By Wayne Allensworth
Read Part I: https://www.american-remnant.com/who-are-we-bombing-this-week-our-own-worst-enemy-part-i/
Trump has claimed that Venezuela was involved in rigging the 2020 election. But none of the American actors in that drama have been targeted. This country needs voter ID and other measures to prevent election fraud, but bombing Venezuela won’t help matters. If it’s interference in U.S. politics that angers you, I can think of a small Middle Eastern state whose leader has boasted about his country’s control of the US. That leader has enormous influence over Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in typical Trumpian juvenile fashion, said that Maduro had effed around and found out what happens if you mess with the U.S. When is he going to say the same thing to Benjamin Netanyahu? Maybe Netanyahu would say FAFO to him as well.
Netanyahu was in Mar-a-Lago recently. He wants regime change in Tehran. Undoubtedly supported by the CIA, the street protests, in Washington’s eyes, are possibly part of a regime-change gambit. They bought off the Venezuelan elite and hope to buy off a portion of the Iranian elite. Netanyahu wants more U.S. strikes on Iran, and Trump said he would “knock the hell out of Tehran” if need be. Larry Johnson (See Part I) suggests that the U.S. may seize Venezuelan oil partly to offset supplies lost if the Strait of Hormuz is blocked in the Persian Gulf in the event of an attack on Iran. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians launched a drone strike on a Putin residence in the Novgorod region of Russia. The Russians are fully aware that the strike used U.S. targeting capabilities. Putin was not there, but the attack was a clear message that Trump, who wanted the Nobel Peace Prize (!), is unhappy that Putin will not agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine. The Russians will continue the war until Putin thinks its strategic objectives have been accomplished in a conflict that was provoked by the West. Regime change in Moscow is apparently still on the agenda in Washington. The threat of World War III is still extant. And one of the main reasons your observer voted for Trump in the first place — heading off a potential war with Russia — has evaporated.
Trump launched DOGE supposedly to drastically cut spending and help restructure the permanent bureaucracy. There was even talk of moving some departments out of D.C. to diminish the concentration of power in the Swamp. That’s all over. We hear nothing about either. Kash Patel at the FBI and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence were supposed to dismantle the Deep State. It’s not happening and won’t happen. It won’t happen because Trump’s deep attachment to hegemonic superpower status as the key to “greatness” requires that the Deep State not only remain intact but also to grow. The Deep State and the military-Industrial complex are closely aligned, and Pentagon spending has only increased under Trump. As for our catastrophic national debt, Trump may see seizing Venezuela’s oil reserves as a means of pumping up an economy that is structurally wobbly. That’s the attitude of a robber baron, displaying the usual short-sightedness we have grown to expect from our political leaders. We are heading off an economic cliff. But seizing assets is easier than restructuring the economy.
Trump’s abstract view of America — as an idea or business, not a concrete nation based on a national ethnic core — and his attachment to “greatness” as military might, as well as his commitment to Israel, meant that “America First” was doomed from the start. Like so many Americans, he vastly overestimates how much military power can accomplish in a complex world. This is not the 19th century. Gunboat diplomacy, which set us on the road to empire and the imperial decline we now suffer, is simply not viable today. Washington’s heavy-handed operations have caused massive blowback, socially, economically, demographically, internationally, and politically. 9/11 should have taught us something. It didn’t. A social media driven society has the attention span of a small child. We remember nothing and learn nothing.
The world is less stable and more dangerous because of Washington’s militaristic foreign policy. Our potential opponents have the ability to strike us from great distances and are determined not to bow to Washington’s demands. Unfortunately, Trump’s “America is an idea” ideology, and blustery “Top Gun” militaristic patriotism, is widely shared among MAGA voters. That and Trump’s mercurial personality made the MAGA movement easy pickings for the neocons and the Ziocons. Trump was supposed to disrupt and dismantle the system. Now, he wants to save it.
Neoliberals and the hard left hold a similar ideological view of America. The neocons were willing to throw the base some cultural and political red meat by combatting illegal immigration, limiting the worst excesses of the hard left’s “trans” agenda, and waving the Stars and Stripes like a red flag in front of a bull to get the base to support more wars, while maintaining mass legal immigration. But the cultural damage has already been done. The social, demographic, and sexual revolutions America has undergone in my lifetime are here to stay because so many of us like them. Business likes cheap labor. We like easy sex, easy abortion, and easy divorce, and the crudely-sexualized culture they have created. The sexualization of children didn’t start with the Biden administration. And technology has spread the worst sort of debased “culture” to every child who has a cell phone. That’s a problem that no foreign war is going to solve.
Trump was always a Hail Mary pass in a dangerous contest that was nearing the final seconds. That pass was intercepted by the usual suspects. It’s beginning to look like a pick six in their favor. The system has devoured and digested MAGA. Trump’s unfiltered insults and bullying aren’t funny anymore. He wants sycophants around him after all. His residual American patriotism is shallow, as he values personal loyalty over competence or true patriotism in the sense of valuing the common good. When his supporters criticize him, he writes them off as traitors like former GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he called “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown.” But who is betraying whom? In search of “wins” and media optics, Trump’s egotism and boastful actions — renaming the Kennedy Center the “Trump-Kennedy Center” and planning the construction of a Triumphal Arch in Washington, like Septimus Severus’ arch in Rome depicting his victories — have him sliding into self-parody. It’s quite telling that he is hostile to once-loyal Greene, and Senator Rand Paul and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, but is on good terms with war-monger Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Nothing fundamental has changed. Instead of a Democrat freak show, we get a GOP clown act.
Like Trump, too many of us see America as a brand, or a team facing other teams on a global gridiron. Like college football fans, we wear our jerseys and wave our banners, singing the alma mater’s fight song, even as the institutions we support betray us and our children and manipulate our loyalty so that we tolerate their corruption. Our team is now made up of mercenaries with no loyalty to the alma mater, but we want to pretend that the Four Horsemen are still on the field. We blind ourselves to the decadence of that which we loved, because we can’t face the world without it. We love the game. Oh, how we love it. We love it so much that we soon forget the coach who bailed out for a rival team, or the scandals that have shaken our beloved alma mater. Too many of us treat war as a game. We love it from afar, as the bombs drop on antlike figures we only see as targets in a video-game reality. USA! USA! It is much easier to bomb some distant country and find ever more foreign dragons to slay than to deal with complex social, economic, and political problems at home. And it’s more fun. More fun for the Deep Staters, more fun for the militarists, more fun for policy wonks, who all play at war like a gigantic game of Risk. And it’s very profitable for certain parties.
But the real war, the one that really matters for our survival, is here — at home. The country is facing an existential crisis. We are overrun with foreigners who don’t share our American attachments and see America only as a vehicle for their advancement. As if on cue, Homeland Security’s Kristi Noem stated that Venezuelans in the U.S. can apply for asylum, this after the “liberation” of that country, continuing the invade-the-world, invite-the-world policies of past administrations. Even more alarming, a significant portion of people who have a real claim on this land simply don’t care or actually despise their own culture and people.
MAGA is in crisis, fracturing over Epstein and foreign wars, and much more. The Zionists especially are losing their hold on younger generations. As Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen polling has warned, Trump is losing independents and cross-over voters, and younger people are frustrated with his indifference to their plight. Do we want America to survive? The GOP should focus on housing affordability so that young people can marry and have children. They won’t do it under today’s uncertain circumstances. Yet Trump denies there is an affordability crisis. J.D. Vance, who should know better, is stumping for AI and robotics.
Meanwhile, the neocons probably see Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a perfect Trump Successor. GOP Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is stumping for the Ziocon vote. Some of us will simply check out; voting seems pointless. Whoever is president, the usual suspects — like parasites that seize an animal’s central nervous system and direct its brain and body — usually run his administration. Another way of looking at this is that the left, the neo-liberals, the neocons, and the Ziocons represent the varying heads of a globalist hydra. They snip at each other sometimes but share a common body. We knew Trump was an SOB. We wanted him to be our SOB, not Netanyahu’s or Lindsey Graham’s.
Lots of us are bewildered and confused. What happened to our country? I love America as a real place and people. I hate their damned empire. I remember her birth as a republic, one that was wary of foreign entanglements, standing armies, and foreign empire building. But “Good War” propaganda replaced that American narrative. Few remember or understand the old ethos. Our country is a bloated, bureaucratic, fractured monster that may soon be ungovernable except by authoritarianism. The superpower narcotic is as addictive as fentanyl and just as lethal. Maybe we should look in the mirror if we are searching for our own worst enemy. We might see the leering visage of the Anti-Christ glaring back at us.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
Please consider supporting American Remnant: A green “Donate Today” button has been added at the end of each article (see below) appearing on the website. If you value what AR is doing, please consider supporting the website financially. $5, $10, or any amount that you can afford. Regular donations would especially be appreciated. Thank you!
