Trump Went Hunting

There was a time when U.S. citizens got fed up with the stupidity and warmongering hypocrisy of their governing elite and decided to do something about it.

They would have heard neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, as well as liberal imperialists in the Obama administration, agree that the world needs a U.S. active on a global scale, committed to all the causes, ready to discipline all the fractious states. As in Iraq! Was it worth it, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked, to wield such authority there, at the price of an estimated half million children killed? The well-mannered battle-ax concluded, “the price is worth it.”

So, when the 2016 electoral campaign began, U.S. voters detected this stench of interventionism not only on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy (one of her advisers was Albright herself), but also on those of Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich and the cracked voices of the usual suspects: John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Mitt Romney. Until Donald Trump showed up.

A joke on two legs, Trump exemplified the ridiculous. But then hard-hitting truths started to spill out of his mouth: the war in Iraq had been a “terrible” mistake; intervening in conflicts like those in the Middle East was meddling with people “that we know nothing about;” the U.S. has everything to gain and nothing to lose by cooperating with Russia; the only enemy of the civilized world today is the Islamic Army …and, above all, “America first.”

His hair continued to look absurd. His personality continued to be unfriendly. Profanities continued to fly out of his mouth. But Trump was sounding incredibly promising: he had denounced the warmongers who have homesteaded in the intelligence services; he wouldn’t fall into the traps of the “Arab Springs” or the Eastern Europeans; he would use U.S. military power to combat Islamic terrorism.

Within a couple of weeks, however, Trump succeeded in wiping out all of the gains mentioned above.

As though we were stepping back into the real world after a performance of a comic play in a theater, those of us in international audiences have heard, in just a few days, a variety of novel news items: that NATO, rightly considered “obsolete” by Trump a few weeks ago, is no longer obsolete; that China, threatened by Trump over its currency manipulations, is no longer manipulating anything; that Russia and its president, whom the press portrayed as controlling Trump, have now been advised that their presence in the Middle East is unwelcome; that Syrian president Bashar Assad, whose overthrow was of no interest to Trump in March, has in April been called an “animal” with no future.

And along with all of this have come some impressive facts: the launching of 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian air base; the sending of aircraft carriers to the Korean coast; and the dropping of the “mother of all bombs” ($16 million to kill a hundred terrorists) on Islamic State targets in Afghanistan.

Trump is at war, and he is enjoying it like nobody else.

One more Holy Week has passed, then, and we have awakened in the middle of a nightmare. The assaults in Syria were carried out, completely ignoring the U.N., and based on dubious information with respect to the use of chemical weapons by Assad in the province of Idlib. The Syrian war, which everyone anticipated would end once and for all as the northern hemisphere summer got closer, has gained new momentum. Washington has once again ended up supporting the terrorists of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group army in the field. Russian control of Syrian airspace has been called into question, and Russia itself is being held indirectly responsible for the use of chemical weapons … and this in spite of the fact that we know Russia doesn’t want to – in fact, can’t – extricate itself from this campaign, in which its internal stability is at risk because of terrorist connections in the Caucasus.

And it gets worse.

Unlike with Syria, nothing can hide the fact that mobilizing submarines and aircraft carriers in the vicinity of the Korean coast is, technically, an act of war. Washington and Pyongyang are legally at war, a war suspended by an armistice signed in 1953. In Korea, there is no possibility of a simple deterrent bombing, any hostile act whatsoever will involve an immediate North Korean attack on the South Korean capital. Seoul is located 40 km (Approximately 25 miles) from the border, and everyone knows that neither the U.S. nor Superman would be able to do anything in the first 24 to 48 hours of carnage in this city of 10 million inhabitants.

And what can we say about the Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb dropped on Afghanistan? It doesn’t matter what bombs you drop there: nothing can conceal the fact that the U.S. has lost the war in Afghanistan, just as it was lost by the British Empire, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The “mother of all bombs” may have succeeded in destroying the system of tunnels used by the Islamic State group in Afghanistan. But the winners in this will be Taliban troops who, beyond any doubt, are fighting for primacy in the country, but who detest the U.S. with every fiber of their being.

The stupidity spreads. The “mother of all bombs,” according to the story Trump himself tells us, is in reality… a warning to North Korea! Yes: the country governed by a psychotic, who is prone to executing his closest family members, tying them to missiles or the mouths of cannons. A man who has ordered five nuclear tests, has developed an intercontinental ballistic missile and, like Trump, childishly loves his armaments.

Everything is going great now in Washington and the Western capitals. Everyone is applauding the fact that the U.S. president has gone back to being what people had hoped he would be: all mention of the alleged Russian hack of the Democratic campaign has disappeared; it would appear that Putin no longer has compromising video with which to blackmail Trump. But even the most sophisticated chancelleries in the world rushed to vote to condemn, not Washington for having bombed a country without any mediation, but Syria for having committed crimes alleged by Washington, even though no evidence has been presented!

This, then, is the Trump that everyone has been waiting for: shaken by video of the bodies of infants on the Fox network, infuriated to see the suffering awakened in his favorite daughter, Ivanka, by these scenes, quick to drop the “mother of all bombs” while eating a beautiful chocolate cake with the Chinese president. Who misses Hillary, then, now that we have before us a president who can hurl his cake and eat it too?

It is to be hoped that Trump may be able to enjoy all of this, and for a long time. But the reality of the processes that he has put in motion with this caper is that wars in the real world are not at all like the wars on TV screens. And the urge to be a gunslinger, which ambushes every U.S. president, has invariably proven to be fool’s gold, and, in the end, enough rope to hang whatever respect they may have.