By David K. Shipler
The man who
craves a Nobel Peace Prize is looking for ways to play with his soldiers. He
declares great swaths of the American citizenry the enemy from within and sends
befuddled National Guard troops into cities governed by his political
opposition. He threatens to go "guns-a-blazing" into Nigeria to stop murders
of Christians. He labels occupants of small boats “terrorists” when he imagines,
with no proof, that they they might be transporting drugs. He launches a
military buildup led by the largest US aircraft carrier to waters near
Venezuela in preparation for a possible military assault to overturn the
government of the socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.
This is
Donald Trump the peacemaker who did manage to get a shaky end to Israel’s war
in Gaza, but who blustered ineffectually about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine
and renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. And this is Donald
Trump the strongman who undermines his military’s combat expertise by letting
his defective “War Secretary,” Pete Hegseth, purge the senior ranks of the most
competent officers, a likely step toward politicizing the armed forces with
right-wing, white Christian nationalists.
If this
array of odd behavior appears contradictory and hypocritical, let’s look again.
It contains significant consistencies of personality and method.
President
Trump thrives on conflict and confrontation, as if his brain chemistry needed
the fix. He enhances his power by tough-guy unpredictability, trying for fear,
flattery, and capitulation in both warmaking and peacemaking scenarios. This
sometimes succeeds, but not always.
If no conflict or crisis exists, he
creates or imagines one, then reimagines it as disappearing because of his bold
acts. He’s already practices this sleight of hand by thanking himself for
restoring order in US cities where no disorder prevailed, and by curtailing
drug smuggling via routes where it barely existed. Sadly, his pattern of
imagining and reimagining is not just a frivolous magician’s act. It hurts and
kills people.
Another constant
in Trump’s disjointed military policies is theatrical. He is a showman, and the
White House is his stage. The set on which he performs may or may not resemble
reality—usually not. But no matter. Once created, it becomes the defining
landscape of his policies, and woe to the underling who disbelieves.
Therefore,
according to Trump, peaceful demonstrators are violent if they oppose his
policies. Cities’ falling crime rates disappear from his portrayal
of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” as he described
Washington, DC. His National Guard have supposedly rescued cities by standing around
looking awkward or picking up trash. His bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites was no
fantasy, of course, but he brought the curtain down a bit too soon as he
immediately declared the facilities “obliterated.”
After the Defense Intelligence Agency submitted a contradictory, preliminary assessment,
Hegseth fired
its commander, Lieut. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, along with two other senior
officials. So much for reporting accurately up the chain of command.
Trump’s performative
style doesn’t often work well in the real world of complexity. It might grab
initial acquiescence from weaker players, but the grand posturing of a
dealmaker usually needs follow-up. Trump likes to stop the play mid-act when it
reaches a positive turn, an illusory happy ending. But military matters don’t
obey the impresario. Wars impart suffering, not glory, and a big mouth can’t
end them.
The
twenty-point Gaza peace plan is an example of a set of good ideas and a hopeful
beginning that will tax Trump’s ability to follow through. With more pressure
than practically any other president has exerted, Trump leaned on Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to win a ceasefire that is mostly holding, an exchange
of hostages and prisoners, a restoration of humanitarian aid, and a partial
pullback of Israel troops. It was no small achievement: a good first act.
If the audience went home at the
intermission, Trump would surely be delighted. But we’re still watching. The
long-term plan to rebuild Gaza and build peace with international military and
civilian involvement requires nitty-gritty bargaining with Arab states, Turkey,
Israel, and a fractured Palestinian leadership. If it requires intricate ongoing
management by Trump himself, far beyond a capability that he has demonstrated,
it is likely to falter in the morass of Middle East grievance and radicalism.
So, will the applause he enjoyed for the first act satisfy him? Is his show
over? Will he now lose interest?
Another
constant in warmaking and peacemaking is Trump’s willingness to threaten just
about anything to cow countries that stand in his way. It is the syndrome of a
mafia boss, which can be useful against
weaker adversaries who are scared of his impulsive craziness. He is obviously willing
to do bad things to people who don’t obey his commands, a practice that is defeating
democracy at home as too many American institutions avoid standing up to him.
That bludgeon is also a burden,
though. The bully in him, which sees others as susceptible to both his threats
and his flattery, can lead to misjudgments of character. The most dangerous case
has been his hot-and-cold relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has
been both admired and reviled by Trump. Indeed, Trump’s insensitivity to shades
of gray, his binary approach to people, actually makes him a lousy negotiator
where hard work is needed to reach the end of a difficult road.
He praised Putin, and Putin praised
him, and nothing came of it. Campaigning on the promise to end the Ukraine war
in 24 hours, Trump in office gave up his two major bargaining chips without
even starting talks: He offered Russia some Ukrainian territory and a pledge
not to accept Ukraine into NATO. He staged an unseemly row with Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and mouthed some of Putin’s
talking points, asserting that Ukraine started the war.
All that made Trump look too eager
to deliver on his loud boast, an obvious effort to win that coveted Nobel Peace
Prize. So, no surprise, Putin continued the war as usual. Perhaps he missed a
chance to take advantage of that moment to fashion some form of agreement. And
he denied Trump the applause he treasures. So, climbing the steep learning
curve, an annoyed Trump flipped on the Russian leader. “We get a lot of
bullshit thrown at us by Putin,” he said
in July. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
(This would not have been news to him if he had longtime Putin-watchers on his
staff, or if he’d watched Putin himself.)
How do Trump’s showmanship, crisis
creation, and tough tactics inform his military policies? We are seeing them
unfold around Venezuela. First, his imagination conflates criminal and military
threats, using the wartime label “armed conflict” to describe the US vs. the
drug cartels. Second, he portrays Venezuela as a source of life-threatening
narcotics when it actually produces
or smuggles none of the fentanyl bound for the US and hardly any of the
cocaine. Although some drug-laden flights depart from Venezuela, the major
smuggling routes are not through the Caribbean, but via the Pacific and into
the US over land.
It is hard to see what a coming war
would be about. It might unseat and seize Maduro, who has been indicted as a
cartel head, and is commonly regarded as having stolen the last election. It
might open Venezuela’s vast oil reserves to American exploitation, although Maduro
offered as much in talks that Trump called off. A senior official told The
New York Times that the military deployment is designed as pressure on
Maduro over oil.
What a war would definitely not be
about is what Trump has consistently touted as the issue, one that most
Americans can grasp with strong concern: the drug trade.
