Trump isn’t a principled “anti-imperialist” in a left-wing sense—he’s more of an instinctual America first isolationist. But regardless of his motives and despite his inconsistencies, more than any recent president he sought to dismantle America’s informal global empire./1
There are plenty of counter-examples that can be adduced—the Suleimani assassination, arming Ukraine, etc—but what’s indisputable is he did a wide array of things that absolutely mortified the foreign-policy and national security establishment. Parenti summarizes them below./2
America’s ruling class benefits from the complex web of imperial arrangements in a variety of ways. Trump’s cavalier vandalism of this system, as opposed to the delicate accommodation every other recent president has made to it, was seen as a genuine threat for good reason./3
The new feeding frenzy should be a reminder that the “media are always eager to make the public hate Trump but can’t tell you the real reason why, because doing so would require acknowledging the realities of the American empire.”/4 compactmag.com
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