U.S. foreign policy, RIP

 By Spy Diplomatic Correspondent Tess Harding

People may find this hard to believe, but for the 80 years ending in 2025, the United States had a foreign policy. 

After the Second World War and until 1990, the foreign policy was structured around the belief that the Soviet Union must be thwarted to the extent possible without blowing up the world.

This fundamental principle had a number of consequences.  Some aged pretty well, like supporting Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe while using massive US military might to backstop Europe via the NATO alliance.  It also led to a surprisingly lenient occupation of Japan, which created a powerful prosperous peaceful nation anchoring Northeast Asia.

Other times, the theology of a monolithic Communist enemy led us into disaster.  This led to a multi-decade (failed) effort to isolate what American white men of both political parties chose to call “Communist China.”

This demonization led directly to the pointless slaughter of Vietnam, on the (ludicrous) grounds that the indigenous Vietnam anti-colonial revolution was nothing more than an instrument of Chinese aggression. 

In 1969, the crooked Republican bastard who led the effort to demonize Democrats as “soft on China” decided to turn on a dime and embrace China as a counterweight to the USSR.  This obviously sound policy helped fracture the supposed Red Alliance, weaken the USSR, and build China up as an economic and political superpower.  Maybe that's bad and good. 

After the USSR collapsed of its own internal decay in 1990, U.S. foreign policy was guided by a more nuanced constellation of principles, from human rights to development to containing Iran to free trade.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

After 9/11 U.S. foreign policy pivoted again, inventing a Global War on Terrorism and then using that intellectual structure to justify attacking a country that had nothing to do with terrorist attacks in America.  Thank you George W. Bush and Dead-Eye Cheney. 

But however wise or idiotic the foreign policy was, there was an apparatus for creating and legitimating it, and various mechanisms, sometimes loud and angry, for providing some democratic oversight over it.

That ended on January 20, 2025, thanks to 77 million white and Hispanic voters.

Architects of US foreign policy: then...

Now we have no rational foreign policy and our political branches are incapable of producing one. The fact that one marginally qualified individual serves as both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser (not to mention, as noted political scientist Stephen Colbert pointed out, while moonlighting as the National Archivist) is an admission that the process of formulating and executing foreign policy has collapsed.

What's replaced it?

There was a lot of supposedly hilarity generated by Rubio's bold path-breaking decision to return to use of Times New Roman in State Department documents (replacing the woke lefty Calibri), but that may have been among the more rational foreign affairs decisions made by the new regime.

It is now clear that U.S. foreign policy is really nothing more than the caprice, often corrupt and sadistic, of a demented vicious bigot who also seems to be acting as a Russian agent when he is not lusting after an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize as if it were another underaged pageant contestant.

We'll start in Europe, where the 75 year old alliance with European democracies has been destroyed and replaced by insult comedy and toadying to Russian aggression.  Why?  Who knows?

Speculation has it that the Mad King is either being blackmailed or paid off by Putin or both.  The evidence goes back to 2016, when Russian agent and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, then not in jail, first excised support for Ukraine from the Republican platform and then shared polling data with Russian agents.  There is but one reason why anyone would do that: so that Russian disinformation campaigners could use the data to target critical swing voters with lies about Trump's opponent.  It worked, and the Tangerine-Faced Traitor has, unusually for him, been grateful ever since.

To serve his boss Putin, the Mad King has bounced around various ridiculous surrender demands on the brave Ukrainians who have resisted Russian aggression for over a decade.  To the defeatists courtiers trying to justify Trump's insane, unworkable, and evil efforts to give in to Russian aggression on the grounds that a nation of 44 million cannot stand up to a much larger power, we remind them that once upon a time another nation of about that size stood up to a larger power most effectively.  It was called Vietnam. 

In the Middle East, where to be fair U.S. foreign policy has long been a confusing and often disastrous muddle, the Mad King launched a war on Iran apparently because he thought that Bibi Netanyahu was getting too much press coverage for Israel's own bombing campaign and then almost immediately stopped it, having achieved nothing except subverting careful diplomatic efforts to restrain the Iranian nuclear program (unleashed by the Mad King's disastrous first term decision to break the Iran nuclear agreement).

We give Trump a shred of credit for leaning on Bibi to halt his savage assault on Gaza in exchange for the release of all hostages.  But the Mad King's inability to focus and lack of competent diplomats have led to an uneasy non-peace in Gaza, continuing suffering for the millions living in tents in the cold winter, and no realistic plan to resolve the conflict by installing a responsible Palestinian government.

Instead, the Mad King with the support of his fellow despots has installed himself as the King of Peace, putting himself over another well-known Middle Eastern figure known as the Prince of Peace.  

The only other aspect of the Mad King's approach to the Middle East is to enrich himself and his miserable mouth-breathing family by trading U.S. national interests to local despots in exchange for naming rights to unbuilt resorts.  His unqualified stupid son-in-law is busily trousering millions from these desert plutocrats in exchange for influence over U.S. foreign policy, and, more recently, over what's left of the U.S. free media. 

Just today, The Guardian reported that the usual finaglers are trying to get rich with nonsensical plans to imprison Gazans:

The Guardian has learned that two former Doge officials – once assigned to Elon Musk’s effort to slash government and fire federal workers in bulk – are leading the group’s conversations about humanitarian assistance and the postwar reconstruction of Gaza. They have circulated slide decks with detailed plans for logistics operations, including prices, financial projections and the locations of potential warehouses.

US companies are gathering for the spoils. One contender, the Guardian has learned, is Gothams LLC, a politically connected contractor that won a $33m contract to help run the notorious south Florida detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”, where immigrants are housed in tents and trailers.

Documents and three people familiar with the plans say that the contractor had an “inside track” to secure what might be the most lucrative contract it’s ever had. But in an interview on Friday, after questions from the Guardian, the company’s founder, Matt Michelsen, said he had reconsidered his company’s participation and was pulling out, citing security concerns.   

That's not foreign policy; that's bank robbery.

In Asia, US foreign policy has been reduced to try to bulldoze China and when that doesn't work, give up.  Rinse, repeat.

...and now

But we save the hottest mess for last: Latin America.  Here we are told there is a foreign policy, in which “America First” (which means isolationism, an idiotic failed policy but at least a policy) now means Americas First, in which the United States gets to lord it over the entire Western Hemisphere (so isolationism plus its opposite).

In practice this has meant trying to bully powerful states, like Brazil, and when Brazil tells us to pound sand, pretend we were just joking.  It has also meant a campaign of high seas murder in violation of U.S. and international law.  We are told that this program of summary execution is aimed at Venezuela, although no one has yet explained how murdering mariners in the Pacific targets Venezuela, which, as many people (not working for the Mad King) know, has no access to the Pacific. 

The violent unprovoked attacks on boats that may or may not be involved in smuggling Don Jr.'s favorite marching powder, like the bombing of Iran, also satisfy the Mad King's sadistic lust for inflicting agonizing violence against those who cannot effectively resist. 

Lest you think that the regime has not put forward any document setting out its foreign policy, last week it released a lengthy statement of U.S. policy toward Europe.  The normally staid New York Times described it:

The Trump administration has not exactly kept its low regard for Europe secret. President Trump has long portrayed European allies as freeloaders that fail to pay enough for their own security and argued that the European Union was “formed to screw the United States.”

Now, that hostility is official White House policy.

Hostility to our most important allies is not really a policy.  It's more like a feeling, inspired by the Mad King's hatred and contempt of democratic states and his corresponding embrace of cruel dictators like his buddy Vladimir Putin. 

Another way to describe it, according to foreign affairs commentator Anne Appelbaum, is a “long suicide note.” 

In practice this so-called policy expresses itself in support for racist neo-Nazi European political parties and adopting Russian policies for ratifying its violent illegal aggression against Ukraine as if they were American.  The abandonment of Ukraine not only sucks up to Putin, it provides (once again) corrupt business opportunities to the Mad King's bumbling plutocrat courtiers, who have replaced professional diplomats in vital negotiations. 

Once we had a foreign policy.  Now we have a Mad King ruling by whim and indulging his insatiable greed and sadism to the detriment of American national interests.

Just a reminder: in this insanity he supported by every Republican and meaningfully opposed by none.

And in media outlets supposedly devoted to careful analysis of inter alia foreign policy you get trollbait like this:

It certainly is working for Vladimir Putin. 

Another reminder: all this is being done in our name.  As with so much of the Mad King's assault on democracy and civilization, silence equals consent.