Democrats’ midterm win may give neocons foreign policy veto: Journalist

If US President Donald Trump continues along some of the policies that he said he would pursue, Republican neoconservatives in the Senate might join Democrats and remove him, American journalist Don DeBar says.

The Republicans lost the House of Representatives to the Democrats in the November 6 midterm elections. The Republicans, however, consolidated their grip on the Senate.

In an interview with Press TV on Thursday, DeBar expressed concerns that the outcome of the midterms might have decreased the possibility of the United States having a detente with Russia and China and peace agreements with North Korea and Iran.

He said that the Democratic control of the House means Trump must not alienate neocons in the Senate to the degree that a House impeachment vote could result in his removal by the Senate.

“It’s important to keep in mind that neocons dominate the foreign policy orientation and program of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties,” DeBar said.

“The perfect image of this is the marriage of Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland (pictured below). Robert Kagan one of the original P-NAC architects, one of the original neocons; Victoria Nuland, his wife, who was a Clinton appointee at the State Department back in the 1990s, and was the architect in the Obama administration of the coup - on the telephone - she was caught organizing the coup in Kiev on the phone with Geoffrey Pyatt, the then US ambassador to Ukraine,” he stated.

“So George Bush and [Donald] Rumsfeld and all those people, most folks are aware of them as Republicans being neocons but the Democrats are also controlled by, not just represented by, but controlled by the neocons,” he said.

“So if you look to the opposition to Trump in terms of policy, it’s hard to imagine that Democrats and some of the institutional Republicans and the media really mean it when they criticize him for being misogynist or racist or an Islamophobe, or any of the other things that they frequently call him, because, of course, those things have been policy of the US pretty much since its inception. Racism is the foundation of the land theft that created the United States and slavery built it,” he noted.

“And, so the real thing, the real offence that Trump has committed - and you could see the coverage of him turn when it happened - was when he started to mouth the heresies in foreign policy. He first questioned the utility of NATO, and that produced a huge outcry in the media. And then he started talking about regime change and nation-building as being wrong-headed and expensive and destructive to the interests of the United States. And those are the building blocks of the neocons’ worldview,” he said.

“So you have to consider that the political class has these folks well-represented and their policies are well-entrenched,” the analyst noted.

"So now, we have a situation where Democrats have control of the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives, of course - on a roll call vote - can impeach him ‘over a ham sandwich’ as they say when they refer to prosecutors here. They could call, on January 2, a vote in the House to impeach him over a hand sandwich and the impeachment would stand. And then get referred to the Senate,” DeBar said.

"Now, as it stands, the Republicans have a majority in the Senate - it's going to be somewhere between 51 and 54 seats, depending on how some of the close ones shake out. But, nested within those 50 or so are many neocons. And if Trump continues along some of the policies that he said he'd pursue, particularly with Korea and Russia and, in my opinion, ultimately Iran and China also - I mean, that bluff that he's been throwing at Iran, and the sanctions, look an awful lot to me like what he did with Korea before the new friendship with the North Korean government - if he's going to go in that direction, that's going to really anger the neocons,” he said.

"Now, if there's a vote on removing Trump, which would take place in the Senate after an impeachment vote in the House, well, you'll have however many Democrats there end up being - 40-something of them - each one of those will vote to remove him. Now you've got to worry about, because there'll be 2/3, or 67 votes, if there are 15 neocon Republicans who will also gang up to remove Trump in order to prevent this change in US foreign policy. That's what I was referring to, and I think that's a very real consideration, and hopefully, it's one that Trump is looking at with a calculator in hand,” he concluded.

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