The Ugly American

Donald Trump sits in the White House refusing to face reality as power ebbs away to Joe Biden, the victor in last week’s US presidential elections. Biden’s victory may not be a great advance for the American people – he is after-all a trusted pair of hands who can be relied on to do the bidding of the American establishment – but it certainly was a defeat for Trump.
    Implausibly depicting the Democrats as dangerous “reds” and playing the race card Trump pulled out all the stops in the last days of his campaign to get the Republican vote out. And though he succeeded in mobilising record numbers of supporters throughout the country the Republicans were overwhelmed by even larger numbers who hate Trump and all that he stands for.
    Trump’s apologists in Europe are mainly found amongst the ranks of the far-right along those deluded “left” poseurs who defend him on the grounds that he, unlike his predecessors, didn’t start any new wars during his four years in the White House. This is, in fact, true. What is equally true is that Trump did nothing to halt the conflicts he inherited from the Obama administration.
    American troops still occupy parts of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Trump tightened the blockade against the Islamic Republic of Iran and restored many of the sanctions that Barack Obama lifted when he established diplomatic relations with Cuba. His summit talks with Democratic Korean leader Kim Jong Un may have slightly reduced tension on the Korean peninsula but in the long term that achieved nothing because Trump was unwilling or unable to deliver on any of the steps towards normalisation that he promised to take at these high-level meetings.
     Trump sanctioned the assassination of General Soleimani, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander killed in a targeted US drone strike in January and threw his weight behind a bogus Middle East peace plan to allow Israel to illegally annex Arab Jerusalem and other parts of the occupied West Bank coveted by the Zionists.
     While no-one expects much from Biden we can expect some change of direction next year. Some fear that Biden will continue where Obama left off in Syria and Ukraine. But though the shadowy figures within the US that the Americans call the “deep state” will undoubtedly be clamouring for more “regime change” Biden’s first priority must be to tackle the coronavirus plague that is sweeping unchecked throughout the USA.
    The president-elect says another of his priorities will be to revive the Iran nuclear deal
and return to the other international treaties that Trump recklessly tore up during his term of office. If he does that will go some way to easing tension in the Middle East.
    No one is going to miss Trump in the region apart from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader who was backed to the hilt by the Trump administration, and a handful of feudal Arab oil princes who will in any case do the bidding of US imperialism regardless of who sits in the Oval Office at any given time.
    But there may be trouble ahead for Boris Johnson. Biden’s already warned Johnson that he can kiss goodbye to his “Treaty of Washington” trade deal if Brexit undermines the Northern Ireland peace process and the Remainers are hoping to exploit the new situation to prolong the Brexit transition period or even replace Johnson with a more Europhile leader.
It doesn’t augur well for Johnson in the next few months.

Johnson’s dilemma

The Prime Minister’s ministerial purge that led to the resignation of the Chancellor, Sajid Javid, and the appointment of a special adviser that was speedily withdrawn following cross-party protests over his crackpot racist views, demonstrate the inherent instability of the Johnson administration.

The Tory Daily Mail tells us that “half the Cabinet” feel unable to work with Dominic Cummings, the aide who pulls the strings behind the throne of the Johnson government, who many believe isn’t even a paid-up member of the Conservative Party. It doesn’t augur well for the future of the current Tory leader, despite the sweeping victory at the December general election that ended Tory dependence on the votes of the sectarian bigots in northern Ireland.

But Johnson has little to fear in the short term. His Tory Europhile rivals were kicked out of the party in September whilst Labour politicians, who should be exploiting the disarray in the Tory ranks, are instead falling over themselves to distance themselves from Corbynism and pledge their loyalty to Zionism in the Labour leadership contest now taking place.

Although Brexit seems done and dusted, future trading relations with the European Union (EU) have still to be thrashed out with Brussels. A substantial section of the ruling class is still opposed to leaving the EU and although they have clearly lost their grip on the Tory Party, they still can count on the Liberal Democrats, Scottish nationalists and most of the Parliamentary Labour Party to argue their case.

They will look to Sir Keir Starmer, the front-runner in the Labour leadership race who is the unrepentant architect of Labour’s volte face over Brexit that cost them the election, and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, to continue to promote the alleged benefits of EU membership.

Last week Sadiq Khan called on Brussels to offer free movement for Britons through “associate citizenship”, as the “next best thing” to membership. Khan said that re-joining the EU was not foreseeable in the “short to medium term” but associate citizenship of the bloc could be one way to “make the best of Brexit”. Although “associate membership” may be theoretically feasible within current EU rules, it clearly is incompatible with British law as it stands at the moment. But Khan’s motive, like Starmer’s justification for Labour’s Brexit U-turn, is simply to keep the issue on the political agenda.

Trump trumped

US imperialism’s position in the Middle East is collapsing like a house of cards following the Syrian army’s sweeping victories over the sectarian terror gangs in the Turkish occupied Idlib enclave and the collapse of the so-called “deal of the century”, that the Americans supposed could resolve the Palestine issue by giving the Zionists everything they want.

Trump’s ‘deal’ leaves Arab Jerusalem and large swathes of occupied Palestinian West Bank territory under Israeli occupation in exchange for some worthless bits of desert along the frontier with Egypt that the USA claims could be developed into industrial zones. The Palestinians get nothing apart from a puppet state, much like those set up by the Nazis in German-occupied Europe, that would be totally dependent on Israel and financial support that the Americans expect the feudal Arab oil princes to provide.

Communists call for the immediate and unconditional end to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip and for a comprehensive peace treaty, based on past United Nations resolutions, to end the Middle East conflict.

United Nations resolutions provided the basis for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. First of all, Israel must withdraw totally from all the occupied territories seized in 1967, including Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. The Palestinians must be allowed to establish a state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian refugees whose homes are now in Israel must be allowed to return or, if they so wish, be paid appropriate compensation in exchange. All states in the region, including Israel, should have internationally agreed and recognised frontiers guaranteed by all the Great Powers.

Ropes of Sand

While Donald Trump lords it in London posing as a great statesman in front of the Queen and Mrs May his dream of winning a Nobel Peace Prize is fading fast in the face of mounting Arab resistance to what the chief American warlord still calls the “deal of the century”.

            Trump really shouldn’t have bothered in the first place if the details of the American “peace plan” that have appeared in the Israeli press are true. His “deal” gives the Zionists everything they want and more. The Palestinians get nothing apart from some monetary compensation funded by the feudal Arab oil sheikhs as part of their effort to build an anti-Iranian front in the Middle East. While some of the princes of oil, including the disgraced Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, were prepared to support Trump’s surrender plan others are clearly having second thoughts.

The Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the refugee camps are boycotting the talks. Few others have shown any enthusiasm for the “Peace to Prosperity” conference in Bahrain which the Americans hoped would kick off the first stage of the Trump “deal” in June. Now even the future direction of the major beneficiary, Israel, has been thrown into doubt as Israel gears up for a second general election after the first one undermined Benyamin Netanyahu’s efforts to form a new coalition in April.

Trump’s unilateral recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights was designed to boost Netanyahu’s chances in the spring election. In actual fact the American card counted for little in elections that revolved around the turf war between Netanyahu’s Likud bloc and the new Blue and White front led by General Benny Gantz.  

 “The citizens of Israel know we are going to elections only because Bibi [Netanyahu] wants to save himself,” Gantz says alluding to Netanyahu’s apparent efforts to scupper pending graft indictments against him. “Netanyahu could have returned the mandate to the president, and we would have formed a government. Why is he not doing that?”

            The Blue and Whites, who are named after the colours of the Israeli flag, style themselves as “centrists” and “liberals”. In fact their platform differs little from Likud’s long-standing right-wing Zionist agenda. Whether a Gantz-led coalition would continue where Netanyahu left off is anyone’s guess.

The social-democratic parties which once dominated Israeli politics are now amongst the also-rans. For the first time Labour and Meretz were pipped at the polls by the communists who have always campaigned for the restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Now the communist-led Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) and three Israeli Arab parties are planning to reunite and run once again, like in 2015, as a single slate in the forthcoming elections scheduled in September.

            Israeli politicians across spectrum are now back on the campaign trail for an election whose outcome no-one can predict. One thing’s for sure though – Trump’s “deal of the century” is going nowhere.