The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, by Geoff Shepard (Bombardier Books, 2021), 384 pages.

There’s an old saying in legal circles: “A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.” That is, a determined prosecutor can allege a crime, somewhere, thereby securing an indictment against a hapless defendant. And if that’s true, then what can 150 prosecutors do?

That’s the question posed by veteran lawyer Geoff Shepard in his new book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President. The conspiracy Shepard limns isn’t by Richard Nixon, it’s against Nixon. A conspiracy waged by some 150 Democratic prosecutors and investigators, scattered across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government, all aiming to bring down the 37th president—who was, of course, a Republican.

Shepard is fully mindful of the parallels. As he writes, “If Donald Trump hoped to understand what he would face upon moving into the White House in 2017, he would have done well to study what happened to Richard Nixon nearly fifty years prior.” In fact, all the parallels fall into place: zealous prosecutors, a leaky bureaucracy, an avidly supportive media, and pre-primed Democrats in Congress, eager to impeach the miscreant chief executive. (In fact, there’s a third Republican president who found himself in these same crosshairs, and we’ll get to him later.)

During the Watergate investigation, beginning in 1972, Democrats succeeded in doing something seemingly impossible: They overturned one of the most decisive electoral mandates in U.S. presidential history. First elected in 1968, Nixon had been reelected four years later with a massive 60.7 percent of the vote, winning 49 of the 50 states. And yet less than two years later, in August 1974, he was forced to resign.

So how did Democrats accomplish that feat? That’s the subject of Shepard’s book. Let him set the stage: “By the time Nixon took power in 1969, the ‘Deep State’ had held the reins of power for 40 years and wasn’t about to give it up. President Eisenhower had famously warned against the ‘military-industrial complex,’ but the Deep State’s tentacles reached much deeper than just the military and allied industries.”

As for Shepard himself, he worked in the Nixon White House for more than five years, first on domestic policy, and then as part of the Nixon legal defense team. The author doesn’t dispute that crimes were committed in Nixon’s name—most notoriously, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on June 17, 1972. And so he makes no attempt to dismiss or minimize the guilt of such figures as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Indeed, Shepard paints Liddy, who worked for a time at the White House, as a nut, even a psychopath.

We can immediately observe that someone such as Liddy slipping into the White House is not a good sign. And yet the overall Executive Office of the President is a big place, employing thousands of people, and so it’s inevitable that a crazy or two can get past the gatekeepers.

In any case, as Shepard records, Liddy soon moved to Nixon’s campaign operation, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, or, of course, “CREEP”). And that’s where, Shepard argues, the real criminality was hatched. Campaigns, after all, are much scruffier, since they are focused on, well, defeating the other side. And to defeat the other side, campaigns engage in “opposition research,” which has, at one or time or another, included just about every possible means, fair or foul. Thus campaigns can attract netherworld types, who sometimes feel free to pursue their dark arts by any means they deem necessary. Keeping his eye on the present, as well as the past, Shepard adds, “As the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC showed in the creation of the infamous Steele Dossier, aggressive oppo research can get out of hand.”

There’s little doubt that the 2016 Clinton campaign was up to its eyeballs in the financing and disseminating of the fake-news Steele Dossier, which seems to have been an effort to defraud not only the FBI, but also the American people. In other words, it sure looks like a conspiracy so immense. Yet only now, five years later, have just two figures on the edge of the campaign, lawyer Michael Sussmann and researcher/fabricator Igor Danchenko, been formally charged. Yet it seems at least plausible that important Clinton campaign officials—and perhaps the candidate herself—were at least aware of these duplicities. Will any of them ever be charged? We don’t know.

All we do know is that in the case of Nixon a half-century ago, the legal piranhas were swarming, each set of jaws eager to chomp on the Republican president. And how could they not be ready to take a bite? As Shepard notes, the waters had been chummed by Sen. Edward Kennedy and his chief aide, James Flug, who were preparing what they hoped would be a triumphant Kennedy presidential campaign in 1976.

As Shepard demonstrates, a key weapon in this proto-campaign was the “independent” (sic) legal investigation of the incumbent president, launched in May 1973, under the leadership of Archibald Cox, a former campaign adviser to John F. Kennedy and then solicitor general in his Department of Justice. In fact, the very name of Cox’s investigative body, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF)—signaled its intended teleology. (In later decades, subsequent iterations of the same investigative approach were softened to “independent counsel” and “special counsel.”)

Cox’s WSPF was a murderer’s row of partisan Democrats. As Shepard writes,

Some seventeen DOJ Democrat appointees, who had been removed from power as a result of Nixon’s 1968 election, regained full investigative and prosecutorial authority over a subsequent Republican administration… a special prosecutor and his team represented a handpicked, specially recruited cadre of highly partisan prosecutors brought together to focus on but a single target. This team also asserted jurisdiction over any possible investigations into possible Democrat wrongdoing—never actually investigating, but effectively precluding any such inquiry by others. This partisan targeting flies in the face of any concept of equal justice under law.

This is the heart of Shepard’s argument: From the get-go, WSPF was out to get Nixon. Not just the obvious Watergate criminals, such as Hunt and Liddy, but Nixon himself.

Those who might wish to discount Shepard as a Nixon dead-ender might be more persuaded by George V. Higgins, a Massachusetts-born prosecutor-turned-novelist who in 1975 published a non-fiction book about Watergate, portraying Nixon as a white-collar gangster. With no little bit of admiration, Higgins noted the purpose-driven life of the WSPF; the entire staff, he wrote, was “conditioned… by the Kennedy Justice methodology.” That methodology came from onetime attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, who saw the Justice Department as a tool to accomplish pre-determined ends. Hence the DOJ’s “Get Hoffa” team, dedicated to the conviction and and imprisonment of Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa.

Higgins added that out of RFK’s instrumentalist ruthlessness “came targeted law enforcement: upon identification of the bad guy, the suspect may resign himself to merciless investigation, reinvestigation, indictment, and re-indictment, trial and retrial, until at last the Government secures a verdict which ratifies the prosector’s assessment of the defendant as the bad guy.”

And Shepard adduces another close observer, The Boston Globe’s John Aloysius Farrell:

Cox and his zealous staff had gone to work with an obvious aim—to get Richard Nixon—and with an array of prosecutorial tactics that would become so familiar to Americans as a series of “independent” counsels, in collusion with Congress and the media, hounded presidents of both parties over the next twenty-five years. . . . [Cox] chose a suspect first and then used a nigh-unlimited budget, his team of 150 investigators, lawyers, and support personnel and his broad subpoena power to find a crime.

Farrell also took note of WSPF’s extra-legal efforts to unsweeten the Nixon pot: “To generate public support for the process, Cox’s office deftly leaked to the press: over the summer of 1973, the media reported that Cox’s team was examining Nixon campaign fund-raising; corporate favors; the President’s tax returns, and government-financed improvements to Nixon’s homes in Florida and California.”

The result, Shepard says, was a “legal pogrom,” staged by “highly partisan Nixon-haters.” To put that another way, it was the Deep State rising against the Republican president.

In fact, the hating went beyond Nixon and his administration. Shepard documents that WSPF chose to investigate “every single potential GOP presidential candidate going into the upcoming 1976 election.” Quoth the author:

Internal WSPF documents that I uncovered at our National Archives show investigations of John Connally, whom they ultimately indicted in the Milk Producers case; President Gerald Ford; Vice President Nelson Rockefeller; Ford’s vice presidential running mate, Kansas Senator Bob Dole; and even California Governor Ronald Reagan.

And once again, it all leaked: “Somehow, news of each of these investigations leaked to an interested media, requiring each to defend himself against rumored allegations of financial wrongdoing. The initiatives of this task force required the work of eight prosecutors.”

Yet it wasn’t just WSPF pushing the needle past the ethical red line. There was also WSPF’s partner—that’s the right word, according to Shepard—Judge John Sirica. Sirica is typically remembered as a hero of Watergate; he was Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1973. And yet Shepard begs to differ with this lionization. He documents (in this book, as well as in two previous books on Watergate) that Sirica was in league closely with the persecutors, er, prosecutors all along. Regarding one of Sirica’s many improper ex parte meetings with prosecutors, Shepard writes:

If disclosed at any time during the scandal’s unfolding, [it] would have been sufficient to remove each of the participants—judges and prosecutors alike—from anything further to do with the Watergate prosecutions. Their presence at the meeting might have been sufficient to have them removed from office entirely.

Interestingly, none of these unethical sessions were disclosed at the time. And why not? Because those were the days of a monolithic liberal media, which was devoted to passionate cheerleading for the prosecutors, as opposed to dispassionate reporting on events. Shepard writes of the one-sided media environment, “There was simply no means for the Nixon administration to get its views on various issues before the American people at all.”

And oh yes: WSPF and Sirica had a third partner, in the U.S. Senate. That would be the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities—generally known as the Ervin Committee. Launched in February 1973, it was led by Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC), a courtly old fellow who looked all of his 76 years. Shepard writes, “In essence, the Ervin Committee was run by its majority counsel, Samuel Dash.” Who, Shepard adds, “conveniently hired many of Senator Kennedy’s staff members from his earlier investigation.”

So Nixon was up against this federal-government-wide legal trifecta: the Ervin Committee representing the legislative branch, Sirica (and, according to Shepard, other judges colluding with him), covering the judicial branch, and WSPF, which was fully in tune with the Deep State elements of the executive branch.

Shepard argues that this combined-arms onslaught swept up the innocent, as well as the guilty. And among the innocent, Shepard maintains, was White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman, and…Richard Nixon. The Judas figure, in Shepard’s telling, was White House counsel John Dean, described as “a very accomplished liar.” And so, in Shepard’s account, the top Nixon men, wrongly accused, went to their legal Calvary.

Ah, but what about that famous “smoking gun” conversation of June 23, 1972—less than a week after the break-in—featuring that same put-upon trio: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Nixon? Doesn’t that tape-recorded session prove that they were guilty, guilty, and guilty?

Shepard says “no,” arguing that the conversation has been badly—and deliberately—misinterpreted all these years: It was really about concealing the names of Democratic donors to Nixon’s re-election campaign whose money was being used for the legal defense of the Watergate breaker-inners. Understandably, these donors wished to keep quiet their connection to the dreaded Nixon.

Perhaps the June 23 conversation was improper, Shepard allows, but it was not the crime of the Watergate cover-up: “The only goal was to prevent several major Democrat donors from being embarrassed, and this was in no sense a criminal act.” Indeed, Shepard quotes John Dean, no fan of any of the people involved, writing in 2014: “In short, the smoking gun was shooting blanks.”

We can each listen to the tape or read the transcript and judge for ourselves, and yet for Shepard, the lesson is clear: the “smoking gun” was just the final kill-shot fired into the unfairly vilified president. The real story of Watergate, Shepard concludes, is “how President Nixon, along with a handful of well-meaning staff and supporters, ended up taking the fall for the misdeeds of their underlings.”

So we can see: before Trump was the target of the Democrats’ legal-industrial complex, Nixon was the target.

Indeed, we can now add a third Republican presidential target, Ronald Reagan. It’s less remembered now, but the 40th president faced a similar legal-investigative barrage, beginning in 1986, in the form of the Iran-Contra investigation. Indeed, Democrats winched up all their legal siege machinery: a Congressional select committee, an “independent” investigation filled with Democratic hit-men, and, of course, a collusionist media; in the exultant words of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, a leading enemy of Nixon, “I haven’t had so much fun since Watergate.”

The Iran-Contra investigation was certainly damaging to Reagan, and yet it fell far short of the Nixonian benchmark; in fact, by the end of his presidency, the Gipper was once again flying high.

One fine day, some careful chronicler will outline all the parallels of these three cases across five decades, tallying the score as one clear political kill (Nixon) one partial kill (Trump), and one mere damage to the target (Reagan).

Yet for now, Shepard has written a persuasively contrarian history of the first of these legal assaults on a Republican president. And who knows: By the time someone gets around to connecting the dots on the first three, there will be a fourth.

theamericanconservative.com

On August 15th, 1971, the then-president of the United States, Richard Nixon, made an eighteen-minute speech to the country whose effects impacted the world. Among other subjects, he announced the end of the dollar-gold parity, which was a shock.

First of all, that decision meant the death of the Bretton Woods Monetary System without telling what would replace it. This fact represented an abrupt change in the international economic order. Secondly, Nixon’s initiative undermined the economic development strategies used since 1947, when the Cold War had started. Those strategies were called “development by invitation” in the center countries and “national developmentalism” in the peripheral ones. Thirdly, the decision strengthened the attacks against the dollar as the main currency in the world, putting more pressure on the international currency hierarchy since then. Finally, in the history of monetary standards, the abandonment of precious metals, as a reference of value, revealed the “charter nature” of money to the detriment of the metallist one.

In the debates on the Bretton Wood system, from its birth and development to its crisis and implosion, a particular narrative seems to prevail. This mainstream interpretation ascribes to the traumas of the great social-economic crisis in the thirties, the system’s origins. Besides the austerity public policies and the automatic recessive adjustments, at the heart of the twenties’ liberal economic order was the freedom of capital movements, whose behavior destabilized the exchange rates, the payments balances, and even the national economies. They were the root causes of the great depression of the thirties, mainly after the Wall Street crash of 1929 when the social and economic context got pretty worse. This scenario fostered the rise of far-right wings mainly in Europe, which created the elements of the beginning of the Second World War.

According to this view, to avoid another experience such as the great economic depression of the thirties and its disastrous effects, the diplomatic representatives of forty-four countries gathered in July 1944 in Bretton Woods, aiming to negotiate a new economic order to the post-war. The talks concluded that the most relevant cause of the economic crisis was the financial capital and its liberty to act against markets, currencies, and national economies. The central proposal was to guarantee the autonomy of the national economic policies. For this reason, they agreed on some points. For instance, capital controls; a system of fixed exchange rates but manageable when necessary; and stabilization funds via IMF without counterparts of recessive policies. It was a victory of Keynesianism against liberal economic orthodoxy. The very participation of John Maynard Keynes as the British government representative in the negotiations was a symbol of it, despite his defeat in defense of a supranational currency, the Bancor, as a new monetary standard.

As a result, the capitalist world, mainly Europe and Japan, achieved excellent economic outputs during the 50s and 60s in terms of product, income, and employment growth, just as international trade and foreign direct investments.

Finally, the mainstream narrative alleges that, during the period, the deficits in the U.S. balance of payments led to the sprawl of the dollar liquidity in the international system without an increase in the Fed’s gold reserves. According to this argument, the military spending growth due to the Vietnam War, above all, triggered such macroeconomic imbalances. So, pressures and speculative attacks against the dollar-gold parity became inevitable. Therefore, in 1971, the situation turned out to be unsustainable.

Nevertheless, from a geopolitical view, it is possible to consider another interpretation for the Bretton Wood system, from its creation to its collapse. First of all, although the authorities of different countries had signed the accords in July 1944, since Roosevelt’s death in March 1945, relevant parts of the agreements were shelved. Henry Morgenthau and Harry White, architects of the postwar new economic order, lost room in the Truman administration. In their place, the bankers constrained the president to implement the Key Currency Plan, which proposed to rebuild a liberal international financial order as it had been in the twenties. However, the new system would rest on the dollar and Wall Street instead of the Pound and the City. Regarding Germany and Japan, the new U.S. orientation aimed to wreck their large industrial conglomerates, transforming their national economies into semiperipheral ones.

Indeed, the international economic order established from 1945 to 1947 operated quite differently than the Agreements of 1944, and the results were terrible. The attempts to recover the national economies stumbled upon the dollar shortage and the difficulties in the Balances of Payments. In this context, the financial capitals in Europe ran to the United States, destabilizing the exchange rates, the external accounts, and, therefore, the national economies in Western Europe. As is natural to all liberal finance orders, not considering capital controls was the core of the economic problems.

Furthermore, during the war, Josef Stalin expanded the borderlines of the Soviet Union and its area of influence to a position unthinkable to any Romanov Emperor. Not to mention that Russia found itself, for the first time in its history, without a single great rival power in all of Eurasia, as said by George Kennan himself, in an official document of May 1945, entitled The International Position of Russia at the End of the War with Germany.

Anyway, the change in the strategy of the Truman Administration lingered to happen. And it took place only in 1947 for two reasons: the civil war in Greece between the old monarchy supported by the British against the anti-fascist forces led by communists and upheld by the Kremlin; and the pressure of Moscow on Ankara to control territories in Anatolia and install two military bases at the straits. Since then, the U.S. president opted for occupying part of the Rimland that Nicholas Spykman had written about before, in his book of 1942, America’s Strategy in the World Politics.

From a geo-historical point of view, it meant a long-standing tradition of Anglo-Saxon geopolitical thought of maintaining Russia outside of the Mediterranean Sea. Its roots had already been in the British imperial policy of the 19th century, as the Greek independence process during 1821-1830 demonstrates.

The head orientation of the new security doctrine launched by Truman in 1947 pointed to the necessity of permanent and global containment of the USSR. The objective was to freeze their respective areas of influence, leaving both countries, in effect, in a continuous opposition against each other. The U.S. projection of securities lines from their Atlantic borders to the Eurasian continental mass required the stabilization of the new disputed regions, mainly in the fimbriae of Asia. Working out the social and economic problems in these regions became part of the U.S. national security strategy. And, at that moment, the main actions prioritized Europe and Japan.

Then, to avoid the Soviet projection in a Europe marked by a severe economic crisis, the United States resumed rebuilding an international order focused on national product expansions, income growths, and employment improvements. The Marshall Plan and the rescue of the Bretton Woods proposals shaped the core of American economic initiatives. Therefore, both of them had a main geopolitical objective. They were an expression of the submission of the economic order to the geopolitical one. In other words, one could define both Marshall Plan and Bretton Woods system as pieces of economic geostrategy of a new kind of conflict, born around 1947, the Cold War. So, the starting point of the Bretton Woods implementation relies essentially on geopolitics, not on social-economic traumas from the thirties. It could be said, in this way, that the Soviet Union and its leader, Josef Stalin, were respectively the entity and personal genuinely responsible for the economic reconstruction of Europe and the Bretton Woods system’s birth.

As a result, the United States could stabilize the national economies in the sensitive regions relative to Cold War and freeze the frontiers with the communist nations. In the limit, they promoted a quarter-century of extraordinary development in first-world countries. In short, the Cold War was the background that allowed the Bretton Woods System to work out from 1947 until the moment when the U.S. economic strategy to its geopolitical struggles changed.

Concerning Bretton Woods’ contradictions, the creation of Euromarkets in 1958 within England, supported by U.S. authorities, allowed the British government to conciliate two different challenges: on the one hand, carrying out a growth-oriented economic policy; and, on the other, defending London’s position in the international financial business. However, these new markets, out of the control of any monetary authorities, expanded more and more the dollar liquidity in the system.

Unlike the mainstream narrative, the U.S. external accounts weren’t unbalanced, shown in the rather unexpressive U.S. compensatory capital flows in its Balance of Payments during the Bretton Woods period. Part of the system dollar liquidity arose from what Charles Kindleberger [1] and Hyman Minsky [2] described as the deepening process of resources inflows and outflows from the United States to the world. While the Trade Balance and the Current Account were positives, the U.S. Capital Account was negative due to the Foreign Direct Investment. So, the pressure against the dollar-gold parity didn’t come from the supposed deficits in their external accounts. It stemmed from the financial markets, whose operations manifolded without restrictions to the dollar assets in the capitalist world, namely, Euromarkets. The problem was that it occurred without a counterpart of growth in the Fed’s gold reserves.

Therefore, if the Bretton Woods implementation were geopolitical and not due to the traumas of the thirties’ economic crisis, its contradictions came from the Euromarkets and not from the North American external accounts’ imbalances. In turn, its existence depended on how useful it would be to U.S. foreign policy.

In 1969, the international context changed expressively. If Bretton Woods System had already promoted the most important historical era of capitalism, the Soviet Union had also achieved substantial strategic improvements in the 60s. There had been its nuclear weapons’ progress, the strengthening of its navy, the development of edge-cutting aerospace technology, and the expansion of its oil production, among others. And this new Soviet success in the 60s had pressured not only the United States and its allies from the first world but also the Popular Republic of China. In that background, Beijing signalized to Washington a careful approach in 1969. The Nixon administration, in turn, took advantage and started the Triangular Diplomacy. Since then, the American government implemented concessions to Beijing and Moscow, such as reductions of economic sanctions.

For example, in that year, the United States created new legislation, altering the Export Control Act of 1949. Later, in April 1971, only three months before the famous Nixon’s speech, the United States lifted some previous restrictions once more. It allowed the purchase of dollars by China and USSR to encourage their import of products from the capitalist world. So, a valuable triangular diplomacy result was the beginning of the entrance process of China and the Soviet Union into the dollar monetary territory on the eve of the end of the Bretton Woods System.

When Nixon addressed the American people on television in August 1971, the strategy of 1947 had already achieved its economic aims. Besides, Japan and Germany had already become strong adversaries in the international economic competition. Not to mention, the Bretton Woods contradictions still required efforts and coordination with the Europeans and Japanese in financial governance, such as in the Gold Pool and the IMF due to Special Drawing Rights, which sometimes was causing tension and opposition among them. Finally, the Bretton Woods System still enforced restrictions on the U.S. managing their economic policy, as in the dollar-gold parity defense.

Richard Nixon started his famous speech by mentioning: alleged advances in “achieving the end of the Vietnam War,” the “challenges of peace,” despite not specifying them, and the “prosperity without military conflicts.” Next, he connected the last of these issues directly to jobs creation in the United States, control of the internal cost of living, and dollar protection, going quickly from tricky subjects of international relations to national issues in daily life. Then, Nixon announced some economic measures with an orthodox bias to encourage the employment increase, for example, tax reductions and spending cuts. He also ordered radical heterodox economic policies to contain the rise in prices: the freeze on all prices and wages for 90 days.

The population was likely astonished and pretty worried about such sort of economic measures, because it always creates graves problems of relative price imbalances. Probably, when Nixon approached the theme of “protection the position of the American dollar as a pillar of monetary stability around the world,” as he said, the attention in the country was still in the freeze on prices and salaries.

After describing the speculators’ efforts in “waging an all-out war on the dollar,” he argued that the strength of a nation’s currency rests on the strength of that nation’s economy. And, then, Nixon claimed the U.S. position in the international monetary hierarchy by saying that “the American economy is by far the strongest in the world.” Next, he clarified the U.S. disposition when he ordered the Secretary of the Treasury to take any necessary action to defend the dollar. And, finally, he announced what would be unthinkable until that moment: the suspension of the dollar-gold convertibility. According to him, a bugaboo that it should lay to rest.

For the domestic audience, Nixon justified the decision by the devaluation advantages to the American-made products in America. For that matter, he also imposed an additional tax of 10% on goods imported into the United States.

Nixon announced the abandonment of the old economic geostrategy inaugurated in 1947 by the Truman administration. He pointed that economies of the major industrial nations of Europe and Asia had become strong competitors against the United States. Then, there was no longer any need for “the United States to compete with one hand beyond her back.” According to Nixon, the time had come for first-world nations to compete as equals. In other words, President Nixon put an end to the development by invitation, except for China, which had been engaging in a strategic rapprochement with the United States.

Summarizing the argument, before 1969, as long as the foreign policy hadn’t changed, the successive U.S. administrations had carried on upholding the Bretton Woods System and its aims, despite its contradictions. To circumvent its problems, they had implemented some efforts, as Gold Pool, Special Drawing Rights, etc. Therefore, during the Cold War’s first decades, the U.S. support for the Bretton Wood order had occurred since this economic system had reached its geopolitical objectives. However, since the international context had changed expressively in the 60s, the economic order had become more and more inappropriate. It had depleted as a Cold War’s strategic instrument, and it had been inadequate and outdated for the new geopolitical struggles and geoeconomic challenges. In other words, the emergence of new economic competitors and mainly the outcomes of Soviet projection in the system brought shifts in U.S. foreign policy in 1969, originating the triangular diplomacy. And, two years later, in 1971, the United States unilaterally abandoned the Bretton Woods Agreements.

It sounds ironic that the most significant historical experience of western capitalism was related to Stalin’s strategy of enlarging the Soviet frontiers in the context of the Second World War and the capacity of the Soviet Union to respond to the Cold War against the United States, mainly during the 60s.

[1] Kindleberger, Charles. P. A Financial History of Western Europe. Oxford University Press, 1993. (p. 453).
[2] Minsky, Hyman. Financial Integration and National Economic Policy. In: Ciclo de Seminários, 25 anos de economia na UNICAMP, Campinas, agosto-outubro de 1993. (p. 17-18).
[3] Grzybowski, Kazimierz. Control of U.S. Trade with China: an overview. Law and Contemporany Problems, 175-181. Summer, 1973. (p.180)

This month marks fifty years since President Richard Nixon closed the “gold window” that had allowed foreign governments to exchange US dollars for gold. Nixon’s action severed the last link between the dollar and gold, transforming the dollar into pure fiat currency.

Since the “Nixon shock” of 1971, the dollar’s value — and the average American’s living standard — has continuously declined, while income inequality and the size, scope, and cost of government have risen.

Since the beginning of this year, price inflation has increased much, and it could continue onward to exceed the 1970s-era price spikes. Understandably, Republicans are trying to blame President Joe Biden for the price increases. However, a major cause of the current price inflation is the unprecedented money creation the Federal Reserve has engaged in since the 2008 market meltdown. This, though, does not mean Biden and most US politicians of both parties do not bear some responsibility for rising prices. Their support for the Fed and massive government spending contributes to the problem.

The main way the Fed pumps money into the economy is by monthly purchases of 120 billion dollars of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. Even many Keynesian economists agree that rising price inflation means the Fed should stop pumping money into the economy. Yet, this year the Fed is likely, at most, to only slightly reduce its purchases of Treasury securities. It will almost certainly keep interest rates at near-zero levels.

A reason the Fed will not stop or significantly reduce its purchases of Treasuries and allow interest rates to increase is that doing so would increase federal debt payments to unsustainable levels. Even with interest rates at historic lows, interest payments remain a significant portion of federal spending, and recent indications are that the US government is not about to start being frugal.  Consider, for example, Congress’ six trillion dollars “Covid relief and economic stimulus” spending spree and the Senate passage of the trillion dollars “traditional infrastructure” bill and a budget “outline” of a 3.5 trillion dollars “human infrastructure” bill.

The “human infrastructure” bill represents an expansion of government along the lines of the Great Society. Among its initiatives are universal pre-kindergarten; two “free” years of community college; increased government control of health care via expansions of Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid; and a raft of new government mandates and spending aimed at reshaping the US economy to fight “climate change.”

The need to gain support of “moderate” Democrats will likely mean the final “human infrastructure” bill will costs less than 3.5 trillion dollars. However, no Democrat is objecting to the bill’s programs; the objectors just want cheaper tolls on the road to serfdom. While progressives will likely accept reduced spending levels in order to get their wish list into law, they will then work to increase funding and expand the programs. As the programs become more entrenched, even many “conservatives” will support increasing their funding.

The expansion of government will increase pressure on the Fed to keep the money spigots open. This will lead to a major economic crisis. The good news is the crisis may mark the beginning of the end of the fiat monetary system and the welfare-warfare state, along with the dawn of a new era of free markets, sound money, and limited government.

ronpaulinstitute.org

Was Richard Nixon a real gold friend who understood the futility of tying a weakening dollar to gold which is the only currency that has survived in history?

So was Nixon actually the instigator of the movement to FreeGold?

I doubt it. He was just another desperate leader who was running out of real money and needed to create unlimited amounts of fiat money. Although his fatal decision to close the gold window was clearly the beginning of the end of the current monetary system.

But although the decision was fatal, Nixon was clearly not personally responsible. What the world saw in August 1971 was just another desperate leader who realised that he couldn’t stick to the monetary or fiscal disciplines necessary to maintain a sound economy and a sound currency.

In history, Nixon should be seen as the rule rather than the exception. Since every currency has been slaughtered throughout history, one particular leader will also be required to be the executor.

So in 1971, history had elected Tricky Dick to be the inevitable destroyer of the dollar.

I don’t quite know what the definition is of “suspend temporarily” but 50 years seems to be pushing the limit!

And as regards the strength of dollar goes, we all know what happened to the “strength of the currency”! Please see the illustration of the dollar collapse further on in the article.

In my article from December 2018 I talked about the advantage of FreeGold.

There are a few conditions that need to be fulfilled for gold to be an effective store of value. The principle of FreeGold best defines what this means. The website FOFOA (Friend Of a Friend of Another) and its predecessors have been pioneers in defining what FreeGold is:

These are the basic principles –

ALL PHYSICAL GOLD MUST BE:

• FREE from official money systems
• Owned FREE of all other claims
• FREELY traded

If all the above conditions are met, there would be no gold backed currencies, no ability to exchange currency for gold at central banks for a fixed parity and most importantly THERE WOULD BE NO PAPER GOLD OR OTHER GOLD DERIVATIVES.

Gold would neither be lent nor leveraged.

In fact, gold should not be tied to any currency. Gold has reigned supreme for 5,000 years whilst all its competitors in the form of fiat money have collapsed. Nixon probably understood this. The world’s current reserve currency could obviously not be shackled any more by gold. Because gold ignores the follies of megalomaniac sovereign leaders who want to cling on to power at any cost.

That is why governments have a Love – Hate relationship with gold.

ON THE ONE HAND – GOVERNMENTS LOVE GOLD

On the one hand gold signifies stability, wealth and the only currency that has survived in history and maintained its purchasing power. That is why governments around the world allegedly hold 34,000 tonnes of it currently valued at $2 trillion.

As Greenspan said a few years ago:

“If it (gold) is worthless and meaningless, why is everybody (central banks) still holding it?”

ON THE OTHER HAND – GOVERNMENTS HATE GOLD

On the other hand governments hate gold since it reveals their total mismanagement of the economy.

Because as soon as they run out of money, tying the currency to gold creates an extremely inconvenient road block that must be eliminated.

As gold is an inconvenient truth sayer, tying it to the currency prevents governments from holding on to power. So out with gold and sound money and in with credit expansion and fake money that temporarily buys votes.

Printing money and buying votes is not just a frivolous folly, but also an extremely costly exercise that without fail leads to the collapse of the economy and the currency.

lewrockwell.com

“A ruthless little bastard,” was President Richard Nixon’s verdict on Donald Rumsfeld as recorded by the Watergate tapes – and everything in his career, supremely successful until the Iraq war, confirmed that Nixon had read him correctly.

Rumsfeld relished such tributes to his toughness, but he was above all else a skilful bureaucratic warrior in Washington and never the warlord he pretended to be. As defence secretary between 2001 and 2006, he gloried in his role as America’s military chief avenging 9/11, but his arrogance and inability to adjust to the realities of the Afghan and Iraq wars produced frustration or failure on the battlefield.

Manoeuvre though Rumsfeld did to avoid responsibility for the Iraq war, he became the living symbol of America’s plunge into the quagmire. Typically, he responded to this by banning his staff at the Pentagon from using the word “quagmire” along with “resistance” and “insurgents”.

Rumsfeld started his career as a Republican Congressman from Illinois and moved on to serve four Republican presidents. He headed the Office for Economic Opportunity under Nixon, became defence secretary and ambassador to Nato in the Ford administration. As President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, he travelled to Baghdad to shake hands with Saddam Hussein and assure him of US support in the eight-year war that the Iraqi dictator had launched against Iran. His camaraderie with Saddam reflected American strategy at the time, but it also showed Rumsfeld’s liking for people with power and his dismissiveness towards those without it.

American democracy in the third decade of the 21st century is but a vague, fading shadow, a dimly receding echo of whatever it even was 40 or 50 years ago. The acclaimed “success” of the Democratic convention that was supposedly held “in” the city of Milwaukee in the Midwest state of Wisconsin is a perfect example of this strange post-reality echo.

The classic American political convention was born with a bang! in the 1820s when that raucous, slave-owning, land-stealing, ethnic cleansing master of war massacres General Andrew Jackson rode them to the Presidency in 1828.

From the start, the conventions were wild, drunken, partying affairs where the prostitutes flocked in their thousands and the cheap booze merchants did millions of dollars of business. For 140 years amid gloriously ridiculous and insincere rhetoric and cynical deals in smoke-filled obscure hotel rooms, the political business of the Great Republic was hammered out.

But in the 1960s national live television came of age and the Great Shift in U.S. politics occurred. So, the roaring, rollicking Great Beasts of the national political conventions were tamed at last. Richard Nixon introduced for the Republicans the era of the minutely scripted, carefully choreographed TV-friendly convention – which also meant the boring-as-all-can-imagine mediocrities marching in lockstep conventions.

These were the jamborees that in their collective (lack of) wisdom propelled Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama into back-to-back double four-year term presidencies. Meanwhile, domestic U.S. industry collapsed, the workshop of the world moved to China, drug addiction rates and deaths soared to record levels unmatched in any other supposedly advanced society and more than ever the United States became the most violent and dangerous nation on earth. And everyone hailed the incomparable wisdom of the Founding Fathers for making it so.

Now the COVID-19 pandemic, its rates of spread and death tolls fanned by the stupidity of right-wing libertarians and liberal left of center big government Democrats alike has taken the process to its next, utterly absurd and therefore logical level: After half a century of conventions without argument or thought we have moved on to conventions without people. What could be more convenient?

Who needs an embarrassing audience of living, breathing people that may not break out in applause for exactly the right period of time and respond to its minute choreography? Everyone already knows that the platforms debated and approved with such passion at every convention will never be put into practice. Current President Donald Trump is the first president since the 1920s who dared to try and actually implement the policies he campaigned for. And an outraged Deep State and Liberal Media joined forces to try and drive him out of office for doing so. The first president since Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge who even tried – or at least imagined himself – to be honest was drenched with tidal waves of hatred for having the effrontery to try and do so.

By 1972, the famous chaotic national conventions of the two main political parties of the United States had been boiled down to a tame, scripted handbook. Genuine democracy insofar as it ever existed had been replaced by a carefully scripted, micro-managed flickering electronic image on 100 million TV screens.

Nearly 50 years on, we see in Milwaukee the next stage. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the perfect excuse to introduce a Political Convention without even the pretense of any people being needed to pretend to attend it.

The imagery of what the U.S. political system has become is perfect. Everything is a lie. Only the cynical image survives.

For the past four nights, as I write this, the American people and the wider world have been treated to an unintended revelation of how democracy, 21st century style is supposed to work in the eyes of its lords and masters. It is a perfect democracy: A democracy free at last of all facts, free at last of all people.

The great attendance halls are totally empty. We are told this is necessary and wise. And it may even be. But how can you have a convention which by definition is a gathering of people if there are no people? No worry. This makes things better, not worse. There is even more room for brain destroying short advertising-agency-produced propaganda more effective than drinking raw bleach in generating brain deaths.

No real convention was ever held in Milwaukee this past. The simulacrum or vague image of a convention – a scrap of paper with the word “Convention” hastily scribbled on it – was “held” in Milwaukee.

No issues were ever debated in Milwaukee. The proud Democrats followed the script of Republican Richard Nixon in 1968. They refused to debate anything. No political issues were debated in Milwaukee. No disagreements were permitted in what passed for “public” in Milwaukee. National political conventions have become the opposite of what they started out as being. Instead of being exercises in freedom of expression and hard-fought political compromise, they have become fantasies imposing conformity from the top down – no disagreement permitted. Ever. Anywhere.

The Prophet Marshall McLuhan heralded the death of political debate – the death of the very possibility of political debate – in America:

The medium is the message.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

That slogan guaranteed Nixon’s election, and was coined by Kevin Phillips, then an expert in “ethnic voting patterns”.

Philips makes for a very interesting case. In 1999, he became the author of a seminal book: The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America, where he tracks how a “small Tudor kingdom” ended up establishing global hegemony.

The division of the English-speaking community into two great powers – “one aristocratic, ‘chosen’ and imperial; and one democratic, ‘chosen’ and manifest destiny-driven”, as Philips correctly establishes – was accomplished by, what else, a war triptych: the English Civil War, the American revolution and the U.S. Civil War.

Now, we may be at the threshold of a fourth war – with unpredictable and unforeseen consequences.

As it stands, what we have is a do-or-die clash of models: MAGA against an exclusivist Fed/Wall Street/Silicon Valley-controlled system.

MAGA – which is a rehash of the American dream – simply cannot happen when society is viciously polarized; vast sectors of the middle class are being completely erased; and mass immigration is coming from the Global South.

In contrast, the Fed as a Wall Street hedge fund meets Silicon Valley model, a supremely elitist 0.001% concoction, has ample margins to thrive.

The model is based on even more rigid corporate monopoly; the preeminence of capital markets, where a Wall Street boom is guaranteed by government debt-buybacks of its own debt; and life itself regulated by algorithms and Big Data.

This is the Brave New World dreamed by the techno-financial Masters of the Universe.

Trump’s MAGA woes have been compounded by a shoddy geopolitical move in tandem with Law and Order: his re-election campaign will be under the sign of “China, China, China.” When in trouble, blame a foreign enemy.

That comes from serially failed opportunist Steve Bannon and his Chinese billionaire sidekick Guo Wengui, or Miles Guo. Here they are in Statue of Liberty mode announcing their no holds barred infowar campaign to demonize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to Kingdom Come and “free the Chinese people”.

Bannon’s preferred talking point is that if his infowar fails, there will be “kinetic war”. That is nonsense. Beijing’s priorities are elsewhere. Only a few neo-conned Dr. Strangeloves would envisage “kinetic war”- as in a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Chinese territory.

Alastair Crooke has masterfully shown how the geoeconomic game, as Trump sees it, is above all to preserve the power of the U.S. dollar: “His particular concern would be to see a Europe that was umbilically linked to the financial and technological heavyweight that is China. This, in itself, effectively would presage a different world financial governance.”

But then there’s The Leopard syndrome: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. Enter Covid-19 as a particle accelerator, used by the Masters of the Universe to tweak “things” a bit so they not only stay as they are but the Master grip on the world tightens.

The problem is Covid-19 behaves as a set of – uncontrollable – free electrons. That means nobody, even the Masters of the Universe, is able to really weigh the full consequences of a runaway, compounded financial/social crisis.

Deconstructing Nixon-Trump

Russiagate, now totally debunked, has unfolded in effect as a running coup: a color non-revolution metastasizing into Ukrainegate and the impeachment fiasco. In this poorly scripted and evidence-free morality play with shades of Watergate, Trump was cast by the Democrats as Nixon.

Big mistake. Watergate had nothing to do with a Hollywood-celebrated couple of daring reporters. Watergate represented the industrial-military-security-media complex going after Nixon. Deep Throat and other sources came from inside the Deep State. And it was not by accident that they were steering the Washington Post – which, among other roles, plays the part of CIA mouthpiece to perfection.

Trump is a completely different matter. The Deep State keeps him under control. One just needs to look at the record: more funds for the Pentagon, $1 trillion in brand new nuclear weapons, perennial sanctions on Russia, non-stop threats to Russia’s western borders, (failed) efforts to derail Nord Stream 2. And this is only a partial list.

So, from a Deep State point of view, the geopolitical front – containment of Russia-China – is assured. Domestically, it’s much more complicated.

As much as Black Lives Matter does not threaten the system even remotely like the Black Panthers in the 60s, Trump believes his own Law & Order, like Nixon, will once again prevail. The key will be to attract the white women suburban vote. Republican pollsters are extremely optimistic and even talking about a “landslide”.

Yet the behavior of an extra crucial vector must be understood: what corporate America wants.

When we look at who’s supporting Black Lives Matter – and Antifa – we find, among others, Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, WalMart, Warner Brothers and YouTube.

This who’s who would suggest a completely isolated Trump. But then we have to look at what really matters; the class war dynamics in what is in fact a caste system, as Laurence Brahm argues.

Black Lives Matter, the organization and its ramifications, is essentially being instrumentalized by selected corporate interests to accelerate their own priority: to crush the U.S. working classes into a state of perpetual anomie, as a new automated economy rises.

That may always happen under Trump. But it will be faster without Trump.

What’s fascinating is how this current strategy of tension scenario is being developed as a classic CIA/NED playbook color revolution.

An undisputed, genuine grievance – over police brutality and systemic racism – has been completely manipulated, showered with lavish funds, infiltrated, and even weaponized against “the regime”.

Just to control Trump is not enough for the Deep State – due to the maximum instability and unreliability of his Demented Narcissus persona. Thus, in yet another priceless historical irony, “Assad must go” metastasized into “Trump must go”.

The cadaver in the basement

One must never lose track of the fundamental objectives of those who firmly control that assembly of bought and paid for patsies in Capitol Hill: to always privilege Divide and Rule – on class, race, identity politics.

After all, the majority of the population is considered expendable. It helps that the instrumentalized are playing their part to perfection, totally legitimized by mainstream media. No one will hear lavishly funded Black Lives Matter addressing the real heart of the matter: the reset of the predatory Restored Neoliberalism project, barely purged of its veneer of Hybrid Neofascism. The blueprint is the Great Reset to be launched by the World Economic Forum in January 2021.

It will be fascinating to watch how Trump deals with this “Summer of Love” remake of Maidan transposed to the Seattle commune. The hint from Team Trump circles is that he will do nothing: a coalition of white supremacists and motorcycle gangs might take care of the “problem” on the Fourth of July.

None of this sweetens the fact that Trump is at the heart of a crossfire hurricane: his disastrous response to Covid-19; the upcoming, devastating effects of the New Great Depression; and his intimations pointing to what could turn into martial law.

Still, the legendary Hollywood maxim – “no one knows anything” – rules. Even running with a semi-cadaver in a basement, the Democrats may win in November just by doing nothing. Yet Teflon Trump should never be underestimated. The Deep State may even realize he’s more useful than they think.

In January 2018, when Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” he was relishing the time when apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, and South-West Africa were considered a pro-US bloc in southern Africa. The links between southern Africa’s exiled black African liberation political parties and movements to Communist- and Marxist-ruled nations, in the minds of Trump and his equally right-wing father, Fred Trump, Sr., made South Africa, Rhodesia, and South-West Africa model nations in the eyes of the Trumps.

Trump’s sympathies for the apartheid countries were crystal clear when, on August 22, 2018, Trump tweeted: “I have asked Secretary of State Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. ‘South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.’”

The South African government was keenly aware that Trump was using a trope from the apartheid era. White South African prime ministers, including John Vorster and P. W. Botha were fond of warning their own constituencies, as well as the West, that if blacks achieved majority rule in South Africa, white farmers would be massacred and their land expropriated. These were fear tactics, pure and simple. Mr. Trump, caught in some sort of time warp, continues to believe the apartheid propaganda.

In response to Trump’s tweet, the government of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa hit back at Trump: “South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past.” It turns out that Trump got his idea that the South African government was seizing land from white farmers from the disreputable Fox News. As for the claim that white farmers were being killed, that bit of bogus information came from a far-right group called AfriForum, consisting of mainly Afrikaners in South Africa and abroad.

The AfriForum disinformation about white-owned farms and farmers in South Africa was picked up by Trump through Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s father, Dick Carlson, was President Ronald Reagan’s chief propagandist as the director of the US Information Agency (USIA), since closed down. During 1985 and 1986, Dick Carlson ensured that a steady stream of right-wing propaganda emanated from the Voice of America, the anti-Cuban Radio Marti, and other platforms. This included support for apartheid South Africa. Other top Republicans involved in pro-South African propaganda included disgraced Republican Party lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Republican activist Lewis Lehrman. In 1985, USIA and the Voice of America, at Carlson’s direction, highlighted an anti-Communist summit meeting held in Jamba, Angola. The summit, called the “Jamboree in Jamba,” was attended by Abramoff, the Angolan UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, Nicaraguan Contra leader Adolfo Calero, Laotian Hmong leader Pa Kao Her, and Afghan Mujaheddin leader Abdul Rahim Wardak. Also present was Reagan National Security Council official Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, as well as South African and Israeli representatives. The South African Defense Force provided the security for the summit. Based on the success of the Jamba summit, the Republican right-wing even had hopes of restoring a proto-colonialist administration in Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony. By attempting to create a RENAMO-led government in Mozambique, the right hoped many Portuguese exiles could return to Mozambique to hold key positions in government and commerce. This, of course, was the same thinking behind the right’s support for Savimbi’s UNITA forces in Angola, also a former Portuguese colony.

One of the US groups backing the apartheid South African government was the Committee on the Present Danger, a fervently anti-Communist group. Extinct since the end of the Cold War, the Committee recently enjoyed a resurgence in Washington under the auspices of Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, and former US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich.

In the 1980s, it was clear that far-right elements in the Reagan administration were trying to shore up white-rule in South Africa, prevent total black rule in South-West Africa, and roll back rule by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe – the former Rhodesia. The racist right-wing in the United States had hoped to prevent Mugabe from coming to power in June 1979 by backing the creation of a post-minority rule country called Zimbabwe Rhodesia. The use of the name Rhodesia was a concession to the white minority in the country, which, upon unilateral independence in 1965, was headed by Prime Minister Ian Smith. Smith was a hero to the far-right elements in the United States, including the Ku Klux Klan. Smith and his allies in South Africa decided the best way to maintain the status quo was to form an alliance with Rhodesian tribes opposed to Mugabe, including Ndebele leaders like Joshua Nkomo.

The first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia was Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who, like Mugabe, was a member of the northern Shona tribe. Muzorewa was an opponent of Mugabe as were other officials in the short-lived Zimbabwe Rhodesia, sometimes called “Rhobabwe.” Smith continued in the government as a minister without portfolio. White Rhodesians continued to serve as ministers of finance, justice, agriculture, and finance. When Britain re-established control over Zimbabwe Rhodesia and changed its name to Southern Rhodesia in December 1979 the writing was on the wall for the white-black coalition government. In 1980, Mugabe became prime minister of Zimbabwe. In the subsequent years, many white Rhodesians fled to South Africa, the United States, Canada, and Australia.

In 2015, Dylan Roof, the US white supremacist who massacred African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church, appeared on a website called “The Last Rhodesian” wearing a jacket emblazoned with the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. Rhodesian expats have also been involved with several racist groups around the world, including Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand. Donald Trump has rekindled hope among these stubborn nostalgists for white rule in southern Africa that what once seemed impossible is now quite thinkable: white-dominated governments in Harare, Pretoria, and Windhoek.

A similar situation was attempted by promoters of white rule in South-West Africa. In 1977, the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance formed a de facto government in Windhoek led by Dirk Mudge. Mudge, an Afrikaner, governed with the support of South Africa and representatives from various ethnic groups, including the Ovaherero, Coloureds (mixed race), Tswana, Damara, a few Ovambo, Caprivians, Nama, Kavango, San, and White Afrikaners and Germans, the latter concentrated on the coast around Swakopmund. The United Nations refused to recognize the Turnhalle government, opting for the exiled South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) of Sam Nujoma, which was heavily supported by a majority of the Ovambo people. The attempt by whites and their allies to prevent Nujoma from becoming president of independent Namibia ultimately failed.

Thanks to social media, a de facto alliance of exiled white Rhodesians, South Africans, Nyasalanders (now Malawi), and Namibians, along with racists in Europe, North America, and Australia, see – with Trump as president of the United States and the equally racist Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil – an opportunity for them to set the calendar back to the 1960s. Just as minority white leaders like Smith, Vorster, Botha, and Mudge attempted to seek alliances of convenience with various African ethnic groups to maintain ascendancy – the Ndebele, Zulu, Venda, Tswana, Damara, and Ndau, among others – Trump, Steve Bannon, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and about a dozen hard right Republican members of the US Congress are hoping to restore de facto white rule in southern Africa.

Since Trump’s “Make America Great Again” trope has become a racist mantra, so, too, have merchandise bearing mottos like “Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia Again,” “Make Afrikaners Great Again,” and “Make Namibia German Again.” Some whites with roots in Malawi, where the second largest city is Blantyre – named after the town of Blantyre in South Lanarkshire, Scotland – would not mind it if they again enjoyed high positions of influence in the country formerly known as Nyasaland. Some of the descendants of the 75,000 whites who formerly lived in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, also pine for the days when whites ruled the country. Afrikaner nationalists also recall with fondness the desire of apartheid South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd wanting to turn Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Basutoland (now Lesotho), and Swaziland (now eSwatini) into South African ruled dominions.

Creation of a South Atlantic Treaty Organization (SATO) has long been a goal of neo-conservatives like John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Adviser, and Elliott Abrams, Trump’s “special envoy” for Venezuela. In March 2019, Trump, restarting this goal of the Reagan and Richard Nixon administrations, said during the visit of Bolsonaro to the White House, “I also intend to designate Brazil as a major non-NATO ally, or even possibly—if you start thinking about it—maybe a NATO ally.”

Pleased with the 1970s success of Operation Condor, an intelligence alliance of Latin American military dictatorships that targeted for assassination and arrest leftists in South America and beyond, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger foresaw a military alliance of the Condor partners of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, along with apartheid South Africa and the United States, as firmly extending US military control over the south Atlantic region. Kissinger’s plan for a SATO continued under Reagan. One Reagan administration policy paper was titled “The Security of the South Atlantic: Is It a Case for ‘SATO’–South Atlantic Treaty Organization?” Just as with Trump and Bolsonaro today, in 1984, Reagan and Brazilian President João Figueiredo, Brazil’s last military dictator, had talks on the formation of SATO.

Influenced by the neo-cons in his administration, Trump was recently asked about Africa policy. Trump responded, “We’re looking at Zimbabwe right now.” Just as with the right-wingers gathered at the Jamba Jamboree in 1985, Trump and his racist supporters are looking at Zimbabwe in order to restore something akin to Rhodesia and get the ball rolling on the restoral of white rule and privilege throughout southern Africa and forcing many blacks back to their rural tribal kraals. Trump’s neo-con allies may seek to create a SATO, but the racist elements in Washington want it to be a military club for white governments. Those who sacrificed so much to eliminate the scourge of apartheid and colonialism from southern Africa should be on constant guard against the plans of Trump and his southern African and Brazilian allies. The United States under Trump is a distinct neo-colonialist enemy of the black African people.

“History is repeating itself, and with a vengeance,” John Dean told the Judiciary Committee, drawing a parallel between Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon, and “Russiagate,” which has bedeviled Donald Trump.

But what strikes this veteran of Nixon’s White House is not the similarities but the stark differences.

Watergate began with an actual crime, a midnight break-in at the offices of the DNC in June 1972 to wiretap phones and filch files, followed by a cover-up that spread into the inner circles of the White House.

Three years after FBI Director James Comey began the investigation of Trump, however, the final report of his successor, Robert Mueller, found there had been no conspiracy, no collusion, and no underlying crime.

How can Trump be guilty of covering up a crime that the special counsel says he did not commit?

And the balance of power today in D.C. is not as lopsided as it was in 1973 and ’74.

During Watergate, Nixon had little support in a city where the elites, the press, the Democratic Congress, and the liberal bureaucracy labored in earnest to destroy him. He had few of what Pat Moynihan called “second and third echelons of advocacy.”

Contrast this with Trump, a massive presence on social media, whose tweets, daily interactions with the national press, and rallies keep his enemies constantly responding to his attacks rather than making their case.

Trump interrupts their storytelling. And behind him is a host of defenders at Fox News and some of the top radio talk show hosts in America.

There are pro-Trump websites that did not exist in Nixon’s time, home to populist and conservative columnists and commentators full of fight.

Leftists may still dominate the mainstream media. But their unconcealed hatred of Trump and the one-sided character of their coverage has cost them much of the credibility they had half a century ago.

The media are seen as militant partisans masquerading as journalists.

Consider the respective calendars.

Two years after the Watergate break-in, Nixon was near the end, about to be impeached by the House with conviction possible in the Senate.

Three years into Russiagate, three in four House Democrats do not want their caucus to take up impeachment. Many of these Democrats, especially moderates from swing districts, do not want to cast a vote to either bring down or exonerate the president.

Assume the House did take up impeachment. Would all the Democrats vote aye? Does anyone think a Republican Senate would deliver the needed 20 votes to provide a two-thirds majority to convict and remove him?

For a Republican Senate to split asunder and vote to expel its own Republican president who is supported by the vast majority of the party would be suicidal. It could cost the GOP both houses of Congress and the White House in 2020. Why would Republicans not prefer to unite and fight to the end, just as Senate Democrats did during the Clinton impeachment?

Trump’s support in the Senate Republican caucus today is rock-solid. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is herself opposed to impeachment hearings in the House, which she considers ruinous to her party’s hopes of maintaining control in 2020.

When Dean went before the Watergate committee of Senator Sam Ervin in 1973, all five days of his testimony were carried live on ABC, CBS, and NBC.

When Dean appeared Monday, the three cable news networks swiftly dropped coverage of the Judiciary Committee hearings to report on a helicopter crash in Manhattan. Dean’s testimony could be seen on C-Span3.

Much of America is bored by the repetitive, nonstop media attacks on Trump and look on the back-and-forth between left and right not as a “constitutional crisis” but a savage battle between parties and partisans.

The impeachers who seek to bring down Trump face other problems.

Now that Mueller has spent two years investigating and found no proof of a Trump-Putin conspiracy to hack the emails of the DNC and Clinton campaign, questions have arisen as to what the evidence was that caused the FBI to launch its unprecedented investigation of a presidential campaign and a newly elected president.

Did an anti-Trump cabal at the apex of the FBI and U.S. security agencies work with foreign intelligence, including former British spy Christopher Steele, in an attempt to destroy Trump?

The political dynamic of Trump’s taunts and defiance of the demands of committee chairs in a Democratic House, and the clamor for impeachment from the Democratic and media left, are certain to produce more calls for hearings.

But if the impeachment hearings come, they will be seen for what they are: an attempted coup to overthrow a president by the losers of 2016 who are fearful they could lose again in 2020 and be out of power for four more years.

Russiagate is not Watergate, but there is this similarity: Nixon and Trump are both the objects of truly great hatred.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

theamericanconservative.com

Forty-nine years ago, on the evening of April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon appeared on television to address the nation. Although his administration was in the process of withdrawing US forces from Vietnam, the purpose of Nixon’s presentation was to announce an expansion of the ongoing conflict. As he spoke, American and South Vietnamese (ARVN) combat units were crossing into Cambodia, a nominally neutral country that had long served as a de facto sanctuary and logistics base for the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

Nixon framed his decision to invade Cambodia as an essential response to an existential threat. “My fellow Americans,” he announced, “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home.”  The situation was dire, not simply (or even especially) in Southeast Asia, but domestically and globally. “We see mindless attacks,” he continued, “on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years.” Within the United States itself, “great universities are being systematically destroyed” even as “small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without.”

Then came Nixon’s nut graf, in which the president scaled the Mount Everest of hyperbole:   “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” Take Nixon’s words at face value and the real mission of the troops entering Cambodia was to avert the collapse of civilization itself.

Most of this was nonsense, of course. By putting a big enough hurt on the NVA, the invasion of Cambodia might buy a bit more time for ARVN to prepare itself to fight without the assistance of US ground troops. That was about the most that could be hoped for. Sadly, however, the operation failed to accomplish even that. After a few weeks, US and ARVN forces withdrew back into South Vietnam. The NVA repaired the damage it had sustained. Overall, the Cambodia campaign proved irrelevant to the war’s ultimate outcome.

At home, meanwhile, Nixon’s decision touched off a wave of protests on campuses across the nation, culminating in the shooting of unarmed student protestors at Kent State University and Jackson State College. Offended at not having been consulted in advance about Nixon’s intentions, the Congress retaliated by rescinding the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution that had first given the previous administration a green light to initiate combat operations in Vietnam. This was an empty gesture, however, which had no practical effect on the events unfolding on the ground.

Except perhaps among those former G.Is who participated, the Cambodian invasion has long since disappeared down the American memory hole. Yet even today in the so-called Age of Trump, I believe that it retains at least modest significance. If nothing else, it offers an instructive example of how wildly inflammatory language serves to camouflage reality and to incite and divide rather than to inform and unify.

The nation is today awash with inflammatory language that might make Nixon himself blush. Some of that language comes from President Trump and his supporters. As much or more emanates from the anti-Trump camp. On both sides, reason has seemingly taken flight. The hysterical tone of public discourse might suggest that totalitarianism, anarchy, and the collapse of Western civilization are lurking right around the corner.

Yet just as that was not the case in 1970, it is not the case today. The United States currently confronts a myriad of challenges, political, economic, diplomatic, and perhaps above all moral.Included among those challenges is the president himself, duly elected but lamentably ill-equipped to fulfill the responsibilities of the office he holds. Yet a mature democracy should fear none of these challenges, which will yield to patient resolve and prudently conceived action—assuming, that is, that those in positions of power and influence will attend to their duties.

In his televised speech about Cambodia, Nixon insisted that it all came down to a question of character. As “the richest and strongest nation in the history of the world,” the United States needed to stand firm in the midst of the current crisis. “If we fail to meet this challenge,” he continued, “all other nations will be on notice that despite its overwhelming power the United States, when a real crisis comes, will be found wanting.”

In fact, however, the Cambodian incursion was not a test of American character, nor was the Vietnam War as a whole. They were expressions of misguided policies devised by a generation of leaders who failed utterly to discern the nation’s actual interests and who blindly proceeded down the road to folly.

Yet arguably, that real crisis of which Nixon warned in 1970 just might be upon us today, a crisis much bigger than Cambodia or Vietnam. Will we be found wanting?   Or will we demonstrate the character needed to set things right?   The preliminary indications are everywhere in evidence and they are not reassuring.

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