Trump gets another mess from Bubba Clinton to clean up...in Indonesia

By Monica Showalter

For all the talk about President Trump being the bull in the china shop of U.S. foreign policy, some recently declassified documents show then-president Bill Clinton as more worthy of that title.

With the documents being declassified now, and Indonesians now closely reading about them, guess who gets to clean up that mess.  Yep, President Trump.

Here is what Voice of America has on it:

The Clinton administration sought to preserve close ties to the Indonesian Armed Forces as President Suharto's rule came to an end in May 1998, even as the Army carried out significant human rights abuses, according to recently declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive based at The George Washington University.  US officials were aware of the military's involvement in kidnappings and disappearances of student activists going on at the time but saw preservation of the Army's role as central to political stability in the country, the records show.

Those shenanigans were accompanied by rank economic warfare on Indonesia, under the guise of "helping" it.  Over in Indonesia, back in 1998, if you recall, there was a massive economic crisis, brought on by the meltdown of the Indonesian rupiah.  It was followed by riots that led to the resignation under pressure of President Suharto, the Indonesian strongman who got the country stabilized after the communists tried to take over in a bloody surge the 1960s.  Clinton triggered it with an economy-killing IMF "austerity" program and tried to pin the blame for the crisis on one economist, Johns Hopkins University professor Steve Hanke, for a Hong Kong-style currency board proposal to stabilize the economy.  The sharp spike between points 5 and 6 on the chart below (it should have its own red dot) shows the point at which Suharto announced that Hanke would be his adviser and the currency improving.  Instead of allowing that to happen, Clinton muscled Suharto into accepting an International Monetary Fund "austerity" program that he knew would crash his country's economy instead of the currency board, which would have fixed it, and the chart's red dots went downward.  Bubba loaded the strong-arm maneuver with oozing words of flattery.  All the red points on the chart are worth looking at in the legend here.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/trump_gets_another_mess_from_bubba_clinton_to_clean_up__in_indonesia.html#ixzz5MQ31QS70
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook