Roaming Charges: Dude, Where’s My War?
Based on the evidence of the last few weeks, when it comes to his role as Commander Supremo of “his” military, Donald J. Trump seems to suffer from a kind of attention deficit disorder. Each week there’s a new threat emanating from the West Wing, louder than the last one and aimed at a new target. The decibel level of Trump’s war shrieks is escalating in rough relation to the downward curve of his poll numbers.
First, Trump ordered the launch of 60 cruise missiles (one took a dive into the Mediterranean) to a largely evacuated Syrian airbase outside Homs. Was this the opening shot in a regime change war to oust Assad from power? Who knows. Trump was already too busy bragging about dropping the hugest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal on some cave-dwelling ISIS tunnel rats. Why now? Why here? A signal to the Mullahs of Tehran or, perhaps, Paul Ryan?
Uncharacteristically, Trump didn’t even pause for a selfie beside the smoldering crater left by his MOAB bomb in Afghanistan, before he was rattling his sabre at North Korea, boasting about how his giant Armada was steaming toward the Korean peninsula. A few days later this robust pronouncement was obsolete, when it turned out that the mighty fleet was instead retreating 3,000 miles in the opposite direction, south to the coast of Australia. Call it the wrong-way Armada. Meanwhile, Trump had already fast-forwarded to furious denunciations of Iran.
Trump’s martial pronouncements are generally too truncated and disarticulated to ever embody something so substantial as a trope or a theme. Indeed, many of these public utterances are so garbled that they defy translation by even the most gifted linguists. They are more like the petulant bleats of an overgrown adolescent testing out a rack of video games, blasting away at one zombie invasion after another until he tires of it and seizes on another scenario. It might be said that he practices the Man-Child theory of foreign relations: belligerent, shallow, easily bored.
Naturally, Trump’s arm-chair Janissaries are all fired-up by these weekly flirtations with global catastrophe, but they also must be a little confused. Syria, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea, Mexico, Iran, Canadian dairy farmers? Which of these are the real foe? Where will the next war start? Will it be the big one they’ve been waiting for?
Of course, what we are really witnessing in Trump’s bombastic, if inchoate, perorations is trace evidence for the diminution of American power. Previously, the leader of the Empire never had to publicly threaten punitive action against such minor global players. The severe consequences for imperial disobedience were simply understood. Ironically, Trump’s chest-beating is precisely the kind of bellicose over-reaction that Kim Jong-Un was hoping for, since it elevates his status among his own government and immiserated population.
Both Iran and North Korea have digested the core lesson of Libya, which is once you relinquish your most powerful weapons you’re dead. Qaddafi submitted to the demands of the West, turned over his aging stockpile of WMDs and promptly lost his country and then his head. Now Libya is the hottest marketplace in the world for the slave trade and Kim Jong-un is racing to install nuclear bombs on ICBMs. Heckuva job, Hillary.
“Strategic patience” has become the new trigger phrase for generating neocon outrage. Trump’s inner circle of warmongers utter the phrase with the same acidic contempt that they once reserved for “nuance,” as if having the patience to develop a strategy to avoid nuclear annihilation is somehow an indicator of political spinelessness.
This kind of uber-male strutting was on full-display this week when Mike Pence went to the DMZ to stare down the North Koreans checking out the vice president a few dozen yards away. In his stentorian drone, Pence said they’d tried everything to deal with the intransigent North Koreans and were running out of non-military options—everything, it seems, but talking to them.
“The United States of America will always seek peace but under President Trump, the shield stands guard and the sword stands ready,” fumed Pence, using empurpled language he seems to have cribbed from the awful remake of Ben-Hur. The tougher Pence talks, the more ridiculous he sounds.
Pence’s trip to South Korea also gave rise to speculation over why the vice president took his wife to what has been called the most dangerous strip of land in the world, the DMZ. Was he using Karen as a human shield or did he need to be in her presence in order to have a private consultation with the country’s recently ousted president Park Geun-hye?
Trump’s historical ignorance leads the president to deploy words like “Armada” with a kind of depraved innocence of their meaning. Recall that the original Spanish Armada, the most fearsome Navy on Earth, was routed at the strait of Dover in 1588 by the rakish pirate-explorer Francis Drake, as Queen Elizabeth anxiously watched the battle from her royal perch on the White Cliffs. Will the past, once again, be prologue to the future?
Everything Trump knows about North Korea he seems to have learned in a 10-minute mini-briefing from the Chinese President over canapés at Mar-a-Lago. If Bannon still had Trump’s ear, he might have told the President that the rise of South Korea was fueled by globalization and the offshoring of US factories, while North Korea—isolated, austere, homogenous, intensely nationalistic–serves as a kind of small-scale model for the kind of retro-America that Trump sketched out as his dream state on the campaign trail.
It must be said that Trump is far from being the worst of his kind for the simple reason that most of the time he is unaware of the implications and potential fallout from his vapid blatherings. Usually, he is just improvising, playing it by feral instinct. The practice of realpolitik is not his thing. Not so for the likes of John McCain and his witless sidekick Lindsay Graham. These two uber-hawks have seized on Trump’s war talk with a sordid fervor. McCain is so aroused that he seems eager to fly the first bombing runs over Damascus, while Graham is just itching to press the launch button on cruise missiles targeting Pyongyang.
This, of course, is the problem with playing at war. Some people will take you seriously. Usually the wrong kind of people, the killing kind.
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posted by Satish Sharma at
13:57
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