From Russia With Animosity

Posted by: Johan Sans Terre , June 10, 2018

How Trump is dissolving both American leadership and Western security.

I moved from the UK to the USA, for love and then subsequent marriage, in the middle of 2015.

Now in 2018, for the first time, as a white, British immigrant, I am unnerved. The general anti-immigrant and now anti-European sentiment that is emanating from the White House is unsettling.

I’m sorry to say, and I had to think hard about this before I typed it, but I’m guessing that if I were Russian, I wouldn’t be feeling this way.

The US has a pedigree history of fighting fascists and bigots. It slew its home-grown version in the Civil War, helped put the autocratic Kaiser to bed in the Great War and shed blood on the beaches of Normandy, along with steadfast British and Canadian allies, to fight and destroy the menace of Nazism.

Now, the Western alliance is falling apart courtesy of a reality tv show, misogynistic, racist clown that was never hugged enough by his parents and puts publicity and being talked about above anything else.

Put another way, Trump is, for reasons particular to him and him alone, bent on unravelling the Western alliance.

I remember where I was in England on 9/11 when the news broke and the world looked on open-mouthed and aghast. My colleagues and I were stunned. I remember one of my colleagues telling me that “Boy, is Uncle Sam going to be charged up now.” And yes, for sure, American wrath was mighty.

At the same time, European allies stepped up to the plate in solidarity with the US, with Article 5 of the NATO treaty invoked, and were unwavering in doing so. Joint NATO anti-terrorist exercises and initiatives sprang forth quickly thereafter and in some cases persist to this day.

Article 5 of the NATO treaty provides for collective defence in that an attack on one is deemed as being an attack on all. NATO was established in 1949. The very first time that Article 5 was invoked was 52 years later when America’s NATO allies deemed the 9 /11 terrorist attacks on the United States as an attack on all.

How do you put a Trump style value on that?

Further, how do we now find ourselves in the situation of the US implementing tariffs as it views the EU, Canada and other traditional allies as being a security risk?

How do we also find ourselves listening to the President of the United Sates, post G7 summit, threatening to end trade with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Japan and wanting to gravitate closer to Russia?

That would be the same Russia that recently annexed the Crimea, used nerve agents to try and murder its political opponents on British soil and blatantly tampered with the last US Presidential election. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of Russian nefariousness of late.

Whatever it is about Russia that has Trump’s fixation is clearly very potent. It defies belief that 70 years of Western coherence is being dissolved by a US President that, we can only imagine, has kompromat on him, financial or otherwise, by the Kremlin.

The US is on a dark and dangerous path. And Trump is leading the way.