Dear Montgomery County Republicans: This week's report has some items on how Trump did better with middle class working voters than those making more than $100,000. Also new data out shows Trump dramatically improved the income of middle America in his first administration.
I also know many of you are worried about the growing crises around the world and our nation’s security. I wrote a new essay for my weekly nuclear report that addresses many of these security issues. Its relatively long but worth reading for insights into what a Trumpian foreign policy would look like. For your mental stability, do not read the Post and please do not watch the network television news. Best, Peter Huessy
The folks on the Democrat Party fringe are still looney!
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is pointing the finger at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for Democrats’ Election Day losses — setting off a firestorm from critics who say she’d rather blame Jews that second-guess her own left-wing policies.“ If people want to talk about members of Congress being overly influenced by a special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that pushes voters away from Democrats then they should be discussing AIPAC,” the Squad member posted on X.
Republicans Party of Working America
Democrats crushed the Trump Republicans with Americans in the top third of the income scale, but among the poorest third of Americans, they received their lowest percentage of the vote in more than SIX DECADES. Trump captured the middle third by a small margin. These results only further reinforce our continuing theme that the Democrats have become the party of the wealthy and culturally left-wing elites.
RCP Average Continues To Be the Most Accurate in Industry
RCP on SiriusXM
RCP co-founder Tom Bevan, Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon, and podcast host Andrew Walworth review how the site's poll averages performed during the 2024 election. Read more
Congressional Analysis: 2024 Election and Senate Appropriations
There will be a new chair of the Senate Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations and that could most likely---if under seniority rules--- be Senator Collins of Maine or Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The current subcommittee chair Mr. Tester was defeated for re-election.
If one examines the full SAC committee, of the top nine ranking members of the current majority, Murray through Coons, seven are on the defense subcommittee. And likewise, of the top 9 minority members of the full Committee, Collins through Boozman, eight are members of the defense subcommittee. Given the makeup of the Senate at 53-47, vs the current 51-49, the defense subcommittee ratios will probably be the same, with the new R majority adding one seat and the new Democratic minority getting only six seats.
For election buffs, there are still 5 million votes still outstanding, meaning that 156 million people will have voted, the second largest vote ever given that in 2020 some 160 million Americans voted. Third party candidates received over 2.5 million votes. President elect Trump is at 77 million compared to 72 million in 2020. VP Harris has received 74.4 million votes, 7 million less than Biden in 2020.
The House has three races left to call with R candidates ahead by 800 and 250 votes, respectively in Iowa and California but with one incumbent Congresswoman in California trailing by slightly less than 500 votes. R have flipped 8 seats and the Dems have flipped 7.
In the Senate, Senator Casey of PA has conceded to Senator elect McCormack who won by 16,000.
California and Chicago Dreamen’
Reminder of some of the $10 billion+ in demands his pals in the teachers union have been demanding and that he’s been seeking to pay out: “9% wage increases for Chicago teachers, a housing program for Chicago teachers, a 100% electric bus fleet and solar panels for Chicago school buildings.” All while spending has almost doubled since 2012, and proficiency has dropped. It’s unclear where Mayor Johnson is going to get the cash, but in response to his whopping loss, Johnson said “Am I aware of the trauma that has existed in city government? Absolutely.” Relevant? Not quite. Relatable? Yes. If there’s one word that describes my relationship with city government, it’s traumatic. I once called 911 because a crazy man with a machete was running toward me on the streets of West Hollywood, and the dispatcher asked me to remain where I was.
And in Oakland, the city accidentally published and then deleted a report from the city’s director of finance that shows they’re going bankrupt: “The results of this First Quarter show that immediate action is necessary to maintain the solvency of the General Purpose Fund and avoid the Chapter 9 process.” After the city deleted the report, they said it was an “unapproved draft” and released a new, rosier one soon after. Sad how far it’s fallen.
Essay by Peter Huessy: A Trumpian Foreign and Security Policy: What to Expect?
With the election of Donald J. Trump to his second term as President of the United States, the critics of the President appear to have forgotten that for four years the former President did have a foreign and security policy, the record of which is now recorded history. Yet despite this ample evidence, supposed security experts writing in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times or speaking at the Center for American Progress or Carnegie Endowment, warned of the myriad dangers of a second Trump administration that often was completely unrelated to the four years 2017—20 when Trump was previously President.
The Liberal World Order: Embrace or Reform?
Three predictions stand out. One is that the new administration would be isolationist. Second that the new administration would reject the international world order constructed primarily by the United States and its top allies in the aftermath of World War II. The third fear was that a Trump administration would reject the values underlying American foreign and security policy and bury what was described as the “exceptional nature” of such US policy.
Whatever world order the United States constructed at the end of World War II; it was not uniformly favorable to US interests. The advent of détente and peaceful coexistence led to nearly two dozen nations falling to Soviet and Chinese subversion making a mockery of the idea that “containment” was a successful US policy.
US security policy succeeded only after President Reagan reversed most of the policies adopted during the era of détente and peaceful coexistence which had led to the loss of Indochina and more than a dozen other nations to growing Soviet power.
The United States embrace of the of the Middle East Peace Process and the false idea that the root of terrorism was based on the legitimate grievance that there was no Palestinian state was also terribly misguided. .
As was the misguided economic embrace of Communist China starting in 1969.
Unpreparedness
US foreign and security policy thus was not one unbroken and consistent pattern from the end of WWII. One pattern that does emerge, however, is not being prepared, the flip side of détente and the embrace of the “peace process” and China. .
After World War II, the US more than disarmed. Despite post-WWII Soviet aggression and subversion in Eastern Europe, the creation of NATO was not initially paired with a robust US defense budget. Compared to $60 billion for the last year of WWII, it was widely assumed the $13 billion defense budget already approved for 1949 was going forward the high water mark for defense, with the Defense Secretary himself thinking of going as low as $8 billion annually.
In the spring of 1950, a DoD official Paul Nitze put together NSC-68—a secret study calling for a new defense policy although the text did not include a secret budget estimate that called for a resulting defense budget of $44 billion. Truman had promised no defense budget north of $13 billion.
The proposed new policy was to prepare the United States to deter its enemies. Nitze once remarked that being unprepared was “provocatively weak” and that during the 1930’s the United States had allowed Japan and Germany to make war on the entire world precisely because we were unprepared.
Tragically, Nitze’s fear that the US was similarly unprepared in early 1950 was well-founded. On June 25, the triumvirate communist bloc of China, North Korea and the Soviet Union invaded the Republic of Korea, stunning the United States.
The House in January 1950 had turned down a Truman proposal to assist the Repubic of Korea with $150 million in economic assistance. Military assistance requested by the Republic of Korea was denied. But on June 19th, reacting to the North Korean invasion, the Senate finally agreed to provide the ROK with $50 million, but that help would arrive only much after the invasion.
The price of unpreparedness? While the war geographically ended pretty much where it had begun, nearly 40,000 American and allied soldiers perished. The US saved the Republic of Korea, but the price was 3 million dead Koreans and the survival of the terrorist DPRK regime, now many decades later armed with dozens of nuclear weapons.
Shameful Retreat
A year later after the Armistice at Panmunjom ending the Korean war, the French were defeated in the far northwest of French Indochina at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 by the communist Vietminh. The US did send the France upwards of $1 billion or 80% of the war effort. The result was a communist North Vietnam, as the French withdrew from all of Indochina.
Over the next two decades, the world-wide communist bloc fought South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, eventually embedding communist governments in all of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in 1975. The wars did not start with a cross border tank army as did North Korea in 1950 but by surreptitiously sending guerilla soldiers along the Ho Chi Minh trail into the South, Laos and Cambodia to terrorize the three nations.
By late 1969, however, after nearly a decade of intensified warfare, the ARVN was surprisingly able to defeat North Vietnamese regulars through the work of America’s General Abrams and his Vietnamization program. But with the withdrawal of most US forces, and Congress unwilling to sustain US support to the ARVN, the US in 1975 withdrew all military assistance, and with no domestic arms industry with which to arm themselves, the South fell victim to North Vietnam’s tank armies that rolled down the coastal highway to Saigon.
The US fight to save the Republic of Korea was heroic and indeed reflected the highest ideals of the American people, as did the extraordinary effort to save South Vietnam. But our failure to anticipate the Chinese entry into the Korean war, and the cutoff of assistance to South Vietnam some two decades later were all shameful, hardly reflective of the best ideals of America.
Mistakes Continue
Détente and peaceful coexistence gave benefits to the USSR that hardly reflected the ideals of the United States or the order sought after the end of World War II. The western banks loaned billions to the Soviet bloc at concessionary terms, freeing Moscow to use their satellites for subversion, sabotage and assassinations. Oil prices during the 1970s skyrocketed, giving Moscow’s exchequer billions.(See Myron Norquist’s How the United Stats Won the Cold War, in Advances in Competitiveness Research(Vol. 10, Issue 1, 2002)
Writes Norquist, “In 1980 the Soviet Union and its ruling elite felt their country was winning the Cold War. The USSR had good hard currency earnings and high expectations of much more. It was buying and smuggling western technology; it had taken over Afghanistan and was in a position to press on in the Middle East. The Soviets had updated their weapons... secretly deploy[ing] SS-20 missiles in Europe unilaterally," according to Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986, and had support in the West for disarmament and a nuclear freeze (Dobrynin, 1995, p. 430).
During the 1990’s, the US suffered four major terror attacks—the Trade Center in 1993; the Khobar Towers in the KSA in 1994; the African embassy bombing in 1998; and the explosion on the USS Cole in Yemen. But still at the end of the decade did not have in place a counter-terrorist plan or policy. In fact, in the summer of 2000 the White House testified to Congress that terrorist threats were just too multifold for the US to have put together a counter-terrorism strategy to prioritize our defenses, although said the witness a plan might be considered.
Even after Reagan’s taking down of the Soviet empire, the US in 2001 brought China into the World Trade Organization. Subsequently, the US embraced lopsided trade deals with communist China and sold out millions of American manufacturing workers. In short, the US provided China with the economic base on which the current breathtaking expansion of the Chinese military rests. The opposite of Reagan’s economic war on the Soviets. So how did this embrace of China reflect the best ideals of America?
Following 20 years of counter-terrorism warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is hard to conclude that the subsequent US withdrawals somehow reflected the best ideals of the US government and its people, let alone were reflective of the liberal international order.
In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and Moldova with little United States, EU or NATO response. In 2012, our diplomatic facilities in Libya were attacked and our ambassador tortured and killed, but our response was to blame an obscure anti-Islamic video let anyone get the idea the US was not prepared to deal with terrorism some thirteen years after 9-11.
And in 2014 Russian invaded Ukraine and the US subsequently put an arms embargo on Ukraine, while sending blankets to Ukraine as a token of our solidarity. Hardly a proud moment for the United States.
Need for Change
The period prior to Trump’s first Presidency certainly did not necessarily reflect throughout the decades the best ideals of America. Most recently, things did not work out despite the US taking the lead in taking down the Taliban and the regime of Saddam Hussein because we got sandbagged by the drive-by media into adopting goals both impractical and unnecessary.
Building democratic institutions in societies ruled by the sword and the pistol is a fool’s errand but we spent two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq trying to do so. Despite particularly brilliant and very short successful campaigns ending Taliban power and the Iraqi government, we then proceeded to do impractical nation building.
Given this decided mixed bag of US security policy from the end of WWII, should it be so worrisome that the new Trump administration will try and change things? After all, the recent relative restraint shown by the United States in Ukraine, Iran, the greater Middle East and the Western Pacific has not worked out well.
For example, despite US restraint, there is apparently no prospect for victory in Ukraine. The administration fears Israeli success will escalate things out of control---perhaps for fear the US is not prepared to deter Iran? The Republic of Korea and Japan are seriously discouraged by the state of the US deterrent, especially re theater nuclear systems which the US does not have in the entirety of the Pacific.
In short, there are many things that need to be fixed.
What then can we expect from former President Trump?
Using the first Trump administration as a guide, here is a what might be expected in the next four years of US foreign and security policy.
Let’s start with Ukraine. As Victor Davis Hanson argues, a settlement of the war is not going to make anyone happy. Some portion of Ukraine may remain in Russian hands but hopefully not anything taken since February 2022. A demilitarized zone may have to be created. A significant pause in Ukraine considering NATO membership will probably be implemented although new NATO members such as Finland and Sweden will remain welcome. On the positive side, the carnage turning Ukraine into one mass “Verdun” will end and hopefully the reconstruction of the country can begin, including the return of its nearly 10-15 million citizens both exiled and kidnapped.
Next is the Middle East: Giving Israel the greenlight to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the weaponry to do so, would help end part of the Iranian scourge. Parallel would be the extension of the Abraham Accords and getting back on track the smart idea that Israel allied with the Gulf States against Iran is the path forward. And jettison the looney idea that terrorism is rooted in the grievance of not having a Palestinian state. Put Hamas back on the terrorist list and take them down everywhere. Eliminate the Houthis and their protection racket for shipping.
With respect to Iran” Again, reduce its foreign exchange to single digits. Embargo its oil revenue. Eliminate any idea that Iran has a “right to enrich.” Enforce the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferations Treaty, as well as the IAEA Additional Protocol, while once and for all junk the JCPOA. Explain the fiction behind the idea that building advanced centrifuges (under the JCPOA) is somehow an indication of not wanting to produce nuclear weapons fuel.
On China and the Western Pacific: Deterrence is the way forward. And stopping China from stealing our industry -based technology which is estimated at $600 billion annually by the former head of the National Security Agency. And having Taiwan buy whatever weapons it needs for defense including robust air and missile defenses and long-range prompt strike capabilities. And perhaps explicitly extending to the Pacific allies the US nuclear deterrent. And making India a real ally. And continuing to strengthen the ROK-Japan growing alliance and cooperation, as well as deploying a theater nuclear deterrent such as the Navy nuclear armed cruise missile and missile defenses.
NATO and US alliance: The Trump administration will push hard and be successful to ensure that our European, Middle Eastern and Pacific allies “pay their fair share” of what is needed to protect our mutual security.
Spending and the budget: Get rid of much of the wasteful foreign assistance, United Nations and World Bank funding, especially the unworkable energy subsidies in pursuit of global zero CO2 and greenhouse gases. Also delete all half a billion dollars for the worthless international family planning budget. And double the information operations such as VOA, Radio Free China and other elements of public diplomacy. Tell America’s story to the world.
Good neighbors: Good fences make good neighbors so the first thing the administration could do was build the wall and begin the process of ending illegal immigration, the rule of law being one of the important liberal elements of the world order the US helped establish after the end of WWII,
The Nuclear Framework
The Nuclear Framework: one of the constants during the entire post WWII era was the consistent attention . The most important policy is the recognition that the nuclear balance is critical to sustaining US led peace and prosperity. Trump, as he did in his first term, will robustly support the US nuclear Triad and the nuclear related recommendations of the Posture Commission, America First think tank and Heritage Foundation.
And we should remember, as President Kennedy declared it was critical that the US nuclear force had to be “second to none” a requirement President Trump shares. And remember the Cuban missile crisis ended peacefully because again as President Kennedy explained, “I had the Minuteman missile ace in the hole,” a new ICBM initially deployed in October 1962 at the Malstrom USAF base in Montana on the very day the US discovered the Soviet missiles were in Cuba.
What Trump will not do is follow what the United States did following the collapse of the Soviet Union when the United States went on what has been described as a “holiday from history” where we let our nuclear deterrent atrophy and come dangerously close to “rusting to obsolesce.”
A Trumpian foreign policy will above all be practical and realistic. It will pursue achievable goals. In 1981 almost no one in Washington except President-elect Reagan believed the US could win the Cold War by ending the Soviet empire.
Today, many “experts” think we can deal with Iran, North Korea, Russia and China as normal nations, committed to the international order created after WWII.
Create a Palestinian state and terrorism goes away. Restrain Israel and Iran won’t be forced to build nuclear weapons. Stop our “hostile policy” toward North Korea and the peninsula can be denuclearized. Arms control or abandoning Ukraine will deter further Russian aggression. China is Burger King to the USA McDonalds—competitors not enemies, trade not tariffs, peaceful rise but not hegemonic goals.
These wrong-headed narratives have repeatedly shaped US security policy.
No longer.
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Peter Huessy is a Member of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee. Since 1981 he has been President of Geo-Strategic Analysis of Potomac, Maryland. He was a former special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior and consultant to the US Air Force. He can be reached at [email protected]
