Because, Mr. Trump, you will set your own foreign policy, the main tasks for the next secretary of state will be to execute that policy and to purge the Department of State of those who have, for so many decades, championed the causes of foreign countries and have plied those foreigners with taxpayer money that should have been spent at home. In simple terms, if American taxpayer money is to be spent to make life better for people, those people can only be Americans.
The next secretary also will have to find and remove the cadre of interventionists, socialists, one-worlders, environmental-quacks, anti-Christians, social engineers, and that corps of incompetent, bespectacled, and ill-spoken young feminists, who have shown beyond doubt that feminism’s only real power is to block a young woman’s growth into a mature adult. Two terms of the Obama administration have sewn this useless and destructive ideological menagerie into the department’s fabric, and, if the department is to be re-professionalized, it must be sent packing.
Of the current names being bandied about for the secretary’s position, not one can be expected to do the necessary in terms of either cleansing the institution of the just noted rubbish or of reliably executing your America First foreign policy.
Mitt Romney: He is a part of the bipartisan governing class that, over the past 40 years, has made the State Department a hive of Ivy League-educated bees who advocate republic-killing interventionist wars and the spending of taxpayer money on what Kipling would have called their favorite “little brown brothers.” Romney and the State Department together would be more of the same status quo doctrine — everything for foreigners whatever it costs Americans — unless you or another adult reviews and approves everything Romney wants to do. It also should be recalled that Romney is a coward. He lost the 2012 election — like McCain did the 2008 election — because they feared being tagged racists if they publicly dismantled a Black man named Barack Obama by proving in debate that he had no contact points with the real world. Romney’s 2012 campaign staff also was flush with Israel-Firsters who spoke and wrote to damn and slander Dr. Ron Paul and other American non-interventionists as “isolationists” and anti-Semites. Finally, Romney and his buddy Netanyahu would keep the United States mired in religious wars that concern none of the republic’s life-and-death national interests.
John Bolton: This man is the quintessential Neoconservative-interventionist-Israel First war monger. The only senior-level, foreign-policy posts for which he is fitted are located in the Israeli government.
Robert Corker: The Senator is Bolton-lite. As secretary of state, he would want more unnecessary military interventions, more aid for and protection of Israeli interests, and probably would ask to have Bolton as his deputy.
David Petraeus: The General lost two wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and wasted U.S. military lives in his faux “surge” in Iraq, which was all show and no substance. The surge’s net result was to allow many of the Islamist fighters now serving with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to escape to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey and build networks and destabilize each before returning to the battlefield. He also happens to be a self-confessed felon who passed classified intelligence to his paramour. Petraeus should be neither appointed nor pardoned. Let him stew in his own self-made juices, and make sure that Hillary Clinton — a person Petraeus championed — stews in the same kind of juices for her multiple and similar felonies.
Rudy Giuliani: Do you recall his arrogant, scurrilous, and neoconservative attacks on Dr. Ron Paul for his reverence for the Founders, his America First philosophy, his non-interventionist policies, and his reluctance to make Israel his country of first allegiance? In so doing, Giuliani displayed his support for the Bush-Cheney-Obama doctrine of relentless militarily intervention in places where no genuine U.S. national interests are at risk; for going to war for the ludicrous and unattainable causes of spreading democracy, freedom, human rights, and feminism; and for continuing the enormous and unconscionable amounts of taxpayer funds that are expended on such wars, and on aid — monetary or military, or both — for such “noble” but unnecessary and generally useless allies as Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, most of NATO, and the other Gulf states.
These five men taken individually or together amount to a poisonous dog’s breakfast of intervention, war-mongering, deeper bankruptcy, and Israel First. There is not an America First-bone in any of them, and they would work against your often-stated goal of reforming U.S. foreign policy in the direction the Founders intended, and ending the influence of the passions of Neoconservatives and Israel Firsters for involving the republic in endless, unnecessary wars.
Able alternatives to these war-lovers are available and ought to be considered, two of whom come quickly to my mind, Senator Rand Paul and Professor Walter A. McDougall, perhaps as a team. The former is a consistent non-interventionist by inclination and birth-right, and the latter wrote the two best books ever written on the cost of a U.S. foreign that deviates from the Founders’ guidance: Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (1997) and The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (2016). MacDougall’s long survival in the academy as a non-interventionist and champion of the Founders’ wisdom also suggests a talent for in-fighting that would help to clear the State Department of the dross mentioned above.
Think it over, Mr. Trump. The five men you are reported to be considering for Secretary of State will do nothing but make America more hated around the world; begin and lose more wars that waste the lives and limbs of young Americans; and, perhaps, distract your government from addressing and funding all the work that needs to be done in the United States. Long-term security for America, after all, depends on stopping illegal immigration, ridding the nation of illegal aliens, unleashing business to create jobs and profits, restoring law and order, rebuilding the military, and completely removing our children’s education from the malign hands of the national government.
Avoiding the cost and distractions caused by war are keys to accomplishing these other, more important domestic tasks. If we have to fight somewhere to defend ourselves and our interests, you have General Mattis to do the job, and there is no better man for doing that task quickly and definitively. Give him a colleague at the State Department who will not seek unnecessary wars for him to fight.
Michael F. Scheuer
December 2, 2016
Image source: A billboard in Detroit stating ‘America First Not Israel’ is causing controversy and accusations of anti-Semitism. The advertisement was paid for by the Deir Yassin Remembered group, which aims to make American’s more aware of the plight of Palestinians. The billboard can be seen 8 Mile Road in the city, and was placed there by Deir Yassin Remembered, which is based in New York. — Blog.deiryassin.org, Oct.27.2016 / selected by wg.pco
