The Trump dossier in historical context

By Brian O’Brien

thetyrannyofthefederalreserve@yahoo.com

11/9/2017

For those who know history, it should come as no surprise that the Trump dossier originated from a former British spy.

British intelligence has a long tradition of dropping incendiary documents into the hands of American officials and media at pivotal moments in our political history.

One of the most consequential and effective of these British-supplied documents was the Zimmermann Telegram, which a British naval intelligence officer presented to the U.S. government in early 1917. The contents of the Zimmermann Telegram consisted of a short message from the German Foreign Office to the Mexican government stating that Germany would assist Mexico in reconquering Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, and join forces with Japan against the United States, should German unrestricted submarine warfare cause the United States to enter World War I on the side of the Entente.

The telegram pushed all the right buttons when it came to convincing Americans that Germany was in fact an enemy of the United States and came at a critical moment when the Russian army was in collapse on the Eastern Front and Germany was preparing a Western offensive against the Entente. President Woodrow Wilson, who had been elected in 1916 promising to keep the U.S. out of the war, cited the telegram as a casus belli in his address to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Germany.

“That it means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors the intercepted note to the German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence,” Wilson said in his address.

Congress declared war, tipping the scales against Germany and changing the course of history.

Mainstream historians have agreed that the Zimmermann Telegram was a genuine document. But the scale of British propaganda efforts in the U.S. during World War I, an effort which included fake atrocity stories planted in newspapers, such as Germans bayoneting Belgian babies and cutting off the breasts of nurses, suggest that the telegram may have been a deliberate propaganda trick by British intelligence in collusion with German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, the man who facilitated Vladmir Lenin’s passage into Russia and the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution.

In any event, the Zimmermann Telegram was either the greatest diplomatic blunder in German history or Britain’s greatest propaganda victory.

Twenty-four years later, history repeated when British intelligence handed over to American officials another document that was used as a casus belli against Germany. On Oct. 27, 1941, more than a month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in a scene reminiscent of President Wilson’s indignation over the Zimmermann Telegram, President Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech on Navy Day in Washington, D.C.

During the speech, Roosevelt held up a map that portrayed a plan for the Nazi takeover of the Western hemisphere. “I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler's government—by the planners of the new world order,” Roosevelt said. “… And that map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.”

But there never was a Nazi plan to invade the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt’s speech was based on fake documents provided to him by British Security Coordination, led by Sir William Stephenson—the man called Intrepid, who was tasked by Winston Churchill to bring the U.S. into the war in Europe.

According to an August 2006 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, “BSC became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda.” The article stated that BSC represented one of the largest covert operations in British spying history and that as many as 3,000 British agents were “spreading propaganda and mayhem in a staunchly anti-war America.”

In Thomas Mahl’s book Desperate Deception, Mahl reveals that Roosevelt’s Nazi map was produced at Station M, a phony document factory in Toronto, and was approved by Stephenson himself. The Nazi map and other fake BSC documents were propaganda tricks used in an attempt to bring America into the war, just as the Zimmermann Telegram had been a pretext for war 24 years before.

In more recent times, President George W. Bush stated in his 2003 State of the Union Address, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” These infamous “Sixteen Words” were based on forged documents that Bush cited as a reason for war against Iraq.

Like the Zimmermann Telegram, Roosevelt’s Nazi map and the Niger uranium forgeries, the Trump dossier was used to influence the American public and our government officials at a critical juncture in our history.

In the 2016 presidential election campaign, Trump often used the slogan “America First,” alluding to the original America First movement, a populist uprising that united Republicans and Democrats against the pro-war propaganda that was becoming pervasive in the American media in the run-up to U.S. entry into World War II.

In 1940 and 1941, British Security Coordination spent considerable effort targeting America First rallies for disruption and its members for defamation and subversion.

After World War II, the sentiments that fueled the rise of the America First movement have been viewed by most mainstream Republican and Democratic politicians as wrong-headed, even un-American, and have been relabeled as isolationism, nativism and protectionism. But the election of Donald Trump signaled a rupture in the post-World War II consensus.

Trump was elected promising to put Americans first by intervening abroad only when American interests were at stake; by renegotiating or pulling out of free trade agreements; and by reducing immigration and cracking down on illegal immigration.

This was in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s vision as revealed in a speech she gave to a Brazilian bank that was published by Wikileaks: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”

The Obama administration put considerable effort into negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), what was potentially the largest trade agreement in history. Passage of the TPP was often portrayed in the American media as an inevitability, but shortly after Trump’s election, the treaty was scrapped. Also scrapped by Trump in his first year in office was American participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, which Trump claimed undermined the American economy and put American industry at a competitive disadvantage. And, as promised in his campaign, the Trump administration is renegotiating our most consequential trade agreement to date, NAFTA. Recent developments suggest that NAFTA may go the way of the TPP.

As President Obama famously stated, “Elections have consequences.”

Trump’s election also promised rapprochement with Russia. But the Trump dossier has made any improvement in relations politically difficult.

The ongoing investigation headed by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia has weakened Trump’s hand when it comes to the implementation of his America First agenda and any realignment of relations with Russia.

Despite the fact that much of the information in the Trump dossier is unproven, the document has had a considerable impact on our current political climate. The salacious and seemingly damning contents of the document might have torpedoed the campaign of any other political candidate, but the fact that Trump has survived and still remains popular with his base proves there is tremendous appeal for his America First agenda despite the opposition of neoconservatives, neoliberals and most of the American media, who have been united in their attempts to thwart any populist revival of what they call isolationism, nativism and protectionism.

In an Oct. 30 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, Senator John McCain, a fierce Trump critic and the man who so happened to supply the Trump dossier to the FBI, said, “We have to fight isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions.”

What McCain may not realize is that immigration restrictionism, non-interventionism in wars abroad, and tariffs to protect American industry and labor from foreign competition, were policies that our Founding Fathers supported, and were key tenets of the Republican Party platform for a century, from the Lincoln administration until Eisenhower.

Our Founding Fathers might have called McCain’s support for mass immigration, free trade and foreign wars, as un-American, and as possibly the result of the “insidious wiles of foreign influence,” one of the most baneful foes of republican government, as explained by President George Washington in his Farewell Address.

If anything qualifies as an insidious wile of foreign influence, it’s the Trump dossier created by British ex-spy Christopher Steele. The creation and release of the Trump dossier was a calculated attempt at stopping cold a return to traditional policies that put American interests above those of foreigners.

What the Trump dossier has illustrated, and what history tells us, is that when it comes to foreign meddling in American politics, our allies are as much a cause for concern as our rivals and enemies.

Brian O’Brien is the author of “The Tyranny of the Federal Reserve.”