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Rant 831: What Trump's Foreign Policy Flip-Flops Mean

2/28/2025

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It only took a few days for Donald Trump to completely upend the stable international construct that has kept the United States and much of the world from immolation for 80 years. The implications of this catastrophic reversal of the global balance of sanity as we look ahead are ominous.
 
The Hard Power Retreat
 
I said in Rant 830 that the unholy trinity of Trump, Vance and Hegseth were appeasers on a level with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938, when he gave up a chunk of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler without even consulting the Czechs in hopes that the Nazi dictator would be satisfied with this latest land grab and stop his aggressive behavior. A very perceptive reader disagreed with my assessment and pointed out that what Trump is doing goes far beyond mere appeasement. The proper term to describe what is happening is “alignment.” Trump is aligning the United States with Vladimir Putin and the current crop of dangerous dictators—China’s Xi, North Korea’s Kim et al.—in their pursuit of territory and global domination.
 
Allies for eight decades have suddenly become adversaries. The NATO treaty that deterred the Soviet Union and its Russian successor state from invading Western Europe is on the cusp of losing its protective U.S. nuclear umbrella. Even a united Europe, which may be a pipedream, will be much more vulnerable to Russian aggression absent the assurance of the U.S. as defender of first resort.
 
Moreover, that vision of Europe is coming apart. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) just garnered more than 20 percent of the vote in Germany’s Bundestag elections, coming in a shocking second by a substantial margin over the governing Social Democrats. The AfD, a neo-Nazi band of extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers and disparagers that is hostile to Ukraine and favors Russia, is openly supported by Trump and Vance. Moreover, the next French presidential election could bring the reactionary Marine Le Pen, another Putin poodle, to power.
 
The implications of the U.S. withdrawal from NATO and realignment with Russia are incredibly dangerous. It is an open invitation to Putin to do what he wants vis-à-vis the very vulnerable front-line democracies: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Poland.
 
Ukraine, which has heroically and successfully defended itself against Russia’s invasion, now finds itself sold out by the U.S. Any so-called security guarantees it might obtain from a peace imposed on it by the U.S. and Russia will not be worth the paper they are printed on. They will be as useless as the prior such guarantees—the Budapest Agreement of 1994 and the two Minsk Agreements that Russia signed—which were trashed by Putin when he invaded Ukraine in 2022.
 
The broader implications of Trump’s reversal of U.S. policy go beyond Trump’s affinity for Russia and hostility to our long-time allies. The American surrender signals to China’s Xi that he may finally realize his ambitions to take Taiwan without worrying about a U.S. military response and to assert Chinese domination in the Western Pacific. Once Taiwan is back in the fold, what will happen to South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaya,  Singapore and Indonesia. They will have little choice but to knuckle under to the new Chinese hegemony. Will this also unleash Trump’s bromancer, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, to realize his territorial ambitions vis-à-vis South Korea?
 
All of which will make the U.S. much more vulnerable to military pressure, if not an actual attack, underscored by new Pentagon leadership loyal to Trump rather than the Constitution and the American people. Replacing the Joint Chiefs and Staff with subservient generals and admirals willing to do whatever Trump orders, and absent any legal guardrails represented by the service Judge Advocate Generals (whom Trump and Hegseth also fired), severely weakens U.S. national security.
 
Sidenote. During my career, I interacted with five Army TJAGs (the two-stars who led the JAG Corps). They were among the finest and most ethical attorneys I ever met. It may be difficult even for Trump to find JAG toadies.

Saber-rattling about acquiring Greenland, the Panama Canal, Gaza and Canada are also not helpful. They are head-scratchers, especially because they appear so contrary to Trump’s long-held views about pulling back from American involvements abroad.

The Greatest Shame

The current nadir (there will surely be many more) of Trump’s disgraceful and highly alarming desertion of our allies and 80 years of wise and successful U.S. foreign policy was last Monday’s U.S. vote in the UN General Assembly against a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The resolution passed overwhelmingly. The U.S. voted “No” along with Russia and NORTH KOREA, among others. Unbelievable!!!

The Soft Power Abandonment


Post-World War II America launched four soft power initiatives that made the U.S. the global force it became and has been ever since, and garnered as much positive feedback as any of our hard power efforts:
​
  1. The Marshall Plan (1948) saved Western Europe from succumbing to Communism and created markets for U.S. goods that contributed enormously to our post-war prosperity.
  2. John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps (1961) sent American goodwill ambassadors all over the world and generated enormous pro-American feelings at the grassroots level. Trump and Musk have not yet come for the Peace Corps, but be assured it is in their sights.
  3. Kennedy’s U.S. Agency for International Development (1961) saved tens of millions of lives throughout the developing world through programs like Food for Peace and the distribution of desperately needed medicines to combat HIV/AIDS, measles, guinea worm and other diseases. The return on this investment in terms of goodwill and admiration for America is many times its miniscule cost (less than 1 percent of the federal budget).
  4. Student exchange programs that brought millions of foreign students to the U.S. who then returned home, many to powerful positions in government and industry, armed with positive impressions of America.

The withdrawal from these hugely successful soft power programs opens the door for China, especially, to jump into the vacuum and redirect recipients’ feelings of warmth, gratitude and biases toward the East. This is an immense loss for the U.S.

It Doesn’t End There


Trump’s meat-axe approach to American foreign policy does not end with hard and soft power retreats. It also extends to his wrong-headed, anti-free trade policies, threatening and imposing tariffs on foreign goods, primarily on goods from our now-former allies. The only time in our history when tariffs were appropriate were in the early decades of the nascent U.S. when Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures induced Congress to impose them in order to protect fledgling American industries. Every other such imposition has hurt this country badly. Trump’s thoughtless tariff policy will prove painful for
American consumers too, while prompting retaliatory tariffs by our trading partners.

While I strongly oppose open borders, I also dispute wholesale deportations of undocumented and legal immigrants such as DACA eligibles and people here under Temporary Protected Status without any thought to the implications of so doing. While the victims of these policies will return to their countries of origin with less than good feelings about the U.S., Americans will also be disadvantaged. Immigrants of all stripes contribute to the U.S. economy. Many perform jobs that Americans simply won’t or can’t do at the wages immigrants will accept. The price of food will inevitably rise because growers will need to pass on increased labor costs for picking and processing foodstuffs. If you don’t like the price of eggs now, just wait.

Even hazardous-to-our-health Secretary of Health & Human Services, Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s public health policies will have an adverse impact on our national security. For America to be strong, our general health needs to be robust. Opposing vaccinations is not the way to get there. Firing hundreds of Centers for Disease Control employees, including many who worked at CDC labs and the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the first lines of defense against pandemics, Food & Drug Administration employees, and National Institutes of Health scientists, is a sure way to undermine public health. Doing this at a time when avian flu is rampant, and measles (which we thought we had eradicated) and even polio are making comebacks, is the epitome of irresponsibility.

Finally, we need to consider climate change. Trump’s denial and hoax language regarding this existential threat is irresponsible and dangerous. Like his Covid response, hiding his spray-tanned face in the ground won’t make global warming go away. It will render Americans poorer in both the short and long terms and is guaranteed to increasingly disrupt our lives and livelihoods. Denigrating the problem with jingoism, exacerbating it by encouraging more fossil fuel extraction, and stymieing attempts to counter it with renewables like wind, solar and electric vehicle production are the definition of shooting oneself in the foot.

Taken together, Trump’s foreign policies are a disaster in the making that will weaken America and harm Americans across the board. Democrats need to shout this from the rooftops and educate the public on why this means disaster for us all.
 
Dick Hermann
February 28, 2025
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Rant 830: Thoughts on the First Month of Coup 2.0

2/21/2025

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​Let’s get right to it:
 
It’s Much Worse than I Anticipated. I read every disturbing, poorly-written page of Project 2025 during the campaign, which Trump denied knowing about and now is implementing item-by-item. Much of it appeared so extreme and irrational that I did not believe that even Republicans were that loony. I was way off base. Some of the most “out-there” items have come to pass or can be expected as the coup d’état that began January 6, 2021 moves forward.
 
A Cabinet of Unqualified Crackpots and Charlatans. A falling-down drunk sexual predator and serial mis-manager in charge at the Pentagon? A Russian asset that Kremlin insiders call “Our Girl” directing national intelligence? Hegseth and Gabbard are the poster children for national security malpractice. A vaccine-hostile crank at Health & Human Services who claims that Covid was designed to keep the Chinese and Ashkenazy Jews from contracting it? A Trump flunky consumed with retribution heading the FBI? And these are only the tips of the licebergs.
 
A Senate of servile sissies. I don’t want to hear any more about the independence of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. These two joined their emasculated colleagues in endorsing most of a cabinet of singularly unqualified cranks. Profiles in cowardice, indeed.
 
Mitch McConnell is no great dissenter. Now that it can make no difference, McConnell becomes the lone Republican vote against some of Trump’s worst cabinet picks. This from the man who is primarily responsible for Trump being where he is today. McConnell could have stopped all of this if he had voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment following his incitement to insurrection on January 6, 2021. Enough members of his cowardly caucus would have followed him then and we would have been rid of the Orange Threat. Now it is too little, too late. I predict that future historians will condemn Mitch for his craven cowardice when courage was needed.
 
Where is George W. Bush? The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was W’s crowning achievement. PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives, primarily in Africa, Trump’s illegal shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has put PEPFAR on the chopping block. Bush needs to get out from behind his easel and loudly object to this evil scheme.
 
People are dying because food and vital medications are rotting on African docks. Unable to be distributed to people in need because USAID contractors that do this work have been put in limbo by Trump and Co-President Musk. Not only is this in violation of Congress’s power of the purse. It is also a criminal waste of taxpayer money.
 
JD Bowman/Hamel/Vance (he changed his name twice) Should Be Disbarred. Early on in law school (if not long before), students learn that (1) there are three co-equal branches of government, and (2) the courts have the power to determine the constitutionality and validity of the acts of the other two branches of government. “Checks and balances” in Madisonian parlance. Apparently, VP JD wasn’t paying attention. Any attorney who says that the Executive Branch can and should ignore court orders with which it disagrees should not be allowed a law license. Hop to it, Kentucky Bar!
 
As if JD wasn’t incendiary enough….Following his insulting and obnoxious Munich Security Conference scold-polemic directed at our European allies, Bowman/Hamel/Vance took the opportunity while in Adolf Hitler’s German heimatstadt and the locus of the West’s shameful 1938 dismemberment of Czechoslovakia to meet with the Führer of the AfD, Germany’s neo-Nazi party.  He pointedly did not meet with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. For 85 years, appeasement has been a dirty word. Trump, Vance and their ilk are rehabilitating it. Neville Chamberlain is opening his umbrella.
 
Not to be outdone…SecDef Hegseth disgraced himself at the Munich Conference when he delivered Ukraine to Vlad the Impaler on a silver platter. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) called it a “rookie mistake.” That implies that Hegseth will improve the longer he is in the job. Good luck with that!
 
The Great Dealmaker strikes again. The President who ceded Afghanistan to the Taliban is now serving up Ukraine to the Russians. Who goes into a peace negotiation announcing what the eventual outcome should be? In this case, allowing the aggressor to keep the territory it wrested from Ukraine, declaring Ukraine a neutral nation, denying it any hope of future NATO membership, and announcing that the U.S. is bailing out of its defense obligations under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Trump is even blaming Ukraine President Zelenzkyy for starting the war! This is revisionist history on a level with the whitewashing of January 6. No wonder the champagne corks are popping all over the Kremlin as they watch, deliriously ecstatic, while the U.S. retreats, its tail between its legs.
 
The Thursday Afternoon Massacre. Seven Justice Department attorneys, most them conservative Republicans, who were working on the Eric Adams slam-dunk corruption case resigned after the Trump administration dropped the indictment against Adams in return for his cooperation with Trump’s anti-immigration show. The very definition of a corrupt quid pro quo. It certainly did not take long for corruption’s stink to engulf the new DOJ leadership.
 
The Democrats Still Don’t Get It. The Democratic National Committee’s recent meeting was a rehash of the same tired material voters rejected in the election. Moving away from identity politics and the insipid “politics of joy” was so offensive and at odds with reality that voters elected a twice-impeached, four-times indicted insurrectionist/convicted felon. Moreover, they elected mild-mannered Ken Martin, another Minnesota Nice Guy, as their chair. They need to be out there every day with credible spokespersons (uncharismatic Chuck Schumer won’t cut it) explaining to voters what the impact of Trump’s actions will do to them and making them angry about it. Anger, as they should have learned from Republicans, is a powerful motivator to voters. Go with the tough guys and gals like Jamie Raskin, Rahm Emanuel, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and JB Pritzker. Junk lame slogans like Schumer’s “We Will Win!” Stop wilting in the face of the Trump/Musk onslaught.
 
A tiny glimmer of light at the end of the democracy deconstruction tunnel. A handful of the “timorous cowrin’ beasties” (a tip of the tam o’shanter to Robert Burns’ To a Mouse) who comprise today’s Republican Party are beginning to mouth meek little squeaks about the impact of the Trump/Musk devastation on their complaining constituents who are losing jobs, contracts and local infrastructure projects. Can this really be the second guardrail (the courts being the one and only at this point)? They will have to conclude that their re-election prospects are threatened more by unhappy constituents than they are by the deranged intimidator in the Oval who has them shaking in their jackboots.
 
Dick Hermann
February 21, 2025
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Rant 829: Satisfied Now, John Roberts?

2/14/2025

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​Blame Chief Justice John Roberts for Elon Musk and his reactionary band of super-arrogant teenage and twenty-something marauders (a.k.a., DOGEbags) who are wreaking havoc and assorted mayhem throughout the federal establishment and destroying lives around the world. They are the reductio ad absurdam of Roberts’ historically terrible majority opinion in the infamous morally, ethically, politically and Constitutionally dead-wrong Supreme Court Citizens United decision in 2010. Back then, Roberts was just getting started flexing his dismal decision muscles that today put him on a par with historians’ ranking of Roger B. Taney of Dred Scott notoriety as the all-time worst Chief Justice. Fitting that he serves at the same time as the all-time worst President, in whose expansive pocket he seems to sit, and the all-time worst House Speaker, Mike Johnson, Louisiana’s contribution to abject servility. A trifecta unlike any other.
 
It is because of the Roberts Court that Elon Musk has been able to buy his way into an unelected co-presidency or, at a minimum, the new post of Prime Minister of the United States. A cool $250 million campaign contribution buys a hell of a lot of access. In Musk’s case, the purchase wins him carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants with the U.S. government.
 
Pre-Citizens United, there were limits on the amounts that donors could contribute to political campaigns. Pre-Musk, legal scholars already viewed Roberts’ Citizens United opinion as dangerously wrong only because he equated corporations with individuals, conferring a First Amendment Free Speech right on the former that previously had only applied to sentient beings with a pulse and a heart. No one contemplated that a former South African born to Apartheid would contribute a king’s ransom to a political candidate in order to buy his way into masterminding a budding dictatorship.
 
The damage Trump and his (domestic) handler, unelected Co-President Musk, have already done is incalculable and will take years to repair if ever it can be. Shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the most important aid agency in the world, after lying that it is a “fraud and corrupt” is beyond appalling. People in Africa, Asia and Latin America are dying because they are suddenly cut off from life-giving medications and live-saving sustenance. It is not too extreme to say that what Dr. Evil and his Mini-Me are doing is illegal and, in my opinion, criminal.
 
Having wrecked USAID, Musk and his malign minions have gone on to perform the same amputation absent anesthesia on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which in its brief history has returned $20 billion to defrauded Americans. Not to mention the anguish he has unleashed on the livelihoods of the 1,700 CFPB employees, who now join their 10,000 USAID fellow civil servants in employee limbo. This is only the beginning of the destruction he and Trump intend to rain down on the heads of the American people.
 
But don’t expect that there will be any immediate consequences for these reprehensible acts.  The courts, the only guardrail left, operate with tortoise-like deliberation while Trump and Musk proceed at light speed to do their harm.
 
John Roberts has led a life of privilege and ambition and has experienced nary a bump in his yellow-brick road to power, fame and wealth (wife Jane brings in $10 million a year—see Rant No 740, “Not So Plain Jane”). Perhaps that’s why he understands so little about what ordinary, less fortunate people must endure, and why his decisions and opinions consistently favor the charmed class into which he was born and has lived his entire life. Someone who had to travel a harder road to the mountaintop might view the devastating implications of a Citizens United decision, which have now come to pass, differently.
 
Dick Hermann
February 14, 2025
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Rant 828: A National Scandal

2/10/2025

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​I live six miles from Reagan National Airport (DCA) and close to the Potomac River, site of the worst aviation disaster in decades. I’ve probably flown in and out of DCA a hundred times. Every day from our house we hear and see hundreds of commercial jets and a bunch of helicopters fly overhead. To say that DCA and the adjacent Potomac River are extremely busy is an understatement.
 
Watching the horror of the January 29 mid-air collision on television brought back memories of January 1982 when Air Florida Flight 90 took off from National in a blizzard and seconds later plummeted into the 14th Street Bridge, hit several vehicles, killing their drivers and passengers, before plunging into the icy Potomac River. Conditions were so bad that evening that no airplane should have been permitted to fly. I was working late and, looking out of my office window, the snowfall was so intense that I could not see the buildings across the street. Ice formed on the plane’s wings as soon as they were de-iced at the departure gate. However, Flight 90 had to bide its time in line long enough that ice was able to reform on the wings. Upon takeoff, the plane was unable to gain enough lift and crashed a minute later. Only five of its 70-plus passengers and crew survived.
 
Two important lessons learned from that crash were that (1) blizzard conditions need to be taken seriously when deciding whether to ground flights, and (2) thorough de-icing in cold conditions just before take-off is a must.
 
President Trump’s reckless, cruel, vile yet eminently predictable claims scapegoated DEI, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg for this horrendous accident. Consoling is totally beyond him. Vice President Vance, leaping at the opportunity to toady up his fealty, eagerly endorsed Trump’s despicable display of crassness. These charlatans would rather lie than lead.
 
However, the real reason this accident rests squarely on three organizations that should know better: The Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Congress, whose monumentally irresponsible decisions were made and never reversed over many years:
 
(1) Allowing military and other helicopters to fly up and down the Potomac River and cross the flight paths of commercial airliners taking off and landing at DCA with only a few hundred feet of clearance. Who thought that was a good idea? Heads should roll at the Pentagon and FAA. Surely there is somewhere else much safer where the military could run helicopter training missions. Now, after this terrible yet avoidable tragedy, the FAA has, for the moment at least, banned such chopper flights.
 
(2) Continuing to let DCA exist and become busier and thus more dangerous because Congress loves its convenience. The Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority had been warning Congress of the dangers of airport over-capacity; and congestion for years, but Congress would not listen. In fact, Congress has consistently voted to increase the number of flights and extend the hours during which they could take off and land (now 5:00 AM through 12:00 AM). They keep doing this solely for their own convenience. It only takes about 15 minutes to get from Capitol Hill to the airport, whereas it takes more than 30 minutes to travel to much safer Dulles Airport in the Virginia suburbs. To save themselves a quarter of an hour or so, members of Congress are perfectly willing to dismiss experts’ safety concerns and put the lives of Americans in jeopardy. Every time a knowledgeable authority recommends closing DCA, Congress says “No!” Since they only work three days a week at best (plus recesses that account for months of time off) and travel to and from their home states and districts on Fridays and Mondays, they keep one of the most dangerous airports in the world operating when it should be shut down. Moreover, they keep adding more and more flights because they all want to be able to fly non-stop to and from their homes. Everyone else be damned.
 
Ask any commercial airline pilot and they will tell you that flying into and out of DCA is a challenge and an increasingly dangerous one. There have been near misses at DCA for years, and they have spiked in recent years. No big deal, says Congress.
 
Add to this horrific mix a shortage of air traffic controllers largely due to previous government shutdowns. Some did not return after not being paid for a month during the 2019 Trump shutdown. After it ended, a number of trainees also did not return to the Aviation Academy for continued training. The coronavirus pandemic subsequently shut down the Academy for a year, contributing to the shortage. Trump wasn’t paying attention because he was consumed with bungling the Covid response. Meanwhile, Congress did nothing to address this concern. Now Trump has frozen federal hiring, including the recruitment of new controllers.
 
The next time your Senator or congressperson holds a town meeting in your burg, ask them how they voted when it came to increasing congestion at DCA. If you don’t like their answer and you value airline safety, you know how you should vote when they come up for re-election.
 
Dick Hermann
February 10, 2025
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    Author

    Richard Hermann is the author of thirteen books, including Encounters: Ten Appointments with History and, most recently, Mother's Century: A Survivor, Her People and Her Times. Soon to be released is his upcoming Close Encounters with the Cold War, a personal reflection on growing up in the nuclear age. He is a former law professor and entrepreneur, and the founder and president of Federal Reports, Inc., a legal information and consulting firm that was sold in 2007. He has degrees from Yale University, the New School University, Cornell Law School and the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s School. He lives with his wife, Anne, and extraordinary dog, Barkley, in Arlington, Virginia and Canandaigua, New York.

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