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The actions of the United States of America in the Middle East over the last four decades have revealed the effects of its ‘nation-building’ policies for just what they truly are. Ideals of ‘exporting freedom’, and, ‘bringing democracy to dictatorships’ (when it suits) are no more than propaganda slogans to cover the truth of global empire-building. America’s Middle Eastern foreign policies since Carter can best be described as fine examples of how things should NOT be done.

It’s hard to imagine that any wannabe U.S. president could conceive of a foreign policy even more inauspicious than those in play over the last forty years. Donald Trump has achieved it.

Trump’s supporters no doubt avidly anticipated his foreign policy speech in Ohio on Monday, hopeful of hearing a new way forward for America and the world, after the catastrophes of the last four decades.

From the first word, it was a speech designed to rouse the great unwashed and uneducated of America, and judging from the whoops of enthusiasm growing ever louder as the speaker progressed, it was an overwhelming success – at least in that one regard.

Sadly, for someone attempting to become ‘leader of the free world’, it turned out to be fifty minutes bereft of substance. The subject matter was clumsy: long tirades against Obama and Clinton, interspersed with bombastic notions of how he would send ISIS packing with it’s tail between it’s legs.

The audience loved to hear how, under Trump’s leadership, America would rapidly vanquish its enemies, end the curse of radical Islam, and bring peace and harmony flooding back into the nation, along with economic prosperity and the occasional Garden of Eden thrown in for good measure.

Unfortunately, though aspiring to mend ties with Russia and side with Assad until Syria was once more restored to order (both, incidentally, absolutely necessary for any chance of Middle Eastern stability), he then accused Iran of being the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, a farcical notion that blew apart his whole Middle East policy, which was then compounded by the statement that it would all be achieved in partnership with America’s greatest friend and ally, Israel.

Obviously, Donald Trump doesn’t know his ‘Shia’ from his ‘Sunni’ if he believes it’s a plan that’ll work. He talked of help from “our friends and allies in the Middle East” by which one can only assume he meant Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia (presently negotiating a $1.5 billion arms purchase from the U.S.), probably a far greater sponsor of world terrorism than Shia Iran had ever been. Saudi Wahhabism is radical Islam that’s simply been honed a little to become the ideology of ISIS.

It’s unlikely Trump’s ever heard of Wahhabism. If he had he mightn’t be so keen to kiss the lips of the Saudi King Salman, as his Republican predecessor, George W Bush, was happy to do on camera with the late and unlamented, Abdullah…

…and that only shortly after the atrocity of 9/11, committed by a group of nineteen terrorists that included fifteen Saudi nationals.

Trump also spoke at length of al Qaeda being decimated in Iraq after the invasion of 2003, and only allowed to recoup by failures of the Obama/Clinton administration, post 2008. To those with no knowledge of recent history, it may have sounded plausible, but there was no al Qaeda in Iraq pre-2003. The Bush administration’s failure to secure Iraq’s borders, coupled with its cruel treatment of Sunnis already under attack by a Shia majority long suppressed by the Hussein regime, created the perfect opening for al Qaeda, and other radical Sunni groups, to infiltrate Iraq. It was from these factions, coupled with the brutal treatment by the U.S. military of thousands of Iraqi Sunnis housed in U.S. internment camps, that ISIS was born.

U.S. policy makers have long neglected to take account of Islamic history and its divisions. Most had never heard of ‘Sunni’ or ‘Shia’ until after the Iraq débâcle. Such gross lack of knowledge of the region and its people is the primary reason for the instability in the Middle East today.

Listening to Trump’s foreign policy speech one could only cringe at both the arrogance and ignorance of the man. Like so many powerful politicians and policy makers before him he believes that, as the only world superpower, America can dictate terms to all and sundry throughout the globe, and expect instant compliance. The last four decades of U.S. foreign policy blundering is surely proof of how wrong that attitude can be.

Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama…all six presidents have adopted similar policies, with disastrous consequences for the peace of the world and the safety of innocent people. Clinton ‘2’ will undoubtedly pursue a similar course if she’s elected to the White House. To date, the only alternative is Donald Trump, which doesn’t even bear consideration.

Trump’s speech was a fine example of skillful marketing practices. Had he been selling vacuum cleaners it’s likely everyone in the arena would have rushed to stump up the money and left clutching the “Trump Mk 2 SuperVac” under their arms.

Unfortunately, once they got home, they’d soon discover that it had no motor.

^{“Donald Trump Foreign Policy Speech” YouTube, August 15th 2016 (For those who can bear to watch it!)}

Today, we are informed by the BBC that the billionaire landowner, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, has died aged 64. In fairness to the BBC, this sudden loss to us all (apparently) was not featured as a major headline on its Home page, but as a ‘sub’ further down, below the threat of a Eurostar rail strike, a report on half of women being sexually harassed at work (it doesn’t define which ‘half’), and the rejection by Peppa Pig of an offer from the media company, ITV.

The report on the late Duke is highly detailed, including video, images of him with the Queen and Prince Charles, and much enthusing on his life and work. It also noted that his bank roll was good to the tune of $10.8 billion, though he lost nearly a billion due to the fall in the value of the U.K. pound following the Brexit result. Perhaps it was the thought of that which brought on his rapid and fatal illness?^[1]

It’s never been clear to the writer why it’s necessary to publicise these people so widely just because they’re stinking rich, and dead. This guy owned half of London, (the better half, that is) and much of the fertile county of Cheshire, had estates in Oxford and Scotland, owned most of Liverpool City Centre, as well as land in Europe. He led a privileged existence and wouldn’t have known a darned thing about working class people, though he may have thought he did.

He joined the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst to train as an army officer, which is really amazing as he left Harrow with only two ‘O’ level GCE passes. The military demands the equivalent of at least four ‘O’ level pass grades – to include English language, mathematics and either a science subject or a foreign language – plus the equivalent of at least two ‘A’ level passes, to enroll at Sandhurst. One can only assume friendship with Prince Charles and the Queen of England made all that academic nonsense irrelevant.

As a ‘military man’ he was awarded the Companion of the Order of the Bath, Efficiency Decoration, Volunteer Reserves Service Medal, Canadian Forces Decoration, the Order of the Garter, the Order of St John, the QEII Silver Jubilee medal, the QEII Golden Jubilee medal, the QEII Diamond Jubilee medal, the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Lazarus, and the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I. He ended up as a Major-General. And all without once going to war.

Privilege is the preserve of too many and the right of none. The BBC makes much of the man’s life, but in truth he was no different from Geoffrey Jones, a council worker from Bridgend in South Wales, except that he had tons more money than Geoff. The Welsh binman enjoyed the occasional bet on the horses and had been known to frequent the seamier areas of Bridgend, after dark, in search of certain ladies of the night.

Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, was no stranger to such ladies, either. Following investigation into the ‘Eliot Spitzer affair’ it was revealed that said Duke had also made use of the services supplied by the Emperors Club VIP, an illegal, high-class, prostitution ring made notorious by Spitzer, then governor of New York, when it was discovered he spent in excess of $80,000 on prostitutes from the club over a two year period.^[2]

There was one difference between the Welsh binman and the Duke: Geoffrey Jones had been a widower ten years, the Duke – like Spitzer – was a married man.

Interestingly, the coat-of-arms of the 6th Duke of Westminster (see above) bears the motto: ‘Vertus Non Stemma’. It can roughly be translated as; ‘Virtue, Not Birth’.

Now that Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, the 6th Duke of Westminster, is dead his son, Hugh, inherits the title and all the billions of dollars that go with it. To achieve this fine state of being all he had to do was that which we all have to achieve just once – suffer the necessary contortions to escape our mother’s womb. Only in his case, mummy’s interior could be likened to a one-armed bandit primed to pour forth the jackpot.

Funeral arrangements for the 6th Duke of Westminster have yet to be finalised. No doubt they’ll be lavish. Most of the British ‘gentry’ and their hangers-on will be in attendance.

Geoffrey Jones also died yesterday. His funeral will be paid for out of council finances, as he couldn’t afford insurance and the government’s funeral allowance is paltry. There’ll not be many to say goodbye to Geoff, just a few old mates from the council and a frail old lady, a neighbour, who kept an eye on him after his wife died.

When Geoffrey Jones first came into this world he worked just as hard to get here as the 6th Duke of Westminster, yet he started with nothing. Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor had everything from the moment he uttered his first breath.

Somehow, it just doesn’t seem right.

^{[1] “Duke of Westminster, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, dies aged 64” BBC, August 10th 2016}

^{[2] “Richest man in England also a regular of prostitution ring in Spitzer scandal” New York Daily News, March 12th 2008}

In 2015, politicians met in Paris and agreed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The meeting was hailed as a breakthrough. Now, one year later, that limit seems almost impossible to achieve. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in Geneva this month it will discuss research that shows global temperatures this year twice peaked at 1.38 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

It seems the only hope of slowing this advance is to shut down all coal-burning power stations and ban the use of combustion engines across the globe within fifteen years – according to a report in the Guardian newspaper.

“If the world puts all its resources into finding ways to generate power without burning fossil fuels, and if there were international agreements that action must happen instantly, and if carbon emissions were brought down to zero before 2050, then a rise of no more than 1.5C might just be achieved,” said Dr Ben Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “That is a tall order, however.”

The problem was made particularly severe because moving too quickly to cut emissions could also be harmful, added Field. “If we shut down fossil fuel plants tomorrow – before we have established renewable alternatives – we can limit emissions and global warming, but people would suffer. There would be insufficient power for the planet. There is an upper limit to the rate at which we can move to a carbon-free future.”^[1]

Banning all combustion engines means taking every petrol or diesel driven vehicle off the road. Global economies would collapse. Even if alternatively powered cars could be produced at reasonable cost, it seems unlikely that 48-ton trucks can ever be developed to run on alternative fuels, and certainly not within a fifteen year time-span.

The situation is now so bad that not only do we need to reduce our CO2 emissions to zero, but we must also develop a method to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and store it on Earth. At present, the technology just isn’t available to do that.

“Some negative emission technology will inevitably have to be part of the picture if you are going to keep 1.5C as your limit,” said Professor Jim Skea, a member of the UK government’s committee on climate change. “There will always be some human activities that put carbon into the atmosphere and they will have to be compensated for by negative emission technology.”

But what form that technology takes is unclear. Several techniques have been proposed. One includes spreading crushed silicate rocks, which absorb carbon dioxide, over vast tracts of land. Another involves seeding oceans with iron to increase their uptake of carbon dioxide. Most are considered unworkable at present – with the exception of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Under this scheme, vast plantations of trees and bushes would be created, their wood burned for energy while the carbon dioxide emitted was liquefied and stored underground.

Unfortunately, ‘bioenergy with carbon capture and storage’ would mean covering so much of the planet with plants used for combustion that there wouldn’t be sufficient left to grow enough food to feed us all.

Basically, it would seem that scientists now believe that unless we can develop clean technology to produce all the energy we need, and convert every vehicle on the planet to run on non-CO2 producing fuel, and do it all in such a way that the world economy isn’t affected, within fifteen years, we’re all doomed.

Cambridge University climate expert Professor Peter Wadhams provides the last word on the subject:

…I think we just have to hope that some kind of extraction technology, as yet unimagined by scientists, is developed in the next couple of decades. If not, we are in real trouble.”

There is, however, another alternative. We can all follow the lead given to us by U.S. Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, and become climate change deniers. He believes all the world’s scientists are wrong, and climate change is just a malicious rumour put about by the Chinese for their own nefarious (and somewhat vague) purposes.

We could all follow Mister Trump’s lead, bury our heads in the sand and hope we don’t eventually end up as the latest edition to the McDonalds’ burger range. Unfortunately, he has such a poor record for being right on anything that most bookies would place him as a rank outsider on this one.

Personally, if this writer were a betting man, he’d know where to put his money. Even if it’s unlikely he’d still be around to collect the winnings.

^{[1] “Scientists warn world will miss key climate target “ Guardian, August 6th 2016}