The Trump Doctrine w/ Srdja Trifkovic: The J. Burden Show Ep. 408

But I had always been interested in world affairs, and so after the grammar school and the fifteen months army service, I went to England to study international relations at the University of Sussex. At that time, fees for foreign students were still quite low, and my family could afford it.

But also I wanted to live in the West because at that time I was actually younger, naive and pro Western, because frankly, Tito's culture personality always got onto my nerves, and I believed that all that the West came to represent, as conveyed in the movies, popular literature, and of course goods such as genes and electronics, had a certain magnetism that was quite strong at the time. I must say.

Also in nineteen seventy two, I was seventeen eighteen at the time, when I spent some months first in France then in England, I really decided that I didn't want to live in what used to be Yugoslavia, that this was much more dynamic, much more interesting part of the world.

And much more promising, both professionally and material So I started my Western career as a radio journalist with the BBC World Service, both in what used to be the Yugoslav Service at the time and later in the news room and talks and features department, moving to the Voice of America, where he stayed only very briefly in eighty

six eighty seven. It was a very bureaucratic and stifling organization, and then I became a freelancer reporting from Belgrade for US News and World Report eighty nine to ninety one. It was the time of Yugoslavia's gradual disintegration and slide into civil war, and in ninety one ninety two I spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hoover

Institution at Stanford on a State Department grant. And that was my swan song, as shall we say, kosher member of the establishment, because with the Western campaign of quessaimoralistic malignment of the Serbs during the civil war in Yugoslavia

boilth in Bosnia and in Kosto. Later I became not only dissillusioned but utterly discussed it with the media machine and accepted the post of informal and unofficial representative of the Bosnian Serb Republic based in London, and also I started writing very critical pieces, especially on the Hague Tribunal more athletes would be called Inquisition, the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the farce known as the Strebnitzer genocide, where if you have genocide at the level of a

municipality of twenty thousand people, then of course we are entering the grays zone of postmodern semantic games, which can lead us anywhere. And in the late nineties I spent some years, one year at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, Texas and two and a half the now defunct rose Hill College in aken, South Carolina, which was the first attempt and the only one so far as to my knowledge, to start a great books college based

on Orthodox faith. It was supposed to be broadly speaking, the Orthodox censor to Saint Thomas, Aquinas, but it ran out of steam due to lack of funds and mismanagement. It's a sad story. And since ninety nine I've been affairs editor of the Chronicles. It has been what twenty seven years now, with two breaks In two thousand and nine I took a year's break and last year two

thousand and five ten months break. But basically I provide one editorial for the print edition, two page editorial of about eighteen hundred words every month and two to three online articles on the subjects of the day. Parallel bit that I teach international relations at the University of Banyaluca, which is the capital of the Republic of Srpska, the Serbian Republic in Bosnia Herzegovina, and currently I'm writing a

book called Space and Power. It's the working title which looks at the entire human history through the prism of geopolitics, primarily of the interaction between the spatial dimension of international relations and the propensity of states in all times, culture, civilizations and geographic spaces to use a force on the threat or the threat of force as the primary means of achieving their objectives. So that's a summary of it.

I spend most of my time now in the small town of Petrovats on the Montenegrin coast of the Adriatic Sea, but I also divide my time between Belgrade Banie Luca, where I still teach postgraduates and Zurich, were my wife. I still has business engagements. I travel a lot through Europe. I visit the US on average once a year, but in Europe I love traveling through Italy and France and Spain primarily, but also very often to the Pannonia lands

of Hungary, Slovakia and southern Germany. Northern Germany doesn't interest me. And also of course Holland, where I have two daughters, one son in law and two granddaughters. And you mentioned my son, he and his wife and their daughter in suburban Washington, d c. So I occasionally visit there too. I'm a US citizen, but I'm dual citizen. I also have Serbian passport and permanent residents in the United Kingdom. So that's just about as far as I can go with a disclosure of private interests.

the Trump administration is doing? And then also, I imagine a great deal has happened since you wrote that piece, Right, there's a little bit of air gap between when you send off a piece and when it appears in print. So what do you make? And I realize I'm throwing out a lot of questions at you all at once, but it is an interview show. What do you make of both the actions in Venezuela and then also sort of saber rattling with Iran.

Union and its key member countries. And I think it's a very very good thing because if you look at the National Security Strategy, which was revealed on December seventh of last year, even though about one half of that thirty two page document is devoted to the Western hemisphere, to my mind, the most important part is towards the end, where it warns of the civilizational threat to Europe's survival if it's ruling elites continue what it terms and are

quoting from memory, cell defeating or suicidal immigration policies, excessive censorship and deficit of democratic uh, and also attempts to stifle sovereignist and patriotic anti immigration political parties such as the Alternative for Germany.

all the way until the Second World War. But at that time the young American Republic was still relatively weak, both militarily and economically, and it had limited means of enforcing this until the period of manifest destiny at the end of the nineteenth century, and of course the Spanish American War of eighteen ninety eight, when the last two Spanish possessions of Cuba and Puerto Rico came under US control.

The modern day reincarnation primarily has the objective of keeping other powers away not only in political and military terms, which was the primary focus of the original, but also economic, and this is primarily directed against China rather than Russia, because even though Russia signed an agreement on strategic cooperation with Venezuela in May of last year, and it was ratified by the Russian Duma in October of last year. It didn't move one little finger to and its protest

of Nadura's captures, shall we say restrained. It was utterly meaningless, especially considering the fact that this was theoretically their strategic

partner in the Americas. And I think this is because since Putin has always insisted on the need to recognize the legitimacy of spheres of interest, and obviously Russia sees Ukraine as a sphere of interest as well as other parts of it's near abroad in the former Soviet Union, that in return, put In would be more than happy to recognize Trump's own sphere of interest, which is of

course the Western Hemisphere. But Russian investment in Venezuela was pretty minor anyway, even though they had this agreement and and military extu even though they had this strategic agreement and military cooperation which antedates this agreement, they had never tried to build in Venezuela, for instance, an equivalent of the naval base at Tartus in Syria, which was their

foothold in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the Chinese are present and have been present for about fifteen years now with major infrastructure projects all over Central and South America from the Panama Canal to especially in Brazil, but

also in Venezuela. And I think that Trump's policy will make some of these states look again at their cooperation with China in the economic sphere, and that they will probably think twice before signing fresh agreements, because it is obvious that with the return to what can be described as imperialist policy, imperialists in the nineteenth century sense, that Trump is determined to speeze the Chinese out from the hemisphere.

So what is refreshing is that his rhetoric is not based on making Venezuela safe for democracy and LGBTQ community, or for the recovery of human rights and establishment of democratic credentials. He is talking about oil. He is talking

about US interests. He is talking about what one might say HOBBSI and politics based on frankly, power relations and reison detta, which is the French term which is loosely translated as state reason, but fundamentally means the perception of the decision maker of what is the national interest of the given country.

it goes one with the other. Whenever you postulate a moral principle as your guiding light, any form of compromise becomes very hard. It goes hand in hand with the irrational belief in the right and wrong side of history, and the rhetoric of the right side of history has been a regular feature of the Obama years, unfortunately also of.

of traders inside the gates which hindered him. And also at that time I think he was still lacking the know how the Sabola fair, the ability to translate some of still rudimentary ideas into concrete policies.

weaponizing Ukraine into the factor anti Russia. When you claim that your actions are not guided by self interest but by some higher principle, that means that your enemy needs to be demonized, because if it is communicated in terms of right and wrong and good and evil, then every enemy is reduced to Hitler Reduxia at Hitlererum applied at different times to Slavodamlosovitch in Serbia, to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and of course the blademic put In in the Kremlin

and the It is the international relations equivalent of the domestic use of the term fascist, where everyone left disagrees with becomes a fascist and the term ultimately becomes meaningless. Of course, we can discuss at length if there is irreducible core or what it means to be fascist, but most certainly neither the national socialists nor the European conservatives, who want to stop uncontrollable immigration and who want to revive pride in their communities and their culture and legacy

are not fascists. So in the nineties there was a great deal of willingness on behalf of the Western powers, led by the United States and the Clinton at that time, to prove to the Islamic world that they are Muslim friendly, which they thought would somehow compensate for the many decades of uncritical and unreserved support of Israel, most notably after the Sixt Year War in nineteen sixty seven, and so the Bosnian Muslims were construed to be the pro Western

multicultural tolerance blah blah blah Muslims, the ones we can work with, the ones we can treat as if necessary, an example for the reform of the Muslim world as a whole in the direction of this collective West as it existed back in the nineties, and Sir were the

victims of it. What is worse, they openly talked about preventing the establishment of an Islamic state in the heart of the Bulkans, thinking that it would appeal to the Western is Exactly at the time when both the European Union in its postmas Strift period and the United States and the Clinton were moving rapidly in the post national and the globalist direction, and especially in Europe, there was a determined push.

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was somehow the shining city on the hill. So if Trump is going to overturn this, and at least with the NSS we have a promise that this might be the case, then we may be witnessing the beginning of a revolutionary change. And I insist that there is not a sign of equality between Trump and his globalist predecessors, even though I dislike foreign interventions, even though I think that US never interests is not visibly served by the removal of Madura. There is a new intellectual and legal

and propagandistic justification for this. It is returned to the old relations of amend nations based on power, on space and resources, and that in itself is well come. If this also means that the European Union and the doors such as Chancellor Mertz and President Macron, and outside the EU the Labor Prime Minister in London will be left to their own devices, and the US will no longer be part of this experiment in self annihilation that done

so much better. I am not a trumpion. I'm simply trying to evaluate his impact on America's position in the world and America's policies on the basis of the results of his actions. As the Bible says, you'll know them by the fruits and in the fullness of time. If this means that power politics is back, at least it will be easier for other powers, primarily China and Russia, to negotiate with the US on the basis of clearly

defined interests and not some nebulous values. Because if your objective is to make the Red Square safe for Pride parades,

then there is nothing to negotiate. If you start with the assumption that Russia needs to fundamentally change its character, or that it would be preferable for Russia to be democratic if it were to disintegrate it into twelve or twenty entities, as suggested by the lads big new Ruzhinski, then of course, again there is nothing to negotiate if you start lambasting the Chinese, as Anthony Blincoln did a Tnchorage four years ago over the treatment of Wigurs and

democracy movement in Hong Kong. Then again, there is nothing

to negotiate with Trump in the White House. I think that the return to the kind of predictability of international relations in the context of a global balance of power system will be both safer for the world and surprisingly more morally sustainable, because moral absolutism of the globalist neo con neolib clique is in fact deeply more and hypocritical, as well as dangerous and laden with the possibility for uncontrollable escalations.

absolutely beside themselves because it is not full isolationism. And these are people I consider friends, Scott Horton, a few others. So what is your response to that position? The true isolationists, the true Because you could say anti war, I guess base, Well.

regularities which absolutely determined relations between states. The first true historian as well as theoretician of geopolitics, even though geopolitics is term, only came into being in nineteen hundred. The historian of the Polar Permission War, to Kiddidis gave us the famous definition of the conflict between Athens and Sparta.

The rise of Sparta and the fear that this created sorry the rise of Athens as maritime trading empire, and the fear of Sparta that its position would be jeopardized, and the desire to preserve the set of scroll made

the war inevitable. Now, he did not mention the fact that Athens was a democracy and Sparta was an aristocracy, because he DMed it irrelevant and the deed it is the notion that domestic order somehow determines or justifies the posture of a country in world relations is simply not true. It's not supported by evidence. But what we have in the case of the Roman Republic, for instance, is the Punic War against the Cartoginians, who are the descendants of

Phoenicians who colonize North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. It was the struggle of central Mediterranean, the space between Tunisia, Sicily and Calabria. It was really a matter of who gets home. There was nothing ideological, nothing ontological about it. It was geopolitics, plain and simple. Only one of those two stay would emerge victorious. It was not a conflict

amenable to compromise. It was an existential conflict, and the victorious power simply destroyed the losers to the point of raising their capital and plowing it with salt, so that even memory of it is.

of the classical balance of power. System, and it was the system that provided Europe with a long period of relative stability, which was only interrupted in a major way by the French Revolutionary Wars, and by Napoleon's seventeen years of meteodic rise and then sudden fall after his Russian adventure, and then again in eighteen fifteen at the Congress of Vienna, the balance of power system was renewed and provided Europe with another ninety nine years of relative peace, when it

flourished into arguably the most successful, both scientifically, technologically and artistically richest, and the most brilliant civilization known to mankind.

So I do believe that both the bipolar world of the Cold War and the monopolar moment of the post Cold War American global dominance were temporary aberrations, and that in the long term, some form of balance of power system, and we do have emerging multipolarity that is obvious, is both as I said, politically more manageable and philosophically more

logical and morally more sustainable. Of course, this is anathema to globalists and exceptionalists of all colors, but their refusal to acknowledge the emerging multipolarity was in fact probably the most destabilizing and the most dangerous element in the foreign policy mix of the old bipartisan Washington establishment, because the refusal to accept reality and the insistence to persevere in trying to continue with full spectrum dominance was in fact

the most stabilizing and the most dangerous strategy that the United States would possibly devise.

Apollosia for whatever policies they conduct in the region. But oddly enough, ironically, even this is the one area where both Israelis and Arabs agree that they both want the United States to remain committed to the Middle East, and I think that the best answer to that is that the region has no longer any tangible, vital interests to the United States, and I was encouraged that in the National Strategic Document issue last month this is actually stated

point when that with the diversification of energy sources, the United States does not have the same degree of interest in the Middle East as before. Now, de mythologizing the relationshipship with Israel is both possible and necessary, and it is unfortunate that so far we still have this curious, passionate attachment in the White House, which is at odds with MAGA assumptions and also at todds with what one

might term foreign national interest guided foreign policy. Demutologization, however, must not veer into the kind of leftist moral condemnation for its own sake, which is both irrational and hypocritical, because at the same time it is completely intervious to the condemnation of the Islamic world for its treatment of Christians and for its general dysfunctionality and its inability to create either sustainable and viable economies or productive and harmonious societies.

So In answer to your question, I think that perfect detachment from the region with equidistant attitude to both parties, especially when they use mythological or religious arguments in support of their aims, is the way to go. For instance, it's a regular feature of the Israeli discourse to claim that there is the biblical basis for Judea and Samaria

as they call them to belong to them. And at same time, on the Muslim side, and this is less known any part of the Umma, the collective community of the Muslim faithful, which used to be under the Muslim control and then falls to infidel must never be recognized

as legitimately theirs. And that's why the late Yasser Arafat in the end refused to sign the Camp David deal offered by Clinton in December two thousand, which was the best off of the Palestinians had ever got since nineteen forty seven eight, because he couldn't bring himself to sign

something that would have permanent character. In the Muslim world, everything is based upon analogy with the early period of Muslim expansion and in the lifetime of Muhammad and his first four successes as they called him the Four rightly guided halifs, and Muhammad signed or agreed to a temporary truce with Mecca, which he later violated. And this model of temporary truths has been present in the period of the Ottoman Empire's decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But the Ottomans never gave up on the hope, however unrealistic at that time of returning to Some of that was sessions in the Balkans and around the Black Sea, so that in Arabic, for instance, Spain is still known as al Andalus, and in Turkish Serbia is still Serbistan and Montenegris Karadag. So biblical claims of the Israelis for are at Israel from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, and the Muslim claims to the return of the Uma and the world of faith dar al Islam from the

world of war. These claims should be simply ignored by the United States, regarded as quaint, as anthropologically interesting, but totally irrelevant to the American interests. And of course, in that context the problem we have is with Christian Zionists. But I think it is a community declining in both size and influence. Mercifully because they are difficult people to deal with in rastural terms.

this transformation very interestingly. It is very much a generational divide. Obviously baby boomers get the worst rap there's maybe some to that as regards Zionism, but even once you get down really halfway through Generation X into millennials, it is at best a certain indifference, if not kind of harsher attitudes towards the State of Israel. Conversation for another day, but I want to return to the subject of Iran.

We mentioned Operation Midnight Hammer, which was targeting their nuclear program, but also it seems as if there is and it's very hard to get data out for any number of reasons. But it seems as if there is a color revolution in the offing currently going on in Iran. What do you make of our relationship to the Islamic Republic? How does that, I guess, mesh with your your previous analysis.

It has nuclear weapons, It has the military that, as we've seen time and over again ever since the nineteen forty seven forty eight War, is superior to any coalition that its real or potential enemies can put together against it, let alone Iran by itself, which is of course viewed with grad deal of suspicion or worse by the Sunni Arab monarchies in the Golf. It is also ridden with domestic discontent and we an economic crisis which makes its

infrastructure barely functional. So I think it would be completely absurd to regard Iran as either a threat or as a potential, let alone real target for the repeat of this lamentable episode from last summer, which I think shook Trump's base pretty badly, and if it were to happen again, I think the whole Marga edifice might start showing cracks equivalent to those that domestically were created with the mismanagement of the Epstein affair.

Yugoslav languages, Bosnia and Montenegrin, you name it. On YouTube, they can find my many appearances on local TV and podcasts in Southeast Europe. I'm afraid we've only touched on so many issues that are yet to be covered, so I hope in the fullness of time we will have an opportunity to talk again.