In his first appearance on the world stage since re-election on November 5th, President-elect Donald Trump was greeted amid Presidential pomp at the Elysses Palace in Paris for the reopening of 900 year old Notre Dame Cathedral since its 2019 fire. Prior to the ceremony, Trump was greeted by a weary French President Emmanuel Macron who had recently survived a no-confidence vote.
Macron was accompanied by the obsequious (no longer) Ukraine President Zolodymyr Zelensky who tagged along, hoping for an opportunity. Trump stepped into the void of American governance for the last four years while Biden was asleep in Angola.
It is said the meeting lasted thirty five minutes and no doubt focused on maintaining US support for the Ukraine war as well as Trump’s past opposition to NATO while Zelensky’s continued pillaging of American coffers for billions worth of weapons and funds has cultivated strong opposition in the US.
At the same time as the Trump – Zelensky meeting, the Biden Administration was granting another $1 Billion in military aid to Ukraine prior to Trump being inaugurated on January 20th.
Trump later met with William, Prince of Wales at the British Embassy to renew their ‘special relationship.”
Trump used the opportunity at Notre Dame which was attended by world leaders and dignitaries, to establish himself as a dominant force internationally. In response to the current crisis in Syria, Trump issued a non intervention statement regarding the escalation on that war-torn country which concluded with
“The United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved. We should not send one penny to Damascus or any other party involved. We cannot let the warmongers in the White House succeed in starting WW III.”
While US intervention in Syria may have begun as early as a 2006 memorandum of leaked diplomatic cables which confirmed more than a decade of the US attempting to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. As the long standing 2011 ‘civil’ war escalated with US sponsored ‘militants,’ by 2015, President Obama, with the support and encouragement of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ordered air strikes and special op troops into Syria.
As a presidential candidate in 2016, HRC promised to conduct a no-fly zone over Syria.
Currently, the Islamist takeover of Syria gains traction as Assad and his family have apparently ‘fled’ to Russia. Trump may have forgotten his 2019 policy of keeping US troops in east Syria to protect US extraction of Syrian oil. “I left troops only for the oil.”
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President-elect Trump has been unnecessarily assertive with anti-BRICS statements that threaten the alliance if it dares undermine the ailing US dollar. It seems apparent that the President does not yet have a working understanding of the international crisis that motivated BRICS in direct response to the US Empire’s sanctions.
Those financial penalties are targeted by the US Treasury Department against multiple nations as the hegemon’s war-like bullying and menacing other nations into submittal or face unmitigated sanctions in reprisal for exercising their prerogatives as independent sovereignties. Somehow Trump has apparently missed a staff briefing that BRICS is protecting itself from the Empire’s overreach rather than setting itself up as a militaristic rival.
President-elect Trump recently caught international attention with his recent announcement of a 100 per cent tariff against BRICS nations if they undermine the US Dollar’s dominant position as the world reserve currency. The President had already announced a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada and a 10% tariff on China regarding illegal immigration and drug trafficking in the US.
Rather than threaten BRICS with an unreasonable economic policy which is exactly one of the reasons BRICS was initiated; it would behoove the Trump Administration to better understand that BRICS formed specifically to avoid the US pervasive use of economic sanctions against the global southern bloc of economically developing nations.
The nine member nations that formed BRICS as an alternative to the US hegemon’s widespread economic penalties against the southern multipolar world blames US foreign policy for the last several decades. Putin’s recent assertion of the US ‘weaponizing’ the dollar has led the BRICS to increase its membership; now accounting for 45% of the world’s population, 45% of global oil production which will not be sold on the dollar, development of the BRICS New Development Bank as well as a challenge to the western bank payment SWIFT system as BRICS continues to focus on diplomacy, trade and economic growth.
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In total admission that the Ukraine war is not winnable against Russia, NATO and its proponents of the Ukraine war must alter Trump’s current thinking and convince him that a hybrid ceasefire will bring peace.
Trump may be attempting to go one-better as his campaign promise that he would stop the Ukraine war his first day in office has not materialized. The President-elect walked into more of a challenge than he anticipated.
Since his meeting in Paris with Macron and Zelensky, Trump has called for an immediate ceasefire in order to conduct peace negotiations. Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Zelenskyy and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness.” Since when has Zelensky been willing to make a deal and ‘stop the madness’ that he himself has continued to create? It does not take a state department professional to recognize that Trump is being played.
What is unclear is whether there will be an exchange of weaponry during the ceasefire as had been previously suggested by Trump’s top Ukraine negotiator, retired Lt. General Keith Kellogg.
On November 22, NATO Chief Mark Rutte visited Trump in Mar a Lago to talk ‘global security issues’ and warn of a ‘dire threat’ facing NATO if a ‘bad’ peace deal is forced on Ukraine. In continuing NATO’s propaganda campaign against Trump, Rutte also met with Rep. Mike Waltz who Trump selected as his national security adviser as well as other Trump staff. The message, however, was not about peace but rather how to continue NATO support, American spending and American weapons to the Ukraine conflict.
Following the Rutte meeting, Trump responded by appointing retired Lt. General Keith Kellogg to be his special envoy and chief negotiator to bring peace to that war torn country which may not have sent a peace message to Putin. A former chief of staff on Trump’s National Security Council during his first term, Kellogg also served as national security advisor to vice president Mike Pence and has no diplomatic experience.
In a previous DOD policy paper, Kellogg along with former Trump aide Fred Fleitz, recommended a ceasefire that would continue military aid to Ukraine during a kind of ‘pause’ that would temporarily ‘freeze’ the conflict while military preparation continued nonstop. It was further suggested that Ukraine could obtain additional US weapons if it entered into peace talks while delaying Ukraine’s NATO membership was also a non-starter.
Putin’s advisor Constantin Malofeyev predicted Kellogg’s plan was doomed to fail if it did not include broader talks on Moscow’s security concerns with the need for a constructive long term peace plan and some general agreement about a new world order.
According to the Russians, negotiations about the future of Europe and the world must include the wars in the Middle East and its burgeoning alliance with China. Malofeyev further suggested that Russia would require Washington to reverse its decision on the use of advanced long range weapons and remove Zelensky, who is not the legal President of Ukraine, from office.
In addition, Malofeyev said the world is on the brink of WW III when US and UK -made long range missiles were fired into Russian territory. Putin’s response was an experimental nuclear capable missile strike.
Spoken like a true neocon, Kellogg responded that Trump should “call Russia’s bluff in response to Putin recent ballistic missile strike on Ukraine. Putin used the nuclear capable missile for psychological reasons. Because he is kind of saying to the west, see what I can do. Rather than back off, the US and western allies should ‘lean in’ because Putin will not start a nuclear war in Europe.”
The prospect of an escalated Ukraine war leaves the essential unanswered question: Can NATO survive without the US?
It might be assumed that two of Trump’s favorite war hawks, Sen. Lindsay Graham and Secretary of State appointee Marco Rubio, both neocon cohorts, may have had a hand in selecting Kellogg or that Trump is allowing warmonger hooks to be deeply embedded. Both are hardly representative of the America First peaceniks who can be counted on to tout NATO in its quest to bring war to Russia.
Zelensky ended on ironic twist that the war could be ended with NATO membership for Ukraine; and that is what started the conflict with Russia.
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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC.
She is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Xinhua/Ting Shen
