Mike Morell on Trump Withdrawal from Paris Climate Agreement

Michael Morell, fmr. deputy director of the CIA, discusses President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

 I look at this from a national security perspective:
  1. The climate will be worse than it would have been
    1. Preservation of the nation
      1. nuclear war with Russia
      2. naturally occurring biological agent
      3. climate change is that serious over the long term
    2. Specific national security implications
      1. water shortages: conflicts over water.
      2. instability caused by growing deserts
      3. food scarcity
    3. US leadership: worse than not enforcing red line in Syria
      1. This undermine allies’s faith in US: Angela Merkel sees greater prospects with China than US
      2. Thought US did well to reassure Middle East Allies in Middle East (vis-a-vis Iran)
      3. Failure to reassure Europe over Article 5.  They feel like America doesn’t have their back
      4. George Shultz: the US helped to forge
        1. Say what you mean: have clearly articulated policty
        2. Do what you say: draw red line, if you forge treaty, don’t abandon it
      5. I’ve been an analyst of other countries.  Now I’m an analyst of my own country:
        1. Nationalists: Bannon, etc: very narrowly focused
        2. Globalists: McMaster, Mattis, Pompeo, Tillperson, Dan Coats, Gary Cohn: traditional Republican foreign policy
        3. Jared Kushner: not ideological, not long-term interests of US, looking out for Reputation of Family: Barak Obama of Administration
        4. President Trump: view was framed on campaign trail, what resonated with people: if there is a threat to US, we will crush it.  Otherwise we will withdraw.

Middle East

Is it wise to make Iran an enemy?  Yes, Iran is a threat to strategic interests

  1. They conduct terror through Kuds force conducts terrorism against Jews, and neighbors
  2. Support terror
  3. Support Shia insurgent groups to overthrow Sunni regimes
  4. It is policy to destroy Israel
  5. It is policy to dominate region
  6. We need to push back agains bad behavior, but give them an out if they want to change.
  7. We need to reassure the allies
  8. We need to talk to our allies about democracy privately
  9. John Kerry says if we do more sanctions, they walk
    1. then that is them walking away from the table
    2. we should leave the door open to them
    3. they have to pay a price for their bad behavior, and I think that happens through sanctions

What is the significance of the James Comey firing and testimony

  1. Did any Trump associates conspire with Russians, help choose material, timing for maximal impacy
  2. Did Russian organized crime help launder money.  Donald Jr. said that money was flowing in from Russia.  Did they do due diligence to know where the money was coming from?
  3. Is there anyone in the Trump administration, particularly with classified info, with inappropriate relationship with Russian Intelligence
  4. Did the president obstruct justice by
    1. asking for loyalty
    2. asking to let Flynn issue go
    3. firing Comey
  5. Jared Kushner meeting with ambassador, asking for backchannel
    1. facts in public domain may not be accurate
      1. Russians talking to each other about meeting
      2. Officials leaking to reporters
      3. Reporters reporting on this: this is not a great chain of evidence
    2. This isn’t just about Kushner, Michael Flynn was there and would have known better than to ask for secure communications
    3. Its less the desire to set up a channel, supposedly to talk to Russian military about Syria.  Why the secrecy?  Maybe they were worried about leaks.
    4. Was this Flynn and Kushner’s acting on their own, or did Trump, Pence have permission?
    5. I’m more interested in what they were doing before the election than after.
    6. The facts as we know them do not indicate that there was something criminal.
    7. Hillary asked about whether anyone in the Trump camp helped weaponize stolen data and what fake news to promote.

Middle East: Syria: we’re entering a new phase

All of our focus is on the defeat of ISIS, but there is a growing risk of conflict between:  US-Iran and US-Russia

Civil War:

  1. Assad-Opposition: as they are winning, they are getting closer to US allies
  2. US & Allies – ISIS:
    1. US: struck Syrian government forces
    2. Russia struck US allies getting closer to their base

Foreign Policy: 2 Kinds of Problems

There are 2 kinds of problems:

  1. Easy to figure out, but difficult politically
  2. No one has a good solution:
    1. North Korea
    2. Syria
    3. Pakistan

Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Century, Gideon Rose of Foreign Affairs Magazine, and David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee with an update on America’s place in the world.

Foreign Policy is like 19th century — mercantilistic economic component with gunboat diplomacy military aspect (11:30 min)
Trump see the US as a victim of the international order — economic and political malfeasance. Trump sees the US as a victim of humiliation, not an anchor of the global order.

The “soft coup” under way in Washington

If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama’s hit squad­-John Brennan,

Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information.

Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud.

.. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening.

Namely, the election by the unwashed masses of an outsider and insurrectionist who could not be counted upon to serve as a “trusty” for the status quo; and whose naïve but correct instinct to seek a rapprochement with Russia was a mortal threat to the very modus operandi of the Imperial City.

.. After all, it didn’t take a Kremlinologist from the old Soviet days to figure out that Putin did not favor Clinton, who had likened him to Hitler. And that he welcomed Trump, who had correctly said NATO was obsolete, that he didn’t want to give lethal aid to the Ukrainians, and had expressed a desire to make a deal with Putin on Syria and numerous other areas of unnecessary confrontation.

.. Given that he is up against a Deep State/Dem/Neocon/ mainstream media prosecution, the Donald has no chance of survival short of an aggressive offensive of the type described above.

But that’s not happening because the man is clueless about what he is doing in the White House and is being advised by a cacophonous coterie of amateurs and nincompoops. So he has no action plan except to impulsively reach for his Twitter account.

.. “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt”

So alone with his Twitter account, clueless advisors and pulsating rage, the Donald is instead laying the groundwork for his own demise. Were this not the White House, it would normally be the point at which they send in the men in white coats with a straight jacket.

.. Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today’s surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn’t exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going­-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to.

.. To wit, Mueller’s #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department’s Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919.

.. Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney’s silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America.

.. But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community’s flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad.

.. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base.

.. in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda­-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran.

.. the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington­–the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs­-was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine’s constitutionally elected President and Russian ally.

.. the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea inexorably followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia and its leader.

.. Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere­ – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII­ – there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated “Yats”, a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising.

.. Russia moved to protect its legitimate interests in its own backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil war in Ukraine, including protecting its 200-year old Naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. The War Party simply characterized these actions falsely as acts of aggression by a potential sacker of the peace and territorial integrity of its European neighbors.

U.S. Plans to Supply Antitank Weapons to Kurdish Fighters in Syria

The U.S. military is preparing to provide Kurdish forces in Syria with antitank weapons in their fight against Islamic State, U.S. officials said Monday, a move that would allow them to target armored Islamic State trucks used in suicide bombings but could also give them the ability to strike Turkish tanks operating in Syria.

.. Mr. Erdogan has said he still hopes to convince Mr. Trump to reverse course and stop plans to arm the YPG. But the U.S. military is already moving to supply the group with more firepower, including machine guns and other weapons, as well as ammunition.

.. To address Turkish objections, it is looking at providing the Kurdish forces with an unguided version of an antitank missile instead of the more sophisticated guided kinds

.. But even that has been the subject of debate. There are some in the administration who are worried about providing the YPG with any kind of antitank weapons

.. Until now, the U.S. has restricted arms supplies to the Kurds as a way to assuage Turkish concerns that the weapons could be smuggled into Turkey and used against its own citizens and soldiers.

.. The YPG is the largest force in the Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of about 50,000 Kurdish and Arab fighters who work with U.S. special operations forces.