Mr. President:
When I last wrote to you and asked whether you had any idea of what the term “America First” means, I focused on the single issue of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I chose that issue because it seemed to me to betray your lack of knowledge about how many billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and the broad and steadily deepening international hatred that move and our overall relationship with Israel have cost the republic. You also seemed just as ignorant of what the yield on our investment in supporting Israel has been. Well, just FYI, it has yielded nothing but a reliably disloyal, domestic Jewish-American fifth column; a sophisticated Israeli intelligence network that suborns Americans to steal or sell secret U.S. military, industrial, and technological data for Israel’s use or for it to sell to our enemies; and a suborned Congress that really is overwhelmingly more responsive to Israel’s monetary and political demands than it is to the needs of, say, U.S. veterans, the nation’s infrastructure, or our malnourished children. There has never been a more historically accurate analysis of the always dreadful results of American interventionism — the polar opposite of America First — than that written about our unquestioning support for Israel by America’s second greatest diplomat, George F. Kennan. On 25 April 1978, Kennan wrote in his diary that the United States had built “a fateful tie to the Israelis from which we have, in contradistinction to the Israelis, everything to lose and nothing to gain.” (1)
George Kennan, Mr. President, was a late-comer to America First, but come he did, and so there may yet be hope for you. But that hope, Sir, can only be nourished by you beginning to think for yourself, trusting your instincts, and either ignoring or shedding yourself of the Neocons-in-U.S.-nationalist-clothing that surround you, people like McMaster; Tillerson — each time his mouth opens out comes Condoleeza Rice’s voice, Niki Hailey, who eagerly whores for Israel at the UN, but refuses to protect the symbols of American tradition and history in South Carolina; and a host of other military officers, appointed officials, retired generals, and civil servants who are either acolytes or paid shills of the Globalists, Neocons, or Israel Firsters. You have a lot of fish to fry, Mr. President, but the easiest road to America First in the foreign-affairs realm is a policy based on quiet observation from afar and resolute non-interventionism. The national government’s consistent abstention from involvement in international events that do not threaten U.S. survival, together with the building of an insurmountable wall along the Mexican border, would bring the greatest degree of genuine national security Americans have experienced since Wilson unnecessarily took the republic to war in 1917 because his personal “ideals” were offended.
But let me move past Israel. With respect, Mr. President, many of your recent foreign-policy decisions could have been authored by commonsense-less, Wilsonians like Obama, either Bush, or the Clintons. For example,
- Ukraine: The media report that the national government recently sent high-powered weaponry to the Ukrainian government’s military. Why, Mr. President? The problem in Ukraine is not Putin and Russia, but the EU and U.S. democracy mongers and media who overthrew a pro-Russia government and installed an increasingly fascist regime that wants EU and NATO membership. When the EU, the BBC, the UN, George Soros, and Hillary’s State Department deposed one regime for another, Putin did the right thing to protect Russia’s national security by re-annexing Crimea, which is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The EU, the media, Obama, and Hillary expected Putin to react to their coup in Kiev as supinely as European politicians do to the quickly proliferating plague of Muslim rapists of women and children that is inundating the EU. Instead, Putin reacted as a Russian patriot and left them — and McCain and Graham — to ally the West with a corrupt and authoritarian regime in Kiev and crazily sputtering like the eunuchs they are. Stop sending weapons to Ukraine, Mr. President, it is a policy that once again has America taking not first, but only the usual stinking hindmost, which is the EU’s desperation for American taxpayers — and perhaps blood — to get them out of the mess their hubris and dilettantism created in Ukraine.
- Iran: Mr. President the only principle that those who elected you demand you always obey is “America First”. No part of your base, or, I would presume, 80-percent of the republic’s entire population, gives a good god-damn about either who rules in Tehran or who can vote in Iran. You, Sir, apparently have succumbed to the now 40-year-old drumbeat that tells Americans that Iran is a threat to the United States. If Iran is a threat to the United States — which it is not, at least in a life-and death sense — it is the result of two actions by the national government: (a) unenforced immigration laws that have permitted Iran’s surrogate Hezbollah to establish narcotics networks and urban-based, Islamic, no-go zones in, at least, New York, Florida, California, Michigan, Illinois, and Texas, and (b) the unnecessary U.S. military intervention in Iraq — which you have prolonged — that placed U.S. troops in the Arab world’s heartland where they are, with a minimum of effort, easy pickings to be killed by Iran’s forces and surrogates. Stop talking about the unrest in Iran, Mr. President, and let the Iranians work out their own future, even if it requires a bloodbath. The best your intervention can do in Iran, Sir, is to produce a nearly identical nightmare to that generated by the Obama-Hillary-EU campaign supporting the “Arab Spring”; namely, tens of thousands of dead Muslims, more Muslim authoritarianism, more support for radical Islamism, more Muslim refugees, and less U.S. security. Get a grip, Mr. President, your job is to defend the American republic. Let the Iranians go their own way, stop Tillerson’s State Department from surreptitiously stirring up dissent in Iran, and henceforth focus on saving the republic through the only means now remaining — restoring the rule of law and equality before the law.
- Afghanistan: When you were running your company, Mr. Trump, did you often turn for advice to other businessmen and companies that had been completely unsuccessful because they had blindly followed what they believed to be a sacrosanct business model for more than 50 years? Since you ran a successful company, I presume you did not. But as president you are now following the advice of generals who belong to — now that the Cubs have won a World Series — the losingest organization in the United States, the republic’s general officer corps. The Afghan War, Sir, was lost because these men and women have no idea of how to fight a war. They lost in Afghanistan — and Iraq — to an enemy that has been in the field since 1979, has no air cover or navy, no secure bases, no heavy artillery, almost no armor, and which wields a hodgepodge of arms that run the gamut from top-of-the-line Kalashnikovs to 19th Century Lee-Enfields. Your, generals, Mr. President, could not beat the Islamists in 2001, and they will lose to them again in 2018 or 2019, especially as Islamic State fighters are steadily moving into Afghanistan from Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. Take it from me, Mr. President, I have worked on Afghanistan since 1985 and I can recognize a botched and irretrievably lost foreign invasion of that country when I see one. Pull all U.S. forces — military, intelligence, and civil — out of Afghanistan now, provide no additional financial aid (use the savings for the border wall), and forcibly retire the generals who gave their countrymen this now 17-year-old deathtrap and money pit. Afghanistan, after all, poses no national security threat to the republic, and Americans, rightly so, do not give a hoot who rules in Kabul. Our immediate withdrawal will save military lives and limbs, free up money for domestic purposes or debt pay-down, and, best of all, leave Russia and China to bleed and spend in what will ultimately be a failed mutual effort to prevent their life-and-death national interests from being attacked by the Islamist forces now assembling in Afghanistan. Get out, Mr. President, while the getting is good The mas of commonsense-driven Americans are ready to overwhelmingly approve and applaud the withdrawal.
- Pakistan: Dear God, Mr. President, as a businessman did you expect other businessmen to do things to help you that would ruin their reputations and/or companies if you simply slipped them a few boxes of cash? I, again, presume that this is not a business model on which you would hang your hat. But Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Cheney, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their — now your —generals eagerly did so. One of the greatest and most consistent failures of U.S. presidents, strategists, and generals is to assume that all countries will do things we want done for a bribe, more commonly known as “foreign aid” and/or “foreign military aid”. That foreign regimes will always take the money is a truism; that they will do things that hurt their nation’s genuine interests or their hold on power in return for money is seldom true. Pakistan was an exception. Under President Musharraf, the Pakistani military and intelligence services captured several dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders and turned them over to us; stood aside and let us destroy the Taliban regime that they had labored mightily to help build; allowed the U.S. State Department to oversee the emplacement of a strong Indian presence in Kabul and along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan; and, finally staged aggressive military offensives into the country’s border provinces that brought Pakistan to the edge of civil war, where it still hangs. In short, Musharraf’s Pakistan did more than any other U.S. ally in Afghanistan to assist the United States fight its war. But U.S. leaders wanted — then and now — Pakistan to win the war for America, although commonsense should have made this a momentary delusion, not a dominating, two-decade dogma. There was never a chance that Pakistan would do all what we wanted. Why? Because Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were not enemies of Pakistan until Musharraf made them so at our behest; because no Pakistani regime that helped kill or capture bin Laden could survive in a state whose population and military/intelligent services are increasingly militant in their Islamic faith; and because no Pakistani regime can ever permit its national security and even survival to be permanently endangered by creation of a pro-Western, pro-Indian, non-Islamist, and ambivalent-toward-Iran regime in Kabul. Clear you head, Mr. President, and recognize that America has lost in Afghanistan because it was unwilling to do its own heavy lifting and because of its mad adherence to the daft and basically Pakistan-and-Afghanistan-ignorant policy of trying to buy victory with foreign aid. Lasting victory has never been achievable in Afghanistan for non-Sunni Muslims, Mr. President, so get out of there, leave the Pakistanis — like the Afghans — with no U.S. aid; chalk up the evacuation as another fulfilled campaign promise; forcibly retire more generals; and turn the mess over to Russia and China, both of which are non-Muslim countries that will be ultimately defeated there.
In closing, Mr. President, let me add that there is some urgency to complete the above-mentioned easy tasks. Get them off America’s plate, Sir, as two far worse foreign-affairs problems are just around the corner. First, Iraq and Syria are near the edge of a Sunni-Shia sectarian war, within which smaller wars between and among local tribes and ethnic groups will thrive, and the Islamic State and al-Qaeda will begin clawing back power. (NB: And do not listen to your advisers on this issue. The massive U.S. reconstruction aid they will urge you to spend to prevent the coming chaos will neither slow nor stop its advent and progress.) Second, in North Africa, while U.S. and the EU officials and experts have rejoiced in the Islamic State’s loss of the Libyan city of Surt, IS and al-Qaeda have regrouped in southern Libya and are already spreading their forces from there into western, eastern, and southern Africa, with enough leftover to begin rekindling the jihad in northern Libya. The Islamists concentration in southern Libya, moreover, also allows them to reinforce the Sinai Peninsula with men and arms, a condition which may lead to more Egyptian military defeats there and even an Islamist rebellion in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt proper. Face facts on this one, Mr. President, Egyptian President al-Sisi’s days are numbered.
There is nothing sane that an American president can do to short-circuit the occurrence of these approaching disasters, so it is best that you get the easily solved problems of Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan out of the way. Thereafter, Sir, prepare yourself to resist the intense pressure from Necons, Globalists, Israel-Firsters, Congress, the generals, and much of the media that will be loosed on you when the Islamists’ African campaign gathers pace and the usual war-mongering subjects in the United States slither out from under their rocks begin to clamor for a war to “liberate Africa”.
As you buckle on your armor for that fight, Mr. President, you should always remember, that non-interventionism is a concept dearly beloved by non-elite Americans, working men and women who see no reason to spend their taxes and children’s lives on always fractious foreigners who hate the United States but love its money. Tax cuts are swell, Mr. President, but non-killed soldier-children are endlessly better. Those same people, Sir, also recall that you sold yourself to them as the champion of a non-interventionism, and can only believe that, to date, you have been close to an utter sham on that score. Words to the wise.
Endnotes:
- Frank Costigliola, (Ed.). The Kennan Diaries. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014, Entry for 31 July 1978, p. 509
