- Entering A 1984 World, Trump-Style
Authored by Michael Klare via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The pundits and politicians generally take it for granted that President Trump lacks a coherent foreign policy. They believe that he acts solely out of spite, caprice, and political opportunism — lashing out at U.S. allies like Germany’s Angela Merkel and England’s Theresa May only to embrace authoritarian rulers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. His instinctive rancor and impulsiveness seemed on full display during his recent trip to Europe, where he lambasted Merkel, undercut May, and then, in an extraordinary meeting with Putin, dismissed any concerns over Russian meddling in the 2016 American presidential election (before half-walking his own comments back).
“Nobody knows when Trump is doing international diplomacy and when he is doing election campaigning in Montana,” commented Danish defense minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen following the summit. “It is difficult to decode what policy the American president is promoting. There is a complete unpredictability in this.”
While that reaction may be typical, it’s a mistake to assume that Trump lacks a coherent foreign-policy blueprint. In fact, an examination of his campaign speeches and his actions since entering the Oval Office — including his appearance with Putin — reflect his adherence to a core strategic concept: the urge to establish a tripolar world order, one that was, curiously enough, first envisioned by Russian and Chinese leaders in 1997 and one that they have relentlessly pursued ever since.
Such a tripolar order — in which Russia, China, and the U.S. would each assume responsibility for maintaining stability within their own respective spheres of influence while cooperating to resolve disputes wherever those spheres overlap — breaks radically with the end-of-the-Cold-War paradigm. During those heady years, the United States was the dominant world power and lorded it over most of the rest of the planet with the aid of its loyal NATO allies.
For Russian and Chinese leaders, such a “unipolar” system was considered anathema. After all, it granted the United States a hegemonic role in world affairs while denying them what they considered their rightful place as America’s equals. Not surprisingly, destroying such a system and replacing it with a tripolar one has been their strategic objective since the late 1990s — and now an American president has zealously embraced that disruptive project as his own.
The Sino-Russian Master Plan
The joint Russian-Chinese project to undermine the unipolar world system was first set in motion when then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin conferred with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin during a state visit to Moscow in April 1997. Restoring close relations with Russia while building a common front against U.S. global dominance was reportedly the purpose of Jiang’s trip.
“Some are pushing toward a world with one center,” said Yeltsin at the time. “We want the world to be multipolar, to have several focal points. These will form the basis for a new world order.”
This outlook was inscribed in a “Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order,” signed by the two leaders on April 23, 1997. Although phrased in grandiose language (as its title suggests), the declaration remains worth reading as it contains most of the core principles on which Donald Trump’s foreign policy now rests.
At its heart lay a condemnation of global hegemony — the drive by any single nation to dominate world affairs — along with a call for the establishment of a “multipolar” international order. It went on to espouse other key precepts that would now be considered Trumpian, including unqualified respect for state sovereignty, non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states (code for no discussion of their human rights abuses), and the pursuit of mutual economic advantage.
Yeltsin would resign as president in December 1999, while Jiang would complete his term in March 2003. Their successors, Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao, would, however, continue to build on that 1997 foundational document, issuing their own blueprint for a tripolar world in 2005.
Following a Kremlin meeting that July, the two would sign an updated “Joint Statement of the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation Regarding the International Order of the 21st Century.” It was even more emphatic in its commitment to a world in which the United States would be obliged to negotiate on equal terms with Moscow and Beijing, stating:
“The international community should thoroughly renounce the mentality of confrontation and alignment, should not pursue the right to monopolize or dominate world affairs, and should not divide countries into a leading camp and a subordinate camp… World affairs should be decided through dialogue and consultation on a multilateral and collective basis.”
The principal aim of such a strategy was, and continues to be, to demolish a U.S.-dominated world order — especially one in which that dominance was ensured by American reliance on its European allies and NATO. The ability to mobilize not only its own power but also Europe’s gave Washington a particularly outsized role in international affairs. If such ties could be crippled or destroyed, its clout would obviously be diminished and so it might someday become just another regional heavyweight.
In those years, Putin was particularly vocal in calling for the dissolution of NATO and its replacement by a European-wide security system that would, of course, include his country. The divisions in Europe “will continue until there is a single security area in Europe,” he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2001. Just as the Warsaw Pact had been disbanded as the Cold War ended, he argued, so Western Europe’s Cold War-era alliance, NATO, should be replaced with a broader security structure.
Donald Trump Climbs on Board
There is no way to know whether Donald Trump was ever aware — no matter how indirectly — of such Sino-Russian goals or planning, but there can be no question that, in his own fashion and for his own reasons, he has absorbed their fundamental principles. As his recent assaults on NATO and his embrace of the Russian president suggest, he is visibly seeking to create the very tripolar world once envisioned by Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin and zealously promoted by Vladimir Putin ever since he assumed office.
The proof that Trump sought such an international system can be found in his 2016 campaign speeches and interviews. While he repeatedly denounced China for its unfair trade practices and complained about Russia’s nuclear-weapons buildup, he never described those countries as mortal enemies. They were rivals or competitors with whose leaders he could communicate and, when advantageous, cooperate. On the other hand, he denounced NATO as a drain on America’s prosperity and its ability to maneuver successfully in the world. Indeed, he saw that alliance as eminently dispensable if its members were unwilling to support his idea of how to promote America’s best interests in a highly competitive world.
“I am proposing a new foreign policy focused on advancing America’s core national interests, promoting regional stability, and producing an easing of tensions in the world,” he declared in a September 2016 speech in Philadelphia. From that speech and other campaign statements, you can get a pretty good idea of his mindset.
First, make the United States — already the world’s most powerful nation — even stronger, especially militarily. Second, protect America’s borders. (“Immigration security,” he explained, “is a vital part of our national security.”) Third, in contrast to the version of globalism previously espoused by the American version of a liberal international order, this country was to pursue only its own interests, narrowly defined. Playing the role of global enforcer for allies, he argued, had impoverished the United States and must be ended. “At some point,” as he put it to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and David Sanger in March 2016, “we cannot be the policeman of the world.”
As for NATO, he couldn’t have been clearer: it had become irrelevant and its preservation should no longer be an American priority. “Obsolete” was the word he used with Haberman and Sanger. “When NATO was formed many decades ago… there was a different threat, [the Soviet Union,]… which was much bigger… [and] certainly much more powerful than even today’s Russia.” The real threat, he continued, is terrorism, and NATO had no useful role in combating that peril. “I think, probably a new institution maybe would be better for that than using NATO, which was not meant for that.”
All of this, of course, fit to a T what Vladimir Putin has long been calling for, not to speak of the grand scheme articulated by Yeltsin and Jiang in 1997. Indeed, during the second presidential debate, Trump went even further, saying, “I think it would be great if we got along with Russia because we could fight ISIS together.”
Though the focus at the moment is purely on President Trump and Russia, let’s not forget China. While frequently lambasting the Chinese in the economic realm, he has nonetheless sought Beijing’s help in addressing the North Korean nuclear threat and other common perils. He speaks often by telephone with President Xi Jinping and insists that they enjoy an amicable relationship. Indeed, to the utter astonishment of many of his Republican allies, he even allowed the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE to regainaccess to essential American technology and computer chips after paying a $1 billion fine, though the firm had been widely accused of violating U.S. sanctions on trade with Iran and North Korea. Such a move was, he claimed, “reflective” of his wish to negotiate a successful trade deal with China “and my personal relationship with President Xi.”
Trump’s World Reflects That Sino-Russian Plan
Although there’s no evidence that Donald Trump ever even knew about the Sino-Russian blueprint for establishing a tripolar global order, everything he’s done as president has had the affect of facilitating that world-altering project. This was stunningly evident at the recent Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki, where he repeatedly spoke of his desire to cooperate with Moscow in solving global problems.
“The disagreements between our two countries are well known and President Putin and I discussed them at length today,” he said at the press conference that followed their private conversation. “But if we’re going to solve many of the problems facing our world, then we’re going to have to find ways to cooperate in pursuit of shared interests.” He then went on to propose that officials of the national security councils of the two countries get together to discuss such matters — an extraordinary proposal given the historical mistrust between Washington and Moscow.
And despite the furor his warm embrace of Putin triggered in Washington, Trump doubled down on his strategic concept by inviting the Russian leader to the White House for another round of one-on-one talks this fall. According to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, National Security Advisor John Bolton is already in preparatory talks with the Kremlin for such a meeting.
The big question in all this, of course, is: Why? Why would an American president seek to demolish a global order in which the United States was the dominant player and enjoyed the support of so many loyal and wealthy allies? Why would he want to replace it with one in which it would be but one of three regional heavyweights?
Undoubtedly, historians will debate this question for decades. The obvious answer, offered by so many pundits, is that he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing, that it’s all thoughtless and impulsive. But there’s another possible answer: that he intuits in the Sino-Russian template a model that the United States could emulate to its benefit.
In the Trumpian mindset, this country had become weak and overextended because of its uncritical adherence to the governing precepts of the liberal international order, which called for the U.S. to assume the task of policing the world while granting its allies economic and trade advantages in return for their loyalty. Such an assessment, whether accurate or not, certainly jibes well with the narrative of victimization that so transfixed his core constituency in rustbelt areas of Middle America. It also suggests that an inherited burden could now be discarded, allowing for the emergence of a less-encumbered, stronger America — much as a stronger Russia has emerged in this century from the wreckage of the Soviet Union and a stronger China from the wreckage of Maoism. This reinvigorated country would still, of course, have to compete with those other two powers, but from a far stronger position, being able to devote all its resources to economic growth and self-protection without the obligation of defending half of the rest of the world.
Listen to Trump’s speeches, read through his interviews, and you’ll find just this proposition lurking behind virtually everything he has to say on foreign policy and national security. “You know… there is going to be a point at which we just can’t do this anymore,” he told Haberman and Sanger in 2016, speaking of America’s commitments to allies. “You know, when we did those deals, we were a rich country… We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We’re not anymore.”
The only acceptable response, he made clear, was to jettison such overseas commitments and focus instead on “restoring” the country’s self-defense capabilities through a massive buildup of its combat forces. (The fact that the United States already possesses far more capable weaponry than any of its rivals and outspends them by a significant margin when it comes to the acquisition of additional munitions doesn’t seem to have any impact on Trump’s calculations.)
This outlook would be embedded in his administration’s National Security Strategy, released last December. The greatest threat to American security, it claimed, wasn’t ISIS or al-Qaeda, but Russian and Chinese efforts to bolster their military power and extend their geopolitical reach. But given the administration’s new approach to global affairs, it suggested, there was no reason to believe that the country was headed for an inevitable superpower conflagration. (“Competition does not always mean hostility, nor does it inevitably lead to conflict. An America that successfully competes is the best way to prevent conflict.”)
However ironic it might seem, this is, of course, the gist of the Sino-Russian tripolar model as embraced and embellished by Donald Trump. It envisions a world of constant military and economic contention among three regional power centers, generating crises of various sorts, but not outright war. It assumes that the leaders of those three centers will cooperate on matters affecting them all, such as terrorism, and negotiate as necessary to prevent minor skirmishes from erupting into major battles.
Will this system prove more stable and durable than the crumbling unipolar world order it’s replacing? Who knows? If Russia, China, and the United States were of approximately equal strength, it might indeed theoretically prevent one party from launching a full-scale conflict with another, lest the aggrieved country join the third power, overwhelming the aggressor.
Eerily enough, this reflects the future world as envisioned in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 — a world in which three great-power clusters, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, contend for global dominance, periodically forming new two-against-one alliances.
However, as the United States currently possesses significantly greater military power than Russia and China combined, that equation doesn’t really apply and so, despite the mammoth nuclear arsenals of all three countries, the possibility of a U.S.-initiated war cannot be ruled out. In a system of ever-competing super-states, the risk of crisis and confrontation will always be present, along with the potential for nuclear escalation.
One thing we can be reasonably sure of, however, regarding such a system is that smaller, weaker states, and minority peoples everywhere will be given even shorter shrift than at present when caught in any competitive jousting for influence among the three main competitors (and their proxies). This is the crucial lesson to be drawn from the grim fighting still ongoing in Syria and eastern Ukraine: you are only worth something as long as you do the bidding of your superpower patron. When your utility is exhausted — or you’re unfortunate enough to be trapped in a zone of contention — your life is worth nothing. No lasting peace is attainable in such an environment and so, just as in Orwell’s 1984, war — or preparing for war — will be a perpetual condition of life.
- Gold Shorts Explode; Specs Sell Vol, Bonds As "Winter In The Markets" Looms
Before the shit really hit the fan this week as Techs wrecked and Yuan crashed, CFTC data (reported as of Tuesday close) showed speculators piling increasingly into the most-crowded trades as if nothing will ever change.
The two most extreme positioning situations are in Gold and US Treasuries as there has never been more hedge fund shorts in the precious metal – and it is accelerating dramatically…
And never been more aggregate speculative short positions across the Treasury complex in history…
Specifically, 10Y Treasury shorts are exploding higher…
Additionally, as China’s offshore Yuan collapses, traders are adding to their net long USDollar positions – but for now, the dollar refuses to follow their positioning…
And finally, specs added further to their renewed belief in the old ‘sell vol’ trade being back…
As if February never happened.
Despite the fact that we are heading into the market’s most seasonally volatile time of year…
All of this positioning occurred before things went a little pear-shaped in global markets towards the latter end of the week, and as Bloomberg notes, this year even more so as for many, unpredictable markets could mar dreams of a lazy summer at the beach. Event risk could derail plans as trade tensions linger and China’s sliding currency recalls August 2015’s devaluation. And lest you forget: President Donald Trump has a Twitter account.
“It’s the winter in the markets — not the summer,” Louis Gargour, the chief investment officer of London-based LNG Capital, an alternative investment-management firm, said in an interview. He’s been reducing exposure to risk and increasing shorts in credit.
“China’s a big story, the second-order effects of trade wars are a much bigger factor that could pressure global markets.”
Additionally, Goldman has warned that depleted liquidity makes the market prone to crises.
“You have a lot of geopolitical events that could happen this summer,” said Barbara Reinhard, head of asset allocation at the $227 billion AUM Voya Asset Management.
“August ones are particularly alarming — that’s when volumes are thin and people are on vacation.”
Risk-off sentiment could rapidly snowball alongside the specter of higher borrowing costs. Investors may struggle to offload positions, from corporate bonds to emerging-market assets, in the second-lowest equity volume month of the year, as Reinhard concluded:
“Let’s put it this way, everyone taking a vacation: they can’t be without their devices.”
- JPMorgan: QE Might Have Devastating Consequences After All
Approximately 9 years after various “tin-foil” wearing blogs first warned that the long-run negative consequences of QE will drown out and vastly outnumber any positive ones (which have mostly been confined to make the rich richer and create the illusion of economic stability built on the cracking foundations of trillions in newly created dollars), none other than JPMorgan today admits that QE may, indeed, have some devastating financial, economic and political consequences. And by some, we mean a lot.
What prompted this exciting moment of monetary introspection?
According to JPM’s Nick Panigirtzoglou, it was last week’s report that the BoJ has expressed concerns over negative side effects of its QE current policies (especially keeping the 10Y yield fixed around 0%), and which resulted in a sharp, if brief, global bond steepening which demonstrated once again just how dominant central bank monetization policies are in determining the long-end of the curve.
And, as the market demonstrated, a hawkish policy shift and a subsequent reduction in duration absorption by the BoJ would intensify the quantitative tightening already in place by the Fed and the ECB, and according to JPM represents “a significant tail risk that has generated intense debate among our clients.”
So what are these possible ‘devastating’ side-side effects from unorthodox BoJ – and other central bank – policies?
Here is a list of the key negative consequences arising from QE, from JPMorgan:
1. Results in Asset Bubbles and a Collapse in CapEx: Even as QE has likely exerted downward pressure on bond yields, the significant increase in central banks’ balance sheets makes an exit potentially more difficult, and raises the risk of a policy error or of an increase in perceptions about debt monetization. It potentially creates asset bubbles by lowering asset yields relative to historical norms, that an eventual return to normality could be accompanied by sharp price declines. Perceptions about asset bubbles can thus also increase long term uncertainty. In turn higher uncertainty might prevent economic agents such as businesses from spending, i.e. the collapse in CapEx observed over the past decade as company used cheap debt to purchase their own, making management teams richer.
2. Creates Zombie Companies and Crushes Productivity. Low credit spreads and corporate bond yields are an intended consequence of QE but not without distortions. By allowing unproductive and inefficient companies to survive, helped by low debt servicing costs, QE could potentially hinder the creative destruction taking place during a normal economic cycle. In principle, QE could thus make economies less efficient or productive over time. Which should answer the long-running debate over the chronic lack of economic productivity in the new normal. The debate about so called “zombie” companies has been particularly intense in Japan given the low business turnover rate. According to OECD, Japan’s business startup and closure rate is about 5%, roughly a third of that in other advanced economies with several commentators blaming the BoJ’s ultra-accommodative policies for this problem.
3. Low Rates crush savers, make the rich richer. One of the most visible impacts of QE has been the decline in discount rates, which in turn has created wealth effects via supporting asset prices. However, an argument could be made that these wealth effects are not evenly distributed, and that low discount rates mean savers suffer from an erosion of income.
4. Exacerbates currency wars. QE could exacerbate so called “currency wars”. The value of the Japanese yen collapsed after Abenomics started in November 2012 and has stayed at historical lows since then helped by BoJ’s ultra accommodative monetary policy. This is shown in Figure 5 by the real trade weighted index of the Japanese yen. Japan’s main competitors across EM and DM have been feeling the pressure from this depreciation, though it is not clear that the depreciation necessarily means the yen is undervalued.
5. NIRP hurts the economy, and chokes off credit supply. Beyond a certain threshold, negative interest rates can have unintended consequences such as lower bank profitability, higher bank lending rates, reduced credit creation to the real economy, impaired functioning of money markets and reduced liquidity in bond markets. And there is a good reason to believe that the threshold below which negative rates start having unintended consequences is higher in Japan than in Europe, not least because of the lower interest margins Japanese banks operate with… Deeply negative policy rates had taken their toll on Danish and Swiss banks’ net interest income (Figure 6). Net interest income as % of assets declined in 2015 for both Danish and Swiss banks following the introduction of very negative policy rates in these countries in January 2015.
6. Chokes Repo markets due to collateral shortages. It is not only commercial banks that are hurt as a result of QE. Reduced liquidity in money and repo markets is another side effect. UST collateral shortages have hampered US repo markets. The BoJ and the ECB inflicted similar damage to European and Japanese repo markets as government collateral was withdrawn at an even stronger pace. An argument could be made that the damage to trading turnover and liquidity is likely to have been even bigger with the BoJ’s and ECB’s QE relative to the Fed’s QE, because the BoJ and the ECB went even further than the Fed by lowering its policy rate to negative territory. Negative yields can hamper trading volumes and liquidity as money market participants are less willing to trade at negative yields.
7. Cripples pension funds by increasing funding deficits. Lower bond yields increase pension fund and insurance company deficits putting pressure on pension funds to match assets and liabilities. This pressure to move further away from equities and other high risk assets into fixed income is even stronger in countries like Japan where demographic pressures are more intense. For example, old age dependency ratios, i.e. the proportion of the population aged 65 years and over as a percentage of the population aged 15-64 years, have been rising steadily, with Japan aging more rapidly than the US or Europe (Figure 1). Generally, an aging population means that allocations are likely to shift towards relatively safer instruments as the ability to withstand larger drawdowns on capital diminishes as individuals age.
What is striking in Japan is that in contrast to GPIF, which shifted towards equities post Abenomics most likely under political pressure, private Japanese pension funds did the opposite shifting even more towards bonds (Figure 3).
8. QE Forces consumers to save even more. The yield-to-worst on the Bloomberg Global Agg Yen denominated bond index currently stands at close to 0.15%, around one-sixth of its average in the expansion preceding the financial crisis. In addition to the effect of deleveraging after the financial crisis and the Euro area sovereign crisis, QE has played a role in pushing down on long-term yields. Particularly the QE programs of the BoJ and ECB which have seen net issuance of government bonds outside of the public sector balance sheet turn negative, not just in their domestic economies but for the G4 on aggregate (Figure 4).
These low yields in turn depress the income that investors receive from bonds, inducing them to save even more, in the process making a mockery of the key “widely accepted” economist axiom behind QE.
9. The rise of populism and extreme political frictions. A longer-term tail risk created by QE is the potential for political frictions, which could escalate in the future especially once QE becomes a negative carry trade for
central banks, i.e. when the interest on excess reserves starts rising above the yield they receive on their bond
holdings.JPMorgan’s punchline:
These political issues could become a big problem in Japan if in the future Abenomics, including BoJ’s ultra-accommodative policies, are perceived as a failed experiment that brought limited benefits to the Japanese economy and society.
Now if readers expand what JPM said about the failure of QE in Japan, they may be reminded of the piece “An Orgy of Blood” by the UK’s Clarmond Wealth, whose conclusion we repost below because with every passing day, the world it previews gets closer:
When historians look back and see the cavalier balance sheets of the central banks they would rightly assume there was a world war going on as every central bank balance sheet is now approaching or exceeding levels not seen since 1945. However, the worrying truth is that there are no external enemies to overcome; the central bankers are only maintaining the growth trajectory that we demand.
The age of sloganeers
The current social contract is mired in the quicksand of global finance. It is being kept alive by the corpulent balance sheets of central banks, who do their government’s bidding so that the politicians do not have to put unpleasant choices in front of their electorates. This cowardly behaviour gives rise to slogans and sloganeers, who provide familiar but false checklists of remedies. “Take bank control”…”America First”…”One Belt, One Road”…”Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer”…”One Man – One Kill”. Central banks are currently furnishing the excess credit that, in the past, has been followed by an orgy of blood.
- Sweden Will Remain Sweden In Name Only
For some time now the Gefira Team has been keeping track of the demographic processes that are taking place in Europe, especially in its Western part.
This time Gefira published a report on Sweden, a well-developed, typical Western state, member of the European Union. The report includes independent calculations, using dedicated demographic software Cerberus 2.0. The report is based on the input that is taken from the official bureaus of statistics.
The Gefira findings based on the official data provided by Statistics Sweden SCB reveal what follows:
-
the fertility rate of native white Swedes is much lower (1.6) than the country’s overall fertility rate (1.9);
-
the Swedish parental system fails to deliver more babies;
-
the number of children with an Islamic name is growing at a fast pace. Since 2010 it has increased by more than 30%, so that now around 8 to 10% of the newborns in Sweden have an Islamic name.
-
the native white Swedish population will be a minority within a maximum of 40 years. The same source shows that 22% of the newborns have a non-Western migration background.
To compensate for the low birth rate the government is pursuing a systematic re-population policy. That it why it can be claimed that the Swedish community will grow in numbers at a moderate speed in the foreseeable future. The SCB statisticians cannot have come to this conclusion on the basis of the Swedish childbearing numbers nor on the global migration trends. The said growth remains and will be a result of importing highly fertile women from low and medium HDI (Human Development Index) countries.
The future of the Swedish population is bleak. On the basis of official fertility and death rates Cerberus 2.0, software designed for demographic calculations, computed the number of births and deaths for each age group, starting in 1970. The number of white native Swedes grew until 1996 and from there it began to decline in a more or less straight line. In 2017 there were again 8 million people and by 2060 there will be 6.6 million Swedish people left. If the authorities are not able to turn the tide and increase the fertility rates of Swedish women, the population will decline to 5 million by the end of the century. While the calculations predict that there will be 8 million natives left now, the current official data show that there are even fewer Swedes with two parents born in Sweden.
Due to the continuation of the influx of immigrants, the current population is 10 million. According to Statistics Sweden it will be 14 million by the end of this century. The Swedish authorities regard only first and second generation immigrants as foreigners. After one generation a sprawling Pakistani community relocated to Malmö will be regarded as natural Swedish growth.
Another approach is to look at the difference between the computed population and the official numbers. If Cerberus 2.0 forecasts 7 million people in 2050 and Statistics Sweden expects 12 million, the difference is due to migrants, whether it is the first, second or fifth generation.
The forecast made by the Swedish authorities is rather a blueprint or plan for the future than a prediction. Comparing the projection made by Cerberus 2.0 and those made by the state planners, the Gefira report expects the Swedish to be a minority by 2066 i.e. by the end of this century only one-third of the population will be of Swedish descent, which means almost a total re-population.
-
- Housing Market Headed For "Broadest Slowdown In Years"
For those who have been focusing on corporate earnings, the stock market and the global economy, a more ominous – if under-reported – flashpoint has emerged in recent days after some scary housing market numbers were published over the past week, or as Robert Shiller told Bloomberg, “This could be the very beginning of a turning point.”
The housing market is showing signs of a downward slide after existing-home sales were down in June, sales hit their slowest pace in eight months, and mortgage rates are on the rise, causing usually restive buyers to stay patiently on the the sidelines.
In reporting on the worrisome data released this week, Bloomberg notes that “the U.S. housing market — particularly in cutthroat areas like Seattle, Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas — appears to be headed for the broadest slowdown in years,” due to a trend of buyers “getting squeezed by rising mortgage rates and by prices climbing about twice as fast as incomes, and there’s only so far they can stretch.”
Meanwhile, according to the latest Attom data, U.S. median home price appreciation decelerated in Q2 of 2018 to its slowest pace in two years. Here are some key indicators that we are indeed witnessing the start of a slowdown, published this week:
- Existing-home sales dropped in June for a third straight month. Purchases of new homes are at their slowest pace in eight months.
- Inventory, which plunged for years, has begun to grow again as buyers move to the sidelines, sapping the fuel for surging home values.
- Prices for existing homes climbed 6.4 percent in May, the smallest year-over-year gain since early 2017, and have gained the least over three months since 2012, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
- Shares of PulteGroup Inc. fell as much as 4.9 percent Thursday morning after the national homebuilder reported that orders had declined 1 percent from a year earlier, blaming rising mortgage rates.
It looks like home prices are plateauing as supply lines increase, according to Bloomberg:
- Some of the most expensive markets, where sales are falling under the weight of prices, are now seeing substantial increases in supply, according to Redfin Corp.
- In San Jose, California, inventory was up 12 percent in June from a year earlier. It rose 24 percent in Seattle and 32 percent in Portland, Oregon. Those big jumps are from low numbers, so the housing crunch is still a serious problem.
- “Inventory has increased quite a bit,” a Seattle agent tells Bloomberg. “We’re seeing less competition.”
- In its preliminary July survey, 65 percent of Americans said it’s a good time to buy a home, the lowest since 2008, when the economy was still in recession.
And as the following chart of FHFA home prices, the recent home price plateau is starting to turn lower:
This as international buyers are dropping out of the US housing market in growing numbers, according to new reports, underscoring the general buyer fatigue on the rise.
“The affordability crisis may have reached a breaking point in Portland, San Jose, and Seattle,” said Settle-based real estate brokerage company Redfin’s CEO.
At the same time, the average homeownership tenure increases to new all-time high of 8.09 years: homeowners who sold in Q2 2018 had owned their homes for an average of 8.09 years, up from an average homeownership tenure of 7.91 years in Q1 2018 and up from an average homeownership tenure of 7.83 years in Q2 2017, according to Attom.
“Buyers want to shop and take some time, as opposed to having to rush and throw offers in,” a real estate agent with Windermere Realty Trust in Portland told Bloomberg of trying to manage sellers’ expectations. “It’s the market correcting itself. At some point, you hit a peak of momentum, and then things level off.”
And as supply grows, and buyers find more options to choose from, buyers are taking their time to pull the trigger:
While we have previously compiled these numbers in separate posts, here is a summary take on the current state of the US housing market:
- The homeownership rate in the second quarter was 64.3 percent, up from 63.7 percent a year earlier, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released Thursday.
- S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller data hint at the softening. The 20-city index of property values rose 6.6 percent in the 12 months ending in April. After seasonal adjustments, the gauge posted its smallest monthly increase in 10 months, with New York, San Francisco and Washington reporting declines.
- Homeownership still remains out of reach for many Americans, especially for first-time and younger buyers. For existing homes, the median price climbed in June to a record $276,900, while properties typically stayed on the market for 26 days, unchanged from the prior three months, according to the National Association of Realtors.
That said, there are still reasons to be optimistic that we are not at the start of a new housing crisis: per Bloomberg:
“While there appears to be a slowdown in the growth rate of home sales and prices, it has not slowed rising homeownership,” Freddie Mac Chief Economist Sam Khater said in a statement — though he added that the rate is a full percentage point below the 50-year average, reflecting “the long-lasting scars from the Great Recession and the lopsided nature of this recovery.”
Market watchers note that the housing sector has strong support from a healthy labor market and steady economic growth, which indicates a stabilizing trend for home prices rather than anything close to the experience of the crisis, when property values plunged. And shares of D.R. Horton Inc., which builds a lot of starter homes, rose as high as 8.7 percent Thursday morning after the company reported a 12 percent jump in orders.
Still, a red flag is that the experts are starting to spin the narrative, usually a key indicator that a major turning point is dead ahead: “The rate of home sales, new and existing, has probably peaked,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “But it’s not going to roll over. It will gently decline.” It was not clear why Shepherdson was confident of this.
Others were less sanguine: “Home prices are plateauing,” said Ed Stansfield, chief property economist at Capital Economics. “People are saying: Let’s just bide our time, there’s no great rush. If we wait six or nine months we’re not going to lose out on getting a foot on the ladder… we’re now looking at a period in which prices move more or less sideways, or increase no more quickly than growth in incomes, over the next few years.”
Which is a problem, because according to the latest Case Shiller data, home prices in all metro areas are increasing at a higher rate than incomes, and in 15 out of 20, the rate of price is more than double that of income growth.
And let’s not forget the uber bubble that is San Francisco, where in just the past six months, median home prices increased by a record $200,000 to an all time high $1.62 million.
Finally, there is the threat that the Fed will hike right into a recession, making mortgages unaffordable: “no one knows how far and how fast borrowing costs may rise as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates”, Stansfield said.
This was confirmed by the latest UMichigan consumer sentiment survey, which revealed that Americans believe current conditions to buy a homes are the worst they have been since 2011 due to high interest rates.
This also means that for most areas, we will not see a price surge just ahead of the next recession. Lenders and borrowers alike are less likely to let credit spiral out of control than in 2005 and 2006. And with financing tighter and wage gains in check, “there’s not much scope for prices to continue to increase sustainably” at recent rates.
The rate-driven cooling, in turn, could curb housing starts, “because builders tend to only build what they think they can confidently sell,” Stansfield said, which he noted is a potential silver lining, as the slowdown in inventory creation “will decrease the risk of a bust.” Alternatively, it will also result in a broad slowdown in the economy as homebuilders hire less (or begin to fire) construction workers, while spending less on growth.
So where does that leave us? We’ll let readers decide on their own where in Phase 2 of the housing market (shown below) the US is currently, with the reminder that nobody rings a bell at the top.
- Trump Declares State Of Emergency As "Apocalyptic" Wildfire Devastates Northern California
Update: The death toll has risen to five, as great-grandmother Mary Bledsoe and her great-grandchildren, James Roberts, 5, and Emily Roberts, 4, were killed as the Carr fire moved through Redding, CA on Saturday. The fire is currently 5% contained and has destroyed over 80,000 acres and 500 structures based on a revised counts.
President Trump has declared a state of emergency in California after deadly wildfires have ripped through over 102,028 acres across the state this week, according to the governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
According to the White House, Trump has authorized FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) to assist California firefighters who are battling tinder-fueled infernos thanks to nearly half-a-decade of drought.
The worst of the blazes has devastated Shasta County, as the Carr Fire has claimed the lives of two first responders, forced thousands to evacuate and burned 48,312 acres – around half the total affected area across the state. The fire was 5% contained as of Friday night according to officials, while Fire Inspector Jeremy Stoke was killed along with a bulldozer operator as they battled the blaze.
Photo: Kaz Weida Redding Chief of Police Roger Moore told the press that so many residents were fleeing the fire that they were creating “gridlock” on the city’s roads, as temperatures reached 110 degrees in some spots and created their own weather described by Can official as “a tornado over the fire.”
“Fire was whipped up into a whirlwind of activity,” said California’s top fire official, Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott, adding that it was “uprooting trees, moving vehicles, moving parts of roadways.” Pimlott said that dry brush was to blame for the wildfires.
Shadrac Herrera of Redding, 34, said he witnessed the upheaval. “I saw a tornado of fire,” he said. “I could hear it whistling and sucking up air and at the same time it was growing. Incredibly scary.” –NBC News
Tops of the Pyrocumulus cloud over the #CarrFire in California are now up to 32,000’! This fire is creating its own weather! pic.twitter.com/dxaVsmEYZD
— Trishcuit (@Trishcuit) July 28, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Aerial View of the Redding Fire 😥 #redding #california #reddingcalifornia #calfire @calfire @ktvu2 @kron4tv @kpixtv @sfgate @sfchronicle @krcrnews @buzzfeednews @buzzfeed https://t.co/dze3bTBIgt pic.twitter.com/EC5ugrkKjH
— Daytodayphotography (@dtdphotographer) July 28, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
On Thursday, Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for Shasta County while formally requesting federal emergency aid from the White House late Friday, according to NBC News.
Massive California fire jumps over river and threatens city of 95,000 people https://t.co/mLiaLiRvto pic.twitter.com/qQb4umkKbV
— jhon (@qihavytyrux) July 27, 2018
“Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,” he said. “Pay very close attention to social media, websites, local television and radio broadcasts.”
So many fires had broken out across the Golden State that Pimlott said first responders were hoping to mount vicious initial attacks to keep them in check. “Our first priority always is the initial attack of new fires,” he said.
Brig. Gen. Matthew Beevers of the California National Guard said 800 of his troops were either at the Carr Fire or were headed that way. The guard has also deployed multiple aircraft, including at least one military drone that is allowing firefighters to monitor the behavior of the blaze, he said. –NBC News
Over 3,400 firefighters from as far away as San Diego have been battling the the Shasta County inferno, which was dealing with its own 240-acre brushfire on Friday near the town of Ramona.
Other fires across the state include the Ferguson fire in Mariposa which has burned 46,675 acres and is around 30% contained, and the 12,300 acre Cranston fire in Riverside county which Cal Fire reports as 17% contained.
While the Northern California Carr fire was reportedly sparked by the “mechanical failure of a vehicle,” a Temecula, CA man was charged on Friday with over a dozen felony accounts related to nine different fires in Riverside County, reports the Temecula Patch.
Brandon McGlover, 32, faces a potential life sentence if convicted as charged, the Riverside County District Attorney’s office said.
McGlover is accused of setting nine separate fires on Wednesday, one of which exploded into the 11,500-acre Cranston Fire burning near Idyllwild. The fires were all allegedly set in the Idyllwild, Anza and Sage areas. –Temecula Patch
Over 6,000 residents have evacuated due to the Cranston Fire, which threatens 5,000 structures and has already destroyed five homes.
- Orban Predicts "Illiberal" EU Christian Democracies As Open-Border Backlash Grows
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has called for a united front between Europe’s “Illiberal” right-wing parties, and has predicted that Europe will shift toward a “Christian Democracy,” claiming that the “big goal” of EU leaders is to transform Europe into a “post-Christian era,” reports Reuters.
Unlike liberal democracy, he said, Christian democracy rejects multiculturalism and immigration while being anti-communist and standing for Christian values. –Reuters
“There’s a general shift toward the right in the whole of Europe,” Orban said in front of an ethnic Hungarian audience in Baile Tusnad, Romania, on Saturday, referring to various populist movements throughout Europe. “We must focus all our attention on the European elections of 2019. It’s high time the European elections were about one serious common theme, immigration.”
Orban, a member of Hungary’s conservative nationalist and populist Fidesz party, has been a vocal critic of forced multiculturalism throughout Europe, along with perhaps its largest private supporter George Soros.
“Their big goal to transform Europe, to ship it into a post-Christian era, and into an era when nations disappear – this process could be undermined in the European elections. And it is our elementary interest to stop this transformation,” Orban said of EU nations which promote and accommodate open-border migration.
Orban also took shots at the Western political “elite,” accusing them of failing to protect European nations unchecked migration primarily from North African countries.
The Hungarian premier renewed his attack on the European Commission after similar remarks in a radio interview on Friday, where he dismissed the bloc’s executive as a lame duck. He said the commission’s concerns about Hungary’s migration and non-government organization policies will soon cease to be relevant as its mandate expires. –Bloomberg
“We are facing a big moment: we are saying goodbye not simply to liberal democracy … but to the 1968 elite,” said Orban, referring to an international wave of leftist, liberal protests which ended the ruling conservative order in several European countries.
On June 20, the Hungarian parliament passed a “STOP Soros” bill, which will criminalize certain types of aid given to illegal immigrants.
Officially dubbed the “STOP Soros” law, the proposal makes it illegal to help migrants not entitled to protection apply for asylum and prohibits helping illegal migrants to gain status to remain in Hungary. Under the law, individuals or groups that commit either act would be subject prison terms. –Daily Caller
Orban loves Bannon
Orban also welcomed the founding of an anti-EU group, “The Movement” which we noted on Saturday. Bannon plans to lead a populist revolt throughout Europe which, if successful, will crush George Soros and his network of open-border NGO’s to smithereens, according to the Daily Beast.
The Movement will be a Brussels-based non-profit NGO which will go head to head with Soros – with the goal of uniting like-minded European parties and various conservative think tanks along with other support structures.
The non-profit will be a central source of polling, advice on messaging, data targeting, and think-tank research for a ragtag band of right-wingers who are surging all over Europe, in many cases without professional political structures or significant budgets.
Bannon’s ambition is for his organization ultimately to rival the impact of Soros’s Open Society, which has given away $32 billion to largely liberal causes since it was established in 1984.
Over the past year, Bannon has held talks with right-wing groups across the continent from Nigel Farage and members of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National) in the West, to Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Polish populists in the East. –Daily Beast
In other words, everyone who doesn’t like largely unchecked human trafficking of migrants into Europe via Soros-funded NGOs which operate throughout the Mediterranean.
Bannon is looking to establish a populist stronghold within European Parliament which could gain as many as a third of the lawmakers following next May’s Europe-wide elections. As the Beast points out, “A united populist bloc of that size would have the ability to seriously disrupt parliamentary proceedings, potentially granting Bannon huge power within the populist movement.”
In June, Bannon met with Italy’s new interior minister Matteo Salvini and American Cardinal Raymond Burke – both of whom are staunchly opposed to the pope’s open border policies. The three met in Rome while Bannon was visiting to celebrate Italy’s new populist coalition government run by Salvini, Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
In short, Hungary’s Orban has declared the tide officially turned towards populism – while supporting Steve Bannon’s plan to unite conservative Europeans under the umbrella of The Movement.
- Mapping The US States Where It's Legal To Smoke Marijuana
At the beginning of July, Vermont became the ninth U.S. state to legalize recreational marijuana and adults are permitted to possess up to 1 ounce of the drug as well as two mature and four immature plants.
As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Vermont joins other states including California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Nevada where votes were passed to green light recreational marijuana in late 2016.
You will find more infographics at Statista
That doubled the number of states where lighting up was permitted with Colorado, Alaska, Washington and Oregon all previously legalizing the green stuff.
In terms of consumption, California has a massive market for recreational marijuana, larger than Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska combined.
- Will Next Steps On Iran Point Towards A New "Big Three" Or World War III?
Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
On July 22 US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a bizarre speech on Iran. Delivered from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, and ostensibly addressed to the Iranian-American community, the speech’s staging clearly sought to evoke the fall of communism, casting the Ayatollahs in the role of Leonid Brezhnev and company.
Iranian “regime change” is not the publicly stated goal of the Trump Administration’s policy. But it is hard to see how US demands on Tehran don’t amount to exactly that, with Pompeo comparing the Iranian “regime” (a term used dozens of times to imply illegitimacy) to a “mafia.” He asserted that Iran’s behavior is “at root in the revolutionary nature of the regime itself.” What can change its “root” or “nature” without ceasing to be itself?
Pompeo demanded not just a total change in policy from Tehran but a different mode of governance amounting to Iran’s ceasing to be an independent regional power. The Reagan venue’s analogy to the collapse of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe echoed in the Secretary’s heavy emphasis on “a new 24/7 Farsi-language TV channel” spanning “not only television, but radio, digital, and social media format, so that the ordinary Iranians inside of Iran and around the globe can know that America stands with them.”
The US position on Iran is that it is solely a question of removing a layer of malign governance, after which democracy, tolerance, peace, and general niceness will spontaneously break forth, and justice will roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Just like happened in Iraq after 2003. Just like in Libya.
Never mind that Iran isn’t North America or Europe. Never mind that American and European ideas of social and personal liberty would be anathema to an unknown but significant percentage of Iran’s population. Never mind that the replacement for the Ayatollahs envisioned by many Administration big shots, the cultish People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (Mojahedin-e Khalq, MEK), may not be particularly democratic or popular with Iranians. Don’t bother us with details – the neo-Bolshevik myth of a spontaneous uprising by the oppressed masses (with a little help from outside, like the Kaiser’s generals were kind enough to provide Lenin) is alive and well in Washington.
One is reminded of “true believer” Condoleezza Rice in 2006 denouncing as – you guessed it! – racist any objections to militant democracy promotion in the Middle East, specifically in Iraq:
‘“Well, growing up in the South and having people underestimate you because one of the reasons for segregation, one of the reasons for the separation of the races was supposedly, the inferiority of one race to the other,” she explains. “And so when I look around the world and I hear people say, ‘Well, you know, they’re just not ready for democracy,’ it really does resonate. I hear echoes of, well, you know, blacks are kind of childlike. They really can’t handle the vote. Or they really can’t take care of themselves. It really does roil me. It makes me so angry because I think there are those echoes of what people once thought about black Americans.”’
Pompeo heavily emphasized Iran’s internal problems, such as political repression, corruption, economic distress, many of which are no doubt are quite real. Still, it was hard to listen to the Secretary without mentally comparing how the identical litany of abuses would apply to Washington’s perennial darling of the Islamic world, Saudi Arabia, which in every particular is far, far worse than Iran. But nobody is talking about what amounts to regime change in Riyadh or even any sanctions against them. Accusations of Iranian state support for terrorism would be risible if arming myriad Sunni jihadist groups by the US and our various partners, the Saudis chief among them, were a laughing matter.
Pompeo’s speech triggered a rebuke by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that “peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars” – an unfortunate choice of words given how Saddam Hussein’s “mother of all battles” turned out. Trump immediately shot back with a tweet threatening that Iran could “SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Predictably, Trump’s ubiquitous critics focused as much on the all capital letters as on the substance of the exchange.
No one knows where any of this is leading. The memory immediately triggered was that of harsh verbal exchanges between North Korea’s “Little Rocket man” Kim Jong-un and the “mentally deranged US dotard” Trump prior to their love fest in Singapore. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com was succinct in his optimism: “This means he’ll be scheduling a Rouhani summit in a few months.”
On the other hand, instead of Singapore 2018 we could be seeing a repeat of the lead-up to Iraq 2003. So many of the same people who were beating the drums for the war with Iraq under President George W. Bush are playing the same tune now with respect to Iran. It is significant that whereas with respect to North Korea our foremost regional partner, South Korea, is pushing hardest for a peaceful outcome, Israel and Saudi Arabia, the two foreign states that exercise almost total control over the political class in Washington, are itching for the US to take care of their Iran problem for them. The hare-brained “Arab NATO” idea has been revived.
Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis has denied a report that the US was identifying targets in Iran to be struck as early as next month and disowned regime change. For what it is worth (probably not much) a recent poll shows that Americans are against war with Iran by a better than two-to-one margin. But, as Raimondo observes,
“there are plenty of warmongers in Washington who just can’t wait for the shooting to start in the Middle East again, and they have targeted Iran as their next victim. … [S]uch a war would destroy Trump’s presidency precisely because his base would oppose it. And yet, … despite the fact that the President’s advisors are pushing war with Iran, Trump routinely ignores them and does exactly as he pleases: that’s why we had the Singapore summit and the Helsinki meeting with Putin.”
We can hope that Trump will decide on his next steps with regard to Iran based on much broader international considerations that impact his domestic goals. Taken most optimistically, that could mean a concept that some of us have been suggesting for almost two years: a new “Big Three” understanding among Trump, Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Indeed, Professor Michael T. Klare, writing in TomDispatch.com, claims this is Trump’s conscious intention:
‘An examination of his campaign speeches and his actions since entering the Oval Office — including his appearance with Putin — reflect his adherence to a core strategic concept: the urge to establish a tripolar world order, one that was, curiously enough, first envisioned by Russian and Chinese leaders in 1997 and one that they have relentlessly pursued ever since.
‘Such a tripolar order — in which Russia, China, and the U.S. would each assume responsibility for maintaining stability within their own respective spheres of influence while cooperating to resolve disputes wherever those spheres overlap — breaks radically with the end-of-the-Cold-War paradigm. During those heady years, the United States was the dominant world power and lorded it over most of the rest of the planet with the aid of its loyal NATO allies.
‘For Russian and Chinese leaders, such a “unipolar” system was considered anathema. After all, it granted the United States a hegemonic role in world affairs while denying them what they considered their rightful place as America’s equals. Not surprisingly, destroying such a system and replacing it with a tripolar one has been their strategic objective since the late 1990s — and now an American president has zealously embraced that disruptive project as his own. [ . . . ]
‘The big question in all this, of course, is: Why? Why would an American president seek to demolish a global order in which the United States was the dominant player and enjoyed the support of so many loyal and wealthy allies? Why would he want to replace it with one in which it would be but one of three regional heavyweights? [ . . . ]
‘In the Trumpian mindset, this country had become weak and overextended because of its uncritical adherence to the governing precepts of the liberal international order, which called for the U.S. to assume the task of policing the world while granting its allies economic and trade advantages in return for their loyalty. Such an assessment, whether accurate or not, certainly jibes well with the narrative of victimization that so transfixed his core constituency in rustbelt areas of Middle America. It also suggests that an inherited burden could now be discarded, allowing for the emergence of a less-encumbered, stronger America — much as a stronger Russia has emerged in this century from the wreckage of the Soviet Union and a stronger China from the wreckage of Maoism. This reinvigorated country would still, of course, have to compete with those other two powers, but from a far stronger position, being able to devote all its resources to economic growth and self-protection without the obligation of defending half of the rest of the world.
‘Listen to Trump’s speeches, read through his interviews, and you’ll find just this proposition lurking behind virtually everything he has to say on foreign policy and national security. “You know… there is going to be a point at which we just can’t do this anymore,” he told Haberman and Sanger in 2016, speaking of America’s commitments to allies. “You know, when we did those deals, we were a rich country… We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We’re not anymore.”
‘The only acceptable response, he made clear, was to jettison such overseas commitments and focus instead on “restoring” the country’s self-defense capabilities through a massive buildup of its combat forces. (The fact that the United States already possesses far more capable weaponry than any of its rivals and outspends them by a significant margin when it comes to the acquisition of additional munitions doesn’t seem to have any impact on Trump’s calculations.)’
If such is indeed Trump’s calculation, his likelihood of attacking Iran is very low.
Conversely, the forces benefitting from the status quo Trump would dismantle cannot be expected to accept such a future with equanimity: the Pentagon and NATO military establishments, the intelligence community, the hordes of contractors and think tank denizens, and others. Perhaps even worse, Trump’s domestic critics face the terrifying prospect that he could emerge as the greatest peacemaker in modern history, as well as restorer of America’s economic might.
We can thus expect an added zeal born of desperation from former “CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, Robert Mueller, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the Democratic National Committee,” who, Paul Craig Roberts aptly says, are “engaged in high treason against the American people and the President of the United States and are actively engaged in a plot to overthrow the President of the United States.” Just in recent weeks the intensity of this campaign prevented Trump from agreeing to anything of substance with Putin in Helsinki, forced him to tap-dance around what he did or didn’t say at the post-summit press conference, and postpone according to Grand Inquisitor Mueller’s convenience a follow-up US-Russia summit (no doubt to the delight of his own appointees no less than to his enemies’).
We can expect that between now the November 2018 Congressional elections Mueller will come out with several indictments against Trump associates with the hope of tipping the House of Representatives to the Democrats. If that happens, despite an anticipated GOP retention of the Senate, Trump will be removed or forced to resign in 2019, with a substantial percentage of Republicans ready to jump at the prospect of putting Mike Pence into the Oval Office, with current UN Ambassador Nikki Haley a virtual shoo-in as Vice President.
Such a development would prompt an anguished but futile outburst from Trump’s base. But with l’ancien régime back in power, the guardians of the neoliberal, unipolar order the interloper had imperiled will move quickly to repudiate any understandings he might have had with Moscow and Beijing. The slide toward a catastrophe of literally unimaginable proportions, which Trump had sought to arrest, will become for all intents and purposes irreversible.
At that point Iran will be the least of our worries.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...