A Tale of Two Princes

Patrick COCKBURN

Prince Andrew and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia have both had a bad week.

On the very same day that Prince Andrew was giving his disastrous interview explaining his relationship with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the crown prince – often referred to as MbS – was hearing from international bankers about the failure of his bid to sell part of Aramco, the state oil company, for a high price on the international markets. The sale had been heralded as the moment when Saudi Arabia would use its oil wealth to exalt its status as a world power.

The two princes have many characteristics in common: both have a reputation for arrogance, ignoring expert advice and showing startlingly poor judgement in taking decisions. The result has been a dismally unsuccessful record for both men.

In the case of Prince Andrew, these failures have been on a limited scale thanks to his relative powerlessness beyond his immediate circle. But ever since his elderly father became king of Saudi Arabia in January 2015, MbS has been the effective ruler of his country.

And it is his performance in this role, his power enhanced by his appointment as crown prince in 2017, that explains in part why international investors baulked at buying even a small piece – only 1.5 per cent was on offer – of Aramco, the largest oil company in the world, at the high overall valuation of $2 trillion placed on it by the Saudis.

One factor fuelling their caution will be their perception that foreign investment in Saudi Arabia faces an enhanced political risk under MbS. His radical measures at home and abroad, so very different from traditional Saudi policies, have seldom succeeded and have sometimes ended in calamity.

These new departures introduced by MbS start in 2015 when, as defence minister, he launched a war in Yemen that was supposed to swiftly defeat the Houthi movement that held the capital Sanaa and much of the country.

Almost five years later, the Houthis are still there, but 100,000 Yemenis have been killed and 24 million of them – 80 per cent of the population – need humanitarian assistance. Lack of clean water sources, and the collapse of the medical system, both allegedly targeted by Saudi bombers, has led to 700,000 suspected cholera cases. The UN describes the food and health crisis in Yemen as the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.

At home, MbS had claimed that he would reform Saudi Arabia’s medieval and oppressive social norms, producing a more tolerant and freer society. But such modernisation as there has been, such as allowing women to drive, has turned out to be cosmetic, while repression has been all too real.

A planned expansion in the rights of women was well publicised abroad, but a Human Rights Watch report issued earlier this month, entitled The High Cost of Change: Repression Under Saudi Crown Prince Tarnishes Reforms, tells a different and much grimmer story, saying that “authorities had tortured four prominent Saudi women activists while in an unofficial detention centre, including by administering electric shocks, whipping the women on their thighs, forcible hugging and kissing and groping.”

As the price of their release, the activists were asked to sign a document and appear on television saying they had not been tortured.

Other reforms have followed the same pattern. In April 2016, MbS launched Vision 2030, an ambitious scheme to modernise the Saudi economy that attracted international plaudits. But the reality of the economic changes to be introduced became clear in November 2017 when leading businessmen and royal family members were confined, some being reportedly abused, as part of an alleged corruption inquiry in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Riyadh.

A few are still detained, while others were only released after handing over part or all of their business interests.

For a long period, MbS was treated gently by foreign governments greedy for Saudi contracts and by the foreign media, which bought into a PR picture of MbS as breaking the bonds of an archaic society. President Trump made a triumphal visit to Riyadh soon after his election and frequently tweeted his approval of all that MbS was doing – including his incarceration of the businessmen.

In terms of publicity, all went well enough until 2 October 2018 when a Saudi death squad murdered the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The crime is now admitted by the Saudi authorities, though they deny that MbS knew about the killing in advance – something asserted to the contrary by US senators briefed by US intelligence.

The Khashoggi killing and the grisly dismemberment of his body released a flood of criticism from which MbS has yet to recover. The dead journalist had said the year before his assassination that the crown prince had “promised an embrace of social and economic reform… but all I see now is the recent wave of arrests”.

The tainting of Saudi Arabia’s reputation by the Khashoggi affair, and the torrent of criticism that followed, played a role in deterring foreign investors from buying into Aramco at the price the Saudis wanted.

But what really undermined Saudi Arabia’s reputation for stability was the surprise Iranian/Houthi drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities in September. As significant as the attack itself was Mr Trump’s refusal to retaliate against Iran. What had for so long seemed like a gold-plated US guarantee of Saudi security turned out to be nothing of the sort.

MbS is not going to be displaced because of these mistakes and miscalculations: when he was appointed heir to his father in 2017, the royal court purged and took over the entire Saudi security apparatus. On the other hand, the long list of self-destructive actions by the Saudi authorities in the last five years has left the country much less stable than it once appeared.

Prince Andrew’s take on the career of his fellow royal in Saudi Arabia would make interesting reading. Perhaps he looks on MbS’s absolute power and gigantic wealth with envy; he may even approve of the rigour with which his counterpart asserts his authority. This is not pure guesswork.

Andrew used to be a regular visitor to Saudi Arabia’s near neighbour and de facto protectorate, Bahrain, praising it as “as source of hope for many people in the world”. These kind words contrast with the report of an independent inquiry into the crushing of the Arab Spring protests there in 2011 which details 18 different torture techniques inflicted on detained protesters.

A British diplomat stationed in Bahrain at the time of a Prince Andrew visit later wrote that the thank-you letters he sent to his hosts after one visit to Bahrain – comparing the size of his plane to theirs – made for cringe-making reading.

In one significant respect, however, Prince Andrew is setting a good example for MbS by standing down from his public duties. Doubtless, the Saudi crown prince will be wondering, after the failures and fiascos of the last five years, if he should consider following the same path.

counterpunch.org

Can Trump’s ‘Middle Lane Nationalism’ Hold the Line Against System-Network Attack Strategy?

Alastair CROOKE

“Trump has blown the lid off. This is not going to go away. There is going to be a Nationalist alternative to [American] foreign policy; I don’t think you can just put it back in a box.” Professor Colin Dueck who has written a book on US foreign policy suggests: “The neoconservative and noninterventionist wings of the Republican party have long sought to take ownership of — and thence to shape — Trump’s unpredictable foreign policy. But the president simply has refused to fit into either mould:”

“He found a kind of the middle position, and that turned out to be the single most popular position in the Republican primary,” says Dueck: “I don’t think there was an established school of thought. He has certainly created a new position that did not exist before.” Dueck calls it middle lane nationalism.

He created space for these ostensibly competing Republican instincts. Another commentator suggests that this “instinctive and shoot-from-the-hip foreign policy style, may become the ‘new normal’ in what security experts say is an increasingly unsettled global threat environment.”

The point here, is that whilst this ‘give’ a little to one side of the policy debate, and then to offer a titbit to the other, may well serve the domestic US audience, it does not do anything to acknowledge global change. US defence policy hardly has evolved over the years – and despite rhetorical re-packaging, it still remains rooted in old-style, ‘big power-big military’, full-on, clashes. This is where the money is, of course, for the military-industrial complex. Similarly, US weaponry has failed to keep up. Again, the ‘big ticket’ items are where the money is. (‘show sales’ to gullible foreign states, rather than re-tool for a new, small-is-better, era).

So the question is, ‘can Trump’s instinctive, creative ambiguity’ hold the line of US ‘credibility’ (which exists more in the eye of the domestic beholder, than for the foreign one)? Can his idiosyncratic policy continue to survive the sealed retort of the US foreign policy machine — a zeitgeist stuck fast – when others’ surely have (i.e. the Russian deck of new weaponry, that has rendered obsolete traditional navies)?

We have been given examples of other evolutions (and startling innovation), amongst America’s challengers in recent weeks. In fact, we can see an ‘alternative’ conflict paradigm taking shape: Firstly, with the 15 September strikes on two Saudi Crude processing plants, of crucial importance to the overall infrastructure of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure. And secondly, by the extraordinary rout of three brigades of the Saudi armed forces (some of them from the élite National Guard) – by AnsarAllah (composed of Houthi, and loyalist Yemeni army elements).

Both actions were well planned, well researched, well executed and sophisticated. Together, they shattered any credibility lingering around the notion of Saudi having any military stature; they imploded the image of America’s ‘security umbrella’; and overturned US and Israeli smug assumptions about ‘rag-tag’ forces in the Region. They all must analyse afresh (after eating humble pie).

The delivery of precise strikes – a mix of drones and cruise missiles – on the Aramco facilities, guarded by an American-supplied air defence system, represents a novel, effective (and wholly inexpensive) attack strategy. How come, for starters, the Saudi missile defences did not work? Did the drones manage to blind the targeting radar; or was some form of electronic warfare (EW) deployed? Is the regional EW better than America’s now?

We are dealing here – it seems – with the Houthis using a new attack paradigm, a new mode of warfare: Some of these latter elements (attacks on oil infrastructure and tankers), seem remarkably consistent with concepts first identified by Russian military theorists Igor Popov and Musa Khamsatov in 2016, as a ‘system-network warfare’, (sistemno-setevaya voyna) in their book: The Future of War.

In this system-network notion, “the entire State and its society should be viewed as a system consisting of critical ‘nodes’, whose destruction would profoundly affect the defense potential [of the whole system], and therefore is likely to lead to a victory with relatively limited commitment from challengers. There would be no need to fight against all military forces of the adversary, nor [to fight against] the whole population. It would be enough just to destroy the ‘centers of gravity’.

Accordingly, the main drivers in such a war, would be what the authors call an “amorphous adversary,” whose “key structural elements and subsistence systems are located, not on one’s own territory; but rather, in the states of ‘near and far-abroad’: Territories or entities that formally are not party to the conflict […] This makes it very hard to point a finger at the real culprit.” That is to say, it provides plausible deniability – and spreads confusion and unease.

This seems to fit the model now being deployed jointly by the Houthis, Iran, the Hash’d al-Shaabi and Hisbullah. It is a model that can be deployed widely, and in differing contexts. But in the context of the Gulf, it signals that any large civilian infrastructure object, including energy, water and transport infrastructure can no longer be regarded as completely safe to Houthi retribution. The Gulf energy-risk calculus needs to be re-visited.

The point about paradigm change is well underlined in a unique interview given by Maj. General Qassem Soleimani, the Commander of the Quds Brigade. He outlines the ‘before’ situation (in the wake of 9/11). Massive US forces were deployed across the Middle East, and in Afghanistan. It was a daunting presence to its inhabitants; and it was clearly intended as the precursor to Condi Rice’s promise of coming painful ‘birth pangs to a New Middle East’. The West then, was cohesive and single-minded.

As Soleimani describes it, these widespread occupations served to give the US and Israel the latitude to contemplate an attack on Hizbullah, sufficient to force the displacement of the Shia population of Lebanon out of the South and into distant refugee camps – far from the Israeli border. (The 2006 war failed to achieve this aim). The psychological impact of this US dispersion, plus Israel’s 2006 precision bombing of Shia areas however, had its effect, Soleimani suggests. For the first time, Arab States sided with a foreign power against a significant Arab constituency (Hizbullah).

Compare that, with the situation with now (a comparison not offered by Soleimani): America’s wars were not successful – Hizbullah, Syria and Iraq all survived the onslaught. And are linked to the Iranian camp. The psychological climate has inverted: The US presence – then intimidating, now smacks of deep western cultural division, and policy uncertainty.

The US President now wants out of this troubled region. And instead, seeks to engage with his Iranian counterpart. Saudi Arabia, the former leader of the Iran-containment bloc, is being pressured by the White House to reach out to the Houthis and Iran. The other Gulf States have already made that switch, having assimilated the reality that the American ‘security umbrella’ offers no protection against system-network strategies.

What now? There are no easy answers to the military challenges posed to the US in the Middle East by amorphous opponents – other than the wearily standard, US military deterrent punishments that might plunge us into region-wide war. The next period may be crucial. The Houthis on the one hand, and Iran on the other, are likely to incrementally escalate counter-pressures – unless, that is, sanctions on Iran are lifted, and a settlement is reached in Yemen.

Really – Saudi has no option but to end its war on Yemen. It needs to monetise is its oil reserves (to fund Vision 2030) – and faced with the choice of monetising a whack of Aramco; or pursuing conflict with Iran, the outcome should be a ‘no brainer’. MbS already has begun to reach out to the Houthis and Iran; but can MbS survive the blow to his fading prestige, of capitulation to the Houthis? It is doubtful.

Trump probably will try to hold the line again, if there are yet further instances of ambiguously-sourced ‘system-network’ actions in the region? But, can he continue to hold out, as Iran periodically continues to ‘de-comply’ with the JCPOA? Trump has already been harshly criticised for eroding US ‘credibility’ through having not responded militarily to Iran (fingered by some in Washington as the source for the Aramco strikes). The pressures will be intense on a President entering the pre-election period.

And following the failure of Macron’s UNGA attempted mediation, it is unlikely that any mooted offers by the US President to ‘lift Iran sanctions’ will be viewed as being credible – with Congress locked into impeachment proceedings. The Democrats, who control US sanction legislation, will lend Trump no helping hand, on this, or any other issue, for time being.

In practice, Trump too, has few options: With Wall Street now having premonitions of US economic recession, Trump desperately needs an Art of the Deal success, (absent a buoyant US economy to claim as his own) – and certainly needs no Middle Eastern blunder (President Carter-style), to tarnish his Presidential candidature.

Yet, reason doesn’t always prevail. And, with Iran declining to meet him (absent the lifting of sanctions), Trump’s present path of hoping MbS or Imran Khan can network a meeting for him with Rouhani – does seem quite a stretch. And American neo-cons, as always, will be on the lookout for the opportunities that an impeachment-distracted President might offer, to seize control of policy.

Alastair CROOKE

Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

Tom LUONGO

John Bolton is out as Donald Trump’s second National Security Director.  That’s an unqualified good thing as we pass the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11.

But Bolton is only one out of half a dozen very problematic neoconservative/evangelical voices in Trump’s cabinet, though the most obviously insane.

Bolton’s missteps this year are legion and legendary.  From the failed coup in Venezuela I like to call the Bay of Fat Pigs to scuttling denuclearization talks with North Korea to helping maneuver Trump into a potential shooting war with Iran, Bolton’s fall from grace is emblematic of the inflexibility of neoconservative thinking.

And the irony here is that Bolton was fired just one day before the anniversary of 9/11, a day that can easily be seen as the day the growing cancer within U.S. foreign policy, neoconservatism, got its wings.

Trump finally seeing Bolton for the massive liability he was in achieving any of his ambitious foreign policy goals should be seen as their apotheosis.  This is Peak Neocon folks.

They got everything they wanted, a pro-Israeli President with a deep-seated need to be liked who valued trust and loyalty over competence.  Trump inherited a geopolitical landscape they’d engineered under Obama for their big win in the Middle East.  All they needed to do was manipulate a volatile and image-obsessed Trump into a moment he couldn’t return from.

That moment came when Iran shot down a U.S. Global Hawk stealth drone violating their airspace alongside a manned P-8 Poseidon.  Trump, smartly, didn’t take the bait and I said then he had a window of opportunity to put paid his peace bona fides by firing one of his inner staff who’d pushed him to that limit.

I give Trump a lot of credit here for not falling into the trap set for him. He now has to begin removing those responsible for this quagmire and I’m sure that will be on the docket when he meets with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping next week at the G-20.

It starts with John Bolton and it ends with Mike Pompeo.

And if he doesn’t replace them in the next six to eight weeks then we know Trump isn’t serious about keeping us out of war. He’s just interested in doing so until he gets re-elected.

He took a little longer than that but it’s clear Trump is not happy with the state of his foreign policy.  Firing Bolton was an excellent start. But it’s not enough, not even close.

The problem, as I see it, is that while Trump’s desire for peace in these hot spots is real, he is incapable of seeing the path to achieving it because he doesn’t care about the details.

And it’s the details that always undo the Neocons’ plans for humanity.  They apply the same tired trope, “squeeze them until the pipe squeak,” as Bolton put it, and if it doesn’t work, squeeze harder.

These folks are Trotskyites at heart, willing to do anything to bring about their revolution. Homeless after World War II, they found a home within the Republican Party starting with Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd in the 1950’s and slowly taking it over.

They have suffused both major parties with their dreams global domination by stoking American exceptionalism run rampant in the post WWII generations to intervene anywhere a wrong could be righted.

It’s pure insanity, if not inherently racist, and it needs to end.

My worry here is that Trump only did this to shore up his position with those who elected him for his foreign policy promises, none of which he has kept and nearly all of them he has broken, either willfully or through his passivity.

So, he needs to build on this down payment and get back to the table with North Korea, actually get Iran to sit at the table and tell the rabid anti-Russian political hoi polloi to just shut up and sit down.

His appeasement of the Neocons began with his bombing of the Al-Shairat airbase in April 2017 in response to the chemical weapons ‘attack’ in Khan Sheikoun.  Isn’t is ironic that just over two years later the re-taking of that town in Syria was the launching point for sweeping changes in the geopolitical chessboard?

Trump wants to be seen as the strong and competent archetype. That’s the mantle he wants to take on as president.  But he’s not doing that at all, he’s projected the aura of a mercurial and inconsistent bully with no clear strategy who refuses to keep his word.

How much of that comes from his staff, like Bolton, undermining him is irrelevant.  As the leader, as the CEO, you are responsible for everything that happens under your command.  Period.

Lead or get out of the way.

Since the Global Hawk incident Trump has gone from one foreign policy embarrassment to another.  Chinese Premier Xi Jinping openly said he cannot believe anything Trump says.  President Erdogan of Turkey recently came out and said he cannot keep silent anymore about how many weapons the U.S. shipped to the Kurdish SDF.  According to Erdogan that number is an astounding 30,000 truckloads.

This is not what we voted for and it isn’t the path to peace in the Middle East.

There are lots of signs that Trump is ready to reverse course on most of his pressure programs and is angling to cut deals.  He’s rumored to be meeting with Iranian President Rouhani on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.   His opening up about how Bolton’s presence angered North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and killed hopes for talks in Hanoi in February was refreshing honesty.

It is, sadly, what passes for diplomacy in his administration.

With the emergence of French President Emmanuel Macron leading rapprochement with Russia, after very successful 2+2 talks recently, Trump’s passive-aggression towards our policy in Ukraine is finally opening the door to improving relations with Russia.

And, of course, there is the climbing down off the mountains by both China and the U.S. over trade and tariffs.  Finally, Trump might have been convinced that destroying global trade to accommodate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by plunging the world into a global financial crisis wasn’t going to get him onto Mount Rushmore.

Firing Bolton may have been a wake-up call to the rest of the neocons in his administration, tow the line or leave.  Pompeo, in particular, has to be reined in as spokesman for Trump with foreign powers.  His behavior to this point has been appalling, walking into places like Beirut and issuing threats like some out-of-touch monarch while availing himself liberally of the buffet table.

The early returns aren’t good.  We see more shenanigans with Venezuela on the horizon.  The U.S. is preparing sanctions on Rosneft and invoking a Cold War treaty to funnel money to pretender Juan Guido.

So, while I hope things improve, I’m not sanguine, in the near term.  Trump has a lot of work to do and he doesn’t look like the guy capable of doing it.  Having occasional bursts of outrage which culminate in him making grand gestures is not the same as having a plan and an agenda.

Like Xi, Trump has squandered the trust and goodwill of many who voted for him in 2016, and we simply don’t trust him anymore.  He’s got to do a lot more than just fire one mustached crazy person who he is responsible for hiring in the first place.

Leaders accept responsibility.  They accept their mistakes and chart a new course.  Everyone on the other side of the ledger wants Trump to do the right thing but to this point he has mostly done the opposite.   Personnel is policy.  And until Trump begins appointing people to key positions that are 1) competent and 2) have a soul the edicts coming from Imperial D.C. will continue.

And the world will adjust to the rapid decline.

Tom LUONGO

Tom Luongo is an independent political and economic analyst based in North Florida, USA

Bolton Gone: Improved Peace Prospects?

The departure of John Bolton as US National Security Adviser is a good step towards decreasing international tensions by the Trump administration. But a lot more is needed from President Donald Trump to indicate a serious pivot to normalizing relations with Russia, Iran and others.

When Trump gave Bolton his marching orders earlier this week, the president said he “strongly disagreed” with his erstwhile security adviser over a range of foreign policy issues. Trump had also expressed frustration with Bolton’s incorrigible militarist tendencies.

There is no doubt Bolton was an odious figure in the White House cabinet. One of our SCF authors, Martin Sieff, wrote this excoriating commentary on Bolton’s nefarious record of warmongering dating as far back as the launching of US wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, when the mustachioed maverick served then as a chief neocon ideologue in the GW Bush administration.

One wonders why Trump brought such a war hawk into his administration when he appointed Bolton as NSA in April 2018. Perhaps, as another of our writers, Robert Bridge, surmised in a separate commentary this week, Trump was using hardliner Bolton as a foil to deflect opponents from within the Washington establishment who have been trying to undermine the president as “soft on foreign enemies”. A ruse by Trump of keeping “your enemies close”, it is averred.

Bolton certainly did his best to hamper Trump’s seeming attempts at scaling back US foreign military interventions. He opposed the plan to withdraw American troops from Syria. The reckless Bolton also wound up a policy of aggression and regime change against Venezuela, which Trump has latterly seemed to grow wary of as a futile debacle.

In regard to Russia, Bolton carried heaps of Cold War baggage which made Trump’s declared intentions of normalizing relations with Moscow more difficult.

The shameless warmonger Bolton openly advocated for regime change in Iran, which seemed to contradict Trump’s oft-stated position of not seeking regime change in Tehran, despite the president’s own animosity towards Iran.

The former NSA also opposed any attempt by Trump to engage in detente with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Reportedly, it was Bolton who derailed the incipient efforts at opening up dialogue with Pyongyang.

It is also thought that Bolton used his influence to impede Trump’s recent bid to host Taliban leaders at Camp David earlier this month which was aimed at trust-building for a proposed peace deal to withdraw US troops from that country after nearly 18 years of disastrous war.

That said, however, President Trump has not shown himself to be exactly a dovish figure. He has overseen countless sanctions being imposed on Russia, the abandoning of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty, and ongoing military support for the anti-Russia regime in Kiev.

Too, it was Trump who ordered the US collapse of the 2015 international nuclear accord with Iran in May 2018 and the re-imposition of harsh sanctions on Tehran. So, it would be misplaced to paint Bolton as the sole malign actor in the White House. Trump is personally responsible for aggravating tensions with Iran, as well as with Russia, Venezuela and others.

Nevertheless, it is to be welcomed that an inveterate war hawk like Bolton no longer has the president’s ear. Perhaps Trump can be freer to act on his instincts as a pragmatic deal-maker. One thing that the president deserves credit for is his unconventional style of engaging with nations and leaders who are designated as foes of America.

Russia this week gave a reserved response to the sacking of Bolton. The Kremlin said it would make assessments of a positive change in US policy based on actions, not mere announcements, such as the firing of Bolton. Time will tell.

It seems significant that immediately after Bolton was relieved of his post, Trump hinted to reporters that he was considering lifting sanctions off Iran if such a move persuaded Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to hold a face-to-face meeting with Trump at the United Nations general assembly in New York later this month.

Iran has repeatedly stated categorically that there will be no talks with Trump unless his administration revokes sanctions and returns to abiding by the nuclear accord. If there is a serious pivot to normal diplomacy by the White House, then what Trump does about sanctions on Iran will be a litmus test.

The same can be said about US sanctions on Russia. If Trump is earnest about a genuine reset in bilateral relations, then he must get rid of the raft of sanctions that Washington has piled on Moscow since the 2014 Ukraine crisis amid the many spurious allegations leveled against Russia.

Bolton banished is but a small step towards a more diplomatically engaged US administration. But it would be unwise to expect the departure of this one figure as being a portent for progress and a more peaceful policy emerging in Washington.

The Washington establishment, the deep state and the bipartisan War Party, with its entrenched Cold War ideology, seems to have an endemic sway over policy which may thwart Trump’s efforts to direct a less belligerent US.

To illustrate the twisted nature of the US establishment, one only had to read the way sections of the American corporate-controlled media lamented the departure of Bolton. The New York Times, which is a dutiful conduit for deep state intelligence and the foreign policy establishment, actually bemoaned the ouster of Bolton, calling him a “voice of restraint”.

The NY Times commented, with approval, on how Bolton “objected to attempts to pursue diplomatic avenues with players considered American enemies. And he angered Trump with a last-minute battle against a peace agreement with the Taliban… whether it was inviting the Taliban to Camp David or cooperating with Russia, he [Bolton] was the national security adviser who said no.”

In another piece this week, the NY Times commented, again approvingly of Bolton: “Mr Bolton strongly opposed detente with Iran, and his unceremonious ouster has reignited concerns among some Republicans [and Democrats] in Congress about the White House’s declining projection of American military power around the world.”

Can you believe it? The so-called US “newspaper of record” is somehow valorizing an out-and-out warmonger in the form of Bolton, and appears to be advocating “projection of American military power around the world”. The latter phrase being but an Orwellian euphemism for imperialism and war.

The sobering conclusion is that Bolton’s departure hardly heralds a new beginning of diplomacy and engagement by Trump, if we assume to give this president the benefit of doubt for good intentions. Bolton may be gone, but there are formidable political forces in the US establishment which will work to ensure Trump’s room for maneuver remains heavily compressed. The Cold War ideology is so ingrained in Washington, it is much bigger than just one man, whether that is the vile personage of Bolton or the more flexible Trump.