World War Trump

by Hall Gardner

  The above is, of course, just a sketch of what kind of steps need to be taken domestically and internationally if the United States, and the world with it, is to literally weather through this global financial, geopolitical, and ecological crisis. Given the significant amount of the US budget that is devoted toward defense purposes, the national debt keeps mounting without apparent end, in large part because of costs directly or indirectly related to military spending and military interventions. It is primarily by seeking ways to forge diplomatic and geopolitical compromises that lead to significant reductions in military expenditure and reconversion of the military-industrial complex to peaceful purposes that the United States will eventually be able to truly devote greater attention to the full development of its own citizens, and those of the world.

  Trump could prove to be like Richard Nixon, who was forced to step down as president under the threat of impeachment. Or he could possibly prove to be more like Ronald Reagan, who reversed hardline American policies in his second term by seeking to improve US relations toward the Soviet Union and by working to put the conflicts of the Cold War to rest in the ash heap of history. In that era, it was the Soviet Union that made major compromises and concessions over nuclear arms and Germany, for example. In this era, it is the United States that must make major compromises and concessions over nuclear arms and policy toward Ukraine, for example, among other compromises with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other countries discussed in this book.

  If the Trump-Pence team or the next administration (whether or not Trump is impeached) does not take a radical about-face away from its present America First course, those nationalist policies will actually accelerate tendencies toward the polarization of Amerian society and the division of the world into rival camps—while concurrently setting the conditions for World War Trump.

  In the midst of his presidential campaign, Trump denied that he was an isolationist, but he did affirm that he liked the expression, “America First.”1

  It is accordingly not certain whether the Trump campaign's America First slogan was inspired by pre–World War II “isolationism” of the America First Committee, the largest anti-war organization in US history. The organization dissolved after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A number of prominent Americans were associated with the anti-war America First movement, which supported a strong national defense, but which opposed US intervention in the then-ongoing war in Europe. These prominent individuals included future US presidents Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy, the controversial aviator Charles Lindbergh, who acted as its spokesperson, and many others. But even if the precise meaning of “America First” for Trump and his team is not entirely clear, the term has certainly lost any anti-war significance that it might have had prior to the arrival of the Trump-Pence administration to power.

  Trump's conception of America First can nevertheless be ascertained by his choice of individuals whom he considers to be great leaders: General George S. Patton, General Douglas MacArthur, and President Teddy Roosevelt.2

  In choosing these individuals, who cannot really be considered anti-war, Trump indicates that he possesses a predilection not only for military power and unilateral actions but also for those maverick leaders who act outside of the chain of command and official hierarchy, or who, in some way, challenge established norms and preconceived ideas.

  George S. Patton's speech to American soldiers appears to parallel Trump's views of America First and his own philosophy of supporting only “winners,” however defined: “All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle…. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win—all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost, not ever will lose a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.”3

  Trump also venerates General MacArthur. In doing so, Trump advanced the dubious thesis that MacArthur was merely using the threat to use nuclear weaponry as leverage to negotiate with the People's Republic of China during the 1950–1953 Korean War.4 In fact, however, MacArthur had drawn up the actual plans to use such weaponry, after already having used the destructive potential of Napalm and other weapons against North Korean and Chinese forces, which did not possess nuclear weapons at that time. In addition, and contrary to the general understanding, MacArthur was not removed from his position as supreme commander of the US-led UN force as a result of his public threat to use nuclear weaponry against North Korea and China; MacArthur was removed from duty for insubordination. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff were still considering the possible use of nuclear weaponry even after MacArthur's dismissal—an action that could have escalated hostilities with China and could have possibly brought the Soviet Union more directly into the war.

  Contrary to Trump's argument, MacArthur's threat to use nuclear weapons did not dissuade Beijing from sending in one million troops across the Yalu River and pursuing the war in support of North Korea after MacArthur had ordered UN forces to attack north of the 38th parallel.5 And the brutal way in which the United States waged the war—US B-29 bombers had dropped 866,914 gallons of Napalm onto North Korea from June to late October 1950—did not deter either North Korea or China from fighting. These facts help to explain the militant pro-nuclear-weapons policy of the contemporary North Korean regime.

  In terms of his favorite US president, Trump points to the Republican maverick Teddy Roosevelt.6 It was Roosevelt who had established the “Roosevelt corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that permitted US military intervention in Latin American affairs while also strengthening the power of the presidency. It was Roosevelt who forced Congress to fund the American Great White Fleet so as to augment US naval capabilities across the globe. To his credit, Teddy Roosevelt also helped broker the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. This fact could possibly inspire the Trump-Pence administration to mediate between Russia and Japan in contemporary circumstances—that is, if it will eventually prove possible to engage in a general rapprochement with Russia, given strong domestic American and international opposition to dealing with Russian President Vladimir Putin.7

  Roosevelt advocated “speaking softly and carrying a big stick.” But this represents a maxim that Trump has not fully ingested. Given his loose and combative tongue, his emotional outbursts and reactions to critical media reports, and his apparent inability to control his “tweets” in the new social media that permits him to comment directly to his followers and denounce his critics outside of both governmental and corporate media outlets, Trump appears incapable of speaking softly, or even in a more controlled manner. Trump is well known for his tweeting; in fact, in a French political cartoon, one White House counselor laments to another: “You will see, he [Trump] will end up tweeting the nuclear codes.”8 Further underscoring his seeming inability to control his speech, Trump has also been accused of inadvertently leaking secret information to Moscow in a White House meeting.9 (See chapter 3.)

  The issue raised here is that Trump's tweets oversimplify complex policy issues that require complex behind-the-scenes discussion and debate before bringing them out into the public. If not appropriately articulated, the emotional impact of such simplified policy statements could provoke strong negative reactions among national populations concerned—particularly as Trump is the leader of the most powerful and influential country in the world. It may also prove difficult for Trump's own official spokespersons and leaders of other countries to play down some of Trump's more inflammatory remarks. Popular outbursts abroad against Trump could, in turn, force the leaderships of those countries to take strong stands—even if those leaders may actually prefer possible compromise approaches. Insulting leaders, if not whole populations, can create deep resentment. Yet Trump has done this with Mexico and China repeatedly; with Iran, which he considers the major cause of terrorism; and with North Korea, which he has threatened to “totally destroy.” Calls for retribution could take a long time t
o die out.

  Moreover, Trump's contemporary domestic policies appear to be totally at odds with the domestic policies of Roosevelt's era. Teddy Roosevelt had fought fiercely for environmental and consumer protection. Roosevelt doubled the number of US national parks to ten; created eighteen national monuments (including the Grand Canyon), through the 1906 Antiquities Act; and set aside fifty-one federal bird sanctuaries, four national game refuges, and more than 100 million acres of national forests.10 Yet it is Teddy Roosevelt's legacy and the Antiquities Act that Trump has begun to undermine by opening public lands (which were not entirely closed) to the mining industry. On March 28, 2017, Trump signed an executive order that could allow companies to mine and drill for oil at all national monuments designated after 1996.11 Companies are now demanding, for example, that the Grand Canyon be opened to uranium mining, in opposition to Obama's 2012 ban on mining. By November 2017, Trump was, in fact, reconsidering the ban on mining in the Grand Canyon.12

  Teddy Roosevelt had also fought for governmental regulation of industry and anti-monopoly reforms under the Sherman Antitrust act—an issue that Trump has largely ignored. And Roosevelt possessed a generally strong, even if mixed, record in support for the right of women to vote and for the rights of African Americans and minorities; this is in contrast to a number of Trump's outrageously crude remarks about women and his blatant sexism.13 Moreover, Trump does not even appear to be offering a Roosevelt-like Square Deal that will eventually compress the burgeoning gap between the very, very rich 1 percent (of which Trump and many members of his cabinet are prime examples) and the rest of the American public, including his own blue-collar supporters. (See chapters 2, 3, and 10.)

  Trump's form of nationalism and populism—and his inauguration promises to the American people that “your voice, your hopes, and your dreams will define our American destiny”—can be traced back even further, to the frontier populism of Andrew Jackson. President Jackson, to a certain extent like President Trump, had been elected by the vote of the frontiersmen of the western states of that era once suffrage was extended. Jackson had hoped to assert federal government control over Native Americans while starting the brutal process of implementing American coast-to-coast claims of Manifest Destiny. The latter was a term, in effect, used by Jackson as early as 1835 in an editorial affirming that the United States was “manifestly called by the Almighty to a destiny” that would have been envied by Greece and Rome.14

  One of Andrew Jackson's many negative legacies was his signing of the democidal Indian Removal Act of 1830, which was responsible for the Cherokee Trail of Tears. This action involved the forced removal of and brutal wars with the Five Civilized Tribes (the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee or Creek, Seminole, and the original Cherokee Nations), in addition to other native peoples.15 One could argue that Trump, although he is an urban New Yorker, exhibits a frontiersmen mentality somewhat similar to that of Andrew Jackson, but in reference to conflicts overseas against non-European cultures that lie on the “frontier” of the American empire in the wider Middle East. In this respect, the American struggle against the Native American peoples on the US-conquered continent throughout the nineteenth century possesses some key parallels with the contemporary Global War on Terrorism against a number of Islamist movements, but now on a global scale.

  In this analogy, the wars between the Texas Rangers (before Texas became a state) and with the US military against the Comanches (with their claims to Comancheria, which ranged from eastern New Mexico to northwestern Texas and parts of Mexico), the Apaches, and other native peoples who opposed American Manifest Destiny have now been replaced by US-led wars with al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other Islamist political movements, which generally possess the ultimate goal to create an Islamic caliphate, much like the Ottoman Empire.

  In many ways, the ultimate goals of Trump's inauguration call—to “unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate from the face of the Earth”—do not appear to have changed that significantly from the brutal democidal anti-Native American campaigns of Andrew Jackson and Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar. In effect, much as the United States expanded its continental empire into the Wild West, Trump has hoped to expand US global hegemony into the wider Middle East. But this effort to assert control over that region is taking place in a geopolitical situation involving a complex mix of rivalry and collaboration with Russia, China, the Europeans, Israel, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, among other powers.

  Trump's support for America First nationalism (in large part by means of undermining systems of interstate governance, including the European Union, trade pacts such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP), plus his decision to drop out of the Paris climate agreement, could actually work to undermine the very “civilized world” that he has hoped will work together for a number of causes and against a number of potential threats. And, given deeper civilizational divisions that Trump himself has emphasized, there is a real danger that despite his expressed hope that the “three Abrahamic Faiths…can join together in cooperation, then peace,”16 Trump's form of Judeo-Christian messianism—as it clashes with Russian Orthodoxy, Chinese Communist revanchism, and differing apocalyptic pan-Islamist movements—risks provoking World War Trump in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  TOWARD A WORLD EVEN BLEAKER THAN 1984?

  Both 1984 by George Orwell and It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis surged in sales after Trump's victory. In many ways, Trump is more like Sinclair Lewis's demagogic and opportunist con man Buzz Windrip (purportedly based on the real-life US Senator Huey Long), who takes total control of the US government in the establishment of a plutocratic state, than he is like Orwell's omnipresent Big Brother in his novel 1984. Moreover, Trump's version of political language is more that of “no think” than like Big Brother's more sophisticated and manipulative “doublethink.” Trump's often vulgar language—and particularly his inability to articulate the reasons for his frequent policy flip-flops—makes his rule very destabilizing. Unlike Orwell's 1984, there is no logic or carefully constructed ideology to his often-unpredictable off-the-cuff remarks. He says or tweets spontaneously what he believes his public supporters will believe. At the same time, Trump appears to be expert at manipulating the news media in his own version of “doublespeak” by denouncing “fake news” even when that news is based on fact, while also proclaiming certain things to be “true” when they are, in fact, false. Trump claims to support America First, that is, to speak for presumed American values, but really he is speaking for the interests of an American empire of which he and his plutocratic associates possess a significant portfolio.

  Yet let us assume that the militarists of the Trump-Pence administration do possess a more or less carefully conceived foreign and defense policy and that they are correct (or just lucky) that a global war will not result from a major arms race. But let us also assume that no significant steps are taken to defuse political-military and economic tensions throughout the world either. Let us assume that global interstate relations can remain in a precarious position of “no peace, no war,” much like that depicted in Orwell's 1984, more so than Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. What will such a world look like? And how long will it last?

  Trump had proclaimed in his January 2017 inauguration that he hoped to cultivate “friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world.” This appeared to represent a utopian, Mazzini-like vision in which the republics and nations of the world would be able to agree to form a coalition to fight together in the Global War on Terrorism, while somehow also cooperating on other important geostrategic and political-economic issues, despite their differing national interests.

  Yet, in accord with the new logic of Trump's version of doublespeak, precisely the opposite is happening. On the domestic side, Trump's inaugural address reflected his own version of doublespeak when he stated: “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to ou
r country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” Yet Trump's claim that allegiance, loyalty, and patriotism will somehow minimize prejudice is contradictory, as it is not at all grounded in actual historical experience. This is particularly true because appeals to patriotism can be very divisive—and even more so if the so-called patriotic cause is not considered by all to be just. Quite the contrary, it is in historical periods of extreme nationalism and patriotism that prejudice runs rampant.

  The question remains: What will happen to those, such as FBI Director James Comey, who do not pledge “total allegiance” to the president or to the US government?17 And what happens if individuals do find themselves subject to discrimination and prejudice because they are not believed to be upholding “national” or “patriotic” values? What happens to those who do not pledge allegiance to the American flag?18 And if individuals are subject to discrimination and prejudice, will that fact then lead to dissent, repression, and social conflict at home?

  Trump's public support during his presidential campaign for the use of torture and extrajudicial killing is very worrisome in this regard. (Both 1984 and It Can't Happen Here deal with themes of torture.) Trump has, for example, stated that he would consider tactics like waterboarding of suspected terrorists—and their families—in the struggle against terrorist groups.19 He has also threatened to engage in drone attacks on the families of terrorists and other civilians who are not directly involved in hostilities, thus expanding the military's mandate to use extrajudicial force.20 Trump has consequently promised to go beyond the efforts of the George W. Bush administration to legalize torture under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques;” by contrast, Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a captured US serviceman during the Vietnam War, vowed to oppose any Trump effort to revive the use of torture against detained terrorism suspects.21