Is Trump/JD Vance Going to Transform the US Foreign Policy? Interview with Nima Alkhorshid on ‘Dialogue Works’
An hour long interview may be challenging for you, the viewer, but it is still more challenging for the interviewee. It moves across the waterfront from the more obvious salient issues of the day for which you have concise answers formulated in advance, whether or not a list of questions was provided in by the host, and moves into unforeseeable areas about which you respond extemporaneously. So it was with this interview taken by Nima Alkhorshid.
I was delighted that from the very start I was asked about the significance of Trump’s naming J.D. Vance to be his running mate. My own spontaneous look into Vance’s record ahead of this show turned up a speech he made in the U.S. Senate in the debate ahead of the vote on the bill providing $60 billion in further aid to Ukraine. This speech put flesh on the scarecrow Vance presented in major media, where attention is paid only to his ‘nyet,’ which puts him in the enemy camp, and no mention is made of the reasoning he applied to the issue, which, in my view demonstrates superior intelligence, independence of thinking and an appreciation of how history is used and mostly abused by his colleagues on Capitol Hill to serve their war-mongering.
He attacked the logic of the defenders of our Ukraine policy who oppose peace negotiations, saying this is just appeasement akin to Chamberlain in the lead-up to WWII. But the film of WWII has been played and replayed endlessly in the Senate and this supposed lesson from history does not fit. Putin is not Hitler, he does not have the power of Hitler. No, there are far more apt likenesses in the past. Look better at WWI in which the major powers stumbled into a horrific catastrophe because they overlooked diplomacy. But then look also at the lessons of the Iraq war. Then as now those who were opposed to the attack on Iraq were subjected to abuse by the pro-war majority, just as today those who oppose the Ukraine war narrative are derided as stooges of Putin. There was no free discussion and this is what we need most to arrive at good policies.
Vance then points out the very same politicians who led us into the war in Iraq on false pretenses of defending democracy are doing that today in calling to arm Ukraine
And war, says Vance, has unintended consequences. That is how America, the biggest Christain countryon earth, by its interventions in Syria wiped out one of the oldest Christian communities in the world dating from the time of the Apostles, 1.5 million strong at the start of hostilities and nil today. This is how the same is playing out in Ukraine where the government is striking hard against the Christian community that it says is aligned with Moscow. The result is an assault on freedom of religion.
I highly recommend this speech to my readers: Live: Republican VP Candidate JD Vance Called for Reevaluation of US Foreign Aid During House Debate (youtube.com)
In my interview, I explained at length something else I have been ruminating over these past several day, namely how the appointment of Vance and the speeches delivered in the Republican National Convention by several powerful representatives of civil society, most particularly the president of the Teamsters union, show that Donald Trump now appears to have the support he needs to do what he was unable to do in his first term: to attract a high quality team to his cabinet and to other high federal positions consisting of people who are dedicated to implementing his policies.. It is likely that he will gain control of both houses of Congress so that the Senate approval of his nominees may be foreseen. Moreover, this time around, a divided Democratic party, such as we now see before us, will be unable to frustrate Trump’s plans, foreign as well as domestic.
I was less successful in this interview setting out my thinking on how the new catchword of the day in international relations, ‘sovereignty,’ relates to the bigger and very traditional dialectic between Realism and Idealism in international relations, with the former standing for the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) based vision of nation states that protect the interests of their citizens in general and most specifically against interference by foreign powers that so often causes civil unrest and wars. The latter, Idealism, as we know, focuses on values and finds its latest _expression_ in globalism, which is promoted by supranational, unelected institutions that suck power away from nation states, and in non-state actors such as multinational corporations. All of this I will come back to in writing another day, because it is of decisive importance to understand who is really who on the world stage today and why today’s catchy and novel jargon is often just a rebranding of distinctions that go back centuries.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024