TRUMP is seriously dangerous

[Sounder]

I predict that Hillary will win a squeaker against Donald, not the actual vote, of course, but the adjusted electronic count.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump will function as the Alex Jones of politics. He will speak much truth and discredit that truth with his loud mouth and easy association with unsavory ideas.

The psy-op will have worked swimmingly, as the anti-interventionist masses will have been tagged as being 'racist' and the liberal left will forget their (idealized) anti war bias as they spew their jazz all over Trump.

Hmmm, we're in a pickle.

[JackRiddler]

So does this come together organically or do you think it's someone's plan?

[Sounder]

Jack wrote...

So does this come together organically or do you think it's someone's plan?

Given that I wrote; 'The psy-op will have worked swimmingly', you should quite well understand that my opinion is that these events are roughly planned and not at all 'organic'.

I even provided the objective and rational behind the psy-op, a non-derivative speculation, if I may say so.

as the anti-interventionist masses will have been tagged as being 'racist' and the liberal left will forget their (idealized) anti war bias as they spew their jazz all over Trump.

Or is this sort of thing not allowed because....... CONSPIRACY THEORY

Meanwhile, in back rooms the whole world over, a bunch of real racist haters are laughing their asses off.

And we keep providing material for their mirth.

[JackRiddler]

Not allowed? Not for me to say, but obviously it is allowed, it's bread and butter on this site. Maybe I missed it, however, but you don't seem to be theorizing very far. Backrooms the world over? Which ones, or at least in which milieu? What's the model for the psyop? Who's behind it or who could be? How do you conceptualize the operators and the operation? Real simple: Who's planning and how do they implement it?

[backtoiam]

This sort of stuff is primarily driving Trump popularity. The average every day common American is not nearly as wound up about the racist BS as the establishment wishes it was. These people at Carrier are pissed off and they should be. "Free Trade", free to lose your job, your home, your food, maybe your family, your vehicles, your dignity, and your future...

Carrier Workers See Costs, Not Benefits, of Global Trade

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZMARCH 19, 2016

INDIANAPOLIS — The fuzzy video, shot by a worker on the floor of a Carrier factory here in the American heartland last month, captured the raging national debate over trade and the future of the working class in 3 minutes 32 seconds.

“This is strictly a business decision,” a Carrier executive tells employees, describing how their 1,400 jobs making furnaces and heating equipment will be sent to Mexico. Workers there typically earn about $19 a day — less than what many on the assembly line here make in an hour. As boos and curses erupt from the crowd, the executive says, “Please quiet down.”

What came next was nothing of the kind.

Within hours of being posted on Facebook, the video went viral. Three days after Carrier’s Feb. 10 announcement, Donald J. Trump seized on the video in a Republican presidential debate and made Carrier’s move to Mexico a centerpiece of his stump speeches attacking free trade.



Carrier Air Conditioner (part of United Technologies) Moving 1,400 Jobs to Mexico Video by Joe Brunner

Jennifer Shanklin-Hawkins is one of those Carrier workers who listened to the announcement on the factory floor. After 14 years on the assembly line, she earns $21.22 an hour, enough to put her oldest son through college while raising two other children with her husband, a truck driver.

And when she saw Mr. Trump talking about Carrier on the news, all she could do was shout “Yessss!” at the TV. “I loved it,” she said. “I was so happy Trump noticed us.”

In living rooms and barrooms across Indianapolis, conversations with Carrier workers like Ms. Shanklin-Hawkins crystallize what has become an extraordinary moment in the American political and economic debate. As both political parties belatedly recognize the anxiety and deep-seated anger of blue-collar workers nationwide, the more-trade-is-good bipartisan consensus that has long held sway in Washington is being sundered.

What isn’t evident in the video — or in the furious debate it has spawned — is that both the company and its soon-to-be former employees are reacting to the same transformative quarter-century of American economic policy aimed at lowering trade barriers and staying globally competitive.


Karlee Macer, an Indiana state representative, left, with Paulene Anderson, a General Motors retiree. Ms. Macer, whose district includes the Carrier plant, is concerned about the loss of manufacturing jobs, which she notes pay more than most jobs available to people who lack a college degree. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times


“We have to look around the corner and see how this market will change in order to invest and stay in business for another 100 years,” said Robert McDonough, a senior executive at Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies. “You can blink and see your market position erode.”

The rub is that the costs and benefits aren’t distributed equally. Global trade has produced big gains for Americans, like more affordable goods — clothes, computers, even air-conditioners — and led to a more advanced economy.

At the same time, a chronic trade deficit and an overvalued dollar have caused factory jobs to dry up, contributing to a deep divide between the political and economic elite and the rest of the nation. Perhaps a clash was inevitable.

Consider the case of Ms. Shanklin-Hawkins. While she says she won’t be voting for Mr. Trump and considers him a racist, she applauds his message on trade. She says she plans to vote for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who similarly blasts free trade, but from the left. The two populist candidates may be political opposites, but when it comes to the downside of globalization, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump are speaking to her with one voice.

In fact, many Carrier workers here say that it was not so much Mr. Trump’s nativist talk on illegal immigrants or his anti-Muslim statements that has fired them up. Instead, it was hearing a leading presidential candidate acknowledging just how much economic ground they’ve lost — and promising to do something about it.

Mr. Trump has repudiated decades of G.O.P. support for free trade, calling for heavy tariffs on Mexican-made goods from the likes of Carrier. This has helped put him within arm’s reach of the Republican nomination.

Opposition to trade deals has also galvanized supporters of Mr. Sanders, helping him unexpectedly win the Michigan Democratic primary this month. At the same time, it has forced his rival Hillary Clinton to distance herself from trade agreements she once supported, like the proposed 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 1994 deal with Mexico that is an important part of President Bill Clinton’s political legacy.

Exit polls after the Michigan primary , for example, showed that a clear majority of both Republican and Democratic voters believe international trade costs the American economy more jobs than it creates.

Nicole Hargrove, a 14-year Carrier worker, said she was an undecided voter and was uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s attacks on immigrants, particularly Mexicans. “But I’d like to turn him loose on the financial world,” she said. “Maybe if Carrier had to pay more to bring stuff in, they’d think twice about moving jobs out.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/busin ... .html?_r=0

[Sounder]

Maybe I missed it, however, but you don't seem to be theorizing very far.

You're right, nor will I as that's not my bag.

But i got opinions and right now they are generally that 'leftists' are easily manipulated dupes and carry more than their fair share of hatred around in those pretty little self-righteous noggins.

[tapitsbo]

Those who have plans can plan organically, plan with pesticides, etc.

[JackRiddler]

Maybe I missed it, however, but you don't seem to be theorizing very far.

You're right, nor will I as that's not my bag.

But i got opinions and right now they are generally that 'leftists' are easily manipulated dupes and carry more than their fair share of hatred around in those pretty little self-righteous noggins.

Okay, but who's doing the duping or how? Why be vague about it, unless you don't have an opinion on that aspect of it?

[Nordic]

Okay here is CRAZY Trump making no sense at all!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... gton-post/

Contrast this with Hillary's psychopathic blood-lust speech at AIPAC today.

Trump questions need for NATO, outlines noninterventionist foreign policy

Donald Trump outlined an unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs Monday, telling The Washington Post's editorial board that he questions the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has formed the backbone of Western security policies since the Cold War.

The meeting at The Post covered a range of issues, including media libel laws, violence at his rallies, climate change, NATO and the U.S. presence in Asia.

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Speaking ahead of a major address on foreign policy later Monday in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Trump said he advocates a light footprint in the world. In spite of unrest abroad, especially in the Middle East, Trump said the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding domestic infrastructure.

Donald Trump speaks with Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan, left, as he departs a meeting with the editorial board of The Washington Post. Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is on the right. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
"I do think it’s a different world today, and I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore," Trump said. "I think it’s proven not to work, and we have a different country than we did then. We have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting, probably, on a bubble. And it’s a bubble that if it breaks, it’s going to be very nasty. I just think we have to rebuild our country."

He added: "I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’re blown up. We build another one, we get blown up. We rebuild it three times and yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education because we can’t build in our own country. At what point do you say, 'Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?' So, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that. But at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities."

For the first time, Trump also listed members of a team chaired by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) that is counseling him on foreign affairs and helping to shape his policies: Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares and Joseph E. Schmitz.

Trump praised George P. Shultz, who served as President Ronald Reagan's top diplomat, and was harshly critical of current secretary of state John F. Kerry. He questioned the United States’ continued involvement in NATO and, on the subject of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, said America’s allies are "not doing anything."

"Ukraine is a country that affects us far less than it affects other countries in NATO, and yet we’re doing all of the lifting," Trump said. "They’re not doing anything. And I say: 'Why is it that Germany’s not dealing with NATO on Ukraine? Why is it that other countries that are in the vicinity of Ukraine, why aren’t they dealing? Why are we always the one that’s leading, potentially the third world war with Russia.' "

Listen: Donald Trump's full interview with The Washington Post editorial board
Play Video63:53
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump visited the editorial board of The Washington Post on Mar. 21. Here is audio of the full, unedited interview. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
Trump said that U.S. involvement in NATO may need to be significantly diminished in the coming years, breaking with nearly seven decades of consensus in Washington. "We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore," Trump said, adding later, "NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money."

Trump sounded a similar note in discussing the U.S. presence in the Pacific. He questioned the value of massive military investments in Asia and wondered aloud whether the United States still was capable of being an effective peacekeeping force there.

“South Korea is very rich, great industrial country, and yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do," Trump said. "We’re constantly sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games — we’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing."

Asked whether the United States benefits from its involvement in the region, Trump replied, "Personally, I don’t think so." He added, "I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country, and we are a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation."

Trump cast China as a leading economic and geopolitical rival and said the United States should toughen its trade alliances to better compete.


"China has got unbelievable ambitions," Trump said. "China feels very invincible. We have rebuilt China. They have drained so much money out of our country that they’ve rebuilt China. Without us, you wouldn’t see the airports and the roadways and the bridges. The George Washington Bridge [in New York], that’s like a trinket compared to the bridges that they build in China. We don’t build anymore. We had our day."

Trump began the hour-long meeting by pulling out a list of some of his foreign policy advisers.

"Walid Phares, who you probably know. PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives. He’s a counterterrorism expert," Trump said. "Carter Page, PhD. George Papadopoulos. He’s an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy. The honorable Joe Schmitz, [was] inspector general at the Department of Defense. General Keith Kellogg. And I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do. But that’s a pretty representative group."

Trump said he plans to share more names in the coming days.

Kellogg, a former Army lieutenant general, is an executive vice president at CACI International, a Virginia-based intelligence and information technology consulting firm with clients around the world. He has experience in national defense and homeland security issues and worked as chief operating officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad following the invasion of Iraq.

Schmitz served as inspector general at the Defense Department during the early years of President George W. Bush’s administration and has worked for Blackwater Worldwide. In a brief phone call Monday, Schmitz confirmed that he is working for the Trump campaign and said that he has been involved for the past month. He said he frequently confers with Sam Clovis, one of Trump's top policy advisers, and that there has been a series of conference calls and briefings in recent weeks.


[Opinion: The foreign policy 'experts' who will flock to Trump should scare you]

Papadopoulos directs an international energy center at the London Center of International Law Practice. He previously advised the presidential campaign of Ben Carson and worked as a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Phares has an academic background, teaching at the National Defense University and Daniel Morgan Academy in Washington, and has advised members of Congress and appeared as a television analyst discussing terrorism and the Middle East.

Page, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and now the managing partner of Global Energy Capital, is a longtime energy industry executive who rose through the ranks at Merrill Lynch around the world before founding his current firm. He previously was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focused on the Caspian Sea region and the economic development in former Soviet states, according to his company biography and documents from his appearances at panels over the past decade.

Trump’s meeting with The Post was on the record. An audio recording was shared by the editorial board, and a full transcript will be posted later Monday. Trump was accompanied to the meeting, which took place at The Post's new headquarters, by his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and spokeswoman, Hope Hicks.

Read more:

[semper occultus]

Divining A ‘Trump Doctrine’: Finding Contours Of Donald Trump’s Foreign And National Security Policy – Analysis



BY PUBLISHED BY THE FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE MARCH 19, 2016

http://www.eurasiareview.com/19032016-divining-a-trump-doctrine-finding-contours-of-donald-trumps-foreign-and-national-security-policy-analysis/

By John R. Haines*

The ancient Greeks maintained that divination — how mortals learn the will of the gods — requires inspiration in the form of phrensy or madness. It was thought especially useful when some calamity shows the gods to be displeased. Today, simply imagining Donald Trump as Commander-in-Chief prompts many political oracles to the requisite condition.[1]

A group of Republican foreign policy notables published an open letter in which they harshly rebuked Donald Trump for some of his recent pronouncements on foreign policy and national defense.[2] Two open letter signatories associated with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Dov Zakheim and Colin Dueck, subsequently penned thoughtful essays in which each elaborated his respective position vis-à-vis Mr. Trump.[3]

The open letter itself reads more like a series of rejoinders than a policy rebuttal per se, to which its authors’ likely response is that Mr. Trump so far has expressed his position in aphorisms, not doctrine. Aphorisms of course have their place in American political discourse — the clarity of Benjamin Franklin’s “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” is undiminished after 230 years — and collected aphorisms can, like with Epicurus’ Sovran Maxims, efficiently summarize a larger doctrine.

One is on one’s own, however, so far as collecting Mr. Trump’s aphorisms and synthesizing them into a coherent doctrine. “Incoherent” is the likely response of Mr. Trump’s critics, but his detractors should be required to demonstrate that claim, not merely assert it. This essay sets out to explore whether the body of what Mr. Trump has said and written over the past two decades suggests a coherent doctrine regarding national security and foreign policy. It is not an apologia for Mr. Trump. It is intended as a fair reading of Mr. Trump’s not inconsiderable record of public statements — one that, to be fair, is infrequently read in its entirety, and most often cherry picked for incendiary phrases. The essay concludes by suggesting some analogous positions from contemporary American politics that are intended to provide useful historical context.

The author takes no position here one way or another on Mr. Trump’s candidacy. That is not the intent of this essay. No expressed position means just that, none expressed here. The same goes for the referenced open letter. The author admits to sympathizing with some of its authors’ objections, especially with regard to demagogic and inflammatory language, and a penchant for oversimplifying complex problems to a point of near-unintelligibility. On the other hand, many of Mr. Trump’s critics in the foreign policy and national defense establishment are encumbered by a legacy of policies that today seem misguided and that have proved dysfunctional to the national interest.

Now to the question: is there a “Trump doctrine” for the national security and foreign policy of the United States?



The final objection leveled by the open letter authors is a direct shot at one of Mr. Trump’s long-held positions: “His equation of business acumen with foreign policy experience is false…”[4] The open letter authors’ implied argument — the only thing that equates to foreign policy experience is…foreign policy experience — is not altogether uncontroversial itself, but that distracts from the more interesting question of what Mr. Trump meant.[5]

For that, we turn first to Mr. Trump’s 2000 book, The America We Deserve, written during his period of involvement with the Reform Party (which itself collapsed some years later). What Mr. Trump wrote in 2000 differs meaningfully from the implication that he subscribes to some symmetric property of equality between business and foreign policy experience:

“In the modern world you can’t very easily draw up a simple, general foreign policy. I was busy making deals during the last decade of the cold war. I would imagine that for employees of the state and defense departments, the world looked very different then. Foreign policy was a big chess game…”

“I believe that the day of the chess player is over. American foreign policy has to be put in the hands of the dealmaker. Two great dealmakers have served as president — one of them was Franklin Roosevelt, who got us through World War II, and the other was Richard Nixon, who began our dialogue with communist China and forced the Russians to the bargaining table to achieve the first meaningful reductions in nuclear arms.”[6]

Taken at face value, that decade and a half old statement seems qualitatively different from the one critics attribute to Mr. Trump. He goes on with an observation about the nuclear nonproliferation treaty — “All the major powers may sign such a treaty, but no one will obey it but us”[7] — a statement that mutatis mutandis could apply to a number of recent agreements, the Iranian nuclear one among them. In Mr. Trump’s view c.2000, American “generosity” — in defending allies, in mediating international disputes, in international trade, in immigration — “leads to very poor deal making.”[8]

Mr. Trump looks disdainfully upon foreign policy “experts,” who as a class are a favorite straw man of his. His comments seem to anticipate criticisms like those in the open letter:

“I can hear the experts now: Where does Trump, the real estate guy, get off thinking he knows more than we do about the international scene? Experts are always on the defensive — and for good reason. They’re wrong so often.”[9]

He continues in a way reminiscent of his reaction today to critics of his promised destruction of ISIS:

“A little humility would do these people good. During the cold war, for example, the newspapers and policy journal were full of geopolitical deep thinking explaining why America could never hope to prevail over the Soviet Union. The best we could expect was to ‘contain’ communism, these learned people insisted.”[10]

However grudgingly, even critics must credit some of what Mr. Trump wrote at the time:

“And as late as 1991 there was a great deal of fashionable theorizing about ‘the end of history’. The idea was that with the demise of the Soviet Union and the victory of capitalism we were entering a trouble-free period of peace and guaranteed prosperity. These guys apparently hadn’t heard of Islamic fundamentalism, miniaturized weapons, terrorism, or the People’s Republic of China.”[11]

So, while giving “experts” a nod — “This isn’t to say that I don’t study what knowledgeable people have to say” — there has never been a particularly warm feeling between Mr. Trump and what is sometime called the foreign policy establishment.

So what would he do? Mr. Trump dedicated a dozen or so pages in his 2000 book to the paired threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs, writing “I can tell you negotiation with these madmen will be fruitless once they have the ability to lob a nuclear missile into Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York.” Citing the “resolve” and unambiguous stance “of Roosevelt and Reagan” in the face of comparable threats, Mr. Trump proposed negotiations backed up by the promise of a preemptive — and he is at pains to stress, conventional — strike to destroy targets within North Korea. Mr. Trump would likely extend his c.2000 position vis-à-vis North Korea to the threat posed today by Iran — in 2000, he identified Iranian missiles explicitly as a coming threat to the United States — either in the event of Iran’s failure to comply with the recent nuclear agreement or its continued noncompliance with United Nations Security Council resolutions directed at Iran’s ballistic missile program? He may have answered that question some time ago: as he wrote in 2000, “Here is the fundamental difference between Donald Trump and our current crop of presidential wannabees: I do have the will.”

It is worth noting the contours shared by Mr. Trump’s position c.2000 with respect to the North Korean nuclear and missile threats; and President George W. Bush’s September 2002 National Security Strategy, in which “preemptive and preventive action” was a key concept.[12] “Terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in the hands of rogue states have made preemption more attractive as a policy option” read one analysis of President Bush’s September 2002 NSS, “but it does not lay out specific criteria or guidelines for determining when the U.S. should carry out preemptive attacks.”[13] Similar is not the same, to be sure, but it is disingenuous to argue that Mr. Trump’s position on the question of the nuclear weapon and ballistic missile threat posed by rogue nations was (is) unhinged or somehow out of the Republican mainstream.

Later in his 2000 book, Mr. Trump turned to the question of the then-raging Balkan conflict, and to the more general one about American intervention in regional conflicts. He wrote, “It should be clear by now that when we intervene in these conflicts we do little more than temporarily tilt the balance of power.” Mr. Trump continued:

“My rules of engagement are pretty simple. If we are going to intervene in a conflict it had better pose a direct threat to our interest — one definition of ‘direct’ being a threat so obvious that most Americans will know where the hot spot is on the globe and will quickly understand why we are getting involved. The threat should be so direct that our leaders, including our president, should be able to make the case clearly and concisely…”

With specific application to many of today’s conflicts, he wrote:

“[W]e must not get involved in a long-festering conflict for humanitarian reasons…We will provide humanitarian assistance, but when our men and women volunteer in our armed forces it should be with the strict understanding that they will be sent into danger’s way only incases where our national survival is directly affected.”

Many of his current positions are largely unaltered from 2000. For example, “In the Middle East, America must stand by our only ally in the region: the State of Israel.” So, too, Western Europe. While writing “I don’t think that we should abandon Europe completely,” Mr. Trump proposed:

“Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually. The cost of stationing NATO troops in Europe is enormous, and these are clearly funds that can be put to better use.”

And so, too, conflicts in Russia’s near abroad:

“America has no vital interest in choosing between warring factions whose animosities go back centuries in Eastern Europe. Their conflicts are not worth American lives.”

He made a broader point in rejecting a c.2000 argument by Pat Buchanan that Nazi Germany could have been appeased:

“Buchanan’s position seems to come from a weird cloudcuckooland [sic] where left and right meet each other. His recommendation of appeasement toward the Nazi regime sounds exactly like what liberals…today are saying about rogue states like North Korea.”

The same consistency is evident in his discussions of trade policy, missile defense, state-sponsored terrorism, emerging WMD threats (which he called “miniwar”), and civil defense and counterterrorism.

The author is in no position to assess how deeply Mr. Trump’s knowledge runs across the gamut of national security and foreign policy issues mentioned above, but there seems little basis on which to argue peremptorily that he lacks conversancy in them. In truth, Mr. Trump’s arguments c.2000 arguments on rogue nation nuclear weapon and ballistic threats, and emerging WMD threats, demonstrate an element of foresight.

So, can we discern from Mr. Trump’s writing and statements the contours of a coherent national defense and foreign policy doctrine? Here are four principles that comes to mind:

The United States must maintain an impregnable defense that adapts agilely to an ever-evolving threat landscape.
No foreign adversary can successfully attack a prepared America, which must be primed to prevent, and failing that, to preempt threats posed by foreign countries and their proxies, and by proto-states and transnational terrorist groups.
American military intervention in distant regional conflicts — excluding direct threats to the homeland — does not serve our national security interests and crowds out domestic priorities. Efforts at “aid short of war” in such conflict zones such as Iraq-Syria and Libya misserve American national interests, and threaten to entangle the nation in war abroad.
The economic burden of American legacy commitments like NATO and similar regional defense pacts — explicitly excluding America’s commitment to the defense of Israel — is unsustainable and must shift to our allies.[14]
These four principles fairly represent what Mr. Trump has written and pronounced on questions of foreign policy and national defense over the past two decades. Since the author’s intent is neither to channel Mr. Trump nor to act as a (uninvited) proxy, there is a larger point: these principles are based on four others articulated in the early 1940’s by the America First Committee.[15]

The author hastens to abjure simplistic efforts that paint Mr. Trump as “isolationist”. As the historian Wayne S. Cole wrote, the term isolationist “became [then and later] a smear word used to connote much that was evil and even subversive in America and foreign affairs.”[16] Unilateralist is a fairer description if indeed any is necessary.[17] That being said, it seems fair to speculate that Mr. Trump would not much disagree with Charles Lindberg when he wrote in late 1941:

“We are at war all over the world, and we are unprepared for it from either a spiritual or material standpoint. We haven’t even a clear idea of what we are fighting to attain.”[18]

Nor is it likely that, in the context of recent short-of-war type campaigns to destabilize autocratic regimes in Syria and Libya, Mr. Trump would take exception to John Quincy Adams’ maxim that “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”[19]

Part of the uncertainty over Mr. Trump’s national security doctrine — indeed, whether he has one — derives from him holding two seemingly discordant views. On the one hand, this paragraph seems to encapsulate one element of Mr. Trump’s thinking:

“The lessons to be learned from the two Great Wars of the 20th century are absolutely opposite each other. World War I tells the Great Powers to stay out of local quarrels. World War II says the Great Powers should become involved. The record of the last half-century indicates that American foreign policy is following the wrong lesson…”[20]

Consider now Mr. Trump’s prescription vis-à-vis the paired threat of North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. His forceful denunciation of efforts to “appease” the North Korea government — he uses the word as what Hans Morgenthau called an absolute term, where “no appeasement” means “no negotiation”.[21] Substituting in the paragraph below “Kim Jong-un” and “North Korea” for “Stalin” and “the Soviet Union” yields a fair approximation of Mr. Trump’s position on what was earlier described as negotiations backed up by the promise of a preemptive strike:

“Having shown good will, we now ‘get tough.’ Since one cannot deal with Stalin by legal contract and without regard for the realities of power, we will now deal with him with the instruments of power alone, without concern for legal stipulations to be agreed upon through mutual suasion. Just as the only alternative to appeasement of Germany, Japan, or Italy without power had been war, so the alternative to appeasement of the Soviet Union is another kind of war.”[22]

Dr. Morgenthau anticipated by several decades what Michael Gerson recently called Mr. Trump’s “dangerous politics of pride.”[23] He cites the “disastrous political and military consequence” that ensue when we fail “to separate our pride in our own moral superiority from our historical judgment,” concluding:

“If we find it so difficult to learn from history, the fault is not with history, but with the pride and the intellectual limitations of men. History, in the words of Thucydides, is philosophy learned from examples.”[24]

The “avoid local conflicts” anti-interventionists assert the straw man argument that “It has come to be expected that America should have a foreign policy position on all foreign issues.”[25] The unilateralist counterargument is that American interests are best served by a policy of “strategic ambiguity” (sometimes called “essential ambiguity”). Strategic ambiguity is the practice of being intentionally vague on certain aspects of foreign policy or intended actions and carries a deterrence aspect involving will and capacity.

It is sometimes said that Mr. Trump relies on strategic ambiguity[26] and admires those who practice it well. Russian President Vladimir Putin, an artful practitioner, is sometimes held out as an example for American policymakers:

“NATO should take a page from the Kremlin’s own playbook. Instead of warning that there is no military solution to Europe’s biggest crisis in decades, suggest to Putin that there might indeed be an armed response and mobilize military power as a demonstration of will. As geopolitical competition intensifies in both Eurasia and the Pacific, it is time to pull the art of strategic ambiguity off the Cold War shelf.”[27]

Put another way, “Russia doesn’t need to control Kiev in order to exert influence over Ukraine.”[28]

Strategic ambiguity is not a risk-less policy. Indeed, it depends upon messaging — and it should be stressed artful messaging — to allies and adversaries alike. In many cases ambiguity reflects an underlying genuine political incoherence between rhetorical declarations and behavior, and gives rise to dangerous misperceptions. When asked by Hugh Hewitt what he would do “if China were to either accidentally or intentionally sink a Filipino or Japanese ship, what would Commander-In-Chief Donald Trump do in response?” Mr. Trump responded:

“I wouldn’t want to tell you, because frankly, they have to, you know, somebody wrote a very good story about me recently, and they said there’s a certain unpredictable, and it was actually another businessman, said there’s a certain unpredictability about Trump that’s great, and it’s what made him a lot of money and a lot of success. You don’t want to put, and you don’t want to let people know what you’re going to do with respect to certain things that happen. You don’t want the other side to know. I don’t want to give you an answer to that.”[29]

Strategic ambiguity deters an adversary by delimiting the option to escalate and creating uncertainty about the extent of the response, but is not the possibility of a response. Here, Mr. Trump is mistaken: you want the other side to know clearly what you are capable of doing ‘and willing to do. Mere vagueness is not strategic ambiguity. Moreover, strategic ambiguity is at odds with Mr. Trump’s c. 2000 declaration that the United States must “switch from chess player to dealmaker.” It risks — returning to Mr. Trump’s chess analogy — being maneuvered into a position of Zugzwang, in which any possible move worsens the player’s position.[30]

Whether Mr. Trump can effectively practice strategic ambiguity in national security and foreign policy affairs is a matter of considerable dispute. As one detractor put it:

“Winston Churchill once described the essential attributes of a great commander as having ‘massive common sense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten.’ Trump may have the legerdemain, but he sorely lacks the rest.”[31]

That caustic appraisal may be unfair, but competency in national security and foreign affairs is better evinced than claimed.



This essay began by assessing the final objection leveled by the open letter authors so it is fitting that it should conclude by considering its first objection, viz., that Mr. Trump’s “vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle. He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.”[32] Here it seems — and it is by no means unfair to do so — the open letter authors rely heavily on Mr. Trump’s recent spoken declarations. A less convincing demonstration is found in Mr. Trump’s written work, but that does not necessarily negate or diminish the open letter authors’ point.

This essay has sought to discern the contours of a “Trump doctrine” in national security and foreign affairs — indeed, whether one exists at all. The author believes Mr. Trump’s record over two decades of oral and written pronouncements do give at least the contours of such a doctrine, although here, “doctrine” may be far too formal a term. Mr. Trump has, for certain, a set of beliefs, which tend toward an inward-looking brand of unilateralism. These beliefs parallel in some interesting ways those advanced by the America First Committee during the run up to World War Two, though the author hastens to reject the “isolationist” epithet in the case of Mr. Trump.

Perhaps what Mr. Trump considers a prime virtue in the management of national security and foreign affairs — unpredictability — is his most unsettling instinct, as it truly does conflate what is efficacious in business negotiations with what can be existentially perilous when armed force is implicated.

Each open letter signatory is in her or his own respect a serious and experienced actor in the realm of national security and foreign affairs. The mere of act of getting 119 persons to agree to anything, let alone a set of nine forceful objections itself demands attention. The author takes these women and men and their objections seriously. Whether the weight of what Mr. Trump has written or said in the past can, or should, outweigh what he says in the current political season is left to each voter to decide. The burden is squarely on Mr. Trump, however, to establish clearly whether he is the man of the incipient Trump Doctrine sketched in this essay, or of the man of the intemperate remarks that so provoked the open letter authors.

The Churchill quote is from his book The Grand Alliance, 603.

About the author:
*John R. Haines is Co-Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s new Eurasia Program and Executive Director of FPRI’s Princeton Committee. Much of his current research is focused on Russia and its near abroad, with a special interest in nationalist and separatist movements. As a private investor and entrepreneur, he is currently focused on the question of nuclear smuggling and terrorism, and the development of technologies to discover, detect, and characterize concealed fissile material. He is also a Trustee of FPRI.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] Regarding direct divination by the ancient Greeks, see: Leonard Whibley (1931). A Companion to Greek Studies. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 422.

[2] See: “Open Letter on Donald Trump from GOP National Security Leaders” (2 March 2016). http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/open-l ... y-leaders/. Last accessed 13 March 2016.

[3] Their articles can be accessed here http://nationalinterest.org/feature/tru ... pped-15408 and here http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... ans-say-no.

[4] Open Letter, op cit. The full claim by the open letter’s authors reads “His equation of business acumen with foreign policy experience is false. Not all lethal conflicts can be resolved as a real estate deal might, and there is no recourse to bankruptcy court in international affairs.”

[5] The author cautions that so far as he is aware, Mr. Trump never made this claim verbatim but as will be shown, has made many public statements roughly congruent with it. Whether the observation is bolstered or diminished by the sentence that follows it in the open letter (Not all lethal conflicts can be resolved as a real estate deal might…) is left to the reader to decide.

[6] Donald J. Trump (2000). The America We Deserve. (New York: Macmillan). Kindle edition.

[7] Ibid. The reference is to commitments made by the Clinton Administration during the calendar year 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference regarding ratification by the United States of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), as well as certain issues under the SALT II agreement and a contemplated SALT III process.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] For example: “The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.”

[13] “The Bush Administration’s Doctrine of Preemption (and Prevention): When, How, Where?” Council on Foreign Relations [published online 1 February 2004]. http://www.cfr.org/world/bush-administr ... ion-/p6799. Last accessed 13 March 2016.

[14] Adapted from Wayne S. Cole (1953). America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press) 15. Cole summarized the four main planks of the America First Committee’s foreign policy platform as:

The United States must build an impregnable defense.
No foreign power or group of powers can successfully attack a prepared America.
Only by remaining out of a European war can America preserve the vital elements of democracy.
“Aid short of war” (meaning to Britain and France) weakens the American national defense at home and threatens to involve the nation in war abroad.
[15] Published under the heading “American First Principles,” the AFC articulated five foreign policy planks in its AFC Bulletin (nos. 140 & 140A) on 20 March 1941:

Our first duty is to keep America out of foreign wars. Our entry would only destroy democracy, not save it. ‘The path to war is a false path to freedom.’
Not by acts of war abroad but by preserving and extending democracy at home can we aid democracy and freedom in other lands.
In 1917 we sent our American ships into the war zone and this led us to war. In 1941 we must keep our naval convoys and merchant vessels on this side of the Atlantic.
We must build a defense, for our own shores, so strong that no foreign power or combination of foreign powers can invade our country, by sea, air or land.
Humanitarian aid is the duty of a strong, free country at peace. With proper safeguards for the distribution of supplies, we should feed and clothe the suffering and needy people of England and the occupied countries and keep alive their hope for the return of better days.
The AFC further elaborated its position on humanitarian aid in September 1940, stating “Aid short of war weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.” Cited in Wayne S. Cole (1951). “The America First Committee.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. 44:4 (Winter 1951), 308

[16] The late Wayne S. Cole (1923-2013) is the author of several definitive historical studies of the America First movement. The quoted text is from Cole (1983). Roosevelt and the Isolationists. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press:) 530.

[17] This likely merits further consideration in its own right, but is beyond the scope and purpose of this essay. In using the term unilateralist, the author references Bradley F. Podliska analytic separation between respectively, a president’s decision to use force, and the decision whether to use this force in a unilateral or multilateral manner. See: Bradley F. Podliska (2010). Acting Alone: A Scientific Study of American Hegemony and Unilateral Use-of-Force Decision Making. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). As Phillip W. Gray noted in his review of Posliska’s book [http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/review_full.asp?id=266], “While this may seem a simple distinction, [Podliska] rightly notes that most previous research blurs these two decisions together.”

[18] Charles Lindberg diary entry dated 11 December 1941. Quoted in John Toland (1982). Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.) 20.

[19] Quoted in Walter McDougall (1997). Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776. (New York: Houghton Mifflin) 36.

[20] Donald E. Schmidt (2005). The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy 1898-2005. (New York: Algora Publishing) 12.

[21] Hans J. Morgenthau (1952). “The Lessons of World War II’s Mistakes: Negotiations and Armed Power Flexibly Combined.” Commentary (1 October 1952). https://www.commentarymagazine.com/arti ... -combined/. Last accessed 16 March 2016.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Michael Gerson (2016). “Donald Trump’s dangerous politics of price. The Washington Post [published online 25 January 2016]. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html. Last accessed 16 March 2016.

[24] Morgenthau (1952), op cit.

[25] It is explicit in Schmidt (2005), op cit., 13

[26] See for example: Dan McLaughlin (2015). ” Military Strategist Explains Why Donald Trump Leads — and How He Will Fail.” The Federalist [published online 15 December 2015). http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/16/mil ... will-fail/. Last acessed 16 March 2016.

[27] Chris Musselman (2014). “Strategic Ambiguity: Speaking Putin’s Language.” The National Interest [published online 4 September 2014]. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-bu ... king-putin’s-language-11201. Last accessed 16 March 2016.

[28] Mark Melton (2016). “State of the Incoherent Foreign Policy.” Providence [published online 15 January 2016]. https://providencemag.com/2016/01/state ... gn-policy/. Last accessed 16 March 2016.

[29] Max Fisher (2015). “We painstakingly annotated Donald Trump’s strange and revealing foreign policy interview.” VOX World [published online 4 September 2015]. http://www.vox.com/2015/9/4/9260463/don ... ugh-hewitt. Last accessed 16 March 2016.

[30] Alexander Motyl made the argument vis-à-vis Mr. Putin’s actions in Ukraine. See: Motyl (2014). “Putin’s Zugzwang: The Russia-Ukraine Standoff.” World Affairs (July/August 2014). http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/putin’s-zugzwang-russia-ukraine-standoff. Last accessed 16 March 2016.

[31] McLaughlin (2015), op cit.

[32] Open Letter, op cit.

[kool maudit]

I like the looks of the foreign policy plan from Trump. It's hard to trust for obvious reasons but Hillary is essentially a neocon, so... she's a non-starter, sane foreign policy-wise. Butcher of Tripoli.

Americans in America may do well to consider all the rest but for me this election is a referendum on the Middle Eastern regime change doctrine.

A whole generation of voters have now essentially known nothing other than a continuous deployment of Western forces to Mesopotamia and the fertile crescent. It has become normal, this situation, and politics ordinarily concerns minor adjustments to such.

This is a problem because the whole project is wrongheaded and insane.

[JackRiddler]

Americans in America may do well to consider all the rest but for me this election is a referendum on the Middle Eastern regime change doctrine.

A whole generation of voters have now essentially known nothing other than a continuous deployment of Western forces to Mesopotamia and the fertile crescent. It has become normal, this situation, and politics ordinarily concerns minor adjustments to such.

This is a problem because the whole project is wrongheaded and insane.

Would that most Americans in America saw it that way. It would be news to them. Unfortunately the terms you use would not even make sense to many of them.

.

[JackRiddler]

You think the following is corporate media distortion?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016 ... we-learned

Trump is going to knock out Isis

Washington Post: If you could substantially reduce the risk of harm to [American] ground troops, would you use a battlefield nuclear weapon to take out Isis?

Trump: I don’t want to use, I don’t want to start the process of nuclear. Remember the one thing that everybody has said, I’m a counterpuncher. Rubio hit me. Bush hit me. When I said low energy, he’s a low-energy individual, he hit me first. I spent, by the way he spent $18m worth of negative ads on me. That’s putting …

WP: This is about Isis. You would not use a tactical nuclear weapon against Isis?

Trump: I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good-looking group of people here. Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?

[backtoiam]

From AIPAC to Trump: Michael Glassner’s journey

by Jacob Kornbluh, Jewish Insider

Posted on Feb. 19, 2016 at 12:09 pm




Michael Glassner. Photo from Twitter via Jewish Insider

How does one go from serving as AIPAC’s Southwest Regional Political Director a year ago to running Donald Trump’s national political operation today?

Ever since Trump announced his White House bid last June, Michael Glassner has been serving as his campaign’s national political director. In part, he is credited with landing the coveted Sarah Palin endorsement ahead of the Iowa Caucus last month.

Glassner’s political journey began as a 20-year-old college student from Kansas when he served as Bob Dole’s traveling aide in the 1988 presidential campaign. “I became the right-hand man for the Senate Majority Leader and a presidential candidate,” Glassner related in an interview with Jewish Insider. “It was a tremendous education in politics, and that was the beginning of what became a 15-year relationship as I worked for Senator Dole in a number of capacities.”

Upon moving to New Jersey in the late nineties, Glassner served as a senior advisor to Lewis Eisenberg, the then-Chairman of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and a prominent Republican Jewish leader. He worked out of the Port Authority’s World Trade Center office but left just before 9/11 to join IDT Corp in Newark. Glassner credits his former boss, IDT founder Howard Jonas, whom he referred to as “a strong Zionist and an AIPAC guy,” with encouraging him to become more active in pro-Israel politics. Intermittently between 2000 to 2008, Glassner would take time off to return to the campaign trail: running George W. Bush’s general election campaign in Iowa, fundraising for Bush’s ’04 re-election effort, and in ’08, where he managed Sarah Palin’s vice presidential campaign.

“My interest in pro-Israel politics had grown exponentially,” Glassner recalled. “Particularly since 9-11, which represented a real credible threat to all Americans and in particular as a Jew, I felt very strongly about the threat of radical Islam and so I became more and more involved with AIPAC.” In 2014, Glassner officially joined AIPAC as their Southwest Regional Political Director where, according to his LinkedIn profile, he managed AIPAC’s legislative mobilizations, conducted briefings with candidates, and spoke at political events throughout the region.

In July 2015, the phone rang. Donald Trump, a real-estate magnate, decided to run an unconventional campaign for president. Keeping senior hires to the minimum, the Trump campaign offered Glassner to join and serve as its national political director. “The Trump campaign came to me for a lot of reasons,” Glassner told Jewish Insider regarding the recruitment process. “I think they were looking for somebody that had experience in presidential politics and who was already in the area, and I live in New Jersey.” And, of course, there was the Sarah Palin factor. “The Palin connection was also very attractive to them because, although Palin and McCain’s campaign was not successful, I think that was sort of a marker for the anti-establishment movement… I think that that helped my credentials in this arena because I’ve shown that I was willing to take on the status quo, willing to buck the establishment, and I think that is what this campaign is all about.”

Glassner told Jewish Insider he didn’t have to use his influence to convince Palin to endorse Trump but that his prior relationship certainly helped. “They had established a relationship sometime back. And I think that her inclination is very much aligned with his.,” he said. “Mr. Trump did the persuading. I think it was helpful that she had a friend here in the campaign, somebody she knew, and I demonstrated my loyalty to her, which I think helped. But, ultimately, it was everything that he is saying about the country is in line with whatever she has been saying. I think that’s a natural alliance in my view.”

Asked to describe the transition from AIPAC to Trump, Glassner said, “This campaign is much different than any campaign I’ve been on in a lot of ways. But probably, primarily because the culture has a more corporate and a business-like approach than other campaigns. Mr. Trump is self-funding his campaign, and he’s been very effective throughout his life in maximizing his investments. And we are approaching this campaign in the same way, and you’ve seen the results of that. If you look at the results in New Hampshire, the amount of money spent per vote, I believe Mr. Trump was by far the most efficient.”

Staff in Trump’s main election headquarters, based in Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, consists of ten to twelve people, according to Glassner. The rest are out on the field in some 20 states, including all of the Super Tuesday primary states. Outlining this centralized approach, which is in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Glassner said: “Our state directors in all of the states have a lot of autonomy. Of course, we have guidelines and expectations but in large part, they have the ability to build and execute their own strategies.”

He added: “The other two things that makes us different is that 1) Mr. Trump as a candidate has a dominance of the media that is unprecedented. Typical candidates have a giant communications staff because that’s what is required. In this campaign, we have two people. There’s one communications director that travels with him (Hope Hicks) and then we have an assistant to her here in the HQ. The primary reason for that is that he is the chief communicator and his dominance of social media, and traditional media, is such that you don’t need a hundred people doing that. He can do it himself. 2) The lack of a fundraising mechanism. Since he is self-funding his campaign, there is no giant fundraising staff either that is eating up office space and overhead. Just those two pieces alone of a traditional campaign makes this one far more efficient.”

In stump speeches on the campaign trail, Trump regularly notes how he is self-funding his campaign and claims that gives him the ability to speak his mind and offer policy proposals without being beholden to outside interests and donors. In December, Trump caused a stir with Republican Jewish donors when he addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition Presidential Forum in DC. “You are not going to support me even though you know I am the best thing that could happen to Israel. I know why you are not going to support me. You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” he told a full auditorium of donors. “You want to control your own politicians.” Asked if Trump overcompensated in his desire to not pander to the RJC crowd, Glassner responded, “I would never, ever suggest that I am aware of his thought process going into this speech, so I can’t comment on that. I think his remarks speak for themselves. He’s a very effective communicator, so I am not going to speculate as to his motives. I think what he said is what he thinks,” he told Jewish Insider.

As Trump continues to surprise the political class and voters with comments that are out of sync with traditional Republican talking points on Israel, Glassner promised that Trump would soon present a detailed plan as it relates to U.S. foreign aid to Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship. “He has said, in general, that he recognizes that Israel is our top ally and he will do everything in his power to protect Israel. He said that, and I think he will continue to say that publicly,” he stressed. “As to specifics of his policies, those will become clear over the time. But I think he has said consistently throughout his career, and in particular throughout this campaign, that he understands the threats that are presented to Israel by its neighbors and by Iran. I think he’s been very clear about that.”

Glassner pointed to Trump’s robust statements against the Iran deal as a clear example of where he stands on Israel. “One of the things that Mr. Trump talks about, almost every single speech he gives, is how bad the Iran deal is,” Glassner maintained. “And he uses that as an example for a lot of reasons. One is, I believe it encourages Iran’s bad intentions toward Israel. Secondly, it’s an example of what bad deal making and poor negotiations can result in. I don’t think it directly speaks towards his policy on Israel but it makes it clear that he recognizes that Israel is our most important ally in the region and through poor deal making the current administration has endangered that ally and that is unacceptable and has, in essence, said that many times.”

“I don’t think there can be any question about his steadfast support for Israel,” Glassner declared just hours before Trump suggested he would be “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I would not be working here if I didn’t believe that that was held by the candidate himself. It’s very important to me, very important to him and the country.”

In December, Trump announced he would be traveling to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he canceled it after Netanyahu rejected his plan of banning Muslims entering the United States. To date, Trump has no plans of rescheduling a trip to Israel as a candidate or as the GOP nominee, says Glassner. “He would go back as President. No discussion beyond that, not currently,” he said. “I mean, it’s hard, as you can guess, now that the primary season is in full run, it’s virtually impossible to do anything but run in the primary states. Leaving the country is probably end life in my view at this time.”

Trump is also not planning to attend any upcoming Jewish events, though that could change. “Mr. Trump appears almost exclusively at our own events because he has the capability of driving out these giant crowds which nobody else in this campaign really enjoys and can control the event, control the venue, control the time, location, everything,” Glassner explained. “We primarily just do our own events but I will certainly encourage that if the right opportunity comes up for him to speak directly to the community. That may be more relevant in the states that have a larger Jewish community — like Florida, Illinois, and ultimately California and New York later on the calendar.”

We asked Glassner if he anticipates more endorsements from leaders in the Jewish community.

“Yeah, anybody who wants to is welcome to get on board the train,” he said. “Endorsements, in general, are important but they are not a central part of our strategy because we really have the support of the grassroots so it’s probably less important to us than to others that we have other prominent people endorsing him although many have. We welcome endorsements from all walks of life and I think you’ll see more of those come across as the campaign continues.”

[Luther Blissett]

After all this non-interventionist talk, Good Morning America faithfully begged Trump for his thoughts on the attacks in Belgium, to which he blamed Belgium, advocated for torture, and pledged more dystopic visions and violence.