Category Archives: Foreign Policy

‘Shahs of Sunset’ Christiane Amanpoor Mocks ‘Poor Me’ America

Celebrity, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Iran, Journalism, Media, Race

In ways intellectual, Christiane Amanpoor is impoverished. The famous CNN anchor, however, is not poor. Amanpoor’s net worth is $12.5 Million. She’s lived, loved and worked among the upper echelons her entire life, in her birth place of Iran, too. Amanpoor is more authentically “Shahs of Sunset” than ordinary America.

Read how Amapoor conflates America (“rich”) with Americans (many of whom are awfully poor).

Via Media Matters comes Christian Amanpoor’s take on Trump’s America. She apparently is unfamiliar with white, working-class demographics:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: [Donald Trump] always comes back to the dollars and cents. So, America’s broke, therefore, America’s weak. These are not true, right, so everybody else has to pony up. This is a businessman’s view of the world, presumably. But it doesn’t make sense when he talks about, for instance, NATO. NATO is not obsolete. Yes, NATO was created 60-plus years ago in response to the Soviet threat. But still, NATO is the organizing principle by which American and the Western democracies’ security is taken care of. And NATO is not just about the United States putting money in. It’s about all the other countries putting in their two percent of GDP as well. Now, they don’t all, that’s true, and America wants them to put more than they do right now. But a good number, nearly half of the NATO countries, put their two percent of GDP in. And the other countries do certain things that America doesn’t do. Now, America, because it is the most powerful military in the world, does a lot of the heavy lifting. You know, you have a military operation and America will do the troop lifting, for instance. Or it will do, you know, many of those kinds of things. But many of the other countries, whether it’s in Afghanistan or elsewhere, pick up a huge lot of the burden as well.

BROOKE BALDWIN (HOST): What about his point on nukes, how he said specifically he would be open to allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals so they can protect themselves from North Korea and China?

AMANPOUR: Well again, that puts on its head decades of the United States and its Pacific allies’ security relationship, and this is one of the first times we’ve heard a serious candidate, if not the first time, who will probably be the nominee for the Republican Party, put that forward, and it’s not a Republican sort of point of view that I’ve ever heard in previous elections. This poor me, America’s weak kind of thing is not the way Republicans generally see their view, and Americans’ view in the world. So one of the reasons why Japan does not have a nuclear arsenal is because of the horror that Japan committed during the Second World War. So Japan has been kind of forced to be a pacifist, pretty much, state. It has a military but it’s not an offensive military capability. And so there was a tradeoff. OK, you trade that off. And if there’s a problem, we’ll come to your rescue. But in the meantime, you’ll help us keep the peace in many other ways in that region. So that’s one of the reasons why Japan doesn’t have nukes. And then of course, well, when it comes to ISIS and all the other things, you need allies to be able to go and help you. [CNN, CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, 3/28/16]

TRUMP’S ‘Bad Week’ Tweets: Silent Majority Rising, Says No To NATO, RNC, Neocons, Kasich, Cruz & Debt

Debt, Donald Trump, Economy, Foreign Policy, Republicans

NATO Another Noose Around The American People’s Necks

Donald Trump, Europe, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, The State

Donald Trump, bless him, puts America First. He can’t help himself. And so it was, again, with his comments against NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As with any bureaucracy, NATO is good for those it employs. The NATO superstate, however, is bad for The People, who must pay for it and live with its self-perpetuating policies and sinecured politicians.

NATO was “… formed to fight the Soviet Union . … “The USSR evaporated a quarter-century ago,” but like a zombie, “NATO has lurched along, taking on new roles. …”

Foolishly and self-servingly, the establishment, Left and Right, equates what governments do, with what the people need. These shysters, Ted Cruz included, have risen on their hind legs in defense of America’s continued membership in NATO, to the tune of 2 percent of GDP. It’s not a conscious act; like a single-celled amoeba, these single-purpose organisms thrash about in unison to preserve the physical integrity of the state structures that feed them.

Where Trump disappoints slightly is when he talks restructuring instead of disinvesting, but there’s so much one human being can say and promise to do. Mr. Trump is fearless.

UPDATED: Trump’s Foreign Policy Team (Stephen Miller’s A Star)

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy

The good news for ordinary Americans is that Donald Trump is advocating “the U.S. decrease its role in NATO’s,” and “certainly decrease it’s spending” in The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

All horrible news if you are of the professional ghoul class. Remember, the D.C. Comitatus doesn’t like less of anything because it means less of them.

The forces aligned against Donald Trump say his “global posture” will be “starkly at odds with longstanding U.S. policy.” Sounds promising. As reported by CNN, “the Republican front-runner’s brain trust on global affairs” is a group lacking name recognition and “clear policy-making track records.” The writers take it to mean “there are still unanswered questions about the international direction they would hope to lead the country in.”

Trump, unfortunately, is employing Dr. Walid Phares, who was the Fox News Channel’s Middle East and terrorism expert. He had advocated a muscular military response in Libya. And some other

The advisers already with Trump include Phares, a professor at National Defense University and and adviser to the U.S. House of Representatives on terrorism. The Lebanese-born Phares, who previously advised 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was also a high-ranking official in a Christian militia tied to massacres during Lebanon’s civil war.

Carter Page, the founder of Global Energy Capital, has experience as an investment banker in London and Moscow. George Papadopoulos, who worked for former Republican candidate Ben Carson, is an oil and gas consultant focused on the geopolitics of the energy trade, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Joe Schmitz, a lawyer, is a former Defense Department Inspector General and a former executive with the Blackwater security firm, associated with the killing of Iraqi civilians.

And Gen. Joseph Keith Kellogg, at one point a COO at Oracle, led the 82nd Airborne Division and served as chief operating officer of the multinational Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq from 2003 through 2004.

Trump has criticized American involvement in Iraq and said that he was an early opponent of intervention there.

He acknowledged that Kellogg and his perspectives on the conflict diverge.

“He does have a different opinion, but I do like different opinions,” Trump told CNN.

And he said more broadly of his advisers: “It doesn’t mean that I’m going to use what they’re saying.”

MORE.

UPDATE (3/22): Stephen Miller’s a star. See my coverage of his first interviews in “Donald Delivers Economic Expertise @ Free-Market Speed,” and these recent tweets: