President Trump has made many excellent choices during his term in office, and hopefully, he can continue to make them over the next four years. However, installing retired General Jim Mattis as Defense Secretary was not one of them. Mattis is, and will forever will be, a globalist neocon.
In an article published two days ago by the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) magazine Foreign Affairs, Mattis, along with CFR member Kori Schake, fellow neocon Jim Ellis, and Joe Felter, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, criticized Trump for his “America First” policy. The column entitled “Defense in Depth: Why US Security Depends on Alliances — Now More than Ever” is a clarion call for globalism and continued U.S. involvement in wars all over the planet.
The article is a blatant attempt to promote an incoming Biden administration. Mattis begins with:
The United States today is undermining the foundations of an international order manifestly advantageous to US interests, reflecting a basic ignorance of the extent to which both robust alliances and international institutions provide vital strategic depth. In practice, “America first” has meant “America alone.” That has damaged the country’s ability to address problems before they reach US territory and has thus compounded the danger emergent threats pose.
This matches a statement by Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken: “We can’t solve all the world’s problems alone. We need to be working with other countries. We need their cooperation. We need their partnership.” Accordingly, Biden plans to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal), the Paris Climate Agreement, and the UN World Health Organization (WHO).
Then Mattis’ article attacks America’s ability to defend itself:
Enhancing national security must start with the fundamental truth that the United States cannot protect itself or its interests without the help of others….
Not even the United States is strong enough to protect itself on its own. Fundamentally, it needs help to preserve its way of life. Cooperating with like-minded nations to sustain an international order of mutual security and prosperity is a cost-effective way of securing that help. But doing so means resisting the temptation to maximize US gains at the expense of countries that share its objectives and instead utilizing the powers of influence and inspiration to enlarge the group of countries that work with the United States toward a common purpose.
Perhaps Mattis and crew are angered by Trump’s successful campaign to force NATO allies to pay more for their own defense and push South Korea to do the same, or Trump’s brilliant strategy of requiring military aid to be used to buy U.S. weapons systems, such as the case with Israel?
The authors then criticize both Trump and Biden for their shortsightedness in regards to pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and call for more direct intervention and nation-building:
To dismiss US involvement today in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere as “endless” or “forever” wars — as both President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden do — rather than as support to friendly governments struggling to exert control over their own territory misses the point. It is in the United States’ interests to build the capacity of such governments to deal with the threats that concern Americans; that work isn’t quick or linear, but it is an investment in both greater security and stronger relationships and preferable to the United States’ indefinitely having to take care of threats on its own.
By all appearances, Trump is determined to pull our remaining troops out of both countries. But by including Biden in this criticism, it might provide the smokescreen Biden uses to go against the will of most Americans and keep troops in both countries indefinitely.
Another area the Mattis article lines up with the Biden camp is in dealing with China by saying:
The principal external threat the United States faces today is an aggressive and revisionist China — the only challenger that could potentially undermine the American way of life. The United States’ goal, however, should not only be to deter great-power war but to seek great-power peace and cooperation in advancing shared interests. For that, the United States’ alliances and partnerships are especially crucial….
It would also expand the cooperative space in which all countries supporting a rules-based order can work together to advance shared interests. Cooperation across different ideological systems is difficult but necessary, and there should be opportunities to cooperate with China in areas of overlapping interests, such as pandemic response, climate change, and nuclear security.
So, the only way to save the American way of life is by creating closer ties to communist China? That, of course, is what Biden is all about.
The post ends with this plea to Biden:
In January, when President Joe Biden and his national security team begin to reevaluate US foreign policy, we hope they will quickly revise the national security strategy to eliminate “America first” from its contents, restoring in its place the commitment to cooperative security that has served the United States so well for decades.
In other words, please return to Obama’s policy of America last.
Trump’s reaction to the article was swift. He tweeted:
And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said of the Mattis piece:
I have a lot of respect for Jim, but he’s just dead wrong on that. “America First” has been at its heart, a recognition that when America is secure at home, when America does good things for our own economy, for our own prosperity, that America will be a force for good….
I would tell you our Japanese colleagues, our South Korean colleagues, our Indian colleagues, our Australian colleagues, all know that the [Obama administration] pivot to Asia was a joke, but that the United States under President Trump actually delivered real benefits to them.
Whether it was the work that we’ve done to build out an enormous coalition to go after the [Venezuelan] socialist Maduro, to go after the Cubans, these are real coalitions, real things that work — it wasn’t America alone.
It was us doing it with our friends and allies based on shared interests and a reality that recognized central facts about what is and not pretending that things are as we would like them to be.
So, it looks like all the globalist swamp dwellers are lining up to further entangle America in foreign alignments, against the sage advice of Founding Father George Washington, should Biden prevail. JBS members will have their work cut out for them to educate our fellow Americans that a policy of “America First” lines up with an “America Kept Safe,” whereas the globalists would have us as little more than pawns acting as the world’s piggy bank.
