As president-elect Donald Trump draws together his transition team at Trump Tower, the upcoming first elements of a Trump administration begin to come into view. Let’s take a quick look at what the “American Conservative” has chosen to highlight at the end of week one
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/the-trump-doctrine/
Is Flynn Trump’s Choice?
[Update: Flynn resigns — February 2017 / Flynn’s Resignation Letter]
This is Flynn’s ‘world-view’:
We’re in a global war, facing an enemy alliance that runs from Pyongyang, North Korea, to Havana, Cuba, and Caracas, Venezuela. Along the way, the alliance picks up radical Muslim countries and organizations such as Iran, al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State.
That’s a formidable coalition, and nobody should be shocked to discover that we are losing the war.
Flynn’s “analysis” amounts to taking every adversarial state and group around the world and pretending that they are all linked together when the connections between them are either tenuous or non-existent. It is an ideological fantasy substituting for analysis, and it isn’t going to make the U.S. or anyone else more secure.
Flynn’s specific recommendations seem to involve endless warfare against what he calls the “the terror armies, above all in the Middle East and Libya,” which would commit the U.S. to an unknown number of conflicts for the foreseeable future that would only be concluded when we “win.” In other words, Flynn offers a recipe for perpetual war…
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/flynns-warped-worldview/
StratDem puts questions to The American Conservative magazine:
So, with the choice of Flynn, it will be expanded neo-conservativism and less realism in foreign policy? Flynn is a Democrat ala the ‘Scoop Jackson’ era. Is the future the past? Is a new Cold War inevitable?
Rapproachement with Russia? Not in the cards now?
A shift in priorities, that campaign promise of “America First” and campaign statements about saving the U.S. trillions avoiding failed wars like Iraq?
Is a Flynn choice about avoiding the current rush toward Cold War 2.0 — or is Flynn a choice that’s a marker, a beginning of a new Cold War, this time including China, and new U.S. nuclear weapons as budgeted, and more new Navy ships with $800k spent per shell fired?
Did the Trump presidential campaign mean what it presented about failed U.S. war policy — or is Flynn the beginning of an expansive, confrontational policy that steps back from global agreements, including the international climate agreement just now going into effect and abandoning allies and global security agreements?
Bottom line: Is the U.S. going to continue building a multi-trillion overseas full-dominance spectrum pushed by those who see perpetual war in the future — or as Donald Trump promised, front-stage-center in his campaign, will there be a shift to spending on American infrastructure and a ‘builder’s policy’ of “America First”?
Donald Trump, September, 2016: I see the other day a report come out $6 trillion, 6 trillion spent on the Middle East. We could have rebuilt our country twice.
