The bad news Trump tour continues. For a second year in a row, President Trump made a mockery of himself, and the world governing body that he was addressing, during his speech yesterday. But beyond the mockery, was a scary world vision that, given his aggressive, John Wayne style of tough guy posturing and his infamous and hugely unpopular (even in the United States) trade tariffs that have led to trade wars all around the globe, the world would so well to pay attention to and take note of.
Aside from the unintended humiliating moment with which President Trump began his address to the United Nations yesterday, his actual speech was no laughing matter.
"Our military will soon be more powerful than it has ever been before. In other words, the United States is stronger, safer and a richer country than it was when I assumed office ... We are standing up for America and for the American people."
That is actually already the case. Hell, it had better be, given the enormous sums of money that the United States invests in the military industrial complex every single year. No other country, or empire, in the history of the world has ever had more bases scattered around the globe, or more ships sailing the oceans and seas around the globe, or more military might at the ready pretty much throughout the world. That was the case under Trump's predecessor, Obama, and it was the case with his predecessor, Bush Jr., and it was the case with the president before that, Clinton, and it was the case with Bush Sr., and this trend was started under President Reagan, who hiked up the spending on the military and, simultaneously, looked to cut the budget elsewhere, such as with welfare, with education, with social benefit programs. Remember, it was Reagan who started all of these trends, as well as attacking the unions. So much of the modern Republican be all, end all solution to everything was initiated with Reagan, although Trump's tenure in the Oval Office has been like all of these policies on steroids, with virtually an absence of any limitations.
He tried to elicit his view further, with a point that underscores his "America First" approach:
"America will always choose independence and cooperation over global governance, control and domination."
That is to say, he was undermining the authority of the United Nations in an address before the United Nations. Of course, he was not the first to do this, as President George W. Bush went against the entire world community in aggressively pushing for the invasion of Iraq, although he cobbled together the loose "Coalition of the Willing" to make it appear that there was broad support for George Bush's war. The vast majority of the people of the world, however, recognized that this was was unjust, and based on false premises. And Donald Trump, even though he was critical of Bush's handling of the Iraq invasion and war, nevertheless essentially stated that he will pursue a similar kind of an approach.
And just in case that last quote left any doubts about this, Trump made his point even clearer, in a moment that more or less mirrored President George W. Bush's comment about how the United States did not need a "permission slip" from the United Nations:
"We will never surrender America's sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy. America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism. And we embrace the doctrine of patriotism."
Much like President Bush, and other American presidents of the past, tried to intimidate other nations into complying with America's will (again, let's remember the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" that received compensation, while nations opposed to Bush's war, such as Germany and especially France, received disdain and even some unofficial economic embargoes), Trump tried to make sure that nations hoping to receive aid from the United States would fall in line politically with the wishes of the United States:
"We are taking a hard look at US foreign assistance ... whether the countries who receive our dollars and protection also have our interests at heart. Moving forward, we are only going to give foreign aid to those who respect us and, frankly, are our friends."
In other, more specific parts of his speech, Trump also praised right-wing Polish President Andzrej Duda for advocating building a permanent military base inside of Poland which would be named Fort Trump. In fact, Duda received considerable praise from Trump for building a Baltic pipeline to try and break dependence upon Russian energy resources:
"We congratulate the European states such as Poland for leading the construction of a Baltic pipeline so that nations are not dependent on Russia ... Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course."
Trump also praised Israel, in a move meant to buttress his controversial decision to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem.
"The whole world is richer, humanity is better, because of this beautiful constellation of nations, each very special, each very unique. And each shining brightly in its part of the world."
A version of this same argument, by the way, was employed by segregationists in the United States, opposed to any attempts by northerners to end Jim Crow segregation in the South, and to maintain the supposedly "separate but equal" way of life that the Supreme Court had already struck down in Brown v. Board of Education. And it was a similar version of this thinking that white minority Afrikaners used to justify apartheid in South Africa, where they viewed all of the different races as belonging to separate worlds, without any unity between them.
Trump concluded his view of this Trump worldview:
"We must defend the foundations that make it all possible. Sovereign and independent nations are the only vehicle where freedom has ever survived."
United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres seemed to sense the direction that Trump would take his address. Speaking before Trump spoke, he warned of the pitfalls of this way of thinking, which the world would do well to remember, given how bloody the wars of the 20th century were. He spoke of the distant past, of the days of ancient Greece, and applied those lessons from history so that we might understand the dangers of such thinking today, in our modern world:
"Today, with shifts in the balance of power, the risk of confrontation may increase... In assessing the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece, Thucydides said, and I quote, 'It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable'."
All of the quotes used above, and most of the facts that I employed in this particular blog entry, were taken from this CNN piece by Nic Robertson, which I would strongly recommend reading for anyone interested in the wider ramifications of Trump's world vision, as he expressed it in his United Nations speech earlier this week:
Donald Trump's worldview was laid bare at the UN -- and it should worry anyone who understands history Nic Robertson-Profile-Image Analysis by Nic Robertson, CNN, September 25, 2018:
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