Justin Raimondo gives Donald Trump some good advice, probably unsolicited. From Raimondo at antiwar.com:
The kudzu vine is one of the most invasive plants in existence: you cut it back, but that just emboldens it! You dig it up, but it keeps returning, stronger than ever. It is, in short, the horticultural equivalent of the neoconservatives, who have survived in spite of leading us over a cliff in Iraq, being roundly repudiated by the voters in the last three presidential elections, and even being called out by President-elect Donald Trump in his April 27 foreign policy speech, in which he said:
“My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations. That’s why I also look and have to look for talented experts with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war. We have to look to new people.
“We have to look to new people because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they’re doing, even though they may look awfully good writing in The New York Times or being watched on television.”
In that speech, and throughout the campaign, Trump took every opportunity to disdain the interventionist nation-building dogmas that had led the GOP and the nation to ruination, and lay out his own foreign policy vision of putting America first. “No country,” he averred, “has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and our enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must start doing the same. We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism.”
From the neoconservative perspective, this was kryptonite. For the central canon of the neocon creed has been and always will be a militant internationalism. When the Soviet Union fell, and the War Party had no more dragons to slay, neocon consigliare Bill Kristol and sidekick Robert Kagan penned a piece laying out the neoconservative design for the new era, which they summed up rather succinctly as “benevolent global hegemony.” Here was globalism beyond the dreams of Alexander – and this is what Trump was and is rejecting.
The neocons know who are their enemies, and they accurately saw Trump as their undoing: they led the “Never Trump” mini-movement, and did everything in their power to destroy him. They sponsored and promoted two open letters from the GOP “foreign policy community,” a.k.a. the League of Discredited Warmongers, viciously attacking Trump: a concerted campaign to declare him “unfit” for office was promoted by the neoconservative media, which charged him with all the familiar epithets: “racist,” “authoritarian,” “isolationist,” and even “fascist.”
One of the loudest and most unrelenting was Eliot Cohen, who opined:
“He is not only an ignoramus, but he’s a dangerous ignoramus who doesn’t know the first thing about foreign policy and doesn’t care and has some very dangerous instincts,” Cohen, who served in the George W. Bush administration, told The Washington Post in a recent interview. ‘Part of what is so dangerous about him is not just his ignorance and contempt for our alliances, but his failure to understand how important these have been to our security since 1945. And he has already done a lot of damage. Our allies are deeply shaken by this election.’”
Those “dangerous instincts” Cohen is so worried about include an instinct to abjure the counsel of people like Cohen, who have a long record of being dead wrong – with deadly consequences.
To continue reading: Dear President Trump: Just Say No to the Neocons
