Sunday, January 7, 2018

Trump’s Saber-Rattling And Pakistan’s Dilemma – OpEd

Several months ago, a couple of caricatures went viral on social media. In one of those caricatures, Donald Trump was depicted as a child sitting on a chair and Vladimir Putin was shown whispering something into Trump’s ears from behind. In the other, Trump was portrayed as sitting in Steve Bannon’s lap and the latter was shown mumbling into Trump’s ears, “Who is the big boy now?” And Trump was shown replying, “I am a big boy.”
The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures was to illustrate that Trump lacks the intelligence to think for himself and that he is being manipulated and played around by Putin and Bannon. Those caricatures must have affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an extent that after the publication of those caricatures, he became ill-disposed towards Putin and fired Bannon from his job as the White House chief strategist in August last year.
Donald Trump is an impressionable man-child whose vocabulary does not extend beyond a few words and whose frequent typographical errors on his Twitter timeline, such as ‘unpresidented’ and ‘covfefe’ have made him a laughing stock for journalists and social media users alike. These spelling mistakes reveal that though fond of watching news and talk shows on the American conservative television channels, like the Fox News, but Trump isn’t much of a reader.
It is very easy for the neuroscientists on the payroll of corporate media to manipulate the minds of such puerile politicians and to lead them by the nose to toe the line of political establishments, particularly on foreign policy matters. Nevertheless, it would be pertinent to mention here that unlike dyed-in-the-wool politicians, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who cannot look past beyond the tunnel vision of political establishments, it appears that Donald Trump is familiar with alternative news perspectives, such as Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, no matter how racist and xenophobic.
Though far from being its diehard ideologue but Donald Trump has been affiliated with the infamous white supremacist ‘alt-right’ movement, which regards Islamic terrorism as an existential threat to America’s security. Trump’s recent tweet slamming Pakistan for playing a double game in Afghanistan and providing safe havens to the Afghan Taliban on its soil reveals his uncompromising and hawkish stance on terrorism.
Many political commentators on the Pakistani media are misinterpreting the tweet as nothing more than a momentary tantrum of a fickle US president, who wants to pin the blame of Washington’s failures in Afghanistan on Pakistan. But along with the tweet, the Trump administration has also withheld a tranche of $255 million US assistance to Pakistan, which shows that it wasn’t ‘just a tweet’ but a carefully considered policy of the new US administration to persuade Pakistan to toe Washington’s line in Afghanistan.
Several months ago, a couple of caricatures went viral on social media. In one of those caricatures, Donald Trump was depicted as a child sitting on a chair and Vladimir Putin was shown whispering something into Trump’s ears from behind. In the other, Trump was portrayed as sitting in Steve Bannon’s lap and the latter was shown mumbling into Trump’s ears, “Who is the big boy now?” And Trump was shown replying, “I am a big boy.”
The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures was to illustrate that Trump lacks the intelligence to think for himself and that he is being manipulated and played around by Putin and Bannon. Those caricatures must have affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an extent that after the publication of those caricatures, he became ill-disposed towards Putin and fired Bannon from his job as the White House chief strategist in August last year.
Donald Trump is an impressionable man-child whose vocabulary does not extend beyond a few words and whose frequent typographical errors on his Twitter timeline, such as ‘unpresidented’ and ‘covfefe’ have made him a laughing stock for journalists and social media users alike. These spelling mistakes reveal that though fond of watching news and talk shows on the American conservative television channels, like the Fox News, but Trump isn’t much of a reader.
It is very easy for the neuroscientists on the payroll of corporate media to manipulate the minds of such puerile politicians and to lead them by the nose to toe the line of political establishments, particularly on foreign policy matters. Nevertheless, it would be pertinent to mention here that unlike dyed-in-the-wool politicians, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who cannot look past beyond the tunnel vision of political establishments, it appears that Donald Trump is familiar with alternative news perspectives, such as Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, no matter how racist and xenophobic.
Though far from being its diehard ideologue but Donald Trump has been affiliated with the infamous white supremacist ‘alt-right’ movement, which regards Islamic terrorism as an existential threat to America’s security. Trump’s recent tweet slamming Pakistan for playing a double game in Afghanistan and providing safe havens to the Afghan Taliban on its soil reveals his uncompromising and hawkish stance on terrorism.
Many political commentators on the Pakistani media are misinterpreting the tweet as nothing more than a momentary tantrum of a fickle US president, who wants to pin the blame of Washington’s failures in Afghanistan on Pakistan. But along with the tweet, the Trump administration has also withheld a tranche of $255 million US assistance to Pakistan, which shows that it wasn’t ‘just a tweet’ but a carefully considered policy of the new US administration to persuade Pakistan to toe Washington’s line in Afghanistan.

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