Monster movie

Trump's foreign policy seems like a crazed mutant that has escaped from some secret government research laboratory and is rampaging across the countryside terrorising those unfortunate enough to cross its path. What horrible experiment went wrong to spawn this abomination?

In the '90s, PNAC (Project for a New American Century), an organisation whose members include individuals like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, had a plan to dislodge former Soviet client states in the Middle East from Russia while she was weak and before another competitor, such as China, could emerge and claim them. This sheds an interestingly light on a lot of what happened subsequently. A lot of what happened in the Middle East seems to make no sense unless one resorts to clandestine motives and hidden actors following something like the PNAC plan.

But the ship has sailed on the PNAC plan. US intervention in the Middle East has resulted in chaos, not the orderly realignment they sought. The plan didn't work.

Poor coordination, the access given to private actors and mercenaries, a failure to appreciate the situation in detail, the shifting alliances and animosities, the casual betrayals, the miscalculations, a lack of victory conditions and exit strategies, and various other factors, contributed to a disaster, costly in both lives and treasure, that has been unfolding over the last decade and a half.

And now Russia has intervened to reassert itself in the Middle East (so that Qatari gas pipeline might not be built in Syria after all), Iraqi oil reparations are nearly paid (hence the recent lift in price) and China has started building islands in the South China Sea (raising potentially more urgent concerns elsewhere).

So the plan never worked and it is too late for the plan to start working now anyway.

The list of states that were included in the plan bears a remarkable resemblance to the states subject to Trump's recent travel ban. The question has to be asked - why is the "new sheriff" and his posse of fascists trying to rerun the PNAC playbook after all the fumbles it has caused, just as we blow the whistle and call time on it.

I said the policy was a crazed mutant, altered beyond the requirements of its original purpose, driven mad, useless, no longer a suitable instrument for anything.

It didn't escape. It was released. Trump set it free. It serves no purpose other than fear and threat, damage and disruption. Trump's inner circle took this deranged plan and are using it to find out which way people run, where they seek refuge, who stands up to it and who doesn't. And all the while a new, more terrible monster is being prepared, ready to be unleashed when they judge the time is right. And when they do, they'll make sure there is nowhere to hide.