“With promises to ‘drain the swamp!’ still ringing in our ears, we have watched Trump appoint nothing but Goldman banksters, Soros stooges, neocon war hawks and police state zealots to head his cabinet. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we examine the swamp-dwellers with which Trump has filled his swamp.”
The U.S. government will transfer $38 billion in “foreign aid” to the accounts of U.S. weapons manufacturers to further arm the Israeli government against the U.S.’s enemies in the Middle East.
At the same time, the UN has enacted a resolution calling on Israel to cease occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, rejecting pressure from incoming U.S. president Donald Trump to instead increase support for the Israeli state’s foreign policy.
Notably, the U.S. government contributes 22% of the UN’s budget, the largest share by far of any member state.
Could anyone be blamed for viewing US foreign policy as symptomatic of madness?
“This new economic forecast presents big challenges to Saudi Arabia’s standing regionally. Its sponsorship of rebel groups in Syria and its military adventurism in Yemen have seen massive increases in its military budget, which has risen by 19 percent a year since 2011. The conflict in Yemen has moved from a rapid response by the Gulf States to a protracted conflict that seems like there is no political or military solution in sight. As Saudi Arabia becomes further bogged down in the conflict, the economic and social costs will likely increase, placing more pressure on the House of Al-Saud.”
http://globalriskinsights.com/2016/01/saudi-arabia-budget-2016-domestic-and-regional-effects/
“The real threat to peace circa 1990 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly in the night. In fact, during the past 25 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914. The modern Warfare State has been the incubator of American imperialism since the Cold War, and is now proving itself utterly invulnerable to fiscal containment, even in the face of a $19 trillion national debt. So 101 years after the Christmas truces along the Western Front there is still no peace on earth.”
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/christmas-2015-why-there-is-no-peace-on-earth/
“A number of foreign liberals—Lithuanian, Russian, Slovakian, Swedish, for instance—have criticized American libertarians for advocating a non-interventionist foreign policy. They’ve instead argued that a ‘compelling’ argument can be made for a ‘globalist’ strategy. Actually, that’s true only so long as one isn’t paying the cost of the foreign policy. As foreigners typically do not for American intervention, unless it is directed at them. Nothing in liberal philosophy requires residents of the globe’s most powerful ‘liberal’ nation to bankrupt themselves, sacrifice their liberty, and court national destruction to try to remake the earth.”
http://www.cato.org/blog/when-foreign-liberals-are-generous-american-lives-money-0
“After the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, interventionists maintained that U.S. troops are over there killing the terrorists before they can come over here and kill us. That notion obviously hasn’t worked out extremely well. Today Americans are more scared of the terrorists than ever before. The war on terrorism racket is so ingenious that regardless of what happens, the U.S. national-security state benefits from it. That is, if there were no more terrorist attacks, interventionists would say, ‘We’ve got to stay the course because it’s working.’ But if there were more terrorist attacks, interventionists would say, ‘The danger is bigger than ever. We’ve got to stay the course until we kill them all.'”
http://fff.org/2015/12/15/noninterventionism-cure-americas-foreign-policy-woes/
“Netanyahu and his government were engaged in an all-out campaign to torpedo the nuclear agreement with Iran, and that effort wasn’t limited to using their American fifth column to put pressure on Congress and the Obama administration. Israeli intelligence planted malware in the hotel computers where US negotiators were staying during the negotiations in Switzerland: they intercepted highly sensitive inside information on the talks, and leaked it. Did they leak to members of Congress opposed to the Iran deal? It no doubt occurred to the US intelligence community to ask this question, and answering it was a matter of national security.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/12/31/mossad-caucus-exposed/
“If the U.S. government has forced the American people to support useful dictators, why is it trying to overthrow Syria’s brutal president, Bashar al-Assad, whose enemies — Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria) and the Islamic State (the ambitious al-Qaeda offshoot) — are also self-proclaimed enemies of America? Instead of discussion we get a parade of retired generals and CIA analysts, along with terrorism ‘experts,’ who insist that to defeat the Islamic State the U.S. government must end the Syrian civil war by ousting Assad. All this adds up to an American, Saudi, Turkish, and Israeli preference for violent Sunni jihadists.”
https://sheldon.liberty.me/why-assad-isnt-our-son-of-a-bitch/
“Aside from the glaring demographic homogeneity — all middle-aged-or-older white people who have spent their careers in corporatized Washington establishments — there is a suffocating ideological and viewpoint homogeneity on this panel as well, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. All of the panelists, for instance, were vocal, aggressive advocates of the invasion of Iraq (as were all three GOP presidential candidates featured on this morning’s show).”
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/29/what-debate-means-on-face-the-nation/
“The day before Netanyahu’s meeting at the White House, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, published a commentary on CNN’s website urging Obama to consider Israeli sovereignty over the Golan. Neither Oren nor presumably Netanyahu highlighted another reason why Israel might be anxious to gain US approval of its effective annexation of the Golan in 1981, when it passed the Golan Heights Law extending Israeli law and administration throughout the territory, in violation of international law. Last month Afek, an Israeli subsidiary of Genie Energy, a US oil company, announced that it had found considerable reserves of oil under the Golan.”
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-stakes-claim-golan-after-oil-find-913890970