G20 in the rear view mirror.

Posted by Pointman on July 14, 2017 · 9 Comments 

I had considered doing a blog on the G20 meeting in Hamburg last week but decided against it for several reasons. The first is that I only turn out a piece once a week and habitually on Friday and as the meeting was planned to last the weekend, it would have meant delaying the article past my usual deadline and then rushing it out sometime early next week. That’s not the pace I choose to work at.

The other obvious consideration was that I fully expected it to be nothing better than a talk shop with any real deals being done behind closed and highly classified doors by the only two big players at it who mattered a damn – Trump and Putin. As it played out, that was pretty much what happened in any case, except that not all of the big result was classified.

I chose instead to give some preliminary thoughts on the Trump speech in Poland which was a lot more interesting in several respects than anything going to potentially happen at the G20, though I knew it’d barely be covered by the MSM and they duly ignored it. It played well on a lot of levels, not only for the Polish people but for Europe in general.

It totally undermined Merkel’s playing mein host to Trump because she had to wait on him to get back from Warsaw before the grand orchestrated irrelevance of G20 could begin. Having pushed her off her agenda by pointedly visiting Poland first, he went on in his speech to rather obliquely identify with the smaller countries within the EU who felt they were still under a German jackboot.

Although ruled nominally from Brussels on a pseudo consensual basis, everybody knows it’s Merkel who’s always pulling the strings.

Merkel and Trump will never get on. She’s still suffers from the internationalist delusion of East German Communists brought up in the worker’s utopia or from another perspective, the vassal state of the USSR that the DDR always was in reality. She was a party member, a true believer who lived a lot higher up the privilege ladder than most East Germans, which maintained her ideology even after the Wall came down.

Just watch the disdain on her face as she removes the German flag from the stage during a party rally. Trump’s almost visceral reaction to internationalists who’d disrespect their country’s flag in favour of a collectivist supranational entity like the EU is all you’ll ever need to know about the impossibility of them ever having anything approaching a cordial relationship. It’ll always be daggers drawn.

Him out of devilment doing a few more visits to small disaffected states in the EU, especially the southern ones, is the darkest nightmare for such avid believers in the whole EU project such as Merkel. If he needs to break her or the EU, that’s exactly what he’ll do and she’s smart enough to pick up on that not so subtle hint that was part of his Poland snub to her.

The reality is the EU needs the USA, but the reverse is simply not true. Both Trump and Merkel realise that. He was just putting her into her rather minor place in the grander scheme of things – a big fish in a little pool who can thereafter be ignored. There’s no mistaking the message inherent in thousands of Poles enthusiastically chanting “USA, USA, USA” in the middle of his speech. America with Trump at the helm is increasingly a success story, while the EU is going rapidly in the other direction.

The big argument on the near horizon he’s going to have with the EU is that all American exports into it attract the usual 8% inward tariff whereas goods exported by the EU into America don’t attract any such punitive taxation. That’s a situation he’s determined to change in some reciprocal way or he’ll slap on import tariffs or impose quotas. Bulling his way through an otherwise useless G20 meeting is a shot across those trade bows.

There were also several other messages there for those prepared to listen to the speech in its entirety, rather than the 20 second “totally unbiased” résumé of it from CNN or MSNBC. He assured them by the availability of American gas exports of energy independence from the threat of Russia turning off their gas as well as complimenting them on living up to their commitment to contribute 2% of their GDP to the expense of maintaining NATO against the Russian threat.

Too many other members of NATO, most notably France and Germany, have underpaid for decades because the cynical thinking was that if Russia attacked mainland Europe, the Americans would have to come to their aid whether they were in arrears or not because of purely selfish superpower reasons. Trump was underlining a threat he made in the presidential election, pay your agreed share or we’ll pare back on our contribution and do bilateral defense deals with countries like Poland who live up to their defense spending obligations with us.

As a finisher upper to the speech giving the EU a kick up the arse wake up call that they were no longer dealing with a weakling president like Obama, he discussed the unmentionable but in guarded terms – the invasion of the EU by shiftless immigrants intent on imposing a medieval and alien culture on the member states within it while all the time living off welfare handouts for the rest of their lives.

He talked about the preservation of Western culture, but there wasn’t a Pole in the square who wasn’t well aware of exactly what he was referring to. History is inculcated into them with their mother’s milk, never mind a first class educational system that knows the practical importance of a knowledge of history as the basis for any understanding of the current political landscape.

The smaller countries have steadfastly refused against all EU pressure to take any of these immigrants, because they’ve seen what happened to Sweden in the space of a year. The barbarians tore it back down to a third world hell hole where women and children daren’t go to a swimming pool in the day or even go out of their house at night.

They know that’s become the everyday reality, even if the MSM steadfastly refuse to report it, because they live in close enough proximity to that country and Germany where the same things are happening. They don’t care a fig about the EU’s noble intentions or their threats to accept waves of immigrants or else – they’ll leave the EU if they have to. The popular mood is those countries is we’re not going to become another Sweden.

As for the G20 meeting itself, there were only two things of consequence; one outside the conference and one inside it, the latter of which wasn’t even on the agenda. Even after some preliminary talks, expecting twenty countries to agree on any issue of any consequence takes a bit longer than a long weekend I’m afraid, which was why there was nothing much of note on the agenda.

The thing that happened outside the conference was the rioting, attacks on the police, arson and of course the looting performed by nominally anti-globalist anarchists protesting the meeting, but all of that was cover for the enjoyment of owning the streets and behaving as badly as they wished.

Nearly four hundred policemen were injured with about the same number of protesters arrested. Half those arrested were let out the next morning to join in with the coming night’s repeat rioting, while it’s commonly expected the other two hundred will be very unlucky to suffer anything other than a few hours of community service or at worst probation because the politicians wouldn’t like to appear too hardline on the spirited protesters.

The effect such lack of judicial and political support has on the morale of a police force under violent attack is immense. Uniquely, a cop goes out the door every morning knowing there is a chance, albeit a small one, he might get injured or killed by end of shift. No other profession has that as a consideration at the start of every working day for the whole of their career.

That’s a lot of risk to take on, especially if your sense of duty is not appreciated or even worse, being used as a political football to be kicked around by whatever fashionable winds are blowing across the body politic. That’s asking a little bit too much of even the sense of duty of a serving officer who knows exactly what sort of support a policeman’s widow and family will get for the next twenty years after the fine speeches over his coffin have been delivered.

Sympathy for the dependants of a fallen officer tends to have a very short financial half-life.

At the height of the BLM craze, where police officers were being lured by emergency calls into ambushes and murdered, there was little or no support coming from the Obama administration. By saying nothing, tacit approval was being given. The silence and failure to condemn such barbarity led to a record number of resignations or early retirements from police departments. Even worse, everybody quite naturally thought long and hard about responding to 911 calls from neighbourhoods where they knew cops were far from welcome.

Just this week, Mayor de Blasio of New York city felt impelled to fly to Hamburg to protest over G20, while the stink of remarks he’s made about New York’s finest meant that when he’d had the almighty gall to turn up to deliver a eulogy about a murdered officer, twenty thousand of them pointed turned their back to him for the third time, despite dire warnings from their superiors not to do so.

Firing twenty thousand NY cops really isn’t a realistic threat, especially when they’ve lost all respect for the current idiot pretending to be Hizzoner, who thinks his immediate duty lies in Hamburg on the side of the rioting mobs rather than the five boroughs.

People can’t have it both ways. You either give the thin blue line the benefit of the doubt and your support unless a particular incident shows they were at fault in a particular case, or get used to the idea that you’ll have to find another number rather than 911 to ring when you really need help against some assorted savages attacking you or your loved ones.

In some areas, some districts, some cities, some countries, that day is fast coming and you better get your head around that. Sweden has already forged that path.

The thing that happened inside the actual conference was the half hour that Trump and Putin were scheduled to meet. There was to be a longer meeting thereafter to discuss global warming and both of their rejections of the Paris accord, which actually committed nobody to any emission targets or anything else at all, although it’s since been rehabilitated by the media in retrospect to being some sort of ironclad agreement committing the west to industrial suicide.

The two of them had their half hour together and then continued on for another two hours, blithely leaving the other eighteen bit players next door to agonise over non-commitments to a non-treaty never mind non-accord that nobody sane actually gives a shite about anyway, but it’d get them all a good write-up in the perennially outraged, grim-faced liberal press that nobody with two surviving brain cells to rub together reads anymore.

That is a huge consideration for the minor players, since they are intimidated by an MSM who in their arrogance think it’s their higher duty to keep politicians in line and not straying off the true path to Christ knows where or towards God knows what in some fevered brains I can only imagine they see as a new age Avalon just on the horizon they charge towards on steeds fully armoured up with their high snide moral outrage and their low expectations of what they think of in their heart of hearts as the common herd.

Any such consideration doesn’t apply to Putin, since there isn’t much in the way of a free press in Russia, but it also is a non-consideration for Trump, since the American media have lost the trust of mainline America for a number of reasons. People actually neither pay attention to them or on the rare occasions when they’re trapped in a waiting room with a somnambulant news channel droning on, they simply don’t believe a word they say.

The MSM is now something for the very young or the very old who’re beyond caring or any critical facilities about what they watch as they dribble on their bibs in the nursing home. With an inordinate amount of help from themselves and a few almost exquisitely targeted twitter goads from Trump, the American MSM have effectively self-destructed.

In a practical sense, the one thing that came out of G20 was a cease-fire in Syria negotiated exclusively between Trump and Putin while the rest of the attendees had a good old handbagging session at each other over the usual impasse of doing something which wouldn’t geld their economies in the fight against global warming.

It’s an interesting sign of the recent change of America’s role from submissive whipping boy anyone can have a lash at back to being the biggest bastard in the room you really don’t want to irritate, that nobody decided to use the usual copout of blaming America for no agreement being reached. That might just piss off Donald.

They both had a side they were in support of in the conflict, but they also had a third party in the area they both wanted to destroy utterly. That was enough to make them bedfellows in that particular sphere of influence. The Syria agreement is not comprehensive, and although very precise in terms of operational areas, is a lot more than anyone else has achieved. It’s a start though.

A side protocol of what they publically agreed is I’d say almost certainly joint military operations to wipe ISIS off the face of the Earth, but we’ll only learn of that indirectly by reading into their progressive degrading of it as a military presence in the area. With two air forces after them precisely directed by both powers’ spec ops teams already on the ground, ISIS will prove to be the biggest casualty of G20.

Stepping back from that, the bigger take away from the conference was Trump and Putin meeting directly and hammering out a deal on a thorny issue. Look carefully at Putin’s face in the picture above. You can almost read his thoughts. At last, a strong US president who’s not afraid to meet me directly, rather than sending me vacillating liars like Clinton and Kerry whom I simply couldn’t trust, because they’d change policy at the drop of a hat, dependent only on whichever way the political wind decides to blow.

The nightmare for Putin has always been he’s had to contend with the last superpower left in the world, but one which was acting increasingly unstable, even to the point of being totally unpredictable in terms of foreign policy. That is a very dangerous situation in international relations, akin to managing a drunken heavily armed psychotic whose mood swings could change in a heartbeat to point in your direction.

He can handle Russia, but he can’t handle some hysterical first strike launch by an America which has been mass media panicked into attacking his country for no rational reason. After meeting Trump in person for the first time and being able to thrash out a small but significant agreement with him on the spot, you can see why there’s that look of relief on his face.

Deals can be done, agreements can be made, accommodations can be reached. As reasonable men, they can find the common ground enabling them to work together to their mutual advantage without compromising the interests of their respective countries.

It’s called diplomacy.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Angela Merkel, Donald Trump, G20, Hamburg, Merkel, Poland, Putin, Syria, Trump, Vladimir Putin