FPIF - John Feffer
Dear Önder,
Just a few days ago, at the NATO summit in The Hague, Donald Trump told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky that he'd consider selling Patriot missiles to the beleaguered country. It didn't take long for his administration to issue a startling reversal. Not only are new Patriot missiles not heading to Ukraine, the administration has stopped a shipment that was already in Poland on its way to Kyiv.
The explanation: the United States is running low on Patriot missiles and needs them for its own protection.
Let me see if I have this straight. Russia has recently intensified its bombing of Ukraine, and the country can't defend against all the incoming missiles. Meanwhile, the United States is currently being attacked by...no one. Even Iran, which half-heartedly attacked a U.S. military base in Qatar, has agreed to a ceasefire in its war with Israel.
The Trump administration's decision will lead to the deaths of who knows how many Ukrainian civilians.
This catastrophic decision has nothing to do with anti-war impulses within Trump's inner circle. "There is much loose speculation that Donald Trump is an isolationist, an anti-militarist, a believer in spheres of influence," I write in my World Beat column this week. "The U.S. attack on Iran should dispense with such nonsense. Donald Trump is a political opportunist. He takes positions—anti-abortion, pro-crypto—based not on principles but on how much they will boost his political (and economic) fortunes."
Bottom line: sending military supplies to defend Ukrainian civilians might be the right thing to do but it doesn't provide any political or economic benefits to Trump himself.
The president, meanwhile, showed up at the NATO summit to push European members to spend more on the military, and was generally received with fawning regard. "During his widely anticipated press conference, Trump was…Trump," writes Mira Oklobdzija. "He boasted about the greatness of America, about technology only Americans have, about an unprecedented lack of inflation. But mostly he boasted about himself, his ability to stop wars, bring about peace, and influence others."
Meanwhile, as William deBuys writes, Trump is busy destroying the institutional foundations of the United States: "In the annals of national suicide, the present dismantling of the American state will surely rank high. It may not reach the apogee attained by Russia in its final Tsarist days or by Louis XVI in the run-up to the French Revolution, but Great Britain’s Brexit hardly smolders compared to the anti-democratic dumpster fire of the Trump regime. Countless governmental, scientific, educational, medical, and cultural institutions have been targeted for demolition. The problem for the rest of the world is that the behavior of Trumpian America is more than suicidal — it’s murderous."
Elsewhere at Foreign Policy In Focus, Imran Khalid looks at how China can take advantage of the latest trade deal with the United States." Ironically, it’s U.S. strategy that has sharpened China’s clarity," he writes. "Export bans on advanced chips and manufacturing equipment, intended to choke Beijing’s AI momentum, may have yielded the opposite result. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted that U.S. export curbs have not halted Chinese innovation but spurred it. His company’s share of China’s AI chip market has already declined from near total dominance to just over 50 percent. When even Silicon Valley’s elite begin admitting the limits of coercive leverage, the time is ripe for Beijing to shift from reactive position to proactive codification."
And Walden Bello concludes that the "recent unilateral strikes by the United States on Iran’s nuclear development sites underline the fact that multilateralism is dead, and has been so for some time."
Finally, on July 8 at 10 am, we'll be holding a webinar on the future of industrial policy with Jayati Ghosh, Daniel Chavez, and Isabel Estevez. You can find out more information and register for the event here.
John Feffer
Director, FPIF
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