A July 9, 2020 record examining Soju Watanabe’s arguments concerning the forces Donald Trump confronted, including neoconservative foreign policy, the Deep State, the Steele dossier, Russiagate, the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine impeachment, and the Biden family’s connection to Burisma.

July 9, 2020
The Four “Monsters” Defeated by Trump: Neoconservatives, the Deep State, Russiagate, and Democratic Money Politics
The following is a continuation of the preceding chapter.
This text is taken from an article by Soju Watanabe published in the monthly magazine WiLL under the title “Trump’s Enemies: Their Appalling True Faces.”
Soju Watanabe is one of the world’s leading researchers of modern and contemporary Japanese–American history.
This article should be read not only by the Japanese people but also by people throughout the world.
It contains facts and arguments concerning the deepest structures of American politics that could never be learned by relying solely on news programs produced by NHK or newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun.
The phrase “Drain the Swamp,” which Donald Trump used during the 2016 presidential election, was not merely a campaign slogan.
It was a declaration of war against the structure created by the political, bureaucratic, and corporate establishment in Washington, the military-industrial complex, intelligence agencies, government officials, the media, and enormous special-interest organizations.
For that reason, the Trump administration continually faced fierce resistance from the existing power structure.
Watanabe described these established forces as “monsters” and discussed four monsters that President Trump had defeated.
The first was the neoconservative faction that had been deeply involved in the foreign policies of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton and had promoted regime change in other countries.
The second consisted of anti-Trump officials within government organizations and the major media outlets that amplified the information supplied by those officials.
The third consisted of Democratic politicians who, in Watanabe’s view, used their political positions and family connections to obtain financial benefits.
This article examines these monsters through the Steele dossier, Russiagate, the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine impeachment, and the controversy surrounding the Biden family and Burisma.
The reference to “M16” in the original Japanese text has been corrected to “MI6,” the name of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
The Four Monsters That Were Defeated
Let us look back at the many monsters defeated by President Trump.
The first and most prominent was the neoconservative faction entrenched within the Obama administration.
I discussed the neoconservatives in detail in my book The Collapse of the American Democratic Party, published by PHP Institute.
In brief, they were a group of anti-Russian interventionists and internationalists who were willing to pursue regime change in countries they disliked.
They promoted regime change in Iraq, Egypt, and Libya.
President Trump ended what he regarded as pointless foreign interventions and shifted to a diplomatic policy aimed at reaching an accommodation with Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia.
He completely rejected the foreign policy of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton and removed the neoconservatives from the center of his administration.
The second monster was the Deep State, meaning the neoconservative-aligned permanent bureaucracy, together with the media.
After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, the Democratic Party used the so-called Steele dossier, prepared by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, to pursue President Trump.
The dossier contained a series of claims portraying Trump as being under the influence of President Putin.
Watanabe described it as a fabricated document designed to depict Trump as Putin’s puppet.
This became the starting point for the controversy known as Russiagate, which concerned alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Following the FBI investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team conducted a lengthy inquiry into the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The investigation did not establish facts sufficient to bring a criminal conspiracy charge against the Trump campaign for coordinating with the Russian government, and the investigation concluded in March 2019.
As a result, the credibility of major media organizations, represented by CNN, which had repeatedly suggested that collusion between Trump and Putin was virtually certain, was seriously damaged.
It was also revealed that the cost of producing the Steele dossier had ultimately been paid, through a law firm and other intermediaries, by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
In other words, a dossier portraying Trump as a Russian puppet had been financed by the political side competing against him in the presidential election.
James Comey, who was then Director of the FBI, had previously held a senior position at the defense company Lockheed Martin.
Watanabe connected this career history with the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation and argued that it exposed the existence of a so-called Deep State linking neoconservative foreign policy, the military-industrial complex, and the permanent government bureaucracy.
The third monster was the Democratic Party’s money-driven political establishment.
The Democratic Party claimed that President Trump had used military assistance approved by Congress for Ukraine as leverage to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating alleged wrongdoing by Joe Biden.
This became known as the Ukraine affair.
In December 2019, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment against President Trump.
However, the Senate did not reach the number of votes required for conviction, and President Trump was acquitted.
Watanabe argued that it was, in fact, Biden who had pressured the Ukrainian government.
Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had joined the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings and received substantial compensation.
Viktor Shokin, who was Ukraine’s Prosecutor General at the time, attracted international attention in connection with controversies surrounding Burisma.
While serving as Vice President, Joe Biden told the Ukrainian government that a United States loan guarantee would not proceed unless Prosecutor General Shokin was removed.
Biden later described this intervention publicly.
Biden’s representatives maintained that the demand for Shokin’s dismissal reflected the common position of the United States government and European countries, which believed that Shokin had failed to combat corruption adequately.
Watanabe, however, argued that Biden’s actions raised serious questions of a potential conflict of interest because his son was serving on the board of Burisma.
The Democratic Party, which sought to impeach President Trump, claimed that Trump had placed improper pressure on the Ukrainian government.
At the same time, the fact that Biden himself had demanded the removal of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General while using a United States loan guarantee as leverage was not sufficiently examined by Japan’s major media organizations.
In both Russiagate and the Ukraine controversy, information damaging to President Trump was reported on an enormous scale.
By contrast, the Clinton campaign’s financing of the Steele dossier and the relationship between the Biden family and Burisma were not reported with the same scale or persistence.
This, according to Watanabe, revealed an enormous power structure formed by the Democratic Party, the permanent bureaucracy, intelligence agencies, and the major media.
President Trump was not fighting merely against one election candidate or a single political party.
He was fighting the established forces that had long dominated American politics, administration, foreign policy, intelligence, and reporting while sharing the benefits of that power among themselves.
The “Washington swamp” that Trump sought to remove could not be eliminated merely by winning a presidential election.
Fearing the loss of their established interests, these forces attempted to remove a democratically elected president through Russiagate, impeachment, and relentless media attacks.
That confrontation was the central reality running through the first three and a half years of the Trump administration.
To be continued.