The new president’s cabinet nominees are a similarly worldly
lot, being either generals or multimillionaires (or both), or simply,
like their president, straight-out billionaires. Rich people jet off to
exotic places for vacations or to make deals; generals are dispatched to
all points of the compass to kill people. With an estimated net wealth
of more than $13 billion,
Trump’s cabinet could be its own small island nation. Make that a very aggressive island nation: The military men in his proposed cabinet—former generals Mike Flynn (national security adviser), James Mattis (defense secretary), and John Kelly (head of Homeland Security), as well as former Navy Seal Ryan Zinke (interior secretary)—have fought in nearly as many countries as Trump has done business.
As worldly as they might be, Trump’s nominees don’t look much like the world. Mostly rich white men, they look more like the American electorate… circa 1817. Still, the media have bent over backward to find as much diversity as they could in this panorama of homogeneity. They have, for instance, identified the nominees according to their different ideological milieus: Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Republican Party, the lunatic fringe.
In this taxonomy of Trumpism, the media continue to miss the obvious. The incoming administration is, in fact, united around one key mission: It’s about to declare war on the world.
Don’t be fooled by the surface cosmopolitanism of the new president and his appointees. For all their international experience, these people care about the planet the way pornographers care about sex. Their interactions are purely transactional, just the means to an end. There couldn’t be less empathy for the people out there involved in the drama. It’s all about the money and that piercing sense of conquest.
The Trump team’s approach, a globalism of the 1 percent, benefits themselves even as it reinforces American exceptionalism. Their worldview is a galaxy distant from the sort of democratic internationalism that values diplomacy, human rights, and multilateral cooperation to address planetary problems like climate change and economic inequality. Such a foreign policy of mutual engagement is, in fact, exactly what’s under immediate threat.
As with Obamacare, the incoming administration wants to shred an inclusive project and substitute an exclusive one for it. In so doing, it will replace a collection of liberal internationalists with something worse: a confederacy of oligarchs.
For such an undertaking that so radically privileges the few over the many, the next administration needs a compelling rationale that goes beyond assertions that the status quo is broken, international institutions are inefficient, and the United States is the indispensable power on the planet. America isn’t facing just any old crisis like failing banks or nuclear wannabe nations. For someone like Donald Trump, the threat has to be huge, the biggest ever.
So brace yourself for a coming clash of civilizations. The new president is circling the wagons in defense of nothing less than the Western way of life. As if it were a town in South Vietnam in 1968, Trump aims to destroy the international community in order to save it.
Read more: Donald Trump’s Strategy? Destroy the International Community in Order to Save It. | The Nation
Trump’s cabinet could be its own small island nation. Make that a very aggressive island nation: The military men in his proposed cabinet—former generals Mike Flynn (national security adviser), James Mattis (defense secretary), and John Kelly (head of Homeland Security), as well as former Navy Seal Ryan Zinke (interior secretary)—have fought in nearly as many countries as Trump has done business.
As worldly as they might be, Trump’s nominees don’t look much like the world. Mostly rich white men, they look more like the American electorate… circa 1817. Still, the media have bent over backward to find as much diversity as they could in this panorama of homogeneity. They have, for instance, identified the nominees according to their different ideological milieus: Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Republican Party, the lunatic fringe.
In this taxonomy of Trumpism, the media continue to miss the obvious. The incoming administration is, in fact, united around one key mission: It’s about to declare war on the world.
Don’t be fooled by the surface cosmopolitanism of the new president and his appointees. For all their international experience, these people care about the planet the way pornographers care about sex. Their interactions are purely transactional, just the means to an end. There couldn’t be less empathy for the people out there involved in the drama. It’s all about the money and that piercing sense of conquest.
The Trump team’s approach, a globalism of the 1 percent, benefits themselves even as it reinforces American exceptionalism. Their worldview is a galaxy distant from the sort of democratic internationalism that values diplomacy, human rights, and multilateral cooperation to address planetary problems like climate change and economic inequality. Such a foreign policy of mutual engagement is, in fact, exactly what’s under immediate threat.
As with Obamacare, the incoming administration wants to shred an inclusive project and substitute an exclusive one for it. In so doing, it will replace a collection of liberal internationalists with something worse: a confederacy of oligarchs.
For such an undertaking that so radically privileges the few over the many, the next administration needs a compelling rationale that goes beyond assertions that the status quo is broken, international institutions are inefficient, and the United States is the indispensable power on the planet. America isn’t facing just any old crisis like failing banks or nuclear wannabe nations. For someone like Donald Trump, the threat has to be huge, the biggest ever.
So brace yourself for a coming clash of civilizations. The new president is circling the wagons in defense of nothing less than the Western way of life. As if it were a town in South Vietnam in 1968, Trump aims to destroy the international community in order to save it.
Read more: Donald Trump’s Strategy? Destroy the International Community in Order to Save It. | The Nation
