Cartoon by Peter Sully

A man of peace? Trump’s cabinet of hawks

By Chris Bambery 

Counterfire: In his victory speech, Donald Trump declared, ‘I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.’ His Vice President-elect, JD Vance, called Trump the ‘candidate of peace’.

Trump carried Michigan, held by the Democrats for 24 years, and home to the largest concentration of Muslim voters in America. Foreign Policy spoke to nineteen-year-old Yemeni American Ali Aljahmi, a member of the family which owns Sheeba, a popular Yemeni restaurant in Dearborn, who told them: ‘I met Mr. Trump briefly along with his team. … They promised to stop the genocide [in] Gaza and what’s happening in Lebanon. Trump wants peace.’

Ali’s hopes must have been dashed as the names were announced of who will form his cabinet when he takes office in January. In Britain, we are living with a government which is a re-heat of Tony Blair’s back in 1997. America faces a new administration stuffed full of neo-conservatives who are a re-tread of George W. Bush’s in 2000.

Warmongers’ cabinet
Marco Rubio, the senator of Florida, is the president-elect’s choice for Secretary of State, replacing the hapless Anthony Blinken. In May after a visit to Israel he stated:

‘Israel’s enemies are also our enemies. The Iranian regime and its proxies … seek Israel’s destruction as part of a multi-stage plan to dominate the Middle East and destabilize the West. The Jewish state is on the front lines of this conflict, fighting with many shared American-Israeli lives … Israel has a right to defend itself, and the United States must support its effort to destroy Hamas as a terrorist threat. We also must support Israel against Iran-backed Hezbollah to Israel’s north …”

Florida Representative Mike Waltz, a former special-forces soldier, will be national-security adviser. He has long argued that the United States should be threatening to bomb Iran. Last month, he begged President Joe Biden to go ahead and ‘punch Iran in the nose’ in response to Iraqi guerrilla attacks.

Both Rubio and Waltz are hawks in regard to China. Rubio called for the US to create a new industrial policy to stop China from ‘eclipsing the United States entirely in the decade that follows.’ He added:

‘The bottom line is that U.S. policymakers cannot afford to be complacent about the largest, most advanced adversary America has ever faced.’ Both men are fully committed to supporting Taiwan all the way against China.

The new Secretary of Defense will be Pete Hegseth, a Fox News TV presenter who still defends the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The new US ambassador to the United Nations will be New York Representative Elise Stefanik, a former George W. Bush administration official and fervent supporter of Israel. The U.S. ambassador to the Israel will be Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and evangelical Christian supporter of West Bank settlements. Correction, he doesn’t use the word ‘settlements’. He stated in 2017: ‘There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as occupation.’ Accordingly, the Palestinians must be ethnically cleansed.

Among many Trump supporters, there is a real sense of despair that he has picked these characters because they expected him to deliver on his promise to end America’s involvement in the wars in Ukraine, Palestine and Lebanon.

On Ukraine, it looks like the new administration will pull American military and financial support for Ukraine. Even Marco Rubio has switched from demanding more and more of that support to saying peace talks are inevitable.

He voted against Biden’s $6 billion military aid package for Ukraine earlier this year. Earlier this month, he said: ‘I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong in standing up to Russia, but at the end of the day, what we are funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion, or that country is going to be set back 100 years.’ >>>