America as Republic, not as Empire – Europe’s “sound and fury” after jaw-dropping pivots in U.S. policy
The bits are falling into a distinct pattern – a pre-prepared pattern.
Defence
Secretary Hegseth at the Munich Security Conference gave us four
‘noes’: No to Ukraine in NATO; No to a return to pre-2014 borders; No to
‘Article 5’ peacekeeper backstops, and ‘No’ to U.S. troops in Ukraine.
And in a final flourish, he added that U.S. troops in Europe are not
‘forever’ – and even placed a question mark over the continuity of NATO.
Pretty plain speaking! The U.S. clearly is cutting away from Ukraine. And they intend to normalise relations with Russia.
Then,
Vice-President Vance threw his fire cracker amongst the gathered
Euro-élites. He said that the élites had retreated from “shared”
democratic values; they were overly reliant on repressing and censoring
their peoples (prone to locking them up); and, above all, he excoriated
the European Cordon Sanitaire (‘firewall’) by which European parties
outside the Centre-Left are deemed non-grata politically: It’s a fake
‘threat’, he suggested. Of what are you really so frightened? Have you so little confidence in your ‘democracy’?
The
U.S., he implied, will no longer support Europe if it continues to
suppress political constituencies, arrest citizens for speech offenses,
and particularly cancel elections as was done recently in Romania. “If
you’re running in fear of your own voters”, Vance said, “there is
nothing America can do for you”.
Ouch! Vance had hit them where it hurts.
It
is difficult to say what specifically most triggered the catatonic
European breakdown: Was it the fear of the U.S. and Russia joining
together as a major power nexus – thus stripping Europe from ever again
being able glide along on the back of American power, through the
specious notion that any European state must have exceptional access to
the Washington ‘ear’?
Or was it the ending of the
Ukraine/Zelensky cult which was so prized amongst the Euro-élite as the
‘glue’ around which a faux European unity and identity could be
enforced? Both probably contributed to the fury.
That the U.S. would in essence leave Europe to their own delusions would be a calamitous event for the Brussels technocracy.
Many
may lazily assume that the U.S. double act at Munich was just another
example of the well-known Trumpian fondness for dropping ‘wacky’
initiatives intended to both shock and kickover frozen paradigms. The
Munich speeches did exactly that all right! Yet that does not make them
accidental; but rather parts that fit into a bigger picture.
It
is clear now that the Trump blitzkrieg across the American
Administrative State could not have been mounted unless carefully
pre-planned and prepared over the last four years.
Trump’s
flurry of Presidential Executive Orders at the outset of his Presidency
were not whimsical. Leading U.S. constitutional lawyer, Johnathan
Turley, and other lawyers say that the Orders were well drafted legally
and with the clear understanding that legal challenges would ensue.
What’s more, that Trump Team welcome those challenges.
What
is going on? The newly confirmed head of the Office of Budget
Management(OBM), Russ Vought, says his Office will become the “on/off
switch” for all Executive expenditure under the new Executive Orders.
Vought calls the resulting whirlpool, the application of Constitutional
radicalism. And Trump has now issued the Executive Order that reinstates
the primacy of the Executive as the controlling mechanism of
government.
Vaught, who was in OBM in Trump 01, is carefully selecting the ground for all-out financial war on the Deep State. It will be fought out firstly at the Supreme Court – which the Trump Team expect confidently to win (Trump has the
6-3 conservative majority). The new régime will then be applied across
all agencies and departments of state. Expect shrieks of pain.
The
point here is that the Administrative State – aloof from executive
control – has taken to itself prerogatives such as immunity to dismissal
and the self-awarded authority to shape policy – creating a dual state
system, run by unelected technocrats, which, when implanted in
departments such as Justice and the Pentagon, have evolved into the
American Deep State.
Article Two of the Constitution
however, says very bluntly: Executive power shall be vested in the U.S.
President (with no ifs or buts at all.) Trump intends for his
Administration to recover that lost Executive power. It was, in fact,
lost long ago. Trump is re-claiming too, the Executive’s right to
dismiss ‘servants of the State’, and to ‘switch off’ wasteful
expenditure at his discretion, as part of a unitary executive
prerequisite.
Of course, the Administrative State is
fighting back. Turley’s article is headlined: They Are Taking Away
Everything We Have: Democrats and Unions Launch Existential Fight. Their
aim has been to cripple the Trump initiative through using politicised
judges to issue restraint orders. Many mainstream lawyers believe
Trump’s Unitary Executive claim to be illegal. The question is whether
Congress can stand up Agencies designed to act independently of the
President; and how does that square with the separation of powers and
Article Two that vests unqualified executive power with one sole elected
official – the U.S. President.
How did the Democrats not see this coming? Lawyer Robert Barnes essentially saysthat
the ‘blitzkrieg’ was “exceptionally well-planned” and had been
discussed in Trump circles since late 2020. The latter team had emerged
from within a generational and cultural shift in the U.S.. This latter
had given rise to a Libertarian/Populist wing with working class roots
who often had served in the military, yet had come to despise the
Neo-con lies (especially those of 9/11) that brought endless wars. They
were animated more by the old John Adams adage that ‘America should not
go abroad in search of monsters to slay’.
In short, they
were not part of the WASP ‘Anglo’ world; they came from a different
Culture that harked back to the theme of America as Republic, not as Empire.
This is what you see with Vance and Hegseth – a reversion to the
Republican precept that the U.S. should not become involved in European
wars. Ukraine is not America’s war.
The Deep State, it
seems, were not paying attention to what a posse of ‘populist’ outliers,
tucked away from the rarefied Beltway talking shop, were up to: They
(the outliers) were planning a concerted attack on the Federal
expenditure spigot – identified as the weak spot about which a
Constitutional challenge could be mounted that would derail – in its
entirety – the expenditures of the Deep State.
It seems that one aspect to the surprise has been the Trump Team’s discipline: ‘no leaks’. And secondly, that those
involved in the planning are not drawn from the preeminent
Anglo-sphere, but rather from a strand of society that was offended by
the Iraq war and which blames the ‘Anglo-sphere’ for ‘ruining’ America.
So
Vance’s speech at Munich was not disruptive – merely for the sake of
being disruptive; he was, in fact, encouraging the audience to recall
early Republican Values. This was what is meant by his complaint that
Europe had turned away from “our shared values” – i.e. the values that
animated Americans seeking escape from the tyranny, prejudices and
corruption of the Old World. Vance was (quite politely) chiding the Euro-élites for backsliding to old European vices.
Vance implicitly was hinting too,
that European conservative libertarians should emulate Trump and act to
slough-off their ‘Administrative States’, and recover control over
executive power. Tear down the firewalls, he advised.
Why?
Because he likely views the ‘Brussels’ Technocratic State as nothing
other than a pure offshoot to the American Deep State – and therefore
very likely to try to torpedo and sink Trump’s initiative to normalise
relations with Moscow.
If these were Vance’s instincts, he
was right. Macron almost immediately summoned an ‘emergency meeting’ of
‘the war party’ in Paris to consider how to frustrate the American
initiative. It failed however, descending reportedly into quarrelling
and acrimony.
It transpired that Europe could not gather a
‘sharp-end’ military force greater than 20,-000-30,000 men. Scholtz
objected in principle to their involvement; Poland demurred as a close
neighbour of Ukraine; and Italy stayed silent. Starmer, however, after
Munich, immediately rang Zelensky to say that Britain saw Ukraine to be
on an irrevocable path to NATO membership – thus directly contradicting
U.S. policy and with no support from other states. Trump will not forget
this, nor will he forget Britain’s former role in supporting the
Russiagate slur during his first term in office.
The
meeting did however, underline Europe’s divisions and impotence. Europe
has been sidelined and their self-esteem is badly bruised. The U.S.
would in essence leave Europe to their own delusions, which would be
calamitous for the Brussels autocracy.
Yet, far more
consequential than most of the happenings of the past few days was when
Trump, speaking with Fox News,after attending Daytona, dismissed
Zelensky’s canard of Russia wanting to invade NATO countries. “I don’t
agree with that; not even a little bit”, Trump retorted.
Trump
does not buy into the primary lie intended as the glue which holds this
entire EU geo-political structure together. For, without the ‘Russia
threat’; without the U.S. believing in the globalist linchpin lie, there
can be no pretence of Europe needing to prepare for war with Russia.
Europe ultimately will have to come to reconcile its future as a
periphery in Eurasia.