Forget Trump: The Military-Industrial Complex is Still Running the Show With Russia

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As the media fulminates, they fail to see how Trump has kept the usual machinery running.

President Donald Trump has strengthened, not weakened, American military and economic opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. That fact has been mostly unreported and it is of the utmost importance. Irrespective of what Trump harrumphs about NATO or Vladimir Putin, the multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial-counterterrorism complex (MICC) rules American-Russian relations as it has for seven decades. And the nightmare of the MICC is not to lose a friend, but to lose an enemy.

Fake news is fixated on personalities. Authentic news understands that nations have no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. The executive branch in particular has a permanent interest in exaggerating threats to augment its own power and to order up more superfluous military spending.

The U.S. Dollar: A Victim of Its Own Success

 

America’s most powerful weapon of war does not shoot, fly or explode. It’s not a submarine, plane, tank or laser. America’s most powerful strategic weapon today is the dollar.

The U.S. uses the dollar strategically to reward friends and punish enemies. The use of the dollar as a weapon is not limited to trade wars and currency wars, although the dollar is used tactically in those disputes. The dollar is much more powerful than that.

The dollar can be used for regime change by creating hyperinflation, bank runs and domestic dissent in countries targeted by the U.S. The U.S. can depose the governments of its adversaries, or at least blunt their policies without firing a shot.

Russia Finance Minister: We Are Ready To Ditch The Dollar In Favor Of The Euro

In a testament to the success of the latest Trump sanctions against Russia, overnight Russian aluminum giant Rusal announced that its chief executive, Aleksandra Buriko, and half of its managerial board resigned to make sure the firm avoids U.S. sanctions against its founder, billionaire oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. The mass resignations were part of “the efforts that have been made by the management of the group to protect the interests of the company and its shareholders” since the sanctions were imposed last month, Rusal said in a May 24 statement.

Turkish actor in US admits selling nuclear technology material to Iran

 

A former Turkish actor, detained in New York for illegally selling to Iran a restricted metallic powder used in missile production, pleaded guilty on June 15.

Erdal Kuyumcu, 44, the chief executive of Global Metallurgy LLC, pleaded guilty in a Brooklyn federal court on June 15 to deliberately violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which limits trade with Iran.

The indictment said Kuyumcu collected more than 450 kilograms of cobalt-nickel metallic powder, which is used in aerospace, missile production and nuclear applications, to export them to Iran.

Braced for imminent nuclear accord with Iran, US pulls away from military option, IDF stays on the ready

This is a followup from a previous DEBKAfile article, which can be found here:

Mystery of missing ayatollah: Ali Khamenei’s three-week seclusion for work on nuclear deal with US

Israel’s high command, working on the assumption that an American-Iranian nuclear accord is near its final stage, plans to keep in place advanced preparations for a unilateral military strike on Iran’s nuclear program into 2014 – hence the IDF’s request for a supplemental NIS3.5bn (app. $1bn) defense budget this week.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report exclusively that the main body of the accord is essentially complete. All the same, President Barack Obama plans to announce before Christmas that only partial agreement has been achieved and negotiations will continue.

He will be cagey in public – partly because not all parts of the accord have been finalized, although the pace of US-Iranian negotiations have been accelerated, and partly to avoid coming clean on the full scope of the deal with Tehran.