Oaklandsocialist talked with a worker who follows military affairs and also the U.S. security apparatus closely.

John Reimann
You were talking before about an article from the Financial Times about this guy Rodney Mims Cook who is overseeing the rebuilding of the East Wing of the White House. Talk about that.

Speaker 1
Rodney Mims Cook Jr. is the chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Okay, but he’s been basically made the ad hoc organizer of much of the activities related to the rebuilding of the East Wing into this whole ballroom bunker, whatever facility. He got in. He got sent to Saint Petersburg to the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum. So the reason why that’s important is because the World Economic Forum, which is held in Davos, sort of like West version of that. And when Russia started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they were banned from Davos. The Russia house that used to always be there at Davos got turned into like a gallery depicting all the crimes that Russia is conducting in Ukraine, and basically the Saint Petersburg Forum became like the Russian alternative. U.S. is supposed to be boycotting it because U.S. capitalist classes’ interests directly contradict with the Russian capitalist class’s interests on a variety of geopolitical questions and just more general economic questions. So for him to get sent there, weird, right? But the apparent logic behind it is that somebody like him could go and like forge a better relationship that was somehow going to solve the warning, right? This was done behind Rubio’s back. Apparently, the Secretary of State had no idea the US was sending somebody extremely close to sensitive activities of the White House to a forum hosted by Putin. Crazy enough in itself. Then find out that part of the reason why they decided to send him there, and that makes us extremely suspicious. That at this panel he was on, he was displaying photographs of what he called his own Dacha, right? That he specifically had built in a Russian vintage from the Czarist era. So the guy running the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and is basically overseeing a lot of the activities, building this new addition to the White House is Russiaphile in the worst way possible. He admires tsarist era culture and was rubbing shoulders with a bunch of high-level Russians. I don’t know what he was actually talking about there, but I would guess the ballroom came up a couple of times. The East Wing project came up a couple of times, and you would think in a normal running of the United States government that you would not want to be,discussing a major strategic rival is how. White House is being constructed. That’s crazy,

John Reimann
Especially since Trump has made a big point of reconstruction of the White House for for security purposes. So, who knows what kind of security stuff is going to be installed in the East Wing.

Speaker 1
Well, here’s the thing. First off, any information about how a building is constructed is a security sharing. That’s all valuable data to somebody who’s trying to infiltrate, sabotage, whatever, any type of facility, right? So even minor details, “oh, we’re gonna have the doors. We’re gonna have this hallway going around here. We’re gonna have doors coming in here. We’re gonna have an elevator here that goes down.” These are all things that, if you’re planning to break in or infiltrate a building one way or the other, it’s all valuable information for any spot. So you’re just giving up valuable intelligence.

John Reimann
And when you say when you say break into a building, you’re not just talking about physically in person, but also, you know, in the virtual world.

Speaker 1
That could mean physical. It could mean cyber. It could mean like sneaking in in the dead of night when no one knows you’re there. It could be sneaking in as somebody who works for a subcontract, you know what I mean. There’s the point is you don’t know what the best route is until you get intimate knowledge about target, and once you get that intimate knowledge, you can bring it back, discuss it with your other experts on on infiltration, and they would come up with a plan of attack. So what you don’t want to do have the guy running that project thinking with high up members of the Russian government-that’s a bad idea because what they’re going to do is they’re obviously going to bring spies into them. Those spies are going to report everything that he’s doing.

John Reimann
Especially when that guy is a fan of Czarist Russia, which is exactly the model that the head of Russian state, Putin, patterns itself on.

Speaker 1
The operation writes itself. You bring in a guy who is an expert on Czarist architecture, right? And you tell him, “look, you’re going to get him to talk about this, this, this, and this, and then we’re going to have this other guy make other recommendations of contractors in the United States that he could use that would come at a really price and could do this kind of work for him.” Then you just make sure your people work for the contractors. This is not complicated stuff. This is not like high-level intelligence work. This is like basic James Bond job. No, it’s not just that he’s vulnerable to it. He’s inviting something with him. This would never be allowed under any rational U.S. government would never allow it to be this easy to affect the construction of the White House as to have a guy with this much power over it and this much of an obsession with Russia hang out with a bunch of powerful Russians. Insane. It makes it’s it’s a total security breech.

John Reimann
So how do you think the U.S. capitalist class is viewing this.

Speaker 1
There’s no way that anyone who has U.S. capitalism as their primary interest, the like the classic national interest of the United States, meaning the sort of consensus strategic goals of all the different major aspects of of the U.S. bourgeoisie – that they are okay with Russia having this much access and influence over the executive branch, having people in the White House building the White House who are this close to Russia. Russia is right now a major strategic rival of the United States. It’s invading Europe, it’s now threatening to make attacks against Britain, which are probably not founded yet. The point is, it’s moving westward. It’s threatening all of U.S. capitalism, in all sorts of different ways, and Putin himself specifically has a longer-term strategy which is directly antagonistic to what the United States bourgeoisie wants to see go on in the world. So they’re enemies.

John Reimann

So let’s let’s just backtrack for one second, We’re not advocating the interests of U.S. capitalism. We’re just pointing out what it is.

Speaker 1

I don’t have to be in favor of it to know what their priorities are. This is just what they prioritize. They’re trying to have a world order where their corporations, their currency, their military has free reign to do whatever it wants all over the world. Putin wants it from his perspective the same thing. These are antagonistic to each other, directly so.

John Reimann
Okay, now let’s shif to Trump’s relationship with North and South Korea.

Speaker 1
Okay, so this one is even more shocking because it’s not necessarily just speculative or potential security risk. Letting him in, letting him that close to Russian officials and Russian oligarchs is extremely risky, but this is just a totally insane situation. So there’s an operation, a training operation, Ulchi Freedom Shield, right? So Ulchi Freedom Shield is a multilateral, all branch, totally involved operation between Republic of Korea, South Korea, and the United States military. That means the Army, the Marines, the Navy, the Air Force, cyber-you name it; every single aspect of of the military, every unit has any relationship or association to the Korean Peninsula. Once a year, they do this war game exercise. But it’s fully involved kinetic training, where they simulate a war on the Korean Peninsula popping off. Basically, North Korea bombing, invading of some form. They change up the exact format of it from year to year to keep people guessing. Basically, the planners set up a scenario, and then they have to work out what they’re going to do. And what it does is it requires both militaries to fully involve all of their systems, right? Whether those are communication systems, logistic systems, they figure out whether or not their armored vehicles work. They check all their weapon systems. What it basically does is twofold: one, it just gives people experience that prepares them for an actual war, and second, it tells the military what things are not functioning as well as they need to in order to be effective. Now, additionally, of course, because it’s major training exercise, it’s a deterrent to North Korea from trying to do anything because it’s proof that “hey, we’re totally prepared for you if you try and if you try anything, we’ve already practiced and rehearsed this. We worked all of our weapon systems and the structure of our militaries to make sure that we can defeat you. So don’t try it, right?” It’s extremely beneficial for the United States to do this because they get to train their troops, they get to use munitions that they wouldn’t otherwise get to use. They get to test all these different systems, whether weapon systems, communication systems, transportation systems, etc. And they get to force project in the Pacific against North Korea specifically, but also against China, because what it shows is that they have this military that they can immediately couple up with and have and force project very quickly in a really effective way. So Trump, in his infinite wisdom, decides that once he started initial talks or the beginnings of talks or the essence of talks with Jim Yong Un, Kim Yong Un brought up that “hey, I don’t like that you doing this operation every year. I think it’s saber rattling at me. You’re trying to intimidate me, and I don’t want to get into talks with you as long as you’re doing this exercise. So stop doing the exercise, and maybe we can talk.” And then he did it. Trump canceled U.S. participation in the exercise, which means it’s not happening. The Koreans can do a version of it themselves, but that’s not the same thing.

John Reimann
Did he cancel it altogether, or did he scale it back?

Speaker 1
Any scale back is canceling. The whole point of the operation is it’s fully involved. You’re testing all the systems. This is that’s like saying “I’m only going to build one wall of your house, so I scale back your house.” That’s not what the exercise tests. The exercise is designed to test fully full multilateral cooperation and kinetic activity from both militaries working in conjunction with each other in the event of a full-scale invasion. That is the exercise. So if you scale it back, you ruin the point of the exercise. If the U.S. is not going to participate at the scale he’s saying it isn’t going to participate. That then is not the same thing. It’s just like a regular exercise. It’s a regular training exercise. It’s not this full scale thing, which means the value of it is erased because the United States doesn’t get what you need out of it.

John Reimann
South Korea doesn’t get what it needs out of it either.

Speaker 1
Well, this is where things get really messed up. So the United States has a defense agreement with Republic of Korea which. says that in the event of such an actual invasion occurring or a military conflict of that scale occurring on the Korean Peninsula, they agree that operational control will go over to a joint South Korean American Task Force, called the ROK UN Combined Forces Committee. Up until now, it has always been the condition of the United States, and Korea has already agreed to it, that task force is led by a four-star U.S. military official. So effectively, in the in the event of a full-scale conflict, U.S. gets control over South Korea’s military. The reason this has been able to work is that the United States, from South Korea’s perspective, saved them during the Korean War. They had this really deep collaborative relationship that’s lasted through the dictatorship, lasted through bourgeois democracy. Just on every level, the relationship is extremely strong. Now that Trump is saying we don’t want to participate in the full-scale exercise, that makes this a strategic problem for Korea. As Trump has said, I don’t want to keep our military ready for an operation like that. Now, President Lee Jae Myung has brought it up again. He’s been in favor of this for a while. But once again, because of Trump’s activities, this can’t happen. “We have to change the agreement. We have to put a Korean in charge of the task force because”, I’m saying it out loud, but it’s the obvious implication for everybody that knows the situation – “We don’t trust the U.S. to run this operation because Kim Jong Un said “boo, Trump backed down from doing the operation that prepares us for such a situation. So, if there’s actually an invasion, we know he’s going to back down because he scares easy.” Again, the whole policy of the U.S. bourgeoisie on North Korea has been containment in collaboration with South Korea, Japan, etc. The Idea that the major things that aid to the policy of containment, Ulchi Freedom Shield, not being a thing anymore, means North Korea just gained massive strategic advantage from the United States, and as a result, so did China because China sees a extremely strong relationship between the United States and South Korean military as a threat to it as well because North Korea is its close ally and it also knows that any type of conflict were to occur on the peninsula, China would not want to get in the middle of it. Now, that’s been debilitating. So China just gained an extra foothold for North Korea. It’s just a massive win. It’s just a huge win for China. It’s a pretty big win too, because even if Trump were to TACO on this, or through a flip, or whatever, the damage is done. South Korea does not trust the United States to have its back in the event of a full-scale military operation, which you cannot reverse. Then,

John Reimann
So you have on the one hand, Ukraine cannot, and does not trust Trump to have their back, as and and not just Ukraine, but all of Europe is not in regards to Russia. When you look at Asia, it seems to me that that that what’s happening with the U.S. or with Trump and North Korea is also related to Trump’s now moving to withdraw its. I think I don’t know if it’s the entire fleet or aircraft carriers from the from the Pacific.

Speaker 1
No, they have to send one, the Washington from coast of Japan to swap out with the Lincoln because the situation has hit the media so hard they’ve they got egg on their face. They have to finish the work they’re doing on the carrier that’s in maintenance. So instead, what they’re doing is they’re going to pull the carrier out of the Pacific, which is there once again. a deterrent to China. This is revealing a larger problem with the U.S. military. For the U.S. to continue to do what it’s doing, they don’t have a large enough military budget. The Navy is not actually big enough for the U.S. to do these mobile operations simultaneously. They can only really do one operation, one theater at a time, without totally debilitating their ability to function as a naval force. And especially because it’s so dependent on carrier fleets, any deficiencies with one carrier are going to ripple through the operational capacity of the rest of the navy. But their problem is, Trump has gotten himself in a protracted situation with Iran that requires immense naval presence at all times. They can’t have that immense naval presence because look really what they need is one ship on deployment, one ship in maintenance, one ship training to go on deployment. So they really need three ships for every one ship that you expect to use. Well, if they’re also preparing for issues in the South China Sea and Taiwan, that’s a problem because you can’t, therefore, ships that you would want to have in theater as deterrents or for potential things to pop off there. They have to actually be reinforcing active combat operations. Now, these are all things that just Trump and Hegseth don’t really understand. They don’t get it. They see, “oh, look, a big aircraft carrier. We can do whatever we want,” and they don’t understand that this is fundamentally a logistics machine. That sometimes things go boom at the end.

Once again, if you’re an American capitalist, that’s not a good thing because the U.S. military, specifically the U.S. Navy, being able to maintain the waters for U.S. capitalism is the whole point of it existing. And now, with the Strait of Hormuz situation, we have a clear example that the U.S. Navy is not capable of doing.

John Reimann
So, in effect, what you have is Trump ceding an economic, political, and in fact military battleground in in in Eastern Europe and more or less in Europe as a whole, to one major capitalist rival, Russia. And in Asia, they’re ceding the Korean Peninsula to another major capitalist rival, which is China, which really stands behind Korea and North Korea itself.. They’re also ceding Taiwan in effect to China. and Taiwan isn’t just some little island off the coast of China. Taiwan is the center for world production of computer chips.

Speaker 1
Yes, it is the future of the economy as we know.

John Reimann
It’s the present. So it kind of plays the role that that you know that the oil states in Southwest Asia and North Africa used to play.

At this point, it’s far more important than what the so-called Middle East played with all its oil, because if the oil’s in the ground, anyone can dig it up. You need those particular experts in order to make those chips. You can’t just have anyone do it. So,if you kill everybody on the surface, you can still get the oil. If you destroy everything in Taiwan, there’s no chips.

So, this gets back to an issue that I’ve debated with some people. Some think that corporate America, which is to say the U.S. capitalist class, controls Trump. But for for any capitalist class, first and foremost, above and beyond everything else, is geopolitics. They can’t be happy about this.

So one of the things I think occurs a lot when people say no, the U.S. capitalist class is still in control of Trump. I think they’re kind of playing into a perception of American exceptionalism they might not fully be aware of it. So smaller countries, they can very clearly see and are totally willing to comment when we start to say, “Hey, this leader is getting out of line with the capitalists, right?

Speaker 1
Like, take Idi Amin, or Mugabi, or something like that. Those are two examples from there. But then, like, think of the situation in Hungary to some extent, you can, or even in something in the UK, where you could have like the Atlee government, or you know, there’s like varieties of different smaller governments where we start to say like the capitalists are is out of line with the leadership there right now, and they’re not happy with what’s going on at the time, right? And we sort of see that because we look and say, “okay, these are smaller countries,” and it’s easier for us to be able to understand this dynamic of the capitalist losing control of a leader in a given country when we’re dealing with these other countries. But because we’ve lived in an era where the United States capitalist class has been so organized, so dynamic, and so hegemonic, we don’t really have the ability to imagine in our heads they’ve lost control of the leader of this country because it just doesn’t really compute because we don’t have examples of it. What I’m saying is, let’s take a step back here. Obviously, profits are crazy high, and they’re happy with that, right? But there’s no way, and if you just read the Wall Street Journal and they’re not happy with the way the situation with Russia is being handled, and there’s no way they’re happy with the way that North Korea is being handled. Like, look, the capitalists of four major countries that we would say definitively are the major enemies of the United States capitalists, are Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. This president has made all of them stronger. How could the U.S. capitalist class be in favor of making all of its biggest rivals stronger? Not. They are going along with this because Trump has a degree of political power that’s inconsistent, according to the way that we’ve always understood American politics. That’s why there’s all these discussions about political crises and this is unprecedented and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Because even the U.S. capitalist class itself doesn’t really know what to do in a scenario like this because they’ve never met a situation where they’ve lost control over the president. It’s happening. It’s totally illogical to say that they’re still driving the bus, and he’s making these many blatant strategic blunders that whether they’re actually blunders or he’s brainwashed or whatever it is, he can’t make these many concessions to the United States capitalists’ enemies and expect everyone in the bourgeoisie of the United States to be happy with it, I would say the majority of them are definitely not. That would suggest they’re not in full control of the situation. He kind of lost some control in the first term. Now that he’s come back for the second term, he’s realized that a lot of this stuff is just based off norms and who you decide to appoint. And he decided to say, “Fuck all that. I’m gonna do what I like,” and the things he decided he likes to do is totally undermine the U.S. strategic position at every turn. Yeah,

John Reimann
Or to put another way, he said, “Well, I saw that certain people in my previous administration stood in my way, even Bill Barr did. Never mind Milly and and and Kelly and and so on. So I’m going to appoint people who won’t stand in my way. And first and foremost is Pete Hegseth. I’m going to appoint people who are nothing but sycophants. Yes, men for me.

Speaker 1
Yeah, and because he also realized another major thing is that the joint chiefs can suggest whatever the fuck they want to suggest. They’re not able to give orders. If if Hegseth, who doesn’t understand how the military works and just wants to do what Trump tells him, if he Is the one actually giving the orders? Joining Chiefs can make all the recommendations they want. He doesn’t have to listen to any of them.

John Reimann
Here’s the other thing: is you know before we were talking about about Watergate I was saying, you know, a certain point, U.S. capitalist class decided that they had to get rid of Nixon. And the reason that they decided that was that Nixon was expanding the war in Vietnam or Southeast Asia, and they had decided the capitalist class had decided it was time to end it because they couldn’t win. It was just leading them ever deeper into a swamp. What did they do? First, they got rid of the person that would take Nixon’s place, which was Agnew, the vice president, on a on a corruption charge that they must have known no known about ever since. You know, way before he became vice president, but they brought that up in a matter of seconds almost. They got him out. Started, then they started a press campaign about Watergate, and this was after Nixon had gotten elected, and within a matter of weeks, they dramatically shifted U.S. public opinion. Now they’ve had a similar press campaign on CNN, the New York Times, and MSNBC, so on against Trump. This had very I wouldn’t say no effect, but very very little effect. It shows how the capitalist class is unable to influence public opinion in the way in which it used to.

Speaker 1
Because once again, Nixon cared about the public perception of legitimacy. It was extremely important to him because he was from an era where he recognized that having that public perception of legitimacy was critical to maintaining American power. Trump doesn’t see.

John Reimann
But it’s not just that. You look at the opinion polls from back then and now. The support for Nixon absolutely collapsed, and the press once again they’ve gone down, but not anywhere near to the same extent for for Trump.

Speaker 1
But once again, Nixon saw that as an existential problem because he believed that the president needed that support and legitimacy in order to be effective. Trump doesn’t really think that’s the case. He’d like to be more popular. He’d like to win the election, but he doesn’t see it as an end-all deal.

John Reimann
I agree with all of that. My point is, though, there’s another angle, which from which we can view it, and and that is that the U.S. capitalist class not only has lost control over its president, or the reason that has lost control over its president is it can’t influence, you know, can’t influence the consciousness, the thinking, of 10s of millions of people, including 10s of millions of workers, in the way in which it used to.

Speaker 1
Right, because there’s a crisis in there’s a crisis in the working class that the capitalists don’t really understand how to approach, and Trump has been the only one who’s managed to figure it out. But because Trump rejects all the traditions and norms that make the U.S. ruling class what it is, that’s caused a crisis in the ruling class as well, because they don’t really know what to do with him either. Caught in a scenario where they don’t see solution because for the system that they’ve always depended on, been trained in, used in a.

John Reimann
So, in other words, really, what we’re talking about is I don’t think we’re all the way towards in a Bonapartist dictatorship, in other words, a one-person dictatorship that is not under really the control of any class. I don’t think we’re all all the way into that. Trump has taken major steps in that direction, and if he able to overthrow or overturn an election in November, will be a huge further step in that direction.

Speaker 1
Even an attempt to a huge step in the direction. I mean, once again, we forgive January six was an attempt. To auto coup, not hyperbole. That’s what he already tried to do. If he tries to do it again, it’s whether he’s successful or not. He still has degraded the legitimacy of United States democracy. That’s not a joke. It’s going to have real effects because if it’s most people perceive the elections are kind of bullshit. There isn’t a mass response to challenge it, which there won’t be. Then, yeah, you move much closer to authoritarianism, despite the sheer fact that it happened. It’s a similar thing to what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz right now? It’s one thing for him to say, right? I’m not going to accept the results of the election. We’ll see if I accept the results of the election. If he actually rejects the results of the election and makes moves to not get people seated, whether or not he’s 100% successful is not really the point. The point is he’s demonstrated that the election system does not work the way that we were told it does. After the votes take place, there’s a further political conflict that needs to take place that’s based off how willing the president is to fight, and that’s not the way the Constitution is supposed to function. Not saying the Constitution is a perfect document, but once again, from the ruling class’s perspective, they need that thing functional. They need to know that everyone’s playing by the rules. Otherwise, they have a massive problem on their hands.

John Reimann
So, they’re not the only ones that have a massive problem on their hands. We do too,

Speaker 1
Part of part of recognizing the issue we’re dealing with here is understanding that things do not work the way that we thought they did anymore. They’ve changed.