The Unspoken Cause
The real underlying reason that Donald Trump has been America’s favorite politician for the last 10 years is very rarely spoken about. There’s a reason why it’s not mentioned, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Neocons, people like Victoria Nuland, Lindsey Graham, Antony Blinken, Marco Rubio, John Bolton, Joe Biden, Paul Wolfowitz, Keith Kellogg, Jake Sullivan, Donald Rumsfeld, Madeliene Albright, Mike Waltz, George Bush Jr., Bill Kristol, Hillary Clinton, Dick and Liz Cheney, etc., took over American politics in the 21st Century during the Bush Jr. years. In a previous Pressenza article I wrote extensively about the history of neoconservatism, its mission and how it began as a Republican movement that spread to and eventually engulfed the Democratic party as well. If you have any questions about the finer details of the past and/or present neoconservative movement I suggest you take a look at this piece of writing.
Seven Wars in the Middle East in Five Years
Over the course of the last 24 years the Neocons running US foreign policy have been responsible for dozens of illegal invasions, wars, proxy wars and regime change operations that have killed millions of civilians all over the world.(1) The amount of global destruction and death generated by the Neocon movement over the course of the last two and a half decades has no precedent in American History.
The madness we’re living through now in 2025 is the result of an openly announced 2003 Neocon plan that aimed to generate “Seven Wars in the Middle East in Five Years” with the final war being a war with Iran.(2a),(2b) In fact, as you read these words the Neocons in Washington are doing everything they can to see that a war with Iran erupts and that the conflict in Ukraine doesn’t stop until every draftable Ukrainian body is forced into a battle that is known now to be unwinnable for Ukraine.(2c),(3a),(3b),(3c) The Neocons are also the people who’ve most strongly backed the arming and funding of Israel’s genocidal massacre in Gaza.(3d),(3e) They were also the folks who gave Benjamin Netanyahu 57 standing ovations as he barked orders at them in Washington a year ago.(4)
*Sidenote here: Regarding the question of what Donald Trump’s actual position on going to war with Iran is, I can’t say for sure that I know. That said, what I can say is that if Israel strikes Iran first, you can be certain that they got a go-ahead greenlight from the US/Trump. In other words, if the US claims that Israel started the war and gave the US no choice but to join in, you can be sure that Trump is lying and that he’s succumbed to Neocon pressure to finally fall in line with their plan.(3f)
The Neocons’ Core Objectives
For the most part, Neocons have been pretty open over the years about their doctrinary methods and their intentions. Neocons believe that the US and Israel are morally superior and therefore charged with the task of eradicating all prospective evil in the world. Really, the more indoctrinated Neocons say these things openly in print and on film.(5) Their mission is and has been to spread neoliberal democracy to all corners of the world by any means necessary. Even if it entails violently overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing dictators or inserting their own preferred choices of “democratically” elected leaders to do it.(6)
Another core Neocon project which dates back to Donald Rumsfeld’s false claims of the existence of a non-existent fleet of Russian submarines in the mid 1970s, has been to exaggerate and proliferate the idea or a looming Russian threat.(7) Although this project ebbed somewhat in the early 1990s after the Cold War ended, it was revived again in the 2000s and the 2010s by people like Paul Wolfowitz (R), Hillary Clinton (D),John McCain (R) and Victoria Nuland (D), who at the time was a Republican.(8a),(8b) By constantly and quite often falsely demonizing Russia, the US generated the appearance of a need to extend NATO eastward. The US moved right up to Russia’s border in the 21st century, annexing a whopping 14 nations in just 2 decades.
It’s now widely agreed that the US and NATO’s breaking of their promise never to move NATO eastward if the Berlin Wall came down, was one of the key factors that spurred Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in 2022.(9) The idea here is not to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s to affirm the fact that the US Neocons have obviously taunted, degraded and lied about Russia over the course of at least the last 15 years, all the while knowing that Russia considered this perpetual disparagement and NATO encroachment to be an existential threat. (10) These consistent, unprompted provocations by the US Neocon NATO establishment put the lives of the populations of several eastern European countries in tremendous danger for no real reason other than that of US hegemonic expansion.(11)
US Business as Usual Before and After 2001
Those of you who are old enough to do so need only to reflect on US business as usual before 2001 and US business as usual after 2001 to see that America has transformed into a perpetual war and weapons sales hub over the course of the last 25 years. This is the reality that these reckless Neocon ideologues have built with their penchant for perpetual bloodshed and their lack of consideration for the real democratic process, which is meant to serve the public and not a handful of exorbitantly wealthy weapons manufacturing donors and the Israel lobby.(12)
It would be hard to deny, at least since 2010 when the Citizens United bill went through, that the American democratic process has been hijacked by a handful of oligarchs who can now buy the policy adjustments they wish to see. This is why the seemingly unlimited wealth of the Israel lobby and the corporations that are politically represented by neoconservative politicians in both parties now dictates the makeup of the candidates in the American electoral voting pool.(13)
The Majority of the American Public Knows
From what I’ve observed, the majority of the US public knows that America is quite sick as a culture and that it probably won’t survive much longer in its current form. They may not articulate it in the way I’m articulating it here, but they are, at bottom, not fooled by the perpetual war and weapons sales shitshow they’ve been enduring for the last two-plus decades. This is the real reason that, for worse or for better, Donald Trump keeps winning elections over career politicians. He keeps winning because Americans know that their needs aren’t going to be represented by donor-owned Democrat and Republican politicians who climb the career ladder by sucking up to and doing the bidding of neocon oligarchs.(14)
Americans have become so disillusioned with the de-democratization of the US political system and perpetual wars over the course of the last two or three decades that they’d rather throw in with someone like Trump, who at least appears to be his own person, than with politicians who lie on behalf of their donors. At least Trump’s lies are his own, or so it seems.
A set of conditions in which someone like Donald Trump could win two presidential elections was not present thirty years ago. In fact, the conditions weren’t present until the full neoconservative takeover of both political parties occured in the 2010s, following the economic crash of 2008, that what was formerly inconceivable became possible.
The problem is that most Americans still don’t yet see how connected the two political parties are now when it comes to foreign policy. They don’t yet see the Neoconservative link between people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and people like John Bolton or even Lindsey Graham, who are, all four, on the exact same page when it comes to their war and military spending voting record in the 21st Century.(15)
Differentiating Between Causes and Symptoms, Between Ideologues and Demagogues
This article wasn’t written to speak about Donald Trump. This article was written to shed light on the real cause of the immense domestic distress and the ridiculous hegemonic overreach and violence that have become the US’ modus operandi. The neocons have generated unprecedented levels of death and destruction over the past two and a half decades. A day will come though, when the Neocons, who have been in control of US politics and foreign policy in the 21st century so far, will be looked back on as war-obsessed terrorists. They’ll be seen on a par with Netanyahu’s current government and, if they get their way in the Middle East this year, the Third Reich, when history eventually irons it all out.
It’s absolutely essential that this now bipartisan neoconservative movement and ideology, that has done so much damage in less than 3 decades, is recognized as the central cause of America’s rapid decline in the 21st century. Until this happens, until this war-centered ideology and its purveyors are jettisoned from power we will continue to go around in circles, at the mercy of war-obsessed ideologues and oligarchs as well as demagogues.
CITATIONS:
1-https://londonspeakerbureau.com/jeffrey-sachs-fatal-expanse-american-imperialism/
2a-https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/brics-summit-2024
2b-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NNEkcfxxHU&t=11s
2c-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2kftU8u3OI
3a-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18nE5j9F3tU
3b-https://www.aaronmate.net/p/the-us-consensus-fight-russia-to
3c-https://time.com/6695261/ukraine-forever-war-danger/
3e-https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/liberal-zionists-answer-the-gaza-genocide-by-appealing-for-nuance/
3f-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2kftU8u3OI
5-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NNEkcfxxHU&t=11s
6-https://washdiplomat.com/academics-say-u-s-interventions-to-force-regime-change-often-fail/
7-https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/02/archives/rumsfeld-policy-keyed-to-soviet.html
8a-https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/15/politics/john-durham-report-fbi-trump-released
9-https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/nato-chief-admits-expansion-behind-russian-invasion
10-https://indepthnews.net/why-nato-expansion-was-the-principal-cause-of-the-ukraine-war/
11-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5WYOv0Bk1w&t=7s
