Bolton and Neocons responsible for billions in opportunity costs – does Trump realize it?

By Martin Love

NORTH CAROLINA - It’s obvious Donald Trump, who touts himself as a superb “dealmaker”, has not made any important deals yet as President. In fact, he’s done little but tear up extant deals, and the most notable one he destroyed was the JCPOA. But at the same time, Trump literally likes talking to other leaders, and some other leaders have responded to him saying they actually thought he was almost charming and reasonably well spoken. One would like to imagine this is the case, because Trump made a lot more sense when he was on the campaign trail back in 2016 than he has in the past two years. Why the change, because now, very few people like Trump, and his reelection is in doubt?

Well, Trump literally had no idea whom to appoint to help him once in office. He wound up appointing people (Bolton, Pompeo, even Pence) opposed to many aspects of his original, campaign agenda, and above all, he appointed some of the worst people imaginable to soothe U.S. relations and establish fundamentally peaceful relations with other countries like Russia, China, Iran and some others in the Middle East, except for Israel (which has been totally rewarded by the U.S. alone for nothing good). The Neocons have long been particularly aggressive. With Bolton fired this week, and some saner names being suggested as a replacement, one can only hope that Trump is beginning to realize that if he wants to MAGA, it will be impossible if he caters to Neocon madness. Under the spell of these American traitors, who are mostly Zionist in orientation, Trump hit Iran with the worst economic sanctions ever imposed on anyone short of outright military attack. And the thinking was that Iran would do the bidding of Pompeo and Bolton, which was way off the mark, and even farther off the mark succumb to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic in favor of the MEK, which is a whacko terrorist organization.

But more importantly, with the U.S. meddling in Hong Kong and with the tariff war underway between the U.S. and China, China’s President Xi no longer trusts Trump and seems to have concluded that trying to make a deal with the U.S. is a fruitless undertaking and that China might be better off just going its own way and doing deals itself with better partners. Such as Iran.

China has said it will invest $400 billion in Iran’s oil infrastructure and other industry. (Iran is, after all, the keystone country in China’s Belt and Road initiative given its size and location between East and West Asia. This scheme by China for Iran gives Iran the option of even continuing its current foreign policies in the Middle East.

Could it be that Trump realizes the opportunity costs the U.S. has borne with the Mideast policies it has maintained over the past three years? This may be too much to ask of Trump, such realization, but it’s not hard to imagine the benefits of a slowly warming relationship between the U.S. and Iran had the U.S. stuck to the JCPOA. (This writer argued with an editor at a major U.S. newspaper for the “normalization” of U.S. relations with BOTH Israel at one extreme and Iran at the other back in 2013, but the ideas were rejected and the editor refused to publish them. The editor had Neocon pals like Bill Kristol, a Zionist.) With normalization, the U.S. certainly would have gotten the lion’s share of scores of commercial deals with Iran, and China would not likely be preparing to make Iran a strategic partner.

Iran, for example, would likely have bought hundreds of Western-made aircraft from Boeing and Airbus, for one thing. The facts are that Natanyahu and the Jewish lobbies in the U.S., aiming to dominate naïve Trump as they did other Presidents, are ultimately to blame for what may be one of the biggest, commercial economic errors the U.S. has made since World War 2: pushing most of Asia and Russia together into a virtually united bloc that ultimately will declare a big “sayonara” to the unreliable, untrustworthy U.S.-led West.

Now, with Bolton out, it is possible that President Rouhani may have second thoughts about rejecting any talks with Trump at the UN General Assembly later this month. The question may be (in some jest) that if “Bibi” Natanyahu loses the election in Israel, whether Trump will do something even crazier than appointing Bolton in the first place in 2018 and appoint “Bibi” or someone like him to replace Bolton.