As everyone gets excited over the prospect of President Trump meeting President Putin, I want to remind people that the US has regularly posed as seeking peace when it was in fact preparing confrontation, including under the previous Trump administration.
In fact there isn't a single instance of the US picking peace over primacy. This would be the first.
Under the Obama administration there was a similar wave of emotional euphoria that the Bush-era wars would end and that nations like Iran, Libya, and Syria would be brought back into the "international community."
As President Obama shook hands with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, plans were already underway to depose and kill him.
Similarly, Secretary Kerry met with Syrian President Assad as plans to topple his government were already underway as early as the Bush administration and would continue until December last year.
During his 1st term, President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and a likewise sense of hope was created.
But even as they shook hands, tarrifs were being prepared, plans to bury Huawei including detaining a senior executive while in Canada were in motion, and the further militarization of the Asia-Pacific was well under way.
The point is there is institutional, industrial, and military planning and policymaking that drives US policy, and nowhere among the 100s of hours of testimony in the Senate or 1000s of pages of policy papers is "peace" and the US seeking a place in the multipolar world mentioned.
Instead, these interests, reflected in comments made even by the Trump administration itself, are committed to maintaining global dominance and is using this theater to disarm the world of its critical thinking, caution, better judgment, and collective memory of recent history.
It creates an attraction to and support for the US under the "new" administration, it places upward pressure from a war weary public and business interests chaffing under sanctions on the Russian and Chinese governments to acquience to US offers, weakening them before the next round of conflict.
This was a recent Senate hearing regarding ACTUAL policy regarding Russia and China:
Learn more here: https://armedservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=4991
youtube.com
The US still fully plans to confront China and seeks to drive a wedge between Russia and China in the process.
President Trump is performing the theater (again) necessary to advance these objectives just as similar theater has been used in the past.