Trump Pursues Weapons Deal With Totalitarian Communist Regime

Originally posted on anti-aggressionleague.com

Source: Bloomberg

It's never been about principles. Politicians like to grandstand about spreading 'democracy' and 'freedom', and protecting 'human rights' but that's never their MO; only naive morons believe them. Nothing about the big lie has changed under the Trump admin. We still have a president that pays lip service to the ideas of 'freedom' and 'democracy' and all that other hurrah while gladhanding foreign dictators and repressive police states that are partial to U.S. business interests, allowing U.S. industries, particularly energy and defense, to expand into foreign markets. The only difference now is that the president is completely transparent about it (Trump doesn't have a filter). During his 2 week Asia Tour, Trump basically went to the APEC conference in Vietnam as an outside salesman for the defense industry. Obama lifted the arms embargo on Vietnam last year, but the communist regime still buys its weapons from Russia. Yet, Trump sought to capitalize on the thawing relations between the two governments by asking them to buy military equipment from the U.S. and overseeing the signing of two memorandums of understanding between Vietnam's state owned gas company, PetroVietnam Gas, AES Corp and Alaska Gasline Development Corp.

Under the agreement signed in Hanoi, AES will work with PV Gas on its Son My liquefied natural gas terminal project in Binh Thuan Province, in southern Vietnam.....Alaska Gasline Development and PV Gas, meanwhile, have agreed to cooperate in LNG supply and upstream investment, opening the door for the U.S. company to sell liquefied natural gas to Vietnam.

As I noted last year, the U.S. already gives the communist regime $122M in foreign aid annually. If the sycophants in Washington cared about 'freedom' and 'human rights', as they pretend to when it comes to other countries, then they could at the very least make not throwing bloggers in prison for thought crimes against the regime a condition of receiving foreign aid. They could use their enormous economic leverage to put a gradual end to the state's slave labor camps and allow fair elections, but we all know what their real agenda is.