Atlanticism

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin

Best explantion I have read about the fuckheads who were ruining the world up until a few weeks ago:

Trump v. Atlanticism: Understanding Russiagate by one legged parrot

Introduction: 

Last month, President Trump bypassed Europe, NATO, and the entire postwar order and opened a conversation directly with Russia. In doing so, he defied Washington’s established foreign policy paradigm that had been in place since the 1940s.

“They” always feared he would go there, and “they” tried to prevent it by a never-ending string of investigations, prosecutions, and impeachments.

The “they” Trump defied is called on X “the Deep State” which is a colorful nickname. It has a real name, too: “Atlanticism,” after the Atlantic Charter entered by Roosevelt and Churchill. It is the “A” in “North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”

In high-toned treatises, Atlanticism described a form of empire built upon American hegemony. The moral justification was ostensibly based on American benevolence, a projection of virtue that relied on propaganda. It’s closest historical analog, though, was colonialism.

The lands occupied by Atlanticist ideology traded in American currency. NATO existed to deter the Soviet threat. But it was also an occupying army. There were not colonial governments. There was, instead, strict control of information, puppet governments, and election interference.

When Trump questioned the continuing need for NATO in 2016, institutions with a financial stake in Atlanticism performed a Cold War soft power operation against him. Western intelligence agencies mobilized to connect Trump to Russia, leading to a series of political dirty tricks.

Russiagate was not merely bureaucratic haplessness masquerading as foreign intrigue. It was, instead, the sclerotic postwar spy apparatus targeting an American presidential candidate and then president.

In 2024, Trump won the presidency again, in part out of the electorate’s disgust over the dirty tricks. Upon returning to the Oval Office, he deliberately refocused foreign policy on the American hemisphere.

He Truth Socialed aggressively about Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and Panama, sending his new Secretary of State on his first diplomatic mission to negotiate better rates on passage through the Panama Canal after threatening to take it back by force.

President Trump was steering the ship of state back to the foreign policy of The Monroe Doctrine, in which America’s focus was on problems in its own hemisphere – and not on “democracy” movements abroad.

Last paragraph: 

Trump’s first term was crippled by Atlanticism. In his second term, he has turned spectacularly on the beast, driving a stake into its still beating heart. The true facts of Russiagate are especially important as the Trump administration proceeds to transform the foreign policy establishment. The above telling is the full story of the worst scandal in American political history.

I like this quote: 

I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics - Donald Trump

The whole story is 9K words long, so it might take a while to read the whole thing, but it's totally worth it. He mentions everyone who was involved on both sides. Marco Rubio was on the wrong side then but evidently realized the error of his ways has come around and is now working with Trump as Secretary of State. I pulled all the names mentioned in the story and put them in a spreadsheet along with links to associated Wikipedia articles. There are 64 people on the list. Took me all morning to put it together.

I asked ChapGPT to do this simple chore for me but it refused. Useless twerp.

Update June 2025. I made a copy of the original article in case it disappears.

Deja Vu All Over Again

American Chinook Helicopter landing at U. S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan

Nothing has changed. Ever since the end of WW2, American foreign policy has been like a rampaging bull in a China shop. Now that I think about it, that was our policy during WW2 as well. It worked so well that we won the war. It worked so well, we just kept on doing the same thing. Have we learned anything? Nah, I expect we'll be up to our ears in another quagmire in short order.

P. S. Title history.

Via Liberal Guy

One Thing Leads To Another

The Police - Wrapped Around Your Finger (video of Stewart Copeland)
I'm watching The Grand Tour (Season 2, Episode 8) and Jeremy (more power) Clarkson has a couple of guests who are drummers, one of whom is Stewart Copeland. Who's that you ask? Wikipedia knows all:

Stewart Armstrong Copeland (born July 16, 1952) is an American musician and composer. He is known as the former drummer for the Anglo-American rock band The Police as well as for his film and video game soundtracks. Copeland has also written various pieces of music for ballet, opera and orchestra. According to MusicRadar, Copeland's "distinctive drum sound and uniqueness of style has made him one of the most popular drummers to ever get behind a drumset".

Okay, he is an accomplished musician. But then we make a turn to the dark side: his dad was a spy:

Miles Axe Copeland Jr. (July 16, 1916 – January 14, 1991) was an American musician, businessman, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer best known for his close personal relationship with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his "controversial books on intelligence," including

• The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics (1969) and
• The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative (1989).

In his memoirs, Copeland recounted his involvement in numerous covert operations, including the March 1949 Syrian coup d'état and the 1953 Iranian coup d'état. A conservative influenced by the ideas of James Burnham, Copeland was associated with the American political magazine National Review. In a 1986 Rolling Stone interview, he stated: "Unlike The New York Times, Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, my complaint has been that the CIA isn't overthrowing enough anti-American governments or assassinating enough anti-American leaders, but I guess I'm getting old."

James Burnham is kind of interesting:

James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was an American philosopher and political theorist. A radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement, in later years Burnham left Marxism and turned to the political Right, serving as a public intellectual of the American conservative movement, and producing the work for which he is best known, The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham is also remembered as an editor and a regular contributor to America's leading conservative publication, National Review, on a variety of topics.

First he was on the left, and then he was on the right, which reminds me of the wheel of political affilication:

The Political Circle

The page where I found this diagram points to story about the The Oregon Constitutional Convention wherein Corporations are discussed. It all seems to be tied together.

The book titles are linked to Amazon. All of the books are expensive, like $50 or more.

More Foreign Policy

Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro at the Summit of the Americas last spring (Pete Souza / White House)

. . . a president who has grown steadily more fatalistic about the constraints on America’s ability to direct global events . . . his growing sense that larger forces—the riptide of tribal feeling in a world that should have already shed its atavism; the resilience of small men who rule large countries in ways contrary to their own best interests; the persistence of fear as a governing human emotion—frequently conspire against the best of America’s intentions. But he also has come to learn, he told me, that very little is accomplished in international affairs without U.S. leadership. - Jeffery Goldberg's story in The Atlantic

Scowcroft awardScowcroft was the inspiration and namesake for a special presidential award begun under the George H. W. Bush administration. According to Robert Gates, the award is given to the official "who most ostentatiously falls asleep in a meeting with the president." According to Gates, the president "evaluated candidates on three criteria. First, duration — how long did they sleep? Second, the depth of the sleep. Snoring always got you extra points. And third, the quality of recovery. Did one just quietly open one's eyes and return to the meeting, or did you jolt awake and maybe spill something hot in the process?" According to Bush himself, the award "gives extra points for he/she who totally craters, eyes tightly closed, in the midst of meetings, but in fairness a lot of credit is given for sleeping soundly while all about you are doing their thing." ^]Scowcroft had gained a reputation for doing such things to the extent that it became a running gag. ^- Wikipedia

Brent Scowcroft KBE was the United States National Security Advisor under U.S. Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush.

Think Tanks

Brookings Institution

The Atlantic has a long story about Obama and foreign policy, wherein I came across this comment:

A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”

Which makes me wonder just how many think tanks are on Massachusetts Avenue, which leads to the State Department's list of think tanks, which leads to my plotting their locations. About half of them show up on this small piece of real estate.

Washington DC Think Tanks

The story in The Atlantic includes a discussion of Syria's use of chemical weapons. The state department's  list of 59 foreign policy outfits includes the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, which was disbanded in 2007.