Arguments for a different foreign policy will surely get a renewed hearing
Andrew Murray
Donald Trump’s election represents many things – most of them somewhere between unpleasant and alarming – but one is a massive rebuke to the “national-security” and foreign policy establishment in the USA, which near-unanimously backed Clinton. It is not surprising that the team behind four disastrous wars this century should back Clinton.
Her positions on Eastern Europe/Nato, Syria and Palestine placed her squarely in the neo-con consensus and to the right of Obama. Trump’s language on the other hand, has been different – against foreign wars and looking to build a better relationship with Russia, alongside a lot of bellicose “America first” rhetoric.
What he will do, in practice is all-but unfathomable, although his more conventionally hard-right vice-president Mike Pence may well play a Cheney-type role in pushing a US imperial agenda. The anti-war movement needs to be warning of these dangers, and demanding that Britain disengage from its uncritical support for the USA at a moment when it is lead by a politician who most people in this country find deeply obnoxious and disturbing – even more than they did George Bush, I would guess.
Arguments for a different foreign policy will surely get a renewed hearing. It would also seem that the voting patterns in the Presidential election reinforce the growing estrangement of the working-class internationally from a left politics (using the term very broadly) which can talk of social liberalism but has nothing to say about the realities of class power and its consequences.
Surely this coal mine needs no more canaries?
Source: Counterfire
