With Trump and trade issues dominating the headlines it is easy to forget the experience of U.S. foreign, and indeed domestic, policy for at least the past century. Trump is America ‘coming out,’ and showing its true colours at home as well as abroad.
The atrocities of previous U.S. administrations are almost too numerous to list. A million people killed in the Philippines in the 1930s. Overthrowing the democratic Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, the Allende government in Chile. Giving decades of support for mass murderers in Central and South America, including Argentina.
Millions killed and entire ecosystems poisoned and destroyed with agent orange in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Libya, another country literally torn apart.
A million killed and a whole region destabilised in Iraq and the Middle East. Afghanistan, Palestine. The litany of terror and destruction was perpetrated by what is undoubtedly the biggest terrorist organisation in the world, the U.S. government.
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Bush, Clinton, Obama, it doesn’t matter a whit which president or which party is in power in the U.S., the policy remains the same: destabilize or destroy governments and countries which do not support the U.S. agenda.
Most Americans and most Canadians have been happy enough to go along with U.S. atrocities as long as they were not directly affected themselves. Surveys continue to show that most Americans believe they live in the ‘best country in the world.’
At home it was Bill Clinton, the darling of the Democrats, who gutted social welfare, public health and education programs in 1996.
Trump and Musk are continuing that agenda. With its racist mass deportations campaign, clampdown on free speech and attacks on the rule of law itself, the U.S. is showing its true colours and Americans are experiencing what others have experienced for generations.
If Trump does manage to bring the war in Eastern Europe to an end, he will at least have been less of a war monger than the others.
As for trade and tariffs, much wider issues are at play here. Trump may think he is directing the show, but historians in the future might see it differently: that he was an inevitable tool of historical and economic decline.
U.S. debt stands at $32 trillion. Think of the interest on that. Last year, for the first time, the U.S. spent more on debt interest than defence, and its defence budget dwarfs that of any other country: the U.S. spends more on defence than the next nine countries combined.
What would happen if bondholders of American debt, the Chinese government for example, asked for their money back?
The U.S. cannot carry on as it has been doing, going deeper and deeper into debt. It will have to pull back globally or go the way of the Soviet Union – imperial overstretch and collapse.
Trump’s intention to withdraw American forces from Europe is part of that, as are the tariffs which he claims will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the American economy. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Time will tell.
In any event we are seeing a global resetting of the geo-economic tectonic plates and Canada is right in the middle of it.
As Canadians in the middle of this, it is important for us to acknowledge that although Trump is an ogre, he is not the unique one he is often represented to be.
Gerry McAlister is a member of the NB Media Co-op.
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