Flight Deck of USS Carl Vinson, dawn on the South China Sea.
They're selling slaves now in Libya. Just in case you were wondering what else could go wrong with our last big "humanitarian intervention."
Having mistakenly backed Hillary Clinton's plan on Libya, it really was quite a thrill for me to learn this early in the week during my early morning listen to the BBC World Service. That was even more appalling than learning some weeks ago that the ex-Libyan general who lived for 20 years near CIA headquarters in Virginia had turned into a freebooting warlord pressing for control over Libyan oil and alliance with Moscow. (I'm told he had a nice phone chat with Vladimir Putin while aboard a Russian warship.)
You're not really hearing these things about Libya here in the U.S.
Now, even with the America media largely ignoring the latest horror show out of "liberated" Libya, I shouldn't even have to mention it, since this is just the sort of thing that a certain Twitter-maniac should be having a field day over with his trademark I-told-you-so antics.
Instead, Donald Trump has been busy bombing Syria, spinning up the Hillary-style new cold war with Russia he had vowed to reverse, and, oh yes, doing sudden 180s on many of his biggest issues. Think NATO, China trade and currency, the Federal Reserve, lots of back and forth on taxes and health care and on and on.
Right now Trump is gloating about ordering the biggest ever non-nuclear explosion to take out some cave-dwelling Isis troops in Afghanistan and posturing about attacking North Korea, which may be on the verge of a major nuclear or missile test. Trump dispatched the Navy's Carrier Strike Group One, centered on the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, to the Korean Peninsula at the beginning of the week.
While there have been weeks of White House infighting between more moderate Wall Streeters centered around Trump son-in-law/White House senior advisor Jared Kushner and ultra-nationalist ideologues led by Trump campaign chief/White House chief strategist Steve Bannon (who is also an ex-Wall Streeter), the present cascade of flip-flops we can call the Big Switch traces back to a, wait for it, tweet by daughter dearest Ivanka. She is now ensconced on the White House staff with her husband.
"Heartbroken and outraged by the images going out of Syria following the atrocious chemical attack yesterday," the brand-new assistant to the President wrote early on the morning of April 5th.
What's happened since then is like a dam break. In the public sequence of events, it looks like the president moved dramatically after his favorite child signaled her deep dismay at the gassing of Syrian civilians, an act denied by the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies.
Assuming the Assad regime did it, which I suppose I do, Trump's reaction might be seen as heartwarming. And his cascading series of flip-flops that make up what feels like an ongoing Big Switch might be seen as also being the result of an aligned set of developments based on weeks of contentious White House infighting and debate.
But let's not be so credulous.
“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think.”
-- The utterly unprepared President Donald Trump, recounting his Mar a Lago summit conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the latest North Korean crisis. Not incidentally, there is a lot of Chinese tech in North Korean missiles. Which Trump probably doesn't know, though much of what Xi said is undoubtedly accurate. It is not at all the simple situation Trump imagined.
For there is something that also coincides with Trump's Big Switch. And that is a series of revelations about his close associates and their ever more intriguing linkages with Russian power players.
We've just learned that the FBI got a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page, an Annapolis grad and ex-Marine intelligence officer and Council on Foreign Relations fellow Trump told the Washington Post editorial board was one of his five foreign policy advisors. To get the judge to go along, the FBI presented a theory of probable cause that Page may well be a Russian agent.
And there are new developments on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The Associated Press succeeded in contradicting at least some of Manafort's denial of additional big payments from pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. Which comes on the heels of their report that Manafort was paid during the past decade by a Russian oligarch close to Putin to set up a pro-Kremlin influence strategy.
Trump did succeed in hamstringing the House Intelligence Committee investigation, at least for awhile, by manipulating its foolish chairman, California Congressman Devin Nunes.
And the Senate effort has a lot of catch-up to do.
But Trump's bid to distract with ex-Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice and her supposed "crimes" in "unmasking" his associates caught in surveillance of foreign intelligence targets fell far short of the mark.
All of which left a big problem for Trump.
But not nearly as big a problem as a more grounded political figure would have. It's not as though Trump is abandoning hard-won intellectual positions here. What Trump has, to borrow a line from my old friend and boss Gary Hart on Trump's views about Russia, is attitudes rather than policies. Check out the absolutely darling Trump quote above, in which he does an complete 180 on China vis a vis North Korea based on 10 minutes of not entirely accurate conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The man is breathtakingly unprepared.
Trump is, after all, an erratic megalomaniac with decided know-nothing and neo-fascist tendencies. Consistency about anything other than himself is hardly his hallmark. When I met and instantly disliked him in the '80s, he was backing my presidential candidate, the future-oriented front-running progressive Senator Hart.
For Trump, it is all about aspiration and the glorification of the self. He can embrace the future, he can embrace the past, he can embrace, well, whatever. Whatever, that is, that he thinks will get him ahead.
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