Special to WorldTribune.com

Analysis by Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs

The follow-on from the U.S. Mueller Investigation which targeted President Donald Trump will confirm just how intractable the great divide is within the U.S. It is a greater strategic threat to U.S. security than the People’s Republic of China.

Few modern, democratic societies are structured to cope with domestic civil threats; they are geared primarily to handle external, conventional security threats.

The U.S. schism is — as with schisms evident in several modern, wealthy societies in the world — between “globalists” and “nationalists”. It is between those who cling to a crumbling status quo, and those for whom that departing status quo had failed to deliver security and who now seek the protection of traditional social defenses.

Today’s globalists believe that the pseudo-borderless world and the wealth of megacity-states over the past seven decades must be sustained (and that any threat of disruption creates disbelief and panic), and those who believe that such a world is collapsing or has already robbed them of their identity, security, and future. Description of this schism has been reduced to urban pseudo-liberal materialists versus “nationalist” supporters of tradition and a secure hierarchy. That is an over-simplification, as it was in the U.S. in 1860 in the run-up to the U.S. Civil War, but it has some resonance. But the symptomatic similarities and causes of the 1860 and 2016-19 trends are profound.

The end, on March 22, 2019, of the investigation by U..S Special Counsel Robert Mueller into alleged collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government in Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016 came with a clear failure to find any such collusion. And yet the entire premise of the visceral anger of the globalists over the election of Donald Trump hinged, at least in stated logic, on the belief that his election was illegitimate, and must have been, in their view, aided by the illegal intervention of a foreign power.

There was a fundamental belief that the election of Donald Trump was so illogical, horrific, and inconceivable — because it violated all they held sacred — that it could only have occurred by satanic means. It was a triumph of belief over reality.

Globalists had invested all their faith in the investigation by Mueller and a team of legal staff dedicated to the destruction of President Trump.

What had been attempted over 22 months was an attempted legal coup to overthrow Trump. It was a more spineless putsch attempt than even the oblique initial containment of Louis XVI of France by palace and bureaucratic intrigues which finally gave way to the “revolutionary” National Convention and the King’s regicide by execution on January 21, 1793 (at the age of 38).

[Not that most in the U.S. today view with any interest the dispatch of Louis XVI, without whose assistance the 13 British colonies in the Americas would have failed to attain sovereignty after their Declaration of Independence in 1776.]

So the collapse of the Mueller Investigation without success for its proponents, from the standpoint of bringing down the Trump Presidency, marked a watershed in current U.S. political life, but what does it mean strategically for the U.S., its allies, and its competitors?

Strategic Outcomes 

• The U.S. societal schism remains unhealed — even untouched — by the outcome of the Mueller Investigation. The globalists in the U.S. political system, who essentially dominate the state bureaucracy and media, were angered by the result and will re-double their efforts to depose President Trump, although now mostly hoping to do so by political means at the 2020 presidential elections. But the collapse without substantive findings against Trump means that the president has been given political impetus which is likely to help him in the 2020 election. Overall, the Mueller collapse has given the first significant boost in legitimacy, credibility, and prestige to President Trump since he took office in January 2017.
• Given that the Democratic Party (essentially now a globalist party) has won a majority in the House of Representatives, the Trump Administration will find passage of key economic and national security legislation difficult, inhibiting a major focus on, for example, comprehensive military reforms to meet the new global framework.
• Continued, and even heightened, political infighting in the U.S. polity will continue to distract the Trump Administration from addressing substantive global issues. Already, major changes in the world — in Africa, the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, and Europe — have failed to receive due attention by the U.S., with consequent losses in the U.S./ Western strategic posture. That the PRC’s late 2018 declaration of a “new Thirty Years’ War” with the U.S. has received no response from the White House or Administration is symptomatic of the total distraction of Washington by the internal civil war. This has been compounded by the reality that President Trump has an extremely thin senior policy team, and that Presidential appointments have been made extremely difficult because of the unprecedented partisan opposition to anything the administration proposes which requires congressional approval.
•  U.S. allies have been ignored, because of preoccupations in the U.S. over internal challenges, and have thus often felt the need to accommodate pressures from the People’s Republic of China (in particular). Washington has moved out of the alliance consensus-building arena to deal with domestic issues.
• The U.S. economy and society will be increasingly challenged by open border initiatives of globalists and narco-traffickers, further exacerbating domestic divisions and lowering productivity.

In short, the Mueller battle was an opening shot in the “new civil war” in the U.S.; not a closing shot. The question is whether the issue will be resolved electorally or by what could best be described as “undemocratic” means.

 

  Analysis: Mueller report opens new civil war posing greater threat to U.S. than China, WorldTribune.com