MAGA All The Way.

As was expected: 

The Trump administration is poised to announce Friday that it is withdrawing from a treaty that has been a centerpiece of superpower arms control since the Cold War and whose demise some analysts worry could fuel a new arms race.An American withdrawal, which has been expected for months, follows years of unresolved dispute over Russian compliance with the pact, known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, treaty. It was the first arms control measure to ban an entire class of weapons: ground-launched cruise missiles with a range between 500 kilometers (310 miles) and 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles). Russia denies that it has been in violation.

Obviously Russia is not in violation of that treaty, she simply has better missiles and because of that this whole thing, the INF Treaty that is, is dead. But not only that--the US needs similar weapons around China. So, all pretense of abiding by treaties and international law is thrown out, but we knew and anticipated this anyway. What is most fascinating, however, is how Trump's Administration became one of the most neocon-infested admins in recent history with even W having his doubts on such specimens as Bolton, not to mention a crooked psychopath such as Elliott Abrams. And here is how Daniel Larison assesses Trump:

The framing of this New York Times article on Trump and Venezuela is all wrong:

Mr. Trump’s forceful challenge to Mr. Maduro is the first such intervention in his anti-interventionist presidency, a sharp departure from an “America First” foreign policy aimed at extracting the United States from overseas quagmires and staying out of the internal affairs of other countries.

The analysis here is wildly misleading. The Trump administration has previously taken a keen interest in meddling in the internal affairs of several countries, including Yemen, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, and he has publicly threatened to attack most of those countries along with North Korea. The latest decision to recognize the opposition leader as Venezuela’s interim president is an outgrowth of the administration’s consistent hawkish position over the last two years.

I have to agree with Larison here--it is not just bellicose rhetoric, Trump completely out of his own volition turned his MAGA into MAAA--Make America Aggressive Again. Not that it was very difficult to do to start with. In fact, he succeeded greatly by laying down the foundation for further American decline and loss of any respect. I have no reasons to like Maduro and all those South American "lefties" but if the regime change in Venezuela does occur (with Trump recognizing some young globalist stooge as legitimate president of the sovereign nation), one has to seriously think about American elites being completely unhinged. Trump is turning into proverbial American war-monger (narcissism was always with him as a malt) and one has to admit--he turned out to be no contest for the cabal of even moronic neocon shysters any person with even rudimentary knowledge of international system and geopolitics would have no problem figuring out. But not Trump--a NYC real estate hustler and TV personality. In general, he betrayed MAGA the same way he gave up on General Flynn, not understanding that if one wanted to change America's (and possibly world's) course away from oblivion one had to learn slightly more than how to built casinos and upscale (and grossly overpriced) condos. But in the end, one has to ask now the question--are there any normal and competent people left in D.C.? Call it a hunch, but I don't think there are any, anymore. And Trump comes across today as defeated and totally corralled by people he thought he was smarter than them. Boy, was he wrong and that is bad news for what remains of American Republic.