Foreign Policy Decisions

BACKGROUND

See,

1) Hugh Canon, “Donald Trump Orders Security Clearances to Be Given to Whomever He Wants; Newsweek, January 21, 2025 (Updated at 4:34 PM EST);

2) Steve Benen, “Maddow Blog: The problem(s) with Trump’s executive order on disclosing ‘sensitive’ information, MSNBC.com, January 21, 2025
(10:13 a.m EST);

3) President Donald Trump, The White House, “Memorandum to the White House Counsel, Memorandum to Resolve the Backlog of Security Clearances for Executive Office of the President Personnel,” January 20, 2025;;

Text of tge Memorandum

MEMORANDUM TO THE WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL
SUBJECT: Memorandum to Resolve the Backlog of Security
Clearances for Executive Office of the President
Personnel
January 20, 2025

MEMORANDUM TO THE WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL
SUBJECT: Memorandum to Resolve the Backlog of Security
Clearances for Executive Office of the President
Personnel

The Executive Office of the President requires qualified and trusted personnel to execute its mandate on behalf of the American people. There is a backlog created by the Biden Administration in the processing of security clearances of individuals hired to work in the Executive Office of the President. Because of this backlog and the bureaucratic process and broken security clearance process, individuals who have not timely received the appropriate clearances are ineligible for access to the White House complex, infrastructure, and technology and are therefore unable to perform the duties for which they were hired. This is unacceptable.

Therefore, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby order:

1. The White House Counsel to provide the White House Security Office and Acting Chief Security Officer with a list of personnel that are hereby immediately granted interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearances for a period not to exceed six months; and

2. That these individuals shall be immediately granted access to the facilities and technology necessary to perform the duties of the office to which they have been hired; and

3. The White House Counsel, as my designee, may supplement this list as necessary; and

4. The White House Counsel, as my designee, shall have the authority to revoke the interim clearance of any individual as necessary.
…

Commentary

It did not take long for the new pto-Russian president of the United States o bypass strict legal procedures for the granting of top security clearance to officials in the government.

Under tge new rules as dictated by Trump, “interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearances” are to be issued to anyone Trump wants.

As Hugh Canon in his Newsweek article points out, this means that such a security clearance could be grant, effective immediately, to Vladimir Putin if Trump so directs.

Now, it is highly unlikely that Trumpnwould make such a transparent move. It is not unlikely, however, that such a clearance could be granted to a lower-ranking official who has not been vetted who would make such information available to Putin’s intelligence services.

Trump asserts tgat he has tge authority to contrave requirements for the granting of security clearances set forth in the laws of tge United States.

Is this true?

Trump argues further that he has the authority ubder the Constitution to decide who gets a security clearance, and to override existing laws in order tondo so.

Again, is this true?

Groups interested in safeguarding U.S. national security should be in court tonight seeking a Temporary Restraing Order to prevent Trump from giving away the crown jewels of our intelligence while Washinton and journalists sleep.

BACKGROUND

1) Yaroslav Trofimov, “In a New Age of Empire, Great Powers Aim to Carve Up the Planet; After World War II, nations pledged to create a more equal and law-abiding world. Now Russia, China and the U.S. are returning to an older model in which powerful countries impose their will,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2025 (9:00 p.m. ET);

Yaroslav Trofimov of the wall Street Journal has written a balanced and thought-proking essay on the decay of the U.N. Cater-based international order built on the cornerstone of the United Nations Carter, Article 2 paragraph 4, which prohibits “the threat or use of force” against “the territorial integrity or political independence” of any state.

We are talking about ibternational law and the U.N. Charter, nottgec ill-defined “rules-based international order”, a term which has come into voguecin recent years.

The vague term, introduced in 2008 by an Australian leader, does not require intellectual rigor or detailed knowlege of international law, allows leaders to violate fundamental norms of international law while still maintaining their support for “rules- based international irder”.

In short, tge term does not require an absolute commitment to uphold and maintain tge legally binding commitments of international law.

What Trofimov describes is not the advent of a “new international order” but the decay of an existing international legal order which took over a century and two World Wars to construct.

What promises replace it if its decay continues is not a “new international order” but an old international anarchy which Trofimov right points out.

The confused thinking of those in the so-called “Global South” doesn’t withstand tge slightest serious scrutiny.

But because we lack statesmen and women of vision in key leadership roles, leaders in the West have failed to mount a strong defense of the existing international legal order.

They fail to make the case, time and time again, for tge maintenance and stregthening of tge U.N. Charter-based international legal order, in part due to ignorance and deficient education, and in part simply because they wish to remain free to violate international law and supplor friedds and allies to violate its norms. Tge U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a glaring example of this phenomenon, while U.S. military support of Israel as it committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza provides a more recent example.

Political leaders now speak openly if reaching a peace settlement with Russia that leaves it in control of Ukrainian territory conquered by military force,despite peremptory norm of international law which prohibit such an outcome.

Americans skeak openly of imposing punitive tariffs that violate the most fundamental norms of the World Trade Organization Charter (formerly known as the Havanna Charter.

Trfimov is correct in pointing out how tge world is soirally toward a state of international anarchy.

The implications are grave. We no longer live in tge 19th-century world of tge Concert of Europe. It is absurd to speak if a alance of power in a world of 200 xountries where oerps 10 and a growing number possess nuclear weapons.

The United Nations was created in 8; December 1945, only months after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Founders of tge U.N. understood what we have forgotten, that moden weapons of mass destruction made allnall-outbwarlike World War II unthinkable. Soon it became clear that the use of these weapons could end human life on earth.

Still our contemporary political leaders allow crazed mikitary leaders and scientists to invest hundreds of billiins of dollars in space-based and other programs to enable one country or another ton”win” a nuclear conflict.

Cinfirming thustorical fact tgat man when hus brain is seized by viions ofvwar can be infinitely stupid.

The Founders of tbe United Natiins, having recently experienced tge devastation of World War II which destroyed Europe and cost some 50 million lives, resokved to change the course of history by creating new institutions for tge maintenance og international peace and security.

Russia, China, and Iran want to change all that

Tell us more, gentlemen , how that is likely tonwork out.

Will it save the planet from the worst effects of global warming? Will it prevent tge use of ever more terrible biological and other weapons, assisted in their design by artificial intelligence?

Where are the leaders who will articulate these considerations?

Where are tge eloquent leaders who have learned from hidpstory, and who can persuade our populations and pokitical elites that international law and tge United Nations Charter are the only tools we have to ensure tge survival of tge human race?

We need to be building them up and not tearing them down,

And we need leaders who get that.

I don’t want to live in Trumpworld.

I don’t want acts of corruption and his latest efforts to hollow out the institutions of our democracy and the valuesto spend the next fouer years reading and hearing about the latest acts of corruption and his latest efforts to hollow out the institutions of our democracy and the values of our culture.

Trump has corrupted America/ It is like an ongoing trainwreck. I don’t want to watch as it unfolds.

I am interested in fighting and defeating the growth of fascism in America and in the world.

That’s what the current Go Fund Me Appeal is about, which you can see by clicking on the button at the bottom of the page.

Donations will go to a newly established Rescue Democracy Fund. Contribute and become a member of the Rescue America movement. We need to join forces and come together as a movement. The fund will support the writing and publication of books and articles which have as an important goal the unmasking and defeat of fascism in the United States, and the support beyond subscriptions to the Trenchant Observations newsletter and its author.

Together, we have the power–to defeat the growing power–or at least that is our ope–of “Techno-Fascism” in the United States. It is Fascism because there is no other word for it. “Authoritarianism” is much too soft a term, which the evidence suggests does not penetrate the ideological and information bubble of Republicans and other Trump supporters.

It is Techno-Fascism because the billionaires who accumulated immense wealth and power through the unregulated growth of the Internet and Surveillance Capitalism have joined forces with the fascist movement of Donald Trump and the Republicans. Through their control of the flow of information and their mastery of propaganda, they have in effect seized control of the government, which has now become part of their power matrix. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world now has demonstrated that he now has the the power to kill a bipartisan bill approved by the 435 elected representatives of Congress.

President Joe Biden explicitly warned us of these developments in his final freewill address on January 15, 2025.

Germans who lived through the Third Reich told us that the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler and Nazism could happen anyplace Naively, we comforted ourselves with the belief that it was a specifically German phenomenon, a product of German history and culture. We failed to pay attention to the development of fascism in other countries, content in the belief that It can’t happen here,the title of Sinclair Lewis’s fabulous novel about the the triumph of fascism in the U.S. (1935).

Well, it has happened here.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote the famous American philosopher George Santayana in The Life of Reason (1905).

Sadly, we have not been able to remember the Nazi past, or the rise and history of fascism in other countries. Even when we saw it, as in Argentina and Chile in the 1970’s, we were too naive to call it by its rightful name: FASCISM.

It is not clear how or whether we will defeat Techno-Fascism in the U.S.and elsewhere. But it is absolutely clear that we will not succeed if we don’t try.

And it is equally clear that our starting point must be to recuse the concept of Truth from it many assaults.

The Rescue Democaacy movement begins there, supporting the publication of books and articles which preserve the truth of recent history, the facts, in the face of massive propaganda efforts by the Republicans to rewrite recent and newt-so-recent history, auxh as the history of what really happened on January 6, 2021.

The title of this essay expresses my feeing: “Trumpworld: Let me out of here!”

Yet surely at a deeper level of our being we also feel the urgency of fighting Trumpworld, of enaging in the battle to rescue all that we hold dear. Undoubtedly the people who lived in Europe furing World War II wanted to secape the hell their world had become.But they did not give up. Tehy stood up to fascism, against very long odds in 1940, but in the end triumphed and saved our civilization from the barbarism that threatened it

We must do the same

And we must begin by launching a fearsome battle to rescue and safeguard the truth,

We must record the truth, and remind people every day of the truth.

1 Timothy W. Ryback, “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days; He used the constitution to shatter the constitution,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2025

Great! not to be confused with DSM-5 070 (news addiction).
Now, Michael, as a co-founder of the DRM, tell me, do you have both my books?

Start thinking about incentives we can give donors to the movement.

E.g.,

For the $200/month pledge level,two T-shirts, both books, a coffee cup, and one book per month to give to your friends.Plus discounted pricing for additional copies of the books.

For the $100/ month pledge level, one T-shirt, both books,a coffee cup, and one additional book every three months to give to your friends.

For the $50 / month pledge level, both books and a coffee cup.

For the $25/ month pledge level, one book and a coffee cup.

Obviously, I need to give more thought to this.

The Democrats could have done this in 2021 when they had a Senate majority.

But they were asleep at the week.

The thoroughly-corrupt Supreme Court we have now is the result.

To rebuild American democracy, this “nuclear option” exception must be reversed.

The Supreme Court’s decisions which must be reversed:

Trump v. Anderson (2024) (14th Amendment, paragraph 3);

U.S. v. Trump (2024) (presidential immunity for “official acts”);

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010);

McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014)

SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010) – D.C. Circuit opinion which building on Citizens United oaved tge way for creation of super PACS.

BACKGROUND

1) Banjamin Quénelle, ‘Trump croit, comme Poutine, que la vocation des forts est de dévorer les faibles’; Dans un entretien au Monde», le professeur de relations internationales à Sciences Po Zaki Laïdi estime que « l’Europe ne pourra jamais rien entreprendre qui aille à l’encontre » des intérêts américains. Propos recueillis par Benjamin Quénelle
Le Minde, le 11 janvier 2025 (modifié à 16h32);

2) Benjamin Quénelle, “‘Trump believes, like Putin, that the vocation of the strong is to devour the weak’; In an interview with Le Monde, International Relations professor at Sciences Po Zaki Laïdi believes that “Europe can never undertake anything that goes against” American interests.
Interviewed by Benjamin Quénelle,” Le Monde, January 11, 2025/(updated at 4:32 pm);

BACKGROUND

1) “Von der Leyen nicht zu Trump-Vereidigung eingeladen – Xi Jinping schon,” Die Welt, den 10. Januar,2025;

2) “Von der Leyen not invited to Trump swearing-in – Xi Jinping was,” DiecWelt, January 10, 2025;

Donald Trump has lost no time insulting the 27 member states of the European Union, including our most important BATO allies. He has sbubbed the president if the European Commission, Ursula van der Leyen, while he has invited the President of China, Xi Jinping, to attend his inauguration on January 29.

Whether a conscious slight by Donald Trump orthe product of the incompetence of the people he has named to theWhite House staff, the slight is inexcusable.

Not even out of the starting blocks, atrumpmhas shot himself in the foot for no apparent reason.

This unforgivable blunder is likely to be a foretaste of much worse to come.

It recalls Trump’s shooting the finger to NATO by ordering his new Secretary if State, Rex Tillerson, to skip a NATO summit and to proceeddirectly to Moscow instead.

Todaywe REPRISE the cokumn in The Trenchant Observer we wrote at the time, on January , 2017.

Refecting a strong intuitive feeling I had this morning, today i purchased the internet domain “Trump47imoeachment.com”.

***
March 21, 2017 Trump Orders Tillerson to Skip NATO summit, Travel to Moscow Instead

Originally published in The Trenchant Observer March 21, 2017. Reprinted in The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2017 (2024), Chapter 17, pp. 60-62.

News that Rex Tillerson would skip an upcoming NATO foreign ministers meeting and travel instead to Moscow is the kind of news that produces a “What the f…?” reaction, almost too grotesque and unbelievable to be true.

But it is true.

To be sure, Vladimir Putin has been lying low, not engaging in any particularly egregious behavior (except in the eastern Ukraine), but apparently he and Donald Trump have concluded it is now safe to proceed with pro-Russian actions.

This is the second big pay-off to Putin since Trump became president on January 20, 2017. The first was an easing of U.S. sanctions against Russia to enable the Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) to resume collecting licensing fees for imported cell phones and other electronic equipment. Trump administration officials justified this as a mere “technical adjustment”, but in fact it was a favor to the very agency that was involved in intervention in the 2016 campaign and elections in the U.S., and also the agency alleged to have compromising information on Trump (kompromat) as alleged in the Christopher Steele “golden showers” dossier.

See “’Technical adjustment’ on Russian sanctions may involve more than meets the eye,” The Trenchant Observer, February 2, 2017.

Beyond the salacious details about Trump allegedly cavorting with Russian prostitutes (which Putin boasts are “the best in the world”), the Steele dossier alleges that Putin himself ordered the Russian intervention in the U.S. elections, and that there was active collusion and cooperation between the Trump campaign and individuals around Trump and Russian officials.

While news media have generally reported that the allegations in the Steele dossier cannot be corroborated, in point of fact a number of details in the dossier–though not the details of the “golden showers” episoode–have been confirmed by intelligence officials speaking on background. Moreover, the dossier was a raw intelligence product. One would not expect that all of its details could be corroborated, given the nature of Steele’s sources.

See

1) Andy Towle, “Rachel Maddow: Details of Trump-Russia Dossier Keep Checking Out as its Author Reemerges from Hiding,” Towleroad, March 8, 2017 (8:15am).

2) Rachel Maddow, “More Pieces Of Donald Trump Russia Dossier, ” MSNBC, March 7, 2017,, found on YouTube here;

Reflect for a moment on the message Trump is sending to our NATO allies, Russia and other countries.

Consider also the message Trump is sending to voters in countries like France who will participate in elections such as the French presidential election, where Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National, with Russian financial support, is running on a pro-Russian platform.

Days after meeting with Angela Merkel of Germany, now the embodiment of the liberal military and political order based on the United Nations Charter, and for many the current leader of the Free World, Trump is doubling down by snubbling NATO and giving Russia a great propaganda victory.

What Trump is doing is anathema to foreign policy experts who understand the importance of not bowing to a dictator who engineered an unprecedented attempt to throw the 2016 presidential election to Trump, and to also influence the Congressional elections, and who has invaded and currently occupies part of the Ukraine.

The greatest irony is that Trump’s actions come at the same time that the FBI director, James Comey, has confirmed in Congressional testimony that Trump and his campaign are the current subjects of a counter-espionage investigation into cooperation and collusion with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.

As for Tillerson, we should recall how he strained credulity by testifying in his Senate confirmation hearings that he had not discussed Russia with Trump.

See

John Nichols, “Rex Tillerson’s Jaw-Dropping Testimony Just Completely Disqualified Him,” The Nation, January 12, 2017.

Perhaps the best that can be said for Tillerson is that he is either oblivious or indifferent to the symbolism and impact of his actions toward NATO and Russia. Otherwise, he looks like a willing tool of the Trojan horse candidate who has become the pro-Russian president of the United States.
 

BACKGROUND

1) Robert Kagan, “TRUMP IS FACING A CATASTROPHIC DEFEAT; If Ukraine falls, it will be hard to spin as anything but a debacle for the United States, and for its president,” The Atlantic, January 7, 2024 (1:04 PM ET);

At T-12, Trump minus 12 days. we need to ask what will happen if Russia wins its war of aggression against Ukraine.

For a comprehensive analysis of the current situation regarding the war, with realistic consideration of military and political realities, see Robert Kagan’s article cited above.

Few policymakers and analysts have thought much about the consequences of such a Ukrainian defeat at the hands of the Russians.

Most avoid the thought by entertaining the illusion that there can be negotiations that could lead to a ceasefire or some kind of a settlement. They argue among themselves about the potential terms of such a ceasefire or settlement, despite the fact that neither Vladimir Putin nor Ukraine is interested in such negotiations.

Vladimir Putin has been absolutely clear. His conditions for entering negotiations amount to total capitulation on the part of Ukraine.

Wolodymyr Zelinski appears to be open to territorial concessions, but his statements in this regard must be read as a brilliant maneuver to get on the right side of Donald Trump. The Ukrainian constitution prohibits any “territorial concessions”.

Moreover, peremptory norms of international law prohibit terms in a peace settlement recognizing the acquisition of territory by military force or even its temporary occupation due to the illegal use of force in violation of Article 2 paragraph 4 of the United Nations Charter, the bedrock principle on which the United Nations is founded. Any trreaty or agreement violating these norms of peremptory international law would be void ab initio under international law, and have no legal effect.

Political leaders know these facts.They are deliberately lying to their populations and to each other by holding out the possibility of a negotiated solution to the conflict.

They can negotiate with themselves about agreements that would leave Russia in control of conquered territories until the cows come home, but they are only blowing smoke in the air. They are only lying to each other and to their populations.

Not one of these political and military leaders and analysts has addressed in any detail the situation that would exist and the consequences that would follow if the leading powers ignored these bedrock principles of international law and the U.N.Charter.

These leaders and analysts are unwilling to face the hard realities of the Ukraine war. To do would require determined and energetic actions, including preparations for a war that may last decades (or at least until Putin leaves the scene); the imposition of sanctions against Russia that would really hurt those imposing them; and an all-out effort to persuade or coerce the nations of the so-called Global South to join the regime of international sanctions against Russia.

To face the hard realities of the Ukraine war would require countries to move toward establishing wartime economies that could sustain the production of munitions and advanced weapons systems over the course of a long and drawn-out war.

Finally, to face the hard realities of the Ukraine war would require recognition of the fact that our military forces, our soldiers, NATO soldiers, might need to become directly engaged in the war to prevent a Russian victory. This requirement, moreover, could become urgent very quickly if the Ukrainian forces begin to falter.

This is a sobering reality. So was the reality facing England, France, and other democratic countries in Europe in 1938 and 1939. They temporized. They delayed. They harbored illusions that peace could be ensured by negotiating an agreement with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, as British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister tried to do in Munich in October 1938.

As late as May 1940 Chamberlain and Foreign Minister Lord Halifax sought to negotiate a separate peace with Germany. Fortunately, Winston Churchill successfully resisted their entreaties.

The world and the U.S. need a leader of the caliber of Winston Churchill to lead us through the coming years of war with Russia.

Instead, we have Donald Trump.

We can only hope that we will be surprised.