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DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

Excerpts from YouTube videoconference, Trump’s Second Term: NATO, War, and the Economy

At this point we are in a new reality and we need to understand it and figure out how to be relevant and effective. . . .

The establishment that determined American foreign policy for 75 years since World War II has been replaced with a new foreign policy establishment with which we have to contend. . .

The old establishment was composed of foreign service officers and the top leadership of the military as well as the elites in the top think tanks in Washington DC and the academic elitse, the top law firms, the top bankers, old wealth Ivy League, Atlanticists to the core. The love French wine and speak French. Their priority was
to preserve US dominance as the number one power,
to promote capitalism,
to maintain global order so that capitalism can function in an orderly fashion,
to promote US values abroad,
to promote Western solidarity.

Well, now we have an entirely new foreign policy elite that’s going to be making the decisions and it’s in the process of formation and we need to understand it better.

I would say it consists of
° number one, the Trump organization itself which has international corporate interests,
° then the Trump family, the capitalists who have attached themselves like Elon Musk to the Trump Empire and seek to profit from a new foreign policy
° you have the right-wing think tanks that have emerged, the Heritage Foundation being the most reasonable of the group
° then there’s the America First Institute and others that we barely knew a year or two ago
° you have the new media moguls set up to escape Facebook
° the new wealth from technology and medical supplies and the like.

We have to learn more about them. What are their priorities? So far as I could tell:
° to promote crony capitalism around the world
° to enrich Trump and his cronies
° to promote white supremacy internationally and domestically. We see this in the outreach to the alternative for Germany, by Musk and Vance and Rubio support for the white Africaners in South Africa and their claim that they have been discriminated against, and there are other
° their priority is to plunder the world’s resources, especially those that bear on the the emerging industries like artificial intelligence, including rare earch minerals and lithium
° to stop the flow of migrants
° and promote the preservation of oil and gas as the dominant energy supply indefinitely into the future . . .

We shouldn’t think that the old elite is still there and we could talk with them and accomplish anything that way. We can’t. They’re gone and we have to figure out how to be effective and accomplish anything with this new power elite that governs Washington under Trump. That means totally new strategies so I’m going to suggest briefly what some of those strategies might be. People may think I’m off course here, but i don’t see any other choice.

So here are the kind of strategies that we should be pursuing.

First of all to encourage Trump, encourage them when their priorities align with ours.

Now Donald Trump has said that he wants to reduce the risk of nuclear war and to negotiate with Russia and China for nuclear arms reductions and controls to try to reduce nuclear risks. [See CPNN article.] I say yes! Go for it! Let’s support him in that and help them accomplish those goals.

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He’s also talked about cutting defence spending. I’ve advocated that with my colleagues and friends for 50 years without any success whatsoever to overcome the military industrial complex. These people say they’re going to do it, and maybe they can. So go for it! Let them go at the military-industrial complex!

They say they want to return US troops from around the world and shut US bases around the world. We’ve been talking about that for decades without any success. If they could do that maybe, we should cheer them on and say go for it!

They say they want to avoid US entanglement in foreign wars, and, well, I share that objective!

They talk about economic competition with China but not military confrontation. We should encourage them. Yes, we could compete with China economically but let’s avoid war. Let’s have negotiations.

So thats our first pathway: encourage them when they’re pursuing goals that align with ours.

Our second pathway, I think, is to persuade these Trumpist elites that it is in their best interests to embrace our priorities.

I think making Ukraine safe from Russia is a priority for us and it’s in their best interests if they want to exploit Ukraine’s resources. I know you find that objectionable and for all kinds of reasons, but if exploiting Ukraine’s resources will impel them to provide security assurances to Ukraine, to protect Ukraine in whatever ways military at least from invasion by Russia in the future, yes, we should persuade them it’s in their best interest to keep Ukraine safe.

I’ll quickly summarize the other pathways.

A path to Palestinian statehood may sound like the last thing they’re going to agree to, but it’s in their best interests if they want to do business all over the Middle East. The Trump organization and their cronites they want ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Well, the only way to get there is at least to accept the notion of Palestinian statehood. So, yes, promote ties with the Saudi oil monarchs if that entails acknowledging their demand for Palestinian statehood.

The third pathway, quickly, is our other task to expose the contradictions and the vulnerabilities and the dangers in their priorities, to expose their own weaknesses.

For example, high tariffs. Trump thinks this is great, but it’s going to damage the interests of his crony capitalists and the people who voted for him like farmers. So let’s expose how what Trump is doing is going to harm his own constituencies. Nail him on it!

Another example is dividing Europe and having an economic fight with Europe. However good that sounds to him, it’s good for China and China is their number one bet. I don’t like making that point about China and its global interests, but the fact is that what Trump is doing in Europe is a win for China and in Africa, too.

So, that’s our job. I think we have to come up with a strategy to be effective in this new world and do so in a way where we could find some leverage or some way to have more effectiveness in this new world. What we did before won’t work. So, I encourage you to think anew and come up with new strategies. . . .

. . . (In the peace movement) We’ve lost that common sense of purpose around opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear war that was universal . . . so in a multipolar world what we have to do is to recreate that kind of mass movement against nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Because there are people in China and Russia who are just as afraid of it as we are.

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