Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Wednesday, 25 July 2018

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au

On Russia, Trump confronts same obstacle as JFK—the Anglo-American war faction

US President Donald Trump last week defied 18 months of coordinated intelligence community and media assault to initiate his policy of normalising relations with Russia, by meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. This issue, above all others, has driven the attacks on his presidency.

In May 2017, American historian Anton Chaitkin shed historical light on this defining aspect of Trump’s presidency in a paper that draws out the parallels between Trump’s approach to Russia and that of his predecessor John F. Kennedy towards the then-Soviet Union, and how JFK had to fight against similar entrenched opposition from the Anglo-American permanent military/intelligence apparatus. Click here to read: “The Coup, Then and Now—the enemies of humanity try to give Trump the JFK treatment”.

Who doesn’t want cooperation between the USA and Russia?

On matters of substance, as opposed to scandals over porn stars and the like, the most extreme vitriol at Trump has been over Russia and related foreign policy issues, including his condemnation of the invasion of Iraq and the policy of regime change, and his criticism of NATO. Aside from Ron Paul, Trump is the only Republican candidate for president to have denounced the claims of British and US intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as deliberate lies.

From the beginning of his campaign, it was clear that Trump’s stated views on these matters represented a serious threat to Anglo-American geopolitical strategy, especially in the hot spots of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Except very few expected Trump to win.

The first to take Trump seriously, well before his election, were those most threatened by his strategic policies, namely the British establishment. The pre-emptive operations of British intelligence against candidate Trump, from even before he secured the nomination as Republican Party candidate in July 2016, are now a matter of record. British intelligence:

planted UK-based MI6 (and CIA) agent Stefan Halper in the Trump campaign to be an informant;
made the first claim, via their junior partners¹ in Australia, that Russia had “hacked” Hillary Clinton’s email, the intelligence for which came from a curious operation involving Australian High Commissioner and former foreign minister Alexander Downer, an MI6 asset, that targeted minor Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos in London in May 2016;
fabricated the salacious dossier on Trump and Russia using “ex”-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, which became the basis for the FBI opening an investigation on alleged Russian meddling, while high-level UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office operative Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, peddled the dossier to senior Republican Party politician and virulent Russophobe Senator John McCain.

These actions by British intelligence manufactured the Russia hysteria, which politicised US intelligence officials then turned into a full-blown witch hunt that has served to de-legitimise Trump’s victory, and shape the domestic political environment in the USA to make cooperation between Trump and Putin very difficult—as witnessed since the Helsinki meeting.

The JFK precedent

British interference in the US-Russia relationship did not start with the Trump campaign, however. It actually started at the end of WWII when, facing the end of their Empire, the British elite embarked on a strategy to maintain geostrategic influence by forging a “special relationship” with the United States; future prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1944 described Britain’s plans for the relationship as “British brains, American brawn”. The strategy hinged upon turning the Soviet Union, which had been an ally in WWII and decisive in defeating Hitler, into a mortal enemy. Franklin Roosevelt had been determined to maintain good relations with the Soviet Union, but under the influence of Winston Churchill his successor Harry Truman led the USA into the Cold War, which Churchill effectively declared in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Truman’s home town of Fulton, Missouri in 1946. The British demonisation of the Soviet Union was such that Churchill even proposed a pre-emptive all-out war on their recent ally against fascism, called Operation Unthinkable.

By the time of JFK, Britain’s strategy was fully entrenched, consolidated through close military and intelligence ties and the NATO alliance. Outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 expressed alarm at the growing power of the “military-industrial complex” that had built up under the pretext of the Cold War, but John F. Kennedy was the first president to challenge it. Anton Chaitkin details in “The Coup, then and now” how JFK had in common with Trump a desire to cooperate with the Soviet Union to scale back the arms race and reduce the danger of nuclear war. The US military and intelligence figures who opposed Kennedy were those with the deepest ties to the British establishment, including CIA director Allen Dulles, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, who in 1961 proposed, like Churchill, a pre-emptive attack on the USSR, but with nuclear weapons. JFK stared them down to avert a nuclear war over the Cuban Missile Crisis, but his assassination in 1963 consolidated the United States under this Anglo-American war faction.

Wolfowitz Doctrine

Today, this war faction continues to operate, through the US and British neoconservatives and so-called liberal interventionists, and the Anglo-American intelligence community, including its Australian, Canadian and New Zealand satellites which operate under the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance. With the end of the Cold War and therefore the Russia “threat” upon which hinged the US-UK special relationship, Anglo-American strategy took the form of the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine, named after neocon Paul Wolfowitz, that US foreign policy would be geared to stop the rise of any rival power. In other words, there would be a sole, Anglo-American superpower, and Russia would never be allowed to rise again, nor would China’s rise be tolerated.

Therein lay the seeds of the conflict today. The Anglo-Americans moved to seize political and economic control of Russia, through brutal neoliberal economic reforms that Thatcherites in London boasted of directing². The shock therapy reforms plundered the Russian economy and people, triggering a population collapse while massively profiting London and Wall Street interests and their Russian partners among the so-called oligarchs. When Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin—who for most of his presidency had been a US puppet and whose 1996 election the US boasted of fixing, on the cover of Time magazine no less (so much for election interference)—the domestic political backlash to the suffering that Russians had endured in the 1990s drove Putin to try to break the Anglo-American control of the economy and assert Russia’s national interests, including by standing up to the massive eastward expansion of NATO. Thereafter Anglo-American policy has been to cut Russia down to size, through encirclement by NATO and regime-change wars against Russia’s allies such as Syria; targeting it with ballistic missile defence installations that weaken its nuclear deterrent; and through economic warfare in the form of crippling sanctions.

The problem for the Anglo-American elite is that this policy has blown up in their own faces:

the neoliberal economic agenda that was ascendant in the early 1990s to the point that neocon fantasist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “The End of History”—that the liberal free market system would reign supreme for all time—drove the world into a series of financial disasters culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, sparking a global voter revolt against free trade, deregulation, privatisation and the other tenets of neoliberalism;
the regime-change wars starting with Iraq, which have cost dearly in blood and treasure and fanned the spread of international terrorism, have been exposed as based on lies, destroying the public’s trust in the intelligence agencies and ruling institutions;
the hostility against Russia that reached the point of a near-total breakdown in communications under Barack Obama, unprecedented even at the height of the Cold War, prompted many experts and senior statesmen, including the late Malcolm Fraser, to again warn of the spectre of a danger that should have disappeared with the Cold War—thermonuclear world war.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election on a platform of ending regime change, improving relations with Russia, ending free trade, and restoring the Glass-Steagall separation of banks from speculation, proves how badly these policies have backfired. As does Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the leadership of a UK Labour Party once fully controlled by the Anglo-American war faction through Tony Blair. In many respects, Trump and Corbyn couldn’t be more different, but they share policies that make them deadly threats to the Anglo-American world order.

For the British elite to maintain the “special relationship” and preserve the Anglo-American faction’s global domination under their Wolfowitz Doctrine of a sole world superpower, their challenge is no longer just containing Russia or China, but destroying the democratic political insurgency in their own nations. The intelligence agencies and corporate media have attempted to do precisely that, through their relentless, hysterical attacks on both Trump and Corbyn, which reach a deranged fever-pitch when it comes to anything to do with Russia. For instance, the British government and media accused Corbyn of being a Russian agent for requesting evidence that Russia was responsible for poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal; and former CIA director John Brennan on the day of the Helsinki meeting with Putin accused Trump of the capital offence of “treason”, meaning that the President of the United States should be executed as a traitor.

There is a far better alternative to the current world order that is defined by a declining Anglo-American empire trying to maintain its position as the sole superpower. That is for the three great powers, the United States, Russia and China, to collaborate on economic development on the model that China has employed to raise 700 million people out of poverty, and which is also responsible for the development of countries like the USA and Australia—massive public investment in infrastructure. Such a collaboration would draw in India and other nations keen for economic development, and generate economic growth that benefits the entire world. To achieve this new order, however, JFK’s fight against the Anglo-American war faction, which continues today, must be won.

Click here to read Anton Chaitkin’s “The Coup, then and now”.

1. Australia’s security agencies ASIO and ASIS are functionally branches of their British counterparts MI5 and SIS (MI6); according to investigative reporters Des Ball and Jeffrey Richelson in their 1985 book The Ties That Bind, “The relationship between ASIS and the SIS is so close that there has never been any need for written agreements or a formal exchange of liaison personnel. It is thus not surprising that ASIS officers continue to call the London headquarters of the SIS the ‘Head Office’ and the Melbourne headquarters of ASIS called itself the ‘Main Office’.” As Australia’s longest serving foreign minister, Alexander Downer was the formal boss of ASIS for 11 years, before going on to other MI6-connected jobs.

2. Margaret Thatcher’s mentor, Lord Ralph Harris of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society and London’s Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), boasted in a 1996 interview that “our men” in Moscow were running the reform agenda.

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