Trump and the Press-A Death Struggle

Patrick J Buchanan

Posted 9-19-2016

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-press-death-struggle-125720

Alerting the press that he would deal with the birther issue at the opening of his new hotel, the Donald, after treating them to an hour of tributes to himself from Medal of Honor recipients, delivered.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. … President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”

The press went orbital.

“Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent” howled the headline over the lead story in The New York Times.

Its editorial called Donald Trump a “reckless, cynical bully” spreading political poison in an “absurdist presidential campaign,” adding that Trump is the “ultimate mountebank” using a “Big Lie” that “made him the darling of the wing nuts and racists” and “nativist hallucinators.”

You get the drift.

While Trump’s depiction of the birther controversy was … inexact … there was truth in it. Obama’s campaign did charge the Clinton campaign with drawing press attention to that photo of Obama in traditional Somali garb. Apparently, Sid Blumenthal did push a McClatchy bureau chief to search for Obama’s birth records in Kenya.

Tim Kaine was wailing on Sunday about how “painful” Trump’s birtherism has been to African-Americans. And Democrats and the media are pledging not to let it go, but to exploit Trump’s attempt to “delegitimize” Obama’s presidency.

These are crocodile tears. Obama gave the game away Saturday night. At the Black Caucus’s annual gala, says The Washington Post, a “beaming” Obama “gleefully” had the attendees rolling in “laughter” over Trump’s concession. “With just 124 days to go,” mocked Obama, “we got that thing resolved.”

Many news organizations will go along with the game. For many appear to be all in on Clinton’s depiction of half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … haters.”

Yet one wonders. Do the major media understand that in their determination, bordering on desperation, to kill Trump, they are killing their credibility? And as they are losing credibility they are losing the country.

According to a new Gallup poll, distrust of the press has hit an all-time high. Half the nation’s Democrats still trust the media, but only one-in-three independents and one-in seven Republicans, 14 percent, believe the media are truthful, honest and fair.

When, early in his presidency, Obama jokingly referred to the White House Correspondents Association dinner as his political base, Americans now believe he was not exaggerating the case.

And the more the media vent their detestation of Trump, the more Trump’s supporters revel in their discomfort. “We love him most of all for the enemies he has made,” said backers of Grover Cleveland in 1884. Trump’s folks feel that way about the national press.

America’s media seem utterly lacking in introspection. Do they understand why so many people hate them so? Do they care? Are they so smugly self-righteous and self-regarding they cannot see?

Take the birther issue again. According to a January HuffPost/YouGov poll, an astonishing 53 percent of all Republicans, 30 percent of all independents, and even 10 percent of Democrats still believe Barack Obama was born outside the USA.

What does this say about the persuasiveness of the press?

Indeed, what does it say about the idea that universal suffrage is the best way to determine the leadership of a republic?

In 2016, America faces serious issues — a rising deficit and escalating debt, the explosion of entitlements, the resurgence of Russian power, Chinese military expansionism in the South and East China seas, North Korea’s development of nuclear missiles, and Afghanistan.

Now consider the issues that have transfixed the media this election season:

The birther issue, David Duke, the KKK, a Mexican-American judge, Black Lives Matter, white cops, the “Muslim ban,” the Battle Flag, the “alt-right,” the national anthem, Trump’s refusals to recant his blasphemies against the dogmas of political correctness, or to “apologize.”

What does the continual elevation of such issues, and the acrimony attendant to them, tell us?

America is bitterly and irreparably divided over race, ideology faith, history and culture, and Trump’s half of the nation rejects the modernist gospel that America’s diversity and multiculturalism are her greatest treasures.

To the contrary, Trump’s half wants secure borders, “extreme vetting” of immigrants, especially from the Mideast, and foreign and trade policies marked by an “Americanism” that seems to be an antonym for globalism.

They want America to be “great again,” and they believe she was once, and is not now.

No matter who wins in November, America is going to face a divide unseen in decades. If Donald Trump wins, he will confront a resident media more hateful than that which confronted Richard Nixon in 1968.

If Hillary Clinton wins, she will come to office distrusted and disbelieved by most of her countrymen, half of whom she has maligned either as “deplorables” or pitiful souls in need of empathy.

Not for half a century has the idea of “one nation under God, indivisible,” seemed so distant.

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http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-wins-debate-125730

How Trump Wins the Debate

9-22-2016

Patrick J. Buchanan

On one of my first trips to New Hampshire in 1991, to challenge President George H. W. Bush, I ran into Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

He was returning to the scene of his ’68 triumph, when he had inflicted the first crippling wound on Lyndon Johnson.

“Pat, you don’t have to win up here, you know,” he assured me. “All you have to do is beat the point spread.”

“Beat the point spread” is a good description of what Donald Trump has to do in Monday night’s debate.

With only a year in national politics, he does not have to show a mastery of foreign and domestic policy details. Rather, he has to do what John F. Kennedy did in 1960, and what Ronald Reagan did in 1980.

He has to meet and exceed expectations, which are not terribly high. He has to convince a plurality of voters, who seem prepared to vote for him, that he’s not a terrible risk, and that he will be a president of whom they can be proud.

He has to show the country a Trump that contradicts the caricature created by those who dominate our politics, culture and press.

The Trump on stage at Hofstra University will have 90 minutes to show that the malicious cartoon of Donald Trump is a libelous lie.

He can do it, for he did it at the Mexico City press conference with President Pena Nieto where he surprised his allies and stunned his adversaries.

Recall. Kennedy and Reagan, too, came into their debates with a crucial slice of the electorate undecided but ready to vote for them if each could relieve the voters’ anxieties about his being within reach of the button to launch a nuclear war.

Kennedy won the first debate, not because he offered more convincing arguments or more details on the issues, but because he appeared more lucid, likable and charismatic, more mature than folks had thought. And he seemed to point to a brighter, more challenging future for which the country was prepared after Ike.

After that first debate, Americans could see JFK sitting in the Oval Office.

Reagan won his debate with Carter because his sunny disposition and demeanor and his “There you go again!” airy dismissal of Carter’s nit-picking contradicted the malevolent media-created caricatures of the Gipper as a dangerous primitive or an amiable dunce.

Even George W. Bush, who, according to most judges, did not win a single debate against Al Gore or John Kerry, came off as a levelheaded fellow who was more relatable than the inventor of the internet or the windsurfer of Cape Cod.

The winner of presidential debates is not the one who compiles the most debating points. It is the one whom the audience decides they like, and can be comfortable taking a chance on.

Trump has the same imperative and same opportunity as JFK and Reagan. For the anticipated audience, of Super Bowl size, will be there to see him, not her. He is the challenger who fills up the sports arenas with the tens and scores of thousands, not Hillary Clinton.

If she were debating John Kasich or Jeb Bush, neither the viewing audience nor the title-fight excitement of Monday night would be there. Specifically, what does Trump need to do? He needs to show that he can be presidential. He needs to speak with confidence, but not cockiness, and to deal with Clinton’s attacks directly, but with dignity and not disrespect. And humor always helps.

Clinton has a more difficult assignment.

America knows she knows the issues. But two-thirds of the country does not believe her to be honest or trustworthy. As her small crowds show, she sets no one on fire. Blacks, Hispanics and millenials who invested high hopes in Barack Obama seem to have no great hopes for her. She has no bold agenda, no New Deal or New Frontier.

“Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?” wailed Hillary Clinton this week.

The answer is simple. America has seen enough of her and has no great desire to see any more; and she cannot change an impression hardened over 25 years — in 90 minutes.

But the country will accept her, if the only alternative is the Trump of the mainstream media’s portrayal. Hence, the strategy of the Democratic Party for the next seven weeks is obvious:

Trash Trump, take him down, make him intolerable, and we win.

No matter how she performs though, Donald Trump can win the debate, for he is the one over whom the question marks hang. But he is also the one who can dissipate and destroy them with a presidential performance.

In that sense, this debate and this election are Trump’s to win.

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A teenager who vanished from Myrtle Beach, S.C., in 2009 was repeatedly raped in a gang “stash house” for several days – then she was shot dead and fed to alligators when her disappearance generated too much media attention, the FBI said last week.

NJ TEEN ADMITS LURING, STRANGLING 12-YEAR-OLD AUTUMN PASQUALE

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October 2, 2013 2:01:57 PM PDT
GEOFF MULVIHILL Associated Press
CAMDEN, N.J. - August 7, 2013 -- A teenager admitted Wednesday that he strangled a 12-year-old girl who disappeared last fall while out riding her bike, touching off a massive search that ended when her body was found in a recycling bin just blocks from her home.
Justin Robinson, 16, pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter in the death of Autumn Pasquale after agreeing earlier in the day to have his case moved to adult court. Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk said that in the court hearing, the teen took sole responsibility for killing the girl, even though his older brother Is also facing a murder charge.

Faulk said the boy admitted luring the girl to his home to trade bike parts, but he declined to discuss a motive for the killing.

Faulk said the state was willing to accept a plea deal for charges less than murder because of the complicated circuмstances of the case.

He said that because of the boy's age at the time of the slaying and his "diminished capacity," it was not a sure thing that a judge would have agreed that the case should be tried in adult court. Further, Faulk said, that while there was forensic evidence that places Autumn's death in Robinson's house, there was not clear evidence - other than the boy's admission - that he was the one who choked the girl to death.

Under a plea agreement, Robinson faces a 17-year prison sentence with no chance of parole for more than 14 years when a judge metes out his punishment Sept. 12. Faulk said that if the case had remained in juvenile court, the maximum sentence would have been 20 years, but he would have a chance of parole in less than seven years.

His brother Dante was 17 at the time and also charged with murder in the case. His case is pending in juvenile court. Because of a court order, prosecutors and others involved in the case would not discuss those charges.

The public defender representing Justin Robinson did not return a call.

Jaime Kaight, an attorney for Autumn's mother, Jennifer Cornwell, said prosecutors did "the best they could" in a challenging case.

Doug Long, a lawyer for the slain girl's father, Anthony Pasquale, said it was hard for him to sit through the sentencing Wednesday. "Mr. Pasquale knows that no amount of years on a sentence is going to bring his daughter back," Long said. "The only justice would be to bring autumn back, but that will never happen."

Forty-eight hours after the girl went missing Oct. 20, her body was found in a recycling bin near the Robinsons' home in Clayton, a rural community 25 miles south of Philadelphia.

Authorities had credited a tip from the suspects' mother with helping them solve the case. They said she saw something in one of their Facebook posts that gave her cause to call police. The call led them to the body and her sons.

Initially, some of the victim's relatives complained about the search for the girl and the way Gloucester County prosecutors handled the case, which was eventually moved to the Camden County prosecutor's office.

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-right-trade-predators-125775

Trump right on Trade Predators

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 9-29-2016

Is America still a serious nation?

Consider. While U.S. elites were denouncing Donald Trump as unfit to serve for having compared Miss Universe 1996 to “Miss Piggy” of “The Muppets,” the World Trade Organization was validating the principal plank of his platform.

America’s allies are cheating and robbing her blind on trade.

According to the WTO, Britain, France, Spain, Germany and the EU pumped $22 billion in illegal subsidies into Airbus to swindle Boeing out of the sale of 375 commercial jets.

Subsidies to the A320 caused lost sales of 271 Boeing 737s, writes journalist Alan Boyle. Subsidies for planes in the twin-aisle market cost the sale of 50 Boeing 767s, 777s and 787s. And subsidies to the A380 cost Boeing the sale of 54 747s. These represent crippling losses for Boeing, a crown Jєωel of U.S. manufacturing and a critical component of our national defense.

Earlier, writes Boyle, the WTO ruled that, “without the subsidies, Airbus would not have existed … and there would be no Airbus aircraft on the market.”

In “The Great Betrayal” in 1998, I noted that in its first 25 years the socialist cartel called Airbus Industrie “sold 770 planes to 102 airlines but did not make a penny of profit.”

Richard Evans of British Aerospace explained: “Airbus is going to attack the Americans, including Boeing, until they bleed and scream.” And another executive said, “If Airbus has to give away planes, we will do it.”

When Europe’s taxpayers objected to the $26 billion in subsidies Airbus had gotten by 1990, German aerospace coordinator Erich Riedl was dismissive, “We don’t care about criticism from small-minded pencil-pushers.”

This is the voice of economic nationalism. Where is ours?

After this latest WTO ruling validating Boeing’s claims against Airbus, the Financial Times is babbling of the need for “free and fair” trade, warning against a trade war.

But is “trade war” not a fair description of what our NATO allies have been doing to us by subsidizing the cartel that helped bring down Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas and now seeks to bring down Boeing?

Our companies built the planes that saved Europe in World War II and sheltered her in the Cold War. And Europe has been trying to kill those American companies.

Yet even as Europeans collude and cheat to capture America’s markets in passenger jets, Boeing itself, wrote Eamonn Fingleton in 2014, has been “consciously cooperating in its own demise.”

By Boeing’s own figures, writes Fingleton, in the building of its 787 Dreamliner, the world’s most advanced commercial jet, the “Japanese account for a stunning 35 percent of the 787’s overall manufacture, and that may be an underestimate.”

“Much of the rest of the plane is also made abroad … in Italy, Germany, South Korea, France, and the United Kingdom.”

The Dreamliner “flies on Mitsubishi wings. These are no ordinary wings: they constitute the first extensive use of carbon fiber in the wings of a full-size passenger plane. In the view of many experts, by outsourcing the wings Boeing has crossed a red line.”

Mitsubishi, recall, built the Zero, the premier fighter plane in the Pacific in the early years of World War II.

In a related matter, the U.S. merchandise trade deficit in July and August approached $60 billion each month, heading for a trade deficit in goods in 2016 of another $700 billion.

For an advanced economy like the United States, such deficits are milestones of national decline. We have been running them now for 40 years. But in the era of U.S. economic supremacy from 1870 to 1970, we always ran an annual trade surplus, selling far more abroad than Americans bought from abroad.

In the U.S. trade picture, even in the darkest of times, the brightest of categories has been commercial aircraft.

But to watch how we allow NATO allies we defend and protect getting away with decades of colluding and cheating, and then to watch Boeing transfer technology and outsource critical manufacturing to rivals like Japan, one must conclude that not only is the industrial decline of the United States inevitable, but America’s elites do not care.

As for our corporate chieftains, they seem accepting of what is coming when they are gone, so long as the salary increases, stock prices and options, severance packages, and profits remain high.

By increasingly relying upon foreign nations for our national needs, and by outsourcing production, we are outsourcing America’s future.

After Munich in 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax visited Italy to wean Mussolini away from Hitler. The Italian dictator observed his guests closely and remarked to his foreign minister:

“These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire.”

If the present regime is not replaced, something like that will be said of this generation of Americans.

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ISIS, Not Russia, is the Enemy in Syria

Patrick J. Buchanan

10-6-2016

http://buchanan.org/blog/isis-not-russia-enemy-syria-125800

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Denouncing Russian air strikes on Aleppo as “barbaric,” Mike Pence declared in Tuesday’s debate:

“The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength. … The United States of America should be prepared to use military force, to strike military targets of Bashar Assad regime.”

John McCain went further:

“The U.S. … must issue an ultimatum to Mr. Assad — stop flying or lose your aircraft … If Russia continues its indiscriminate bombing, we should make clear that we will take steps to hold its aircraft at greater risk.”

Yet one gets the impression this is bluster and bluff.

Pence has walked his warnings back. And there are few echoes of McCain’s hawkishness. Even Hillary Clinton’s call for a “no-fly zone” has been muted.

The American people have no stomach for a new war in Syria.

Nor does it make sense to expand our enemies list in that bleeding and broken country — from ISIS and the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front — to Syria’s armed forces, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

These last three have been battling to save Assad’s regime, because they see vital interests imperiled should it fall.

We have not plunged into Syria, because we have no vital interest at risk in Syria. We have lived with the Assads since Richard Nixon went to Damascus.

President Obama, who has four months left in office, is not going to intervene. And Congress, which has the sole power to declare war, has never authorized a war on Syria.

Obama would be committing an impeachable act if he started shooting down Russian or Syrian planes over Syrian territory. He might also be putting us on the escalator to World War III.

For Russia has moved its S-400 anti-aircraft system into Syria to its air base near Latakia, and its S-300 system to its naval base at Tartus.

As the rebels have no air force, that message is for us.

Russia is also moving its aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, into the Med. Vladimir Putin is doubling down in Syria.

Last weekend, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that U.S. attacks in Syria “will lead to terrible tectonic consequences not only on the territory of this country but also in the region on the whole.”

Translation: Attack Syria’s air force, and the war you Americans start could encompass the entire Middle East.

Last week, too, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, warned that creating a “no-fly zone” in Syria could mean war — with Russia. Dunford’s crisp retort to Sen. Roger Wicker:

“Right now, senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria it would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia. That’s a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I’m not going to make.”

And neither, thankfully, will Barack Obama.

So, where are we, and how did we get here?

Five years ago, Obama declared that Assad must step down. Ignoring him, Assad went all out to crush the rebels, both those we backed and the Islamist terrorists.

Obama then drew a “red line,” declaring that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would lead to U.S. strikes. But when Obama readied military action in 2013, Americans rose up and roared, “No!”

Reading the country right, Congress refused to authorize U.S. military action. Egg all over his face, Obama again backed down.

When Assad began losing the war, Putin stepped in to save his lone Arab ally, and swiftly reversed Assad’s fortunes.

Now, with 10,000 troops — Syrian, Iraqi Shiite militia, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Afghan mercenaries — poised to attack Aleppo, backed by Russian air power, Assad may be on the cusp of victory in the bloodiest and most decisive battle of the war.

Assad and his allies intend to end this war — by winning it.

For the U.S. to reverse his gains now, and effect his removal, would require the introduction of massive U.S. air power and U.S. troops, and congressional authorization for war in Syria.

The time has come to recognize and accept reality.

While the U.S. and its Turkish, Kurdish and Sunni allies, working with the Assad coalition of Russia, Hezbollah and the Iranians, can crush ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria, we cannot defeat the Assad coalition — not without risking a world war.

And Congress would never authorize such a war, nor would the American people sustain it.

As of today, there is no possibility that the rebels we back could defeat ISIS and the al-Nusra Front, let alone bring down Bashar Assad and run the Russians, Hezbollah, Iran and the Iraqi Shiite militias out of Syria.

Time to stop the killing, stop the carnage, stop the war and get the best terms for peace we can get. For continuing this war, when the prospects of victory are nil, raises its own question of morality.

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http://buchanan.org/blog/system-rigged-betcha-125844

Is the System is Rigged? You Betcha

Patrick J Buchanan

Posted 10-17-2016

“Remember, it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged election,” said Donald Trump in New Hampshire on Saturday.

The stunned recoil in this city suggests this bunker buster went right down the chimney. As the French put it, “Il n’y a que la verite qui blesse.” It is only the truth that hurts.

In what sense is the system rigged?

Consider Big Media — the elite columnists and commentators, the dominant national press, and the national and cable networks, save FOX. Not in this writer’s lifetime has there been such blanket hatred and hostility of a presidential candidate of a major party.

“So what?” They reply. “We have a free press!”

But in this election, Big Media have burst out of the closet as an adjunct of the regime and the attack arm of the Clinton campaign, aiming to bring Trump down.

Half a century ago, Theodore White wrote of the power and bias of the “adversary press” that sought to bring down Richard Nixon.

“The power of the press in America,” wrote Teddy, “is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk about and think about — an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” Newt Gingrich volunteered on Sunday that, “without the unending one-sided assault of the news media, Trump would be beating Hillary by 15 points.”

On this one, Newt is right.

With all due respect, as adversaries, Harry Reid and Nancy Peℓσѕι are not terribly formidable. Big Media is the power that sustains the forces of globalism against those of Americanism.

Is the system rigged? Ask yourself.

For half a century, the U.S. Supreme Court has systematically de-Christianized and paganized American society and declared abortion and ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ marriage constitutional rights.

Where did these unelected jurists get the right to impose their views and values upon us, and remake America in their own secularist image? Was that really the Court’s role in the Constitution?

How did we wind up with an all-powerful judicial tyranny in a nation the Founding Fathers created as a democratic republic?

There are more than 11 million illegal immigrants here, with millions more coming. Yet the government consistently refuses to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.

Why should those Americans whose ancestors created, fought, bled and died to preserve America not believe they and their children are being dispossessed of a country that was their patrimony — and without their consent?

When did the country vote to convert the America we grew up in into the Third World country our descendants will inherit in 2042?

In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Congressional majority voted to end discrimination against black folks.

When did we vote to institute pervasive discrimination against white folks, especially white males, with affirmative action, quotas and racial set-asides? Even in blue states like California, affirmative action is routinely rejected in statewide ballots.

Yet it remains regime policy, embedded in the bureaucracy.

In 2015, in the Democratic primaries, the big enthusiastic crowds were all for 75-year-old Socialist senator Bernie Sanders.

We now know, thanks to leaked emails, that not only the superdelegates and the Obama White House but a collaborationist press and the DNC were colluding to deny Sanders any chance at the nomination.

The fix was in. Ask Sanders if he thinks the system is rigged.

If there is an issue upon which Americans agree, it is that they want secure borders and an end to trade policies that have shipped abroad the jobs, and arrested the wages, of working Americans.

Yet in a private speech that netted her $225,000 from Brazilian bankers, Hillary Clinton confided that she dreams of a “common market, with open trade and open borders” from Nome, Alaska, to Patagonia.

That would mean the end of the USA as a unique, sovereign and independent nation. But the American press, whose survival depends upon the big ad dollars of transnational corporations, is more interested in old tapes of the Donald on The Howard Stern Show.

As present, it appears that in 2017, we may get a government headed by Hillary Clinton, and an opposition headed by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

Is that what the people were hoping for, working for, voting for in the primaries of 2016? Or is this what they were voting against?

Big money and the media power of the establishment elites and the transnationals may well prevail.

And if they do, Middle America — those who cling to their bibles, bigotries and guns in Barack Obama’s depiction, those “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic,” who are “not America” and are “irredeemable” in Hillary Clinton’s depiction — will have to accept the new regime.

But that does not mean they must love it, like it or respect it.

Because, in the last analysis, yes, Virginia, the system is rigged.

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http://buchanan.org/blog/dump-duterte-starters-125879

Dump Duterte for Starters

Patrick J Buchanan

10/24/2016

Alliances are transmission belts of war.

So our Founding Fathers taught and the 20th century proved.

When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany in 1914, America sat out, until our own ships were being sunk in 1917.

When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany, Sept. 3, 1939, we stayed out until Hitler declared war on us, Dec. 11, 1941.

As the other Western powers bled and bankrupted themselves, we emerged relatively unscathed as the world’s No. 1 power. The Brits and French lost their empires, and much else, and ceased to be great powers.

Stalin’s annexation of Central Europe and acquisition of an atom bomb, and Mao’s triumph in China in 1949, caused us to form alliances from Europe to Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Australia.

Yet, with the end of the Cold War, we did not dissolve a single alliance. NATO was expanded to embrace all the nations of the former Warsaw Pact and three former republics of the USSR.

This hubristic folly is at the heart of present tensions with Russia.

Now, Beltway hawks have begun to push the envelope to bring former Soviet republics Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, with some urging us to bring in the Cold War neutrals Sweden and Finland.

Given the resentment of the Russian people toward America, for exploiting their time of weakness after the breakup of the Soviet Union, to drive our alliance onto their front porch, such moves could trigger a conflict that could escalate to nuclear weapons.

Moscow has warned us pointedly and repeatedly about this.

Yet now that the election is almost over, neocons burrowed in their think tanks are emerging to talk up U.S. confrontations with Syria, Russia, Iran and China. Restraining America’s War Party may be the first order of business of the next president.

Fortunately, after the Libyan debacle, President Obama has lost any enthusiasm for new wars.

Indeed, he has a narrow window of opportunity to begin to bring our alliances into conformity with our interests — by serving notice that the United States is terminating its 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with Manila.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is proving himself to be an unstable anti-American autocrat, who should not be entrusted with the power to drag us into war over some rocks or reefs in the South China Sea.

Earlier this year, we got an idea of what a commitment to go to war for a NATO ally might mean when President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, another mercurial autocrat, shot down a Russian plane that strayed over Turkish territory for 17 seconds.

Had Vladimir Putin retaliated in kind, Erdogan could have invoked Article 5 of NATO, requiring us come to Turkey’s defense against Russia.

Given how Erdogan has acted since this summer’s attempted coup, purging Turkish democratic institutions and imprisoning tens of thousands, do the benefits of our NATO alliance with Ankara still outweigh the risks?

Duterte harbors a lifelong grudge against America for our war of 1899-1902 to crush the Philippine independence movement, after Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. We liberated the Philippines, only to annex them.

A longtime mayor on Mindanao before being elected president, Duterte is reputedly the godfather of death squads that executed drug dealers and users. Now, the practice has apparently been introduced nationwide.

While campaigning, Duterte said he would Jet Ski 120 miles to Scarborough Shoal, which is occupied by China though it is in Manila’s territorial waters. Since then, he has flipped and become outspokenly pro-China.

Before attending a summit in Laos, Duterte called President Obama “the son of a whore.” He has insulted America and canceled joint military exercises. In Beijing he announced a “separation from the United States. … No more American influence. No more American [military] exercises. It’s time to say goodbye.”

“I would rather go to Russia and to China,” he added.

President Obama should email President Duterte: “Message received. Accept your decision. Good luck with the Russians and Chinese.”

Would termination of our Mutual Defense Treaty mean severing ties with the Filipino people? By no means.

What it would do, though, is this: restore America’s absolute freedom to act or not act militarily in the South China Sea, according to our interests, and not Duterte’s whims.

Whether we intervene on Manila’s behalf or not, the decision would be ours alone. Terminating the treaty would absolve us of any legal or moral obligation to fight for Scarborough Shoal, Mischief Reef or any of the other rocks in a South China Sea that are now in dispute between Beijing and half a dozen nations.

A U.S. decision to terminate the treaty would also send a wake-up call to every ally:

America’s Cold War commitments are not forever. Your security is not more important to us than it is to you. As Donald Trump has been saying, we are starting to put America first again.

On this, maybe even President Obama could find common ground.

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