In These New Times

Cailean Bochanan

1st March, 2021

Trump’s triumphant return at the CPAC can only accentuate the despair felt in Atlanticist circles, especially those emanating from London. After 4 years trying to tame the beast he is back and Biden’s election turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory. In fact, Trump looks in a stronger position than ever, continuing to highlight the blatant electoral fraud which denied him victory ( with three dissenters on the Supreme Court openly sympathetic), pushing for quicker reopening of schools (with falling “cases” due to a suspiciously timed intervention from the WHO curbing PCR testing excesses), a plank of Biden’s programme, lamenting Biden’s failure to withdraw the military from the Middle East and escoriating the treacherous republican leadership to the delight of the crowds, a Republican leadership which now has no choice but to endorse the man they queued up to stab on Capitol Hill. There is nothing here to suggest that the greatly feared Democratic Party dictatorship has become a realty. Trump has not been driven from political life, his supporters haven’t been hunted down, the far-left, rather than being empowered, are in despair at having been sold down the river so soon. The drive to open up the economy as the so-called covid epidemic tails off is becoming irresistible.

While Trump exudes strength, Biden exudes weakness. True, he has presided over a piece of gratuitous aggression, a missile attack on Syria, a traditional blooding of the new incumbent, but it’s questionable whether he was even informed, let alone consulted about it. His Vice-President Kamala Harris certainly wasn’t and complained vociferously. In office, but not in power. Extraordinarily, leading members of the Democratic Party want to take away Biden’s power to press the nuclear button. I would suggest that is symptomatic of a situation where power is escaping their hands. They want to control the president but someone else is already doing that. Quite explicitly, in fact. Shortly before Biden’s inauguration the Joints Chief’s of Staff made the unprecedented announcement that they would guarantee the Biden succession. So he owes his position to them in a sort of managed transition. Is this a soft military regime being signalled to us also through the occupation of Washington DC by the National Guard, at Trump’s command remember! General Michael Flynn spoke openly of a military intervention but not quite in this way. The fact that he is not facing treason charges, which undoubtedly would have been the first move of a Democratic single party dictatorship following on a coup by electoral fraud, confirms that the coup hasn’t happened. The appointment of his brother to head Asia Command confirms it doubly. It is as if MacBeth, after killing Duncan, continued to encounter his ghost in the corridors of the castle, failed to kill Banquo and the rest of the Duncan supporters, promoted some of them and even allowed them to continue to propagate conspiracy theories about Duncan’s death.

If we are in a period of military stewardship of the United States what would their goal be? To keep the states unified, in the first instance. They would seek to prevent the slide into civil war so confidently predicted in certain circles. Blocking normal politics would then be an essential step since normal politics is driven by irreconcilable extremes. Having a puppet Democratic president is then ideal to take the wind out of the sails of the loony left whose identity nonsense if incompatible in principle with any stable body politic. They do indeed seem to have gone quiet and the Trots are in despair, always a reliable marker. As WSWS puts it : “Biden and the Democratic Party leadership have strengthened Trump and his fellow Republican plotters.”

They would also have grasped by now that China has emerged victorious from Coronawars and that the USA better open up quickly before even more damage has been done to its standing in the world. They would also seek to salvage something of the middle class as some kind of stable base to the political system.

They would also seek to strengthen the military, of course, through the time honoured method of generating tension against imaginary enemies. At the same time the realists would be in charge as they have tended to be since the Iraq debacle and the overthrow of Rumsfeld, checking any temptation towards reckless conflict. This, of course, is contradictory but the trend towards non-engagement by US troops spread out around the world will likely continue. Any realist would also realise that US levels of defence spending are incompatible with diminished US economic power and the looming financial blowout. Perhaps, bringing the troops home and curbing the Military/Industrial Complex might be the twin planks of future Trump foreign policy. Meanwhile, London will continue its amateur propaganda campaign to bounce the USA into conflict with the evil Russians

The great losers in these developments are precisely these the warmongers and neo-imperialists in London. As I have argued within the anti-lockdown movement, the immediate goal of lockdown is not a NWO, as advocated by Klaus Schwab, already a figure of fun and general derision, but the NOW, the New Order of the West, a remilitarised, streamlined West under the leadership of a re-empowered NATO and Johnson’s D-10, a grandiose Freedom Alliance of the Western democracies with the Eastern democracies, Australia, Japan, South Korea, India underpinned by the strict denial of basic democratic rights under the pretext of an imaginary epidemic. Significantly, the ten leading countries in terms of covid “cases” are members of NATO. By Covid will they stand or fall. They will fall.

Trump has not drained the swamp but neither has the swamp drained Trump. The USA is in an unstable equilibrium that has to resolve itself either through its refoundation as a nation state or a disastrous, renewed bid for global hegemony.