SecDef Mattis to Ukraine, H.R. McMaster's Rise With Bannon Out at the White House, and Washington's Build-Up Near Russia

By James The Russian Analyst

Does Steve Bannon's Departure from the Trump Administration Mean the Neocons and Deep State Hawks Have Won the Debate Over Its Foreign Policy? Or is It Too Early to Say?

Taken in isolation, the first visit of a U.S. Defense Secretary to Ukraine since 2007 could be dismissed as political posturing by Washington, including for the purpose of debunking the relentlessly propagandized notion that President Trump is 'soft on Russia' or is 'Putin's puppet'. However, the recent long range U.S. Global Hawk drone flights skirting Russian air space and the Donbass, along with the rapid construction of what appears to be a permanent 'rotational' naval base along the Black Sea coast near Crimea, appears to be part of a larger plan.

The U.S. State Department approved this week the sale of long range (up to 200 miles) HIMARS rocket launch systems to Romania, which faces no other conceivable adversary to use such weapons against besides Russia or its proxies in the unrecognized Moldovan republic of Pridnestrovie (the PMR also known as Transnistria). Across the Black Sea, the Americans are stepping up their military exercises with Georgia, whose bid to join NATO under former President Saakashvili collapsed after the country's humiliating defeat in the short August 2008 war with Russia. These U.S. power projection efforts of course, must be balanced against the reality controlling Crimea makes Moscow the overwhelmingly dominant power in the Black Sea basin, and the high probability that Washington's once staunch NATO ally Turkey will leave the alliance and evict the Americans from Incirlik Air Base within the next few years.

Globally, there is a bright spot of tacit (if at times grudgingly acknowledged) cooperation between the U.S. and Russia to deconflict their forces and destroy ISIS as a territorial entity in Syria. But overall, with the departure of anti-neocon adviser Steve Bannon from the White House, the Trump Administration appears to be slouching towards the Cold War 2 policies of its predecessor. It was no coincidence that Bannon felt free to speak his mind to the liberal/progressive magazine the American Prospect, shorty before his announced exit from the White House. It remains a matter of dispute whether Bannon resigned, as he told Circa News national security reporter Sara A. Carter, or if he was fired, as his detractors in the Administration and media insist.

Is Bannon Returning to Breitbart to Wage War on Neocons and Globalists Pressuring Trump Alongside Congress to Maintain Cold War 2 at All Costs?

““To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”

Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.””
— http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant

What's indisputable is that Bannon stated his opinion that China, not Russia, is America's top geostrategic adversary. Like many other economic nationalists such as Pat Buchanan (who is reportedly on friendly terms with Trump in private and writes columns in support of the beleaguered President), Bannon sees the battlefield between Washington and Beijing playing out primarily in the realm of economics, rather than through a first Cold War-style arms race. Bannon's words can be interpreted in many ways, but they strike the Russia Analyst as a not so subtle rebuke of Trump's surrounding himself with generals, for whom the world's biggest military industrial complex hammer tends to require only martial and not economic nails, as well as a poke at Washington's bipartisan obsession with Russia.

Although Bannon is no Russophile or Vladimir Putin fan, as his 2014 remarks via video conference to a Vatican conference make clear, he is a critic of technocratic globalism and therefore had been the most vilified man in the Administration to date. The rivalry between Steve Bannon and Anthony Scaramucci aka 'The Mooch' culminated in the latter delivering obscenity laced 'off the record' tirades against the former to a reporter for The New Yorker before being fired. But the clash between Bannon and White House National Security Adviser and career military man H.R. McMaster, who succeeded the short lived tenure of Bannon ally retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, has been covered extensively as a consequential battle within the Administration. This is in no small part thanks to independent 'alt lite' blogger and Trump supporter Mike Cernovich accusing McMaster of being a serial leaker to the legacy media, while also purging Flynn loyalists from the National Security Council (NSC). McMaster was also accused by not only Cernovich but others grumbling to pro-Trump outlets of supporting former National Security Adviser Susan Rice as having done nothing wrong in 'unmasking' Trump campaign members and associates whose phone calls were supposedly picked up 'incidentally' in National Security Agency (NSA) wiretaps.

Cernovich's credibility has been attacked, while simultaneously being amplified in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) globalist mouthpiece Foreign Policy, but appear to be based on actual credible sources inside the Administration. Whether dissatisfaction with Bannon loyalists leaking to Cernovich played a role in Steve's departure from the White House, the blogger's reporting that McMaster supported sending more troops to Afghanistan appears to have been confirmed by reports of a forthcoming 'new strategy' that looks much like the mini-surge Obama approved a few years ago.

The Democratic Party and Deep State mouthpiece media, by contrast, have rallied around McMaster, as has the U.S. Senate's neocon foreign policy proconsul in chief, John McCain (R-AZ). As the Russia Analyst wrote in a previous RogueMoney article, the neocons at the German Marshall Fund's so-called Alliance for Securing Democracy have claimed the #FireMcMaster hash tag on Twitter was 'amplified by' Russian government funded bots and trolls. Media outlets hostile to Trump such as Reuters, the #NeverTrump er neocon fanatics at The Weekly Standard and neolibcons of The Washington Post have repeated these claims despite the troika of ex-FBI agent Clint Watts, former Hasbarah troll/cyberstalker Andrew Weisburd and leftist researcher J.M. Berger providing no proof to back up their claims. What's clear is, regardless of the alleged bad blood between Bannon and McMaster, the former is now much more free to go after the latter at Breitbart than he was from inside the Trump White House.

Multiple and Often Contradictory Foreign Policies Coming from a D.C. in Disarray

As the Russia Analyst's friend The Saker said in his recent interview with Southfront.org, Washington presently has multiple, often contradictory foreign policies. There are multiple agendas coming from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's office, stripped down to bare bones to plug the leaks State Department; the Pentagon's empire of overseas bases (including thoe being constructed around Russia) and military to military diplomacy; a CIA Director in Mike Pompeo who differs little in his rabid Russophobia from his predecessor, the outspoken Trump hating former DCI John Brennan, and lastly the President's Twitter feed. The latter appears to be, along with friendly outlets like Breitbart, Fox News, Washington Times or Circa among the few tools the seemingly neutered President has to get his own message and foreign policy views out (whatever they happen to be at the moment). This is sadly the case after Congress voted to strip President Trump or any successor of the ability to lift sanctions against Russia, in a seemingly unprecedented usurpation of presidential powers by a legislative branch hellbent on making Cold War 2 permanent. It's difficult to see, even if Bannon's ambitious plans of launching a new 'Trump TV' network under the Breitbart or other brand come to fruition, sufficient pushback against the second Cold War now underway actually changing policy.

What we do know about Breitbart as it relates to Russia, is that the outlet has endorsed Disobedient Media and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)'s challenging of the US intelligence community assessment that Russian security services hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC). And even months before Breitbart challenged the hack that didn't happen at the heart of the fraudulent Russian meddling in the 2016 election story, it was attacked by Cold War 2 waging propagandists, including EU Stratcom's Jakub Kalensky. This track record and his recent thinking shared with the American Prospect suggest that with Bannon's return to Breitbart, the outlet is going to concentrate on undermining the mainstream media and deep state's Russia story while focusing its foreign policy fire on (Israel's enemy) Iran and China.

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