Among the possible ways such planning may not work out, here’s one thing Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd don’t recognize: the troops they plan to rely on to carry out the deportations of potentially millions of people are, in their own way, also migrants. After all, on average, they move from place to place every two and a half years — more if you count the rapid post-9/11 deployments and the Global War on Terror that followed, often separating families multiple times during each soldier’s tour of duty.

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen know what it means to be out of place in a new community or in a country not their own. President Trump and his crew are counting on our armed forces being able to live with forcibly taking people from their homes and separating families right here in the United States, an experience that many of them are all too familiar with. As a military spouse myself, I wonder how amenable they will be to the kinds of orders many Americans can already see coming their way.

An Uncertain Future

Donald Trump’s goals have been outlined in countless campaign speeches, rallies, and press conferences, as well as in Project 2025. According to Tara Watson and Jonathon Zars of the Brookings Institution, his administration could, in fact, do a number of different things when it comes to immigrants. One possibility would be to launch a series of high-profile mass deportation events in which the military would collaborate with federal, state, and local law enforcement, instead of leaving such tasks to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agencies typically responsible for managing migration. To do so, the federal government would have to expand its powers over local and state jurisdictions, including by imposing stiff penalties on sanctuary cities, where local officials have been instructed not to inquire about people’s immigration status or implement federal deportation orders.

Watson and Zars assume that the policies of the second Trump administration will impact a number of other vulnerable groups as well. For example, about four to five million people with temporary parole status (TPS) or a notice to appear in immigration court are seeking asylum, having fled political persecution or humanitarian disasters in their home countries. Millions of them would (at least theoretically) have to return to the situations they fled because the new administration may not grant their petitions. It could even try to repeal TPS for the approximately 850,000 individuals who already have it.

It might also reinstitute the “remain in Mexico” policy last in place in 2019, which required Central and South Americans requesting asylum to wait on the Mexican side of our southern border — a measure the Biden administration repealed due to significant safety concerns. Also at risk would be the two-year grace period granted to approximately half a million people from war-torn or politically unstable countries like Haiti, Ukraine, and Venezuela, while new people would probably no longer be admitted under that program and asylum might be denied to those caught up in this country’s backlogged immigration courts.

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Additionally, President Trump could try again to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a protected status that now covers more than half a million young people who came to this country as kids. His administration would also undoubtedly slow-walk legal paths to immigration, like the granting of student and work visas to people from China, and could institute policies that would make it ever more difficult for immigrants to access services like Medicaid and public education. His divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of this country,” has already created a climate of fear for many migrants.

A Merging of Powers

In the early 2000s, America’s post-9/11 War on Terror, the remnants of which are still underway in dozens of countries around the world, provided an impetus for the U.S. to consolidate its military, intelligence, and law enforcement entities under a behemoth new Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of government since World War II. As part of that reorganization, Customs and Border Patrol has become ever more involved in non-border-related functions like local law enforcement while benefitting from closer resource- and information-sharing relationships with federal agencies like the Pentagon.

CBP officers now use military hardware and training and work closely with Pentagon intelligence. To take just one high-profile example, consider the heroic intervention in May 2022 by both on- and off-duty federal Border Patrol agents, including several from a special search-and-rescue tactical unit, during the deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. While much has (justifiably) been made of the heroism of those individuals who stormed the building, relatively little has been said about the fact that CBP, state, and local law enforcement agents were all on the scene within minutes and that the presence of hundreds of Border Patrol officers may have actually contributed to the confusion and long period of inaction that day.

Perhaps more to the point, few questioned why Border Patrol agents were better prepared to enter an elementary school than a local police force, or why it seemed like such an obvious thing for them to do in the first place.

Given all that, consider this a distinct irony: the flip side of CBP’s speed in arriving at Uvalde is how regularly it has failed to perform a range of functions it’s supposed to carry out at the border itself in a timely fashion (or at all), especially when such functions are not combative in nature. Take the standoff in early 2024 in Shelby Park, Texas, a 2.5-mile stretch of border along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general. There, Texas Governor Greg Abbott deployed state National Guard members to prevent CBP from actually processing arriving migrants, complaining that “the only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border.” Abbott’s planned standoff marked the first time a governor had deployed a state national guard against federal orders since 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to keep black children from attending an elementary school under federal orders.

The Strange Bedfellows Who Would Implement Trump’s Desires

Military troops who would no doubt have to step in to implement migrant deportation plans as massive as Trump’s would occupy a similarly complicated position, both as outsiders on the local scene and as those charged (nominally at least) with protecting innocent lives. Stranger yet, a small but significant slice of any set of troops asked to take part in such deportations would themselves be immigrants. Five percent, or one in 20 servicemembers in our military, were not born here. And there’s nothing new about that. Since the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of noncitizens have served in America’s wars. During times of hostility, which (officially speaking) include all the years since the War on Terror began in 2001, the federal government expedited the legal path of those immigrant troops to citizenship. It remains unclear how a military that has long been diverse will respond to orders to brutalize people, some of whom may come from their very own communities.

As a military spouse and a private practice psychotherapist who treats U.S. troops, refugees, and migrants from our post-9/11 wars, I can also say that our servicemembers — all of them — are migrants of a very real sort. Culturally, our troops understand both migration and multiculturalism because they have to adapt again and again to new towns or cities where residents don’t see them as real members of their communities, where it’s hard to find doctors and childcare within the military’s anemic infrastructure, and still harder to find these services in communities about which they lack knowledge and connections. In the most challenging of such cases, servicemembers and their families end up in countries where they don’t speak the language or know anyone, and where they may encounter justifiable hostility towards their presence.

The experiences of the myriad groups I see in my practice and know in my broad military community overlap in often profound ways that bring images of immigrants to my mind. Many in such populations understand in their bones what it’s like to be the object of local attention, curiosity, even hostility when they venture out each day. They know what it means to constantly translate from your own language and world into that of a local one (or navigate life without knowledge of the native language at all). They also know what it’s like to have all too few resources to handle a medical emergency or an event like the illness or even the death of a loved one that neither the military nor local resources can help with.

I know one military family whose members struggled for two years in a foreign post because one of their children had a physical disability that neither the military nor the local educational system could accommodate, forcing the military spouse to homeschool. When that spouse came down with a severe case of Covid-19 during the pandemic, they searched long and hard for an appropriate doctor to provide outpatient care so that she didn’t have to leave her young children.

Their experiences mirror those of many I see within migrant communities of color here in the U.S., who come up short when they seek educational and health services for children with special needs, and who suffered more gravely during the Covid-19 pandemic due to overcrowded hospitals as well as social isolation and lack of enough connections to care for young family members when one got ill. It’s no wonder that two groups among us with some of the highest rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality are military families and immigrants from poor countries.

Violence Touches Us All

Broadly speaking, what those two distinctive groups have in common is that, in this century, they felt the most pressure when it came to dealing with this country’s global imperial desires, either by fighting our remarkably disastrous post-9/11 wars or by finding themselves forced to pick up and start over amid the never-ending destruction of those very wars. To end that cycle of migration-as-combat and combat-as-migration, a better world would not dream of kicking out the migrants in this country. Instead, it would be working to bring back the troops from all the places where they are currently still engaged, rather than preparing for conflicts that will only help to create more migrants.

The United States should stop organizing military “exercises” in places like Saudi Arabia and Somalia; stop training troops in countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uzbekistan; and cease drone and air strikes in Syria and Iraq, among other examples of our military involvement abroad. We should just get out. And we should start funneling some of the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve channeled annually into weapons production into our education system, healthcare, and green infrastructure here at home, so that there’s room for everyone, immigrants included, to be safe and cared for in the communities where they live.

Otherwise, if President Trump manages to realize even a modest part of the immigrant deportation goals he and his political allies have outlined, the bulk of the work of ejection will be done by those for whom it may be the most morally devastating. Many more of our troops than he could ever imagine will, I suspect, be unnerved by what they have in common with the people they’re charged with deporting from their adoptive homeland.

Yes, this may very well be wishful thinking on my part, but I do believe that, Donald Trump or not, our common humanity is likely to win out in the end. After years of studying America’s post-9/11 wars from a range of viewpoints (and listening to those deeply disturbed by their War on Terror experiences), the largest commonality I find among our troops is not a desire to take up arms or fight terrorists in distant lands, or even the experience of being personally victimized — hunted, shot, tortured, or maimed. Rather, it’s the trauma of hurting another human being. It’s wrought from looking a Taliban soldier in the eye at a checkpoint in Kabul and realizing he’s human just like you, or separating a suspected opposition fighter from his spouse and kids during an arrest. It’s the scream of a child whose parent you shot during a raid to prevent an attack on you.

In no small part, the stress of those experiences also came from having to leave your own children for months at a time, knowing that the youngest might not even remember you when you return, or telling your teenager that she has to abandon everything she knows — boyfriend, school, sports teams — to go to a new military town where no one will even know her name. Many of those involved in America’s post-9/11 wars have witnessed another’s suffering in an up-close-and-personal fashion and the ongoing nightmare they face is the possibility of hurting yet more people in all of our names.

Thanks to Donald Trump, at least some of those troops will undoubtedly face the choice of having to do it all again, this time on our own soil. Unless they pause at the memory of what that may be like, Americans could find themselves in an unrecognizable land. It will be a nightmare if, his second time in the White House, Donald Trump launches a war on terror domestically against migrants, because that would be a war on America itself.

Copyright 2025 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

This principle was demonstrated on Friday when the International Development Committee (do we even have one of those?) issued a Report on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

The committee is not a court, and noted its lack of ability to render a legal verdict, but said: “In line with a growing list of experts, we believe that there is a plausible risk that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza may have included grave violations of international humanitarian law, which has given rise to accusations of genocide.”

They add, “this Report also calls on the Government to set out further details and a timeline for the recognition of a Palestinian state — a statement of intent to match the rhetoric of this and previous Governments. This recognition, alongside safety and security for Israel, are necessary for a sustainable and long-lasting peace.”

Although there are individual congressmen who might say such a sensible thing, I can’t imagine a whole committee of our US House of Representatives coming up with such language.

The Committee is entirely correct. As I pointed out in my book, Gaza Yet Stands, the statelessness of the Palestinians is a constant obstacle to their well-being. Stateless people don’t have the right to have rights. You can make a treaty with them, like the 1993 Oslo Accords, which Israel signed off on, and then just entirely renege on it. What are they going to do? Sue?

That Palestinians have no citizenship in a state also means that there is no real reason for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adhere to the terms of the ceasefire deal his cabinet approved just before midnight on Friday. Apparently incoming president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff flew to Israel last weekend and read Netanyahu the riot act. Netanyahu blew off and humiliated Joe Biden for over 15 months, but he folded after some choice expletives from Witkoff.

Photo by @nomundodejr Jr.: https://www.pexels.com/photo/thames-river-panorama-with-big-ben-and-westminster-bridge-london-england-17487791/

I’m not sure why, but Trump appears to have felt that it was important for his image that the Gaza War wind down before his inauguration, and Netanyahu decided not to cross him, even though the Israeli cabinet did not want this deal and Netanyahu did not want the deal. The members of the far, far right Jewish Power bloc, the Israel equivalent of Neo-Nazis, resigned in protest, including Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The problem is that the long 3-stage peace process in Gaza will only succeed if both Hamas and the Israeli government abide by it. And we can’t be sure that Trump or Witkoff will keep the pressure on.

Moreover, when they speak about Palestine, many US congressmen and senators appear to have a nervous breakdown and they start shouting AIPAC slogans and denigrating and dehumanizing Palestinians, so you can’t expect this Congress to play a positive role in upholding the peace process.

If Washington loses interest or turns even more malicious than usual, and given that the Palestinians are stateless and without any power or leverage, then Netanyahu can restart his extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza at any time.

The UK parliamentary committee continued, “We call on the Government to treat the removal of Palestinian civilians from the West Bank, through co-ordinated destruction of property and settler violence, as forcible transfer, which is illegal under international law, rather than simply displacement. Finally, we restate our view that it is imperative that UNRWA — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — be permitted to carry on its UN-mandated role across the Occupied Palestinian Territory unimpeded, in the light of laws passed recently by the Israeli Knesset that will effectively ban UNRWA from the region.”

Beyond Gaza, the committee is worried about the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from Occupied Territories, including the Palestinian West Bank, and urges the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer to recognize these actions as severe violations of international law. [They violate the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.]

Member of Parliament for the Labour Party Sarah Champion heads the committee, and has a long record of speaking out about Palestine — and of visiting there.

Although my respect for MLK is enduring, when it comes to that upward-trending curve connecting past to present, his view of human history has proven to be all too hopeful. At best, history’s actual course remains exceedingly difficult to decipher. Some might say it’s downright devious (and, when you look around this embattled planet of ours today, from the Ukraine to the Middle East, deeply disturbing).

Let’s consider a specific, very recent segment of the past. I’m thinking of the period stretching from my birth year of 1947 to this very moment. An admission: I, too, once believed that the unfolding events during those long decades I was living through told a discernible story. Although not without its zigs and zags, so I was convinced once upon a time, that story had both direction and purpose. It pointed toward an ultimate destination — so politicians, pundits, and prophets like Dr. King assured us. In fact, embracing the essentials of that story was then considered nothing less than a prerequisite for situating yourself in the ongoing stream of history. It offered something to grab hold of.

Sadly enough, all of this turned out to be bunk.

That became abundantly clear in the years after 1989 when the Soviet Union began to collapse and the U.S. was left alone as a great power on Planet Earth. The decades since then have carried a variety of labels. The post-Cold War order came and went, succeeded by the post-9/11 era, and then the Global War on Terror which, even today, in largely unattended places like Africa, drags on in anonymity.

In those precincts where opinions are manufactured and marketed, an overarching theme informed each of those labels: the United States was, by definition, the sun around which all else orbited. In what was known as an age of unipolarity or, more modestly, the unipolar moment, we Americans presided as the sole superpower and indispensable nation of Planet Earth, exercising full-spectrum dominance. In the pithy formulation of columnist Max Boot, the United States had become the planet’s “Big Enchilada.” The future was ours to mold, shape, and direct. Some influential thinkers insisted — may even have believed — that History itself had actually “ended.”

Alas, events exposed that glorious moment as fleeting, if not altogether illusory. For several reasons — Washington’s propensity for needless war certainly offers a place to start — things did not pan out as expected. Assurances of peace, prosperity, and victory over the foe (whoever the foe it was at that moment) turned out to be false. By 2016, that fact had registered on Americans in sufficient numbers for them to elect as “leader of the Free World” someone hitherto chiefly known as a TV host and real estate developer of dubious credentials.

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The seemingly impossible had occurred: The American people (or at least the Electoral College) had delivered Donald Trump to the pinnacle of American politics.

It was as if a clown had taken possession of the White House.

Shocked and appalled, millions of citizens found this turn of events hard to believe and impossible to accept. President Trump promptly proceeded to fulfill their worst expectations. By almost any of the measures habitually employed to evaluate political leadership, he flopped as a commander-in-chief. To my mind, he was an embarrassment.

Yet, however inexplicably, Trump remained to many Americans — growing numbers, it would turn out — a source of hope and inspiration. If given sufficient time, he would redeem the nation. History had summoned him to do so, so his followers believed, fervently and adamantly.

In 2020, the anti-Trump Establishment did manage to scratch out one final chance to show that it was not entirely bankrupt. Yet sending to the White House an elderly white male who embodied the politics of the Old School merely postponed Trump’s Second Coming.

No doubt Joe Biden was seasoned and well-intentioned, but he proved to possess little or nothing of Trump’s mystifying appeal. And when he stumbled, the remnant of the Establishment quickly and brutally abandoned him.

So, four years on, Americans have reversed course. They have decided to give Trump — now elevated to the status of folk hero in the eyes of many — another chance.

What does this head-scratching turn of events signify? Could History be trying to tell us something?

The End of the End of History

Allow me to suggest that those who counted History out did so prematurely. It’s time to consider the possibility that all too many of the very smart, very earnest, and very well-compensated people who take it upon themselves to interpret the signs of our times have been radically misinformed. Simply put: they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Viewed in retrospect, perhaps the collapse of communism did not signify the turning point of cosmic significance so many of them then imagined. Add to that another possibility: Perhaps liberal democratic consumer capitalism (also known as the American Way of Life) does not, in fact, define the ultimate destination of humankind.

It just might be that History is once again on the move — or simply that it never really “ended” in the first place. And as usual, it appears to have tricks up its sleeve, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House arguably one of them.

More than a few of my fellow citizens see his election as a cause for ultimate despair — and I get that. But to saddle Trump with responsibility for the predicament in which our nation now finds itself vastly overstates his historical significance.

Let’s start with this: Despite his extraordinary aptitude for self-promotion, Trump has shown little ability to anticipate, shape, or even forestall events. Yes, he is distinctly a blowhard, who makes grandiose promises that rarely pan out. (If you want documentation, take your choice among Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, Trump Taj Mahal, and even Trump: the Game.) Barring a conversion akin to the Apostle Paul’s on his journey to Damascus, we can expect more of the same from his second term as president.

Yet the yawning gap between his over-the-top MAGA rhetoric and what he’s really delivered should be instructive. It trains a spotlight on what the “end of history” has actually yielded: lofty unfulfilled promises that have given way to unexpected and often distinctly undesired consequences.

That adverse judgment hardly applies to Trump alone. In reality, it applies to every president since George H.W. Bush unveiled his “new world order” back in 1991, with his son George W. Bush’s infamous 2003 “Mission Accomplished” claim serving as its exclamation point.

Since then, at the national level, American politics, especially presidential politics, has become a scam. What happens in Washington, whether in the White House or on Capitol Hill, no more reflects the hopes of the Founders of the American republic than Black Friday and Cyber Monday express “the reason for the Season.”

In that sense, while Trump’s return to the White House may not be worth celebrating, it is entirely appropriate. It may well be History’s way of saying: “Hey, you! Wake up! Pay attention!”

The Big Enchilada No More

In 1962, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson remarked that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” Although a bit snarky, his assessment was apt.

Today, one can easily imagine some senior Chinese or Indian (or even British) diplomat offering a similar judgment about the United States. America’s imperial pretensions have run aground. Yet the loudest and most influential establishment voices — Donald Trump notably excepted — continue to insist otherwise. With apparent sincerity, President Biden all too typically clung to the notion that the United States does indeed remain the planet’s “indispensable nation.”

Events say otherwise. Consider the arena of war. Once upon a time, professing a commitment to peace, the United States sought to avoid war. When armed conflict became unavoidable, America sought to win, quickly and neatly. Today, in contrast, this country seemingly adheres to an informal doctrine of “bomb-and-bankroll.” Since three days after the 9/11 attacks (with but a single negative vote), when Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, war has become a fixture of presidential politics, with a compliant Congress issuing the checks. As for the Constitution, when it comes to war powers, it has become a dead letter.

In recent years, U.S. military casualties have been blessedly few, but outcomes have been ambiguous at best and abysmal — think Afghanistan — at worst. If the United States has played an indispensable role in these years, it’s been in underwriting disaster, spending billions of dollars on catastrophic wars that were, from the moment they were launched, of distinctly questionable relevance to this country’s wellbeing.

In his inconsistent, erratic, and bloviating way, Donald Trump — almost alone among figures on the national stage — has appeared to find this objectionable and has proposed a radical course change. Under his leadership, he insists, the Big Enchilada will rise to new heights of glory.

To be clear, the likelihood of the incoming administration making good on the myriad promises contained within its MAGA agenda is close to zero. When it actually comes to setting basic U.S. policy on a more sensible course, Trump is manifestly clueless. Buying Greenland, taking the Panama Canal, or even making Canada our 51st state will not restore our ailing Republic to health. As for the team of lackeys Trump is assembling to assist him in governing, let us simply note that there is not a single figure of Acheson’s stature among them.

Still, here we may find reason for at least a glimmer of hope. For far too long — all my life, in fact — Americans have looked to the White House for salvation. Those expectations have met with repeated, seemingly endless disappointment.

Vowing to Make America Great Again, Donald Trump has, in his own strange fashion, vaulted those hopes to a new level. That he, too, will disappoint his followers, no less the rest of us, is, of course, foreordained. Yet his failure might — just might — bring Americans to rethink and renew their democracy.

Listen: History is signaling to us. Whether we can successfully interpret those signals remains to be seen. In the meantime, brace yourself for what promises to be a distinctly bumpy ride.

Copyright 2025 Andrew Bacevich

Tomdispatch.com

Learning on the night of November 5th that Donald Trump had probably been reelected president certainly left me feeling stupefied, with a sense that I’d somehow sustained a number of heavy blows to the head. The experience was undoubtedly amplified by the fact that I’d spent the previous three months in Reno, Nevada, as part of a seven-day-a-week political effort to prevent just such an outcome, along with a crew of valiant UNITE-HERE union members and more than 1,000 volunteer canvassers organized by Seed the Vote.

Still, I hoped that battered feeling would wear off after our campaign office was dismantled, the rental car returned, and the extended-stay hotel room vacated. Surely, once reunited with my beloved partner (and a pair of disgruntled cats), I’d find the disorienting pain of repeated shocks beginning to dissipate.

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

In fact, it’s only gotten worse, as Trump has rolled out his picks and plans for the new administration. As old radio DJs used to shout: the hits just keep on coming! Unfortunately, these hits aren’t rock-n-roll records; they’re blows to the collective consciousness of those of us who worked to prevent Trump’s reelection, and perhaps even to a few of those who voted for him.

Ethics-deficient Matt Gaetz for attorney general? Bam! Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer, to run the Department of Homeland Security? Pow! Wait, Matt Gaetz is out! Now, it’s Pam Bondi, the woman who accepted an illegal $25,000 campaign contribution from the now-defunct Trump Foundation for attorney general. Bam! Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to run health and human services? Bang! Convicted (and Trump-pardoned) felon Charles Kushner (Jared’s dad) for ambassador to France? Take that, Emmanuel Macron! Wham! And then there’s a double-whammy for those of us who spent a couple of decades opposing this country’s Global War on Terror, as we watch the liberal media (even the British Guardian) lionize old neocon war criminals like John Bolton and Dick Cheney for their opposition to Trump this time around. Whack! No wonder our ears are ringing!

As one uppercut after another left us reeling, a whole flurry of stiff jabs followed in the form of Trump’s announcements of new territorial ambitions for this country. He wants the Panama Canal back. And Greenland, which was never ours to begin with. As he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” L’état, c’est Donald Trump, apparently.

O Canada! Yes, he wants that, too! “It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada,” he wrote on Truth Social. Governor Trudeau, really? Bernie Sanders jokingly probed the possible benefits of a U.S.-Canada assimilation, asking on X, “Does that mean that we can adopt the Canadian health care system and guarantee health care to all, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and spend 50% less per capita on healthcare?”

The Referee Goes AWOL

One problem with being punch-drunk is that not only do you feel funny, but you begin to think everything else is a little funny, too. Demanding the Panama Canal and Greenland, not to mention Canada, is the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a Saturday Night Live skit. As it turns out, though, it’s neither a caricature nor a joke. In fact, Donald Trump has transformed this presidential transition period into a Theater of the Absurd performance. And while some of his most outrageous statements may indeed turn out to be mere political theater, in the post-November 5th world, we won’t be waiting for Godot, but for the other shoe to drop.

And that’s undoubtedly been part of Trump’s point with his recent flurry of absurdities. He’s already testing how far he can go without meeting any meaningful resistance. How hard can he hit (and how far below the belt) before the referee blows the whistle and stops the fight? Or is there even a referee anymore?

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Our problem (and the rest of the world’s, too) is that the fight is rigged and anyone who might have refereed it is either too corrupt, too terrified, or too absent to do the job. Don’t count on the courts, not after the Supreme Court granted the soon-to-be sitting president more or less blanket immunity for anything he does on the job. Too many Republican members of Congress, never known for possessing spines of steel, now seem perfectly happy to relinquish their lawmaking powers to unelected First Buddy Elon Musk, ducking and covering when he threatens their reelection prospects with primary fights.

With Congress and the judiciary unwilling or unable to do the job, the executive branch will undoubtedly be largely left to referee itself. Foxes and hen houses, anyone? In fact, at least since Ronald Reagan, no president has sought to reduce the power of the executive, while the once-fringe theory of a “unitary executive” has increasingly come to underpin the moves of successive administrations, locating ever more power in the person of the president. That principle was fundamental to Project 2025, the transition program the Heritage Foundation prepared for the next Trump presidency. The central premise of its key document, Mandate for Leadership, is that all executive government functions belong under direct presidential control. That control would extend even to those offices Congress made independent, such as the Federal Reserve, various special prosecutors and inspectors general, and agencies like the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency. This is the reasoning behind Project 2025’s plan to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with Trumpist political appointees, who will serve only at the pleasure of the president.

During his recent campaign, Trump disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025 or its architects. But today, the project and the key individuals connected to it are once again openly in his good graces. In fact, he plans to restore one of its key architects, Russell Vought, to his old job directing the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, a low-profile agency with tremendous power. The National Archives describes it this way:

“The core mission of OMB is to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch. OMB is the largest component of the Executive Office of the President. It reports directly to the President and helps a wide range of executive departments and agencies across the Federal Government to implement the commitments and priorities of the President.”

In other words, the head of the most powerful office in the executive branch will, under President Donald Trump, be someone whose understanding of the role of president is frankly monarchical — that is, the government of a single, all-powerful ruler.

Still Standing — and Not Standing Still

So, if we can’t count on this country’s vaunted checks and balances to either check or balance the power of an absurdist president, where else can we look?

Well, there’s the media. Its freedom is enshrined in the first article of the Bill of Rights and the rest of us must do what we can to protect journalists (whether from U.S. missiles flying in Gaza, or Trumpian threats at home). Of course, it’s also worth remembering journalist A.J. Liebling’s classic observation that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Such prescient words first appeared in his 1960 New Yorker article about the disappearance of competing newspapers in various markets. I doubt he would be at all surprised, more than 60 years later, by the spectacle of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times preventing their editorial staffs from publishing pre-election endorsements of Kamala Harris. I wonder what he would have made of ABC’s abject $15-million surrender to Donald Trump’s patently frivolous defamation lawsuit.

A free media will remain crucial in the coming period, but though it pains my writer’s soul to admit it, there are limits to the power of the written (or even the spoken) word. To check a power-mad president and his fascist handlers, those of us who are already punch-drunk but still standing in the ring will have to find new ways to amplify our commitment to freedom and human dignity through collective action.

We can undoubtedly look to existing organizations like the fighting unions of today’s reinvigorated labor movement for guidance and inspiration. We can value our own narratives in the fashion of Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify, who creates the space for women to tell our stories in Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. We can work with any number of national progressive electoral organizations like Seed the Vote, Swing Left, or Indivisible. We can support organizations dedicated to defending the groups that even many mainstream Democrats are ready to blame for their loss of the White House — among them undocumented immigrants and transgender folks.

Seeing Negative Spaces

I really do believe what I just wrote. We must continue learning and practicing the skills, discipline, and joys of collective action. However, I wonder whether there’s something else we — each of us individually — need to do as well in the new age of Trump.

Over the last year, I’ve been trying to learn to draw. As I struggle with line and value, and my never-very-impressive hand-eye coordination, I remember how my father, a painter and illustrator, used to say that he could teach anyone the basic skills. He’s been gone for more than a decade now and, though I’m glad he didn’t live to see Donald Trump in the White House, I’m sad that I never asked him to teach me to draw. So, I’ve turned elsewhere.

For all its horrors, the Internet contains wonderful resources when it comes to learning anything — from how to knit to how to interpret that annoying little illuminated wrench on your car’s dashboard. Hundreds of thousands of generous people freely share their hard-won knowledge there with strangers around the world. One of them is Julia Bausenhardt, a German artist and illustrator. I’ve learned so much from her many video lessons on sketching the natural world. Above all, I’ve learned that drawing is as much about what you do with your eyes as with your hands. It’s about learning to look.

Like most drawing teachers, Julia emphasizes the value of observing “negative space.” If you want to understand, for example, how a tangle of overlapping leaves and blossoms relate to each other, take a look at what isn’t there. Consider the negative spaces around the shapes you’re drawing.

I wonder whether those of us seeking to forestall an autocratic takeover of this country would benefit from focusing on the negative spaces around the Trump phenomenon, looking for what isn’t there as much as what is. I suspect that’s what the historian Timothy Snyder is doing when he counsels those resisting Trump not to “obey in advance.” There’s no reason to fill in the space around the future autocrat with our own obedience before it’s even demanded. Let’s decorate it with resistance instead.

Similarly, in the spaces around the program Trump’s handlers have devised (most explicitly, Project 2025), we can discern what’s missing from it. Surrounding its blueprints for destroying public education (the foundation of democratic life), decimating labor unions, and resurrecting long-buried regimes of child labor, forced marriage, and childbearing we can discern negative space.

What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

We must do this work collectively in organized ways, but we can also do it individually in small ways. As I contemplate another four horrific years of Donald Trump, I’m also thinking about the negative spaces of daily life. I’m thinking about small daily interactions with strangers and acquaintances. I’m thinking about the in-between times that surround the events of our lives — “negative time,” if you will. In the era of Trump 2.0, I hope to fill my negative time waiting in lines or sitting in yet another endless meeting with small acts of attention and respect. Those, too, can be acts of resistance.

Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

As Joe Biden hobbles into… well, if not the future, then some unknown past, HE looms over us, the political equivalent of a giant armed drone about to be back in the skies of our lives. Of all the Americans whom, once upon a time, I couldn’t have dreamed of being in the White House, Donald J. Trump would have been at the top of my list. No longer, of course. Sometimes I even imagine calling my parents back from the dead and trying to explain President Trump (twice!) to them. They would be… well, flabbergasted is far too modest a word for it, even if, to put him in a context they would have understood, I had compared him to a nightmarish figure of their own time: Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

My mother was a political and theatrical caricaturist in the 1950s. Of all the drawings of hers I still have, the one that, grimly enough, I keep propped up near my desk in the room where I work — call me a masochist, if you will — is a caricature she did for the New York Post (in the pre-Murdoch days when it was still a liberal publication) of that grimmest of senators of her era, Joe McCarthy. He was the fellow who claimed that the State Department contained hundreds — yes, hundreds! — of communists. She drew that eerily smiling portrait in the spring of 1954 at the time of the Army-McCarthy hearings when he insisted that the U.S. military, too, was filled with commies and, in the process, essentially took himself down.

I was then nine years old and Senator McCarthy’s face was quite literally the first one I ever saw on a black-and-white TV in my house after the Post hired my mom to draw those televised congressional hearings. On opening our front door and walking in from school on whatever spring day that was, the face on that new TV screen was… well, the political precursor to D.J.T., although McCarthy looked far more like the evil monster he was than The Donald does. (No yellow hair and burnished red face for him.)

And yes, he was indeed a monster (and not just an anti-communist maniac, but an antisemitic one, too). Here’s the difference, though: he could indeed wound officials in Washington, as well as figures in the entertainment industry and elsewhere, destroying careers, but he was a senator and no more than that. In other words, he never truly entered the ultimate realms of American, not to speak of global, power.

Unlike Donald Trump, he was never chosen to be president, no less reelected to that powerful position in an era when, thanks in part to this country’s Global War on Terror, whoever holds that office has become a far more powerful figure in the American political landscape. Senator McCarthy never had a significant hand in creating the national budget. He undoubtedly couldn’t have imagined taking stances like insisting that this country should possess Greenland or repossess the Panama Canal, no less referring to Canada as “the 51st state” and its leader as “Governor Justin Trudeau,” as You Know Who did only recently. He could never have ordered the U.S. military to do anything, no less potentially round up and deport masses of immigrants (though, had he been alive in 2017, he might at least have agreed with Donald Trump that a group of neo-Nazi and white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, included some “very fine people”).

Strangely enough, however, they had more in common than just a certain grim similarity in style, belligerence, and subject matter. The two of them were also linked by a single adviser, one Roy Cohn, who helped them both find their all-too-aggressive footing in this ever stranger world of ours.

A New “Golden” Age

Now, of course, we’re about to face the modern Joe McCarthy the third time around (counting, of course, his loss in 2020 that he’s never stopped disputing). He will return to the White House on a planet that, in more than one sense, is all too literally going to hell in a handbasket. I mean, just imagine this: in the last election, 49.7% of American voters and a striking number of energy industry funders decided to send back to the Oval Office a man whose tagline was, above all else, “drill, baby, drill” — a phrase that, in reality, should have been “heat, baby, heat,” or “destroy, baby, destroy,” in a world that’s already been warming to the boiling point, with year after year of unprecedented high temperatures even when he wasn’t in office. We’re talking about a candidate who has openly sworn that, on Day One back in the White House, he will direct his government to do everything in its power to turn this planet into an all-too-literal hothouse.

So, expect a presidency focused — to the extent that Donald Trump can truly focus on anything (except, of course, himself) — on drilling, drilling, drilling for oil and natural gas, and so adding significantly more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (and waters) of Planet Earth. Which means more wildfires, droughts, unprecedented storms, you name it. And that, of course, is just to begin to lay out the nightmare to come. And don’t forget that, at least until (as predictably will happen) Trump turns on him, it looks like we’ll have as co-president the richest person on earth, that potential future first trillionaire Elon Musk. We’re talking, of course, about the fellow who only recently and all too symbolically gave his support to Germany’s rising anti-immigrant neo-Nazi party, the Alternative für Deutschland. (“Only the AfD can save Germany.”)

Yes, Donald Trump is guaranteed to make this not only the hottest planet around but a planet of billionaires living in a new golden age (both of their wealth and of a world in flames).

When you think about it (as so many American voters obviously didn’t) on this ever hotter, more arid, more wildly stormy planet of ours, we (and I think under the circumstances I should put that in quotes) — “we” voted back into office someone who will leave Senator Joe McCarthy in the dust of history when it comes to utter malevolence and destructiveness. Consider it guaranteed that he will go a long way toward tearing both this country and this world apart. Indeed, he truly does give the all-American decline of the United States and this planet wild new meaning.

Unlike Senator McCarthy, he won’t just malignantly take out a few imagined bad guys, but potentially all of us. In such a context, four years of (or do I mean in?) hell will have a new, anything but metaphorical meaning in the wake (not an inappropriate word under the circumstances) of the year that will undoubtedly prove to have been the hottest ever and which, in the years to come, will undoubtedly be left in — once again! — the dustbin of history. Oh, and with the help of Elon Musk (or as Bernie Sanders calls him “President Elon Musk”), he only recently tried (and failed) to ensure that Americans who were recently clobbered by two horrific hurricanes that had been fed mightily by the ever more severely overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico would not get any further government help in the recovery process.

Consider it no small thing that, 70 years after Senator Joe McCarthy went down in flames (and then essentially drank himself to death), an all-too-fierce update of him (and what an update he is!) will once again be in the White House, backed — imagine this, Joe! — by the richest man on Planet Earth, a possible future speaker of the House of Representatives, Trump’s ultimate attack dog — or do I mean (thanks to Space X) the commander in chief of outer space? — Elon R. Musk, who controls a world of commentary, communication, and entertainment that would have been inconceivable on the planet where black-and-white TVs were a wonder to behold.

Make America Gross Again

Imagining the future has never been among humanity’s greatest skills. With that in mind let me nonetheless suggest that Donald Trump’s return to the all-too-grimly Grayer House is a sign of how this country and this planet are preparing to go down big time. The second time around, consider him the functional definition of decline — even if the U.S. does get Greenland and the Panama Canal in the bargain. (Okay, I’m just joking or do I mean Donalding?) In fact, think of MAGA the second time around as Make America Gross Again.

There have, of course, been distinctly bad times in this country before. Consider, for instance, 1968, the year of the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, of rioting and destruction in American cities, and of the horror of the ongoing war in Vietnam and the election of — god save us! — Richard M. Nixon as president. Still, it remains hard to face the second round (or is it the 102nd round?) of Donald J. Trump.

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Yes, starting on January 20th, you can plan on watching the country that, in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, American officials came to think of as “the sole superpower” on planet Earth, begin to come apart at the seams on a planet that, unfortunately, is now doing the same. After all, a Europe increasingly threatened by rightist regimes seems itself at the edge of a similar reality (while, of course, Donald Trump functionally dismisses the NATO alliance), even as the nightmarish war in Ukraine spins on (and on and on), while the Middle East seems to be in a stunning process of disintegration.

It’s important, in fact, to put Donald Trump in a global context since he was anything but solely responsible for either the climate or war chaos that’s been increasing for all too long with or without him. What he represents, however, is the coming apart at the seams of that once-upon-a-time sole superpower and that’s no small thing in what still passes for human (or perhaps I mean inhuman) history.

And don’t expect any better when he takes on what passes (even if not very well these days) for the rising superpower on Planet Earth, China, tariff by tariff. Believe me, it won’t be pretty, economically, politically, or even potentially militarily to see who trumps whom in that global showdown between the two powers now putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other countries on this planet.

In short, we’re living in a world of increasingly human-made chaos (with a distinct helping hand from nature) that’s about to experience an occupant of the White House who should be considered President Chaos. You know, the man who won the 2024 election by “a landslide” (or so he claims) and is, as Senator Bernie Sanders has suggested, moving us ever closer to oligarchy and authoritarianism. Under the circumstances, don’t be surprised if, in our future, lurks an even more devastating set of landslides due to… yes, among other things, climate change.

So, thank you, President Chaos (and, for the time being, Elon) for offering such a helping hand in putting us on the path to an all too literal hell on Earth.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

In April 2019, Jimmy Carter told his church congregation in Georgia that President Trump had called him for advice about China. Carter said he told Trump that China was economically overtaking the United States as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy because the United States had spent decades wasting trillions of dollars to fight endless wars, while China had instead focused on economic development and lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of extreme poverty. “China has not wasted a single penny on war,” Carter said, “and that’s why they’re ahead of us, in almost every way.”

The next day, the White House confirmed that the two presidents “had a very good telephone conversation about President Trump’s stance on trade with China and numerous other topics.”

Some of Trump’s statements during the election campaign suggest that he hasn’t forgotten Carter’s advice. At the very least, he got the message that peace would be good for America, and that a lot of Americans understand that. Majorities of Americans have long supported a ceasefire in Gaza, and a plurality now support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, too. Trump promised to deliver on both. He even said that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, based on his good relations with leaders in Russia and Ukraine.

Americans may be more worried about problems closer to home than the Middle East or Ukraine, but President Carter connected the dots between U.S. war-making and our quality of life in America.

“And I think the difference is, if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover,” Carter explained to his congregation. “We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.”

What Carter described to Trump is the classic choice between “guns and butter” that faces every society. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States was a rising economic power, like China today. Europe’s imperial powers destroyed each other in the First World War, leaving even the victors, Britain and France, with multibillion dollar debts to J.P. Morgan and the U.S. Treasury. The United States’ economic success made it the world’s banker and industrial leader and gave it a decisive role in the history of the 20th century. 

Today, it is the United States that has an unprecedented national debt of $36 trillion, and our military budget consumes 56% of federal discretionary spending, putting the squeeze on all our other needs. But we can still enjoy shared prosperity and a brighter future if Trump can do as Carter advised him and wean our government off its addiction to war.

So why are we not reassured by Trump’s promises to make peace and put America first? There are three things that worry us: his first-term track record; his second-term cabinet picks; and his aggressive rhetoric since the election (as opposed to what he said on the campaign trail).

Let’s start with his track record. Despite loud promises to tackle the entrenched interests of the “Deep State” and to “Drain the Swamp,” Trump’s first term was four years of Christmas Days for billionaires and corporate interests, starting with the military-industrial complex. In FY2025 inflation-adjusted dollars, Trump spent an average of $292 billion per year on Pentagon “investment” accounts, or payments to weapons makers and other military suppliers. That was a 24% increase over Obama’s second term.

“Carter & Trump,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

Trump’s record tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies was not balanced by any cuts in military spending, which was as much of a sacred cow to him as to Bush, Obama and Biden. This toxic combination blew up the national debt, leaving nothing in the kitty for improving education, healthcare, public transportation or any of our society’s other critical needs. That tax cut will expire in a year’s time, but Trump has made it clear that he intends to give even greater tax breaks to his billionaire buddies.

Trump deserves credit for not starting any new wars during his first term, but his escalations of Bush’s and Obama’s wars made his first year in office in 2017 the heaviest year of U.S. and allied bombing since the First Gulf War in 1991, dropping more than 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. 

Many Americans remember Trump’s shocking statement that “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” What the U.S. corporate media swept under the rug was that the Iraqi forces who captured the bombed out ruins of Islamic State’s stronghold in Mosul’s Old City took Trump at his word and killed all the survivors, including women and children, just as Israel is doing in parts of Gaza today. Maybe now Trump can understand that normalizing war crimes only leads to more war crimes, not to peace or stability.

When it comes to Trump’s new cabinet picks, he might have jettisoned some of the worst hawks in his last coterie, such as John Bolton, but some of his nominees for  top foreign policy jobs are awful, including Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth. 

Tulsi Gabbard is a more encouraging choice as National Intelligence Director, but as a House member, she voted for two thirds of Obama’s and Trump’s military spending bills, and was always a pushover for expensive new weapon systems. As we asked when she ran for president in 2020, which Tulsi Gabbard will we see in her new job? The one who opposes regime change wars and the new Cold War with Russia, or the one who couldn’t say no to nuclear-armed cruise missiles in 2014, 2015 or 2016? And who will Trump listen to? Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance, who is more non-interventionist, or warmongers Rubio and Waltz?

We don’t want to place too much stock in Trump’s often contradictory public statements, but he has sounded very hawkish lately. If you believe everything Trump says, he wants to buy Greenland, invade Mexico to fight immigrants and drug gangs, annex Canada as the 51st state, put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and seize the Panama Canal and close it to China. In Trump’s last term he badgered NATO countries to increase their military spending to 2 percent of GDP, but now he is calling on them to spend a staggering 5 percent, far more than the 3.1 percent of GDP that the U.S. spent in 2024.

This is a test for the American people. Do we want a showman, tough guy president, playing ringmaster of the corporate media circus? Do we want a leader who threatens to invade Canada, Mexico, Panama (again) and Greenland, like an American Netanyahu dreaming of a Western Greater Israel? Or should we demand a president who really puts America First? A president who makes peace in Ukraine and the Middle East? A president who finally starts bringing our troops home from those 800 foreign military bases all over the world? A president who can look at a map and see that Guantanamo is in Cuba and the Golan Heights are in Syria? 

As Jimmy Carter told Trump, by making peace and renouncing war and militarism he can actually put America First, save trillions of dollars and invest in America. The Democrats have had their chances to do right by the American people and they’ve blown it so many times we’ve lost count. So the ball’s in Trump’s court. Will he follow Carter’s sage advice?

The blame game for such doomsday fears ranges far and wide. Many pinpoint the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to grant immunity to presidents for their core official acts, essentially removing any restraints on Trump’s agenda of retribution and revenge. Some, like Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, see loopholes in the law as the basis for their concern about the future and are urging Congress to pass legislation that will place additional constraints on the deployment of the military on American soil. Others argue that the Constitution itself is the problem. In his new book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky even suggests that it may be time for a new constitution.

But those involved in the fear and blame game might do well to take a step back and reflect for a moment on how we got here. Today’s crisis has been evolving for so many years now. In fact, much (though admittedly, not all) of what we’re witnessing today might simply be considered an escalation of the dire turn that this country took after the attacks of September 11, 2001, nearly a quarter of a century ago. 

“Quaint” and “Obsolete”

It was January 2002 when White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales used the two words “quaint and obsolete,” whose echoes remain eerily with us to this very day (and seemingly beyond). The occasion was a debate taking place at the highest levels of the administration of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. By then, this country had invaded Afghanistan and authorized the opening of a new detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, ominously offshore of American justice, for captives of what already was being called the Global War on Terror. Two weeks after the first prisoners arrived at that prison camp on January 11th, administration officials were already wondering which, if any, laws should apply when it came to the treatment of such prisoners.

Gonzales, who was to become the attorney general in Bush’s second term, laid out the options for the president. At issue was whether the Geneva Conventions — a set of treaties established in the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War — applied to the United States in its treatment of any prisoners from its war on terror.

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In a memo to President Bush, Gonzales noted that Department of Justice lawyers had already concluded, when it came to al-Qaeda and Taliban (Afghan insurgents in 2001, now in charge of the country) captives, the answer was no. Gonzales agreed, stating that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war.” The laws of war, he told the president, were “obsolete” in the current context and the laws and norms requiring humane treatment for enemy prisoners had been “render[ed] quaint,” given this new kind of war.  Accordingly, the Bush administration took the position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners they had already captured. As a result, in the years to come, the indefinite and arbitrary detention of about 780 men would be institutionalized and disregard for the law would become a regular, if secret, part of the war on terror — an approach that would lead to the practice of torture at what came to be known as CIA “black sites” globally.

Nor would that be the only situation in which old laws were deemed outdated on national security grounds. 

The Wider Framework

At the heart of such a rejection of the law was the determination that the president had primary, if not ultimate, authority when it came to national security. As Princeton historian Julian Zelizer has put it, top Bush administration officials “claimed that executive power was essential to fighting the war.” Members of Congress generally agreed and facilitated the shift to ever more solitary executive power in the name of war, setting a template for yielding some of its constitutional and statutory powers in matters of war to the president. One week after 9/11, Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that granted the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”  

Subsequently, other laws were bent, bypassed, or even broken in the name of keeping the nation safe. Congress also further enhanced the powers of the executive by passing the USA Patriot Act which, among other things, weakened the Fourth Amendment’s protections against the surveillance of American citizens. Prior to 9/11, such protections had remained strong. After 9/11, as Brown’s Costs of War Project reports, “These mass surveillance programs allow[ed] the U.S. government to warrantlessly and ‘incidentally’ vacuum up Americans’ communications, metadata and content, and store their information in data centers and repositories,” sacrificing standing protections in the name of greater security.

Nor would that be the end of the matter. In the name of national security, the country’s law enforcement entities would also turn their backs on prohibitions against discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin as laid out, for example, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a Costs of War Project report summed it up, the “Special Registration” requirement “announced in 2002 required all males from a list of Arab and Muslim countries [to] report to the government to register and be fingerprinted.” According to the ACLU, that program (known as NSEERS) would end up affecting foreign nationals from 25 countries.

Worse yet, such deviations from constitutional protections and the law did not come to an end with the Bush administration. Although President Barack Obama would issue an executive order restoring adherence to the laws banning torture and end the NSEERS program (which, the ACLU noted, “did not achieve a single terrorism-related conviction” despite “tens of thousands of people having been forced to register”), there were other key areas in which his administration did not reverse past policy — anything but, in fact. “Early in [President Obama’s] administration,” as historian Kathryn Olmstead notes, “the new president signaled his intention to continue Bush’s surveillance policies.” Though “surprised by the extent of the spying” in the domestic intelligence program, Obama’s team nonetheless “quickly agreed to continue Bush’s mass surveillance program.”

In addition, by escalating a global drone program of “targeted killings,” the Obama administration would forge its own path toward weakening legal protections in the name of national security. During the Obama years, on what came to be known as “Terror Tuesdays,” national security officials presented the president with a list of names, all potential targets to be captured or killed. (It would come to be known in the media as “the kill list.”) As NPR summed it up, Obama, “wishing to be seen as a restraining influence,” would weigh in on the final list of names. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush.”

Leaving those programs on the table for the next president would be — and remains — a prescription for disaster.

Trump and the Tactics of the War on Terror

Trump’s first presidency combined the strategies of Bush and Obama when it came to the war on terror. Though it was little noted then, he launched an unprecedented number of drone strikes, tripling Obama’s numbers by 2022, including the targeted assassination of a high-ranking Iranian official, Revolutionary Guard leader Qassim Soleimani. Political scientist Micah Zenko noted that, despite his claims of being non-interventionist, Trump proved to be “more interventionist than Obama: in authorizing drone strikes and special operations raids in non-battlefield settings (namely, in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia).” 

The 45th president’s disregard for legal restraints took other war-on-terror policies to a new level. Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump had issued an executive order that came to be known as “the Muslim Ban,” forbidding citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries entry to the United States. And like his predecessor, he showed little interest in sunsetting the expansive surveillance authority he had inherited.

In fact, Trump brought the tools and tactics designed for the war on terror to the “home front,” notably in his approach to dissent. He attacked Black Lives Matter protesters as enemies, labeling them “terrorists.” He made discrimination against foreigners a national policy at the onset of his first presidency, announcing his plans to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and promising to institute policies that intentionally separated migrant children from their families. He even threatened to widen the uses of Guantánamo: “…[W]e are keeping [Guantanamo] open … and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” Wondering who those “bad dudes” would be, NPR noted that captives in the war on terror were mostly a thing of the past and reminded listeners of an interview in which Trump had said such suspects should be tried by military commissions, the fraught trial system already in place there.

When Joe Biden became president, he curtailed a number of the excesses of the war on terror from the Trump years, even issuing a proclamation revoking the Muslim ban. When it came to drone strikes, he lessened them substantially, leaving them “far from their peaks under the Obama and Trump administrations.”  In addition, he put new limits on their use going forward. In a striking gesture, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines pledged to “promote transparency” in place of the excessive secrecy that had underpinned the torture program, surveillance abuses, and the targeted-killing program. Still, all too much remained ongoing or fully capable of being revived in the new Trump years.

Bringing It All Back Home

Which brings us to expectations — or fears — of what will happen in a second Trump presidency. When it comes to the use of force, detention, discrimination, and the erasure of constitutional protections, Trump has already promised to bring the broad counterterrorism authority of earlier in this century to bear on the home front.

Let’s begin with his promises to institute discriminatory policies based on race and national origin. As of today, the incoming administration has pledged to round up, put in camps, and oversee the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants from Latin America in particular, potentially combining a detention nightmare (lacking due process and underpinned by massive discrimination) with suspicion often based on national origin rather than specific evidence of criminal behavior — an echo of the war on terror’s early years.

In place of national security, Trump has promised to substitute, in the words of the 2024 Republican platform, the “threat to our very way of life,” a term that expands the vagueness encapsulated in “terror” and “terrorism” to a new level. Notably, in the run-up to the 2024 election he had already made it crystal clear that the path from the war on terror abroad to his internal policy plans would be important to his administration. When candidate Trump promised to use the military to counter “the enemy from within,” a spokesperson clarified the meaning for the press. As the Washington Post reported at the time, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung acknowledged the way the candidate was linking his political enemies to terrorists. Trump, he explained, was “equat[ing] the prospect of unspecified efforts by the left during the elections with the recent arrest of an Afghan man in Oklahoma, who is accused of plotting an Election Day attack in the United States in the name of the Islamic State group.” Cheung then furthered the analogy by adding, “President Trump is 100% correct — those who seek to undermine democracy by sowing chaos in our elections are a direct threat, just like the terrorist from Afghanistan that was arrested for plotting multiple attacks on Election Day within the United States.”

Where Are We Today?

While the war on terror has receded into the background of our lives, its premises and tactics remain all too readily available. Its expansion of presidential powers, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision when it comes to more or less anything a president does in office, leaves the country in a state of imminent peril. Surveillance powers remain remarkably broad. Drone-strike authorities remain in place, even if, in the wake of the Biden years, curtailed for now. And the prospect of indefinite detention as a codified element of American policy remains possible not only at Guantanamo but for migrants across the United States. And to top it all off, Congress continues to be unwilling to restrict a president’s war powers in any significant way, having repeatedly refused to repeal or replace that original 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in which neither time, nor geographical limits, nor even precise limits on the definition of the enemy exist. 

If only, as a nation, we could look beyond the tumultuous context of the current moment and imagine how to make our way to a safer, more sustainable future. Sadly, despite the dangers that may lie ahead, it’s not just partisan politics, or economic disarray, or the fragile state of the world that has brought us to this point. It’s our own negligence in accepting the dismantling of the laws and norms that had guided us prior to 9/11 and refusing ever since to restore our once-upon-a-time respect for the rule of law and for one another.

Copyright 2024 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

Make no mistake: China truly is considered The Big One by those in Trump’s entourage responsible for devising foreign policy. While they imagine many international challenges to their “America First” strategy, only China, they believe, poses a true threat to the continued global dominance of this country.

“I feel strongly that the Chinese Communist Party has entered into a Cold War with the United States and is explicit in its aim to replace the liberal, Western-led world order that has been in place since World War II,” Representative Michael Waltz, Trump’s choice as national security adviser, declared at a 2023 event hosted by the Atlantic Council. “We’re in a global arms race with an adversary that, unlike any in American history, has the economic and the military capability to truly supplant and replace us.”

As Waltz and others around Trump see it, China poses a multi-dimensional threat to this country’s global supremacy. In the military domain, by building up its air force and navy, installing military bases on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea, and challenging Taiwan through increasingly aggressive air and naval maneuvers, it is challenging continued American dominance of the Western Pacific. Diplomatically, it’s now bolstering or repairing ties with key U.S. allies, including India, Indonesia, Japan, and the members of NATO. Meanwhile, it’s already close to replicating this country’s most advanced technologies, especially its ability to produce advanced microchips. And despite Washington’s efforts to diminish a U.S. reliance on vital Chinese goods, including critical minerals and pharmaceuticals, it remains a primary supplier of just such products to this country.

Fight or Strike Bargains?

For many in the Trumpian inner circle, the only correct, patriotic response to the China challenge is to fight back hard. Both Representative Waltz, Trump’s pick as national security adviser, and Senator Marco Rubio, his choice as secretary of state, have sponsored or supported legislation to curb what they view as “malign” Chinese endeavors in the United States and abroad.

Waltz, for example, introduced the American Critical Mineral Exploration and Innovation Act of 2020, which was intended, as he explained, “to reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of critical minerals and bring the U.S. supply chain from China back to America.” Senator Rubio has been equally combative in the legislative arena. In 2021, he authored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which banned goods produced in forced labor encampments in Xinjiang Province from entering the United States. He also sponsored several pieces of legislation aimed at curbing Chinese access to U.S. technology. Although these, as well as similar measures introduced by Waltz, haven’t always obtained the necessary congressional approval, they have sometimes been successfully bundled into other legislation.

In short, Trump will enter office in January with a toolkit of punitive measures for fighting China ready to roll along with strong support among his appointees for making them the law of the land. But of course, we’re talking about Donald Trump, so nothing is a given. Some analysts believe that his penchant for deal-making and his professed admiration for Chinese strongman President Xi Jinping may lead him to pursue a far more transactional approach, increasing economic and military pressure on Beijing to produce concessions on, for example, curbing the export of fentanyl precursors to Mexico, but when he gets what he wants letting them lapse. Howard Lutnick, the billionaire investor from Cantor Fitzgerald whom he chose as Commerce secretary, claims that Trump actually “wants to make a deal with China,” and will use the imposition of tariffs selectively as a bargaining tool to do so.

What such a deal might look like is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to see how Trump could win significant concessions from Beijing without abandoning some of the punitive measures advocated by the China hawks in his entourage. Count on one thing: this complicated and confusing dynamic will play out in each of the major problem areas in U.S.-China relations, forcing Trump to make critical choices between his transactional instincts and the harsh ideological bent of his advisers.

Trump, China, and Taiwan

Of all the China-related issues in his second term in office, none is likely to prove more challenging or consequential than the future status of the island of Taiwan. At issue are Taiwan’s gradual moves toward full independence and the risk that China will invade the island to prevent such an outcome, possibly triggering U.S. military intervention as well. Of all the potential crises facing Trump, this is the one that could most easily lead to a great-power conflict with nuclear undertones.

When Washington granted diplomatic recognition to China in 1979, it “acknowledged” that Taiwan and the mainland were both part of “one China” and that the two parts could eventually choose to reunite. The U.S. also agreed to cease diplomatic relations with Taiwan and terminate its military presence there. However, under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, Washington was also empowered to cooperate with a quasi-governmental Taiwanese diplomatic agency, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, and provide Taiwan with the weapons needed for its defense. Moreover, in what came to be known as “strategic ambiguity,” U.S. officials insisted that any effort by China to alter Taiwan’s status by force would constitute “a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area” and would be viewed as a matter “of grave concern to the United States,” although not necessarily one requiring a military response.

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For decades, one president after another reaffirmed the “one China” policy while also providing Taiwan with increasingly powerful weaponry. For their part, Chinese officials repeatedly declared that Taiwan was a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, preferably by peaceful means. The Taiwanese, however, have never expressed a desire for reunification and instead have moved steadily towards a declaration of independence, which Beijing has insisted would justify armed intervention.

As such threats became more frequent and menacing, leaders in Washington continued to debate the validity of “strategic ambiguity,” with some insisting it should be replaced by a policy of “strategic clarity” involving an ironclad commitment to assist Taiwan should it be invaded by China. President Biden seemed to embrace this view, repeatedly affirming that the U.S. was obligated to defend Taiwan under such circumstances. However, each time he said so, his aides walked back his words, insisting the U.S. was under no legal obligation to do so.

The Biden administration also boosted its military support for the island while increasing American air and naval patrols in the area, which only heightened the possibility of a future U.S. intervention should China invade. Some of these moves, including expedited arms transfers to Taiwan, were adopted in response to prodding from China hawks in Congress. All, however, fit with an overarching administration strategy of encircling China with a constellation of American military installations and U.S.-armed allies and partners.

From Beijing’s perspective, then, Washington is already putting extreme military and geopolitical pressure on China. The question is: Will the Trump administration increase or decrease those pressures, especially when it comes to Taiwan?

That Trump will approve increased arms sales to and military cooperation with Taiwan essentially goes without saying (as much, at least, as anything involving him does). The Chinese have experienced upticks in U.S. aid to Taiwan before and can probably live through another round of the same. But that leaves far more volatile issues up for grabs: Will he embrace “strategic clarity,” guaranteeing Washington’s automatic intervention should China invade Taiwan, and will he approve a substantial expansion of the American military presence in the region? Both moves have been advocated by some of the China hawks in Trump’s entourage, and both are certain to provoke fierce, hard-to-predict responses from Beijing.

Many of Trump’s closest advisers have, in fact, insisted on “strategic clarity” and increased military cooperation with Taiwan. Michael Waltz, for example, has asserted that the U.S. must “be clear we’ll defend Taiwan as a deterrent measure.” He has also called for an increased military presence in the Western Pacific. Similarly, last June, Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, wrote that the U.S. “should make clear” its “commitment” to “help defend” Taiwan, while expanding military cooperation with the island.

Trump himself has made no such commitments, suggesting instead a more ambivalent stance. In his typical fashion, in fact, he’s called on Taiwan to spend more on its own defense and expressed anger at the concentration of advanced chip-making on the island, claiming that the Taiwanese “did take about 100% of our chip business.” But he’s also warned of harsh economic measures were China to impose a blockade of the island, telling the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, “I would say [to President Xi]: if you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%.” He wouldn’t need to threaten the use of force to prevent a blockade, he added, because President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m [expletive] crazy.”

Such comments reveal the bind Trump will inevitably find himself in when it comes to Taiwan this time around. He could, of course, try to persuade Beijing to throttle back its military pressure on the island in return for a reduction in U.S. tariffs — a move that would reduce the risk of war in the Pacific but leave China in a stronger economic position and disappoint many of his top advisers. If, however, he chooses to act “crazy” by embracing “strategic clarity” and stepping up military pressure on China, he would likely receive accolades from many of his supporters, while provoking a (potentially nuclear) war with China.

Trade War or Economic Coexistence?

The question of tariffs represents another way in which Trump will face a crucial choice between punitive action and transactional options in his second term — or, to be more precise, in deciding how severe to make those tariffs and other economic hardships he will try to impose on China.

In January 2018, the first Trump administration imposed tariffs of 30% on imported solar panels and 20%-50% on imported washing machines, many sourced from China. Two months later, the administration added tariffs on imported steel (25%) and aluminum (10%), again aimed above all at China. And despite his many criticisms of Trump’s foreign and economic policies, President Biden chose to retain those tariffs, even adding new ones, notably on electric cars and other high-tech products. The Biden administration has also banned the export of advanced computer chips and chip-making technology to China in a bid to slow that country’s technological progress.

Accordingly, when Trump reassumes office on January 20th, China will already be under stringent economic pressures from Washington. But he and his associates insist that those won’t be faintly enough to constrain China’s rise. The president-elect has said that, on day one of his new term, he will impose a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports and follow that with other harsh measures. Among such moves, the Trump team has announced plans to raise tariffs on Chinese imports to 60%, revoke China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (also known as “most favored nation”) status, and ban the transshipment of Chinese imports through third countries.

Most of Trump’s advisers have espoused such measures strongly. “Trump Is Right: We Should Raise Tariffs on China,” Marco Rubio wrote last May. “China’s anticompetitive tactics,” he argued, “give Chinese companies an unfair cost advantage over American companies… Tariffs that respond to these tactics prevent or reverse offshoring, preserving America’s economic might and promoting domestic investment.”

But Trump will also face possible pushback from other advisers who are warning of severe economic perturbations if such measures were to be enacted. China, they suggest, has tools of its own to use in any trade war with the U.S., including tariffs on American imports and restrictions on American firms doing business in China, including Elon Musk’s Tesla, which produces half of its cars there. For these and other reasons, the U.S.-China Business Council has warned that additional tariffs and other trade restrictions could prove disastrous, inviting “retaliatory measures from China, causing additional U.S. jobs and output losses.”

As in the case of Taiwan, Trump will face some genuinely daunting decisions when it comes to economic relations with China. If, in fact, he follows the advice of the ideologues in his circle and pursues a strategy of maximum pressure on Beijing, specifically designed to hobble China’s growth and curb its geopolitical ambitions, he could precipitate nothing short of a global economic meltdown that would negatively affect the lives of so many of his supporters, while significantly diminishing America’s own geopolitical clout. He might therefore follow the inclinations of certain of his key economic advisers like transition leader Howard Lutnick, who favor a more pragmatic, businesslike relationship with China. How Trump chooses to address this issue will likely determine whether the future involves increasing economic tumult and uncertainty or relative stability. And it’s always important to remember that a decision to play hardball with China on the economic front could also increase the risk of a military confrontation leading to full-scale war, even to World War III.

And while Taiwan and trade are undoubtedly the most obvious and challenging issues Trump will face in managing (mismanaging?) U.S.-China relations in the years ahead, they are by no means the only ones. He will also have to decide how to deal with increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, continued Chinese economic and military-technological support for Russia in its war against Ukraine, and growing Chinese investments in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.

In these, and other aspects of the U.S.-China rivalry, Trump will be pulled toward both increased militancy and combativeness and a more pragmatic, transactional approach. During the campaign, he backed each approach, sometimes in the very same verbal outburst. Once in power, however, he will have to choose between them — and his decisions will have a profound impact on this country, China, and everyone living on this planet.

Copyright 2024 Michael Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

I will present a commentary on his observations about Syria:

Mr. President. . . With 900 troops in Syria, are you planning to withdraw when you leave office?

Trump: “We had 5,000 troops along the border, and I asked a couple of generals: So, we have an army of 250,000 in Syria, and you had an army of 400,000 — they have many more people than that. Turkey is a major force, by the way. And Erdogan — he’s somebody I got along with great — has a major military force. His military has not been worn out with war. It hasn’t been exhausted like others. He’s built a very strong and powerful army.

I am not sure, but I think Mr. Trump is saying that the former government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria had had 400,000 men in the Syrian Arab Army before the Arab Spring revolts of 2011, but that the numbers declined to 250,000 with desertions thereafter. My own guess is that when Trump was in office the numbers of Syrian troops had declined to more like 100,000.

I think he is recalling that he thought the 5,000 U.S. troops, which were there to coordinate the Kurdish and Arab militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces in fighting ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), were not necessary because Syria’s own 250,000 troops should have been able to handle ISIL.

If that is what he thought, it is incorrect. The Baath government of al-Assad relinquished the eastern Raqqa Province to ISIL and used its remaining troops to dominate the west of the country, what the French colonialists had called “Useful Syria” (la Syrie utile ). It had been the 5,000 US troops and the fighters of the SDF, mainly drawn from the leftist Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the northeast, who took Raqqa and defeated ISIL on October 17, 2017. That was on Trump’s watch. Perhaps he meant to say that by October, 2019, two years later, he felt that the US troop presence was no longer necessary to ensure that there wasn’t a resurgence of ISIL.

He is right about the Turkish army. which Global Fire Power ranks as eighth in the world. Turkey, a country a little more populous than Germany, has some 355,000 active duty military personnel and a similar number of reservists. It has 205 fighter jets and 111 attack helicopters. It has over 2,000 tanks and 1,700 or so big pulled artillery pieces. It is ranked above both Italy and France.

Trump: “So, we had 5,000 soldiers between a 5-million-person army and a 250,000-person army. I asked the general, ‘What do you think of that situation?’ He said, ‘They’ll be wiped out immediately.’ And I moved them out because I took a lot of heat. And you know what happened? Nothing. I saved a lot of lives. Now, we have 900 troops. They put some back in, but it’s still only 900.

My guess is that Trump’s mention of a 5 million-person army is a reference to the military of the Russian Federation, which actually has 3.7 million military personnel including reservists. The 250,000-man army is likely that of Syria, though I believe it is an over-estimate for 2019. Most authorities had the Syrian Arab Army at 141,400 at that time.

However, the size of the Russian and Syrian armies was a little irrelevant, since the US special operations forces supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces were fighting the remnants of ISIL and were not in active combat against the Syrian or Russian armies. Moscow and Damascus had left Syria’s far east and its ISIL problem to the US and the Kurds. The US and Russia seem to have had excellent deconfliction mechanisms in Syria.

The major battle between US forces and Russian ones was not with the regular Russian military but with Wagner group mercenaries. It took place in February 2018, when Wagner irregulars attempted to seize oil fields that the US was using to fund the Kurds.

So there wasn’t really in my view much chance that the 5,000 US troops in Syria in October 2019 would have to take on either the Russians or the Syrian Arab Army, or that they would be crushed, since they had excellent air cover.

I’m sure, on the other hand, that Russian President Vladimir Putin very much wanted the US troop presence in Syria to end.

Trump (Flash-forwards to the present:) “At this point, one of the sides has essentially been wiped out. Nobody knows who the other side is, but I do. You know who it is? Turkey. Turkey is the one behind it. He’s a very smart guy. They’ve wanted that territory for thousands of years, and he got it. Those people that went in are controlled by Turkey, and that’s okay — it’s another way to fight.

“No, I don’t think I want our soldiers killed. I don’t think that will happen now, because one side has been decimated.”

Trump’s estimation that the HTS sweep across Syria was made possible by Turkish backing is correct. The “smart guy” here is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is probably true that Turkiye exercises a certain amount of control over the new government. Using such proxies to dominate Syria and unseat the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party is indeed “another way to fight.”

Trump’s isolationist instincts are sometimes salutary. I can’t imagine what good it would be for the US to get involved militarily in the new Syria, and I hope he pulls out the remaining US troops at Tanf.

The only statement here with which I would quibble is the assertion that Turkiye has wanted Syria for thousands of years.

Turkiye only came into being on October 29, 1923. It was preceded by the Ottoman Empire, which defeated the Mamluks in 1516 at Marj Dabiq and conquered Syria that year. It ruled Syria until World War I, when the Arabic-speaking population allied with Britain during the war and expelled Turkish troops from Aleppo on October 25, 1918.

The Turkic Seljuks, who ruled part of what is now Turkiye along with Iran and Iraq, held part of Syria in the eleventh through thirteenth century. The Turkic peoples only came into the Middle East from East Asia in a big way with the Seljuks in the 1000s, the same period when the Norman French conquered England.

Before that, what is now Turkiye was inhabited by Armenians, peoples who spoke Iranian languages, and Greek speakers. So “Turkey” hasn’t existed for thousands of years, to want Syria all that time.

The rulers of Asia Minor, what is now Turkiye, included the Roman Empire. Augustus took Ankara in 25 BC. The Romans had already annexed Syria in 64 BC. So in that case, it was Italians based in Syria who took what is now Turkiye rather than the other way around.

The eastern Roman Empire lost Syria to Muslim forces in the 630s. The Muslim Umayyad caliphate based in Damascus attempted on several occasions to take Asia Minor away from the Byzantines or Eastern Rome, but failed. So too did the Abbasid caliphate after it.

I mean, if you want to consider “Turkey” anyone who lived in Anatolia, then I suppose there were ancient kingdoms based there that wanted Syria. The ancient Hittite kingdom in what is now Turkiye, which spoke an Indo-European language, conquered Syria on more than one occasion in the 1600s through 1400s BC. But before the Hittites, in the 2000s BC, the Hattians ruled Anatolia and they don’t seem to have been interested in Syria.

Saying that a “people” has wanted to do anything for thousands of years is essentialist and we historians don’t approve of that sort of language. Things change. “Peoples” go in and out of existence. State ambitions change.

A reporter asked Are you concerned about more unrest in that region, or do you think it will stabilize?

Trump: “Nobody knows what the final outcome will be in the region. Nobody knows who the final victor is going to be. I believe it’s Turkey. Erdogan is very smart, and he’s very tough. Turkey did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost. I can’t say that Assad wasn’t a butcher — what he did to children. You remember, I attacked him with 58 missiles. Unbelievable missiles coming from ships 700 miles away, and every one of them hit their target.

Mr. Trump is correct that Turkiye’s Erdogan is likely the final victor by virtue of his allies now controlling Damascus. However, the likelihood that Syria will stabilize seems to me low, given the regional rivalries, internal divisions, poverty and displacement. Also, Israel has destroyed the Syrian government weapons stock with hundreds of bombing raids in the past week, which leaves the new government with no means of fighting challengers such as a resurgent ISIL.

Mr. Trump is also correct that Bashar al-Assad was a butcher responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, for thousands of prisoners tortured to death, for striking children’s playgrounds with barrel bombs. He also did use chemical weqpons, to which Trump responded with a missile barrage in 2017.

Trump: “Obama had drawn the red line in the sand, but then he refused to honor it. Assad killed many more children after that, and Obama did nothing. But I did. I hit him with a lot of missiles. I remember the night President Xi was here; we were having chocolate cake at dinner when I explained what we were doing. Those missiles were shot, and it was amazing how precise they were —- every one hit its target.

“Had Obama enforced his red line, you wouldn’t have even had Russia there. But they are there now, and I never understood why. Russia isn’t getting much out of it. Now, their time is taken up with Ukraine, and we want that to stop too. It’s Carnage.”

I do not believe that Mr. Obama’s having declined to bomb Syria over chemical weapons use in 2013 had anything to do with the continuation of the war. Mr. Obama was refused support for this move both by the British Parliament and by the Republican-controlled Congress, and was politically forestalled from launching missiles. Those missiles would not have had any affect on the civil war. Nor did Mr. Trump’s 2017 missile barrage have any material impact on the course of the last stages of the Syrian Civil War.

Jeff: You mentioned the wars. Can you tell us what you said to Prime Minister Netanyahu in your call on Saturday? And have you spoken to President Putin since your election?

Trump: “I’m not going to comment on the Putin question, but I will comment on Netanyahu. We had a very good conversation. We discussed what’s going to happen moving forward, and I made it clear that I’ll be very available starting January 20th.

“Beyond that, it was mostly a recap call. I asked him about the current situation and where things stand. Mike Waltz, by the way, is doing a fantastic job. Everyone is very happy with him, and he was very involved in the call as well. . . “

Let’s hope the remaining Israeli hostages are indeed returned within a month. However, all hell broke loose in Gaza a year ago and has been ongoing and it is difficult to see what more Trump could do to Gaza short of killing off the remaining 2 million people entirely.

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Video:

PBS NewsHour: “WATCH LIVE: Trump speaks to reporters at Mar-a-Lago”