) – In the weeks leading up to the 2024 US presidential election, Americans and many around the world invested hope that former-president and now President-elect Donald Trump would grind America’s wars abroad to a halt and instead invest in the United States itself.
These hopes were based on rhetoric surrounding the Trump campaign. The candidate’s son, Donald Trump Jr., remarked publicly, “we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration,” a reflection of candidate Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail.
Unfortunately, just as was the case during President-elect Donald Trump’s previous term in office, this was an empty promise meant to secure the support of war-weary Americans and possibly even to throw nations abroad off balance, before filling his cabinet with the most vocal “neocons and war hawks” living and breathing in Washington D.C.
Continuity of Agenda…
During President-elect Trump’s previous administration, he lined his cabinet with hardcore neocons and war hawks like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley who all worked ceaselessly to continue all the wars President Trump inherited from the Obama administration and attempt to provoke additional wars US special interests have long-since sought including with China, Iran, and even Russia itself.
During the first Trump administration, the US initiated a trade war with China and other measures aimed at gutting China’s largest and most successful businesses including smartphone manufacturer Huawei, culminating in sales bans across the collective West, US-based Google cutting Huawei off from its Android operating system, and even the detainment of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou while traveling in Canada.
During the first Trump administration, the US also continued its military build-up across the Asia-Pacific as a means of encircling and containing China within its own borders, another policy inherited from the Obama administration.
In the Middle East, the Trump administration continued the illegal occupation of Syria which began under the Obama administration, continued carrying out strikes against the Syrian government and its allies, with President Trump bragging about pilfering Syrian oil. It was also during the first Trump administration that the US assassinated senior Iranian military leader General Qasem Soleimani while visiting Iraq on official business, an indisputable act of war against both Iran and Iraq. General Soleimani had until then been successfully fighting the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” across the region, including in Syria and Iraq.
And while President Trump was accused of being an agent of Russian interests, in reality his administration helped accelerate the US proxy war with Russia in Ukraine by beginning to arm Ukrainian forces, almost certainly the final red line crossed convincing Moscow to launch its Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. It was also during the first Trump administration that the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, paving the way for the subsequent Biden administration to station intermediate-range missiles in Europe pointed at Russia.
As the first Trump administration egregiously violated campaign promises of ending US involvement abroad, many Trump supporters resorted to a number of excuses including President Trump’s “inexperience,” suggesting he may not have known who Pompeo, Bolton, or Haley actually were and that during a second administration his cabinet would act upon lessons learned.
Restocking the Swamp…
Fast-forward to today, the incoming Trump administration had temporarily bolstered that hope – that these lessons were indeed learned – by announcing Bolton, Pompeo and Haley would play no role in the incoming administration.
This was short-lived, however, as it was subsequently announced that the next national security adviser would likely be Mike Waltz, the ideological twin of John Bolton. Elsie Stafanik was announced as US ambassador to the UN, the ideological twin of Nikki Haley. And both Marco Rubio and Richard Grenell are being considered as the possible incoming US Secretary of State, men whose views are indistinguishable from former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – or US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken under the Biden administration for that matter.
All of President-elect Trump’s considerations and appointments are enthusiastic neocons and war hawks who have spent their careers advocating war abroad, particularly against Russia, China, and Iran, but also Libya, Syria, Venezuela, and many other nations. Stafanik is listed as an “expert” at the US National Endowment for Democracy, a neocon directed organization involved in political interference worldwide, including in Ukraine in 2014, beginning what has now evolved into Washington’s failing proxy war with Russia.
While some may claim the incoming Trump administration’s neocon and war hawk picks represent a “bait and switch,” in reality the Trump administration’s inclusion of J.D. Vance as vice president pick was – up front – an open declaration that war and warmongering would continue abroad, just not in Ukraine.
Newsweek in its article, “JD Vance Tells Tim Dillon US Needs Weapons To Fight China, Not Russia,” made it clear that “stability in the Indo-Pacific and supporting Taiwan should be a higher priority for the U.S. than military aid to Ukraine.”
President-elect Trump’s close association with and appointment of neocons and war hawks involved in the very policies he ran on opposing represents a repeat of the first Trump administration’s seamless continuation of US foreign policy, regardless of appealing rhetoric suggesting otherwise.
Pausing Ukraine to Accelerate War Elsewhere…
It may seem paradoxical, then, that the incoming Trump administration seems determined to end the conflict in Ukraine. Rather than any sort of political transition in the US, this represents more of a transition of priorities among America’s unelected special interests driving US foreign policy, regardless of who occupies the White House or controls the US Congress.
The US proxy war in Ukraine, a war the first Trump administration played an equal role in precipitating, by all accounts, has run its course. The goal of “extending Russia” at the expense of Ukraine has been achieved to the fullest extent possible. With US stockpiles exhausted and escalation requiring what is left of US military power being reserved for a larger and more dangerous war with either Iran and/or China, Washington’s choice is to either double-down on Ukraine or pivot toward Iran and/or China before the windows of opportunity for success amid these two potential conflicts closes for good.
The incoming Trump administration is lined with neocons and war hawks who have openly promoted the arming of the US-installed separatist regime on Taiwan in a bid to eventually carve Taiwan off from China permanently. This is despite the US State Department officially not supporting Taiwan independence and agreeing bilaterally with Beijing on a “one China” policy noting there is one China, Taiwan is part of China, and there is only one recognized government of China, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing.
As part of preparing for this conflict, the US has expanded its military presence in the Asia-Pacific spanning the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, and will undoubtedly continue during the second Trump administration made up of the most vocal proponents of this policy.
This process also involves creating conflict between the Philippines and China, currently the Philippines’ largest trade partner and until recently an important infrastructure partner, to create a pretext for an expanding US military footprint upon the former US colony and Southeast Asian nation. This allows the US to further surround China and a possible conflict zone around its island province of Taiwan with nearby US forces.
While the political “right” in the United States depicted the Biden administration as “soft” on China, it was under the Biden administration that an intensive reorganization of US military forces took place specifically to prepare for war with China.
This included the reorganization of the US Marine Corps into a highly mobile anti-shipping missile force, and the US Air Force’s adoption of its Agile Combat Employment (ACE) strategy dispersing US air bases across the Asia-Pacific to make it more difficult for China to retaliate against US installations should war begin.
These transformed US military forces will now be fully in place as an openly hostile anti-China administration takes power, just as the Trump administration helped set the stage for the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine commencing during the subsequent Biden administration.
What is abundantly clear is that US foreign policy is not determined by US elections. Elections merely determine the rhetoric used to sell what is otherwise a continuous agenda to the public, the faces presenting that rhetoric, and the excuses for why US foreign policy continuously fails to change despite elections.
For the rest of the globe facing four more years of US hostility worldwide, it must continue working on a multipolar international order that creates the conditions within which US aggression abroad is simply impossible. This can and is being achieved by using financial, economic, diplomatic, and military means to constrain US coercion – be it sanctions or military force, proxy or direct intervention – through financial and economic alternatives beyond the reach of US sanctions and powerful military deterrence. This leaves US special interests with only one option – to work constructively with a world it can no longer impose itself upon.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
