 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmad and we are going to discuss what's happening in the United States and the larger issue of U.S., Russia, Trump and Obama's latest sanctions. Ajaz, good to have you back with us. Very good to be back. What explains Obama's sudden decision to expel 35 diplomats and bring the relations between Russia and the U.S. to a head? Do you think it's basically to preempt the foreign policy of Trump? Well, I think yes, that is certainly a consideration. Although knowing how Trump acts, if he and his people decide not to do that, he can repudiate this very policy in no time whatsoever. You know, this notion that Trump is one of those people, that there will be a kind of continuity between Obama and Trump as it was between Bush and Obama. You know, once you set some policies in place, the next president carries them forward and takes time extricating them from them even if he wants to. It's not going to apply in the case of Trump. Trump will make an independent decision whether to be trapped in this or not. My sense is probably that many things have come to a head. On the one hand, I think the U.S. is trapped. It overplayed its hands in Europe in terms of the encirclement of Russia, and at the same time overplayed its hands in terms of the encirclement of China, which in fact brought the two of them together in a strategic partnership of a kind that the U.S. does not know what to do about it. Secondly, I think again they tried to press Russia in Ukraine, not only that Russia in fact checkmated them, but they thought they would trap Russia. The same thing happened in Syria even on a bigger scale, that there's a total defeat of the Americans in Syria. So this animosity with Russia is multifaceted and this is a desperate sort of attempt. I think it is as much addressed to Europe as it is to Trump. This is what we Americans are going to do when you better come along, because the normalization of relations between Russia and Europe is the nightmare in Washington. And that nightmare is looming because the economic bloc that Russia and China now represent and the attractiveness of that bloc for Europe to recover from its own extreme crisis is much too attractive for Europe. And sooner or later, unless the Americans keep on pressing and pressing and pressing, the NATO Allies are not going to, they might start moving towards Russia. So I think it is both. And what you have is a national security establishment. Majority of them, there's a split in that establishment in my view. They were the hawks, the great majority of that establishment, which is very hawkish, were just preparing for Clinton to come in and in fact escalate the war all over the Middle East and against Russia and this, that and the other possibly Ukraine and so on. Remember those letters from the top US diplomats, I mean, in the State Department officials 55 or 60 of them, whatever, we have to do this, we have to do that. All of them have been checkmated. Clinton has been beaten. Democratic Party is a very bad shape. Their internal crisis is very great. Saunders could have, actually Saunders would have beaten Clinton if all that hanky-panky was not done. And then he would have come out as a credible candidate. So Democratic Party is very much split over this. The base on one side and the party elite on top. So part of what is happening is that Obama and who is part of that central elite in the party is trying to deflect the attention from the actual loss of the elections that they were beaten. You know, it's a very interesting stage when you have the entire intelligence establishment publicly saying that Trump has won because of Russia. And this is how you start the new regime, so to say that discredited as a Russian ploy in US politics. This is something very strange. Yes, and you can't prove it. None of them can prove it. And you're taking him on and this is a wild card. He is saying that he's going to abolish this whole business of national security advisor and so on and he's going to fire the CIA and he's not going to go for sit for briefings by the CIA because CIA lies. Look, they're lying about my elections. You know, this is the other part of it. Trump represents unpredictability. You don't know whether he will be more hawkish. For instance, Israel, his argument that he's going to shift the embassy to Jerusalem. There is that hawkishness that we see with respect to Israel, which can again go out of hand in West Asia. He's going to Iran and he's now coming down without China, but he was being very, very hawkish about China and so on. Yes, right. But we actually do not know what he will do on which and whether or not he will even have a consistent policy before he settles down to understanding that running a state is quite different from running a business. You can't just whooping people and so on. So we don't really know. However, the most important thing is to my mind that Trump represents neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party establishment. He owes nothing to either of those two establishments and he owes nothing to the deep state, which is going after him. So you have a president of the United States who is remarkably independent of all the political institutions of the US state. How this will play out in the future? We don't know. At the same time, the appointments he has made, the steps that he is taking are so extreme. Indeed, his cabinet is the most right-wing cabinet you could imagine. When you say it's the most right-wing cabinet that we have seen for a long time, does it mean that we really have an American right coming into power, which Trump represents, which is a kind of isolationist right, which used to be one of the wings of the Republican or the US political scene, that they didn't want to engage internationally in wars, expansive policies, but sort of performed a kind of isolationist policy. At the isolationist scene in America, historically, we are not the far right. This is the far right. This is not just the right wing. This is the far right. The whole combination of it. In fact, all those people are actually in that crowd. Trump is the only person who does not have a consistent ideology. In terms of internal policies, there seems to be a big coalition building up on the question of Trump and the kind of internal policies you will do. Do you think that is going to see a change in the American politics? The change is occurring already. That is what I think certainly the Obama's and the Clinton's and so forth are. They're actually smart enough to understand what is happening. They were just so committed to their own corporate world and everything that they represent that they thought they could prevent it. But what is happening already is that there is a kind of mobilization starting against Trump in the United States, which is also. We have not seen that since the sixties. You know, there is no part of the American political spectrum outside the established Democratic Party leadership and the Republican Party and so on, which is not getting mobilized. The women's movement, the churches, the unions or the enormous number of young people who gained the experience of having been betrayed by Obama when they were getting elected. And now again betrayed by those people by depriving them of the presidential candidate that they had supported. And in the meanwhile, they become much more experienced. So you have a very different kind of situation in which you are witnessing the possible emergence of a left-wing movement in the United States of a magnitude that certainly has not seen since the sixties. We could have that. And that is in particular about domestic policies. The potential exists for such a left-wing growth of movements now and coming together of different strands. The kind of resistance that is protest movement and to actively resist, you know, sort of nonviolent resistance of that kind is getting started very fast. I am not aware of any such thing. You know, when, let's say, when the last great dramatic thing happened when Reagan was elected in this country, or when Bush was, the younger Bush was blamed for having, you know, taken away the elections from God and so on. There is no such resistance of this kind. Never. This is of a completely different order. Ajal, thank you very much. In the part two of this discussion, we'll come back with the issue of the emergence of the new left that you were talking about, the movements that are coming up as compared to the emergence of the new right, which has already taken place. Trump being the representative, but there are various other formations that are coming up in different parts of the world. So, we'll come back to you on this and we are second part of the discussion. We'll continue with talking about the new right and the new left, possibilities of the new left. Thank you very much. This is all the time we have for this part of our discussions with Professor Jahaz Ahmad. We'll come back to you with part two of this discussions. Keep watching.