By Mark Anderson
President Trump’s anti-globalist rhetoric once again became reality when the White House canned veteran globalists on the Defense Policy Board (DPB). Until recently, the DPB was a rather obscure panel that Bill Gertz, the respected veteran national security reporter at the Washington Times, recently described as a bevy of Obama administration “holdovers” and “pro-China officials.” But there’s much more to this development than that.
On the eve of Thanksgiving, these hegemonic heavyweights were fired:
- Henry Kissinger, whose early years in the Beltway as secretary of State and national security advisor in the Nixon administration, saw the U.S. “normalize” relations with China when the murderous Mao Tse-Tung was still alive, an initiative that introduced some elements of capitalism into Mao’s prison state. Yet, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held onto power by leveraging its formerly massive trade surpluses with the U.S. to build the very Chinese military arsenal that the DPB has discussed as being a serious threat.
- Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. secretary of State who, in May 1996, told Leslie Stahl of CBS that it was “worth it” to kill 500,000 Iraqis, including children, in order to topple former Iraqi “strongman” Saddam Hussein. Like Kissinger, she’s a Council on Foreign Relations member, but Albright boasts the distinction of serving as director emerita on the CFR’s board of directors.
- Jane Harman, the former nine-term California congresswoman (and Kissinger and Albright’s fellow CFR member) who served on all the major security committees, including the Select Committee on Intelligence, and who was instrumental in foisting the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act and its increased surveillance measures on the American people. Ms. Harman went on to become president and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson Center think tank, a position from which she stepped down in mid-July 2020 after nearly 10 years at the helm of an outfit whose namesake embroiled the U.S. in World War I and sold the nation down the river by signing the Federal Reserve Act.
That’s a boatload of “Deep Staters” that Trump threw overboard, with all of them being on the CFR’s roster, no less. And an early leading DPB member, from 1987 to 2004, was neocon Bilderberger Richard Perle.
But virtually none of these connections have been reported by the controlled press. Various news outlets, ranging from the conventionally conservative Washington Times and Fox News, across the spectrum to ultra-liberal CNN, and also to the allegedly neutral, non-partisan Foreign Policy magazine (a globalist journal sponsored by the FP Group, a division of Graham Holdings Co., formerly the Bilderberg-connected Washington Post Co.) all provided surprisingly little in the way of meaningful information on the backgrounds of Kissinger, Albright, and Harman, thereby failing to impart the full significance of Trump having booted these weathered wonks off the DPB.
While it’s bad enough that these information outlets didn’t even bother mentioning Harman’s Wilson Center connection, which would be a no-brainer, they certainly did not remind anyone that Kissinger also is a longtime Bilderberg Meetings attendee and a former member of the extra-exclusive Bilderberg Steering Committee. They also ignored the fact that Ms. Harman also is a longtime member of the Trilateral Commission—Bilderberg’s “junior varsity” founded in 1973 by Kissinger’s longtime (and now deceased) comrades in the quest for total world government, David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Considering the DPB’s function is to provide the secretary, deputy secretary and under secretary of Defense “with independent, informed advice and opinion concerning major matters of defense policy,” as the DPB’s own charter states, it’s vital that the American people know that a CFR-Bilderberg-Brookings-Trilateral trio was playing a key role on the panel, providing their “non-partisan” opinions regarding sensitive strategic policy decisions. But, of course, the mass media cartel also cannot fathom much less explain that the real partisan divide is nationalism versus internationalism, not Democrat versus Republican or liberal versus conservative. Thus, the Kissinger-Albright-Harman ousting removed the most risky people from the DPB.
OTHERS OUSTED
Yet another D.C. “rock star” who was ousted from the DPB in this purge (reportedly 11 of the 13 Defense Policy Board members were removed, with the full list of names difficult to fully confirm at press time) was Eric Cantor, the former Republican speaker of the House from Virginia, along with Jack Dyer Crouch II, a former deputy national security advisor, Rudy de Leon, a former deputy secretary of Defense, Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general, and Robert Joseph, a former under secretary of State, among others. Former U.S. Sen. James Talent, a Missouri conservative Republican, and former under secretary of State Paula Dobriansky (who’s still listed as a Trilateral Commission member and is on the Atlantic Council’s Board of Directors) were kept on the DPB.
ANOTHER PANEL SEES DISMISSALS
Another body with a similar name, the Defense Business Board, also was on the receiving end of a second Trump purge, which happened in December. The majority of the board was replaced with new appointees, including Trump allies David Bossie, president and chairman of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United and a 2016 deputy campaign manager for Mr. Trump, and Corey Lewandowski, a former journalist, former lobbyist and a 2016 campaign manager for Mr. Trump. The DBB’s function is to provide private sector input on best business practices to overcome bureaucratic inertia within the Defense Department.
Mark Anderson is AFP’s roving editor. Email him at [email protected].
