Look At It From A Real Estate Perspective-- Understanding Trump’s Foreign Policy

by Doroth Reik

Trump’s foreign policy is easy to understand. He likes places where he can make money and he doesn’t like places where he cannot. Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, places that used to be our allies, which fought alongside us in our tragically misbegotten wars-- he can’t make money there so the hell with them! His only investment in Europe is that loser golf course in Scotland.

North Korea is another story-- it’s a goose that can lay golden eggs for everyone. Trump even spelled it out at yesterday’s press conference-- "Look at it from a real estate perspective," he exclaimed. Casinos for Sheldon Adelson? No problem-- and the South Koreans have plenty of money to gamble with. He can put those casinos right on the DMZ so those South Koreans can stop by on the way to visit their northern brethren. Trump Tower and a golf course-- for sure! And while they are at it-- a McDonalds!

Where else would our kleptocrats and corporate big wigs stay and play while they plan their sweat shops and factories as well as the infrastructure projects we are all waiting for here at home-- projects which the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank are waiting to fund and Trump’s supporters are waiting to build. North Korea already has a well-disciplined (to say the least) work force accustomed to toiling for starvation wages. Bangladesh-- watch out! And then there is agriculture. Monsanto is probably gearing up to flood North Korea with its poison seeds and the glyphosate to kill off everything else.

Yes-- this "peace treaty" will happen-- it should be called the "piece of the action" treaty! But North Korea is only one piece of the foreign policy the puzzle. There are fortunes to be made in kleptocracies and dictatorships all over the world-- Russia, for example, where Trump has already made his first deal-- and not for a Trump Tower-- yet. This was an oil deal. "The Trump Russia Dossier describes a massive privatization deal to deliver a chunk of the state-owned Rosneft Oil company to Qatar and also a secret buyer in the Cayman Islands."

In China daughter Ivanka leads the pack-- you gotta take care of your kids! WAPO was outraged at the number of trademarks she acquired. And the Donald got some money too-- for his project in Indonesia-- a cool $500 billion!

And then there is Saudi Arabia. The $270,000 the Saudi princes have spent at the Trump Hotel is just the beginning. It seems that during the campaign Trump registered 8 businesses in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. No wonder he was dancing around and fondling a crystal ball!

Wherever there was or is a bad guy in charge Trump has a tower and a friend-- the Philippines, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, even Panama. Just follow the dots as TIME did.

But Robert Mueller seems poised to put an end to it all, including the money laundering, when he finishes his investigation: "One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea in the Republic of Georgia, has not received much journalistic attention. But the deal, for which Trump was reportedly paid a million dollars, involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as "red flags" for bank fraud and money laundering; moreover, it intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. As a result, Putin and his security services have access to information that could put them in a position to blackmail Trump. (Sekulow said that "the Georgia real-estate deal is something we would consider out of scope," adding, “Georgia is not Russia”)."

While we wait we can just keep following the money, dirty or otherwise, from kleptocracy to oligarchy to dictatorship because these are, or will be, our new allies. At least for now Kim Jong Un seems to be substituting shiny glass towers for nukes as his phallic symbol of choice.