BOLTON AND PHASE III OF THE REGIME CHANGE COUP AGAINST TRUMP
Courtesy of Harley Schlanger
22 June 2020
In an interview with ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz on June 18, John Bolton unleashed his full fury on his former boss, Donald Trump. Describing the President as “unfit for office,” he said he lacks “the competence to carry out the job.” Accusing Trump of having only one focus in his presidency, which is to do what is necessary to be re-elected—as if that had not been a major concern for many previous incumbent presidents during their first term in office—Bolton stated, “There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern.” He concluded his assault by adding, “I think Putin thinks he can play (Trump) like a fiddle,” implying there was some truth in the charges that Putin helped Trump win in 2016.
The interview, which aired on June 21, is part of a promotional push for the release of Bolton’s memoir, “The Room Where It Happened”. Bolton served as Trump’s National Security Advisor from April 18, 2018 until he was fired—or resigned, as he claims—on September 10, 2019.
The Trump administration has gone to court, to prevent the release of his book, charging that it contains classified material. But the book is already circulating, with copies distributed to anti-Trump media bastions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. As the content is leaking out, including Bolton’s take on the Ukraine impeachment, which failed to remove Trump from office, Democrats are hyping his conclusions. Senator Schumer, the leading Democrat in the Senate, claimed that Bolton’s account shows that the vote to convict and remove Trump, which every Democratic Senator supported, “was absolutely the right vote.”
It is worth noting that many Democrats, who falsely claim to be for peace, are so willing to embrace Bolton, who as some say, “Never met a war or coup he didn’t support.”
Bolton claims that the Democrats blew it in the way they handled impeachment, saying they committed “impeachment malpractice.” He wrote, “Had the House not focused solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump’s confusion of his personal interests, there might have been a greater chance to persuade others ‘that high crimes and misdemeanors’ had been perpetrated.”
In other words, Bolton admits that he believes Trump should have been removed from office!
PHASE III OF THE REGIME CHANGE COUP
The acquittal of Trump by the U.S. Senate on February 5, 2020 on two bogus impeachment counts related to U.S.-Ukraine relations should have put an end to the efforts by his opponents to remove him from office. For three years, his presidency had been subjected to investigations regarding fraudulent accounts of his relations with Russia and President Putin—the so-called Russiagate scandal—and a call he made to Ukraine’s President, who he was accused of blackmailing to get “dirt” on his likely 2020 opponent, Joe Biden. For three years, he has been the target of slanders and smears, designed to undermine his ability to act as a duly elected President.
Those responsible for the attempted regime change coup against him did not stop after those operations failed to remove him. A “Phase III” of anti-Trump activity commenced, with the politicization of his handling of the Coronavirus, and the protests which occurred following the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota by police. As the demonstrations against police violence were hijacked by violent networks, which engaged in targeting police, burning cars and businesses, and looting, Trump’s efforts to halt the violence became the occasion for charges that he is a racist and an authoritarian leader, prepared to unleash armed forces against the American people.
As clashes between law enforcement officials and demonstrators veered out of control, including in Washington, D.C., it seemed to confirm the forecast made by Putin in January 2017, when he warned of the likelihood that Trump would face a Maidan-style coup, a reference to the chaos in Kiev used to carry out an anti-Russian regime change there. Putin said the attacks on Trump, even before he assumed his office, were designed to “undermine the legitimacy of [the] Trump victory,” and to “tie his hands and legs.” While Putin did not elaborate, it is noteworthy that the Anglo-American intelligence networks which ran the coup in Ukraine—including former MI6 operative Christopher Steele, former CIA Director John Brennan, State Department operatives, and activist groups funded by George Soros—have been at the center of the coup attempt against President Trump.
Asked about the present crisis in the U.S., Putin reiterated his belief that “the losing side [in the 2016 election] thought up all kinds of fairy tales—anything to cast doubt on his legitimacy.” He elaborated that the problem is that “party interests in this case are placed above the interests of the entire society and the interests of the people.”
By party interests, it is likely Putin was not limiting his critique to the Democrats, but to the “war party”, sometimes referred to as the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), or Deep State—but more accurately referred to as the British Empire, backed by American muscle—which controls both U.S. political parties.
AN UNREPENTANT WAR HAWK
Just prior to the latest eruption of anti-Trumpism, centered around the release of Bolton’s book, Trump made some remarks to the graduating cadets at West Point Military Academy, which reminded the coup plotters of what they feared most in a Trump administration. He asserted that, with his administration, “We are ending the era of endless wars,” and that “We are not the policemen of the world.”
These comments reaffirmed a major theme of his 2016 campaign, in which he emphasized one of the major differences between his approach to foreign policy and that of the multitude of Republican war hawks he defeated to win the nomination, as well as between himself and Hillary Clinton. The costs of permanent warfare, he stated, are too high, both in loss of lives and money spent, and take away from funds needed to rebuild infrastructure, schools, health care, etc., without improving the security of the U.S. He promised to work with Russia to establish peaceful cooperation, and to collaborate to defeat terrorism and reduce strategic tensions. As President, he moved quickly to accomplish that, in summits with Putin and China’s President Xi, and in an effort to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan—an effort blocked military officials in his administration, such as former Defense Secretary Mattis. This was also vehemently opposed by John Bolton, and virtually every Democratic and Republican member of Congress.
It was this commitment of Trump which triggered the regime change coup in the first place, the fear of members of the war party that Trump was committed to fully break with the strategic paradigm of geopolitical confrontation which characterized the actions of his predecessors.
John Bolton has long been a member in good standing in this war party. He has always been skeptical, even contemptuous, of Trump’s approach to Putin. In June 2017, he wrote, “We negotiate with Russia at our peril.” He called Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election “a true act of war.” In a Weekly Standard article written on March 22, 2018, three weeks before his appointment as National Security Advisor, he said of Russia, China, Syria, Iran and North Korea that they “make agreements and lie about them. A national security policy that is based on the faith that regimes like that will honor their commitments is doomed to failure.” He openly favored regime change in Syria, Iran, Libya and North Korea, among others, and played a major role in sabotaging Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un in the Hanoi summit in February 2019, when he told the North Koreans that if they didn’t accept full denuclearization, they would get the “Gaddafi treatment.” He wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on February 28, 2018, “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First”, and continued to push for regime change in Iran, expressing great disappointment when Trump called off a strike on Iran in June 2019.
When Trump fired him, he warned, if he hadn’t fired him, “We’d be at World War 6 by now.” Bolton’s increasingly unrestrained war mongering had been undermining Trump’s efforts at diplomacy, and keeping him around as a sign of his “toughness” toward potential adversaries had outlived whatever usefulness that served—most likely to appease the hard-core war hawks among Republicans who admired Bolton, and rejected Trump’s peace initiatives as a sign of “weakness.”.
END THE ERA OF BRITISH IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS
The real issue is not Bolton, as it is likely that, as with Russiagate and Ukrainegate, the charges he is leveling against Trump will soon be dispelled, and forgotten by the majority of Americans, despite an endless and well-funded campaign by Democrats to undercut him. The deeper problem is that the geopolitical policies Bolton championed continue to guide the administration’s policy, as they are the embedded axioms which shape the outlook of members of the permanent bureaucracy in government agencies, even though they are counter to what Trump expresses in his opposition to regime change wars, and his calls for peaceful cooperation—and they are reinforced by America’s “allies”, led by the Brits, and echoed by members of NATO.
Bolton’s sabotage of Trump’s peace offensive for the Korean peninsula is now devolving into a danger of war between North and South, as the Kim regime is facing increasing hunger and related problems due to the brutal sanctions imposed on that country. The sanction regime imposed on Syria likewise threatens the progress made by Trump-Putin coordination to defeat the terrorists there. The attempt by the Obama administration and his British-NATO allies to impose regime change in Syria through arming and training Islamic militants was defeated. In response to that failure, Secretary of State Pompeo announced this week 39 new sanctions against Syrian officials, and said more can be expected. The sanctions were fully supported by the Congress, which likewise operates on the basis of geopolitics, and whose members are richly rewarded in campaign funds and other benefits from the MIC. Since nine million Syrians are already “food insecure,” the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp LaRouche asked if this is “regime change through famine.”
One other area of geopolitical confrontation where Bolton’s rhetoric coincides with the intention of Pompeo—despite the fact that the two were reported to be bitter rivals by the end of Bolton’s tenure—is in taking a hard line against China. Bolton derides Trump for his view that relations with the People’s Republic of China are more important than with Taiwan, writing sarcastically, “So much for American commitment and obligations to another democratic ally.” On the Phase I trade deal with China, which Trump holds up as a significant accomplishment, Bolton writes that it shows Trump was “willing to trade away our most cherished democratic values for the empty promise of a flimsy trade deal that bailed him out of his disastrous trade war….He thought that letting the president of China run the table on us in the long run would give him another term in the short run.” Pompeo continues to tour the world in an effort to derail China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative, and holds China responsible for the damage done by the global Coronavirus pandemic.
To end the era of endless wars and regime change, as Trump again stated as his goal, it is time to end the era of geopolitical confrontation as an instrument of Great Power politics. This requires the long-overdo dumping of the adherents to geopolitics in branches of the U.S. government and intelligence agencies, combined with a summit of Four Powers—the U.S., Russia, China, and India—which possess the economic power to overcome the deadly manipulations of the City of London, designed to sustain the present system. Only such an arrangement can initiate a process of developing a new, just order, a New Paradigm built on a New Bretton Woods system, which can disarm lunatics such as Bolton and the war hawks, eliminating their influence in shaping strategic policy.
Bolton and Phase III of the Regime Change Coup Against Trump – Harley Schlanger