US President Donald Trump gestures during a commercial break of a Fox News virtual town hall America Together: Returning to Work, event from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on May 3, 2020. (AFP photo)

By Mark Dankof

It’s really amazing to me that Donald Trump was running on the America first platform which indicated back in 2016 that he would get us out of worthless foreign conflicts. We now have Mr. Trump starting to engage in gunboat diplomacy or shall we put it B One bomber diplomacy with China.

Now, of course, the story about these four American B One bombers with these 200 airmen being moved to Guam is very, very significant for a number of reasons.

One is it basically continues this pattern of gunboat diplomacy, that we have seen with the Trump administration and with neoconservatives generally, especially since 9/11 in both of the major American political parties.

In this particular case, this saber-rattling with China now seems to be a diversion from a number of grim realities that the American government and the Trump administration and neoconservatives generally don’t want the American public to find out about.

The first of these, of course, I was discussing with Vision Plus television the other day, and that is that there are more players in this COVID-19 situation, not than just China alone.

So, as this continues to spiral out of control, it also gets into the question of what the American government knew about this COVID-19 situation and when it knew it.

There is evidence that the United States government was communicating to Israel all the way back in November that there was an issue in China with this COVID-19 situation, and that it was likely to cause problems in more places than simply China.

So why the slowness of the Trump administration in the beginning of a response to this that was several months later, when the American intelligence community apparently knew a lot more than it’s presently admitting about this COVID-19 situation.

All of this in the way of deploying B One bombers to Guam is a diversion from the American public asking more questions about all of this and for mainstream media doing its job in covering the real inside story of how this COVID-19 situation arose, and now many different players are involved, what the implications of this might happen to be.

The Trump administration of course apparently does notice that we have a spiraling national debt in this country.

We are talking about a situation where the national debt is standing at something like $23 trillion. It is generally believe that this COVID-19 crisis led another $10 trillion to that debt.

We are talking about a deficit in 2020 alone, that is thought to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.7 trillion before the end of the fiscal year.

So with all of this in mind, and keeping in mind the amount of American debt and American debt instruments that are being held by China, why in the world are we engaged in gunboat diplomacy with them in a circumstance where they could easily turn around and simply dump all these US Treasury bills in the open market that they have been holding.

This would create an unbelievable economic situation. And it’s something the Trump administration needs to keep in mind when it begins this process of fooling around in the South China Sea, and starting something with China over the Paracel Islands in a fashion which is very similar to the kind of gunboat diplomacy, that the United States is engaging with Iran in the Persian Gulf, which the last time I checked, is the Persian or Iranian Gulf, it’s not the American Gulf, any more than the South China Sea is the American South Sea, anymore than the Paracel Islands or something that risk of war with China over.

So all of this comes to pass as being a part of this larger picture of irresponsibility with the Trump administration in regard to the way that it’s doing business.

And then we get into the unemployment crisis in the United States, as a result of this COVID-19 shutdown. That’s a situation of course where the service economy of the United States, producing whatever goods and services it can have now been reduced to a shadow of its former self.

At the same time that more people have not received unemployment checks, more people have not yet received their federal stimulus checks, more people are wondering how they’re going to survive even a week economically, with all of these things that have been going on in the United States since the end of February or the beginning of March.

Now when we start looking at this in terms of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment in major other components of what should be an industry of manufacturing in the United States.

Much of this has been exported to China. Not to mention other countries around the world but China comes up specifically in regard to the pharmaceutical industry and the medical equipment industry.

Do we really need to start a war with the very people who are holding all of these American debt instruments in the way of US Treasury bills?

Do we really need to start a war with the very country on whom we are now dependent for our pharmaceuticals and for our medical protective equipment, largely because of the exportation of these industries to that country by the American political elite?

I certainly don’t think so.

So we start looking at this entire situation as a diversion from very pressing domestic and international issues the Trump administration has largely fumbled.

When we start looking at the fact that this COVID-19 crisis raises as many questions as it has answered in terms of the American government in regard to who’s involved in this? How many players have been involved? Was this a bio-weapon? Was it an artificial creation?

What did the United States and the United States administration and the United States intelligence community know about all of this and when?

We start looking at this debt spiral, we start looking at the overextension of the American military Empire abroad, we start looking at burgeoning unemployment and social unrest in this country, we start looking at the exportation of the American pharmaceutical and medical protective equipment industries to China.

This policy of threatening them, this policy of engaging in aerial diplomacy and gunboat diplomacy with them is simply irresponsible and seems to be a continuation of the same neoconservative policies that we see out of the Trump administration, with a way of handling the Middle East and Iran specifically at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby.

So this is a part of a larger mess, and it begs the question as to who would profit out of an American war with China? Will the oil industry profit? Would it begin to recover some of its losses?

Will the bankers continued to make money off a major war between the United States and China, and controlling the death that such a conflict would generate?

Would we be talking about a situation here where in terms of the armaments manufacturers, would they do really well in such a situation?

The answer is largely, yes.

But they would do so, the banks, the armaments manufacturers, the Fed and the oil industry, all of these players would do very well at the expense of the American public, at the expense of the Chinese people, at the expense of the rest of the world.

So this is what we’re talking about here whether we’re talking about China, or we’re talking about Iran and Syria, or we’re talking about Venezuela.

This is all a part of the bigger picture that points to nothing good on the part of the Trump administration in regard to the American political and economic elite that controls both the major political parties in the United States.

Mark Dankof, former US Senate candidate, is a political commentator, broadcaster and pastor based in San Antonio, Texas. He recorded this article for Press TV website.