to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war before it started, he is also correct. As Chomsky and Robinson wrote in the above-mentioned book, the Biden administration “declined to push for a settlement and refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO” and “made no diplomatic efforts to influence Russia's behavior.” They even “reaffirmed that it (Ukraine) was ultimately planning to integrate (into NATO)” as late as December of 2021.

Trump went on in the speech to accurately point out that the Biden administration blocked a peace deal in Ukraine saying:

they had a deal and then Biden broke it, they had a deal that would have been a satisfactory deal to Ukraine and everybody else but that Biden said no you have to be able to join NATO.

This is another undeniable fact, Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and Turkish officials all confirmed that Ukraine and Russia came close to a peace deal in April of 2022 but the Biden administration sent UK prime minister Boris Johnson to block the deal.

The Ukrainian outlet “Pravda” reported that when Boris Jonson visited Ukraine, he told the government that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they (the West) are not.”

While Trump's factual statements may be refreshing, he is leaving out a major part, the role he played in provoking the Ukraine war.

While Trump brought up NATO expansion he did not mention the eight year proxy war in Eastern Ukraine that also helped provoke the war. This is likely because he was responsible for escalating that war by sending lethal arms to Ukraine, a policy even Obama did not support because he saw it as too provocative towards Russia.

Trump also did not mention the fact that he pulled out of the INF Cold War era Nuclear treaty with Russia, something that Russia cited at the UN as something that provoked the Ukraine war.

Trump also neglected to mention the fact that he privately supported Republican leadership in voting for arms packages to Ukraine or the fact that some of his top officials such as his national security advisor Mike Waltz and senior director for counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka are supporters of the war.

While Trump's comments are certainly promising, they are more likely empathy rhetoric that his policies will not match up with, as is often the case with him.

Trump’s Even More Shocking Middle East Social Media Post

Even more shockingly, Trump shared a video to “Truth Social” of Economist and Columbia University professor Jeffery Sachs criticizing Israel for pushing America into the Iraq war, dirty war in Syria and towards War with Iran, calling Benjamin Netanyahu a “deep dark son a bitch”. In the clip Sachs says:

The war in Syria, and you may actually hear from grown-up reporters who are lying through their teeth or ignorant beyond imagining that, oh, the war in Syria, yes, Russia intervened in Syria. Well, do you know that Obama tasks the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government, starting four years before Russia intervened? What kind of nonsense is that? And how many times did the New York Times report on Operation Timber Sycamore, which was the presidential order to the CIA to overthrow Bashar al-Assad? Three times in ten years. This is not democracy.

This is a game, and it's a game of narrative. Why did the U.S. invade Iraq in 2003? Well, first of all, it was completely phony. It wasn't, oh, we were so wrong, they didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

They actually did focus groups in the fall of 2002 to find out what would sell that war to the American people. Abe Shulsky, if you want to know the name of the PR genius. They did focus groups on the war.

They wanted war all the time. They had to figure out how to sell the war to the American people, how to scare the shit out of the American people. It was a phony war.

Where did that war come from? You know what? It's quite surprising. That war came from Netanyahu, actually. You know that? It's weird.

And the way it is, is that Netanyahu had from 1995 onward the theory that the only way we're going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the governments that support them. That's Iraq, Syria, and Iran. And the guy's nothing if not obsessive.

And he's still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week. He's a deep, dark son of a bitch, sorry to tell you, because he's gotten us into endless wars and because of the power of all of this in U.S. politics, he's gotten his way. But that war was totally phony.

So what is this democracy versus dictatorship? Come on. This is, these are not even sensible terms.

What Sachs said in the clip is undeniably correct. Benjamin Netanyahu strongly pushed the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of Mass Destruction to manufacture consent for the Iraq war and Israel armed rebels in the Syrian proxy war alongside the CIA, UK, Turkey and Gulf State Monarchies.

It is also undeniably true that Benjamin Netanyahu wants to provoke an American war with Iran. As far back as 2015 Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech to Congress in an attempt to stop the JCPOA in order to prevent peace between America and Iran.

In his speech to Congress last year he consistently made comments trying to provoke an American war with Iran claiming that “Iran sees America as its greatest enemy” and was “the most radical and murderous enemy of the United States of America”.

He also tried to drill down the idea that America was threatened by Iran saying “For Iran Israel is first, America is next” and that “Iran’s regime has been fighting America from the moment it came to power”.

He even said that “America and Israel today can forge a security alliance in the Middle East to counter the growing Iranian threat”.

What is mind-boggling about Trump sharing this clip is the fact that he is one of the biggest Netanyahu simps in American politics. He let Netanyahu annex the Golan Heights and West Bank settlements, backed his 2018 massacre of protestors in Gaza, and facilitated the Abraham Accords which allowed Netanyahu to normalize with Arab states while sidelining Palestinians.

Furthermore, on Iran and Syria, he wasn’t exactly going against Netanyahu’s preferred policies. In Syria, Trump bombed the government twice and even had to be talked out of intervening to take out Assad. He also occupied Syria’s oil and wheat-rich areas while bragging about “taking the oil” and passed starvation sanctions on the country that deliberately targeted reconstruction, two moves that undoubtedly helped lead to the recent toppling of Assad.

On Iran, he pulled out of the Iran deal (something Netanyahu really wanted) and passed crippling sanctions on the country which his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo admitted was intended to make the economic situation “much worse for the Iranian people” so that they would “rise up and change the behavior of the regime.”

And it’s not like Trump exactly had a change of heart of these issues, on the campaign trail he consistently called for Netanyahu to “finish the job” of the Genocide in Gaza and bragged about his Hawkish policy toward Iran.

And it’s not as if he is not still tied to Netenyahu, he has received 100 million dollars from the pro-Israel donor Miriam Adelson.

His cabinet picks also show where he actually stands on Israel

His Secretary of State Marco Rubio has received over 100,000 dollars from the pro-Israel lobby group “pro Israel America pac” while his national security advisor Mike Waltz has received 70,00 dollars from AIPAC and his UN ambassador Elise Stefnik has received 200,000 dollars from AIPAC.

Almost all of his cabinet are supportive of Netenyahu and his genocide in Gaza, his defense secretary Pete Hegseth for example gave a softball interview to Benjamin Netanyahu when he was a Fox News host where they both openly came out against the existence of a Palestinian state.

His cabinet is equally hawkish on Iran. His Secretary of State Marco Rubio has supported “Military Action” in Iran as far back as 2012 and said on Israeli TV that regime change in Iran should be an American goal.

His defense secretary Pete Hegseth similarly called for Trump to bomb Iranian nuclear sites in 2020.

Recently the Wall Street Journal has reported that the Trump team is “seriously” considering “the military-strike option against nuclear facilities” in Iran.

How Trump went from a zionist Iran Hawk to sharing a video clip that correctly called Netenyahu a “son of a bitch” and called him out for trying to incite an American war with Iran is very confusing. But given his cabinet choices and his previous connection with Netenyahu and the Israel lobby it is more likely than not empty rhetoric.

What is Trump Up To?

Hearing Trump say these accurate statements about American foreign policy is certainly refreshing, but what does it actually mean? I would love to think that Trump will actually end the Ukraine war and stop funding “son of a bitch” Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza and refuse to go to war with Iran on his behalf, but his actual cabinet choices and policy history says otherwise.

Is Trump just doing damage control to try to win back his base who are now starting to question if he was serious about starting “no new wars” given how many neocons are in his cabinet? Has he actually had a change of heart? Only time will tell. I hope I am wrong but if I had to bet I would say this is a PR move to win back the anti-war element of his base which his actual policies will not reflect.