Why has Trump’s foreign policy been such a shambolic disaster?

Much of it is his own fault as he’s clearly allowed far to many neoconservative ideologues into his administration due to Israel-first campaign funders like Sheldon Adelson. As a businessman turned politician and Washington outsider, Trump also has been at the mercy of Beltway insiders who’ve advised him and helped him choose the members of his administration.

However, in this imperial capital, the voice of the interventionist prevails. The media, the foreign policy elite, the think tanks, the ethnic lobbies, the Pentagon, the State Department, Capitol Hill, are almost all interventionist, devoted to America’s endless regime-change wars.  Thus, despite Trump’s campaign pledges he’s faced ferocious establishment resistance.

Even the corporate media has  finally admitted to this open secret. Last week The New York Times published a remarkable piece that essentially acknowledged the existence of an American deep state and its implacable hostility to Donald Trump.

This dynamic goes a long way towards explaining the Trump administrations foreign policy schizophrenia. In a nutshell, Trump wants to keep his campaign promises to end America’s endless wars but the deep state is committed to keeping them going. Trump also campaigned on a platform of improved relations with Russia. Yet, three years after his election, no real improvement has materialized and, if anything, they have deteriorated.

I’ve always believed that Russia-gate has been, at its very essence, the deep state locking in a new Cold war against Russia despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric. The intention was to cripple Trump’s presidency. If they couldn’t remove him from office, they could at least ensure he played by their rules rather than follow through on wild promises to end the wars in Syria and Afghanistan and normalize relations with Moscow.

It turns out I was right.

After a lengthy investigation, evidence is emerging that Russia-gate really was a coup against Trump. Former CIA chief, John Brennan, set up a anti-Trump Task Force at the CIA in early 2016 with the blessings of Jim Clapper. According to former CIA case officer Larry C Johnson, “Brennan reportedly took it upon himself to recruit foreign intelligence organizations, such as MI-6, the Aussies, the Italians and the Israelis, to help in spying on Trump and his campaign. He sold it as a “counter-intelligence” mission citing his fear that Trump was a Russian puppet. And these foreign services agreed to help. But they did more than passive collection. They helped create and implement covert actions, such as entrapping Michael Flynn as a foreign agent and cultivating and ensnaring George Papadopoulos.”

If you depend on the corporate media for your news all this will sound bewildering. That’s because the corporate media has been working with the deep state to depose Trump.

It’s always helpful to review recent history, living as we do in the United States of Amnesia. Lets recall that Trump’s election sent a shock wave through the Democratic establishment and that there needed to be a reckoning. How could it happen? Was Hillary Clinton truly the “queen of warmongers” while too aligned with Wall Street as Bernie Sanders and his supporters alleged? And did the DNC sabotage Bernie’s campaign as a result of these criticisms?

Those were hardly the kinds of questions that Democratic Party leaders and corporate media wanted to put in the national spotlight. Instead, they quickly shifted the focus to Russia.

Within 24 hours of Clinton’s concession speech, campaign manager Robby Mook and campaign chair John Podesta “assembled her communications team” at the national headquarters in Brooklyn “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up,” journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes report in their inside-story book Shattered. “For a couple of hours … they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

For the Democrats, the traumatic reality of Trump’s victory called for a serious and well-grounded investigation of the key factors that led to the catastrophe. Such an exploration might have critically assessed their abandonment of many working-class voters in their pursuit of moderate Republicans and upscale professionals. The elitism of the DNC and failure to put forward progressive policies like a truly single-payer health care system or examine their disastrous trade policies failed to ignite enthusiasm or inspire turnout from the working class. But instead of scrutinizing these failures the Democrats blamed Vladimir Putin and the Russians.

The corporate media was quickly onboard with the anti-Russia campaign, implicated as they were with the smears of Sanders and celebration of the Democrats as the party of wealthy professionals. After all, the corporate media is largely composed of wealthy professionals who are liberal on cultural issues.

The result has been 3 years of relentless Russia-gate, interrupted only briefly with the fundamentally dishonest Mueller Report, then reenergized with Ukraine-gate and the impeachment proceedings.

Just as a thought experiment for my liberal readers, lets reverse the actors. Imagine that when Obama was elected in 2008 office intelligence operatives in tandem with the corporate media came up with a narrative that Obama was a traitor, groomed since his childhood in Indonesia to be a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda. Nor only that but leaked intelligence reports suggested that Obama was secretly conspiring with Osama bin Laden and moreover they were gay lovers!

Crazy huh?

It pains me to spend all my time defending Trump but the thought of a deep state that has a veto over our chief executive terrifies me. I didn’t vote for Trump and I’m not a fan, but basically I think the behavior of his enemies has been much worse and much more dangerous for our republic. If a deep state is allowed to make its own policies against the will of the elected officials why should we bother with holding elections?

Our founders provided a way to deal with boorish presidents. Defeat them at the polling booth. If the Democrats are serious about deposing Trump they need to put forward a candidate that appeals to the millions of working class citizens who’ve been disenfranchised by both parties.