Is Trump's Agenda Being Eclipsed?

Is Trump's Agenda Being Eclipsed?

By Patrick Buchanan
Lew Rockwell.com
August 23, 2017

“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over
the liquidation of the British Empire,” said Winston Churchill to
cheers at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon in London in November 1942.

True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation.

When his countrymen threw him out in July 1945, that role fell
to Clement Attlee, who began the liquidation.

Churchill, during his second premiership from 1951-1955, would
continue the process, as would his successor, Harold Macmillan,
until the greatest empire the world had ever seen had vanished.

While its demise was inevitable, the death of the empire
was hastened and made more humiliating by the wars into
which Churchill had helped to plunge Britain, wars that
bled and bankrupted his nation.

At Yalta in 1945, Stalin and FDR treated the old imperialist with
something approaching bemused contempt.

War is the health of the state, but the death of empires.

The German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires
all fell in World War I.

World War II ended the Japanese and Italian empires
— with the British and French following soon after.

The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989.

Afghanistan delivered the coup de grace.

Is it now the turn of the Americans?

Persuaded by his generals — Mattis at Defense, McMasters on the
National Security Council, Kelly as chief of staff — President Trump
is sending some 4,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to augment
the 8,500 already there.

Like Presidents Obama and Bush, he does not intend to preside
over a U.S. defeat in its longest war. Nor do his generals.

Yet how can we defeat the Taliban with 13,000 troops when
we failed to do so with the 100,000 Obama sent?

The new troops are to train the Afghan army to take over the
war, to continue eradicating the terrorist elements like ISIS,
and to prevent Kabul and other cities from falling to a Taliban
now dominant in 40 percent of the country.

Yet what did the great general, whom Trump so admires,
Douglas MacArthur, say of such a strategy?

“War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision.”

Is not “prolonged indecision” what the Trump strategy promises?

Is not “prolonged indecision” what the war policies of Obama
and Bush produced in the last 17 years?

Understandably, Americans feel they cannot walk away from
this war. For there is the certainty as to what will follow when
we leave.

When the British left Delhi in 1947, millions of former subjects died
during the partition of the territory into Pakistan and India and the
mutual slaughter of Muslims and Hindus.

When the French departed Algeria in 1962, the “Harkis” they
left behind paid the price of being loyal to the Mother Country.

When we abandoned our allies in South Vietnam, the result was
mass murder in the streets, concentration camps and hundreds of
thousands of boat people in the South China Sea, a final resting
place for many.

In Cambodia, it was a holocaust.

Trump, however, was elected to end America’s involvement in
Middle East wars.

And if he has been persuaded that he simply cannot liquidate these
wars — Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan — he will likely end
up sacrificing his presidency, trying to rescue the failures of those
who worked hardest to keep him out of the White House.

Consider the wars, active and potential, Trump faces.

Writes Bob Merry in the fall issue of The National interest:

“War between Russia and the West seems nearly inevitable. No
self-respecting nation facing inexorable encirclement by an alliance
of hostile neighbors can allow such pressures and forces to continue
indefinitely. Eventually (Russia) must protect its interests through
military action.”

If Pyongyang tests another atom bomb or ICBM, some national
security aides to Trump are not ruling out preventive war.

Trump himself seems hell-bent on tearing up the nuclear deal
with Iran.

This would lead inexorably to a U.S. ultimatum, where Iran would
be expected to back down or face a war that would set the Persian
Gulf ablaze.

Yet the country did not vote for confrontation or war.

America voted for Trump’s promise to improve ties with Russia, to
make Europe shoulder more of the cost of its defense, to annihilate
ISIS and extricate us from Mideast wars, to stay out of future wars.

America voted for economic nationalism and an end to the
mammoth trade deficits with the NAFTA nations, EU, Japan
and China.

America voted to halt the invasion across our Southern border
and to reduce legal immigration to ease the downward pressure
on American wages and the competition for working-class jobs.

Yet today we hear talk of upping and extending the U.S. troop
presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, of confronting Iran, of
sending anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine to battle
pro-Russia rebels in the east.

Can the new custodians of Trump’s populist-nationalist and America
First agenda the generals and the Goldman Sachs alumni association
be entrusted to carry it out?

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/08/patrick-j-buchanan/
trumps-agenda-eclipsed