15 May 2018

Donald Trump - fluke, or grand design?

Is now the time to stop fooling ourselves that Donald Trump is a political aberration that became the United States President by some kind of fluke, and accept that he's the World's most powerful leader by American design
 


After all, the Republican Party picked him out from a bunch of other nominees. The American people, in their millions, voted for him and so,  despite near universal world-wide derision, Donald Trump remains firmly in power.  

Donald Trump is not, in my view, in power because of unique, or special attributes, but because the majority of the American elite, followed by the American people, believe he can deliver what they wantSince his election, Donald Trump has given the wealthiest Americans what they wanted, mainly in the form of huge reductions in their corporate and personal taxes, but, in terms of workers rights and denial of universal healthcare, environmental damage, and so on, the President has been less sucessful.   

Nevertheless, Donald Trump doesn't appear, as his critics fear, to be deliberately trying to start World War IIIIt seems to me more likely that he's been put in place to manage America's withdrawal from the international stage and, at the same time, rescue America from what many believe to be an unsustainable and overly pro-active, US foreign policy.   In short, to put America first.

Recent events, support this view. In North Korea, Iraq and Syria, America has played a much smaller part than has been the case in similar conflicts that occurred during the Bush and Obama/Clinton years. Since Trump was engineered into the Whitehouse, it has been China and not the USA that has put in place the diplomatic arrangements for North Korea to make their peace with the South and shelve their nuclear plans.  Similarly, it was and still is, Russia, and not the USA, that has control of the civil war in Syria.

So, what next? Will this recent escalation of Middle Eastern conflict, triggered by the USA pulling out of the Iranian nuclear peace treaty, be resolved by American military might, or will it, once again, be left to others: Russia, China and possibly Israel and Iran this time, to resolve the Palestinian impasse?

My point is that the World should not be surprised that Donald Trump is putting into practise what he said he wanted do all along.  In his inauguration speech, and a million times before and since, the forty-fifth president of the United States said he was going to put America first. The wider international community, now have to plan for the probability that putting America first means Donald Trump is not going to continue to sink trillions of dollars trying to resolve recurring and insurmountable, international conflicts. As the World gets used to an inward looking North America, other countries will be increasingly expected to step-up and make a far larger contribution towards settling the World's conflicts themselves.
More this blog about Donald Trump 

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