‘Deep Politics’ and Supranational Aspects of the Trump Era

Every American president is covertly backed by a consortium of “deep political” factions and interest groups. These groups invariably wind up stacking the administrations they help parlay into power with members and associates of their clique. This factional quarreling and proxy activity is usually largely confined to the domestic sphere and in the United States almost always at its core runs along the lines of fundamental foreign policy differences. On the one hand, a liberal-internationalist-“globalist” wing supports multilateral foreign policy (the United Nations), typically restrains from interventionist misadventures (instead preferring to utilize soft power ) and generally opposes increases in defense spending. On the other hand, a militaristic conservative-ultranationalist wing advocates unilateral foreign policy, is highly supportive of military intervention/rollback (hard power) and is fanatically in favor of increased defense spending and “national security” measures. Both of these viewpoints exist in both American political parties and along a gradation. The most important takeaway from this is that literally not a single American president has ever in any way been a “political outsider”. They virtually always have clandestine and/or open ties to foreign policy interest groups and think tank networks. From a deep political standpoint, domestic and economic policy is almost always an accessory to be used in the furtherance of some kind of foreign agenda.

What’s special about the 2016 election and the Trump apparatus is the extensive involvement of foreign groups (namely Russia, Israel and the Gulf States) that further complicates an analysis of the political circles involved. This article will examine not only the domestic covert politics behind the Trump presidency but also the numerous foreign reciprocities that are apparently present.

The Hard-Right National Security Establishment

Most of my research on Trump, his entourage and his benefactors up until this point has revolved around their deep-seated ties to the primarily US-based right-leaning ultranationalist national security establishment centered around the Pentagon (and in particular its internal advisory bodies), conservative elements in the CIA and militaristic national security-boosting think tanks and foreign policy interest groups such as the Center for Security Policy, American Security Council , Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Jamestown Foundation, American Foreign Policy Council, Henry Jackson Society, Hudson Institute, Association of Former Intelligence Officers/OSS Society, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) before it was disbanded and last but not least, the Committee on the Present Danger (probably the most elite).

Founded in 1950 and populated by CIA men, top generals, and researchers/scientists around the RAND Corp. and its wartime predecessors, the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) was along with the American Security Council (the originator of the “peace through strength” doctrine) one of the original hard-right militarist foreign policy pressure groups and military-industrial complex lobbying organizations. [0] The CPD — which remains dormant for extended periods of time before springing into action again — and American Security Council were immensely influential in establishing long-term US national security protocols and successful in lobbying for a post-World War II remilitarization and troop deployment that helped initiate the Cold War ( NSC 68 ), for more aggressively articulating the Soviet threat and pulling away from detente, containment and the “mutually assured destruction”-arms control doctrine in favor of rollback and arms build-up in the ’70s and ’80s (CIA’s Team B ) and for a number of actions taken by the Bush administration in the name of the “War on Terror” and 9/11, including initiating the Iraq War, identifying the “Axis of Evil” and seeding calls for regime change in Iran, a thread that carries on into the present and is quite obviously the conservative national security apparatus’s current favored undertaking. [1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1978 the ASCF created the “National Strategy for Peace through Strength,�? and has been cited numerous times with providing the overall foreign affairs theme for the administration of former President Ronald Reagan. President Reagan personally gave the ASCF credit for this on several occasions and said America won the Cold War based upon the ASCF’s “National Strategy for Peace through Strength�? doctrine. [5]

Beginning in the ’70s (right around the time CIA-Mossad liaison James Angleton joined the American Security Council) this network shed its original anti-Zionist, “old right” baggage and has morphed into today’s “neoconservatives” and “Scoop Jackson Democrats” by joining with — and becoming almost indistinguishable from — the “pro-Israel” lobby which exists to promote the militaristic right-wing Likud elements in Israel by identifying Israeli national security issues with American national security and at this point constitutes a fifth column within the US establishment. Organizations representing this Israeli (Likud) fifth column include AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security of America), CPMAJO (Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations) and WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), the Israel lobby’s primary liaison with the Eastern Establishment.

After the Cold War ended, much of the American Security Council’s funding dried up and it was replaced by its spiritual and intellectual successors — stereotypically “neoconservative” think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy, American Foreign Policy Council and Foundation for Defense of Democracies, all of which are as militaristic as its predecessors and overlap considerably with the Israel lobby and pro-Israel interest groups. [6] Several key members of this group today such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Edward Luttwak, Frank Gaffney, Douglas Feith and Elliott Abrams sprang out of the offices of anti-communist, pro-Zionist Cold Warrior senator and ultra-right CIA asset Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who ran a small army of nuclear alarmists and anti-Kissinger “detente-wreckers” during the Cold War. Perle and Wolfowitz were dispatched to Jackson’s office by proto-neoconservative RAND nuclear strategist, Albert Wohlstetter. [7] [8]

Indeed, a large number of those in this conservative faction appears to simply be high-level informal liaisons between the United States and hard-right Likud factions in Israel. Top neoconservative Richard Perle and his aide, Stephen Bryan, were actually caught passing classified information to Israel embassy officials while working for Henry Jackson in the ’70s. In 2004, the FBI was engaged in a frantic molehunt for a suspected Israeli spy in the Pentagon passing classified information on US deliberations on Iran to Israel who had close ties to Jewish neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. However, this is not to say that neoconservatism/hard-right national security is purely an Israeli or Jewish project. Virtually every hawkish policy coup involving Jewish neoconservatives (NSC 68, Team B, Reagan administration/”Star Wars”, Rumsfeld Commission, Iraq War, etc.) has been enabled and managed at the higher levels by non-Jewish, typically more moderate hawks/unilateralists such as George H.W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson, Bill Casey, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Carlucci, Cap Weinberger (ethnically half-Jewish, religiously Episcopalian), etc. All of these people know that the Likud interlopers like Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith are there, but never do anything about it because they’re protected — there has been deep national security state support for Israel since the days of James Jesus Angleton intrigue with the Mossad and Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Richard Helms giving Israel carte blanche to develop nukes, even going so far as to not even bother taking any action against Israel after it was caught stealing highly enriched uranium from NUMEC and smuggling it out of the country.

While many in conspiracy circles try to ascribe very abstruse, esoteric and sometimes almost occult-like or racial motives and beliefs to this war-hungry hard-right network, this is misguided. While certain bodies aligned with the American conservative defense establishment such as the hyper-shadowy, bizarre, extreme-right Le Cercle “black network” do have essentially unknowable motives, the foreign policy school of thought held by the hard-right faction in the United States (and Britain, to an extent) can be traced back to a school of thought in the development of systems analysis, operations research, applied science and war-gaming by the WWII-era Office of Scientific Research and Development and later the RAND Corp. under people like Albert Wohlstetter, Andrew Marshall (Office of Net Assessment), James Conant and Vannevar Bush (CPD & Raytheon). Author Craig Unger writes, “to join Team Wohlstetter, apparently, one had to embrace unquestioningly his worldviews, which eschewed old-fashioned intelligence as a basis for assessing the enemy’s intentions and military capabilities in favor of elaborate statistical models, probabilities, reasoning, systems analysis, and game theory developed at RAND … Even a small probability of vulnerability, or a potential future vulnerability, could be presented as a virtual state of emergency … If you look down the road and see a war with, say, China, twenty years off, go to war now.” [9] [10]

This fusion of highly rigorous and technically/mathematically-informed game theory and strategy with paranoid, survivalist, preemptive instincts (very present in Israel and in Zionist Jews such as Wohlstetter and his pupils Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz) seen in the CPD, American Security Council and similar hard right think tanks contrasts sharply with the realist- realpolitik- “geo-strategic”-“grand chessboard” worldview found in most (but certainly not all) Eastern Establishment types like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who constitute the core of liberal “realist” think tanks such as the CFR, Trilateral Commission, etc. The kernel of the rift that evolved between the anti-detente game theorists and the pro-detente “geo-strategists” during the Cold War was a game theoretic dispute over whether a nuclear conflict would consist of preemptive nuclear strikes on only military and nuclear installations (the scenario envisaged by the proto-neoconservatives) or of a tit-for-tat escalation precipitating retaliatory strikes on population centers (the “mutual assured destruction” scenario subscribed to by liberal “realists”).

Nuclear exchange payoff matrix

Most mainstream nuclear strategists theorized that nuclear stand-off was essentially an “ iterated prisoners dilemma ” in which both countries merely possessing even a small amount of thermonuclear weapons was sufficient for nuclear deterrence/”cooperative” stand-off and preventing the outbreak of thermonuclear war. This was the so-called “balance of terror”. On the other hand, nuclear strategists around the CPD and ASC (Wohlstetter in particular) believed, because of asymmetric capabilities and information between the US and USSR and many other granular technical and game theoretic considerations, that the payoffs involved in a nuclear exchange were unclear; that complete and utter annihilation of civilian population centers in both countries was not guaranteed and therefore a nuclear exchange was 1) “winnable” in some sense even though both sides would likely suffer major casualties (i.e., it may not be a mutual assured destruction/prisoners dilemma) and 2) actually much more likely than anyone would like to admit. Because of this, they vigorously, and in many cases successfully, advocated for the development of aggressive “second strike” capabilities, exotic space-based, other experimental and conventional missile defense systems and nuclear countermeasures in order to ensure effective deterrence and possibly enable a US first strike on the USSR that would not involve mutually assured destruction.

This kind of thinking permeates the neoconservative foreign policy establishment today even though the Soviet threat disappeared — they are basically transcendentally militaristic and still display the same preemptive first strike mentality in regards to “rogue” nuclear powers such as North Korea and possibly Iran (the “axis of evil”). They are intensely paranoid — they place zero trust in other countries (except for Israel and sometimes the UK), have no faith in diplomacy or multilateralism (usually when they conduct diplomacy it’s part of a trap) and have a strategy of minimizing downside risk, even if that risk is small and distant. They are constantly scanning the horizon for potential threats, real or imagined, to threats to US global domination (as well as Israeli regional domination) and developing weapons, technology and plans to combat those threats.

As a result, this American-Israeli hard-right/”neoconservative” national security apparatus is:

• Generally skeptical of the rules-based international order: multilateralism, international law and international diplomatic forums (particularly the United Nations) that facilitate cooperative strategies among world powers. Instead prefers unilateral/bilateral action and (wasteful) competitive strategies without regard for any kind of international or even transatlantic consensus. This applies to defense/foreign relations and often trade as well, which is itself closely related to the former. Tends to view international relations as a zero-sum game.
• Always promotes continual military/defense build-up and employing hard power (direct, aggressive and usually preemptive military and covert actions) and militaristic “peace through strength” strategies over soft power (diplomatic maneuvering, economic and cultural co-opting) strategies. This advocacy for military expansion is one of the main reasons it receives so much support from the defense industry and the “military-industrial complex”. Generally expansionist and interventionist. Pro-rollback, pro-first strike/preemption, pro-SDI/”Star Wars”. Anti-containment, anti-detente and anti-realist/ realpolitik.
• Typically prioritizes the US-Israeli special relationship over transatlantic (NATO) and other relations, or at least elevates it to the same level. Although, despite sometimes being skeptical of NATO as an organization, it generally promotes US-led NATO expansion in line with its expansionism.
• Has a penchant for using almost rogue-like American, pan-European and Israeli private intelligence/”parallel CIA” black networks to conduct covert operations in a manner both more deniable and more expedient than using official channels. Examples of these kinds of almost rogue-like private networks include Erik Prince’s Blackwater, BCCI, the Western Goals Foundation, Rupert Murdoch’s clandestine network , Ted Shackley’s renegade covert operations cliques ( Le Cercle , 6I, Safari Club, etc.) and a whole bevy of private Mossad/Shin Bet/IDF spin-offs.
• Because of its wide placement in the Pentagon-CIA-national security bureaucracy and ties to defense contractors, is deeply involved in “deep black”, usually unaccountable technical projects such as secret weapons systems, novel espionage technology and experimental energy sources. Large swaths of the Pentagon bureaucracy including the DIA, NRO and NSA are basically a permanent private playground for this group.
• Highly supportive of domestic “homeland security” measures such as blanket mass surveillance, militarization of law enforcement, etc.

How is this all relevant? Well, the Trump administration is not only connected to think tanks that purport these views, but also displays this kind of thinking in spades itself: aggressive increases in military expenditures, allowing the Pentagon to operate more independently from the rest of the executive, neutering the State Department (traditionally liberal-“globalist” territory), predominantly unilateral/bilateral foreign policy, diplomacy and trade, hawkish unilateral actions against China, floating the idea of a “Space Force” (which was a side project of Donald Rumsfeld & friends in the late ’90s and later incorporated into PNAC), advocacy for rollback and/or attacks on Iran tied in with the unilateral US dismantling of the Iran deal, the use of Erik Prince-associated and Israeli private intelligence networks, ambivalence if not outright hostility towards the UN, expansion of NATO into Montenegro, arming the Ukrainian government, etc.

Additionally, the above general foreign policy subscriptions manifest most visibly today in bizarre Islamophobic “counter-jihad” and “Axis of Evil” propaganda seen throughout the conservative and alternative media (replacing Cold War-era anti-Soviet propaganda) as well as support for military and/or covert actions against the current Iranian regime (a major theme in the Trump administration), which is seen as the principal regional threat to Israel and other US allies in the region such as Saudi Arabia. And these anti-Iranian aspirations are part of a wider scheme embraced initially by Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan (the Mossad operative who oversaw NUMEC and Jonathan Pollard) and backed by elements in the US and the ruling Likud political alliance in Israel to balkanize and destabilize the Middle East as a means of establishing “Greater Israel”. Iran-Contra, an operation run entirely out of the same hard-right circles within the US and Israeli national security establishments now backing Trump, was, in addition to being an anti-communist effort, a plot to destabilize Iran internally through arming and funding a moderate faction within Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime that supposedly sought rapprochement with the United States, a result that would have greatly benefited Israel as well.

The right-wing foreign policy-centered axis described above is attached domestically to domestic policy/politics, media and economics think tanks and interest groups like the Council for National Policy (CNP), Heritage Foundation, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Olin Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Mont Pelerin Society, etc. “Old right” John Birch-style Christian conservatives, mainline moderate Republicans, neoconservatives, newfangled “alt-right” types and even many libertarians are all represented in this. However, this more intellectual, “movement”-oriented domestic group that more or less hijacked the previously Eastern Establishment-dominated GOP in the ’60s and dragged it rightward never really existed as an independent entity, as throughout history it appears to have always ultimately been run and funded by higher-level CIA/military intelligence and foreign policy/defense-centered networks essentially as a media and financing arm to combat the Eastern Establishment-dominated legacy media and bankroll favored politicians. Same goes for the so-called “New Left”, which is alternatively financed by liberal CIA “globalist” establishment groups such as the Soros, Ford, Carnegie & Rockefeller Foundations.

Most of the above think tanks mentioned above (particularly the Heritage Foundation) are controlled and financed by the likes of Edwin Fuelner (ASC & Le Cercle) and wealthy legacy right-wing CIA financiers such as the Mellon-Scaife, DeVos, Bechtel, Coors, Hunt and Forbes families. The John Birch Society, World Anti Communist League and Liberty Lobby were completely controlled at the higher levels by American Security Council-tied CIA and military intelligence assets (Roy Cohn, John Rees, John Singlaub, Larry MacDonald, N.B. Hunt, etc.) primarily through the Western Goals Foundation , an intelligence clearinghouse for hard-right anti-communist operatives whose members were fed any intelligence they collected to the CIA, FBI and NSA and is widely believed to have received off-the-books CIA financing [11] [12]. Legendary conservative think tanker and intellectual William F. Buckley was recruited into the CIA by covert operations specialist E. Howard Hunt of Watergate infamy, who remained a confidante of Buckley’s until his death. [13]

Hunt, Buckley and others such as Rush Limbaugh, the John Birch Society, Ann Coulter, Ludwig von Mises, Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Newt Gingrich, David Horowitz, Mike Pence and Donald Trump would later be published and promoted by the CIA-financed Regnery Publishing company, owned by the Regnery family that was part of the American Security Council and the ASC-operated America First Committee. Today, William Regnery II is running Richard Spencer and the National Policy Institute from behind the scenes. [14]

On a related note, many alternative media characters and conspiracy promoters come from military intelligence in particular. This isn’t surprising given how the Department of Defense is so thoroughly infiltrated by hard-right extremists from the conservative defense establishment. Steve Bannon ( Breitbart ) and Jack Posobiec (pro-Trump Pizzagate promoter) both come from Naval intelligence. [15] [16] In fact, Bannon even served as “special assistant” to the Chief of Naval Operations in the Pentagon and, according to investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, was indirectly associated with a Costa Rica-based stock swindler and cocaine trafficker whose network included former CIA, US military intelligence and Genovese mafia members. [17] [18] Alex Jones, who hired a “former” employee of Erik Prince’s Blackwater as head of security at Infowars , admits that his family is tied in with the Texas CIA-oilman crowd and Army intelligence. [19] Pizzagate-promoter Mike Flynn comes out of the DIA, as does his collaborator and former aide at the NSC, Ezra Cohen-Watnick , a Zionist national security troll who assembled the dossier of classified files which showed that members of the Trump campaign had been swept up in US intelligence agencies’ monitoring of foreign individuals and which was later arranged by the Trump administration to be funneled to Trump surrogate, Devin Nunes.

Pictured: A sampling of some of the deranged, incoherent and often weirdly militaristic propaganda coming out of the ‘QAnon’ crowd. Just query any image search engine for ‘qanon’ and it will return literally hundreds of similar graphics. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that these are made by real people. Who knows, maybe they aren’t. After all, it is widely known that Pentagon contractors have developed software to manipulate social media and online discourse using both automated bots and actual people running sock puppet accounts to disseminate targeted propaganda.

Trump Ties To Conservative National Security

Principal members and key operatives within the American-Israeli right-wing national security combination include neoconservatives (both Republican and Democrat and many of whom were Cold Warriors), underhanded political and media operatives, GOP megadonor billionaires, CIA-Mossad assets and “national security”-boosters: James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Edwin Meese, Oliver North, Erik Prince, Joe Lieberman, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Stone, Paula Dobriansky, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer, Sheldon Adelson, Dick Cheney, Tom Barrack, Elliott Broidy, Roger Ailes (deceased), Michael Ledeen, the Mellon-Scaife family and the DeVos family — all of whom are inextricably linked to the Trump apparatus. Indeed, even the above-ground Trump administration is itself riddled with members and associates of this network — Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Bill Shine, Keith Kellogg, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and the disgraced Oliver North-like Michael Flynn, who was apparently run by ultra-connected neoconservative and CIA-Pentagon insider James Woolsey and appears to have been the most important pointman between the Trump camp, broader American ultranationalist faction and foreign bodies in Israel, Russia, Turkey & the Gulf States.

This same loose confederation – which can probably be described as a successor to the John Birch-American Security Council-Western Goals Foundation conspiracy and private intelligence network of the 50s through the early 80s sans its occasional anti-Semitic leanings – was also responsible for bolstering Ted Cruz (who very well may have been their first choice for president in 2016), Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, George Wallace, Ross Perot, Sarah Palin, Douglas MacArthur and, to a marginally lesser extent, George W. Bush and Bob Dole. The network can be credited almost exclusively for the creation and rise of conservative and hard-right media outlets such as Fox , Breitbart , Drudge , Newsmax , etc. as well as for much of the “ alternative media “, which has since the 90s been responsible for the emergence of a cottage industry of conjuring up cartoonish anti-Democrat, anti-liberal and often times Islamophobic conspiracy theories in line with the anti-UN, anti- liberal establishment rhetoric that originated with the “old right” John Birch Society, America First Committee, World Anti Communist League and Liberty Lobby.

Of particular interest is the neoconservative national security fraternity, a subset of the hard-right US-Israeli coalition described above. In its current iteration, almost all of the characters in this hawkish unilateralist faction were Reagan White House notables and somehow involved in Iran-Contra, pro-Iraq War influence operations, anti-Iran advocacy and the Project for a New American Century. And with the appointment of the rabidly anti-UN arch-unilateralist and the right-wing think tank network’s top State Dep’t/UN asset John Bolton — who ticks all of the above boxes — as National Security Advisor and the equally unsubtle anti-Iran hawk and unilateralist, Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, this ring is now nestled in the administration at the highest level and the current White House foreign policy leadership is among the most hawkish in modern history alongside the Bush II administration’s. Bolton, who was appointed Ambassador to the UN by the Bush II administration as a deliberate affront to the UN itself, openly advocates for preemptive military strikes and regime change operations against Iran and North Korea and was a major promoter of backing out the Iran deal. [20] Paula Dobriansky, a neoconservative Bush 43 State Dep’t official, right-wing think tanker (CSP & PNAC member) and daughter of anti-communist and American Security Council member Lev Dobriansky, will be joining Mike Pompeo as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. [21]

It was widely rumored in the “alternative” media that Bolton attempted to sabotage the North Korean “denuclearization” summit by making a reference to the “Libya model” for denuclearization (a reference to Gadaffi’s gruesome demise after entering into nuclear negotiations with the US) in a television appearance and then subsequently sidelined, but this isn’t true. Firstly, Bolton played an important behind the scenes advisory role in the Singapore summit and secondly, he was hired on as National Security Advisor after having gone on Fox News several times advocating for a diplomatic trap whereby North Korea would eventually and inevitably infract some aspect of the denuclearization agreement, potentially paving the way for the use of force. [22] [23] This suggests that the Libya model comment was likely an accurate representation of the Trump national security team’s strategy, though it certainly didn’t look good from a PR standpoint. As it turns out, the North Korea “deal” appears more and more to have been an elaborate PR stunt as opposed to a trap or a diplomatic achievement, as it has so far been utterly substance-free.

Perhaps the most unexpected character involved in this pro-Trump national security clique is James Woolsey, who served as the Trump campaign and transition team’s national security advisor. Woolsey is a neoconservative Democrat and former CIA director with a somewhat shrouded and under wraps past whose influence has been felt in every administration since Carter and has been an anchor of the neoconservative foreign policy wing for decades. He’s possibly the most widely influential and connected foreign policy and international relations personality living after Henry Kissinger and maybe one or two others such as George Schultz and Brent Scowcroft. Woolsey, who was highly involved in the SALT and START US-Soviet nuclear arms negotiations, is a member of seemingly almost every major foreign policy think tank/NGO and Pentagon-CIA advisory board and also serves in an advisory capacity to every major defense conglomerate and contractor in the United States. [24] [25] [26] Recently, he’s joined advisory boards of private equity companies that invest in high-tech companies with defense and intelligence applications.