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From maverick to lapdog: Trump is already serving the agenda of America’s oligarchs

He campaigned on promises to ‘drain the swamp’ and radically alter the United States’ course in the world, but not even a week has passed and President Donald Trump has already made it clear that he’ll be following a very familiar agenda.

by Whitney Webb

Part 5 - The illusion of Trump’s independence

Diplomatic relations with Russia plunged to new lows under Obama, and Trump’s work to mend those ties drew supporters across the nation who were weary of Obama’s wars.

From his nomination of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state to his stated goal of working together with Russia in Syria to eviscerate Daesh (an Arabic acronym for the terrorist organization known as ISIS or ISIL in the West), all indications seem to suggest that Trump is genuine in his desire to resolve the tensions that nearly escalated into an armed conflict between the two military powers.

Yet, upon further examination, this too falls in line with the predominating geopolitical strategy of American oligarchs. As journalist Pepe Escobar pointed out in a Jan. 19 piece for The Saker, the ultimate goal of this maneuvering is to “seduce Russia away from its strategic partnership with China, while keep harassing the weakest link, Iran.

Daniel McAdams, director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and foreign policy expert on U.S. empire, echoed Escobar’s analysis in an interview with MintPress, saying that “Trump’s tilt towards Russia is a classic ‘grand strategy’ type of move to attempt to peel Russia away from China” — a textbook case of the divide and conquer strategy.

Indeed, the intelligence community, Congress, and the mainstream media continue to play “bad cop” on the Russians, vilifying Moscow at every turn in order to manipulate them into cooperating with Trump, who plays the role of the “good cop.” Of course, the added bonus of this is that Trump gets to look like a great negotiator, diplomat, and an anti-interventionist of sorts while still allowing him to advance neoconservative goals of containing the threat to American hegemony presented by a China-Russia-Iran alliance.

However, as McAdams noted, it remains to be seen if Russia will ultimately fall for the ruse. That, he said, “depends on how the Russians can balance their desire for improved U.S. relations with a sober look at their long-term regional interests and the veracity of U.S. promises.

Other commonly cited evidence of Trump’s “independence” from globalist plans has been his efforts to bring U.S. jobs back from overseas. Recently, Ford Motor Co. canceled a planned $1.6 billion factory in Mexico, choosing instead to expand an existing plant in Michigan in what was widely viewed as a capitulation to Trump. In addition, Trump’s removal of the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and his promise to re-negotiate NAFTA have often been taken as proof that he is indeed putting America first.

However, an anonymous but high-ranking source told Escobar that U.S. oligarchs need jobs to return to the United States from Mexico and Asia chiefly because the shift of labor overseas is a major reason why the United States has “lost control of the seas and cannot secure its military components during a major war.” Essentially, the same financial elite who grew wealthy as a result of the initial labor transfer also stand to gain financially from shifting jobs back to the United States as part of a strategic decision to mitigate the strength of China and its regional allies.

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