A War Cabinet?

On March 23, The New York Times published a long editorial that warns about the risk of war posed by the combination of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as the new national security advisor to Donald Trump. Between the two, that important daily newspaper suggests, the stage could be set for a war useful to a president with such questionable legitimacy.

Wars have historically served as terrible and effective solutions to the dilemmas of domestic politics in the United States. United States nationalism, threatened in recent decades by the increase in multiculturalism, finds in war something energizing that momentarily reinforces the sense of belonging to a single community.

That was something that happened in the last two Gulf Wars, although much more clearly in the second, when the George W. Bush administration combined the pretext of a threat to the security of the United States because of Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction with a project to remove an authoritarian regime and build a democracy in the Middle East.

At that moment, so delicate after the attack on the twin towers, war functioned as a political resource and Bush rapidly increased his popularity, which assured his re-election in 2004. The editorial board of The New York Times is right when it warns of the danger that two members of the government who supported the Iraq War and, in the case of Bolton – who has served in recent years as a Republican analyst for Fox News – still justify it, occupy decisive positions with regard to national security.

In segments of the right, the center, and even on the left in the United States, New York Times editorials are considered exaggerated or alarmist. Conservative opinion holds that those texts form part of the public confrontation between the liberal press and Trump’s presidency. Still, history carries great weight, especially if it has repeated itself so many times in the recent past, to the point of being a kind of modus operandi for United States politics for the past two centuries.

The less serious diagnoses argue that Pompeo and Bolton, instead of launching a war against North Korea or against Iran, will definitively end Trump’s romance with Russia. It is not possible to verify that hypothesis in such a short time; what has been placed in evidence is that both have openly expressed their doubts about the nuclear accord with Iran and with the idea of a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un proposed by the departing secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.

Nor have we seen in recent days a forceful show of support by the new security cabinet for Great Britain in its dispute with Russia regarding the accusations against the Vladimir Putin government after the London assassination attempts. What we did see, just as replacements were being made for the posts of secretary of state and national security advisor, is that Trump congratulated Putin on his re-election to the Kremlin.

What most unsettles sectors shaping liberal public opinion in the United States is that Pompeo, his successor at the CIA, Gina Haspel, and Bolton have been strong supporters of unilateralism in what is called “the war on terror.” If these officials apply that same logic to the treatment of conflicts like those with North Korea and Iran, disaster could be around the corner.