OPINIONS/TRIBUNE – For the first time in the history of the United States, a former president describes the stranglehold of the “deep state” on the main American institutions, while denouncing the harmful influence of this warrior lobby on the situation in Ukraine for years. Analysis of Donald Trump’s speech given on February 21.
WATCH: President Trump announces plan for immediate mass firings of “warmonger” bureaucrats at the State Department and Pentagon if he’s reelected President in 2024.
“I am the President who delivers peace.” – @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/cY5rkWq6Vg
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 21, 2023
In line with Dwight Eisenhower
“Stop warmongers and globalists” : this is the title of Trump’s speech which begins by warning that “World War III has never been closer than it is now”. He goes on to call for “clean the house” of all the “Warmongers, ‘America Last’ globalists and the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Industrial complex”.
From the introduction, we think of another speech by an American president who made history, that of President Dwight Eisenhower, on January 17, 1961. Eisenhower was also the first supreme commander of NATO. In this farewell speech to the presidency, the former general had denounced the threat of influence from the “military-industrial complex” on United States policy. And it is clear that this country has been almost in perpetual war since the departure of Eisenhower, directly or indirectly, which seems to demonstrate the reality of the considerable influence of this famous complex.
Trump has revived the phrase. Because, from its experience at the White House, this influential lobby goes beyond the simple circle of the military and industrialists. It also includes civil servants, bureaucrats themselves under the influence of neo-conservatives, particularly at the level of the State Department. When Trump then mentions “the National Security Establishment”we can legitimately think that he includes without naming them the big security and intelligence agencies: FBI, CIA and NSA, which are all the more powerful as they work in the shadows, under the protection of the imperative to “national security” which authorizes them to secrecy. Recall that Trump had many difficulties with the FBI at the start of his presidency.
Trump then congratulates himself on having been “the only president not to have started a war for generations”which is correct, because it would have “rejected the catastrophic advice of many generals, bureaucrats and diplomats”.
Victoria Nuland
Specifically, Trump accuses high-ranking diplomat Victoria Nuland, along with others, of being “obsessed with the idea of integrating Ukraine into NATO” and to have “supported the insurrection” de Maidan, “seeking confrontation”as their predecessors did with Iraq.
Remember that Victoria Nuland is the wife of Robert Kagan, who is none other than one of the founders of the neo-conservative movement (and co-founder with William Kristol of the “Project for the New American Century”, PNAC, “Project for the New American Century”, an American think tank operating 1997 to 2006), a bipartisan warmongering lobby that somehow seized power during the administration of George W. Bush. The two spouses thus share an aggressive conception of the role of the United States in the world, but always “in the name of democracy”. The concordance of interests between these ideologues and the arms dealers constitutes the hard core of the forces which push towards wars.
Between 2013 and 2016, Nuland worked as Assistant to the Secretary of State, in charge of Eurasian and European affairs. In this capacity, she coordinated US policy regarding Ukraine. Nuland was ubiquitous during the time of the Maidan protests, which culminated in the downfall of President Yanukovych. She had said that the United States had spent $5 billion to “support democracy” in Ukraine, by financing various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and new media, entities which had a key role in launching and accompanying the demonstrations.
All this is clearly depicted in the films signed by Igor Lopatonok with Oliver Stone “Ukraine on Fire” et “Revealing Ukraine” (Lopatonok is incidentally bliss of Trump’s speech). Nuland and the American ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, also received opposition leaders at the time, as well as a few American senators like John McCain or Lindsey Graham who came to harangue the crowd of demonstrators. What other country in the world could afford such interference, so openly, in the internal affairs of a sovereign country?
On February 19 and 20, 2014, the Maidan massacre, blamed on the police, was to precipitate Yanukovych’s downfall. But the academic Ivan Katchanovski, in a masterful study ignored by the mainstream media, demonstrated that this affair was a set-up, a most cynical false flag attack, whose sponsors remain mysterious…
Even before this event, on February 4, the recording of a conversation between Nuland and Pyatt was publicly revealed. The newspapers mainly retained the expression “F..k the EU” which Nuland had let slip. But what was most interesting in the exchange between the two diplomats was the fact that they were deciding who would join the future government and who would be excluded.
And it is the candidate chosen by name by Nuland, Arsenyi Yatsenyuk, who will become the new Prime Minister of Ukraine a few weeks later. How could these American diplomats be so sure of themselves when Yanukovych was still president? Moreover, in the conversation, Nuland also quotes Joe Biden, who at the time as vice-president supervised the Ukrainian file for the White House.
In recent weeks, two US sources have claimed that the United States was far more involved in overthrowing Yanukovych than the general public knows. It was first the economist Jeffrey Sachsthen the journalist Seymour Hersch. What had been presented as a revolution, and which was in fact a coup, is the starting point of the war that we know today between NATO and Russia, via Ukraine. It all started from there.
Eight years later, we will find the same Biden and Nuland at the helm, but a notch above in the hierarchy. As Biden became President, Nuland was appointed Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, a position some describe as the third most senior in the State Department. But she still oversees Ukraine.
Interestingly, both Biden and Nuland warned before the Russian invasion of Ukraine that if Russian tanks crossed the border, NordStream would no longer exist. And just recently, Nuland was pleased that NordStream was no longer in working order. But officially, the United States has nothing to do with the sabotage operation that destroyed the gas pipelines.
However, thanks to the revelations of Seymour Hersch, one of the most renowned investigative journalists in the world, former Pulitzer Prize winner, we know the very plausible scenario which would have led to the destruction of the pipelines, and which would directly involve the Americans.
To date, there is no other thesis that is even remotely credible that can explain what happened. And these are not the speculations close to the ridicule of the so-called experts of the French television channels who will be able to convince us otherwise. Besides, why, and how, would a man of Hersh’s caliber invent false testimony, or allow himself to be manipulated, on such a serious matter? With this affair of the sabotage of Nord-Stream, we seem in fact to have moved to the next stage of the “F..k the EU”.
These recent revelations, terrible for the image of the United States and carrying great dangers, could have motivated Trump’s intervention. The time is no longer for mixed words.
Continuation of the speech
The former president concedes that “None of this excuses the horrific and outrageous invasion of Ukraine”. But he immediately clarifies that none of this would ever have happened, according to him, if he had been in power. If President Trump had abandoned the idea of integrating Ukraine into NATO, while pushing for the implementation of the Minsk Accords, it would have deprived Russia of the main reasons that led it to invade the Ukraine. From this point of view, we can therefore imagine that Trump can tell the truth.
The ex-president thus claims that the Ukrainian conflict could be settled in 24 hours with the “bon leadership”, implied with his. He then affirms the need for “get rid of the corrupt globalist establishment that has sabotaged every major foreign policy decision for decades”and get rid of the Biden administration.
He calls again “stop lobbyists and representatives of the defense industry” in their efforts to influence senior army officers and senior civil servants working in the field of national security, promising them very lucrative jobs to end their careers. He thus describes in a concrete way, as no president has done before him, the functioning of the industrial and national security complex.
As an illustration of what Trump denounces, on February 16, former judge turned commentator Andrew Napolitano and former Colonel Douglas McGregor, who worked as an adviser to the Pentagon during the end of Trump’s presidential term, were discussing of this phenomenon of senior army officers who are hired by the private sector after their military career.
They quoted Lloyd Austin, the current Secretary of Defense who, upon his retirement from the military in 2016, had joined Raytheon technologies, one of the largest companies in the world working in the armaments sector. Commenting on the contradictory statements on Ukraine by the current Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General Miley, McGregor analyzed that the latter was only repeating what he was told to say in order to ensure a future gold in the private sector for services rendered. We can also recall that the former vice-president Dick Cheney, who was previously the CEO of Halliburton, a Pentagon subcontractor, had offered this company the contract to support the American army in Iraq without a call for tenders. .
By proposing to change this system, Trump is committing to a radical break, almost a revolution, as the defense industry is sprawling in the United States. It remains to be seen if he would have the means of his ambitions. Because we know that parliamentarians are also targeted by these manufacturers. An arms factory in a constituency also means jobs, and therefore votes. And Trump had already failed to “clean the swamp” of Washington as he had promised to do. But it must also be recognized that he had the entire establishment against him, the state apparatus as well as the media, and that he spent most of his mandate defending himself against attempts at impeachment.
But Trump is also committed to strengthening the military, so that America can hold its adversaries at bay,“peace through strength”, he said. Tactically, this policy would also aim to satisfy at least the defense industries which remain essential. The ex-president ends his speech by promising to put in place at the end of his next presidency a competent administration which will defend the interests of the Americans.
The campaign for the 2024 US elections is therefore already underway. But it seems a secondary subject compared to the urgency of avoiding the Third World War.
36 hours after this speech, it seems that there is no reaction from the major American press or from the political class to this frontal denunciation of the “deep state”.